f by which it is capable of
profiting. And the less dramatic, strictly speaking, the subject may
be--the less it is able, that is to say, to express itself in action
and in action only--the more it is needful to heighten its flat,
pictorial, descriptive surface by the arts of drama. It is not managed
by peppering the surface with animated dialogue, by making the
characters break into talk when they really have nothing to contribute
to the subject; the end of this is only to cheapen and discredit their
talk when at length it is absolutely required. The dramatic rule is
applied more fundamentally; it animates the actual elements of the
picture, the description, and makes a drama of these. I have noted how
in The Ambassadors the picture of Strether's mind is transformed into
an enacted play, even where his story, for chapters at a time, is bare
of action in the literal sense. The result, no doubt, is that his mind
emerges from the book with force and authority, its presence is
_felt_. And now I would track the same method and measure the result
in another book, The Wings of the Dove, where the value of this kind
of dramatization is perhaps still more clearly to be seen. Again we
are dealing with a subject that in the plain meaning of the word is
entirely undramatic.

Milly, the Dove, during all that part of the book in which her mind
lies open--in the chapters which give her vision of the man and the
girl, Densher and Kate, not theirs of her--is hoarding in silence two
facts of profoundest import to herself; one is her love for Densher,
the other the mortal disease with which she is stricken. It is of
these two facts that Kate proposes to take advantage, and there is
nothing weak or vague about Kate's design. She and Densher are
penniless, Milly is rich, but they can afford to bide their time and
Milly cannot; let them do so, therefore, let Densher accept his
opportunity, and let him presently return to Kate, well endowed by the
generosity of an exquisite young wife, dead in her prime. That is how
Milly's condition is to be turned to account by a remarkably
clear-headed young woman; but Milly herself is still unaware of any
confederation between her two friends, and she silently broods over
the struggle in her mind--her desire for life, her knowledge of her
precarious hold on life. The chapters I speak of are to give the sense
of this conflict, to show unmistakably the pair of facts upon which
Kate's project is founded. M