That James should have followed this story with an essay on "The Novels of George Eliot" is no mere coincidence. How completely he had saturated himself with all the work of the great English sibyl, appears on every page. Her faithfulness to her material, her vivid photographs, her devotion to science which little by little crushed out her woman's heart, her conception of the novel as the record of a dissection--the reactions of human souls under the scalpel and the microscope, her materialism that refused all testimony save that of the test-tube and the known reagents, that reduced man to a problem in psychology--all this made its reflex upon the young student. He too became a scientist, taking nothing for granted, stripping himself of all illusions, relegating the ideal, the intuitive, the spiritual to the realm of the outgrown; he too became a taker of notes--"The new school of fiction in France is based very much on the taking of notes," he remarks in his essay on Daudet. "The library of the great Flaubert, of the brothers Goncourt, of Emile Zola, and of the writer of whom I speak, must have been in a large measure a library of memorandum-books."[97] In his earlier work at least, he was George Eliot with the skill and finesse of Maupassant, and he may be summed up with his whole school in the words he has put into the mouth of his own Anastasia Blumenthal: "It was meager," he makes her say of the singing of Adelina Patti, "it was trivial, it lacked soul. You can't be a great artist without a great passion." IV During the first period of his literary life, the period that ended somewhere in the early nineties, James took as the subject of his study that vagrom area that lies on the borderland between the old culture of Europe and the new rawness of America. Howells has made much of the longings of certain classes in the older parts of his native land to visit the European cities, and he has pictured more than once their idealizations of foreign things, their retrospections and dreamings. James showed these Americans actually in Europe, their manners as seen against the older background, their crudeness and strength; and in doing so he produced what was widely hailed as the new international novel. There was nothing really new about it. James wrote of Americans in Europe just as Mark Twain wrote of Americans on the Mississippi or in California. As a scientist he must deal only with facts which had passed under his own observation--that was his much-discussed "realism"--and the life that he was most familiar with was the life of the pensions and grand hotels of Rome and Switzerland and Paris and London.