Preface

(_underscores_ denote italics)

--

I profess a certain vagueness of remembrance in respect to the origin
and growth of _The Tragic Muse_, which appeared in the _Atlantic
Monthly_ again, beginning January 1889 and running on, inordinately,
several months beyond its proper twelve. If it be ever of interest and
profit to put one's finger on the productive germ of a work of art, and
if in fact a lucid account of any such work involves that prime
identification, I can but look on the present fiction as a poor
fatherless and motherless, a sort of unregistered and unacknowledged
birth. I fail to recover my precious first moment of consciousness of
the idea to which it was to give form; to recognise in it--as I like to
do in general--the effect of some particular sharp impression or
concussion. I call such remembered glimmers always precious, because
without them comes no clear vision of what one may have intended, and
without that vision no straight measure of what one may have succeeded
in doing. What I make out from furthest back is that I must have had
from still further back, must in fact practically have always had, the
happy thought of some dramatic picture of the "artist-life" and of the
difficult terms on which it is at the best secured and enjoyed, the
general question of its having to be not altogether easily paid for. To
"do something about art"--art, that is, as a human complication and a
social stumbling-block--must have been for me early a good deal of a
nursed intention, the conflict between art and "the world" striking me
thus betimes as one of the half-dozen great primary motives. I remember
even having taken for granted with this fond inveteracy that no one of
these pregnant themes was likely to prove under the test more full of
matter. This being the case, meanwhile, what would all experience have
done but enrich one's conviction?--since if, on the one hand, I had
gained a more and more intimate view of the nature of art and the
conditions therewith imposed, so the world was a conception that clearly
required, and that would for ever continue to take, any amount of
filling-in. The happy and fruitful truth, at all events, was that there
was opposition--why there _should_ be was another matter--and that the
opposition would beget an infinity of situations. What had doubtless
occurred in fact, moreover, was that just this question of the essence
and the reasons of the opposition had shown itself to demand the light
of experience; so that to the growth of experience, truly, the treatment
of the subject had yielded. It had waited for that advantage.

Yet I continue to see experience giving me its jog mainly in the form of
an invitation from the gentle editor of