-line
between the real and the romantic as to plant a milestone between north and
south; but I am not sure an infallible sign of the latter is not this rank
vegetation of the power of bad people that good get into, or vice versa. It is
so rarely, alas, into our power that any one gets!)
    It is difficult for me to-day to believe that I had not, as my work went on,
some shade of the rueful sense of my affront to verisimilitude; yet I catch the
memory at least of no great sharpness, no true critical anguish, of remorse: an
anomaly the reason of which in fact now glimmers interestingly out. My concern,
as I saw it, was to make and to keep Newman consistent; the picture of his
consistency was all my undertaking, and the memory of that infatuation perfectly
abides with me. He was to be the lighted figure, the others - even doubtless to
an excessive degree the woman who is made the agent of his discomfiture - were
to be the obscured; by which I should largely get the very effect most to be
invoked, that of a generous nature engaged with forces, with difficulties and
dangers, that it but half understands. If Newman was attaching enough, I must
have argued, his tangle would be sensible enough; for the interest of everything
is all that it is his vision, his conception, his interpretation: at the window
of his wide, quite sufficiently wide, consciousness we are seated, from that
admirable position we assist. He therefore supremely matters; all the rest
matters only as he feels it, treats it, meets it. A beautiful infatuation this,
always, I think, the intensity of the creative effort to get into the skin of
the creature; the act of personal possession of one being by another at its
completest - and with the high enhancement, ever, that it is, by the same
stroke, the effort of the artist to preserve for his subject that unity, and for
his use of it (in other words for the interest he desires to excite) that effect
of a centre, which most economise its value. Its value is most discussable when
that economy has most operated; the content and the importance of a work of art
are in fine wholly dependent on its being one: outside of which all prate of its
representative character, its meaning and its bearing, its morality and
humanity, are an impudent thing. Strong in that character, which is the
condition of its really bearing witness at all, it is strong every way. So much
