, with space, abound in remarks
about Nick's character and Nick's crisis suggested to my present more
reflective vision. It strikes me, alas, that he is not quite so
interesting as he was fondly intended to be, and this in spite of the
multiplication, within the picture, of his pains and penalties; so that
while I turn this slight anomaly over I come upon a reason that affects
me as singularly charming and touching and at which indeed I have
already glanced. Any presentation of the artist _in triumph_ must be
flat in proportion as it really sticks to its subject--it can only
smuggle in relief and variety. For, to put the matter in an image, all
we then--in his triumph--see of the charm-compeller is the back he turns
to us as he bends over his work. "His" triumph, decently, is but the
triumph of what he produces, and that is another affair. His romance is
the romance he himself projects; he eats the cake of the very rarest
privilege, the most luscious baked in the oven of the gods--therefore he
mayn't "have" it, in the form of the privilege of the hero, at the same
time. The privilege of the hero--that is, of the martyr or of the
interesting and appealing and comparatively floundering _person_--places
him in quite a different category, belongs to him only as to the artist
deluded, diverted, frustrated or vanquished; when the "amateur" in him
gains, for our admiration or compassion or whatever, all that the expert
has to do without. Therefore I strove in vain, I feel, to embroil and
adorn this young man on whom a hundred ingenious touches are thus
lavished: he has insisted in the event on looking as simple and flat as
some mere brass check or engraved number, the symbol and guarantee of a
stored treasure. The better part of him is locked too much away from us,
and the part we see has to pass for--well, what it passes for, so
lamentedly, among his friends and relatives. No, accordingly, Nick
Dormer isn't "the best thing in the book," as I judge I imagined he
would be, and it contains nothing better, I make out, than that
preserved and achieved unity and quality of tone, a value in itself,
which I referred to at the beginning of these remarks. What I mean by
this is that the interest created, and the expression of that interest,
are things kept, as to kind, genuine and true to themselves. The appeal,
the fidelity to the prime motive, is, with no little art, strained clear
(even as silver is polished) in a degree answering--at