The Tragic Muse | Page 6

Miriam is central then to analysis, in spite of being objective;
central in virtue of the fact that the whole thing has visibly, from the
first, to get itself done in dramatic, or at least in scenic
conditions--though scenic conditions which are as near an approach to
the dramatic as the novel may permit itself and which have this in
common with the latter, that they move in the light of alternation. This
imposes a consistency other than that of the novel at its loosest, and, for
one's subject, a different view and a different placing of the centre. The
charm of the scenic consistency, the consistency of the multiplication
of aspects, that of making them amusingly various, had haunted the
author of The Tragic Muse from far back, and he was in due course to
yield to it all luxuriously, too luxuriously perhaps, in The Awkward Age,
as will doubtless with the extension of these remarks be complacently
shown.
To put himself at any rate as much as possible under the protection of it
had been ever his practice (he had notably done so in The Princess
Casamassima, so frankly panoramic and processional); and in what
case could this protection have had more price than in the one before us?
No character in a play (any play not a mere monologue) has, for the
right expression of the thing, a usurping consciousness; the
consciousness of others is exhibited exactly in the same way as that of
the "hero"; the prodigious consciousness of Hamlet, the most capacious
and most crowded, the moral presence the most asserted, in the whole
range of fiction, only takes its turn with that of the other agents of the
story, no matter how occasional these may be. It is left, in other words,
to answer for itself equally with theirs: wherefore (by a parity of
reasoning if not of example) Miriam's might without inconsequence be
placed on the same footing; and all in spite of the fact that the "moral
presence" of each of the men most importantly concerned with her--or

with the second of whom she at least is importantly concerned--is
independently answered for. The idea of the book being, as I have said,
a picture of some of the personal consequences of the art-appetite
raised to intensity, swollen to voracity, the heavy emphasis falls where
the symbol of some of the complications so begotten might be made (as
I judged, heaven forgive me!) most "amusing": amusing I mean in the
best very modern sense. I never "go behind" Miriam; only poor
Sherringham goes, a great deal, and Nick Dormer goes a little, and the
author, while they so waste wonderment, goes behind them: but none
the less she is as thoroughly symbolic, as functional, for illustration of
the idea, as either of them, while her image had seemed susceptible of a
livelier and "prettier" concretion. I had desired for her, I remember, all
manageable vividness--so ineluctable had it long appeared to "do the
actress," to touch the theatre, to meet that connexion somehow or other,
in any free plunge of the speculative fork into the contemporary social
salad.
The late R. L. Stevenson was to write to me, I recall--and precisely on
the occasion of The Tragic Muse--that he was at a loss to conceive how
one could find an interest in anything so vulgar or pretend to gather
fruit in so scrubby an orchard; but the view of a creature of the stage,
the view of the "histrionic temperament," as suggestive much less,
verily, in respect to the poor stage per se than in respect to "art" at large,
affected me in spite of that as justly tenable. An objection of a more
pointed order was forced upon me by an acute friend later on and in
another connexion: the challenge of one's right, in any pretended show
of social realities, to attach to the image of a "public character," a
supposed particular celebrity, a range of interest, of intrinsic distinction,
greater than any such display of importance on the part of eminent
members of the class as we see them about us. There was a nice point if
one would--yet only nice enough, after all, to be easily amusing. We
shall deal with it later on, however, in a more urgent connexion. What
would have worried me much more had it dawned earlier is the light
lately thrown by that admirable writer M. Anatole France on the
question of any animated view of the histrionic temperament--a light
that may well dazzle to distress any ingenuous worker in the same field.
In those parts of his brief but inimitable Histoire Comique on which he

is most to be congratulated--for there are some that prompt to
reserves--he has "done the actress," as well as the