ican antecedents?

Rich people in America are far less responsible in their attitude
towards the working classes, and far less troubled by pricks of
conscience than in older countries, where some remote traces of the
feudal system still do something towards bridging the gulf between
class and class.

One must remember too that, after all, Henry James is a great
_deracine,_ a passionate pilgrim from the new world making
amorous advances toward the old. It is always difficult, in a country
which is not one's own, to feel the sting of conscience with regard to
social injustices as sharply as one feels it at home. Travelling in
Egypt or Morocco, one seems to take it carelessly for granted that
there should be scenes of miserable poverty sprinkled around the
picturesque objects of our aesthetic tour.

Well! England and France and Italy are to Henry James like Egypt
and Morocco; and as long as he finds us picturesquely and
charmingly ourselves; set that is, in our proper setting, and with the
picturesque background of local colour behind us--he naturally does
not feel it incumbent upon him to worry himself very greatly over
our social inequalities.

But there is probably more in it than that. These things--the presence
or the absence of the revolutionary conscience--are matters, when
one gets to the bottom of it, of individual temperament, and James,
the kindest and most charitable of men in his personal life, was
simply untouched by that particular spark of "saeva indignatio."

It was not out of stupidity or any lack of sensitiveness that he let it
alone. Perhaps--who can tell?--he, like Nietzsche's Zarathustra,
overcame "the temptation of pity," and deliberately turned aside
from the "ugliest man's" cries.

One feels in one's more ardent moments, when the wish to smite this
accursed economic system some shattering blow becomes red-hot, a
little chilled, it must be confessed, when one recalls that immense
brow, heavy with brooding intellect, and those dreamy, full-orbed
Shakespearian eyes. Was the man, one is tempted to wonder then,
too great, too lonely, too wise, to believe in any beautiful desperate
change in the tragic "pathos of distance" between man and man?
Was indeed the whole mortal business of human life a sort of grand
tour of "Egypt and Morocco" to him; a mere long-drawn-out search
after aesthetic sensations and a patient satisfying of Olympian
curiosity?

No novelist that has ever lived "shows his hand