Not to walk straight up to the fact and put it into phrases, but to
_surround_ the fact, and so to detach it inviolate--such is Henry
James's manner of dramatizing it. Soon after Milly's first appearance
there are some pages that illustrate his procedure very clearly, or
very clearly, I should say, when the clue has been picked up and
retraced. There is an hour in which Milly gazes open-eyed upon her
prospect, measuring its promises and threats, gathering herself for
the effort they demand. She sits on a high Italian mountain-ledge,
with a blue plain spread out beneath her like the kingdoms of the
world; and there she looks at her future with rapt absorption, lost to
all other thought. Her mind, if we saw it, would tell us everything
then at least; she searches its deepest depth, it is evident. And that
is the very reason why her mind should not be exposed in that hour;
the troubling shapes that lurk in it are not to be described, they are
to make their presence known of their own accord. Instead of intruding
upon Milly's lonely rumination, therefore, the author elects to leave
her, to join company with her friend in the background, and in that
most crucial session to reveal nothing of Milly but the glimpse that
her friend catches of her in passing.
The glimpse, so rendered, _tells_ nothing. But in Milly's attitude,
while she sits enthroned above the world, there is a certain
expression, deep and strange, not to be missed, though who shall say
exactly what it implies? Is it hope, is it despair? At any rate the
clear picture of her remains, and a little later, when her mind is
visible again, the memory of her up there on the mountain has
quickened the eye of the onlooker.
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