His nationality saved Henry James from the common English necessity of taking a side in the political game; and in the United States nobody of his world had expected him to be interested in politics. There is a pleasant account in _The Middle Years_ of his blankness when he was asked at a London breakfast-table for "distinctness about General Grant's first cabinet, upon the formation of which the light of the newspaper happened then to beat." The question was embarrassing. "There were, it appeared, things of interest taking place in America, and I had had, in this absurd manner, to come to England to learn it: I had had over there on the ground itself no conception of any such matter--nothing of the smallest interest, by any perception of mine, as I suppose I should still blush to recall, had taken place in America since the War." Nothing of any great public interest, by any perception of his, was to take place in Europe until the outbreak of another war at that time far beyond the range of speculation. But if cabinets and parties and politics were and remained outside the pale of his sensibility, he was none the less charmed by the customs of a country where Members of Parliament and Civil Servants could meet together for a leisurely breakfast, thus striking "the exciting note of a social order in which everyone wasn't hurled straight, with the momentum of rising, upon an office or a store." IX Henry James came to England to admire. But his early reverence for the men and women of an island with so fine and ancient a historic tone as Great Britain soon faded. He had forgotten, in the first passion of acquaintance, that the English are born afresh in every generation and are about as new as young Americans, differing from them chiefly in having other forms of domestic and ecclesiastical architecture and smoother lawns to take for granted. He looked at old stone castles and Tudor brickwork, at great hanging eaves and immemorial gardens, and then he looked at the heirs of this heritage and listened intently for their speech. This was disappointing, partly because they spoke so little. "I rarely remember," he wrote when he had lived through several London months, "to have heard on English lips any other intellectual verdict (no matter under what provocation) than this broad synthesis 'so immensely clever.' What exasperates you is not that they can't say more but that they wouldn't if they could."