_To Mrs. Humphry Ward._
Lamb House, Rye.
July 26th, 1899.
Dear Mrs. Ward,
I beg you not to believe that if you elicit a reply from me--to your so
interesting letter just received--you do so at any cost to any extreme
or uncomfortable pressure that I'm just now under. I am always behind
with everything--and it's no worse than usual. Besides I shall be very
brief.[A] But I must say two or three words--not only because these are
the noblest speculations that can engage the human mind, but because--to
a degree that distresses me--you labour under two or three mistakes as
to what, the other day, I at all wanted to express. I don't myself, for
that matter, recognise what you mean by any "old difference" between us
on _any_ score--and least of all when you appear to glance at it as an
opinion of mine (if I understand you, that is,) as to there being but
_one general_ "hard and fast rule of _presentation_." I protest that I
have never had with you any difference--consciously--on any such point,
and rather resent, frankly, your attributing to me a judgment so
imbecile. I hold that there are five million such "rules" (or as many as
there are subjects in all the world--I fear the subjects are _not_
5,000,000!) only each of them imposed, artistically, by the particular
case--involved in the writer's responsibility to it; and each
_then_--and then only--"hard and fast" with an immitigable hardness and
fastness. I don't see, _without_ this latter condition, where any work
of art, any artistic _question_ is, or any artistic probity. Of course,
a 1000 times, there are as many magnificent and imperative cases as you
like of presenting a thing by "going behind" as many forms of
consciousness as you like--all Dickens, Balzac, Thackeray, Tolstoi (save
when they use the autobiographic dodge,) are huge illustrations of it.
But they are illustrations of extreme and calculated selection, or
singleness, too, whenever that has been, by the case, imposed on them.
My own immortal works, for that matter, if I may make bold, are
recognizable instances of all the variation. I "go behind" right and
left in "The Princess Casamassima," "The Bostonians," "The Tragic
Muse," just as I do the same but singly in "The American" and "Maisie,"
and just as I do it consistently _never at all_ (save for a false and
limited _appearance_, here and there, of doing it a _little_, which I
haven't time to explain) in "The Awkward Age." So far from not seeing
what you mean in _Pecheur d'Islande_, I see it as a most beautiful
example--a crystal-clear one. It's a picture of a _relation_ (a _single_
relation) and that relation isn't given at all unless given on both
sides, because, practically, there are no other relations to make
_other_ feet for the situation to walk withal. The logic jumps at the
eyes. Therefore acquit me, please, _please_, of anything so abject as
putting forward anything at once specific and _a priori_. "Then why," I
hear you ask, "do you pronounce for _my book_ a priori?" Only because of
a mistake, doubtless, for which I do here humble penance--that of
assuming too precipitately, and with the freedom of an inevitably
too-foreshortened letter, that I was dealing with it _a
posteriori_!--and _that_ on the evidence of only those few pages and of
a somewhat confused recollection of what, in Rome, you told me of your
elements. Or rather--more correctly--I was giving way to my irresistible
need of wondering how, _given_ the subject, one could best work one's
self into the presence of it. And, lo and behold, the subject isn't (of
course, in so scant a show and brief a piece) "given" at all--I have
doubtless simply, with violence and mutilation, _stolen_ it. It is of
the nature of that violence that I'm a wretched person to _read_ a
novel--I begin so quickly and concomitantly, _for myself_, to write it
rather--even before I know clearly what it's about! The novel I can
_only_ read, I can't read at all! And I had, to be just with me, one
attenuation--I thought I gathered from the pages already absorbed that
your _parti pris_ as to your process with "Eleanor" was already
defined--and defined as "dramatic"--and that was a kind of _lead_: the
people all, as it were, phenomenal to a particular imagination (hers)
and that imagination, with all its contents, phenomenal to the reader.
I, in fine, just rudely and egotistically thrust forward the beastly way
_I_ should have done it. But there is too much to say about these
things--and I am writing too much--and yet haven't said half I want
to--_and_, above all, there _being_ so much, it is doubtless better not
to attempt to say pen in hand what one can say but so partially. And yet
I _must_ still add one or two things more. What I said above about the
"rule" of presentation being, in each case, hard and fast, _that_ I will
go to the stake and burn with slow fire for--the slowest that will burn
at all. I hold the artist must (infinitely!) know how he is doing it, or
he is not doing it at all. I hold he must have a perception of the
interests of his subject that grasps him as in a vise, and that (the
subject being of course formulated in his mind) he sees _as_ sharply the
way that most presents it, and presents most of it, as against the ways
that comparatively give it away. And he must there choose and stick and
be consistent--and that is the hard-and-fastness and the vise. I am
afraid I _do_ differ with you if you mean that the picture can get any
_objective_ unity from any other source than that; can get it from,
e.g., the "personality of the author." From the personality of the
author (which, however enchanting, is a thing for the reader only, and
not for the author himself, without humiliating abdications, to my
sense, to count in at all) it can get nothing but a unity of execution
and of tone. There is no short cut for the subject, in other words, out
of the process, which, having made out most what it (the subject) is,
_treats_ it most, handles it, in that relation, with the most consistent
economy. May I say, to exonerate myself a little, that when, e.g., I
see you make Lucy "phenomenal" to Eleanor (one has to express it briefly
and somehow,) I find myself supposing completely that you "know how
you're doing it," and enjoy, as critic, the sweet peace that comes with
that sense. But I haven't the sense that you "know how you're doing it"
when, at the point you've reached, I see you make Lucy phenomenal, even
for one attempted stroke, to the little secretary of embassy. And the
reason of this is that Eleanor counts as presented, and thereby _is_
something to go behind. The secretary _doesn't_ count as presented (and
isn't he moreover engaged, at the very moment--_your_ moment--in being
phenomenal himself, to Lucy?) and is therefore, practically, _nothing_
to go behind. The promiscuous shiftings of standpoint and centre of
Tolstoi and Balzac for instance (which come, to my eye, from their being
not so much big dramatists as big _painters_--as Loti is a painter,) are
the inevitable result of the _quantity of presenting_ their genius
launches them in. With the complexity they pile up they _can_ get no
clearness without trying again and again for new centres. And they don't
_always_ get it. However, I don't mean to say they don't get enough. And
I hasten to add that you have--I wholly recognise--every right to reply
to me: "Cease your intolerable chatter and dry up your preposterous
deluge. If you will have the decent civility to _wait_, you will see
that _I_ 'present' also--_anch' io!_--enough for _every_ freedom I use
with it!"--_And with my full assent to that, and my profuse_ prostration
in the dust for this extravagant discourse, with all faith, gratitude,
appreciation and affection, I _do_ cease, dear Mrs. Ward, I dry up! and
am yours most breathlessly,