BOOKS.

RODERICK HUDSON.*

We learn in a prefatory note that Roderick Hudson was origin- ally published in Boston in 1875, and hence we suppose that it is not a later work than The American, The Europeans, and An International Episode, but an earlier one, We are glad of this, as it is certainly in some respects inferior to them. Like all Mr. Henry .Tames writes, it is skilful and subtle, and also somewhat dreary iu its total effect upon the mind. But it certainly contains less vivacity and more dreariness than the books we have referred to. Mr. Henry James is never tired of contrasting the complexity of the Old World with the simplicity of the New. We hardly know which he prefers. Apparently he prefers the Old World intellectually, and the New morally. It is certain that he thinks the New World a little slow, compared with the Old, and the Old World intensely ruse, compared with the New. And he is never tired of contrasting the two, and showing the be- wildering effect produced by the rich and complicated European world of art and society on the homely Puritan mind, or on the simple shrewdness and keenness characteristic of the Western States.

In Roderick Hudson, Mr. Henry James confines himself ex- clusively to the study of the effect produced by the world of Roman art and Roman society on American natures. Roderick Hudson is an American, who, with a great genius for sculpture, is failing to learn to be a lawyer. Rowland Mallet, an American connoisseur in art, finds him out, and offers him the means of going to Rome to study sculpture, at which he eagerly grasps, leaving behind him his mother, and a cousin, to whom lie is en- * Roderick Iludann. By ]:Ionry James, Junior. a vols. Revised Edition. London Macmillan. gaged, in the little Massachussetts village of Northampton. In Rome, a girl of marvellous beauty, also of American blood, but not pure American blood, intoxicates poor Roderick, and dries up the springs of his enthusiasm as an artist by the fever of his passion for her ; anti his friend Rowland Mallet persuades him to send for his mother and cousin, in order to cure this dis- temper of the heart. This Roderick does, without effect on himself, though with much on them. And so the whole novel may be said to be a study of the effect produced by Roman art and manners on different typos of American character. First, and perhaps foremost, there is Mrs. Light, the American adventuress, who had deserted her father, betrayed her husband, and eventually taken to spurious piety, and to superstitions of the fortune-telling kind, in addition to the great work of her life, the making of a great match for her beautiful daughter. No- thing in the book is better done, perhaps nothing quite so well done, as the curious mixture of frantic superstition and frantic but purely Yankee worldliness in Mrs. Light, when she finds her daughter determined to reject an extraordinarily wealthy Neapolitan Prince, Prince Casamassima, who is anxious to marry her. Mrs. Light has sent for Rowland Mallet, that he may say a word to her daughter on behalf of the Neapolitan Prince :— " ' Speak to her, plead with her, command her!' she cried, pressing and shaking his hands. She'll not heed us, no more than if we were a pair of running fountains. Perhaps she will listen to you; she always liked you.'—' She always disliked me,' said Rowland. 'But that doesn't matter now. I have come here simply because you sent for mo—not because I can help you. I can't advise your daughter.' Oh cruel, deadly man ! You must advise her ; you shan't leave this house till you have advised her !' the poor woman passionately retorted. Look at me in my misery and refuse to help me I You needn't be afraid, I know I'm a fright, I haven't an idea what I have on. If this goes on, she and I may both as well turn scarecrows. If ever a woman was desperate, frantic, heart-broken, such a woman speaks to you now ! I can't begin to toll you. To have nourished a serpent, sir, all those years ! to have lavished ono's self upon a viper that turns and stings her own poor mother I To have toiled and prayed, to have pushed and struggled, to have eaten the broad of bitterness and gone through fire and water—and at the end of all things to find myself at this pass. It can't be, it's too cruel, such things don't happen, the Lord don't allow it. I'm a religious woman, sir, and the Lord knows all about me, With his own hand he had given me his reward ! I would have lain down in the dust and let her walk over me ; I would have given her the eyes out of my head if mho had taken a fancy to them. No, she's a cruel, 'wicked, heart- loss, unnatural girl ! I speak to you, Mr. Mallet, in my dire distress, as to my onh friend. There isn't a creature here that I can look to --not one of them all that I have faith in. But I always admired you. I said to Christina the first time I saw you that you were a perfect gentleman, and very different from some ! Come, don't die. appoint me now ! I feel so terribly alone, you see ; I feel what a nasty hard heartless world it is that has come and devoured my dinners and danced to my fiddles, and yet that hasn't a word to throw to me in my agony ! Oh, the money alone that I have put into this thing would melt the heart of a Turk !' During this frenzied outbreak Rowland had had time to look round the room and to see the Cavaliere sitting in a corner, like a major-domo on the divan of an antechamber, pale, rigid, inscrutable.—' I have it at heart to tell you,' Rowland said, 'that if you consider my friend Hudson—.' Mrs. Light gave a toss of her head and hands. Oh, it's not that ! She told me last night to bother her no longer with Hudson, Hudson forsooth I She didn't care a button for Hudson. I almost wish she did ; then perhaps one might understand it, But she doesn't care for anything in the wide world except to do her own hard wicked will and to crush me and shame me with her cruelty.'—' Ah then,' said Rowland, I am as much at sea as you, and my presence hero is an impertinence. I should like to say three words to Miss Light on my own account. But I must wholly decline to talk to her about Prince Casamassima. This is simply impossible.' — Mrs. Light burst into angry tears. 'Because the poor boy is a prince, eh ? because he's of a great family and has an income of millions, eh ? That's why you grudge him and hate him. I knew there were vulgar people of that way of feeling, but I didn't expect it of you. Make an effort, Mr. Mallet ; rise to the occasion; forgive the poor follow his advantages. Bo just, be reasonable ! It's not his fault, and it's not mine. He's the best, the kindest young man in the world, and the most correct and moral and virtuous ! If he were standing here in rags, I would say it all the the same. The man first—the money afterwards : that was always my motto—ask the Cavalier°. What do you take me for ? Do you suppose 1 would give Christina to a vicious person ? do you suppose I would sacrifice my precious child, little comfort as I have in her, to a man against whose character a unable could be breathed ? Casamassima is only too good, he's a saint of saints, he stupidly good. There isn't such another in the length and breadth of Europe. What he has been through in this house not a common peasant would endure. Christina has treated him as you wouldn't treat a dog. He hart been been insulted, outraged, persecuted ! He has been driven hither and thither till ho didn't know where he was. He has stood there where

you stand—there, with his name and his millions and his devotion—as white as your handkerchief, with hot tears in his eyes, and me ready to go down on my knees to him, and say, " My own sweet Prince, I could kiss the ground you tread on, but it isn't decent that I should allow you to enter my house and expose yourself to those horrors again." And he would come back, and be would come back, and go through it all again, and take all that was given him, and only want the girl the more. 1 was his confidant ; I know everything. He used to bog my own forgiveness for Christina. What do you say to that ? I seized him once and kissed him, I did To find that and to find all the rest with it, and to believe that it was a gift straight from the pitying angels of heaven, and then to see it dashed away before your eyes and to stand hero helpless,—oh, it's a fate I hope you may ever be spared"'

Mrs. Light is the typo of an American whose mind, origin- ally frivolous enough, has been absolutely subdued by the smallest frivolities of the Old World. She has no knowledge at all of the world of Roman art,—mistakes a statue of Adam for one of a Roman gladiator, and that of Eve for a gipsy,—but she does know the world of Continental fashion ; and her Yankee shrewdness, too, tells her something of the meaner secrets of the heart. Between the two we have the woman who raves in this fashion at the prospect of her daughter's refusing a rich Neapolitan prince as a suitor ; and who con- ceives of the dreadful expedient of overriding her daughter's wishes, by threatening a publication of her• own, and therefore indirectly also of her daughter's, shame, in case she refuses to yield. Mrs. Light, with her little sense and little character, yet indomitable tenacity and unscrupulousness of purpose, and her worship of the world she lives in, is a powerful sketch; but then she has but a slight relation to the story, and is too intrinsically uninteresting for the ablest study in it, which in many senses she certainly is.

The hero, Roderick Hudson, is certainly not equally well, though much more elaborately painted. Mr. Henry James's object has been to draw a man of thoroughly original, but of what may be called a thin, vein of genius, a man with too little genius to find a resource in his genius from the fermentation of his griefs and passions, a man who needs to guard carefully the tranquillity of his heart, in order to extract any perennial spring of suggestion from his head. He is a restless egotist, who is blind to almost everything in others which has no special significance for himself ; but yet a brilliant egotist, whose interest for himself is so great, that by means of that which interests him in himself, he can interpret powerfully a good deal in other people. The picture is powerful in itself, and to a certain extent, natural. Only what we doubt is this,— whether any man of genius so great as Roderick Hudson's, Over could be so long and so completely diverted from the natural themes of that genius by an unhappy passion. If we know anything of the true artist, we should say that when the first edge of bitterness duo to personal disappointments was

once dulled, the imagination of the sculptor, instead of being dried up, would be quickened by the new insight it had gained into the meaning of certain lines of expression written on the countenance. Roderick Hudson must be quite a new type of artist, if, with the power and originality attributed to him, his imagination was simply dried up by his unreturned passion for Christian Light. His selfishness and egotism are not, perhaps, over-clone. But his artistic sterility under pain and disappointment surely is. Surely nothing has greater effect in stimulating the imagination than mental pain of which the first keenness is past.

But probably the cleverest sketch in this dismal little group is poor Mrs. Hudson, the motherly little wren of a woman, who is, as Mr. James says, in relation to her influence in society, quite "im- ponderable," and who nevertheless manages to make her son's friend and patron so very miserable, by her quaint assumption of a right to reproach him—to hold him responsible—for her son's derelictions of duty and defects of character. Nothing can be better than this r-

"' Oh yes, Mr. Mallet, be merciful 1 said Mrs. Hudson, in a tone which for all its gentleness made Rowland stare. The poor follow's stare covered a great deal of concentrated wonder and apprehension, —a presentiment of what a small, sweet, feeble, elderly lady might be capable of in the way of suddenly generated animosity. There was no space in Mrs. Hudson's tiny maternal mind for complications of fooling, and one emotion existed only by turning another over flat and perching on top of it. She was evidently not following Roderick at all in his dusky aberrations. Sitting without, in dismay, she only saw that all was darkness and trouble, and Its Roderick's glory had now quite outstripped her powers of imagination and lifted him beyond her jurisdiction, so that he had become a thing too precious and sacred for blame, she found it infinitely comfortable to lay the burden of their common affliction upon Rowland's broad shoulders. Had he not promised to make them all rich and happy ? And this was the end of it! Rowland felt as if his trials wore only beginning."

And again, when Mrs. Hudson, in alarm for her son, plucks up courage to assert herself, and makes a formal visit to Mr. Mallet in her best gown, to inform him officially, as it were, that she holds him responsible for restoring Roderick to cheerfulness and artistic activity, nothing can be better described than her attempt at indicating this feeling, without verbally expressing it :-

" Her visit was evidently intended as a formal reminder of forgotten vows. Mre. Hudson was doubtless too sincerely humble a person to suppose that if ho had had the wicked levity to break faith with her her imponderable presence would operate as a chastisement. But by some diminutive logical process of her own, slie had convinced herself that she had been weakly trustful, and that she had suffered Rowland to think too meanly, not only of her understanding, but of her social consequence. A visit in her best gown would have an admonitory effect, as regards both of these attributes ; it would cancel some favour% received, and show him that she was not incapable of grasping the theory, at least, of retribution ! These wore the reflections of a very shy woman, who, determining for once in her life to hold up her head, was actually flying it like a kite. 'You know we have very little money to spend,' she said, as Rowland remained silent. ' Roderick tolls me that he has debts, and nothing at all to pay them with. Ho says I must write to Mr. Striker to sell my house for what it will bring, and send me out the money. When the money comes, I must give ib to him. 1 am sure I don't know ; I never heard of anything so dread- ful. My house is all I have. nut that is all Roderick will say. Wo ;must be very economical' Before this speech was finished, Mrs. Hudson's voice had begun to quaver softly, and her face, which had no capacity for the expression of a privileged consciousness, to look as humbly appealing as before."

But making all allowance for these admirable pictures, and for many graphic passages describing Rome and Italian scenery, we cannot but say that, on the whole, this is a dismal story. Indeed, Mr. Henry James delights in dismal stories. He thinks, appar- ently, that it is flying somehow in the face of his own genius to let any story fall out happily. But still, in most of them, though, he insists on making you dismal in the end, he contrives to amuse you very much in the interval. But in this book he' makes you dismal almost from beginning to end. He makes.

it so very evident that Roderick is to go to the bad, that Mary Garland will not desert him, and will never return Rowland's.

love, that Rowland Mallet will not desert Roderick, and that Mrs. Hudson will be a burden on all, that there is hardly a ray of sunshine through the story. Even Christina Light is a dismal beauty. You cannot enjoy her picturesque, grand ways, because you feel that an inward dreariness is at the- bottom of them all, and so there is no set-off against the dreariness of the main story. Why is Mr. Henry James, with all his groat• talents, so deeply persuaded of the pessimism of human destiny ? Is it that he thinks it the destiny of all New Englanders, not

only "to suffer and be strong," but to suffer the more from making acquaintance with the main stream of civilisation,

and be all the stronger for thus suffering the more P Cer- tainly he has never published anything of which it has no been the chief idea that evil comes front the Old World, against which the New World fights desperately a losing battle, or at least a battle in which it loses happiness, at the expense of a sort of dismal aureole of moral glory.