Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/112

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HENRY JAMES

than name. Stuart Straith and Mrs. Harvey, Marcher and May Bartram, Neil Paraday, Dencombe, Morris Gedge—all the foiled multiplied people of The Better Sort—eager artists and authors, too fine for their places, used and then left, their wings bruised by the rough shoulders of the world. The crushed watcher in The Cage—the crushed teacher in The Pupil—the ebbing wraith of the pupil himself. The four figures in The Golden Bowl—suffering and frustrate in exact proportion to their fineness. And then, last and loveliest, in The Wings of the Dove,^[1] Milly Theale, with her deep malady, the perfect type of all these condamnés—panting for life because she must die, draining as much of its essence as she may with lips as feverish as poor Searle's. "Tous condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis," they do indeed seize their chance of "expanding that

↑ Mr. James's own comment upon Milly Theale is well worth quoting here—if only for the sake of its curious resemblance to that famous "pulsation" passage of Pater's. "The Wings of the Dove" he says in his Preface to that book, "represents to my memory a very old 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 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." The reader's memory may also be invited to travel back, for the sake of noting an exactly equivalent case, to the first book of The Portrait of a Lady, written thirty years before, where Ralph Touchett's sense for life, his capacity for serving us as cicerone, is made perfect by the same dire process. "He said to himself that his hour was in sight, and that it behoved him to keep his eyes upon it, but that it was also open to him to spend the interval as agreeably as might be consistent with such pre-occupation. With the prospect of losing them, the simple use of his faculties became an exquisite pleasure; it seemed to him that the delights of observation had never been suspected."

[1] Mr. James's own comment upon Milly Theale is well worth quoting here—if only for the sake of its curious resemblance to that famous "pulsation" passage of Pater's. "The Wings of the Dove" he says in his Preface to that book, "represents to my memory a very old 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 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." The reader's memory may also be invited to travel back, for the sake of noting an exactly equivalent case, to the first book of The Portrait of a Lady, written thirty years before, where Ralph Touchett's sense for life, his capacity for serving us as cicerone, is made perfect by the same dire process. "He said to himself that his hour was in sight, and that it behoved him to keep his eyes upon it, but that it was also open to him to spend the interval as agreeably as might be consistent with such pre-occupation. With the prospect of losing them, the simple use of his faculties became an exquisite pleasure; it seemed to him that the delights of observation had never been suspected."

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