The Italian Experience of Henry James

Abstract

HENRY JAMES'S European experience was of great importance to his intellectual and imaginative development and the Italian portion of that experience played a definite role in James's writing. It was totally different from his experience of England and France. His early visits to England, the English atmosphere of his family's household, the friends, the conversations,' the countless books, particularly the English realistic writers with whom the adolescent boy acquired a great familiarity,2 constituted a long initiation into English life and made England a place which held for him deeper and richer than did any other country, a place where he felt most at home, where he could find that regal of intelligent and suggestive society 3 for which he yearned so much during the first years of his European exile. His equally frequent visits to France and his early reading of, and writing on, the French realistic novelists had led to a comprehension of the French spirit both extensive and unromanticized. In Italy, James admitted, he was able to see things only from the outside. The difference between his grasp of English and French