ally-stricken people into
tragic accomplices of the human drama, making field or factory, as
it may happen, dumb but significant participators in the fatal issue.
But in their case, and in the case of so many other powerful modern
writers, the emotions required are simple and direct, such as
harmonise well with the work of men's hands and the old eternal
struggle with the elements.

It may be said, and with a great deal of plausibility, that this natural
and simple toil adds a dignity and a grandeur to human emotions
which must necessarily vanish with the vanishing of its heavy
burdens. It may be said that the mere existence of an upper class
more or less liberated from such labours and permitted the leisure to
make so much of its passing sensations, is itself a grievous
indictment of our present system. This also is a contention full of
convincing force.

Oscar Wilde himself--the most sophisticated of hedonists--declares
in his "Soul of Man" that the inequality of the present system, when
one considers aesthetic values alone, is as injurious to the rich as it
is pernicious to the poor. Almost every one of the great modern
writers, not excluding even the courtly Turgenief, utters bitter and
eloquent protests against the injustice of this difference.

Nietzsche alone maintains the necessity of a slave caste in order that
the masters of civilisation may live largely, freely, nobly, as did the
ancient aristocracies of the classic ages, without contact with the
burden and tediousness of labour. And in this--in his habitual and
arbitrary neglect of the toiling masses--Henry James is more in
harmony with the Nietzschean doctrine than any other great novelist
of our age. He is indeed, the only one--except perhaps Paul Bourget,
and Bourget cannot in any sense be regarded as his intellectual
equal--who relentlessly and unscrupulously rules out of his work
every aspect of "the spirit of the revolution."

There is something almost terrifying and inhuman about this
imperturbable stolidity of indifference to the sufferings and
aspirations of the many too many. One could imagine any
intellectual proletarian rising up from his perusal of these
voluminous books with a howl of indignation against their urbane
and incorrigible author.

I do not blush to confess that I have myself sometimes shared this
righteous astonishment. Is it possible that the aloofness of this
tenderhearted man from the burden of his age, is due to his
Amer