The Portrait of a Lady, vol 1 | Page 6

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