He was sustained in this long swim by two beloved subjects, one bitter and one sweet. The literary life was written about in those days almost as much as it was talked about, and it was continually being used by the young decadents as the occasion for predictions of their own later squalor in which morphia and dark ladies, moulded in the likeness of beautiful young Mrs Patrick Campbell, played parts which in the subsequent realisation were taken by plain beer and plainer barmaids. Mr James took up the poor, scribbled-about thing and turned it over very reverently, none knowing better than he that the artist was the _sacer vates_ of his time, and very sadly, because he had now close on thirty years of intimacy with artists behind him. He had known Turgeniev, the most "beautiful genius" of his age, and had found him rather lonely and pre-eminently not eminent in the eyes of the world; he had seen the dark days of Rossetti; he had trod so close on the heels of Alfred de Musset as to know that _il s'absente trop de l'Academie parcequ'il s'absinthe trop_; he had seen poor, fat little Zola, who thought that though one could not build Rome in a day one could describe it in less, plodding and sweating up the wrong road to art. And so, in a mood of clear melancholy, with an occasional flash of irony which was doubtless the sole comment wrung from his urbanity by the fact that that age, when the change of the novel's price from thirty-one and sixpence to six shillings had enormously increased the reading public, had brought no enlargement of his circle of readers, he wrote that wonderful series of stories which began with _The Lesson of the Master_ (1888) and included _The Middle Years_ (1893), _The Next Time_ (1895), and _The Death of the Lion_ (1894). Save for that roaring joke, _The Coxon Fund_ (1894), where one sees Frank Saltram, a "free rearrangement of Coleridge," charming and sponging on the rich, bringing into their drawing-rooms a swaying body that should be taken home at once in a cab and a mind "like a crystal suspended in the moral world--swinging and shining and flashing there," these are all sad stories. The master is bullied out of being a master by the financial importunities of a smart wife and comely children; the author of _The Middle Years_ dies with none but an acquaintance picked up at the seaside to hold his hand; Ralph Limbert is killed by worry because he could not stop producing masterpieces when it was the damned marketable asset that was required to pay the wages of his wife's maid; the lion dies in a cold country house, with no fire in his bedroom, while his hostess gets paragraphed for her charity to the wild literary, and his last manuscript goes astray downstairs somewhere between Lord Dorimont's man and Lady Augusta's maid. One knows next to nothing at all about the faith consciously rejected or adopted by Henry James, and whether the atmosphere of speculative theology in which he