Henry James will find himself very much at home with the discarnate minds who, it is presumed, are now his companions. Incarnation, embodiment, was for him a screen to be looked through, got over somehow, divined into, penetrated. He regarded it as a sort of magic curtain which concealed at the same time that under careful observation it revealed by its shadows and movements the mind behind it. And I fancy I see him sitting before the actual sensible world of things and persons with infinite patience watching for a significant gesture or a revealing shadow. And such motions and shadows he recorded as impressions which became the stuff of his analysis and synthesis of the souls that originated them. But if that was his attitude towards the material world—and it is further proved by his occasional excursions into the completely ghostly—may we not safely conclude that in the world he now inhabits his sense of impressions is more at home still. For there, as I take it, the curtain is drawn, and minds and souls are by one degree the more exposed to direct vision. With his marvellous insight into the actual, what would Henry James not make of the mental and psychic when these are no longer concealed by the material? On the whole, nobody is likely to be happier “dead” than Henry James. TURGENEV.—Both in Mr. Conrad’s Introduction and Mr. Edward Garnett’s critical study of Turgenev I observe the attitude of defence. They are defending rather than praising Turgenev. But Turgenev has been so long the victim of polemics that it is about time some judge summed up the contentions and delivered judgment. Neither Mr. Conrad nor Mr. Garnett, however, is qualified for this task by either temper or the power of judgment itself. Mr. Conrad is a great writer, but he is not a great critic, and as for Mr. Garnett, he is not even a great writer; and the temper of both is shown in their common tendency to abuse not only the plaintiff’s attorney but the jury as well. But there is no use in abusing the jury—in other words, the reading public of the world—even if some gain may be got by polemics with this or that critic. I am content to hear Mr. Maurice Baring and M. Haumont told that they are merely echoes of Russian partisanship and incapable of feeling the fine shades of “truth” in Turgenev; for both these writers are quite capable of hitting back. But when Mr. Conrad satirically remarks that Turgenev had qualities enough to ruin the prospects of any writer, and Mr. Garnett echoes _him_ to the effect that Turgenev owes his “unpopularity” to “an exquisite feeling for balance” which nowadays is “less and less prized by modern opinion,” I feel that the defence of Turgenev is exceeding the limits of discretion. For it is not by any means the case that the “unpopularity” of Turgenev is confined to the mob that has no feeling for balance or is jealous of his possession of too many qualities. Critics as good as Mr. Garnett and with no Russian political prejudices against