It was years ago, I remember, one Christmas Eve when I
was dining with
friends:
a
lady
beside me made in the course of talk one of those allusions that I have
always found myself recognising on the spot as ‘germs’. The germ,
wherever gathered, has ever been for me the germ of a ‘story’,
and most of the stories straining to shape under my hand have sprung from
a single small seed, a seed as minute and wind-blown as that casual hint for
The spoils of Poynton
dropped unwittingly by my neighbour, a mere floating particle in the stream
of talk. What above all comes back to me with this reminiscence is the sense
of the inveterate minuteness, on such happy occasions, of the precious
particle – reduced, that is, to its mere fruitful essence. Such is the
interesting truth about the stray suggestion, the wandering word, the vague
echo, at touch of which the novelist’s imagination winces as at the
prick of some sharp point: its virtue is all in its needle-like quality, the
power to penetrate as finely as possible. This fineness it is that
communicates the
virus
of suggestion, anything more than the minimum of
which spoils the operation. If one is given a hint at all designedly one is
sure to be given too much; one’s subject is in the merest grain, the
speck of truth, of beauty, of reality, scarce visible to the common eye
– since, I firmly hold, a good eye for a subject is anything but usual.
Strange and attaching, certainly, the consistency with which the first thing
to be done for the communicated and seized idea is to reduce almost to
nought the form, the air as of a mere disjoined and lacerated lump of life,
in which we may have happened to meet it. Life being all inclusion and
confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in
search of the hard latent
value with which alone it is concerned, sniffs round the mass as
instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone. The
difference here, however, is that, while the dog desires his bone but to
destroy it, the artist finds in his tiny nugget, washed free of
awkward accretions and hammered into a sacred hardness, the very stuff for a
clear affirmation, the happiest chance for the indestructible. It at the
same time amuses him again and again to note how, beyond the first step of
the actual case, the case that constitutes for him his germ, his vital
particle, his grain of gold, life persistently blunders and deviates, loses
herself in the sand. The reason is of course that life has no direct sense
whatever for the subject and is capable, luckily for us, of nothing but
splendid waste. Hence the opportunity for the sublime economy of art, which
rescues, which saves, and hoards and ‘banks’, investing and
reinvesting these fruits of toil in wondrous useful ‘works’ and
thus making up for us, desperate spendthrifts that we all naturally are, the
most princely of incomes. It is the subtle secrets of that system, however,
that are meanwhile the charming study, with an endless attraction, above
all, in the question – endlessly baffling indeed – of the method
at the heart of the madness; the madness, I mean, of a zeal, among the
reflective sort, so disinterested. If life, presenting us the germ, and left
merely to herself in such a business, gives the case away, almost always,
before we can stop her, what are the signs for our guidance, what the
primary laws for a saving selection, how do we know when and where to
intervene, where do we place the beginnings of the wrong or the right
deviation? Such would be the elements of an enquiry upon which, I hasten to
say, it is quite forbidden me here to embark: I but glance at them in
evidence of the rich pasture that at every turn surrounds the ruminant
critic. The answer may be after all that mysteries here elude us, that
general considerations fail or mislead, and that even the fondest of artists
need ask no wider range than the logic of the particular case. The
particular case, or in other words his relation to a given subject, once the
relation is
established forms in itself a little world of exercise and agitation. Let
him hold himself perhaps supremely fortunate if he can meet half the
questions with which that air alone may swarm.
So it was, at any rate, that when my amiable
friend,
on the Christmas Eve, before the table that glowed safe and fair through the
brown London night, spoke of such an odd matter as that a good lady in the
north, always well looked on, was at daggers drawn with her only son, ever
hitherto exemplary, over the ownership of the valuable furniture of a fine
old house just accruing to the young man by his father’s death, I
instantly became aware, with my ‘sense for the subject’, of the
prick of inoculation; the whole of the virus, as I have called it,
being infused by that single touch. There had been but ten words, yet I had
recognised in them, as in a flash, all the possibilities of the little drama
of my
Spoils,
which glimmered then and there into life; so that when in the next breath I
began to hear of action taken, on the beautiful ground, by our engaged
adversaries, tipped each, from that instant, with the light of the highest
distinction, I saw clumsy Life again at her stupid work. For the action
taken, and on which my friend, as I knew she would, had already begun all
complacently and benightedly further to report, I had absolutely, and could
have, no scrap of use; one had been so perfectly qualified to say in
advance: “It’s the perfect little workable thing, but she’ll
strangle it in the cradle, even while she pretends, all so cheeringly, to
rock it; wherefore I’ll stay her hand while yet there’s
time.” I did n’t, of course, stay her hand – there never
is in such cases ‘time’; and I had once more the full
demonstration of the fatal futility of Fact. The turn taken by the excellent
situation – excellent, for development, if arrested in the right place,
that is in the germ – had the full measure of the classic ineptitude;
to which with the full measure of the artistic irony one could once more,
and for the thousandth time, but take off one’s hat. It was not,
however, that this in the least mattered, once the seed had been
transplanted to richer soil; and I dwell on that almost inveterate
redundancy of the wrong, as opposed to the ideal right, in any free
flowering of the actual, by reason only of its approach to calculable
regularity.
If there was nothing regular meanwhile, nothing more so
than the habit of vigilance, in my quickly feeling where interest would
really lie, so I could none the less acknowledge afresh that these small
private cheers of recognition made the spirit easy and the temper bland for
the confused whole. I ‘took’ in fine, on the spot, to the rich
bare little fact of the two related figures, embroiled perhaps all so
sordidly; and for reasons of which I could most probably have given at the
moment no decent account. Had I been asked why they were, in that stark
nudity, to say nothing of that ugliness of attitude,
‘interesting’, I fear I could have said nothing more to the point,
even to my own questioning spirit, than “Well, you’ll see!”
By which of course I should have meant “Well, I shall
see” – confident meanwhile (as against the appearance or the
imputation of poor taste) that interest would spring as soon as one should
begin really to see anything. That points, I think, to a large part
of the very source of interest for the artist: it resides in the strong
consciousness of his seeing all for himself. He has to borrow his motive,
which is certainly half the battle; and this motive is his ground, his site
and his foundation. But after that he only lends and gives, only builds and
piles high, lays together the blocks quarried in the deeps of his
imagination and on his personal premises. He thus remains all the while in
intimate commerce with his motive, and can say to himself – what really
more than anything else inflames and sustains him – that he alone has
the secret of the particular case, he alone can measure the truth
of the direction to be taken by his developed data. There can be for him,
evidently, only one logic for these things; there can be for him only one
truth an one direction – the quarter in which his subject most
completely expresses itself. The careful ascertainment of how it shall do
so, and the art of guiding it with consequent authority – since this
sense of ‘authority’ is for the master-builder the treasure of
treasures, or
at least the joy of joys – renews in the modern alchemist something
like the old dream of the secret of life.
Extravagant as the mere statement sounds, one seemed
accordingly to handle the secret of life in drawing the positive right truth
out of the so easy muddle of wrong truths in which the interesting
possibilities of that ‘row’, so to call it, between mother and son
over their household
gods
might have been stifled. I find it odd to
consider, as I thus revert, that I could have had none but the most general
warrant for ‘seeing anything in it’, as the phrase would have
been; that I could n’t in the least, on the spot, as I have
already hinted, have justified my faith. One thing was ‘in it’, in
the sordid situation, on the first blush, and one thing only – though
this, in its limited way, no doubt, a curious enough value: the sharp light
it might project on that most modern of our current passions, the fierce
appetite for the upholsterer’s and joiner’s and brazier’s
work, the chairs and tables, the cabinets and presses, the material odds and
ends, of the more labouring ages. A lively mark of our manners indeed the
diffusion of this curiosity and this avidity, and full of suggestion,
clearly, as to their possible influence on other passions and other
relations. On the face of it the ‘things’ themselves would form
the very centre of such a crisis; these grouped objects, all conscious of
their eminence and their price, would enjoy, in any picture of a conflict,
the heroic importance. They would have to be presented, they would have to
be painted – arduous and desperate thought; something would have to be
done for them not too ignobly unlike the great array in which
Balzac,
say, would have marshalled them: that amount of workable interest
at least would evidently be ‘in it’.
It would be wrapped in the silver tissue of some such
conviction, at any rate, that I must have laid away my prime impression for
a rest not disturbed till long afterwards, till the year 1896, I make out,
when there arose a question of my contributing three ‘short
stories’ to
The Atlantic Monthly;
or supplying rather perhaps a third to complete a trio two members of which
had appeared. The echo of
the situation mentioned to me at our Christmas Eve dinner awoke again, I
recall, at that touch – I recall, no doubt, with true humility, in view
of my renewed mismeasurement of my charge. Painfully associated for me had
The spoils of Poynton
remained, until recent re-perusal, with the awkward consequence of that
fond error. The subject had emerged from cool reclusion all suffused with a
flush of meaning; thanks to which irresistible air, as I could but plead in
the event, I found myself – as against a mere commercial austerity
– beguiled and led on. The thing had ‘come’, the flower of
conception had bloomed – all in the happy dusk of indifference and
neglect; yet, strongly and frankly as it might now appeal, my idea
would n’t surely overstrain a natural brevity. A story
that could n’t possibly be long would have inevitably to be
‘short’, and out of the depths of that delusion it accordingly
began to struggle. To my own view, after the ‘first number’, this
composition (which in the magazine bore
another title)
conformed but to its
nature, which was not to transcend a modest amplitude; but, dispatched in
instalments, it felt itself eyed, from month to month, I seem to remember,
with an editorial ruefulness excellently well founded – from the moment
such differences of sense could exist, that is, as to the short and the
long. The sole impression it made, I woefully gathered, was that of length,
and it has till lately, as I say, been present to me but as the poor little
‘long’ thing.
It began to appear in April 1896, and, as is apt
blessedly to occur for me throughout this process of revision, the old, the
shrunken concomitants muster again as I turn the pages. They lurk between
the lines; these serve for them as the barred seraglio-windows behind which,
to the outsider in the glare of the Eastern street, forms indistinguishable
seem to move and peer; ‘association’ in fine bears upon them with
its infinite magic. Peering through the lattice from without inward I
recapture
a cottage on a cliff-side,
to which, at the earliest approach of the summer-time, redoubtable in London
through the luxuriance of still other than ‘natural’ forces, I had
betaken myself to finish a book in quiet and to begin
another in fear. The cottage was, in its kind, perfection; mainly by reason
of a small paved terrace which, curving forward from the cliff-edge like the
prow of a ship, overhung a view as level, as purple, as full of rich change,
as the expanse of the sea. The horizon was in fact a band of sea; a
small red-roofed town,
of great antiquity, perched on its sea-rock, clustered
within the picture off to the right; while above one’s head rustled a
dense summer shade, that of a trained and arching ash, rising from the
middle of the terrace, brushing the parapet with a heavy fringe and covering
the place like a vast umbrella. Beneath this umbrella and really under
exquisite protection
The spoils of Poynton
managed more or less symmetrically to grow.
I recall that I was committed to begin, the day I
finished it, short of dire penalties,
The other house;
with which work, however, of whatever high profit the considerations
springing from it might be too, we have nothing to do here – and to the
felt jealousy of which, as that of a grudging neighbour, I allude only for
sweet recovery of the fact, mainly interesting to myself I admit, that the
rhythm of the earlier book shows no flurry of hand. I ‘liked’ it
– the earlier book: I venture now, after years, to welcome the sense of
that amenity as well; so immensely refreshing is it to be moved, in any
case, toward these retrospective simplicities. Painters and writers, I
gather, are, when easily accessible to such appeals, frequently questioned
as to those of their productions they may most have delighted in; but the
profession of delight has always struck me as the last to consort, for the
artist, with any candid account of his troubled effort – ever the sum,
for the most part, of so many lapses and compromises, simplifications and
surrenders. Which is the work in which he has n’t surrendered,
under dire difficulty, the best thing he meant to have kept? In which
indeed, before the dreadful done, does n’t he ask himself
what has become of the thing all for the sweet sake of which it was to
proceed to that extremity? Preference and complacency, on these terms, riot
in general as they best may; not disputing, however, a grain of which
weighty truth, I still make out, between
my reconsidered lines, as it were, that I must – my opera-box of a
terrace and my great green umbrella indeed aiding – have assisted at
the growth and predominance of Fleda Vetch.
For something like Fleda Vetch had surely been latent in
one’s first apprehension of the theme; it wanted, for treatment, a
centre, and, the most obvious centre being ‘barred’, this image,
while I still wondered, had, with all the assurance in the world, sprung up
in its place. The real centre, as I say, the citadel of the interest, with
the fight waged round it, would have been the felt beauty and value of the
prize of battle, the Things, always the splendid Things, placed in the
middle light, figured and constituted, with each identity made vivid, each
character discriminated, and their common consciousness of their great
dramatic part established. The rendered tribute of these honours, however,
no vigilant editor, as I have intimated, could be conceived as allowing room
for; since, by so much as the general glittering presence should spread, by
so much as it should suggest the gleam of brazen idols and precious metals
and inserted gems in the tempered light of some arching place of worship, by
just so much would the muse of ‘dialogue’, most usurping influence
of all the romancingly invoked, be routed without ceremony, to lay her
grievance at the feet of her gods. The spoils of Poynton were not directly
articulate, and though they might have, and constantly did have, wondrous
things to say, their message fostered about them a certain hush of cheaper
sound – as a consequence of which, in fine, they would have been costly
to keep up. In this manner Fleda Vetch, maintainable at less expense –
though even she, I make out, less expert in spreading chatter thin than the
readers of romance mainly like their heroines to-day – marked her place
in my foreground at one ingratiating stroke. She planted herself centrally,
and the stroke, as I call it, the demonstration after which she
could n’t be gainsaid, was the simple act of letting it be seen
she had character.
For somehow – that was the way interest broke out,
once the germ had been transferred to the sunny south window-sill of
one’s fonder attention – character, the question of what my
agitated friends should individually, and all intimately and at the core,
show themselves, would unmistakeably be the key to my modest drama, and
would indeed alone make a drama of any sort possible. Yes, it is a story of
cabinets and chairs and tables; they formed the bone of contention, but what
would merely ‘become’ of them, magnificently passive, seemed to
represent a comparatively vulgar issue. The passions, the faculties, the
forces their beauty would, like that of antique
Helen of Troy,
set in motion, was what, as a painter, one had really wanted of them, was the
power in them
that one had from the first appreciated. Emphatically, by that truth, there
would have to be moral developments – dreadful as such a prospect might
loom for a poor interpreter committed to brevity. A character is interesting
as it comes out, and by the process and duration of that emergence; just as
a procession is effective by the way it unrolls, turning to a mere mob if
all of it passes at once. My little procession, I foresaw then from an early
stage, would refuse to pass at once; though I could keep it more or less
down, of course, by reducing it to three or four persons. Practically, in
The spoils,
the reduction is to four, though indeed – and I clung to that as to my
plea for simplicity – the main agents, with the others all dependent,
are Mrs Gereth and Fleda. Fleda’s ingratiating stroke, for
importance, on the threshold, had been that she would understand; and
positively, from that moment, the progress and march of my tale became and
remained that of her understanding.
Absolutely, with this, I committed myself to making the
affirmation and the penetration of it my action and my ‘story’;
once more, too, with the re-entertained perception that a subject so
lighted, a subject residing in somebody’s excited and concentrated
feeling about something – both the something and the somebody being of
course as important as possible – has more beauty to give out than
under any other style of pressure. One is confronted obviously thus with the
question of the importances; with that in particular, no doubt, of the
weight of intelligent consciousness, consciousness of the whole, or of
something ominously like it, that one may decently permit a represented
figure to appear to throw. Some plea for this cause, that of the
intelligence of the moved mannikin, I have already had occasion to make, and
can scarce hope too often to evade it. This intelligence, an honourable
amount of it, on the part of the person to whom one most invites attention,
has but to play with sufficient freedom and ease, or call it with the right
grace, to guarantee us that quantum of the impression of beauty which is the
most fixed of the possible advantages of our producible effect. It may fail,
as a positive presence, on other sides and in other connexions; but more or
less of the treasure is stored safe from the moment such a quality of inward
life is distilled, or in other words from the moment so fine an
interpretation and criticism as that of Fleda Vetch’s – to cite
the present case – is applied without waste to the surrounding tangle.
It is easy to object of course “Why the deuce then
Fleda Vetch, why a mere little flurried bundle of petticoats, why not
Hamlet
or Milton’s
Satan
at once, if you ’re going in for a superior
display of ‘mind’?” To which I fear I can only reply that in
pedestrian prose, and in the ‘short story’, one is, for the best
reasons, no less on one’s guard than on the stretch; and also that I
have ever recognised, even in the midst of the curiosity that such displays
may quicken, the rule of an exquisite economy. The thing is to lodge
somewhere at the heart of one’s complexity an irrepressible
appreciation, but where a light lamp will carry all the flame I
incline to look askance at a heavy. From beginning to end, in
The spoils of Poynton,
appreciation, even to that of the very whole, lives in Fleda; which is
precisely why, as a consequence rather grandly imposed, every one else shows
for comparatively stupid; the tangle, the drama, the tragedy and comedy of
those who appreciate consisting so much of their relation with those who
don’t. From the presented reflexion of this truth my story draws, I
think, a certain assured appearance of roundness and felicity. The
‘things’
are radiant, shedding afar, with a merciless monotony, all their light,
exerting their ravage without remorse; and Fleda almost demonically both
sees and feels, while the others but feel without seeing. Thus we get
perhaps a vivid enough little example, in the concrete, of the general
truth, for the spectator of life, that the fixed constituents of almost any
reproducible action are the fools who minister, at a particular crisis, to
the intensity of the free spirit engaged with them. The fools are
interesting by contrast, by the salience they acquire, and by a hundred
other of their advantages; and the free spirit, always much tormented, and
by no means always triumphant, is heroic, ironic, pathetic or whatever, and,
as exemplified in the record of Fleda Vetch, for instance,
‘successful’, only through having remained free.
I recognise that the novelist with a weakness for that
ground of appeal is foredoomed to a well-nigh extravagant insistence on the
free spirit, seeing the possibility of one in every bush; I may perhaps
speak of it as noteworthy that this very volume happens to exhibit in two
other cases my disposition to let the interest stand or fall by the tried
spontaneity and vivacity of the freedom. It is in fact for that respectable
reason that I enclose
A London life
and
The chaperon
between these covers; my purpose having been here to class my reprintable
productions as far as possible according to their kinds. The two tales I
have just named are of the same ‘kind’ as
The spoils,
to the extent of their each dealing with a human predicament in the light,
for the charm of the thing, of the amount of ‘appreciation’ to be
plausibly imputed to the subject of it. They are each – and truly there
are more of such to come – ‘stories about women’, very young
women, who, affected with a certain high lucidity, thereby become
characters; in consequence of which their doings, their sufferings or
whatever, take on, I assume, an importance. Laura Wing, in
A London life,
has, like Fleda Vetch, acuteness and intensity, reflexion and passion, has
above all a contributive and participant view of her situation; just as Rose
Tramore, in
The chaperon,
rejoices, almost to
insolence, very much in the same cluster of attributes and advantages. They
are thus of a family – which shall have also for us, we seem
forewarned, more members, and of each sex.
As to our young woman of
The spoils,
meanwhile, I briefly come back to my claim for a certain definiteness of
beauty in the special effect wrought by her aid. My problem had decently to
be met – that of establishing for the other persons the vividness of
their appearance of comparative stupidity, that of exposing them to the full
thick wash of the penumbra surrounding the central light, and yet keeping
their motions, within it, distinct, coherent and ‘amusing’. But
these are exactly of course the most ‘amusing’ things to do;
nothing, for example, being of a higher reward artistically than the shade
of success aimed at in such a figure as Mrs Gereth. A character she
too, absolutely, yet the very reverse of a free spirit. I have found myself
so pleased with Mrs Gereth, I confess, on resuming acquaintance with
her, that, complete and in all equilibrium as she seems to me to stand and
move there, I shrink from breathing upon her any breath of qualification;
without which, however, I fail of my point that, thanks to the
‘value’ represented by Fleda, and to the position to which the
elder woman is confined by that irradiation, the latter is at the best a
‘false’ character, floundering as she does in the dusk of
disproportionate passion. She is a figure, oh definitely –
which is a very different matter; for you may be a figure with all the
blinding, with all the hampering passion in life, and may have the grand air
in what shall yet prove to the finer view (which Fleda again,
e. g., could at any time strike off) but a perfect rage of
awkwardness.
Mrs Gereth was, obviously, with her pride and her pluck, of an
admirable fine paste; but she was not intelligent, was only clever, and
therefore would have been no use to us at all as centre of our subject
– compared with Fleda, who was only intelligent, not distinctively
able. The little drama confirms at all events excellently, I think, the
contention of the old wisdom that the question of the personal will has more
than all
else to say to the verisimilitude of these exhibitions. The will that rides
the crisis quite most triumphantly is that of the awful Mona Brigstock, who
is all will, without the smallest leak of force into taste or
tenderness or vision, into any sense of shades or relations or proportions.
She loses no minute in that perception of incongruities in which half
Fleda’s passion is wasted and misled, and into which Mrs Gereth,
to her practical loss, that is by the fatal grace of a sense of comedy,
occasionally and disinterestedly strays. Every one, every thing, in the
story is accordingly sterile but the so thriftily constructed Mona,
able at any moment to bear the whole of her dead weight at once on any given
inch of a resisting surface. Fleda, obliged to neglect inches, sees and
feels but in acres and expanses and blue perspectives; Mrs Gereth too,
in comparison, while her imagination broods, drops half the stitches of the
web she seeks to weave.
If I speak of classifying I hasten to recognise that
there are other marks for the purpose still and that, failing other
considerations,
A London life
would properly consort, in this series, with a dozen of the tales by which
I at one period sought to illustrate and enliven the supposed
‘international’ conflict of manners; a general theme dealing for
the most part with the bewilderment of the good American, of either sex and
of almost any age, in presence of the ‘European’ order. This group
of data might possibly have shown, for the reverse of its medal, the more or
less desperate contortions of the European under American social pressure.
Three or four tried glances in that direction seemed to suggest, however, no
great harvest to be gathered; so that the pictorial value of the general
opposition was practically confined to one phase. More reasons are here
involved than I can begin to go into – as indeed I confess that the
reflexions set in motion by the
international fallacy
at large, as I am now moved to regard it, quite crowd upon me; I simply note
therefore, on one corner of the ground, the scant results, above all for
interesting detail, promised by confronting the fruits of a constituted
order with the fruits of no order at all. We may
strike lights by opposing order to order, one sort to another sort; for in
that case we get the correspondences and equivalents that make differences
mean something; we get the interest and the tension of disparity where a
certain parity may have been in question. Where it may not have
been in question, where the dramatic encounter is but the poor concussion of
positives on one side with negatives on the other, we get little beyond a
consideration of the differences between fishes and fowls.
By which I don’t mean to say that the appeal of the
fallacy, as I call it, was not at one time quite inevitably irresistible;
had it nothing else to recommend it to the imagination it would always have
had the advantage of its showy surface, of suggesting situations as to which
assurance seemed easy, founded, as it felt itself, on constant observation.
The attraction was thus not a little, I judge, the attraction of facility;
the international was easy to do, because, as one’s wayside bloomed
with it, one had but to put forth one’s hand and pluck the frequent
flower. Add to this that the flower was, so often, quite positively
a flower – that of the young American innocence transplanted to
European air. The general subject had, in fine, a charm while it lasted; but
I shall have much more to say about it on another occasion. What here
concerns us is that
A London life
breaks down altogether, I have had to recognise, as a contribution to my
comprehensive picture of bewildered Americanism. I fail to make out to-day
why I need have conceived my three principal persons as sharers in that
particular bewilderment. There was enough of the general human and social
sort for them without it; poor young Wendover in especial, I think, fails on
any such ground to attest himself – I need n’t, surely, have
been at costs to bring him all the way from New York. Laura Wing, touching
creature as she was designed to appear, strikes me as a rare little person
who would have been a rare little person anywhere, and who, in that
character, must have felt and judged and suffered and acted as she did,
whatever her producing clime.
The great anomaly, however, is Mrs Lionel; a study
of a type quite sufficiently to be accounted for on the very scene of her
development, and with her signs and marks easily mistakeable, in London, for
the notes of a native luxuriance. I recall the emphasis, quite the derision,
with which a remarkably wise old friend, not American, a trenchant judge who
had observed manners in many countries and had done me the honour to read my
tale, put to me: “What on earth possessed you to make of your Selina an
American, or to make one of your two or three Americans a Selina? –
resembling so to the life something quite else, something which hereabouts
one need n’t go far to seek, but failing of any felicity for a
creature engendered
là-bas.”
And I think my friend
conveyed, or desired to convey, that the wicked woman of my story was
falsified above all, as an imported product, by something distinctly other
than so engendered in the superficial ‘form’ of her perversity, a
high stiff-backed angular action which is, or was then, beyond any American
‘faking’. The truth is, no doubt, that, though Mrs Lionel, on
my page, does n’t in the least achieve character, she yet passes
before us as a sufficiently vivid image, which was to be the effect designed
for her – an image the hard rustle of whose long steps and the sinister
tinkle of whose multiplied trinkets belie the association invoked for them
and positively operate for another. Not perhaps, moreover, as I am moved to
subjoin, that the point greatly matters. What matters, for one’s
appreciation of a work of art, however modest, is that the prime intention
shall have been justified – for any judgment of which we must be clear
as to what it was. It was n’t after all of the prime, the very
most prime, intention of the tale in question that the persons concerned in
them should have had this, that or the other land of birth; but that the
central situation should really be rendered – that of a charming and
decent young thing, from wheresoever proceeding, who has her decision and
her action to take, horribly and unexpectedly, in face of a squalid
‘scandal’ the main agent of which is her nearest relative, and
who, at the dreadful crisis, to guard against
personal bespattering, is moved, with a miserable want of effect, to a wild
vague frantic gesture, an appeal for protection that virtually proves a
precipitation of her disgrace.
Nobody concerned need, as I say, have come from New York
for that; though, as I have likewise intimated, I must have seen the
creation of my heroine, in 1888, and the representation of the differences I
wished to establish between her own known world and the world from which she
finds herself recoiling, facilitated in a high degree by assured reference
to the simpler social order across the sea. I had my vision (as I recover
the happy spell) of her having ‘come over’ to find, to her dismay,
what ‘London’ had made of the person in the world hitherto most
akin to her; in addition to which I was during those years infinitely
interested in almost any demonstration of the effect of London. This was a
form of response to the incessant appeal of the great city, one’s
grateful, one’s devoted recognition of which fairly broke out from day
to day. It was material ever to one’s hand; and the impression was
always there that no one so much as the candid outsider, caught up and
involved in the sweep of the machine, could measure the values revealed.
Laura Wing must have figured for me thus as the necessary candid outsider
– from the moment some received impression of the elements about me was
to be projected and embodied. In fact as I remount the stream it is the
particular freshness of that enjoyed relation I seem to taste again; the
positive fond belief that I had my right oppositions. They seemed to ensure
somehow the perfect march of my tolerably simple action; the straightness,
the artful economy of which – save that of a particular point where my
ingenuity shows to so small advantage that, to anticipate opprobrium, I can
but hold it up to derision – has n’t ceased to be
appreciable. The thing made its first appearance in
Scribner’s magazine
during the summer of 1888, and I remember being not long before at work
upon it, remember in fact beginning it, in one of the wonderful faded back
rooms of an old
Venetian palace,
a room with a pompous
Tiepolo
ceiling and walls of ancient pale-green damask, slightly shredded and patched,
which, on the warm mornings, looked into the shade of a court where a high
outer staircase, strikingly bold, yet strikingly relaxed, held together one
scarce knew how; where Gothic windows broke out, on discoloured blanks of
wall, at quite arbitrary levels, and where above all the strong Venetian
voice, full of history and humanity and waking perpetual echoes, seemed to
say more in ten warm words, of whatever tone, than any twenty pages of
one’s cold pale prose.
In spite of all of which, I may add, I do penance here
only for the awkwardness of that departure from the adopted form of my
recital which resides in the picture of the interview with young Wendover
contrived by Lady Davenant in the interest of some better provision for
their poor young friend. Here indeed is a lapse from artistic dignity, a
confession of want of resource, which I may not pretend to explain to-day,
and on behalf of which I have nothing to urge save a consciousness of my
dereliction presumably too vague at the time. I had seen my elements
presented in a certain way, settled the little law under which my story was
to be told, and with this consistency, as any reader of the tale may easily
make out for himself, interviews to which my central figure was not a party,
scenes revolving on an improvised pivot of their own, had nothing to do with
the affair. I might of course have adopted another plan – the artist is
free, surely, to adopt any he fancies, provided it be a plan and he
adopt it intelligently; and to that scheme of composition the independent
picture of a passage between Lady Davenant and young Wendover might
perfectly have conformed. As the case stands it conforms to nothing; whereas
the beauty of a thing of this order really done as a whole is ever,
certainly, that its parts are in abject dependence, and that even any great
charm they may individually and capriciously put forth is infirm so far as
it does n’t measurably contribute to a harmony. My momentary
helplessness sprang, no doubt, from my failure to devise in time some way of
giving the value of Lady Davenant’s appeal to the young man, of making
it play its part in my heroine’s history and consciousness,
without so awkwardly thrusting the lump sum on the reader.
Circumventions of difficulty of this degree are
precisely the finest privilege of the craftsman, who, to be worth his salt,
and master of any contrived harmony, must take no tough technical
problem for insoluble. These technical subterfuges and subtleties, these
indirectly-expressed values, kept indirect in a higher interest, made
subordinate to some general beauty, some artistic intention that can give an
account of itself, what are they after all but one of the nobler parts of
our amusement? Superficially, in
A London life,
it might well have seemed that the only way to picture the intervention on
Laura Wing’s behalf of the couple just named was to break the chain of
the girl’s own consciousness and report the matter quite straight and
quite shamelessly; this course had indeed every merit but that of its
playing the particular game to which I had addressed myself. My prime
loyalty was to the interest of the game, and the honour to be won the more
desirable by that fact. Any muddle-headed designer can beg the question of
perspective, but science is required for making it rule the scene. If it be
asked how then we were to have assisted at the copious passage I thus
incriminate without our privilege of presence, I can only say that my
discovery of the right way should – and would – have been the very
flower of the performance. The real ‘fun’ of the thing would have
been exactly to sacrifice my comparative platitude of statement – a
deplorable depth at any time, I have attempted elsewhere to signify, for any
pretending master of representation to sink to – without sacrificing a
grain of what was to be conveyed. The real fun, in other words, would have
been in not, by an exceptional collapse of other ingenuity, making my attack
on the spectator’s consciousness a call as immediate as a
postman’s knock.
This attack, at every other point, reaches that objective only through the
medium of the interesting girl’s own vision, own experience, with which
all the facts are richly charged and coloured. That saturates our sense of
them with the savour of Laura’s sense – thanks to which enhancement
we get
intensity. But from the chapter to which I have called attention, so that it
may serve perhaps as a lesson, intensity ruefully drops. I can’t say
worse for it – and have been the more concerned to say what I do that
without this flaw the execution might have appeared from beginning to end
close and exemplary.
It is with all that better confidence, I think, that the
last of my three tales here carries itself. I recapture perfectly again, in
respect to
The chaperon,
both the first jog of my imagination and the particular local influence that
presided at its birth – the latter a
ramshackle inn
on the Irish coast, where the table at which I wrote was of an equilibrium
so vague that I wonder to-day how any object constructed on it should stand
so firm. The strange sad charm of the tearful Irish light hangs about the
memory of the labour of which this small fiction – first published
in two numbers of
The Atlantic monthly
of 1891 – was one of the fruits; but the subject had glimmered upon
me, two or three years before, in an air of comedy comparatively free from
sharp under-tastes. Once more, as in the case of its companions here, the
single spoken word, in London, had said all – after the manner of that
clear ring of the electric bell that the barest touch of the button may
produce. The talk being of a
certain lady
who, in consequence of early
passages, had lived for years apart from her husband and in no affluence of
good company, it was mentioned of her that her situation had improved, and
the desert around her been more or less brought under cultivation, by the
fact of her having at last made acquaintance with her young unmarried
daughter, a charming girl just introduced to the world and thereby qualified
for ‘taking her out’, floating her in spite of whatever past damage.
Here in truth, it seemed to me, was a morsel of queer comedy to play
with, and my tale embodies the neat experiment. Fortunately in this case the
principle of composition adopted is loyally observed; the values gathered
are, without exception, gathered by the light of the intense little personal
consciousness, invoked from the first, that shines over my field and the
predominance of which
is usurped by none other. That is the main note to be made about
The chaperon;
except this further, which I must reserve, however – as I shall find
excellent occasion – for an ampler development. A short story, to my
sense and as the term is used in magazines, has to choose between being
either an anecdote or a picture and can but play its part strictly according
to its kind. I rejoice in the anecdote, but I revel in the picture; though
having doubtless at times to note that a given attempt may place itself near
the dividing-line. This is in some degree the case with
The chaperon,
in which, none the less, on the whole, picture ingeniously prevails;
picture aiming at those richly summarised and foreshortened effects –
the opposite pole again from expansion inorganic and thin – that refer
their terms of production, for which the magician has ever to don his best
cap and gown, to the inner compartment of our box of tricks. From
them comes the true grave close consistency in which parts hang
together even as the interweavings of a tapestry.
The chaperon
has perhaps, so far as it goes, something of that texture. Yet I shall be
able, I think, to cite examples with still more.
end of the preface to volume 10
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