ite of our upper middle
class life, with its aristocrats at the top and its luckless governesses
and tutors and journalists at the bottom; as we, who are in it, know it
and feel it and suffer from it, every day of our existence.

And, curiously enough, this is a very rare achievement. Of course
there is a horde of second-rate writers, cheap hucksters of glittering
sentimental wares for the half-educated, who write voluminously of
the life of which I am speaking. There are others, more cultivated
but endowed with less vivacity, who crowd their pages with grave
personages from what are called "liberal professions." But the more
imaginative writers of our day are not to be looked for in the
drawing-rooms of their wives and daughters.

Mr. Hardy confines himself to the meadows of Blackmoor and the
highways and hedges of Dorset Uplands. Mr. Conrad sails down
tropical rivers and among the islands of Southern seas. The
American Mr. Dreiser ploughs his earth-upheaving path through the
workshops of Chicago and the warehouses of Manhattan.

It is Henry James and Henry James alone, who unravels for us the
tangled skein of our actual normal-abnormal life, as the destinies
twist and knot it in the civilised chambers of our natural sojourning.

The curious thing is that even among our younger and most modern
writers, no one, except John Galsworthy, really deals with the sort of
life that I have in mind when I speak of the European "upper
classes"; and one knows how Mr. Galsworthy's noble and chivalrous
interest in social questions militates against the intellectual
detachment of his curiosity.

The cleverer authors among our younger school almost invariably
restrict their scope to what one feels are autobiographical histories
of their own wanderings through the pseudo-Latin quarters of
London and Paris. They flood their pages with struggling artists,
emancipated seamstresses, demi-mondaine actresses, social
reformers, and all the rag-tag and bob-tail of suburban semi-culture;
whereas in some mysterious way--probably by reason of their not
possessing imaginations strong enough to sweep them out of the
circle of their own experiences--the more normal tide of ordinary
"upper-class" civilisation passes them untouched.

It is imagination which is lacking, imagination which, as in the case
of Balzac and Dostoievsky, can carry a writer beyond the sphere of
his own personal adventures, into the great tides and currents of the
human c