f work from our minds.

And what a hole there would be, what a jagged, bleeding, horrible
hole, if the books of Henry James--and it is a continuous satisfaction
to a lover of literature to think how many of them there are--were
flung upon oblivion.

How often as the days of our life drift by, growing constantly more
crowded and difficult, do we find ourselves exclaiming, "Only
Henry James could describe this! What a situation for Henry
James!"

The man has come to get himself associated more--oh, far more
--than any other writer of our day, with the actual stir and pressure of
environment in which we habitually move. I say "we." By this I
mean the great mass of educated people in Europe, England and
America. Of the "Masses," as they are called; of the persons by
whose labours our middle-class and upper-class life, with its
comparative leisure and comfort, is made possible, Henry James has
little to say.

He never or very rarely deals, as Balzac and de Maupassant and
Hardy do, with the farmers and farm labourers on the land. He never
or very rarely deals with the slums of our great cities, as did Dickens
and Victor Hugo. He confines himself more rigorously than any
other novelist of equal power to the ways and manners and
entanglements of people who are "in society," or who could be in
society if they wanted to, or are on the verge and edge of society.

When the "lower classes"--I use the convenient term; doubtless in
the eyes of celestial hierarchies the situation is reversed--enter at all
into the circle of Mr. James' consciousness, they enter, either as
interesting anarchists, like young Hyacinth, or as servants.
Servants--especially butlers and valets--play a considerable part, and so
do poor relations and impecunious dependents. For these latter of both
sexes the great urbane author has a peculiar and tender consideration.
It is not in the least that he is snobbish. Of that personal uneasiness
in the presence of worldly greatness so unpleasantly prominent in
Thackeray there is absolutely nothing. It is only that, conscientious
artist as he is, he is unwilling to risk any sort of aesthetic "faux pas"
by adventuring outside his natural sphere, the sphere to which he
was born. Of gentlefolk who are poor and of artists and writers who
are poor there are innumerable types strewn throughout his works.

It were quite unfair to say that he only writes of the idle rich. What
he actually does is--as I have said--to wr