effervescent"? What might not Hawthorne have become if he had sprung from another soil! . . . Thus Henry James read his own fears into the world that surrounded him. Was there any occasion for these fears, any justification in the facts of the case itself? It suffices to say that he felt them: the instances to which I have referred, and which are all to be found in his writings, show us how constantly his mind was occupied with this question. We remember how the narrator in The Aspern Papers marvels that Jeffrey Aspern, that American Shelley of the previous age, had "found means to live and write like one of the first; to be free and general and not at all afraid; to feel, understand and express everything." We remember the moral that James tells us he had drawn from Hawthorne's case before his first naïve opinion of Hawthorne had been subjected to the test of his friend H. B. Brewster's "cosmopolitan culture," the moral "that an American could be an artist, one of the finest, without 'going outside' about it." Clearly, Hawthorne to James' mind was the exception that proved the rule, the rule that, without "going outside," an American could not be an artist at all, and even Hawthorne ceased to be an entirely convincing exception. As for Poe, Thoreau, Whitman, whose poems he was so soon to read, they could never have dispelled his apprehensions. Of Poe he said, that "to take him with more than a certain degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness oneself"; and of Thoreau, that "he is worse than provincial, he is parochial." And he accused Whitman of "discharging the undigested contents of his blotting-book into the lap of the public." It might be said of these estimates that they reveal simply a series of legitimate personal antipathies, though I think they suggest more than a little of that provincial humility, that inability to believe that any good thing could come out of the American Nazareth, which he exhibited when he found his opinion of Hawthorne so sadly reduced at the approach of a Europeanized friend. My present point, however, is that, feeling as he did about the greatest of his predecessors, he could find neither in the world about him nor in the history and traditions of that world anything to reassure him, anything to counterbalance the fears, the dread, with which from the first he had looked out upon it. The "striking evidence" of his childhood that "scarce aught but disaster could, in that so unformed and unseasoned society, overtake young men who were in the least ex-
