glimpse, in carrying my design through, of that artistic
rage and that artistic felicity which I have ever supposed to be
intensest and highest, the confidence of the dramatist strong in the
sense of his postulate. The dramatist has verily to BUILD, is committed
to architecture, to construction at any cost; to driving in deep his
vertical supports and laying across and firmly fixing his horizontal,
his resting pieces--at the risk of no matter what vibration from the tap
of his master-hammer. This makes the active value of his basis immense,
enabling him, with his flanks protected, to advance undistractedly, even
if not at all carelessly, into the comparative fairy-land of the mere
minor anxiety. In other words his scheme HOLDS, and as he feels this in
spite of noted strains and under repeated tests, so he keeps his face
to the day. I rejoiced, by that same token, to feel MY scheme hold, and
even a little ruefully watched it give me much more than I had ventured
to hope. For I promptly found my conceived arrangement of my material
open the door wide to ingenuity. I remember that in sketching my project
for the conductors of the periodical I have named I drew on a sheet of
paper--and possibly with an effect of the cabalistic, it now comes over
me, that even anxious amplification may have but vainly attenuated--the
neat figure of a circle consisting of a number of small rounds disposed
at equal distance about a central object. The central object was my
situation, my subject in itself, to which the thing would owe its title,
and the small rounds represented so many distinct lamps, as I liked to
call them, the function of each of which would be to light with all due
intensity one of its aspects. I had divided it, didn't they see? into
aspects--uncanny as the little term might sound (though not for a moment
did I suggest we should use it for the public), and by that sign we
would conquer.

They "saw," all genially and generously--for I must add that I had made,
to the best of my recollection, no morbid scruple of not blabbing about
Gyp and her strange incitement. I the more boldly held my tongue over
this that the more I, by my intelligence, lived in my arrangement and
moved about in it, the more I sank into satisfaction. It was clearly to
work to a charm and, during this process--by calling at every step for
an exquisite management--"to haunt, to startle and waylay." Each of my
"lamps" would be the light of a single "social