I am myself inclined to think that it is this very tenderness and friendliness in Henry James, this natural amiability of disposition which all his detachment and curiosity cannot kill, that makes him so much more attractive a figure than the sombre Flaubert whose passion for literary objectivism is touched by no such charm. It is a matter of great interest to watch the little tricks and devices of a genius of this kind preparing the ground, as one might put it, for the peculiar harvest of impressions. What Henry James aims at is a clear field for the psychological emotions of people who have, so to speak, time and leisure to indulge themselves in all the secondary reactions and subtle ramifications of their peculiar feelings. The crude and intrusive details of any business or profession, the energy-absorbing toil of manual or otherwise exhausting labour, prevent, quite naturally, any constant preoccupation with one's emotional experiences. A Maxim Gorky or a Thomas Hardy will turn the technical labours of his emotionally-stricken people into tragic accomplices of the human drama, making field or factory, as it may happen, dumb but significant participators in the fatal issue. But in their case, and in the case of so many other powerful modern writers, the emotions required are simple and direct, such as harmonise well with the work of men's hands and the old eternal struggle with the elements. It may be said, and with a great deal of plausibility, that this natural and simple toil adds a dignity and a grandeur to human emotions which must necessarily vanish with the vanishing of its heavy burdens. It may be said that the mere existence of an upper class more or less liberated from such labours and permitted the leisure to make so much of its passing sensations, is itself a grievous indictment of our present system. This also is a contention full of convincing force. Oscar Wilde himself--the most sophisticated of hedonists--declares in his "Soul of Man" that the inequality of the present system, when one considers aesthetic values alone, is as injurious to the rich as it is pernicious to the poor. Almost every one of the great modern writers, not excluding even the courtly Turgenief, utters bitter and eloquent protests against the injustice of this difference. Nietzsche alone maintains the necessity of a slave caste in order that the masters of civilisation may live largely, freely, nobly, as did the ancient aristocracies of the classic ages, without contact with the burden and tediousness of labour. And in this--in his habitual and arbitrary neglect of the toiling masses--Henry James is more in harmony with the Nietzschean doctrine than any other great novelist of our age. He is indeed, the only one--except perhaps Paul Bourget, and Bourget cannot in any sense be regarded as his intellectual equal--who relentlessly and unscrupulously rules out of his work every aspect of "the spirit of the revolution."