best in this book, for the greater portion of it is certainly fashioned or recovered from journalistic pages, but still it is Arthur Symons, and that is saying much. His peculiar sensitive approach to the arts is evident even in his most occasional ventures. He cannot but react strongly to the esthetic implications of any work that is set before him. Indeed, this is true of life in general so far as he is concerned, and if we want an authentic picture in our minds of Arthur Symons, we will visualize a man to whom the aesthetic in everything, painting, literature, music, dancing, cities, women, jewels, rouge, and even hansom cabs, finds a distinguished and entirely individual reaction.

A SUPERB BRIEF1

By ALYSE GREGORY

THE PILGRIMAGE OF HENRY JAMES. By Van Wyck Brooks. E. P. Dutton and Company, New York.

MR

R. VAN WYCK BROOKS is always driving the same jaunty, brightly polished trap up to our door; and-like some trim, punctual, somewhat sly guardian of an aged relative who is both a disgrace and an honor to his family-he helps to descend the latest victim of his penetrating concern. Our emotions felt no stirring of protest when Mark Twain, downcast, but still able to jest, lean and jocular, appeared before us, but when Henry James, a little ponderous, yet so very, very soft of foot, is produced in order to be closed away in some obscure niche of partial failures, we are decidedly put out. For do we not recall our old boundless gratitude in those early days when his pen created for us a sophistication of intercourse we had never dreamed could exist; when the haunting miasma of provincialism in which we unresistingly moved was for once inconceivably dispersed and the pulse of our thought beat with an odd new tension and insight, the effects of which could never again be lost or forgotten, as also the inadequacy of our environment could never again quite blot out for us

1 From The Dial, September, 1925.

the compensating perception of our predicament, with its most subtle implications mirrored back to us in artistic utterance? So we recall with fresh assurance the unique debt we owe our favorite American author, and we regard Mr. Brooks with intrepid skepticism. Yet we listen, and as we listen we become involved in his argument, then we become amused, and finally we smile a light, somewhat ironical, yet wholly admiring smile; for Mr. Brooks, besides being nimble, is persuasive, and all the little bits of evidence he so ingeniously gathers, so sedulously and absorbedly picks out from the writings of the great man himself, with the sharp, nipping, unwearied eagerness of a woodpecker, a woodpecker whose red cap flashes in the sun as it draws reluctant booty from under the crinkled bark of some solid, delicately blossoming locust tree, are made in the end to form a pattern which, if dubious in intention, is at least brilliant in design.

The predicament of Henry James, as seen by Mr. Brooks, is as follows. Nourished by his parents on stories about the graces of the old world, James absorbed even as a small boy a distrust of the barbaric crudity of his own native land, and together with this distrust, a desire to ally himself securely with the ancient, more exclusive, more engaging traditions of European culture, a desire sustained and fortified, given his first opportunity of testing the response of his senses in the European scene; a desire which, indeed, hardening finally into a somewhat affrighted purpose as the years progressed, led

finally to his becoming a stranger stranded in a society in which he could never feel wholly at home and alienated for ever from the only environment which might, since it was his native air, have helped to sustain his intensity and to fructify his genius. Thus Mr. Brooks traces in James's writings the rise and decay of his inspiration, marking it as at its highest expression during that period of his life when his knowledge of his country was most emphatic and as at its lowest in those later years when his memories of it had become dimmer and dimmer in permanent expatriation.

And it is just here that one feels a weakness in Mr. Brooks's argument. For in the interests of his thesis he shifts and classifies James's disparate works with the unsleeping, unillumined eye of the social scientist rather than with the nervous, conjuring fingers of the artist to whose gentlest pressure innumerable doors swing soundlessly back to reveal incomparable treasures within. For how can Mr. Brooks see as unreal or sterile that later novel of Henry James in which his matured technical skill was rendered so willing a handmaiden to his harvested and mellowed intensity? And though the present writer admired so much Mr. Edmund Wilson's admirable essay in The New Republic on Mr. Brooks's work, yet she must beg to disagree with both Mr. Brooks and Mr. Wilson in this matter of The Wings of the Dove. For surely the dramatic motif which actuates the story is just that malevolent cynicism and base duplicity which Mr. Wilson de

nies; and yet at the same time Merton Densher does remain throughout the "gentleman" which James has established him at the outset of the novel, more conspired against than conspiring, and explained with so lucid an adequacy that one shares with him at every step the embarrassment of his plight; while Milly, the innocent "cat's-paw," though dead, wins a lasting victory over the crafty Kate, who must view her lover initiated into some deep and tender secret, the soft energy of which will separate them for ever. Thus evil is irretrievably overcome by good, and Mr. Brooks's estimate of this book is shown as biased in the interests of his theory.

But one feels throughout this study that Mr. Brooks in some subtle way is allying himself with the Philistines, and one experiences a curious kind of gratitude that Henry James was after all able to escape out of that deadening Cambridge society set in its "box of sky lavender," from the center of which his brother once complained that the name of Bernard Shaw was banned. And is there not something peculiarly irritating in the attitude of this same brother who, after visiting Henry James in his English home, refers to him thus in a letter to Mrs. James: "... the same dear, old, good, innocent and at bottom very powerless-feeling Harry . . . . caring for little but his writing, and full of dutifulness and affection for all gentle things"? "Powerlessfeeling Harry" and "dutifulness and affection"; are these not the very phrases that Cambridge would most applaud and that Mr. Brooks seems not to