onstatation is, as I have hinted, in
the detail of the matter, and the detail is so dense, the texture of the
figured and smoothed tapestry so loose, that the genius of Gyp herself,
muse of general looseness, would certainly, once warned, have uttered
the first disavowal of my homage. But what has occurred meanwhile is
that this high consistency has itself, so to speak, constituted an
exhibition, and that an important artistic truth has seemed to me
thereby lighted. We brushed against that truth just now in our glance
at the denial of expansibility to any idea the mould of the "stage-play"
may hope to express without cracking and bursting--and we bear in mind
at the same time that the picture of Nanda Brookenham's situation,
though perhaps seeming to a careless eye so to wander and sprawl, yet
presents itself on absolutely scenic lines, and that each of these
scenes in itself, and each as related to each and to all of its
companions, abides without a moment's deflexion by the principle of the
stage-play. In doing this then it does more--it helps us ever so happily
to see the grave distinction between substance and form in a really
wrought work of art signally break down. I hold it impossible to say,
before "The Awkward Age," where one of these elements ends and the other
begins: I have been unable at least myself, on re-examination, to mark
any such joint or seam, to see the two DISCHARGED offices as separate.
They are separate before the fact, but the sacrament of execution
indissolubly marries them, and the marriage, like any other marriage,
has only to be a "true" one for the scandal of a breach not to show.
The thing "done," artistically, is a fusion, or it has not BEEN done--in
which case of course the artist may be, and all deservedly, pelted with
any fragment of his botch the critic shall choose to pick up. But his
ground once conquered, in this particular field, he knows nothing of
fragments and may say in all security: "Detach one if you can. You can
analyse in YOUR way, oh yes--to relate, to report, to explain; but you
can't disintegrate my synthesis; you can't resolve the elements of my
whole into different responsible agents or find your way at all (for
your own fell purpose). My mixture has only to be perfect literally
to bewilder you--you are lost in the tangle of the forest. Prove this
value, this effect, in the air of the whole result, to be of my subject,
and that other value, other effect, to be of my tr