The WIngs of the Dove

(To make this a blog exclusively about the Wings of the Dove click here.)

Chapter 24 is like a release. After all this thrashing out of nuance and qualifying remarks, it feels like the story actually get's moving again. Henry James himself seemed to feel it as his writing gets noticeably better here. There area some joyfully wonderful metaphors. This description of Eugenio, the man Milly hires to manage her household in Venice for example:

Gracefully, respectfully, consummately enough--always with hands in position and the look, in his thick neat white hair, smooth fat face and black professional, almost theatrical eyes, as of some famous tenor grown too old to make love, but with an art still to make money ...

And then there is the discussion of figurative masks that Kate and Milly seem to let down in one another's presence. What's so wonderful about that? Well two things, the first is that James has set up the whole notion of role playing earlier with his description of Merton's meeting with Maud after his return from the States. And now we have the intoxicating suggestion that Milly thinks these roles are being dropped. The second wonderful thing is that all this happens in Venice a  city where mask-wearing has all sorts of overtones.

I suspect poor Milly is misleading herself on this.

Other high points of note include the opening sentence:

Not yet so much as this morning had she felt herself sink into possession; gratefully glad that the warmth of the Southern summer was still in the high florid rooms, palatial chambers where hard cool pavements took reflexions in their lifelong polish, and where the sun on the stirred sea-water, flickering up through open windows, played over the painted "subjects" in the splendid ceilings--medallions of purple and brown, of brave old melancholy colour, medals as of old reddened gold, embossed and beribboned, all toned with time and all flourished and scolloped and gilded about, set in their great moulded and figured concavity (a nest of white cherubs, friendly creatures of the air) and appreciated by the aid of that second tier of smaller lights, straight openings to the front, which did everything, even with the Baedekers and photographs of Milly's party dreadfully meeting the eye, to make of the place an apartment of state.

That is 155 words. That is 155 wonderfully written words. That is the art of the long sentence at its best.

And then there is Lord Mark re-appearing. You can't decide whether you trust him or not. Milly can't either. A lot of talk about the novel gets bogged down about free indirect speech but here James has accomplished an amazing thing: reading this you tend to have the same reactions to Lord Mark as Milly does. After a while I found myself thing, "Did I think that or did she?"


Contrary to my observations from last time, I can see the point of telling Milly's story again. I still think the novel lacks a strong sense of a central thread running through it but Milly's story suddenly became more compelling with her arrival in Venice.


Final thought, here is some of what Milly thinks about Lord Mark:

He had waited then, Lord Mark, he was waiting--oh unmistakeably; never before had he so much struck her as the man to do that on occasion with patience, to do it indeed almost as with gratitude for the chance, though at the same time with a sort of notifying firmness.

It's impossible to read that and not think of the opening sentence of the novel and Kate Croy's contrasting experience:

She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him.

The novel is full of people waiting for something to happen so their lives can really start.