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<h1> THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY </h1>
<h2> VOLUME I (of II) </h2>
<h2> By Henry James </h2>
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<h2> PREFACE </h2>
<p>"The Portrait of a Lady" was, like "Roderick Hudson," begun in Florence,
during three months spent there in the spring of 1879. Like "Roderick" and
like "The American," it had been designed for publication in "The Atlantic
Monthly," where it began to appear in 1880. It differed from its two
predecessors, however, in finding a course also open to it, from month to
month, in "Macmillan's Magazine"; which was to be for me one of the last
occasions of simultaneous "serialisation" in the two countries that the
changing conditions of literary intercourse between England and the United
States had up to then left unaltered. It is a long novel, and I was long
in writing it; I remember being again much occupied with it, the following
year, during a stay of several weeks made in Venice. I had rooms on Riva
Schiavoni, at the top of a house near the passage leading off to San
Zaccaria; the waterside life, the wondrous lagoon spread before me, and
the ceaseless human chatter of Venice came in at my windows, to which I
seem to myself to have been constantly driven, in the fruitless fidget of
composition, as if to see whether, out in the blue channel, the ship of
some right suggestion, of some better phrase, of the next happy twist of
my subject, the next true touch for my canvas, mightn't come into sight.
But I recall vividly enough that the response most elicited, in general,
to these restless appeals was the rather grim admonition that romantic and
historic sites, such as the land of Italy abounds in, offer the artist a
questionable aid to concentration when they themselves are not to be the
subject of it. They are too rich in their own life and too charged with
their own meanings merely to help him out with a lame phrase; they draw
him away from his small question to their own greater ones; so that, after
a little, he feels, while thus yearning toward them in his difficulty, as
if he were asking an army of glorious veterans to help him to arrest a
peddler who has given him the wrong change.</p>
<p>There are pages of the book which, in the reading over, have seemed to
make me see again the bristling curve of the wide Riva, the large
colour-spots of the balconied houses and the repeated undulation of the
little hunchbacked bridges, marked by the rise and drop again, with the
wave, of foreshortened clicking pedestrians. The Venetian footfall and the
Venetian cry—all talk there, wherever uttered, having the pitch of a
call across the water—come in once more at the window, renewing
one's old impression of the delighted senses and the divided, frustrated
mind. How can places that speak IN GENERAL so to the imagination not give
it, at the moment, the particular thing it wants? I recollect again and
again, in beautiful places, dropping into that wonderment. The real truth
is, I think, that they express, under this appeal, only too much—more
than, in the given case, one has use for; so that one finds one's self
working less congruously, after all, so far as the surrounding picture is
concerned, than in presence of the moderate and the neutral, to which we
may lend something of the light of our vision. Such a place as Venice is
too proud for such charities; Venice doesn't borrow, she but all
magnificently gives. We profit by that enormously, but to do so we must
either be quite off duty or be on it in her service alone. Such, and so
rueful, are these reminiscences; though on the whole, no doubt, one's
book, and one's "literary effort" at large, were to be the better for
them. Strangely fertilising, in the long run, does a wasted effort of
attention often prove. It all depends on HOW the attention has been
cheated, has been squandered. There are high-handed insolent frauds, and
there are insidious sneaking ones. And there is, I fear, even on the most
designing artist's part, always witless enough good faith, always anxious
enough desire, to fail to guard him against their deceits.</p>
<p>Trying to recover here, for recognition, the germ of my idea, I see that
it must have consisted not at all in any conceit of a "plot," nefarious
name, in any flash, upon the fancy, of a set of relations, or in any one
of those situations that, by a logic of their own, immediately fall, for
the fabulist, into movement, into a march or a rush, a patter of quick
steps; but altogether in the sense of a single character, the character
and aspect of a particular engaging young woman, to which all the usual
elements of a "subject," certainly of a setting, were to need to be super
added. Quite as interesting as the young woman herself at her best, do I
find, I must again repeat, this projection of memory upon the whole matter
of the growth, in one's imagination, of some such apology for a motive.
These are the fascinations of the fabulist's art, these lurking forces of
expansion, these necessities of upspringing in the seed, these beautiful
determinations, on the part of the idea entertained, to grow as tall as
possible, to push into the light and the air and thickly flower there;
and, quite as much, these fine possibilities of recovering, from some good
standpoint on the ground gained, the intimate history of the business—of
retracing and reconstructing its steps and stages. I have always fondly
remembered a remark that I heard fall years ago from the lips of Ivan
Turgenieff in regard to his own experience of the usual origin of the
fictive picture. It began for him almost always with the vision of some
person or persons, who hovered before him, soliciting him, as the active
or passive figure, interesting him and appealing to him just as they were
and by what they were. He saw them, in that fashion, as disponibles, saw
them subject to the chances, the complications of existence, and saw them
vividly, but then had to find for them the right relations, those that
would most bring them out; to imagine, to invent and select and piece
together the situations most useful and favourable to the sense of the
creatures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to
produce and to feel.</p>
<p>"To arrive at these things is to arrive at my story," he said, "and that's
the way I look for it. The result is that I'm often accused of not having
'story' enough. I seem to myself to have as much as I need—to show
my people, to exhibit their relations with each other; for that is all my
measure. If I watch them long enough I see them come together, I see them
PLACED, I see them engaged in this or that act and in this or that
difficulty. How they look and move and speak and behave, always in the
setting I have found for them, is my account of them—of which I dare
say, alas, que cela manque souvent d'architecture. But I would rather, I
think, have too little architecture than too much—when there's
danger of its interfering with my measure of the truth. The French of
course like more of it than I give—having by their own genius such a
hand for it; and indeed one must give all one can. As for the origin of
one's wind-blown germs themselves, who shall say, as you ask, where THEY
come from? We have to go too far back, too far behind, to say. Isn't it
all we can say that they come from every quarter of heaven, that they are
THERE at almost any turn of the road? They accumulate, and we are always
picking them over, selecting among them. They are the breath of life—by
which I mean that life, in its own way, breathes them upon us. They are
so, in a manner prescribed and imposed—floated into our minds by the
current of life. That reduces to imbecility the vain critic's quarrel, so
often, with one's subject, when he hasn't the wit to accept it. Will he
point out then which other it should properly have been?—his office
being, essentially to point out. Il en serait bien embarrasse. Ah, when he
points out what I've done or failed to do with it, that's another matter:
there he's on his ground. I give him up my 'sarchitecture,'" my
distinguished friend concluded, "as much as he will."</p>
<p>So this beautiful genius, and I recall with comfort the gratitude I drew
from his reference to the intensity of suggestion that may reside in the
stray figure, the unattached character, the image en disponibilite. It
gave me higher warrant than I seemed then to have met for just that blest
habit of one's own imagination, the trick of investing some conceived or
encountered individual, some brace or group of individuals, with the
germinal property and authority. I was myself so much more antecedently
conscious of my figures than of their setting—a too preliminary, a
preferential interest in which struck me as in general such a putting of
the cart before the horse. I might envy, though I couldn't emulate, the
imaginative writer so constituted as to see his fable first and to make
out its agents afterwards. I could think so little of any fable that
didn't need its agents positively to launch it; I could think so little of
any situation that didn't depend for its interest on the nature of the
persons situated, and thereby on their way of taking it. There are methods
of so-called presentation, I believe among novelists who have appeared to
flourish—that offer the situation as indifferent to that support;
but I have not lost the sense of the value for me, at the time, of the
admirable Russian's testimony to my not needing, all superstitiously, to
try and perform any such gymnastic. Other echoes from the same source
linger with me, I confess, as unfadingly—if it be not all indeed one
much-embracing echo. It was impossible after that not to read, for one's
uses, high lucidity into the tormented and disfigured and bemuddled
question of the objective value, and even quite into that of the critical
appreciation, of "subject" in the novel.</p>
<p>One had had from an early time, for that matter, the instinct of the right
estimate of such values and of its reducing to the inane the dull dispute
over the "immoral" subject and the moral. Recognising so promptly the one
measure of the worth of a given subject, the question about it that,
rightly answered, disposes of all others—is it valid, in a word, is
it genuine, is it sincere, the result of some direct impression or
perception of life?—I had found small edification, mostly, in a
critical pretension that had neglected from the first all delimitation of
ground and all definition of terms. The air of my earlier time shows, to
memory, as darkened, all round, with that vanity—unless the
difference to-day be just in one's own final impatience, the lapse of
one's attention. There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth
in this connexion than that of the perfect dependence of the "moral" sense
of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it. The
question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the
artist's prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject
springs. The quality and capacity of that soil, its ability to "grow" with
due freshness and straightness any vision of life, represents, strongly or
weakly, the projected morality. That element is but another name for the
more or less close connexion of the subject with some mark made on the
intelligence, with some sincere experience. By which, at the same time, of
course, one is far from contending that this enveloping air of the
artist's humanity—which gives the last touch to the worth of the
work—is not a widely and wondrously varying element; being on one
occasion a rich and magnificent medium and on another a comparatively poor
and ungenerous one. Here we get exactly the high price of the novel as a
literary form—its power not only, while preserving that form with
closeness, to range through all the differences of the individual relation
to its general subject-matter, all the varieties of outlook on life, of
disposition to reflect and project, created by conditions that are never
the same from man to man (or, so far as that goes, from man to woman), but
positively to appear more true to its character in proportion as it
strains, or tends to burst, with a latent extravagance, its mould.</p>
<p>The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million—a
number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which
has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need
of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will. These
apertures, of dissimilar shape and size, hang so, all together, over the
human scene that we might have expected of them a greater sameness of
report than we find. They are but windows at the best, mere holes in a
dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft; they are not hinged doors opening
straight upon life. But they have this mark of their own that at each of
them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-glass,
which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique instrument,
insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every
other. He and his neighbours are watching the same show, but one seeing
more where the other sees less, one seeing black where the other sees
white, one seeing big where the other sees small, one seeing coarse where
the other sees fine. And so on, and so on; there is fortunately no saying
on what, for the particular pair of eyes, the window may NOT open;
"fortunately" by reason, precisely, of this incalculability of range. The
spreading field, the human scene, is the "choice of subject"; the pierced
aperture, either broad or balconied or slit-like and low-browed, is the
"literary form"; but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the
posted presence of the watcher—without, in other words, the
consciousness of the artist. Tell me what the artist is, and I will tell
you of what he has BEEN conscious. Thereby I shall express to you at once
his boundless freedom and his "moral" reference.</p>
<p>All this is a long way round, however, for my word about my dim first move
toward "The Portrait," which was exactly my grasp of a single character—an
acquisition I had made, moreover, after a fashion not here to be retraced.
Enough that I was, as seemed to me, in complete possession of it, that I
had been so for a long time, that this had made it familiar and yet had
not blurred its charm, and that, all urgently, all tormentingly, I saw it
in motion and, so to speak, in transit. This amounts to saying that I saw
it as bent upon its fate—some fate or other; which, among the
possibilities, being precisely the question. Thus I had my vivid
individual—vivid, so strangely, in spite of being still at large,
not confined by the conditions, not engaged in the tangle, to which we
look for much of the impress that constitutes an identity. If the
apparition was still all to be placed how came it to be vivid?—since
we puzzle such quantities out, mostly, just by the business of placing
them. One could answer such a question beautifully, doubtless, if one
could do so subtle, if not so monstrous, a thing as to write the history
of the growth of one's imagination. One would describe then what, at a
given time, had extraordinarily happened to it, and one would so, for
instance, be in a position to tell, with an approach to clearness, how,
under favour of occasion, it had been able to take over (take over
straight from life) such and such a constituted, animated figure or form.
The figure has to that extent, as you see, BEEN placed—placed in the
imagination that detains it, preserves, protects, enjoys it, conscious of
its presence in the dusky, crowded, heterogeneous back-shop of the mind
very much as a wary dealer in precious odds and ends, competent to make an
"advance" on rare objects confided to him, is conscious of the rare little
"piece" left in deposit by the reduced, mysterious lady of title or the
speculative amateur, and which is already there to disclose its merit
afresh as soon as a key shall have clicked in a cupboard-door.</p>
<p>That may he, I recognise, a somewhat superfine analogy for the particular
"value" I here speak of, the image of the young feminine nature that I had
had for so considerable a time all curiously at my disposal; but it
appears to fond memory quite to fit the fact—with the recall, in
addition, of my pious desire but to place my treasure right. I quite
remind myself thus of the dealer resigned not to "realise," resigned to
keeping the precious object locked up indefinitely rather than commit it,
at no matter what price, to vulgar hands. For there ARE dealers in these
forms and figures and treasures capable of that refinement. The point is,
however, that this single small corner-stone, the conception of a certain
young woman affronting her destiny, had begun with being all my outfit for
the large building of "The Portrait of a Lady." It came to be a square and
spacious house—or has at least seemed so to me in this going over it
again; but, such as it is, it had to be put up round my young woman while
she stood there in perfect isolation. That is to me, artistically
speaking, the circumstance of interest; for I have lost myself once more,
I confess, in the curiosity of analysing the structure. By what process of
logical accretion was this slight "personality," the mere slim shade of an
intelligent but presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed with the high
attributes of a Subject?—and indeed by what thinness, at the best,
would such a subject not be vitiated? Millions of presumptuous girls,
intelligent or not intelligent, daily affront their destiny, and what is
it open to their destiny to be, at the most, that we should make an ado
about it? The novel is of its very nature an "ado," an ado about
something, and the larger the form it takes the greater of course the ado.
Therefore, consciously, that was what one was in for—for positively
organising an ado about Isabel Archer.</p>
<p>One looked it well in the face, I seem to remember, this extravagance; and
with the effect precisely of recognising the charm of the problem.
Challenge any such problem with any intelligence, and you immediately see
how full it is of substance; the wonder being, all the while, as we look
at the world, how absolutely, how inordinately, the Isabel Archers, and
even much smaller female fry, insist on mattering. George Eliot has
admirably noted it—"In these frail vessels is borne onward through
the ages the treasure of human affection." In "Romeo and Juliet" Juliet
has to be important, just as, in "Adam Bede" and "The Mill on the Floss"
and "Middlemarch" and "Daniel Deronda," Hetty Sorrel and Maggie Tulliver
and Rosamond Vincy and Gwendolen Harleth have to be; with that much of
firm ground, that much of bracing air, at the disposal all the while of
their feet and their lungs. They are typical, none the less, of a class
difficult, in the individual case, to make a centre of interest; so
difficult in fact that many an expert painter, as for instance Dickens and
Walter Scott, as for instance even, in the main, so subtle a hand as that
of R. L. Stevenson, has preferred to leave the task unattempted. There are
in fact writers as to whom we make out that their refuge from this is to
assume it to be not worth their attempting; by which pusillanimity in
truth their honour is scantly saved. It is never an attestation of a
value, or even of our imperfect sense of one, it is never a tribute to any
truth at all, that we shall represent that value badly. It never makes up,
artistically, for an artist's dim feeling about a thing that he shall "do"
the thing as ill as possible. There are better ways than that, the best of
all of which is to begin with less stupidity.</p>
<p>It may be answered meanwhile, in regard to Shakespeare's and to George
Eliot's testimony, that their concession to the "importance" of their
Juliets and Cleopatras and Portias (even with Portia as the very type and
model of the young person intelligent and presumptuous) and to that of
their Hettys and Maggies and Rosamonds and Gwendolens, suffers the
abatement that these slimnesses are, when figuring as the main props of
the theme, never suffered to be sole ministers of its appeal, but have
their inadequacy eked out with comic relief and underplots, as the
playwrights say, when not with murders and battles and the great mutations
of the world. If they are shown as "mattering" as much as they could
possibly pretend to, the proof of it is in a hundred other persons, made
of much stouter stuff; and each involved moreover in a hundred relations
which matter to THEM concomitantly with that one. Cleopatra matters,
beyond bounds, to Antony, but his colleagues, his antagonists, the state
of Rome and the impending battle also prodigiously matter; Portia matters
to Antonio, and to Shylock, and to the Prince of Morocco, to the fifty
aspiring princes, but for these gentry there are other lively concerns;
for Antonio, notably, there are Shylock and Bassanio and his lost ventures
and the extremity of his predicament. This extremity indeed, by the same
token, matters to Portia—though its doing so becomes of interest all
by the fact that Portia matters to US. That she does so, at any rate, and
that almost everything comes round to it again, supports my contention as
to this fine example of the value recognised in the mere young thing. (I
say "mere" young thing because I guess that even Shakespeare, preoccupied
mainly though he may have been with the passions of princes, would scarce
have pretended to found the best of his appeal for her on her high social
position.) It is an example exactly of the deep difficulty braved—the
difficulty of making George Eliot's "frail vessel," if not the all-in-all
for our attention, at least the clearest of the call.</p>
<p>Now to see deep difficulty braved is at any time, for the really addicted
artist, to feel almost even as a pang the beautiful incentive, and to feel
it verily in such sort as to wish the danger intensified. The difficulty
most worth tackling can only be for him, in these conditions, the greatest
the case permits of. So I remember feeling here (in presence, always, that
is, of the particular uncertainty of my ground), that there would be one
way better than another—oh, ever so much better than any other!—of
making it fight out its battle. The frail vessel, that charged with George
Eliot's "treasure," and thereby of such importance to those who curiously
approach it, has likewise possibilities of importance to itself,
possibilities which permit of treatment and in fact peculiarly require it
from the moment they are considered at all. There is always the escape
from any close account of the weak agent of such spells by using as a
bridge for evasion, for retreat and flight, the view of her relation to
those surrounding her. Make it predominantly a view of THEIR relation and
the trick is played: you give the general sense of her effect, and you
give it, so far as the raising on it of a superstructure goes, with the
maximum of ease. Well, I recall perfectly how little, in my now quite
established connexion, the maximum of ease appealed to me, and how I
seemed to get rid of it by an honest transposition of the weights in the
two scales. "Place the centre of the subject in the young woman's own
consciousness," I said to myself, "and you get as interesting and as
beautiful a difficulty as you could wish. Stick to THAT—for the
centre; put the heaviest weight into THAT scale, which will be so largely
the scale of her relation to herself. Make her only interested enough, at
the same time, in the things that are not herself, and this relation
needn't fear to be too limited. Place meanwhile in the other scale the
lighter weight (which is usually the one that tips the balance of
interest): press least hard, in short, on the consciousness of your
heroine's satellites, especially the male; make it an interest
contributive only to the greater one. See, at all events, what can be done
in this way. What better field could there be for a due ingenuity? The
girl hovers, inextinguishable, as a charming creature, and the job will be
to translate her into the highest terms of that formula, and as nearly as
possible moreover into ALL of them. To depend upon her and her little
concerns wholly to see you through will necessitate, remember, your really
'doing' her."</p>
<p>So far I reasoned, and it took nothing less than that technical rigour, I
now easily see, to inspire me with the right confidence for erecting on
such a plot of ground the neat and careful and proportioned pile of bricks
that arches over it and that was thus to form, constructionally speaking,
a literary monument. Such is the aspect that to-day "The Portrait" wears
for me: a structure reared with an "architectural" competence, as
Turgenieff would have said, that makes it, to the author's own sense, the
most proportioned of his productions after "The Ambassadors" which was to
follow it so many years later and which has, no doubt, a superior
roundness. On one thing I was determined; that, though I should clearly
have to pile brick upon brick for the creation of an interest, I would
leave no pretext for saying that anything is out of line, scale or
perspective. I would build large—in fine embossed vaults and painted
arches, as who should say, and yet never let it appear that the chequered
pavement, the ground under the reader's feet, fails to stretch at every
point to the base of the walls. That precautionary spirit, on re-perusal
of the book, is the old note that most touches me: it testifies so, for my
own ear, to the anxiety of my provision for the reader's amusement. I
felt, in view of the possible limitations of my subject, that no such
provision could be excessive, and the development of the latter was simply
the general form of that earnest quest. And I find indeed that this is the
only account I can give myself of the evolution of the fable it is all
under the head thus named that I conceive the needful accretion as having
taken place, the right complications as having started. It was naturally
of the essence that the young woman should be herself complex; that was
rudimentary—or was at any rate the light in which Isabel Archer had
originally dawned. It went, however, but a certain way, and other lights,
contending, conflicting lights, and of as many different colours, if
possible, as the rockets, the Roman candles and Catherine-wheels of a
"pyrotechnic display," would be employable to attest that she was. I had,
no doubt, a groping instinct for the right complications, since I am quite
unable to track the footsteps of those that constitute, as the case
stands, the general situation exhibited. They are there, for what they are
worth, and as numerous as might be; but my memory, I confess, is a blank
as to how and whence they came.</p>
<p>I seem to myself to have waked up one morning in possession of them—of
Ralph Touchett and his parents, of Madame Merle, of Gilbert Osmond and his
daughter and his sister, of Lord Warburton, Caspar Goodwood and Miss
Stackpole, the definite array of contributions to Isabel Archer's history.
I recognised them, I knew them, they were the numbered pieces of my
puzzle, the concrete terms of my "plot." It was as if they had simply, by
an impulse of their own, floated into my ken, and all in response to my
primary question: "Well, what will she DO?" Their answer seemed to be that
if I would trust them they would show me; on which, with an urgent appeal
to them to make it at least as interesting as they could, I trusted them.
They were like the group of attendants and entertainers who come down by
train when people in the country give a party; they represented the
contract for carrying the party on. That was an excellent relation with
them—a possible one even with so broken a reed (from her slightness
of cohesion) as Henrietta Stackpole. It is a familiar truth to the
novelist, at the strenuous hour, that, as certain elements in any work are
of the essence, so others are only of the form; that as this or that
character, this or that disposition of the material, belongs to the
subject directly, so to speak, so this or that other belongs to it but
indirectly—belongs intimately to the treatment. This is a truth,
however, of which he rarely gets the benefit—since it could be
assured to him, really, but by criticism based upon perception, criticism
which is too little of this world. He must not think of benefits,
moreover, I freely recognise, for that way dishonour lies: he has, that
is, but one to think of—the benefit, whatever it may be, involved in
his having cast a spell upon the simpler, the very simplest, forms of
attention. This is all he is entitled to; he is entitled to nothing, he is
bound to admit, that can come to him, from the reader, as a result on the
latter's part of any act of reflexion or discrimination. He may ENJOY this
finer tribute—that is another affair, but on condition only of
taking it as a gratuity "thrown in," a mere miraculous windfall, the fruit
of a tree he may not pretend to have shaken. Against reflexion, against
discrimination, in his interest, all earth and air conspire; wherefore it
is that, as I say, he must in many a case have schooled himself, from the
first, to work but for a "living wage." The living wage is the reader's
grant of the least possible quantity of attention required for
consciousness of a "spell." The occasional charming "tip" is an act of his
intelligence over and beyond this, a golden apple, for the writer's lap,
straight from the wind-stirred tree. The artist may of course, in wanton
moods, dream of some Paradise (for art) where the direct appeal to the
intelligence might be legalised; for to such extravagances as these his
yearning mind can scarce hope ever completely to close itself. The most he
can do is to remember they ARE extravagances.</p>
<p>All of which is perhaps but a gracefully devious way of saying that
Henrietta Stackpole was a good example, in "The Portrait," of the truth to
which I just adverted—as good an example as I could name were it not
that Maria Gostrey, in "The Ambassadors," then in the bosom of time, may
be mentioned as a better. Each of these persons is but wheels to the
coach; neither belongs to the body of that vehicle, or is for a moment
accommodated with a seat inside. There the subject alone is ensconced, in
the form of its "hero and heroine," and of the privileged high officials,
say, who ride with the king and queen. There are reasons why one would
have liked this to be felt, as in general one would like almost anything
to be felt, in one's work, that one has one's self contributively felt. We
have seen, however, how idle is that pretension, which I should be sorry
to make too much of. Maria Gostrey and Miss Stackpole then are cases,
each, of the light ficelle, not of the true agent; they may run beside the
coach "for all they are worth," they may cling to it till they are out of
breath (as poor Miss Stackpole all so visibly does), but neither, all the
while, so much as gets her foot on the step, neither ceases for a moment
to tread the dusty road. Put it even that they are like the fishwives who
helped to bring back to Paris from Versailles, on that most ominous day of
the first half of the French Revolution, the carriage of the royal family.
The only thing is that I may well be asked, I acknowledge, why then, in
the present fiction, I have suffered Henrietta (of whom we have
indubitably too much) so officiously, so strangely, so almost
inexplicably, to pervade. I will presently say what I can for that anomaly—and
in the most conciliatory fashion.</p>
<p>A point I wish still more to make is that if my relation of confidence
with the actors in my drama who WERE, unlike Miss Stackpole, true agents,
was an excellent one to have arrived at, there still remained my relation
with the reader, which was another affair altogether and as to which I
felt no one to be trusted but myself. That solicitude was to be
accordingly expressed in the artful patience with which, as I have said, I
piled brick upon brick. The bricks, for the whole counting-over—putting
for bricks little touches and inventions and enhancements by the way—affect
me in truth as well-nigh innumerable and as ever so scrupulously fitted
together and packed-in. It is an effect of detail, of the minutest;
though, if one were in this connexion to say all, one would express the
hope that the general, the ampler air of the modest monument still
survives. I do at least seem to catch the key to a part of this abundance
of small anxious, ingenious illustration as I recollect putting my finger,
in my young woman's interest, on the most obvious of her predicates. "What
will she 'do'? Why, the first thing she'll do will be to come to Europe;
which in fact will form, and all inevitably, no small part of her
principal adventure. Coming to Europe is even for the 'frail vessels,' in
this wonderful age, a mild adventure; but what is truer than that on one
side—the side of their independence of flood and field, of the
moving accident, of battle and murder and sudden death—her
adventures are to be mild? Without her sense of them, her sense FOR them,
as one may say, they are next to nothing at all; but isn't the beauty and
the difficulty just in showing their mystic conversion by that sense,
conversion into the stuff of drama or, even more delightful word still, of
'story'?" It was all as clear, my contention, as a silver bell. Two very
good instances, I think, of this effect of conversion, two cases of the
rare chemistry, are the pages in which Isabel, coming into the
drawing-room at Gardencourt, coming in from a wet walk or whatever, that
rainy afternoon, finds Madame Merle in possession of the place, Madame
Merle seated, all absorbed but all serene, at the piano, and deeply
recognises, in the striking of such an hour, in the presence there, among
the gathering shades, of this personage, of whom a moment before she had
never so much as heard, a turning-point in her life. It is dreadful to
have too much, for any artistic demonstration, to dot one's i's and insist
on one's intentions, and I am not eager to do it now; but the question
here was that of producing the maximum of intensity with the minimum of
strain.</p>
<p>The interest was to be raised to its pitch and yet the elements to be kept
in their key; so that, should the whole thing duly impress, I might show
what an "exciting" inward life may do for the person leading it even while
it remains perfectly normal. And I cannot think of a more consistent
application of that ideal unless it be in the long statement, just beyond
the middle of the book, of my young woman's extraordinary meditative vigil
on the occasion that was to become for her such a landmark. Reduced to its
essence, it is but the vigil of searching criticism; but it throws the
action further forward that twenty "incidents" might have done. It was
designed to have all the vivacity of incidents and all the economy of
picture. She sits up, by her dying fire, far into the night, under the
spell of recognitions on which she finds the last sharpness suddenly wait.
It is a representation simply of her motionlessly SEEING, and an attempt
withal to make the mere still lucidity of her act as "interesting" as the
surprise of a caravan or the identification of a pirate. It represents,
for that matter, one of the identifications dear to the novelist, and even
indispensable to him; but it all goes on without her being approached by
another person and without her leaving her chair. It is obviously the best
thing in the book, but it is only a supreme illustration of the general
plan. As to Henrietta, my apology for whom I just left incomplete, she
exemplifies, I fear, in her superabundance, not an element of my plan, but
only an excess of my zeal. So early was to begin my tendency to OVERTREAT,
rather than undertreat (when there was choice or danger) my subject. (Many
members of my craft, I gather, are far from agreeing with me, but I have
always held overtreating the minor disservice.) "Treating" that of "The
Portrait" amounted to never forgetting, by any lapse, that the thing was
under a special obligation to be amusing. There was the danger of the
noted "thinness"—which was to be averted, tooth and nail, by
cultivation of the lively. That is at least how I see it to-day. Henrietta
must have been at that time a part of my wonderful notion of the lively.
And then there was another matter. I had, within the few preceding years,
come to live in London, and the "international" light lay, in those days,
to my sense, thick and rich upon the scene. It was the light in which so
much of the picture hung. But that IS another matter. There is really too
much to say.</p>
<p>HENRY JAMES <SPAN name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"></SPAN></p>
<h1> THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY </h1>
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