As an artist, Henry James possessed the American taste for prodigality. He liked flourishes. He needed a superabundance of materials. If the materials failed him, he made up for them with a prodigality of disquisitions and arabesques. He could be deep and he could also be sophisticated. In several of his novels a superfluity of the trimmings hardly compensates for a thinness of the substance. His writings were the result of what he called _saturation_. He was creative enough to be convinced that art was not and cannot be an imitation of reality. He who writes adds something to what he writes about. He reproached William Dean Howells for sacrificing creative imagination to reality. He declared himself unable to observe, even if it were possible for him to do so, and at the same time to imagine. All perception to him was a vision, something to soar above after going round and round it. The transcendentalist and the detective, those two chief attitudes of the American mind, were innate with him. His father was a Swedenborgian and his brother William an adept of psychical research. American undervitality redeemed itself in Henry James’ novels by a flight into the transcendental and the introspective, along a road discovered and traveled already by Ralph Waldo Emerson. * * * * * Mrs. Wharton specialized in the society novel. The author of “The House of Mirth,” “The Fruit of the Tree,” “The Reef,” “The Age of Innocence” is an excellent craftsman. Like Henry James, she draws from and caters to the élite. She imported the novel of manners to America and gave to it an original turn. It would have been impossible for her to write or for us to read them as they are without constant reference to the aristocratic and cultural background which Henry James insisted upon in his novels. She draws portraits and studies environments with an objectivity verging on indifference and even on cruelty. Her field is limited and even narrow but it is her own and she has conscientiously explored it. Her writings have a touch of cutting and elegant precision. She brings everything to the surface. Her Muse is curiosity for curiosity’s sake. In studying American high life she used about the same process which Paul Bourget applied in French fiction to the happy few of the Boulevard Saint Germain, that most aristocratic citadel. She preserved the fossils of American gentry for posterity.