uld there
be for a due ingenuity? The girl hovers, inextinguishable, as a charming
creature, and the job will be to translate her into the highest terms
of that formula, and as nearly as possible moreover into ALL of them. To
depend upon her and her little concerns wholly to see you through will
necessitate, remember, your really 'doing' her."

So far I reasoned, and it took nothing less than that technical rigour,
I now easily see, to inspire me with the right confidence for erecting
on such a plot of ground the neat and careful and proportioned pile of
bricks that arches over it and that was thus to form, constructionally
speaking, a literary monument. Such is the aspect that to-day "The
Portrait" wears for me: a structure reared with an "architectural"
competence, as Turgenieff would have said, that makes it, to the
author's own sense, the most proportioned of his productions after "The
Ambassadors" which was to follow it so many years later and which has,
no doubt, a superior roundness. On one thing I was determined; that,
though I should clearly have to pile brick upon brick for the creation
of an interest, I would leave no pretext for saying that anything is
out of line, scale or perspective. I would build large--in fine embossed
vaults and painted arches, as who should say, and yet never let it
appear that the chequered pavement, the ground under the reader's
feet, fails to stretch at every point to the base of the walls. That
precautionary spirit, on re-perusal of the book, is the old note that
most touches me: it testifies so, for my own ear, to the anxiety of my
provision for the reader's amusement. I felt, in view of the possible
limitations of my subject, that no such provision could be excessive,
and the development of the latter was simply the general form of that
earnest quest. And I find indeed that this is the only account I can
give myself of the evolution of the fable it is all under the head thus
named that I conceive the needful accretion as having taken place, the
right complications as having started. It was naturally of the essence
that the young woman should be herself complex; that was rudimentary--or
was at any rate the light in which Isabel Archer had originally dawned.
It went, however, but a certain way, and other lights, contending,
conflicting lights, and of as many different colours, if possible, as
the rockets, the Roman candles and Catherine-wheels of a "pyrotechnic
display," would be