VOLUME I

By Henry James

PREFACE

“_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.

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 <i>in general</i> 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.

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.

“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 embarrassé_. 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.”

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 disponibilité_.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

HENRY JAMES

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY