One could continue to write indefinitely of the charms of London, but already many readers have undoubtedly been giving vent to that characteristic remark whenever one praises foreign lands or suggests anything lacking in “God’s Country”: “Why don’t you go there to live if you think it’s so much better?”—with an inflection of annoyance that makes the sentence much more of an imperative than an interrogative. Over here, year after year, as one’s life passes so easily and humanely, one asks one’s self that question, especially as one reads that marvelously fascinating last page of the morning Times with its illustrated advertisements, veritable “magic casements,” of country houses for sale at fabulously low prices according to American standards. Also one knows one can be sure of a cook. Why not stay here and live? And yet one doesn’t—or, at least, one has not yet. As for the mere matter of changing one’s residence, American opinion has always been irrational. Americans think it laudable that a citizen of any other nation should[Pg 272] come to America to better his condition, but shameful that an American should emigrate to Europe for the same purpose. Let an Astor or a Henry James or an Edwin Abbey transfer himself to England and, in the American vernacular, “a howl goes up” as though he had been a Benedict Arnold. But life after all is not rational, and one hesitates. The advantages of this country are all rational. The reasons for not packing up forthwith are largely irrational and usually they win, though they are not easy to describe. There is at bottom that largely modern and perhaps hardest of all passions to analyze, the love of one’s country, even in America where in many neighborhoods one’s neighbors have ceased to be of one’s own race or even, perhaps, capable of speaking one’s own tongue. As one looks at the beautiful English landscape, more beautiful in its well-tended charm and utter peacefulness than any other I know in the whole world, a sudden nostalgia will come over one for a rough, neglected bit of some Vermont hillside or the familiar ugliness of some fishing village on the shore. One murmurs to one’s self, “Beautiful, beautiful,” in Devon or Warwickshire, and then may unaccountably be seized with a sudden desire to “muss it all up.” All Englishmen have to some extent this love of the wild and the unfinished, and perhaps those of us whose families have been in America for centuries—and mine, counting South as well as North America, was here for two generations before even the Mayflower sailed—have “gone native” a bit, have become a little more uncivilized, a little savage. Something revolts in us at living too continuously too perfect, too orderly, too civilized a life.