born
again as is felt by many a convert to Christianity. He can speak of the
joy of it all only in superlatives. He had the convert's sense of--in
his own phrase--"agitations, explorations, initiations (I scarce know
how endearingly enough to name them I)." He speaks of "this really
prodigious flush" of his first full experience of England. He passes on
the effect of his religious rapture when he tells us that "really
wherever I looked, and still more wherever I pressed, I sank in and in
up to my nose." How breathlessly he conjures up the scene of his
dedication, as he calls it, in the coffee-room of a Liverpool hotel on
that gusty, "overwhelmingly English" March morning in 1869, on which at
the age of almost twenty-six he fortunately and fatally landed on these
shores,

with immediate intensities of appreciation, as I may call the
muffled accompaniment, for fear of almost indecently overnaming it.

He looks back, with how exquisite a humour and seriousness, on that
morning as having finally settled his destiny as an artist. "This doom,"
he writes:--

This doom of inordinate exposure to appearances, aspects, images,
every protrusive item almost, in the great beheld sum of things, I
regard ... as having settled upon me once for all while I observed,
for instance, that in England the plate of buttered muffins and its
cover were sacredly set upon the slop-bowl after hot water had been
ingenuously poured into the same, and had seen that circumstance in
a perfect cloud of accompaniments.

It is characteristic of Henry James that he should associate the hour in
which he turned to grace with a plate of buttered muffins. His fiction
remained to the end to some extent the tale of a buttered muffin. He
made mountains out of muffins all his days. His ecstasy and his
curiosity were nine times out of ten larger than their objects. Thus,
though he was intensely interested in English life, he was interested in
it, not in its largeness as life so much as in its littleness as a
museum, almost a museum of _bric-a-brac_. He was enthusiastic about the
waiter in the coffee-room in the Liverpool hotel chiefly as an
illustration of the works of the English novelists.

Again and again in his reminiscences one comes upon evidence that Henry
James arrived in England in the spirit of a collector, a connoisseur, as
well as that of a convert. His ecstasy was that of a convert: his
curiosity was tha