imagination, would probably, as a general thing, be appalling. The natural remark, in the almost lurid light of such an indictment, would be that if these things are left out, everything is left out. The American knows that a good deal remains; what it is that remains—that is his secret, his joke, as one may say."
It could not have occurred to James in the 'seventies that most of the items he enumerates here are absent as much from the texture of Russian and Scandinavian as from that of American life, and that this was not to prevent the emergence in Russia and Scandinavia of a fiction entirely comparable with that of England and France. The evidence for such a deduction was still to come, at least for an American reader; but so much for the general law involved in this bill of the novelist's rights. Was Howells mistaken when, in his review of James' book, he remarked that after one had omitted all these paraphernalia one had "simply the whole of human life left"? Was there anything, anything but the limitations—the mental configuration, rather—of the individual himself, to make it impossible for an artist to shape in prose the material that Whitman, for example, had found so abundantly at hand? Or is there some truth in the theory that a given society must have arrived at a certain equilibrium and crystallized in certain more or less permanent forms before the novelist can effectively handle it? "Looking about for myself," James wrote in 1871, "I conclude that the face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But," he adds, "it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. . . . To write well and worthily of American things one needs even more than elsewhere to be a master." And that, at least, was undoubtedly true: would it not have required a Tolstoy, a Balzac, one of those veritable creators of societies, really to present the America of the generation that followed the Civil War—to present it with anything like the adequacy with which novelists of the second or the third rank had been able to present the organized societies of Europe? However this may be, James had taken his world and his scale of values from the fiction with which his mind was saturated. He was thus destined to make certain exactions of America which America could not fulfil.
For if it was a question of palaces, castles, thatched cottages, and
