Yet I continue to see experience giving me its jog mainly in the form of an invitation from the gentle editor of the Atlantic, the late Thomas Bailey Aldrich, to contribute to his pages a serial that should run through the year. That friendly appeal becomes thus the most definite statement I can make of the ‘genesis’ of the book; though from the moment of its reaching me everything else in the matter seems to live again. What lives not least, to be quite candid, is the fact that I was to see this production make a virtual end, for the time, as by its sinister effect – though for reasons still obscure to me – of the pleasant old custom of the ‘running’ of the novel. Not for many years was I to feel the practice, for my benefit, confidingly revive. The influence of The tragic muse was thus exactly other than what I had all earnestly (if of course privately enough) invoked for it, and I remember well the particular chill, at last, of the sense of my having launched it in a great grey void from which no echo or message whatever would come back. None, in the event, ever came, and as I now read the book over I find the circumstance make, in its name, for a special tenderness of charity; even for that finer consideration hanging in the parental breast about the maimed or slighted, the disfigured or defeated, the unlucky or unlikely child – with this hapless small mortal thought of further as somehow ‘compromising’. I am thus able to take the thing as having quite wittingly and undisturbedly existed for itself alone, and to liken it to some aromatic bag of gathered herbs of which the string has never been loosed; or, better still, to some jar of potpourri, shaped and overfigured and polished, but of which the lid, never lifted, has provided for the intense accumulation of the fragrance within. The consistent, the sustained, preserved tone of The tragic muse, its constant and doubtless rather fine-drawn truth to its particular sought pitch and accent, are, critically speaking, its principal merit – the inner harmony that I perhaps presumptuously permit myself to compare to an unevaporated scent.
After which indeed I may well be summoned to say what I mean, in such a business, by an appreciable ‘tone’ and how I can justify my claim to it – a demonstration that will await us later. Suffice it just here that I find the latent historic clue in my hand again with the easy recall of my prompt grasp of such a chance to make a story about art. There was my subject this time – all mature with having long waited, and with the blest dignity that my original perception of its value was quite lost in the mists of youth. I must long have carried in my head the notion of a young man who should amid difficulty – the difficulties being the story – have abandoned ‘public life’ for the zealous pursuit of some supposedly minor craft; just as, evidently, there had hovered before me some possible picture (but all comic and ironic) of one of the most salient London ‘social’ passions, the unappeasable curiosity for the things of the theatre; for every one of them, that is, except the drama itself, and for the ‘personality’ of the performer (almost any performer quite sufficiently serving) in particular. This latter, verily, had struck me as an aspect appealing mainly to satiric treatment; the only adequate or effective treatment, I had again and again felt, for most of the distinctively social aspects of London: the general artlessly histrionised air of things caused so many examples to spring from behind any hedge. What came up, however, at once, for my own stretched canvas, was that it would have to be ample, give me really space to turn round, and that a single illustrative case might easily be meagre fare. The young man who should ‘chuck’ admired politics, and of course some other admired object with them, would be all very well; but he would n’t be enough – therefore what should one say to some other young man who would chuck something and somebody else, admired in their way too?
There need never, at the worst, be any difficulty about the things advantageously chuckable for art; the question is all but of choosing them in the heap. Yet were I to represent a struggle – an interesting one, indispensably – with the passions of the theatre (as a profession, or at least as an absorption) I should have to place the theatre in another light than the satiric. This, however, would by good luck be perfectly possible too – without a sacrifice of truth; and I should doubtless even be able to make my theatric case as important as I might desire it. It seemed clear that I needed big cases – small ones would practically give my central idea away; and I make out now my still labouring under the illusion that the case of the sacrifice for art can ever be, with truth, with taste, with discretion involved, apparently and showily ‘big’. I dare say it glimmered upon me even then that the very sharpest difficulty of the victim of the conflict I should seek to represent, and the very highest interest of his predicament, dwell deep in the fact that his repudiation of the great obvious, great moral or functional or useful character, shall just have to consent to resemble a surrender for absolutely nothing. Those characters are all large and expansive, seated and established and endowed; whereas the most charming truth about the preference for art is that to parade abroad so thoroughly inward and so naturally embarrassed a matter is to falsify and vulgarise it; that as a preference attended with the honours of publicity it is indeed nowhere; that in fact, under the rule of its sincerity, its only honours are those of contraction, concentration and a seemingly deplorable indifference to everything but itself. Nothing can well figure as less ‘big’, in an honest thesis, than a marked instance of somebody’s willingness to pass mainly for an ass. Of these things I must, I say, have been in strictness aware; what I perhaps failed of was to note that if a certain romantic glamour (even that of mere eccentricity or of a fine perversity) may be flung over the act of exchange of a ‘career’ for the æsthetic life in general, the prose and the modesty of the matter yet come in with any exhibition of the particular branch of a æsthetics selected. Then it is that the attitude of hero or heroine may look too much – for the romantic effect – like a low crouching over proved trifles. Art indeed has in our day taken on so many honours and emoluments that the recognition of its importance is more than a custom, has become on occasion almost a fury: the line is drawn – especially in the English world – only at the importance of heeding what it may mean.
The more I turn my pieces over, at any rate, the more I now see I must have found in them, and I remember how, once well in presence of my three typical examples, my fear of too ample a canvas quite dropped. The only question was that if I had marked my political case, from so far back, for ‘a story by itself
’,
and then marked my theatrical case
for another, the joining together of these interests, originally seen as
separate, might, all disgracefully, betray the seam, show for mechanical and
superficial. A story was a story, a picture a picture, and I had a mortal
horror of two stories, two pictures, in one. The reason of this was the
clearest – my subject was immediately, under that disadvantage, so
cheated of its indispensable centre as to become of no more use for
expressing a main intention than a wheel without a hub is of use for moving
a cart. It was a fact, apparently, that one had on occasion seen
two pictures in one; were there not for instance certain sublime
Tintorettos
at Venice, a measureless Crucifixion in especial, which showed without loss
of authority half a dozen actions separately taking place? Yes, that might
be, but there had surely been nevertheless a mighty pictorial fusion, so
that the virtue of composition had somehow thereby come all mysteriously to
its own. Of course the affair would be simple enough if composition could be
kept out of the question; yet by what art or process, what bars and bolts,
what unmuzzled dogs and pointed
guns, perform that feat? I had to know myself utterly inapt for any such
valour and recognise that, to make it possible, sundry things should have
begun for me much further back than I had felt them even in their dawn. A
picture without composition slights its most precious chance for beauty, and
is moreover not composed at all unless the painter knows how that
principle
of health and safety, working as an absolutely premeditated art, has
prevailed. There may in its absence be life, incontestably, as
The Newcomes
has life, as
Les trois mousquetaires,
as Tolstoi’s
Peace and war,
have it; but what do such large loose baggy monsters, with their queer
elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean?
We have heard it maintained, we well remember, that such things are
‘superior to art’; but we understand least of all what that
may mean, and we look in vain for the artist, the divine explanatory genius,
who will come to our aid and tell us. There is life and life, and as waste
is only life sacrificed and thereby prevented from ‘counting’, I
delight in a deep-breathing economy and an organic form. My business was
accordingly to ‘go in’ for complete pictorial fusion, some such
common interest between my two first notions as would, in spite of their
birth under quite different stars, do them no violence at all.I recall with this confirmed infatuation of retrospect that through the mild perceptions I here glance at there struck for The tragic muse the first hour of a season of no small subjective felicity; lighted mainly, I seem to see, by a wide west window that, high aloft, looked over near and far London sunsets, a half-grey, half-flushed expanse of London life. The production of the thing, which yet took a good many months, lives for me again all contemporaneously in that full projection, upon my very table, of the good fog-filtered Kensington mornings; which had a way indeed of seeing the sunset in and which at the very last are merged to memory in a different and a sharper pressure, that of an hotel bedroom in Paris during the autumn of 1889, with the Exposition du Centenaire about to end – and my long story, through the usual difficulties, as well. The usual difficulties – and I fairly cherish the record as some adventurer in another line may hug the sense of his inveterate habit of just saving in time the neck he ever undiscourageably risks – were those bequeathed as a particular vice of the artistic spirit, against which vigilance had been destined from the first to exert itself in vain, and the effect of which was that again and again, perversely, incurably, the centre of my structure would insist on placing itself not, so to speak, in the middle. It mattered little that the reader with the idea or the suspicion of a structural centre is the rarest of friends and of critics – a bird, it would seem, as merely fabled as the phœnix: the terminational terror was none the less certain to break in and my work threaten to masquerade for me as an active figure condemned to the disgrace of legs too short, ever so much too short, for its body. I urge myself to the candid confession that in very few of my productions, to my eye, has the organic centre succeeded in getting into proper position.
Time after time, then, has the precious waistband or girdle, studded and buckled and placed for brave outward show, practically worked itself, and in spite of desperate remonstrance, or in other words essential counterplotting, to a point perilously near the knees – perilously I mean for the freedom of these parts. In several of my compositions this displacement has so succeeded, at the crisis, in defying and resisting me, has appeared so fraught with probable dishonour, that I still turn upon them, in spite of the greater or less success of final dissimulation, a rueful and wondering eye. These productions have in fact, if I may be so bold about it, specious and spurious centres altogether, to make up for the failure of the true. As to which in my list they are, however, that is another business, not on any terms to be made known. Such at least would seem my resolution so far as I have thus proceeded. Of any attention ever arrested by the pages forming the object of this reference that rigour of discrimination has wholly and consistently failed, I gather, to constitute a part. In which fact there is perhaps after all a rough justice – since the infirmity I speak of, for example, has been always but the direct and immediate fruit of a positive excess of foresight, the overdone desire to provide for future need and lay up heavenly treasure against the demands of my climax. If the art of the drama, as a great French master of it has said, is above all the art of preparations, that is true only to a less extent of the art of the novel, and true exactly in the degree in which the art of the particular novel comes near that of the drama. The first half of a fiction insists ever on figuring to me as the stage or theatre for the second half, and I have in general given so much space to making the theatre propitious that my halves have too often proved strangely unequal. Thereby has arisen with grim regularity the question of artfully, of consummately masking the fault and conferring on the false quantity the brave appearance of the true.
But I am far from pretending that these desperations of ingenuity have not – as through seeming most of the very essence of the problem – their exasperated charm; so far from it that my particular supreme predicament in the Paris hotel, after an undue primary leakage of time, no doubt, over at the great river-spanning museum of the Champ de Mars and the Trocadero, fairly takes on to me now the tender grace of a day that is dead. Re-reading the last chapters of The tragic muse I catch again the very odour of Paris, which comes up in the rich rumble of the Rue de la Paix – with which my room itself, for that matter, seems impregnated – and which hangs for reminiscence about the embarrassed effort to ‘finish’, not ignobly, within my already exceeded limits; an effort prolonged each day to those late afternoon hours during which the tone of the terrible city seemed to deepen about one to an effect strangely composed at once of the auspicious and the fatal. The ‘plot’ of Paris thickened at such hours beyond any other plot in the world, I think; but there one sat meanwhile with another, on one’s hands, absolutely requiring precedence. Not the least imperative of one’s conditions was thus that one should have really, should have finely and (given one’s scale) concisely treated one’s subject, in spite of there being so much of the confounded irreducible quantity still to treat. If I spoke just now, however, of the ‘exasperated’ charm of supreme difficulty, that is because the challenge of economic representation so easily becomes, in any of the arts, intensely interesting to meet. To put all that is possible of one’s idea into a form and compass that will contain and express it only by delicate adjustments and an exquisite chemistry, so that there will at the end be neither a drop of one’s liquor left nor a hair’s breadth of the rim of one’s glass to spare – every artist will remember how often that sort of necessity has carried with it its particular inspiration. Therein lies the secret of the appeal, to his mind, of the successfully fore-shortened thing, where representation is arrived at, as I have already elsewhere had occasion to urge, not by the addition of items (a light that has for its attendant shadow a possible dryness) but by the art of figuring synthetically, a compactness into which the imagination may cut thick, as into the rich density of wedding-cake. The moral of all which indeed, I fear, is, perhaps too trivially, but that the ‘thick’, the false, the dissembling second half of the work before me, associated throughout with the effort to weight my dramatic values as heavily as might be, since they had to be so few, presents that effort as at the very last a quite convulsive, yet in its way highly agreeable, spasm. Of such mild prodigies is the ‘history’ of any specific creative effort composed!
But I have got too much out of the ‘old’ Kensington light of twenty years ago – a lingering oblique ray of which, to-day surely quite extinct, played for a benediction over my canvas. From the moment I made out, at my high-perched west window, my lucky title, that is from the moment Miriam Rooth herself had given it me, so this young woman had given me with it her own position in the book, and so that in turn had given me my precious unity, to which no more than Miriam was either Nick Dormer or Peter Sherringham to be sacrificed. Much of the interest of the matter was immediately therefore in working out the detail of that unity and – always entrancing range of questions – the order, the reason, the relation, of presented aspects. With three general aspects, that of Miriam’s case, that of Nick’s and that of Sherringham’s, there was work in plenty cut out; since happy as it might be to say “My several actions beautifully become one,” the point of the affair would be in showing them beautifully become so – without which showing foul failure hovered and pounced. Well, the pleasure of handling an action (or, otherwise expressed, of a ‘story’) is at the worst, for a storyteller, immense, and the interest of such a question as for example keeping Nick Dormer’s story his and yet making it also and all effectively in a large part Peter Sherringham’s, of keeping Sherringham’s his and yet making it in its high degree his kinsman’s, too, and Miriam Rooth’s into the bargain; just as Miriam Rooth’s is by the same token quite operatively his and Nick’s, and just as that of each of the young men, by an equal logic, very contributively hers – the interest of such a question, I say, is ever so considerably the interest of the system on which the whole thing is done. I see to-day that it was but half a system to say: “Oh Miriam, a case herself, is the link between the two other cases”; that device was to ask for as much help as it gave and to require a good deal more application than it announced on the surface. The sense of a system saves the painter from the baseness of the arbitrary stroke, the touch without its reason, but as payment for that service the process insists on being kept impeccably the right one.
These are intimate truths indeed, of which the charm mainly comes out but on experiment and in practice; yet I like to have it well before me here that, after all, The tragic muse makes it not easy to say which of the situations concerned in it predominates and rules. What has become in that imperfect order, accordingly, of the famous centre of one’s subject? It is surely not in Nick’s consciousness – since why, if it be, are we treated to such an intolerable dose of Sherringham’s? It can’t be in Sherringham’s – we have for that altogether an excess of Nick’s. How on the other hand can it be in Miriam’s, given that we have no direct exhibition of hers whatever, that we get at it all inferentially and inductively, seeing it only through a more or less bewildered interpretation of it by others. The emphasis is all on an absolutely objective Miriam, and, this affirmed, how – with such an amount of exposed subjectivity all round her – can so dense a medium be a centre? Such questions as those go straight – thanks to which they are, I profess, delightful; going straight they are of the sort that makes answers possible. Miriam is central then to analysis, in spite of being objective; central in virtue of the fact that the whole thing has visibly, from the first, to get itself done in dramatic, or at least in scenic conditions – though scenic conditions which are as near an approach to the dramatic as the novel may permit itself and which have this in common with the latter, that they move in the light of alternation. This imposes a consistency other than that of the novel at its loosest, and, for one’s subject, a different view and a different placing of the centre. The charm of the scenic consistency, the consistency of the multiplication of aspects, that of making them amusingly various, had haunted the author of The tragic muse from far back, and he was in due course to yield to it all luxuriously, too luxuriously perhaps, in The awkward age, as will doubtless with the extension of these remarks be complacently shown.
To put himself at any rate as much as possible under the protection of it had been ever his practice (he had notably done so in The Princess Casamassima, so frankly panoramic and processional); and in what case could this protection have had more price than in the one before us? No character in a play (any play not a mere monologue) has, for the right expression of the thing, a usurping consciousness; the consciousness of others is exhibited exactly in the same way as that of the ‘hero’; the prodigious consciousness of Hamlet, the most capacious and most crowded, the moral presence the most asserted, in the whole range of fiction, only takes its turn with that of the other agents of the story, no matter how occasional these may be. It is left in other words to answer for itself equally with theirs: wherefore (by a parity of reasoning if not of example) Miriam’s might without inconsequence be placed on the same footing; and all in spite of the fact that the ‘moral presence’ of each of the men most importantly concerned with her – or with the second of whom she at least is importantly concerned – is independently answered for. The idea of the book being, as I have said, a picture of some of the personal consequences of the art-appetite raised to intensity, swollen to voracity, the heavy emphasis falls where the symbol of some of the complications so begotten might be made (as I judged, heaven forgive me!) most ‘amusing’: amusing I mean in the blest very modern sense. I never ‘go behind’ Miriam; only poor Sherringham goes, a great deal, and Nick Dormer goes a little, and the author, while they so waste wonderment, goes behind them: but none the less she is as thoroughly symbolic, as functional, for illustration of the idea, as either of them, while her image had seemed susceptible of a livelier and ‘prettier’ concretion. I had desired for her, I remember, all manageable vividness – so ineluctable had it long appeared to ‘do the actress’, to touch the theatre, to meet that connexion somehow or other, in any free plunge of the speculative fork into the contemporary social salad.
The late R. L. Stevenson was to write to me, I recall – and precisely on the occasion of The tragic muse – that he was at a loss to conceive how one could find an interest in anything so vulgar or pretend to gather fruit in so scrubby an orchard; but the view of a creature of the stage, the view of the ‘histrionic temperament’, as suggestive much less, verily, in respect to the poor stage per se than in respect to ‘art’ at large, affected me in spite of that as justly tenable. An objection of a more pointed order was forced upon me by an acute friend later on and in another connexion: the challenge of one’s right, in any pretended show of social realities, to attach to the image of a ‘public character’, a supposed particular celebrity, a range of interest, of intrinsic distinction, greater than any such display of importance on the part of eminent members of the class as we see them about us. There was a nice point if one would – yet only nice enough, after all, to be easily amusing. We shall deal with it later on, however, in a more urgent connexion. What would have worried me much more had it dawned earlier is the light lately thrown by that admirable writer M. Anatole France on the question of any animated view of the histrionic temperament – a light that may well dazzle to distress any ingenuous worker in the same field. In those parts of his brief but inimitable Histoire comique on which he is most to be congratulated – for there are some that prompt to reserves – he has ‘done the actress’, as well as the actor, done above all the mountebank, the mummer and the cabotin, and mixed them up with the queer theatric air, in a manner that practically warns all other hands off the material for ever. At the same time I think I saw Miriam, and without a sacrifice of truth, that is of the particular glow of verisimilitude I wished her most to benefit by, in a complexity of relations finer than any that appear possible for the gentry of M. Anatole France.
Her relation to Nick Dormer, for instance, was intended as a superior interest – that of being (while perfectly sincere, sincere for her, and therefore perfectly consonant with her impulse perpetually to perform and with her success in performing) the result of a touched imagination, a touched pride for ‘art’, as well as of the charm cast on other sensibilities still. Dormer’s relation to herself is a different matter, of which more presently; but the sympathy she, poor young woman, very generously and intelligently offers him where most people have so stinted it, is disclosed largely at the cost of her egotism and her personal pretensions, even though in fact determined by her sense of their together, Nick and she, postponing the ‘world’ to their conception of other and finer decencies. Nick can’t on the whole see – for I have represented him as in his day quite sufficiently troubled and anxious – why he should condemn to ugly feebleness his most prized faculty (most prized, at least, by himself) even in order to keep his seat in Parliament, to inherit Mr Carteret’s blessing and money, to gratify his mother and carry out the mission of his father, to marry Julia Dallow in fine, a beautiful imperative woman with a great many thousands a year. It all comes back in the last analysis to the individual vision of decency, the critical as well as the passionate judgment of it under sharp stress; and Nick’s vision and judgment, all on the æsthetic ground, have beautifully coincided, to Miriam’s imagination, with a now fully marked, an inspired and impenitent, choice of her own: so that, other considerations powerfully aiding indeed, she is ready to see their interest all splendidly as one. She is in the uplifted state to which sacrifices and submissions loom large, but loom so just because they must write sympathy, write passion, large. Her measure of what she would be capable of for him – capable, that is, of not asking of him – will depend on what he shall ask of her, but she has no fear of not being able to satisfy him, even to the point of ‘chucking’ for him, if need be, that artistic identity of her own which she has begun to build up. It will all be to the glory therefore of their common infatuation with ‘art’: she will doubtless be no less willing to serve his than she was eager to serve her own, purged now of the too great shrillness.
This puts her quite on a different level from that of the vivid monsters of M. France, whose artistic identity is the last thing they wish to chuck – their only dismissal is of all material and social overdraping. Nick Dormer in point of fact asks of Miriam nothing but that she shall remain ‘awfully interesting to paint’; but that is his relation, which, as I say, is quite a matter by itself. He at any rate, luckily for both of them it may be, does n’t put her to the test: he is so busy with his own case, busy with testing himself and feeling his reality. He had seen himself as giving up precious things for an object, and that object has somehow not been the young woman in question, nor anything very nearly like her. She on the other hand has asked everything of Peter Sherringham, who has asked everything of her; and it is in so doing that she has really most testified for art and invited him to testify. With his professed interest in the theatre – one of those deep subjections that, in men of ‘taste’, the Comédie Française used in old days to conspire for and some such odd and affecting examples of which were to be noted – he yet offers her his hand and an introduction to the very best society if she will leave the stage. The power – and her having the sense of the power – to ‘shine’ in the world is his highest measure of her, the test applied by him to her beautiful human value; just as the manner in which she turns on him is the application of her own standard and touchstone. She is perfectly sure of her own; for – if there were nothing else, and there is much – she has tasted blood, so to speak, in the form of her so prompt and auspicious success with the public, leaving all probations behind (the whole of which, as the book gives it, is too rapid and sudden, though inevitably so: processes, periods, intervals, stages, degrees, connexions, may be easily enough and barely enough named, may be unconvincingly stated, in fiction, to the deep discredit of the writer, but it remains the very deuce to represent them, especially represent them under strong compression and in brief and subordinate terms; and this even though the novelist who does n’t represent, and represent ‘all the time’, is lost, exactly as much lost as the painter who, at his work and given his intention, does n’t paint ‘all the time’).
Turn upon her friend at any rate Miriam does; and one of my main points is missed if it fails to appear that she does so with absolute sincerity and with the cold passion of the high critic who knows, on sight of them together, the more or less dazzling false from the comparatively grey-coloured true. Sherringham’s whole profession has been that he rejoices in her as she is, and that the theatre, the organised theatre, will be, as Matthew Arnold was in those very days pronouncing it, irresistible; and it is the promptness with which he sheds his pretended faith as soon as it feels in the air the breath of reality, as soon as it asks of him a proof or a sacrifice, it is this that excites her doubtless sufficiently arrogant scorn. Where is the virtue of his high interest if it has verily never been an interest to speak of and if all it has suddenly to suggest is that, in face of a serious call, it shall be unblushingly relinquished? If he and she together, and her great field and future, and the whole cause they had armed and declared for, have not been serious things they have been base make-believes and trivialities – which is what in fact the homage of society to art always turns out so soon as art presumes not to be vulgar and futile. It is immensely the fashion and immensely edifying to listen to, this homage, while it confines its attention to vanities and frauds; but it knows only terror, feels only horror, the moment that, instead of making all the concessions, art proceeds to ask for a few. Miriam is nothing if not strenuous, and evidently nothing if not ‘cheeky’, where Sherringham is concerned at least: these, in the all-egotistical exhibition to which she is condemned, are the very elements of her figure and the very colours of her portrait. But she is mild and inconsequent for Nick Dormer (who demands of her so little); as if gravely and pityingly embracing the truth that his sacrifice, on the right side, is probably to have very little of her sort of recompense. I must have had it well before me that she was all aware of the small strain a great sacrifice to Nick would cost her – by reason of the strong effect on her of his own superior logic, in which the very intensity of concentration was so to find its account.
If the man, however, who holds her personally dear yet holds her extremely personal message to the world cheap, so the man capable of a consistency and, as she regards the matter, of an honesty so much higher than Sherringham’s, virtually cares, ‘really’ cares, no straw for his fellow struggler. If Nick Dormer attracts and all-indifferently holds her it is because, like herself and unlike Peter, he puts ‘art’ first; but the most he thus does for her in the event is to let her see how she may enjoy, in intimacy, the rigour it has taught him and which he cultivates at her expense. This is the situation in which we leave her, though there would be more still to be said about the difference for her of the two relations – that to each of the men – could I fondly suppose as much of the interest of the book ‘left over’ for the reader as for myself. Sherringham for instance offers Miriam marriage, ever so ‘handsomely’; but if nothing might lead me on further than the question of what it would have been open to us – us novelists, especially in the old days – to show, ‘serially’, a young man in Nick Dormer’s quite different position as offering or a young woman in Miriam’s as taking, so for that very reason such an excursion is forbidden me. The trade of the stage-player, and above all of the actress, must have so many detestable sides for the person exercising it that we scarce imagine a full surrender to it without a full surrender, not less, to every immediate compensation, to every freedom and the largest ease within reach: which presentment of the possible case for Miriam would yet have been condemned – and on grounds both various and interesting to trace – to remain very imperfect.
I feel moreover that I might still, with space, abound in remarks about Nick’s character and Nick’s crisis suggested to my present more reflective vision. It strikes me, alas, that he is not quite so interesting as he was fondly intended to be, and this in spite of the multiplication, within the picture, of his pains and penalties; so that while I turn this slight anomaly over I come upon a reason that affects me as singularly charming and touching and at which indeed I have already glanced. Any presentation of the artist in triumph must be flat in proportion as it really sticks to its subject – it can only smuggle in relief and variety. For, to put the matter in an image, all we then – in his triumph – see of the charm-compeller is the back he turns to us as he bends over his work. ‘His’ triumph, decently, is but the triumph of what he produces, and that is another affair. His romance is the romance he himself projects; he eats the cake of the very rarest privilege, the most luscious baked in the oven of the gods – therefore he may n’t ‘have’ it, in the form of the privilege of the hero, at the same time. The privilege of the hero – that is of the martyr or of the interesting and appealing and comparatively floundering person – places him in quite a different category, belongs to him only as to the artist deluded, diverted, frustrated or vanquished; when the ‘amateur’ in him gains, for our admiration or compassion or whatever, all that the expert has to do without. Therefore I strove in vain, I feel, to embroil and adorn this young man on whom a hundred ingenious touches are thus lavished: he has insisted in the event on looking as simple and flat as some mere brass check or engraved number, the symbol and guarantee of a stored treasure. The better part of him is locked too much away from us, and the part we see has to pass for – well, what it passes for, so lamentedly, among his friends and relatives. No, accordingly, Nick Dormer is n’t ‘the best thing in the book’, as I judge I imagined he would be, and it contains nothing better, I make out, than that preserved and achieved unity and quality of tone, a value in itself, which I referred to at the beginning of these remarks. What I mean by this is that the interest created, and the expression of that interest, are things kept, as to kind, genuine and true to themselves. The appeal, the fidelity to the prime motive, is, with no little art, strained clear (even as silver is polished) in a degree answering – at least by intention – to the air of beauty. There is an awkwardness again in having thus belatedly to point such features out; but in that wrought appearance of animation and harmony, that effect of free movement and yet of recurrent and insistent reference, The tragic muse has struck me again as conscious of a bright advantage.