But I can't make a picture of the brown-stone stoops in the Fifth Avenue, or the platform of the elevated railway in the Sixth. . . . I can sketch the palazzo and can do nothing with the uptown residence." And this was precisely the situation of Henry James.
In his old age, when he returned to America, he commented on "the thinness, making too much for transparency, for the effect of paucity, still inherent in American groupings; a law under which the attempt to subject them to portraiture, to see them as 'composing,' resembles the attempt to play whist with an imperfect pack of cards." Well he remembered that sensation of helplessness, of impotence, as of those creatures of the deep sea who change colour and shrink when they are astray in fresh water. He had felt so baffled, so powerless in this environment that refused to conform to the shapes within his brain; he had not been able to conquer his world, and every day it had seemed to him more menacing. "Long would it take," he says in his reminiscences, "to tell why [New England] figured as a danger, and why that impression was during the several following years much more to gain than to lose intensity." But we can restore perhaps a few filaments of the mood that possessed him. He would lose, if he remained, the wondrous web of images that shimmered in his mind! He would forget the thoughts that he had laid away, nuts or winter apples, in the dim chambers of his consciousness! He would sink into a dull conformity with the cautious, conventional, commonplace routine literary Boston. At fifty, at sixty . . . he could see himself rather stout, a little shabby, his arm laden with parcels, waiting at the corner of Boylston Street for the Cambridge horse-car, his mind running on a new serial, another "old New England story" for the Atlantic. . . . Shades of Balzac and the world forgone! The world, alas, the great, the dangerous, the delightful world!
The recurring theme of James' first period as a novelist was to be that "hatred of tyranny" of which Mr Ezra Pound speaks, that defence of "human liberty, personal liberty, the rights of the individual against all sorts of intangible bondage." His novels, Miss Bosanquet observes, are "a sustained and passionate plea for the fullest freedom of the individual development that he saw continually imperilled by barbarian stupidity." Who that recalls The Bostonians, that picture of a world which seems to consist of noth-
