read into the incidents of his life, into the scenes that confronted him, associations with the novelized Europe from which he had drawn such "mystic strength": he had caught in the legend of his father's friendship with Edwin Forrest echoes of the diaries and memoirs of "the giftedly idle and the fashionably great, the Byrons, the Bulwers, the Pelhams, the Coningsbys"; he had seen in Miss Upham's boarding-house in Cambridge a translation in American terms of Balzac's Maison Vauquer; he had found in his cousin Robert Temple, newly returned from Europe, a character "in the sense," as he puts it, "in which 'people in books' were characters, and other people, roundabout us, were somehow not. . . . We owed him to Dickens or Thackeray, the creators of superior life to whom we were at that time always owing most." And as the years had gone by and the American scene had failed to stimulate his interest on its own account, he had continued to romanticize it in this way, re-creating it in the image of the pattern within his brain. Glance at his stories of this period. In Crawford's Consistency, Elizabeth is brought up "in the manner of an Italian princess of the Middle Ages," in a "high-hedged old garden" at Orange, New Jersey. In De Grey: A Romance, Mrs De Grey keeps a priest in her house to serve as her confessor. In Poor Richard, the young New England farmer is represented as kissing Gertrude's hand whenever he meets her, while she, a homespun Yankee by every implication of her being, maintains in her rustic parlour the ritual of an English country-house. In Eugene Pickering, the story turns upon the fact that a marriage had been arranged when Eugene was a boy between himself and the daughter of one of his father's friends. "I have an especial fondness for going into churches on week-days," says Miss Guest, in Guest's Confession. "One does it in Europe, you know; and it reminds me of Europe." Virtually all these early stories of James' are the fruit of a similar nostalgia, a similar effort to discover in the American world the traces of a Europe either of memory or of fantasy: their creator was as much out of key with the scene upon which his eyes rested as Roger Lawrence, in Watch and Ward, standing on the piazza of his house and surveying the bursting spring through an opera-glass. As for the American spectacle in and of itself, he could make nothing of it. "I believe I should be a good patriot," says Miss Condit, in The Impressions of a Cousin, "if I could sketch my native town.
