I did not ask to meet him, because, having read him, I understood the aesthetic proprieties, and did not wish to surprise a Great Master with his mouth full of lunch. Also, the days of my discipleship had long since passed, and I was not sure if I would be able to think of just the proper delicate subtlety with which to convey my attitude to one whom I had once revered, and now regarded with affection because of reverence remembered. That sentence is a little longer and more subtle than I usually write--such being the effect upon one’s style of merely thinking about Henry James. In my youth I wanted to know the great world, and who could tell me with such compelling authority? I read everything he had written up to that time--no small task, some forty volumes, many of them fat. I stuck to it day and night for a couple of months, and then wrote an essay, “The Leisure-Class Historian,” which, alas, no editor could be found to publish, and which was consumed, with all the rest of my belongings except one night-shirt, in the Helicon Hall fire. Coming back to the task at this interval, I realize that I gave Henry James too broad a title; he is “the cultured-class historian.” He knows of the existence of the uncultivated mob of idle rich, the “high-feeding, champagne-quaffing, orchid-arranging,” as he describes them; but his theme is that small section of the rich who possess aesthetic sensibilities, and withdraw in haughty aloofness from high-feeding, champagne-quaffing, and orchid-arranging, and live fastidious lives devoted to the cultivation of beauty. The word “beauty” Henry James understands in the broadest sense; it covers not merely the things you look at, but the things you do and the things you think. You recognize it by its being elegant, dignified and restrained.