ally _mean_? We have heard it
maintained, we well remember, that such things are "superior to art";
but we understand least of all what _that_ may mean, and we look in vain
for the artist, the divine explanatory genius, who will come to our aid
and tell us. There is life and life, and as waste is only life
sacrificed and thereby prevented from "counting," I delight in a
deep-breathing economy and an organic form. My business was accordingly
to "go in" for complete pictorial fusion, some such common interest
between my two first notions as would, in spite of their birth under
quite different stars, do them no violence at all.

I recall with this confirmed infatuation of retrospect that through the
mild perceptions I here glance at there struck for _The Tragic Muse_ the
first hour of a season of no small subjective felicity; lighted mainly,
I seem to see, by a wide west window that, high aloft, looked over near
and far London sunsets, a half-grey, half-flushed expanse of London
life. The production of the thing, which yet took a good many months,
lives for me again all contemporaneously in that full projection, upon
my very table, of the good fog-filtered Kensington mornings; which had a
way indeed of seeing the sunset in and which at the very last are merged
to memory in a different and a sharper pressure, that of an hotel
bedroom in Paris during the autumn of 1889, with the Exposition du
Centenaire about to end--and my long story, through the usual
difficulties, as well. The usual difficulties--and I fairly cherish the
record as some adventurer in another line may hug the sense of his
inveterate habit of just saving in time the neck he ever
undiscourageably risks--were those bequeathed as a particular vice of
the artistic spirit, against which vigilance had been destined from the
first to exert itself in vain, and the effect of which was that again
and again, perversely, incurably, the centre of my structure would
insist on placing itself _not_, so to speak, in the middle. It mattered
little that the reader with the idea or the suspicion of a structural
centre is the rarest of friends and of critics--a bird, it would seem,
as merely fabled as the phoenix: the terminational terror was none the
less certain to break in and my work threaten to masquerade for me as an
active figure condemned to the disgrace of legs too short, ever so much
too short, for its body. I urge myself to the candid confession that in
very few of my