The Tragic Muse | Page 3

note that if a certain romantic
glamour (even that of mere eccentricity or of a fine perversity) may be
flung over the act of exchange of a "career" for the esthetic life in
general, the prose and the modesty of the matter yet come in with any
exhibition of the particular branch of esthetics selected. Then it is that
the attitude of hero or heroine may look too much--for the romantic
effect--like a low crouching over proved trifles. Art indeed has in our
day taken on so many honours and emoluments that the recognition of
its importance is more than a custom, has become on occasion almost a
fury: the line is drawn--especially in the English world--only at the
importance of heeding what it may mean.

The more I turn my pieces over, at any rate, the more I now see I must
have found in them, and I remember how, once well in presence of my
three typical examples, my fear of too ample a canvas quite dropped.
The only question was that if I had marked my political case, from so
far back, for "a story by itself," and then marked my theatrical case for
another, the joining together of these interests, originally seen as
separate, might, all disgracefully, betray the seam, show for mechanical
and superficial. A story was a story, a picture a picture, and I had a
mortal horror of two stories, two pictures, in one. The reason of this
was the clearest--my subject was immediately, under that disadvantage,
so cheated of its indispensable centre as to become of no more use for
expressing a main intention than a wheel without a hub is of use for
moving a cart. It was a fact, apparently, that one had on occasion seen
two pictures in one; were there not for instance certain sublime
Tintorettos at Venice, a measureless Crucifixion in especial, which
showed without loss of authority half-a-dozen actions separately taking
place? Yes, that might be, but there had surely been nevertheless a
mighty pictorial fusion, so that the virtue of composition had somehow
thereby come all mysteriously to its own. Of course the affair would be
simple enough if composition could be kept out of the question; yet by
what art or process, what bars and bolts, what unmuzzled dogs and
pointed guns, perform that feat? I had to know myself utterly inapt for
any such valour and recognise that, to make it possible, sundry things
should have begun for me much further back than I had felt them even
in their dawn. A picture without composition slights its most precious
chance for beauty, and is, moreover, not composed at all unless the
painter knows how that principle of health and safety, working as an
absolutely premeditated art, has prevailed. There may in its absence be
life, incontestably, as The Newcomes has life, as Les Trois
Mousquetaires, as Tolstoi's Peace and War, have it; but what do such
large, loose, baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the
accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean? We have heard it
maintained, we well remember, that such things are "superior to art";
but we understand least of all what that may mean, and we look in vain
for the artist, the divine explanatory genius, who will come to our aid
and tell us. There is life and life, and as waste is only life sacrificed and
thereby prevented from "counting," I delight in a deep-breathing

economy and an organic form. My business was accordingly to "go in"
for complete pictorial fusion, some such common interest between my
two first notions as would, in spite of their birth under quite different
stars, do them no violence at all.
I recall with this confirmed infatuation of retrospect that through the
mild perceptions I here glance at there struck for The Tragic Muse the
first hour of a season of no small subjective felicity; lighted mainly, I
seem to see, by a wide west window that, high aloft, looked over near
and far London sunsets, a half-grey, half-flushed expanse of London
life. The production of the thing, which yet took a good many months,
lives for me again all contemporaneously in that full projection, upon
my very table, of the good fog-filtered Kensington mornings; which
had a way indeed of seeing the sunset in and which at the very last are
merged to memory in a different and a sharper pressure, that of an hotel
bedroom in Paris during the autumn of 1889, with the Exposition du
Centenaire about to end--and my long story, through the usual
difficulties, as well. The usual difficulties--and I fairly cherish the
record as some adventurer in another line may hug the sense of his
inveterate habit of just saving in time the neck he ever
undiscourageably risks--were