turning to it. "I know what I am about," he writes at thirty-five to William James, "and I have always my eyes on my native land." But there was something that came between him and the picture, something that is revealed in the fact that he endeavoured to find America in such places as Newport and Saratoga: a certain pattern that he had drawn from his reading had taken shape in his imagination, and he could look in the world about him only for the traces of that alien literary world. He could scarcely conceive indeed of an art of fiction that dispensed with the mise-en-scène of the writers he admired. Was this merely, was it purely, a matter of spontaneous taste? Is it not more accurate to say that a certain preconception had taken root at the very base of his literary consciousness? By whatever name we are to call the vision that filled his mind, he expressed it, in any case, in the following passage in his life of Hawthorne—a passage that explains better than anything else the inevitable rift between himself and his own country:
"It takes so many things, as Hawthorne must have felt later in life, when he made the acquaintance of the denser, richer, warmer European spectacle—it takes such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a fund of suggestion for a novelist. . . . The negative side of the spectacle on which Hawthorne looked out, in his contemplative saunterings and reveries, might, indeed, with a little ingenuity, be made almost ludicrous; one might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches, nor great universities, nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class—nor Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things of American life—especially in the American life of forty years ago, the effect of which, upon an English or a French
