The Tragic Muse | Page 9

condemned--and on grounds both various and interesting to
trace--to remain very imperfect.
I feel, moreover, that I might still, with space, abound in remarks about
Nick's character and Nick's crisis suggested to my present more
reflective vision. It strikes me, alas, that he is not quite so interesting as
he was fondly intended to be, and this in spite of the multiplication,
within the picture, of his pains and penalties; so that while I turn this
slight anomaly over I come upon a reason that affects me as singularly
charming and touching and at which indeed I have already glanced.
Any presentation of the artist in triumph must be flat in proportion as it
really sticks to its subject--it can only smuggle in relief and variety. For,

to put the matter in an image, all we then--in his triumph--see of the
charm-compeller is the back he turns to us as he bends over his work.
"His" triumph, decently, is but the triumph of what he produces, and
that is another affair. His romance is the romance he himself projects;
he eats the cake of the very rarest privilege, the most luscious baked in
the oven of the gods--therefore he mayn't "have" it, in the form of the
privilege of the hero, at the same time. The privilege of the hero--that is,
of the martyr or of the interesting and appealing and comparatively
floundering person--places him in quite a different category, belongs to
him only as to the artist deluded, diverted, frustrated or vanquished;
when the "amateur" in him gains, for our admiration or compassion or
whatever, all that the expert has to do without. Therefore I strove in
vain, I feel, to embroil and adorn this young man on whom a hundred
ingenious touches are thus lavished: he has insisted in the event on
looking as simple and flat as some mere brass check or engraved
number, the symbol and guarantee of a stored treasure. The better part
of him is locked too much away from us, and the part we see has to
pass for--well, what it passes for, so lamentedly, among his friends and
relatives. No, accordingly, Nick Dormer isn't "the best thing in the
book," as I judge I imagined he would be, and it contains nothing better,
I make out, than that preserved and achieved unity and quality of tone,
a value in itself, which I referred to at the beginning of these remarks.
What I mean by this is that the interest created, and the expression of
that interest, are things kept, as to kind, genuine and true to themselves.
The appeal, the fidelity to the prime motive, is, with no little art,
strained clear (even as silver is polished) in a degree answering--at least
by intention--to the air of beauty. There is an awkwardness again in
having thus belatedly to point such features out; but in that wrought
appearance of animation and harmony, that effect of free movement
and yet of recurrent and insistent reference, The Tragic Muse has struck
me again as conscious of a bright advantage.
HENRY JAMES.

BOOK FIRST

I
The people of France have made it no secret that those of England, as a
general thing, are to their perception an inexpressive and speechless
race, perpendicular and unsociable, unaddicted to enriching any
bareness of contact with verbal or other embroidery. This view might
have derived encouragement, a few years ago, in Paris, from the
manner in which four persons sat together in silence, one fine day about
noon, in the garden, as it is called, of the Palais de l'Industrie--the
central court of the great glazed bazaar where, among plants and
parterres, gravelled walks and thin fountains, are ranged the figures and
groups, the monuments and busts, which form in the annual exhibition
of the Salon the department of statuary. The spirit of observation is
naturally high at the Salon, quickened by a thousand artful or artless
appeals, but it need have put forth no great intensity to take in the
characters I mention. As a solicitation of the eye on definite grounds
these visitors too constituted a successful plastic fact; and even the
most superficial observer would have marked them as products of an
insular neighbourhood, representatives of that tweed-and-waterproof
class with which, on the recurrent occasions when the English turn out
for a holiday--Christmas and Easter, Whitsuntide and the autumn--Paris
besprinkles itself at a night's notice. They had about them the
indefinable professional look of the British traveller abroad; the air of
preparation for exposure, material and moral, which is so oddly
combined with the serene revelation of security and of persistence, and
which excites, according to individual susceptibility, the ire or the
admiration of foreign communities. They were the more unmistakable
as they presented mainly the happier aspects