Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 104, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 May 1916 — Henry James on France. [ARTICLE]

Henry James on France.

She has gardened where the soil of humanity has been most grateful, and the aspect, so to call it, most toward the sun, and there, at the high and yet mild and fortunate center, she has grown the precious, intimate, nourishing, finishing things that she has inexhaustibly scattered abroad. And if we have all taken them from her, so expected them from her as our right, to the point that she would have seemed positively to fail of a passed pledge to help us to happiness if she had disappointed us, this has been because of her treating us to the impression of genius as no other nation since the Greeks has treated the watching world, and because of our -feeling that genius at that intensity is infallible. — Henry James, in “The Book of France,” Macmillan.