at river-spanning museum of the Champ de Mars and the
Trocadero, fairly takes on to me now the tender grace of a day that is
dead. Re-reading the last chapters of _The Tragic Muse_ I catch again
the very odour of Paris, which comes up in the rich rumble of the Rue de
la Paix--with which my room itself, for that matter, seems
impregnated--and which hangs for reminiscence about the embarrassed
effort to "finish," not ignobly, within my already exceeded limits; an
effort prolonged each day to those late afternoon hours during which the
tone of the terrible city seemed to deepen about one to an effect
strangely composed at once of the auspicious and the fatal. The "plot"
of Paris thickened at such hours beyond any other plot in the world, I
think; but there one sat meanwhile with another, on one's hands,
absolutely requiring precedence. Not the least imperative of one's
conditions was thus that one should have really, should have finely and
(given one's scale) concisely treated one's subject, in spite of there
being so much of the confounded irreducible quantity still to treat. If
I spoke just now, however, of the "exasperated" charm of supreme
difficulty, that is because the challenge of economic representation so
easily becomes, in any of the arts, intensely interesting to meet. To
put all that is possible of one's idea into a form and compass that will
contain and express it only by delicate adjustments and an exquisite
chemistry, so that there will at the end be neither a drop of one's
liquor left nor a hair's breadth of the rim of one's glass to
spare--every artist will remember how often that sort of necessity has
carried with it its particular inspiration. Therein lies the secret of
the appeal, to his mind, of the successfully _foreshortened_ thing,
where representation is arrived at, as I have already elsewhere had
occasion to urge, not by the addition of items (a light that has for its
attendant shadow a possible dryness) but by the art of figuring
synthetically, a compactness into which the imagination may cut thick,
as into the rich density of wedding-cake. The moral of all which indeed,
I fear, is, perhaps too trivially, but that the "thick," the false, the
dissembling second half of the work before me, associated throughout
with the effort to weight my dramatic values as heavily as might be,
since they had to be so few, presents that effort as at the very last a
quite convulsive, yet in its way highly agreeable,