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HENRY JAMES: THE AMERICANO-EUROPEAN LEGEND* LEON EDEL To speak of "the Americana-European legend" and Henry James's cosmopolitan spirit is to refer to an earlier and more leisurely time when travellers crossed the ocean with the unhurried throb of the steamer, slowly enough to accommodate themselves to the changing and visible environment; when they moved from city to city in small inconvenient trains that seemed the height of luxury and took side-trips into little towns and villages in the rambling horse and buggy or even in the lingering diligence. Travel then still had some relation, however remote, to the faring forth of Columbus or the Pilgrim Fathers; it was active, observant, at times even heroic, filled with the risks of storms at sea and plagues abroad. Today it has become more commonplace; we travel anywhere on the instalment plan, in a world of comparative antibiotic security, passively , with our seat-belts fastened. The jets in their hundreds deposit the Jamesian heroines, in their thousands, in Venice or Rome, London or Paris. The "international" of Henry James has yielded to the intercontinental ; the intercontinental will yield to the interstellar. Odysseus wanders, in electronic garb, in outer space. The myth of travel embodied in Henry James represented a still finite world; one spoke with respect in those days of going around the world in eighty days. City and nation, prOvince and the world remained distinct; time had not yet devoured space. The young man from the provinces, in a Balzac novel, embarked upon a hazardous picaresque journey that put him On his way to Paris, at a greater time-distance from his home than the distance which separates two sides of the globe today. We must recognize thus that it required an even wider imagination to have, in such an era, an international point of view. The Church to be sure has always aspired to be universal; the philosophers of the Enlightenment had regarded themselves as citizens of the world- the world of *This article was originally a lecture delivered by Dr. Edel as Centennial Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto, January 20, 1967. It is also being published in the United States in another version under the title "Henry James and the Cosmopolitan Imagination." Vohmle XXXVI, Number 4, J111y, 1967 322 LEON EDEL ideas. But the vision of golden threads binding America to Europe and Europe to America, as Henry James precociously acquired it, was distinctly rare, more so than we are likely to recognize now. We have only to remember how widely the term "American isolation" was used in the era before the Second World War to understand the powerful nationalism and sense of self-sufficiency which had developed in the United States. Thus when Henry James spoke of "the real cosmopolitan spirit, the easy imagination of differences and hindrances surmounted," he invoked an idea peculiarly repugnant to his fellow-Americans. Henry James possessed this cosmopolitan imagination. All his life he sought to render, as he said in his late prefaces, "the boundless and tangled but highly explorable garden" of the "copiOUS cosmopolitan legend." And it is a fine garden to explore, espeCially in Canada at this moment, when the province and the nation, the nation and the world, great related entities, come into focus in a centenary that reminds us of an earlier era, when certain statesmen here had a vision and imagination of "differences and hindrances surmounted." I We could go very far back indeed if we wanted to look into the history of parochialism and provincialism and the concepts of internationalism, from the tight self-sufficient warring city states of ancient times to the humane ideal of urbi et orbi embodied in the Papal blessing; the struggle of the cities in renaissance Italy; the wars and blood-letting of European conquests and unifications. Our ground at the moment, however, is literary; and the example of Henry James is unusual: he was at once the most nationally conscious and least national of novelists. Within his work we find not merely a superficial chronicle of comedies of tourism, but great cosmopolitan feeling, that act of life that resides in observation and notation, in sympathetic comprehension...

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