The Golden Bowl - Henry James (top fiction books of all time .TXT) 📗

of the last vividness. He might have been signifying by it the sharp corners and hard edges, all the stony pointedness, the grand right geometry of his spreading Palladian church. Just so, he was insensible to no feature of the felicity of a contact that, beguilingly, almost confoundingly, was a contact but with practically yielding lines and curved surfaces. “You’re round, my boy,” he had said⁠—“you’re all, you’re variously and inexhaustibly round, when you might, by all the chances, have been abominably square. I’m not sure, for that matter,” he had added, “that you’re not square in the general mass⁠—whether abominably or not. The abomination isn’t a question, for you’re inveterately round⁠—that’s what I mean⁠—in the detail. It’s the sort of thing, in you, that one feels⁠—or at least I do⁠—with one’s hand. Say you had been formed, all over, in a lot of little pyramidal lozenges like that wonderful side of the Ducal Palace in Venice⁠—so lovely in a building, but so damnable, for rubbing against, in a man, and especially in a near relation. I can see them all from here⁠—each of them sticking out by itself⁠—all the architectural cut diamonds that would have scratched one’s softer sides. One would have been scratched by diamonds⁠—doubtless the neatest way if one was to be scratched at all⁠—but one would have been more or less reduced to a hash. As it is, for living with, you’re a pure and perfect crystal. I give you my idea⁠—I think you ought to have it⁠—just as it has come to me.” The Prince had taken the idea, in his way, for he was well accustomed, by this time, to taking; and nothing perhaps even could more have confirmed Mr. Verver’s account of his surface than the manner in which these golden drops evenly flowed over it. They caught in no interstice, they gathered in no concavity; the uniform smoothness betrayed the dew but by showing for the moment a richer tone. The young man, in other words, unconfusedly smiled⁠—though indeed as if assenting, from principle and habit, to more than he understood. He liked all signs that things were well, but he cared rather less why they were.

In regard to the people among whom he had since his marriage been living, the reasons they so frequently gave⁠—so much oftener than he had ever heard reasons given before⁠—remained on the whole the element by which he most differed from them; and his father-in-law and his wife were, after all, only first among the people among whom he had been living. He was never even yet sure of how, at this, that or the other point, he would strike them; they felt remarkably, so often, things he hadn’t meant, and missed not less remarkably, and not less often, things he had. He had fallen back on his general explanation⁠—“We haven’t the same values;” by which he understood the same measure of importance. His “curves” apparently were important because they had been unexpected, or, still more, unconceived; whereas when one had always, as in his relegated old world, taken curves, and in much greater quantities too, for granted, one was no more surprised at the resulting feasibility of intercourse than one was surprised at being upstairs in a house that had a staircase. He had in fact on this occasion disposed alertly enough of the subject of Mr. Verver’s approbation. The promptitude of his answer, we may in fact well surmise, had sprung not a little from a particular kindled remembrance; this had given his acknowledgment its easiest turn. “Oh, if I’m a crystal I’m delighted that I’m a perfect one, for I believe that they sometimes have cracks and flaws⁠—in which case they’re to be had very cheap!” He had stopped short of the emphasis it would have given his joke to add that there had been certainly no having him cheap; and it was doubtless a mark of the good taste practically reigning between them that Mr. Verver had not, on his side either, taken up the opportunity. It is the latter’s relation to such aspects, however, that now most concerns us, and the bearing of his pleased view of this absence of friction upon Amerigo’s character as a representative precious object. Representative precious objects, great ancient pictures and other works of art, fine eminent “pieces” in gold, in silver, in enamel, majolica, ivory, bronze, had for a number of years so multiplied themselves round him and, as a general challenge to acquisition and appreciation, so engaged all the faculties of his mind, that the instinct, the particular sharpened appetite of the collector, had fairly served as a basis for his acceptance of the Prince’s suit.

Over and above the signal fact of the impression made on Maggie herself, the aspirant to his daughter’s hand showed somehow the great marks and signs, stood before him with the high authenticities, he had learned to look for in pieces of the first order. Adam Verver knew, by this time, knew thoroughly; no man in Europe or in America, he privately believed, was less capable, in such estimates, of vulgar mistakes. He had never spoken of himself as infallible⁠—it was not his way; but, apart from the natural affections, he had acquainted himself with no greater joy, of the intimately personal type, than the joy of his originally coming to feel, and all so unexpectedly, that he had in him the spirit of the connoisseur. He had, like many other persons, in the course of his reading, been struck with Keats’s sonnet about stout Cortez in the presence of the Pacific; but few persons, probably, had so devoutly fitted the poet’s grand image to a fact of experience. It consorted so with Mr. Verver’s consciousness of the way in which, at a given moment, he had stared at his Pacific, that a couple of perusals of the immortal lines had sufficed to stamp them in his memory. His “peak in Darien” was the sudden hour that had transformed his life, the hour