Henry James
Preface to volume 3
of the New York edition
(containing : The portrait of a lady)
(1908)
The
portrait of a lady
was, like
Roderick Hudson,
begun in Florence, during three months spent there in the
spring of 1879.
Like
Roderick
and like
The American,
it had been designed for publication in
The Atlantic monthly,
where it began to appear in 1880. It differed from its two predecessors,
however, in finding a course also open to it, from month to month, in
Macmillan’s magazine;
which was to be for me one of the last occasions of simultaneous
‘serialisation’ in the two countries that the changing conditions
of literary intercourse between England and the United States had up to then
left unaltered. It is a long novel, and I was long in writing it; I remember
being again much occupied with it, the following year, during a
stay of several weeks
made in Venice. I had rooms on
Riva Schiavoni,
at the top of a
house near the passage leading off to San Zaccaria; the waterside life, the
wondrous lagoon spread before me, and the ceaseless human chatter of Venice
came in at my windows, to which I seem to myself to have been constantly
driven, in the fruitless fidget of composition, as if to see whether, out in
the blue channel, the ship of some right suggestion, of some better phrase,
of the next happy twist of my subject, the next true touch for my canvas,
might n’t come into sight. But I recall vividly enough that the
response most elicited, in general, to these restless appeals was the rather
grim admonition that romantic and historic sites, such as the land of Italy
abounds in, offer the artist a questionable aid to concentration when they
themselves are not to be the subject of it. They are too rich in their own
life and too charged with their own meanings merely to help him out with a
lame phrase; they draw him away from his small question to their own greater
ones; so that, after a little, he feels, while
thus yearning toward them in his difficulty, as if he were asking an army
of glorious veterans to help him to arrest a peddler who has given him the
wrong change.
There are pages of the book which, in the reading over,
have seemed to make me see again the bristling curve of the wide
Riva,
the large colour-spots of the balconied houses and the repeated undulation
of the little hunchbacked bridges, marked by the rise and drop again, with
the wave, of foreshortened clicking pedestrians. The Venetian footfall and
the Venetian cry – all talk there, wherever uttered, having the pitch
of a call across the water – come in once more at the window, renewing
one’s old impression of the delighted senses and the divided,
frustrated mind. How can places that speak in general so to the
imagination not give it, at the moment, the particular thing it wants? I
recollect again and again, in beautiful places, dropping into that
wonderment. The real truth is, I think, that they express, under this
appeal, only too much – more than, in the given case, one has use for;
so that one finds one’s self working less congruously, after all, so
far as the surrounding picture is concerned, than in presence of the
moderate and the neutral, to which we may lend something of the light of
our vision. Such a place as Venice is too proud for such charities; Venice
does n’t borrow, she but all magnificently gives. We profit by
that enormously, but to do so we must either be quite off duty or be on it
in her service alone. Such, and so rueful, are these reminiscences; though
on the whole, no doubt, one’s book, and one’s ‘literary
effort’ at large, were to be the better for them. Strangely
fertilising, in the long run, does a wasted effort of attention often prove.
It all depends on how the attention has been cheated, has been
squandered. There are high-handed insolent frauds, and there are insidious
sneaking ones. And there is, I fear, even on the most designing
artist’s part, always witless enough good faith, always anxious enough
desire, to fail to guard him against their deceits.
Trying to recover here, for recognition, the germ of my
idea, I see that it must have consisted not at all in any conceit
of a ‘plot’, nefarious name, in any flash, upon the fancy, of a
set of relations, or in any one of those situations that, by a logic of
their own, immediately fall, for the fabulist, into movement, into a march
or a rush, a patter of quick steps; but altogether in the sense of a single
character, the character and aspect of a particular engaging young woman,
to which all the usual elements of a ‘subject’, certainly of a
setting, were to need to be superadded. Quite as interesting as the young
woman herself, at her best, do I find, I must again repeat, this projection
of memory upon the whole matter of the growth, in one’s imagination,
of some such apology for a motive. These are the fascinations of the
fabulist’s art, these lurking forces of expansion, these necessities of
upspringing in the seed, these beautiful determinations, on the part of the
idea entertained, to grow as tall as possible, to push into the light and
the air and thickly flower there; and, quite as much, these fine
possibilities of recovering, from some good standpoint on the ground gained,
the intimate history of the business – of retracing and reconstructing
its steps and stages. I have always fondly remembered a remark that
I heard fall years ago from the lips of
Ivan Turgenieff
in regard to his own experience of the usual origin of the fictive picture.
It began for him almost always with the vision of some person or persons,
who hovered before him, soliciting him, as the active or passive figure,
interesting him and appealing to him just as they were and by what they
were. He saw them, in that fashion, as
disponibles,
saw them subject to the chances, the complications of existence, and saw
them vividly, but then had to find for them the right relations, those that
would most bring them out; to imagine, to invent and select and piece
together the situations most useful and favourable to the sense of the
creatures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to
produce and to feel.
“To arrive at these things is to arrive at my
‘story’,” he said, “and that’s the way I look for
it. The result is that I ’m often accused of not having
‘story’ enough. I seem to myself to have as much as I need –
to show my people,
to exhibit their relations with each other; for that is all my measure. If I
watch them long enough I see them come together, I see them placed,
I see them engaged in this or that act and in this or that difficulty. How
they look and move and speak and behave, always in the setting I have found
for them, is my account of them – of which I dare say, alas,
que cela manque souvent d’architecture.
But I would rather, I think, have too little architecture than too much
– when there ’s danger of its interfering with my measure
of the truth. The French of course like more of it than I give –
having by their own genius such a hand for it; and indeed one must give
all one can. As for the origin of one’s wind-blown germs themselves,
who shall say, as you ask, where they come from? We have to go
too far back, too far behind, to say.
Is n’t it all we can say that they come from every quarter of
heaven, that they are there at almost any turn of the road? They
accumulate, and we are always picking them over, selecting among them. They
are the breath of life – by which I mean that life, in its own way,
breathes them upon us. They are so, in a manner prescribed and imposed
– floated into our minds by the current of life. That reduces to
imbecility the vain critic’s quarrel, so often, with one’s
subject, when he has n’t the wit to accept it. Will he point out
then which other it should properly have been? – his office being,
essentially to point out.
Il en serait bien embarrassé.
Ah, when he points out what I ’ve done or failed to do with it,
that ’s another matter: there he ’s on his ground.
I give him up my ‘architecture’,” my distinguished friend
concluded, “as much as he will.”
So this beautiful genius, and I recall with comfort the
gratitude I drew from his reference to the intensity of suggestion that may
reside in the stray figure, the unattached character, the image
en disponibilité.
It gave me higher warrant than I seemed then to have met for just that blest
habit of one’s own imagination, the trick of investing some conceived
or encountered individual, some brace or group of individuals, with the
germinal property and authority.
I was myself so much more antecedently conscious of my figures than of their
setting – a too preliminary, a preferential interest in which struck me
as in general such a putting of the cart before the horse. I might envy,
though I could n’t emulate, the imaginative writer so constituted
as to see his fable first and to make out its agents afterwards: I could
think so little of any fable that did n’t need its agents
positively to launch it; I could think so little of any situation that
did n’t depend for its interest on the nature of the persons
situated, and thereby on their way of taking it. There are methods of
so-called presentation, I believe – among novelists who have appeared
to flourish – that offer the situation as indifferent to that support;
but I have not lost the sense of the value for me, at the time, of the
admirable Russian’s testimony to my not needing, all superstitiously,
to try and perform any such gymnastic. Other echoes from the same source
linger with me, I confess, as unfadingly – if it be not all indeed
one much-embracing echo. It was impossible after that not to read, for
one’s uses, high lucidity into the tormented and disfigured and
bemuddled question of the objective value, and even quite into that of
the critical appreciation, of ‘subject’ 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 genuine, is it sincere, the result of some direct
impression or perception of life? – I had found small edification,
mostly, in a critical pretension that had neglected from the first all
delimitation of ground and all definition of terms. The air of my earlier
time shows, to memory, as darkened, all round, with that vanity –
unless the difference to-day be just in one’s own final impatience,
the lapse of one’s attention. There is, I think, no more nutritive or
suggestive truth in this connexion than that of the perfect
dependence of the ‘moral’ sense of a work of art on the amount
of felt life concerned in producing it. The question comes back thus,
obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist’s prime
sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs. The
quality and capacity of that soil, its ability to ‘grow’ with
due freshness and straightness any vision of life, represents, strongly or
weakly, the projected morality. That element is but another name for the
more or less close 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
and ungenerous one. Here we get exactly the high price of the novel as a
literary form – its power not only, while preserving that form with
closeness, to range through all the differences of the individual relation
to its general subject-matter, all the varieties of outlook on life, of
disposition to reflect and project, created by conditions that are never the
same from man to man (or, so far as that goes, from man to woman), but
positively to appear more true to its character in proportion as it strains,
or tends to burst, with a latent extravagance, its mould.
The house of fiction has in short not one window,
but a million – a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather;
every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast
front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the
individual will. These apertures, 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 aloft; they are not hinged doors
opening straight upon life. But they have this mark of their own that at
each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a
field-glass, which forms, again and again, for
observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an
impression distinct from every other. He and his neighbours are watching the
same show, but one seeing more where the other sees less, one seeing black
where the other sees white, one seeing big where the other sees small, one
seeing coarse where the other sees fine. And so on, and so on; there is
fortunately no saying on what, for the particular pair of eyes, the window
may not open; ‘fortunately’ by reason, precisely, of this
incalculability of range. The spreading field, the human scene, is the
‘choice of subject’; the pierced aperture, either broad or
balconied or slit-like and low-browed, is the ‘literary form’; but
they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the
watcher – without, in other words, the consciousness of the artist.
Tell me what the artist is, and I will tell you of what he has been
conscious. Thereby I shall express to you at once his boundless freedom and
his ‘moral’ reference.
All this is a long way round, however, for my word about
my dim first move toward
The Portrait,
which was exactly my grasp of a single character – an acquisition I
had made, moreover, after a fashion
not here to be retraced.
Enough that I
was, as seemed to me, in complete possession of it, that I had been so for a
long time, that this had made it familiar and yet had not blurred its charm,
and that, all urgently, all tormentingly, I saw it in motion and, so to
speak, in transit. This amounts to saying that I saw it as bent upon its
fate – some fate or other; which, among the possibilities,
being precisely the question. Thus I had my vivid individual – vivid,
so strangely, in spite of being still at large, not confined by the
conditions, not engaged in the tangle, to which we look for much of the
impress that constitutes an identity. If the apparition was still all to be
placed how came it to be vivid? – since we puzzle such quantities out,
mostly, just by the business of placing them. One could answer such a
question beautifully, doubtless, if one could do so subtle, if not so
monstrous, a thing as to write the history of the growth of one’s
imagination. One would describe then what, at a given time, had
extraordinarily happened to it, and one would so, for instance, be in a
position to tell, with an approach to clearness, how, under favour of
occasion, it had been able to take over (take over straight from life) such
and such a constituted, animated figure or form. The figure has to that
extent, as you see, been placed – placed in the imagination
that detains it, preserves, protects, enjoys it, conscious of its presence
in the dusky, crowded, heterogeneous back-shop of the mind very much as a
wary dealer in precious odds and ends, competent to make an
‘advance’ on rare objects confided to him, is conscious of the
rare little ‘piece’ left in deposit by the reduced, mysterious
lady of title or the speculative amateur, and which is already there to
disclose its merit afresh as soon as a key shall have clicked in a
cupboard-door.
That may be, I recognise, a somewhat superfine analogy
for the particular ‘value’ I here speak of, the image of the young
feminine nature that I had had for so considerable a time all curiously at
my disposal; but it appears to fond memory quite to fit the fact – with
the recall, in addition, of my pious desire but to place my treasure right.
I quite remind myself thus of the dealer resigned not to
‘realise’, resigned to keeping the precious object locked up
indefinitely rather than commit it, at no matter what price, to vulgar
hands. For there are dealers in these forms and figures and
treasures capable of that refinement. The point is, however, that this
single small corner-stone, the conception of a certain young woman
affronting her destiny, had begun with being all my outfit for the large
building of
The Portrait of a Lady.
It came to be a square and spacious house – or has at least seemed so
to me in this going over it again; but, such as it is, it had to be put up
round my young woman while she stood there in perfect isolation. That is to
me, artistically speaking, the circumstance of interest; for I have lost
myself once more, I confess, in the curiosity of analysing the structure. By
what process of logical accretion was this slight ‘personality’,
the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl, to find itself
endowed with the high attributes of a Subject? – and indeed by what
thinness, at the best, would such a subject not be vitiated? Millions of
presumptuous girls, intelligent or not intelligent, daily affront their
destiny, and what is it open to their destiny to be, at the most,
that we should make an ado about it? The novel is of its very nature an
‘ado’, an ado about something, and the larger the form it takes
the greater of course the ado. Therefore, consciously, that was what one was
in for – for positively organising an ado about Isabel Archer.
One looked it well in the face, I seem to remember, this
extravagance; and with the effect precisely of recognising the charm of the
problem. Challenge any such problem with any intelligence, and you
immediately see how full it is of substance; the wonder being, all the while,
as we look at the world, how 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 Gwendolen Harleth
have to be; with that much of firm ground, that much of bracing air, at the
disposal all the while of their feet and their lungs. They are typical, none
the less, of a class difficult, in the individual case, to make a centre of
interest; so difficult in fact that many an expert painter, as for instance
Dickens
and
Walter Scott,
as for instance even, in the main, so subtle a hand as that of
R. L. Stevenson,
has preferred to leave the task unattempted. There are in fact writers as to
whom we make out that their refuge from this is to assume it to be not worth
their attempting; by which pusillanimity in truth their honour is scantly
saved. It is never an attestation of a value, or even of our imperfect sense
of one, it is never a tribute to any truth at all, that we shall
represent that value badly. It never makes up, artistically, for an
artist’s dim feeling about a thing that he shall ‘do’ the
thing as ill as possible. There are better ways than that, the best of all
of which is to begin with less stupidity.
It may be answered meanwhile, in regard to
Shakespeare’s and to George Eliot’s testimony, that their
concession to the ‘importance’ of their Juliets and Cleopatras and
Portias (even with Portia as the very type and model of the young person
intelligent and presumptuous) and to that of their Hettys and Maggies and
Rosamonds and Gwendolens, suffers the abatement that these slimnesses are,
when figuring as the main props of the theme, never suffered to be sole
ministers of its appeal, but have their inadequacy eked out with comic
relief and underplots, as the playwrights say, when not with murders and
battles and the great mutations of the world. If they are shown as
‘mattering’ as much as they could possibly pretend to, the proof
of it is in a hundred other persons, made of much stouter stuff, and each
involved moreover in a hundred relations which matter to 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
gentry there are other lively concerns; for Antonio, notably, 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 becomes of interest all by the fact that Portia
matters to us. That she does so, at any rate, and that almost
everything comes round to it again, supports my contention as to this fine
example of the value recognised in the mere young thing. (I say
‘mere’ young thing because I guess that even Shakespeare,
preoccupied mainly though he may have been with the passions of princes,
would scarce have pretended to found the best of his appeal for her on her
high social position.) It is an example exactly of the deep difficulty
braved – the difficulty of making George Eliot’s
‘frail vessel’, if not the all-in-all for our attention, at least
the clearest of the call.
Now to see deep difficulty braved is at any time, for
the really addicted artist, to feel almost even as a pang the beautiful
incentive, and to feel it verily in such sort as to wish the danger
intensified. The difficulty most worth tackling can only be for him, in
these conditions, the greatest the case permits of. So I remember feeling
here (in presence, always, that is, of the particular uncertainty of my
ground), that there would be one way better than another – oh, ever so
much better than any other! – of making it fight out its battle. The
frail vessel, that charged with
George Eliot’s ‘treasure’,
and thereby of such importance to those who curiously approach it, has
likewise possibilities of importance to itself, possibilities which permit
of treatment and in fact peculiarly require it from the moment they are
considered at all. There is always the escape from any close account of the
weak agent of such spells by using as a bridge for evasion, for retreat and
flight, the view of her relation to those surrounding her. Make it
predominantly a view of their relation and the trick is played: you
give the general sense of her effect, and you give it, so far as the raising
on it of a superstructure goes, with the maximum of ease. Well, I recall
perfectly how little, in my 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 the centre of
the subject in the young woman’s own consciousness,” I said to
myself, “and you get as interesting and as beautiful a difficulty as
you could wish. Stick to that – for the centre; put the
heaviest weight into that scale, which will be so largely the
scale of her relation to herself. Make her only interested enough, at the
same time, in the things that are not herself, and this relation
need n’t fear to be too limited. Place meanwhile in the other
scale the lighter weight (which is usually the one that tips the balance
of interest): press least hard, in short, on the consciousness of your
heroine’s satellites, especially the male; make it an
interest contributive only to the greater one. See, at all events, 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
little concerns wholly to see you through will necessitate, remember, your
really ‘doing’ her.”
So far I reasoned, and it took nothing less than that
technical rigour, I now easily see, to inspire me with the right confidence
for erecting on such a plot of ground the neat and careful and proportioned
pile of bricks that arches over it and that was thus to form,
constructionally speaking, a literary monument. Such is the aspect that
to-day
The Portrait
wears for me: a structure reared with an
‘architectural’ competence, as Turgenieff would have said,
that makes it, to the author’s own sense, the most proportioned of his
productions after
The Ambassadors
– which was to follow it so many years later and which has, no doubt,
a superior roundness. On one thing I was determined; that, though I should
clearly have to pile brick upon brick for the creation of an interest, I
would leave no pretext for saying that anything is out of line, scale or
perspective. I would build large – in fine embossed vaults and painted
arches, as who should say, and yet never let it appear that the chequered
pavement, the ground under the reader’s feet, fails to stretch at every
point to the base of the walls. That precautionary spirit, on re-perusal of
the book, is the old note that most touches me: it testifies so, for my own
ear, to the anxiety of my provision for the reader’s amusement. I felt,
in view of the possible limitations of my subject, that no such provision
could be excessive, and the development of the latter was simply the general
form of that earnest quest. And I find indeed that this is the only account
I can give myself of the evolution of the fable: it is all under the head
thus named that I conceive the needful accretion as having taken place, the
right complications as having started. It was naturally of the essence
that the young woman should be herself complex; that was rudimentary –
or was at any rate the light in which Isabel Archer had originally dawned.
It went, however, but a certain way, and other lights, contending,
conflicting lights, and of as many different colours, if possible, as the
rockets, the Roman candles and Catherine-wheels of a ‘pyrotechnic
display’, would be employable to attest that she was. I had, no doubt,
a groping instinct for the right complications, since I am quite unable to
track the footsteps of those that constitute, as the case stands, the
general situation exhibited. They are there, for what they are worth, and as
numerous as might be; but my memory, I confess, is a blank as to how and
whence 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 Osmond and his daughter and his sister, of Lord Warburton,
Caspar Goodwood and Miss Stackpole, the definite array of contributions to
Isabel Archer’s history. I recognised them, I knew them, they were the
numbered pieces of my puzzle, the concrete terms of my ‘plot’. It
was as if they had simply, by an impulse of their own, floated into my ken,
and all in response to my primary question: “Well, what will she
do?” Their answer seemed to be that if I would trust them they
would show me; on which, with an urgent appeal to them to make it at least
as interesting as they could, I trusted them. They were like the group of
attendants and entertainers who come down by train when people in the
country give a party; they represented the contract for carrying the party
on. That was an excellent relation with them – a possible one even with
so broken a reed (from her slightness of cohesion) as Henrietta Stackpole.
It is a familiar truth to the novelist, at the strenuous hour, that, as
certain elements in any work are of the essence, so others are only of the
form; that as this or that character, this or that disposition of the
material, belongs to the subject directly, so to speak, so this or that
other 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 this
world. He must not think of benefits, moreover, I freely recognise, for that
way dishonour lies: he has, that is, but one to think of – the benefit,
whatever it may 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 is bound to admit, that can come to him, from the
reader, as a result on the latter’s part of any act of reflexion or
discrimination. He may enjoy this finer tribute – that is
another affair, but on condition only of taking it as a gratuity
‘thrown in’, a mere miraculous windfall, the fruit of a tree he
may not pretend to have shaken. Against reflexion, against discrimination,
in his interest, all earth and air conspire; wherefore it is that, as I say,
he must in many a case have schooled himself, from the first, to work but
for a ‘living wage’. The living wage is the reader’s grant of
the least possible quantity of attention required for consciousness of a
‘spell’. The occasional charming ‘tip’ is an act of his
intelligence over and beyond this, a golden apple, for the writer’s
lap, straight from the wind-stirred tree. The artist may of course, in
wanton moods, dream of some Paradise (for art) where the direct appeal to
the intelligence might be legalised; for to such extravagances as these his
yearning mind can scarce hope ever completely to close itself. The most he
can do is to remember they are extravagances.
All of which is perhaps but a gracefully devious way of
saying that Henrietta Stackpole was a good example, in
The Portrait,
of the truth to which I just adverted – as good an example as I
could name were it not that Maria Gostrey, in
The Ambassadors,
then in the bosom of time, may be mentioned as a better. Each of these
persons is but wheels to the coach; neither belongs to the body of that
vehicle, or is for a moment accommodated with a seat inside. There the
subject alone is ensconced, in the form of its ‘hero and heroine’,
and of the privileged high officials,
say, who ride with the king and queen. There are reasons why one would have
liked this to be felt, as in general one would like almost anything to be
felt, in one’s work, that one has one’s self contributively felt.
We have seen, however, how idle is that pretension, which I should be sorry
to make too much of. Maria Gostrey and Miss Stackpole then are cases, each,
of the light
ficelle,
not of the true agent; they may run beside the coach ‘for all they are
worth’, they may cling to it till they are out of breath (as poor Miss
Stackpole all so visibly does), but neither, all the while, so much as gets
her foot on the step, neither ceases for a moment to tread the dusty road.
Put it even 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
French Revolution, the carriage of the royal 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, so
strangely, so almost inexplicably, to pervade. I will presently say what I
can for that anomaly – and in the most conciliatory fashion.
A point I wish still more to make is that if my relation
of confidence with the actors in my drama who were, unlike Miss
Stackpole, true agents, was an excellent one to have arrived at, there still
remained my relation with the reader, which was another affair altogether
and as to which I felt no one to be trusted but myself. That solicitude was
to be accordingly expressed in the artful patience with which, as I have
said, I piled brick upon brick. The bricks, for the whole counting-over
– putting for bricks little touches and inventions and enhancements by
the way – affect me in truth as well-nigh innumerable and as ever so
scrupulously fitted together and packed-in. It is an effect of detail, of
the minutest; though, if one were in this connexion to say all, one would
express the hope that the general, the ampler air of the modest monument still
survives. I do at least seem to catch the key to a part of this abundance of
small anxious, ingenious illustration as I recollect putting my finger,
in my young woman’s interest, on the most obvious of her predicates.
“What will she ‘do’? Why, the first thing she ’ll do will
be to come to Europe; which in fact will form, and all inevitably, no small
part of her principal adventure. Coming to Europe is even for the
‘frail vessels’,
in this wonderful age, a mild adventure; but what
is truer than that on one side – the side of their independence of
flood and field, of the moving accident, of battle and murder and sudden
death – her adventures are to be mild? Without her sense of them, her
sense for them, as one may say, they are next to nothing at all;
but is n’t the beauty and the difficulty just in showing their
mystic conversion by that sense, conversion into the stuff of drama or, even
more delightful word still, of ‘story’?” It was all as clear,
my contention, as a silver bell. Two very good instances, I think, of this
effect of conversion, two cases of the rare chemistry, are the pages in
which Isabel, coming into the drawing-room at Gardencourt, coming in from a
wet walk or whatever, that rainy afternoon, finds Madame Merle in possession
of the place, Madame Merle seated, all absorbed but all serene, at the
piano, and deeply recognises, in the striking of such an hour, in the
presence there, among the gathering shades, of this personage, of whom a
moment before she had never so much as heard, a turning-point in her life.
It is dreadful to have too much, for any artistic demonstration, to dot
one’s i’s and insist on one’s intentions, and I am
not eager to do it now; but the question here was that of producing the
maximum of intensity with the minimum of strain.
The interest was to be raised to its pitch and yet the
elements to be kept in their key; so that, should the whole thing duly
impress, I might show what an ‘exciting’ inward life may do for
the person leading it even while it remains perfectly normal. And I cannot
think of a more consistent application of that ideal unless it be in the
long statement, just beyond the middle of the book, of my young woman’s
extraordinary meditative vigil on the occasion that was to become for her
such a landmark. Reduced to its essence, it is but the vigil of searching
criticism; but it
throws the action further forward than twenty ‘incidents’ might
have done. It was designed to have all the vivacity of incident and all the
economy of picture. She sits up, by her dying fire, far into the night,
under the spell of recognitions on which she finds the last sharpness
suddenly wait. It is a representation simply of her motionlessly
seeing, and an attempt withal to make the mere still lucidity of
her act as ‘interesting’ as the surprise of a caravan or the
identification of a pirate. It represents, for that matter, one of the
identifications dear to the novelist, and even indispensable to him; but it
all goes on without her being approached by another person and without her
leaving her 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 fear, in her
superabundance, not an element of my plan, but only, an excess of my zeal.
So early was to begin my tendency to overtreat, rather than
undertreat (when there was choice or danger) my subject. (Many members of
my craft, I gather, are far from agreeing with me, but I have always held
overtreating the minor disservice.) ‘Treating’ that of
The Portrait
amounted to never forgetting, by any lapse, that the thing was under a
special obligation to be amusing. There was the danger of the noted
‘thinness’ – which was to be averted, tooth and nail, by
cultivation of the lively. That is at least how I see it to-day. Henrietta
must have been at that time a part of my wonderful notion of the lively. And
then there was another matter. I had, within the few preceding years,
come to live in London,
and the ‘international’ light lay, in those days, to my sense,
thick and rich upon the scene. It was the light in which so much of the
picture hung. But that is another matter. There is really too
much to say.
end of preface to volume 3
part of an etext edition of the
prefaces to the New York edition
of Henry James
on
the Ladder : a Henry James website