^{Note 1 in page 305} Oscar Cargill, “The First International Novel,” PMLA, lxxiii (September 1958), 418–425. Professor Cargill's definition runs as follows: “An international novel is one in which a character, usually guided in his actions by the mores of one environment, is set down in another, where his learned reflexes are of no use to him, where he must employ all his individual resources to meet successive situations, and where he must intelligently accommodate himself to the new mores, or, in one way or another, be destroyed. It is ... a device for the revelation of character” (p. 419). With the general drift of this definition it is easy to agree. But the statement “where his learned reflexes are of no use to him” seems too sweeping since obviously not all the character's learned reflexes are meant. Equally sweeping is the statement that the hero must accommodate himself or be destroyed. Either these alternatives are too rigorous or accommodate is too vague. Neither quite fits Strether of The Ambassadors, for instance, or John Durham in Edith Wharton's Madame de Treymes, who, much like Strether, has had his plans crossed and his eyes opened and is now waiting for what the future may have in store. Similarly, in A Foregone Conclusion, Florida Vervain, one hopes, has learnt something, although, since her expense of emotion is modest, one wonders how much wisdom it can have bought. Even James's Newman, the hero of Professor Cargill's major exemplar, can hardly be said either to have been destroyed or to have accommodated himself, though he too has learnt a great deal—about the world and about himself. And of course he goes on living. Very likely it all comes down to what precisely is meant by accommodate. But the important thing, it seems to me, is that in these novels the conflict of manners always leads to illumination—in the hero or in the reader or in both. For a more fundamental disagreement with Professor Cargill, see n. 16 below.—I am indebted to the University of Oregon Office of Scientific and Scholarly Research for financial support of this study.

^{Note 2 in page 305} Phrase quoted in R. B. Mowat, Americans in England (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), p. 156.

^{Note 3 in page 306} John Lothrop Motley, Morton's Hope: or, The Memoirs of a Provincial (New York, 1839), I, 96.

^{Note 4 in page 306} Francis Parkman, Vassall Morton. A Novel (Boston, 1856), p. 404.

^{Note 5 in page 307} All these figures are derived from three Government publications: August Maffry, Oversea Travel and Travel Expenditures in the Balance of International Payments of the United States 1919–38, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce Economic Series No. 4 (Washington, 1939), pp. 6, 11; Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1891, Fourteenth Number (Washington, 1892), pp. 220–221; and Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1903, Twenty-Sixth Number (Washington, 1904), p. 425. No figure for the four major Atlantic ports alone was available for 1860; the figure of 19,387 listed for 1860 is extrapolated on the basis of figures for all U. S. ports, viz., 1860: 26,051, 1870: 33,865.

^{Note 6 in page 307} “Americans Abroad,” The Nation, xxvii (3 October 1878) 208–209.

^{Note 7 in page 308} Preface to Dashes at Life, Part I: High Life in Europe, Complete Works (New York, 1846), p. 250.

^{Note 8 in page 308} Christof Wegelin, “Social Criticism of Europe in the Fiction of N. P. Willis,” American Literature, xx (November 1948), 320; this essay treats Willis' European short stories in greater detail.

^{Note 9 in page 308} (New York, 1834), p. 12.

^{Note 10 in page 308} Paul Fane; or, Parts of a Life Else Untold, A Novel (New York, 1857), p. 20.

^{Note 11 in page 308} This is the wording of the first edition; see The American, Rinehart Editions (New York, 1950), p. 357. The New York Edition replaces “unregenerate good nature” by “mere human weakness of will” (p. 534). But the fundamental conception of the character of Newman remains the same.

^{Note 12 in page 309} A number of specific parallels between Paul Fane's situation and Willis' give the novel a certain autobiographical cast, perhaps alluded to in the subtitle: Parts of a Life Else Untold. For some details see Wegelin, op. cit., p. 316, n. 13, pp. 320–321, n. 28.

^{Note 13 in page 309} “Mr. Henry James's Later Work,” The Question of Henry James, ed. F. W. Dupee (New York, 1945), p. 7 (reprinted from the North American Review, January 1903).

^{Note 14 in page 309} Heroines of Fiction (New York and London, 1901), ii, 166. Howells' statement need not mean that before 1860 the type of the young American girl was not to be met in Europe. If, as he puts it, “In 1860–1870, you saw her and heard her everywhere on the European continent,” the likelihood is that you met her at least occasionally before that. Howells went to Europe for the first time in 1860 and is speaking of his own experience. Note, too, that before 1860 the peak in American transatlantic travel occurred in 1840.

^{Note 15 in page 310} The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York, 1948), pp. 21–22.

^{Note 16 in page 310} Professor Cargill rules out A Foregone Conclusion as well as James's “Madame de Mauves” as “more or less unconscious creations in the genre” (op. cit., p. 421). This raises the problem of the relevance of the author's conscious intention. Concerned as he is in “The First International Novel” with tracking down literary sources and influences, Cargill seems to conceive the process of creation as primarily a matter of the conscious manipulation of literary material. I see the creation of fiction as a complex process of transforming experience (including literary experience) into art, a process in which the degrees of an author's consciousness of his intention vary immensely and may be very difficult to assess. But Cargill's point can be questioned on other than the thorny grounds of the intentional fallacy. As far as “Madame de Mauves” is concerned, his argument is based largely on James's remark in one of the prefaces that this story and a few other early ones were “sops instinctively thrown to the international Cerberus formidably posted where I doubtless then didn't quite make him out, yet from whose capacity to loom larger and larger with the years there must already have sprung some chilling portent” (The Art of the Novel, p. 194; but the italics are Cargill's; see “The First International Novel,” p. 419). Taken by itself and without the italics, the passage may be regarded as ambiguous with regard to the consciousness of James's intention. But a few pages later in the same preface James speaks of Euphemia de Mauves, the heroine of the story in question, as having been “experimentally international” (The Art of the Novel, p. 197). Both statements are part of a long discussion which James introduces as follows: “the ‘international’ light lay thick, from period to period, on the general scene of my observation ...; everything that possibly could . . . managed at that time (as it had done before and was undiscourageably to continue to do) to be international for me: which was an immense resource” (ibid., p. 186; the italics are James's). And the theme of the whole long passage (pp. 186–197) is precisely the intimate relationship between James's stories of the 1870's and 1880's, on the one hand, and his experience and observation of the international scene, on the other.