The Portrait of a Lady, vol 1 | Page 8

sole ministers of its
appeal, but have their inadequacy eked out with comic relief and
underplots, as the playwrights say, when not with murders and battles
and the great mutations of the world. If they are shown as "mattering"
as much as they could possibly pretend to, the proof of it is in a
hundred other persons, made of much stouter stuff; and each involved
moreover in a hundred relations which matter to THEM concomitantly
with that one. Cleopatra matters, beyond bounds, to Antony, but his
colleagues, his antagonists, the state of Rome and the impending battle
also prodigiously matter; Portia matters to Antonio, and to Shylock,
and to the Prince of Morocco, to the fifty aspiring princes, but for these
gentry there are other lively concerns; for Antonio, notably, there are
Shylock and Bassanio and his lost ventures and the extremity of his
predicament. This extremity indeed, by the same token, matters to
Portia--though its doing so becomes of interest all by the fact that
Portia matters to US. That she does so, at any rate, and that almost
everything comes round to it again, supports my contention as to this
fine example of the value recognised in the mere young thing. (I say
"mere" young thing because I guess that even Shakespeare,
preoccupied mainly though he may have been with the passions of
princes, would scarce have pretended to found the best of his appeal for
her on her high social position.) It is an example exactly of the deep
difficulty braved--the difficulty of making George Eliot's "frail vessel,"
if not the all-in-all for our attention, at least the clearest of the call.
Now to see deep difficulty braved is at any time, for the really addicted
artist, to feel almost even as a pang the beautiful incentive, and to feel it
verily in such sort as to wish the danger intensified. The difficulty most
worth tackling can only be for him, in these conditions, the greatest the
case permits of. So I remember feeling here (in presence, always, that is,

of the particular uncertainty of my ground), that there would be one
way better than another--oh, ever so much better than any other!-- of
making it fight out its battle. The frail vessel, that charged with George
Eliot's "treasure," and thereby of such importance to those who
curiously approach it, has likewise possibilities of importance to itself,
possibilities which permit of treatment and in fact peculiarly require it
from the moment they are considered at all. There is always the escape
from any close account of the weak agent of such spells by using as a
bridge for evasion, for retreat and flight, the view of her relation to
those surrounding her. Make it predominantly a view of THEIR
relation and the trick is played: you give the general sense of her effect,
and you give it, so far as the raising on it of a superstructure goes, with
the maximum of ease. Well, I recall perfectly how little, in my now
quite established connexion, the maximum of ease appealed to me, and
how I seemed to get rid of it by an honest transposition of the weights
in the two scales. "Place the centre of the subject in the young woman's
own consciousness," I said to myself, "and you get as interesting and as
beautiful a difficulty as you could wish. Stick to THAT--for the centre;
put the heaviest weight into THAT scale, which will be so largely the
scale of her relation to herself. Make her only interested enough, at the
same time, in the things that are not herself, and this relation needn't
fear to be too limited. Place meanwhile in the other scale the lighter
weight (which is usually the one that tips the balance of interest): press
least hard, in short, on the consciousness of your heroine's satellites,
especially the male; make it an interest contributive only to the greater
one. See, at all events, what can be done in this way. What better field
could there be for a due ingenuity? The girl hovers, inextinguishable, as
a charming creature, and the job will be to translate her into the highest
terms of that formula, and as nearly as possible moreover into ALL of
them. To depend upon her and her little concerns wholly to see you
through will necessitate, remember, your really 'doing' her."
So far I reasoned, and it took nothing less than that technical rigour, I
now easily see, to inspire me with the right confidence for erecting on
such a plot of ground the neat and careful and proportioned pile of
bricks that arches over it and that was thus to form, constructionally
speaking, a literary monument. Such is the aspect that to-day "The
Portrait" wears for me: a