The Tragic Muse | Page 4

those bequeathed as a particular vice of
the artistic spirit, against which vigilance had been destined from the
first to exert itself in vain, and the effect of which was that again and
again, perversely, incurably, the centre of my structure would insist on
placing itself not, so to speak, in the middle. It mattered little that the
reader with the idea or the suspicion of a structural centre is the rarest
of friends and of critics--a bird, it would seem, as merely fabled as the
phoenix: the terminational terror was none the less certain to break in
and my work threaten to masquerade for me as an active figure
condemned to the disgrace of legs too short, ever so much too short, for
its body. I urge myself to the candid confession that in very few of my
productions, to my eye, has the organic centre succeeded in getting into
proper position.
Time after time, then, has the precious waistband or girdle, studded and
buckled and placed for brave outward show, practically worked itself,
and in spite of desperate remonstrance, or in other words essential

counterplotting, to a point perilously near the knees--perilously I mean
for the freedom of these parts. In several of my compositions this
displacement has so succeeded, at the crisis, in defying and resisting
me, has appeared so fraught with probable dishonour, that I still turn
upon them, in spite of the greater or less success of final dissimulation,
a rueful and wondering eye. These productions have in fact, if I may be
so bold about it, specious and spurious centres altogether, to make up
for the failure of the true. As to which in my list they are, however, that
is another business, not on any terms to be made known. Such at least
would seem my resolution so far as I have thus proceeded. Of any
attention ever arrested by the pages forming the object of this reference
that rigour of discrimination has wholly and consistently failed, I gather,
to constitute a part. In which fact there is perhaps after all a rough
justice--since the infirmity I speak of, for example, has been always but
the direct and immediate fruit of a positive excess of foresight, the
overdone desire to provide for future need and lay up heavenly treasure
against the demands of my climax. If the art of the drama, as a great
French master of it has said, is above all the art of preparations, that is
true only to a less extent of the art of the novel, and true exactly in the
degree in which the art of the particular novel comes near that of the
drama. The first half of a fiction insists ever on figuring to me as the
stage or theatre for the second half, and I have in general given so much
space to making the theatre propitious that my halves have too often
proved strangely unequal. Thereby has arisen with grim regularity the
question of artfully, of consummately masking the fault and conferring
on the false quantity the brave appearance of the true.
But I am far from pretending that these desperations of ingenuity have
not--as through seeming most of the very essence of the problem--their
exasperated charm; so far from it that my particular supreme
predicament in the Paris hotel, after an undue primary leakage of time,
no doubt, over at the great river-spanning museum of the Champ de
Mars and the Trocadero, fairly takes on to me now the tender grace of a
day that is dead. Re-reading the last chapters of The Tragic Muse I
catch again the very odour of Paris, which comes up in the rich rumble
of the Rue de la Paix--with which my room itself, for that matter,
seems impregnated--and which hangs for reminiscence about the

embarrassed effort to "finish," not ignobly, within my already exceeded
limits; an effort prolonged each day to those late afternoon hours
during which the tone of the terrible city seemed to deepen about one to
an effect strangely composed at once of the auspicious and the fatal.
The "plot" of Paris thickened at such hours beyond any other plot in the
world, I think; but there one sat meanwhile with another, on one's
hands, absolutely requiring precedence. Not the least imperative of
one's conditions was thus that one should have really, should have
finely and (given one's scale) concisely treated one's subject, in spite of
there being so much of the confounded irreducible quantity still to treat.
If I spoke just now, however, of the "exasperated" charm of supreme
difficulty, that is because the challenge of economic representation so
easily becomes, in any of the arts, intensely interesting to meet. To put
all that is possible of one's idea into a form and