The Portrait of a Lady [Volume 1] Review
The Portrait of a Lady [Volume 1] Overview
Title: The Portrait of a Lady [Volume 1]
Author: Henry James
VOLUME I
PREFACE
"The Portrait of a Lady" was, like "Roderick Hudson," begun in
Florence, during three months spent there in the spring of 1879.
Like "Roderick" and like "The American," it had been
designed for publication in "The Atlantic Monthly," where it
began to appear in 1880. It differed from its two predecessors,
however, in finding a course also open to it, from month to
month, in "Macmillan's Magazine"; which was to be for me one of
the last occasions of simultaneous "serialisation" in the two
countries that the changing conditions of literary intercourse
between England and the United States had up to then left
unaltered. It is a long novel, and I was long in writing it; I
remember being again much occupied with it, the following year,
during a stay of several weeks made in Venice. I had rooms on
Riva Schiavoni, at the top of a house near the passage leading
off to San Zaccaria; the waterside life, the wondrous lagoon
spread before me, and the ceaseless human chatter of Venice came
in at my windows, to which I seem to myself to have been
constantly driven, in the fruitless fidget of composition, as if
to see whether, out in the blue channel, the ship of some right
suggestion, of some better phrase, of the next happy twist of my
subject, the next true touch for my canvas, mightn't come into
sight. But I recall vividly enough that the response most
elicited, in general, to these restless appeals was the rather
grim admonition that romantic and historic sites, such as the
land of Italy abounds in, offer the artist a questionable aid to
concentration when they themselves are not to be the subject of
it. They are too rich in their own life and too charged with
their own meanings merely to help him out with a lame phrase;
they draw him away from his small question to their own greater
ones; so that, after a little, he feels, while thus yearning
toward them in his difficulty, as if he were asking an army of
glorious veterans to help him to arrest a peddler who has given
him the wrong change.
There are pages of the book which, in the reading over, have
seemed to make me see again the bristling curve of the wide Riva,
the large colour-spots of the balconied houses and the repeated
undulation of the little hunchbacked bridges, marked by the rise
and drop again, with the wave, of foreshortened clicking
pedestrians. The Venetian footfall and the Venetian cry--all
talk there, wherever uttered, having the pitch of a call across
the water--come in once more at the window, renewing one's old
impression of the delighted senses and the divided, frustrated
mind. How can places that speak IN GENERAL so to the imagination
not give it, at the moment, the particular thing it wants? I
recollect again and again, in beautiful places, dropping into
that wonderment. The real truth is, I think, that they express,
under this appeal, only too much--more than, in the given case,
one has use for; so that one finds one's self working less
congruously, after all, so far as the surrounding picture is
concerned, than in presence of the moderate and the neutral, to
which we may lend something of the light of our vision. Such a
place as Venice is too proud for such charities; Venice doesn't
borrow, she but all magnificently gives. We profit by that
enormously, but to do so we must either be quite off duty or be
on it in her service alone. Such, and so rueful, are these
reminiscences; though on the whole, no doubt, one's book, and
one's "literary effort" at large, were to be the better for
them. Strangely fertilising, in the long run, does a wasted
effort of attention often prove. It all depends on HOW the
attention has been cheated, has been squandered. There are
high-handed insolent frauds, and there are insidious sneaking
ones.
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