Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/111

85 HENRY JAMES 85 alters : the landscapes become landscapes with figures — the figures turn into portraits : in The Portrait of a Lady Europe has become a kind of tapestry, hanging behind the figure of Isabel like the map in that portrait of Vermeer's. But the effect of this adjustment was but to bring the eye the closer to the little universals, the things of daily life: the lineaments of desire and distress, the homely gestures of joy — an even triter stuff than fields and clouds. And for the purpose of noting these qualities, remind- ing us of their romance, there were always called in characters who were kinsfolk of Searle — as full of " fine tastes " and eager senses — people of The Finer Grain — The Better Sort. And finally, for the privilege of rendering this service to the reader, they all had to pay a price as dreadful as that exacted from poor Searle : they have all paid for it with health or with life or with the joys of success, with one or other of life's normal satisfactions. Doomed to sterility, invariably frustrate, they may seem to us like a new Order of abnegants, undergoing strange penances, suffering for the sake of the world. Recall them to your memory. Let them troop past in turn. Roderick Hudson — Daisy Miller, the youngest and the blithest, yet both paying for their ardour with their lives, killed exactly by the fine force of their vitality. Isabel Archer — Isabel Osmond, supreme in the pale sisterhood, her tragedy in the altered name : giving joy and taking sorrow, turned to marble resignation and mute grief by the refracted beams of her own first radiance. Ralph Touchett — Madame Merle, Madame de Cintre, doubly a renun- ciant, and Newman, refusing even his revenge. Little Hyacinth Robinson, rarest of suicides, slain by the echo of his own ideal, by the fall of the arrow he had let fly at the stars : near to Narcissus in more