March 26th, 1892
The idea of the soldier – produced a little by the fascinated perusal of Marbot’s magnificent memoirs. The image, the type, the vision, the character, as a transmitted, hereditary, mystical, almost supernatural force, challenge, incentive, almost haunting, apparitional presence, in the life and consciousness of a descendant – a descendant of totally different temperament and range of qualities, yet subjected to a superstitious awe in relation to carrying out the tradition of absolutely military valour – personal bravery and honour. Sense of the difficulty – the impossibility, etc.; sense of the ugliness, the blood, the carnage, the suffering. All the things make him dodge it – not from cowardice, but from suffering. Get something it is enjoined upon him to do – etc. I can’t complete this indication now; but I will take it up again, as I see in it the glimmer of an idea for a small subject, though only dimly and confusedly – the subject, or rather the idea, of a brave soldierly act – an act of heroism – done in the very effort to evade all the ugly and brutal part of the religion, the sacrifice, and winning (in a tragic death?) the reward of gallantry – winning it from the apparitional ancestor. This is very crude and rough, but there is probably something in it which I shall extract.
May 8th, 1892, 34 De Vere Gardens
Can’t I hammer out a little the idea – for a short tale – of the young soldier? – the young fellow who, though predestined, by every tradition of his race, to the profession of arms, has an insurmountable hatred of it – of the bloody side of it, the suffering, the ugliness, the cruelty; so that he determines to reject it for himself – to break with it and cast it off, and this in the face of every sort of coercion of opinion (on the part of others), of such pressure not to let the family honour, etc. (always gloriously connected with the army), break down, that there is a kind of degradation, an exposure to ridicule, and ignominy in his apostasy. The idea should be that he fights, after all, exposes himself to possibilities of danger and death for his own view – acts the soldier, is the soldier, and of indefeasibile soldierly race – proves to have been so – even in this very effort of abjuration. The thing is to invent the particular heroic situation in which he may have found himself – show just how he has been a hero even while throwing away his arms. It is a question of a little subject for the Graphic – so I mustn’t make it ‘psychological’ – they understand that no more than a donkey understands a violin. The particular form of opposition, of coercion, that he has to face, and the way his ‘heroism’ is constatée. It must, for prettiness’s sake, be constatée in the eyes of some woman, some girl, whom he loves but who has taken the line of despising him for his renunciation – some fille de soldat, who is very montée about the whole thing, very hard on him, etc. But what the subject wants is to be distanced, relegated into some picturesque little past when the army occupied more place in life – poetized by some slightly romantic setting. Even if one could introduce a supernatural element in it – make it, I mean, a little ghost-story; place it, the scene, in some old country-house, in England at the beginning of the present century – the time of the Napoleonic wars. – It seems to me one might make some haunting business that would give it a colour without being ridiculous, and get in that way the sort of pressure to which the young man is subjected. I see it – it comes to me a little, He must die, of course, be slain, as it were on his own battle-field, the night spent in the haunted room in which the ghost of some grim grandfather – some bloody warrior of the race – or some father slain in the Peninsular or at Waterloo – is supposed to make himself visible.
part of an etext edition of
Owen Wingrave
on
the Ladder : a Henry James website