Wings of the Dove

The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
New York Edition, 1909
Volumes 1 and 2
Volume 1
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 a of [emendation: 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 (vi) 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. 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," (vii) 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