of American perception is a poor little barren, artificial deposit. Yes! we are wedded to imperfection. An American, to excel, has just ten times as much to learn as a European. We lack the deeper sense: we have neither taste, nor tact, nor force. How should we have them? Our crude and garish climate, our silent past, our deafening present, the constant pressure about us of unlovely circumstance, are as void of all that nourishes and prompts and inspires the artist as my sad heart is void of bitterness in saying so! We poor aspirants must live in perpetual exile." How many times, in hours of doubt, James must have shared these misgivings! One thing is clear: he was convinced that he had a long inheritance to make amends for, that he must win what others had by right of birth. "He could never forget," as Mr Lubbock says, "that he had somehow to make up to himself for arriving as an alien from a totally different social climate: for his own satisfaction he had to wake and toil while others slept."
The traces of this intense preoccupation are to be found everywhere in his early writings. "I believe in you," says Rowland Mallet to Roderick Hudson, as they set out for Europe, "if you are prepared to work and to wait and to struggle and to exercise a great many virtues." And again: "For heaven's sake, if you have got facility, revere it, respect it, adore it, hoard it—don't speculate on it." But aside from such mere fragments of dialogue as these, how does it happen that so many of James' characters are represented as having on their hands some more or less gifted protégé whose education is their principal object in life? His first novel, Watch and Ward, describes the bringing up of Nora, the exotic little Western waif, by her future husband Roger Lawrence. Roderick Hudson is largely the story of Rowland's endeavour to keep his extravagant young friend in the strait path of self-development. In The Tragic Muse, Sherringham devotes himself to educating Miriam Rooth for the stage, while Gabriel Nash’s function in life seems to consist in serving as a sort of conscience for Nick Dormer. And there is The Bostonians, the theme of which is the struggle between Ransome and Olive Chancellor for the tutelage of Verena Tarrant. Do we not distinguish, in the continual recurrence of this motif, the vestiges of James' own absorption in the problem of educating himself? These characters are all engaged in remodelling one another, in preparing one another for a career that involves in-
