The simplest account of the origin of
The Princess Casamassima
is, I think, that this fiction proceeded quite directly, during the
first year
of a long residence in London, from the habit and the interest of
walking the streets. I walked a great deal – for exercise, for
amusement, for acquisition, and above all I always walked home at the
evening’s end, when the evening had been spent elsewhere, as happened
more often than not; and as to do this was to receive many impressions, so
the impressions worked and sought an issue, so the book after a time was
born. It is a fact that, as I look back, the attentive exploration of
London, the assault directly made by the great city upon an imagination
quick to react, fully explains a large part of it. There is a minor element
that refers itself to another source, of which I shall presently speak; but
the prime idea was unmistakeably the ripe round fruit of perambulation. One
walked 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
appeal, on the part of everything, to be interpreted and, so far as may be,
reproduced. ‘Subjects’ and situations, character and history, the
tragedy and comedy of life, are things of which the common air, in such
conditions, seems pungently to taste; and to a mind curious, before the
human scene, of meanings and revelations the great grey
Babylon
easily becomes, on its face, a garden bristling with an immense illustrative
flora. Possible stories, presentable figures, rise from the thick jungle as
the observer moves, fluttering up like startled game, and before he knows it
indeed he has fairly to guard himself against the brush of importunate
wings. He goes on as with his head in a cloud of humming presences –
especially during the younger, the
initiatory time, the fresh, the sharply-apprehensive months or years, more
or less numerous. We use our material up, we use up even the thick
tribute
of the London streets – if perception and attention but sufficiently
light our steps. But I think of them as lasting, for myself, quite
sufficiently long; I think of them as even still – dreadfully changed
for the worse in respect to any romantic idea as I find them – breaking
out on occasion into eloquence, throwing out deep notes from their vast
vague murmur.
There was a moment at any rate when they offered me no
image more vivid than that of some individual sensitive nature or fine mind,
some small obscure intelligent creature whose education should have been
almost wholly derived from them, capable of profiting by all the
civilisation, all the accumulations to which they testify, yet condemned to
see these things only from outside – in mere quickened consideration,
mere wistfulness and envy and despair. It seemed to me I had only to imagine
such a spirit intent enough and troubled enough, and to place it in presence
of the comings and goings, the great gregarious company, of the more
fortunate than himself – all on the scale on which London could show
them – to get possession of an interesting theme. I arrived so at the
history of little Hyacinth Robinson – he sprang up for me out of the
London pavement. To find his possible adventure interesting I had only to
conceive his watching the same public show, the same innumerable
appearances, I had watched myself, and of his watching very much as I had
watched; save indeed for one little difference. This difference would be
that so far as all the swarming facts should speak of freedom and ease,
knowledge and power, money, opportunity and satiety, he should be able to
revolve round them but at the most respectful of distances and with every
door of approach shut in his face. For one’s self, all conveniently,
there had been doors that opened – opened into light and warmth and
cheer, into good and charming relations; and if the place as a whole lay
heavy on one’s consciousness there was yet always for relief this
implication of one’s own lucky
share of the freedom and ease, lucky acquaintance with the number of lurking
springs at light pressure of which particular vistas would begin to recede,
great lighted, furnished, peopled galleries, sending forth gusts of
agreeable sound.
That main happy sense of the picture was always there
and that retreat from the general grimness never forbidden; whereby
one’s own relation to the mere formidable mass and weight of things was
eased oft and adjusted. One learned from an early period what it might be to
know London in such a way as that – an immense and interesting
discipline, an education on terms mostly convenient and delightful. But what
would be the effect of the other way, of having so many precious things
perpetually in one’s eyes, yet of missing them all for any closer
knowledge, and of the confinement of closer knowledge entirely to matters with
which a connexion, however intimate, could n’t possibly pass for a
privilege? Truly, of course, there are London 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 meaner conditions, the
lower manners and types, the general sordid struggle, the weight of the
burden of labour, the ignorance, the misery and the vice. With such matters
as those my tormented young man would have had contact – they would
have formed, fundamentally, from the first, his natural and immediate
London. But the reward of a romantic curiosity would be the question of what
the total assault, that of the world of his work-a-day life and the world of
his divination and his envy together, would have made of him, and what in
especial he would have made of them. As tormented, I say, I thought of him,
and that would be the point – if one could only see him feel enough to
be interesting without his feeling so much as not to be natural.
This in fact I have ever found rather terribly the point
– that the figures in any picture, the agents in any drama, are
interesting only in proportion as they feel their respective situations;
since the consciousness, on their part, of the complication exhibited forms
for us their link of connexion
with it. But there are degrees of feeling – the muffled, the faint, the
just sufficient, the barely intelligent, as we may say; and the acute, the
intense, the complete, in a word – the power to be finely aware and
richly responsible. It is those moved in this latter fashion who ‘get
most’ out of all that happens to them and who in so doing enable us, as
readers of their record, as participators by a fond attention, also to get
most. Their being finely aware – as
Hamlet
and
Lear,
say, are finely aware – makes absolutely the intensity of their
adventure, gives the maximum of sense to what befalls them. We care, our
curiosity and our sympathy care, comparatively little for what happens to the
stupid, the coarse and the blind; care for it, and for the effects of it, at
the most as helping to precipitate what happens to the more deeply wondering,
to the really sentient.
Hamlet
and
Lear
are surrounded, amid their complications, by the stupid and the
blind,
who minister in all sorts of ways to their recorded fate. Persons of markedly
limited sense would, on such a principle as that, play a part in the career
of my tormented youth; but he would n’t be of markedly limited sense
himself – he would note as many things and vibrate to as many occasions
as I might venture to make him.
There would n’t moreover simply be the question
of his suffering – of which we might soon get enough; there would be the
question of what, all beset and all perceptive, he should thus adventurously
do, thus dream and hazard and attempt. The interest of the attitude and the
act would be the actor’s imagination and vision of them, together with
the nature and degree of their felt return upon him. So the intelligent
creature would be required and so some picture of his intelligence involved.
The picture of an intelligence appears for the most part, it is true, a dead
weight for the reader of the English novel to carry, this reader having so
often the wondrous property of caring for the displayed tangle of human
relations without caring for its intelligibility. The teller of a story is
primarily, none the less, the listener to it, the reader of it, too; and,
having
needed thus to make it out, distinctly, on the crabbed page of life, to
disengage it from the rude human character and the more or less gothic text
in which it has been packed away, the very essence of his affair has been
the imputing of intelligence. The basis of his attention has been
that such and such an imbroglio has got started – on the page of life
– because of something that some one has felt and more or less
understood.
I recognise at the same time, and in planning
The Princess Casamassima
felt it highly important to recognise, the danger of filling too full any
supposed and above all any obviously limited vessel of consciousness. If
persons either tragically or comically embroiled with life allow us the
comic or tragic value of the embroilment in proportion as their struggle is
a measured and directed one, it is strangely true, none the less, that
beyond a certain point they are spoiled for us by this carrying of a due
light. They may carry too much of it for our credence, for our compassion,
for our derision. They may be shown as knowing too much and feeling too much
– not certainly for their remaining remarkable, but for their remaining
‘natural’ and typical, for their having the needful communities
with our own precious liability to fall into traps and be bewildered. It
seems probable that if we were never bewildered there would never be a story
to tell about us; we should partake of the superior nature of the
all-knowing immortals whose annals are dreadfully dull so long as flurried
humans are not, for the positive relief of bored
Olympians,
mixed up with them. Therefore it is that the wary reader for the most part
warns the novelist against making his characters too interpretative
of the muddle of fate, or in other words too divinely, too priggishly
clever. ‘Give us plenty of bewilderment,’ this monitor seems to
say, ‘so long as there is plenty of slashing out in the bewilderment
too. But don’t, we beseech you, give us too much intelligence; for
intelligence – well, endangers; endangers not perhaps the
slasher himself, but the very slashing, the subject-matter of any
self-respecting story. It opens up too
many considerations, possibilities, issues; it may lead the slasher
into dreary realms where slashing somehow fails and falls to the
ground.’
That is well reasoned on the part of the reader, who can
in spite of it never have an idea – or his earnest discriminations
would come to him less easily – of the extreme difficulty, for the
painter of the human mixture, of reproducing that mixture aright. ‘Give
us in the persons represented, the subjects of the bewilderment (that
bewilderment without which there would be no question of an issue or of the
fact of suspense, prime implications in any story) as much experience as
possible, but keep down the terms in which you report that experience,
because we only understand the very simplest’: such in effect are the
words in which the novelist constantly hears himself addressed, such the
plea made him by the would-be victims of his spell on behalf of that
sovereign principle the economy of interest, a principle as to which their
instinct is justly strong. He listens anxiously to the charge – nothing
can exceed his own solicitude for an economy of interest; but feels himself
all in presence of an abyss of ambiguities, the mutual accommodations in
which the reader wholly leaves to him. Experience, as I see it, is our
apprehension and our measure of what happens to us as social creatures
– any intelligent report of which has to be based on that apprehension.
The picture of the exposed and entangled state is what is required, and
there are certainly always plenty of grounds for keeping down the
complexities of a picture. A picture it still has to be, however, and by
that condition has to deal effectually with its subject, so that the simple
device of more and more keeping down may well not see us quite to our end or
even quite to our middle. One suggested way of keeping down, for instance,
is not to attribute feeling, or feelings, to persons who would n’t
in all probability have had any to speak of. The less space, within the frame
of the picture, their feelings take up the more space is left for their
doings – a fact that may at first seem to make for a refinement of
economy.
All of which is charming – yet would be infinitely
more
so if here at once ambiguity did n’t yawn; the unreality of the sharp
distinction, where the interest of observation is at stake, between doing
and feeling. In the immediate field of life, for action, for application,
for getting through a job, nothing may so much matter perhaps as the descent
of a suspended weight on this, that or the other spot, with all its
subjective concomitants quite secondary and irrelevant. But the affair of
the painter is not the immediate, it is the reflected field of life, the
realm not of application, but of appreciation – a truth that
makes our measure of effect altogether different. My report of people’s
experience – my report as a ‘story-teller’ – is
essentially my appreciation of it, and there is no ‘interest’ for
me in what my hero, my heroine or any one else does save through that
admirable process. As soon as I begin to appreciate simplification is
imperilled: the sharply distinguished parts of any adventure, any case of
endurance and performance, melt together as an appeal. I then see their
‘doing’, that of the persons just mentioned, as, immensely, their
feeling, their feeling as their doing; since I can have none of the conveyed
sense and taste of their situation without becoming intimate with them. I
can’t be intimate without that sense and taste, and I can’t
appreciate save by intimacy, any more than I can report save by a projected
light. Intimacy with a man’s specific behaviour, with his given case,
is desperately certain to make us see it as a whole – in which event
arbitrary limitations of our vision lose whatever beauty they may on
occasion have pretended to. What a man thinks and what he feels are the
history and the character of what he does; on all of which things the logic
of intensity rests. Without intensity where is vividness, and without
vividness where is presentability? If I have called the most general state
of one’s most exposed and assaulted figures the state of bewilderment
– the condition for instance on which
Thackeray
so much insists in the interest of his exhibited careers, the
condition of a humble heart, a bowed head, a patient wonder, a suspended
judgement, before the ‘awful will’ and the mysterious decrees of
Providence – so it is
rather witless to talk of merely getting rid of that displayed mode of
reaction, one of the oft-encountered, one of the highly recommended,
categories of feeling.
The whole thing comes to depend thus on the
quality of bewilderment characteristic of one’s creature, the
quality involved in the given case or supplied by one’s data. There are
doubtless many such qualities, ranging from vague and crepuscular to
sharpest and most critical; and we have but to imagine one of these latter
to see how easily – from the moment it gets its head at all – it
may insist on playing a part. There we have then at once a case of feeling,
of ever so many possible feelings, stretched across the scene like an
attached thread on which the pearls of interest are strung. There are
threads shorter and less tense, and I am far from implying that the minor,
the coarser and less fruitful forms and degrees of moral reaction, as we may
conveniently call it, may not yield lively results. They have their
subordinate, comparative, illustrative human value – that appeal of the
witless which is often so penetrating. Verily even, I think, no
‘story’ is possible without its fools – as most of the
fine painters of life,
Shakespeare, Cervantes and Balzac, Fielding, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens,
George Meredith, George Eliot, Jane Austen, have abundantly felt.
At the same time I confess I never see the leading
interest of any human hazard but in a consciousness (on the part of the
moved and moving creature) subject to fine intensification and wide
enlargement. It is as mirrored in that consciousness that the gross fools,
the headlong fools, the fatal fools play their part for us – they have
much less to show us in themselves. The troubled life mostly at the centre
of our subject – whatever our subject, for the artistic hour, happens
to be – embraces them and deals with them for its amusement and its
anguish: they are apt largely indeed, on a near view, to be all the cause of
its trouble. This means, exactly, that the person capable of feeling in the
given case more than another of what is to be felt for it, and so serving in
the highest degree to record it dramatically and objectively, is
the only sort of person on whom we can
count not to betray, to cheapen or, as we say, give away, the value and
beauty of the thing. By so much as the affair matters for some such
individual, by so much do we get the best there is of it, and by so much as
it falls within the scope of a denser and duller, a more vulgar and more
shallow capacity, do we get a picture dim and meagre.
The great chroniclers have clearly always been aware of
this; they have at least always either placed a mind of some sort – in
the sense of a reflecting and colouring medium – in possession of the
general adventure (when the latter has not been purely epic, as with
Scott,
say, as with
old Dumas
and with
Zola);
or else paid signally, as to the interest created, for their failure to do
so. We may note moreover in passing that this failure is in almost no case
intentional or part of a plan, but has sprung from their limited curiosity,
their short conception of the particular sensibility projected.
Edgar of Ravenswood
for instance, visited by the tragic tempest of
The bride of Lammermoor,
has a black cloak and hat and feathers more than he has a mind; just as
Hamlet,
while equally sabled and draped and plumed, while at least equally
romantic, has yet a mind still more than he has a costume. The situation
represented is that
Ravenswood
loves
Lucy Ashton
through dire difficulty and danger, and that she in the same way loves
him; but the relation so created between them is by this neglect of the
‘feeling’ question never shown us as primarily taking place.
It is shown only in its secondary, its confused and disfigured aspects
– where, however, luckily, it is presented with great romantic good
faith. The thing has nevertheless paid for its deviation, as I say, by a
sacrifice of intensity; the centre of the subject is empty and the
development pushed off, all round, toward the frame – which is, so
to speak, beautifully rich and curious. But I mention that relation to
each other of the appearances in a particular work only as a striking
negative case; there are in the connexion I have glanced at plenty
of striking positive ones. It is very true that Fielding’s hero in
Tom Jones
is but as ‘finely’, that is but as intimately, bewildered as a
young man of great health
and spirits may be when he has n’t a grain of imagination: the point to
be made is, at all events, that his sense of bewilderment obtains altogether
on the comic, never on the tragic plane. He has so much ‘life’
that it amounts, for the effect of comedy and application of satire, almost
to his having a mind, that is to his having reactions and a full
consciousness; besides which his author – he handsomely
possessed of a mind – has such an amplitude of reflexion for him and
round him that we see him through the mellow air of Fielding’s fine old
moralism, fine old humour and fine old style, which somehow really enlarge,
make every one and every thing important.
All of which furthers my remarking how much I have been
interested, on reading
The Princess Casamassima
over, to recognise my sense, sharp from far back, that clearness and
concreteness constantly depend, for any pictorial whole, on some
concentrated individual notation of them. That notation goes
forward here in the mind of little Hyacinth, immensely quickened by the fact
of its so mattering to his very life what he does make of things: which
passion of intelligence is, as I have already hinted, precisely his highest
value for our curiosity and our sympathy. Yet if his highest it is not at
all his only one, since the truth for ‘a young man in a book’ by
no means entirely resides in his being either exquisitely sensitive or
shiningly clever. It resides in some such measure of these things as may
consort 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 clever for them, if he knows more than is likely or natural
– for him – it ’s as if he were n’t
at all, as if he were false 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 – or be in the way of
learning enough – for his maximum dramatic value without feeling and
knowing too much for his minimum verisimilitude, his proper fusion with the
fable. This is the charming, the tormenting, the eternal little matter
to be made right, in all
the weaving of
silver threads and tapping on golden nails;
and I should take perhaps too
fantastic a comfort – I mean were not the comforts of the artist just
of the raw essence of fantasy – in any glimpse of such achieved
rightnesses, whether in my own work of that of others. In no work whatever,
doubtless, are they the felicities the most frequent; but they have so
inherent a price that even the traceable attempt at them, wherever met,
sheds, I think, a fine influence about.
I have for example a weakness of sympathy with that
constant effort
of George Eliot’s which plays through Adam Bede and Felix Holt and Tito
Melema, through Daniel Deronda and through Lydgate in Middlemarch,
through Maggie Tulliver, through Romola, through Dorothea Brooke and
Gwendolen Harleth; the effort to show their adventures and their history
– the author’s subject-matter all – as determined by their
feelings and the nature of their minds. Their emotions, their stirred
intelligence, their moral consciousness, become thus, by sufficiently
charmed perusal, our own very adventure. The creator of Deronda and of
Romola is charged, I know, with having on occasion – as in dealing with
those very celebrities themselves – left the figure, the concrete man
and woman, too abstract by reason of the quantity of soul employed; but such
mischances, where imagination and humour still keep them company, often have
an interest that is wanting to agitations of the mere surface or to those
that may be only taken for granted. I should even like to give myself the
pleasure of retracing from one of my own productions to another the play of
a like instinctive disposition, of catching in the fact, at one point after
another, from
Roderick Hudson
to
The golden bowl,
that provision for interest which consists in placing advantageously,
placing right in the middle of the light, the most polished of possible
mirrors of the subject. Rowland Mallet, in
Roderick Hudson,
is exactly such a mirror, not a bit autobiographic or formally ‘first
person’ though he be, and I might exemplify the case through a long
list, through the nature of such a ‘mind’ even as the
all-objective Newman in
The American,
through the thickly-peopled imagination of Isabel Archer in
The portrait of a lady
(her imagination positively the deepest depth of her imbroglio) down to
such unmistakeable examples as that of Merton Densher in
The wings of the dove,
that of Lambert Strether in
The ambassadors
(he a mirror verily of miraculous
silver and quite pre-eminent, I think, for the connexion) and that of the
Prince in the first half and that of the Princess in the second half of
The golden bowl.
I should note the extent to which these persons are, so far as their other
passions permit, intense perceivers, all, of their respective
predicaments, and I should go on from them to fifty other examples; even to
the divided Vanderbank of
The awkward age,
the extreme pinch of 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 cases, to the disaffected guardian of
an overgrown legend in
The birthplace,
to the luckless fine artist of
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 by good talk, disqualified for common domestic service by the beautiful
growth of his habit of quiet attention, his faculty of appreciation. But though
this demonstration of a rooted vice – since a vice it would appear mainly
accounted – might yield amusement, the examples referred to must await
their turn.
I had had for a long time well before me, at any rate,
my small obscure but ardent observer of the ‘London world’, saw
him roam and wonder and yearn, saw all the unanswered questions and baffled
passions that might ferment in him – once he should be made both
sufficiently thoughtful
and sufficiently ‘disinherited’; but this image, however
interesting, was of course not by itself a progression, an action,
did n’t by itself make a drama. I got my action however – failing
which one has nothing – under the prompt sense that the state of
feeling I was concerned with might develop and beget another state, might
return at a given moment, and with the greatest vivacity, on itself. To see
this was really to feel one’s subject swim into one’s ken,
especially after a certain other ingenious connexion had been made for it. I
find myself again recalling, and with the possible ‘fun’ of it
reviving too, how I recognised, as revealed and prescribed, the particular
complexion, profession and other conditions of my little presumptuous
adventurer, with his combination of intrinsic fineness and fortuitous
adversity, his small cluster of ‘dingy’ London associations and
the swelling spirit in him which was to be the field of his strange
experience. Accessible through his imagination, as I have hinted, to a
thousand provocations and intimations, he would become most acquainted with
destiny in the form of a lively inward revolution. His being jealous of all
the ease of life of which he tastes so little, and, bitten, under this
exasperation, with an aggressive, vindictive, destructive social faith, his
turning to
‘treasons,
stratagems and spoils’
might be as vivid a picture as one chose, but would move to pity and terror
only by the aid of some deeper complication, some imposed and formidable
issue.
The complication most interesting then would be that he
should fall in love with the beauty of the world, actual order and all, at
the moment of his most feeling and most hating the famous ‘iniquity of
its social arrangements’; so that his position as an irreconcileable
pledged enemy to it, thus rendered false by something more personal than his
opinions and his vows, becomes the sharpest of his torments. To make it a
torment that really matters, however, he must have got practically involved,
specifically committed to the stand he has, under the pressure of more
knowledge, found impossible; out of which has come for him the deep dilemma
of the disillusioned and repentant conspirator. He has
thrown himself into the more than ‘shady’ underworld of militant
socialism, he has undertaken to play a part – a part that with the drop
of his exasperation and the growth, simply expressed, of his taste, is out
of all tune with his passion, at any cost, for life itself, the life,
whatever it be, that surrounds him. Dabbling deeply in revolutionary
politics of a hole-and-corner sort, he would be ‘in’ up to his
neck, and with that precarious part of him particularly involved, so that
his tergiversation is the climax of his adventure. What was essential with
this was that he should have a social – not less than a socialist
– connexion, find a door somehow open to him into the appeased and
civilised state, into that warmer glow of things he is precisely to help to
undermine. To look for this necessary connexion was for me to meet it
suddenly in the form of that extremely
disponible
figure of Christina Light whom I had ten years before found left on my hands
at the conclusion of
Roderick Hudson.
She had for so long, in the vague limbo of those ghosts we have conjured
but not exorcised, been looking for a situation, awaiting a niche and a
function.
I shall not pretend to trace the steps and stages by
which the imputability of a future to that young woman – which was like
the act of clothing her chilled and patient nakedness – had for its
prime effect to plant her in my little bookbinder’s path. Nothing would
doubtless beckon us on further, with a large leisure, than such a chance to
study the obscure law under which certain of a novelist’s characters,
more or less honourably buried, revive for him by a force or a whim of their
own and ‘walk’ round his house of art like haunting ghosts,
feeling for the old doors they knew, fumbling at stiff latches and pressing
their pale faces, in the outer dark, to lighted windows. I mistrust them, I
confess, in general; my sense of a really expressed character is that it
shall have originally so tasted of the ordeal of service as to feel no
disposition to yield again to the strain. Why should the Princess of the
climax of
Roderick Hudson
still have made her desire felt, unless in fact to testify that she had not
been – for what she was – completely recorded?
To continue in evidence, that had struck me from far back as her natural
passion; in evidence at any price, not consenting to be laid away with
folded hands in the pasteboard tomb, the doll’s box, to which we
usually relegate the spent puppet after the fashion of a recumbent worthy on
the slab of a sepulchral monument. I was to see this, after all, in the
event, as the fruit of a restless vanity: Christina had felt herself, known
herself, striking, in the earlier connexion, and could n’t resign
herself not to strike again. Her pressure then was not to be resisted –
sharply as the question might come up of why she should pretend to strike
just there. I shall not attempt to answer it with reasons (one can
never tell everything); it was enough that I could recognise her claim to
have travelled far – far from where I had last left her: that, one
felt, was in character – that was what she naturally would
have done. Her prime note had been an aversion to the
banal,
and nothing could be of an effect less
banal,
I judged, than her intervention in the life of a dingy little London bookbinder
whose sensibility, whose flow of opinions on ‘public questions’ in
especial, should have been poisoned at the source.
She would be world-weary – that was another of her
notes; and the extravagance of her attitude in these new relations would
have its root and its apparent logic in her need to feel freshly about
something or other – it might scarce matter what. She can, or she
believes she can, feel freshly about the ‘people’ and 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 to a certainty where I was to have looked for her
– quite off and away (once granted the wisdom of listening to
her anew at all): therefore Hyacinth’s encounter with her could pass
for natural, and it was fortunately to be noted that she was to serve for
his experience in quite another and a more ‘leading’ sense than
any in which he was to serve for hers. I confess I was not averse –
such are the possible weaknesses of the artist in face of high difficulties
– to
feeling that if his appearance of consistency were obtained I might at least
try to remain comparatively at my ease about hers. I may add moreover that
the resuscitation of Christina (and, on the minor scale, of the Prince and
of Madame Grandoni) put in a strong light for me the whole question, for the
romancer, of ‘going on with a character’: as Balzac first of all
systematically
went on,
as Thackeray, as Trollope, as Zola all more or less ingeniously
went on.
I was to find no small savour in the reflexions so
precipitated; though I may treat myself here only to this remark about them
– that the revivalist impulse on the fond writer’s part strikes me
as one thing, a charmingly conceivable thing, but the effect of a free
indulgence in it (effect, that is, on the nerves of the reader) as, for
twenty rather ineffable reasons, quite another.
I remember at any rate feeling myself all in possession
of little Hyacinth’s consistency, as I have called it, down at
Dover
during certain weeks that were none too remotely precedent to the autumn of
1885 and the appearance, in
The Atlantic monthly
again, of the first chapters of the story. There were certain sunny, breezy
balconied rooms at the quieter end of the Esplanade of that cheerful
castle-crested little town – now infinitely perturbed by gigantic
‘harbour works’,
but then only faded and over-soldiered and all
pleasantly and humbly submissive to the law that snubs in due course the
presumption of flourishing resorts – to which I had already more than
once had recourse in hours of quickened industry and which, though much else
has been swept away, still archaically exist. To have lately noted this
again from the old benched and asphalted walk by the sea, the twinkling
Channel
beyond which on occasion the opposite coast of France used to gleam
as an incident of the charming tendency of the whole prospect (immediate
picture and fond design alike) amusingly to shine, was somehow to
taste afresh, and with a certain surprise, the odd quality of that original
confidence that the parts of my plan would somehow hang together. I
may wonder at my confidence now – given the extreme, the very
particular truth
and ‘authority’ required at so many points; but to wonder is to
live back gratefully into the finer reasons of things, with all the detail
of harsh application and friction (that there must have been) quite happily
blurred and dim. The finest of reasons – I mean for the sublime
confidence I speak of – was that I felt in full personal
possession of my matter; this really seemed the fruit of direct experience.
My scheme called for the suggested nearness (to all our apparently ordered
life) of some sinister anarchic underworld, heaving in its pain, its power
and its hate; a presentation not of sharp particulars, but of loose
appearances, vague motions and sounds and symptoms, just perceptible
presences and general looming possibilities. To have adopted the scheme was
to have had to meet the question of one’s ‘notes’, over the
whole ground, the question of what, in such directions, one had ‘gone
into’ and how far one had gone; and to have answered that question
– to one’s own satisfaction at least – was truly to see
one’s way.
My notes then, on the much-mixed world of my hero’s
both overt and covert consciousness, were exactly my gathered impressions
and stirred perceptions, the deposit in my working imagination of all my
visual and all my constructive sense of London. The very plan of my book had
in fact directly confronted me with the rich principle of the Note, and was
to do much to clear up, once for all, my practical view of it. If one was to
undertake to tell tales and to report with truth on the human scene, it
could be but because ‘notes’ had been from the cradle the
ineluctable consequence of one’s greatest inward energy: to take them
was as natural as to look, to think, to feel, to recognise, to remember, as
to perform any act of understanding. The play of the energy had been
continuous and could n’t change; what changed was only the objects and
situations pressing the spring of it. Notes had been in other words the
things one could n’t not take, and the prime result of all
fresh experience was to remind one of that. I have endeavoured to
characterise the peremptory fashion in which my fresh experience of London
– the London of the habitual observer,
the preoccupied painter, the pedestrian prowler – reminded me; an
admonition that represented, I think, the sum of my investigations. I recall
pulling no wires, knocking at no closed doors, applying for no
‘authentic’ information; but I recall also on the other hand the
practice of never missing an opportunity to add a drop, however small, to
the bucket of my impressions or to renew my sense of being able to dip into
it. To haunt the great city and by this habit to penetrate it,
imaginatively, in as many places as possible – that was to be
informed, that was to pull wires, that was to open doors,
that positively was to groan at times under the weight of
one’s accumulations.
Face to face with the idea of Hyacinth’s
subterraneous politics and occult affiliations, I recollect perfectly
feeling, in short, that I might well be ashamed if, with my advantages
– and there was n’t a street, a corner, an hour, of London that was
not an advantage – I should n’t be able to piece together a proper
semblance of those things, as indeed a proper semblance of all the odd parts
of his life. There was always of course the chance that the propriety might
be challenged – challenged by readers of a knowledge greater than mine.
Yet knowledge, after all, of what? My vision of the aspects I more or less
fortunately rendered was, exactly, my knowledge. If I made my
appearances live, what was this but the utmost one could do with them? Let
me at the same time not deny that, in answer to probable ironic reflexions
on the full license for sketchiness and vagueness and dimness taken indeed
by my picture, I had to bethink myself in advance of a defence of my
‘artistic position’. Should n’t I find it in the happy
contention 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
not knowing, but only guessing and suspecting and trying to ignore, what
‘goes on’ irreconcileably, subversively, beneath the vast smug
surface? I could n’t deal with that positive quantity for itself –
my subject had another too exacting side; but I might perhaps show the
social ear as on occasion applied to the ground,
or catch some gust of the hot breath that I had at many an hour seemed to
see escape and hover. What it all came back to was, no doubt, something like
this wisdom – that if you have n’t, for fiction, the root
of the matter in you, have n’t the sense of life and the penetrating
imagination, you are a fool in the very presence of the revealed and
assured; but that if you are so armed you are not really helpless,
not without your resource, even before mysteries abysmal.
end of the preface to volume 5
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