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Kultur Dokumente
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
R.
P.
BLACKMUR
Henry James
813
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KANSAS CITY
11330
Henry James
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
B7
Richard P. Blackmur
NEW YORK
LONDON
LTD.,
COPYRIGHT, 1934, BY
HENRY JAMES;
COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY
may
tH
No
C-4.6i [C]
Printed in the United States of America
INTRODUCTION
BY
RICHARD
P.
BLACKMUR
INTRODUCTION
I
hard and
full
and
critical to
purpose was high, the reference wide, and the terms of discourse had to be conceived and defined as successive need for
them
He
arose.
had
so eminently suited to
there has certainly
and
James,
Henry
never been an author who saw the need and had the ability to
criticise specifically and at length his own work. He was avid
of his opportunity
did with
it.
as to
what he
Hudson,
of an
all,
perhaps, their
vii
own
tendency to
INTRODUCTION
multiply, with the implication, thereby, of a memory much
enriched." Thus his strict modesty; he wrote to Grace Norton
March
(5
do
difficult to
but
"The
jolly interest;
and
am
though
To W. D. Howells he
ductions."
general trade,
it
"They
They
ought, collected together, none the less, to form a sort of comprehensive manual or vademecum for aspirants in our arduous
Still, it
profession.
will
In
James
short,
strated
an
artist's
felt
be long before
them
consciousness
in
an
detail,
interest
one's own."
What we
viii
INTRODUCTION
of course but in kind, are by the same author, "The Art of
young man and printed in Partial Por-
Fiction," written as a
and "The Novel in The Ring and the Book/ " written
in 1912 and published in Notes on Novelists; the first of
which the reader should consult as an example of general criticism with a prevailing ironic tone, and the second as an example of what the same critical attitude as that responsible
for the Prefaces could do on work not James own.) Naturally,
then, our own act of appropriation will have its difficulties, and
we shall probably find as James found again and again, that
the things most difficult to master will be the best. At the
least we shall require the maximum of strained attention, and
the faculty of retaining detail will be pushed to its limit. And
these conditions will not apply from the difficulty of what
James has to say which is indeed lucid but because of the
convoluted compression of his style and because of the positive
unf amiliarity of his terms as he uses them. No one else has
written specifically on his subject.
Before proceeding to exhibition and analysis, however, it
may be useful to point out what kind of thing, as a type by
itself, a James Preface is, and what kind of exercise the reader
traits,
may
lect
series
INTRODUCTION
But the
many
ments
feature of autobiography, as a rule held to a minimum an account of the Paris hotel, the Venetian palace, the English cot:
tage, in
which the
tale in question
was
written. Aside
from
cumstances in which
cir-
upon the articulated plot; and the aspect of the theme in relation to society, which is the moral
and evaluating aspect. Varying from Preface to Preface as the
need commands, there
sition, in terms of
the further feature of technical expowhich everything else is for the moment
is
subsumed. That
order to
he
make
and
for understanding,
by definition
and
exemplification.
These are the principal separate features which
compose the
face of a Preface. There are also certain
emphases brought to
INTRODUCTION
method
sises
And
emulation.
None of this, not the furthest eloquence nor the most detached precept, but flows from the specific observation and
the particular example. When he speaks of abjuring the "platitude of statement," he is not making a phrase but summaargument which runs
throughout the Prefaces, that in art what is merely stated is
not presented, what is not presented is not vivid, what is not
vivid is not represented, and what is not represented is not
rising, for the particular occasion, the
description;
it is
ist's
only by constantly retaining the specific in the field of discussion could he ever establish or maintain the principles by which
he wrote. That
is
his
unique virtue
xi
INTRODUCTION
as it was analogously his genius as
object is always in hand;
a novelist that what he wrote about was always present in
knowledge of it. In neither capacity did
somebody's
specific
The
difference
is
that writers
who
any
attitude,
any
style.
It is
comparable
documents, but the mere imitators of James are not readable at all. It is not that James is
more or less great than his compeers the question is not be-
fore us
made
de
force.
sacrifice for
intelligibility
every
fashions of interest have made their full period, it will be seen
I think that his triumph is none the less for that.
There remains
be made, and
it
flows
Xll
INTRODUCTION
an inexcusable heresy. He is difficult to read in his later
works among which the Prefaces are included and his subjects, or rather the way in which he develops them, are oc-
least
He
characters
He
in one
way
finest.
dramatically intelligence at
most beautiful point. This
it.
The
all
its
is
his
most
the
if
if
most
difficult, its
sum
lucid, its
him
of
all
knowl-
appropriate it intellectually
of the work itself.
II
Now
James
to resume the
theme of
this essay, to
"remount," as
What
we may embalm the itemised mortal remains, but that
we may intellectually understand the movement of parts and
the relation between them in the living body we appreciate.
that
xiii
INTRODUCTION
Such
dissection
alone,
and but
is
articulates
and mind
lar beat.
Let us
first
native examination
those parts of
some
object except to
single Preface
which
reveal themselves as
And none
deeply animating.
make
subjects
which are
To
begin with,
let
us
list
which have no
more or less withthe most part the most
is
the shortest
and for
general of the divisions, and therefore the least easily susceptible of definition in
summary form.
The
and
xiv
INTRODUCTION
one or more of them, are constantly arrived
thetically or as the definite
The sequence
which
in
of
it.
Thus
art
was the
viable representation
him on
him
in
either of
two courses
He
acters.
telligence
of Subjects. Subjects never came ready-made or combut always from hints, notes, the merest suggestion.
Growth
plete,
go
xv
INTRODUCTION
had to listen, he paid no recording attention;
what he then heard was only "clumsy Life at her stupid work"
of waste and muddlement. Taking his single precious germ
he meditated upon it, let it develop, scrutinised and encouraged, compressed and pared the developments until he had
found the method by which he could dramatise it, give it a
central intelligence whose fortune would be his theme, and
shape it in a novel or a story as a consistent and self-sufficient
organism. James either gives or regrets that he cannot give
both the original donnee and an account of how it grew to be
politeness lie
New
York
Edition.
possible.
method
The
Looseness. Looseness of any description, whether of conception or of execution, he hated contemptuously. In both respects he found English fiction "a paradise of loose ends," but
more
in
ness or laziness
would
Any
xvi
INTRODUCTION
The
James
felt that
As he missed
the signs of
it
upon
its
To
amuse the
attention;
opposed; nor could their use in equal parts cancel each other.
They are, in the novel, two ends of one stick, and no one can
where either end begins. The characterising aspect of the
say
Indirect
Approach
is
xvii
a definite created
INTRODUCTION
between the reader and the felt experithe subject of the fiction. James never put his
reader in direct contact with his subjects; he believed it was
sensibility interposed
ence which
is
impossible to do
so,
what
James used
it self-
use of the Scene resembled that in the stage-play. The comare endless and some of them are
plexities of possible choice
handled below.
Plea for a Fine Central Intelligence. But the novel
not a play however dramatic it might be, and among the
The
was
distinctions
possibility,
which
ligence in terms of
rected attention, the cultivated appreciation, might be concentrated. And this central intelligence served a dual purpose,
with
It
If
it
could be created at
all,
then
it
xviii
INTRODUCTION
the novels where they apply. Here it is enough to repeat once
and not for the last time that the fine intelligence,
more
is
at the
Theme
The
discus-
his.
own work;
It deals,
it
however,
manners
as a
also a discussion
Theme
(VII).
The
The
Artist as a
two Prefaces
deal-
XV
XV
of the Dead; XVIII Daisy Miller; XIX The Wings of the Dove; XXI The
Ambassadors; XXIII The Golden Bowl.
xix
INTRODUCTION
ence,
and
himself.
In both sections the possibilities and the actualities are worked out with specific reference to the char-
and
to himself.
and the
stration in
hero in
The
discussion
is
of practical
VII
fiction,
tales.
Of
because he
amateur or the
failure
heroic downfall.
The
ration of these
two
aspects of
(much
of the socially
and
in-
death to
,of
the his-
Browning, and
(I
so far
and the great man is in a way only the most eminent case of
the average type, and is certainly the type that the novelist can
do most with. To the charge that his "great"
people were
such as could never exist, James responded that the world
would be
better
representation
The Dead
if
as a
of this
Preface present "the permanent
to
the
free
appeal
intelligence
of some image of the lost dead" and describe how this
appeal
may be worked out in fiction. "The sense of the state of the
INTRODUCTION
dead/' James
"is
felt,
living."
On Wonder,
and
How
Ghosts,
(XII,
XVII)
Produce Evil (XII). These again make two aspects of one theme and the rules for securing one pretty much
to
resemble those for securing the other. They are shown best
"by showing almost exclusively the way they are felt, by
recognising as their
main
intensely received."
Research Society
apprehend them. The objectively rendered prodigy always
ran thin. Thickness is in the human consciousness that records
cal
it
particular act
when
it
rendered always
The
charming job
and
his
own
experience, his
him
him
supply
released
from weak
own sympathy
specifications."
all
it
the particulars.
for himself,
Make
(XII, 176.)
On
the Use of
Wonder
to
xxi
INTRODUCTION
of itself alone makes that character live. It is a faculty upon
which every novelist depends, both in his books to make them
vivid, and in his readers where it is the faculty that drives
them to read. It is to be distinguished from the wonder dis-
Why
only one
of experience with
which
it
deals
experience liberated, so to
and
if
a state subject to
applies his
all
answer to
experience here represented is the disconnected and unconuncontrolled by our general sense of 'the
trolled experience
way
things happen'
off
it. Roderick
Hudson,
Even though he is special
and eminent, still he must not live, change and
disintegrate
too rapidly; he loses verisimilitude
by so doing. His great
capacity for ruin is projected on too small a field. He should
have had more adventures and digested more
experience be-
he
xxii
INTRODUCTION
fore we can properly believe that he has reached his end. But
James was able to put the whole matter succinctly. "To give
all the sense without all the substance or all the surface, and
so to summarise or foreshorten, so to make values both rich
and sharp, that the mere procession of items and profiles is not
only, for the occasion, superseded, but is, for essential quality,
almost 'compromised' such a case of delicacy proposes itself
at every turn to the painter of life who wishes both to treat his
chosen subject and to confine his necessary picture." Composition and arrangement must give the effect of the
lapse of
time. For this purpose elimination was hardly a good
enough
device.
The
The whole question is bound up with James' exthat the art of fiction is an organic form,
conviction
ceeding
and that it can neither be looked at all round nor will it be
elsewhere.
able to
centre.
own account
Commanding centres are
move on
its
xxiii
unless
it
of various descriptions. In I
INTRODUCTION
Mallet's consciousness of Roderick. In II it
image of Newman. In VII it is in the combination
of relations between three characters. In X it is in a houseful
it is
is
in
Rowland
in the
of beautiful furniture.
In
XI
it
is
by which the
situ-
which the
The
Upon
act is
performed.
given character. Omniscience would be incredible; the novelist must not make his "characters too interpretative of the
muddle
clever."
vague or the
is
The vague
critical.
leading interest
ness.
The Necessity of Fools (V, X, XI), and The Use of Muddlement (XI, XIX). These subjects are evidently related to
that of Intelligence and Bewilderment. In themselves nothing,
fools are the very agents of action. They
represent the stupid
force o life and are the cause of trouble to the
intelligent
consciousness.
this:
The
"The
(X, 129)
ducible action are the fools
who
xxiv
Mud-
INTRODUCTION
dlement
is
the condition of
and
life
which
really to represent is
muddlement. The
is one of the
of
the
that
it
also
has
colour
and form
realities,
very sharpest
and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality,
many of the signs and values of the appreciable." (XI, 149.)
in face of the constant force that
great thing
is
makes
for
make
a subject. In
child, intelligent as
lucid, people
and
un-
by her mere
existence, determining
and changing
XXI
Str ether is
outlined as the example of the adult sensibility fulfilling similar functions, with the additional grace of greatly extended
understanding.
passim).
(III,
Prefaces to
mere
outline of
its
terms here
From
In VII
In
III,
each selected
window
the scene
is
differently observed.
how
XXI
there
is
intermittent
XXV
promote
INTRODUCTION
and a comparison with the general scenic method in
IX that the reader must resort for a
sustained specific discussion of the Scene in fiction and its relation to the Scene in drama, and to XIX, of which pp. 296-306
deal with the scenic structure of that book, where the distinction is made between Scenes and Pictures and it is shown how
one partakes of the other, and where it is insisted on that the
scenes,
XIX.
It is principally to
maximum
value
is
obtained
On
Revision
(I,
is,
in the
are
felt.
Sub-
same
reference, a description
of the various reflectors (characters) used to illuminate the
subject in terms of the scene.
XXIII).
The Notes on
Revision in these
representatively. Revision
was responsible
re-seeing.
upon
it.
"Anything that
real.
To
the
INTRODUCTION
artist who practised in it the difficulties of its
constant seduction and an exalted delight.
economy were
ways enough.
The
real
wisdom was
this:
that
"if
you
haven't, for fiction, the root of the matter in you, haven't the
sense of life and the penetrating imagination, you are a fool
in the very presence of the revealed and the assured; but that
if you are so armed you are not
really helpless, not without
and other critics (the two need not be quite the same)
well
have found other matters for emphasis; and so too
might
they may reprehend the selection of Minor Notes which folreaders
lows.
development
On
triumph,
if
(p. 18).
xxvu
INTRODUCTION
On
the
127). James'
view may
it
unrolls, turning
too
is
consummately
singleness, clearness
imagination working
freely,
working
yet to
depend on an
(call it)
with extrava-
The Anecdote
whom
tinguishes."
first
232).
of these references
struggle
to keep compression rich and accretions
compressed; to
keep the form that of the concise anecdote, whereas the sub-
was
ject
INTRODUCTION
James solved the problem by working from the outward edge
in rather than from the centre outward; and this was law for
On
Operative Irony (XV, 222). James defended his "superon the ground that they were ironic, and he found
subtle fry"
chemical adjustments.
In XVII, 262,
the nouvelle
valuable device.
It
ness that has a charm, to the only spareness that has a force,
to the only simplicity that has a grace those, in each order,
that produce the rich effect."
On "Narrative in the First Person
bore a
little
Whether
methods.
it
sition
which he
specifies
may
xxix
unavailingly resorted to in
INTRODUCTION
the attempt to get round the freedom of the method. The
double privilege (in the first person), said James, of being
at once subject and object sweeps away difficulties at the ex-
pense of discrimination.
It
On
Ficelles
theatrical
one of the
difficulties
first
person narrative.
On
Characters as Disponibles
a
(III,
42-44).
this
Here again
time from
James adapted
Turgenev. Disponibles are the active or passive persons
it
who
The
from
But
On
let
me add
round dozen
Against
On
and so on.
may possibly have observed that we have nowhere illustrated the relation which James again and again
made eloquently plain between the value or morality of his
art and the form in which it
appears. It is not easy to select
The
from a
reader
multiplicity of choice,
and
xxx
it is
impossible,
when
the
INTRODUCTION
matter emerges in a style already so compact, to condense. I
should like to quote four sentences from the middle and end
of a paragraph in the Preface to
There
is,
I think,
no more
The
Portrait of
a Lady
The
range through
all
general subject-matter,
gance,
its
mould.
These sentences
mecum
made
and
and exemplification. We have, by what
no more than an arbitrary exertion of interest, exrough scheme of the principal contents; there remain
both for himself
really
hibited a
Ill
are
to
of the Dove or
in refertechnical
explicitly
Maisie Knew more firmly de-
The Wings
more
xxxi
and although
that to
The
INTRODUCTION
the most useful of all
perhaps in every respect
atI think it may be better to fasten our single
was
the
This
tention on the Preface to The Ambassadors.
book of which James wrote most endearingly. It had in his
most intelligent of all his themes, and
opinion the finest and
he thought it the most perfectly rendered of his books. Furthermore in its success it constituted a work thoroughly characterThere is a contagion
istic of its author and of no one else.
and a beautiful desolation before a great triumph of the hu-
Tragic Muse
the Prefaces,
is
which
we
man mindbefore
situation involved in
tells
is
grown
independent
by him as a crisis."
life, that he made in his
the
about
mistake
possibilities of life, and he
grave
youth
xxxn
felt
INTRODUCTION
exhorts Bilham not to repeat his mistake. "Live all you can.
Live, live!" And he has the terrible question within him:
"Would there yet perhaps be time for reparation?" At any
rate he sees what he had missed and knows the injury done
his character.
as
it
The
story
is
came
The
by a friend of
words addressed him by a man of distinction similar in burden
to those addressed by Strether to little Bilham. This struck
James as a theme of great possibilities. Although any theme
or subject is absolute once the novelist has accepted it, there
are degrees of merit among which he may first choose. "Even
among
since
is it
one's
maximum. Then,
truly> one's
theme may be
said to shine."
And
the theme of
so for James
"I rejoiced,"
James
promise
who would
little."
The predominant
would
do.
sion of Intelligence
There was no
XXXUl
INTRODUCTION
character.
in finding the situation involved by a conceived
the
"assumes
Once the situations are rightly found the story
them.
find
to
the labour is
authenticity of concrete existence";
fulldeals with what we see, it must first contribute
"Art
handed
pressed,
is
stale
with
its situations,
the subject,
story of the story
is
itself
which
is
telling.
Still
how
from and
his outburst in the garden. Where has he come
these
answer
What is he doing in Paris?
questions
To
why?
man
probably
New
and the
sulting.
would
There was
situation
.
also the
itself,
INTRODUCTION
a moral scheme which was yet framed to break down on
any
approach to vivid facts; that is to any at all liberal appreciation
of them." His note was to be of discrimination and his dram&
with that
He
was
to be
ration.
Now
XXXV
INTRODUCTION
he had
to
difficulties.
For
ex.
Newsome
of making Mrs.
ample, there was the problem
to Paris to save), actually in
come
had
Strether
son
(whose
5
Woolet, Mass., "no less intensely than circuitously present' ;
is,
to
make
would have
is
posi-
tive beauty."
as Strether's experience,
but
own
marsh,
ficelles to
had to
is
Indispensable
facts,
through their
dissimulated.
the subject
is
Analogous
made
xxxvi
INTRODUCTION
scene in the book as an "artful expedient for mere consistency
of form." It gives or adds nothing on its own account but only
expresses "as vividly as possible certain things quite other than
and that are of the already fixed and appointed measure."
itself
structure of the
book
is
scenic
and the
He
centre
is
first
encounter with
Chad
are
that
it raises,
still,
meant
IV
There
is
in
cer-
and whose
its
minor
Henry James
xxxvii
INTRODUCTION
full, and ordered. One answer to almost every relevant
question will be found, given always in specific terms and
calm,
illustrative example, somewhere among his Prefand if the answer he gives is not the only one, nor to
some minds necessarily the right one, it has yet the paramount
merit that it results from a thoroughly consistent, informed
mind operating at its greatest stretch. Since what he gives is
always specifically rendered he will even help you disagree
flowing from
aces;
form
felt it.
to be a waste,
with
its
ment; while
art, the imaginative representation of life, selected, formed, made lucid and intelligent, -gave value and^
meaning
to,
artist. The
emphases were on
was
the
novelist
of the free
intelligence James
avowedly
the
liberated
and
on
form.
spirit,
intelligenceon feeling,
The subject might be what it would and the feeling of it
what it could. When it was once found and known, it should
be worked for all it was worth. If it was felt
intensely and
intelligently
enough
it
would
reach, almost of
and
size
and
itself,
towards
density.
Then
intent of the
anything
So
else.
thing"
xxxviii
INTRODUCTION
who was
difficulty
most
conditions, the
RICHARD P. BLACKMUR.
xxxlx
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD
I.
BLACKMUR
P.
v
3
10
III.
40
IV.
59
79
II.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII
PREFACE TO "THE
AWKWARD AGE"
"WHAT
MAISIE
KNEW"
98
119
140
IX.
159
X.
180
198
XII.
117
XIII.
232.
XIV.
2.41
167
188
307
XL
XV.
XVI.
XVII.
XVIII.
BOWL"
317
IN THE
NEW YORK
EDITION)
after
relation with
think,
more kinds
of interest
shall find
easy to express, and yet will light not a little, to his eyes, that
veiled face of his Muse which he is condemned forever and all
it
to spread
Therefore
it is
some system
and
cheer,
see it as pausing from
able immensity, of losing its way.
time to time to consult its notes, to measure, for guidance, as
We
many
and
receptive.
value
This accordingly
or put
it
simply
is
as, to
what
one's
case. This
of the accessory facts in a given artistic
sincere
as one looks back, the private history of any
why,
work, however modest
its
pretensions,
ambiguous
aesthetic air,
table
this
backward view,
his
duction, for a
He
fiction
"short story"
carry a
sail.
and master
The
me
me too, the
ache of
fear, that
was
to
become so
familiar, of
RODERICK HUDSON
them. They are of the very essence of the
and
and
it is
by
novelist's process,
their aid,
fundamentally, that his idea takes form
but
To
is
expression?
Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite
problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry
of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear
do
so.
which
and of the tendency inherent in his manycoloured flowers and figures to cover and consume as many as
of the flower, of
possible of the little holes. The development
been,
It
seemed
system,
The
is
acquired
very meaning of expertness
the mofrom
crisis
self for the cruel
one's
brace
to
courage
ment one sees it grimly loom.
"Roderick Hudson" was further, was earnestly pursued dur-
and
sacrifice.
finished
when
it
had
to begin
appearing in
many
any
facility
now most
about
it
indeed outlives
all
was
It
soreness in
still
and in prolonging,
RODERICK HUDSON
golden air. Little enough of that medium may the novel, read
over today, seem to supply; yet half the actual interest lurks
for
me
making
it felt.
slits
pedestal,
if I
remenv-
we
Pathetic, as
say,
to re-
New
my
of intensity if intensity, in such a connexion, had been indeed to be looked for. Could I verily, by the terms of my little
plan, have "gone in" for it at the best,
these terms was the projection, for
my
some more or
less
What I
some
perfectly
drawback in
ing
my
To name
place.
some degree
to represent
the use of existing names, the only ones that carry weight. I
wanted one
obviously
lie,
my
which
had
my
was
which,
recklessly, the opening passages of "Roderick Hudson" put their foot. I was to have nothing then, on the spot,
to sustain me but the rather feeble plea that I had not
freA
all
tended so very
much
was charmingly
more came
up.
He
RODERICK HUDSON
o "representation," and
is
pledged thereby to remember that
the art of interesting us in things once these
things are the
right ones for his case can only be the art of representing
them.
interest, involves
with his
him
to.
do,
on
occasion,
when the writer, as so often happens, comThe way in which this sense has been, or has
it
my
feebler fashion, I yearned over the preliminary presentasmall square patch of the American scene, and yet
tion of
my
was not
sufficiently
on
my
guard to
Nemours and
my
Provins: therefore
see
how
case.
why
fond
fatuity, talk of
least, in one's
he would
It
verily, after
found
little
to tackle.
He
something
tackle
it
to
him an
on his
was that,
act reflecting
dishonour. Therefore
general course the deepest
under his
as the moral of these many remarks, I "named,"
not
of
most conscious
being held
contagion, when I was really
effect of
the
all
for
to it; and therefore it was, above all, that
the
occasion
let
have
to achieve, I might
representation I was
indication would have served my turn except
"fancy"
pass.
that I should so have failed perhaps of a pretext for my present
it
insistence.
Since I do
me
for
perhaps even more reasserted
within the very covers of the book, those that wander and idle
there as in some sweet old overtangled walled garden, a safe
of self-criticism. Here it is that if there be air for it
paradise
to breathe at
picture,
it only, blest
its allotted duration, and taken up,
for
thought, strengthened,
in its degree, poor dear brave thing, some shade of the all
he has to "clean
it
anew,
ment
of
it
together, have
may
had
find a strange
charm in
prime
creator,
10
It
RODERICK HUDSON
helps
him
and the old motives fall together once more, and a lesson and
a moral and a consecrating final light are somehow disengaged.
All this,
easily that
sees
it
were
do.
not,
mind
to the thing
is
to dismiss
On
is
insists
-logically to stay
secrets,
worth the burying. No so, however, when the moistened canvas does obscurely flush arid when resort to the varnish-bottle
II
is
To
Hudson" was
re-read "Roderick
to find
one remark
so promptly and
only take it as pointing
me in the face that the time-scheme of the story is quite
to that degree that the fault but
inadequate, and positively
fails to wreck it. The thing escapes, I conceive, with
just
its life:
is
fortunately
bears
missed, since the interest of the subject
ual
and
occasional,
this
and thereby
and watchable,
traceable
The
is
naturally that
he
instance, as
eminent as
we
like,
of our
own
conscious kind.
12
RODERICK HUDSON
are not our rates,
we
pressure,for what
We
a fight.
say;
is
it
we
after
conceive
we
see people
do
have
where is the provision for so much weakOne feels indeed, in the light of this challenge, on
how much too scantly projected and suggested a field poor
Roderick and his large capacity for ruin are made to turn
great an interest,
ness?"
round.
this
commend
It
was
itself
was
and proportion.
on this score even
at ease
in the
my
effect?
brevity, beauty, all the merits required for
How, when it was already so difficult, as I found, to proity,
tlie difficulty
could dodge
still
struck
me,
at
any
rate,
as leaving more than enough; and yet I was already conof the most interesting question
sciously in presence, here,
the artist has to consider. To give the image and the sense
them subordinate to his
while still
of certain
keeping
things
plan,
keeping them
in relation to matters
more immediate
masquerade in
its
name. This
terrify all
general
It
is
it
doing
my
14
RODERICK HUDSON
principle of simplification was the precious truth that
was dealing, after all, essentially with an Action, and that
no action, further, was ever made historically vivid without
my
I
remedy
more adequate
it
and
his-
tory. Since one was dealing with an Action one might borrow a scrap of the Dramatist's all-in-all, his intensity
which the
in
The amount
itself*
could
all
must have
command; but
what
of the
book
make
me.
had defined
really saved
of difficulties,
now
tried, I
I
My
see,
itself
and
adventure. This
my
young
sculp-
it
indirectly,
to have felt one's subject right whether instinct or calculation, in those dim days, most served; and the circumstance
From
this
its centre,
centre the interest has spread, and so, whatever else it may
do or may not do, the thing has acknowledged a prinleast to hang together*
ciple of composition and contrives at
is
in
Row-
its
interesting; this
one's thesis.
It
human
the beautiful
little
problem was
to
keep
human
it
connected,
and
and bewildered, anxious,
restless, fallible, and yet to endow it with such intelligence
that the appearances reflected in it, and constituting together
there the situation and the "story," should become by that
fact intelligible. Discernible from the first the joy of such
exposure,
time a
sufficiently clear
medium
to represent a whole.
This
for him.
The
who
with
the girl
is herself
16
RODERICK HUDSON
cution of
which should
logically have involved the readbeing put into position to take more closely home the
impression made by Mary Garland. The ground has not
been laid for it, and when that is the case one builds all
it;
er's
and
banners from
its
its
roof
presently to be mentioned)
why Rowland
should not, at
Northampton, have conceived a passion, or as near an approach to one as he was capable of, for a remarkable young
woman there suddenly dawning on his sight, a particular
fundamental care was required for the
The
possibility.
care,
enough taken, in
figure.
of a
We
fail to
young person
a
vivification of that
accept
it,
on the
irresistible at
skilfully
patching-up of the
girl's
all
moment
irresistible at
The
cast
remind us of
dubitably,
that.
of attraction
spell
is
all
sorts of
office
than to
in
we
in-
quite
distinct
workwhole
ing together.
sense of the situation depicted is that they should each have
been o the strongest, too strong to walk hand in hand.
Therefore it is that when, on the ship, under the stars,
Roderick suddenly takes his friend into the confidence of
his engagement,
to discomfiture.
my
deep.
the first that I required my
antithesis to Christina Light, one of the main
One is ridden by the law that anti-
tency.
difficult
feeling,
pang
such case
and
RODERICK HUDSON
why. The multiplication o touches had produced even more life than the subject required, and that
to understand
life,
in other conditions, in
still
in
fact,
later on.
11
NEW YORK
5'
EDITION)
early in
in "The
on its course while much was still unwritten, and there again
come back to me, with this remembrance, the frequent hauntings and alarms of that comparatively early time; the habit
of wondering what would happen if anything should "happen," if one should break one's arm by an accident or make
or suffer, in body, mind, fortune, any other
visitation involving a loss of time. The habit of apprehension became of course in some degree the habit of confidence
a long
illness
one would
that
eray's
ters"
(that of Stevenson's
"Weir
of Hermiston"
was yet to
come)
economy of serialisation. I make myself out in memory as
having at least for many months and in many places given
my
Providence
much
so
mer out
what
THE AMERICAN
must
sort,
recklessly
I seem
was met,
to recall
no other
like
anxieties of every
difficulties.
my
it; yet, as I had at the time no sense of neglectneither acute nor rueful solicitude, I can but speculate
all vainly to-day on the oddity of my
composure. I ask my-
ter care of
ing
it,
it,
years before:
inter-
recall
esting case,
I
the
of
the
first
forget the
sharply
glimpse, though
felicity
accident of thought that produced it. I recall that I was
seated in an American "horse-car" when I found myself,
I
betrayed,
some
in especial
insidiously beguiled
and
would he "do" in
himself, or
self
how,
that predicament,
failing a
without a dream of
go, in
have
THE AMERICAN
cisely
because
dropped
it
had so much to
it
give, I think,
must
have
known
come
iri-
was at
and in December, 1875; my good fortune
being apparently that Paris had ever so promptly offered
me, and with an immediate directness at which I now marvel (since I had come back there, after earlier visitations,
but a few weeks before), everything that was needed to make
my conception concrete. I seem again at this distant day
fo see it become so quickly and easily, quite as if filling
itself with life in that air. The
objectivity it had wanted it
promptly put on, and if the questions had been, with the
usual intensity, for my hero and his crisis the whole formidable list, the who? the what? the where? the when?
the
moment
the
why?
living,
the
shadow
how?
of the
my
was important
my
clear,
the Seine
charmingly simple,
this conception,
man
medium by
all
est
general
in fine, for his wary freshness
gilded the whole trap set,
blunder
and into which it would
upon its fate. I have, I
a
of
confess, no
disturbing doubt; once the man
memory
him
of
art.
The
interestedly sacrificed
by
Juliet;
and
to this
end
had but
hero con-
have
haviour, in given conditions, of which great people
the
was
this
light
been historically so often capable. But as
24
THE AMERICAN
which they were to show, so the essence of the matter
would be that he should at the right moment find them in
his power, and so the situation would reach its
highest
in
with the question of his utilisation of that knowlwould be here, in the possession and application
edge.
of his power, that he would come out strong and would so
interest
It
all it really
was,
however, that
my conception unfurled, with the best conscience in the world, the emblazoned flag of romance; which
venerable ensign
first
and
it
good
faith.
had
short,
no reward comparable
The
thing
is
make
fain
consistently,
consummately
bold to say
and
would
and
romantic;
really
charmingly
without intention, presumption, hesitation, contrition. The
effect is equally undesigned and unabashed, and I lose my-
all
self, at
am bound
aside
when
little
frolic fancy,
25
till
tb^v have
all
new
somehow
outlay) sat
feel,
on the
accordingly, that
and
high
Was
it
indeed meanwhile
my
to have
remained?
excellent
it
or
how
with-
conscience that
is
mere
old
work
sounded or
even
if
image
and rummages
fragments and relics of the submerged life and the extinct
consciousness as tempt us to piece them together. My windows looked into the Rue de Luxembourg since then
meagrely re-named Rue Cambon and the particular light
Parisian click of the small cab-horse on the clear asphalt,
with its sharpness of detonation between the high houses,
makes for the faded page to-day a sort of interlineation of
sound. This sound rises to a martial clatter at the moment
a troop of cuirassiers charges down the narrow street, each
ory
stirs
morningj
26
THE AMERICAN
manner to one of the Ministeres that
on the Place Vendome; an expanse marked, along a
considerable stretch of the street, by one of those high painted
and administratively-placarded garden walls that form deep,
tached in a rearward
front
have but
circumstance
an
now
dignified, to
and a
my
imagination, I may
add, by the fact that the fruits of this weakness, the various
items of the vivid picture, so constantly recaptured, must have
own
as
it
could
its
27
unwind my
with a firm
tangle,
narrowish French
hand, in the very light (that light of high,
windows in old rooms, the light somehow, as one always feels>
I was
of "style" itself) that had quickened my original vision.
a
reason
the
was
to pass over to London that autumn; which
final
Newman's
more for considering the matter the matter of
predicament
would
so fix
let
strenuously
the dishonour of piecemeal composition. Therefore I
strove to finish first in a small dusky hotel of the Rive Gauche,
air
felt,
dim and
testified to ancient
pire portrait-medallion,
old salon,
panel of my almost noble
creetest,
made
case-
huge an organism.
I shall not tell whether I did there bring my book to a
c l ose an d indeed I shrink, for myself, from putting the quesrhythms for
so
I infer
all
that I did
undue
perhaps, however, by that small subjective issue, any
measure of the interest of this insistent recovery of what I
have called attendant facts. There always has been, for the
valid
less,
work
of
art,
a history
critic,
though mainly
for
28
whom
inviting, doubt-
THE AMERICAN
formed very much in the manner of attaching young
and characters, those conspicuous cases of happy development as to which evidence and anecdote are always in order.
The development indeed must be certain to have been happy,
and
are
lives
the
life sincere,
work
of art, to create
it
a matter of widely-varying
in a given
kindle as on the artist's
interest,
after all
may be
am
own
And
part.
it
am
afraid that
personal plea the joy of living over, as a chapter of experience, the particular intellectual adventure. Here lurks
an immense homage to the general privilege of the artist,
to that constructive, that creative passion portentous words,
but they are convenient the exercise of which finds so
him
to
the
of the gods.
highest of
He values
as
it, all sublimely and perhaps a little fatuously, for itself
the great extension, great beyond all others, of experience
and of consciousness; with the toil and trouble a mere
sun-cast
shadow
that
falls,
shifts
and
On
vanishes,
the result
"life
of art"
who
repines
might surely be
he endlessly wonder
suit
privilege.
It
may
after
all
leave
but the
last
refinement of
29
how,
to expect at
he will have
lived!
As
That
if
silly
one were
safety
is
Who
can imagine
but the sign of bondage and forfeiture.
terrible
whole
of art
is
the
free selection which
beautiful,
without free difficulty? This is the very franchise of the
the citizen. The vision of the
city and high ambition of
take advantage of
them
all
to repeat that
my
'The American"
If in
without malice prepense, yet with a production of the romantic effect that is for myself unmistakeable, the occasion
is of the best perhaps for penetrating a little the obscurity
may
it
affect
of reality?
to see
how
It is
is
producible save
by a complex of fine measurements. The cause of the deflexion, in one pronounced sense or the other, must lie deep,
however; so that for the most part we recognise the character
I
say,
of
we
is,
30
THE AMERICAN
ever). The determining condition would at any rate seem
so latent that one may well doubt if the full artistic con-
it;
mitigation as
interest is
we
greatestthe
wealthwhen he commits
of his general
The
mean, and
himself in both
Of
the
human
toward
we
feel,
and the
tonic shock, as
may
all
and
strange.
(In
real represents to
my
one of the incidents of their quantity and number, that parhave not yet come our way. The romantic
stands, on the other hand, for the things that, with all the
ticular instances
31
in the world,
facilties
and
all
the wit
and
all
all
the adventure,
we
subterfuge
gather,
many
definitions of
romance, as
where
enjoyed on the flowery plains of heaven,
conceive ourselves proceeding in ecstasy from one
we may
form of
it
to another.
And
if
it
be
measure of the type is then in the appreciation of danger the sign of our projection of the real being
the smallness of its dangers, and that of our projection of
fails,
since
of kind, which
is
it
provoke;
32
THE AMERICAN
"look like nothing" and that can be but inwardly and occultly dealt with, which involve the sharpest hazards to life
instant decisions and intrepidan arbitrary stamp that keeps these latprosaic and makes the former heroic; and yet I should
ities
ter
of action.
still
less
one
that
It is
subscribe to a
would
To classify it by that aspect the definition of the spirit that happens to animate her is like settling the question (as I have seen it witlessly settled) by
the presence or absence of "costume." Where again then
of her adventures.
We
artless mixtures.
The only
can
see,
the kind of experience with which it deals experience liberated, so to speak; experience disengaged, disembroiled,
we usually
we wish so to put the matter,
in a medium which relieves it,
know
to attach to
it
and,
if
ities.
The
balloon of experience
is
sacrifice
at
all.
33
are,
we
is
cut
we
are at
5'
it,
it
us.
It
is
a case of
shall
intelligible;
the
the
the
better cause)
this
ture,
hocus-pocus
is
to
my
pen
is
of
the fabulous
lapses,
felicity
of
and not
my
way
least so, I
candour.
in
34
its
having been
romantic
all is
hasten to add,
The way
things hap-
THE AMERICAN
as having happened,
I
in
Paris,
my
to
me
my
invention of something better. The great house of Bellegarde, in a word, would, I now feel, given the circumstances,
in a
Itself
which
to
my
narrative
commits
it;
of
over, I
was destined
Newman
to fall.1l
was
which
truth,
spite of
what
morehave
so possessed of
my
which
idea that
soundness
been played;
er's
suspecting
had taken
is first
queer
patched
trick,
it.
to
up
to a greater apparent
speaking,
would have
my
read-
repeat, believed
impart the
to the
falsity
it
artistically
my
been greater,
that
Had
my own
They would
and second
to the
my
rich
35
only of interest
felt
most of
all
in the light
of
comedy and of
irony.
him, but in that of their taking with alaccould give them, only asking for more
rity everything he
and more, and then adjusting their pretensions and their pride
to it with all the comfort in life. Such accommodation of
ready to
sacrifice
meant of course
forlorn.
The
the misfortune of
and the
I
all
insistence
on "worldly" advantages
which
events,
however
The
it
hang
with as
seat.
might very
well be a situation and a subject: only it wouldn't have
been the theme of "The American" as the book stands,
the theme to which
was from so
early pledged.
Since I
THE AMERICAN
after
all,
of "defining" everything.
but
one
gets!)
me
It is difficult for
work went
my
on,
some shade
memory
at least of
keep
was
all
the others
who
is
of his consistency
of that infatuation
the lighted figure,
made
woman
were to be the
obscured;
wide, consciousness
we
we
are seated,
from
He
tion
"assist."
effort to get into the skin of the creature; the act of personal
of one being by another at its completest and
possession
with the high enhancement, ever, that it is, by the same
that
stroke, the effort of the artist to preserve for his subject
the
interest
other words for
unity, and for his use of it (in
he
37
its
value.
Its
value
is
the "importance"
economy has most operated; the content and
of a work of art are in fine wholly dependent on its being one:
outside of which
all
prate of
representative character,
morality and humanity, are
its
its really
character,
bearing witness at
all,
which
it is
is
its
an
the con-
strong every
on behalf of my instinct
way. So much remains true then
of multiplying the fine touches by which Newman should
live and communicate life; and yet I still ask myself, I con-
what
fess,
can have
made
of
"life," in
my
picture, at
such
my
crown
it.
severely alone.
to find,
on turning
sented immediately
uously introduced
husband-to-be
is
him
that of
which he
is
pre-
Madame de
to
all
an evening
at
if
The
truth
was
that at
and
pass; lingering
was too
difficult
parent
acted in clear good faith, but how could I give the detail of
an attitude, on her part, of which the foundation was yet
38
THE AMERICAN
so
weak ?
plank,
is laid
and
tic
tout
crachethe
for
necessarily the less workable, to a rejoicing ingenuity,
shut
his
of
the
reader's
up,
being
that; beguile
suspicion
it
transform
liberty,
it
for
and the
him
look
to,
the
terms, than his prompt general profession, before
for
example,
Tristrams, of aspiring to a "great" marriage,
could surely not well be imagined. I had to take that over
with the rest of him and fit it in I had indeed to exclude
the outer air. Still, I find on re-perusal that I have been able
to breathe at least in my aching void; so that, clinging to
hero as to a tall,
good-natured elder brother
my
my
protective,
more
fall
by
his
Ill
Monthly," where
its
much
occupied with
several
some
40
the artist a questionable aid to concentrathey themselves are not to be the subject of it.
are too rich in their own life and too
charged with
in, offer
when
tion
They
own meanings
their
own
their
merely to help
they
phrase;
a lame
little,
he
feels,
to
while
peddler
who
ment.
The
one
real truth
is,
I think, that
much more
this appeal,
only too
Such a place
as
Venice
is
We
Venice does
n't
4*
depends on
how
most designing
artist's part,
desire, to fail to
faith,
their deceits.
character
sities
possible, to
push into the light and the air and thickly flower
much, these fine possibilities of recover-
and appealing
to
him
just as they
42
him
were.
to invent
ful
and select
and favourable
"
he
arrive at these things is to arrive at
story,'
is that I'm
result
The
I
for
it.
that's
the
look
"and
said,
way
often accused of not having 'story' enough. I seem to my-
"To
self
to
my
have
as
much
as I
need
to
show
people, to
my
measure.
If I
see
all
is
this or
engaged in
How
my
them come
have
dare
say, alas,
que
cela
rather, I think,
when
there's
of the truth.
is
manque
have too
would
much
my
measure
it than
Isn't
by
own
way, breathes
them upon
us.
manminds
into our
by the
They
are so, in a
subject,
43
when he
critic's
hasn't the
my
'architecture/
his ground. I give him up
"as much as he will"
friend
concluded,
distinguished
there he's
So
this
gratitude
my
on
"
some
imagination, the trick of investing
or
brace
some
group
conceived or encountered individual,
of individuals, with the germinal property and authority. I
was myself so much more antecedently conscious of my
a too preliminary, a preferfigures than of their setting
as in general such a putme
struck
which
in
ential interest
habit of one's
own
could think so
little
agents positively to
launch
it;
it
didn't need
could think so
depend for
its
interest
little
its
of any
on the nature
among
novelists
who have
appeared to flourish
that offer
my
not needing,
all
super-
to try
44
that
in
the
novel.
One had had from an early time, for that matter, the
instinct of the right estimate of such values and of its reducing to the inane the dull dispute over the "immoral'* subject
and the moral. Recognising so promptly the one measure
of the worth of a given subject, the question about it that,
rightly answered, disposes of all others is it valid, in a
word,
is it
from the
first all
of terms.
The
delimitation of
air of
my
earlier
ground and
had neglected
all
definition
prime
sensibility,
The
life,
That element
connexion of the subject with some mark made on the intelligence, with some sincere experience. By which, at the
same time, of course, one is far from contending that this
enveloping air of the artist's humanity which gives the last
touch to the worth of the work is not a widely and wondrously varying element; being on one occasion a rich and
magnificent medium and on another a comparatively poor
woman), but
in proportion
extravagance,
mould.
The house
milliona
possible
rather; every one of which has
the
able, in its vast front, by
of dissimilar shape and size, hang so, all together, over the
human scene that we might have expected of them a greater
sameness of report than we find. They are but windows at
the best, mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched
life.
they are not hinged doors opening straight upon
at
each
of
them
that
own
their
of
mark
this
have
But they
with a pair of eyes, or at least with a fieldstands a
aloft;
figure
glass,
for observation, a
making use
of
it
unique
an im-
pression distinct
where the other sees fine. And so on, aad so on; there is
for the particular pair of eyes,
fortunately no saying on what,
my
my
dim
is
at
a long
first
that I was, as
seemed
to
it,
still
at large,
not con-
vivid?
since
was
still all
we
One would
time,
had
clearness,
occasion,
it
on
little
by the reduced, mysterious lady of title or the specuand which is already there to disclose its merit
lative amateur,
47
cupboard
door.
my
and
figures
and
treasures
woman
going
be put up round my young
perfect
isolation.
That
is
woman
to me, artistically
ous
girl, to
find itself
endowed with
very nature an
form it takes
"ado," an ado about something, and the larger the
the greater of course the ado. Therefore, consciously, that was
what one was in for for positively organising an ado about
should
is
of
its
Isabel Archer.
One
looked
it
seem to remember,
this
any
substance; the
the
intelligence,
how
world,
absolutely,
how
inordinately,
the
Isabel
Archers, and even much smaller female fry, insist on mattering. George Eliot has admirably noted it "In these frail
vessels is borne onward through the
ages the treasure of human affection." In "Romeo and Juliet" Juliet has to be important, just as, in "Adam Bede" and "The Mill on the
Floss" and "Middlemarch" and "Daniel Deronda," Hetty
Sorrel and Maggie Tulliver and Rosamond Vincy and Gwen-
much
feet
and
of bracing
their lungs.
much
of firm ground^
air, at
make
a centre of in-
many an expert
painter, as for
one,
it
is
all,
that
we
shall
the best of
It
may
and
of the world.
If
they are
"mattering" as much
the proof of it is in a hun-
shown
as
them concomitantly with that one. Cleopatra matters, beyond bounds, to Antony, but his colleagues, his antagonists,
the state of Rome and the impending battle also prodigiously
matter; Portia matters to Antonio, and to Shylock, and to the
Prince of Morocco, to the fifty aspiring princes, but for these
for Antonio, notably,
gentry there are other lively concerns;
there are Shylock and Bassanio and his lost ventures and the
extremity of his predicament. This extremity indeed, by
the same token, matters to Portia though its doing so be-
comes of
she does
round
to
interest all
so, at
it
any
by the
and
rate,
again, supports
my
mere young
thing.
That
comes
exam(I say
ample
making George
our attention,
at least
the difficulty of
all-in-all for
not the
call.
Now
danger
intensified.
The
difficulty
50
is,
of
making
it
my
much
oh, ever so
bet-
The
and
is played:
the
sense
her
of
and
you give
effect,
general
you give it, so
far as the raising on it of a superstructure goes, with the maxiof ease. Well, I recall perfectly how little, in my
mum
now
quite established connexion, the maximum of ease appealed to me, and how I seemed to get rid of it by an honest transposition of the weights in the two scales. "Place
own
con-
sciousness,"
weight (which
usually the one that tips the balance of interest): press least hard, in short, on the consciousness of
is
your heroine's
satellites, especially
the male;
make
it
an
inter-
what can be done in this way. What better field could there
be for a due ingenuity? The girl hovers, inextinguishable, as
a charming creature, and the job will be to translate her into
the highest terms of that formula, and as nearly as possible
moreover into all of them. To depend upon her and her
5*
little
nical rigour, I
now
less
me
it
petence,
author's
own
sense, the
pile
leave
the walls.
book,
is
my own
on re-perusal
me: it testifies
of the
so, for
ear, to
amusement.
named
having taken
as
place, the right complications
having
started.
which
Roman
numerous
as to
as
might
be; but
my
memory,
I confess, is
a blank
they came.
I seem to myself to have waked
up one morning in possession of them of Ralph Touchett and his parents, of
Madame
Merle, of Gilbert
his sister, of
numbered
pieces of
was
my
my
as if they
least
as interesting
were
like the
down by
group
as
they
could,
of attendants
and
trusted
them.
entertainers
They
who come
train
etta Stackpole.
It is
belongs to it but indirectly belongs intimately to the treatment. This is a truth, however, of which he rarely gets the
benefit since it could be assured to him, really, but by criticism based upon perception, criticism which is too little of
53
He
benefits,
way dishonour
benefit,
lies:
whatever
it
moreover,
he
has, that
may
freely
is,
but
be, involved in
his having cast a spell upon the simpler, the very simplest,
forms of attention. This is all he is entitled to; he is entitled
to nothing,
he
the reader, as
ion or discrimination.
He may
affair, but on
"thrown in," a mere miraculous windfall, the fruit of
a tree he may not pretend to have shaken. Against reflexall earth and air
ion, against discrimination, in his interest,
it is that, as I say, he must in many
wherefore
conspire;
a case have schooled himself, from the first, to work but for
another
tuity
where the
might
he can do
is
to
All of which
is
way
of
54
reasons
eral
may
that they are like the fishwives who helped to bring back
to Paris from Versailles, on that most ominous day of the
first
half of the
family. The only thing is that I may well be asked, I acknowledge, why then, in the present fiction, I have suffered Henrietta (of whom we have indubitably too much) so officiously,
point
wish
still
more
to
make
my
is
that
if
my
relation
one would express the hope that the general, the ampler air
of the modest monument still survives. I do at least seem
55
ingenious
young woman's
interest,
one side
of the
moving
death
of them, her sense for them, as one may say, they are next
to nothing at all; but isn't the beauty and the difficulty just
in
showing
their mystic
drama
was all as
bell
of 'story'?"
Two
version,
It
clear,
my
very good instances, I think, of this effect of concases of the rare chemistry, are the pages in which
two
Isabel,
contention, as a silver
at
Gardencourt, com-
and deeply
whom
moment
before she
point in her
artistic
It is
life.
i's
and
insist
on
one's
am
and
minimum of strain.
The interest was to be
the
ments to be kept in
thing duly impress,
ward
life
may do
raised to its pitch and yet the eleso that, should the whole
their key;
I
56
it
in-
even while
it
And
cannot think o
statement,
it
more
be in the long
just
my
its essence, it is
tions
It
one of
the identifications dear to the novelist, and even indispensable to him; but it all goes on without her being approached
chair.
It is
obviously the best thing in the book, but it is only a supreme illustration of the general plan. As to Henrietta, my
apology for whom I just left incomplete, she exemplifies, I
my plan, but
to
begin my tendency
early
my
to overtreat, rather than undertreat (when there was choice or
fear, in
only an excess of
zeal.
So
was
time a part of
there
my
was another
lively.
And
then
come
to live in
It
light
lay,
that is another
ma^r. There is
really too
much
to say
THE
massima"
is,
during the
"The
Princess Casa-
proceeded quite
directly,
first
One walked
ripe round
of course with one's
eyes greatly open, and I hasten to declare that such a practice, carried on for a long time and over a considerable space,
positively provokes, all round, a .mystic solicitation, the urgent
as
the
and
and
common
to a
air,
mind
face, a
garden bristling
59
before he
knows
it
We
months or
up,
if
I
I
we
use
up
London
streets
but sufficiently
steps. But
perception and attention
think of them as lasting, for myself, quite sufficiently long;
think of them as even stilldreadfully changed for the worse
light our
vague murmur.
There was a moment
vast
image more
vivid
at
any
rate
when
they offered
me
no
tunity
but
at the
number
ticular vistas
would begin
that retreat
one's
own
Truly,
mysteries (dense categories of
dark arcana) for every spectator, and it's in a degree an exclusion and a state of weakness to be without experience of the
of course^ there are
London
meaner
and what in
we may
word
faint,
and
say;
the
power
aware
the
ra^w absolutely
maximum
curiosity
of sense to
what
befalls
them.
care, comparatively
We
little
care,
for
our
what
sentient.
my
and the
act
would be the
actor's
ligence involved.
the most part, it
The
English novel to carry, this reader having so often the wondrous property of caring for the
of human
displayed tangle
The
teller of
is
primarily,
page of
more
I
cess
life
felt
and
or less understood.
recognise at the same time, and in planning "The PrinCasamassima" felt it highly important to recognise, the
danger of
all
any
none the
less,
for us
this carrying of
that
feeling too much not certainly for their remaining remarkable, but for their remaining "natural" and typical, for their
to
tell
that
it is
the wary reader for the most part warns the novelist against
his characters too interpretative of the muddle of
making
fate,
monitor seems to
say,
any
it
may
somehow
dreary realms where slashing
ground.**
That
is
well reasoned
in spite of
nations would
it
on the
and
falls to
the
come
to
him
less easily
the subjects of the bewilderment (thac bewilderment without which there would be no question of an issue or of the
fact of suspense, prime implications in any story) as much
but keep down the terms in which
experience as possible,
because we only understand the
that
you report
experience,
is to
Experience, as
I see
what happens
apprehension and our measure of
it,
is
to us as
any
intelligent report of
is
what
is
which has to be
The
make
for a refinement of
All of which
is
economy.
charming
yet
would be
infinitely
more
if
stake,
feeling.
In the immediate
field
of
its
But the
it is
the
reflected field of
appreciation
My
different.
report of people's
a
as
report
"story-teller" is essentially
in
there
is no "interest" for
and
it,
together
my
me
my
my
appreciation of
what
my
hero,
able process.
is
experience
As soon
the
imperilled:
venture, any case of endurance and performance, melt together as an appeal. I then see their "doing," that of the
as,
65
suspended
decrees of Providence
of reaction,
so
it
is
rather
mode
in-
There
by
from
vague and
are doubtless many such qualities, ranging
have but
we
and
most
and
critical;
crepuscular to sharpest
the
from
how
see
to
latter
these
to imagine one of
easily
on
insist
it
all
at
head
moment it gets its
playing a
may
volved in the given case or supplied
part.
at
one's data.
66
which
no
"story"
painters of
is
is
often
so>
human
possible without
life,
value
penetrating.
its
ing,
Eliot,
moving
creature)
enlargement.
It is
gross fools, the headlong fools, the fatal fools play their part
for us they have much less to show us in themselves. The
life mostly at the centre of our subject
whatever our
for
the artistic hour, happens to be embraces them
subject,
and deals with them for its amusement and its anguish: they
troubled
felt
whom we
we
is
of
it,
and by so much
as
it
falls
sort
in possession
not been purely epic, as with Scott, say, as with old Dumas
and with Zola); or else paid signally, as to the interest
may note moreover
created, for their failure to do so.
We
67
Edgar
Hamlet,
equally
has a co-stume.
wood
has yet a
mind
still
more than he
The
is
loves Lucy
and that she in the same way loves him; but the relation
the "feeling"
so created between them is by this neglect of
It is
as
us
shown
primarily taking place.
question never
and
confused
its
disfigured asshown only in its secondary,
it
is
presented with great
pectswhere, however, luckily,
nevertheless
has
The
faith.
paid for its
romantic good
thing
centre of
the
of
sacrifice
a
I
intensity;
deviation, as
say, by
the
and
the subject is empty
development pushed off, all
framewhich
the
is, so to speak, beautifully
round, toward
relation to each other
that
I
mention
But
curious.
rich and
and
having
consciousness; besides
which
his author
he handsomely pos-
thing important.
interested,
it
not at
is
man
all
in a book" by
with the fine measure of other things too with that of the
other faces of his situation and character. If he's too sensitive
and too
or natural
for
him
it's
as
if
and impossible. Extreme and attaching always the difficulty of fixing at a hundred points the place where one's
Impelled bonhomme may feel enough and "know" enough
false
or be in the
way
of learning
enough
for his
maximum
dra-
matic value without feeling and knowing too much for his
minimum verisimilitude, his proper fusion with the fable. This
is
be
on golden
comfort
of the
nails;
raw essence
Tightnesses,
and
mean were
of fantasy
whether in
my own work or
doubtless, are they the felicities the most frehave so inherent a price that even the tracebut
they
quent;
able attempt at them, wherever met, sheds, I think, a fiae
work whatever,
influence about.
T
stirred intelligence,
very
on occasion as in
charged, I know, with having
left the figure,
themselves
celebrities
those
with
very
dealing
reason of the
abstract
too
and
man
concrete
woman,
by
the
ola
is
wanting
to those that
may be
should even
my
Hudson,"
is
Rowland
Mallet, in "Roderick
a bit autobiographic
exactly such a mirror, not
or formally "first person" though he be, and I might exema long list, through the nature of such a
plify the case through
"mind" even
as the all-objective
Newman
in
"The American,"
Isabel Archer in
through the thickly-peopled imagination of
"The Portrait of a Lady" (her imagination positively the
70
first
and
Bowl."
"The Golden
whose romance
is
the vivacity in him, to his positive sorrow and loss, of the state
of being aware; even to scanted Fleda Vetch in "The
Spoils of Poynton," through whose own delicate vision of
everything so little of the human value of her situation is
wasted for us; even to the small recording governess confronted with the horrors of "The Turn of the Screw" and
to the innocent child patching together all ineffectually those
of "What Maisie Knew"; even in short, since I may name
so
few
"The
guardian of an overgrown
"The
Next Time," trying to despoil himself, for a "hit" and bread
and butter, of his fatal fineness, to blunt the tips of his intellectual fingers, and to the hapless butler Brooksmith, ruined
legend in
by good
beautiful
"London world,*
saw all the unan-
sufficiently thoughtful
but this image, however inan action,
teresting, was of course not by itself a progression,
howeverdidn't by itself make a drama. I got my action
and
sufficiently "disinherited";
failing
7*
greatest vivacity,
on
swim
itself.
To
see this
was
ing
in
spirit
my
little
his imagination, as I
Accessible through
perience.
to a thousand provocations and intimations,
have hinted,
he would become
a lively inward
of
form
the
in
most acquainted with destiny
of
life of which
ease
the
all
of
revolution. His being jealous
this
under
he tastes so little, and, bitten,
exasperation, with
destructive social faith, his turning
aggressive, vindictive,
to "treasons, stratagems and spoils" might be as vivid a
but would move to pity and terror only
picture as one chose,
an
issue.
The
and
all,
at the
moment
of his
rendered
arrangements";
so that
and
it
false
its
his vows,
practically
more than "shady" underworld of militant socialhe has undertaken to play a part a part that with the
of
drop of his exasperation and the growth, simply expressed,
into the
ism,
72
his taste,
is
life itself,
the
life,
all
whatever
would be "in" up
of
him
to his neck,
sort, he
and with that precarious part
he should have a
social
not
less
find a door
ised state,
help to undermine.
for
me
to
meet
it
To
than a
socialist
connexion,
more or
less
or a
whim
like
of their
fumbling
to feel
still
felt,
for
73
again.
enough
far from where I had last left her: that, one felt, was in charthat was what she naturally would have done. Her
acter
to the band, and nothing
prime note had been an aversion
I
less
effect
band, judged, than her intervention
could be of an
London bookbinder whose sensilittle
of
a
in the life
dingy
bility,
whose flow
of opinions
on "public
questions'* in especial,
She
and
matter what.
something or otherit might scarce
their wrongs and their sorrows and their perpetual smothered ferment; for these things are furthest removed from those
others among which she has hitherto tried to make her life.
That was
on with
a character": as Balzac
flexions so precipitated;
to this
that
remember
at
little
autumn of
little
town
now
odd
together. I
75
may wonder
at
my
my con-
fidence
now
gratefully
mean
my
My
was
scheme
that I
seemed
appearances.,
perceptible presences
To
one's
own
satisfaction at
leastwas
My
working imagination
sense of London. The very plan of
my
book had
in fact
it
the
ineluctable
conse-
of the
perform any act of understanding. The play
what
energy had been continuous and couldn't change;
situations pressing the
and
the
was
objects
only
changed
in other words the things one
spring of it. Notes had been
ber, as to
76
all
fresh experi-
that.
have endeavoured to
characterise the peremptory fashion in which my fresh experience of London the London of the habitual observer,
my
investigations.
I recall
and
occult
affiliations,
recollect
perfectly
feeling,
might well be ashamed if, with my advantand there wasn't a street, a corner, an hour, of Lon-
In short, that
ages
that
knowledge,
more
my
knowl-
tention that the value I wished most to render and the effect
I wished most to produce were precisely those of our not
knowing, of
society's
77
my
armed you
your resource,
remembrance in respect to
the origin and growth of "The Tragic Muse," which
appeared in
"The
Atlantic
proper twelve.
If it
unacknowledged
moment
birth.
I fail to recover
my
precious first
was to give
in general the effect
which
it
it
as I like to do
some particular sharp impression or concussion. I call
such remembered glimmers always precious, because without
them comes no clear vision of what one may have intended,
and without that vision no straight measure of what one may
have succeeded in doing. What I make out from furthest
back is that I must have had from still further back, must
form; to recognise in
of
on which
it
paid
for.
human
been for
flict
as
is at
its
To
me
between
good deal of a nursed intention, the conand "the world" striking me thus betimes
early a
art
remember
-even
would
any amount
events, was
happy and
was opposition why there should be was another
matter and that the opposition would beget an infinity of
situations. What had doubtless occurred in fact, moreover,
this question of the essence and the reasons of the
was that
fruitful truth, at all
that there
just
in the
form of an
invitation
Thomas
editor of
"The
tc
his pages a serial that should run through the year. Thai
thus the most definite statement
friendly appeal becomes
What
was
by
lives
not
least,
be quite candid, i
make a virtual end
to
though
for reasons
stil
my
The
influence of "Thi
what
had
a]
as I
now read
the
80
from which no
ech<
its
name,
polished, but of
which the
lid,
never
has provided for the intense accumulation of the fragrance within. The consistent, the sustained, preserved tone
lifted,
of
the inner
harmony
fine*
criti-
that
unevaporated scent.
After which indeed
I
mean, in such a
how
can
await us
justify
may
business,
my
well be
claim to
it
There was
Suffice
it
my
81
that
meagre
way
too?
without a
possible too
less
even be able to
might
desire
it.
It
sacrifice of truth;
make my
seemed
and
clear that I
should doubt-
important as
needed big cases
theatric case as
small ones
would
practically give
my
still
say
it
glimmered upon
me
deep in the fact that his repudiation of the great obvious, great
moral or functional or useful character, shall just have to
consent to resemble a surrender for absolutely nothing. Those
82
ward and so
vulgarise it;
of publicity
rule of
its
is
is
sincerity, its
have been in
ass.
Of
these things
must,
strictness
look too
Then
much
it is
romantic
for the
effect
world
mean.
lish
may
like a
only at the
is
drawn
especially in the
importance of heeding
what
it
Eng-
may
that if I
show
all
for mechanical
a picture a picture,
83
one.
pictures, in
two
my
subject
reason of this
was the
clearest
that disadvantage, so
as to become of no more
indispensable centre
use for expressing a main intention than a wheel without
a hub is of use for moving a cart. It was a fact, apparently,
cheated of
its
and
bolts,
that
have
their
feat?
it;
artist,
who
come
to our aid
and
tell us.
common
interest
be-
don
for
lives
fog-filtered
of seeing the sunset in and which at the very last are merged
to memory in a different and a sharper pressure, that of an
hotel
the Exposition
story,
culties
and
I fairly
in another line
difficulties, as well.
may hug
The
usual
diffi-
some adventurer
spirit,
first
would
middle.
It
insist
on placing
mattered
little
itself
my
struc-
break in and
my work
me
as
an
85
Time
worked
itself,
and in
perilously
of these parts. In several of
spite o
my
crisis,
in defying
and
resisting
me,
my
seem
my
Of any
there
is
perhaps after
all
positive
desire to provide for future
novel,
degree
proved strangely
the
question of artfully, of consummately masking
the
brave
false
on
the
fault and conferring
appearquantity
larity the
But
am
far
from pretending
86
after
of a day that
is dead.
Re-reading the last chapters of "The
Muse"
I
catch
Tragic
again the very odour of Paris, which
comes up in the rich rumble of the Rue de la Paix with which
my room itself, for that matter, seems impregnated and which
effort to "fin-
The
Not
much
nor a
rim of
remember how often
its
attendant
shadow
a possible
dryness) but by the art of figuring synthetically, a compactness into which the imagination may cut thick, as into the
rich density of wedding-cake. The moral of all which indeed, I fear, is, perhaps too trivially, but that the "thick,"
the false, the dissembling second half of the work before me,
associated throughout with the effort to weight my dramatic
be
sacrificed.
Much
diately therefore in
Dormer
or Peter Sherringham
was immeand
become
so
beautifully
(or, other-
storyteller,
Sherringham's his
Sherringham's, of keeping
it
in
its
high degree
his-
just as that of
much
service the
without
process insists
one.
why,
It is
are
we
we have for
It can't be in Sherringham's
an excess of Nick's. How on the other hand
be in Miriam's, given that we have no direct exhibi-
Sherringham's?
that altogether
can
it
inductively, seeing
interpretation of it
we
get at
it all
inferentially
and
absolutely objective
such an amount of exposed subjectivity all round her can so
dense a medium be a centre? Such questions as those go
thanks to which they are, I profess, delightful; goof the sort that makes answers posstraight they are
straight
ing
Miriam
is
visibly,
from the
first,
to get
itself
though
done in dramatic, or
which
scenic conditions
permit
move
of aspects, that of
sistency of the multiplication
Muse" from
it
all
far back,
and he was
in
making them
"The Tragic
due course
to yield to
ward Age,"
so in
"The
No
concerned
zV
90
made
(as
judged,
and
"prettier" concretion. I
had desired
for her, I
remember,
all
nexion somehow or other, in any free plunge of the speculative fork into the
The
late
I recall
less, verily,
An
by an acute friend
later
challenge of one's right, in any pretended show of social realities, to attach to the image of a "public character," a supposed particular celebrity, a range of interest, of intrinsic
distinction, greater
about us. There was a nice point if one would yet only nice
shall deal with it
enough, after all, to be easily amusing.
We
peramenta
same time
truth, that is
think
a superior interest
that of being
with
perfectly consonant
to
her impulse perpetually
perform and with her success in
a
touched imagination, a touched
of
result
the
and therefore
performing)
well as of the
pride for "art," as
charm
relation to herself
cast
on other
sensi-
a different matter,
Dormer's
which more presently; but the sympathy she, poor young
woman, very generously and intelligently offers him where
bilities still.
is
of
resented
him
anxious
mission of his father, to marry Julia Dallow in fine, a beautiwoman with a great many thousands a year.
ful imperative
under sharp
stress;
own:
is
She
is
and
write sympathy, write
must
they
would be capable of
she
what
<o
sacrifices
satisfy
material
asks of
He
may
own case,
be,
with his
his reality.
put
busy with testing himself and feeling
He
for an object,
woman
in question,
the other hand has asked everything of Peter Sherringham,
who has asked everything of her; and it is in so doing that
most testified for art and invited him to testify.
she has
on
really
With
his
93
manner
of her so prompt
in
and
all
probations
too rapid and sudden, though inevitably so: procgives
be
esses, periods, intervals, stages, degrees, connexions, may
leaving
it, is
easily
my
main
missed
points
so with absolute sincerity
if it fails
her as she
is,
pronouncing
it,
which he sheds
Where
her doubtless
sufficiently ar-
rogant scorn.
is
94
homage
where Sherringham
is
concerned
she
is
of her so
his
own
tration
superior logic, in which the very intensity of concento find its account,
was so
of an honesty so
much
Nick Dormer
attracts
no straw
and
it is
because, like herself and unlike Peter, he puts "art" first; but
the most he thus does for her in the event is to let her see how
she
may
it
has taught
him and
men
could
fondly suppose as
95
much
of the
book
"left
man
and above
all
of the actress,
it
a full surrender to
fect.
to
my
present
more
reflective vision.
It strikes
me,
alas,
that
he
is
anomaly over I come upon a reason that affects me as singularly charming and touching and at which indeed I have
already glanced. Any presentation of the artist in triumph
must be flat in proportion as it really sticks to its subjectit can only smuggle in relief and variety. For, to put the mat'
see of the
ter in an image, all we then in his triumph
as
to
us
he
back
he
turns
bends
over
is
the
charm-compeller
his work. "His" triumph, decently, is but the triumph of
what he produces, and that is another affair. His romance is
the romance he himself projects; he eats the cake of the very
rarest privilege, the most luscious baked in the oven of the
gods therefore he may n't "have" it, in the form of the privilege of the hero, at the same time. The privilege of the
96
that
is
only
whom
The
stored treasure.
away from
we
No,
ing
better, I
make
and
least
of recurrent
reference,
struck
97
me
and
insistent
again as con-
VI
PREFACE TO "THE
(VOLUME
ix IN
AWKWARD
AGE"
leaders
and
still
germ sunk
am half-moved
in
it
to leave
my
I shall
interest.,
of the quite incalculable tendency of a mere grain of subjectmatter to expand and develop and cover the ground when conit. I
say all, surely, when I speak of
as
the thing
planned, in perfect good faith, for brevity, for
levity, for simplicity, for jocosity, in fine, and for an accomo-
ditions
happen to favour
above
all
measure of which
The
buried, so that
ecstasy
when, on an
be possible in
own
adventure
I feel I
have
now
proceed to do.
in
its
don; it fell even into the order of the minor "social phenomena" with which, as fruit for the observer, that mightiest of the
trees of suggestion bristles. It was not, no doubt> a fine purple peach, but it might pass for a round ripe plum, the note
one had inevitably had to take of the difference made in
certain friendly houses and for certain flourishing mothers
by the sometimes dreaded, often delayed, but never fully arrested
coming
to the forefront of
99
some vague
slip
of a daugh-
ter.
from
for it in those
be
felt
whom
it
as a
about, I see
my experience paved:
save, I confess,
is
ing
wanting
This lesson would,
some grasp
of
its
final lesson.
appeals,
and
that yet,
if
must have
storyteller considers
its
it
because
The
it
making
acclimatised presence, as to
its
sible relations
loyal entertainer, cultivating fondly its posextensions, the bright efflorescence latent
and
it,
hale, in
its
superficial convenience resides in the fact that, though the relations of a human figure or a social occurrence are what make
such objects interesting, they also make them, to the same tune,
difficult to isolate, to surround with the sharp black line, to
frame in the square, the circle, the charming oval, that helps
any arrangement of objects to become a picture. The storyteller has but to have been condemned by nature to a liber^
of really amused and beguiled, a richly sophisticated, view
sense
for
a
fine
and
lations
them, to
inquisitive speculative
find himself at
These
are the
case, the
in the smallness.
particular advised use, had been precisely
I may say at once that this had seemed to me, under the
101
of recognition, the
good mark
a sudden, an
put about by having, of
to count
ingenuous mind and a pair of limpid searching eyes
9
of the "free
circle'
issue
leaves
its
true lover
and
be-
count them on
long unprovided. One could
the liberal firesides beyond the
abundant
allowance),
gers (an
of which, in a comparative dimness, female adowide
one's fin-
liever
glow
lescence hovered
its
disconcertment averted either by some master-stroke of diplomacy or some rude simplification; yet these were ugly matters,
102
remove her from the sphere of the play of mind; but these
were exactly not crudities, and even then, at the worst, an interval had to be bridged. "The Awkward Age" is precisely a
study of one of these curtailed or extended periods of tension
and apprehension, an account of the manner in which the
resented interference with ancient liberties came to be in a particular instance dealt with.
and
very
much
In
to one's appreciation.
circles
highly
civilised the great things, the real things, the hard, the cruel
and even the tender things, the true elements of any tension
and true facts of any crisis, have ever, for the outsider's, for
the
critic's use,
tinguished
which, more
struck
at
me
terms in the
dis-
name
moments no end
European
societies, it
relief
We
the inveterate
and so
intellectually
live notoriously, as I
suppose every
may still be said
compromise.
in an "epoch of transition"; but it
of the French for instance, I assume, that their social scheme
absolutely provides against awkwardness. That is it would be,
helpless
age
by
lives,
this
"good"
till
young
to be conceived
and
it
is
home more, on
man-
The
French,
all analytically,
have conceived of
fifty different
said,
As
practice,
The American
if I
theory,
think, that talk should never
ideal.
may "drag
become
it
in,"
would
be, I
French;
my tale)
is
less real,
this,
her-
dom
on the
it
send simplicity
flying.
Poor Nanda's
little
case,
and
once
its
am
to double at
considering
all
these
matters, I need scarce say, only as they are concerned with that
105
faculty.
storyteller
It
was
to profit in a particular
way by
My
known
to them,
"
to hear
them mostly
cry:
"We
made
adequately "slick."
can't
have too
much
far
of
back
it,
we
ever began to injure a book so< much as even the very scantest
claim put in for form and substance." This wisdom had al-
ways been in
it
had
at
106
loom
as
it
may be with
indeed
this can't
but
all
commerce
//
printed,
would
though
much through
reveal
so the
same
horror seems to attach to any typographic hint of the proscribed playbook or any insidious plea for it. The immense
oddity resides in the almost exclusively typographic order of
the offence. An English, an American Gyp would typographically offend,
and
that
me my
as well as
shone
her.
There gloomed
me my
warning,
provocation, in
of
to
the
this
I might emuwriter.
delightful
respect
example
late her, since I presumptuously would, but dishonour would
at
at
my
hand
in
admonished, that
it
is that I was at any rate duly
measures accordingly, and that the
hand round
I
took
my
manner
in
which
Gyp and, by
her
the
school.,
even,
moved
to declare that
107
least
it.
Let
me
my tracks
lest I truly
which
of organising dialogue
to-
"speak for
itself."
What
now
see
My
private inspiration
plan (artfully dissimulated, for dear life, and applied with the
very subtlest consistency, but none the less kept in secret view) ;
yet I
was
to fail to
make
book
suc-
when
come
my
way; in
spite
of which
the vision of a hundred bright phenomena. Some of these incidents I must treat myself to naming, for they are among the
of the degree in
comes back to me, the whole "job," as wonderfully amusdifficult from the first; since amusement
deeply abides, I think, in any artistic attempt the basis and
groundwork of which are conscious of a particular firmness.
On that hard fine floor the element of execution feels it may
more or less confidently dance; in which case puzzling quesIt
is
scheme
persuaded an author of the "saving" virtue of treatment. Being "treated" is never, in a workable idea, a mere passive condition, and I hold no subject ever susceptible of help that is n't,
tensest
and
committed to
architecture, to construction at
any
and laying
cost; to
across
and
not at
mere minor
as
he
feels
tests, so
token, to feel
For
terial
named
drew on a
plification
may
and
sheet of paper
it
circle consisting
of a
number
situation,
an
effect
my
possibly with
now comes
over me, that even anxious amhave but vainly attenuated the neat figure of
of the cabalistic,
my
subject in
itself,
to
had divided it, didn't they see? into aspects uncanny as the
term might sound (though not for a moment did I suggest we should use it for the public), and by that sign we would
little
conquer.
They "saw," all genially and generously for I must add that
had made, to the best of my recollection, no morbid scruple
of not blabbing about Gyp and her strange incitement I the
more boldly held my tongue over this that the more I, by my
intelligence, lived in my arrangement and moved about in it,
the more I sank into satisfaction. It was clearly to work to a
charm and, during this processby calling at every step for
an exquisite management "to haunt, to startle and waylay."
Each of my "lamps" would be the light of a single "social occasion" in the history and intercourse of the characters concerned,
and would bring out to the full the latent colour of the scene
I
in question and cause it to illustrate, to the last drop, its bearing on my theme. I revelled in this notion of the Occasion as
a thing by itself,
scarce
name
110
kinds
is
so to renounce that line utterly and do something quite different instead may become in another connexion the true course
and the
vehicle of effect.
fine rigour, of this special sacrifice (which is capable of affecting the form-lover, I think, as really more of a projected form
than any other) lends it moreover a coercive charm; a charm
as the appeal to it tests
powerfully to the touch.
that
grows in proportion
and
strains
it
it, puts
presented occasion tell
and
stretches
To make
the
weight
is laid
on
it,
but
difficult
enough
The
with
all
means
richly
and
The
moment
it
can loom
in
you have to be
self
and complex, and you cease to be clear. Rewith the clearness required by the infantine
of any public consenting to see a play and what
intelligence
becomes of the 'importance' of
Dumas
is
literary,
intellectual distinction,
have attached
what
'prestige'
of achievement, would
of the People,' to 'Ghosts, to 'Rosmersholm' (or taking also Ibsen's 'subtler period') to 'John
Gabriel Borkmann/ to 'The Master-Builder'? Ibsen is in fact
Enemy
112
moment
he's clear,
The
those he's most capable of, and by that choice he's known."
So the objector concludes, and never surely without great
profit
if
it
an absolute
can't pretend to
test.
The
Alphonse" develops
that
if
He
is
all
remember
rejoicing as
feels, I
ment,
I tasted to
may mean
in
fifty
largely
the perfect paradise of the loose end.
practised in English, is
The play consents to the logic of but one way, mathematically
loose end as gross an impertinence on its
right, and with the
the dangle of a snippet
surface, and as grave a dishonour, as
We
are shut
of silk or wool on the right side of a tapestry.
itaction
the
to cross-relations, relations all within
up wholly
no part
self;
of which
is
save of course by
of my
invoking the protection of Gyp, I saw the point
relations
conditioned
these
game all in the problem of keeping
I should, in emulation of life,
crystalline at the same time that
part
after
among
that
my
subject
preciable, or
appreciative, over-treatment.
me
thus in
114
ing, to
them
disqualifying
found the
its
interest I speak of
cally,
from page
to page,
was
as I
and the
detail is
would
disavowal of
certainly,
my
that this high consistency has itself, so to speak, constituted an exhibition, and that an important artistic truth has
brushed against that truth
seemed to
thereby lighted.
denial
of expansibility to any
in
our
at
now
the
just
glance
is
We
me
idea the
mould
of the "stage-play"
may hope
to express with-
itself,
and each as
related to each
and
to all
its
such joint or seam, to see the two discharged offices as separate. They are separate before the fact, but the sacrament of
115
a fusion, or
it
The
be, and all deservedly, pelted with any fraghis botch the critic shall choose to pick up. But
his ground once conquered, in this particular field, he knows
the artist
may
ment of
you
my
whole into
own
fell
purpose).
ally to bewilder
Prove
My
you are
you
lost
to be of
my
and
subject,
whole
result,
my treatment, prove that I have n't so shaken them together as the conjurer I profess to be must consummately
shake, and I consent but to parade as before a booth at the
of
fair."
affects
The exemplary
me, on
closeness of
present opportunity
ively and foreseeingly laid up against
for these remarks. I have been positively struck by the quan-
my
tity of
into
each of
my
illuminating
Occasions:
116
on
by
the
where the
picture of the assembled group at Mrs. Grendon's,
"cross-references" of the action are as thick as the green leaves
of a garden, but
none the
less,
as they
have scenically to
be,
loud colours
on the
table together
placed, as
be for a subject to
by over-treatment.
Bowed down
so long
having
my
moral; which is
and joy. And from this precisely I deduce
to the effect that, since our only way, in general, of knowing
is
that we have had too much of
jedtng that too
my
anything
by
much:
117
what we
however,
is
is liable
to fluctuate.
we want
the notation.
The
notation,
lack,
by the
fact that if
our
art
it
produces, to defer to the rise and fall, in the critical temperature, of the telltale mercury, it -tf iU has n't to reckon with the
engraved thermometer-face.
VII
sharp point:
its
virtue
is
all
in
its
all
designedly one
is
much;
first
is
happened
and art being
all
discrimination
and
which alone
it
is
con-
cerned, sniffs
it,
tible.
It at
to note
that
how, beyond the first step of the actual case, the case
his
grain of
constitutes far him his germ, his vital particle,
in
herself
loses
and deviates,
gold, life persistently blunders
sense
direct
no
has
the sand. The reason is of course that life
we
princely
however, that are meanwhile the charming study, with an endless attraction, above all, in the question
endlessly baffling
indeed
of the
method
at
ness, I
mean, of a
ested.
zeal,
among
the reflective
germ, and
mad-
sort, so disinter-
left
merely to her-
self in such a business, gives the case away, almost always, before we can stop her, what are the signs for our guidance, what
120
THE
OF POYNTON
SPOILS
general considerations
So
it
was, at any
rate, that
when my amiable
friend,
on
the Christmas Eve, before the table that glowed safe and fair
through the brown London night, spoke of such an odd mat-
was
at
hand while
121
of Fact.
The
full
demonstration of the
fatal futility
excellent,
was not, however, that this in the least mattered, once the seed
had been transplanted to richer soil; and I dwell on that almost
inveterate redundancy of the wrong, as opposed to the ideal
reason only of its
right, in any free flowering of the actual, by
would
really
lie,
the
and
on
little facts
of
two
at the
moment no
decent account.
Had
been asked
why
they were, in that stark nudity, to say nothing of that ugliness of attiude, "interesting," I fear I could have said noth-
meant "Well, /
seeing
all
for himself.
He
certainly half the battle; and this motive is his ground, his site
and his foundation. But after that he only lends and gives,
122
THE
SPOILS
OF POYNTON
motive, and can say to himself what really more than anything else inflames and sustains him that he alone has the
secret of the particular case, he alone can measure the truth of
the direction to be taken by his developed data. There can be
for him, evidently, only one logic for these things; there can be
him
his subject
is
Extravagant as the mere statement sounds, one seemed accordingly to handle the secret of life in drawing the positive
right truth out of the so easy
muddle
of
wrong
truths in
123
to be presented, they
my
awoke
me
at
touch
no doubt, with
I recall,
now
it
my
To my own
with an
the
to the short
exist,
sole impression
124
from
founded
moment
it
that
made,
is,
as
woe-
THE
fully gathered,
been present
was
to
me
SPOILS
OF POYNTON
that of length,
and
it
little
has
till
lately, as I say,
"long" thing.
to occur for
They
me
them
as the
move and
its infinite
inward
sea.
The
trained
and arching
ash, rising
ter-
aged more or
and
neighbour,
grudging
the
fact,
the
mainly interesting to myself I admit, that the rhythm of
earlier book shows no flurry of hand. I "liked" it the ear125
fc
such appeals, frequently questioned as to those of their productions they may most have delighted in; but the profession
of delight has always struck me as the last to consort, for
the artist, with any candid account of his troubled effort
ever the sum, for the most part, of so many lapses and com-
all for
was
to proceed
complacency, on these
it
tween
my
reconsidered lines, as
opera-box of a terrace
aidinghave
assisted
and
my
it
my
at
Fleda Vetch.
Fleda Vetch had surely been latent in
one's first apprehension of the theme; it wanted, for treatment, a centre, and, the most obvious centre being "barred,"
this image, while I still wondered, had, with all the assurance
For something
like
Things, always
battle,
middle
light, figured
and
constituted,
made
vivid, each character discriminated, and their common consciousness of their great dramatic part established. The ren-
by
126
THE
SPOILS
OF POYNTON
light of
the
and
constantly did have, wondrous things to say, their message fostered about them a certain hush of cheaper sound as a
consequence of which, in fine, they would have been costly to
keep up. In this manner Fleda Vetch, maintainable at less expense though even she, I make out, less expert in spreading
chatter thin than the readers of romance mainly like their
heroines to-day marked her place in my foreground at one
ingratiating stroke. She planted herself centrally, and the
stroke, as I call it, the demonstration after which she could n't
be gainsaid, was the simple act of letting it be seen she had
character.
For somehow that was the way interest broke out, once
germ had been transferred to the sunny south windowsill of one's fonder attention
character, the question of what
friends
should
individually, and all intimately
my agitated
and at the core, show themselves, would unmistakeably be the
key to my modest drama, and would indeed alone make a
drama of any sort possible. Yes, it is a story of cabinets and
chairs and tables; they formed the bone of contention, but what
would merely "become" of them, magnificently passive, seemed
the
My
would
though
as to
early stage,
my
the
main
all
my
once more,
too,
less of
128
THE
OF POYNTON
SPOILS
moment
"Why
From
beginning to
their relation
with those
who
ing their ravage without remorse; and Fleda almost demonically both sees and feels, while the others but feel without see-
ing.
who
free spirit
trast,
their
minister, at a particular
crisis,
con-
is
perhaps speak of
may
it
my
happens to exhibit in two
interest stand or fall by the tried spontaneity and vivacity of the
freedom.
It is
"A London
my
very
young
As
to our
briefly
Spoils," meanwhile, I
certain definiteness of
them
wash
of the
THE
SPOILS
OF POYNTON
are exactly of course the most "amusing" things to do; nothing, for example, being of a higher reward artistically than the
and in
there, I
all
woman
is
my point that,
by Fleda, and
thanks
to the position to
lat-
the dusk of disproportionate passion. She is a figure, oh definitely which is a very different matter; for you may be a
figure with all the blinding, with all the hampering passion
in life, and may have the grand air in what shall yet prove
to the finer view (which Fleda again, e. g., could at any time
strike off) but a perfect rage of awkwardness. Mrs. Gereth
was, obviously, with her pride and her pluck, of an admirable fine paste; but she was not intelligent, was only clever,
and
therefore
to us at all as centre
of our subject compared with Fleda, who was only intelligent, not distinctively able. The little drama confirms at
all
events excellently, I think, the contention of the old wisthat the question of the personal will has more than all
dom
ing surface. Fleda, obliged to neglect inches, sees and feels but
in acres and expanses and blue perspectives; Mrs. Gereth too,
in comparison, while her imagination broods, drops half the
stitches of the web she seeks to weave.
speak of classifying
If I
considerations,
this series,
London
Life'*
tales
illustrate
conflict of
under American
European
Three or four tried glances
suggest, however, no great harvest
social pressure.
to be gathered; so that the pictorial value of the general oppowas practically confined to one phase. More reasons are
sition
at large, as I
I
results,
all.
sort
equivalents that
the interest and the tension of disparity where a certain parity
may have been in question. Where it may not have been in
question, where the dramatic encounter is but the poor concussion of positives on one side with negatives on the other,
we
get
fishes
little
and
fowls.
132
THE
By which
don't
OF POYNTON
SPOILS
mean
was not
one time quite inevitably irrehad it nothing else to recommend it to the imagination it would always have had the advantage of its showy
surface, of suggesting situations as to which assurance seemed
easy, founded, as it felt itself, on constant observation. The attraction was thus not a little, I judge, the attraction of facility;
the international was easy to do, because, as one's wayside
bloomed with it, one had but to put forth one's hand and pluck
lacy, as I call
it,
at
sistible;
the frequent flower. Add to this that the flower was, so often,
quite positively a flower that of the young American inno-
"A London
down
Life" breaks
nise, as a contribution to
wildered Americanism.
have conceived
altogether, I
my
I fail
have had
to recog-
to
my
particular bewilderment.
human and
Wendover
himself
attest
to
all
the
way from
creature as she
clime.
The
her development, and with her signs and marks easily mistakeable, in London, for the notes of a native luxuriance. I recall
the emphasis, quite the derison, with which a remarkably wise
old friend, not American, a trenchant judge who had observed
manners in many countries and had done me the honour to
I 33
my
make
two
something quite
go
else,
gendered la-bas"
And
any
felicity for
a creature en-
think
by something
distinctly other
which was to be the effect designed for her an image the hard
rustle of whose long steps and the sinister tinkle of whose
multiplied trinkets belie the association invoked for them
positively operate for another. Not perhaps, moreover, as
to subjoin, that the point greatly matters. What
and
I
am moved
for
was.
that o
a charming and decent young thing, from wheresoever proceeding, who has her decision and her action to- take, horribly and
unexpectedly, in face of a squalid "scandal' the main agent
of which is her nearest relative, and who, at the dreadful crisis,
to guard against personal bespattering, is moved, with a miserable want of effect, to a wild vague frantic gesture, an appeal
for protection that virtually proves a precipitation of her disgrace.
THE
SPOILS
OF POYNTON
my heroine, in 1888, and the representation of the differences I wished to establish between
her own known world and the world from which she finds
herself recoiling, facilitated in a high degree
by assured
refer-
hold
thing
warm
Venetian voice,
prose.
all of which, I may add, I do penance here
awkwardness of that departure from the adopted
form of my recital which resides in the picture of the interview with young Wendover contrived by Lady Davenant
In the interest of some better provision for their poor young
friend. Here indeed is a lapse from artistic dignity, a confession of want of resource, which I may not pretend to explain
to-day, and on behalf of which I have nothing to urge save
In spite of
a consciousness of
the time.
settled
and with
this consistency,
make
as
tale
may
which my central
easily
a
was
not
scenes
an improvised
on
figure
party,
revolving
of
their
the
affair.
had
to
with
I might
do
own,
pivot
nothing
o<ut for himself,
interviews to
the artist
is free, surely,
is
mony.
my
of
My
momentary
failure to devise in
Lady
136
THE
SPOILS
OF POYNTON
play its part in my heroine's history and consciousness, without so awkwardly thrusting the lump sum on the reader.
Circumventions of difficulty of this degree are precisely
it
insoluble.
of
might well have seemed that the only way to picture the intervention on Laura Wing's behalf of the couple just named
was to break the chain of the girl's own consciousness and
report the matter quite straight and quite shamelessly; this
we were
my
all
recapture perfectly
the first jog of
of
my
again, in respect to
itself.
my
coast,
where the
table at
which
rium so vague that I wonder to-day how any object constructed on it should stand so firm. The strange sad charm
of the tearful Irish light hangs about the memory of the
labour of which this small fiction first published in two
numbers of "The Atlantic Monthly" of 1891 was one of
the fruits; but the subject had glimmered upon me, two or
three years before, in an air of
from sharp
companions
said all
under-tastes.
may
produce.
The
no
affluence of
good company,
it
her situation had improved, and the desert around her been
more or less brought under cultivation, by the fact of her
at last made acquaintance with her young unmarried
daughter, a charming girl just introduced to the world and
thereby qualified for "taking her out," floating her in spite
having
138
THE
SPOILS
OF POYNTON
of the intense
first,
little
is
reserve,
however
for an
and as the
story, to
my
sense
the
I think, to cite
examples with
still
139
more.
VIII
acorn; since
its
is
small
at
least
a tree that
germ might on a
first
handling have appeared likely to make for it. The accidental mention had been made to me of the manner in which
the situation of some luckless child of a divorced couple was
under
affected,
one of
its
my
parents
limited desire for its
the law of
father
and
step-parent,
its
from the
now
a story
recollect,
140
WHAT
MAISIE
KNEW
me
named
to
little
whole appeal.
an imagination touched by them couldn't
thanks to which it
help therefore projecting a further ray,
than the chance
less
not
clear
became rather quaintly
that,
The
light of
state,
and
ease.
that
vague
out
Sketchily clustered even, these elements gave
first appeal of a
the
forms
which
glow
pictorial
before
some innermost
one, in almost
postulate
it
become
T4I
To which
and penetrated^
of the fragrance.
higher
truth
the
young
life,
would
it
in the
way
early relation
would be exchanged
order
contribute, that
is,
tie,
from
tribution of a certain sensibility (if but a mere relative finethe prime cause
ness) to either of the new parties. Say
for the ultimate attempt to shirk on one side or the
and better still if on both, a due share of the decreed
burden should have been, after all, in each progenitor, a
making
other,
142
ance o
it:
we
mate the
its
step-parents, the
more
inti-
by the mere
web
of sophistication; the child becoming a centre and pretext for a fresh system of misbehaviour, a system moreover
No
themes are
originally picked up would logically flower.
so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion
of
life,
and
which
is
my
least
of
many
yond the
fact
that
sensibility of the
tagonist.,
amount
of
it
my
plan would
"no end" of
faculties should
call,
sensibility.
should have
end
should have of course to suppose for my heroine dispositions originally promising, but above all I should have to invest
I
my
as I turned
charm of
rounded
design;
it
itself
that matter, I
"Maisie"
large, for
no theme
that, at
me
my
its
development,
has n't signally refused to remain humble, even (or perhaps all
the more resentfully) when fondly selected for its conscious
144
WHAT
MAISIE
KNEW
the faint intelligence, or at the least attested by the imponderable presence, and still advertising its sense.
I recall that
my
first
view of
this
neat possibility
was as
might be conceived
to
have understood
to have been
able to interpret and appreciate. Further reflexion and experiment showed me my subject strangled in that extreme of
The infant mind would at the best leave great gaps and
that with a systematic surface possibly beyond reso
voids;
should nevertheless fail of clearness of sense. I
we
proach
rigour.
my
wondering
wit-
ness materially and inevitably saw; a great deal of which quantity she either would n't understand at all or would quite mis-
understand
be
and on those
giving
it
dl, the
To
lines,
only on those,
whole
my
task
would
to the question of
and appeal
to her, as
it
we
mark
of beauty;
and
have been
interested to find
this in spite of
on
an appearance that
at
moments
obscures
my
ment much
own comis
that
on
occasion, doubtless, seems to represent us as going so "behind" the facts o her spectacle as to exaggerate the activity
than she
herself.
theless required
me
figure
some
embalmed
little
spectacle
in her
WHAT
MAISIE
KNEW
another
scale,
another perspective, another horizon. Our busiis to extract from her current reaction
whatever
in
it
its so
expressing the variety of the
not only the extraordinary "ironic centre"
I have already noted; she has the wonderful
importance of
a
far
reach
of
her
shedding light
beyond any
comprehension;
child's values.
She
is
stuff
connexions
that
degree of being
"objectivity" (the
most developed
they have?
have wholly
so that
failed to render
it
all
all,
of our attention ?
by the play of her good
to
my
vision
unless I
concrete,
get
the thoroughly pictured creature, the striking figured symbol. At two points in particular, I seem to
of associational
recognise, we enjoy at its maximum this effect
interesting in
magic.
The
itself,
M7
which
interest
may be
constituted.
The
whom
he introduces
ignoble, that the friend to
his daughter is deplorable, and that from the commerce of the
two, as the two merely, we would fain avert our heads. Yet
Beale Farange
is
wrought hard, to the hardness of the unforgettable; the scene that is exactly what Beale
and Ida and Mrs. Cuddon, and even Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale,
would never for a moment have succeeded in making their
emerge and
prevail
vivid, special,
unredeemed importances
whom
mit her for twenty minutes while she herself deals with the
second husband.
The human
substance here
would have
life
to
his results;
to that
me
flourish.
to
Of
course
WHAT
MAISIE
KNEW
unpleasant confessed
ness,
is that, however
one may have "discounted" in advance, and as once for all,
their general radiance, one is disappointed if the hour for
him when
of
life
a considerable part of
in the
guise of that sapience. The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes
for
state too is
interesting
do the
the
more anxious
small vibrations, fine and shy and anxious with the passion that
precedes knowledge, succeed in being negligible: which is
doubtless one of
many
reasons
why
stirred,
on which
the subject
is
relief,
strong,
to
my
sense at
least,
the side
other advantages certainly aiding, as I may say for the expression of its beauty. The active, contributive close-circling won149
My
urchin of
"The Pupil"
mind,
as I perfectly recall,
which struck
me as abounding in aspects.
this vision, as
it
first
vision,
one of those guarantees of value that can never be recaptured. The sign has been made to the seer only it is his
queer affair; of which any report to others, not as yet involved,
has but the same effect of flatness as attends, amid a group
gathered under the canopy of night, any stray allusion to a
tled, is
shooting star. The miracle, since miracle it seems, is all for the
candid exclaimer. The miracle for the author of "The Pupil,"
any rate, was when, years ago, one summer day, in a very
hot Italian railway-carriage, which stopped and dawdled everywhere, favouring conversation, a friend with whom I shared it,
a doctor of medicine who had come from a far country to
at
settle in Florence,
happened
to speak to
150
me
of a wonderful
WHAT
MAISIE
KNEW
American
member
of
weak
pre-
it
as
for a
ing windfall
No
the spot,
little
Moreens;
I felt,
friend's relation
process
and no
Morgan Moreen,
saw
all
at
on
once
my young
my young
to a certainty,
minor
results; yet
agination;
We
mainly to
of
what
live.
it
to the front.
The
the
general adventure of
were
little
composi-
to
venient scene of a society that has passed away for ever with
all its faded ghosts and fragile relics; immaterial presences that
have quite ceased to revisit (trust an old romancer's, an old
have made sure of it!) walks
pious observer's fine sense to
and prospects once sacred and shaded, but now laid bare, gapto any appreciing wide, despoiled of their past and unfriendly
ation of it? through which the unconscious Barbarians troop
with the regularity and passivity of "supplies," or other promiscuous goods, prepaid and forwarded.
They had nothing to do, the dear Moreens, with this dreadful period, any more than I, as occupied and charmed with
them, was humiliatingly subject to it; we were, all together,
of a better romantic age and faith; we referred ourselves, with
151
WHAT
MAISIE
KNEW
Amer-
The comparatively
brief
but
infinitely rich
and
to the candid, children of the West, things admirably incongruous and incredible; but no story of all the list was to find its
just interpreter, and nothing is now more probable than that
every key to interpretation has been lost. The modern reporter's big brushes, attached to broom-handles that match the
height of his sky-scrapers, would sadly besmear the fine parchment of our missing record.
were to lose, clearly, at anj
rate, a vast body of precious anecdotes, a long gallery of won-
We
given in
"The Pupil"
is little
them
thing that makes for proportion and perspective, that conview of all the dimensions. Addicted to seeing
tributes to a
"through"
were, atmospheric.
second in order of these fictions speaks for itself, I
Its
think, so frankly as scarce to suffer further expatiation.
it
The
it
large,
course in these connexions one's especial resort, the office nearest one's own door, where one had come to enjoy in a man-
This
range of experience otherwise quite closed to them.
wonderment, once the spark was kindled, became an amusement, or an obsession, like another; though falling indeed,
154
WHAT
at the best,
MAISIE
no doubt, but
KNEW
all
the
critics,
with the
criticised
make
thing and
itself
advice
projects itself
Admirable thus
ing that
it
its
it
one's
thus on
many
things, while
on few.
economic
instinct;
it is
You may
curious of noth-
starve in
London,
gives
that idle faculty continues to abound
agination. That rash,
in questions, and to supply answers to as many of them as
all of which makes a great occupation for idleness.
possible;
To
up
practise
in Mayfair or in Kensington, our portrayal of the caged
telegraphist
may
little
monument. The
may
cast
up
as to
our way.
The range
of wonderment attributed in
tale to the
all wonder, for that matter, very much after the fashion of
our portentous little Hyacinth of "The Princess Casamassima," tainted to the core, as we have seen him, with the
with treasures of
but his strength so much less formed. The two little spirits
of maidens, in the group, bear up, oddly enough, beyond those
of their brothers; but the just remark for each of these small
exhibited lives is of course that, in the longer or the shorter
piece, they are actively, are luxuriously, lived. The luxury is
restricted
number of their moral vibrations, well-nigh unnot that of an account at the grocer's: whatever it
be, at
rate, it
that of the
My
any
makes them,
brooding telegraphist
ingenuity, scarcely
as
may be
156
WHAT
estimable
MAISIE
KNEW
that class, even though obscurely enough, of neglected interests and undivined occasions.
central spirit, in the anecdote, is, for verisimilitude, I grant, too ardent a focus of
My
girl's
detailed
phenomena
principle of cohesion.
The
action of
"subjective" adventure
that of
would seem
to present
itself,
wit
expected,
me
thing. But
instead, for
an
If I
chance
on the
founded
scenic consistency,
and knowing
little
more than
that.
To
read them over has been to find them on this ground never at
fault. The process repeats and renews itself, moving in the
all adopted. These finer idiosyncracies of a
form
seem
to be regarded as outside the scope of
literary
criticism small reference to them do I remember ever to have
light
it
met; such surprises of re-perusal, such recoveries of old fundamental intention, such moments of almost ruefully independ-
would doubtless in that case not have wayGoing over the pages here placed together has
ent discrimination,
laid
my
steps.
The
this fash-
true to
much
its
function, taking
as the fiddles, in
an
up
the
orchestra,
violins.
on ground
we happen
connexions,
this were the case with
them.
we feel, with
is
we feel it when,
in such tangled
go on
as if
IX
enough assuredly, but his discoveries are, like those of the navigator, the chemist, the biologist, scarce more than alert recognitions. He comes upon the interesting thing as Columbus
came upon the isle of San Salvador, because he had moved in
the right direction for it also because he knew, with the encounter, what "making land" then and there represented.
Nature had so placed it, to profit if as profit we may measure
the matter!
we
by
life
as I
ago; which
is precisely,
most to remember.
it,
a mixture that
The
on the
and
159
We
upon them,
they have at our disposal.
but without acting on their professions. The offer has been
too large and our assurance is too small; we peep at most
two or three of the chambers of their hospitality, with
the rest of the case stretching beyond our ken and escaping
our penetration. The pious fiction suffices; we have entered,
into
we
have seen,
we
and
left,
in Italy
we hang about in
if
all
vance to
I note,
rele-
drinking
deeply
in.
So
it is
at
any
my
rate, fairly in
old Venice of
one of
"The Aspem
Papers,"
earlier
Jeffrey
profess; and, with the ground of this desire frankly admitted, something that somehow makes, in the whole story,
for a romantic harmony. I have had occasion in the course of
may
self,
but must
tion
it
first refer
was immediately
more
the very first blush as romantic for the use, of course I mean,
I should certainly have had to make of it
that Jane Clairthe
half-sister
of
mont,
Mary Godwin, Shelley's second wife
and
of his daughter Allegra, should have been living on in Florence, where she had long lived, up to our own day, and that in
whether
had
luckily not
all,
had to deal with the difficult option; diffiby reason of that odd law which somehow
minimum
drama-
only wants
really take.
Nothing,
depended on my
delicacy; I might have "looked up" Miss Clairmont in previous
years had I been earlier informed the silence about her seemed
fortunately, however, had, as the case stood,
full
question of the particular sort of person I might have flattered myself I "found." I had certainly at the very least been
positively
would
was
should have
made
It
I
meas-
waking up sooner to
the question of opportunity. That item consisted of the action
taken on the premises by a person who had waked up in time,
I
in
him
in
was named
to
on the
162
was
my
ear a
it
remained
trifle coarse,
in a
man-
or at least
rather vague and obscure. It mentioned a younger female relative of the ancient woman as a person who, for a queer climax,
had had
to
be dealt with;
it
flickered so for a
moment and
then,,
as a light, to
great relief, quite went out. It had flickered indeed but at the best yet had flickered enough to give me
"facts," bare facts of intimation; which, scant handful though
my
my
more
distinct
we
is,
mostly
say of an etcher's
in
"state."
Nine
an
tenths of the artprogressive subject,
early
ist's interest in them is that of what he shall add to them and
how he
shall
them, that
as
speak of, had fortunately got away from me, and quite of their
own movement, in time not to crush me. So it was, at all
events, that
mere
essential
dim
if
my
make
con-
ceivable for her the fortunate privacy, the long uninvaded and
uninterviewed state on which I represent her situation as
defy probability
the air of the past just in the degree in which that air, I conme when the region over which it
fess, most appeals to
is far
away without being too far.
enough
hangs
we may
appreciable.
element of the appreciable shrinks just as the charm of lookanother garden breaks down when
ing over a garden-wall into
successions of walls appear.
The
still
be-
The one
partition
makes the
place
we have wondered
about other, both richly and recogniseably so; but who shall
effect of composition to the twenty?
pretend to impute an
between liking to feel the past strange
course
of
divided
We are
the difficulty is, for intensity, to
liking to feel it familiar;
the
scales of the balance hang with
when
moment
the
at
it
catch
and
them
loosely.
clearer to
it,
grace, for the backward vision, has faded, the afternoon darkened; for any time nearer to us the special effect has n't begun.
So there, to put the matter crudely, is the appeal I fondly
recognise,
effect," in
some deep
"special
associational force, than in a virtue more
intrinsic. I
pretend,
Since what
that there
had come
social facts
was any
though
greater wisdom.
cannot
to
picked up on the banks of the Hudson? (Only just there, beyond the great sea, if anywhere: in no other connexion would
the question so
pern
is n't
much
as raise
even feebly
projected him.)
It
its
localised,
but
thought
New York
as I
my Juliana
my
165
first
all,
saw
her,
was
thinkable only in Byronic and more or less immediately postBy ronic Italy; but there were conditions in which she was
ideally arrangeable, as happened, especially in respect to the
time and the long undetected survival; there being ab-
later
solutely
may
rococo, in
human
or
located water-steps of almost any decayed monument of Venetian greatness in auspicious quest of. It was a question, in fine,
am
know whether
me little or
that
it
my
critical friend
me
that I
now
find, I confess,
most
interesting.
comfort myself
come up
My
ward
friend's
at the
time and
after-
on
my
In which
so-called
who
persons,
definite
this
of
some
Mere
private
have put one's self at such pains for Miriam Rooth in "The
Tragic Muse"; but there was misapplied zeal, there a case of
Miriam is
pitiful waste, crying aloud to be denounced.
offered not as a
like the
be then Miriam's inscribed "counterfoil," and in what conditions of the contemporary English theatre, in what conditions
of criticism, of appreciation, under what conceivable Anglo-
Saxon
star,
might we take an
artistic
We are,
as a "public," chalk-
167
my
pages.
shall
fence
them
the
come
when
hour,
I shall
into the
world
carries
all
since,
obviously,
hadn't cast
I deal for
it.
our
The
American
early
charge being that I foist upon
annals a distinguished presence for which they yield me
within them, gracious heaven,
absolutely no warrant "Where,
were we to look for so much as an approach to the social elements of habitat and climate of birds of that note and
then just in the
plumage?" I find his link with reality
was that tone
What
tone of the picture wrought round him.
but exactly, but exquisitely, calculated, the harmless hocuswe might suppose him to have
pocus under cover of which
existed? This tone is the tone, artistically speaking of "amuse-
wash
represented
discussion but only a link, and flimsy enough too, with the
restrictive truth exactly
deepest depths of the artificial: the
which
contended for,
embody my critic's last word rather
may
of course than
my
own.
My
own, so
ther development
imputed
which so exposes the wrong and so conse*
168
My
if I
of high fancy is to be led back by it to easy and happy recognitions. Let the first of these be that of the starting-point itself
the sense, all charming again, of the circle, one winter
afternoon,
where
round the
(for all
hall-fire of a
the world as
on
turned,
if
I forget
night-fears, to the
ply,
and
still
The
neither
new
new
tap,
credentials
vouching for
for the
more
it
this
the
new
was
respectably
of a nature to rouse the dear old
little,
sacred terror.
form
169
at its best.
He
had never
made on him
as a
whom
a lady with
have been
friend's
old converser
only assure
him
of the
that
able by the promoters of a periodical dealing in the timehonoured Christmas-tide toy, I bethought myself at once of
the vividest little note for sinister romance that I had ever jotted
down.
Such was the private source of "The Turn of the Screw";
and I wondered, I confess, why so fine a germ, gleaming
there in the wayside dust of life, had never been deftly picked
up. The thing had for me the immense merit of allowing
the imagination absolute freedom of hand, of inviting it to
act on a perfectly clear field, with no "outside" control in-
170
of
was worth
I
its
playing, I
have noted
strikes
own
me
bat.
now,
of two
or
less
Hop
o'
of the
my Thumb
gems
and
Little
of the Brothers
Grimm
the long and loose, the copious, the various, the endless, where,
dramatically speaking, roundness is quite sacrificed sacrificed
to fulness, sacrificed to exuberance, if one will: witness at
The charm
of
is right
kept up.
Nothing
is
on and
from the
sadly compromised, however,
Then
flood.
into
stream breaks bounds and gets
of invention;
moment
its
the waters
may
it is
and crops and cities into their arms and wrenching off, for
our amusement, the whole face of the land only violating
of the course and the channel,
by the same stroke our sense
which is our sense of the uses of a stream and the virtue of
a story. Improvisation, as in the Arabian Nights, may keep
on terms with encountered objects by sweeping them in and
them on its breast; but the great effect it so loses
floating
that of keeping
on terms with
itself.
This
is ever,
I in-
me
me
affect
treme
sibility
as irresistibly prescribed.
freedom and yet at the same
To
with itself:
stream, in a word, on something like ideal terms
to aim
was
The
business.
definite
here
was
thing
that
my
at
yet to
The
merit of the
that
it
and highly emphasised and returning upon itself; as, for that
matter, Cinderella and Blue-Beard return. I need scarcely
add after this that it is a piece of ingenuity pure and siman amusette to catch those
ple, of cold artistic calculation,
not easily caught (the "fun" of the capture of the merely
witless being ever but small), the jaded, the disillusioned, the
fastidious. Otherwise expressed, the study is of a conceived
"tone," the tone of suspected and felt trouble, of an inordinate and incalculable sort the tone of tragic, yet of exquisite,
172
7o knead
the subject o
my young
friend's, the
no
Indeed
me as
that endeavour.
which
seem to
draw behind
see
it
reproach
made me by
a reader capable
evidently, for the time, of some attention, but not quite capable
of enough, who complained that I hads't sufficiently "characterised" my young woman engaged in her labyrinth; hadn't
endowed her with signs and marks, features and humours,
hadn't in a word invited her to deal with her own mystery
less children.
remember
and
by which
many
don't of course
mean
her explanation of
saw no way,
feebly grant
grudged inch
my
one of which,
precisely,
It
no
constitutes
own
as
much
it
of her
nature as
and
in-
of a character indeed, in
little
says,
'privately
make
her particular credible statement of such strange matters. She has 'authority/ which
n't have arrived
is a good deal to have given her, and I could
more."
for
at so much had I clumsily tried
For which truth I claim part of the charm latent on oc-
me
under the
ous, the deep. Let
place above all, however,
fiction
this
which
the
side
by
protection of that presence
of
its
of
choice
its
most to consideration:
meeting
way
appeals
were
its
not so grave: I
attempt to keep the
difficulties
all
reports,
mark
mobilities consistently impose themselves. Recorded and attested "ghosts" are in other words as little expressive, as little
dramatic, above
all
as
little
responsive, as is consistent
had to decide in
and having my
fine
between having
story
"good"
174
my
apparitions correct
that is producing
my
im-
speaking by book,
my
designed horror.
make poor
subjects,
and
Good
was
it
ghosts,
clear that
my
lot
Jessel are
and Miss
we now know
as
bility to any form of the pleasing pure and simple; they please
at the best but through having helped
to express
sub-
me
was
my
in the use
ject all
directly
them
it
made
of
and here
on reading the
tale over, I find my precautions justiessence of the matter was the villainy of motive in
the evoked predatory creatures; so that the result would be
it is that,
fied.
The
ignoble by which I mean would be trivial were this element of evil but feebly or inanely suggested. Thus arose on
behalf of my idea the lively interest of a possible suggestion
best to con-
my
imputed
vice,
175
To
the cited
illustration,
act,
the
the limited
round of badness
is
to
warrant them as
One had
seen, in fiction,
some
some
particular brutality,
some
particular immorality,
some
my
our,
accordingly must have been, that struck the proper
for
my right, though by no means easy, short cut. What,
light
in the last analysis, had I to give the sense of? Of their being,
it
What would
lation,
said to myself
and
that already
is
a charming job
his
and his
own sympathy
(with
the children) and horror (of their false friends) will supply
him quite sufficiently with all the particulars. Make him thinly
the
evil,
from weak
it
for himself,
176
vincing
have
this success.
How
can
even
I feel
when most
my
con-
calculation to
failed,
my
can ever
fail to
He
who
visits
his
may
be enlivened!
arrive with
(1900)
"The Liar"
members
at the first
Two
Faces"
(1888) and "The
of the considerable group of
though
should per-
family
its
and
its
proper representatives,
its
"heads,"
its
subdivisions
branches, its poor relations perhaps not least: its unmistakeable train of poor relations in fact, the very poorer, the poorest
of whom I am, in family parlance, for this formal appearance
in society, "cutting" without a scruple. These repudiated members, some of them, for that matter, well-nourished and substantial presences
as
plausibly, almost touchingly dissimulated, I fondly figure
standing wistful but excluded, after the fashion of the outer
whom
177
enough
whether (for
yet
will insist
Then
it
seed, of
my
their
sciousness in the
image of a
shell
However
for so
this
many
of
may
its
be, I
come
back, for
"The
Liar," as
my personal experience,
have been, immediately accountable.
fellows, to holding
it
may
For by what
else in
magnificent
duty by
as,
each,
have never,
balmed
for
evening
itself
em-
any aspect
of
my
mer
ranean
isles,
guardedly, but
among
Mediter-
discreetly, ever so
all expressively,
It
was
exquisite,
it
the thrilling question of the poor painter's tormented acceptance, in advance, of the scanted canvas; of the writer's rueful hopeful assent to the conditions known to him as "too
little
room
or so
at least I
to turn round."
how he may
The value of "The Two
the
liveliest interest
then
may
Faces"
by reason of which
have
Of
in
is
is fuller still)
more
appreciable.
X
PREFACE TO "THE REVERBERATOR"
(VOLUME xni IN THE NEW YORK EDITION. CONTAINING: "THE
REVERBERATOR/' "MADAME DE MAUVES," "A PASSIONATE PILGRIM," "THE MADONNA OF THE FUTURE," "LOUISA PALLANT")
HAVE gathered into this volume some early brevities, the
which dates from further back than any
tale comprised in the Edition. The first in order appeared
considerably later, but I have given it precedence in this group
by reason of its greatest length. It is the most recent in the
list, but, as having originally (in the good old days, though
they are as yet none so remote, of "pleasant" publication) enjoyed the honour of two pretty little volumes "all to itself,"
it falls into the category of Shorter Novels
under an inI
third in order of
its
compeers.
"The Rever-
which figured at birth (1888) in half a dozen numbers of "Macmillan's Magazine" may be described, I suppose,
beyond any fiction here reproduced, as a jeu d' esprit: I can
think at least of none other on the brow of which I may
berator/'
myself think of
it
me
for
And yet as I cast about
hospitality I thus give it I find
in other rich lights as well; quite in the
might seem, on so slight a composition; but I brave the extravagance under the interest of recognising again how the
weight of expatiation is ever met in such cases that of the
slender production equally with that of the stout by a surface
really much larger than the mere offered face of the work.
180
THE REVERBERATOR
The
surface, the
the
whole
in
itself,
represented clearly the best chance of life for the matter involved in "The Reverberator"; but also it is of the essence of
may
them
The
if this
had
failed
them.
whom
it
you or
rated?
whom
The
or of the Dossons ?
To whom
sciousness,"
all
together?
Parisians in general, if not to the girl's distracted young lover
in particular? It is easy, alas, to defy a clear statement on
this
I can't
181
say
whom
or
what or
bow: I
another string, a second, to
nately there remains
should have been nowhere, in the event o a challenge, had
for all its slightness, as
felt
my
not concomitantly
my subject,
a small straight action, and so placed
light
it
does, orders
concerned, exactly as in
just as
a case
we have
much more
seen
it
may
already have
been a bore.
After which perhaps too vertiginous explanatory flight I
feel that I drop indeed to the very concrete and comparaof some comof
trivial
story short, that is,
petent
at
my
origin
tively
critical attribution
any
rate,
am
afraid,
but watch
my
Who
question
nimbus of the
all but lost, of the miraculously recovered, chapof experience shall absolutely fade and stop? That would
be possible only were experience a chessboard of sharp blackand-white
Taking one of these for a convenient plot,
ter
and
squares.
to see
have but
it
up,
to
loom
with a
into
my
life, its
"Oh but we
too,
and pleading
pretend to
resist:
experi-
THE REVERBERATOR
Which comes to scarce more than saying indeed, no
that
doubt,
nothing more complicates and overloads the act o
retrospect than to let one's imagination itself work backward
ence?"
Some
art of
preventing
this
by keeping
application; and
would include the question of providing conveniently for the
officious faculty in the absence of its natural caretakers, the
that interference out
it
mind
were,
with-
back, lives for me again in the light of all the parts, such as
they are, of my intelligence. Or to express the phenomenon
otherwise,
the
still
more complacency
medium and
for
it,
the
first stir
in the
of
trifle
and confined supplies the link that is missing and makes the
whole occasion (the occasion of the glorious birth to him of
still another infant
motive) comprehensively and richly one.
come
to
Reverberator."
was
in a
neither in
Rome
183
tion"
an odd,
many-coloured
little
pinned
an ideal of
strictness!
among
charming
vided.
was
free
The
said, more or
been
charming stranger even these penetralia had not
her
shed
had
she
to
be
influence,
over
brief,
them,
closed, and,
she had gathered her harvest.
just as among them, not less,
She had corne, in fine, she had seen and had conquered; after
yet to the
which she had withdrawn with her spoil. Her spoil, to put it
a treasure of impressions; her harvest, as I
plainly, had been
have said, a wealth of revelations. I made an absence of several weeks, I went to Florence and to Rome, but I came back
in the spring
and
all
THE REVERBERATOR
many of them temples harbouring the very altar of
the exclusive; she had made free with them, pen in hand,
with the best conscience in the world, no doubt, but to a
treats,
effect of confidence
betrayed, and to the amazement
and consternation of every one involved, though most of all,
high
naturally, to the
The young
had made use
lady, frankly,
journalist,
less,
all
back to
or beetle, an embodiment of popping eyes, a whirl of brandished feathers and claws. Strange, it struck me, to tell the
truth, the fact itself of "anybody's knowing," and still more
of anybody's caring the fact itself, that is, of such prompt
ject thinkable
stranger's
all
young
affect as scarce
finer interest
but on the other hand, in its indirect way, flooded "American society" with light, became on that side in the highest
degree documentary. So it was, I soon saw, that though the
5*
perpetrated act was in itself and immediately no "situation,
it nevertheless pointed to one, and was for that value to be
stored up.
It
thingone
last,
make
couldn't
out at
first
exactly what;
till
at
and
designer's
mind was
weighted with.
my
time (as
it
points of view. Therefore I may say at once that if no particular element or feature of the view had struck me from far back
as receiving so
much
THE REVERBERATOR
innocence of the spirit of my countryfolk, by that
same token everything had a price, was of immediate application and found itself closely interwoven, that could tend
to emphasise or vivify the innocence. I had indeed
early to
recognise that I was in a manner shut up to the contem-
state of
uncanny spell, amid the level sands and across the patchless
desert of a single and of a not especially rich or fruitful aspect.
Here, for that matter, comes in one of the oddest and most
interesting of facts as I measure it; which again will take
much stating, but to which I may provisionally give this importance, that, sketchily speaking, if I had n't had, on behalf
no
aspects at
all.
I shall
it
on a near
now
negative sides were always at me, for illustration, for interpretation, and that though I looked yearningly, from time to time,
my
as the
alternative
but meanwhile
inevitable,
more
logical
187
more or
of their
less
stranded helplessness.
If
asked
why
call
a sea-change.
of
all
since that
is
what
it
conscious of deficiencies
and
values.
fictions,
noted. Suffice
it,
show
at large,
young
THE REVERBERATOR
something more widely significant?
larger,
What was
so
what
large,
altogether
so well constituted and introduced, she could have kept up
to the end (the end of our concern with her) the state of unawareness? Immense at any rate the service she so rendered
the brooding critic capable of taking a hint from her, for she
became on the spot an inimitable link with the question of
"Europe,"
collectively, as a vast
doll,
one might almost call it, of the artless venand mainly in the public prints, of European matter
originally gathered in under the supposed law of privilege enjoyed on the one hand and security enjoyed on the other. A
hundred good instances confirmed this tradition that nothing
in the new world was held accountable to anything in the old,
that the hemispheres would have been as dissociated as differ-
this inveteracy, as
tilation,
189
was
More than all was it striking that the "naturalness" was all of
American making in spite, as had ever seemed to me, of the
American tradition to- the contrary; the tradition that Europe,
much rather, had originally made social commerce unequal.
Europe had had quite other matters on her hands; Europe had,
into the bargain, on what might n't be newspaperised or otherwise ventilated, quite her own religion and her own practice.
This superstition held true of the fruits of curiosity wherever
whether in bustling archipelagos or in neighbouring kingdoms. It did n't, one felt, immensely signify, all
socially gathered,
harm was
done,
for supreme,
rare that
the blest
sole safety, as
it
life
air
of scant seconds,
it were,
by the sky-scraping clock, is as good for our sense
and measure of the vulgar thing, for keeping apprehension
down and keeping immunity up, as no life at all; since in the
as
what
can prevail ?
particular vulgarity,
Still
all
what individual
of which, too,
blatancy,
we are made
the beau-
shall
THE REVERBERATOR
denominate henceforth ignoring in the lump: than which
nothing is more likely to work better, I suggest, toward a finer
economy of consciousness. For the new beauty is that the
lump, the vast concretion of the negligible, is, thanks to prodigious expensive machinery working all ad hoc, carefully
wrought and prepared for our so dealing with it; to the great
saving of our labour of selection, our own not always too beguiled or too sweetened picking over of the heap.
Our ingenious young friend of the shocked saloons
finish her history
had
to
among
failed to
make
that she
new and
equally
I say,
the
still
was
some
it
fallible,
yet as
little
bedimmed
when I got my
criminal, her
me once more;
so that
precedent
right
and
commemorated in "The
Reverberator," and which dangled loosely from the peg supplied by the earlier case, this reference was much more directly
to the pathetic than to anything else. The Dosson family, here
before us, are sunk in their innocence, sunk in their irremedi-
be perfectly true; but on the other hand they could be perfectly true and yet too abandoned for vivification, too consentingly feeble to be worth saving. Even this, still, would n't mateyet
rially limit in
them
was
ex-
was
had
191
my
sub-
at large
ject-matter
Francina.
of
figure
which
was involved
fact
is
with
systematically constructed;
the clear sense that if I
me
for
whom I mean
the general
but displaced,
quaint sisterhood, perfectly distinguishable then,
and
disfeatured, "discounted" to-day, for all I know) as always
at
any
cost
at
is
worth
up my international department.
said already more than enough
have
practically
to convey they were what the American branch of that equathrew me back upon; by reason indeed of a
tion
saving, I
might
For
as well shut
-as
constantly
strictly
inhered in the
show itself.
In the heavy light of "Europe" thirty or forty years ago,
there were mo-re of the Francie Dossons and the Daisy Millers and the Bessie Aldens and the Pandora Days than of
the other attested American objects put together more
of them, of course I mean, from the moment the weird harvester was at all preoccupied with charm, or at all com-
all
minor
proach
made out to be.
it.
stiff fact,
quantities,
The minor
but in a single light that of promiscuous obscure attendance on the Daisies and Bessies and Francies; a generalized
little by little
crepuscular state at best, even though yielding
a view of
differences.
These adum-
brations,
sufficient tests
prompt
which placed him, when
The men,
all
was
said,
THE REVERBERATOR
brothers, playmates,
fathers,
deemably
ing
helpless,
with no fibre of
to his mystery.
No
approach
his "business side" really got near
incompetent, and
my
could
it.
That
is
where
was
turn
this in
glance to see how the matter was in such a fashion simpliWith the men wiped out, at a stroke, so far as any
fied.
in the
dentally turned
down,
this
whom
evidence,
"A
Passionate Pilgrim," written in the year 1870, the earliwhich anything in the whole present series refers
strikes me to-day, and by the same token indescribably
est date to
itself,
193
posted where
make him
out,
sneaking attempts
the American
fiction I
real.
To
"Madame de Mauves"
belong. As American as
it,
then
telling effect
He is
as in the furthest
under
all
and
coldest of
knew
194
THE REVERBERATOR
gotten thrill of a first sight of Italy, from late in the summer
of 1869 on; so that a return to America at the beginning of
the following year was to drag with
chain, the torment of losses and regrets.
it,
as a lengthening
The
repatriated vic-
intense question:
to a
Why
otherwise so queer a
taste.
again in motion.
As I read over
possibly
though
have
at this
stand off;
difficulty
me
for
them
sticks
and
at need,
out of them
consecrates
de Mauves" and
"Louisa Pallant" are another matter; the latter, in especial, belongs to recent years. The former is of the small group of my
productions yielding to present research no dimmest responsive
ghost of a traceable origin. These remarks have constituted to
excess perhaps the record of what may have put this, that and
the other treated idea into my head; but I am quite unable to
following year, in
with
this,
"The Galaxy,"
a periodical to
which
I find,
I recall
the toler-
goddess Chance
THE REVERBERATOR
which
I occupied a dampish,
dusky, unsunned room, cool,
however, to the relief of the fevered muse, during some very
hot weather. The place was so dark that I could see my wa)
many mild
In
this retreat I
crepuscular comfort pouring forth again, and, no doubt, artfully editing, the confidences with which she honoured me.
She again,
was what
might have
called
if
the
term be not arrogant, to hand her down, I yet win from her no
shadow of an intelligible account of herself. I had taken possession, at Florence,
others just
commemorated)
I
I
my best
for
it
my
subject
one February
while the light and the colour and the sound of old Italy played
in again through my open windows and about my patient table
after the
fore, to teach
be,
and
indirectly
197
XI
type
fictions of
the
to as "interna-
though I freely recognise, before the array of my productions, of whatever length and whatever brevity, the general
tional"
things
any painter of
ing from
it its
life
and manners
sense
and
its lesson.
Their author,
can and the distinctively European outlook. He might even perhaps on such a showing be representd as scarce aware, before
the
human
scene, of
antithesis at all.
He
is
far
from denying
that this one has always been vivid for him; yet
there are cases in which, however obvious and however con-
has been
or that of
LADY BARBARINA
not been the exhibited behaviour of certain Americans as Americans, o
Romans
man
come
to the
two novels
have
just
We
that the subject could in each case have been perfectly expressed
had all the persons concerned been only American or only English
If it
why
natural harmony, why the author resorts to the greater extravagance when the less would serve, the answer is simply that
the course taken has been, on reflexion, the course of the greater
amusement. That
when
itself
little
moment merely
more
and
as a portent
fresh
phenomena
involved,
199
must he
see
a vast
new
dom
On
of the dramatist.
this point,
however,
much more
is
that the idea could not have expressed itquite definitely been
self without the narrower application of international terms.
Barbarina" depends altogether on the
The contrast in
"Lady
immitigable Anglicism of
marked
projection of
this
New York
itself
more
so far as there
may have
enacted, not
become, while the
come
have
up on some
relevant, though their relevancy might
been such
story is
virtually
other basis.
But
that this
is
true,
always in
its
we
shall sufficiently
make
am only
struck,
we take them
indeed parenthesise, with the inveteracy of the general
over which my
I
ground (not to say of the extension give it)
in their order.
out, I think, as
I
may
lights,
my
LADY BARBARINA
its
legendary train. At the same time I pretend not at all to remy having had from the very first to see my workable
gret
world
and only
all
as
an unnatural mixture.
No
mixture, for
more simply
else,
blocked out aspects and combinawas at least not open to the re-
conditioned,
The
discussing them.
however,
is, I
range of vision
and suggestions
this is
ever
one with the very turn one's life has taken; so that what"gives," whatever it makes us feel and think of, we re-
it
gard very
much
as
imposed and
inevitable.
The
subject thus
pressed upon the artist is the necessity of his case and the fruit
of his consciousness; which truth makes and has ever made of
marks has in any case felt it, from far back, quite his least
stupid course to meet halfway, as it were, the turn taken and
the perceptions engendered by the tenor of his days. Here it is
that he has never pretended to "go behind" which would have
been for him a deplorable waste of time. The thing of profit
to have your experience to recognise and understand it, and
is
for this almost any will do; there being surely no absolute ideal
about it beyond getting from it all it has to give. The artist
it is
honest sense of
consequence, and, quite by the same law that governs the responsive affection of a kindly-used animal, in proportion as
is
confidently asked,
201
little
far
from
pearances.
elsewhere glanced at was
early-taken ply I have already
to embrace it) some considerable
(should I have the intelligence
occasion to appreciate the mixture of manners. So, as I say,
there would be a decent economy in cultivating the intelligence;
through the
sincerity of
which process
It
was
as if I had, vulgarly
appreciable
the finer
if
old rigours of
gence and a social fusion tending to abridge
the many-colof
in
must
I
admit,
spite
separation. This too,
have hitherto
which
in
such
of
oured
general,
rigours
sanctity
which
kept the globe larger, and by
immediate
immediate
immediate strangeness,
curiosity
beauty,
were so much fostered. Half our instincts work for the main-
what would
LADY BARBARINA
reconciled, domesticated, developed, o possibly
greater vividness than the quite other vision expressed in these
Lady Barbarina
and
dies
their
international, in a
may
easily
make many
of those of a
more
famil-
some
my
of
list,
its
in the present
companions; con-
sistently giving
precedence by reason of its greatest length.
The idea at the root of it scarcely brooks indication, so inevitait
had
ble
it
happy
but the
girl,
had acquired
and even amusing. And yet, withal,
as they apit seemed scarce to demand explanations. So far
confident on the American side. The
peared indeed they were
that interest had no call in life to go "outside"
representatives of
for their wives having obviously close at hand the largest and
choicest assortment of such conveniences; as was sufficiently
on the market. What American
proved by the European "run"
been noted? -save indeed alhad
run on any foreign market
It
all redounded to the honour
women!
the
ways on the part of
woman
and glory of the young
grown in American conditions
Custom
clearly
rarity
we had
more
it
documents.
I have only to add that I found mine, once I had produced
them, thoroughly convincing: the most one could do, in the
conditions, was to make one's picture appear to hang together,
and I should have broken down, no doubt, had my own, after
me as decently hanging.
a. superficial question or two, not struck
204
LADY BARBARINA
The
as a resultant of
many
short sure of
artist's
luck in face of
it;
such certainly, to
for
him
as
else
versed
so fine
and
so direct a consequence; his estimate, his appreciafounded thus on a vision of innumerable close
late in the
all
day
of which
at least as I
lights his
205
my
however; for
critical lantern,
it
in that tale
and
its
tory. "Civilisation"
associates will already pass for ancient hisand education move fast, after all, and too
likely to
all,
I make no doubt, will promote the inspiraand poets to come; but it may meanwhile
kinds of occurrences,
tion of observers
or in
of
Rome.
little
suffers,
more exactly speaking perhaps, that of the gentleconcerned with her, is no longer eminent, or at least
salient. Both she and her friends have had too many com-
cation, or,
men
and
"An International Episode," "A Bundle of Letand "The Pension Beaurepas." Or ratKer Indeed perhaps
I should distinguish among these things and, if presuming to
claim for several some hint of the distinction we may see exemits
congeners
ters"
plified in
any
first-class
What
I think, is that
206
LADY BARBARINA
tional cases, those that bristle
with
fifty sorts
social reference
illustra
now
So much, as
put
it,
a certain
fresh-
anecdotes
sion Beaurepas"
in glowing for
is
me with
yet,
newer
Geneva
all
with
was of old
all instinctive,
in face of the
"common
run" of appearances, the even then multitudinous, miscellaneous minor international phenomena, those of which the "short
a fairly
story," as contemporaneously practised, could effect
course always asked, but with the actual difference that the
race,'
him
fire
but really
affects
which he
can't choose, I
as
and
leaves
having for
admit)
him
to wait
and wonder,
little
more than
a conscious
or even,
as "Don't you wish that, on your side, you could say
for your own convenience, so much as guess?"
For there is no communicating to the diluvian presence, on
such a scale, any suspicion that convenience shall anywhere
consciousness,
self
hotels
visited palace
more
and
castle,
to see
them
bristle
with names of a
in isolation or in association,
208
LADY BARBARINA
old sweet Anglo-Saxon spell; they had their
when
all
was
said, to suggest
who
should say that any such ghost of a quiet conformity presides in the fulness of time over the interminable
passenger-lists that proclaim the prosperity of the great convey-
however,
on
we were mainly
conscious
up
to
few
may momentarily
call
them
self,
our
and
my
One
can
such people, who are obviously bedivination. They strike one, above all, as giving no
ways,
yond
my
account of themselves in any terms already consecrated by human use; to this inarticulate state they probably form, collectively, the most unprecedented of monuments; abysmal the
mystery of what they think, what they feel, what they want,
what they suppose themselves to be saying. There would appear to be to-day no slim scrap even of a Daisy Miller to bridge
the chasm; no light-footed Francie Dosson or Pandora Day to
o the
one must pray to be delivered. There are doubtless many possible views of such a dilemma as Olivier 's, the conflict of prothe man he likes and esteems and the
priety for him between
woman he has loved but has n't esteemed and does n't, and as to
whom
he
he thinks, befooled; in
not re-judging his case. But I re-
consequence of which I am
cover with a pensive pleasure that is almost all a pang the inthen feel it; to the extent of wondertensity with which I could
of the three persons coning whether the general situation
be shown as taking quite
n't
cerned, or something like it, might
an Olivier of our race,
conceivable
not
another turn. Was there
himself how at such
ask
to
moved
a different Olivier altogether,
was easy
210
LADY BARBARINA
ception of which the state of mind so reflected strikes
making, I confess, very ancient history.
me
as
Far away and unspeakably regretted the days, alas, or, more
on which one could walk away from the
Franf ais under the spell of such fond convictions and such deep
and agitating problems. The emphasis of the international
proposition has indeed had time, as I say, to place itself elsewhere if, for that matter, there be any emphasis or any propexactly, the nights,
when
make, in due
course, at
glimmering image of a
more
any
rate,
M. de
and I sent "The Siege of London" accordadmirable friend the late Leslie Stephen, then editor
fellow-feeling,
ingly to
my
5*
positions resulting strike my fancy to-day as so closely interfused that in reading over those of them I here preserve every
aspect and element of my scene of application lives again for
me. This scene consisted of small chambers in a small street
London of
211
The
big
human rumble
of Piccadilly (all
human
"great house," forming the southwest corner of Picand with its long and practically featureless side, con-
cadilly
its ample court, opposite my openeyed windows, gloomed, in dusky brick, as the extent of my
view, but with a vast convenient neutrality which I found,
soon enough, protective and not inquisitive, so that what-
brown tone
hung
This surface
it
masked
the very stage of the great theatre of the town. To sit for
certain hours at one's desk before it was somehow to occupy
in the most suitable way in the world the proportionately
ample
was
dramas.
When
went
of fiddles
"The
difficulties,
Parisian."
He
212
was fondly
an Anglo-American periodinvited
me
to contribute to
LADY BARBARINA
its
and
pages,
Rue de
la Paix,
(it
comes back to
to
less effective
at
the other,
its
community, however
with
indirect,
grace, to
its
where
visit
first
occa-
promptly,
if
one
really
213
interest of
may
also serve, in
ment
The
different.
thing
to a recognition
nature of the burden bequeathed by such rash multiplications
of the candid consciousness. They are splendid for experience,
each in its way an intensifier; but expresthe
multiplications,
for
it,
above
all
to be
The
that no
made
case remains,
representation of
life
worth
London and
one of
tity for
me,
I profess,
when
214
The
chair I
Washington had
LADY BARBARINA
not, I found, survived the ravage of nearly thirty years;
its
place,
nest of rickety tables and chairs, lame and disqualified utensils of every sort, and of smiling, shuffling, procrastinating
persons of colour, had exhaled for me, to pungency, the domestic spirit of the "old South." I had nursed the unmistakeable scent; I had read history by its aid; I had learned
more than I could say of what had anciently been the matter
under the reign of the great problem of persons of colour
fire
and
tears
another.
I
the other, the superseded Washington of the exquisite springtime, of the earlier initiation, of the hovering plaintive ghosts,
itself to a great vague blur of warmth and colour
and fragrance. It kept flushing through the present very
much as if I had had my small secret for making it. I could
reduced
215
my
a thing, a
slight
prose,
and
there hangs about the last item on this list, the picture of
"The Pension Beaurepas," the unearthly poetry, as I call
have been.
An
and
incredibly quaint;
me
prodigiously archaic
I so
wasted the precious treasure of a sense that absolutely primitive pre-revolutionary "Europe" had never really been swept
out of its cupboards, shaken out of its curtains, thumped out
its
mattresses.
further back,
XII
first
to introduce a
most
original "lines"
omen
all its
217
still
The
project,
spot
or at
that influence
first
an
to profit. If
his mirth;
guiling
The
ing of
perhaps even
be in charge of the
illustrator, his
to
unmistakeably intelligent, somehow invested the whole proposition with a detached, a slightly ironic and melancholy
grace. I had met him before, on a single occasion, and had
seen an example or two of his so curious and so disconcert-
wear
to
nothing
me
else in the
scribbler
this
turn of the
affair,
which
at
fully, that
any
intelligible
I
219
at
one
that
we
already
knew on
and effectively, the things; so that, for the delight of mankind, form might compete with form and might correspond to
fitness; might, that is, in the given case, have an inevitability,
a
marked felicity.
dimensional ground
beautiful
had been,
and
just lately, in
all
all
220
common
their reference
to the
make
troubled
artistic consciousness,
they
recall to
it
say,
to gather
fell to
221
eminence.
was reduced
On
my
all,
my
It
flame,
remarks is that
cause that guides it.
application of which
the studies here collected have their justification in the ironic
My
spirit,
making
name of the
we must take
general self-respect
honour
intellectual
for granted, there's a kind of rudimentary
at
least
of
interest
the
civilisation,
to which we must, in
pretend." But I must
reproduce the whole passion of my
cies that in
the
really
retort.
"What
speak,
enough to
distressing.
baffle
react
an admission too
accordingly fain do is to
of
any such calamity, to create the record, in default
222
it;
How
some
escape?
fine
One
symptoms of immunity from the general infection; one recognises with rapture, on occasion, signs of a protest against the
rule of the cheap and easy; and one sees thus that the tradition
of a high aesthetic temper needn't, after all, helplessly and
ignobly perish. These reassurances are one's warrant, accordingly, for so many recognitions of the apparent doom and the
exasperated temper whether with the spirit and the career
fatally bruised and finally broken in the fray, or privileged but
to gain from it a finer and more militant edge. I have had, I
admit, to project signed specimens
way
to achieve
of
Henry
name
the
St.
who
George; and
it
it
is
'aimed
at'
in the story
me to
his
less
observed reality
though
equally
done quite my
and not
best for
it.
It
was the
my
given
as
he can
grows
if it
salient
all!
as the
independent, of really indifferent, exhibitory egotism,
and
his
borrowed
harried and hunted Neil Paraday
practically
brandished and then fatally mislaid manuscript, I'm equally
irony, for
is
the very
life
and
is at
any
224
on
As
dote.
Here
exactly
is
a significant fable, I
My
illustrations
which
it
was
pass that
if I
"what gave
me my
helped myself to
it
deprived of him,
my
my
active
The
still
as a
225
for identification,
whatever
after
is,
all,
claimed by what
can but
n't,
view that so
have
in our conditions,
been "given,"
must reply
man
up among
money
exercise of
needs
which yet
of
isn't lucrative,
the satisfaction of
felicity.
critical spirit
its
restlessness,
breaking
226
fine
proveably
measurement.
is;
but the
a misadventure
don't
know,
confess,
that
it
of so slight
of course deplor-
as a waste of curiosity is
The
public
is
sought
is
straight
a part of the
precisely the
sistently
of
otic
strous countenance
itself.
Herein
resides, as I
anxious and easy interest of almost any sincere man of letters in the mere vicinage, even if that be all, of such strained
situations as
situations, to
mentary zeal; and this though that fine process be the Beautiful
Gate itself of enjoyment. To have become consistently aware
227
was
to
to
Hugh
would
fain call
it,
That strikes
rne,
when all
an ample indication of the starting-point of this parportrayal. There may be links missing between the
said, as
is
ticular
chronic consciousness I have glanced at that of Hugh Vereker 's own analytic projector, speaking through the mouth of
the
anonymous
scribe
attributive depen-
may
amusement almost always yielded by such recoveries and reminiscences, or to be gathered from the manipulation of any
string of evolutionary pearls. What I most remember of my
proper process
is
the lively impulse, at the root of it, to reinby some ironic or fantastic stroke,
so far as possible, in
to this
the public, or at the worst the not unthinkable private, exercise of penetration.
those rare
and
I couldn't, I confess,
be indifferent to
odd and
attaching,
much
mere
or less realised
itself,
for instance,
some
Vereker, in fine, by this travelled road of a generalisahaving noted for many years how strangely
and helplessly, among us all, what we call criticism its curi-
Hugh
is
"The Figure in the Carpet" exhibits a small group of wellmeaning persons engaged in a test. The reader is, on the evidence,
The
left
to conclude.
subject of
Yellow Book" in
beyond doubt,
to
much
to making it vivid. Yet it's none the less true that the
Frank Saltram of "The Coxon Fund" pretends to be of his
great suggester no more than a dim reflexion and above all a
free rearrangement. More interesting still than the man for
the dramatist at any rate is the S. T. Coleridge type; so what
229
and the
fancy.
new
my own
had
idea,
which
though, when
had assuredly taken the recorded, transmitted
required, to express
person, the
figures
itself,
set
of relations
image embalmed in
my
space serving,
But
this pursuit
common
laxities
would take us
far,
for.
We
new and
richer saturation.
In
it
gives out, to
this state it is in
due course
picked out and served, and a meagre esteem will await, a poor
importance attend it, if it does n't speak most of its late genial
medium, the good, the wonderful company it has, as I hint,
aesthetically kept.
for
it
It
new
has entered, in
fine, into
new
relations,
emerges
but its prime identity destroyed which is what was to be demonstrated. Thus it has become a different and, thanks to a rare
alchemy, a better thing. Therefore let us have here as little
as possible about its "being" Mr. This or Mrs. That. If it ad-
new
justs itself
with the
be
either.
230
life it can't
it
possibly
it
thing of fact
after
all,
noted.
on behalf of the
trol.
an
lights.
thing that
its
if it still
clearness
tion of
less.
to
memory,
seems to carry
rules here, or
still
is
itself
serves
and
such a complicated
by which
mean
if
XIII
WHAT
had
Coxon Fund"
and most
lately
is
no
published in "Scribner's
particularly to
true of
less
"The Middle
Magazine" (1893)
had
to squeeze
had been
to
do
it
over to
make
sure of
it.
say of
Years/'
"The
first
that recollection
it
the
To
get
number of
right was
it
perhaps
name, in which
my
better
still,
insane engaged at a
straitjacket.
critical
The form
of
moment
demanding "developments"
distinctions
232
doubtless speak
secret
However this
for exactly tracing deflexions and returns.)
was
it
as
an
an
anecdote
anecdote,
only, that I was
may be,
situation
here
little
should figure; to which end
determined
my
my
its
was
effort
of course to follow
fond formula,
had
much
it
as
from
its
as possible
centre outward.
may
set as
from
That
many
set in the
wood; so that
opposite may
the
of
contents
of my small
reboilings
after boilings
its
and
added pounds of
cauldron, after
its sort
in
which
gaged.
But
I recall,
by good
luck,
no
less vividly
how much
finer
One
wisdom
here, only
be so constituted that to see any form of beauty, for a particular application, proscribed or even questioned, was forthto
with to covet that form more than any other and to desire the
it exactly there. One had only to be reminded that
benefit of
so
shouldn't press
it
special in-
tion, before
him in fact
ashamed; whereby let him shirk
discriminate leaves
at
moments even a
little
issues
make
how
that emerges,
concentrated I tried to
apat the beginning of the
peared in a London weekly journal
a dim warm
"nineties"; but as to which I further retain only
I re-read,
hours.
summer
pleasantness as of old Kensington
that of a
aftertaste
mild
a
of
the
ever so kindly, to
promotion
to in
resorted
room
north
cool
in
a
certain feverish
it
pressure,
stray, rare
perception,
velopmental" enough,
dotic concession;
effect of
a small
doubtless a
more
and
yet
harmony
who
We
son and daughter, and yet had I believed the right effect missed
"Greville Fane" wouldn't have figured here.
been conNothing, by the same stroke, could well have
demned to struggle more for that harmony than "The Abase-
ment of
the Northmores"
234
capital.
These
it
strikes
me
duplicity: which,
however,
may
add,
was
since they
little
"The Middle
Years."
On
member
whom I
wise an
artist,
though
superficially
more
tragic;
up
in so
happy a per-
235
"How
not be
all sorts
of
good things in
"The
it
Ambient.
Elliptic, I allow, and much of a skipping of stages, so bare
an account of such performances; yet with the constitutive
process for each idea quite sufficiently noted by my having had,
for
admonition of such adventures as poor Mrs. Harvey's, the elegant representative of literature at Mundham? to such predica-
the grim
show
their
realities
that laid
away
as a tragic "value"
not
much
less
tenderly
to wait long to
become
active.
"Drama-
however,
there
into
it,
I find,
recommend
indications
is
must
wait.
The
was
life
all
tion
round
to be false
lady
spoils
credentials, so to call
them, bore
in the
upon a triumphant sojourn in Europe, long years before,
a dim
her
of
husband,
the
high scholarly reputation
hey-day of
observaown
of
time
the
at
my
displaced superseded celebrity
had been "much made of," he and she, at various
tion.
They
dote laid
good
up
slice
my
con-
morning
on which the
(this
was
little
by the
238
The
justification I awaited,
on
"good old" American days when the touching case was still
possible) of not having "been to Europe." Exceptionally prepared by culture for going, they yet couldn't leave their immemorial mother, the headspring, precisely, of that grace in
them, who on the occasion of each proposed start announced
her approaching end only to postpone it again after the plan
did the
sisters
who
sat
which they have always been fed and that has so notoriously
their appetite." Or something of that sort. I recognise
that I so but express here the "plot" of
tale as it stands;
except for so far as my formula, "something of that sort," was
opened
my
to
make
many
imposed
2*9
scale before,
at it
by the innumer-
the
costliest,
most
even
if,
indestructible,
its
having,
all sternly,
many
of
its
XIV
further to
view
241
was conscious of no
strain,
and above
of no
garly,
loss,
is really
practised
was
impossible for
any
critic
finite.
ask himself
loss.
The
no doubt,
neither to a definite
moment nor
by
at
no
in a sustained experience of London as to find him profitto let confirmably prepared for them, and yet early enough
Not
to this day,
round.
in
abundance
matter
gather
atory
in fine, has he forgotten the hard, handsome, gentlemanly
conface, as it was expressionally affected in a particular
in other years at
junction, of a personage occasionally met
one of the friendliest, the most liberal of "entertaining*
end of
all
my
but what could exactly better attest the power of prized survival in personal signs than my even yet felt chiH as I saw
the old penal glare rekindled in
him by
the form of
my
aid
memory. "We
to his
"Why,
"Indeed they
"and
it's
they're Dead,
are,
precisely
sir,
why
sir
alas,"
that
spirit;
II
ne
dead
because
I
they're
manquerait plus que
should n't!" is what I came within an ace of adding; or rather
might have come hadn't I felt my indecency too utterly put
in its place. I was left with it in fact on my hands where
cela,
however
was
anecdote
is
quite everlastingly, as
mild and
its
person, unencompassed by literary luggage or other monumental matter, had dropped from the rank at a great age and,
as I
was
my
surprise,
want of manners in
it
there
intervene
latter's
control.
good impulse as
was disconcerted
tion.
"I really
about Mrs.
make out
The
don't see
she's dead."
Again
felt
beautiful of reasons.
in question never appeared nor, to the best of my knowledge, anything else of the sort; which fact was to take its
other grim values. These pointed, as they all too
to the general black truth that London
accumulated,
largely
was a terrible place to die in; doubtless not so much moreplace
among
more
or
less,
Monstrous masses
are,
to possess themselves
by
this truth, so
and to be aware.
impervious to vibra-
no
an
would
conditions.
These are
easily,
one
is
many
for
it;
life
of
244
dead
is
homage
in such an
We
perforce fall
on the coarser
which form together the rank and showy bloom of "success/*
of multiplied contact and multiplied motion; the bloom of a
myriad many-coloured "relations" amid which the precious
plant that is rare at the best becomes rare indeed. "The
Altar of the Dead" then commemorates a case of what I have
called the individual independent effort to keep it none the
less tended and watered, to cultivate it, as I say, with an
exasperated piety. I am not however here reconstituting my
more
all
any
erably driven
Stransom
man
is that of
To
desire,
sible, like
of memories,
who
simply at
last
it.
amid
with
situation of
like,
245
As
poor
sensitive
was
to
my
have been,
me
old of his career, condemned to keep counting with the unreasoned prevision of some extraordinary fate; the conviction,
246
it
under this
fate,
least to divine
it,
in a word;
but none of
its
to see
as intelligible, to learn
it
it,
or at
He
stifles
his
leav-
lets
distinguished
everything go
perforce
all the while his general presumption disguised and his
general abstention unexplained; since he's ridden by the idea
ing
of
human
since,
the light under which he reads his lifelong riddle and sees
iiis conviction proved. He has indeed been marked and in-
this
more
may
must
so.
I cer-
in the thing
depend
tainly grant that any felt merit
on the clearness and charm with which the subject just noted
expresses
all
itself.
"The
If
here
more
ity.
first
at least I
I lay
It
was
my
can claim to
hand, for
my
gentleman
rough fate
have gone by book, here once
warrant,
"How
on
and
curiosity of the
whole English-speaking
race,
and
adding that here afresh and in the highest degree were the
conditions reproduced for that mystic, that "chemical" change
wrought in the impression of life by its dedication to an
248
Coxon Fund."
on
all this
make
and
fresh
employment
peat, I believe,
my
some sound
who may,
Jolly Corner":
or
less
for
me,
I confess,
find
on which the
rests for
me
on such a
even under
its
and whose
possible (at least to my wondering sense) the high denotements, the rich implications and rare associations, of the genius
249
to
which he owed
all so assertive
and
so
man,
illustrious
and undistinguished-
So
at least
for relief
suffered.
much
mystery:
constructed in
mentsone
two quite distinct and "water-tight" compartof these figured by the gentleman who sat at a
on
250
exist
his side,
depended on his
man
as a presence
and only to society, was he conon the return home and the
threshold of the closed study, by the waiting spirit who* would
flash at that signal into form and possession. Once I had so
seen the case I could n't see it otherwise; and so to see it moreover was inevitably to feel in it a situation and a motive. The
ever-importunate
murmur,
"Dramatise
it,
dramatise
it!"
much
support
till,
possibility
ply to "drama," if "drama" there was to- be, the precious elecontrast and antithesis?
that most accomplished
ment of
of
really
skill
and
and
grace,
taste
under
to be able,
stress,
truly single is
solus, to know at need the interlunar
to
be separate, to be
swoon
of
some
inde-
much
as
imputable to him?
Was n't
last
his potentiality of
ral opposition in
pair
of
against each other" the ingenuity
'The Private Life" reflects as it can.
I fear I
amusement in them
"The
my
printed
ing to expect
it;
"The Friends
"Owen Wingrave"
title
of
(1893), "Sir
"The
Way It Came"
Edmund Orme"
(1896),
(1891),
"The
Real Right Thing" (1900), would obviously never have existed but for that love of "a story as a story" which had from
far back beset and beguiled their author. To this passion, the
252
and he
will indeed
failed to let
it,
in
all
cunning, reader.
He
it, as on a strange
the
in
heart
man
of
his
for
benefit, a myspassion planted
terious provision made for him in the scheme of nature.
He
has seen this particular sensibility, the need and the love of
wondering and the quick response to any pretext for it, as
the beginning and the end of his affair thanks to the in-
make
it
or in other
interest appealing
most (by
its
to himself.
last is
tion whatever.
have a
subject,
253
he
for himself
most aptly
vibrates.
makes a
All of which
all
cord
all its
When we want
own.
to
wonder
there's
no such
wonderful
What
as the
its spell
strength,
when
it
saves
blows where
itself, is
wind
of
interest
it lists,
is
at the best
desolation;
(we have
and
"ghost-story," as
me
surely long
had
to recognise) another's
eyes, this
and
the
effectively
more or
working of the
of course
decently
success; a truth
ficult
spell is
254
interest
is
asked
how one
"likes" such
is
his
me
I
must wait
"rave" about
is
no
them
all
me
tell
your
subject,
you how
basis of opinion in
I like
vision, and no ground for that, in turn, without some communicated closeness of truth. There are portentous situations,
there are prodigies and marvels and miracles as to which this
communication, whether by necessity or by chance, works com-
adventures,
is all for
255
all for
ground
evocation
tible
call
may
hibition.
the
it,
field,
By which,
cryptic than
I feel
the
exclusively
main
is
way
by recognising as their
strongly made by them and
but too probably break down, I have
they are
felt,
some impression
interest
We
intensely received.
ever reasoned, when
mystification, in
sised the report
we
itself;
(it is
with
its
empha-
We want it clear,
indeed,
when
the question
is
when
we do
they come
they keep
all
is
absent,
accidents,
coming straight,
the attempt
is all
256
The
result is thats
to
my
whereby
we see
the effect
lost,
invoked
it,
"The Turn
I
I
have
have
of the Screw,"
"The
that of
that in art
which in themselves,
is
Which
The moving
amusement, our
and the human
thrill
we
make
The
human
conditions
is most
expect presented, only
extraordinary in that it happens to you and me, and it 's of
value (of value for others) but so far as visibly brought home
At any
it.
extraordinary
one
feels
on
rate,
safer
257
may
spirit engaged
most when I can think of it as engaged most deeply, most
For then it is that,
finely and most "subtly" (precious term!).
of
consciousness, I
as with the longest and firmest prongs
is above all that
there
it
and hold the throbbing subject;
me
grasp
I
my
did they
first
wake up
is
and why, in
what there might be, siace
we
try
258
special pride of
any
however
small, is to
chair within
my
slim
fluid,
may
Owen Win-
have found
is,
a figure
and a
my
claim to
make
peal.
any
right,
during so
few
any
sneaked
in,
seconds, so
much
lightness? However,
besides being doubtless of interest, in general, at the best, but
to the infatuated author.
Moved
Edmund Orme"
remember
ab-
myself up
presumption that this morsel must first have appeared, with
a large picture, in a weekly newspaper and, as then struck
why
upon
we say,
Orme"; one of these the bright thought of a state of unconscious obsession or, in romantic parlance, hauntedness, on the
part of a given person; the consciousness of it on the part of
some other, in anguish lest a wrong turn or forced betrayal shall
Not
to
be
my
ing
my
breezy air, the great friendly, fluttered, animated, many-coloured "front," would emphasise the note I wanted; that of
the strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the
261
fantasies that, achieving success or not, speak best even to- the
themselves which I leave it to do, while I
comment).
I have placed "Julia Bride," for material reasons, at the
end of this Volume, quite out of her congruous company,
though not very much out of her temporal order; and mainly
with this drawback alone that any play of criticism she may
seem formed to provoke rather misses its link with the reflexions I have here been making. That link is with others
to come, and I must leave it to suggest itself on the occasion
of these others;
if
which
it
has been
my
Such value
as
may
seems to me, on
produced. Julia
is
"foreshortened,"
262
admit, to within
The
lives,
they prevail at best by indirectness; and the bid for amusement, the effect presumably sought, is by making us con-
and respond
ceive
surmise, of the
movement
of
life.
But,
again and again, it would take me long to retail the refinements of ingenuity I felt poor re-invoked Julia all anxiously,
all intelligently invite
me
and
it
was
I confessed to
little
dim and
had had,
out to myself that my little frisking haunter, under private stress, of the New York public
scene, was related with a certain intensity to the world about
the note, so to
call
it,
of multitudinous reference. I
make
it
263
enough in a
in itself, that
comedy. What if she were the silver key, tiny
view of
a
whole
would unlock a treasure? the treasure of
social
aspects?
swell at its
put that question was to see one's subject
the
same
stroke, was to ask
mere touch; but to do this, by
could be made to
mass
one's self, alas, how such a majestic
with the up-town
tainted
all
turn round in a nouvelle. For,
To
though
debility
parative
it still
might be
and
all,
com-
How
expression,
to me, in the first place, but as possibly and perhaps even
of consequences and remoter
illustrating, in respect
minutely
and who
one of the
licence as to getting
rights, the large juvenile
"engaged,"
dis-
clinging to
it
common
it
pect in
it
some
264
it
much
general case.
What
been "gone
into."
no such
fine quantities
till
and
On
preter of
life
we
enforcement to
my
possibly
"Superadd some view of the so enjoyed and so typical freedoms of the mother to the element, however presented, of the
daughter's inimitable career of licence; work in, as who should
say, a tablespoonful of the
roused and
spreading a
and
to
and
stir
season
judgement
according
wing;
then set the whole to simmer, to stew, or whatever, serving hot
ness, of
tentative
my
early stage, a
much
bowl, than
had engaged
265
more
in-
Such
and a
must again
and the profits of
technical thirft
latent
little
lost,
interested squeeze, to
of.
So what does
of consecration of
this truth
what
amount
have
but a sort
my
predicament?
I clutch at the claim in question indeed, since I feel that without it the shadow I may have cast mightn't bear compari-
Don
rose
Fair.
266
XV
PREFACE TO "DAISY MILLER"
(VOLUME xvin IN THE NEW YORK
EDITION.
CONTAINING:
RIAGES,"
MEDWIN")
IT
was
in
Rome
science in the world, a good-looking Roman, of vague identity, astonished at his luck, yet (so far as might be, by the
pair)
all
at least
innocently,
till
all
serenely exhibited
the occurrence of
who
weren't
point a
want
margin
The
the sense of
Miller,"
dram-
result of
my
which
indited in
London
267
and
I remember,
magazine that had its seat of publication at
Philadelphia and had lately appeared to appreciate my contributions. That gentleman however (an historian of some
repute) promptly returned me my missive, and with an ab-
to the editor of a
comment
me
that struck
at the
it
ference.
If accordingly I
fully,
in
was afterwards
to
be cradled, almost
least,
bliss-
among my
productions, might approach "success," such success for example, on her eventual appearance, as the state of being
promptly pirated in Boston a sweet tribute I had n't yet received and was never again to know the irony of things
yet claimed its rights, I couldn't but long continue to feel,
in the circumstance that quite a special reprobation had waited
on the first appearance in the world of the ultimately most
prosperous child of
all events, this
in the eyes of
invention.
So doubly discredited,
my
was published
my
in
two numbers
of
late Leslie
at
great delay,
Stephen and
(1878).
qualified itself in that publication and afterwards as "a
Study"; for reasons which I confess I fail to recapture unIt
less
in
they
my
may have
little
poor
deed, one must have
felt,
Flatness in-
story; so
DAISY
that perhaps after
all
critical
as
hope
might eventually
extract a
shy incongruous charm. I suppress at all events here the appended qualification in view of the simple truth, which ought
from the first to have been apparent to me, that my little
is
water-steps of one of the hotels. The considerable little terrace there was so disposed as to make a salient stage for
certain demonstrations on the part of two young girls, chil-
dren they,
if ever,
those resources, in the general public eye, and under our own
as we sat in the gondola, drew from the lips of a second
companion, sociably afloat with us, the remark that there
before us, with
Millers.
Then
once betrayed
a figure of which
the only fault is touchingly to have transmuted so sorry a
type and to have, by a poetic artifice, not only led our judgement of it astray, but made any judgement quite impossible?"
protest, the whirligig, as I
itself.
it,
at
With which
and admirable
critic
turned on the
quite
by the turn
with
in mind,
the
had
begun
having
thing you
you gave
the thing you had had, to satiety, the chance of 'observing':
your pretty perversion of it, or your unprincipled mystification
of our sense of it, does it really too much honour in spite of
it,
%now you
falsified,
less,
as anything
itself,
charming or touching
we
al-
ways
and understand you. But why waste your romance? There
are cases, too many, in which you Ve done it again; in which,
at first no doubt suffiprovoked by a spirit of observation
with the measured and felt truth fairly
ciently sincere, and
to your incurable
twitching your sleeve, you have yielded
to whatever it is in you that
prejudice in favour of grace
makes so inordinately for form and prettiness and pathos;
not to say sometimes for misplaced drolling. Is it that you Ve
after all too much imagination? Those awful young women
at the hotel-door, they are the real little Daisy Millers
capering
that were; whereas yours in the tale is such a one, more's
the pity, as-for pitch of the ingenuous, for quality of the
answer to
couldn't possibly have been at all."
I can
than
more
with
all which bristled of course
professions
the
effect
to
them
chief
of
the
inevitably
or need report here;
course
of
was
little
pure
that my supposedly typical
figure
been anything else; since this is what
poetry, and had never
however slight a dose, ever directly
helpful imagination, in
I dare
the
for
As
makes for.
original grossness of readers,
but one which at any
I added, that was another matter
My
artless
say
rate
had then
of this anecdote, given to the light in a New York newsfor me in the mists
paper (1884), pretty well lose themselves
of time. I do nevertheless connect "Pandora" with one of
the scantest of memoranda, twenty words jotted down in
New York during a few weeks spent there a year or two
before.
as without
ceptibly unsupported and unguaranteed fashion,
other connexions, without more operative "backers," than a
270
DAISY MILLER
proposer possibly half-hearted and a slightly sceptical seconder; and had been answered to the effect that she was an
interesting representative of a new social and local variety, the
patronage-
Docked
of
all
natural appendages
and
and her
was
hers,
and
be
own
for
where they
shall find
founding
brothers,
marrying her
on her
own
behalf
being
271
am
What
obliged to recognise, was to struggle to the suris more to the point is the moral I at present
my
to that fact of
for
me,
and
me
to dilate.
York, and New York was, for force and accent, nothing
else worth speaking of; but without the special lights it
remained impenetrable and inconceivable; so that one but
all
unverified
presumptions,
mean, as to the
my own
already
made
early humiliation
272
my
one drop
that at
least
DAISY MILLER
blance of such a competitor slipping in at any door or perched,
for raking the scene, on any coign of vantage. That invidious
my own
memory of a not inconsiderably earlier season when, seated for several months at the very moderate
altitude of Twenty-Fifth Street, he felt himself day by day
to confess to the
as lacking, detrimentally,
a serious fe-
that
and
to
some of the
was to be sure of
more was this a conselive in some of the greater.
these, had ever struck one as
all
smaller,
the
273
when
nineteen twentieths of
it,
or in other words the huge organised mystery of the consumwere inexormately, the supremely applied money-passion,
answer
own practical
figures here
ably closed to him. My
such
of
them
in
in the terms, and
propositions
only,
perforce
as are constituted
in this
series.
by the four or
What
it
came
was
to
that up-town
comprised
would do
for me simply what up-town could and seemed in a manner apologetically conscious that this mightn't be described
as much. The kind of appeal to interest embodied in these
and in several of their like companions was the
portrayals
measure of the
that
ecstasy.
But a single
I so easily
alternatives of course
else
274
that I
DAISY MILLER
me, even though so imperfectly, by
Such
sentimentally, financially, or by
and if the fact nevertheless re-
artistically,
New
to face;
still
my
common
appeal re-
as "Julia Bride"
symbolise
my
sense of
a subtle patience,
my
my
my
shorter tales
seem to
see
it
having
still
hoped
as against
hope
that
would
suffer, I
mean,
to
glimmer
out,
occupies in
fact, to
so fondly
fine, that
something (out of
would turn up
275
if
if
which
all, alas,
on the
I refer
had
n't
publication of "Fordham
my reader to Volume xvi,
gleam had
proof
thousand words" of "Fordham Castle" for instance to meet,
or even with the easier allowance of space for its successor
to rise to, I was but to feel myself fumble again in the old
a certain larger connexion; I may also add that of the exceedthe packed
ingly close complexus of intentions represented by
it would take some ampler glance
few
those
of
pages
density
town
My point
is
that
my pair
of
little
up-
and
To
276
DAISY MILLER
couple bear the brunt of immediate appearance and are charged
with the function of adorning at least the foreground of the
general scene; they convey, by implication, the moral of the
at least its aesthetic one, if there be such a thing: they
fairly hint, and from the very centre of the familiar field, at
tale,
international
ladies, felt
by
young
me
ladies.
It
'$
as if the international
me
young
much, my
be a
bit
conjured away.
These in
dramatic poet's
its
wind of
it
in
my sails, "internationally"
my subject mightn't aspire
was urgently enough indicated which condition straightWay placed it in the time-honoured category; but the range of
choice as to treatment, by which I mean as to my pressing
tfie clear liquor of amusement and refreshment from the
to
its infi-
repeatedly referred to
it,
is
so interesting that it
can scarce be
made
human
strains ever, as
intensely, to justify that claim;
it
were, toward
or of
fact
a perfect economic
one must have a name and which has in its single blessedness
and its determined pitch, I think, a higher price than twenty
other clustered loosenesses; and just because full-fed statement,
the picture of as many of the conditions as posjust because
sible made and kept proportionate, just because the surface
iridescent,
Let
to close
field, in
more complacently
so called
nor from
garden of
DAISY MILLER
55
"unconventional
by the more
initiated
have thrown me
back in absolute dejection on the poverty of my own cateWhy hadn't so quickened a vision of the great
gories.
stance,
grasped
at in recovery of self-respect,
my
ground and
reflexion,
all
completely
namely, that the com-
was the odd case: the key to the whole of the treasure of romance independently garnered was the riot of the vulgar
tongue. One might state it more freely still and the truth
would be as evident: the plural number, the vulgar tongues,
each with its intensest note, but pointed the moral more
luridly. Grand generalised continental riot or particular pedanand self-contic, particular discriminated and "sectional"
to feel the thick breath, to catch the ugly snarl,
or of either, was to be reminded afresh of the only
conditions that guard the grace, the only origins that save
scious riot
of
all
soil
felt
none that determined even a tardy compunction. The monument was there, if one would, but was one to regret one's own
failure to have contributed a stone? Perish, and all ignobly,
the thought!
Each of the other pieces of which this volume is composed
would have its small history; but they have above all in com-
mon
mark my
that they
have called
it,
just
glanced
at;
my
at least partial
way
out
of the
American
from
however,
my
it
was
quite internationally
salvation.
variety had,
the
more
by the
predetermined
salient
effective repoussoir,
and
yet with
280
"The
Princess Casamassima/*
DAISY MILLER
*The Tragic Muse," "The Spoils of Poynton," "The Other
House/' "What Maisie Knew/' "The Sacred Fount/' practically, among the more or less sustained things, exhausting the
in which moreover I have set down two compositions not
list
included in the present series. Against these longer and shorter
may
call
He
and on
all
such
but a
born
civil alien,
mean
differently.
's
quite liable to say to himself, what would
under
the dead collective weight of those
perhaps become,
that
he
knowledges
may, as the case stands for him, often
Only
then, as he
just
now
who
has
may
n't easily
281
mark
of their
immediately to use
felicity.
which
is
the
of specu-
lation let
since
on the
me
confess to
pangs of
possible
filial
the successor, in
piety in face of
the given instance, to either lost parent, but perhaps more paroften inflicted on it by the parent
ticularly to the lost mother,
As
surviving.
but a question
my
was suggested
to
me by a briefly-reported
case.
To
begin
had her
choice,
or of a return to her
alike too cruel.
had
lost
so that nothing
was
left
282
DAISY MILLER
end. There
was
make "Drama-
than a heroine.
desired for
my
poor
lost spirit
the measured
"social" illustrations to
the best
effect,
and
handsome proposed, so
their
so
almost haggard competitors, originally, by every sign, of the best condition and estate,
but overtaken by reverses even while conforming impeccably
anxious,
so*
who had
ation of
it
at
a bound.
so thoroughly does
"Flickerbridge" indeed I verily give up:
its
cover
anecdote
tracks; looking
this highly-finished little
with
at me, over the few years and out of its bland neatness,
the
of
the
fact
in
positive coquetry,
the fine
inscrutability,
thing.
that preliminary, there could n't not
Wenham
came to
visit to Miss
picture of Frank Granger's
noted
the
of
cloud
whole
the
apissue from
thick-looming
and dismal consequences, involved more
pearances, the dark
in
our
more
celebration, our commemoration, our
and
to-day
of any charming impresunguardedly-uttered appreciation,
under
we
do
as
sion? Living
permanent visitation of the
rash word, any light thought
deadly epidemic of publicity, any
instantly, by that accident, find
may
a fashion poisonous,
our
subject that is to
practically,
and speedily
fatal,
to
its
its twin-sister,
lingered
idea,
on a while only
to begin, in like
man-
that to be
ner, to perish by inches to learn, in other words,
so much as breathed about is to be handed over to the big
all the effects of the vulgarstate after the cyclone of sound and
desecrated
trampled,
observed that, in turn, is to
fury has spent itself. To have
learn to dread reverberation, mere mechanical ventilation,
more than the Black Death; which lesson the hero of my little
drum and
ised,
284
DAISY MILLER
represented as, all by himself and with anguish at
his heart, spelling out the rudiments of. Of course it was a far
cry, over intervals of thought, artistically speaking, from the
is
apologue
I here glance at to
small projected example, lookall
unconscious
of
so
such
any
portentous burden of sense;
ing
but through that wilderness I shall not attempt to guide
my
dire truth
my
"dramatising."
Intervals of thought and a desolation of missing links strike
me, not less, as marking the approach to any simple expression of
my
"The
Story In
It."
tion
is that,
fruitless
even after
ingenuity to
What
produc-
my compositions
haunted, a graceless beggar, for a couple of years, tne
cold avenues of publicity; till finally an old acquaintance, about
for
it
it
is
still
that first
mistake not, to
pair.
perhaps "morbidly" to think
have
more than the magazine
been
may
in the event,
if I
I like
ing
why
specting themselves.
My
friend's reply
285
rally,
was
any passage,
to
taste of uncertainty to
Therefore the thing is, all beautifully, a matter of interpretation and of the particular conditions; without a view of
life.
tell
it,
As
for
286
DAISY MILLER
and in "The Better Sort" (1903), I have also accommodated here for convenience. There is a note or two I would
fain add to this; but I check myself with the sense of having,
as it is, to all probability, vindicated with a due zeal, not to
say a due extravagance, the most general truth of many a
story-teller's case: the truth, already more than once elsewhere
glanced at, that what longest lives to his backward vision, in
the whole business, is not the variable question of the "success/
hut the inveterate romance of the labour.
(1902)
afcr
XVI
situation
vividly
of a young person^ conscious of a great capacity for life, but
eariynstrfelSSi and doomed^ 'mad^mted^fo^'dier^iinLder short
'
ll
the condemnation
extinction as
many
It
stood there with secrets and compartments, with posand traps; it might have a great deal to give,
sible treacheries
but would probably ask for equal services in return, and would
collect this debt to the last shilling. It involved, to begin with,
the placing in the strongest light a person infirm and ill a case
sure to prove difficult and to require much handling; though
giving perhaps, with other matters, one of those chances for
possibly even for the play of the very best in the
are not only always to be invoked and cultivated,
that
world,
but that are absolutely to be jumped at from the moment they
good
make
taste,
a sign.
at the
young woman,
and the whole ordeal of whose consciousness one would have
quite honestly to assist. The expression of her state and that of
one's intimate relation to it might therefore well need to be
discreet and ingenious; a reflexion that fortunately grew and
grew, however, in proportion as I focussed my image roundabout which, as it persisted, I repeat, the interesting possibilities
and the attaching wonderments, not to say the insoluble my&thickened apace. Why had one to look so straight in
and so closely to cross-question that idea of making
one's protagonist "sick"?
as if to be menaced with death or
teries,
the face
Why
crown with a
sick, it is still
by the
The
process of
life
gives
way
them and
fighting,
so shine
men, among the moron the whole more overtly and more
grossly than women, and resist with a ruder, an inferior
strategy. I had thus to take that anomaly for what it was worth,
and I give it here but as one of the ambiguities amid which my
subject ended by making itself at home and seating itself
world have been his
quite in confidence.
With the clearness I have just noted, accordingly, the last
thing in the world it proposed to itself was to be the record
offered victim
dragged by a greater force than any she herself could exert; she
far back as contesting every inch of the
were they in truth but the soul of drama? which is the portrayal, as we know, of a catastrophe determined in spite of
oppositions. My young woman would herself be the opposition to the catastrophe announced by the associated Fates,
powers conspiring to a sinister end and, with their command
of means, finally achieving it, yet in such straits really to stifle
290
would meanwhile wish, moreover, all along, to live for parwould found her struggle on particular
human interests, which would inevitably determine, in respect
ticular things, she
still
as
much
promoting her
illusion,
together, for her, contribute vely, her sum of experience, represent to her somehow, in good faith or in bad, what
make up
woman as quite dazzlingly livethe great pang for her is in what she must
shall appreciate it the more from the sight of all
itself to
and that
give up
she has.
we
our young
if
One would see her then as possessed of all things, all but
the single most precious assurance; freedom and money and
mind and
and
her freedom
of
an "old"
New
York
may
not
now go
into,
and
this
even though the fine association that shall yet elsewhere await
me is of a sort, at the best, rather to defy than to encourage
exact expression. There goes with it, for the heroine of "The
Wings of the Dove," a strong and special implication of
of action, of choice, of appreciation, of contactproceeding from sources that provide better for large
independence, I think, than any other conditions in the world
liberty, liberty
this
would be in
selves deeply
particular
concerned with.
heir of
light
For
truly,
what
what a
suspicion of "swagger" in
So at least I could reason so I even
my
already,
itself:
this, that
292
in.
was
that a
young person
so devoted
and exposed, a
stage,
creature
with her security hanging so by a hair, could n't but fall someinto some abysmal trap this being, dramatically speaksuch a situation most naturally implied and imposed.
what
ing,
how
Did n't
mean when
could be to herself as prime subject. If her story was to consist, as it could so little help doing, of her being let in, as we
say, for this, that and the other irreducible anxiety, how could
life,
have named
existence
measure of their never not being, in some direction, generous and extravagant, and thereby provoking).
The
all
293
it is
still
more, to remain
secured
my
down
for
"The Wings
of the
breath in such pain, should not the elements have been, with
If one had seen that her
all solicitude, duly prefigured.
stricken state
was but
my
hang free, its obverse and its reverse, its face and its back,
would beautifully become optional for the spectator. I somehow wanted them correspondingly embossed, wanted them
inscribed and figured with an equal salience; yet it was none
the
less
visibly
my "key,"
New
as I
have
said, that
though
my
294
so absent.
I scarce
remember perhaps
insist on it
a case
I like
which the
possible, and
in
is
behind
the face of the subject, was to assert itself with less scruple.
The free hand, in this connexion, was above all agreeable the
hand the freedom of which I owed to the fact that the work
was
(as
we
here
two or
three
shorter fictions;
to be,
amid which
fine,
There
chill,
it
to lose itself.
accommodations he can
practise.
Those addressed
to "condi-
alien to the
of the
work
from a
soil
often wholly
ground
They are almost always
the fruit of another air altogether and conceived in a light
liable to represent within the circle of the work itself little
else
than darkness.
operate as a tax
craftsman which
to
itself.
when not
on ingenuity
likes to
295
feeling
my
divisions,
of fixing
successive centres
tions of the subject
them
commanded by them
as by happy points
of view, and accordingly treated from them, would constitute, so to speak, sufficiently solid blocks of wrought material,
to effect
is
volve, so that they have sides and backs, parts in the shade
as true as parts in the sun
these were plainly to be
con-
my
ditions, right
and
amount of
would require,
left,
way
at
present
is,
alas,
more
else,
general attempt
are numbered,
plan.
so I am perhaps nearer the point in saying that this last strikes
at present as most characterised by the happy features that
me
it.
them
all as I
in
words
He
it
or in other
an earnest
sounded deep
places, after
he has
at least
enough, heaven knows, for their brave position; yet the bridge
spans the stream, after the fact, in apparently complete inde^
pendence of these properties, the principal grace of the original
design. They were an illusion, for their necessary hour; but
the span itself, whether of a single arch or of many, seems by
the oddest chance in the world to be a reality; since, actually,
the rueful builder, passing under
bears
and
is
positively
The building-up
out,
with
it,
sees figures
and hears
being "used."
The image
was
of her so
all effectively
to
it,
297
was
little
to
have
missed,
pass
have enjoyed
so
much
adduce the
detail of so
many
reconsiderations,
one's
ting done. It was n't, after this fashion, by making good
dream of Lionel Croy that my structure was to stand on its
more than it was by letting him go that I was to be
feet:
any
and
the
is
We
my
reel.
no doubt, however
to recover, after
all,
our
criti-
simple statement
The
clearness
have
is
Book
obtained in
First
or otherwise, as I
its
subordi-
nate and contributive pattern through the associated consciousness of my two prime young persons, for whom I early
recognised that
tical fusion
should have to consent, under stress, to a pracIt is into the young woman's
of consciousness.
mind
is
2QQ
and
when
it,
it
and an
when
and
From
have never,
the
moment we
I confess,
proceed by "centres"
embraced the
logic of
any
su-
no breaking-up of the
register,
no
sacrifice of the
recording
aspect of the subject which we have our noted choice of treating either as picture or scenically, buc which is apt, I think,
to
show
its fullest
case, I can't
little
the
has
Its
at a crisis for
My
name them
300
ever
it
on.
rich
as
and
say). It is
by the scene
given
at Lancaster Gate.
moment
is
crowned
by my original plan with the quaintest functions, in fact reduced); just as Kate's relation with Densher and Densher's
with Kate have ceased previously, and are then to cease again,
to be projected for us, so far as Milly is concerned with them,
on any more responsible plate than that of the latter's admirable
at the
301
interesting
half-dissimulated despair at the inveterate displacement of his
of the Dove" happens to offer
general centre. "The Wings
I may cite (though with
perhaps the most striking example
it already performed) of my regular failpublic penance for
ure to keep the appointed halves of my whole equal. Here
the makeshift middlefor which the best I can say is that it 's
recall,
it
must
verily, I
critic bent on
think,
signal object-lesson for a literary
the
of
the
to
his
occasion
budding artist. This
profit
improving
whole corner of the picture bristles with "dodges" such as he
should feel himself all committed to recognise and denounce
form a
for disguising the reduced scale of the exhibition, for forethe value of
shortening at any cost, for imparting to patches
the
dimensions
as
of
air
an
in
for
dressing objects
presences,
his free hand
have
he
would
Thus
have.
can't
possibly
they
for pointing out what a tangled web we weave when well,
trifling
with our
interest for
them
earlier
reach
the book, not only no deformities but, I think, a positively close and felicitous application of method, the pre-
be, is that of a pair of natures well-nigh consense of their intimate affinity and congruity,
the reciprocity of their desire, and thus passionately impa-
so far as
may
sumed by a
as I
to set so
high a value on
it
prompt provision of
my
mere
lifting of a latch.
Infinitely interesting to
have built up
the relation of the others to the point at which its aching restlessness, its need to affirm itself otherwise than by an exasper*
303
young woman's
structed, for
Drama
whole
These
ture, the
to our
major convenience, as
it
Gate
is
replaced by her apprehension, her contributive assimimelts back into that accumulation,
reasons
my
had
defi-
nitely
pair.
is
it is
304
Densher's eyes
gently
marked
is
is
that I
of
had
it.
intelli-
So, at all
Here again
my
meet a supplementary
even though
two
women
ham
height, at
which
it
Stringham has to
Book
is
new
block mainly in
its
with renewed
time
all
profit,
on an
elastic
but a
and there a
little
by which
deep, as a
mean
test,
for
that having to
my
sound here
o method, I find
draws the "occasion"
basis
it
into tune
home
and
to
me, on
re-
of his
everywhere for the indirect presentation
a
little
but
I
and
note
main image. I
go
how, again
again,
of
exhibition
the
with
is
that
direct
straight
way with the
some
to
it
whenever
this
can,
for
relief,
process,
Milly; it resorts
some merciful indirection: all as if to approach her
thor's instinct
kinder,
princess
for her, the sounds, the
an unspotted
her kept easy
this
and other
ure leaves
me
taste,
306
XVII
NOTHING
sadors/'
that
is
benefit, into as
few words
Book
The whole
outbreak to
case, in fine, is in
little
Bilhani
as an independent particle.
Lambert Strether's irrepressible
Glori-
The idea of the tale resides indeed in the very fact that
an hour of such unprecedented ease should have been felt by
him as a crisis, and he is at pains to express it for us as neatly
crisis.
as
we
could desire.
The remarks
to
utter-
much
your
life.
old
what
37
I see.
What one
loses
one
that.
Still,
the
memory
of that illusion.
was
me
we
have the
to-day,
illu-
be without
it,
as
ing he
He
it
in conditions that
Would
my
is just my
action, not to say the precious moral of everything,
demonstration of this process of vision.
whole
Nothing can exceed the closeness with which the
fits again into its germ. That had been given me bodily, as
the
word, for I was to take the image over
usual,
by
exactly as I
spoken
happened
to
have met
it.
had repeated
two said to him
and to which a
friend
be imputed-said
of
art,
The
to
308
THE AMBASSADORS
the scene they sketched: these constituents clustered and combined to give me further support, to give me what I may call
the note absolute.
There
it
way; driven in, with hard taps, like some strong stake for the
noose of a cable, the swirl of the current roundabout it. What
amplified the hint to more than the bulk of hints in general
was the gift with it of the old Paris garden, for in that token
were sealed up values infinitely precious. There was of course
the seal to break and each item of the packet to count over and
handle and estimate; but somehow, in the light of the hint,
all the elements of a situation of the sort most to
my taste
were there. I could even remember no occasion on which,
so confronted, I had found it of a livelier interest to take
stock, in this fashion, of suggested wealth. For I think,
degrees of merit in subjects in spite
of the fact that to treat even one of the most ambiguous
verily, that there are
we must
merit and
What
it
comes
to,
its
doubtless,
is
and
dignity as
that even
among
its
maximum. Then
am
round," of
my productions;
any
of complacency publicly
fatuous.
I recall then in this connexion no moment of subjective
intermittence, never one of those alarms as for a suspected
hollow beneath one's feet, a felt ingratitude in the scheme
but to mock.
as I
me
39
at
moments by
a sealing-
up
of
face
its
as the later.)
Even
Madame
still
differ-
feel
it
seem to make
Nothing resisted, nothing
the
it
shed from any
sense
of
and
sound
in
full
this
matter;
out,
side I could turn it to the same golden glow. I rejoiced in the
promise of a hero so mature, who would give me thereby the
more to bite into since it 's only into thickened motive and
betrayed, I
serene.
accumulated character,
of
life bites
more than a
little.
My
his type,
ready to pay for it; and till then might, as from far back, remain hung up well in view and just out of reach. The comparative case meanwhile would serve it was only on the
minor scale that I had treated myself even to comparative cases.
310
THE AMBASSADORS
was to hasten to add however that, happy stopgaps as
scale had thus yielded, the instance in hand should
minor
the
I
or
if
not involved by
strict logic
then
all ideally
my
glimmering
its
maximum,
have nipped
the thread of connexion with the possibilities of the actual reremains but the happiest of accidents; his
ported speaker.
all
too
actualities,
definite, precluded any range of possibilities;
He
it
his
the white sheet suspended for the figures of a child's magiclantern a more fantastic and more moveable shadow.) No
privilege of the teller of tales
is
more
half-grasped,
sistibly,
being thus the respectable hint that I had with such avidity
picked up, what would be the story to which it would most
It
It
then
is,
it
essentially
it
may
more or less obscurely lurk; so that the point is not in the least
what to make of it, but only, very delightfully and very damnit.
ably, where to put one's hand on
In which truth resides surely much of the interest of that
admirable mixture for salutary application which we know
as art. Art deals with what we see, it must first contribute
full-handed that ingredient;
expressed, in the garden of
it
plucks
its
material, otherwise
when
life
no
"character," does
little
to do.
The
joys of find-
's all a
sedentary part involves
merit the highest salary
as
would
of
sorts,
ciphering,
that the chief aca
to
chief
accountant.
Not,
however,
paid
countant has n't his gleams of bliss; for the felicity, or at least
as
much
who
sequence of
all
AMBASSADORS
seem here to have
my choice
of narrating
my
"hunt" for
Lam-
bert Strether, of describing the capture of the shadow profriend's anecdote, or of reporting on the occurjected by
my
on occasion
latter
imbroglio
more
is
to strike
me
as really the
comedy has
it,
"led
up"
Where has he come from and why has he come, what is he doing (as we Anglo-Saxons, and we only, say, in our foredoomed
clutch of exotic aids to expression) in that galere? To answer
these questions plausibly, to answer them as under cross-examination in the witness-box by counsel for the prosecution, in
other
words
satisfactorily to
the same
"peculiar tone,"
was
him
so ironic
an
accent.
been noting "tones" all one's life without recognising when one
heard it the voice of the false position. The dear man in the
Paris garden was then admirably and unmistakeably in one
One
tould
one had
see
it
me
really
its secrets.
give up
worthy, from the very heart of New England at the heels of
which matter of course a perfect train of secrets tumbled for
They had
to be sifted
and
sorted,
and
I shall
and why, on
his hands,
it
the "position"
had turned
would
"false"
infallibly be,
these inductive
for everything
it is
ever,
(as
THE AMBASSADORS
other than this I have never been able to see
it)
as to
which
seem
it,
knowledge, what
be caught by us with
its tongue in its cheek and absolutely no warrant but its
splendid impudence. Let us grant then that the impudence is always
there there, so to speak, for grace and effect and allure; there,
above all, because the Story is just the spoiled child of art, and
light, to
it's
about
to
liable as it yet is at
we
because, as
moments
last
to
probably does
ourselves that
surance
an
so, in truth,
we
air
links multiplied,
had
I felt less
he best could. The false position, for our beworld belated because he had endeavoured
so long to escape being one, and now at last had really to face
his doom the false position for him, I say, was obviously to
little flurried, as
lated
man
of the
it
The
from the
first
of our
drama
legend whatever.
to become,
under
stress,
the
drama
blest imagination,
of discrimination.
we have
seen, that
It
had
moment
fell across
little
human comedy,
scheme does
down in Paris;
break
or less cynical persons annually visit the place for the sake of
the probable catastrophe, and that I came late in the day to
work myself up about it. There was in fine the trivial association,
pause no longer,
I think,
simply because
its
is
me
so ad-
vulgarity
revolution performed by Strether under the influence of the most interesting of great cities was to have nothvertised.
The
upon
which friendly
test
symbol for more things than had been dreamt of in the philosophy of Woollett. Another surrounding scene would have
done as well for our show could it have represented a place in
which Strether's errand was likely to lie and his crisis to await
him. The lively place had the great merit of sparing me preparations; there would have been too many involved not at all
impossibilities,
316
difficulties-
THE AMBASSADORS
In positing elsewhere Chad Newsome's interesting relation, his
so interesting complexity o relations. Strether's appointed
stage, in fine, could
in, as
charm; and where he would have found it, by the turn of his
mind, most "authentic," was where his earnest friend's analysis
would most find him; as well as where, for that matter, the
former's whole analytic faculty would be led such a wonderful
dance.
had made up
law
my mind
so as to
make
it,
in
its
my
The
thing was to be so much this worthy's intimate adventure that even the projection of his consciousness upon it
pass.
of
number were
axe to grind, his or her situation to treat, his or her coherency not to fail of, his or her relation to my leading motive,
in a word, to establish and carry on. But Strether's sense
of these things, and Strether's only, should avail me for
less
3*7
among
his
most
interesting motions,
the effect
and a
full ob-
ened
at
story-teller will
sacrifice if
need
be all other graces whatever. I refer of course to the grace of inare ways of signally achieving and ways of
tensity, which there
as
we
see
it,
all
it is n't,
when
That
interest fresh:
it is
a principle,
we remember,
essentially raven-
with no
ous, without scruple and without mercy, appeased
It enjoys the costly sacrifice and
nourishment.
nor
easy
cheap
in the very odour of difficulty even as ogres,
rejoices thereby
Thus
all
it
was, at
all
so speedy, definition of
out, all
my
bewilderingly not
young man
lost that a
though
so disobligingly and, at
new
after
his
coming
"save" Chad, and
gentleman's job
first,
so
in
nexion, prodigiously faces them, which has to be dealt with
a new light promised as many calls on ingenuity and on the
detail the
THE AMBASSADORS
scheme of consistency "gone in" for. As always
charm never fails the retracing of the process from
becter, of the
since the
point to point brings back the old illusion. The old intentions
bloom again and flower in spite of all the blossoms they were
to have dropped by the way. This is the charm, as I say, of
-the thrilling
ups and downs, the inand outs of the compositional problem, made after
such a fashion admirably objective, becoming the question at
issue and keeping the author's heart in his mouth. Such an ele-
adventure transposed
tricate ins
most
mistakeably there, takes on again an actuality not too much impaired by the comparative dimness of the particular success.
a real extension,
if
suc-
cessful, of the
figuration
was to square. But oh the cares begotten, none the less, of that
same "judicious" sacrifice to a particular form of interest! One's
work should have composition, because composition alone is
positive beauty; but all the while apart from one's inevitable
consciousness too of the dire paucity of readers ever recognising
or ever missing positive beauty how, as to the cheap and easy,
at every turn,
to the
how,
commoner
as to
immediacy and
vivacity, positive
319
facility,
and even
as
as its virtue
how,
were, to himself.
had never been so little so as on this particular occawhich reflexions flocked to the standard from the
moment a very early one the question of how to keep my
form amusing while sticking so close to my central figure and
constantly taking its pattern from him had to be faced. He
my affair,
All of
sion.
arrives (arrives at Chester) as for the dreadful purpose of giving his creator "no end" to tell about him before which rigorous mission the serenest of creators might well have quailed.
I
was
far
from the
serenest; I
agitated
sons
sity,
tell
could
n't,
save by implication,
of the drama,
him
which reaches
make
blest resource,
its
enough
one sub-
and
nail
other per-
blest neces-
320
THE AMBASSADORS
to do. I
had
relations for
him none
the
less,
by the mercy of
make him
tell
should
n't
his
him with
The answer
sweep.
surrender only
if
to
one
which
is
is, I
think,
prepared not to
and
object
a course
away questions
that one makes
make
at a
that
certain precious
discriminations.
much
stiffer
and more
to
salutary than any our straight and credulous gape are likely
in a
to
conditions
exhibitional
has
to
home
meet,
him,
bring
my
may
that,
had thus inevitably to set him up a conwave away with energy the custom of the
first care, I
fidant or two, to
merely
of Balzac, but
impatience, on the serried page
which seems simply to appal our actual, our general weaker,
"Harking back to make up" took at any rate more
of the
modern
digestion.
of the thing
when done
mind
in particular
friend
him
so eminently
we
well
know
since
if
we
with enthusiasm as
many
Gostreys as need
be.
The
material of
in this
respect exactly to that of "The Wings of the Dove," published just before it, is taken absolutely for the stuff of drama;
so that, availing myself of the opportunity given me by this edition for some prefatory remarks on the latter work, I had
mainly to
make on
its
322
THE AMBASSADORS
and the parts, or otherwise into the scenes, that justify
the preparation. It may definitely be said, I think^
crown
and
that everything in it that is not scene (not, I of course mean,
complete and functional scene, treating all the submitted matscenes,
ter,
as
by logical
start,
logical
discriminated preparation,
is
turn,
the fusion
ture.
speaks at once for itself, and by the time she has dined with
Strether in London and gone to a play with him her inter-
vention as a ficelle
is, I
Thanks
to
it
we
and
scenically,
scenically alone, the whole lumpish question of Strether's "past," which has seen us more happily on the way than anything else could have done; we have
have treated
we
three
immediate friends
my
to
where
is
normal and
and
distiller
entire, is really
of his
an excellent
The
323
of,
that
is,
afresh how many quite incalculable but none the less clear
sources of enjoyment for the infatuated artist, how many copious springs of our never-to-be-slighted "fun" for the reader
and
critic susceptible
plash as
soon
as
an
ment. Exquisite
of contagion,
may sound
their incidental
process begins to enjoy free developin illustration of this the mere interest and
artistic
itself,
Nowhere
more
vividness,
one was
all art is
to find the
must keep
all helplessly,
for
my
my
my
324
THE AMBASSADORS
and related question of expressional
and expressional decency.
I am moved to add after so much insistence on the scenic
side of my labour that I have found the steps of re-perusal
much
almost as
same
in the
failed to note
as this last
tion
is
change and
contrast.
One would
like, at
such an hour as
this,
go
deviation (from too fond an original vision) that the
ex-
though
bristle
to
form though they be, yet lay the firmso far at least as intention goes on representational effect. To report at all closely and completely of what
hand
"passes"
or
less
too
on
is inevitably to become
instance I allude to,
in
the
yet
a given occasion
scenic;
and
more
with
the conveyance, expressional curiosity and expressional decency are sought and arrived at under quite another law.
The
may be
at
ished
is,
of
its
propor-
whole economy of
redetermined.
The
him has
at
book, however,
important points to be
viewed, is touch-
critically
which
Mamie Pocock
suspense in the hotel salon, in our partaking of her concentrated study of the sense of matters bearing on her own case,
all the bright warm Paris afternoon, from the balcony that
overlooks the Tuileries garden these are as marked an example of the representational virtue that insists here and there
being, for the charm of opposition and renewal, other than
the scenic. It would n't take much to make me further argue
on
an
336'
XVIII
AMONG many
xxm
IN THE
NEW YORK
EDITION)
make up my mind
of
my
mode of treatment, on
the contrary, any superficial appearance notwithstanding, the
deed
to call this
as
my story,"
more
or less detached,
some not
sensibility of
some
though
thor-
strictly involved,
and interpretation of
it.
Again and
again,
on
re-
account of the
affair in
hand, but as
my
account of somebody's
and disembodied.
and the
figures intro-
fessed agent
as
is,
say,
its
effective interest
charmed painter's or
avowed the "minor" quality in the latter
observer's, a projected,
tive contact
my
however
and sensiI now reflect, must
for the process and
poet's
close
irrepressible ideal
than the
am
itself
may be
"The Golden
Bowl." It 's not that the muffled majesty of authorship does n't
here ostensibly reign; but I catch myself again shaking it off
and disavowing the pretence of it while I get down into
the arena and do my best to live and breathe and rub
shoulders and converse with the persons engaged in the
struggle that provides for the others in the circling tiers the
entertainment of the great game. There is no other partithan each of the real, the deeply involved
and immersed and more or less bleeding participants; but I
cipant, of course,
my
fondly, with
328
and makes
concerns us
registration,
interest us reflected in
many
may most
own, but
it
and of the
my
interest,
dreamed of
as
all
good causes
There
329
I take a moment only to meet a possible obshould any reader be so far solicitous or even attentive
to what I have just said. It may be noted, that is, that the
hand and
jection
Prince, in the
presides, is repthose
of
resented as in comprehensive cognition only
aspects as
to which Mrs. Assingham doesn't functionally- perhaps all
too officiously, as the reader may sometimes feel it supersede him. This disparity in my plan is, however, but superficial; the thing abides rigidly by its law of showing Maggie Verver at first through her suitor's and her husband's
exhibitory vision of her, and of then showing the Prince,
at least
the same stroke with the nearest possible approach to a desirable vividness. It is the Prince who opens the door to half
is
performed.
Adam Verver,
We
first,
and we see
like consistency
We
may
of
them
as a
330
were worth
and to work
my
genuity
itself
might
be.
To
more,
always
interest
such
So
was
out,
its
and the
by which, once
exactly to see
sincerities
much
mean
it
would give.
some only of the suggestions
of re-perusal here
the while, I feel myself awaited by a pair of appeals really more pressing than either of those just met; a
minor and a major appeal, as I may call them: the former
for
since, all
of
which
take
first.
by
my
associates in the
my
course,
Anything that
relieves
itself,
and scenes that are as nought from the mobecome more or less visible appearances,
this
for
manipulator of aspects to see such power
charming
as he may possess approved and registered by the springing
of such fruit from his seed. His own garden, however, remains one thing, and the garden he has prompted the cultivation of at other hands becomes quite another; which means
that the frame of one's own work no more provides place for
such a plot than we expect flesh and fish to be served on the
ator of figures
ment they
same
fail to
platter.
One welcomes
illustration, in
its
text in
its
spirit,
my
tinction
and
if
between the
in spite of
it I
writer's
of a
hunt for a
series
scenery of London; a field yielding a ripe harvest of treasure from the moment I held up to it, in my fellow artist's
company, the
light of
is,
of
thing in the book, and yet at the same time speak enough
It will be noticed that our
its odd or interesting self.
for
333
series
frontispieces,
while doing
all
fice to this
often flooded with light the question of what a "sub"character," what a saving sense in things, is
ject,"
and isn't; and that when our quest was rewarded, it was,
itself so
what
On
the question,
I make bold to say, rewarded in perfection.
for instance, of the proper preliminary compliment to the
first volume of "The Golden Bowl" we easily felt that nothing
only an image
distilled
It
would have
on
and
Charlotte's
and the
these terms long evaded us, but all the while really with-
334
London ends by
was equally obvious that for the second volume of the same
nothing would so nobly serve as some generalised vision
of Portland Place. Both our limit and the very extent of our
it
fiction
itself.
This
is
precisely,
lesson takes
me
too far.
To
my
same terms as the apparent and actual, the contemto become aware in other words that the march
terms;
porary
of my present attention coincides sufficiently with the march
quite in the
of
my
concretely stated,
without an
my
effort or
meets
him
halfway, passive,
335
Into his very footprints the responsive, the imaginative steps of the docile reader that I consentingly become for
tween
him
us.
all
my own
is
Nothing
in
tween
and
that to
which the
all sensibly, as if
It
exist-
the clear
was,
matter being still there, even as a shining expanse of snow
spread over a plain, my exploring tread, for application to it,
had quite unlearned the old pace and found itself naturally
question at
all.
No
momentous, as, to a philosophic mind, a sudden large apprehension of the Absolute. What indeed could be more de-
as
lightful
conditions?
deviations
all,
and
differences
might of course
they began
moment
with
bristle
interregnum, involving, as
flat
who
might
Not
really
least
dust, any washing of wizened faces, or straightening of grizzled locks, or twitching, to a better effect, of superannuated
garments, might let one in, as the phrase is, for expensive
renovations. I make use here of the figure of age and infirmity,
first-born of
on
as a descent of awkward
their respective casual cradles
from the nursery to the drawing-room under the kind
infants
appeal of enquiring, of possibly interested, visitors. I had accordingly taken for granted die common decencies of such
the responsible glance of some power above from one
nursling to another, the rapid flash of an anxious needle, the
a case
not imperceptible effect of a certain audible splash of soap-andwater; all in consideration of the searching radiance of draw-
as a merely
but
only in the
strictly conceivable;
it had never taken effect in any fair and
that
the
truth
of
light
re-issue of anything.
stately, in any not vulgarly irresponsible
barbarous injunction,
it was easy to see that any such apologetic suppression as that of the "altogether," any such admission as that of
a single dab of the soap, left the door very much ajar. Any
Therefore
repeat, at
none the
frankly to a test
in other
and from
word.
To
my
revise
is
338
more nor
which means
less
than to
re-
read
it.
proved
What
to
and
be but one
this
an
effort
but at the
first
blush.
it
me
to this
honourably expressed
ent Edition
it;
in the pres-
at last
I dare say
admir-
go
history of this effect
of experience; the history, in other words, of the growth of the
immense array of terms, perceptional and expressional, that,
ably difficult, to
into
comes back
to, for
the maturer
mind granting
of course, to
mind
begin with, a
it:
the
how and
life
seems involved in
whole of
it
339
and re-enjoyed
the matter
itself
and
left it
out)
yet for
am
to retrace the
of the things deepest in us. The "taste" of the poet is, at bottom and so far as the poet in him prevails over everything
else, his active
keep one's
sense of
hand on
life:
it is
in accordance with
to
hold the
which truth to
the whole
silver clue to
of consenting re-perusal; as has again and again publicly befallen him, to our no small edification, on occasions within
when
it is
clear to the
most limited
we
give
it
may
is
when
is n't
god
340
ter in
attests quite
The
blest
good
ingly responsive to
pass with
me
stuff, sitting
new
a delightful bargain,
possible
as
I
my original passage. This by itself introduced the charm of suspense: what would the operative terms,
in the given case, prove, under criticism, to have been a series
of waiting satisfactions or an array of waiting misfits? The
misfits had but to be positive and concordant, in the special
acter of the tracks of
two
sides of a
show
substitutes.
But
couldn't at
all,
chances and changes and proportions; they could but show for
what they were as I went; criticism after the fact was to find in
them arrests and surprises, emotions alike of disappointment
and
of elation:
all
The
rate at
interposed, to
this
make any
became, to
one at
times
all
quite marvelled
such a developed difference of measure as to what might and
what might n't constitute, all round, a due decency of "renmost aware of asking myself,
dering." What I have been
how writers, on such occasions of "revision," arresistance to the confident assault of the
successful
rive at that
in the great majority of examples
which
new
however,
is
appears
reading
any
so that ia short
we
shall
never guess,
whom
its
think, the
colour
working
and scent stir the
but as immediately to be assimilated. Failing our divinafor the simtion, too, we shall apparently not otherwise learn,
air
don't really
effect either of
at least they
life
do so
to the
of a past
com-
342
even
may
lie
down
beside their
work
and on system stopped their ears, their eyes and even their very
noses. This latter heroic policy I find myself glancing at,
however, to wonder in what particular cases failing, as I
say, all the really confessed it can have been applied. The
actual non-revisionists (on any terms) are of course numerous enough, and with plenty to say for themselves their faith,
clearly, is great, their lot serene and their peace, above all,
equally protected and undisturbed. But the tantalising image
;
of the revisionist
visionist,
who
is n't
inconsequent and
one, the partial, the piecemeal reinsincere, this obscure and de-
why assume
that
we
we
are
absolutely forced?
If I turn for relief and contrast to
once encounter
posite I at
it,
re-assaulted
nels,
all
or
finer chan-
had on the
other ceased to press forward. His case has equal mass and
authority
and beneath
its
We
my
my
because of
its
former ground,
still
constant refrain
humming through
re-write,
only one could do better justice to the
crude
of
surface, the poor morsels of consciouslypatches
decent matter that catch one's eye with their rueful reproach
one could
if
its
superlative as well as
its
This sharpness of appeal, the claim for exemplary damages, or at least for poetic justice, was reduced to
nothing, on the other hand, in presence of the altogether
better literary manners of "The Ambassadors" and "The
their plaint.
Golden Bowl"
list I
"The
"The
Portrait of a
Lady" and
of good intentions baffled by a treacherous vehicle, an expertdream the whole thing over as I
went
hope
as I read; and,
that,
some
still
bathing
it,
so to speak, in that
trophes
and
critic's
medium,
intelligence
344
and gild them over at least for readers, however few, at all
curious of questions of air and form. Nothing even at this
point, and in these quite final remarks, I confess, could strike
me as more pertinent than with a great wealth of marginto attempt to scatter here a few gleams of the light in which
some of
visions have all sturdily and complacently repeated
my
and others have, according to their kind and law, all joyously
and blushingly renewed themselves. These have doubtless both
been ways of remaining unshamed; though, for myself, on the
whole, as I seem to make out, the interest of the watched renewal has been
livelier
affair
been
am most moved
to ask,
my
The
ideally
is for him to
multiply in any
the possible sources of entertainment or,
handsome way
given connexion
all
more
my
visibilities
take
them
to the
utmost
many
to feel
see the
We
mon
phrase, "sold"
is,
in the com-
atically
part,
heads, least of
fails to
all
swindled
state
when
it
fails
We talk
whose
here, naturally, not of non-poetic forms, but of those
is addressed to the imagination, to the spiritual
bid
highest
and the
aesthetic vision,
the
346
lately
it
reward
as
chance and
which
its
much
it
as it will
can never honestly be indifferent, by not having so aras to owe the flower of its effect to the act and
itself
ranged
it
then
where in
this
any imaged
that I have
found revision
by
my
my
way of abiding and showing and testifyour innumerable acts, are no arbitrary, no
ing,
and
so,
among
senseless separations.
The more we
we
exactly and responsibly and interminably to do them. Our expression of them, and the terms on which we understand that,
belong as nearly to our conduct and our life as every other fea-
ture of our freedom; these things yield in fact some of its most
exquisite material to the religion of doing. More than that, our
literary
acts, that,
347
and reference
may make
almost anything
we
to us,
like.
we will or no,
over
forget and disown and hand
to
We
condemned, in
abandon and outlive, to
are
to desolation,
many
vital or
We
them
is essentially
traceable,
and in
Our
re-
artist. It rests
altogether
with himself not to break with his values, not to "give away"
his importances. Not to be disconnected, for the tradition of
behaviour, he has but to feel that he is not; by his lightest touch
the whole chain of relation
Thus
if
he
is
and
responsibility is reconstituted.
scarce, by his own measure,
which means
for
perpetually
consent to
criticism.
its
appearing in undress
But on
all
the
ground
to
348
130606