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By J. Owen Grundy
Originally appeared in the Villager on December 13, 1945
While James lived abroad most of the time subsequent to 1876, he revisited these scenes in 1904. Rambling again over Village streets, which he knew in his boyhood, found Sixth Avenue "overstraddled by the L," but his memory of it, he writes, "wanted only the warm smell of the bakery on the corner of Eighth Street – a blessed repository of doughnuts, cookies, cream cakes, and pies," a spot that especially arrested his attention to and from school. His nostalgic rambles led him to "the little red brick house in Waverly Pl." where he and his brother , William had gone to school. The house was there but the school had departed. Viewing the Washington Arch, he commented that it appeared "unaffiliated" with its surroundings , but standing before the beautiful altar mural of his friend LaFarge in the Church of the Ascension, he describes it as "the lovliest cluster of images that the city has ever taken thought to offer itself." Although he feared that the hustling city would not let such beauty too long remain undisturbed, he was pleased to find according to "The American Scene" in which he made these observations of 1904, that Washington Square had retained its charming character. "The space between 14th St. and Washington Sq.," he writes: "counted for tone . . . the ivory of an over-scored tablet."
Van Wyck Brooks, author of "The World of Washington Irving" gives us the best picture of this erudite old Villager in his "The Pilgrimage of Henry James." At 27, when Henry James again plunged into the Old World culture for which he had longed, he appears "A grave and somewhat priestlike figure, sedate and watchful, guarded in his movements, slow and hesitating in speech. He has not yet acquired that look of an Ezlizabethian sea-captain that is to accompany the black, silky beard of his early London days; he suggests rather some Hellenized Roman of the third century, though there are times when his personality is enveloped in a kind of shadow. He is reserved and yet one would say eager for experience, affectionate and suspicious, precise and slightly prosaic, but full of the keenest sort of aesthetic subtleties. His talk, enchanting in the presence of a single companion, bristles with intense little preferences and sharp little exclusions. ". . . He is determined to vindicate his existence, to write as man has never written before."
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