The Tragic Muse | Page 7

actor, done above all
the mountebank, the mummer and the cabotin, and mixed them up with
the queer theatric air, in a manner that practically warns all other hands
off the material for ever. At the same time I think I saw Miriam, and
without a sacrifice of truth, that is of the particular glow of
verisimilitude I wished her most to benefit by, in a complexity of
relations finer than any that appear possible for the gentry of M.
Anatole France.
Her relation to Nick Dormer, for instance, was intended as a superior
interest--that of being (while perfectly sincere, sincere for her, and
therefore perfectly consonant with her impulse perpetually to perform
and with her success in performing) the result of a touched imagination,
a touched pride for "art," as well as of the charm cast on other
sensibilities still. Dormer's relation to herself is a different matter, of
which more presently; but the sympathy she, poor young woman, very
generously and intelligently offers him where most people have so
stinted it, is disclosed largely at the cost of her egotism and her
personal pretensions, even though in fact determined by her sense of
their together, Nick and she, postponing the "world" to their conception
of other and finer decencies. Nick can't on the whole see--for I have
represented him as in his day quite sufficiently troubled and
anxious--why he should condemn to ugly feebleness his most prized
faculty (most prized, at least, by himself) even in order to keep his seat
in Parliament, to inherit Mr. Carteret's blessing and money, to gratify
his mother and carry out the mission of his father, to marry Julia
Dallow in fine, a beautiful imperative woman with a great many
thousands a year. It all comes back in the last analysis to the individual
vision of decency, the critical as well as the passionate judgement of it
under sharp stress; and Nick's vision and judgement, all on the esthetic
ground, have beautifully coincided, to Miriam's imagination, with a
now fully marked, an inspired and impenitent, choice of her own: so
that, other considerations powerfully aiding indeed, she is ready to see
their interest all splendidly as one. She is in the uplifted state to which
sacrifices and submissions loom large, but loom so just because they
must write sympathy, write passion, large. Her measure of what she

would be capable of for him--capable, that is, of not asking of him--will
depend on what he shall ask of her, but she has no fear of not being
able to satisfy him, even to the point of "chucking" for him, if need be,
that artistic identity of her own which she has begun to build up. It will
all be to the glory, therefore, of their common infatuation with "art":
she will doubtless be no less willing to serve his than she was eager to
serve her own, purged now of the too great shrillness.
This puts her quite on a different level from that of the vivid monsters
of M. France, whose artistic identity is the last thing they wish to
chuck--their only dismissal is of all material and social over-draping.
Nick Dormer in point of fact asks of Miriam nothing but that she shall
remain "awfully interesting to paint"; but that is his relation, which, as I
say, is quite a matter by itself. He at any rate, luckily for both of them it
may be, doesn't put her to the test: he is so busy with his own case,
busy with testing himself and feeling his reality. He has seen himself as
giving up precious things for an object, and that object has somehow
not been the young woman in question, nor anything very nearly like
her. She, on the other hand, has asked everything of Peter Sherringham,
who has asked everything of her; and it is in so doing that she has
really most testified for art and invited him to testify. With his
professed interest in the theatre--one of those deep subjections that, in
men of "taste," the Comédie Française used in old days to conspire for
and some such odd and affecting examples of which were to be
noted--he yet offers her his hand and an introduction to the very best
society if she will leave the stage. The power--and her having the sense
of the power--to "shine" in the world is his highest measure of her, the
test applied by him to her beautiful human value; just as the manner in
which she turns on him is the application of her own standard and
touchstone. She is perfectly sure of her own; for--if there were nothing
else, and there is much--she has tasted blood, so to speak, in the form
of her so prompt and auspicious success with