It took all Mr James' cosmopolitan training to see that there existed an international situation, that the fact that Americans visited Europe constituted a drama. An Englishman who visited Italy did no more than take a look at a more richly coloured order of life that braced him up, as any gay spectacle might have done, to return to his own; his travel was a pleasure, or, at most, if he happened to be a Landor or a Browning, an inspiration. It might reasonably be supposed that the visit to Europe of an American was no greater matter. But Mr James knew that the wealthy American was in the position of a man who has built a comfortable house and has plenty of money over, yet cannot furnish it because furniture is neither made nor sold in his country; until he has crossed the sea to the land where they do make furniture he must sleep and eat on the floor. "One might enumerate," he writes in those early days, "the items of high civilisation as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy...." There follows a long list, so long as to provoke the "natural remark ... that if these things are left out everything is left out." And, Mr James goes on to complain, "it takes so many things--such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a fund of suggestion for a novelist." He wrote novelist because at the moment he was criticising Hawthorne, but he would certainly have applied his phrase to anyone who desired his life to be not a corduroy track but a marble terrace with palaces on the one hand and fair gardens on the other.