Preface - Page 2

in beautiful places, dropping into
that wonderment. The real truth is, I think, that they express,
under this appeal, only too much--more than, in the given case,
one has use for; so that one finds one's self working less
congruously, after all, so far as the surrounding picture is
concerned, than in presence of the moderate and the neutral, to
which we may lend something of the light of our vision. Such a
place as Venice is too proud for such charities; Venice doesn't
borrow, she but all magnificently gives. We profit by that
enormously, but to do so we must either be quite off duty or be
on it in her service alone. Such, and so rueful, are these
reminiscences; though on the whole, no doubt, one's book, and
one's "literary effort" at large, were to be the better for
them. Strangely fertilising, in the long run, does a wasted
effort of attention often prove. It all depends on HOW the
attention has been cheated, has been squandered. There are
high-handed insolent frauds, and there are insidious sneaking
ones. And there is, I fear, even on the most designing artist's
part, always witless enough good faith, always anxious enough
desire, to fail to guard him against their deceits.

Trying to recover here, for recognition, the germ of my idea, I
see that it must have consisted not at all in any conceit of a
"plot," nefarious name, in any flash, upon the fancy, of a set of
relations, or in any one of those situations that, by a logic of
their own, immediately fall, for the fabulist, into movement,
into a march or a rush, a patter of quick steps; but altogether in
the sense of a single character, the character and aspect of a
particular engaging young woman, to which all the usual elements
of a "subject," certainly of a setting, were to need to be super
added. Quite as interesting as the young woman herself at her
best, do I find, I must again repeat, this projection of memory
upon the whole matter of the growth, in one's imagination, of
some such apology for a motive. These are the fascinations of the
fabulist's art, these lurking forces of expansion, these
necessities of upspringing in the seed, these beautiful
determinations, on the part of the idea entertained, to grow as
tall as possible, to push into the light and the air and thickly
flower there; and, quite as much, these fine possibilities of
recovering, from some good standpoint on the ground gained, the
intimate history of the business--of retracing and reconstructing
its steps and stages. I have always fondly remembered a remark
that I heard fall years ago from the lips of Ivan Turgenieff in
regard to his own experience of the usual origin of the fictive
picture. It began for him almost always with the vision of some
person or