 Where again then does costume begin or end? - save with the
run of one or another sort of play? We must reserve vague labels for artless
mixtures.
    The only general attribute of projected romance that I can see, the only one
that fits all its cases, is the fact of the kind of experience with which it
deals - experience liberated, so to speak; experience disengaged, disembroiled,
disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it
and, if we wish so to put the matter, drag upon it, and operating in a medium
which relieves it, in a particular interest, of the inconvenience of a related,
a measurable state, a state subject to all our vulgar communities. The greatest
intensity may so be arrived at evidently - when the sacrifice of community, of
the related sides of situations, has not been too rash. It must to this end not
flagrantly betray itself; we must even be kept if possible, for our illusion,
from suspecting any sacrifice at all. The balloon of experience is in fact of
course tied to the earth, and under that necessity we swing, thanks to a rope of
remarkable length, in the more or less commodious car of the imagination; but it
is by the rope we know where we are, and from the moment that cable is cut we
are at large and unrelated: we only swing apart from the globe - though
remaining as exhilarated, naturally, as we like, especially when all goes well.
The art of the romancer is, for the fun of it, insidiously to cut the cable, to
cut it without our detecting him. What I have recognised then in The American,
much to my surprise and after long years, is that the experience here
represented is the disconnected and uncontrolled experience - uncontrolled by
our general sense of the way things happen - which romance alone more or less
successfully palms off on us. It is a case of Newman's own intimate experience
all, that being my subject, the thread of which, from beginning to end, is not
once exchanged, however momentarily, for any other thread; and the experience of
others concerning us, and concerning him, only so far as it touches him and as
he recognises, feels or divines it. There is our general sense of the way things
happen - it abides with us indefeasibly, as readers of fiction, from the moment
we demand that our fiction shall be intelligible; and there is our particular
sense of the way they don't happen, which is liable to wake up unless reflexion
and criticism
