back the prodigal. This ambassador, whose name is Strether, discovers that a crude young barbarian has been changed by his Parisian life into a cultured and selfpossessed man of the world. Strether is duly impressed by the change, and attributes it to the influence of a middle-aged French lady, who has been the young man's good angel.

He writes about the situation, but the family is not satisfied, and another ambassador comes, this time the young man's elder sister, the incarnation of the acidulous propriety of New England. This sister is not in the least impressed by the French lady, but on the contrary suspects the very worst between the lady and her brother. Strether is shocked by her crude ideas; but then comes the climax of the drama-a scene wherein it is accidentally revealed to Strether that the acidulous sister is right; a part of the process whereby the charming French lady has civilized the young barbarian has been to take him as her lover. So two civilizations meet, and in the clash between them we see the hearts of both revealed.

You note that in all these stories we are dealing with well-to-do people. No other kind of people exist in the world of Henry James. Such highly complicated and subtle aesthetic sensibilities are only possible in connection with large sums of money, freely furnished to the characters without effort on their part. It is impossible to imagine any person in the "third manner" being so vulgar as to make, or even to take money. What they do is to spend money elegantly, and when they meet persons who spend it inelegantly, they turn away in dignified disdain. There are only a few passages in which the novelist condescends to be aware of the existence of the lower orders, who by their toil produce the wealth which makes the aesthetic sensibilities possible. We get one such glimpse in "The Princess Casamassima"; the hero glances at the women and girls of the working classes, and then:

"What remedy but another deluge, what alchemy but annihilation?" he asked himself as he went his way; and he wondered what fate there could be, in the great scheme of things, for a planet overgrown with such vermin, what redemption but to be hurled against a ball of consuming fire.

This cultured-class hero fails to ask himself what

would happen to his cultured self if the working-class vermin were to be wiped out. Manifestly, these vermin have to be allowed to go on working, in order that elegant illuminati from America and England and Italy and France may gather in the great capitals to listen to beautiful music and attend the newest art exhibitions and discuss the newest books. It is necessary that hundreds of millions of peasants should drudge on the rack-rented soil of Europe, it is necessary that mill slaves in New England and sweat-shop slaves in New York and mine slaves in Pennsylvania should wear out their bodies, in order that culture ambassadors may acquire old world subtlety and understanding; may watch the "European scene" and, by reporting it for us, enable us, at least in imagination, to escape the crudity and provinciality of our home lives.

Henry James wrote a biography of Hawthorne, who as a fellow sufferer under Puritanism he greatly admired; and in the course of that biography he drew a picture of the "American scene,' which enables us to understand why a cultured-class novelist fled from it at the age of twenty-six, and came back for only one visit in a long lifetime. Read the list of our deficiencies-and do not read it hurriedly, but stop and, as Henry James would say, "savour" each phrase, realizing the mass of content it has to the aesthetically sensitive mind:

No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, no manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, no abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools-no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class-no Epsom nor Ascot!

CHAPTER XCIX

THE PREMIER NOVELIST

We have studied two great novelists of the later Victorian age who failed of wide popularity. We shall not understand that age completely unless we study one who was crowned, not merely by the critics, but by the mass of novel-reading ladies.

Mrs. Humphry Ward was her name, and she takes

me back to the days when I was a poor devil of a wouldbe writer, half starving in a New York lodging-house. What made success in the world of books? I had to know, or die; and the New York "Times" was kind enough to publish a weekly review to give me the information. Every year or two there would appear a new novel by Mrs. Humphry Ward; and always this novel would be the occasion for a grand state review, signed by the name of some eminent pundit, occupying pages one and two, with a large portrait on page one. So I knew that Mrs. Humphry Ward was modern literature, and read each novel as part of my life training.

I read it with a mingling of interest and fear; interest, because it told me about a set of people whom I knew did actually exist, and did actually govern the world in which I lived; and fear, because this set of people, so obviously both predaceous and stupid, were so powerfully buttressed by the prestige of snobbery, and protected by the holy mantle of religion. No novelist every worshipped Mammon-respectability more piously or portrayed it with more patient devotion than Mrs. Humphry Ward in her later years.

She was brought up in the inner circle of culture; her father was an Oxford big-wig, and Matthew Arnold was her "Uncle Matt." Everything that education could dc. for a young girl was done for her, and she was writing a history of Spain at the age of twenty. Incidentally, she was dreaming a wonderful dream-that some day she might be presented at court.

Her first novel, "Robert Elsmere," dealt with the subject of religion. A large section of the idling classes of England get their incomes by believing that Jesus was born of a virgin and that Jonah swallowed a whale; and with the progress of science they were naturally finding this more and more difficult. A school of ingenious Bibletwisters arose, to invent symbolical and literary meanings for fairy-tales, in order that people who no longer believed could continue with good conscience to collect the salaries of belief. Mrs. Ward made her hero one of these new-style clergymen, and somebody persuaded Gladstone to read the novel, and he wrote a long refutation of it, which caused a tremendous fuss. Statesmen in England, as a rule, read only Thucydides and Homer, while in the

United States they read only the "Saturday Evening Post." There were a great many people who never saw a modern novel, who hastened to read it when Gladstone called it dangerous. Half a million copies were sold in our country, and Mrs. Ward's fortune was made.

She had begun, you see, as a radical; and in her next novel, "The History of David Grieve," she glorifies a young hero who devotes himself to social reform. But in a very few years success and wealth and the applause of the great changed the hue of this lady novelist's reflections. She wrote "Marcella," a complete recantation of her unorthodoxy, and a picture of what had gone on in her mind. Leaders of labor and social reformers now turn out to be dangerous demagogs; and a beautiful heroine, who loves one, discovers the error of her way, and comes back to safety as the wife of a nobleman's son. From which time on Mrs. Humphry Ward was safe for aristocracy.

She moved to a mansion in Grosvenor Place, where she had a view of the garden of Buckingham Palace. She became an intimate of duchesses, and a great figure in society and politics. Her publisher would negotiate with America before breakfast, and get her seven thousand pounds advance on a new novel; so the good lady spent the rest of her life grinding out a series of glorified pot-boilers in support of the Tory principles of government. Each novel was an Anglo-Saxon world event, and the counters of book-stores in the fashionable shopping districts of America were piled to the ceiling with the new volume. Mrs. Ward's following was the Anglomaniac mob, people who have but one idea in life, to imitate the British governing classes; the sort of people who study those page advertisements and speculate anxiously: "What is Wrong with this Picture?"

Says Mrs. Ogi: "I was in that mob. In our town in Mississippi there was no book-store, but an adventurous Jew who kept a cigar-store had the idea of getting a shelf of modern novels and renting them for ten cents a volume. I was the first young lady in the town who had the courage to go into a cigar-store, and I set all the other young ladies to reading Mrs. Humphry Ward."

"What did you get out of it?"

"I never could find out. It was all about British polit

ical life; people were pulling and hauling and intriguing, but I never could understand what their principles were, or what they expected to do when they got elected."

"That's the point exactly; there are no principles, there are only parties. Whichever one gets in constitutes the 'government,' and its task is to hold labor by the throat while capital picks its pockets. Labor produces a sovereign a day, and capital takes it, and gives labor four shillings wages, and labor tips its cap and is grateful. And then capital's favorite lady-novelist comes round with a market basket containing sixpence worth of food and medicine; which is called charity, and is the means of getting labor's vote at election time."

Such was the private life of Mrs. Humphry Ward. She was what is called "philanthropic"; that is, she was prominent in those society activities which help the poor by playing upon the vanity and love of display of the rich. Her life consisted in rushing about from one meeting to another, shaking hands and chatting, rushing home to dress and dine with prominent people, and then reading about it in the next day's newspapers. She was so busy with all this that she could only find half an hour a day in which to read Greek!

The characters in her books are busy with the same kind of activities. The leading man is a handsome young aristocrat, whose occupation is becoming premier. We never have any idea why he wants to be premier, except that as hero that is his function. The idea that the people of England should ask reasons for making an emptyheaded noodle into their premier is one that never occurs to anyone in the novels. What interests us is the efforts of the young man's friends to push him in, and the efforts of his enemies to bar him out.

Success or failure in all such "political novels" depends on one factor, an entanglement of sex. It appears that the English voters insist rigidly upon one requirementthat the statesman who holds them by the throat while their pockets are being picked shall be ostensibly chaste. The law may be summed up by saying that he is permitted to have only one leisure-class female during his life. Of course, if she dies, he is permitted one more leisure-class female; but for the rest, he is required to satisfy his needs with females of lower classes. Political novels derive