the human organism with the obscene cruelty of medical students, to whom nothing, or rather everything, everything but art, was common and unclean, whose talk savoured only of the laboratory and the brothel. Ah, one's tender dreams of Europe, the soft illusion, the fond hope—was this what lay behind the veil? Perish the profane suggestion!
Such appear to have been James' sensations, face to face with the literary Paris of 1876. He loved it and hated it, he was at once fascinated and shocked by it. He had felt himself for the first time on his mettle; his perception had been excited to the highest pitch. Never was he to forget the "sharp contagion" of that superior air, the mysteries of which he had been a witness. But that was not all: if his artistic sensibilities had been stimulated, his social and moral sensibilities had been outraged, his pride had been wounded, his romantic vision of Europe had suffered a cruel wrong. Such later reminiscences as we find here and there in his Notes on Novelists, for example, tell us very little about his real feelings at the time: it is from his writings of the 'seventies, from the general view of life revealed in those writings, and from the scattered reports one has gathered of his private conversation, that his true attitude is to be discerned. Mr Huefler, for instance, tells us that he cherished for Flaubert, in reality, a "lasting, deep rancour," that he "hated" him, that he referred again and again to Flaubert as having abused him in the discussion of Mérimée, that he could never forgive the master for having opened his own door in a dressing-gown, and would talk of the other writers he had met "not infrequently in terms of shuddering at their social excesses," that he would relate "unrepeatable stories of the ménages of Maupassant." Turn to his own writings of the time, or of the years immediately preceding it. Had he not, in one of his reviews, reproved Swinburne for not striking the moral note or betraying the smallest acquaintance with the conscience? Had he not summed up his admiration for George Eliot by saying that her touchstone was "the word respectable?" And was he not to make it clear that, when he dined with members of the Comédie Française, it was only with the "more genteel" of them? In these writings of his own, as in these reports of his conversation, we distinguish at least a few of the "fifty reasons" why, as he wrote to Howells, he could not become intimate with the literary fraternity of Paris or even "like their
