The Portrait of a Lady, vol 1 | Page 9

structure reared with an "architectural"

competence, as Turgenieff would have said, that makes it, to the
author's own sense, the most proportioned of his productions after "The
Ambassadors" which was to follow it so many years later and which
has, no doubt, a superior roundness. On one thing I was determined;
that, though I should clearly have to pile brick upon brick for the
creation of an interest, I would leave no pretext for saying that anything
is out of line, scale or perspective. I would build large--in fine
embossed vaults and painted arches, as who should say, and yet never
let it appear that the chequered pavement, the ground under the reader's
feet, fails to stretch at every point to the base of the walls. That
precautionary spirit, on re-perusal of the book, is the old note that most
touches me: it testifies so, for my own ear, to the anxiety of my
provision for the reader's amusement. I felt, in view of the possible
limitations of my subject, that no such provision could be excessive,
and the development of the latter was simply the general form of that
earnest quest. And I find indeed that this is the only account I can give
myself of the evolution of the fable it is all under the head thus named
that I conceive the needful accretion as having taken place, the right
complications as having started. It was naturally of the essence that the
young woman should be herself complex; that was rudimentary--or was
at any rate the light in which Isabel Archer had originally dawned. It
went, however, but a certain way, and other lights, contending,
conflicting lights, and of as many different colours, if possible, as the
rockets, the Roman candles and Catherine-wheels of a "pyrotechnic
display," would be employable to attest that she was. I had, no doubt, a
groping instinct for the right complications, since I am quite unable to
track the footsteps of those that constitute, as the case stands, the
general situation exhibited. They are there, for what they are worth, and
as numerous as might be; but my memory, I confess, is a blank as to
how and whence they came.
I seem to myself to have waked up one morning in possession of
them--of Ralph Touchett and his parents, of Madame Merle, of Gilbert
Osmond and his daughter and his sister, of Lord Warburton, Caspar
Goodwood and Miss Stackpole, the definite array of contributions to
Isabel Archer's history. I recognised them, I knew them, they were the
numbered pieces of my puzzle, the concrete terms of my "plot." It was
as if they had simply, by an impulse of their own, floated into my ken,

and all in response to my primary question: "Well, what will she DO?"
Their answer seemed to be that if I would trust them they would show
me; on which, with an urgent appeal to them to make it at least as
interesting as they could, I trusted them. They were like the group of
attendants and entertainers who come down by train when people in the
country give a party; they represented the contract for carrying the
party on. That was an excellent relation with them --a possible one even
with so broken a reed (from her slightness of cohesion) as Henrietta
Stackpole. It is a familiar truth to the novelist, at the strenuous hour,
that, as certain elements in any work are of the essence, so others are
only of the form; that as this or that character, this or that disposition of
the material, belongs to the subject directly, so to speak, so this or that
other belongs to it but indirectly--belongs intimately to the treatment.
This is a truth, however, of which he rarely gets the benefit--since it
could be assured to him, really, but by criticism based upon perception,
criticism which is too little of this world. He must not think of benefits,
moreover, I freely recognise, for that way dishonour lies: he has, that is,
but one to think of--the benefit, whatever it may be, involved in his
having cast a spell upon the simpler, the very simplest, forms of
attention. This is all he is entitled to; he is entitled to nothing, he is
bound to admit, that can come to him, from the reader, as a result on
the latter's part of any act of reflexion or discrimination. He may
ENJOY this finer tribute--that is another affair, but on condition only of
taking it as a gratuity "thrown in," a mere miraculous windfall, the fruit
of a tree he may not pretend to have shaken. Against reflexion, against
discrimination, in his interest, all earth and air conspire; wherefore it is
that, as I say, he must in many a case have