I recognise again, for the first of these three Tales,
another instance of the growth of the ‘great oak’ from the little
acorn; since
What Maisie knew
is at least a tree that spreads beyond any provision its small germ might
on a first handling have appeared likely to make for it. The accidental
mention had been made to me of the manner in which the situation of some
luckless child of a divorced couple was affected, under my informant’s
eyes, by the re-marriage of one of its parents – I forget which; so
that, thanks to the limited desire for its company expressed by the
step-parent, the law of its little life, its being entertained in rotation
by its father and its mother, would n’t easily prevail. Whereas
each of these persons had at first vindictively desired to keep it from the
other, so at present the re-married relative sought now rather to be rid of
it – that is to leave it as much as possible, and beyond the appointed
times and seasons, on the hands of the adversary; which malpractice,
resented by the latter as bad faith, would of course be repaid and avenged
by an equal treachery. The wretched infant was thus to find itself
practically disowned, rebounding from racquet to racquet like a tennis-ball
or a shuttlecock. This figure could but touch the fancy to the quick and
strike one as the beginning of a story – a story commanding a great
choice of developments. I recollect, however, promptly thinking that for a
proper symmetry the second parent should marry too – which in the case
named to me indeed would probably soon occur, and was in any case what the
ideal of the situation required. The second step-parent would have but to be
correspondingly incommoded by obligations to the offspring of a hated
predecessor for the misfortune of the little victim to become altogether
exemplary. The business would accordingly be
sad enough, yet I am not sure its possibility of interest would so much have
appealed to me had I not soon felt that the ugly facts, so stated or
conceived, by no means constituted the whole appeal.
The light of an imagination touched by them
could n’t help therefore projecting a further ray, thanks to which
it became rather quaintly clear that, not less than the chance of misery and
of a degraded state, the chance of happiness and of an improved state might
be here involved for the child, round about whom the complexity of life
would thus turn to fineness, to richness – and indeed would have but so
to turn for the small creature to be steeped in security and ease. Sketchily
clustered even, these elements gave out that vague pictorial glow which
forms the first appeal of a living ‘subject’ to the painter’s
consciousness; but the glimmer became intense as I proceeded to a further
analysis. The further analysis is for that matter almost always the torch of
rapture and victory, as the artist’s firm hand grasps and plays it
– I mean, naturally, of the smothered rapture and the obscure victory,
enjoyed and celebrated not in the street but before some innermost shrine;
the odds being a hundred to one, in almost any connexion, that it
does n’t arrive by any easy first process at the best
residuum of truth. That was the charm, sensibly, of the picture thus at
first confusedly showing; the elements so could n’t but flush, to
their very surface, with some deeper depth of irony than the mere obvious.
It lurked in the crude postulate like a buried scent; the more the attention
hovered the more aware it became of the fragrance. To which I may add that
the more I scratched the surface and penetrated, the more potent, to the
intellectual nostril, became this virtue. At last, accordingly, the
residuum, as I have called it, reached, I was in presence of the red
dramatic spark that glowed at the core of my vision and that, as I gently
blew upon it, burned higher and clearer. This precious particle was the
full ironic truth – the most interesting item to be read into
the child’s situation. For satisfaction of the mind, in other words,
the small expanding consciousness would have to be
saved, have to become presentable as a register of impressions; and saved by
the experience of certain advantages, by some enjoyed profit and some
achieved confidence, rather than coarsened, blurred, sterilised, by
ignorance and pain. This better state, in the young life, would reside in
the exercise of a function other than that of disconcerting the selfishness
of its parents – which was all that had on the face of the matter
seemed reserved to it in the way of criticism applied to their rupture. The
early relation would be exchanged for a later; instead of simply submitting
to the inherited tie and the imposed complication, of suffering from them,
our little wonder-working agent would create, without design, quite fresh
elements of this order – contribute, that is, to the formation of a
fresh tie, from which it would then (and for all the world as if through a
small demonic foresight) proceed to derive great profit.
This is but to say that the light in which the vision so
readily grew to a wholeness was that of a second marriage on both sides; the
father having, in the freedom of divorce, but to take another wife, as well
as the mother, under a like licence, another husband, for the case to begin,
at least, to stand beautifully on its feet. There would be thus a perfect
logic for what might come – come even with the mere attribution of a
certain sensibility (if but a mere relative fineness) to either of the new
parties. Say the prime cause making for the ultimate attempt to shirk on one
side or the other, and better still if on both, a due share of the decreed
burden should have been, after all, in each progenitor, a constitutional
inaptitude for any burden, and a base intolerance of it: we should
thus get a motive not requiring, but happily dispensing with, too particular
a perversity in the step-parents. The child seen as creating by the fact of
its forlornness a relation between its step-parents, the more intimate the
better, dramatically speaking; the child, by the mere appeal of
neglectedness and the mere consciousness of relief, weaving about, with the
best faith in the world, the close web of sophistication; the child becoming
a centre and pretext for a fresh system of misbehaviour, a system moreover
of a nature to spread and ramify: there would be the
‘full’ irony, there the promising theme into which the hint I had
originally picked up would logically flower. No themes are so human as those
that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close connexion of
bliss and bale, of the things that help with the things that hurt, so
dangling before us for ever that bright hard medal, of so strange an alloy,
one face of which is somebody’s right and ease and the other
somebody’s pain and wrong. To live with all intensity and perplexity
and felicity in its terribly mixed little world would thus be the part of my
interesting small mortal; bringing people together who would be at least
more correctly separate; keeping people separate who would be at least more
correctly together; flourishing, to a degree, at the cost of many
conventions and proprieties, even decencies; really keeping the torch of
virtue alive in an air tending infinitely to smother it; really in short
making confusion worse confounded by drawing some stray fragrance of an
ideal across the scent of selfishness, by sowing on barren strands, through
the mere fact of presence, the seed of the moral life.
All this would be to say, I at once recognised, that my
light vessel of consciousness, swaying in such a draught,
could n’t be with verisimilitude a rude little boy; since, beyond
the fact that little boys are never so ‘present’, the sensibility
of the female young is indubitably, for early youth, the greater, and my
plan would call, on the part of my protagonist, for ‘no end’ of
sensibility. I might impute that amount of it without extravagance to a slip
of a girl whose faculties should have been well shaken up; but I should have
so to depend on its action to keep my story clear that I must be able to
show it in all assurance as naturally intense. To this end I should have of
course to suppose for my heroine dispositions originally promising, but
above all I should have to invest her with perceptions easily and almost
infinitely quickened. So handsomely fitted out, yet not in a manner too
grossly to affront probability, she might well see me through the whole
course of my design; which design, more and more attractive as I turned it
over, and dignified
by the most delightful difficulty, would be to make and to keep her so
limited consciousness the very field of my picture while at the same time
guarding with care the integrity of the objects represented. With the charm
of this possibility, therefore, the project for
Maisie
rounded itself and loomed large – any subject looming large, for that
matter, I am bound to add, from the moment one is ridden by the law of entire
expression. I have already elsewhere noted, I think, that the memory of my
own work preserves for me no theme that, at some moment or other of its
development, and always only waiting for the right connexion or chance,
has n’t signally refused to remain humble, even (or perhaps all
the more resentfully) when fondly selected for its conscious and hopeless
humility. Once ‘out’, like a house-dog of a temper above
confinement, it defies the mere whistle, it roams, it hunts, it seeks out
and ‘sees’ life; it can be brought back but by hand and then only
to take its futile thrashing. It was n’t at any rate for an idea
seen in the light I here glance at not to have due warrant of its value
– how could the value of a scheme so finely workable not be
great? The one presented register of the whole complexity would be the play
of the child’s confused and obscure notation of it, and yet the whole,
as I say, should be unmistakeably, should be honourably there, seen through
the faint intelligence, or at the least attested by the imponderable
presence, and still advertising its sense.
I recall that my first view of this neat possibility was
as the attaching problem of the picture restricted (while yet achieving, as
I say, completeness and coherency) to what the child might be conceived to
have understood – to have been able to interpret and
appreciate. Further reflexion and experiment showed me my subject strangled
in that extreme of rigour. The infant mind would at the best leave great
gaps and voids; so that with a systematic surface possibly beyond reproach
we should nevertheless fail of clearness of sense. I should have to stretch
the matter to what my wondering witness materially and inevitably
saw; a great deal of which quantity she either would n’t
understand at all or
would quite misunderstand – and on those lines, only on those, my task
would be prettily cut out. To that then I settled – to the question of
giving it all, the whole situation surrounding her, but of giving
it only through the occasions and connexions of her proximity and her
attention; only as it might pass before her and appeal to her, as it might
touch her and affect her, for better or worse, for perceptive gain or
perceptive loss: so that we fellow witnesses, we not more invited but only
more expert critics, should feel in strong possession of it. This would be,
to begin with, a plan of absolutely definite and measurable application
– that in itself always a mark of beauty; and I have been interested to
find on re-perusal of the work that some such controlling grace successfully
rules it. Nothing could be more ‘done’, I think, in the light of
its happiest intention; and this in spite of an appearance that at moments
obscures my consistency. Small children have many more perceptions than they
have terms to translate them; their vision is at any moment much richer,
their apprehension even constantly stronger, than their prompt, their at all
producible, vocabulary. Amusing therefore as it might at the first blush
have seemed to restrict myself in this case to the terms as well as to the
experience, it became at once plain that such an attempt would fail.
Maisie’s terms accordingly play their part – since her simpler
conclusions quite depend on them; but our own commentary constantly attends
and amplifies. This it is that on occasion, doubtless, seems to represent us
as going so ‘behind’ the facts of her spectacle as to exaggerate
the activity of her relation to them. The difference here is but of a shade:
it is her relation, her activity of spirit, that determines all our own
concern – we simply take advantage of these things better than she
herself. Only, even though it is her interest that mainly makes matters
interesting for us, we inevitably note this in figures that are not yet at
her command and that are nevertheless required whenever those aspects about
her and those parts of her experience that she understands darken off into
others that she rather tormentedly misses. All of which gave me a high
firm logic to observe; supplied the force for which the straightener of
almost any tangle is grateful while he labours, the sense of pulling at
threads intrinsically worth it – strong enough and fine enough and
entire enough.
Of course, beyond this, was another and well-nigh equal
charm – equal in spite of its being almost independent of the acute
constructional, the endless expressional question. This was the quite different
question of the particular kind of truth of resistance I might be able to
impute to my central figure – some intensity, some continuity
of resistance being naturally of the essence of the subject. Successfully
to resist (to resist, that is, the strain of observation and the assault of
experience) what would that be, on the part of so young a person, but to
remain fresh, and still fresh, and to have even a freshness to communicate?
– the case being with Maisie to the end that she treats her friends to
the rich little spectacle of objects embalmed in her wonder. She wonders, in
other words, to the end, to the death – the death of her childhood,
properly speaking; after which (with the inevitable shift, sooner or later,
of her point of view) her situation will change and become another affair,
subject to other measurements and with a new centre altogether. The
particular reaction that will have led her to that point, and that it has
been of an exquisite interest to study in her, will have spent itself; there
will be another scale, another perspective, another horizon. Our business
meanwhile therefore is to extract from her current reaction whatever it may
be worth; and for that matter we recognise in it the highest exhibitional
virtue. Truly, I reflect, if the theme had had no other beauty it would
still have had this rare and distinguished one of its so expressing the
variety of the child’s values. She is not only the extraordinary
‘ironic centre’ I have already noted; she has the wonderful
importance of shedding a light far beyond any reach of her comprehension; of
lending to poorer persons and things, by the mere fact of their being
involved with her and by the special scale she creates for them, a precious
element of dignity. I lose myself, truly, in appreciation
of my theme on noting what she does by her ‘freshness’ for
appearances in themselves vulgar and empty enough. They become, as she deals
with them, the stuff of poetry and tragedy and art; she has simply to
wonder, as I say, about them, and they begin to have meanings, aspects,
solidities, connexions – connexions with the ‘universal’!
– that they could scarce have hoped for. Ida Farange alone, so to
speak, or Beale alone, that is either of them otherwise connected –
what intensity, what ‘objectivity’ (the most developed degree of
being anyhow thinkable for them) would they have? How would they
repay at all the favour of our attention?
Maisie makes them portentous all by the play of her good
faith, makes her mother above all, to my vision – unless I have wholly
failed to render it – concrete, immense and awful; so that we get, for
our profit, and get by an economy of process interesting in itself, the
thoroughly pictured creature, the striking figured symbol. At two points in
particular, I seem to recognise, we enjoy at its maximum this effect of
associational magic. The passage in which her father’s terms of
intercourse with the insinuating but so strange and unattractive lady whom
he has had the detestable levity to whisk her off to see late at night, is a
signal example of the all but incalculable way in which interest may be
constituted. The facts involved are that Beale Farange is ignoble, that the
friend to whom he introduces his daughter is deplorable, and that from the
commerce of the two, as the two merely, we would fain avert our
heads. Yet the thing has but to become a part of the child’s bewilderment
for these small sterilities to drop from it and for the scene
to emerge and prevail – vivid, special, wrought hard, to the hardness
of the unforgettable; the scene that is exactly what Beale and Ida and
Mrs Cuddon, and even Sir Claude and Mrs Beale, would never for a
moment have succeeded in making their scant unredeemed importances –
namely appreciable. I find another instance in the episode of
Maisie’s unprepared encounter, while walking in the Park with Sir
Claude, of her mother and that beguiled attendant of her mother, the
encouraging,
the appealing ‘Captain’, to whom this lady contrives to commit her
for twenty minutes while she herself deals with the second husband. The
human substance here would have seemed in advance well-nigh too poor for
conversion, the three ‘mature’ figures of too short a radiation,
too stupid (so stupid it was for Sir Claude to have married Ida!)
too vain, too thin, for any clear application; but promptly, immediately,
the child’s own importance, spreading and contagiously acting, has
determined the total value otherwise. Nothing of course, meanwhile,
is an older story to the observer of manners and the painter of life than
the grotesque finality with which such terms as ‘painful’,
‘unpleasant’ and ‘disgusting’ are often applied to his
results; to that degree, in truth, that the free use of them as weightily
conclusive again and again re-enforces his estimate of the critical sense of
circles in which they artlessly flourish. Of course under that superstition
I was punctually to have had read to me the lesson that the
‘mixing-up’ of a child with anything unpleasant confessed itself
an aggravation of the unpleasantness, and that nothing could well be more
disgusting than to attribute to Maisie so intimate an
‘acquaintance’ with the gross immoralities surrounding her.
The only thing to say of such lucidities is that,
however one may have ‘discounted’ in advance, and as once for all,
their general radiance, one is disappointed if the hour for them, in the
particular connexion, does n’t strike – they so keep before
us elements with which even the most sedate philosopher must always reckon.
The painter of life has indeed work cut out for him when a considerable part
of life offers itself in the guise of that sapience. The effort really to
see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the
constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed
that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities,
that it also has colour and form and character, has often in fact a broad
and rich comicality, many of the signs and values of the appreciable. Thus
it was to be, for example, I might gather, that the very principle of
Maisie’s appeal, her undestroyed freshness, in other words that vivacity
of intelligence by which she indeed does vibrate in the infected air, indeed
does flourish in her immoral world, may pass for a barren and senseless
thing, or at best a negligible one. For nobody to whom life at large is
easily interesting do the finer, the shyer, the more anxious small
vibrations, fine and shy and anxious with the passion that precedes
knowledge, succeed in being negligible: which is doubtless one of many
reasons why the passage between the child and the kindly, friendly, ugly
gentleman who, seated with her in
Kensington Gardens
under a spreading tree, positively answers to her for her mother as no one has
ever answered, and so stirs her, filially and morally, as she has never been
stirred, throws into highest relief, to my sense at least, the side on which
the subject is strong, and becomes the type-passage – other advantages
certainly aiding, as I may say – for the expression of its beauty. The
active, contributive close-circling wonder, as I have called it, in which
the child’s identity is guarded and preserved, and which makes her case
remarkable exactly by the weight of the tax on it, provides distinction for
her, provides vitality and variety, through the operation of the tax –
which would have done comparatively little for us had n’t it been
monstrous. A pity for us surely to have been deprived of this just reflexion.
Maisie
is of
1897.
I pass by, for the moment, the
second of these compositions,
finding in the third, which again deals with the experience of a very young
person, a connexion more immediate; and this even at the risk of seeming to
undermine my remark of a few pages back as to the comparative sensibility
of the sexes. My urchin of
The pupil
(1891) has sensibility in abundance, it would seem – and yet
preserves in spite of it, I judge, his strong little male quality. But there
are fifty things to say here; which indeed rush upon me within my present
close limits in such a cloud as to demand much clearance. This is perhaps
indeed but the aftersense of the assault made on my mind, as I perfectly
recall, by every aspect of the original vision, which struck me as abounding
in aspects. It lives again for me, this vision, as it first alighted; though
the inimitable prime flutter, the air as of an ineffable sign
made by the immediate beat of the wings of the poised figure of fancy that
has just settled, is one of those guarantees of value that can never be
re-captured. The sign has been made to the seer only – it is
his queer affair; of which any report to others, not as yet
involved, has but the same effect of flatness as attends, amid a group
gathered under the canopy of night, any stray allusion to a shooting star.
The miracle, since miracle it seems, is all for the candid exclaimer. The
miracle for the author of
The pupil,
at any rate, was when, years ago, one summer day, in a very hot Italian
railway-carriage, which stopped and dawdled everywhere, favouring
conversation, a friend with whom I shared it, a doctor of medicine who had
come from a far country to settle in Florence, happened to speak to me of a
wonderful American family, an odd adventurous, extravagant band, of high but
rather unauthenticated pretensions, the most interesting member of which was
a small boy, acute and precocious, afflicted with a heart of weak action,
but beautifully intelligent, who saw their prowling precarious life exactly
as it was, and measured and judged it, and measured and judged
them, all round, ever so quaintly; presenting himself in short as
an extraordinary little person. Here was more than enough for a
summer’s day even in old Italy – here was a thumping windfall. No
process and no steps intervened: I saw, on the spot, little Morgan
Moreen, I saw all the rest of the Moreens; I felt, to the last delicacy, the
nature of my young friend’s relation with them (he had become at once
my young friend) and, by the same stroke, to its uttermost fine throb, the
subjection to him of the beguiled, bewildered, defrauded,
unremunerated, yet after all richly repaid youth who would to a certainty,
under stress of compassion, embark with the tribe on tutorship, and whose
edifying connexion with it would be my leading document.
This must serve as my account of the origin of
The pupil:
it will commend itself, I feel, to all imaginative and projective persons
who have had – and what imaginative and projective person
has n’t? – any like experience of the suddenly-determined
absolute of perception. The whole
cluster of items forming the image is on these occasions born at once; the
parts are not pieced together, they conspire and interdepend; but what it
really comes to, no doubt, is that at a simple touch an old latent and
dormant impression, a buried germ, implanted by experience and then
forgotten, flashes to the surface as a fish, with a single
‘squirm’, rises to the baited hook, and there meets instantly the
vivifying ray. I remember at all events having no doubt of anything or
anyone here; the vision kept to the end its ease and its charm; it worked
itself out with confidence. These are minor matters when the question is of
minor results; yet almost any assured and downright imaginative act is
– granted the sort of record in which I here indulge – worth
fondly commemorating. One cherishes, after the fact, any proved case of the
independent life of the imagination; above all if by that faculty one has
been appointed mainly to live. We are then never detached from the
question of what it may out of simple charity do for us. Besides which, in
relation to the poor Moreens, innumerable notes, as I have intimated, all
equally urging their relevance, press here to the front. The general
adventure of the little composition itself – for singular things were
to happen to it, though among such importunities not the most worth noting
now – would be, occasion favouring, a thing to live over; moving as one
did, roundabout it, in I scarce know what thick and coloured air of slightly
tarnished anecdote, of dim association, of casual confused romance; a
compound defying analysis, but truly, for the social chronicler, any student
in especial of the copious ‘cosmopolite’ legend, a boundless and
tangled, but highly explorable, garden. Why, somehow – these were the
intensifying questions – did one see the Moreens, whom I place at Nice,
at Venice, in Paris, as of the special essence of the little old
miscellaneous cosmopolite Florence, the Florence of other, of irrecoverable
years, the restless yet withal so convenient scene of a society that has
passed away for ever with all its faded ghosts and fragile relics;
immaterial presences that have quite ceased to revisit (trust an old
romancer’s, an old pious observer’s fine sense
to have made sure of it!) walks and prospects once sacred and shaded, but
now laid bare, gaping wide, despoiled of their past and unfriendly to any
appreciation of it? – through which the unconscious Barbarians troop
with the regularity and passivity of ‘supplies’, or other
promiscuous goods, prepaid and forwarded.
They had nothing to do, the dear Moreens, with this
dreadful period, any more than I, as occupied and charmed with them, was
humiliatingly subject to it; we were, all together, of a better romantic age
and faith; we referred ourselves, with our highest complacency, to the
classic years of the great Americano-European legend; the years of limited
communication, of monstrous and unattenuated contrast, of prodigious and
unrecorded adventure. The comparatively brief but infinitely rich
‘cycle’ of romance embedded in the earlier, the very early
American reactions and returns (mediæval in the sense of being, at
most, of the mid-century), what does it resemble to-day but a gold-mine
overgrown and smothered, dislocated, and no longer workable? – all for
want of the right indications for sounding, the right implements for
digging, doubtless even of the right workmen, those with the right tradition
and ‘feeling’, for the job. The most extraordinary things appear to
have happened, during that golden age, in the ‘old’ countries
– in Asia and Africa as well as in Europe – to the candid children
of the West, things admirably incongruous and incredible; but no story of
all the list was to find its just interpreter, and nothing is now more
probable than that every key to interpretation has been lost. The modern
reporter’s big brushes, attached to broom-handles that match the height
of his sky-scrapers, would sadly besmear the fine parchment of our missing
record. We were to lose, clearly, at any rate, a vast body of precious
anecdotes, a long gallery of wonderful portraits, an array of the oddest
possible figures in the oddest possible attitudes. The Moreens were of the
family then of the great unstudied precursors – poor and shabby
members, no doubt; dim and superseded types. I must add
indeed that, such as they were, or as they may at present incoherently
appear, I don’t pretend really to have ‘done’ them; all I
have given in
The pupil
is little Morgan’s troubled vision of them as reflected in the vision,
also troubled enough, of his devoted friend. The manner of the thing may
thus illustrate the author’s incorrigible taste for gradations and
superpositions of effect; his love, when it is a question of a picture, of
anything that makes for proportion and perspective, that contributes to a
view of all the dimensions. Addicted to seeing ‘through’
– one thing through another, accordingly, and still other things
through that – he takes, too greedily perhaps, on any errand,
as many things as possible by the way. It is after this fashion that he
incurs the stigma of labouring uncannily for a certain fulness of truth
– truth diffused, distributed and, as it were, atmospheric.
The second in order of these fictions speaks for itself,
I think, so frankly as scarce to suffer further expatiation. Its origin is
written upon it large, and the idea it puts into play so abides in one of
the commonest and most taken-for-granted of London impressions that some
such experimentally-figured situation as that of
In the cage
must again and again have flowered (granted the grain of observation) in
generous minds. It had become for me, at any rate, an old story by the time
(1898) I cast it into this particular form. The postal-telegraph office in
general, and above all the small local office of one’s immediate
neighbourhood, scene of the transaction of so much of one’s daily
business, haunt of one’s needs and one’s duties, of one’s
labours and one’s patiences, almost of one’s rewards and
one’s disappointments, one’s joys and one’s sorrows, had
ever had, to my sense, so much of London to give out, so much of its huge
perpetual story to tell, that any momentary wait there seemed to take place
in a strong social draught, the stiffest possible breeze of the
human comedy.
One had of course in these connexions one’s especial resort, the office
nearest one’s own door, where one had come to enjoy in a manner the
fruits of frequentation
and the amenities of intercourse. So had grown up, for speculation –
prone as one’s mind had ever been to that form of waste – the
question of what it might ‘mean’, wherever the admirable service
was installed, for confined and cramped and yet considerably tutored young
officials of either sex to be made so free, intellectually, of a range of
experience otherwise quite closed to them. This wonderment, once the spark
was kindled, became an amusement, or an obsession, like another; though
falling indeed, at the best, no doubt, but into that deepest abyss of all
the wonderments that break out for the student of great cities. From the
moment that he is a student, this most beset of critics, his danger
is inevitably of imputing to too many others, right and left, the critical
impulse and the acuter vision – so very long may it take him to learn
that the mass of mankind are banded, probably by the sanest of instincts, to
defend themselves to the death against any such vitiation of their
simplicity. To criticise is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take
intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticised
thing and make it one’s own. The large intellectual appetite projects
itself thus on many things, while the small – not better advised, but
unconscious of need for advice – projects itself on few.
Admirable thus its economic instinct; it is curious of
nothing that it has n’t vital use for. You may starve in London,
it is clear, without discovering a use for any theory of the more equal
division of victuals – which is moreover exactly what it would appear
that thousands of the non-speculative annually do. Their example is much to
the point, in the light of all the barren trouble they are saved; but
somehow, after all,
it gives no pause to the
‘artistic’,
to the morbid, imagination. That rash, that idle faculty continues to abound
in questions, and to supply answers to as many of them as possible; all of
which makes a great occupation for idleness. To the fantastic scale on which
this last-named state may, in favouring conditions, organise itself, to the
activities it may practise when the favoring conditions happen to crop up
in Mayfair or in Kensington, our portrayal of the caged
telegraphist may well appear a proper little monument. The composition
before us tells in fact clearly enough, it seems to me, the story of its
growth; and relevance will probably be found in any moral it may pluck
– by which I mean any moral the impulse to have framed it may pluck
– from the vice of reading rank subtleties into simple souls and
reckless expenditure into thrifty ones. The matter comes back again, I fear,
but to the author’s irrepressible and insatiable, his extravagant and
immoral, interest in personal character and in the ‘nature’ of a
mind, of almost any mind the heaving little sea of his subject may cast up
– as to which these remarks have already, in other connexions, recorded
his apology: all without prejudice to such shrines and stations of penance
as still shall enliven our way. The range of wonderment attributed in our
tale to the young woman employed at Cocker’s differs little in essence
from the speculative thread on which the pearls of Maisie’s experience,
in this same volume – pearls of so strange an iridescence – are
mostly strung. She wonders, putting it simply, very much as Morgan Moreen
wonders; and they all wonder, for that matter, very much after the fashion
of our portentous little Hyacinth of
The Princess Casamassima,
tainted to the core, as we have seen him, with the trick of mental reaction
on the things about him and fairly staggering under the appropriations, as I
have called them, that he owes to the critical spirit. He collapses, poor
Hyacinth, like a thief at night, overcharged with treasures of reflexion and
spoils of passion of which he can give, in his poverty and obscurity, no
honest account.
It is much in this manner, we see on analysis, that
Morgan Moreen breaks down – his burden indeed not so heavy, but his
strength so much less formed. The two little spirits of maidens, in the
group, bear up, oddly enough, beyond those of their brothers; but the just
remark for each of these small exhibited lives is of course that, in the
longer or the shorter piece, they are actively, are luxuriously, lived. The
luxury is that of the number of their moral vibrations, well-nigh
unrestricted – not that of
an account at the grocer’s: whatever it be, at any rate, it makes them,
as examples and ‘cases’, rare. My brooding telegraphist may be in
fact, on her ground of ingenuity, scarcely more thinkable than desirable;
yet if I have made her but a libel, up and down the city, on an estimable
class, I feel it still something to have admonished that class, even though
obscurely enough, of neglected interests and undivined occasions. My central
spirit, in the anecdote, is, for verisimilitude, I grant, too ardent a focus
of divination; but without this excess the phenomena detailed would have
lacked their principle of cohesion. The action of the drama is simply the
girl’s ‘subjective’ adventure – that of her quite
definitely winged intelligence; just as the catastrophe, just as the
solution, depends on her winged wit. Why, however, should I explain further
– for a case that, modestly as it would seem to present itself, has yet
already whirled us so far? A course of incident complicated by the
intervention of winged wit – which is here, as I say, confessed to
– would be generally expected, I judge, to commit me to the explanation
of everything. But from that undertaking I shrink, and take refuge instead,
for an instant, in a much looser privilege.
If I speak, as just above, of the action
embodied, each time, in these so ‘quiet’ recitals, it is under
renewed recognition of the inveterate instinct with which they keep
conforming to the ‘scenic’ law. They demean themselves for all the
world – they quite insist on it, that is, whenever they have a chance
– as little constituted dramas, little exhibitions founded on the logic
of the ‘scene’, the unit of the scene, the general scenic
consistency, and knowing little more than that. To read them over has been
to find them on this ground never at fault. The process repeats and renews
itself, moving in the light it has once for all adopted. These finer
idiosyncracies of a literary form seem to be regarded as outside the scope
of criticism – small reference to them do I remember ever to have met;
such surprises of re-perusal, such recoveries of old fundamental intention,
such moments of almost ruefully independent
discrimination, would doubtless in that case not have waylaid my steps.
Going over the pages here placed together has been for me, at all events,
quite to watch the scenic system at play. The treatment by
‘scene’, regularly, quite rhythmically recurs; the intervals
between, the massing of the elements to a different effect and by a quite
other law, remain, in this fashion, all preparative, just as the scenic
occasions in themselves become, at a given moment, illustrative, each of the
agents, true to its function, taking up the theme from the other very much
as the fiddles, in an orchestra, may take it up from the cornets and flutes,
or the wind-instruments take it up from the violins. The point, however, is
that the scenic passages are wholly and logically scenic, having
for their rule of beauty the principle of the ‘conduct’, the
organic development, of a scene – the entire succession of values that
flower and bear fruit on ground solidly laid for them. The great advantage
for the total effect is that we feel, with the definite alternation, how the
theme is being treated. That is we feel it when, in such tangled
connexions, we happen to care. I should n’t really go on as if
this were the case with many readers.
end of the preface to volume 11
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