The simplest account of the origin of _The Princess Casamassima_ is,
I think, that this fiction proceeded quite directly, during the first
year of a long residence in London, from the habit and the interest of
walking the streets. I walked a great deal—for exercise, for amusement,
for acquisition, and above all I always walked home at the evening’s
end, when the evening had been spent elsewhere, as happened more often
than not; and as to do this was to receive many impressions, so the
impressions worked and sought an issue, so the book after a time was
born. It is a fact that, as I look back, the attentive exploration
of London, the assault directly made by the great city upon an
imagination quick to react, fully explains a large part of it. There
is a minor element that refers itself to another source, of which I
shall presently speak; but the prime idea was unmistakably the ripe
round fruit of perambulation. One walked of course with one’s eyes
greatly open, and I hasten to declare that such a practice, carried on
for a long time and over a considerable space, positively provokes,
all round, a mystic solicitation, the urgent appeal, on the part of
everything, to be interpreted and, so far as may be, reproduced.
“Subjects” and situations, character and history, the tragedy and
comedy of life, are things of which the common air, in such conditions,
seems pungently to taste; and to a mind curious, before the human
scene, of meanings and revelations the great grey Babylon easily
becomes, on its face, a garden bristling with an immense illustrative
flora. Possible stories, presentable figures, rise from the thick
jungle as the observer moves, fluttering up like startled game, and
before he knows it indeed he has fairly to guard himself against the
brush of importunate wings. He goes on as with his head in a cloud of
humming presences—especially during the younger, the initiatory time,
the fresh, the sharply-apprehensive months or years, more or less
numerous. We use our material up, we use up even the thick tribute
of the London streets—if perception and attention but sufficiently
light our steps. But I think of them as lasting, for myself, quite
sufficiently long; I think of them as even still—dreadfully changed
for the worse in respect to any romantic idea as I find them—breaking
out on occasion into eloquence, throwing out deep notes from their vast
vague murmur.
There was a moment at any rate when they offered me no image more vivid
than that of some individual sensitive nature or fine mind, some small
obscure intelligent creature whose education should have been almost
wholly derived from them, capable of profiting by all the civilisation,
all the accumulations to which they testify, yet condemned to see
these things only from outside—in mere quickened consideration, mere
wistfulness and envy and despair. It seemed to me I had only to imagine
such a spirit intent enough and troubled enough, and to place it in
presence of the comings and goings, the great gregarious company, of
the more fortunate than himself—all on the scale on which London could
show them—to get possession of an interesting theme. I arrived so at
the history of little Hyacinth Robinson—he sprang up for me out of the
London pavement. To find his possible adventure interesting I had only
to conceive his watching the same public show, the same innumerable
appearances, I had watched myself, and of his watching very much as
I had watched; save indeed for one little difference. This difference
would be that so far as all the swarming facts should speak of freedom
and ease, knowledge and power, money, opportunity and satiety, he
should be able to revolve round them but at the most respectful of
distances and with every door of approach shut in his face. For one’s
self, all conveniently, there had been doors that opened—opened into
light and warmth and cheer, into good and charming relations; and if
the place as a whole lay heavy on one’s consciousness there was yet
always for relief this implication of one’s own lucky share of the
freedom and ease, lucky acquaintance with the number of lurking springs
at light pressure of which particular vistas would begin to recede,
great lighted, furnished, peopled galleries, sending forth gusts of
agreeable sound.
That main happy sense of the picture was always there and that retreat
from the general grimness never forbidden; whereby one’s own relation
to the mere formidable mass and weight of things was eased off and
adjusted. One learned from an early period what it might be to know
London in such a way as that—an immense and interesting discipline, an
education on terms mostly convenient and delightful. But what would
be the effect of the other way, of having so many precious things
perpetually in one’s eyes, yet of missing them all for any closer
knowledge, and of the confinement of closer knowledge entirely to
matters with which a connexion, however intimate, couldn’t possibly
pass for a privilege? Truly, of course, there are London mysteries
(dense categories of dark arcana) for every spectator, and it’s in a
degree an exclusion and a state of weakness to be without experience
of the meaner conditions, the lower manners and types, the general
sordid struggle, the weight of the burden of labour, the ignorance, the
misery and the vice. With such matters as those my tormented young man
would have had contact—they would have formed, fundamentally, from the
first, his natural and immediate London. But the reward of a romantic
curiosity would be the question of what the total assault, that of
the world of his work-a-day life and the world of his divination and
his envy together, would have made of him, and what in especial he
would have made of them. As tormented, I say, I thought of him, and
that would be the point—if one could only see him feel enough to be
interesting without his feeling so much as not to be natural.
This in fact I have ever found rather terribly the point—that the
figures in any picture, the agents in any drama, are interesting
only in proportion as they feel their respective situations; since
the consciousness, on their part, of the complication exhibited
forms for us their link of connexion with it. But there are degrees
of feeling—the muffled, the faint, the just sufficient, the barely
intelligent, as we may say; and the acute, the intense, the complete,
in a word—the power to be finely aware and richly responsible. It is
those moved in this latter fashion who “get most” out of all that
happens to them and who in so doing enable us, as readers of their
record, as participators by a fond attention, also to get most. Their
being finely aware—as Hamlet and Lear, say, are finely aware—_makes_
absolutely the intensity of their adventure, gives the maximum of sense
to what befalls them. We care, our curiosity and our sympathy care,
comparatively little for what happens to the stupid, the coarse and the
blind; care for it, and for the effects of it, at the most as helping
to precipitate what happens to the more deeply wondering, to the really
sentient. Hamlet and Lear are surrounded, amid their complications, by
the stupid and the blind, who minister in all sorts of ways to their
recorded fate. Persons of markedly limited sense would, on such a
principle as that, play a part in the career of my tormented youth; but
he wouldn’t be of markedly limited sense himself—he would note as many
things and vibrate to as many occasions as I might venture to make him.
There wouldn’t, moreover, simply be the question of his suffering—of
which we might soon get enough; there would be the question of what,
all beset and all perceptive, he should thus adventurously do, thus
dream and hazard and attempt. The interest of the attitude and the act
would be the actor’s imagination and vision of them, together with the
nature and degree of their felt return upon him. So the intelligent
creature would be required and so some picture of his intelligence
involved. The picture of an intelligence appears for the most part,
it is true, a dead weight for the reader of the English novel to
carry, this reader having so often the wondrous property of caring
for the displayed tangle of human relations without caring for its
intelligibility. The teller of a story is primarily, none the less,
the listener to it, the reader of it, too; and, having needed thus to
make it out, distinctly, on the crabbed page of life, to disengage it
from the rude human character and the more or less gothic text in which
it has been packed away, the very essence of his affair has been the
_imputing_ of intelligence. The basis of his attention has been that
such and such an imbroglio has got started—on the page of life—because
of something that some one has felt and more or less understood.
I recognise at the same time, and in planning _The Princess
Casamassima_ felt it highly important to recognise, the danger of
filling too full any supposed and above all any obviously limited
vessel of consciousness. If persons either tragically or comically
embroiled with life allow us the comic or tragic value of their
embroilment in proportion as their struggle is a measured and directed
one, it is strangely true, none the less, that beyond a certain point
they are spoiled for us by this carrying of a due light. They may carry
too much of it for our credence, for our compassion, for our derision.
They may be shown as knowing too much and feeling too much—not
certainly for their remaining remarkable, but for their remaining
“natural” and typical, for their having the needful communities with
our own precious liability to fall into traps and be bewildered. It
seems probable that if we were never bewildered there would never be
a story to tell about us; we should partake of the superior nature
of the all-knowing immortals whose annals are dreadfully dull so
long as flurried humans are not, for the positive relief of bored
Olympians, mixed up with them. Therefore it is that the wary reader
for the most part warns the novelist against making his characters
too _interpretative_ of the muddle of fate, or in other words too
divinely, too priggishly clever. “Give us plenty of bewilderment,”
this monitor seems to say, “so long as there is plenty of slashing
out in the bewilderment too. But don’t, we beseech you, give us too
much intelligence; for intelligence—well, _endangers_; endangers not
perhaps the slasher himself, but the very slashing, the subject-matter
of any self-respecting story. It opens up too many considerations,
possibilities, issues; it _may_ lead the slasher into dreary realms
where slashing somehow fails and falls to the ground.”
That is well reasoned on the part of the reader, who can in spite of
it never have an idea—or his earnest discriminations would come to him
less easily—of the extreme difficulty, for the painter of the human
mixture, of reproducing that mixture aright. “Give us in the persons
represented, the subjects of the bewilderment (that bewilderment
without which there would be no question of an issue or of the fact
of suspense, prime implications in any story), as much experience as
possible, but keep down the terms in which you report that experience,
because we only understand the very simplest”: such in effect are
the words in which the novelist constantly hears himself addressed,
such the plea made him by the would-be victims of his spell on behalf
of that sovereign principle the economy of interest, a principle as
to which their instinct is justly strong. He listens anxiously to
the charge—nothing can exceed his own solicitude for an economy of
interest; but feels himself all in presence of an abyss of ambiguities,
the mutual accommodations in which the reader wholly leaves to him.
Experience, as I see it, is our apprehension and our measure of what
happens to us as social creatures—any intelligent report of which
has to be based on that apprehension. The picture of the exposed and
entangled state is what is required, and there are certainly always
plenty of grounds for keeping down the complexities of a picture.
A picture it still has to be, however, and by that condition has to
deal effectually with its subject, so that the simple device of more
and more keeping down may well not see us quite to our end or even
quite to our middle. One suggested way of keeping down, for instance,
is not to attribute feeling, or feelings, to persons who wouldn’t in
all probability have had any to speak of. The less space, within the
frame of the picture, their feelings take up the more space is left for
their doings—a fact that may at first seem to make for a refinement of
economy.
All of which is charming—yet would be infinitely more so if here at
once ambiguity didn’t yawn; the unreality of the sharp distinction,
where the interest of observation is at stake, between doing and
feeling. In the immediate field of life, for action, for application,
for getting through a job, nothing may so much matter perhaps as the
descent of a suspended weight on this, that or the other spot, with
all its subjective concomitants quite secondary and irrelevant. But
the affair of the painter is not the immediate, it is the reflected
field of life, the realm not of application, but of _appreciation_—a
truth that makes our measure of effect altogether different. My report
of people’s experience—my report as a “story-teller”—is essentially my
appreciation of it, and there is no “interest” for me in what my hero,
my heroine or any one else does save through that admirable process.
As soon as I begin to appreciate simplification is imperilled: the
sharply distinguished parts of any adventure, any case of endurance
and performance, melt together as an appeal. I then see their “doing,”
that of the persons just mentioned, as, immensely, their feeling, their
feeling as their doing; since I can have none of the conveyed sense
and taste of their situation without becoming intimate with them. I
can’t be intimate without that sense and taste, and I can’t appreciate
save by intimacy, any more than I can report save by a projected
light. Intimacy with a man’s specific behaviour, with his given case,
is desperately certain to make us see it as a whole—in which event
arbitrary limitations of our vision lose whatever beauty they may on
occasion have pretended to. What a man thinks and what he feels are the
history and the character of what he does; on all of which things the
logic of intensity rests. Without intensity where is vividness, and
without vividness where is presentability? If I have called the most
general state of one’s most exposed and assaulted figures the state
of bewilderment—the condition for instance on which Thackeray so much
insists in the interest of _his_ exhibited careers, the condition of
a humble heart, a bowed head, a patient wonder, a suspended judgement,
before the “awful will” and the mysterious decrees of Providence—so it
is rather witless to talk of merely getting rid of that displayed mode
of reaction, one of the oft-encountered, one of the highly recommended,
categories of feeling.
The whole thing comes to depend thus on the _quality_ of bewilderment
characteristic of one’s creature, the quality involved in the
given case or supplied by one’s data. There are doubtless many such
qualities, ranging from vague and crepuscular to sharpest and most
critical; and we have but to imagine one of these latter to see how
easily—from the moment it gets its head at all—it may insist on playing
a part. There we have then at once a case of feeling, of ever so
many possible feelings, stretched across the scene like an attached
thread on which the pearls of interest are strung. There are threads
shorter and less tense, and I am far from implying that the minor,
the coarser and less fruitful forms and degrees of moral reaction, as
we may conveniently call it, may not yield lively results. They have
their subordinate, comparative, illustrative human value—that appeal
of the witless which is often so penetrating. Verily even, I think, no
“story” is possible without its fools—as most of the fine painters of
life, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Balzac, Fielding, Scott, Thackeray,
Dickens, George Meredith, George Eliot, Jane Austen, have abundantly
felt. At the same time I confess I never see the _leading_ interest of
any human hazard but in a consciousness (on the part of the moved and
moving creature) subject to fine intensification and wide enlargement.
It is as mirrored in that consciousness that the gross fools, the
headlong fools, the fatal fools play their part for us—they have much
less to show us in themselves. The troubled life mostly at the centre
of our subject—whatever our subject, for the artistic hour, happens
to be—embraces them and deals with them for its amusement and its
anguish: they are apt largely indeed, on a near view, to be all the
cause of its trouble. This means, exactly, that the person capable of
feeling in the given case more than another of what is to be felt for
it, and so serving in the highest degree to _record_ it dramatically
and objectively, is the only sort of person on whom we can count not
to betray, to cheapen or, as we say, give away, the value and beauty of
the thing. By so much as the affair matters _for_ some such individual,
by so much do we get the best there is of it, and by so much as it
falls within the scope of a denser and duller, a more vulgar and more
shallow capacity, do we get a picture dim and meagre.
The great chroniclers have clearly always been aware of this; they have
at least always either placed a mind of some sort—in the sense of a
reflecting and colouring medium—in possession of the general adventure
(when the latter has not been purely epic, as with Scott, say, as with
old Dumas and with Zola); or else paid signally, as to the interest
created, for their failure to do so. We may note, moreover, in passing
that this failure is in almost no case intentional or part of a plan,
but has sprung from their limited curiosity, their short conception
of the particular sensibility projected. Edgar of Ravenswood for
instance, visited by the tragic tempest of _The Bride of Lammermoor_,
has a black cloak and hat and feathers more than he has a mind; just
as Hamlet, while equally sabled and draped and plumed, while at least
equally romantic, has yet a mind still more than he has a costume. The
situation represented is that Ravenswood loves Lucy Ashton through
dire difficulty and danger, and that she in the same way loves him;
but the relation so created between them is by this neglect of the
“feeling” question never shown us as primarily taking place. It is
shown only in its secondary, its confused and disfigured aspects—where,
however, luckily, it is presented with great romantic good faith.
The thing has nevertheless paid for its deviation, as I say, by a
sacrifice of intensity; the centre of the subject is empty and the
development pushed off, all round, toward the frame—which is, so to
speak, beautifully rich and curious. But I mention that relation to
each other of the appearances in a particular work only as a striking
negative case; there are in the connexion I have glanced at plenty
of striking positive ones. It is very true that Fielding’s hero in
_Tom Jones_ is but as “finely,” that is but as intimately, bewildered
as a young man of great health and spirits may be when he hasn’t a
grain of imagination: the point to be made is, at all events, that his
sense of bewilderment obtains altogether on the comic, never on the
tragic plane. He has so much “life” that it amounts, for the effect of
comedy and application of satire, almost to his having a mind, that is
to his having reactions and a full consciousness; besides which his
author—_he_ handsomely possessed of a mind—has such an amplitude of
reflexion for him and round him that we see him through the mellow air
of Fielding’s fine old moralism, fine old humour and fine old style,
which somehow really enlarge, make every one and every thing important.
All of which furthers my remarking how much I have been interested, on
reading _The Princess Casamassima_ over, to recognise my sense, sharp
from far back, that clearness and concreteness constantly depend, for
any pictorial whole, on some _concentrated_ individual notation of
them. That notation goes forward here in the mind of little Hyacinth,
immensely quickened by the fact of its so mattering to his very life
what he does make of things: which passion of intelligence is, as I
have already hinted, precisely his highest value for our curiosity and
our sympathy. Yet if his highest it is not at all his only one, since
the truth for “a young man in a book” by no means entirely resides
in his being either exquisitely sensitive or shiningly clever. It
resides in some such measure of these things as may consort with the
fine measure of other things too—with that of the other faces of his
situation and character. If he’s too sensitive and too clever for
_them_, if he knows more than is likely or natural—for _him_—it’s as
if he weren’t at all, as if he were false and impossible. Extreme and
attaching always the difficulty of fixing at a hundred points the place
where one’s impelled _bonhomme_ may feel enough and “know” enough—or be
in the way of learning enough—for his maximum dramatic value without
feeling and knowing too much for his minimum verisimilitude, his
proper fusion with the fable. This is the charming, the tormenting, the
eternal little matter _to be made right_, in all the weaving of silver
threads and tapping on golden nails; and I should take perhaps too
fantastic a comfort—I mean were not the comforts of the artist just of
the raw essence of fantasy—in any glimpse of such achieved rightnesses,
whether in my own work or that of others. In no work whatever,
doubtless, are they the felicities the most frequent; but they have so
inherent a price that even the traceable attempt at them, wherever met,
sheds, I think, a fine influence about.
I have, for example, a weakness of sympathy with that constant effort
of George Eliot’s which plays through Adam Bede and Felix Holt and Tito
Melema, through Daniel Deronda and through Lydgate in _Middlemarch_,
through Maggie Tulliver, through Romola, through Dorothea Brooke
and Gwendolen Harleth; the effort to show their adventures and
their history—the author’s subject-matter all—as determined by their
feelings and the nature of their minds. Their emotions, their stirred
intelligence, their moral consciousness, become thus, by sufficiently
charmed perusal, our own very adventure. The creator of Deronda and of
Romola is charged, I know, with having on occasion—as in dealing with
those very celebrities themselves—left the figure, the concrete man
and woman, too abstract by reason of the quantity of soul employed;
but such mischances, where imagination and humour still keep them
company, often have an interest that is wanting to agitations of the
mere surface or to those that may be only taken for granted. I should
even like to give myself the pleasure of retracing from one of my own
productions to another the play of a like instinctive disposition,
of catching in the fact, at one point after another, from _Roderick
Hudson_ to _The Golden Bowl_, that provision for interest which
consists in placing advantageously, placing right in the middle of the
light, the most polished of possible mirrors of the subject. Rowland
Mallet, in _Roderick Hudson_, is exactly such a mirror, not a bit
autobiographic or formally “first person” though he be, and I might
exemplify the case through a long list, through the nature of such
a “mind” even as the all-objective Newman in _The American_, through
the thickly-peopled imagination of Isabel Archer in _The Portrait of a
Lady_ (her imagination positively the deepest depth of her imbroglio)
down to such unmistakable examples as that of Merton Densher in _The
Wings of the Dove_, that of Lambert Strether in _The Ambassadors_
(_he_ a mirror verily of miraculous silver and quite pre-eminent, I
think, for the connexion), and that of the Prince in the first half
and that of the Princess in the second half of _The Golden Bowl_. I
should note the extent to which these persons are, so far as their
other passions permit, intense _perceivers_, all, of their respective
predicaments, and I should go on from them to fifty other examples;
even to the divided Vanderbank of _The Awkward Age_, the extreme pinch
of whose romance is the vivacity in him, to his positive sorrow and
loss, of the state of being aware; even to scanted Fleda Vetch in _The
Spoils of Poynton_, through whose own delicate vision of everything
so little of the human value of her situation is wasted for us; even
to the small recording governess confronted with the horrors of _The
Turn of the Screw_, and to the innocent child patching together all
ineffectually those of _What Maisie Knew_; even in short, since I may
name so few cases, to the disaffected guardian of an overgrown legend
in _The Birthplace_, to the luckless fine artist of _The Next Time_,
trying to despoil himself, for a “hit” and bread and butter, of his
fatal fineness, to blunt the tips of his intellectual fingers, and to
the hapless butler Brooksmith, ruined by good talk, disqualified for
common domestic service by the beautiful growth of his habit of quiet
attention, his faculty of appreciation. But though this demonstration
of a rooted vice—since a vice it would appear mainly accounted—might
yield amusement, the examples referred to must await their turn.
I had had for a long time well before me, at any rate, my small obscure
but ardent observer of the “London world,” saw him roam and wonder
and yearn, saw all the unanswered questions and baffled passions
that might ferment in him—once he should be made both sufficiently
thoughtful and sufficiently “disinherited”; but this image, however
interesting, was of course not by itself a progression, an action,
didn’t by itself make a drama. I got my action, however—failing which
one has nothing—under the prompt sense that the state of feeling I was
concerned with might develop and beget another state, might return at
a given moment, and with the greatest vivacity, on itself. To see this
was really to feel one’s subject swim into one’s ken, especially after
a certain other ingenious connexion had been made for it. I find myself
again recalling, and with the possible “fun” of it reviving too, how
I recognised, as revealed and prescribed, the particular complexion,
profession and other conditions of my little presumptuous adventurer,
with his combination of intrinsic fineness and fortuitous adversity,
his small cluster of “dingy” London associations and the swelling
spirit in him which was to be the field of his strange experience.
Accessible through his imagination, as I have hinted, to a thousand
provocations and intimations, he would become most acquainted with
destiny in the form of a lively inward revolution. His being jealous of
all the ease of life of which he tastes so little, and, bitten, under
this exasperation, with an aggressive, vindictive, destructive social
faith, his turning to “treasons, stratagems and spoils” might be as
vivid a picture as one chose, but would move to pity and terror only by
the aid of some deeper complication, some imposed and formidable issue.
The complication most interesting then would be that he should fall
in love with the beauty of the world, actual order and all, at the
moment of his most feeling and most hating the famous “iniquity of
its social arrangements”; so that his position as an irreconcilable
pledged enemy to it, thus rendered false by something more personal
than his opinions and his vows, becomes the sharpest of his torments.
To make it a torment that really matters, however, he must have got
practically involved, specifically committed to the stand he has,
under the pressure of more knowledge, found impossible; out of which
has come for him the deep dilemma of the disillusioned and repentant
conspirator. He has thrown himself into the more than “shady”
underworld of militant socialism, he has undertaken to play a part—a
part that with the drop of his exasperation and the growth, simply
expressed, of his taste, is out of all tune with his passion, at any
cost, for life itself, the life, whatever it be, that surrounds him.
Dabbling deeply in revolutionary politics of a hole-and-corner sort,
he would be “in” up to his neck, and with that precarious part of him
particularly involved, so that his tergiversation is the climax of
his adventure. What was essential with this was that he should have a
social—not less than a socialist—connexion, find a door somehow open
to him into the appeased and civilised state, into that warmer glow of
things he is precisely to help to undermine. To look for this necessary
connexion was for me to meet it suddenly in the form of that extremely
_disponible_ figure of Christina Light whom I had ten years before
found left on my hands at the conclusion of _Roderick Hudson_. She had
for so long, in the vague limbo of those ghosts we have conjured but
not exorcised, been looking for a situation, awaiting a niche and a
function.
I shall not pretend to trace the steps and stages by which the
imputability of a future to that young woman—which was like the act of
clothing her chilled and patient nakedness—had for its prime effect
to plant her in my little bookbinder’s path. Nothing would doubtless
beckon us on further, with a large leisure, than such a chance to study
the obscure law under which certain of a novelist’s characters, more or
less honourably buried, revive for him by a force or a whim of their
own and “walk” round his house of art like haunting ghosts, feeling
for the old doors they knew, fumbling at stiff latches and pressing
their pale faces, in the outer dark, to lighted windows. I mistrust
them, I confess, in general; my sense of a really expressed character
is that it shall have originally so tasted of the ordeal of service
as to feel no disposition to yield again to the strain. Why should
the Princess of the climax of _Roderick Hudson_ still have made her
desire felt, unless in fact to testify that she had not been—for what
she was—completely recorded? To continue in evidence, that had struck
me from far back as her natural passion; in evidence at any price, not
consenting to be laid away with folded hands in the pasteboard tomb,
the doll’s box, to which we usually relegate the spent puppet after the
fashion of a recumbent worthy on the slab of a sepulchral monument. I
was to see this, after all, in the event, as the fruit of a restless
vanity: Christina had felt herself, known herself, striking, in the
earlier connexion, and couldn’t resign herself not to strike again.
Her pressure then was not to be resisted—sharply as the question might
come up of why she should pretend to strike just _there_. I shall not
attempt to answer it with reasons (one can never tell everything); it
was enough that I could recognise her claim to have travelled far—far
from where I had last left her: that, one felt, was in character—that
was what she naturally _would_ have done. Her prime note had been
an aversion to the _banal_, and nothing could be of an effect less
_banal_, I judged, than her intervention in the life of a dingy little
London bookbinder whose sensibility, whose flow of opinions on “public
questions” in especial, should have been poisoned at the source.
She would be world-weary—that was another of her notes; and the
extravagance of her attitude in these new relations would have its root
and its apparent logic in her need to feel freshly about something or
other—it might scarce matter what. She can, or she believes she can,
feel freshly about the “people” and their wrongs and their sorrows
and their perpetual smothered ferment; for these things are furthest
removed from those others among which she has hitherto tried to make
her life. That was to a certainty where I was to have looked for
her—quite _off_ and away (once granted the wisdom of listening to her
anew at all): therefore Hyacinth’s encounter with her could pass for
natural, and it was fortunately to be noted that she was to serve for
his experience in quite another and a more “leading” sense than any
in which he was to serve for hers. I confess I was not averse—such are
the possible weaknesses of the artist in face of high difficulties—to
feeling that if his appearance of consistency were obtained I might
at least try to remain comparatively at my ease about hers. I may add,
moreover, that the resuscitation of Christina (and, on the minor scale,
of the Prince and of Madame Grandoni) put in a strong light for me the
whole question, for the romancer, of “going on with a character”: as
Balzac first of all systematically went on, as Thackeray, as Trollope,
as Zola all more or less ingeniously went on. I was to find no small
savour in the reflexions so precipitated; though I may treat myself
here only to this remark about them—that the revivalist impulse on the
fond writer’s part strikes me as one thing, a charmingly conceivable
thing, but the effect of a free indulgence in it (effect, that is,
on the nerves of the reader) as, for twenty rather ineffable reasons,
quite another.
I remember at any rate feeling myself all in possession of little
Hyacinth’s consistency, as I have called it, down at Dover during
certain weeks that were none too remotely precedent to the autumn
of 1885 and the appearance, in the _Atlantic Monthly_ again, of
the first chapters of the story. There were certain sunny, breezy,
balconied rooms at the quieter end of the Esplanade of that cheerful
castle-crested little town—now infinitely perturbed by gigantic
“harbour works,” but then only faded and over-soldiered and all
pleasantly and humbly submissive to the law that snubs in due course
the presumption of flourishing resorts—to which I had already more
than once had recourse in hours of quickened industry and which, though
much else has been swept away, still archaically exist. To have lately
noted this again from the old benched and asphalted walk by the sea,
the twinkling Channel beyond which on occasion the opposite coast of
France used to gleam as an incident of the charming tendency of the
whole prospect (immediate picture and fond design alike) amusingly
to _shine_, was somehow to taste afresh, and with a certain surprise,
the odd quality of that original confidence that the parts of my plan
_would_ somehow hang together. I may wonder at my confidence now—given
the extreme, the very particular truth and “authority” required at
so many points; but to wonder is to live back gratefully into the
finer reasons of things, with all the detail of harsh application and
friction (that there must have been) quite happily blurred and dim. The
finest of reasons—I mean for the sublime confidence I speak of—was that
I felt in full _personal_ possession of my matter; this really seemed
the fruit of direct experience. My scheme called for the suggested
nearness (to all our apparently ordered life) of some sinister anarchic
underworld, heaving in its pain, its power and its hate; a presentation
not of sharp particulars, but of loose appearances, vague motions and
sounds and symptoms, just perceptible presences and general looming
possibilities. To have adopted the scheme was to have had to meet the
question of one’s “notes,” over the whole ground, the question of what,
in such directions, one had “gone into” and how far one had gone; and
to have answered that question—to one’s own satisfaction at least—was
truly to see one’s way.
My notes then, on the much-mixed world of my hero’s both overt and
covert consciousness, were exactly my gathered impressions and stirred
perceptions, the deposit in my working imagination of all my visual
and all my constructive sense of London. The very plan of my book
had in fact directly confronted me with the rich principle of the
Note, and was to do much to clear up, once for all, my practical
view of it. If one was to undertake to tell tales and to report with
truth on the human scene, it could be but because “notes” had been
from the cradle the ineluctable consequence of one’s greatest inward
energy: to take them was as natural as to look, to think, to feel,
to recognise, to remember, as to perform any act of understanding.
The play of the energy had been continuous and couldn’t change; what
changed was only the objects and situations pressing the spring of
it. Notes had been, in other words, the things one couldn’t _not_
take, and the prime result of all fresh experience was to remind one
of that. I have endeavoured to characterise the peremptory fashion
in which my fresh experience of London—the London of the habitual
observer, the preoccupied painter, the pedestrian prowler—reminded me;
an admonition that represented, I think, the sum of my investigations.
I recall pulling no wires, knocking at no closed doors, applying for
no “authentic” information; but I recall also on the other hand the
practice of never missing an opportunity to add a drop, however small,
to the bucket of my impressions or to renew my sense of being able to
dip into it. To haunt the great city and by this habit to penetrate it,
imaginatively, in as many places as possible—_that_ was to be informed,
_that_ was to pull wires, _that_ was to open doors, _that_ positively
was to groan at times under the weight of one’s accumulations.
Face to face with the idea of Hyacinth’s subterraneous politics and
occult affiliations, I recollect perfectly feeling, in short, that I
might well be ashamed if, with my advantages—and there wasn’t a street,
a corner, an hour, of London that was not an advantage—I shouldn’t be
able to piece together a proper semblance of those things, as indeed
a proper semblance of all the odd parts of his life. There was always
of course the chance that the propriety might be challenged—challenged
by readers of a knowledge greater than mine. Yet knowledge, after all,
of what? My vision of the aspects I more or less fortunately rendered
_was_, exactly, my knowledge. If I made my appearances live, what was
this but the utmost one could do with them? Let me at the same time not
deny that, in answer to probable ironic reflexions on the full licence
for sketchiness and vagueness and dimness taken indeed by my picture,
I had to bethink myself in advance of a defence of my “artistic
position.” Shouldn’t I find it in the happy contention that the value
I wished most to render and the effect I wished most to produce were
precisely those of our not knowing, of society’s not knowing, but
only guessing and suspecting and trying to ignore, what “goes on”
irreconcilably, subversively, beneath the vast smug surface? I couldn’t
deal with that positive quantity for itself—my subject had another too
exacting side; but I might perhaps show the social ear as on occasion
applied to the ground, or catch some gust of the hot breath that I had
at many an hour seemed to see escape and hover. What it all came back
to was, no doubt, something like _this_ wisdom—that if you haven’t, for
fiction, the root of the matter in you, haven’t the sense of life and
the penetrating imagination, you are a fool in the very presence of the
revealed and assured; but that if you _are_ so armed you are not really
helpless, not without your resource, even before mysteries abysmal.