function of complacency. And outside, in the streets, how shrill were the voices, how angular were the gestures, how deficient somehow in weight, volume, and resonance were the souls one discerned in these hurrying passers-by! . . . And there was the Cambridge horse-car, clattering along through the dust on its lazy everlasting way: one could sit there on a summer noon, utterly alone, jogging home to one's work-table, with a sense of being on the periphery of the universe, twenty thousand leagues from the nearest centre of energy. One stared through the dingy pane of the window at the bald, bare, bleak panorama that seemed to shuffle past: an unkempt field, and then a wooden cottage, and then another wooden cottage, a rough front yard, a little naked piazza, a foot- way overlaid with a strip of planks.
Was it all like this, was it all a void or a terror? He had received every encouragement, certainly; and yet he had never been really drawn out, as young men were drawn out—or weren't they?—in England, in France. People seemed somehow never to expect one to become, or even to want one to become, what one was determined to become. A portent, a veritable genius—that would have been so disconcerting in Boston! There was something a little indecent in the mere thought of such a thing: it appeared to be taken for granted that a bright young American ought not to make himself too conspicuous, ought not even to desire a destiny that deviated too far from the common lot. And then there were those prescriptions, those impalpable moulds that one was supposed to have accepted. There was Howells' repeated warning, for instance, against not "ending happily": one laboured always under the conviction that to terminate a fond aesthetic effort in felicity had to be as much one's obeyed law as to begin it and carry it on in the same rosy mood. And in any case—granting that one didn't, for one's life, for the very life of one's imagination, dare to penetrate too far beyond one’s own circle—how could one ever create a comédie humaine out of the world at one's disposal? It was utterly, fantastically impossible!
Years later, in London, Henry James told his friend E. S. Nadal that before deciding to live in Europe he had given his own country a "good trial." It was true; for the greater part of a decade he kept his eyes fixed upon the American scene, and even then for a number of years he seems not to have relinquished the idea of re-
