JAMESIAN LIE
77
there
are
objects in art is because they are always pointed at by
the very interpretations which obscure them. Something nevertheless
does of course happen to the work of art in time, whether it be the
time of the artist's creation, or
of
his revisions or of the revisions of
criticism. The very strength of the design depends on a certain loss
or erosion of some of its values; in his Prefaces James movingly
evokes those sacrifices of profit which Laurence Holland, in
The
Exp'ense of Vision,
has brilliantly shown to be part of the enacted
drama of James's fiction. The lost profit in
The Golden Bowl
on
which the triumph of the original design depends is the relation be–
tween Maggie and her father. The Ververs' departure for America
is
the consequence of that critical lucidity which, during the time
of
this
composition, has discovered the contradictions and the dangers
of a too ambitious design.
But the profit gained from this loss testifies to a power in the
design grea!er than any weakness. The coerced freedom which
Maggie gives to Amerigo, analogous to the freedom which
art
offers
to criticism, consecrates a marriage in which there is finally nothing
to say or to know. Her patience requires that his appreciation of
her mature to the point where his interest in interpretation will have
died. The adulterous lovers' ingenious use of Maggie as a "composi–
tional resource" yields to the pressure of the decorous fiction that
she
is
a wife, that is, a "value intrinsic." That surrender of interest
in the name of a more complete surrender is of course the love for
which Maggie tells Fanny Assingham that she can bear anything.
And when Maggie's forms have survived every possible interpretation
of them, Amerigo intimately identifies himself with her self-confident
art,
thus ending her performance by his unqualified participation in it.
The Prince's conversion, like Densher's, depends on his recog–
nition of a sacrifice so lovingly and so tyr.annically devoid of specific
claims that in order to accept it he must imitate it. By appearing
to
ask
for absolutely nothing in return for their stupendous gifts,
Milly and Maggie make partial reimbursements impossible. As the
Prince guesses even before his marriage, he will have to pay for
Maggie's love and for the Ververs' millions with his being. We
of course recognize the profound Christian bias in this notion of
a generosity which can be acknowledged only by a reenactment
of
the generous life. The freedom which Milly and Maggie give to
