Wings of the Dove | Page 2

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 (viii) 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 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 (ix) 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