Notes on novelists, with some other notes, by Henry James.

CHARLES ELIOT NORTON

329

What comes back to me then from the early day I have
glanced at is exactly that prompt sense of the clustered evidence
of my friend's perfect adaptation to the civilising mission, and
not least to the needfully dauntless and unperturbed side of it.
His so pleasant old hereditary home, with its ample acres and
numerous spoils-at a time when acres merely marginal and,
so to speak, atmospheric, as well as spoils at all felicitously
gathered, were rare in the United States-seemed to minister
to the general assurance, constituting as they did such a picture
of life as one vaguely supposed recognisable, right and left, in
an old society, or, otherwise expressed, in that " Europe"
which was always, roundabout one, the fond alternative of the
cultivated imagination, but of which the possible American
copy ever seemed far to seek. To put it in a nutshell, the
pilgrimage to the Shady Hill of those years had, among the
4" spoils," among pictures and books, drawings and medals,
memories and relics and anecdotes, things of a remote but
charming reference, very much the effect of a sudden rise into
a finer and clearer air and of a stopgap against one's own
coveted renewal of the more direct experience. If I allude to
a particular, to a personal yearning appreciation of those
matters, it is with the justified conviction-this justification
having been all along abundantly perceptible- that appreciation of the general sort only waited to be called for, though
to be called for with due authority. It was the sign of our host,
on the attaching spot, and almost the principal one, that he
spoke, all round and with the highest emphasis, as under the
warrant of authority, and that at a time when, as to the main
matter of his claim and his discourse, scarce anyone pretended
to it, he carried himself valiantly under that banner. The main
matter of his discourse offered itself just simply as the matter
of civilisation-the particular civilisation that a young roaring
and money-getting democracy, inevitably but almost exclusively
occupied with " business success," most needed to have brought
home to it. The New England air in especial was no natural
conductor of any appeal to an esthetic aim, but the interest of
Professor Norton's general work, to say nothing of the interest
y