All of which I note, however, perhaps with too scant relevance to the inexhaustible charm of Roman and Florentine memories. Off the ground, at a distance, our fond indifference to being ‘silly’ grows fonder still; the working convention, as I have called it – the convention of the real revelations and surrenders on one side and the real immersions and appreciations on the other – has not only nothing to keep it down, but every glimpse of contrast, every pang of exile and every nostalgic twinge to keep it up. These latter haunting presences in fact, let me note, almost reduce at first to a mere blurred, sad, scarcely consolable vision this present revisiting, re-appropriating impulse. There are parts of one’s past, evidently, that bask consentingly and serenely enough in the light of other days – which is but the intensity of thought; and there are other parts that take it as with agitation and pain, a troubled consciousness that heaves as with the disorder of drinking it deeply in. So it is at any rate, fairly in too thick and rich a retrospect, that I see my old Venice of The Aspern papers, that I see the still earlier one of Jeffrey Aspern himself, and that I see even the comparatively recent Florence that was to drop into my ear the solicitation of these things. I would fain ‘lay it on’ thick for the very love of them – that at least I may profess; and, with the ground of this desire frankly admitted, something that somehow makes, in the whole story, for a romantic harmony. I have had occasion in the course of these remarks to define my sense of the romantic, and am glad to encounter again here an instance of that virtue as I understand it. I shall presently say why this small case so ranges itself, but must first refer more exactly to the thrill of appreciation it was immediately to excite in me. I saw it somehow at the very first blush as romantic – for the use, of course I mean, I should certainly have had to make of it – that Jane Clairmont, the half-sister of Mary Godwin, Shelley’s second wife and for a while the intimate friend of Byron and the mother of his daughter Allegra, should have been living on in Florence, where she had long lived, up to our own day, and that in fact, had I happened to hear of her but a little sooner, I might have seen her in the flesh. The question of whether I should have wished to do so was another matter – the question of whether I should n’t have preferred to keep her preciously unseen, to run no risk, in other words, by too rude a choice, of depreciating that romance-value which, as I say, it was instantly inevitable to attach (through association above all, with another signal circumstance) to her long survival.
I had luckily not had to deal with the difficult option; difficult in such a case by reason of that odd law which somehow always makes the minimum of valid suggestion serve the man of imagination better than the maximum. The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take. Nothing, fortunately, however, had, as the case stood, depended on my delicacy; I might have ‘looked up’ Miss Clairmont in previous years had I been earlier informed – the silence about her seemed full of the ‘irony of fate’; but I felt myself more concerned with the mere strong fact of her having testified for the reality and the closeness of our relation to the past than with any question of the particular sort of person I might have flattered myself I ‘found’. I had certainly at the very least been saved the undue simplicity of pretending to read meanings into things absolutely sealed and beyond test or proof – to tap a fount of waters that could n’t possibly not have run dry. The thrill of learning that she had ‘overlapped’, and by so much, and the wonder of my having doubtless at several earlier seasons passed again and again, all unknowing, the door of her house, where she sat above, within call and in her habit as she lived, these things gave me all I wanted; I seem to remember in fact that my more or less immediately recognising that I positively ought n’t – ‘for anything to come of it’ – to have wanted more. I saw, quickly, how something might come of it thus; whereas a fine instinct told me that the effect of a nearer view of the case (the case of the overlapping) would probably have had to be quite differently calculable. It was really with another item of knowledge, however, that I measured the mistake I should have made in waking up sooner to the question of opportunity. That item consisted of the action taken on the premises by a person who had waked up in time, and the legend of whose consequent adventure, as a few spoken words put it before me, at once kindled a flame. This gentleman, an American of long ago, an ardent Shelleyite, a singularly marked figure and himself in the highest degree a subject for a free sketch – I had known him a little, but there is not a reflected glint of him in The Aspern Papers – was named to me as having made interest with Miss Clairmont to be accepted as a lodger on the calculation that she would have Shelley documents for which, in the possibly not remote event of her death, he would thus enjoy priority of chance to treat with her representatives. He had at any rate, according to the legend, become, on earnest Shelley grounds, her yearning, though also her highly diplomatic, pensionnaire – but without gathering, as was to befall, the fruit of his design.
Legend here dropped to another key; it remained in a manner interesting, but became to my ear a trifle coarse, or at least rather vague and obscure. It mentioned a younger female relative of the ancient woman as a person who, for a queer climax, had had to be dealt with; it flickered so for a moment and then, as a light, to my great relief, quite went out. It had flickered indeed but at the best – yet had flickered enough to give me my ‘facts’, bare facts of intimation; which, scant handful though they were, were more distinct and more numerous than I mostly like facts: like them, that is, as we say of an etcher’s progressive subject, in an early ‘state’. Nine tenths of the artist’s interest in them is that of what he shall add to them and how he shall turn them. Mine, however, in the connexion I speak of, had fortunately got away from me, and quite of their own movement, in time not to crush me. So it was, at all events, that my imagination preserved power to react under the mere essential charm – that, I mean, of a final scene of the rich dim Shelley drama played out in the very theatre of our own ‘modernity’. This was the beauty that appealed to me; there had been, so to speak, a forward continuity, from the actual man, the divine poet, on; and the curious, the ingenious, the admirable thing would be to throw it backward again, to compress – squeezing it hard! – the connexion that had drawn itself out, and convert so the stretched relation into a value of nearness on our own part. In short I saw my chance as admirable, and one reason, when the direction is right, may serve as well as fifty; but if I ‘took over’, as I say, everything that was of the essence, I stayed my hand for the rest. The Italian side of the legend closely clung; if only because the so possible terms of my Juliana’s life in the Italy of other days could make conceivable for her the fortunate privacy, the long uninvaded and uninterviewed state on which I represent her situation as founded. Yes, a surviving unexploited unparagraphed Juliana was up to a quarter of a century since still supposeable – as much so as any such buried treasure, any such grave unprofaned, would defy probability now. And then the case had the air of the past just in the degree in which that air, I confess, most appeals to me – when the region over which it hangs is far enough away without being too far.
I delight in a palpable imaginable visitable past – in the nearer distances and the clearer mysteries, the marks and signs of a world we may reach over to as by making a long arm we grasp an object at the other end of our own table. The table is the one, the common expanse, and where we lean, so stretching, we find it firm and continuous. That, to my imagination, is the past fragrant of all, or of almost all, the poetry of the thing outlived and lost and gone, and yet in which the precious element of closeness, telling so of connexions but tasting so of differences, remains appreciable. With more moves back the element of the appreciable shrinks – just as the charm of looking over a garden-wall into another garden breaks down when successions of walls appear. The other gardens, those still beyond, may be there, but even by use of our longest ladder we are baffled and bewildered – the view is mainly a view of barriers. The one partition makes the place we have wondered about other, both richly and recogniseably so; but who shall pretend to impute an effect of composition to the twenty? We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar; the difficulty is, for intensity, to catch it at the moment when the scales of the balance hang with the right evenness. I say for intensity, for we may profit by them in other aspects enough if we are content to measure or to feel loosely. It would take me too far, however, to tell why the particular afternoon light that I thus call intense rests clearer to my sense on the Byronic age, as I conveniently name it, than on periods more protected by the ‘dignity’ of history. With the times beyond, intrinsically more ‘strange’, the tender grace, for the backward vision, has faded, the afternoon darkened; for any time nearer to us the special effect has n’t begun. So there, to put the matter crudely, is the appeal I fondly recognise, an appeal residing doubtless more in the ‘special effect’, in some deep associational force, than in a virtue more intrinsic. I am afraid I must add, since I allow myself so much to fantasticate, that the impulse had more than once taken me to project the Byronic age and the afternoon light across the great sea, to see in short whether association would carry so far and what the young century might pass for on that side of the modern world where it was not only itself so irremediably youngest, but was bound up with youth in everything else. There was a refinement of curiosity in this imputation of a golden strangeness to American social facts – though I cannot pretend, I fear, that there was any greater wisdom.
Since what it had come to then was, harmlessly enough, cultivating a sense of the past under that close protection, it was natural, it was fond and filial, to wonder if a few of the distilled drops might n’t be gathered from some vision of, say, ‘old’ New York. Would that human congeries, to aid obligingly in the production of a fable, be conceivable as ‘taking’ the afternoon light with the right happy slant? – or could a recogniseable reflexion of the Byronic age, in other words, be picked up on the banks of the Hudson? (Only just there, beyond the great sea, if anywhere: in no other connexion would the question so much as raise its head. I admit that Jeffrey Aspern is n’t even feebly localised, but I thought New York as I projected him.) It was ‘amusing’, in any case, always, to try experiments; and the experiment for the right transposition of my Juliana would be to fit her out with an immortalising poet as transposed as herself. Delicacy had demanded, I felt, that my appropriation of the Florentine legend should purge it, first of all, of references too obvious; so that, to begin with, I shifted the scene of the adventure. Juliana, as I saw her, was thinkable only in Byronic and more or less immediately post-Byronic Italy; but there were conditions in which she was ideally arrangeable, as happened, especially in respect to the later time and the long undetected survival; there being absolutely no refinement of the mouldy rococo, in human or whatever other form, that you may not disembark at the dislocated water-steps of almost any decayed monument of Venetian greatness in auspicious quest of. It was a question, in fine, of covering one’s tracks – though with no great elaboration I am bound to admit; and I felt I could n’t cover mine more than in postulating a comparative American Byron to match an American Miss Clairmont – she as absolute as she would. I scarce know whether best to say for this device to-day that it cost me little or that it cost me much; it was ‘cheap’ or expensive according to the degree of verisimilitude artfully obtained. If that degree appears nil the ‘art’, such as it was, is wasted, and my remembrance of the contention, on the part of a highly critical friend who at that time and later on often had my ear, that it had been simply foredoomed to be wasted, puts before me the passage in the private history of The Aspern papers that I now find, I confess, most interesting. I comfort myself for the needful brevity of a present glance at it by the sense that the general question involved, under criticism, can’t but come up for us again at higher pressure.
My friend’s argument bore then – at the time and afterward – on my vicious practice, as he maintained, of postulating for the purpose of my fable celebrities who not only had n’t existed in the conditions I imputed to them, but who for the most part (and in no case more markedly than in that of Jeffrey Aspern) could n’t possibly have done so. The stricture was to apply itself to a whole group of short fictions in which I had, with whatever ingenuity, assigned to several so-called eminent figures positions absolutely unthinkable in our actual encompassing air, an air definitely unfavourable to certain forms of eminence. It was vicious, my critic contended, to flourish forth on one’s page ‘great people’, public persons, who should n’t more or less square with our quite definite and calculable array of such notabilities; and by this rule I was heavily incriminated. The rule demanded that the ‘public person’ portrayed should be at least of the tradition, of the general complexion, of the face-value, exactly, of some past or present producible counterfoil. Mere private figures, under one’s hand, might correspond with nobody, it being of their essence to be but narrowly known; the represented state of being conspicuous, on the other hand, involved before anything else a recognition – and none of my eminent folk were recogniseable. It was all very well for instance to have put one’s self at such pains for Miriam Rooth in The tragic muse; but there was misapplied zeal, there a case of pitiful waste, crying aloud to be denounced. Miriam is offered not as a young person passing unnoticed by her age – like the Biddy Dormers and Julia Dallows, say, of the same book, but as a high rarity, a time-figure of the scope inevitably attended by other commemorations. Where on earth would be then Miriam’s inscribed ‘counterfoil’, and in what conditions of the contemporary English theatre, in what conditions of criticism, of appreciation, under what conceivable Anglo-Saxon star, might we take an artistic value of this order either for produced or for recognised? We are, as a ‘public’, chalk-marked by nothing, more unmistakeably, than by the truth that we know nothing of such values – any more than, as my friend was to impress on me, we are susceptible of consciousness of such others (these in the sphere of literary eminence) as my Neil Paraday in The death of the lion, as my Hugh Vereker in The figure in the carpet, as my Ralph Limbert, above all, in The next time; as sundry unprecedented and unmatched heroes and martyrs of the artistic ideal, in short, elsewhere exemplified in my pages. We shall come to these objects of animadversion in another hour, when I shall have no difficulty in producing the defence I found for them – since, obviously, I had n’t cast them into the world all naked and ashamed; and I deal for the moment but with the stigma in general as Jeffrey Aspern carries it.
The charge being that I foist upon our early American annals a distinguished presence for which they yield me absolutely no warrant – “Where, within them, gracious heaven, were we to look for so much as an approach to the social elements of habitat and climate of birds of that note and plumage?” – I find his link with reality then just in the tone of the picture wrought round him. What was that tone but exactly, but exquisitely, calculated, the harmless hocus-pocus under cover of which we might suppose him to have existed? This tone is the tone, artistically speaking, of ‘amusement’, the current floating that precious influence home quite as one of those high tides watched by the smugglers of old might, in case of their boat’s being boarded, be trusted to wash far up the strand the cask of foreign liquor expertly committed to it. If through our lean prime Western period no dim and charming ghost of an adventurous lyric genius might by a stretch of fancy flit, if the time was really too hard to ‘take’, in the light form proposed, the elegant reflexion, then so much the worse for the time – it was all one could say! The retort to that of course was that such a plea represented no ‘link’ with reality – which was what was under discussion – but only a link, and flimsy enough too, with the deepest depths of the artificial: the restrictive truth exactly contended for, which may embody my critic’s last word rather of course than my own. My own, so far as I shall pretend in that especial connexion to report it, was that one’s warrant, in such a case, hangs essentially on the question of whether or no the false element imputed would have borne that test of further development which so exposes the wrong and so consecrates the right. My last word was, heaven forgive me, that, occasion favouring, I could have perfectly ‘worked out’ Jeffrey Aspern. The boast remains indeed to be verified when we shall arrive at the other challenged cases.
That particular challenge at least The turn of the screw does n’t incur; and this perfectly independent and irresponsible little fiction rejoices, beyond any rival on a like ground, in a conscious provision of prompt retort to the sharpest question that may be addressed to it. For it has the small strength – if I should n’t say rather the unattackable ease – of a perfect homogeneity, of being, to the very last grain of its virtue all of a kind; the very kind, as happens, least apt to be baited by earnest criticism, the only sort of criticism of which account need be taken. To have handled again this so full-blown flower of high fancy is to be led back by it to easy and happy recognitions. Let the first of these be that of the starting-point itself – the sense, all charming again, of the circle, one winter afternoon, round the hall-fire of a grave old country-house where (for all the world as if to resolve itself promptly and obligingly into convertible, into ‘literary’ stuff) the talk turned, on I forget what homely pretext, to apparitions and night-fears, to the marked and sad drop in the general supply, and still more in the general quality, of such commodities. The good, the really effective and heart-shaking ghost-stories (roughly so to term them) appeared all to have been told, and neither new crop nor new type in any quarter awaited us. The new type indeed, the mere modern ‘psychical’ case, washed clean of all queerness as by exposure to a flowing laboratory tap, and equipped with credentials vouching for this – the new type clearly promised little, for the more it was respectably certified the less it seemed of a nature to rouse the dear old sacred terror. Thus it was, I remember, that amid our lament for a beautiful lost form, our distinguished host expressed the wish that he might but have recovered for us one of the scantest of fragments of this form at its best. He had never forgotten the impression made on him as a young man by the withheld glimpse, as it were, of a dreadful matter that had been reported years before, and with as few particulars, to a lady with whom he had youthfully talked. The story would have been thrilling could she but have found herself in better possession of it, dealing as it did with a couple of small children in an out-of-the-way place, to whom the spirits of certain ‘bad’ servants, dead in the employ of the house, were believed to have appeared with the design of ‘getting hold’ of them. This was all, but there had been more, which my friend’s old converser had lost the thread of
:
she could only assure him of the wonder of the allegations as
she had anciently heard them made. He himself could give us but this shadow
of a shadow – my own appreciation of which, I need scarcely say, was
exactly wrapped up in that thinness. On the surface there was n’t
much, but another grain, none the less, would have spoiled the precious
pinch addressed to its end as neatly as some modicum extracted from an old
silver snuff-box and held between finger and thumb. I was to remember the
haunted children and the prowling servile spirits as a ‘value’, of
the disquieting sort,
in all conscience sufficient; so that when, after an interval, I was asked
for something seasonable by the promoters of a
periodical
dealing in the time-honoured Christmas-tide toy, I bethought myself at once of
the vividest little note for sinister romance that I had ever jotted down.Such was the private source of The turn of the screw; and I wondered, I confess, why so fine a germ, gleaming there in the wayside dust of life, had never been deftly picked up. The thing had for me the immense merit of allowing the imagination absolute freedom of hand, of inviting it to act on a perfectly clear field, with no ‘outside’ control involved, no pattern of the usual or the true or the terrible ‘pleasant’ (save always of course the high pleasantry of one’s very form) to consort with. This makes in fact the charm of my second reference, that I find here a perfect example of an exercise of the imagination unassisted, unassociated – playing the game, making the score, in the phrase of our sporting day, off its own bat. To what degree the game was worth playing I need n’t attempt to say: the exercise I have noted strikes me now, I confess, as the interesting thing, the imaginative faculty acting with the whole of the case on its hands. The exhibition involved is in other words a fairy-tale pure and simple – save indeed as to its springing not from an artless and measureless, but from a conscious and cultivated credulity. Yet the fairy-tale belongs mainly to either of two classes, the short and sharp and single, charged more or less with the compactness of anecdote (as to which let the familiars of our childhood, Cinderella and Blue-Beard and Hop o’ my Thumb and Little Red Riding Hood and many of the gems of the Brothers Grimm directly testify), or else the long and loose, the copious, the various, the endless, where, dramatically speaking, roundness is quite sacrificed – sacrificed to fulness, sacrificed to exuberance, if one will: witness at hazard almost any one of the Arabian Nights. The charm of all these things for the distracted modern mind is in the clear field of experience, as I call it, over which we are thus led to roam; an annexed but independent world in which nothing is right save as we rightly imagine it. We have to do that, and we do it happily for the short spurt and in the smaller piece, achieving so perhaps beauty and lucidity; we flounder, we lose breath, on the other hand – that is we fail, not of continuity, but of an agreeable unity, of the ‘roundness’ in which beauty and lucidity largely reside – when we go in, as they say, for great lengths and breadths. And this, oddly enough, not because ‘keeping it up’ is n’t abundantly within the compass of the imagination appealed to in certain conditions, but because the finer interest depends just on how it is kept up.
Nothing is so easy as improvisation, the running on and on of invention; it is sadly compromised, however, from the moment its stream breaks bounds and gets into flood. Then the waters may spread indeed, gathering houses and herds and crops and cities into their arms and wrenching off, for our amusement, the whole face of the land – only violating by the same stroke our sense of the course and the channel, which is our sense of the uses of a stream and the virtue of a story. Improvisation, as in the Arabian Nights, may keep on terms with encountered objects by sweeping them in and floating them on its breast; but the great effect it so loses – that of keeping on terms with itself. This is ever, I intimate, the hard thing for the fairy-tale; but by just so much as it struck me as hard did it in The turn of the screw affect me as irresistibly prescribed. To improvise with extreme freedom and yet at the same time without the possibility of ravage, without the hint of a flood; to keep the stream, in a word, on something like ideal terms with itself
:
that was here my definite business. The thing was to aim at
absolute singleness, clearness and roundness, and yet to depend on an
imagination working freely, working (call it) with extravagance; by which
law it would n’t be thinkable except as free and
would n’t be amusing except as controlled. The merit of the tale,
as it stands, is accordingly, I judge, that it has struggled successfully
with its dangers. It is an excursion into chaos while remaining, like
Blue-Beard and Cinderella, but an anecdote – though an anecdote
amplified
and highly emphasised and returning upon
itself;
as, for that matter,
Cinderella and Blue-Beard return. I need scarcely add after this that it is
a piece of ingenuity pure and simple, of cold artistic calculation, an
amusette
to catch those not easily caught (the ‘fun’ of
the capture of the merely witless being ever but small), the jaded, the
disillusioned, the fastidious. Otherwise expressed, the study is of a
conceived ‘tone’, the tone of suspected and felt trouble, of an
inordinate and incalculable sort – the tone of tragic, yet of
exquisite, mystification. To knead the subject of my young friend’s,
the supposititious narrator’s,
mystification thick, and yet strain the expression of it so clear and
fine that beauty would result: no side of the matter so revives for me as
that endeavour. Indeed if the artistic value of such an experiment be
measured by the intellectual echoes it may again, long after, set in motion,
the case would make in favour of this little firm fantasy – which I
seem to see draw behind it to-day a train of associations. I ought doubtless
to blush for thus confessing them so numerous that I can but pick among them
for reference. I recall for instance a reproach made me by a reader capable
evidently, for the time, of some attention, but not quite capable of enough,
who complained that I had n’t sufficiently
‘characterised’ my young woman engaged in her labyrinth;
had n’t endowed her with signs and marks, features and humours,
had n’t in a word invited her to deal with her own mystery as well
as with that of Peter Quint, Miss Jessel and the hapless children. I
remember well, whatever the absurdity of its now coming back to me, my reply
to that criticism – under which one’s artistic, one’s ironic
heart shook for the instant almost to breaking. “You indulge in that
stricture at your ease, and I don’t mind confiding to you that –
strange as it may appear! – one has to choose ever so delicately among
one’s difficulties, attaching one’s self to the greatest, bearing
hard on those and intelligently neglecting the others. If one attempts to
tackle them all one is certain to deal completely with none; whereas the
effectual dealing with a few casts a blest golden haze under cover of which,
like wanton mocking goddesses
in clouds, the others find prudent to retire. It was
‘déjà
très-joli’,
in
The turn of the screw,
please believe, the general proposition of our young woman’s keeping
crystalline her record of so many intense anomalies and obscurities –
by which I don’t of course mean her explanation of them, a different
matter; and I saw no way, I feebly grant (fighting, at the best too,
periodically, for every grudged inch of my space) to exhibit her in
relations other than those; one of which, precisely, would have been her
relation to her own nature. We have surely as much of her own nature as we
can swallow in watching it reflect her anxieties and inductions. It
constitutes no little of a character indeed, in such conditions, for a young
person, as she says, ‘privately bred’, that she is able to make
her particular credible statement of such strange matters. She has
‘authority’, which is a good deal to have given her, and I
could n’t have arrived at so much had I clumsily tried for
more.”For which truth I claim part of the charm latent on occasion in the extracted reasons of beautiful things – putting for the beautiful always, in a work of art, the close, the curious, the deep. Let me place above all, however, under the protection of that presence the side by which this fiction appeals most to consideration: its choice of its way of meeting its gravest difficulty. There were difficulties not so grave: I had for instance simply to renounce all attempt to keep the kind and degree of impression I wished to produce on terms with the to-day so copious psychical record of cases of apparitions. Different signs and circumstances, in the reports, mark these cases; different things are done – though on the whole very little appears to be – by the persons appearing; the point is, however, that some things are never done at all: this negative quantity is large – certain reserves and proprieties and immobilities consistently impose themselves. Recorded and attested ‘ghosts’ are in other words as little expressive, as little dramatic, above all as little continuous and conscious and responsive, as is consistent with their taking the trouble – and an immense trouble they find it, we gather – to appear at all. Wonderful and interesting therefore at a given moment, they are inconceivable figures in an action – and The turn of the screw was an action, desperately, or it was nothing. I had to decide in fine between having my apparitions correct and having my story ‘good’ – that is producing my impression of the dreadful, my designed horror. Good ghosts, speaking by book, make poor subjects, and it was clear that from the first my hovering prowling blighting presences, my pair of abnormal agents, would have to depart altogether from the rules. They would be agents in fact; there would be laid on them the dire duty of causing the situation to reek with the air of Evil. Their desire and their ability to do so, visibly measuring meanwhile their effect, together with their observed and described success – this was exactly my central idea; so that, briefly, I cast my lot with pure romance, the appearances conforming to the true type being so little romantic.
This is to say, I recognise again, that Peter Quint and Miss Jessel are not ‘ghosts’ at all, as we now know the ghost, but goblins, elves, imps, demons as loosely constructed as those of the old trials for witchcraft; if not, more pleasingly, fairies of the legendary order, wooing their victims forth to see them dance under the moon. Not indeed that I suggest their reducibility to any form of the pleasing pure and simple; they please at the best but through having helped me to express my subject all directly and intensely. Here it was – in the use made of them – that I felt a high degree of art really required; and here it is that, on reading the tale over, I find my precautions justified. The essence of the matter was the villainy of motive in the evoked predatory creatures; so that the result would be ignoble – by which I mean would be trivial – were this element of evil but feebly or inanely suggested. Thus arose on behalf of my idea the lively interest of a possible suggestion and process of adumbration; the question of how best to convey that sense of the depths of the sinister without which my fable would so woefully limp. Portentous evil – how was I to save that, as an intention on the part of my demon-spirits, from the drop, the comparative vulgarity, inevitably attending, throughout the whole range of possible brief illustration, the offered example, the imputed vice, the cited act, the limited deplorable presentable instance? To bring the bad dead back to life for a second round of badness is to warrant them as indeed prodigious, and to become hence as shy of specifications as of a waiting anti-climax. One had seen, in fiction, some grand form of wrong-doing, or better still of wrong-being, imputed, seen it promised and announced as by the hot breath of the Pit – and then, all lamentably, shrink to the compass of some particular brutality, some particular immorality, some particular infamy portrayed: with the result, alas, of the demonstration’s falling sadly short. If my bad things, for The turn of the screw, I felt, should succumb to this danger, if they should n’t seem sufficiently bad, there would be nothing for me but to hang my artistic head lower than I had ever known occasion to do.
The view of that discomfort and the fear of that dishonour, it accordingly must have been, that struck the proper light for my right, though by no means easy, short cut. What, in the last analysis, had I to give the sense of? Of their being, the haunting pair, capable, as the phrase is, of everything – that is of exerting, in respect to the children, the very worst action small victims so conditioned might be conceived as subject to. What would be then, on reflexion, this utmost conceivability? – a question to which the answer all admirably came. There is for such a case no eligible absolute of the wrong; it remains relative to fifty other elements, a matter of appreciation, speculation, imagination – these things moreover quite exactly in the light of the spectator’s, the critic’s, the reader’s experience. Only make the reader’s general vision of evil intense enough, I said to myself – and that already is a charming job – and his own experience, his own imagination, his own sympathy (with the children) and horror (of their false friends) will supply him quite sufficiently with all the particulars. Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. This ingenuity I took pains – as indeed great pains were required – to apply; and with a success apparently beyond my liveliest hope. Droll enough at the same time, I must add, some of the evidence – even when most convincing – of this success. How can I feel my calculation to have failed, my wrought suggestion not to have worked, that is, on my being assailed, as has befallen me, with the charge of a monstrous emphasis, the charge of all indecently expatiating? There is not only from beginning to end of the matter not an inch of expatiation, but my values are positively all blanks save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness – on which punctual effects of strong causes no writer can ever fail to plume himself – proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures. Of high interest to the author meanwhile – and by the same stroke a theme for the moralist – the artless resentful reaction of the entertained person who has abounded in the sense of the situation. He visits his abundance, morally, on the artist – who has but clung to an ideal of faultlessness. Such indeed, for this latter, are some of the observations by which the prolonged strain of that clinging may be enlivened!
I arrive with The liar (1888) and The two faces (1900) at the first members of the considerable group of shorter, of shortest tales here republished; though I should perhaps place quite in the forefront The chaperon and The pupil, at which we have already glanced. I am conscious of much to say of these numerous small productions as a family – a family indeed quite organised as such, with its proper representatives, its ‘heads’, its subdivisions and its branches, its poor relations perhaps not least: its unmistakeable train of poor relations in fact, the very poorer, the poorest of whom I am, in family parlance, for this formal appearance in society, ‘cutting’ without a scruple. These repudiated members, some of them, for that matter, well-nourished and substantial presences enough, with their compromising rustiness plausibly, almost touchingly dissimulated, I fondly figure as standing wistful but excluded, after the fashion of the outer fringe of the connected whom there are not carriages enough to convey from the church – whether (for we have our choice of similes) to the wedding-feast or to the interment! Great for me from far back had been the interest of the whole ‘question of the short story’, roundabout which our age has, for lamentable reasons, heard so vain a babble; but I foresee occasions yet to come when it will abundantly waylay me. Then it will insist on presenting itself but in too many lights. Little else perhaps meanwhile is more relevant as to The liar than the small fact of its having, when its hour came, quite especially conformed to that custom of shooting straight from the planted seed, of responding at once to the touched spring, of which my fond appeal here to ‘origins’ and evolutions so depicts the sway. When it shall come to fitting, historically, anything like all my small children of fancy with their pair of progenitors, and all my reproductive unions with their inevitable fruit, I shall seem to offer my backward consciousness in the image of a shell charged and recharged by the Fates with some patent and infallible explosive. Never would there seem to have been a pretence to such economy of ammunition!
However this may be, I come back, for The liar, as for so many of its fellows, to holding my personal experience, poor thing though it may have been, immediately accountable. For by what else in the world but by fatal design had I been placed at dinner one autumn evening of old London days face to face with a gentleman, met for the first time, though favourably known to me by name and fame, in whom I recognised the most unbridled colloquial romancer the ‘joy of life’ had ever found occasion to envy? Under what other conceivable coercion had I been invited to reckon, through the evening, with the type, with the character, with the countenance, of this magnificent master’s wife, who, veracious, serene and charming, yet not once meeting straight the eyes of one of us, did her duty by each, and by her husband most of all, without so much as, in the vulgar phrase, turning a hair? It was long ago, but I have never, to this hour, forgotten the evening itself – embalmed for me now in an old-time sweetness beyond any aspect of my reproduction. I made but a fifth person, the other couple our host and hostess; between whom and one of the company, while we listened to the woven wonders of a summer holiday, the exploits of a salamander, among Mediterranean isles, were exchanged, dimly and discreetly, ever so guardedly, but all expressively, imperceptible lingering looks. It was exquisite, it could but become, inevitably, some ‘short story’ or other, which it clearly pre-fitted as the hand the glove. I must reserve The two faces till I come to speak of the thrilling question of the poor painter’s tormented acceptance, in advance, of the scanted canvas; of the writer’s rueful hopeful assent to the conditions known to him as ‘too little room to turn round’. Of the liveliest interest then – or so at least I could luckily always project the case – to see how he may nevertheless, in the event, effectively manœuvre. The value of The two faces – by reason of which I have not hesitated to gather it in – is thus peculiarly an economic one. It may conceal rather than exhale its intense little principle of calculation; but the neat evolution, as I call it, the example of the turn of the whole coach and pair in the contracted court, without the ‘spill’ of a single passenger or the derangement of a single parcel, is only in three or four cases (where the coach is fuller still) more appreciable.