American humor, according to James, was born from the bareness of the American scene. It bobbed up in America for reasons analogous to those which seventeenth-century savants assigned to the rising of the liquid column in the barometer: “_la nature a horreur de vide_”; nature is afraid of the vacuum and must find some compensations for it. Such was the map of the great American desert drawn by Henry James. For Walt Whitman, the United States were a cornucopia. They were a blank for Henry James. He fled to Great Britain to forget the great Valley of Death and the call-of-the-wild. To imagine Henry James and Jack London as countrymen takes not a little imagination indeed. As a challenge to this unpatriotic programme, let the reader remember the sarcasms heaped on European aristocracy, traditions and culture by Mark Twain, in “Innocents Abroad” and “The Prince and the Pauper,” which are contemporary with Henry James’ productions. Mark Twain voted for American philistinism, and American literature to-day has also cast its suffrage in favor of the democratic ideals. Puritanism was the last form of aristocratic tradition in the United States. Henry James’ indictment of his native country marked the parting of the ways between the ancient and the modern, between tradition and evolution, culture and spontaneity. A character in one of his early novels solved for us the riddle of James’ exile. He told us that Americans are artistically disinherited; that they are condemned to be superficial; that they do not belong to the magic circle; that the substratum of American perceptions is thin, barren, artificial; that, as follows, Americans are bound to imperfection. To excel in anything they have ten times more things to learn than a European. There is a certain deep sense which they lack. They have neither taste, tact nor strength. How could they have any? Their climate is harsh and violent, their past silent, their present dizzying, their environment oppressive and without charms. There is nothing in America to feed, stir and inspire an artist. All aspiring souls become exiles.