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a room. That father—who had been a friend of both Emerson and Carlyle—so despised pedantry that he kept all five children constantly on the move, from one teacher to another and from one school to another, so that their minds would never fix on any “inhumanity of Method.” Before he was twelve, Henry had gone through seven schools in New York alone, and years later he would recall how, during a particularly volatile stretch, he and his siblings “had been to my particular consciousness virtually in motion.” But the father went further than that, and would move them from one town, from one country, from one continent and one language to another—“our rootless & accidental childhood,” his sister would later complain—with transitory homes in New York, Albany, Boston, Newport, and Cambridge, but also in Geneva, London, Paris, Boulogne-sur-Mer, and Bonn. The James children got a deep experience of European organicism and European repose—but they got it odd, bit by bit, and always on the road. So William James may have known best when he said his brother was “a native of the James family, and has no other country.”
    But even William James was mostly wrong, for in fact his brother was above all an American, and he had deeply American habits—as when in youth he left his entire family behind and crossed the Atlantic to go it alone. It is useful to recall that when Alexis de Tocqueville came to the United States, he saw a distinguished future for a remarkable people, but he also suspected a somber potential beyond anything the founding fathers had conceived. Here was a people and here was a nation where every connection, every link, was being challenged, and where, as he wrote in 1840, the
    . . . woof of time is every instant broken, and the track of generations effaced. Those who went before are soon forgotten; of those who will come after, no one has any idea. . . . [The Americans] acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their hands.
    Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.
    Therefore it may have been a blood and bone American isolation that was felt by the expatriate Henry James when he sat on the Riva degli Schiavoni or walked on the Rue de Rivoli. And it may also have been a doggedly American isolation that marks the fiction’s independent, rather parentless, vaguely childless people who rarely stay home but keep on the move or at least remain strangely unsettled. Long before Henry James—even before Bartleby turned inward or Hawthorne’s minister lowered his black veil—perhaps de Tocqueville was right after all when he wondered if American democracy might not be creating a new kind of human being.

V.
    By the turn of the century, art had begun to look suspiciously like religion. Spiritual enough to satisfy languishing needs, it had an esoteric and holy vocabulary, an ancient tradition, a long novitiate, a priesthood jealous of its power, a rule of inspiration, and a pattern of grace. With its meditative isolation and its searching mystic moments, it knew it was vaguely larger than itself and it promised greater things. In our obscurely spiritual Western culture, it still does. Its cathedrals—the magnificent museums of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cincinnati, and James’s own fictional “American City”—had suddenly rent the surface of the earth and risen to cast sublime shadows, and on Sundays the congregations always came. Although James was not alone in turning to art for what might still give life dignity, grace, and shape, he may have taken art’s promise further than anyone else. At the very least, as Blackmur recognized, James honored the “sacred rage of his art as