It is unpleasant to travel in a runaway motor-car, even if it ultimately spills one into a rose-garden, and when Mr James produced a picture gallery when he had intended a grave study of social differences, he was in much that case. But already in _The Author of Beltraffio_ (1884) he had shown his awareness of a movement which had started with the intention of destroying both Christian morality and rationalism, and otherwise making us fearfully gay, and which actually achieved the slight mitigation of the offensiveness of plumbers' shop windows and the recovery by Mr Henry James of control over his machine. That story is not one of Mr James' best; the author makes his readers regard his scene through so small a peephole that even the characters who are to be conceived as above all retiring have to come grossly near if their audience is to make anything of the drama at all. The theme is that an author's wife who considers her husband's books objectionable lets her child die rather than that he should grow up in the companionship of one so utterly without reserve; yet, since the tale is told by a total stranger who is visiting them for the week-end, she has necessarily to behave with a lack of reserve that makes her imputed motive incredible. The special value of the story lies in the moments when the author of _Beltraffio_, whose affectation of a velveteen coat and a remote foreign air makes us desire to scream out to the weekend visitor that he is being fooled, and this is no writer but an artistic photographer, remarks with some complacency that to the conventional he appears "no better than an ancient Greek" and professes a thirst for "the cultivation of beauty without reserve or precautions." Our happy generation cannot understand these phrases which doubtless had their salutary meaning for that distant day when England fed herself on so low a diet that _Jude the Obscure_ seemed to her a maddening draught. But they interest us by showing that even Mr James, who ordinarily turned aside with so chill a wince from the ridiculous, had exposed his consciousness to the aesthetic movement which had been remotely engendered by Leigh Hunt's Cockney crow of joy at Italy and afterwards fostered by Ruskin as one of his wild repartees to the railway train, and which was then being given the middle-class touch by Oscar Wilde.