But I
would rather, I think, have too little architecture than too much--when
there's danger of its interfering with my measure of the truth. The
French of course like more of it than I give--having by their own genius
such a hand for it; and indeed one must give all one can. As for the
origin of one's wind-blown germs themselves, who shall say, as you ask,
where THEY come from? We have to go too far back, too far behind,
to say. Isn't it all we can say that they come from every quarter
of heaven, that they are THERE at almost any turn of the road? They
accumulate, and we are always picking them over, selecting among them.
They are the breath of life--by which I mean that life, in its own
way, breathes them upon us. They are so, in a manner prescribed and
imposed--floated into our minds by the current of life. That reduces to
imbecility the vain critic's quarrel, so often, with one's subject, when
he hasn't the wit to accept it. Will he point out then which other it
should properly have been?--his office being, essentially to point out.
Il en serait bien embarrasse. Ah, when he points out what I've done or
failed to do with it, that's another matter: there he's on his ground. I
give him up my 'sarchitecture,'" my distinguished friend concluded, "as
much as he will."

So this beautiful genius, and I recall with comfort the gratitude I drew
from his reference to the intensity of suggestion that may reside in the
stray figure, the unattached character, the image en disponibilite.
It gave me higher warrant than I seemed then to have met for just
that blest habit of one's own imagination, the trick of investing some
conceived or encountered individual, some brace or group of individuals,
with the germinal property and authority. I was myself so much more
antecedently conscious of my figures than of their setting--a too
preliminary, a preferential interest in which struck me as in general
such a putting of the cart before the horse. I might envy, though I
couldn't emulate, the imaginative writer so constituted as to see his
fable first and to make out its agents afterwards. I could think so
little of any fable that didn't need its agents positively to launch
it; I could think so little of any situation that didn't depend for its
interest on the nature of the persons situated, and thereby on their
way of taking it. There are methods of so-called presentation, I believe
among novelists who have appeared to flourish--that offer