ll before me
here that, after all, _The Tragic Muse_ makes it not easy to say which
of the situations concerned in it predominates and rules. What has
become in that imperfect order, accordingly, of the famous centre of
one's subject? It is surely not in Nick's consciousness--since why, if
it be, are we treated to such an intolerable dose of Sherringham's? It
can't be in Sherringham's--we have for that altogether an excess of
Nick's. How, on the other hand, can it be in Miriam's, given that we
have no direct exhibition of hers whatever, that we get at it all
inferentially and inductively, seeing it only through a more or less
bewildered interpretation of it by others. The emphasis is all on an
absolutely objective Miriam, and, this affirmed, how--with such an
amount of exposed subjectivity all round her--can so dense a medium be a
centre? Such questions as those go straight--thanks to which they are, I
profess, delightful; going straight they are of the sort that makes
answers possible. Miriam _is_ central then to analysis, in spite of
being objective; central in virtue of the fact that the whole thing has
visibly, from the first, to get itself done in dramatic, or at least in
scenic conditions--though scenic conditions which are as near an
approach to the dramatic as the novel may permit itself and which have
this in common with the latter, that they move in the light of
_alternation_. This imposes a consistency other than that of the novel
at its loosest, and, for one's subject, a different view and a different
placing of the centre. The charm of the scenic consistency, the
consistency of the multiplication of _aspects_, that of making them
amusingly various, had haunted the author of _The Tragic Muse_ from far
back, and he was in due course to yield to it all luxuriously, too
luxuriously perhaps, in _The Awkward Age_, as will doubtless with the
extension of these remarks be complacently shown.

To put himself at any rate as much as possible under the protection of
it had been ever his practice (he had notably done so in _The Princess
Casamassima_, so frankly panoramic and processional); and in what case
could this protection have had more price than in the one before us? No
character in a play (any play not a mere monologue) has, for the right
expression of the thing, a _usurping_ consciousness; the consciousness
of others is exhibited exactly in the same way as that of the "hero";
the prodigious consciousness of Ham