pregnated with the New England air." One had only to consider The Marble Faun beside these works! "He has described the streets and monuments of Rome with a closeness which forms no part of his reference to those of Boston and Salem. But for all this he incurs that penalty of seeming factitious and unauthoritative which is always the result of an artist's attempt to project himself into an atmosphere in which he has not a transmitted and inherited property." Disturbing thoughts for a young novelist at the cross roads!
Yes; with the examples of all these other novelists in his mind, Henry James was aware that he had much at stake. Not for nothing, in spite of his fears, had he given his own country a "good trial": all the great novelists had had worlds to interpret, it was necessary to have one's world, and had any one ever heard of a novelist—a serious novelist—whose world was not the matrix of his own inherited instincts? Linger as one might in fancy over this or that alien paradise, could one ever be anything else than the child of one's own people, could one truly engraft oneself upon another civilization, engraft oneself so completely as to assimilate it and live it and re-live it and create from it? Possibly; conceivably. Still, how much one would have to risk! At the lowest estimate, one would have as it were to be born again; one would have to undergo a second education; one would have to learn the ropes of life anew; one would have to acquire by study, by concentrated effort, those innumerable elements of the soul of a people which the native absorbs with his mother's milk. Oh, one could make up stories as readily about England or France as about the land of Cockaigne! But to express the genius of the race in the manner of the masters—was that compassable? How easily one might succeed only in losing one's own world without gaining any other! How easily one might expend all one’s energy in the preliminary effort to grasp one's material! And one would be working quite without precedent, one would be leaping in the dark. . . .
These thoughts, we may be sure, presented themselves in their full force to the mind of Henry James. They must inevitably have arisen out of the situation in which he found himself and of which the two outstanding elements were that he dreamed of being a novelist after the pattern of the greatest and that he stood in the most equivocal of relationships to the society in which he had been born. They pressed upon his troubled consciousness: at least, it is difficult
