Roderick Hudson, originally published in Boston in 1875, is full of the subtle but somewhat morbid analysis that is so prominent a characteristic of Mr. James's genius. He seems very emphatically to dissent from his hero's theory that ugliness is treason to art, and that if artistic things are not positively beautiful they are to be set down as failures. Without maintaining what in such an absolute form would be a paradox, we may maintain that the province of art is to create ideals, and that ideals are necessarily beautiful, each in its domain. Whereas for ideals Mr. James substitutes types, which he exaggerates; and as his choice seems instinctively to be of defect and disorder, the almost uniform impression of his novels is painful. He does not incite by great examples; he warns by shocking beacons, and this, we say again, for the hundredth time, is not the true conception of the poem or the novel any more than of the picture or the statue. Where processes of development are exhibited almost uniformly the evil element overcomes the good, not the good the evil. ... Not a single character throughout the story produces satisfaction. It is as cynical and as pessimist as The American reviewed in our last number. Christina and her husband disappear into infinite possibilities, nay, certainties of misery, if not of shame. Her mother is left to the bitter reaping of her worldliness. Roderick's mother to the misery of weak reproaches and senile sorrow. Roderick's own tragic fate is the great moral of the story. The book is unrelieved in its melancholy failures, masterly as are the penetration and power with which these are analyzed. It is the pessimism of life. Heraclitus is its presiding genius. It is Ecclesiastes in a story.