this quality of beauty in them as something friendly, breathed in with the air. Often, because of long familiarity with the landscape about me, I am not consciously aware that it is beautiful. Nevertheless, the fact that it is so is never quite forgotten. If, though with every possible advantage of space, leisure and friends, I had suddenly to live in Patterson, New Jersey, or in Superior, Wisconsin, something of tremendous importance would seem to me to have disappeared from my life, and a background of serenity that enables me happily to do the little that I can do as well as is possible for me would become a background to be at any moment consciously subdued before I should be able to achieve anything at all. ‘But all these things.’ a quite justifiably impatient reader might by now object, ‘are no better than theories. You, who are by way of being a writer, like and are able to live abroad, and it amuses you to depict this as advantageous. But is it really? Let us have facts. Discarding those degenerate rose-garden Americans, are there others to whom living abroad has been of actual benefit?’ Well, if by ‘benefit’ is meant actual benefit to achievement, I honestly cannot say. I know, or know of, a number of American writers and painters who live in France or Italy, and I cannot truthfully claim that I think any of their work as good as the best that is being done by some in America itself. But that, unfortunately, proves nothing. Their number, of course, is very small compared with the number of those at home, and among these last only a handful are achieving work of consequence. The significant question (which it is quite impossible to answer) is whether these transplanted Americans are painting better pictures or writing better books than, given the limitations of their talent, they would have been able to write or paint had they stayed at home.