A Passionate Pilgrim

A Passionate Pilgrim is a long short story or short novella by Henry James, first published in the Atlantic Monthly in March and April 1871 and collected in A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales in 1875 as the title piece of his first volume of collected fiction. It is one of his early international stories and one of the most characteristic pieces of his early years, treating directly the theme of the American discovering Europe that would become the central subject of his career.

The central character is Clement Searle, a poor and ailing American gentleman of distinguished but obscure ancestry who has come to England in search of his ancestral home, a country house called Lockley Park that has been in his family for centuries but that has passed to a distant English cousin. Searle is essentially a passionate pilgrim, in love with the England his Yankee imagination has constructed out of literature and family memory long before he ever crossed the Atlantic.

The narrator is an American friend of Searle who accompanies him on the journey and who serves as a slightly cooler observer of his friend’s growing obsession with the recovery of his English inheritance. The visit to Lockley Park is the central scene of the story. The English cousin, a cold and cautious gentleman entirely unsympathetic to his American kinsman’s fantasies, refuses to acknowledge any claim and quietly arranges for Searle to be sent away. The story ends with Searle dying soon afterward in Oxford, his pilgrimage having essentially killed him.

The story is somewhat overwritten by the standard of the mature James, with romantic emphases that he would later have toned down. But the basic situation is one he would return to many times in different forms, and the central image of the American consumed by his own romantic fantasy of England gives the story its lasting force.