The Portrait of a Lady, vol 1 | Page 7

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