which circumstance but shows us afresh how many quite incalculable but none the
less clear sources of enjoyment for the infatuated artist, how many copious
springs of our never-to-be-slighted fun for the reader and critic susceptible of
contagion, may sound their incidental plash as soon as an artistic process
begins to enjoy free development. Exquisite - in illustration of this - the mere
interest and amusement of such at once creative and critical questions as how
and where and why to make Miss Gostrey's false connexion carry itself, under a
due high polish, as a real one. Nowhere is it more of an artful expedient for
mere consistency of form, to mention a case, than in the last scene of the book,
where its function is to give or to add nothing whatever, but only to express as
vividly as possible certain things quite other than itself and that are of the
already fixed and appointed measure. Since, however, all art is expression, and
is thereby vividness, one was to find the door open here to any amount of
delightful dissimulation. These verily are the refinements and ecstasies of
method - amid which, or certainly under the influence of any exhilarated
demonstration of which, one must keep one's head and not lose one's way. To
cultivate an adequate intelligence for them and to make that sense operative is
positively to find a charm in any produced ambiguity of appearance that is not
by the same stroke, and all helplessly, an ambiguity of sense. To project
imaginatively, for my hero, a relation that has nothing to do with the matter
(the matter of my subject) but has everything to do with the manner (the manner
of my presentation of the same) and yet to treat it, at close quarters and for
fully economic expression's possible sake, as if it were important and essential
- to do that sort of thing and yet muddle nothing may easily become, as one
goes, a signally attaching proposition; even though it all remains but part and
parcel, I hasten to recognise, of the merely general and related question of
expressional curiosity and expressional decency.
    I am moved to add after so much insistence on the scenic side of my labour
that I have found the steps of re-perusal almost as much waylaid here by quite
another style of effort in the same signal interest - or have in other words not
failed to note how, even so associated and so discriminated, the finest
proprieties and charms of the non-scenic may, under the right hand for them,
still keep their intelligibility and assert their office. Infinitely suggestive