72
LEO BERSANI
ties in which the real hero is a narrator-center responsible to other
people only in his appreciations. The community of consciousness
achieved in
The Wings of the Dove
is an impressive warning of
the very dangers to community in the critically-minded Densher's
"reading"
of
the "text" of Milly. He literally makes her his own,
destroying the real peculiarity of her presence which we feel early
in the work. Densher illustrates how a language of appreciation runs
the risk of generalizing the particular too successfully, thus eliminat–
ing the unassirnilable differences among individuals without which
community extends no further than the reaches of one man's in–
genuities.
IV
Appreciation and intelligence in themselves give us illusory vic–
tories over the restraints imposed on freedom by personal needs and
social antagonisms.
In
his later fiction James finally submits criticism
to a critique provided by what might be called the superior finality
of
art.
The Golden Bowl
affirms the triumph of fictional composi–
tion over a powerfully resistant reality, but Maggie Verver's fictions
have the irresistibly coercive strength of an art which uncom–
promisingly rejects any attempt to tamper with its forms. She lacks
that vulnerability to appreciation which makes Mme. de Vionnet
extraordinarily but somehow imperfectly artful. By subjecting his
most artful characters to either the greater moral sensitivity or the
greater conjectural talents of a critical center of consciousness, James
has generally made us view images of
his
own novelistic activity
with some suspicion. (Mme. de Vionnet is finally willing to believe,
with Strether, that her magnificent forms
aor:e
deceptions; she would
have liked to "be" as sublime as he has imagined her to be.) But
in
The Golden Bowl
we see the action
of
art from the point of
view of the artist; James shifts from dramatizing a critical appre–
ciation of art to representing directly an artistic manipulation of
life's materials. And
the
deceptions which throughout James's fic–
tion have allowed him to consider the idea of discrediting art are
now offered as art's
moral
justification. Maggie is a fusion of Isabel
Archer and of Madame Merle, an extraordinary fusion in which
idealism is confirmed by a willingness to lie which makes Madame
Merle's duplicity seem tamely scrupulous.
In
The Golden Bowl
