Art deals with what we see, it must first contribute full-handed that ingredient; it plucks its material, otherwise expressed, in the garden of life--which material elsewhere grown is stale and uneatable.But it has no sooner done this than it has to take account of a PROCESS--from which only when it's the basest of the servants of man, incurring ignominious dismissal with no "character," does it, and whether under some muddled pretext of morality or on any other, pusillanimously edge away.The process, that of the expression, the literal squeezing-out, of value is another affair--with which the happy luck of mere finding has little to do.The joys of finding, at this stage, are pretty well over; that quest of the subject as a whole by "matching," as the ladies say at the shops, the big piece with the snippet, having ended, we assume, with a capture.The subject is found, and if the problem is then transferred to the ground of what to do with it the field opens out for any amount of doing.This is precisely the infusion that, as I submit, completes the strong mixture.It is on the other hand the part of the business that can least be likened to the chase with horn and hound.It's all a sedentary part--involves as much ciphering, of sorts, as would merit the highest salary paid to a chief accountant.Not, however, that the chief accountant hasn't HIS gleams of bliss; for the felicity, or at least the equilibrium of the artist's state dwells less, surely, in the further delightful complications he can smuggle in than in those he succeeds in keeping out.He sows his seed at the risk of too thick a crop; wherefore yet again, like the gentlemen who audit ledgers, he must keep his head at any price.In consequence of all which, for the interest of the matter, I might seem here to have my choice of narrating my "hunt" for Lambert Strether, of describing the capture of the shadow projected by my friend's anecdote, or of reporting on the occurrences subsequent to that triumph.But I had probably best attempt a little to glance in each direction; since it comes to me again and again, over this licentious record, that one's bag of adventures, conceived or conceivable, has been only half-emptied by the mere telling of one's story.It depends so on what one means by that equivocal quantity.There is the story of one's hero, and then, thanks to the intimate connexion of things, the story of one's story itself.
I blush to confess it, but if one's a dramatist one's a dramatist, and the latter imbroglio is liable on occasion to strike me as really the more objective of the two.