HEIRESS OF ALL THE AGES
233
high lucidity, thereby become characters," it is because all the
conditions of his art made for such a choice.
His male figures are, generally speaking, to be identified
with his less masterful side, with the negative component of his
sense of experience and the masochistic tendency to refuse the
natural gifts of life. It is in deviating from this code of refusal
that Roderick Hudson goes to pieces. In
The Ambassadors
Lem–
bert Strether learns the lesson of
not
refusing, but his advent11I'e in
Paris gains its point from the sheer process of his learning that
lesson rather than from his application of it. Nor can one overlook
the repeated appearance in James of certain sad and uncertain
young men who vie with each other in devising painfully subtle
motives for renouncing their heart's desire once it is within their
grasp. One such specimen is the young man (Bernard Longmore
in
Madame de Mauves)
who is revolted by the idea of making
love to the woman whose happiness he tries to save. Another is
the incredibly appealing though emotionally dense Mr. Wendover,
who has "no more physical personality than a consulted ther–
mometer" and who, courting the girl he loves with more propriety
than imagination, fails her when she needs him most
(A London
Life).
In point of fact, the heiress is the one native Jamesian who
knows exactly what she wants. She, too, is confronted, to be sure,
by "beautiful difficulties," but they are never of the kind that
spring from some crucial frustration or of the kind that can be
translated into some moral issue, which is then to be carefully
isolated and solved in a chessboard fashion. In her case the
"beautiful difficulties" spring out of her very search for self–
fulfilment and impetuosity in "taking full in the face the whole
assault of life."
It
is with a bright and sudden flutter of self-awareness that
Mary Garland reveals, in a brief passage of dialogue, the state
of mind of the heiress as she sets out to meet her fate. The occasion
for it is a night-scene in
Roderick Hudson,
when Mary confesses
to Rowland Mallet that her stay in Italy has induced a change in
her conception of life:
Mary: "At home ... things don't speak to us of enjoyment as
they do here. Here it's such a mixture; one doesn't know what
to believe. Beauty stands here-beauty such as this night and
