as the result of some profound impression that he had received in his youth; and is it not the case indeed that Zola had given him the cue for which he had been waiting? Was it true, after all, as Hawthorne had seemed to prove, that a novelist could not successfully "project himself into an atmosphere in which he had not a transmitted and inherited property?" Was it really a fact that one's "native soil" mattered so very much? Zola denied it—if not by word, at least by every implication of his doctrine: was he not himself on the very point of "getting up" Italy with a Baedeker? . . . To be sure, Zola's Italy. . . . Even if one couldn't quite compare the case with Hawthorne's. . . . But James was not in a position to look too closely into a faith that seemed to assure his own artistic salvation. There is a certain truth in Mr Lubbock's remark that he went to England "more by a process of exhaustion than by deliberate choice": he could not turn back to America, and he had found that the Continent was impracticable. And how his heart leaped at the thought of England, England on any terms!
