Henry James
Preface to volume 1
of the New York edition
(containing : Roderick Hudson)
(1907)
Roderick
Hudson
was begun in Florence in the spring of 1874, designed from the first for
serial publication in
The Atlantic monthly,
where it opened in January 1875 and persisted through the year. I yield to
the pleasure of placing these circumstances on record, as I shall place
others, and as I have yielded to the need of renewing acquaintance with the
book after a quarter of a century. This revival of an all but extinct
relation with an early work may often produce for an artist, I think, more
kinds of interest and emotion than he shall find it easy to express, and yet
will light not a little, to his eyes, that veiled face of his Muse which he
is condemned for ever and all anxiously to study. The art of representation
bristles with questions the very terms of which are difficult to apply and
to appreciate; but whatever makes it arduous makes it, for our refreshment,
infinite, causes the practice of it, with experience, to spread round us in
a widening, not in a narrowing circle. Therefore it is that experience has
to organise, for convenience and cheer, some system of observation –
for fear, in the admirable immensity, of losing its way. We see it as
pausing from time to time to consult its notes, to measure, for guidance, as
many aspects and distances as possible, as many steps taken and obstacles
mastered and fruits gathered and beauties enjoyed. Everything counts,
nothing is superfluous in such a survey; the explorer’s note-book
strikes me here as endlessly receptive. This accordingly is what I mean by
the contributive value – or put it simply as, to one’s own sense,
the beguiling charm – of the accessory facts in a given
artistic case. This is why, as one looks back, the private history of any
sincere work, however modest its pretensions, looms with its own
completeness in the rich, ambiguous æsthetic air, and seems at
once to borrow a dignity
and to mark, so to say, a station. This is why, reading over, for revision,
correction and republication, the volumes here in hand, I find myself, all
attentively, in presence of some such recording scroll or engraved
commemorative table – from which the ‘private’ character,
moreover, quite insists on dropping out. These notes represent, over a
considerable course, the continuity of an artist’s endeavour, the
growth of his whole operative consciousness and, best of all, perhaps, their
own tendency to multiply, with the implication, thereby, of a memory much
enriched. Addicted to ‘stories’ and inclined to retrospect, he
fondly takes, under this backward view, his whole unfolding, his process of
production, for a thrilling tale, almost for a wondrous adventure, only
asking himself at what stage of remembrance the mark of the relevant will
begin to fail. He frankly proposes to take this mark everywhere for granted.
Roderick
Hudson
was my first attempt at a novel, a long fiction with a ‘complicated’
subject, and I recall again the quite uplifted sense with which my idea, such
as it was, permitted me at last to put quite out to sea. I had but hugged the
shore on sundry previous small occasions; bumping about, to acquire skill, in
the shallow waters and sandy coves of the ‘short story’ and master
as yet of no vessel constructed to carry a sail. The subject of
Roderick
figured to me vividly this employment of canvas, and I have not forgotten,
even after long years, how the blue southern sea seemed to spread
immediately before me and the breath of the spice-islands to be already in
the breeze. Yet it must even then have begun for me too, the ache of fear,
that was to become so familiar, of being unduly tempted and led on by
‘developments’; which is but the desperate discipline of the
question involved in them. They are of the very essence of the
novelist’s process, and it is by their aid, fundamentally, that his
idea takes form and lives; but they impose on him, through the principle
of continuity that rides them, a proportionate anxiety. They are the very
condition of interest, which languishes and drops without them; the
painter’s subject consisting ever,
obviously, of the related state, to each other, of certain figures and
things. To exhibit these relations, once they have all been recognised, is
to ‘treat’ his idea, which involves neglecting none of those that
directly minister to interest; the degree of that directness remaining
meanwhile a matter of highly difficult appreciation, and one on which
felicity of form and composition, as a part of the total effect,
mercilessly rests. Up to what point is such and such a development
indispensable to the interest? What is the point beyond which it
ceases to be rigourously so? Where, for the complete expression of
one’s subject, does a particular relation stop – giving way to
some other not concerned in that 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 to do
so. He is in the perpetual predicament that the continuity of things is the
whole matter, for him, of comedy and tragedy; that this continuity is never,
by the space of an instant or an inch, broken, and that, to do anything at
all, he has at once intensely to consult and intensely to ignore it. All of
which will perhaps pass but for a supersubtle way of pointing the plain
moral that a young embroiderer of the canvas of life soon began to work in
terror, fairly, of the vast expanse of that surface, of the boundless number
of its distinct perforations for the needle, and of the tendency inherent
in his many-coloured flowers and figures to cover and consume as many as
possible of the little holes. The development of the flower, of the figure,
involved thus an immense counting of holes and a careful selection among
them. That would have been, it seemed to him, a brave enough process, were
it not the very nature of the holes so to invite, to solicit, to persuade,
to practise positively a thousand lures and deceits. The prime effect of so
sustained a system, so prepared a surface, is to lead on and on; while the
fascination of following resides, by the same token, in the presumability
somewhere of a convenient, of a visibly-appointed stopping-place.
Art would be easy indeed if, by a fond power disposed to
‘patronise’ it, such conveniences, such simplifications, had been
provided. We have, as the case stands, to invent and establish them, to
arrive at them by a difficult, dire process of selection and comparison, of
surrender and sacrifice. The very meaning of expertness is acquired courage
to brace one’s self for the cruel crisis from the moment one sees it
grimly loom.
Roderick
Hudson
was further, was earnestly pursued during a summer partly spent in the
Black Forest
and (as I had returned to America early in September) during
three months passed
near Boston.
It is one of the silver threads of the
recoverable texture of that embarrassed phase, however, that the book was
not finished when it had to begin appearing in monthly fragments: a fact in
the light of which I find myself live over again, and quite with wonderment
and tenderness, so intimate an experience of difficulty and delay. To have
‘liked’ so much writing it, to have worked out with such
conviction the pale embroidery, and yet not, at the end of so many months,
to have come through, was clearly still to have fallen short of any facility
and any confidence: though the long-drawn process now most appeals to
memory, I confess, by this very quality of shy and groping duration. One
fact about it indeed outlives all others; the fact that, as the loved Italy
was the scene of my fiction – so much more loved than one has ever been
able, even after fifty efforts, to say! – and as having had to leave it
persisted as an inward ache, so there was soreness in still contriving,
after a fashion, to hang about it and in prolonging, from month to month,
the illusion of the golden air. Little enough of that medium may the novel,
read over to-day, seem to supply; yet half the actual interest lurks for me
in the earnest, baffled intention of making it felt. A whole side of the old
consciousness, under this mild pressure, flushes up and prevails again; a
reminder, ever so penetrating, of the quantity of ‘evocation’
involved in my plan, and of the quantity I must even have supposed myself
to achieve. I take the lingering perception of all this,
I may add – that is of the various admonitions of the whole
reminiscence – for a signal instance of the way a work of art, however
small, if but sufficiently sincere, may vivify and even dignify the
accidents and incidents of its growth.
I must that winter (which I again like to put on record
that I spent in New York) have brought up my last instalments in due time,
for I recall no haunting anxiety: what I do recall perfectly is the felt
pleasure, during those months – and in
East Twenty-fifth Street! –
of trying, on the other side of the world, still to surround with the
appropriate local glow the characters that had combined, to my vision, the
previous year in Florence. A benediction, a great advantage, as seemed to
me, had so from the first rested on them, and to nurse them along was really
to sit again in the high, charming, shabby old room which had originally
overarched them and which, in the hot May and June, had looked out, through
the slits of cooling shutters, at the rather dusty but ever-romantic glare of
Piazza Santa Maria Novella.
The house formed the corner (I delight to
specify) of Via della Scala, and I fear that what the early chapters of the
book most ‘render’ to me to-day is not the umbrageous air of their
New England town, but the view of the small cab-stand sleepily disposed
– long before the days of strident electric cars – round the
rococo obelisk of the Piazza, which is supported on its pedestal, if I
remember rightly, by four delightful little elephants. (That, at any rate,
is how the object in question, deprecating verification, comes back to me
with the clatter of the horse-pails, the discussions, in the intervals of
repose under well-drawn hoods, of the unbuttoned
cocchieri,
sons of the most garrulous of races, and the occasional stillness as of the
noonday desert.)
Pathetic, as we say, on the other hand, no doubt, to
reperusal, the manner in which the evocation, so far as attempted, of the
small New England town of my first two chapters, fails 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, and even though one of these terms was the projection, for my fable,
at the outset, of some more or less vivid antithesis to a state of
civilisation providing for ‘art’? What I wanted, in essence, was
the image of some perfectly humane community which was yet all incapable of
providing for it, and I had to take what my scant experience furnished me. I
remember feeling meanwhile no drawback in this scantness, but a complete, an
exquisite little adequacy, so that the presentation arrived at would quite
have served its purpose, I think, had I not misled myself into naming my
place. To name a place, in fiction, is to pretend in some degree to
represent it – and I speak here of course but of the use of existing
names, the only ones that carry weight. I wanted one that carried weight
– so at least I supposed; but obviously I was wrong, since my effect
lay, so superficially, and could only lie, in the local type, as to
which I had my handful of impressions. The particular local case was another
matter, and I was to see again, after long years, the case into which, all
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 pretended so very much to
‘do’
Northampton Mass.
The plea was charmingly allowed, but nothing could have been more to the
point than the way in which, in such a situation, the whole question of the
novelist’s ‘doing’, with its eternal wealth, or in other
words its eternal torment of interest, once more came up. He embarks, rash
adventurer, under the star of ‘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. This relation to them, for invoked interest,
involves his accordingly ‘doing’; and it is for him to settle
with his intelligence what that variable process shall commit him to.
Its fortune rests primarily, beyond doubt, on
somebody’s having, under suggestion, a sense for it –
even the reader will do, on occasion, when the writer, as so often happens,
completely falls out. The way in which this sense has been, or has not been,
applied constitutes, at all events, in respect to any fiction, the very
ground of critical appreciation. Such appreciation takes account, primarily,
of the thing, in the case, to have been done, and I now see what,
for the first and second chapters of
Roderick,
that was. It was a peaceful, rural New England community
quelconque
– it was not, it was under no necessity of being,
Northampton Mass.
But one nestled, technically, in those days, and with yearning, in the great
shadow of
Balzac;
his august example, little as the secret might ever be
guessed, towered for me over the scene; so that what was clearer than
anything else was how, if it was a question
of Saumur, of Limoges, of Guérande,
he ‘did’ Saumur, did Limoges, did
Guérande. I remember how, in my feebler fashion, I yearned over the
preliminary presentation of my small square patch of the American scene, and
yet was not sufficiently on my guard to see how easily his high practice
might be delusive for my case.
Balzac
talked of
Nemours and Provins:
therefore why should n’t one, with fond fatuity, talk of almost
the only small American
ville de province
of which one had happened to lay up, long before, a pleased vision? The
reason was plain: one was not in the least, in one’s prudence, emulating
his systematic closeness. It did n’t confuse the question either
that he would verily, after all, addressed as he was to a due density in his
material, have found little enough in
Northampton Mass
to tackle. He tackled no group of appearances, no presented face of the
social organism (conspicuity thus attending it), but to make
something of it. To name it simply and not in some degree tackle it would
have seemed to him an act reflecting on his general course the deepest
dishonour. Therefore it was that, as the moral of these many remarks, I
‘named’, under his contagion, when I was really most conscious
of not being held to it; and therefore it was, above all, that for all the
effect of representation I was to achieve, I might have let the occasion
pass. A ‘fancy’ indication would have served my turn –
except
that I should so have failed perhaps of a pretext for my present
insistence.
Since I do insist, at all events, I find this ghostly
interest perhaps even more reasserted for me by the questions begotten
within the very covers of the book, those that wander and idle there as in
some sweet old overtangled walled garden, a safe paradise of self-criticism.
Here it is that if there be air for it to breathe at all, the critical
question swarms, and here it is, in particular, that one of the happy hours
of the painter’s long day may strike. I speak of the painter in general
and of his relation to the old picture, the work of his hand, that has been
lost to sight and that, when found again, is put back on the easel for
measure of what time and the weather may, in the interval, have done to it.
Has it too fatally faded, has it blackened or ‘sunk’, or otherwise
abdicated, or has it only, blest thought, strengthened, for its allotted
duration, and taken up, in its degree, poor dear brave thing, some shade of
the all appreciable, yet all indescribable grace that we know as pictorial
‘tone’? The anxious artist has to wipe it over, in the first
place, to see; he has to ‘clean it up’, say, or to varnish it
anew, or at the least to place it in a light, for any right judgment of its
aspect or its worth. But the very uncertainties themselves yield a thrill,
and if subject and treatment, working together, have had their felicity, the
artist, the prime creator, may find a strange charm in this stage of the
connexion. It helps him to live back into a forgotten state, into
convictions, credulities too early spent perhaps, it breathes upon the dead
reasons of things, buried as they are in the texture of the work, and makes
them revive, so that the actual appearances and the old motives fall
together once more, and a lesson and a moral and a consecrating final light
are somehow disengaged.
All this, I mean of course, if the case will wonderfully
take any such pressure, if the work does n’t break down under even
such mild overhauling. The author knows well enough how easily that may
happen – which he in fact frequently enough sees it do. The old reasons
then are too
dead to revive; they were not, it is plain, good enough reasons to live. The
only possible relation of the present mind to the thing is to dismiss it
altogether. On the other hand, when it is not dismissed – as the only
detachment is the detachment of aversion – the creative intimacy is
reaffirmed, and appreciation, critical apprehension, insists on becoming as
active as it can. Who shall say, granted this, where it shall not begin and
where it shall consent to end? The painter who passes over his old sunk
canvas the wet sponge that shows him what may still come out again makes his
criticism essentially active. When having seen, while his momentary glaze
remains, that the canvas has kept a few buried secrets, he proceeds
to repeat the process with due care and with a bottle of varnish and a
brush, he is ‘living back’, as I say, to the top of his bent, is
taking up the old relation, so workable apparently, yet, and there is
nothing logically to stay him from following it all the way. I have felt
myself then, on looking over past productions, the painter making use again
and again of the tentative wet sponge. The sunk surface has here and there,
beyond doubt, refused to respond: the buried secrets, the intentions, are
buried too deep to rise again, and were indeed, it would appear, not much
worth the burying. Not so, however, when the moistened canvas does obscurely
flush and when resort to the varnish-bottle is thereby immediately
indicated. The simplest figure for my revision of this present array of
earlier, later, larger, smaller, canvases, is to say that I have achieved it
by the very aid of the varnish-bottle. It is true of them throughout that,
in words I have had occasion to use
in another connexion
(where too I had revised with a view to ‘possible amendment of form and
enhancement of meaning’), I have ‘nowhere scrupled to re-write a
sentence or a passage on judging it susceptible of a better turn’.
To re-read
Roderick Hudson
was to find one remark so promptly and so urgently prescribed that I could
at once only take it as pointing almost too stern a moral. It stared me in
the face that the time-scheme of the story is quite
inadequate, and positively to that degree that the fault but just fails to
wreck it. The thing escapes, I conceive, with its life: the effect sought is
fortunately more achieved than missed, since the interest of the subject
bears down, auspiciously dissimulates, this particular flaw in the
treatment. Everything occurs, none the less, too punctually and moves too
fast: Roderick’s disintegration, a gradual process, and of which the
exhibitional interest is exactly that it is gradual and occasional,
and thereby traceable and watchable, swallows two years in a mouthful,
proceeds quite not by years, but by weeks and months, and thus
renders the whole view the disservice of appearing to present him as a
morbidly special case. The very claim of the fable is naturally that he
is special, that his great gift makes and keeps him highly
exceptional; but that is not for a moment supposed to preclude his appearing
typical (of the general type) as well; for the fictive hero successfully
appeals to us only as an eminent instance, as eminent as we like, of our own
conscious kind. My mistake on Roderick’s behalf – and not in the
least of conception, but of composition and expression – is that, at
the rate at which he falls to pieces, he seems to place himself beyond our
understanding and our sympathy. These are not our rates, we say; we
ourselves certainly, under like pressure, – for what is it after all?
– would make more of a fight. We conceive going to pieces –
nothing is easier, since we see people do it, one way or another, all round
us; but this young man must either have had less of the principle of
development to have had so much of the principle of collapse, or less of the
principle of collapse to have had so much of the principle of development.
“On the basis of so great a weakness,” one hears the reader say,
“where was your idea of the interest? On the basis of so great an
interest, where is the provision for so much weakness?” One 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 round. It has all begun too soon, as I say, and too simply, and the
determinant function attributed to Christina Light,
the character of well-nigh sole agent of his catastrophe that this
unfortunate young woman has forced upon her, fails to commend itself to our
sense of truth and proportion.
It was not, however, that I was at ease on this score
even in the first fond good faith of composition; I felt too, all the while,
how many more ups and downs, how many more adventures and complications my
young man would have had to know, how much more experience it would have
taken, in short, either to make him go under or to make him triumph. The
greater complexity, the superior truth, was all more or less present to me;
only the question was, too dreadfully, how make it present to the reader?
How boil down so many facts in the alembic, so that the distilled result,
the produced appearance, should have intensity, lucidity, brevity, beauty,
all the merits required for my effect? How, when it was already so
difficult, as I found, to proceed even as I was proceeding? It
did n’t help, alas, it only maddened, to remember that
Balzac
would have known how, and would have yet asked no additional credit for it.
All the difficulty I could dodge still struck me, at any rate, as leaving
more than enough; and yet I was already consciously in presence, here, of
the most interesting question the artist has to consider. To give the image
and the sense of certain things while still keeping them subordinate to his
plan, keeping them in relation to matters more immediate and apparent, to
give all the sense, in a word, without all the substance or all the surface,
and so to summarise and 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. It is only by doing such
things that art becomes exquisite, and it is only by positively becoming
exquisite that it keeps clear of becoming vulgar, repudiates the coarse
industries that masquerade in its name. This eternal time-question is
accordingly, for the novelist, always there and always formidable;
always insisting on the effect of the great lapse and passage, of
the ‘dark backward and abysm’, by the terms of truth, and on the
effect of compression, of composition and form, by the terms of literary
arrangement. It is really a business to terrify all but stout hearts into
abject omission and mutilation, though the terror would indeed be more
general were the general consciousness of the difficulty greater. It is not
by consciousness of difficulty, in truth, that the story-teller is mostly
ridden; so prodigious a number of stories would otherwise scarce get
themselves (shall it be called?) ‘told’. None was ever very well
told, I think, under the law of mere elimination – inordinately as that
device appears in many quarters to be depended on. I remember doing my best
not to be reduced to it for
Roderick,
at the same time that I did so helplessly and consciously beg a thousand
questions. What I clung to as my principle of simplification was the
precious truth that I was dealing, after all, essentially with an Action,
and that no action, further, was ever made historically vivid without a
certain factitious compactness; though this logic indeed opened up horizons
and abysses of its own. But into these we must plunge on some other
occasion.
It was at any rate under an admonition or two fished out
of their depths that I must have tightened my hold of the remedy afforded,
such as it was, for the absence of those more adequate illustrations of
Roderick’s character and history. Since one was dealing with an Action
one might borrow a scrap of the Dramatist’s all-in-all, his intensity
– which the novelist so often ruefully envies him as a fortune in
itself. The amount of illustration I could allow to the grounds of my young
man’s disaster was unquestionably meagre, but I might perhaps make it
lively; I might produce illusion if I should be able to achieve intensity.
It was for that I must have tried, I now see, with such art as I could
command; but I make out in another quarter above all what really saved me.
My subject, all blissfully, in face of difficulties, had defined itself
– and this in spite of the title of the book – as not directly, in
the least, my young sculptor’s
adventure. This it had been but indirectly, being all the while in essence
and in final effect another man’s, his friend’s and patron’s,
view and experience of him. One’s luck was to have felt one’s
subject right – whether instinct or calculation, in those dim days,
most served; and the circumstance even amounts perhaps to a little lesson
that when this has happily occurred faults may show, faults may disfigure,
and yet not upset the work. It remains in equilibrium by having found its
centre, the point of command of all the rest. From this centre the subject
has been treated, from this centre the interest has spread, and so, whatever
else it may do or may not do, the thing has acknowledged a principle of
composition and contrives at least to hang together. We see in such a case
why it should so hang; we escape that dreariest displeasure it is open to
experiments in this general order to inflict, the sense of any
hanging-together precluded as by the very terms of the case.
The centre of interest throughout
Roderick
is in Rowland Mallet’s consciousness, and the drama is the very drama
of that consciousness – which I had of course to make sufficiently
acute in order to enable it, like a set and lighted scene, to hold the play.
By making it acute, meanwhile, one made its own movement – or rather,
strictly, its movement in the particular connexion – interesting; this
movement really being quite the stuff of one’s thesis. It had,
naturally, Rowland’s consciousness, not to be too acute –
which would have disconnected it and made it superhuman: the beautiful
little problem was to keep it connected, connected intimately, with the
general human exposure, and thereby bedimmed and befooled 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 a ‘job’
as this making of his relation to everything involved a sufficiently
limited, a sufficiently pathetic, tragic, comic, ironic, personal state to
be thoroughly natural, and yet at the same time a sufficiently
clear medium to represent a whole. This whole was to be the sum of what
‘happened’ to him, or in other words his total adventure; but as
what happened to him was above all to feel certain things happening to
others, to Roderick, to Christina, to Mary Garland, to Mrs Hudson, to
the Cavaliere, to the Prince, so the beauty of the constructional game was
to preserve in everything its especial value for him. The ironic
effect of his having fallen in love with the girl who is herself in love
with Roderick, though he is unwitting, at the time, of that secret –
the conception of this last irony, I must add, has remained happier than my
execution of it; which should logically have involved the reader’s
being 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 vainly in the air: one patches up one’s superstructure,
one paints it in the prettiest colours, one hangs fine old tapestry and rare
brocade over its window-sills, one flies emblazoned banners from its roof
– the building none the less totters and refuses to stand square.
It is not really worked-in that Roderick
himself could have pledged his faith in such a quarter, much more at such a
crisis, before leaving America: and that weakness, clearly, produces a limp
in the whole march of the fable. Just so, though there was no reason on
earth (unless I except one, 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 vivification of that possibility. The care, unfortunately, has not
been skilfully enough taken, in spite of the later patching-up of the
girl’s figure. We fail to accept it, on the actual showing, as that of
a young person irresistible at any moment, and above all irresistible at a
moment of the liveliest other preoccupation, as that of the weaver
of (even the highly conditioned) spell that the narrative imputes to her. The
spell of attraction is cast upon young men by young women in all sorts of
ways, and the novel has no more constant office than to remind us of that.
But Mary Garland’s way does n’t, indubitably, convince us;
any more than we are truly convinced, I think, that Rowland’s destiny,
or say his nature, would have made him accessible at the same hour to two
quite distinct commotions, each a very deep one, of his whole personal
economy. Rigidly viewed, each of these upheavals of his sensibility must
have been exclusive of other upheavals, yet the reader is asked to accept
them as working together. They are different vibrations, but the whole sense
of the situation depicted is that they should each have been of 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, we instinctively disallow the friend’s
title to discomfiture. The whole picture presents him as for the time on the
mounting wave, exposed highly enough, no doubt, to a hundred discomfitures,
but least exposed to that one. The damage to verisimilitude is deep.
The difficulty had been from the first that I required
my antithesis – my antithesis to Christina Light, one of the main terms
of the subject. One is ridden by the law that antitheses, to be efficient,
shall be both direct and complete. Directness seemed to fail unless Mary
should be, so to speak, ‘plain’, Christina being essentially so
‘coloured’; and completeness seemed to fail unless she too should
have her potency. She could moreover, by which I mean the antithetic young
woman could, perfectly have had it; only success would have been then in the
narrator’s art to attest it. Christina’s own presence and action
are, on the other hand, I think, all firm ground; the truth probably being
that the ideal antithesis rarely does ‘come off’, and that it has
to content itself for the most part with a strong term and a weak term, and
even then to feel itself lucky. If one of the terms is strong, that
perhaps may pass, in the most difficult of the arts, for a triumph. I
remember at all events feeling, toward the end of
Roderick,
that the Princess Casamassima had been launched, that, wound-up with the
right silver key, she would go on a certain time by the motion communicated;
thanks to which I knew the pity, the real pang of losing sight of her. I
desired as in no other such case I can recall to preserve, to recover the
vision; and I have seemed to myself in re-reading the book quite to
understand why. The multiplication of touches had produced even more life
than the subject required, and that life, in other conditions, in some other
prime relation, would still have somehow to be spent. Thus one would watch
for her and waylay her at some turn of the road to come – all that was
to be needed was to give her time. This I did in fact, meeting her again and
taking her up later on.
end of preface to volume 1
part of an etext edition of the
prefaces to the New York edition
of Henry James
on
the Ladder : a Henry James website