Wings of the Dove | Page 5

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, (xiv) 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 Hermes and

crowning him with flowers. One's main anxiety, for each one's