 fifty times as little as I had
fondly dreamt it might; but that scarce spoils for me the pleasure of
recognising the fifty ways in which I had sought to provide for it. The mere
charm of seeing such an idea constituent, in its degree; the fineness of the
measures taken - a real extension, if successful, of the very terms and
possibilities of representation and figuration - such things alone were, after
this fashion, inspiring, such things alone were a gage of the probable success
of that dissimulated calculation with which the whole effort was to square. But
oh the cares begotten, none the less, of that same judicious sacrifice to a
particular form of interest! One's work should have composition, because
composition alone is positive beauty; but all the while - apart from one's
inevitable consciousness too of the dire paucity of readers ever recognising or
ever missing positive beauty - how, as to the cheap and easy, at every turn,
how, as to immediacy and facility, and even as to the commoner vivacity,
positive beauty might have to be sweated for and paid for! Once achieved and
installed it may always be trusted to make the poor seeker feel he would have
blushed to the roots of his hair for failing of it; yet, how, as its virtue can
be essentially but the virtue of the whole, the wayside traps set in the
interest of muddlement and pleading but the cause of the moment, of the
particular bit in itself, have to be kicked out of the path! All the
sophistications in life, for example, might have appeared to muster on behalf of
the menace - the menace to a bright variety - involved in Strether's having all
the subjective say, as it were, to himself.
    Had I, meanwhile, made him at once hero and historian, endowed him with the
romantic privilege of the first person - the darkest abyss of romance this,
inveterately, when enjoyed on the grand scale - variety, and many other queer
matters as well, might have been smuggled in by a back door. Suffice it, to be
brief, that the first person, in the long piece, is a form foredoomed to
looseness, and that looseness, never much my affair, had never been so little so
as on this particular occasion. All of which reflexions flocked to the standard
from the moment - a very early one - the question of how to keep my form amusing
while sticking so close to my central figure and constantly taking its pattern
from him had to be faced. He arrives (arrives at Chester) as for the
