You note that in all these stories we are dealing with well-to-do people. No other kind of people exist in the world of Henry James. Such highly complicated and subtle aesthetic sensibilities are only possible in connection with large sums of money, freely furnished to the characters without effort on their part. It is impossible to imagine any person in the “third manner” being so vulgar as to make, or even to take money. What they do is to spend money elegantly, and when they meet persons who spend it inelegantly, they turn away in dignified disdain. There are only a few passages in which the novelist condescends to be aware of the existence of the lower orders, who by their toil produce the wealth which makes the aesthetic sensibilities possible. We get one such glimpse in “The Princess Casamassima”; the hero glances at the women and girls of the working classes, and then: “What remedy but another deluge, what alchemy but annihilation?” he asked himself as he went his way; and he wondered what fate there could be, in the great scheme of things, for a planet overgrown with such vermin, what redemption but to be hurled against a ball of consuming fire. This cultured-class hero fails to ask himself what would happen to his cultured self if the working-class vermin were to be wiped out. Manifestly, these vermin have to be allowed to go on working, in order that elegant illuminati from America and England and Italy and France may gather in the great capitals to listen to beautiful music and attend the newest art exhibitions and discuss the newest books. It is necessary that hundreds of millions of peasants should drudge on the rack-rented soil of Europe, it is necessary that mill slaves in New England and sweat-shop slaves in New York and mine slaves in Pennsylvania should wear out their bodies, in order that culture ambassadors may acquire old world subtlety and understanding; may watch the “European scene” and, by reporting it for us, enable us, at least in imagination, to escape the crudity and provinciality of our home lives. Henry James wrote a biography of Hawthorne, who as a fellow sufferer under Puritanism he greatly admired; and in the course of that biography he drew a picture of the “American scene,” which enables us to understand why a cultured-class novelist fled from it at the age of twenty-six, and came back for only one visit in a long lifetime. Read the list of our deficiencies--and do not read it hurriedly, but stop and, as Henry James would say, “savour” each phrase, realizing the mass of content it has to the aesthetically sensitive mind: