From Hawthorne to the present time, American fiction numbers many masters. Preëminent among them stand Henry James, Edith Wharton and William Dean Howells. They are a group apart. Their philosophy of life and their æsthetics place them in the past more than in the present. Each one of them, in his own original way, continued the tradition of the novel of intrigue, the novel of character and that of manners. Of the three, Henry James stands foremost as a psychologist and an artist. His career was marked by a progressive alienation from his native environment and culminated with a complete desertion of America for England. James, with Edgar Allan Poe, was the sole example of an artistic conscience in American letters. He represented in American literature the longing for the European background. He confessed that he could not do his work outside of aristocratic surroundings. This he explicitly avowed in his essay on Hawthorne. He deplored the fact that the New England novelist had to estrange himself from Europe where he could have matured his talent and made it bear fruit. “The flower of art,” wrote he, “blooms only where the soil is deep.... It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature ... it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion.” He pleaded extenuating circumstances for what he called “the modest” and provincial “nosegay” of Hawthorne: It takes so many things ... it takes such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a fund of suggestion for a novelist.... The negative side of the spectacle on which Hawthorne looked out, in his contemplative saunterings and reveries, might, indeed, with a little ingenuity, be made almost ludicrous; one might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know 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, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, no manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools--no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class--no Epson nor Ascot! For an English or French imagination there is something appalling in this vast emptiness. The American is well aware that something remains in his huge country to make up for these deficiencies, but when we come to the question of knowing what it is that remains--“that is his secret, his joke, as one might say.”