The fiction of the future! It is an idea that propounds itself after reading The Wings of the Dove. Here at last is companion work to the modern movement in music, sculpture, painting. Why prose should lag behind its sister arts I do not know; possibly because every drayman and pothouse politician is supposed to speak it. But any one who has dipped into that well of English undefiled, the seventeenth-century literature, must realize that to-day we write parlous and bastard prose. It is not, however, splendid, stately, rhythmic prose that Mr. James essays or ever has essayed. For him the “steam-dried style” of Pater, as Brander Matthews cruelly calls it, has never offered attractions. The son of a metaphysician and moralist,—I once fed full on Henry James, senior,—the brother of that most brilliant psychologist, William James, of Harvard, it need hardly be said that character problems are of more interest to this novelist than are the external qualities of rhetorical sonority, the glow and fascination of surfaces. Reared upon the minor moralities of Hawthorne, and ever an interested, curious observer of manners, the youthful James wrote books which pictured in his own exquisite orchestra of discreet tints and delicate grays the gestures, movements, and thoughts of many persons, principally those of travelled Americans. He pinned to the printed page a pronounced type in his Daisy Miller, and shall we ever forget his Portrait of a Lady, the Princess Cassimassima,—the latter not without a touch of one of Turgénieff’s bewilderingly capricious heroines. It is from the great, effortless art of the Russian master that Mr. James mainly derives. But Turgénieff represented only one form of influence, and not a continuing one. Hawthorne it was in whom Mr. James first planted his faith; the feeling that Hawthorne’s love of the moral problem still obsesses the living artist is not missed in his newer books. The Puritan lurks in James, though a Puritan tempered by culture, by a humanism only possible in this age. Mr. James has made the odious word, and still more odious quality of cosmopolitanism, a thing of rare delight. In his newer manner, be it never so cryptic, his Americans abroad suffer a rich sea change, and from Daisy Miller to Milly Theale is the chasm of many years of temperamental culture. We wonder if the American girl has so changed, or whether the difference lies with the author; whether he has readjusted his point of vantage with the flight of time; or if Daisy Miller was but a bit of literary illusion, the _pia fraus_ of an artist’s brain. Perhaps it is her latest sister, Milly, whose dovelike wings hover about the selfish souls of her circle, that is the purer embodiment of an artistic dream.