ylline
volumes; buying most of them--I can recall the occasion--in one
huge derelict pile from a certain friendly book-shop in Brighton; and
leaving the precious parcel, promise of more than royal delights, in
some little waiting-room on the sun-bathed Georgian front, while I
walked the beach like a Grand Vizier who has received a present
from the Sultan.

The only people who are to be more envied than those who have
collected Henry James from the beginning--and these alas! are most
of them grey-headed now--are the people who, possessed of the true
interior unction, have by some accident of obstructing circumstance
been debarred from this voluptuous pleasure until late in their
experience. What ecstasies such persons have in store for them,
what "linked sweetness long-drawn out" of sybaritish enjoyment!

But I was speaking of those secret and interesting preparations that
every great artist makes before he gets to work; those clearings of
his selected field of operations from the alien and irrelevant growths.

What Henry James requires before he can set his psychological
machinery in motion is uninterrupted leisure for the persons of his
emotional dramas. Leisure first, and after leisure a certain pleasant
congruity of background.

Henry James is indeed the author "par excellence" of a leisured
upper class who have time to think and feel, and to dwell at large
upon their thoughts and feelings, undisturbed by the spade, the
plough, the sword, the counter, the wheels of factories or the roar of
traffic. It is amusing to watch the thousand and one devices by
which he disentangles his people from the intrusive irrelevancy of
work. They are either rich themselves--and it cannot be concealed
that money, though not over-emphasised, is never quite eliminated
from the field of action--or they are dependent upon rich relatives
and friends.

It is for this reason perhaps that there are so few professional people
in his books. The absence of lawyers is quite striking; so is the
absence of doctors,--though a charming example of the latter
profession does certainly appear in "The Wings of a Dove" as the
medical attendant upon the dying girl in Venice. I cannot at this
moment recall a single clergyman or priest. Is this because these
spiritual guides of our race are too poor or too over-worked to serve
his purpose, or do we perhaps,--in this regrettable "lacuna"--stumble
upon one of the little smiling prejudices of our great co