ABSTRACT
The phrase 'country of the blue' occurs in a short story by Henry James called 'The Next Time', written four years after Meredith's One of Our Conquerors, in 1895. The country is a world of abstraction and artistic isolation inhabited by Ray Limbert during his literary career. He is tempted to vulgarize his style to make the money needed to support his wife and family, but he cannot do it, and, as the narrator says, his bid for popularity merely produces another variation of his artistic gifts, and the novel may still be compared with the superior and distant character of the sky:
I fidgeted to my high-perched window for a glimpse of the summer dawn, I became at last aware that I was staring at it out of eyes that had compassionately and admiringly filled. The eastern sky, over the London house-tops, had a wonderful tragic crimson. That was the colour of his magnificent mistake (174-5).1
