I just finished reading an old, long, classic novel I had not picked up in decades – desperately sad, brilliant, and haunting. A young woman is musing on the poisonous disillusionment in her marriage. A passage caught my eye, as something vaguely familiar: “It was not her fault—she had practised no deception; she had only admired and believed. She had taken all the first steps in the purest confidence, and then she had suddenly found the infinite vista of a multiplied life to be a dark, narrow alley with a dead wall at the end.”
Then I remembered: a passage that had touched me – again, decades before – from another cherished novel. Another young woman, realizing the terrible mistake she had made in a naive marriage: “How was it that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither?”
The second passage is from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, published in 1872. The first? Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, published in 1882. James not only knew Middlemarch, he wrote a serious (and rather lukewarm) review of it in 1873. But even in his review he describes Middlemarch‘s heroine, Dorothea Brooke, thus: “An ardent young girl was to have been the central figure, a young girl framed for a larger moral life than circumstance often affords, yearning for a motive for sustained spiritual effort and only wasting her ardor and soiling her wings against the meanness of opportunity.” One might apply these words to James’s Lady, Isabel Archer, almost equally well – though poor Isabel, once freed from her particular “meanness of opportunity,” misdirects her ardor, and if she doesn’t “soil” her wings, she has them broken rather painfully. Even if he didn’t care for aspects of Eliot’s novel (his qualms are numerous – and much as I love Middlemarch, I agree with a number of them), an image caught his attention, something about expected horizons dwindling into constricted passageways…
If you’re going to steal, steal from the best.
And thanks to Gutenberg.org, without which I could never have unearthed those passages from two big, dense novels by just searching the word “vista”!