Preface
The Wings of the Dove,” published in
1902, represents to my memory a very old—if I shouldn’t perhaps
rather say a very young—motive; I can scarce remember the time when
the situation on which this long-drawn fiction mainly rests was not
vividly present to me. The idea, reduced to its essence, is that of
a young person conscious of a great capacity for life, but early
stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite, while
also enamoured of the world; aware moreover of the condemnation and
passionately desiring to ”put in” before extinction as many of the
finer vibrations as possible, and so achieve, however briefly and
brokenly, the sense of having lived. Long had I turned it over,
standing off from it, yet coming back to it; convinced of what
might be done with it, yet seeing the theme as formidable.1 The image
so figured would be, at best, but half the matter; the rest would
be all the picture of the struggle involved, the adventure brought
about, the gain recorded or the loss incurred, the precious
experience somehow compassed. These things, I had from the first
felt, would require much working-out; that indeed was the case with
most things worth working at all; yet there are subjects and
subjects, and this one seemed particularly to bristle. It was
formed, I judged, to make the wary adventurer walk round and round
it—it had in fact a charm that invited and mystified alike that
attention; not being somehow what one thought of as a ”frank”
subject, after the fashion of some, with its elements well in view
and its whole character in its face. It stood there with secrets
and compartments, with possible treacheries and traps; it might
have a great deal to give, but would probably ask for equal
services in return, and would collect this debt to the last
shilling. It involved, to begin with, the placing in the strongest
light a person infirm and ill—a case sure to prove difficult and to
require much handling; though giving perhaps, with other matters,
one of those chances for good taste, possibly even for the play of
the very best in the world, that are not only always to be invoked
and cultivated, but that are absolutely to be jumped at from the
moment they make a sign.
Yes then, the case prescribed for its central
figure a sick young woman, at the whole course of whose
disintegration and the whole ordeal of whose consciousness one
would have quite honestly to assist. The expression of her state
and that of one’s intimate relation to it might therefore well need
to be discreet and ingenious; a reflexion that fortunately grew and
grew, however, in proportion as I focussed my image—roundabout
which, as it persisted, I repeat, the interesting possibilities and
the attaching wonderments, not to say the insoluble mysteries,
thickened apace. Why had one to look so straight in the face and so
closely to cross-question that idea of making one’s protagonist
“sick”?—as if to be menaced with death or danger hadn’t been from
time immemorial, for heroine or hero, the very shortest of all cuts
to the interesting state. Why should a figure be disqualified for a
central position by the particular circumstance that might most
quicken, that might crown with a fine intensity, its liability to
many accidents, its consciousness of all relations? This
circumstance, true enough, might disqualify it for many
activities—even though we should have imputed to it the
unsurpassable activity of passionate, of inspired resistance. This
last fact was the real issue, for the way grew straight from the
moment one recognised that the poet essentially can’t be concerned
with the act of dying. Let him deal with the sickest of the sick,
it is still by the act of living that they appeal to him, and
appeal the more as the conditions plot against them and prescribe
the battle.2 The
process of life gives way fighting, and often may so shine out on
the lost ground as in no other connexion. One had had moreover, as
a various chronicler, one’s secondary physical weaklings and
failures, one’s accessory invalids—introduced with a complacency
that made light of criticism. To Ralph Touchett in “The Portrait of
a Lady,” for instance, his deplorable state of health was not only
no drawback; I had clearly been right in counting it, for any happy
effect he should produce, a positive good mark, a direct aid to
pleasantness and vividness. The reason of this moreover could never
in the world have been his fact of sex; since men, among the
mortally afflicted, suffer on the whole more overtly and more
grossly than women, and resist with a ruder, an inferior strategy.
I had thus to take that anomaly for what it was worth, and I give
it here but as one of the ambiguities amid which my subject ended
by making itself at home and seating itself quite in
confidence.
With the clearness I have just noted,
accordingly, the last thing in the world it proposed to itself was
to be the record predominantly of a collapse. I don’t mean to say
that my offered victim was not present to my imagination,
constantly, as dragged by a greater force than any she herself
could exert; she had been given me from far back as contesting
every inch of the road, as catching at every object the grasp of
which might make for delay, as clutching these things to the last
moment of her strength. Such an attitude and such movements, the
passion they expressed and the success they in fact represented,
what were they in truth but the soul of drama?—which is the
portrayal, as we know, of a catastrophe determined in spite of
oppositions. My young woman would herself be the
opposition—to the catastrophe announced by the associated Fates,
powers conspiring to a sinister end and, with their command of
means, finally achieving it, yet in such straits really to
stifle the sacred spark that, obviously, a creature so
animated, an adversary so subtle, couldn’t but be felt worthy,
under whatever weaknesses, of the foreground and the limelight. She
would meanwhile wish, moreover, all along, to live for particular
things, she would found her struggle on particular human interests,
which would inevitably determine, in respect to her, the attitude
of other persons, persons affected in such a manner as to make them
part of the action. If her impulse to wrest from her shrinking hour
still as much of the fruit of life as possible, if this longing can
take effect only by the aid of others, their participation
(appealed to, entangled and coerced as they find themselves)
becomes their drama too—that of their promoting her illusion, under
her importunity, for reasons, for interests and advantages, from
motives and points of view, of their own. Some of these promptings,
evidently, would be of the highest order—others doubtless mightn’t;
but they would make up together, for her, contributively, her sum
of experience, represent to her somehow, in good faith or in bad,
what she should have known. Somehow, too, at such a rate,
one would see the persons subject to them drawn in as by some pool
of a Loreleia—see
them terrified and tempted and charmed; bribed away, it may even
be, from more prescribed and natural orbits, inheriting from their
connexion with her strange difficulties and still stranger
opportunities, confronted with rare questions and called upon for
new discriminations. Thus the scheme of her situation would, in a
comprehensive way, see itself constituted; the rest of the interest
would be in the number and nature of the particulars. Strong among
these, naturally, the need that life should, apart from her
infirmity, present itself to our young woman as quite dazzlingly
liveable, and that if the great pang for her is in what she must
give up we shall appreciate it the more from the sight of all she
has.
One would see her then as possessed of all
things, all but the single most precious assurance; freedom and
money and a mobile mind and personal charm, the power to interest
and attach; attributes, each one, enhancing the value of a future.
From the moment his imagination began to deal with her at close
quarters, in fact, nothing could more engage her designer than to
work out the detail of her perfect rightness for her part; nothing
above all more solicit him than to recognise fifty reasons for her
national and social status. She should be the last fine
flower—blooming alone, for the fullest attestation of her
freedom—of an “old” New York stem; the happy congruities thus
preserved for her being matters, however, that I may not now go
into, and this even though the fine association that shall yet
elsewhere await me is of a sort, at the best, rather to defy than
to encourage exact expression. There goes with it, for the heroine
of “The Wings of the Dove,” a strong and special implication of
liberty, liberty of action, of choice, of appreciation, of
contact—proceeding from sources that provide better for large
independence, I think, than any other conditions in the world—and
this would be in particular what we should feel ourselves deeply
concerned with. I had from far back mentally projected a certain
sort of young American as more the “heir of all the ages” than any
other young person whatever (and precisely on those grounds I have
just glanced at but to pass them by for the moment); so that here
was a chance to confer on some such figure a supremely touching
value. To be the heir of all the ages only to know yourself, as
that consciousness should deepen, balked of your inheritance, would
be to play the part, it struck me, or at least to arrive at the
type, in the light on the whole the most becoming. Otherwise,
truly, what a perilous part to play out— what a suspicion of
“swagger” in positively attempting it! So at least I could
reason-so I even think I had to—to keep my subject to a decent
compactness. For already, from an early stage, it had begun richly
to people itself: the difficulty was to see whom the situation I
had primarily projected might, by this, that or the other turn,
not draw in. My business was to watch its turns as the fond
parent watches a child perched, for its first riding-lesson, in the
saddle; yet its interest, I had all the while to recall, was just
in its making, on such a scale, for developments.
What one had discerned, at all events, from an
early stage, was that a young person so devoted and exposed, a
creature with her security hanging so by a hair, couldn’t but fall
somehow into some abysmal trap—this being, dramatically speaking,
what such a situation most naturally implied and imposed. Didn’t
the truth and a great part of the interest also reside in the
appearance that she would constitute for others (given her
passionate yearning to live while she might) a complication as
great as any they might constitute for herself?—which is what I
mean when I speak of such matters as “natural.” They would be as
natural, these tragic, pathetic, ironic, these indeed for the most
part sinister, liabilities, to her living associates, as they could
be to herself as prime subject. If her story was to consist, as it
could so little help doing, of her being let in, as we say, for
this, that and the other irreducible anxiety, how could she not
have put a premium on the acquisition, by any close sharer of her
life, of a consciousness similarly embarrassed? I have named the
Rhine-maiden, but our young friend’s existence would create rather,
all round her, very much that whirlpool movement of the waters
produced by the sinking of a big vessel or the failure of a great
business; when we figure to ourselves the strong narrowing eddies,
the immense force of suction, the general engulfment that, for any
neighbouring object, makes immersion inevitable. I need scarce say,
however, that in spite of these communities of doom I saw the main
dramatic complication much more prepared for my vessel of
sensibility than by her—the work of other hands (though with her
own imbrued too, after all, in the measure of their never not
being, in some direction, generous and extravagant, and thereby
provoking).
The great point was, at all events, that if in a
predicament she was to be, accordingly, it would be of the essence
to create the predicament promptly and build it up solidly, so that
it should have for us as much as possible its ominous air of
awaiting her. That reflexion I found, betimes, not less inspiring
than urgent; one begins so, in such a business, by looking about
for one’s compositional key, unable as one can only be to move till
one has found it. To start without it is to pretend to enter the
train and, still more, to remain in one’s seat, without a ticket.
Well—in the steady light and for the continued charm of these
verifications—I had secured my ticket over the tolerably long line
laid down for “The Wings of the Dove” from the moment I had noted
that there could be no full presentation of Milly Theale as
engaged with elements amid which she was to draw her breath
in such pain, should not the elements have been, with all
solicitude, duly prefigured. If one had seen that her stricken
state was but half her case, the correlative half being the state
of others as affected by her (they too should have a “case,” bless
them, quite as much as she!) then I was free to choose, as it were,
the half with which I should begin. If, as I had fondly noted, the
little world determined for her was to “bristle”—I delighted in the
term!—with meanings, so, by the same token, could I but make my
medal hang free, its obverse and its reverse, its face and its
back, would beautifully become optional for the spectator. I
somehow wanted them correspondingly embossed, wanted them inscribed
and figured with an equal salience; yet it was none the less
visibly my “key,” as I have said, that though my regenerate young
New Yorker, and what might depend on her, should form my centre, my
circumference was every whit as treatable. Therefore I must trust
myself to know when to proceed from the one and when from the
other. Preparatively and, as it were, yearningly—given the whole
ground—one began, in the event, with the outer ring, approaching
the centre thus by narrowing circumvallations. There, full-blown,
accordingly, from one hour to the other, rose one’s process—for
which there remained all the while so many amusing formulae.
The medal did hang free—I felt this perfectly, I
remember, from the moment I had comfortably laid the ground
provided in my first Book, ground from which Milly is superficially
so absent. I scarce remember perhaps a case—I like even with this
public grossness to insist on it—in which the curiosity of
“beginning far back,” as far back as possible, and even of going,
to the same tune, far “behind,” that is behind the face of the
subject, was to assert itself with less scruple. The free hand, in
this connexion, was above all agreeable—the hand the freedom of
which I owed to the fact that the work had ignominiously failed, in
advance, of all power to see itself “serialized.” This failure had
repeatedly waited, for me, upon shorter fictions; but the
considerable production we here discuss was (as “The Golden Bowl”
was to be, two or three years later) born, not otherwise than a
little bewilderedly, into a world of periodicals and editors, of
roaring “successes” in fine, amid which it was well-nigh unnotedly
to lose itself. There is fortunately something bracing, ever, in
the alpine chill, that of some high icy arête,bshed by
the cold editorial shoulder; sour grapes may at moments fairly
intoxicate and the story-teller worth his salt rejoice to feel
again how many accommodations he can practise. Those addressed to
“conditions of publication” have in a degree their interesting, or
at least their provoking, side; but their charm is qualified by the
fact that the prescriptions here spring from a soil often wholly
alien to the ground of the work itself. They are almost always the
fruit of another air altogether and conceived in a light liable to
represent within the circle of the work itself little else
than darkness. Still, when not too blighting, they often operate as
a tax on ingenuity—that ingenuity of the expert craftsman which
likes to be taxed very much to the same tune to which a well-bred
horse likes to be saddled. The best and finest ingenuities,
nevertheless, with all respect to that truth, are apt to be, not
one’s compromises, but one’s fullest conformities, and I well
remember, in the case be fore us, the pleasure of feeling my
divisions, my proportions and general rhythm, rest all on permanent
rather than in any degree on momentary proprieties. It was enough
for my alternations, thus, that they were good in themselves; it
was in fact so much for them that I really think any further
account of the constitution of the book reduces itself to a just
notation of the law they followed.
There was the “fun,” to begin with, of
establishing one’s successive centres—of fixing them so exactly
that the portions of the subject commanded by them as by happy
points of view, and accordingly treated from them, would
constitute, so to speak, sufficiently solid blocks of wrought
material, squared to the sharp edge, as to have weight and mass and
carrying power; to make for construction, that is, to conduce to
effect and to provide for beauty. Such a block, obviously, is the
whole preliminary presentation of Kate Croy, which, from the first,
I recall, absolutely declined to enact itself save in terms of
amplitude. Terms of amplitude, terms of atmosphere, those terms,
and those terms only, in which images assert their fulness and
roundness, their power to revolve, so that they have sides and
backs, parts in the shade as true as parts in the sun—these were
plainly to be my conditions, right and left, and I was so far from
overrating the amount of expression the whole thing, as I saw and
felt it, would require, that to retrace the way at present is,
alas, more than anything else, but to mark the gaps and the lapses,
to miss, one by one, the intentions that, with the best will in the
world, were not to fructify. I have just said that the process of
the general attempt is described from the moment the “blocks” are
numbered, and that would be a true enough picture of my plan. Yet
one’s plan, alas, is one thing and one’s result another; so that I
am perhaps nearer the point in saying that this last strikes me at
present as most characterised by the happy features that
were, under my first and most blest illusion, to have
contributed to it. I meet them all, as I renew acquaintance, I
mourn for them all as I remount the stream, the absent values, the
palpable voids, the missing links, the mocking shadows, that
reflect, taken together, the early bloom of one’s good faith. Such
cases are of course far from abnormal—so far from it that some
acute mind ought surely to have worked out by this time the “law”
of the degree in which the artist’s energy fairly depends on his
fallibility. How much and how often, and in what connexions and
with what almost infinite variety, must he be a dupe, that of his
prime object, to be at all measurably a master, that of his actual
substitute for it—or in other words at all appreciably to exist? He
places, after an earnest survey, the piers of his bridge—he has at
least sounded deep enough, heaven knows, for their brave position;
yet the bridge spans the stream, after the fact, in apparently
complete independence of these properties, the principal grace of
the original design. They were an illusion, for their necessary
hour; but the span itself, whether of a single arch or of many,
seems by the oddest chance in the world to be a reality; since,
actually, the rueful builder, passing under it, sees figures and
hears sounds above: he makes out, with his heart in his throat,
that it bears and is positively being “used.”
The building-up of Kate Croy’s consciousness to
the capacity for the load little by little to be laid on it was, by
way of example, to have been a matter of as many hundred
close-packed bricks as there are actually poor dozens. The image of
her so compromised and compromising father was all effectively to
have pervaded her life, was in a certain particular way to have
tampered with her spring; by which I mean that the shame and the
irritation and the depression, the general poisonous influence of
him, were to have been shown, with a truth beyond the
compass even of one’s most emphasised “word of honour” for it, to
do these things. But where do we find him, at this time of day,
save in a beggarly scene or two which scarce arrives at the dignity
of functional reference? He but “looks in,” poor beautiful
dazzling, damning apparition that he was to have been; he sees his
place so taken, his company so little missed, that, cocking again
that fine form of hat which has yielded him for so long his one
effective cover, he turns away with a whistle of indifference that
nobly misrepresents the deepest disappointment of his life. One’s
poor word of honour has had to pass muster for the show. Every one,
in short, was to have enjoyed so much better a chance that, like
stars of the theatre condescending to oblige, they have had to take
small parts, to content themselves with minor identities, in order
to come on at all. I haven’t the heart now, I confess, to adduce
the detail of so many lapsed importances; the explanation of most
of which, after all, I take to have been in the crudity of a truth
beating full upon me through these reconsiderations, the odd
inveteracy with which picture, at almost any turn, is jealous of
drama, and drama (though on the whole with a greater patience, I
think) suspicious of picture. Between them, no doubt, they do much
for the theme; yet each baffles insidiously the other’s ideal and
eats round the edges of its position; each is too ready to say “I
can take the thing for ‘done’ only when done in my way.” The
residuum of comfort for the witness of these broils is of course
meanwhile in the convenient reflexion, invented for him in the
twilight of time and the infancy of art by the Angel, not to say by
the Demon, of Compromise, that nothing is so easy to “do” as not to
be thankful for almost any stray help in its getting done. It
wasn’t, after this fashion, by making good one’s dream of Lionel
Croy that my structure was to stand on its feet—any more than it
was by letting him go that I was to be left irretrievably
lamenting. The who and the what, the how and the why, the whence
and the whither of Merton Densher, these, no less, were quantities
and attributes that should have danced about him with the antique
grace of nymphs and fauns circling round a bland Hermesc and
crowning him with flowers. One’s main anxiety, for each one’s
agents, is that the air of each shall be given; but what
does the whole thing become, after all, as one goes, but a series
of sad places at which the hand of generosity has been cautioned
and stayed? The young man’s situation, personal, professional,
social, was to have been so decanted for us that we should get all
the taste; we were to have been penetrated with Mrs. Lowder, by the
same token, saturated with her presence, her “personality,” and
felt all her weight in the scale. We were to have revelled in Mrs.
Stringham, my heroine’s attendant friend, her fairly choral
Bostonian, a subject for innumerable touches, and in an extended
and above all an animated reflexion of Milly Theale’s
experience of English society; just as the strength and sense of
the situation in Venice, for our gathered friends, was to have come
to us in a deeper draught out of a larger cup, and just as the
pattern of Densher’s final position and fullest consciousness there
was to have been marked in fine stitches, all silk and gold, all
pink and silver, that have had to remain, alas, but entwined upon
the reel.
It isn‘t, no doubt, however—to recover, after
all, our critical balance—that the pattern didn’t, for each
compartment, get itself somehow wrought, and that we mightn’t thus,
piece by piece, opportunity offering, trace it over and study it.
The thing has doubtless, as a whole, the advantage that each piece
is true to its pattern, and that while it pretends to make no
simple statement it yet never lets go its scheme of clearness.
Applications of this scheme are continuous and exemplary enough,
though I scarce leave myself room to glance at them. The clearness
is obtained in Book First—or otherwise, as I have said, in the
first “piece,” each Book having its subordinate and contributive
pattern—through the associated consciousness of my two prime young
persons, for whom I early recognised that I should have to consent,
under stress, to a practical fusion of consciousness. It is
into the young woman’s “ken” that Merton Densher is represented as
swimming; but her mind is not here, rigorously, the one reflector.
There are occasions when it plays this part, just as there are
others when his plays it, and an intelligible plan consists
naturally not a little in fixing such occasions and making them, on
one side and the other, sufficient to themselves. Do I sometimes in
fact forfeit the advantage of that distinctness? Do I ever abandon
one centre for another after the former has been postulated? From
the moment we proceed by “centres”—and I have never, I confess,
embraced the logic of any superior process—they must be, each, as a
basis, selected and fixed; after which it is that, in the high
interest of economy of treatment, they determine and rule. There is
no economy of treatment without an adopted, a related point of
view,3 and
though I understand, under certain degrees of pressure, a
represented community of vision between several parties to the
action when it makes for concentration, I understand no breaking-up
of the register, no sacrifice of the recording consistency, that
doesn’t rather scatter and weaken. In this truth resides the secret
of the discriminated occasion—that aspect of the subject which we
have our noted choice of treating either as picture or scenically,
but which is apt, I think, to show its fullest worth in the Scene.
Beautiful exceedingly, for that matter, those occasions or parts of
an occasion when the boundary line between picture and scene bears
a little the weight of the double pressure.
Such would be the case, I can’t but surmise, for
the long passage that forms here before us the opening of Book
Fourth, where all the offered life centres, to intensity, in the
disclosure of Milly’s single throbbing consciousness, but where,
for a due rendering, everything has to be brought to a head. This
passage, the view of her introduction to Mrs. Lowder’s circle, has
its mate, for illustration, later on in the book and at a crisis
for which the occasion submits to another rule. My registers or
“reflectors,” as I so conveniently name them (burnished indeed as
they generally are by the intelligence, the curiosity, the passion,
the force of the moment, whatever it be directing them), work, as
we have seen, in arranged alternation; so that in the second
connexion I here glance at it is Kate Croy who is; “for all she is
worth,” turned on. She is turned on largely at Venice, where the
appearances, rich and obscure and portentous (another word I
rejoice in) as they have by that time become and altogether
exquisite as they remain, are treated almost wholly through her
vision of them and Densher’s (as to the lucid interplay of which
conspiring and conflicting agents there would be a great deal to
say). It is in Kate’s consciousness that at the stage in question
the drama is brought to a head, and the occasion on which, in the
splendid saloon of poor Milly’s hired palace, she takes the measure
of her friend’s festal evening, squares itself to the same
synthetic firmness as the compact constructional block inserted by
the scene at Lancaster Gate. Milly’s situation ceases at a given
moment to be “renderable” in terms closer than those supplied by
Kate’s intelligence, or, in a richer degree, by Densher’s, or, for
one fond hour, by poor Mrs. Stringham’s (since to that sole brief
futility is this last participant, crowned by my original plan with
the quaintest functions, in fact reduced); just as Kate’s relation
with Densher and Densher’s with Kate have ceased previously, and
are then to cease again, to be projected for us, so far as Milly is
concerned with them, on any more responsible plate than that of the
latter’s admirable anxiety. It is as if, for these aspects, the
impersonal plate—in other words the poor author’s comparatively
cold affirmation or thin guarantee—had felt itself a figure of
attestation at once too gross and too bloodless, likely to affect
us as an abuse of privilege when not as an abuse of
knowledge.
Heaven forbid, we say to ourselves during almost
the whole Venetian climax, heaven forbid we should “know” anything
more of our ravaged sister than what Densher darkly pieces
together, or than what Kate Croy pays, heroically, it must be
owned, at the hour of her visit alone to Densher’s lodging, for her
superior handling and her dire profanation of. For we have time,
while this passage lasts, to turn round critically; we have time to
recognise intentions and proprieties; we have time to catch
glimpses of an economy of composition, as I put it, interesting in
itself: all in spite of the author’s scarce more than
half-dissimulated despair at the inveterate displacement of his
general centre. “The Wings of the Dove” happens to offer perhaps
the most striking example I may cite (though with public penance
for it already performed) of my regular failure to keep the
appointed halves of my whole equal. Here the makeshift middle—for
which the best I can say is that it’s always rueful and never
impudent—reigns with even more than its customary contrition,
though passing itself off perhaps too with more than its usual
craft. Nowhere, I seem to recall, had the need of dissimulation
been felt so as anguish; nowhere had I condemned a luckless theme
to complete its revolution, burdened with the accumulation of its
difficulties, the difficulties that grow with a theme’s
development, in quarters so cramped. Of course, as every novelist
knows, it is difficulty that inspires; only, for that perfection of
charm, it must have been difficulty inherent and congenital, and
not difficulty “caught” by the wrong frequentations. The latter
half, that is the false and deformed half, of “The Wings” would
verily, I think, form a signal object-lesson for a literary critic
bent on improving his occasion to the profit of the budding artist.
This whole corner of the picture bristles with “dodges”—such as he
should feel himself all committed to recognise and denounce—for
disguising the reduced scale of the exhibition, for foreshortening
at any cost, for imparting to patches the value of presences, for
dressing objects in an air as of the dimensions they can’t
possibly have. Thus he would have his free hand for pointing out
what a tangled web we weave when—well, when, through our mislaying
or otherwise trifling with our blest pair of compasses, we have to
produce the illusion of mass without the illusion of extent.
There is a job quite to the measure of most of our
monitors—and with the interest for them well enhanced by the
preliminary cunning quest for the spot where deformity has
begun.
I recognise meanwhile, throughout the long
earlier reach of the book, not only no deformities but, I think, a
positively close and felicitous application of method, the
preserved consistencies of which, often illusive, but never really
lapsing, it would be of a certain diversion, and might be of some
profit, to follow. The author’s accepted task at the outset has
been to suggest with force the nature of the tie formed between the
two young persons first introduced—to give the full impression of
its peculiar worried and baffled, yet clinging and confident,
ardour. The picture constituted, so far as may be, is that of a
pair of natures well-nigh consumed by a sense of their intimate
affinity and congruity, the reciprocity of their desire, and thus
passionately impatient of barriers and delays, yet with qualities
of intelligence and character that they are meanwhile
extraordinarily able to draw upon for the enrichment of their
relation, the extension of their prospect and the support of their
“game.” They are far from a common couple, Merton Densher and Kate
Croy, as befits the remarkable fashion in which fortune was to
waylay and opportunity was to distinguish them—the whole strange
truth of their response to which opening involves also, in its
order, no vulgar art of exhibition; but what they have most to tell
us is that, all unconsciously and with the best faith in the world,
all by mere force of the terms of their superior passion combined
with their superior diplomacy, they are laying a trap for the great
innocence to come. If I like, as I have confessed, the “portentous”
look, I was perhaps never to set so high a value on it as for all
this prompt provision of forces unwittingly waiting to close round
my eager heroine (to the eventual deep chill of her eagerness) as
the result of her mere lifting of a latch. Infinitely interesting
to have built up the relation of the others to the point at which
its aching restlessness, its need to affirm itself otherwise than
by an exasperated patience, meets as with instinctive relief and
recognition the possibilities shining out of Milly Theale.
Infinitely interesting to have prepared and organised,
correspondingly, that young woman’s precipitations and liabilities,
to have constructed, for Drama essentially to take possession, the
whole bright house of her exposure.
These references, however, reflect too little of
the detail of the treatment imposed; such a detail as I for
instance get hold of in the fact of Densher’s interview with Mrs.
Lowder before he goes to America. It forms, in this preliminary
picture, the one patch not strictly seen over Kate Croy’s shoulder;
though it’s notable that immediately after, at the first possible
moment, we surrender again to our major convenience, as it happens
to be at the time, that of our drawing breath through the young
woman’s lungs. Once more, in other words, before we know it,
Densher’s direct vision of the scene at Lancaster Gate is replaced
by her apprehension, her contributive assimilation, of his
experience: it melts back into that accumulation, which we have
been, as it were, saving up. Does my apparent deviation here count
accordingly as a muddle?—one of the muddles ever blooming so thick
in any soil that fails to grow reasons and determinants. No,
distinctly not; for I had definitely opened the door, as attention
of perusal of the first two Books will show, to the subjective
community of my young pair. (Attention of perusal, I thus confess
by the way, is what I at every point, as well as here, absolutely
invoke and take for granted; a truth I avail myself of this
occasion to note once for all—in the interest of that variety of
ideal reigning, I gather, in the connexion. The enjoyment of a work
of art, the acceptance of an irresistible illusion, constituting,
to my sense, our highest experience of “luxury,” the luxury is not
greatest, by my consequent measure, when the work asks for as
little attention as possible. It is greatest, it is delightfully,
divinely great, when we feel the surface, like the thick ice of the
skater’s pond, bear without cracking the strongest pressure we
throw on it. The sound of the crack one may recognise, but never
surely to call it a luxury.) That I had scarce availed myself of
the privilege of seeing with Densher’s eyes is another matter; the
point is that I had intelligently marked my possible, my occasional
need of it. So, at all events, the constructional “block” of the
first two Books compactly forms itself. A new block, all of the
squarest and not a little of the smoothest, begins with the
Third—by which I mean of course a new mass of interest governed
from a new centre. Here again I make prudent provision—to be
sure to keep my centre strong. It dwells mainly, we at once see, in
the depths of Milly Theale’s “case,” where, close beside it,
however, we meet a supplementary reflector, that of the lucid even
though so quivering spirit of her dedicated friend.
The more or less associated consciousness of the
two women deals thus, unequally, with the next presented face of
the subject—deals with it to the exclusion of the dealing of
others; and if, for a highly particular moment, I allot to Mrs.
Stringham the responsibility of the direct appeal to us, it is
again, charming to relate, on behalf of that play of the portentous
which I cherish so as a “value” and am accordingly for ever setting
in motion. There is an hour of evening, on the alpine height, at
which it becomes of the last importance that our young woman should
testify eminently in this direction. But as I was to find it long
since of a blest wisdom that no expense should be incurred or met,
in any corner of picture of mine, without some concrete image of
the account kept of it, that is of its being organically
re-economised, so under that dispensation Mrs. Stringham has to
register the transaction. Book Fifth is a new block mainly in its
provision of a new set of occasions, which readopt, for their
order, the previous centre, Milly’s now almost full-blown
consciousness. At my game, with renewed zest, of driving portents
home, I have by this time all the choice of those that are to brush
that surface with a dark wing. They are used, to our profit, on an
elastic but a definite system; by which I mean that having to sound
here and there a little deep, as a test, for my basis of method, I
find it everywhere obstinately present. It draws the “occasion”
into tune and keeps it so, to repeat my tiresome term; my nearest
approach to muddlement is to have sometimes—but not too often—to
break my occasions small. Some of them succeed in remaining ample
and in really aspiring then to the higher, the sustained lucidity.
The whole actual centre of the work, resting on a misplaced pivot
and lodged in Book Fifth, pretends to a long reach, or at any rate
to the larger foreshortening—though bringing home to me, on
reperusal, what I find striking, charming and curious, the author’s
instinct everywhere for the indirect presentation of his
main image. I note how, again and again, I go but a little way with
the direct—that is with the straight exhibition of Milly; it
resorts for relief, this process, whenever it can, to some kinder,
some merciful indirection: all as if to approach her circuitously,
deal with her at second hand, as an unspotted princess is ever
dealt with; the pressure all round her kept easy for her, the
sounds, the movements regulated, the forms and ambiguities made
charming. All of which proceeds, obviously, from her painter’s
tenderness of imagination about her, which reduces him to watching
her, as it were, through the successive windows of other people’s
interest in her. So, if we talk of princesses, do the balconies
opposite the palace gates, do the coigns of vantage and respect
enjoyed for a fee, rake from afar the mystic figure in the gilded
coach as it comes forth into the great place. But my use of
windows and balconies is doubtless at best an extravagance by
itself, and as to what there may be to note, of this and other
super-subtleties, other arch-refinements, of tact and taste, of
design and instinct, in “The Wings of the Dove,” I become conscious
of overstepping my space without having brought the full quantity
to light. The failure leaves me with a burden of residuary comment
of which I yet boldly hope elsewhere to discharge myself.
HENRY JAMES