The Tragic Muse | Page 5

compass that will
contain and express it only by delicate adjustments and an exquisite
chemistry, so that there will at the end be neither a drop of one's liquor
left nor a hair's breadth of the rim of one's glass to spare--every artist
will remember how often that sort of necessity has carried with it its
particular inspiration. Therein lies the secret of the appeal, to his mind,
of the successfully foreshortened thing, where representation is arrived
at, as I have already elsewhere had occasion to urge, not by the addition
of items (a light that has for its attendant shadow a possible dryness)
but by the art of figuring synthetically, a compactness into which the
imagination may cut thick, as into the rich density of wedding-cake.
The moral of all which indeed, I fear, is, perhaps too trivially, but that
the "thick," the false, the dissembling second half of the work before
me, associated throughout with the effort to weight my dramatic values
as heavily as might be, since they had to be so few, presents that effort
as at the very last a quite convulsive, yet in its way highly agreeable,
spasm. Of such mild prodigies is the "history" of any specific creative
effort composed!
But I have got too much out of the "old" Kensington light of twenty
years ago--a lingering oblique ray of which, to-day surely quite extinct,
played for a benediction over my canvas. From the moment I made out,
at my high-perched west window, my lucky title, that is from the
moment Miriam Rooth herself had given it me, so this young woman

had given me with it her own position in the book, and so that in turn
had given me my precious unity, to which no more than Miriam was
either Nick Dormer or Peter Sherringham to be sacrificed. Much of the
interest of the matter was immediately, therefore, in working out the
detail of that unity and--always entrancing range of questions--the order,
the reason, the relation, of presented aspects. With three general
aspects, that of Miriam's case, that of Nick's and that of Sherringham's,
there was work in plenty cut out; since happy as it might be to say, "My
several actions beautifully become one," the point of the affair would
be in showing them beautifully become so--without which showing
foul failure hovered and pounced. Well, the pleasure of handling an
action (or, otherwise expressed, of a "story") is at the worst, for a
storyteller, immense, and the interest of such a question as for example
keeping Nick Dormer's story his and yet making it also and all
effectively in a large part Peter Sherringham's, of keeping
Sherringham's his and yet making it in its high degree his kinsman's too,
and Miriam Rooth's into the bargain; just as Miriam Rooth's is by the
same token quite operatively his and Nick's, and just as that of each of
the young men, by an equal logic, is very contributively hers--the
interest of such a question, I say, is ever so considerably the interest of
the system on which the whole thing is done. I see to-day that it was
but half a system to say, "Oh Miriam, a case herself, is the link between
the two other cases"; that device was to ask for as much help as it gave
and to require a good deal more application than it announced on the
surface. The sense of a system saves the painter from the baseness of
the arbitrary stroke, the touch without its reason, but as payment for
that service the process insists on being kept impeccably the right one.
These are intimate truths indeed, of which the charm mainly comes out
but on experiment and in practice; yet I like to have it well before me
here that, after all, The Tragic Muse makes it not easy to say which of
the situations concerned in it predominates and rules. What has become
in that imperfect order, accordingly, of the famous centre of one's
subject? It is surely not in Nick's consciousness--since why, if it be, are
we treated to such an intolerable dose of Sherringham's? It can't be in
Sherringham's--we have for that altogether an excess of Nick's. How,
on the other hand, can it be in Miriam's, given that we have no direct

exhibition of hers whatever, that we get at it all inferentially and
inductively, seeing it only through a more or less bewildered
interpretation of it by others. The emphasis is all on an absolutely
objective Miriam, and, this affirmed, how--with such an amount of
exposed subjectivity all round her--can so dense a medium be a centre?
Such questions as those go straight--thanks to which they are, I profess,
delightful; going straight they are of the sort that makes answers
possible.