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elaborate detail. Yet the palaces and galleries constituted only a part of
James 's education, and we must look beyond these letters to his fiction
to
learn in what other ways Europe taught him. There , in works like
Roden'ck
Hudson
and
Daisy Mzller,
James begins
to
describe, almost pathologically ,
the experience ofseduction , and here we see the other things he observed and
felt in Europe.
Italy seduced him . The Italian letters are ecstatic. He arrived in Rome
when it was still a papal state, gorgeous and vile . It was the vivid presence of
corruption , one
feel~,
that most struck James in Italy, corruption in the full
ambivalent sense of the word . The corruption of oranges, of monks, of an
attitude toward experience that was cold and stiff and fearful. His own
corruption especially. For his brother William did not much fancy the ripeness
of Rome when he briefly joined Henry in Italy, and there is evidence that
William worried a little about Henry at the time. Still , a streak of
Winterbourne persists in James . " It 's the absolute and incredible lack of
culture
that strikes you in common travelling Americans," he complains
to
hismotherin 1870.They are "vulgar, vulgar, vulgar ." What did
culture
mean
to James at this point in his nascent career? A knowledge of the golden
section , an appreciation of the implicit in discourse? Culture is what Lawrence
Godkin would bring to Mentmore . He would not bother, nor bore, and never
rashly insist. And what did one have
to
surrender in order to get inside
Mentmore? Vulgarity . Long before 1875 James must have decided that some–
how he would remain in Europe, that America was a prison he had to escape.
The fact that nowhere in these letters does he confide such a scheme thus be–
comes itself significant, a conspicious silence .
What one longs to find in this collection is that letter to a friend in which
the writer says: look, I can 't say this to B., but I am just now very troubled , et
cetera. Instead the correct son and cheerful brother indefatigibly speaks . . 'I've
gone each morning to the great Uffizi Gallery to commune with the
immortals and in the afternoon I have taken a good walk out into the
country ," he writes in 1869 . . .I have not yet opened the chapter of churches ,
having been recently rather over-churched-save
to
stare with the proper and
inevitable feeling at the magnificent many-colored, marble-plated walls and
dome of the cathedral. " The" proper and inevitable feeling" unfortunately
governs agood deal ofJames's observations in Europe . Even when he mourns
the death ofMinny Temple , his expression is scrupulous in its piety . Nor do
the letters in Volume I give us, as Edel claims, a remarkable vision of Europe
moving from its feudal night into its modern night .James seems to have had
almost no sense at all of the politics then swirling about him in Italy and
France. But then this ugly Europe was not what he had come to see . There are
moments , however, whenJames 's gaze focuses sharply. James Russell Lowell ,
