plaintively, in the manner of roaming Americans, for a few stray crumbs from the native social board; with my fancy vainly beating its wings against the great blank wall, behind which, in travel-haunted Europe, all gentle private interests nestle away from intrusion. Here, as elsewhere, I was struck with the mere surface-relation of the Western tourist to the soil he treads. He filters and trickles through the dense social body in every possible direction, and issues forth at last the same virginal water drop. 'Go your way, these antique houses seemed to say, from their quiet courts and gardens; 'the road is yours and welcome, but the land is ours. You may pass and stare and wonder, but you may never know us.'" Ah, that arrogant old Europe! Turn where he might, at the native social board there had been no place for James.
"I have done with 'em forever," he wrote to his brother in 1876, "and am turning English all over. I desire only to feed on English life and the contact of English minds—I wish greatly I knew some. Easy and smooth-flowing as life is in Paris, I would throw it over tomorrow for an even very small chance to plant myself for a while in England. If I had but a single good friend in London I would go thither. I have got nothing important out of Paris nor am likely to." But that was an exaggeration. Paris had not given him a field for the exercise of his talent; on the other hand, he had acquired there a doctrine, a faith, without which he could hardly have confronted the future at all. He had grown up artistically under the old dispensation in which the novelist was nothing if not the child of his own people, the voice of his own people. It was this belief, more than anything else—or so we are led to assume—that had kept him so long in America; he had had no warrant to suppose that he could ever master another world, and his leap to Europe had been largely a leap in the dark. And here in Paris he had heard of nothing but "observation": the writer had ceased to be called a voice, he had become an animated note-book. Was it not the burden of those conversations at Flaubert's that one could "get up" any subject, any field, any world, if one set to work with sufficient system and lived in one's eyes and one's ears? Had not the whole Flaubertian brotherhood listened with unqualified sympathy when Zola set forth the prodigious achievements of his own sensory organism? . . . To the end of his life James cherished for Zola a respect that we find almost inexplicable save
