NOVELS.
THE WINGS OF THE DOVE.* IT was pointed out in a recent article on the Boer generals in the Spectator that towards the end of the campaign De Wet became the victim of a veritable passion for evasion. We can think of no better analogy to describe the later phases in the evolution of Mr. Henry James's genius. In his astonishing elusiveness, his constant escapes from the pursuit of the plain plodding intellect, his indisposition to render up his meaning, Mr. James is the De Wet of modern fiction. He never gives his readers the chance of catching him napping and saying "Hands up ! " The analogy, however, must not be pushed below the surface; since in other respects De Wet is quite a mediaeval personage, and Mr. Henry James stands for the ne plus ultra of sophisticated modernity. With the elemental, the primitive, the heroic, or the normal aspects of humanity he has no concern whatever. He does not move in the mid- stream of humanity, but is content with a few drops of the ditch-water of civilisation, which under the micro- scope of his imagination reveal the presence of all kinds of sinister and morbid organisms. Having, more- over, concentrated an extraordinarily subtle intellect on the task of magnifying the petty monstrosities of advanced civilisation in its stalest and least efficient aspect, he has gradually developed an amazing phraseology of his own, which in its way is every whit as artificial as the technical jargon of the laboratory or the dissecting-room. Thus he habitually uses a number of words—" splendid," "beautiful," "immense," &c.—in a sense so tropical, as the grammarians would say, that one might search the New Oxford Dictionary in vain for any adequate clue to the Jacobean connotation.
The simplest words and phrases, as in the time of the Corey- rean Revolution, take on an entirely alien and bewildering significance. "There we are," for example—one of his favourite sayings—assumes an import that is positively
abysmal. In the art of ellipse, aposiopesis, innuendo, and in the employment of all sorts of labyrinthine devices for the avoidance of saying a plain thing in a plain way, Mr. James
is a past-master. He is the most distinguished modern pupil of the schoolman whose advice was summed up in the word 2,arrtaor. Marvellously skilful in conveying hints, impressions, suspicions, he is so enamoured of entanglement that anything like a satisfying dinoximent is absolutely impossible. Endless modulation and suspension, without ever a full close, would be the musical parallel. The dialogue, to use one of Mr. James's epithets, is truly immense. Let us take by way of illustration the passage in which Kate Croy and her lover, Merton Densher, discuss the question of enlightening her aunt as to the precise nature of their relations before Densher starts for America :--
"Kate's free profession was that she wished not to deprive him of Mrs. Lowder's countenance, which, in the long-run, she was convinced he would continue to enjoy ; and as, by a blessed turn, aunt Maud had demanded of him no promise that would tie his hands, they should be able to cultivate their destiny in their own way and yet remain loyal. One difficulty alone stood out, which Densher named. 'Of course it will never do—we must remember that—from the moment you allow her to found hopes of you for any one else in particular. So long as her view is content to remain as general as at present appears, I don't see that we deceive her. At a given moment, you see, she must be undeceived: the only thing therefore is to be ready for the moment and to face it. Only, after all, in that case,' the young man observed, one doesn't quite make out what we shall have got from her." What she'll have got from us? Kate inquired with a smile. .`1% hat she'll have got from us,' the girl went on, is her own affair—it's for her to measure. I asked her for nothing,' she added; I never put myself upon her. She must take her risks, and she surely understands them. What we shall have got from her is what we've already spoken of,' Kate further explained; it's that we • T114 Wings of the Dore. By Henry James. London A. Constable and Co. [68.1 shall have gained time. And so, for that matter, will she.' Densher gazed alittle at all this clearness; his gaze was not at the present hour into romantic obscurity. Yes ; no doubt, in our particular situation, time's everything. And then there's the joy of it' She hesitated. Of our secret, ? Not so much perhaps of our secret in itself, but of what's represented and, as we must somehow feel, protected and made deeper and closer by it.' And his fine face, relaxed into happiness, covered her with all his inesflng. 'Our being as we are.' It was as if for a moment she let the meaning sink into her. `So gone?" So gone. So ex- tremely gone. However,' he smiled, 'we shall go a good deal further.' Her answer to which was only the softness of her silence—a silence that looked out for them both at the far reach of their prospect. This was immense, and they thus took final possession of it. They were practically united and they were splendidly strong; but there were other things—things they were precisely strong enough to be able successfully to count with and safely to allow for; in consequence of which they would, for the present, subject to some better reason, keep their understanding to themselves."
It would be unjust to give the impression that the reading of this extraordinary book is always like wading through
glue, hunting phantoms in the fog, or endeavouring to see round several corners into the jungle of mixed motives by which the
dramatis personae are actuated. The reader, if he has the persistence of an African explorer seeking to penetrate the
gloom of the Aruwhimi forest, will eventually emerge into something like daylight. But before the quasi-illumination in the Ninth Book, after some four hundred and fifty pages of immensely tough reading, the author occasionally lapses into
lucidity. It is in one of these lapses—on p. 148—that we get the motif or text of the entire story : "Kate did explain, for
her listening friend : every one who had anything to give—it was true they were the fewest—made the sharpest possible bargain for it, got at least its value in return." Society, or that stratum of it which chiefly interests Mr. James, is a sort of organised cannibalism in which every one is more or less successfully employed in preying on his or her neighbour, much as the micro-organisms in the drop of ditch-water. Their methods vary, and the precise " value " they demand is not always to be estimated in cash. But the arch-vampire, the supreme harpy and anti-heroine of the plot, is Kate Croy, the pensioner of a wealthy widowed aunt, who employs as her chief instrument and tool in " working " everybody for all they are worth her amiable, impressionable lover, Merton Densher.
We have called Kate a harpy because the desire of luxury and wealth is the ruling passion of her existence, and to secure her ends she does not hesitate to subject the man whom she loves, and is pledged to by the most solemn vows, to the humiliating ordeal of making up to, and, if need be, even marrying, a charm- ing American girl, an heiress who is dying by inches of an incurable disease, and from whom Kate herself has received nothing but kindness. The plot fails owing to the interested intervention of another adventurer—a parasitic English Peer —and the story ends with the partial awakening of Densher to the true character of the woman he loves.
Setting aside a good deal of wilful mystery-mongering, and exasperating mannerism, the talent displayed in the unravel- ling of this strange and unholy conspiracy is nothing short of amazing. Yet as we part from the "wonderful," "im- mense," and " prodigious " characters of Mr. James's novel, our sentiments towards them recall the story which is told of
a &items still standing in Switzerland. Once upon a time, so the legend runs, it was the home of a noble Knight who had four beautiful daughters. It chanced that he had to make a Journey into a neighbouring valley, and returning suddenly by n. ight before he was expected, he found the castle brilliantly illuminated. Wishing to ascertain what was the cause of this festivity without being observed, he got a ladder, climbed up it, and on looking through the window beheld his four beautiful daughters taking part in the most infamous orgies with four monks. His mind was at once made up : such people must not be allowed to live; so quietly summoning
the neighbours, he barricaded the doors, piled faggots round the castle, set them on fire, and burned the guilty inmates to death. That is what we feel we should like to do with the Characters in most of Mr. James's recent books,—shut them up and burn them at their dreary and morbid psychological °rgica. We lament the concentration of such a distinguished talent on the portraiture of types which too often inspire horror without pity.
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