The only people who are to be more envied than those who have collected Henry James from the beginning--and these alas! are most of them grey-headed now--are the people who, possessed of the true interior unction, have by some accident of obstructing circumstance been debarred from this voluptuous pleasure until late in their experience. What ecstasies such persons have in store for them, what "linked sweetness long-drawn out" of sybaritish enjoyment! But I was speaking of those secret and interesting preparations that every great artist makes before he gets to work; those clearings of his selected field of operations from the alien and irrelevant growths. What Henry James requires before he can set his psychological machinery in motion is uninterrupted leisure for the persons of his emotional dramas. Leisure first, and after leisure a certain pleasant congruity of background. Henry James is indeed the author "par excellence" of a leisured upper class who have time to think and feel, and to dwell at large upon their thoughts and feelings, undisturbed by the spade, the plough, the sword, the counter, the wheels of factories or the roar of traffic. It is amusing to watch the thousand and one devices by which he disentangles his people from the intrusive irrelevancy of work. They are either rich themselves--and it cannot be concealed that money, though not over-emphasised, is never quite eliminated from the field of action--or they are dependent upon rich relatives and friends. It is for this reason perhaps that there are so few professional people in his books. The absence of lawyers is quite striking; so is the absence of doctors,--though a charming example of the latter profession does certainly appear in "The Wings of a Dove" as the medical attendant upon the dying girl in Venice. I cannot at this moment recall a single clergyman or priest. Is this because these spiritual guides of our race are too poor or too over-worked to serve his purpose, or do we perhaps,--in this regrettable "lacuna"--stumble upon one of the little smiling prejudices of our great conformist? He must have met some black coats, we are compelled to suppose, in the drawing-rooms of his country houses. Did he perhaps, like so many of his discreet and cautious young men, "conform" without "committing himself," in these high places? If I were asked what types of character--among men I mean--emerge as most characteristic of his interest and as best lending themselves to his method, I should put my finger upon those pathetic middle-aged persons, like Mr. Verver in "The Golden Bowl," or Mr. Longdon in "The Awkward Age," who, full of riches and sad experience, have retired completely from active life, only to exercise from the depths of their sumptuous houses and secluded gardens, a sort of fairy influence upon the fortunes of their younger friends.