Wings of the Dove | Page 7

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 (xviii) 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 (xix) 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