I recall with perfect ease the idea in which
The awkward age
had its origin, but re-perusal gives me pause in respect to naming it. This
composition, as it stands, makes, to my vision – and will have made
perhaps still more to that of its readers – so considerable a mass
beside the germ sunk in it and still possibly distinguishable, that I am
half-moved to leave my small secret undivulged. I shall encounter, I think,
in the course of this
copious commentary,
no better example, and none on behalf of which I shall venture to invite more
interest, of the quite incalculable tendency of a mere grain of subject-matter
to expand and develop and cover the ground when conditions happen to favour
it. I say all, surely, when I speak of the thing as planned, in perfect good
faith, for brevity, for levity, for simplicity, for jocosity, in fine, and for
an accomodating irony. I invoked, for my protection, the spirit of the lightest
comedy, but
The awkward age
was to belong, in the event, to a group of productions, here
re-introduced, which have in common, to their author’s eyes, the
endearing sign that they asserted in each case an unforeseen principle of
growth. They were projected as small things, yet had finally to be provided
for as comparative monsters. That is my own title for them, though I should
perhaps resent it if applied by another critic – above all in the case
of the piece before us, the careful measure of which I have just freshly
taken. The result of this consideration has been in the first place to
render sharp for me again the interest of the whole process thus
illustrated, and in the second quite to place me on unexpectedly good terms
with the work itself. As I scan my list I encounter none the
‘history’ of which embodies a greater number of curious truths
– or of truths at least by which I find contemplation more enlivened.
The thing done and dismissed has ever,
at the best, for the ambitious workman, a trick of looking dead, if not
buried, so that he almost throbs with ecstasy when, on an anxious review,
the flush of life reappears. It is verily on recognising that flush on a
whole side of
The awkward age
that I brand it all, but ever so tenderly, as monstrous – which is
but my way of noting the quantity of finish it stows away. Since I
speak so undauntedly, when need is, of the value of composition, I shall not
beat about the bush to claim for these pages the maximum of that advantage.
If such a feat be possible in this field as really taking a lesson from
one’s own adventure I feel I have now not failed of it – to so
much more demonstration of my profit than I can hope to carry through do I
find myself urged. Thus it is that, still with a remnant of self-respect, or
at least of sanity, one may turn to complacency, one may linger with pride.
Let my pride provoke a frown till I justify it; which – though with
more matters to be noted here than I have room for – I shall
accordingly proceed to do.
Yet I must first make a brave face, no doubt, and
present in its native humility my scant but quite ponderable germ. The seed
sprouted in that vast nursery of sharp appeals and concrete images which
calls itself, for blest convenience, London; it fell even into the order of
the minor ‘social phenomena’ with which, as fruit for the
observer, that mightiest of the trees of suggestion bristles. It was not, no
doubt, a fine purple peach but it might pass for a round ripe plum, the note
one had inevitably had to take of the difference made in certain friendly
houses and for certain flourishing mothers by the sometimes dreaded, often
delayed, but never fully arrested coming to the forefront of some vague slip
of a daughter For such mild revolutions as these not, to one’s
imagination, to remain mild one had had, I dare say, to be infinitely
addicted to ‘noticing’; under the rule of that secret vice or that
unfair advantage, at any rate, the ‘sitting downstairs’, from a
given date, of the merciless maiden previously
perched aloft
could easily be felt as a crisis. This crisis, and the sense for it in those
whom it most concerns, has to confess itself courageously the prime propulsive
force of
The awkward age.
Such a matter might well make a scant show for a ‘thick book’, and
no thick book, but just a quite charmingly thin one, was in fact originally
dreamt of. For its proposed scale the little idea seemed happy – happy,
that is, above all in having come very straight; but its proposed scale was
the limit of a small square canvas. One had been present again and again at
the exhibition I refer to – which is what I mean by the ‘coming
straight’ of this particular London impression; yet one was (and
through fallibilities that after all had their sweetness, so that one would
on the whole rather have kept them than parted with them) still capable of
so false a measurement. When I think indeed of those of my many false
measurements that have resulted, after much anguish, in decent symmetries, I
find the whole case, I profess, a theme for the philosopher. The little
ideas one would n’t have treated save for the design of keeping
them small, the developed situations that one would never with malice
prepense have undertaken, the long stories that had thoroughly meant to be
short, the short subjects that had underhandedly plotted to be long, the
hypocrisy of modest beginnings, the audacity of misplaced middles, the
triumph of intentions never entertained – with these patches, as I look
about, I see my experience paved: an experience to which nothing is wanting
save, I confess, some grasp of its final lesson.
This lesson would, if operative, surely provide some law
for the recognition, the determination in advance, of the just limits and
the just extent of the situation, any situation, that appeals, and
that yet, by the presumable, the helpful law of situations, must have its
reserves as well as its promises. The storyteller considers it because it
promises, and undertakes it, often, just because also making out, as he
believes, where the promise conveniently drops. The promise, for instance,
of the case I have just named, the case of the account to be taken, in a
circle of free talk, of a new and innocent, a wholly unacclimatised
presence, as to which such accommodations have never had to come up, might
well have appeared as limited as it was lively; and if these pages
were not before us to register my illusion I should never have made a braver
claim for it. They themselves admonish me, however, in fifty interesting
ways, and they especially emphasise that truth of the vanity of the
a priori
test of what an
idée-mère
may have to give.
The truth is that what a happy thought has to give depends immensely on the
general turn of the mind capable of it, and on the fact that its loyal
entertainer, cultivating fondly its possible relations and extensions, the
bright efflorescence latent in it, but having to take other things in their
order too, is terribly at the mercy of his mind. That organ has only to
exhale, in its degree, a fostering tropic air in order to produce
complications almost beyond reckoning. The trap laid for his superficial
convenience resides in the fact that, though the relations of a human figure
or a social occurrence are what make such objects interesting, they also
make them, to the same tune, difficult to isolate, to surround with the
sharp black line, to frame in the square, the circle, the charming oval,
that helps any arrangement of objects to become a picture. The storyteller
has but to have been condemned by nature to a liberally amused and beguiled,
a richly sophisticated, view of relations and a fine inquisitive speculative
sense for them, to find himself at moments flounder in a deep warm jungle.
These are the moments at which he recalls ruefully that the great merit of
such and such a small case, the merit for his particular advised use, had
been precisely in the smallness.
I may say at once that this had seemed to me, under the
first flush of recognition, the good mark for the pretty notion of the
‘free circle’ put about by having, of a sudden, an ingenuous mind
and a pair of limpid searching eyes to count with. Half the attraction was
in the current actuality of the thing: repeatedly, right and left, as I have
said, one had seen such a drama constituted, and always to the effect of
proposing to the interested view one of those questions that are of the
essence of drama: what will happen, who suffer, who not suffer, what turn be
determined, what crisis created, what issue found? There had of course to
be, as a basis, the
free circle, but this was material of that admirable order with which the
good London never leaves its true lover and believer long unprovided. One
could count them on one’s fingers (an abundant allowance), the liberal
firesides beyond the wide glow of which, in a comparative dimness, female
adolescence hovered and waited. The wide glow was bright, was favourable to
‘real’ talk, to play of mind, to an explicit interest in life, a
due demonstration of the interest by persons qualified to feel it: all of
which meant frankness and ease, the perfection, almost, as it were, of
intercourse, and a tone as far as possible removed from that of the nursery
and the schoolroom – as far as possible removed even, no doubt, in its
appealing ‘modernity’, from that of supposedly privileged scenes
of conversation twenty years ago. The charm was, with a hundred other
things, in the freedom – the freedom menaced by the inevitable
irruption of the ingenuous mind; whereby, if the freedom should be
sacrificed, what would truly become of the charm? The charm might
be figured as dear to members of the circle consciously contributing to it,
but it was none the less true that some sacrifice in some quarter would have
to be made, and what meditator worth his salt could fail to hold his breath
while waiting on the event? The ingenuous mind might, it was true, be
suppressed altogether, the general disconcertment averted either by some
master-stroke of diplomacy or some rude simplification; yet these were ugly
matters, and in the examples before one’s eyes nothing ugly, nothing
harsh or crude, had flourished. A girl might be married off the day after
her irruption, or better still the day before it, to remove her from the
sphere of the play of mind; but these were exactly not crudities, and even
then, at the worst, an interval had to be bridged.
The awkward age
is precisely a study of one of these curtailed or extended periods of
tension and apprehension, an account of the manner in which the resented
interference with ancient liberties came to be in a particular instance
dealt with.
I note once again that I had not escaped seeing it
actually and traceably dealt with – after (I admit) a good deal of
friendly suspense; also with the nature and degree of the
‘sacrifice’ left very much to one’s appreciation. In circles
highly civilised the great things, the real things, the hard, the cruel and
even the tender things, the true elements of any tension and true facts of
any crisis, have ever, for the outsider’s, for the critic’s use,
to be translated into terms – terms in the distinguished name of which,
terms for the right employment of which, more than one situation of the type
I glance at had struck me as all irresistibly appealing. There appeared in
fact at moments no end to the things they said, the suggestions into which
they flowered; one of these latter in especial arriving at the highest
intensity. Putting vividly before one the perfect system on which the
awkward age is handled in most other European societies, it threw again into
relief the inveterate English trick of the so morally well-meant and so
intellectually helpless compromise. We live notoriously, as I suppose every
age lives, in an ‘epoch of transition’; but it may still be said
of the French for instance, I assume, that their social scheme absolutely
provides against awkwardness. That is it would be, by this scheme, so
infinitely awkward, so awkward beyond any patching-up, for the hovering
female young to be conceived as present at ‘good’ talk, that their
presence is, theoretically at least, not permitted till their youth has been
promptly corrected by marriage – in which case they have ceased to be
merely young. The better the talk prevailing in any circle, accordingly, the
more organised, the more complete, the element of precaution and exclusion.
Talk – giving the term a wide application – is one thing, and a
proper inexperience another; and it has never occurred to a logical people
that the interest of the greater, the general, need be sacrificed to that of
the less, the particular. Such sacrifices strike them as gratuitous and
barbarous, as cruel above all to the social intelligence; also as perfectly
preventable by wise arrangement. Nothing comes home more, on the other hand,
to the observer of English manners than the very moderate degree in which
wise arrangement, in the French sense of a scientific economy, has ever been
invoked; a fact indeed largely explaining the
great interest of their incoherence, their heterogeneity, their wild
abundance. The French, all analytically, have conceived of fifty different
proprieties, meeting fifty different cases, whereas the English mind, less
intensely at work, has never conceived but of one – the grand
propriety, for every case, it should in fairness be said, of just being
English. As practice, however, has always to be a looser thing than theory,
so no application of that rigour has been possible in the London world
without a thousand departures from the grim ideal.
The American theory, if I may ‘drag it in’,
would be, I think, that talk should never become ‘better’ than the
female young, either actually or constructively present, are minded to allow
it. That system involves as little compromise as the French; it has
been absolutely simple, and the beauty of its success shines out in every
record of our conditions of intercourse – premising always our
‘basic’ assumption that the female young read the newspapers. The
English theory may be in itself almost as simple, but different and much
more complex forces have ruled the application of it; so much does the
goodness of talk depend on what there may be to talk about. There are more
things in London, I think, than anywhere in the world; hence the charm of
the dramatic struggle reflected in my book, the struggle somehow to fit
propriety into a smooth general case which is really all the while bristling
and crumbling into fierce particular ones. The circle surrounding
Mrs Brookenham, in my pages, is of course nothing if not a particular,
even a ‘peculiar’ one – and its rather vain effort (the
vanity, the real inexpertness, being precisely part of my tale) is toward
the courage of that condition. It has cropped up in a social order where
individual appreciations of propriety have not been formally allowed for, in
spite of their having very often quite rudely and violently and insolently,
rather of course than insidiously, flourished; so that as the matter stands,
rightly or wrongly, Nanda’s retarded, but eventually none the less
real, incorporation means virtually Nanda’s exposure. It means this,
that is, and many things beside – means them for Nanda herself and,
with a various intensity,
for the other participants in the action; but what it particularly means,
surely, is the failure of successful arrangement and the very moral, sharply
pointed, of the fruits of compromise. It is compromise that has suffered her
to be in question at all, and that has condemned the freedom of the circle
to be self-conscious, compunctious, on the whole much more timid than brave
– the consequent muddle, if the term be not too gross, representing
meanwhile a great inconvenience for life, but, as I found myself feeling, an
immense promise, a much greater one than on the ‘foreign’ showing,
for the painted picture of life. Beyond which let me add that here
immediately is a prime specimen of the way in which the obscurer, the
lurking relations of a motive apparently simple, always in wait for their
spring, may by seizing their chance for it send simplicity flying. Poor
Nanda’s little case, and her mother’s, and Mr Longdon’s
and Vanderbank’s and Mitchy’s, to say nothing of that of the
others, has only to catch a reflected light from over the
Channel
in order to double at once its appeal to the imagination. (I am considering
all these matters, I need scarce say, only as they are concerned with that
faculty. With a relation not imaginative to his material the
storyteller has nothing whatever to do.)
It exactly happened moreover that my own material here
was to profit in a particular way by that extension of view. My idea was to
be treated with light irony – it would be light and ironical or it
would be nothing; so that I asked myself, naturally, what might be the least
solemn form to give it, among recognised and familiar forms. The question
thus at once arose: What form so familiar, so recognised among alert
readers, as that in which the ingenious and inexhaustible, the charming
philosophic
‘Gyp’
casts most of her social studies?
Gyp
had long struck me as mistress, in her levity, of one of the happiest of forms
– the only objection to my use of which was a certain extraordinary
benightedness on the part of the Anglo-Saxon reader. One had noted this
reader as perverse and inconsequent in respect to the absorption of
‘dialogue’ – observed the ‘public for fiction’
consume it, in certain connexions, on the scale and
with the smack of lips that mark the consumption of bread-and-jam by a
children’s school-feast, consume it even at the theatre, so far as our
theatre ever vouchsafes it, and yet as flagrantly reject it when served, so
to speak,
au naturel.
One had seen good solid slices of fiction, well
endued, one might surely have thought, with this easiest of lubrications,
deplored by editor and publisher as positively not, for the general gullet
as known to them, made adequately ‘slick’.
“
But that I did, positively and seriously – ah so
seriously! – emulate the levity of
Gyp
and, by the same token, of that hardiest of flowers fostered in her school,
M. Henri Lavedan,
is a contribution to the history of
The awkward age
that I shall obviously have had to brace myself in order to make. Vivid
enough to me the expression of face of any kindest of critics, even, moved
to declare that he would never in the least have suspected it. Let me say at
once, in extenuation of the too respectful distance at which I may thus have
appeared to follow my model, that my first care had to be the
covering of my tracks – lest I truly should be caught in the act of
arranging, of organising dialogue to ‘speak for itself’. What I
now see to have happened is that I organised and arranged but too well
– too well, I mean, for any betrayal of the Gyp taint, however faded
and feeble. The trouble appears to have been that while I on the one hand
exorcised the baleful association, I succeeded in rousing on nobody’s
part a sense of any other association whatever, or of my having cast myself
into any conceivable or calculable form. My private inspiration had been in
the Gyp plan (artfully dissimulated, for dear life, and applied with the
very subtlest consistency, but none the less kept in secret view); yet I was
to fail to make out in the event that the book succeeded in producing the
impression of any plan on any person. No hint of that sort of
success, or of any critical perception at all in relation to the business,
has ever come my way; in spite of which when I speak, as just above, of what
was to ‘happen’ under the
law of my ingenious labour, I fairly lose myself in the vision of a hundred
bright phenomena. Some of these incidents I must treat myself to naming, for
they are among the best I shall have on any occasion to retail. But I must
first give the measure of the degree in which they were mere matters of the
study. This composition had originally appeared in
Harper’s weekly
during the autumn of 1898 and the first weeks of the winter, and the volume
containing it was
published that spring.
I had meanwhile been
absent from England,
and it was not till my return, some time later, that I had from my
publisher any news of our venture. But the news then met at a stroke all my
curiosity: “I’m sorry to say the book has done nothing to speak
of; I’ve never in all my experience seen one treated with more general
and complete disrespect.” There was thus to be nothing left me for fond
subsequent reference – of which I doubtless give even now so adequate
an illustration – save the rich reward of the singular interest
attaching to the very intimacies of the effort.
It comes back to me, the whole ‘job’, as
wonderfully amusing and delightfully difficult from the first; since
amusement deeply abides, I think, in any artistic attempt the basis and
groundwork of which are conscious of a particular firmness. On that hard
fine floor the element of execution feels it may more or less confidently
dance; in which case puzzling questions, sharp obstacles, dangers
of detail, may come up for it by the dozen without breaking its heart or
shaking its nerve. It is the difficulty produced by the loose foundation or
the vague scheme that breaks the heart – when a luckless fatuity has
over-persuaded an author of the ‘saving’ virtue of treatment. Being
‘treated’ is never, in a workable idea, a mere passive condition,
and I hold no subject ever susceptible of help that is n’t, like
the embarrassed man of our proverbial wisdom, first of all able to help
itself. I was thus to have here an envious glimpse, in carrying my design
through, of that artistic rage and that artistic felicity which I have ever
supposed to be intensest and highest, the confidence of the dramatist strong
in the sense of his
postulate. The dramatist has verily to build, is committed to
architecture, to construction at any cost; to driving in deep his vertical
supports and laying across and firmly fixing his horizontal, his resting
pieces – at the risk of no matter what vibration from the tap of his
master-hammer. This makes the active value of his basis immense, enabling
him, with his flanks protected, to advance undistractedly, even if not at
all carelessly, into the comparative fairy-land of the mere minor anxiety.
In other words his scheme holds, and as he feels this in spite of
noted strains and under repeated tests, so he keeps his face to the day. I
rejoiced, by that same token, to feel my scheme hold, and even a
little ruefully watched it give me much more than I had ventured to hope.
For I promptly found my conceived arrangement of my material open the door
wide to ingenuity. I remember that in sketching my project for the
conductors of the periodical I have named I drew on a sheet of paper –
and possibly with an effect of the cabalistic, it now comes over me, that
even anxious amplification may have but vainly attenuated – the neat
figure of a circle consisting of a number of small rounds disposed at equal
distance about a central object. The central object was my situation, my
subject in itself, to which the thing would owe its title, and the small
rounds represented so many distinct lamps, as I liked to call them, the
function of each of which would be to light with all due intensity one of
its aspects. I had divided it, did n’t they see? into aspects
– uncanny as the little term might sound (though not for a moment did
I suggest we should use it for the public), and by that sign we would
conquer.
They ‘saw’, all genially and generously –
for I must add that I had made, to the best of my recollection, no morbid
scruple of not blabbing about
Gyp
and her strange incitement. I the more boldly held my tongue over this that
the more I, by my intelligence, lived in my arrangement and moved about in
it, the more I sank into satisfaction. It was clearly to work to a charm
and, during this process – by calling at every step for an exquisite
management –
‘to
haunt, to startle and waylay’.
Each of my ‘lamps’ would
be the light of a
single ‘social occasion’
in the history and intercourse of the characters concerned, and would bring
out to the full the latent colour of the scene in question and cause it to
illustrate, to the last drop, its bearing on my theme. I revelled in this
notion of the Occasion as a thing by itself, really and completely a scenic
thing, and could scarce name it, while crouching amid the thick arcana of my
plan, with a large enough O. The beauty of the conception was in this
approximation of the respective divisions of my form to the successive Acts of
a Play – as to which it was more than ever a case for charmed capitals.
The divine distinction of the act of a play – and a greater than any other
it easily succeeds in arriving at – was, I reasoned, in its special, its
guarded objectivity. This objectivity, in turn, when achieving its ideal,
came from the imposed absence of that ‘going behind’, to compass
explanations and amplifications, to drag out odds and ends from the
‘mere’ storyteller’s great property-shop of aids to illusion:
a resource under denial of which it was equally perplexing and delightful,
for a change, to proceed. Everything, for that matter, becomes interesting
from the moment it has closely to consider, for full effect positively to
bestride, the law of its kind. ‘Kinds’ are the very life of
literature, and truth and strength come from the complete recognition of
them, from abounding to the utmost in their respective senses and sinking
deep into their consistency. I myself have scarcely to plead the cause of
‘going behind’, which is right and beautiful and fruitful in its
place and order; but as the confusion of kinds is the inelegance of letters
and the stultification of values, so to renounce that line utterly and do
something quite different instead may become in another connexion the true
course and the vehicle of effect. Something in the very nature, in the fine
rigour, of this special sacrifice (which is capable of affecting the
form-lover, I think, as really more of a projected form than any other)
lends it moreover a coercive charm; a charm that grows in proportion as the
appeal to it tests and stretches and strains it, puts it powerfully to the
touch. To make the presented occasion tell all its story
itself, remain shut up in its own presence and yet on that patch of
staked-out ground become thoroughly interesting and remain thoroughly clear,
is a process not remarkable, no doubt, so long as a very light weight is
laid on it, but difficult enough to challenge and inspire great adroitness
so soon as the elements to be dealt with begin at all to ‘size
up’.
The disdainers of the contemporary drama deny,
obviously, with all promptness, that the matter to be expressed by its means
– richly and successfully expressed that is – can loom
with any largeness; since from the moment it does one of the conditions
breaks down. The process simply collapses under pressure, they contend,
proves its weakness as quickly as the office laid on it ceases to be simple.
“Remember,” they say to the dramatist, “that you have to be,
supremely, three things: you have to be true to your form, you have to be
interesting, you have to be clear. You have in other words to prove yourself
adequate to taking a heavy weight. But we defy you really to conform to your
conditions with any but a light one. Make the thing you have to convey, make
the picture you have to paint, at all rich and complex, and you cease to be
clear. Remain clear – and with the clearness required by the infantine
intelligence of any public consenting to see a play – and what becomes
of the ‘importance’ of your subject? If it’s important by any
other critical measure than the little foot-rule the ‘produced’
piece has to conform to, it is predestined to be a muddle. When it has
escaped being a muddle the note it has succeeded in striking at the furthest
will be recognised as one of those that are called high but by the courtesy,
by the intellectual provinciality, of theatrical criticism, which, as we can
see for ourselves any morning, is – well, an abyss even deeper than the
theatre itself. Don’t attempt to crush us with
Dumas
and
Ibsen,
for such values are from any informed and enlightened point of view, that is
measured by other high values, literary, critical, philosophic, of the most
moderate order.
Ibsen
and
Dumas
are precisely cases of men, men in their degree, in their poor theatrical
straight-jacket, speculative,
who have had to renounce the finer thing for the coarser, the
thick, in short, for the thin and the curious for the self-evident. What
earthly intellectual distinction, what ‘prestige’ of achievement,
would have attached to the substance of such things as
Denise,
as
Monsieur Alphonse,
as
Francillon
(and we take the
Dumas
of the supposedly subtler period) in any other form? What virtues of the same
order would have attached to
The pillars of society,
to
An enemy of the people,
to
Ghosts,
to
Rosmersholm
(or taking also Ibsen’s ‘subtler period’) to
John Gabriel Borkmann,
to
The master-builder?
Ibsen
is in fact wonderfully a case in point, since from the moment he’s
clear, from the moment he’s ‘amusing’, it’s on the
footing of a thesis as simple and superficial as that of
A doll’s house
– while from the moment he’s by apparent intention comprehensive
and searching it ’s on the footing of an effect as confused and
obscure as
The wild duck.
From which you easily see all the conditions can’t be met.
The dramatist has to choose but those he ’s most capable of,
and by that choice he ’s known.”
So the objector concludes, and never surely without
great profit from his having been ‘drawn’. His apparent triumph
– if it be even apparent – still leaves, it will be noted,
convenient cover for retort in the riddled face of the opposite stronghold.
The last word in these cases is for nobody who can’t pretend to an
absolute test. The terms here used, obviously, are matters of
appreciation, and there is no short cut to proof (luckily for us all round)
either that
Monsieur Alphonse
develops itself on the highest plane of irony or that
Ghosts
simplifies almost to excruciation. If
John Gabriel Borkmann
is but a pennyworth of effect as to a character we can imagine much more
amply presented, and if
Hedda Gabler
makes an appeal enfeebled by remarkable vagueness, there is by the nature
of the case no catching the convinced, or call him the deluded, spectator or
reader in the act of a mistake. He is to be caught at the worst in the act
of attention, of the very greatest attention, and that is all, as a precious
preliminary at least, that the playwright
asks of him, besides being all the very divinest poet can get. I remember
rejoicing as much to remark this, after getting launched in
The awkward age,
as if I were in fact constructing a play; just as I may doubtless appear
now not less anxious to keep the philosophy of the dramatist’s course
before me than if I belonged to his order. I felt, certainly, the support he
feels, I participated in his technical amusement, I tasted to the full the
bitter-sweetness of his draught – the beauty and the difficulty (to
harp again on that string) of escaping poverty even though the
references in one’s action can only be, with intensity, to each other,
to things exactly on the same plane of exhibition with themselves.
Exhibition may mean in a ‘story’ twenty different ways, fifty
excursions, alternatives, excrescences, and the novel, as largely practised
in English, is the perfect paradise of the loose end. The play consents to
the logic of but one way, mathematically right, and with the loose end as
gross an impertinence on its surface, and as grave a dishonour, as the
dangle of a snippet of silk or wool on the right side of a tapestry. We are
shut up wholly to cross-relations, relations all within the action itself;
no part of which is related to anything but some other part – save of
course by the relation of the total to life. And, after invoking the
protection of
Gyp,
I saw the point of my game all in the problem of keeping these conditioned
relations crystalline at the same time that I should, in emulation of life,
consent to their being numerous and fine and characteristic of the London
world (as the London world was in this quarter and that to be deciphered).
All of which was to make in the event for complications.
I see now of course how far, with my complications, I
got away from
Gyp;
but I see to-day so much else too that this particular
deflexion from simplicity makes scarce a figure among the others; after
having once served its purpose, I mean, of lighting my original imitative
innocence. For I recognise in especial, with a waking vibration of that
interest in which, as I say, the plan of the book is embalmed for me, that
my subject was probably condemned in advance
to appreciable, or more exactly perhaps to almost preposterously
appreciative, over-treatment. It places itself for me thus in a group of
small productions exhibiting this perversity, representations of conceived
cases in which my process has been to pump the case gaspingly dry, dry not
only of superfluous moisture, but absolutely (for I have encountered the
charge) of breatheable air. I may note, in fine, that coming back to the
pages before us with a strong impression of their recording, to my shame,
that disaster, even to the extent of its disqualifying them for decent
reappearance, I have found the adventure taking, to my relief, quite another
turn, and have lost myself in the wonder of what ‘over-treatment’
may, in the detail of its desperate ingenuity, consist of. The revived
interest I speak of has been therefore that of following critically, from
page to page, even as the red Indian tracks in the forest the pale-face, the
footsteps of the systematic loyalty I was able to achieve. The amusement of this
constatation
is, as I have hinted, in the detail of the matter, and the detail is so dense,
the texture of the figured and smoothed tapestry so close, that the genius of
Gyp
herself, muse of general
looseness, would certainly, once warned, have uttered the first disavowal of
my homage. But what has occurred meanwhile is that this high consistency has
itself, so to speak, constituted an exhibition, and that an important
artistic truth has seemed to me thereby lighted. We brushed against that
truth just now in our glance at the denial of expansibility to any idea the
mould of the ‘stage-play’ may hope to express without cracking and
bursting; and we bear in mind at the same time that the picture of Nanda
Brookenham’s situation, though perhaps seeming to a careless eye so to
wander and sprawl, yet presents itself on absolutely scenic lines, and that
each of these scenes in itself, and each as related to each and to all of
its companions, abides without a moment’s deflexion by the principle of
the stage-play.
In doing this then it does more – it helps us ever
so happily to see the grave distinction between substance and form in a really
wrought work of art signally break down. I hold it impossible to say, before
The awkward age,
where
one of these elements ends and the other begins: I have been unable at least
myself, on re-examination, to mark any such joint or seam, to see the two
discharged offices as separate. They are separate before the fact,
but the sacrament of execution indissolubly marries them, and the marriage,
like any other marriage, has only to be a ‘true’ one for the
scandal of a breach not to show. The thing ‘done’, artistically,
is a fusion, or it has not been done – in which case of course
the artist may be, and all deservedly, pelted with any fragment of his botch
the critic shall choose to pick up. But his ground once conquered, in this
particular field, he knows nothing of fragments and may say in all security:
“Detach one if you can. You can analyse in your way, oh yes
– to relate, to report, to explain; but you can’t disintegrate my
synthesis; you can’t resolve the elements of my whole into different
responsible agents or find your way at all (for your own fell purpose). My
mixture has only to be perfect literally to bewilder you – you are lost
in the tangle of the forest. Prove this value, this effect, in the air of
the whole result, to be of my subject, and that other value, other effect,
to be of my treatment, prove that I have n’t so shaken them
together as the conjurer I profess to be must consummately shake,
and I consent but to parade as before a booth at the fair.” The
exemplary closeness of
The awkward age
even affects me, on re-perusal, I confess, as treasure quite instinctively
and foreseeingly laid up against my present opportunity for these remarks.
I have been positively struck by the quantity of meaning and the number of
intentions, the extent of ground for interest, as I may call it,
that I have succeeded in working scenically, yet without loss of sharpness,
clearness or ‘atmosphere’, into each of my illuminating Occasions
– where, at certain junctures, the due preservation of all these values
took, in the familiar phrase, a good deal of doing.
I should have liked just here to re-examine with the
reader some of the positively most artful passages I have in mind –
such as the hour of Mr Longdon’s beautiful and, as it were, mystic
attempt at a compact with Vanderbank, late at night,
in the billiard-room of the country-house at which they are staying; such as
the other nocturnal passage, under Mr Longdon’s roof, between
Vanderbank and Mitchy, where the conduct of so much fine meaning, so many
flares of the exhibitory torch through the labyrinth of mere immediate
appearances, mere familiar allusions, is successfully and safely effected;
such as the whole array of the terms of presentation that are made to serve,
all systematically, yet without a gap anywhere, for the presentation,
throughout, of a Mitchy ‘subtle’ no less than concrete and
concrete no less than deprived of that officious explanation which we know
as ‘going behind’; such as, briefly, the general service of
co-ordination and vivification rendered, on lines of ferocious, of really
quite heroic compression, by the picture of the assembled group at
Mrs Grendon’s, where the ‘cross-references’ of the
action are as thick as the green leaves of a garden, but none the less, as
they have scenically to be, counted and disposed, weighted with
responsibility. Were I minded to use in this connexion a ‘loud’
word – and the critic in general hates loud words as a man of taste may
hate loud colours – I should speak of the composition of the chapters
entitled ‘Tishy Grendon’, with all the pieces of the game on the
table together and each unconfusedly and contributively placed, as
triumphantly scientific. I must properly remind myself, rather, that the
better lesson of my retrospect would seem to be really a supreme revision of
the question of what it may be for a subject to suffer, to call it
suffering, by over-treatment. Bowed down so long by the inference that its
product had in this case proved such a betrayal, my artistic conscience
meets the relief of having to recognise truly here no traces of suffering.
The thing carries itself to my maturer and gratified sense as with every
symptom of soundness, an insolence of health and joy. And from this
precisely I deduce my moral; which is to the effect that, since our only
way, in general, of knowing that we have had too much of anything is by
feeling that too much: so, by the same token, when we don’t
feel the excess (and I am contending, mind, that in
The awkward age
the multiplicity
yields to the order) how do we know that the measure not recorded, the notch
not reached, does represent adequacy or satiety? The mere feeling helps us
for certain degrees of congestion, but for exact science, that is for the
criticism of ‘fine’ art, we want the notation. The notation,
however, is what we lack, and the verdict of the mere feeling is liable to
fluctuate. In other words an imputed defect is never, at the worst,
disengageable, or other than matter for appreciation – to come back to
my claim for that felicity of the dramatist’s case that his synthetic
‘whole’ is his form, the only one we have to do with. I
like to profit in his company by the fact that if our art has certainly, for
the impression it produces, to defer to the rise and fall, in the critical
temperature, of the telltale mercury, it still has n’t to reckon
with the engraved thermometer-face.
end of the preface to volume 9
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