But this is to forestall the history itself, which tells of a fray unprecedented enough.

The world first! The tale opens in the back, shady regions-surely on the south side of the Thames-where Mr. George Gissing moves so easily, knowing them as a man might know his own house in the dark. The hard and gray tones lower the pulse of the spectator. Mr. Henry James, when he wishes, can visit the same scene; but it is with the fresh-edged perceptions of one coming from another society altogether, and not yet accustomed to the voices and smells and tints of this one. In a small room in "Chirk Street," Kate Croy awaits her impossible, jaunty father, who has done something which reticence cannot specify, but who is "all pink and silver," with "kind, safe eyes," and an inimitable manner, and "indescribable arts that quite turned the tables." Here Kate tastes "the faint, flat emanation of things, the failure of fortune and of honor." The interview is a triumph of acrid comedy; the talk of Croy fully bears out his inventory. This nameless parent (her mother has died of her troubles) stands aside from the story, but is necessary in order to explain Kate. He is that from which she flies; yet she has sprung from him. She flies, by instinct, upwards in society, on the wings of the hawk, not of the dove; no mere kite, but a predatory creature of a larger sweep, with nobilities, with weaknesses after all. She flies to the only life in which she can imagine herself-where there is room for her will, room for her beauty-chances for her

marriage, chances for winning money, and station, and love as well, and not merely one of these things without the rest.

When she leaves the house we know something of Kate; her exhalation of silent power, her disregard of all cost to herself in pursuit of her quest, her mysterious, undeniable nobleness of stamp, which we must reconcile as best we can with her later piracies and perversities. Already she has got away from her father and her weariful widowed sister, whom, by the way, she supports with her own inheritance. Her aunt in Lancaster Gate, Mrs. Lowder, the "Aunt Maud" of the story, has seen the value of Kate. She is a girl who might, and must, marry a "great man," and so satisfy the dowager affections and long-delayed ambitions of her aunt. Thus they would both escape from the amphibious society in which they move, into that region of the London world which is really "great." Fielding would have rejoiced in this view of "greatness." Their ambition, at bottom vulgar, is embraced by them with a religious gravity. The author himself almost seems to take it too seriously, at moments.

Kate, in her revulsion from Chirk Street, is ready enough for this programme, but for one obstacle. She loves a man who can never be great at all. He is merely a journalist of some parts, with a foreign education, Merton Densher, who from the standpoint of Mrs. Lowder is inadmissible. It would seem that Kate must either resign Densher or her expectations. She is weak; she cannot give up her expectations. But she is also strong; for she is prepared to play high, and to wait for an opportunity of winning both, should such present itself. It does present itself; there is the story, but there also is the tragedy. Meantime let her have her precarious, whole

hearted, stolen happiness, walking pledged in Kensington Gardens.

The difficulties sharpen. Densher is visiting on terms of sufferance, which are dissected to the thinnest point, at the house in Lancaster Gate, where the hostess accepts him because she feels she can crush him at any time, and positively likes him all the while. A certain "Lord Mark" who is asserted rather than proved to be uncannily clever, but who is wanted for the conduct of the tragedy, is on the watch; and in any case Kate must tarry for the great man who is not yet forthcoming. At this point Densher is sent by his newspaper office to America to make articles. Kate's opportunity for high play is not ripe till his return. Unaware she waits the coming of the "Dove."

Milly Theale, strangely and richly left, the dying flower of an old wild family, carrying in herself, too, the seeds of an undefined malady, and, further, the memory of three calls paid to her in New York by a young Englishman, Densher-Milly Theale is found in Europe, whither she has restlessly fled with a lady escort, a simple, but not foolish, little New Englander, by profession a furnisher of novels. Fled, from what? and whither? From the fear and from the memory, which accompany her nevertheless. The method of reticence, of dumb actions and silences, is here followed worthily. The reader, as well as Milly's companion, Mrs. Stringham, are cunningly let into the secret, which is stoically kept. It comes out by degrees, on a wooded pass, in the little parlors of the inns; and before England is reached the charm is felt by the reader, who knows the pale face, coppery hair, and the radiation, strong, soft, and beneficent, of the lonely, wealthy woman, who "thinks," when congratulated, that she has not "really everything." To England they go; Mrs. Stringham remem

bers an old friend, Mrs. Lowder, now high in the world; and with her the Americans are next found in company, without it being at first known that Densher is a common acquaintance.

The Dove has to face fresh waters, that welcome her, unsparing as they may prove later, more than graciously at first. The opening dinner-party is described, from the point of view of Milly, with Richardsonian prolixity; the dinner itself could hardly take longer. But this is Mr. Henry James's way of enhancing his illusion. The persons move, through a strange, turbid medium, towards a dramatic comprehension of one another. We hear slowly-but we do not, wish the tale shorter-how the two girls, Kate Croy and Milly, become intimate; how they discover, without words, that both know and think of Densher; how Milly betrays her passion to the "onyx-eyed Aunt Maud"; how Densher returns, visits the National Gallery as a rendezvous with Kate, and is thus beheld by Milly as she sits there forlornly "counting the Americans." In one scene, which precedes this incident, the doom of Milly is foreshadowed. Milly is taken by Lord Mark, who is trying to wrap invisible nets round the heiress, to a great house, in order that she may be seen in his company. He brings her up to an old picture, "by Bronzino," of a fair, dead lady to whom she has a surprising chance likeness.

She found herself, for the first moment, looking at the mysterious portrait through tears. Perhaps it was her tears that made it just then so strange and fair-as wonderful as he had said: the face of a young woman, all magnificently drawn, down to the hands, and magnificently dressed; a face almost livid in hue, yet handsome in sadness and crowned with a mass of hair, rolled back and high, that must, before fading with time, have had a family resemblance to her own. The lady in question, at all events, with

her slightly Michaelangelesque squareness, her eyes of other days, her full lips, her long neck, her recorded jewels, her brocaded and wasted reds, was a very great personage, only unaccompanied by a joy. And she was dead, dead, dead. Milly recognized her exactly in words that had nothing to do with her. "I shall never be better than this" (p. 183).

This is but one of many passages that show how Mr. James has shared in the special impulse towards beauty which distinguishes the new generation. Such an American as Milly Theale becomes, by her rich ancestry, by her affinity of type to the masterpainting, herself a member of an old world, no longer merely simple-minded and delightfully puritan, but with all kinds of complicated stirrings and concessions that might surprise her countrywomen. And the style of Mr. James gathers, itself, the dignity of an old master's as it rises to the expression of these deeper and more dramatic things. It has become more and more charged with beauty; it marches with slow, intricately measured paces, as in a dream; and, in this book, even the harsher incidents and cruelties of the story do not prove too much for the style. It would be idle to credit younger Belgian or Celtic symbolists with a definite influence in any direction upon Mr. James. This kind of enchantment is now in the air of literature; and Mr. Henry James, in the fullness of his powers, has returned spell for spell.

Soon Milly knows how she stands. A big, clear-witted physician, Sir Luke Strett, with his "fine, closed face," comes into her life. It is implied that she will die, or die the sooner, unless she has the happiness, the marriage that she needs. The doctor tells her, significantly, to "live"; and that she wishes to do. The scenes in his consulting-room form one of the many ac

Sir Luke sees that Densher is the man. Soon they all see, they all crowd round from different sides. Mrs. Lowder is willing he should be tempted away, so that Kate may be free for greatness. Kate herself has to act, and the critical episodes begin. Mr. James has tried hard to render probable the bold and ugly scheme which she devises on behalf of herself and her lover. May it be conjectured that, having first thought of this central motive, he proceeded to invent backwards explanatory antecedents for Kate Croy, which should leave her capable of a crime even against her own passion; that he made her, nevertheless, a woman of large build, of sympathy, full of heart and pieties of her own kind; and that when the moment came for unscrupulous action, behold, she was too good for the work? So Chaucer, when his authorities tell him that the time is due for Cressida to be false to Troilus, has himself spent too much kindness on her to believe it, and refers, somewhat shamefacedly, to the "books" to prove the fact. Kate goes wrong, but not in Cressida's way. At this point there is a change in the method of painting her, which serves to cover any violence in the transition. We are never again in her confidence as before, the curtain is dropped, and the story becomes a diary not of her feelings, but of the feelings of Densher. Thus any struggle in the mind of Kate is unknown. The second great difficulty of the author is to make Densher her accomplice, and to incline him to acquiesce in the false report that, while he is desperate for Kate, Kate is averse from him. On this footing of a person to be pitied he drifts, by delicate degrees, into the position of an intimate with Milly, whom she is ready to console.

The plan is virtually a kind of dubious, low insurance job; Mr. Henry James has never invented anything so

that her friend's last ray of happiness may be made possible. Densher is kept back from going through with his bond by a host of little cords of conscience and distaste, and soon it is too late. He has a final, astonishing interview with the dying lady, in which she receives him with invincible style, in full dress, refusing "to smell of drugs, to taste of medicine." What passed no others know: the interview is only mentioned in a later conversation with Kate; and Kate is not the person to hear its details-does not wish to hear them. But we gather that Milly, while knowing much, and divining we know not how much more-knowing certainly, since a malicious, finally killing revelation by Lord Mark, that she had been lied to, and that Kate had really cared for Densher throughoutMilly pardons. This divine impression is left on Densher: her last words

Enforce attention, like deep harmony.

Thus Milly prevails. Having lost all, she regains everything-not practically, but in the sphere of love, soul, and devotion, in which she moves, and in which Densher must henceforth be said to live a kind of absolved existence. Even practically, as the sequel shows, she exerts a decisive influence.

For the memory of her is now fixed in Densher. His experience of power and craft, of passion secular and unshrinking, is overborne by an experience yet stronger. The waft of the Dove's wings as she fled has altered him. He has, in a sense, killed her; he would not have her; now she, and not Kate, is mistress of him. By the same token, he is false to Kate. Where, then, is there an issue?

him. He comes home to England, and the final act is played. All that went before is really nothing as compared with his present complication with Kate. And the last beneficent action of the Dove adds another coil to the tangle. He resumes, with a difference, his old wanderings with Kate; the change is best expressed in his phrase that they are "damned civil" to each other. Kate is strong still, strong to the last. Though Densher has not married Milly, she guesses that she has gained her end nevertheless-without, for that matter, having had to pay the expected price of seeing him Milly's husband for a time. So far she has guessed right. Milly has left him a great fortune. Her last letter comes, in which he would have seen, had he read it, the wonderful and gracious turn she would have given to her bequest. Kate burns the unopened letter, when he offers it to her, under the sway of a wholly new feeling, which is out of her usual reckoning altogether-jealousy of the dead. This is one of the many profundities of the tale. Kate could bear to see her lover marry Milly without love; but she cannot bear to see him in love with Milly dead. But she sees that the centres of his ed; he is all with the letter that is ashes. true in act to Kate. The business letter announcing the fortune comes from America; he sends this letter to her to "test" her; she is positive-minded, she does not understand the "test," and she reads it. Densher refuses to read it, and the final crisis comes. He pursues his last sad advantage with Kate. He will not touch the money for himself. There must be a kind of expiation. Either she must marry him poor, as he was of old: or, he will make over the money to her; but in that case he will not marry her. Such at least seems to be the meaning of the

life have shiftdead, with the But he is still