PARTISAN REVIEW
mistake, has an arbitrary and almost impious character; the reader
opposes him, for the reader divines, through his instinct, that the doc–
tor's fears, however applicable they might be in any ordinary case,
are in this instance groundless-nothing can happen to Catherine. And
the doctor's death, in the novel, has the irony of a pure irrelevance; he
dreaded what would happen when he left her, but everything goes on
as before.
.
Catherine, clearly, is a square, that least dynamic of aU shapes, the
shape that gives the book both its pattern and its title. Yet this un–
budging entity can feel-this is the miracle of the novel, which has a
charm truly pantheistic: the hills are skipping with Catherine, and a
rock can quiver at a slight. In James, there is a delicate tenderness to–
ward Catherine that is a courtesy extended to all inanimate objects and
inarticulate creatures. The coercion attempted on Catherine by each
of those interested parties, father, and suitor, and aunt, appears, in the
light of this tenderness, as a cosmic want of refinement, a crass in–
sensitiveness on man's part to life of a lower order. All plans made for
Catherine must of necessity deny her nature, and the well-meaning
efforts of Aunt Penniman are quite as cruel in this respect as the selfish
schemes of the suitor and the father's clever maneuver. But this cruelty,
too, like everything impinging on Catherine, fails to dent its object. A
cry of pain, a silence, and then Nature resumes its habits. Human
beings, the past, sympathy itself are defeated in the serene middle age
of the heroine, which knows no grudges or regrets, but smiles placidly
back on its memories like a blue and empty day.
In the problem of awareness it sets itself, the recognition of con–
sciousness in a creature mute and inglorious, this story is, in essence, a
poetic feat of personification. To "humanize" the tale in the vulgar
sense, which is the task Mr. and Mrs. Goetz have undertaken, to make
Catherine, that is, sympathetic by making her social presentable, teach–
ing her how to walk and speak, like a DuBarry Success Salon neophyte,
how to do her hair and respond to the advances of a lover, is to undo,
with infinite labor, the work of the original author.
If
the playwrights
are not wholly lacking in invention, a fresh start would have been more
advisable, for though a passable melodrama results when the adapters
have got their hand in--cruel father, abused daughter, deceitful lover,
Victorian setting, crashing psychological finale which suggests a subtitle,
The Spinster's Revenge--yet enough of the novel is still protruding,
particularly in the first act, to throw the sequel into very flat relief. The
audience which has beheld Basil Rathbone, a tired, trenchant practi-
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