creating a life for himself he enjoys inspecting the lives other men have created for themselves, just as a man who is building a house will examine with care the experiments of a neighbor doing the same thing.

[Pg vii]

The international attracts the American, and yet even the American has no broad international strain in his literature. The theme crops out occasionally, but is never constant. Two or three writers have made it specially their own, but they have founded no line. When we have mentioned Hawthorne in one notable book, Henry James and Marion Crawford in not a few from each, we have almost exhausted the list of the great names of the past, while of the present there is practically no one to quote.

The explanation, if we wanted one, might be found in lack of authority. Though many writers travel in foreign countries few live in them[Pg viii] with sufficient intimacy to see below the surface. Against outsiders continental European private life is guarded like a shrine. The Latin countries in particular know little of the easy throwing open of the home instinctive to the Anglo-Saxon, so that, as a rule, a stranger steps within the seclusion of a French or Italian family only by marriage or some unusual set of conditions.

[Pg viii]

And yet both marriage and the unusual set of conditions occur.

In the case of the former we who remain in America are not greatly benefited, since few of the American women who marry into continental Europe ever tell what they know for the information of compatriots. The power of absorption of a highly organized social life, like that of Italy, France, or Spain, is such that not many who enter it ever come out of it again. They are held by a thousand social and domestic tentacles, which have no counterpart in happy-go-lucky American relationships. Amid their surroundings they may always remain alien, and yet they are enclosed by them, as insects in amber.

[Pg ix]

[Pg ix]

It is to the unusual set of conditions that we owe most, and the author of the novel of which these words are meant to be a prelude has enjoyed those conditions to an exceptional degree. Diplomatic life has the special advantage that it establishes close relations as a matter of course. It admits one to the palace of which the chance traveller sees only the windows and walls. It knows no slow approaches or apprenticeships. Not only are the barred doors thrown open, 

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