‘the impermeability of English society’

[I]n this respect the [democratic] American self can be taken to be a microcosm of American society, which has notably lacked the solidity and intractability of English society; it is little likely to be felt by its members as being palpably  there. The testimony on this score is one of the classic elements of nineteenth-century American cultural history. James Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne, Henry James, all in one way or another said that American society was, in James’s phrase, ‘thinly composed’, lacking the thick, coarse actuality which the novelist, as he existed in their day, needed for the practice of his craft. It did not offer him the palpable material, the stuff, out of which novels were made. What came as a revelation to American visitors to England was exactly the impermeability of English society, the solidness of the composition, the thick, indubitable thereness which enforced upon its members a sort of primary sincerity—the free acknowledgement that in one respect, at least, they were not free, that their existences were bound by their society, determined by its peculiarities. About their being social rather than transcendent beings the English told the truth to themselves and the world.

Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity