wares." He had fled from Boston, but he had retained, as we see, the stamp of a very small and homely world.
He had not been able to stomach these ferocious companions, not for long. But how he had acclaimed their ideas, how he had marvelled at their way of doing the very things that he had so seldom been able to like! He who had reproved Swinburne for not striking the moral note had also reproved Browning for his neglect of form; he had remarked, in another review and on the same grounds, that it was "an offense against humanity" to place Dickens among the greatest novelists; and he had been repelled by Rubens because of his wastefulness, his "careless grasp." He had been ready, in short, for this Gallic evangel of design, economy, method, and with what rapture he had embraced it! And there was something else that he owed to these mandarins, something a little painful, but at the same time infinitely exhilarating. Why had he listened to them so silently, so breathlessly? Had he not felt himself at a disadvantage, he who had waited so long in that far-away America, hesitating, irresolute, chafing to be off, he who was no longer a child and who had lost perhaps a little of his original capacity to adapt himself, to respond fully to this eagerly anticipated opportunity? How assured these men seemed, even the youngest of them: it was as if they had been born veterans of the craft. And what pace-makers they were! How disconcerting, and at the same time how enlivening! . . . He had been stirred to a passion of emulation, a "rage of determination," as he was to call it later, "to do, and triumph."
Fear—if we must go back to that—fear had given him wings. "There were 'movements' he was too late for," Strether is conceived as thinking in The Ambassadors; "weren't they, with the fun of them, already spent? There were sequences he had missed and great gaps in the procession; he might have been watching it all recede in a golden cloud of dust." Strether was middle-aged when at last he found his way to Paris; but had not James himself shared and remembered that sensation of being perhaps too late? Had he not always felt that the great life, the creative life, was a European secret, that it was almost open to question whether an American could be an artist at all? "We are the disinherited of art!" says Theobald in The Madonna of the Future. "We are condemned to be superficial. We are excluded from the magic circle. The soil
