The Tragic Muse | Page 8

the public, leaving all
probations behind (the whole of which, as the book gives it, is too rapid
and sudden, though inevitably so: processes, periods, intervals, stages,
degrees, connexions, may be easily enough and barely enough named,
may be unconvincingly stated, in fiction, to the deep discredit of the
writer, but it remains the very deuce to represent them, especially

represent them under strong compression and in brief and subordinate
terms; and this even though the novelist who doesn't represent, and
represent "all the time," is lost, exactly as much lost as the painter who,
at his work and given his intention, doesn't paint "all the time").
Turn upon her friend at any rate Miriam does; and one of my main
points is missed if it fails to appear that she does so with absolute
sincerity and with the cold passion of the high critic who knows, on
sight of them together, the more or less dazzling false from the
comparatively grey-coloured true. Sherringham's whole profession has
been that he rejoices in her as she is, and that the theatre, the organised
theatre, will be, as Matthew Arnold was in those very days
pronouncing it, irresistible; and it is the promptness with which he
sheds his pretended faith as soon as it feels in the air the breath of
reality, as soon as it asks of him a proof or a sacrifice, it is this that
excites her doubtless sufficiently arrogant scorn. Where is the virtue of
his high interest if it has verily never been an interest to speak of and if
all it has suddenly to suggest is that, in face of a serious call, it shall be
unblushingly relinquished? If he and she together, and her great field
and future, and the whole cause they had armed and declared for, have
not been serious things they have been base make-believes and
trivialities--which is what in fact the homage of society to art always
turns out so soon as art presumes not to be vulgar and futile. It is
immensely the fashion and immensely edifying to listen to, this
homage, while it confines its attention to vanities and frauds; but it
knows only terror, feels only horror, the moment that, instead of
making all the concessions, art proceeds to ask for a few. Miriam is
nothing if not strenuous, and evidently nothing if not "cheeky," where
Sherringham is concerned at least: these, in the all-egotistical
exhibition to which she is condemned, are the very elements of her
figure and the very colours of her portrait. But she is mild and
inconsequent for Nick Dormer (who demands of her so little); as if
gravely and pityingly embracing the truth that his sacrifice, on the right
side, is probably to have very little of her sort of recompense. I must
have had it well before me that she was all aware of the small strain a
great sacrifice to Nick would cost her--by reason of the strong effect on
her of his own superior logic, in which the very intensity of

concentration was so to find its account.
If the man, however, who holds her personally dear yet holds her
extremely personal message to the world cheap, so the man capable of
a consistency and, as she regards the matter, of an honesty so much
higher than Sherringham's, virtually cares, "really" cares, no straw for
his fellow-struggler. If Nick Dormer attracts and all-indifferently holds
her it is because, like herself and unlike Peter, he puts "art" first; but the
most he thus does for her in the event is to let her see how she may
enjoy, in intimacy, the rigour it has taught him and which he cultivates
at her expense. This is the situation in which we leave her, though there
would be more still to be said about the difference for her of the two
relations--that to each of the men--could I fondly suppose as much of
the interest of the book "left over" for the reader as for myself.
Sherringham, for instance, offers Miriam marriage, ever so
"handsomely"; but if nothing might lead me on further than the
question of what it would have been open to us--us novelists, especially
in the old days--to show, "serially," a young man in Nick Dormer's
quite different position as offering or a young woman in Miriam's as
taking, so for that very reason such an excursion is forbidden me. The
trade of the stage-player, and above all of the actress, must have so
many detestable sides for the person exercising it that we scarce
imagine a full surrender to it without a full surrender, not less, to every
immediate compensation, to every freedom and the largest ease within
reach: which presentment of the possible case for Miriam would yet
have been