Henry James
Preface to volume 19
of the New York edition
(containing : The wings of the dove)
(1909)
The
wings of the dove,
published in 1902, represents to my memory a very old – if I
should n’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. 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
had n’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. 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, could n’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 might n’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 Lorelei
– 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, baulked 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, could n’t but fall somehow into
some abysmal trap – this being, dramatically speaking, what such a
situation most naturally implied and imposed. Did n’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 formulæ.
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
‘serialised’. 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,
shed 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 before 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 have n’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 was n’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
Hermes
and crowning him with flowers. One’s main anxiety, for each of
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 is n’t, no doubt, however – to
recover, after all, our critical balance – that the pattern
did n’t, for each compartment, get itself somehow wrought, and
that we might n’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, 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 does n’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 re-perusal, 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
supersubtleties, 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.
end of preface to volume 19
part of an etext edition of the
prefaces to the New York edition
of Henry James
on
the Ladder : a Henry James website