The Kings of the Dove: Or, False Gold

BY MAXWELL GEISMAR

THE WINGS OF THE DOVE, published in 1902, was the first of the three novels in Henry James’s major phase. The other two were The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, in a strong, late burst of the Jamesian virtuosity. The Wings of the Dove is generally accounted as the great tragedy of this period, as well as the first big example of James’s later manner; and there is even more than the usual voluminous amount of critical commentary, from James himself and from his modern disciples, surrounding the novel.

The Miily Theale story was, according to Matthiessen-Murdock’s Notebooks of Henry James, based on James’s deepest feeling, “the stored-up accumulation of one of the primary emotional experiences of his youth,” the death of his cousin Minny Temple. In the portrait of Milly, James “probed the deep connection between love and the will to live,” while in the novel itself, “his accumulated resources of pity and terror enabled him to produce his principal tragedy.” In Henry James: The Major Phase, F. O. Matthiessen, so often elsewhere a discerning critic with sound values, described The Wings of the Dove in such terms as James’s “masterpiece,” or “that single work where his characteristic emotional vibration seems deepest.” This critic was not unaware of certain limitations both in the masterpiece and its author. His whole study of the novel, originally given as a lecture, is an attempt to explain away, to “understand,” and to prove the hidden merits of what are precisely James’s most severe deficiencies.

By contrast, F. W. Dupee’s Henry James is both more uncertain about the real stature of The Wings of the Dove and more acute. The writing in the novel, says Dupee, reaches “some kind of high water mark in English prose,” but he neglects to specify the kind. The two girls, Milly Theale and Kate Croy — the two heroines, or the heroine and the villainess — are “magnificent,” to be sure; but “As Milly is mortally ill, so Kate is mortally poor” — a sharp observation, which fails to state that Kate is only too poor to marry Merton Densher in middle-class circumstances.

The novel’s heroine is a more exquisite Daisy Miller, said Dupee, but “Milly is free to embody in a large way the uncreated conscience of her race.” And what this statement means, reminiscent as it is of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist and now applied to this romantic, innocent, betrayed Jamesian heroine, I frankly have no idea. The Wings of the Dove is another old-fashioned Jamesian romance of Europe, often rather glamorous and touching, if at times somewhat tedious. But it is refinished with the later James technique and refurbished with a subplot which is in essence a melodrama of lust and greed, and which is in turn described through the highly idiosyncratic focus of the late James’s sensibility. No wonder the critics have their troubles in locating the particular source of greatness in this masterwork of the late period. It is in fact a peculiar mixture of literary parts.

The long, slow opening section of Book One, which describes Kate Croy’s evil heritage, is a study of middle-class “degradation” — the lowest depths, to James, of material and spiritual constriction. Kate’s father is a bankrupt dandy whose mysterious and unmentionable crime has already influenced his beautiful, ambitious daughter. Kate’s unfortunate sister Marian has, to be sure, received “her scant share of the provision their mother had been able to leave them.” For none are so poor, even in this middle-class nether land of the Jamesian social cosmos, as not to have a small inheritance. But Mrs. Condrip has made the mistake of marrying the parson ol a suburban parish. She exists in The Wings of the Dove to show us the awful example of marriage without social position or money, or with just a little money, with four children, and with only a “small Irish governess” in a very small private house.

From this background Kate Croy emerges as a rather good portrait of an unloved, unwanted child who is being pressured to “make good” — that is, to make a rich marriage — while, unfortunately, she has fallen desperately in love with Densher, a dubious journalist who hardly offers her this prospect. She has consented to being “adopted” by her rich, brassy, vulgar Aunt Maud, the “Britannia of the Market Place,” who is another satiric portrait of modern — that is to say, debased — London society.

Maud, too, is determined that her beautiful niece shall not marry Merton Densher — that is the price of Kate’s being adopted; and this hero’s muggy name, like that of the Condrips, shows his uncertain social status.

Thus, the opening sections of the book are an illuminating exposition of the genteel poverty which James considered to be the most ignoble human or social existence. But he had introduced in the novel a new element of a consuming and, on Kate Croy’s part at least, “illegitimate” passion, which is first described in the lovers’ long walks and long talks as they wander around beneath the walls and windows of Mrs. Lowder’s London mansion. Here one notices the deliberate, enforced indirection of the late Jamesian narrative technique, where ambiguity is compounded by obliquity, as in Merton Densher’s reverie about his meeting with Aunt Maud just when he is conversing with Kate, when we get all the hints and suggestions of unlawful love without a gesture of physical affection. And into the midst of this flow of reminiscence, introspection, speculation on the part of the two lovers — the continual action of their minds, the perpetual flow of their words, the use of their larynges rather than their lips — there is the sudden arrival of the American fairy princess herself, the “striking apparition” of Milly Theale.

This is the slim, pale, delicately haggard,“agreeably angular young person” in Book Three: “of not more than two-and-twenty summers, in spite of her marks, whose hair was somehow exceptionally red even for the real thing, which it innocently confessed to being, and whose clothes were remarkably black even for robes of mourning, which was the meaning they expressed. It was New York mourning, it was New York hair, it was a New York history. . . .”

So James described her in curiously moving terms, despite the exaggerated flow of rhetoric, the dramatic attempt to make more of Milly than she was: “It was a New York history, confused as yet, but multitudinous, of the loss of parents, brothers, sisters, almost every human appendage, all on a scale and with a sweep that had required the greater stage; it was a New York legend of affecting, of romantic isolation, and, beyond everything, it was by most accounts, in respect to the mass of money so piled on the girl’s back, a set of New York possibilities. She was alone, she was stricken, she was rich. . .”

What a marvelous heroine of romance indeed, never forgetting, as James never did, the last item of cash, or gold, on top of the human loss or isolation. For Milly is a “real orphan,” and wealthy, while Kate Croy is an acquired or selfmade orphan, so to speak, and poor. But even Milly comes to us in the narrative through another technical reflector, or perhaps reverberator: through the mind of Mrs. Stringham, a rather dullish caricature of a New England spinsterish artist who is Milly’s companion, or semi-governess, and whose reverie gives us the heroine’s background.

WAS this technique overdone by the later James, amounting in The Wings of the Dove to a tour de force of oblique narrative, or to something that might be called the circular novel? At least the story’s opening, up through the fourth book, is slow, heavy, verbose, extended, magnified, both in style and in structure. What James called his “misplaced centre” really described his elaborate, portentous, elongated opening, where there was no middle to the narrative at all, but only the sudden gripping of the melodrama for which he had set the scene. The formal structure of the Dove is really that of “pre-analysis,” in which the characters reveal themselves and their past while they reflect upon each other and speculate, sometimes coyly, about the impending event. Then there is the big scene itself, in which we see them all functioning — that is to say, talking — and last, the post-analysis, where the characters, reverting to their reveries, examine the event which has happened, both in their own minds and in further conversations with each other. This curiously complex structure which James had evolved for his drama of consciousness—the multicircle or con-circular narrative — had even more elaborate developments.

Meanwhile, with Milly Theale’s confrontation of English society toward the close of the first volume of the Dove, we have reached the point of impending melodrama and of the novel’s real theme. Was it the familiar conflict of appearance and reality, as the contemporary Jacobite critics insist? At Mrs. Lowder’s Lancaster Gate, and at Matcham, the great English country house where Lord Mark takes over Milly’s education, where she had never felt life and civilization at so high a peak, where her vibrations, her sensibilities, are almost too tense and sharp for comfort, the Jamesian heroine feels that her quest has been achieved. But in James’s own mind this modern English society of Mrs. Lowder and Lord Mark is no social set at all; moreover, they are all conspiring to entrap the innocent, beautiful, wealthy, and sick American princess.

The real conflict is that of illusion and illusion, or illusion upon illusion. The American princess is false, or at least a romantic and improbable embodiment of James’s own youthful dream of Europe. Her vision of English culture is false; and the actual appearance or materialization of her dream in the smart British circle of the Dove is not only false but designed to be false, made to be a lure and a snare. Furthermore, just as Milly represents the early, romantic Jamesian vision of Europe almost intact — and how this vision, this obsession, this fixed compulsion still haunted the Jamesian mind! — so the reality of English society which is portrayed so glamorously, so villainously, in the novel was simply his later disenchantment with English society. It is the obverse of the fairy tale, or the nightmare extreme of the artist’s disillusionment, in which the daylight world of solid, material factuality is hardly represented. Thus the Jamesian manipulation of all these Jamesian characters (or embodied fantasies) is at the core of the novel, is the real secret, and perhaps the real fascination, of The Wings of the Dove. The plot action has completely superseded any chance of genuine character development or of genuine human relations in the later narratives; but what is revealed is what Henry James was thinking about Henry James.

The themes, to be sure, were dramatized and projected with great skill. Under the spell of this magician’s literary enchantment, the characters, motives, relations are convincing until we look at them in the cold light of day. There is the baroque scene of Milly’s visitation with Sir Luke Strett, the noble English doctor who looks “half like a general and half like a bishop" — who looks, that is to say, like anything but a doctor — and who becomes her moral and spiritual, as well as medical, adviser. Is it only Milly’s beauty and charm — since nothing is mentioned between doctor and patient under “the odious head of cash” — that bring the eminent Sir Luke immediately to her side, so that he now trails after her anywhere she may need him? But James’s doctors as a tribe behave in a way hardly to be condoned by the usual standards of medical ethics. And is it only a coincidence that Milly is accompanied on this visit by the “handsome girl,” Kate Croy herself, who thereby divines the secret of the heroine’s fatal illness? Milly feels indeed as if she had been on her knees. “I’ve confessed and I’ve been absolved. It has been lifted off,” she tells Kate in respect to her tuberculosis (which is, incidentally, too “vulgar” to mention). And now she is really trapped.

In another famous scene in the novel, Milly becomes the dove and Kate the panther. (It is Kate who has described Milly in such terms.) “With which she [Milly] felt herself ever so delicately, so considerately embraced; not with familiarity or as a liberty taken, but almost ceremonially and in the manner of an accolade; partly as if, though a dove who could perch on a finger, one were also a princess with whom forms were to be observed.” And this imagery is elaborated and expanded in the story almost too heavily, in the manner of the later James, for this was the embrace of the panther which is stalking its prey. What one becomes most conscious of at the middle point of the novel (or at the close of the first volume) is simply the high degree to which this whole cast of literary characters — who, except for the two women, are a rather mediocre lot — are handling and manipulating each other for their own purposes; or, more accurately, how James himself is handling and manipulating each and every one of them for the purposes of his own highly plotted melodrama. How, in short, this supposedly great novel, fascinating as it is to read and speculate about, is centered around a series of tricks, angles, and twists in the narrative line.

What a curious middle climax there is in The Wings of the Dove, where each character is hiding from or plotting against every other character. Where Kate is protecting her relationship with Densher even while she is offering Densher to Milly; where Milly, in turn, is concealing her own earlier friendship with Densher, even while she vaguely suspects, or doesn’t suspect, the secret relation of Kate and Densher. Where these characters, and the supporting cast of characters, snoop upon each other’s doings from those hidden balconies or windows which are the theatrical stage props of James’s voyeurism; or catch each other walking with each other down the aisles of the great British art museums.

Milly is the last good dead (or dying) American princess. All the other figures in The Wings of the Dove are conspiring to trap her, or to kill her for the sake of her golden treasure, while the dove herself is not without her own dovelike secrets and stratagems. “The great debate” might be another title for the final sections of the first volume; but as the melodrama begins to grip, as James, after the long, slow buildup of his plot, throws all his action into these pages of the novel, into these strange talks, what an odd debate of virtue and vice it really is.

There is the description of Kate Croy’s lecture to Milly on the verities of life which, in indirect discourse, is being strained through Milly’s consciousness and then through James’s consciousness, to let us know certain things about Kate that Milly doesn’t know, or that Kate doesn’t know, or at least doesn’t choose to reveal. For this is the stream of consciousness quite literally; not the stream of the unconscious, as in the generation of writers who followed James. Every detail in the passage has been carefully selected by the artist to throw its light on Milly, on Kate, on the surrounding cast of characters in the novel (so falsely interpreted by Milly, so carefully characterized by Kate for her own advantage), and on the novel’s plot action.

There is the description of Lord Mark (whom Mrs. Lowder has chosen for Kate, and whom Kate is using as a cover for her passion for Densher) as weighing out his emotions in ounces, while both Maud and Mark are each “waiting for what the other would put down.” What is inescapable here, even to the innocent and thrilled Milly, is that while Mrs. Lowder has put Kate “on the counter” - how these Jamesian figures buy and sell each other — she is still also “keeping hold” of her — and how these Jamesian figures also toy with their power over each other! This is a curious application of the marketplace to the most intimate human relations. It is a kind of financial sadism, if you like, where human beings are being bribed and corrupted by the cash nexus, where they are being displayed on the counter and yet not quite offered for sale, where the only force superior to the commercial factor is not so much the will to power as the will to tease by power. The remarkable passage during which Kate has interposed her own power over Milly directly in the path of Mrs. Lowder’s projected power also ends with Kate’s declaration that while Lord Mark has been intended for her, he has actually turned to Milly; and with Milly’s enforced declaration that she will have no part of Lord Mark, which clears the way for her to have a part of Kate’s Densher.

But whose hard commercial ethos, whose will to power, whose delight in teasing are triumphant, if not James’s own? It is here also that Kate warns Milly against herself, Densher, Mark, and their whole crowd. “My honest advice to you would be . . . to drop us while you can,” which has the effect both of providing Kate with a moral “alibi,” another Jamesian term which is increasingly sounded in this world of manipulators, and of suggesting the dangers to come. Before this there is the scene where Kate is probing Milly as to the extent of her sickness and where Milly proclaims her new line of going in for “pleasure.” “But what kind of pleasure?” asks Kate. “The highest,” says Milly. “Her friend met it nobly. ‘Which is the highest?’ ” Which, indeed? — since this could be the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question in James’s work, though it is certainly not a question of sexual pleasure.

IT IS all quite mad, and yet it is done so well. It is altogether of a rare and fantastic species of literature. And there before us stands Volume Two of the Dove, more of the same, but even longer, larger, and more complex.

In the opening pages we come, finally, to Densher’s own moment of self-revelation; this mediocre hero of dubious name and uncertain social standing, rather indefinable and weak-willed, who has been left dangling on the rope of Kate Croy’s beauty so long, as the puppet of her passion, her ambition, her grand scheme. What is the meaning of Densher? Well, first, like the noble little bookbinding hero of The Princess Casamassima, Densher comes from the lower classes — in James’s view, that is. He is a working journalist, rare figure indeed among all these leisure-class protagonists; even though he works mainly (and mysteriously) at night, and somehow has the means to follow Milly to Venice and to dally there at his leisure.

Yet he is still harried by his lack of means, his lack of place, his lack of Kate. If James describes passion here as a mixture of illness, sedatives, and vulgarity, Densher is still a good portrait of a suffering, small soul. And there is the moment in the narrative — while both Kate and Densher rejoice that, after all, they have made Milly “want to live” (“It’s wonderful, it’s beautiful.” “It’s beautiful indeed.”) — the moment when the novel’s “secret,” which everybody knows, is let out. “You’re cryptic, love!” says Densher, and Kate retorts, “Don’t think, however, I’ll do all the work for you. If you want things named you must name them.” “Since she’ll die I’m to marry her?” Densher says. And Kate’s lips “bravely moved: ‘To marry her.’ ” “So that when her death has taken place I shall in the natural course have money.” “You’ll in the natural course have money. We shall in the natural course be free” — since in the leisure-class novel, freedom, like love, implies, above all, money. And when, from across the reception hall, Milly sends to them “all the candour of her smile, the lustre of her pearls, the value of her life, the essence of her wealth,” Densher agrees to the bargain if Kate will come directly to his rooms. The sexual act is the culmination of the criminal plot.

Matthiessen’s The Major Phase points to this relationship as a refutation of “those inattentive critics who keep insisting that James is always flinching from physical passion.” But this most attentive critic neglects to give the context of Jamesian sexuality, just as here it is the symptom of poverty, thwarted power, and crime.

Yet when Densher is summoned by Mrs. Stringham to save Milly’s life, even, if need be, by lying to her, he refuses, since he is entranced by the memory of Kate’s single embrace. He avoids seeing the heartbroken American princess; he flees from her presence, from Venice itself, only to discover, upon her death, that he is really in love with her memory, with her death, with the great fortune which she has, in spite of his treason, bestowed upon him. There is the final glimpse of Milly, knowing all, dying quite mum:

“She’ll never tell?”

“She’ll never tell.”

Once more he thought. “She must be magnificent.”

“She is magnificent.”

And Densher, overwhelmed at Milly’s magnificence, concludes with a typical James euphoria that “Women were wonderful. . . .” But what curious human motivation all this is: what fairytale generosity on the part of the dying princess; what a growing sense of noblesse oblige on the part of the mediocre little hero Densher, whose “physical passion” for Kate is now quite balanced off, negated, and made ambivalent by his growing moral and spiritual love for the dead American girl.

Is he really a weak and petty criminal of the heart, the leisure-class equivalent of a Clyde Griffiths, whose whole moral fiber collapses at the evidence of his guilt being known? Couldn’t he, in fact, have loved both women at the same time, particularly since one of them has conveniently died? And didn’t this final guilty, selftormented remorse on Densher’s part follow a still deeper, fixed, and recurrent Jamesian pattern of the impossible love, of always loving the woman you cannot have?

Nevertheless, Densher has been enobled through his suffering. Back in London, he refuses to see Kate for a fortnight, consumed by his remorse over Milly, by his newly won moral superiority, and by a kind of priggish hauteur. When he does see her at Lancaster Gate and they have a little scrap of time to themselves, “after the withdrawal of the footman,” Densher has an altogether new tone with his former mistress. “We are, my dear child ... I suppose still engaged.” He is full of “honour” and middle-class respectability while he lectures Kate on Milly’s magnificence and prodigiousness, hardly an endearing trait on the part of any lover. He has almost come to exonerate his own actions in the melodrama. “He understood,” Densher tells Kate about the equally noble Sir Luke. “But understood what?” says Kate, quite reasonably. “That I had meant awfully well,” says Densher. He is really quite unbearable.

Two months later, the final renunciation scene in the Dove revolves around the fact that the letter from Milly’s New York lawyers to Densher has been opened by Kate. It is the final proof of her perfidy, of her “departure from delicacy.” Densher announces after much formal discussion that he won’t accept Milly’s fortune, nor Kate in marriage if she accepts it. But Kate, rather sensibly, won’t accept him without the money. “You lose me?” Densher cries, and, “He showed, though naming it frankly, a sort of awe of her high grasp. ‘Well, you lose nothing else. I make over to you every penny.’ ” And there are the muchquoted last lines of the novel. “I’ll marry you, mind you,” Densher cries again, “in an hour.” “As we were?” asks Kate. “As we were.” But she turned to the door, so James wrote in his final exit line for Kate Croy, “and her headshake was now the end. ‘We shall never be again as we were!’ ”

Well, naturally. Nobody ever is. But when were two protagonists of a so-called major novel ever put in a box like this, for which what they were, some seven hundred pages earlier in The Wings of the Dove, is merely the long buildup, laborious and meticulous alike, for what they come to be? Though Kate’s ostensible reason for not marrying Densher is that he is now in love with Milly’s memory, and Densher’s for not marrying Kate is that she won’t marry him without the money, there is no doubt that the final note in the last great tragedy of Henry James is the note of cash.

JUST as wealth is always to some degree “illegitimate” in James’s leisure-class novels, in the sense that it is always inherited or acquired by any means except those of earning a fortune or really making money, so here the Jamesian wealth is not only inherited quite illegitimately but altogether improbably, simply to demonstrate Milly’s peculiar generosity, Densher’s newly acquired nobility, Kate’s fundamental avarice. And it this last cornerstone of the Jamesian sense of reality is removed from The Wings of the Dove, what is left? Surely, among the great novels of world literature, this one is the most fantastic in its values and its form alike. The calculated, contrived, altogether esoteric literary method merely reflects the artificial and fabricated human values which, in part, the method is designed actually to conceal from us.

But can such a novel, with its false premises, its artificial conclusions, and its theatrical form, a novel that is based on such an idiosyncratic vision of life, always oscillating between the makebelieve extremes of the fairy tale and the nightmare, compounded of illusion upon illusion, with so little sense of reality or of true human experience anywhere in its pages — can The Wings of the Dove, in short, really be classified among the great novels of world literature?

No, of course not; since all our major novels do bear on human destiny, while this one concerns itself with human daydreams of a very special order. Perhaps the Dove is a perfect example of just that “magic hope” and “magic faith” which Ernest Schachtel has recently described in his Metamorphosis as the period of early youth when the child imagines that his desires and his fears really do dominate and control the outside world.

At least The Wings of the Dove draws us back to that nostalgic fantasy world of how things “might have been,” even though we realize that they never were and never could be like that. All artists, like most people, draw their primary inspiration from this buried core of fantasy; but the great writers confront the infantile dreams of life with the hard reality of things as they are. Doesn’t the true revelation of great fiction consist precisely, most often, in just this stripping away of human illusions? But the fiction of Henry James, by contrast, is not only magic hope, or magic fear, or magic craft; it is, at its real center, a kind of magic magic. What a scries of pure and inviolate visions, indeed, does this writer present us with. And what an extraordinary kind of elite illusion, as it were, or illusions for the elite, he propounded in that high, brief flowering of the great American fortunes and in the face of the hitherto generally accepted artistic record of human aspiration and suffering.

The remarkable thing about the Dove is that James — working in such a peculiar sphere of values, using such contrived methods of fiction, giving us a final picture of no recognizable area of life but of a special and unique fantasy of civilization and culture, a fantasy ranging at best from the infantile to the adolescent — still could hold our interest to the degree that he did and stimulate our imagination to the point, at least, of trying to understand what his literary vision means. That is the true Jamesian “secret,” the enchantment of an extraordinary magician whose bag of verbal tricks contains more and more astounding surprises.