Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/117

91 HENRY JAMES 91 of a suite : it has no doorway leading out into new lives. One of his books is called Terminations ^ and the title would do for them all. Their last sentences are always sentences of death. As in the great, grim, devastating dramas of the ancients, the descent of the curtain at the close seems scarcely needful : there is nothing left to conceal. All has been cancelled out and settled up : only the lights remain unextinguished. In the merciless justice of these audits, in this cold refusal to allow debts to stand over and Fate to be fobbed off with promissory notes, we may perhaps discern the pressure, once more, of Mr. James's essential Puritanism — a grim New England delight in (1) a defiant honesty of book-keeping, an insistent production of all the vouchers that prove the integrity of every act and scene, and in (2) moral warnings and arraignments, reminders of the implacable accountancy of life. But it is the exquisite avidity of his creatures that gives these impulses their oppor- tunity. It is their very joy in life that makes their days all Days of Judgment. For their acute con- sciousness of the present cuts through to the past behind. Their " historic sense " is keen, and it registers messages as faint as sighs. The most familiar things exhale them, sometimes dreadfully : forgotten graves, long turned to gardens, keep giving up their dead. Louisa Pallant is the living presence of her mother's buried selfishness. It is her father's blood in her veins, even more than her recoil from, his hands, that carries Kate Croy into the dubious labyrinth that leads, at last (in The Wings of the Dove), to the strangest crime yet committed in our literature. Parental relics are the talismans in The Tragic Muse : the tale is the fight between Nick Dormer and their spells. In The Portrait of a Lady, by a refinement rarely noticed, it is the clinging touch of Osmond's daughter, who is the