The Portrait of a Lady, vol 1 | Page 3

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Etext created by Eve Sobol, South Bend, Indiana, USA

The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James

VOLUME I
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