The Portrait of a Lady, vol 1 | Page 5

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."
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.
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,