cognising the fifty ways in
which I had sought to provide for it. The mere charm of seeing such an
idea constituent, in its degree; the fineness of the measures taken--a
real extension, if successful, of the very terms and possibilities of
representation and figuration--such things alone were, after this
fashion, inspiring, such things alone were a gage of the probable
success of that dissimulated calculation with which the whole effort
was to square. But oh the cares begotten, none the less, of that same
"judicious" sacrifice to a particular form of interest! One's work
should have composition, because composition alone is positive beauty;
but all the while--apart from one's inevitable consciousness too of the
dire paucity of readers ever recognising or ever missing positive
beauty--how, as to the cheap and easy, at every turn, how, as to
immediacy and facility, and even as to the commoner vivacity, positive
beauty might have to be sweated for and paid for! Once achieved and
installed it may always be trusted to make the poor seeker feel he
would have blushed to the roots of his hair for failing of it; yet,
how, as its virtue can be essentially but the virtue of the whole, the
wayside traps set in the interest of muddlement and pleading but the
cause of the moment, of the particular bit in itself, have to be kicked
out of the path! All the sophistications in life, for example, might
have appeared to muster on behalf of the menace--the menace to a bright
variety--involved in Strether's having all the subjective "say," as it
were, to himself.

Had I, meanwhile, made him at once hero and historian, endowed him with
the romantic privilege of the "first person"--the darkest abyss of
romance this, inveterately, when enjoyed on the grand scale--variety,
and many other queer matters as well, might have been smuggled in by a
back door. Suffice it, to be brief, that the first person, in the long
piece, is a form foredoomed to looseness and that looseness, never much
my affair, had never been so little so as on this particular occasion.
All of which reflexions flocked to the standard from the moment--a very
early one--the question of how to keep my form amusing while sticking
so close to my central figure and constantly taking its pattern from
him had to be faced. He arrives (arrives at Chester) as for the
dreadful purpose of giving his creator "no end" to tell about
him--before which rigorous mission the serenest of creato