The Tragic Muse

The Tragic Muse, by Henry
James

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Tragic Muse, by Henry James
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: The Tragic Muse
Author: Henry James

Release Date: December 10, 2006 [eBook #20085]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
TRAGIC MUSE***
E-text prepared by Chuck Greif, R. Cedron, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team Europe (http://dp.rastko.net/)

THE TRAGIC MUSE

by
HENRY JAMES

MacMillan and Co., Limited St. Martin's Street, London
1921

PREFACE
I profess a certain vagueness of remembrance in respect to the origin
and growth of The Tragic Muse, which appeared in the Atlantic
Monthly again, beginning January 1889 and running on, inordinately,
several months beyond its proper twelve. If it be ever of interest and
profit to put one's finger on the productive germ of a work of art, and if
in fact a lucid account of any such work involves that prime
identification, I can but look on the present fiction as a poor fatherless
and motherless, a sort of unregistered and unacknowledged birth. I fail
to recover my precious first moment of consciousness of the idea to
which it was to give form; to recognise in it--as I like to do in
general--the effect of some particular sharp impression or concussion. I
call such remembered glimmers always precious, because without them
comes no clear vision of what one may have intended, and without that
vision no straight measure of what one may have succeeded in doing.
What I make out from furthest back is that I must have had from still
further back, must in fact practically have always had, the happy
thought of some dramatic picture of the "artist-life" and of the difficult
terms on which it is at the best secured and enjoyed, the general
question of its having to be not altogether easily paid for. To "do
something about art"--art, that is, as a human complication and a social
stumbling-block--must have been for me early a good deal of a nursed
intention, the conflict between art and "the world" striking me thus
betimes as one of the half-dozen great primary motives. I remember
even having taken for granted with this fond inveteracy that no one of
these pregnant themes was likely to prove under the test more full of

matter. This being the case, meanwhile, what would all experience have
done but enrich one's conviction?--since if, on the one hand, I had
gained a more and more intimate view of the nature of art and the
conditions therewith imposed, so the world was a conception that
clearly required, and that would for ever continue to take, any amount
of filling-in. The happy and fruitful truth, at all events, was that there
was opposition--why there should be was another matter--and that the
opposition would beget an infinity of situations. What had doubtless
occurred in fact, moreover, was that just this question of the essence
and the reasons of the opposition had shown itself to demand the light
of experience; so that to the growth of experience, truly, the treatment
of the subject had yielded. It had waited for that advantage.
Yet I continue to see experience giving me its jog mainly in the form of
an invitation from the gentle editor of the Atlantic, the late Thomas
Bailey Aldrich, to contribute to his pages a serial that should run
through the year. That friendly appeal becomes thus the most definite
statement I can make of the "genesis" of the book; though from the
moment of its reaching me everything else in the matter seems to live
again. What lives not least, to be quite candid, is the fact that I was to
see this production make a virtual end, for the time, as by its sinister
effect--though for reasons still obscure to me--of the pleasant old
custom of the "running" of the novel. Not for many years was I to feel
the practice, for my benefit, confidingly revive. The influence of The
Tragic Muse was thus exactly other than what I had all earnestly (if of
course privately enough) invoked for it, and I remember well the
particular chill, at last, of the sense of my having launched it in a great
grey void from which no echo or message whatever would come back.
None, in the event, ever came, and as I now read the book over I find
the circumstance make, in its name, for a special tenderness of charity;
even for that finer consideration hanging in the