The Portrait of a Lady, vol 1 | Page 4

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 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.
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