Mr. Hardy confines himself to the meadows of Blackmoor and the highways and hedges of Dorset Uplands. Mr. Conrad sails down tropical rivers and among the islands of Southern seas. The American Mr. Dreiser ploughs his earth-upheaving path through the workshops of Chicago and the warehouses of Manhattan. It is Henry James and Henry James alone, who unravels for us the tangled skein of our actual normal-abnormal life, as the destinies twist and knot it in the civilised chambers of our natural sojourning. The curious thing is that even among our younger and most modern writers, no one, except John Galsworthy, really deals with the sort of life that I have in mind when I speak of the European "upper classes"; and one knows how Mr. Galsworthy's noble and chivalrous interest in social questions militates against the intellectual detachment of his curiosity. The cleverer authors among our younger school almost invariably restrict their scope to what one feels are autobiographical histories of their own wanderings through the pseudo-Latin quarters of London and Paris. They flood their pages with struggling artists, emancipated seamstresses, demi-mondaine actresses, social reformers, and all the rag-tag and bob-tail of suburban semi-culture; whereas in some mysterious way--probably by reason of their not possessing imaginations strong enough to sweep them out of the circle of their own experiences--the more normal tide of ordinary "upper-class" civilisation passes them untouched. It is imagination which is lacking, imagination which, as in the case of Balzac and Dostoievsky, can carry a writer beyond the sphere of his own personal adventures, into the great tides and currents of the human comedy, and into the larger air of the permanent life-forces. It is the universal element which one misses in these clever and interesting books, that universal element which in the work of Henry James is never absent, however slight and frivolous his immediate subject or however commonplace and conventional his characters. Is it, after all, not they,--these younger philosophical realists--but he, the great urbane humanist, who restricts his scope, narrowing it down to oft-repeated types and familiar scenes, which, as the world swings forward, seem to present themselves over and over again as an integral and classic embodiment of the permanent forces of life? It might seem so sometimes; especially when one considers how little new or startling "action" there is in Henry James, how few romantic or outstanding figures there are to arrest us with the shock of sensational surprise. Or is it, when we get to the bottom of the difference--this difference which separates Henry James from the bulk of our younger novelists--not a matter of subject at all, but purely a matter of method and mental atmosphere?