AUGUSTA BRADHAM, "Gussie" Bradham, for the big social woman. Basil Hunn
I think on the whole for Hero. Graham Rising, which becomes familiarly
Gray Rising, I have considered but incline to keep for another occasion.
Horton Crimper, among his friends Haughty Crimper, seems to me right and
best, on the whole, for my second young man. I don't want for him a
surname intrinsically pleasing; and this seems to me of about the good
nuance. My Third Man hereby becomes, I seem to see, Davey Bradham; on
which, I think, for the purpose and association, I can't improve.
My Girl, in the relinquished thing, was Cissy Foy; and this was all
right for the figure there intended, but the girl here is a very
different one, and everything is altered. I want her name moreover, her
Christian one, to be Moyra, and must have some bright combination with
that; the essence of which is a surname of two syllables and ending in a
consonant--also beginning with one. I am thinking of Moyra Grabham, the
latter excellent thing was in the Times of two or three days ago; its
only fault is a little too much meaning, but the sense here wouldn't be
thrown into undue relief, and I don't want anything pretty or
conventionally "pleasing." Everything of the shade of the real. Remain
thus important the big, the heavy Daughter of the billionaire, with her
father; in connection with whom I think I give up Betterman. That must
stand over, and I want, above all, a single syllable. All the other
names have two or three; and this makes an objection to the Shimple,
which I originally thought of as about odd and ugly enough without being
more so than I want it. But that also will keep, while I see that I have
the monosyllable Hench put down; only put down for another connection. I
see I thought of "Wenty" Hench, short for Wentworth, as originally good
for Second Young Man. If I balance that against Haughty Crimper, I
incline still to the latter, for the small amusement of the Haughty. On
the other hand I am not content with Hench, though a monosyllable, for
the dear Billionaire girl, in the light of whom it is alone important to
consider the question, her Father so little mattering after she becomes
by his death the great Heiress of the time. And I kind of want to make
_her_ Moyra; with which I just spy in the Times a wonderful and
admirable "Chown"; which makes me think that Moyra Chown may do. Besides
which if I keep Grabham for my "heroine" I feel the Christian name
should there be of one syllable. All my others are of two; and I shall
presently make the ease right for this, finding the good thing. The
above provides for the time for the essential. Yet suddenly I am pulled
up--Grabham, after all, won't at all do if I keep Bradham for the other
connection; which I distinctly prefer: I want nothing with any shade of
a special sense there. Accordingly, I don't know but what I may go in
for a different note altogether and lavish on her the fine Cantupher;
which I don't want however really to waste. When Cantupher is used there
ought to be several of it, and above all men: no, I see it won't do, and
besides I don't want anything positively fine. I like Wither, and I like
Augurer, and I like, in another note, Damper, and I even see a little
Bessie as a combination with it, though I don't on the whole want a
Bessie. At any rate I now get on.
[3]What I want the first Book to do is to present the Gaws, the Bradhams
and Cissy Foy, in Three Chapters or Scenes, call them Scenes of the
Acts, in such a way that I thus present with them the first immediate
facts involved; or in other words present the first essence of the
Situation. What I see is, as I further reflect, that it is better to get
Graham Fielder there within the Act, to have him on the premises
already, and learnt so to be, before it has progressed beyond the first
Scene; though he be not seen till the Second Book. When Rosanna goes
over to her Father it befals before she has had more than twenty words
with him that one of the Nurses who is most sympathetic to her appears
in the long window that opens from the house on to the verandah, and it
is thus at once disclosed that he has come. Rosanna has taken for
granted from the quiet air of the place that this event hasn't yet
occurred; but Gray has in fact arrived with the early morning, has come
on the boat from New York, the night one, and is there above with, or
ready to be with, the dying man. Perfectly natural and plausible I make
it that he doesn't begin at once to pervade the place; delicacy,
discretion, anxiety naturally operating with him; so that we know only
he is there, and that matters are more or less taking place above,
during the rest of the Book. But the fact in question immediately
determines, for proprieties' and discretions' sake, the withdrawal of
Rosanna and her Father; they return to their own abode; and I see the
rest of the business of the act as taking place partly there and partly,
by what I make out, on the Bradhams' own premises, the field of the
Third Scene. Here is the passage between the two young women that I
require, and my Heroine, I think, must be on a visit of a number of days
to Gussie. I want Davey first with Rosanna, and think I get something
like his having walked over, along the cliff, to their house, to bring
her, at his wife's request, over to tea. Yes, I have Davey's walk back
with Rosanna, and her Father's declining to come, or saying that he will
follow afterward; his real design being to sneak over again, as I may
call it, to the other house, in the exercise of his intense curiosity.
That special founded and motived condition is what we sufficiently know
him by and what he is for the time (which is all the time we have of
him) identified by. I get thus for Book 2 that Gray, latish in the
afternoon, coming down from his uncle's quarter, finds him, has a
passage or scene with him, above all an impression of him; and this
before he has had any other: we learn that he hasn't seen his uncle yet;
the judgment of the doctors about this being operative and they wishing
a further wait. I want Rosanna's Father for his first very sharp
impression; this really making, I think, Scene First of Book 2. It gives
me Scene 2 for what I shall then want without further delay of his first
introduction to his Uncle's room and his half hour, or whatever, there;
with the fact determined of the non-collapse of the latter, his good
effect from the meeting quite rather, and the duration of him determined
to end of Book 2. After Book 2 he is no more. Scene 3 of Book 2 then can
only be, for Gray, with Rosanna; that scene having functions to be
exercised with no more delay at all, by what I make out, and being put
in, straight, then and there, that we may have the support of it. I by
the same token see Book 3 now as functional entirely for the encounter
of Gray with the two other women and, for the first time, with Davey;
and also as preparing the appearance of Horton Vint, though not
producing it. I see _him_, in fact, I think, as introduced independently
of his first appearance to Gray, see it as a matter of his relation with
Cissy, and as lighting up what I immediately want of _their_ situation.
In fact don't I see this as Horton's "Act" altogether, as I shall have
seen and treated Book I as Rosanna's, and Book 2 as Gray's. By the blest
operation this time of my Dramatic principle, my law of successive
Aspects, each treated from its own centre, as, though with
qualifications. The Awkward Age, I have the great help of flexibility
and variety; my persons in turn, or at least the three or four foremost,
having control, as it were, of the Act and Aspect, and so making it his
or making it _hers._ This of course with the great inevitable and
desirable preponderance, in the Series, of Gray's particular weight. But
I seem to make out, to a certainty, at least another "Act" for Rosanna
and probably another for Horton; though perhaps not more than one, all
to herself, for Cissy. I say at least another for Horton on account of
my desire to give Gray as affecting Horton, only less than I want to
give Horton as affecting Gray. It is true that I get Gray as affecting
Horton more or less in Book 3, but as the situation developes it will
make new needs, determinations and possibilities. All this for feeling
my way and making things come, more and more come. I want an Aspect
under control of Davey, at all events--this I seem pretty definitely to
feel; but things will only come too much. At all events, to retreat,
remount, a little there are my 3 first Books sufficiently started
without my having as yet exactly noted the absolutely fundamental
antecedents. But before I do this, even, I memorise that Gray's Scene
with Rosanna for 3 of Book 2 shall be by her coming over to Mr.
Betterman's house herself that evening, all frankly and directly, to see
him there; not by his going over to her. And I seem to want it evening;
the summer night outside, with their moving about on the Terrace and
above the sea etc. Withal, by the same token, I want such interesting
things between them from immediately after the promulgation of Mr.
Betterman's Will; I want that, but of course can easily get it, so far
as anything is easy, in Book 4, the function of which is to present Gray
as face to face with the situation so created for him. This is
obviously, of course, one of Gray's Aspects, and the next will desirably
be, I dare say too; can only be, so far as I can now tell, when I
consider that the Book being my Fourth, only Six of the Ten which I most
devoutly desire to limit the thing to then remain for my full evolution
on the momentum by that time imparted. Certainly, at all events, the
Situation leaves Newport, to come to life, its full life, in New York,
where I seem to see it as going on to the end, unless I manage to treat
myself to some happy and helpful mise-en-scène or exploitation of my
memory of (say) California. The action entirely of American
localisation, as goes without saying, yet making me thus kind of hanker,
for dear "amusement's" sake, to decorate the thing with a bit of a
picture of some American Somewhere that is not either Newport or N.Y. I
even ask myself whether Boston wouldn't serve for this garniture, serve
with a narrower economy than "dragging in" California. I kind of want to
drag in Boston a little, feeling it as naturally and thriftily workable.
But these are details which will only too much come; and I seem to see
already how my action, however tightly packed down, will strain my Ten
Books, most blessedly, to cracking. That is exactly what I want, the
tight packing _and_ the beautifully audible cracking; the most
magnificent masterly little vivid economy, with a beauty of its own
equal to the beauty of the donnée itself, that ever was.
However, what the devil _are_, exactly, the little fundamentals in the
past? Fix them, focus them hard; they need only be perfectly
conceivable, but they must be of the most lucid sharpness. I want to
have it that for Gray, and essentially for Rosanna, it's a _renewal_ of
an early, almost, or even quite positively, childish beginning; and for
Gray it's the same with Horton Vint--the impression of Horton already
existing in him, a very strong and "dazzled" one, made in the quite
young time, though in a short compass of days, weeks, possibly months,
or whatever, and having lasted on (always for Gray) after a fashion that
makes virtually a sort of relation already established, small as it
ostensibly is. Such his relation with Rosanna, such his relation with
Horton--but for his relation with Cissy----? Do I want that to be also a
renewal, the residuum of an old impression, or a fresh thing altogether?
What strikes me prima facie is that it's better to have two such
pre-established origins for the affair than three; the only question is
does that sort of connection more complicate or more simplify for that
with Cissy? It more simplifies if I see myself wanting to give, by my
plan, the full effect of a revolution in her, a revolution marked the
more by the germ of the relation being thrown back, marked the more,
that is, in the sense of the shade of perfidy, treachery, the shade of
the particular element and image that is of the essence, so far as she
is concerned, of my action. How this exactly works I must in a moment go
into--hammer it out clear; but meanwhile there are these other
fundamentals. Gray then is the son of his uncle's half-sister, not
sister (on the whole, I think); whose dissociation from her rich
brother, before he was anything like _so_ rich, must have followed upon
her marrying a man with whom he, Mr. Betterman, was on some peculiarly
bad terms resulting from a business difference or quarrel of one of
those rancorous kinds that such lives (as Mr. Betterman's) are
plentifully bestrown with. The husband has been his victim, and he
hasn't hated him, or objected to him for a brother-in-law, any the less
for that. The objected-to brother-in-law has at all events died early,
and the young wife, with her boy, her scant means, her disconnection
from any advantage to her represented by her half-brother, has betaken
herself to Europe; where the rest of _that_ history has been enacted. I
see the young husband, Gray's father, himself Graham Fielder the elder
or whatever, as dying early, but probably dying in Europe, through some
catastrophe to be determined, two or three years after their going
there. This is better than his dying at home, for removal of everything
from nearness to Mr. Betterman. Betterman has been married and has had
children, a son and a daughter, this is indispensable, for diminution of
the fact of paucity of children; but he has lost successively these
belongings--there is nothing over strange in it; the death of his son,
at 16 or 18 or thereabouts, having occurred a few years, neither too few
nor too many, before my beginning, and having been the sorest fact of
his life. Well then, young Mrs. Fielder or whoever, becomes thus in
Europe an early widow, with her little boy, and there, after no long
time, marries again, marries an alien, a European of some nationality to
be determined, but probably an Englishman; which completes the effect of
alienation from her brother--easily conceivable and representable as "in
his way," disliking this union; and indeed as having made known to her,
across the sea, that if she will forbear from it (this when he first
hears of it and before it has taken place) and will come back to America
with her boy, he will "forgive" her and do for her over there what he
can. The great fact is that she declines this condition, the giving up
of her new fiancé, and thereby declines an advantage that may, or might
have, become great for her boy. Not so great then--Betterman not _then_
so rich. But in fine--With which I cry Eureka, eureka; I have found what
I want for Rosanna's connection, though it will have to make Rosanna a
little older than Gray, 2 or 3 or 3 or 4 years, instead of same age. I
see Gray's mother at any rate, with her small means, in one of the
smaller foreign cities, Florence or Dresden, probably the latter, and
also see there Rosanna and her mother, this preceding by no long time
the latter's death. Mrs. Gaw has come abroad with her daughter, for
advantages, in the American way, while the husband and father is
immersed in business cares at home; and when the two couples, mother and
son, and mother and daughter, meet in a natural way, a connection is
more or less prepared by the fact of Mr. Gaw having had the business
association with Mrs. Fielder's half-brother, Mr. Betterman, at home,
even though the considerably violent rupture or split between the two
men will have already taken place. Mrs. Gaw is a very good simple, a
bewildered and pathetic rich woman, in delicate health, and is
sympathetic to Gray's mother, on whom she more or less throws herself
for comfort and support, and Gray and Rosanna, Rosanna with a governess
and all the facilities and accessories natural to wealth, while the
boy's conditions are much leaner and plainer--the two, I say, fraternise
and are good friends; he figuring to Rosanna (say he is about 13, while
she is 16) as a tremendously initiated and informed little polyglot
European, knowing France, Germany, Italy etc. from the first. It is at
this juncture that Mrs. Fielder's second marriage has come into view, or
the question and the appearance of it; and that, very simultaneously,
the proposal has come over from her half-brother on some rumour of it
reaching him. As already mentioned, Betterman proposes to her that if
she will come back to America with her boy, and not enter upon the union
that threatens, and which must have particular elements in it of a
nature to displease and irritate him, he will look after them both,
educate the boy at home, do something substantial for them. Mrs. Fielder
takes her American friend into her confidence in every way, introduces
to her the man who desires to marry her, whom Rosanna sees and with whom
the boy himself has made great friends, so that the dilemma of the poor
lady becomes a great and lively interest to them all; the pretendant
himself forming also a very good relation with the American mother and
daughter, the friends of his friend, and putting to Mrs. Gaw very
eagerly the possibility of her throwing her weight into the scale in his
favour. Her meeting, that is Mrs. Fielder's meeting, the proposition
from New York involves absolutely her breaking off with him; and he is
very much in love with her, likes the boy, and, though he doesn't want
to stand in the latter's light, has hopes that he won't be quite thrown
over. The engagement in fact, with the marriage near at hand, must be an
existing reality. It is for Mrs. Fielder something of a dilemma; but she
is very fond of her honourable suitor, and her inclinations go strongly
to sticking to him. She takes the boy himself into her confidence, young
as he is,--perhaps I can afford him a year or two more--make him 15,
say; in which case Rosanna becomes 18, and the subsequent chronology is
thereby affected. It isn't, I must remember, as a young man in his very
first youth, at all, that I want Gray, or see him, with the opening of
the story at Newport. On the contrary all the proprieties, elements of
interest, convenience etc., are promoted by his being not less than 30.
I don't see why I shouldn't make him 33, with Rosanna thus _two_ years
older, not three. If he is 15 in Dresden and she 17, it will be old
enough for each, without being too old, I think, for Gray. 18 years will
thus have elapsed from the crisis at Florence or wherever to the arrival
at Newport. I want that time, I think, I can do with it very well for
what I see of elements operative for him; and a period of some length
moreover is required for bringing the two old men at Newport to a proper
pitch of antiquity. Mr. Betterman dies very much in the fulness of
years, and as Rosanna's parent is to pass away soon after I want him to
have come to the end. If Gray is 15, however, I mustn't make his mother
too mature to inspire the devotion of her friend; at the same time that
there must have been years enough for her to have lived awhile with her
first husband and lost him. Of course this first episode may have been
very brief--there is nothing to prevent that. If she had married at 20
she will then be, say, about 36 or so at the time of the crisis, and
this will be quite all right for the question of her second marriage.
Say she lives a considerable number of years after this, in great
happiness, her marriage having taken place; I in fact require her to do
so, for I want Gray to have had reasons fairly strong for his not having
been back to America in the interval. I may put it that he has, even,
been back for a very short time, on some matter connected with his
mother's interests, or his own, or whatever; but I complicate the case
thereby and have to deal somehow with the question of whether or no he
has then seen Mr. Betterman. No, I don't want him to have been back, and
can't do with it; keep this simple and workable. All I am doing here is
just to fix a little his chronology. Say he has been intending to go
over at about 25, when his mother's death takes place, about 10 years
after her second marriage. Say then, as is very conceivable, that his
stepfather, with whom he has become great friends, then requires and
appeals to his care and interest in a way that keeps him on and on till
the latter's death takes place just previous to Mr. Betterman's sending
for him. This gives me quite sufficiently what I want of the previous
order of things; but doesn't give me yet the fact about Rosanna's
connection in her young history which I require. I see accordingly what
has happened in Florence or Dresden as something of this kind: that Mrs.
Fielder, having put it to her boy that he shall decide, if he can, about
what they shall do, she lets Mrs. Gaw, who was at this juncture in
constant intercourse with her, know that she has done so--Mrs. Gaw and
Rosanna being, together, exceedingly interested about her, and Rosanna
extremely interested, in a young dim friendly way, about Gray; very much
as if he were the younger brother she hasn't got, and whom, or an older,
she would have given anything to have. Rosanna hates Mr. Betterman, who
has, as she understands and believes, in some iniquitous business way,
wronged or swindled her father; and isn't at all for what he has
proposed to the Fielders. In addition she is infatuated with Europe,
makes everything of being there, dreams, or would dream, of staying on
if she could, and has already in germ, in her mind, those feelings about
the dreadful American money-world of which she figures as the embodiment
or expression in the eventual situation. She knows thus that the boy has
had, practically, the decision laid upon him, and with the whole case
with all its elements and possibilities before her she takes upon
herself to act upon him, influence and determine him. She wouldn't have
him accept Mr. Betterman's cruel proposition, as she declares she sees
it, for the world. She proceeds with him as she would in fact with a
younger brother: there is a passage to be alluded to with a later
actuality, which figures for her in memory as her creation of a
responsibility; her very considerably passionate, and thereby
meddlesome, intervention. I see some long beautiful walk or stroll, some
visit to some charming old place or things--and Florence is here
indicated--during which she puts it all to him, and from which he, much
inspired and affected by her, comes back to say to his mother that he
doesn't want what is offered--at any such price as she will have to pay.
I see this occasion as really having settled it--and Rosanna's having
always felt and known that it did. She and her mother separate then from
the others; Mrs. Fielder communicates her refusal, sticks to her friend,
marries him shortly afterwards, and her subsequent years take the form I
have noted. The American mother and daughter go back across the sea; the
mother in time dies etc. I see also how much better it is to have
sufficient time for these various deaths to happen. But the point is
that the sense of responsibility, begetting gradually a considerable, a
deepening force of reflection, and even somewhat of remorse, as to all
that it has meant, is what has taken place for Rosanna in proportion as,
by the sequence of events and the happening of many things, Mr.
Betterman has grown into an apparently very rich old man with no natural
heir. His losses, his bereavements, I have already alluded to, and a
considerable relaxation of her original feeling about him in the light
of more knowledge and of other things that have happened. In the light,
for instance, of her now mature sense of what her father's career has
been and of all that his great ferocious fortune, as she believes it to
be, represents of rapacity, of financial cruelty, of consummate special
ability etc. She has kept to some extent in touch with Gray, so far that
is as knowing about his life and general situation are concerned; but
the element of compunction in her itself, and the sense of what she may
perhaps have deprived him of in the way of a great material advantage,
may be very well seen, I think, as keeping her shy and backward in
respect to following him up or remaining in intercourse. It isn't
likely, for the American truth of things, that she hasn't been back to
Europe again, more than once, whether before or after her mother's
death; but what I can easily and even interestingly see is that on
whatever occasion of being there she has yet not tried to meet him
again. She knows that neither he nor his stepfather are at all well off,
she has a good many general impressions and has tried to get knowledge
of them, without directly appealing for it to themselves, whenever she
can. Thus it is, to state things very simply, that, on hearing of the
stepfather's death, during the Newport summer, she has got at Mr.
Betterman and spoken to him about Gray; she has found him accessible to
what she wants to say, and has perceived above all what a pull it gives
her to be able to work, in her appeal, the fact, quite vivid in the
fulness of time to the old man himself indeed, that the young man, so
nearly, after all, related to him, and over there in Europe all these
years, is about the only person, who could get at him in any way, who
hasn't ever asked anything of him or tried to get something out of him.
Not only this, but he and his mother, in the time, are the only ones who
ever refused a proffered advantage. I think I must make it that Rosanna
finds that she can really tell her story to Mr. Betterman, can make a
confidant of him and so interest him only the more. She feels that he
likes her, and this a good deal on account of her enormous difference
from her father. But I need only put it here quite simply: she does
interest him, she does move him, and it is as a consequence of her
appeal that he sends for Gray and that Gray comes. What I must above all
take care of is the fact that she has represented him to the old man as
probably knowing less about money, having had less to do with it, having
moved in a world entirely outside of it, in a degree utterly unlike
anyone and everyone whom Mr. Betterman has ever seen.
But I have got it all, I needn't develop; what I want now independently
is the beginning, quite back in the early years, of some relation on
Gray's part with Horton Vint, and some effect, which I think I really
must find right, of Horton's having done something for him, in their
boyish time, something important and gallant, rather showy, but at all
events really of moment, which has always been present to Gray. This I
must find--it need present no difficulty; with something in the general
way of their having been at school together--in Switzerland, with the
service rendered in Switzerland, say on a holiday cours among the
mountains, when Horty has fished Gray out of a hole, I don't mean quite
a crevasse, but something like, or come to his aid in a tight place of
some sort, and at his own no small risk, to bring him to safety. In fine
it's something like having saved his life, though that has a tiresome
little old romantic and conventional note. However I will make the thing
right and give it the right nuance; remember that it is all allusional
only now and a matter of reference on Gray's part. What must have
further happened, I think, is that Horty has been in Europe again, in
much later years, after College, indeed only a very few years previous,
and has met Gray again and they have renewed together; to the effect of
his apprehension of Gray's (to him) utterly queer and helpless and
unbusinesslike, unfinancial, type; and of Gray's great admiration of
everything of the opposite sort in him--combined, that is, with other
very attractive (as they appear) qualities. He has made Gray think a lot
about the wonderful American world that he himself long ago cut so loose
from, and of which Horty is all redolent and reverberant; and I think
must have told him, most naturally told him, of what happened in the far
off time in Florence. Only when, then, was the passage of their being at
school, or, better still, with the Swiss pasteur, or private tutor,
together? If it was before the episode in Florence they were rather
younger than I seem to see them; if it was after they were rather older.
Yet I don't at all see why it should not have been just after--this
perfectly natural at 16 for Gray, at 17 for Horty; both thoroughly
natural ages for being with the pasteur, and for the incident
afterwards; Gray going very naturally to the pasteur, whom in fact he
may have been with already before, during the first year of his mother's
new marriage. That provides for the matter well enough, and Eve only to
see it to possess it; and gives a basis for their taking up together
somehow when they meet, wherever I may put it, in the aftertime. There
are forms of life for Gray and his stepfather to be focussed as the
right ones--Horty sees this pair _together_ somewhere; and nothing is
more arrangeable, though I don't think I want to show the latter as
having dangled and dawdled about Italy only; and on the other hand do
see that Gray's occupation and main interest, other than that of looking
after his elder companions, must be conceived and presented for him.
Again no difficulty, however, with the right imagination of it. Horty
goes back to America; the 3 or 4, or at the most 4 or 5, years elapse,
so that it is with that comparative freshness of mutual remembrance that
the two men meet again. What I do see as definite is that Horty has had
up to the time of Gray's return no sort of relation whatever with Mr.
Betterman or his affairs, or any point of the question with which the
action begins at Newport. He is on the other hand in relation with
Cissy; and there are things I have got to account for in his actual
situation. Why is he without money, with his interest in the getting of
it etc.? But that is a question exactly _of_ interest--I mean to which
the answer may afford the greatest. And settle about the degree of his
apprehension of, relation to, designs on, or general lively
consciousness of Rosanna. Important the fact that the enormous extent of
her father's fortune is known only after his death, and is larger even
than was supposed; though it is to be remembered that in American
financial conditions, with the immense public activity of money there
taking place, these things are gauged in advance and by the general
knowledge, or speculative measure, as the oldfashioned private fortune
couldn't be. But I am here up against the very nodus of my history, the
facts of Horty's connection with the affairs that come into being for
Gray under his uncle's Will; the whole mechanism, in fine, of this part
of the action, the situation so created and its consequences. Enormous
difficulty of pretending to show various things here as with a business
vision, in my total absence of business initiation; so that of course my
idea has been from the first not to show them with a business vision,
but in some other way altogether; this will take much threshing out, but
it is the very basis of the matter, the core of the subject, and I shall
worry it through with patience. But I must get it, plan it, utterly
right in advance, and this is what takes the doing. The other doing, the
use of it when schemed, is comparatively easy. What strikes me first of
all is that the amount of money that Gray comes in for must, for reasons
I needn't waste time in stating, so obvious are they, be no such huge
one, by the New York measure, as in many another case: it's a tremendous
lot of money for Gray, from his point of view and in relation to his
needs or experience. Thus the case is that if Mr. Gaw's accumulations or
whatever have distinctly surpassed expectation, the other old man's have
fallen much below it--or at least have been known to be no such great
affair anyhow. Various questions come up for me here, though there is no
impossibility of settling them if taken one by one. The whole point is
of course that Mr. Betterman _has_ been a ruthless operator or whatever,
and with doings Davey Bradham is able to give Gray so dark an account
of; therefore if the mass of money of the acquisition of which such a
picture can be made is not pretty big, the force of the picture falls a
good deal to the ground. The difficulty in that event, in view of the
bigness, is that the conception of any act on Horton's part that amounts
to a swindle practised on Gray to such a tremendous tune is neither a
desirable nor a possible one. As one presses and presses light
breaks--there are so many ways in which one begins little by little to
wonder if one may not turn it about. There is the way in the first place
of lowering the pitch altogether of the quantities concerned for either
men. I see that from the moment ill--gotten money is concerned the
essence of my subject stands firm whatever the amount of the
same--whatever the amounts in either case. I haven't proposed from the
first at all to be definite, in the least, about financial details or
mysteries--I need hardly say; and have even seen myself absolutely not
stating or formulating at all the figure of the property accruing to
Gray. I haven't the least need of that, and can make the absence of it
in fact a positively good and happy effect. That is an immense gain for
my freedom of conduct; and in fine there glimmers upon me, there
glimmers upon me----! The idea, which was vaguely my first, of the
absolute theft practised upon Gray by Horty, and which Gray's large
appeal to his cleverness and knowledge, and large trust in his
competence, his own being nil--this theft accepted and condoned by Gray
as a manner of washing his own hands of the use of the damnosa
hereditas--this thinkable enough in respect to some limited, even if
considerable, amount etc., but losing its virtue of conceivability if
applied to larger and more complicated things. Vulgar theft I don't
want, but I want something to which Horty is led on and encouraged by
Gray's whole attitude and state of mind face to face with the impression
which he gets over there of so many of the black and merciless things
that are behind the great possessions. I want Gray absolutely to inherit
the money, to have it, to have had it, and to let it go; and it seems to
me that a whole element of awkwardness will be greatly minimised for me
if I never exactly express, or anything like it, what the money is. The
difficulty is in seeing any one particular stroke by which Horty can do
what he wants; it will have to be much rather a whole train of
behaviour, a whole process of depredation and misrepresentation, which
constitutes his delinquency. This, however, would be and _could_ be only
an affair of time; and my whole intention, a straight and compact
action, would suffer from this. What I originally saw was the fact of
Gray's detection of Horty in a piece of extremely ingenious and able
malversation of his funds, the care of which he has made over to him,
and the then determination on his part simply to show the other in
silence that he understands, and on consideration will do nothing; this
being, he feels in his wrought-up condition after what he has learnt
about the history of the money, the most congruous way of his ceasing
himself to be concerned with it and of resigning it to its natural
associations. That was the essence of my subject, and I see as much in
it as ever; only I see too that it is imaginable about a comparatively
small pecuniary interest much more than about a great. It has to depend
upon the kind of malpractice involved; and I am partly tempted to ask
myself whether Horty's connection with the situation may not be
thinkable as having begun somewhat further back. One thing is certain,
however; I don't want any hocus-pocus about the Will itself--which an
anterior connection for H. would more or less amount to: I want it just
as I have planned it up to the edge of the circle in which his misdeed
is perpetrated. What glimmers upon me, as I said just now, is the
conception of an extreme frankness of understanding between the two
young men on the question of Gray's inaptitudes, which at first are not
at all disgusts--because he doesn't _know_; but which makes them, the
two, have it out together at an early stage. Yes, there glimmers, there
glimmers; something really more interesting, I think, than the mere
nefarious act; something like a profoundly nefarious attitude, or even
genius: I see, I really think I see, the real fine truth of the matter
in _that._ With which I keep present to me the whole significance and
high dramatic value of the part played in the action by Cissy Foy; have
distinct to me her active function as a wheel in the machine. How it
isn't simply Gray and Horty at all, but Gray and Horty and _her_; how it
isn't She and Gray, any more than it's She and Horty, simply, but is for
her too herself and the _two_ men: in which I see possibilities of the
most interesting. But I must put her on her feet perfectly in order to
see as I should. Without at all overstraining the point of previous
contacts for Gray with these three or four others--than which even at
the worst there is nothing in the world more verisimilitudinous--I want
some sort of relation for him with her _started_; this being a distinct
economy, purchased by no extravagance, and seeing me, to begin with, so
much further on my way. And who, when I bethink myself, have his
contacts been with, after all, over there, but Horty and Rosanna--the
relation to Mr. Betterman being but of the mere essence. Of the people
who matter the Bradhams are new to him, and that is all right; Cissy may
have been seen of him on some occasion over there that is quite recent,
as recent as I like; all the more that I must remember how if I want her
truly a Girl I must mind what I'm about with the age I'm attributing to
Gray. I want a disparity, but not too great, at the same time that
though I want her a Girl, I want her not too young a one either.
Everything about her, her intelligence, character, sense of life and
knowledge of it, imply a certain experience and a certain time for that.
The great fact is that she is the poor Girl, and the "exceptionally
clever," in a society of the rich, living her life with them, and more
or less by their bounty; being, I seem to see, already a friend and
protégée of Rosanna's, though it isn't Rosanna but the Bradhams who
put her in relation with Gray, whether designedly or not. I seem to run
here the risk a bit of exposure to the charge of more or less repeating
the figure of Charlotte in The Golden Bowl, with the Bradhams repeating
even a little the Assinghams in that fiction; but I shake this
reflection off, as having no weight beyond duly warning; the situation
being such another affair and the real characteristics and exhibited
proceedings of these three persons being likewise so other. Say
something shall have passed between Cissy at a _then_ 25, or 24 at most,
and Gray "on the other side"; this a matter of but two or three
occasions, interesting to him, shortly before his stepfather's death--a
person with whom she has then professed herself greatly struck, to whom
she has been somehow very "nice": a circumstance pleasing and touching
at the time to Gray, given his great attachment to that charming, or at
any rate to Gray very attaching, though for us slightly mysterious,
character. Say even if it doesn't take, or didn't, too much exhibition
or insistence, that the meeting has been with the stepfather only, who
has talked with her about Gray, made a point of Gray, wished she could
know Gray, excited her interest and prepared her encounter for Gray, in
some conditions in which Gray has been temporarily absent from him. Say
this little intercourse has taken place at some "health resort", some
sanatorium or other like scene of possibilities, where the stepfather,
for whom I haven't even yet a name, is established, making his cure,
staving off the affection of which he dies, while this interesting young
American creature is also there in attendance on some relative whom she
also has since lost. I multiply my orphans rather, Charlotte too having
been an orphan; but I can keep this girl only a half-orphan perhaps if I
like. I kind of want her, for the sake of the characteristic, to have a
mother, without a father; in which case her mother, who hasn't died, but
got better, will have been her companion at the health resort; though it
breaks a little into my view of the girl's dependence, her isolation
etc., her living so much with these other people, if her mother is
about. On the other hand the mother may be as gently but a charge the
more for her, and so in a manner conducive; though it's a detail, at any
rate, settling itself as I get in close--and she would be at the worst
the only mother in the business. What I seem to like to have at all
events is that Gray and Cissy, have _not_ met, yet have been in this
indirect relation--complicated further by the fact of her existing
"friendship", say, as a temporary name for it, with Horton Vint. She
arrives thus with her curiosity, her recollections, her
intelligence--for, there's no doubt about it, I am, rather as usual,
offering a group of the personally remarkable, in a high degree, all
round. Augusta Bradham, really, is about the only stupid one, the only
approach to a fool, though she too in her way is a force, a driving
one--that is the whole point; which happens to mark a difference also,
so far good, from the Assinghams, where it was the wife who had the
intelligence and the husband who was in a manner the fool. The fact of
the personal values, so to call them, thus clustered, I of course not
only accept, but cherish; that they are each the particular individual
of the particular weight being of course of the essence of my donnée.
They are interesting that way--I have no use for them here in any other.
Horton has meanwhile become in a sort tied up with Cissy, as she has
with him; through the particular conditions of their sentiment for each
other--she in love with him, so far as she, by her conviction and
theory, has allowed herself to go in that direction for a man without
money, though destined somehow to have it, as she feels; and he in love
with her under the interdict of a parity of attitude on the whole
"interested" question. The woman whom he would give truly one of his
limbs to commend himself to is Rosanna, who perfectly knows it and for
whom he serves as the very compendium and symbol of that danger of her
being approached only on that ground, the ground of her wealth, which
is, by all the mistrusts and terrors it creates, the deep note of her
character and situation; that he serves to her as the very type of what
she most dreads, not only the victory, but the very approach of it,
almost constituting thus a kind of frank relation, a kind of closeness
of contact between them, that involves for her almost a sinister (or
whatever) fascination. It is between him and my ambitious young woman (I
call her ambitious to simplify) that they are in a manner allies in what
may be called their "attitude to society"; the frankness of their
recognition, on either side, that in a world of money they can't _not_
go in for it, and that accordingly so long as neither has it, they can't
go in for each other: though how each would--each makes the other
feel--if it could all be only on a different basis! Horty's attitude is
that he's going to have it somehow, and he to a certain extent infects
her with this conviction--but that he doesn't wholly do so is exactly
part of the evidence as to that latent limitation of the _general_ trust
in him which I must a good deal depend on to explain how it is that,
with his ability, or the impression of this that he also produces, he
hasn't come on further. Deep down in the girl is her element of
participation in this mistrust too--which is part of the reason why she
hangs back, in spite of the kind of attraction he has for her, from any
consent to, say, marry him. He, for that matter, hasn't in the least
urged the case either--it hasn't been in him up to now, in spite of a
failure or two, in spite of the failure notably with Rosanna, to close
by a positive act the always possibly open door to his marrying money.
I see the recognition of all this between them as of well-nigh the
crudest and the most typical, the most "modern"; in fact I see their
relation as of a highly exhibitional value and interest. What the Girl
indeed doesn't, and doesn't want to (up to now) express, is exactly that
limit, and the ground of it, of her faith in him as a financial
conqueror. She is willing more or less to believe, to confide, in his
own confidence--she sees him indeed as more probably than not marked for
triumphant acquisition; but the latent, "deep down" thing is her
wonderment as to the character of his methods--if the so-called straight
ones won't have served or sufficed. She sees him as a fine
adventurer--which is a good deal too how she sees herself; but almost
crude though I have called their terms of mutual understanding it hasn't
come up for them, and I think it is absolutely never to come up for
them, that she so far faces this question of his "honour", or of any
capacity in him for deviation from it, as even to conjure it away. There
are depths within depths between them--and I think I understand what I
mean if I say there are also shallows beside shallows. They give each
other rope and yet at the same time remain tied; that for the moment is
a sufficient formula--once I keep the case lucid as to what their tie
is.
What accordingly does her situation in respect to Gray come to, and how
do I see it work out? The answer to that involves of course the question
of what his, in respect to her, comes to, and what it gives me for
interest. She has got her original impression about him over there as of
the man without means to speak of; but it is as the heir to a fortune
that she now first sees him, and as the person coming in virtue of that
into the world she lives in, where her power to guide, introduce and
generally help and aid and comfort him, shows from the first as
considerable. She strikes him at once as the creature, in all this
world, the most European and the most capable of, as it were,
understanding him intellectually, entering into his tastes etc. He
recognises quickly that, putting Davey Bradham perhaps somewhat aside,
she is the being, up and down the place, with whom he is going to be
able most to _communicate._ With Rosanna he isn't going to communicate
"intellectually", æsthetically, and all the rest, the least little bit:
Rosanna has no more taste than an elephant; Rosanna is only _morally_
elephantine, or whatever it is that is morally most massive and
magnificent. What I want is to get my right firm _joints_, each working
on its own hinge, and forming together the play of my machine: they
_are_ the machine, and when each of them is settled and determined it
will work as I want it. The first of these, definitely, is that Gray
does inherit, has inherited. The next is that he is face to face with
what it means to have inherited. The next to that is that one of the
things it means--though this isn't the light in which he first sees the
fact--is that the world immensely opens to him, and that one of the
things it seems most to give him, to offer and present to him, is this
brilliant, or whatever, and interesting young woman. He doesn't at first
at all see her in the light of her making up to him on account of his
money; she is too little of a crudely interested specimen for that, and
too sincere in fact to herself--feeling very much about him that she
would certainly have been drawn to him, after this making of
acquaintance, even if no such advantages attached to him and he had
remained what he had been up to then. But all the same it is a Joint,
and we see that it is by seeing _her_ as we shall; I mean I make it and
keep it one by showing "what goes on" between herself and Horton. I have
blessedly that view, that alternation of view, for my process throughout
the action. The determination of her interest towards him--that then is
a Joint. And let me make the point just here that at first he has
nothing but terror, but horror, of seeing himself affected as Rosanna
has been by her own situation--from the moment, that is, he begins to
take in that she is so affected. He takes this in betimes from various
signs--before that passes between them which gives him her case in the
full and lucid way in which he comes to have it. _She_ gives it to him
presently--but at first as her own simply, holding her hand entirely
from intimating that his need be at all like it; as she must do, for
that matter, given the fact that it is really through her action that he
was brought over to see his uncle. She thinks her feelings about her own
case right and inevitable for herself; but I want to make it an
interesting and touching inconsistency in her that she desires not to
inspire him, in respect to his circumstances, with any correspondingly
justified sense. Definite is it that what he learns, he learns not the
least mite from herself, though after a while he comes quite to
challenge her on it, but from Davey Bradham, so far as he learns it, for
the most part, concretely and directly--as many other impressions as I
can suggest helping besides. I want him at all events to have a full
large clear moment or season of exhilaration, of something like
intoxication, over the change in his conditions, before questions begin
to come up. An essential Joint is constituted by their beginning to come
up, and the difference that this begins to make. What I want of Davey
Bradham is that he is a determinant in this shift of Gray's point of
view, though I want also (and my scenario has practically provided for
that) that the immediate amusement of his contact with Davey shall be
quite compatible with his _not_ yet waking up, _not_ yet seeing
questions loom. I must keep it well before me too that his whole
enlarged vision of the money-world, so much more than any other sort of
world, that all these people constitute, operates inevitably by itself,
promotes infinite reflection, makes a hundred queer and ugly things, a
thousand, ten thousand, glare at him right and left. A Joint again is
constituted by Gray's first consciousness of malaise, first
determination of malaise, in the presence of more of a vision, and more
and more impression of everything; which determination, as I call it, I
want to proceed from some sense in him of Cissy's attitude as affected
by his own reactions, exhibition of questions, wonderments and, to put
it simply and strongly, rising disgusts. She has appealed to him at the
outset, on his first apprehension of her, exactly as a poor girl who
wasn't meant to be one, who has been formed by her nature and her
experience to rise to big brilliant conditions, carry them, take them
splendidly, in fine do all justice to them; this under all the first
flush of what I have called his own exhilaration. He hasn't then
committed himself, in the vulgar sense, at all--had only committed
himself, that is, to the appearance of being interested and charmed: his
imaginative expansion for that matter being naturally too great to
permit for the moment of particular concentration or limitations. But
isn't his incipient fear of beginning to be, of becoming, such another
example, to put it comprehensively, as Rosanna, doesn't this proceed
precisely from the stir in him of certain disconcerting, complicating,
in fact if they go a little further quite blighting, wonderments in
respect to Cissy's possibilities? She throws her weight with him into
the _happy_ view of his own; which is what he likes her, wants her, at
first encourages her to do, lending himself to it while he feels
himself, as it were, all over. Mrs. Bradham, all the while, backs her up
and backs _him_ up, and is in general as crude and hard and blatant, as
vulgar is what it essentially comes to, in her exhibited desire to bring
about their engagement, as is exactly required for producing on him just
the wrong effect. Gray's tone to the girl becomes, again to simplify:
"Oh yes, it's all right that you should be rich, should have all the
splendid things of this world; but I don't see, I'm not sure, of its
being in the least right that _I_ should--while I seem to be making out
more and more, round me, how so many of them are come by." It is the
insistence on them, the way everyone, among that lot at any rate,
appears aware of no values but those, that sets up more and more its
effect on his nerves, his moral nerves as it were, and his reflective
imagination. The girl counters to this of course--she isn't so crude a
case as not to; she denies that she's the sort of existence that he thus
imputes--all the while that she only sees in his attitude and his
position a kind of distinction that would simply add to their situation,
simply gild and after a fashion decorate it, were she to marry him. I
want to make another Joint with her beginning, all the same, to doubt of
him, to think him really perhaps capable of strange and unnatural
things, which she doesn't yet see at all clearly; but which take the
form for her of his possibly handing over great chunks of his money to
public services and interests, deciding to be munificent with it, after
the fashion of Rockefellers and their like: though with the enormous
difference that his resources are not in the slightest degree of that
calibre. He's rich, yes, but not rich enough to remain rich if he goes
in for that sort of overdone idealism. Some passage bearing on this
takes place, I can see, about at the time when he has the so to call it
momentous season, or scene, or whatever, of confidence or exchange with
Rosanna in which she goes the whole "figure", as they say, and puts to
him that exactly her misery is in having come in for resources that
should enable her to do immense things, but that are so dishonoured and
stained and blackened at their very roots, that it seems to her that
they carry their curse with them, and that she asks herself what
application to "benevolence" as commonly understood, can purge them, can
make them anything but continuators, somehow or other, of the wrongs in
which they had their origin. This, dramatically speaking, is momentous
for Gray, and it makes a sort of clearing up to realities between him
and Rosanna which offers itself in its turn, distinctly, as a Joint. It
makes its mark for value, has an effect, leaves things not as they were.
But meanwhile what do I see about Horton, about the situation between
them, so part and parcel of the situation between Gray and Cissy and
between Horton and Cissy. Absolute the importance, I of course
recognise, of such a presentation of matters between her and Horton, and
Horton and her, as shall stand behind and under everything that takes
place from this point. In my adumbration of a scenario for these earlier
aspects I have provided, I think, for this; at any rate I do hereby
provide. I want to give the effect, for all it's worth, of their being
constantly, chronically, naturally and, for my drama, determinatively,
in communication; with which it more and more comes to me that when the
great _coup_ of the action effects itself Gray shall have been brought
to it as much by the forces determining it on her behalf, in relation to
her, in a word, as by those determining it in connection with Horton.
She helps him to his solution about as much as Horton does, and,
lucidly, logically, ever so interestingly, everything between them up to
the verge is but a preparation for that. Enormous meanwhile the relation
with Horton constituted by his making over to this dazzling person (by
whom moreover he wants to be, consents to be, dazzled) the care or
administration of his fortune; for which highly characteristic, but
almost, in its freehandedness, abnormally, there must have been
preparation, absolutely, and oh, as I can see, ever so interestingly, in
Book 2, the section containing his face to face parts with Mr.
Betterman. It comes to me as awfully fine, given the way in which I
represent the old dying man as affected and determined, to sweep away
everything in the matter of precautions and usualisms, provisions for
trusteeships and suchlike, and lump the whole thing straight on to the
young man, without his having a condition or a proviso to consider. What
I have wanted is that he should at a stroke, as it were, in those last
enshrouded, but perfectly possessed hours, make over his testament
utterly and entirely, in the most simplified way possible; in short by
a sweeping codicil that annihilates what he has done before and puts
Gray in what I want practically to count as unconditioned possession.
Thank the Lord I have only to give the effect of this, for which I can
trust myself, without going into the ghost of a technicality, any
specialising demonstration. I need scarcely tell myself that I don't by
this mean that Gray makes over matters definitely and explicitly to
Horton at once, with attention called to the tightness with which his
eyes are shut and all his senses stopped or averted; but that naturally
and inevitably, also interestingly, this result proceeds, in fact very
directly and promptly springs, from his viewing and treating his friend
as his best and cleverest and vividest adviser--whom he only doesn't
rather abjectly beg to take complete and irresponsible charge because he
is ashamed of doing so. Two things very definite here; one being that
Gray isn't in the least blatant or glorious about his want, absolutely
phenomenal in that world, of any faint shade of business comprehension
or imagination, but is on the contrary so rather helplessly ashamed of
it that he keeps any attitude imputable to him as much as possible out
of the question--and in fact proceeds in the way I know. He has moments
of confidence--he tells Rosanna, makes a clean breast to her and with
Horton doesn't need to be explicit, beyond a point, since all his
conduct expresses it. What happens is that little by little, inevitably,
as a consequence of first doing this for him and then doing that and
then the other, Horton more and more gets control, gets a kind of
unlimited play of hand in the matter which practically amounts to a sort
of general power of attorney; as Gray falls into the position, under a
feeling insurmountably directing him, of signing anything, everything,
that Horton brings to him for the purpose--but only what Horton brings.
The state of mind and vision and feeling, the state of dazzlement with
reserves and reflections, the play of reserves and reflections with
dazzlement (which is my convenient word covering here all that I intend
and prefigure) is a part of the very essence of my subject--which in
fine I perfectly possess. What happens is, further, that, even with the
rapidity which is of the remarkable nature of the case, Horton shows for
a more and more monied, or call it at first a less and less non-monied
individual; with an undisguisedness in this respect which of itself
imposes and, vulgarly speaking, succeeds. I express these things here
crudely and summarily, by rude signs and hints, in order to express them
at all; but what is of so high an interest, and so bright and
characteristic, is that Horton is "splendid", plausible, delightful,
_because_ exactly so logical and happily suggestive, about all this; he
puts it to Gray that _of course_ he is helping himself by helping Gray,
that _of course_ his connection with Gray does him good in the business
world and gives him such help to do things for himself as he has never
before had. I needn't abound in this sense here, I am too well possessed
of what I see--as I find myself in general more and more. A tremendous
Joint is formed, in all this connection, when the first definite
question begins to glimmer upon Gray, under some intimation, suggestion,
impression, springing up as dramatically as I can make it, as to what
Horton is really doing with him, and as to whether or no he shall really
try to find out. That question of whether or no he _shall becomes_ the
question; just as the way he answers it, not all at once, but under
further impressions invoked, becomes a thing of the liveliest interest
for us; becomes a consideration the climax of which represents exactly
the Joint that is in a sense the climax of the Joints. He sees--well
what I see him see, and it is of course not at all this act of vision in
itself, but what takes place in consequence of it, and the process of
confrontation, reflection, resolution, that ensues--it is this that
brings me up to my high point of beautiful difficulty and clarity. An
exquisite quality of representation here of course comes in, with
everything that is involved to make it rich and interesting. A Joint
here, a Joint of the Joint, for perfect flexible working, is Horton's
vision of his vision, and Horton's exhibited mental, moral audacity of
certainty as to what that may mean for himself. There is a scene of
course in which, between them, this is what it can only be provisionally
gross and approximate to call settled: as to which I needn't insist
further, it's _there_; what I want is there; I've only to pull it out:
it's _all_ there, heaped up and pressed together and awaiting the
properest hand. So much just now for _that._