to the last perfection; or to be destined and committed so to do, at any
rate, as one presses it with the right pressure. How shall I put it for
the moment, _her_ case, in the very simplest and most rudimentary terms?
She sees the improvement in Horton's situation, she assists at it, it
gives her pleasure, it even to a certain extent causes her wonder, but a
wonder which the pleasure only perches on, so to speak, and converts to
its use; so does the vision appeal to her and hold her of the exercise
on his part, the more vivid exercise than any she has yet been able to
enjoy an exhibition of, of the ability and force, the _doing_ and
man-of-action quality, as to the show of which he has up to now been so
hampered. She likes his success at last, plainly, and he has it from her
that she likes it; she likes to let him know that she likes it, and we
have her for the time in contemplation, as it were, of these two
beautiful cases of possession and acquisition, out of which indeed poor
little impecunious she gets as yet no direct advantage, but which are
somehow together there _for_ her with a kind of glimmering looming
option well before her as to how they shall _come_ yet to concern her.
Awfully interesting and attractive, as one says, to mark the point (such
a Joint _this!_) at which the case begins to glimmer for Gray about her,
as it has begun to glimmer for him about Horton. I make out here, so far
as I catch the tip of the tail of it, such an interesting connection and
dependence, for what I may roughly call Gray's state of mind, as to what
is taking place within Cissy, so to speak. Since I speak of the most
primitive statement of it possible he catches the moment at which she
begins to say to herself "But if Horton, if _he_, is going to be
rich----?" as a positive arrest, say significant warning or omen, in his
own nearer approach to her; which takes on thereby a portentous, a kind
of ominous and yet enjoyable air of evidence as to his own likelihood,
at this rate, of getting poor. He catches her not asking herself withal,
at least _then_, "_How_ is Horton going to be rich, _how_, at such a
rate, has it come on, and what does it mean?"--it is only the "_If_
Horton, oh _if_----?" that he comes up against; it's as if he comes up
against, as well, some wondrous implication in it of "If, if, _if_ Mr.
Gray is, 'in such a funny way,' going to be poor----?" He sees her
_there_, seeing at the same time that it's as near as she yet gets; as
near perhaps even--for this splendid apprehension sort of begins to take
place in him--as she's going to allow herself to get; and after the
first chill of it, shock of it, pain of it (because I want him to be at
the point at which he has _that_) fades a little away for him, he
emerging or shaking himself out of it, the beautiful way in which it
falls into the general ironic apprehension, imagination, appropriation,
of the Whole, becomes for him _the_ fact about it. She has them, each on
his side, there in her balance--and this is between them, between him
and her; I must have prepared everything right for its being oh such a
fine moment. What I want to do of course is to get out of _this_
particular situation all it can give; what it most gives being, to the
last point, the dramatic quality, intensity, force, current or whatever,
of Gray's apprehension of it, once this is determined, and of course
wondering interest in it--as a light, so to speak, on both of the
persons concerned. What I see is that she gives him the measure, as it
were, of Horton's successful proceeding--and does so, in a sort, without
positively having it herself, or truly wanting to have it beyond the
fact that it is success, is promise and prospect of acquisition on a big
scale. What it comes to is that he finds her believing in Horton just at
the time and in proportion as he has found himself ceasing to believe,
so far as the latter's disinterestedness is concerned. No better, no
more vivid illustration of the force of the money-power and
money-prestige rises there before him, innumerably as other examples
assault him from all round. The effect on her is there for him to
"study," even, if he will; and in fact he does study it, studies it in a
way that (as he also sees) makes her think that this closer
consideration of her, approach to her, as it were, is the expression of
an increased sympathy, faith and good will, increased desire, in fine,
to make her like him. All the while it is, for Gray himself, something
other; yet something at the same time wellnigh as absorbing as if it
were what she takes it for. The fascination of seeing what will come of
it--that is of the situation, the state of vigilance, the wavering
equilibrium, at work, or at play, in the young woman--this "fascination"
very "amusing" to show, with everything that clusters about it. He
really enjoys getting so detached from it as to be able to have it
before him for observation and wonder as he does, and I must make the
point very much of how this fairly soothes and relieves him, begins to
glimmer upon him exactly _through_ that consciousness as something like
the sort of issue he has been worrying about and longing for. Just so
something that he makes out as distinguishable there in Horton, a
confidence more or less dissimulated but also, deeply within, more or
less determined, operates in its way as a measure for him of Horton's
intimate sense of how things will go for him; the confidence referring,
I mustn't omit, to his possibility of Cissy, after all, whom his
sentiment for makes his most disinterested interest, so to call it: all
this in a manner corresponding to that apprehension in Gray of _her_
confidence, which I have just been sketchily noting. The one
disinterested thing in Horton, that is, consists of his being so
attached to her that he really cares for her freedom, cares for her
doing what on the whole she most wants to, if it will but come as she
wants it, by the operation, the evolution, so to say, of her clear
preference. He has somehow within him a sense that anyway, whatever
happens, they shall not fail of being "friends" after all. I see myself
wanting to have Gray come up against some conclusive sign of how things
_are_ at last between them--though I say "at last" as if he has had
_much_ other light as to how such things _have_ been, precedently. I
don't want him to _have_ had much other light, though he needs of course
to have had _some_; there being people enough to tell him, he being so
in the circle of talk, reference, gossip; but with his own estimate of
the truth of ever so much of the chatter in general, and of that chatter
in particular, taking its course. What I seem to see just in this
connection is that he has "believed" so far as to take it that she _has_
"cared" for his friend in the previous time, but that Horton hasn't
really at all cared for her, keeping himself in reserve as it is of his
essence to do, and in particular (this absolutely _known_ to Gray) never
having wholly given up his views on Rosanna. Gray believes that he
hasn't, at any rate, and this helps him not to fit the fact of the
younger girl's renounced, quenched, outlived, passion, or whatever one
may call it, to any game of patience or calculation, rooted in a like
state of feeling, on Horton's part. I want the full effect of what I can
only call for convenience Gray's Discovery, his full discovery of them
"together", in some situation, and its illuminating and signifying, its
in a high degree, to repeat again my cherished word, determinant
character. This effect requires exactly what I have been roughly
marking--the line of argument in which appearances, as interpreted for
himself, have been supporting Gray. "She has been in love with him,
yes--but nothing has come of it--nothing could come of it; because,
though he has been aware, and has been nice and kind to her, he isn't
affected in the same way--is, in these matters, too cool and calculating
a bird. He likes women, yes; and has had lots to do with them; but in
the way of what a real relation with _her_ would have meant--not! She
has given him up, she has given it up--whereby one is free not to worry,
not to have scruples, not to fear to cut across the possibility of one's
friend." That's a little compendium of what I see. But it comes to me
that I also want something more--for the full effect and the exact
particular and most pointed bearing of what I dub Gray's discovery. He
must have put it to Horton, as their relations have permitted at some
suggested hour, or in some relevant connection: "Do you mind telling me
if it's true--what I've heard a good deal affirmed--that there has been
a question of an engagement between you and Miss Foy?--or that you are
so interested in her that to see somebody else making up to her would be
to you as a pang, an affront, a ground of contention or challenge or
whatever?" I seem to see that, very much indeed; and by the same token
to see Horton's straight denegation. I see Horton say emphatically
No--and this for reasons quite conceivable in him, once one apprehends
their connection with his wishing above all, beyond anything else that
he at this moment wishes, to keep well with Gray. His denegation is
plausible; Gray believes it and accepts it--all the more that at the
moment in question he _wants_ to, in the interest of his own freedom of
action. Accordingly the point I make is that when he in particular
conditions finds them all unexpectedly and unmistakably "together", the
discovery becomes for him _doubly_ illuminating. I might even better say
trebly; showing him in the very first place that Horton has lied to him,
and thereby that Horton _can_ lie. This very interesting and
important--but also, in a strange way, "fascinating" to him. It shows in
the second way how much Cissy is "thinking" of Horton, as well as he of
her; and it shows in the last place, which makes it triple, how well
Horton must think of the way his affairs are getting on that he can now
consider the possibility of a marriage--that he can feel, I mean, he can
_afford_ to marry; not having need of one of the Rosanna's to make up
for his own destitution. This clinches enormously, as by a flash of
vision, Gray's perception of what he is about; and is thus very
intensely a Joint of the first water! What I want to be carried on to
is the point at which all that he sees and feels and puts together in
this connection eventuates in a decision or attitude, in a clearing-up
of all the troubled questions, obscurities and difficulties that have
hung for him about what I call his Solution, about what he shall be
most at ease, most clear and consistent for himself, in making up his
mind to. The process here and the position on his part, with all the
implications and consequences of the same in which it results, is
difficult and delicate to formulate, but I see with the last intensity
the sense of it, and feel how it will all come and come as I get nearer
to it. What is a big and beautiful challenge to a whole fine handling
of these connections in particular is the making conceivable and clear,
or in other words credible, consistent, vivid and interesting, the
particular extraordinary relation thus constituted between the two men.
That one may make it these things for Gray is more or less calculable,
and, as I seem to make out, workable; but the greatest beauty of the
difficulty is in getting it and keeping it in the right note and at the
right pitch for Horton. Horton's "acceptance"--on what prodigious basis
save the straight and practical view of Gray's exalted queerness and
constitutional, or whatever, perversity, can _that_ be shown as resting?
Two fine things--that is one of them strikes me as very fine--here come
to me; one of these my seeing (_don't_ I see it?) how it will fall in,
not to say fall out, as of the essence of the true workability, that the
extent to which i's are not dotted between them, are left consciously
undotted, to which, to the most extraordinary tune, and yet with the
logic of it all straight, they stand off, or rather Gray does, the other
all demonstrably thus taking his cue--the way, I say, in which the
standing-off from sharp or supreme clearances is, and confirms itself as
being, a note of my hero's action in the matter, throws upon one the
most interesting work. Horton accepts it as exactly part of the
prodigious queerness which he humours and humours in proportion as Gray
will have it that he shall; the "fine thing", the second of the two,
just spoken of, being that Horton never flinches from his perfectly
splendid theory that he is "taking care", consummately, of his friend,
and that he is arranging, by my exhibition of him, just as consummately
to _show_ for so doing. No end, I think, to be got out of this wondrous
fact of Gray's sparing Horton, or saving him, the putting of anything to
a real and direct Test; such a Test as would reside in his asking
straight for a large sum of money, a big amount, really consonant with
his theoretically intact resources arid such as he with the highest
propriety in the world might simply say that he has an immediate use
for, or can make some important application of. No end, no end, as I
say, to what I see as given me by this--this huge constituted and
accepted eccentricity of Gray's holdings-off. I have the image of the
relation between them made by it in my vision thus of the way, or the
ways, they look at each other even while talking together to a tune
which would logically or consistently make these ways _other_; the sort
of education of the look that it breeds in Horton on the whole ground of
"how far he may go." The things that pass between them after this
fashion quite beautiful to do if kept from an overdoing; with Horton's
formula of his "looking after" Gray completely interwoven with his whole
ostensibility. It is with this formula that Horton meets the world all
the while--the world that at a given moment can only find itself so full
of wonderment and comment. It is with it above all that he meets Cissy,
who takes it from him in a way that absolutely helps him to keep it up;
and it _would_ be with it that he should meet Rosanna if, after a given
day or season, he might find it in him to dare, as it were, to "meet"
Rosanna at all. It is with Horton's formula, which I think I finally
show him as quite publicly delighting in, that Gray himself meets
Rosanna, whom he meets a great deal all this time; with such passages
between them as are only matched in another sense, and with all the
other values with which they swell, so to speak, by his passages with
the consummate Horton. Charming, by which I mean such interesting,
things resident in what I _there_ touch on; with the way _they_ look at
each other, Rosanna and Gray, if one is talking about looks. Gray keeps
it in comedy, so far as he can--making a tone, a spell, that Rosanna
doesn't break into, as she breaks, anything to call _really_ breaks,
into nothing as yet: I seem to see the final, from-far-back-prepared
moment when she does, for the first and last time, break as of a big and
beautiful value. _That_ will be a Joint of Joints; but meanwhile what is
between them is the sombre confidence, tenderness, fascination, anxiety,
a dozen admirable things, with which she waits on Gray's tone, not
playing up to it at all (playings-up and suchlike not being verily in
her) but taking it from him, accommodating herself to it with all her
anxiety and her confidence somehow mixed together, as if to see how far
it will carry her. Such a lot to be done with Gussie Bradham, portentous
woman, even to the very cracking or bursting of the mould meanwhile--so
functional do I see her, in spite of the crowding and pressing together
of functions, as to the production of those (after all early-determined)
reactions in Gray by the simple complete exhibition of her type and
pressure and aggressive mass. She is really worth a book by herself, or
would be should I look that way; and I just here squeeze what I most
want about her into a sort of nutshell by saying that it marks for Gray
just where and how his Solution, or at any rate some of its significant
and attendant aspects, swims into his ken, with the very first scene she
makes him about the meanness then of his conception of his opportunity.
Then it is he feels he must be getting a bit into the truth of
things--if that's the way he strikes her. His very measure of taste and
delicacy and the sympathetic and the nice and the what he wants, becomes
after a fashion what she will want most to make him a scene about. I
have it at first that he lends himself, that her great driving tone and
pressure, her would-be act of possession of him, Cissy and the question
of Cissy being the link, have amounted to a sort of trouble-saving thing
which he has let himself "go to", which he has suffered as his
convenient push or handy determinant, for the hour (sceptical even then
as to its lasting)--but which has inordinately overdosed him,
overhustled him, almost, as he feels in his old habit of financial
contraction, overspent and overruined him. He does the things, the
social things, for the moment, that she prescribes, that she foists upon
him as the least ones he can decently do; does them even with a certain
bewildered amusement--while Rosanna, brooding apart, so to speak, out of
the circle and on her own ground, but ever so attentive, draws his eye
to the effect of what one might almost call the intelligent, the
patience-inviting, wink! Oh for the pity of scant space for specific
illustration of Mrs. Bradham; where-with indeed of course I reflect on
the degree to which my planned compactness, absolutely precious and not
to be compromised with, must restrict altogether the larger
illustrational play. Intensities of foreshortening, with alternate
vividnesses of extension: that is the rough label of the process. I keep
it before me how mixed Cissy is with certain of the consequences of this
hustlement of Mrs. Bradham, and how bullyingly, so to call it almost,
she has put the whole matter of what he ought to "do for them all," on
the ground in particular of what it is so open to him, so indicated for
him, to do for that poor dear exquisite thing in especial.
Illustrational, illustrational, yes; but oh how every inch of it will
have to count. I seem to want her to have made him do some one rather
gross big thing above all, as against his own sense of fineness in these
matters; and to have this thing count somehow very much in the matter of
his relation with Cissy. I seem to want something like his having
consented to be "put up" by her to the idea of offering Cissy something
very handsome by way of a "kind" tribute to her mingled poverty and
charm--jolly, jolly, I think Eve exactly got it! I keep in mind that
Mrs. Bradham wants him to marry her--this amount of "disinterestedness"
giving the measure of Mrs. B. at her most exalted "best". Wherewith, to
consolidate this, her delicacy being capable--well, of what we shall
see, she works of course to exaggeration the idea of his "recognising"
how nice Cissy was, over there in the other time, to his poor sick
stepfather, who himself so recognised it, who wrote to her so charmingly
a couple of times "about it", after her return to America and quite
shortly before his death. Gray "knows about this", and of course will
quite see what she means. Therefore wouldn't it be nice for Gray to give
her, Cissy, something really beautiful and valuable and socially helpful
to her--as of course he can't give her money, which is what would be
most helpful. Under this hustlement, in fine, and with a sense, born of
his goodnature, his imagination, and his own delicacy, such a very
different affair, of what Gussie Bradham has done for him, by her
showing, he finds himself in for having bought a very rare single row of
pearls, such as a girl, in New York at least, may happily wear, and
presenting it to our young person as the token of recognition that Mrs.
Bradham has imagined for them. The beauty in which, I see, is that it
may be illustrational in more ways than one--illustrational of the
hustle, of the length Gray has "appreciatively" let himself go, and,
above all, of Cissy's really interesting intelligence and "subtlety".
She refuses the gift, very gently and pleadingly, but as it seems to him
really pretty well finally--refuses it as not relevant or proportionate
or congruous to any relation in which they yet stand to each other, and
as oh ever so much over-expressing any niceness she may have shown in
Europe. She does, in doing this, exactly what he has felt at the back of
his head that she would really do, and what he likes her for doing--the
effect of which is that she has furthered her interest with him
decidedly more (as she of course says to herself) than if she had taken
it. He is left with it for the moment on his hands, and what I want is
that he shall the next thing find himself, in revulsion, in reaction,
there being for him no question of selling it again etc., finds himself,
I say, offering it to Mrs. Bradham herself, who swallows it without
winking. Yet, in a way, this little history of the pearls, of her not
having had them, and of his after a fashion owing her a certain
compensation for that, owing her something she _can_ accept, is there
_between_ him and my young person. They figure again between them,
humorously, freely, ironically--the girl being of an irony!--in their
appearances on Mrs. Bradham's person, to whose huge possession of
ornament they none the less conspicuously add.
But my point here is above all that Gray exactly _doesn't_ put the
question of what is becoming of his funds under Horty's care of them to
the test by any cultivation of that courage for large drafts and big
hauls, that nerve for believing in the fairy-tale of his sudden fact of
possession, which was briefly and in a manner amusingly possible to him
at the first go off of his situation. He forbears, abstains, stands off,
and finds himself, or in particular is found by others, to the extent of
their observing, wondering and presently challenging him, to be living,
to be drawing on his supposed income, with what might pass for the most
extraordinarily timorous and limited imagination. He _likes_ this
arrest, enjoys it and feels a sort of wondrous refreshing decency, at
any rate above all a refreshing interest and curiosity about it, or,
rather, for it; but what his position involves is his explaining it to
others, his making up his mind, his having to, for a line to take about
it, without his thereby giving Horton away. He isn't to give Horton away
the least scrap from this point on; but at the same time he is to have
to deal with the world, with society, with the entourage consisting for
him, in its most pressing form, of, say, three representative
persons--he has to deal with this challenge, as I have called it, in
some way that will sort of meet it _without_ givings-away. These three
persons are in especial Rosanna and the two Bradhams; and it is before
me definitely, I think, that I want to express, and in the very vividest
way, his sense of his situation here, of what it means, and of what _he_
means, _in_ it, through what takes place for him about it with Rosanna
and with the Bradhams. It is by what he "says" to the Bradhams and to
Rosanna (in the way, that is largely, of _not_ saying) that I seem to
see my values here as best got, and the presentation of their different
states most vivified and dramatised. These are scenes, and the function
of them to serve up for us exactly, and ever so lucidly, what I desire
them to represent. If the greatest interest of them, of sorts, belongs
to them in so far as they are "with" Rosanna, there are yet particular
values that belong to the relation with Davey, and the three relations,
at any rate, work the thing for me. They are perfectly different, on
this lively ground, though the "point" involved is the same in each; and
the having each of them to do it with should enable me to do it
beautifully; I mean to squeeze _all_ the dramatic sense from it. The
great beauty is of course for the aspects with Rosanna, between whom and
him everything passes--and there is so much basis already in what has
been between them--without his "explaining", as I have called it,
anything. Even without explanations--or all the more by reason of their
very absence--there is so much of it all; of the question and the
dramatic illumination. With Gussie Bradham--_that_ aspect I needn't
linger or insist on, here, so much as a scrap. I have that, see it all,
it's _there._ But with Davey I want something very good, that is in
other words very functional; and I think I even wonder if I don't want
to see Davey as attempting to borrow money of him. This--if I do see
it--will take much putting on the right basis; and it seems to kind of
glimmer upon me richly what the right basis is. My idea has been from
the first that the Bradham money is all Gussie's; I have seen Davey, by
the very type and aspect, by all his detached irony and humour and
indiscretion and general value as the unmonied young man who has married
the heiress, as Horton would have been had he been able to marry
Rosanna. But no interfering analogy need trouble me here; Horton's not
having done that, and the essential difference between the men, eases
off any such question. Only don't I seem to want it that Gussie's
fortune, besides not having been even remotely comparable to Rosanna's,
is, though with a fair outward face, a dilapidated and undermined
quantity, much ravaged by Gussie's violent strain upon it, and
representing thus, through her general enormous habit and attitude, an
association and connection with the money world, but all the more
characteristically so, for Gray as he begins to see, that almost
everything but the pitch of Gussie's wants and arrangements and ideals
has been chucked, as it were, out of its windows and doors. Don't I
really see the Bradhams thus as _predatory?_ Predatory on the very rich,
that is; with Gussie's insistence that Gray shall _be_ and shall proceed
as quite one of the _very_, oh the very, very, exactly in order that she
_may_ so prey? Yes and so it is that Gray learns--so it is that a part
of Davey's abysses of New York financial history, is his own, their own,
but his in particular, abyss of inconvenience, abyss of inability to
keep it up combined with all the social impossibility of not doing so. I
somehow want such values of the supporting and functional and
illustrative sort in Davey that I really think I kind of want him to be
the person, _the_ person, to whom Gray gives--as a kind of recognition
of the remarkable part, the precious part, don't I feel it as being?
that Davey plays for him. He likes so the illuminating Davey, whom I'm
quite sure I want to show in no malignant or vicious light, but just as
a regular rag or sponge of saturation in the surrounding medium. He is
beyond, he is outside of, all moral judgments, all scandalised states;
he is amused at what he himself does, at his general and particular
effect and effects on Gray, who is his luxury of a relation, as it were,
and whom I somehow seem to want to show him feel as the only person in
the whole medium appreciating his genius; in other words his detached
play of mind and the deep "American humour" of it. Don't I seem to want
him even as asking for something rather big?--a kind of a lump of a sum
which Gray, always with amusement, answers that he will have to see
about. Gray's seeing about anything of this sort means, all notedly,
absolutely _all_, as I think I have it, asking Horton whether he can,
whether he may, whether Horton will give it to him, whether in short the
thing will suit Horton; even without any disposition of the sum, any
account of what he wants to do, indicated or reported or confessed to
Horton? Don't I see something like this?--that Gray, having put it to
Horton, has precisely determined, for his vision, on Horton's part, just
that first important plea of "Really you can't, you know, at this
rate"--even after Gray has been for some time so "ascetic"--"It won't be
convenient for you just now; and I must ask you really, you know, to
take my word for it that you'd much better not distract from what I am
in the act of doing for you such a sum"--by which I mean, for I am
probably using here not the terms Horton _would_ use--"much better not
make such a call (call is the word) when I am exactly doing for you
etc." What I seem to see is that Davey does have money from him, but has
it only on a scale that falls short, considerably, of his appeal or
proposal or whatever; in other words that Gray accommodates him to the
third, or some other fraction, of the whole extent; and that this
involves for him practically the need of his saying that Horton won't
let him have more. I want that, I see it as a value; I see Davey's
aspect on it as a value, I see what is determined thus between them as a
value; and I seem to see most this _covering_ by Gray of Horton in
answer to the insinuations, not indignant but amused, in answer to the
humorously fantastic picture, on Davey's lips, of the rate at which
Horton is cleaning him out or whatever, this taking of the line of so
doing and of piling up plausibilities of defence, excuse etc., so far as
poor Gray can be plausible in these difficult "technical" connections,
as the vivid image, the vividest, I am most concerned to give of what I
show him as doing. The covering of Horton, the covering of Horton--this
is much more than not giving him away; this active and positive
protection of him seems to me really what my subject logically asks.
Well then if that is it, is what it most of all, for the dramatic value,
asks, how can this be consistently less than Gray's act of going all the
way indeed? I don't know why--as it has been hovering before me--I don't
want the complete vivid sense of it to take the form of an awful, a
horrible or hideous, crisis on Horton's part which, under the stress of
it, he "suddenly" discloses to Gray, throwing himself upon him in the
most fevered, the most desperate appeal for relief. What then
constitutes the nature of the crisis, what _then_ can, or constitute the
urgency of the relief, unless the fact of his having something
altogether dreadful to confess; so dreadful that it can only involve the
very essence of his reputation, honour and decency, his safety in short
before the law? He has been guilty of some huge irregularity, say--but
which yet is a different thing from whatever irregularities he has been
guilty of in respect to Gray himself; and which up to now, at the worst,
have left a certain substantial part of Gray's funds intact. Say that,
say that; turn it over, that is, to see if it's really wanted. I think
of it as wanted because I feel the need of the effect of some _acute_
determination play up as I consider all this--and yet also see
objections; which probably will multiply as I look a little closer. I
throw this off, at all events, for the moment, as I go, to be looked at
straighter, to return to presently--after I've got away from it a bit, I
mean from this special aspect a little, in order to come back to it
fresher; picking up meanwhile two or three different matters.
The whole question of what my young man has been positively interested
in, been all the while more or less definitely occupied with, I have
found myself leaving, or at any rate have left, in abeyance, by reason
of a certain sense of its comparative unimportance. That is I have felt
my instinct to make him definitely and frankly as complete a case as
possible of the sort of thing that will make him an anomaly and an
outsider alike in the New York world of business, the N. Y. world of
ferocious acquisition, and the world there of enormities of expenditure
and extravagance, so that the real suppression for him of anything that
shall count in the American air as a money-making, or even as a
wage-earning, or as a pecuniarily picking-up character, strikes me as
wanted for my emphasis of his entire difference of sensibility and of
association. I have always wanted to do an out and out non-producer, in
the ordinary sense of non-accumulator of material gain, from the moment
one should be able to give him a positively interested aspect on another
side or in another sense, or even definitely a _generally_ responsive
intelligence. I see my figure then in this case as an absolutely frank
example of the tradition and superstition, the habit and rule so
inveterate there, frankly and serenely deviated from--these things
meaning there essentially some mode of sharp reaching out for money over
a counter or sucking it up through a thousand contorted channels. Yet I
want something as different as possible, no less different, I mean, from
the people who are "idle" there than from the people who are what is
called active; in short, as I say, an out and out case, and of course an
avowedly, an exceptionally fine and special one, which antecedents and
past history up to then may more or less vividly help to account for. A
very special case indeed is of course our Young Man--without his being
which my donnée wouldn't come off at all; his being so is just of the
very core of the subject. It's a question therefore of the way to make
him _most_ special--but I so distinctly see this that I need scarce here
waste words----! There are three or four definite facts and
considerations, however; conditions to be seen clear. I want to steer
clear of the tiresome "artistic" associations hanging about the usual
type of young Anglo-Saxon "brought up abroad"; though only indeed so far
as they _are_ tiresome. My idea involves absolutely Gray's taking his
stand, a bit ruefully at first, but quite boldly when he more and more
sees what the opposite of it over there is so much an implication of, on
the acknowledgment that, no, absolutely, he hasn't anything at all to
show in the way of work achieved--with _such_ work as he has seen
achieved, whether apologetically or pretentiously, as he has lived
about; and yet has up to now not had at all the sense of a vacuous
consciousness or a so-called wasted life. This however by reason of
course of certain things, certain ideas, possibilities, inclinations and
dispositions, that he has cared about and felt, in his way, the
fermentation of. Of course the trouble with him is a sort of excess of
"culture", so far as the form taken by his existence up to then has
represented the growth of that article. Again, however, I see that I
really am in complete possession of him, and that no plotting of it as
to any but one or two material particulars need here detain me. He
isn't, N.B., big, personally, by which I mean physically; I see that I
want him rather below than above the middling stature, and light and
nervous and restless; extremely restless above all in presence of
swarming new and more or less aggressive, in fact quite assaulting
phenomena. Of course he has had _some_ means--that he and his stepfather
were able to live in a quiet "European" way and on an income of an
extreme New York deplorability, is of course of the basis of what has
been before; with which he must have come in for whatever his late
companion has had to leave. So with what there was from his mother, very
modest, and what there is from this other source, not less so, he _can_,
he could, go back to Europe on a sufficient basis: this fact to be kept
in mind both as mitigating the prodigy of his climax in N.Y., and yet at
the same time as making whatever there is of "appeal" to him over there
conceivable enough. Note that the statement he makes, when we first know
him, to his dying uncle, the completeness of the picture of detachment
then and there drawn for him, and which, precisely, by such an
extraordinary and interesting turn, is what most "refreshes" and works
upon Mr. Betterman--note, I say, that I absolutely require the utterness
of his difference to _be_ a sort of virtual determinant in this
relation. He puts it so to Rosanna, tells her how extraordinarily he
feels that this is what it _has_ been. Heaven forbid he should
"paint"--but there glimmers before me the sense of the connection in
which I can see him as more or less covertly and waitingly, fastidiously
and often too sceptically, conscious of possibilities of "writing".
Quite frankly accept for him the complication or whatever of his
fastidiousness, yet of his recognition withal of what makes for
sterility; but again and again I have all this, I have it. His
"culture", his initiations of intelligence and experience, his
possibilities of imagination, if one will, to say nothing of other
things, make for me a sort of figure of a floating island on which he
drifts and bumps and coasts about, wanting to get alongside as much as
possible, yet always with the gap of water, the little island _fact_, to
be somehow bridged over. All of which makes him, I of course desperately
recognise, another of the "intelligent", another exposed and assaulted,
active and passive "mind" engaged in an adventure and interesting in
_itself_ by so being; but I rejoice in that aspect of my material as
dramatically and determinantly _general._ It isn't _centrally_ a drama
of fools or vulgarians; it's only circumferentially and surroundedly
so--these being enormously implied and with the effect of their hovering
and pressing upon the whole business from without, but seen and felt by
us only with that rich indirectness. So far so good; but I come back for
a moment to an issue left standing yesterday--and beyond which, for that
matter, two or three other points raise their heads. Why did it appear
to come up for me again--I having had it present to me before and then
rather waved it away--that one might see Horton in the _kind_ of crisis
that I glanced at as throwing him upon Gray with what I called violence?
Is it because I feel "something more" is wanted for the process by which
my Young Man works off the distaste, his distaste, for the ugliness of
his inheritance--something more than his just _generally_ playing into
Horton's hands? I am in presence there of a beautiful difficulty,
beautiful to solve, yet which one must be to the last point
crystal-clear about; and this difficulty is certainly added to if Gray
sees Horton as "dishonest" in relation to others over and above his
being "queer" in the condoned way I have so to picture for his relation
to Gray. Here are complexities not quite easily unravelled, yet
manageable by getting sufficiently close to them; complexities, I mean,
of the question of whether----? Horton is abysmal, yes--but with the
mixture in it that Gray sees. Ergo I want the mixture, and if I adopt
what I threw off speculatively yesterday I strike myself as letting the
mixture more or less go and having the non-mixture, that is the "bad" in
him, preponderate. It has been my idea that this "bad" figures in a
degree to Gray as after a fashion his own creation, the creation, that
is, of the enormous and fantastic opportunity and temptation he has held
out--even though these wouldn't have operated in the least, or couldn't,
without predispositions in Horton's very genius. If Gray saw him as a
mere vulgar practiser of what he does practise, the interest would by
that fact exceedingly drop; there would be no interest indeed, and the
beauty of my "psychological" picture wouldn't come off, would have no
foot to stand on. The beauty is in the complexity of the
question--which, stated in the simplest terms possible, reduces itself
to Horton's practically saying to Gray, or seeing himself as saying to
Gray should it come to the absolute touch: "You _mind_, in your
extraordinary way, how this money was accumulated and hanky-pankied, you
suffer, and cultivate a suffering, from the perpetrated wrong of which
you feel it the embodied evidence, and with which the possession of it
is thereby poisoned for you. But I don't mind one little scrap--and
there is a great deal more to be said than you seem so much as able to
understand, or so much as able to want to, about the whole question of
how money comes to those who know _how_ to make it. Here you are then,
if it's so disagreeable to you--and what can one really say, with the
chances you give me to say it, but that if you are so burdened and
afflicted, there are ways of relieving you which, upon my honour, I
should perfectly undertake to work--given the facilities that you so
morbidly, so fantastically, so all but incredibly save for the testimony
of my senses, permit me to enjoy." _That_, yes; but that is very
different from the wider range of application of the aptitudes
concerned. The confession, and the delinquency preceding it, that played
a bit up for me yesterday--what do they do but make Horton just as
vulgar as I _don't_ want him, and, as I immediately recognise, Gray
wouldn't in the least be able to stomach seeing him under any
continuance of relations. I have it, I have it, and it comes as an
answer to _why_ I _worried?_ Because of felt want of a way of providing
for some Big Haul, really big; which my situation absolutely requires.
There must be at a given moment a big haul in order to produce the big
sacrifice; the latter being of the absolute essence. I say I have it
when I ask myself why the Big Haul shouldn't simply consist of the
consequence of a confession made by Horton to Gray, yes; but made not
about what he has lost, whether dishonestly or not, for somebody else,
but what he has lost for Gray. Solutions here bristle, positively, for
the case seems to clear up from the moment I make Horton put his matter
as a mere disastrous loss, of unwisdom, of having been "done" by others
and not as a thing involving his own obliquity. What I want is that he
_pleads the loss_--whether loss to Gray, loss to another party, or loss
to both, is a detail. I incline to think loss to Gray sufficient--loss
that Gray accepts, which is different from his meeting the disaster
inflicted on another by Horton. What I want a bit is all contained in
Gray's question, afterwards determined, not absolutely present at the
moment, of whether this fact has not been a feigned or simulated one,
not a genuine gulf of accident, but an appeal for relinquishment
practised on Gray by the latter's liability to believe that the cause is
genuine. I clutch the idea of this determinant of rightness of suspicion
being one with the circumstance that Cissy in a sort of _thereupon_
manner "takes up" with Horton, instead of not doing so, as figures to
Gray as discernible if Horton were merely minus. Is it cleared up for
Gray that the cause is not genuine?--does he get, or does he seek, any
definite light on this? Does he tell any one, that is does he tell
Rosanna of the incident (though I want the thing of proportions bigger
than those of a mere incident)--does he put it to her, in short does he
take her into his confidence about it? I think I see that he does to
this extent, that she is the only person to whom he speaks, but that he
then speaks with a kind of transparent and, as it were, (as it is in her
sight) "sublime" dissimulation. Yes, I think that's the way I want
it--that he tells her what has happened, tells it to her as having
happened, as a statement of what he has done or means to do--perhaps his
mind isn't even yet made up to it; whereby I seem to get a very
interesting passage of drama and another very fine "Joint." He doesn't,
no, decidedly, communicate anything to Davey Bradham--his instinct has
been against that--and I feel herewith how much I want this D.B.
relation for him to have all its possibility of irony, "comedy",
humorous colour, so to speak. I want awfully to do D.B. to the full and
give him all his value. However, it's of the situation here with Rosanna
that the question is, and I seem to feel that still further clear up for
me. There has been the passage, the big circumstance, with Horton--as to
which, as to the sense of which and of what it involves for him, don't I
after all see him as taking time? after all see him as a bit staggered
quand même, and, as it were, _asking_ for time, though without any
betrayal of "suspicion", any expression tantamount to "What a queer
story!" Yes, yes, it seems to come to me that I want the _determination
of suspicion_ not to come at once; I want it to hang back and wait for a
big "crystallisation," a falling together of many things, which now
takes place, as it were, in Rosanna's presence and under her
extraordinary tacit action, in that atmosphere of their relation which
has already given me, or _will_ have given, not to speak presumptuously,
so much. It kind of comes over me even that I don't want _any_
articulation to _himself_ of the "integrity" question in respect to
Horton to have taken place at all--till it very momentously takes place
all at once in the air, as I say, and on the ground, and in the course,
of this present scene. Immensely interesting to have made Everything
precedent to have consisted but in preparation for this momentousness,
so that the whole effect has been gathered there ready to break. At the
same time, if I make it break not in the right way, unless I so rightly
condition its breaking, I do what I was moved just above to bar, the
giving away of Horton to Rosanna in the sense that fixing his behaviour
upon him, or inviting or allowing her to fix it, is a thing I see my
finer alternative to. The great thing, the great find, I really think,
for the moment, is this fact of his having gone to her in a sort of
still preserved uncertainty of light that amounts virtually to darkness,
and then after a time with her coming away with the uncertainty
dispelled and the remarkable light instead taking its place. That gives
me my very form and climax--in respect to the "way" that has most
perplexed me, and gathers my action up to the fulness so proposed and
desired; to the point after which I want to make it workable that there
shall be but two Books left. In other words the ideal will be that this
whole passage, using the word in the largest sense, with all the
accompanying aspects, shall constitute Book 8, "Act" 8, as I call it, of
my drama, with the dénouement occupying the space to the end--for the
foregoing is of course not in the least the dénouement, but only
prepares it, just as what is thus involved is the occupancy of Book 7 by
the history with Horton. Of course I can but reflect that to bring this
splendid economy off it must have been practised up _to_ VII with the
most intense and immense art: the scheme I have already sketched for I
and II leaving me therewith but III, IV, V, and VI to arrive at the
completeness of preparation for VII, which carries in its bosom the
completeness of preparation for VIII--this last, by a like grand law,
carrying in _its_ pocket the completeness of preparation for IX and X.
But why not? Who's afraid? and what has the very essence of my design
been but the most magnificent packed and calculated closeness? Keep this
closeness up to the notch while admirably _animating_ it, and I do what
I should simply be sickened to death not to! Of course it means the
absolute exclusively _economic_ existence and situation of every
sentence and every letter; but again what is that but the most desirable
of beauties in _itself?_ The chapters of history with Rosanna leave me
then to show, speaking simply, its effect with regard to (I assume I put
first) Gray and Horton, to Gray and Cissy, to Cissy and Horton, to Gray
and Mrs. Bradham on the one hand and to Gray and Davey on the other and
finally and supremely to Gray and Rosanna herself. It is of course
definitely on that note the thing closes--but wait a little before I
come to it. Let me state as "plainly" as may be what "happens" as the
next step in my drama, the next Joint in the action after the climax of
the "scene" with Rosanna. Obviously the first thing is a passage with
Horton, the passage _after_, which shall be a pendant to the passage
before. But don't I want some episode to interpose here on the momentous
ground of the Girl? These sequences to be absolutely planned and fitted
together, of course, up to their last point of relation; to work such
complexity into such compass can only be a difficulty of the most
inspiring--the prize being, naturally, to achieve the lucidity _with_
the complexity. What then is the lucidity for us about my heroine, and
exactly what is it that I want and don't want to show? I want something
to take place here between Gray and her that _crowns_ his vision and his
action in respect to Horton. As I of course want every point and comma
to be "functional", so there's nothing I want that more for than for
this aspect of my crisis--which does, yes, decidedly, present itself
before Gray has again seen Horton. I seem even to want this aspect, as I
call it, to be the decisive thing in respect to his "decision". I want
something to have still depended for him on the question of how she is,
what she does, what she makes him see, however little intending it, of
her sensibility to the crisis, as it were--knowing as I do what I mean
by this. But what does come up for me, and has to be faced, is all the
appearance that all this later development that I have sketched and am
sketching, rather directly involves a deviation from that _help by
alternations_ which I originally counted on, and which I began by
drawing upon in the first three or four Books. What becomes after the
first three or four then of that variation--if I make my march between
IV and VIII inclusive all a matter of what appears to Gray? Perhaps on
closer view I can for the "finer amusement" escape that
frustration--though it would take some doing; and the fact remains that
I don't really want, and can't, any other exhibition than Gray's own
_except_ in the case of Horton and the Young Woman. I should like _more_
variation than just that will yield me withal--so at least it strikes
me; but if I press a bit a possibility perhaps will rise. Two things
strike me: one of these being that instead of making Book 9 Gray's "act"
I may make it in a manner Cissy's own; save that a terrific little
question here comes up as involved in the very essence of my cherished
symmetry and "unity". The absolute prime compositional idea ruling me is
thus the unity of each Act, and I get unity with the Girl for IX only if
I keep it _to_ her and whoever else. To her and Horton, yes, to her and
Gray (Gray first) yes; only how then comes in the "passage" of Gray and
Horton without her, and which I don't want to push over to X. It would
be an "æsthetic" ravishment to make Book 10 balance with Book 1 as
Rosanna's affair; which I glimmeringly see as interestingly possible if
I can wind up somehow as I want to do between Gray and Horton. In
connection with which, however, something again glimmers--the
possibility of making Book 9 quand même Cissy and Horton and Gray;
twisting out, that is, some admirable way of her being participant in,
"present at", what here happens between them as to their own affair. I
say these things after all with the sense, so founded on past
experience, that, in closer quarters and the intimacy of composition,
pre-noted arrangements, proportions and relations, do most uncommonly
insist on making themselves different by shifts and variations, always
improving, which impose themselves as one goes and keep the door open
always to something _more_ right and _more_ related. It is subject to
that constant possibility, all the while, that one does pre-note and
tentatively sketch; a fact so constantly before one as to make too idle
any waste of words on it. At the same time I do absolutely and utterly
want to stick, even to the very depth, to the _general_ distribution
here imagined as I have groped on; and I am at least now taking a
certain rightness and conclusiveness of parts and items for granted
until the intimate tussle, as I say, happens, if it does happen, to
dislocate or modify them. Such an assumption for instance I find myself
quite loving to make in presence of the vision quite colouring up for me
yesterday of Book 9 as given to Gray and Horton and Cissy Together, as I
may rudely express it, and Book 10, to repeat, given, with a splendid
richness and comprehensiveness, to Rosanna, as I hope to have shown Book
I as so given. Variety, variety--I want to go in for that for all the
possibilities of my case may be worth; and I see, I feel, how a sort of
fond fancy of it is met by the distribution, the little cluster of
determinations, or, so to speak, for the pleasure of putting it,
determinatenesses, so noted. It gives me the central mass of the thing
for my hero's own embrace and makes beginning and end sort of confront
each other over it.
Is it vain to do anything but say, that is but feel, that this situation
of the Three in Book 9 absolutely demands the intimate grip for clearing
itself up, working itself out? Yes, perfectly vain, I reflect, as at all
precluding the high urgency and decency of my seeing in advance just how
and where I plant my feet and direct my steps. Express absolutely, to
this end, the conclusive sense, the clear firm function, of Book 9--out
of which the rest bristles. I want it, as for that matter I want each
Book, with the last longing and fullest intention, to be what it is
"amusing" and regaling to think of as "complete in itself"; otherwise a
thoroughly expressed Occasion, or as I have kept calling it Aspect, such
as one can go at, thanks to the flow of the current in it, in the
firmest possible little narrative way. The form of the Occasion is the
form that I somehow see as here very _particularly_ presenting itself
and contributing its aid to that impression of the Three Together which
I try to focus. Where, exactly, and exactly how, are they thus vividly
and workably together?--what is the most "amusing" way of making them
so? It is fundamental for me to note that my action represents and
embraces the sequences of a Year, not going beyond this and not falling
short of it. I can't get my Unity, can't keep it, on the basis of more
than a year, and can't get my complexity, don't want to, in anything a
bit less. I see a Year right, in fine, and it brings me round therefore
to the early summer from the time of my original Exposition. With which
it comes to me of course that one of the things accruing to Gray under
his Uncle's Will is the house at Newport, which belonged to the old man,
and which I have no desire to go into any reason whatever for his heir's
having got rid of. There is the house at Newport--as to which it comes
over me that I kind of see him in it once or twice during the progress
of the autumn's, the winter's, the spring's events. Isn't it also a part
of my affair that I see the Bradhams with a Newport place, and am more
or less encouraged herewith to make out the Scene of Book 9, the
embracing Occasion, of the three, as a "staying" of them, in the natural
way, the inevitable, the illustrative, under some roof that places them
vividly in relation to each other. Of _course_ Mrs. Bradham has her
great characteristic house away from N.Y., where anything and everything
may characteristically find their background--the whole case being
compatible with that lively shakiness of fortune that I have glanced at;
only I want to keep the whole thing, so far as my poor little
"documented" state permits, on the lines of absolutely current New York
practice, as I further reflect I probably don't want to move Gray an
inch out of N.Y. "during the winter", this probably a quite
unnecessarily bad economy. Having what I have of New York isn't the
question of using it, and it only, as entirely adequate from Book 4 to 8
inclusive? To keep everything as like these actualities of N.Y. as
possible, for the sake of my "atmosphere", I must be wary and wise; in
the sense for instance that said actualities don't at all comprise
people's being at Newport _early_ in the summer. How then, however, came
the Bradhams to be there at the time noted in my Book 1? I reflect
happily apropos of this that my there positing the early summer (in Book
1) is a stroke that I needn't at all now take account of; it having been
but an accident of my small vague plan as it glimmered to me from the
very first go-off. No, definitely, the time-scheme must a bit move on,
and give help there--by to the place-scheme; if I want Gray to arrive en
plein Newport, as I do for immediate control of the assault of his
impressions, it must be a matter of August rather than of June; and
nothing is simpler than to shift. Let me indeed so far modify as to
conceive that 15 or 16 months will be as workable as a Year--practically
they will count as the period both short enough and long enough; and
will bring me for Nine and Ten round to the Newport or whatever of
August, and to the whatever else of some moment of beauty and harmony in
the American autumn. Let me wind up on a kind of strong October or
perhaps even better still--yes, better still--latish November, in other
words admirable Indian Summer, note. That brings me round and makes the
circle whole. Well then I don't seem to want a repetition of Newport--as
if it were, poor old dear, the only place known to me in the
country!--for the images that this last suggestion causes more or less
to swarm. By the blessing of heaven I am possessed, sufficiently to say
so, of Lenox, and Lenox for the autumn is much more characteristic too.
What do I seem to see then?--as I don't at all want, or imagine myself
wanting at the scratch, to make a local jump between Nine and Ten. These
things come--I see them coming now. Of course it's perfectly
conceivable, and entirely characteristic, that Mrs. Bradham should have
a place at Lenox as well as at Newport; if it's necessary to posit her
for the previous summer in her own house at the latter place. It's
perfectly in order that she may have taken one there for the summer--and
that having let the Lenox place at that time may figure as a sort of
note of the crack in her financial aspect that is part, to _call_ it
part, of my concern. All of which are considerations entirely meetable
at the short range--save that I do really seem to kind of want Book 10
at Lenox and to want Nine there by the same stroke. I should like to
stick Rosanna at the beautiful Dublin, if it weren't for the grotesque
anomaly of the name; and after all what need serve my purpose better
than what I already have? It's provided for in Book I that she and her
father had only taken the house at Newport for a couple of months or
whatever; so that is all to the good. Oh yes, all that New England
mountain-land that I thus get by radiation, and thus welcome the idea of
for values surging after a fashion upon Gray, appeals to one to "do" a
bit, even in a measure beyond one's hope of space to do it. Well before
me surely too the fact that my whole action does, can only, take place
in the air of the last actuality; which supports so, and plays into, its
sense and its portée. Therefore it's a question of all the intensest
modernity of every American description; cars and telephones and
facilities and machineries and resources of certain sorts not to be
exaggerated; which I can't not take account of. Assume then, in fine,
the Bradhams this second autumn at Lenox, assume Gussie blazing away as
if at the very sincerest and validest top of her push; assume Rosanna as
naturally there in the "summer home" which has been her and her father's
only possessional alternative to N.Y. I violate verisimilitude in not
brushing them all, all of the N.Y. "social magnates", off to Paris as
soon as Lent sets in, by their prescribed oscillation; but who knows but
what it will be convenient quite exactly to shift Gussie across for the
time, as nothing then would be more in the line of truth than to have
her bustle expensively back for her Lenox proceedings of the autumn.
These things, however, are trifles. All I have wanted to thresh out a
bit has been the "placing" of Nine and Ten; and for this I have more
than enough provided.
What it seems to come to then is the "positing" of Cissy at Lenox with
the Bradhams at the time the circumstances of Book Eight have occurred;
it's coming to me with which that I seem exactly to want them to occur
in the empty town, the New York of a more or less torrid
mid-August--this I feel so "possessed of"; to which Gray has "come back"
(say from Newport where he has been for a bit alone in his own house
there, to think, as it were, with concentration); come back precisely
for the passage with Horton. So at any rate for the moment I seem to see
_that_; my actual point being, however, that Cissy is posited at Lenox,
that the Book "opens" with her, and that it is in the sense I mean "her"
Book. She is there waiting as it were on what Horton does, so far as I
allow her intelligence of this; and it is there that Gray finds her on
his going on to Lenox whether under constraint (by what has gone before)
of a visit to the Bradhams, a stay of some days with them, or under the
interest of a conceivable stay with Rosanna; a sort of thing that I
represent, or at any rate "posit", as perfectly in the line of Rosanna's
present freedom and attributes. Would I rather have him with Rosanna and
"going over" to the Bradhams? would I rather have him with the Bradhams
and going over to Rosanna?--or would I rather have him at neither place
and staying by himself at an hotel, which seems to leave me the right
margin? There has been no staying up to this point for him with either
party, and I have as free a hand as could be. With which there glimmer
upon me advantages--oh yes--in placing him in his own independence;
especially for Book 10: in short it seems to come. Don't I see Cissy as
having obtained from Gussie Bradham that Horton shall be invited--which
fact in itself I here provisionally throw off as giving me perhaps a
sort of starting value.
[Footnote 3: From this point the names of the characters, most of which
were still uncertain, are given in accordance with Henry James' final
choice; though it may be noted that he was to the end dissatisfied with
the name of Cissy Foy and meant to choose another.]