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a magnificent maximum
Jun. 13th, 2007 03:00 pmI first started reading The Wings of the Dove nearly two years ago. Always, after reading it for a spell, I would have to put it aside for a while. It would get too intense. It would relentlessly engage me and force me to read slowly, to pay attention to its exquisite unfolding. In the Introduction to the Penguin edition of the book, John Bayley quotes a character in James's other late, great novel, The Golden Bowl, who describes a relationship as "filled to the brim with the wine of consciousness." That's exactly the feeling, the sensation that The Wings of the Dove evokes in me.
I'm finally in the home stretch of the book, though. Wanted to share one more quote and then I promise I'll shut up about Henry James. Here, Milly Theale—beautiful, rich, and doomed—regards a Bronzino portrait:
"Once more things melted together—the beauty and the history and the facility and the splendid midsummer glow: it was a sort of magnificent maximum, the pink dawn of an apotheosis coming so curiously soon. What in fact befell was that, as she afterwards made out, it was Lord Mark who said nothing in particular—she found herself, for the first moment, looking at the mysterious portrait through tears. Perhaps it was her tears that made it just then so strange and fair—as wonderful as he had said: the face of a young woman, all splendidly drawn, down to the hands, and splendidly dressed; a face almost livid in hue, yet handsome in sadness and crowned with a mass of hair, rolled back and high, that must, before fading with time, have had a family resemblance to her own. The lady in question, at all events, with her slightly Michael-angelesque squareness, her eyes of other days, her full lips, her long neck, her recorded jewels, her brocaded and wasted reds, was a very great personage—only unaccompanied by a joy. And she was dead, dead, dead. Milly recognised her exactly in words that had nothing to do with her. 'I shall never be better than this.' "
I'm finally in the home stretch of the book, though. Wanted to share one more quote and then I promise I'll shut up about Henry James. Here, Milly Theale—beautiful, rich, and doomed—regards a Bronzino portrait:
"Once more things melted together—the beauty and the history and the facility and the splendid midsummer glow: it was a sort of magnificent maximum, the pink dawn of an apotheosis coming so curiously soon. What in fact befell was that, as she afterwards made out, it was Lord Mark who said nothing in particular—she found herself, for the first moment, looking at the mysterious portrait through tears. Perhaps it was her tears that made it just then so strange and fair—as wonderful as he had said: the face of a young woman, all splendidly drawn, down to the hands, and splendidly dressed; a face almost livid in hue, yet handsome in sadness and crowned with a mass of hair, rolled back and high, that must, before fading with time, have had a family resemblance to her own. The lady in question, at all events, with her slightly Michael-angelesque squareness, her eyes of other days, her full lips, her long neck, her recorded jewels, her brocaded and wasted reds, was a very great personage—only unaccompanied by a joy. And she was dead, dead, dead. Milly recognised her exactly in words that had nothing to do with her. 'I shall never be better than this.' "
