The young sculptor reverted to his late adventures again in the evening, and this time talked of them more objectively, as the phrase is; with a detachment that flowered little by little into free anecdote – quite as if they had been the adventures of some other, some different, ass. He related a half dozen droll things that had happened to him, and, as if his responsibility had been disengaged by all this ventilation, wondered, with laughter, that such absurdities could have been. Rowland sat perfectly grave –he kept it up on principle. Then Roderick began to talk of a half a dozen plastic ideas that he had in his head, and set them forth with his old inimitable touch. Suddenly, as it was relevant, he declared that his Baden doings had not been altogether fruitless, for the lady who had reminded Rowland of Madame de Cruchecassee had, poor dear, in her make-up, some wonderful, beautiful lines. Rowland at last said that such experiences might pass if one felt one was really wiser for them. ‘By the wiser,’ he sententiously added, ‘I mean the stronger in reconsidered and confirmed purpose, in acquired will-power.’
‘Oh, don’t talk of such dreadful things!’ Roderick answered, throwing back his head and looking at the stars. This conversation also took place in the open air, on the little island in the rushing Rhone where Jean-Jacques himself so far from remarkable for the control of his course, is enthroned in bronze as the genius of the spot.
“This will, it seems to me, is an abyss of abysses and a riddle of riddles. Who can answer for his properly having one? who can say beforehand that it’s going in a given case to be worth anything at all? There are all kids of uncanny underhand currents moving to and fro between one’s will and the rest of one – one’s imagination in particular. People talk as if the two things were essentially distinct; on different sides of one’s organism, like the heart and the liver. Mine, I know – that is my imagination and my conscience – are much nearer together. It all depends on circumstances. I believe there’s a certain group of circumstances possible for every man, in which his power to choose is destined to snap like a dry twig.’
“My dear man,’ said Rowland, ‘don’t talk about any part of you that has a grain of character in it being ‘destined.’ The power to choose is destiny. That’s the way to look at it.’
‘Look at it, my good Rowland,’ Roderick answered, ‘as you find most comfortable. One conviction I’ve gathered from my summer’s experience,’ he went on – ‘it’s as well to look it frankly in the face – is that I’m damnably susceptible, by nature, to the grace and the beauty and the mystery of women, to their power to turn themselves ‘on’ as creatures of subtlety and perversity. So there you have me.’
Rowland, so ‘having’ him, stared, and then strolled away, softly whistling to himself. He was unwilling to admit even tacitly that this speech had really the ominous meaning it seemed to have.
Preface to Scribner's 1907 edition of Henry James's collected works . . .
ReplyDeleteThe center of interest throughout ‘Roderick’ is in Rowland Mallet’s consciousness, and the drama is the very drama of that consciousness –which I had of course to make sufficiently acute in order to enable it, like a set and lighted scene, to hold the play.
It had, naturally, Rowland’s consciousness, not to be too acute – which would have disconnected it and made it superhuman: the beautiful little problem was to keep it connected, connected intimately, with the general human exposure, and thereby bedimmed and befooled and bewildered, anxious, restless, fallible, and yet to endow it with such intelligence that the appearances reflected in it, and constituted together there the situation and the ‘story’, should become by that fact intelligible.