Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/118

92 92 HENRY JAMES living symbol of the wrong which the innocence of Isabel has to expiate, that prevents the latter from escaping from her doom. Everywhere the past thrills and populates the air. We see the stage with clair- voyant eyes. There is a constant resurrection of dead deeds. And of more than deeds. . . . Uncannier than any- thing we have noted yet, I think, is the grisly phenomenon we come to now : the fact that actual apparitions, visible phantoms — not mere metaphors but horrid actual semblances of people dead and grieving — are constantly being invoked in secret in these high, bright, supercivilized Jacobean abodes, with their air of supreme polish and discretion. I heard the great clock in the little parlour below strike twelve, one, half-past one. Just as the vibration of this last stroke was dying on the air the door of communication with Searle's room was flung open and my companion stood on the threshold, pale as a corpse, shining like a phantom against the darkness behind him. " Look well at me I " he intensely gasped, "touch me, embrace me, well revere me! You see a man who has seen a ghost I " That crazed cry of Searle's, heard in the very porch, echoes through them all. It is a phantom (foretold in the first chapter of the book) that summons Isabel Archer to Ralph's death-bed (in the last). The hero of Sir Edmund Orme is a spectre. The Way It Came is woefully, wonderfully haunted. An appari- tion baffles the actors in The Real Thing. In The Turn of the Screiv^ the hideous spectres of the dead Quint and his drab return to prey still further on the little children whom they had corrupted when alive. ... It is an obsession that the surrounding urbanity has served somehow to conceal : but which that urbanity really makes the more amazing. It is a symptom as startling as that harsh cry of Searle's — and