Wings of the Dove | Page 3

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 (x)
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 (xi) 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