The Black Prince (Penguin Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page A

not me at all, but to which I was somehow related. More than once I had a Julian-like thought: “You don’t really see me.” I cannot forget those predatory eyes, and the way they attended to something of immense importance that was, as I say, not exactly outside of me, and that was perhaps more real than me, but that was not precisely me either. Nor can I ever forget the essential mysteriousness of her face, so much more alive than most people, so blazing with uncompromising passion, so intent upon things that were not exactly in the room. (I remember thinking a sad thought: that this was going to be the hoped-for friendship with a brilliant woman, but it is after all an encounter with just another predatory man. Erotic control and artistic control: where did one leave off and the other begin?)
    If the gaze of art is in this way both intent on the person and at the same time intent on the creative work that appropriates and goes beyond the person, the question is whether this gaze can ever be, in the fullest sense, a humanly loving gaze, exemplary of the virtue that Murdoch’s philosophy describes. Why not? It sees more truly than most loving people see. I had no doubt, for example, that Murdoch could have described me, after an hour, far more precisely than any lover of mine after some years. In that sense, Proust seems right when he says that art is the fully-lived life, life without patches of deadness and obtuseness.
    And yet I think there is something more to loving vision than just seeing. There is, for example, a willingness to permit oneself to be seen. And there is a willingness to stop seeing, to close one’s eyes before the loved one’s imperfections. There is also a willingness to be, for a time, an animal or even a plant, relinquishing the sharpness of creative alertness before the presence of a beloved body. Does the artist’s vision have about it these aspects of vulnerability, silence, and grace? Or does the artist’s eye, like an eagle’s soaring above us, look down with something like disdain at the muddled animal interactions of human beings with one another, so obtuse and so lacking in nuance?
    But I believe that The Black Prince in the end knows and embraces all this, too—and that its endorsement of the vision of art is qualified by a very explicit awareness of the limits of that vision. Although both Bradley and Loxias seem at times to claim that art can contain the whole of a life, Bradley’s most genuinely loving moment is one in which he yields before the elusive reality of the real Julian, acknowledging that she has a being that is not encompassed by his work:
    And I would not wish it to seem at the end that I have, in my own sequestered happiness, somehow forgotten the real being of those who have figured as my characters.... And Julian. I do not, my darling girl, however passionately and intensely my thought has worked upon your being, really imagine that I invented you. Eternally you escape my embrace. Art cannot assimilate you nor thought digest you. I do not now know, or want to know, anything about your life. For me, you have gone into the dark. Yet elsewhere I realize, and I meditate upon this knowledge, that you laugh, you cry, you read books and cook meals and yawn and lie perhaps in someone’s arms. This knowledge too may I never deny, and may I never forget how in the humble hard time-ridden reality of my life I loved you. That love remains, Julian, not diminished though changing, a love with a very clear and a very faithful memory. It causes me on the whole remarkably little pain. Only sometimes at night when I think that you live now and are somewhere, I shed tears. (384)
    And this means that there is a real sense in which the conclusion of this love story, and of its celebration of love, is written in the silence after this conclusion, and in the artist’s solitary and for once inarticulate tears.

To Ernesto De Marchi

Editor’s Foreword
    I am in more than one way