The Tragic Muse | Page 2

parental breast about
the maimed or slighted, the disfigured or defeated, the unlucky or
unlikely child--with this hapless small mortal thought of further as
somehow "compromising." I am thus able to take the thing as having
quite wittingly and undisturbedly existed for itself alone, and to liken it
to some aromatic bag of gathered herbs of which the string has never
been loosed; or, better still, to some jar of potpourri, shaped and

overfigured and polished, but of which the lid, never lifted, has
provided for the intense accumulation of the fragrance within. The
consistent, the sustained, preserved tone of The Tragic Muse, its
constant and doubtless rather fine-drawn truth to its particular sought
pitch and accent, are, critically speaking, its principal merit--the inner
harmony that I perhaps presumptuously permit myself to compare to an
unevaporated scent.
After which indeed I may well be summoned to say what I mean, in
such a business, by an appreciable "tone" and how I can justify my
claim to it--a demonstration that will await us later. Suffice it just here
that I find the latent historic clue in my hand again with the easy recall
of my prompt grasp of such a chance to make a story about art. There
was my subject this time--all mature with having long waited, and with
the blest dignity that my original perception of its value was quite lost
in the mists of youth. I must long have carried in my head the notion of
a young man who should amid difficulty--the difficulties being the
story--have abandoned "public life" for the zealous pursuit of some
supposedly minor craft; just as, evidently, there had hovered before me
some possible picture (but all comic and ironic) of one of the most
salient London "social" passions, the unappeasable curiosity for the
things of the theatre; for every one of them, that is, except the drama
itself, and for the "personality" of the performer (almost any performer
quite sufficiently serving) in particular. This latter, verily, had struck
me as an aspect appealing mainly to satiric treatment; the only adequate
or effective treatment, I had again and again felt, for most of the
distinctively social aspects of London: the general artlessly histrionised
air of things caused so many examples to spring from behind any hedge.
What came up, however, at once, for my own stretched canvas, was
that it would have to be ample, give me really space to turn round, and
that a single illustrative case might easily be meagre fare. The young
man who should "chuck" admired politics, and of course some other
admired object with them, would be all very well; but he wouldn't be
enough--therefore what should one say to some other young man who
would chuck something and somebody else, admired in their way too?
There need never, at the worst, be any difficulty about the things

advantageously chuckable for art; the question is all but of choosing
them in the heap. Yet were I to represent a struggle--an interesting one,
indispensably--with the passions of the theatre (as a profession, or at
least as an absorption) I should have to place the theatre in another light
than the satiric. This, however, would by good luck be perfectly
possible too--without a sacrifice of truth; and I should doubtless even
be able to make my theatric case as important as I might desire it. It
seemed clear that I needed big cases--small ones would practically give
my central idea away; and I make out now my still labouring under the
illusion that the case of the sacrifice for art can ever be, with truth, with
taste, with discretion involved, apparently and showily "big." I daresay
it glimmered upon me even then that the very sharpest difficulty of the
victim of the conflict I should seek to represent, and the very highest
interest of his predicament, dwell deep in the fact that his repudiation
of the great obvious, great moral or functional or useful character, shall
just have to consent to resemble a surrender for absolutely nothing.
Those characters are all large and expansive, seated and established and
endowed; whereas the most charming truth about the preference for art
is that to parade abroad so thoroughly inward and so naturally
embarrassed a matter is to falsify and vulgarise it; that as a preference
attended with the honours of publicity it is indeed nowhere; that in fact,
under the rule of its sincerity, its only honours are those of
contradiction, concentration and a seemingly deplorable indifference to
everything but itself. Nothing can well figure as less "big," in an honest
thesis, than a marked instance of somebody's willingness to pass
mainly for an ass. Of these things I must, I say, have been in strictness
aware; what I perhaps failed of was to