Christopher Newman the opinion that those who spoke ill of the United States should be carried home in irons and compelled to live in the neighbourhood of the Back Bay. "What it all came to saying," as he remarks in his life of W. W. Story, apropos of the latter's attempt to adjust himself to an earlier Boston, "was that, with an alienated mind, he found himself again steeped in a society both fundamentally and superficially bourgeois, the very type and model of such a society, presenting it in the most favourable, in the most admirable light; so that its very virtues irritated him, so that its ability to be strenuous without passion, its cultivation of its serenity, its presentation of a surface on which it would appear to him that the only ruffle was an occasionally acuter spasm of the moral sense, must have acted as a tacit reproach." And Story had "belonged"; and that had been Boston at its best!
Boston! And, beyond Boston, that great unendowed, unfurnished, unentertained, and unentertaining continent where one sniffed as it were the very earth of one's foundations! "I shall freeze after this sun," said Albrecht Dürer, as he turned homeward across the Alps from Italy. And where was James to turn for warmth, he whose every fibre longed for that other gracious world, that soft, harmonious, picturesque "Europe" of his imagination, that paradise of form, colour, style from which he had been ravished away and which had captured and retained, as in some delirious, some alas, too soon interrupted embrace, the virtue, the very principle of his desire, his fancy, his every instinct? Ah, that secret passionate ache, that rebellious craving of the unsatisfied senses! One felt like a traveller in the desert, deprived of water and subject to the terrible mirage, the torment of illusion, of the thirst-fever. One heard the plash of fountains, one saw the green gardens, the orchards, hundreds of miles away. Europe. And then this emptiness, this implacable emptiness: not a shadow, nothing but the glare of a common-place prosperity.. . . . There were moments, to be sure, when Boston seemed almost European. How one rejoiced in those quiet squares, in the ruddy glow of the old brick walls in the late October sunlight! And there was Norton's great brown study at Shady Hill. . . . But one seemed somehow to lose the feeling of one's identity, one seemed to breathe in a vacuum. There was so little spontaneity in the air; it was all so earnest, or so cold and restrained, or so complacent—wit itself in Boston seemed to be a
