The first volume of Sheldon M. Novick’s biography takes Henry James’s career up to the publication of The Portrait of a Lady in 1881, when he was thirty-eight. By then he had behind him not only The Portrait, the first of his novels of which one can say that it exhibits genius as distinct from high accomplishment, but also Roderick Hudson, The American, The Europeans, Washington Square, and a large number of tales best exemplified by “Daisy Miller.” Physically nomadic but intellectually consistent, James had staked out his abiding theme in a magazine article of 1878:

It is hard to say exactly what is the profit of comparing one race with another, and weighing in opposed groups the manners and customs of neighboring countries; but it is certain that as we move about the world we constantly indulge in this exercise. This is especially the case if we happen to be infected with the baleful spirit of the cosmopolite—that uncomfortable consequence of seeing many lands and feeling at home in none.

James’s quest for a way of life which should unite the virtues of the old and new worlds was both lifelong and lonely. For him, as for Man in Henry Vaughan’s poem of that title, “God ordered motion, but ordained no rest.” Mr. Novick’s observation that, “denied the possibility of completion in his own life, he lived for others, and, imaginatively, lived through them” is more damaging than he seems to