Thus wrote Henry James in his first American journal, glancing backward in 1881 to his 1876 arrival in England. In representing himself as an artist and a bachelor, James describes a double life divided between “passion” and “business,” yet joined by the single purpose of studious observation. The appositive structure of the second sentence seems to assign “passion” to the artist and “business” to the bachelor, suggesting a constitutive difference, a schism or struggle between two of the many sources of identity that informed James's sense of himself as an author. Yet the artist and the bachelor seem here to be more compatible than not. They are joined in harmony rather than in conflict: united by the shared object of their gaze and particularly by the intensity that their ways of seeing have in common. The artist and the bachelor share a fascination with and dedication to that encompassing other, London, which is itself a “form of life.”