productions, to my eye, _has_ the organic centre
succeeded in getting into proper position.

Time after time, then, has the precious waistband or girdle, studded and
buckled and placed for brave outward show, practically worked itself,
and in spite of desperate remonstrance, or in other words essential
counterplotting, to a point perilously near the knees--perilously I mean
for the freedom of these parts. In several of my compositions this
displacement has so succeeded, at the crisis, in defying and resisting
me, has appeared so fraught with probable dishonour, that I still turn
upon them, in spite of the greater or less success of final
dissimulation, a rueful and wondering eye. These productions have in
fact, if I may be so bold about it, specious and spurious centres
altogether, to make up for the failure of the true. As to which in my
list they are, however, that is another business, not on any terms to be
made known. Such at least would seem my resolution so far as I have
thus proceeded. Of any attention ever arrested by the pages forming the
object of this reference that rigour of discrimination has wholly and
consistently failed, I gather, to constitute a part. In which fact there
is perhaps after all a rough justice--since the infirmity I speak of,
for example, has been always but the direct and immediate fruit of a
positive excess of foresight, the overdone desire to provide for future
need and lay up heavenly treasure against the demands of my climax. If
the art of the drama, as a great French master of it has said, is above
all the art of preparations, that is true only to a less extent of the
art of the novel, and true exactly in the degree in which the art of the
particular novel comes near that of the drama. The first half of a
fiction insists ever on figuring to me as the stage or theatre for the
second half, and I have in general given so much space to making the
theatre propitious that my halves have too often proved strangely
unequal. Thereby has arisen with grim regularity the question of
artfully, of consummately masking the fault and conferring on the false
quantity the brave appearance of the true.

But I am far from pretending that these desperations of ingenuity have
not--as through seeming _most_ of the very essence of the problem--their
exasperated charm; so far from it that my particular supreme predicament
in the Paris hotel, after an undue primary leakage of time, no doubt,
over at the gre