Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 13 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1908).djvu/24

, sunk in their irremediable unawareness almost beyond fishing out. This constituted for handling them, I quite felt, a serious difficulty; they could be too abandoned and pathetic, as the phrase is, to live, and yet be perfectly true; but on the other hand they could be perfectly true and yet too abandoned for vivification, too consentingly feeble to be worth saving. Even this, still, would n't materially limit in them the force of the characteristic—it was exactly in such formless terms that they would speak best for the majority of their congeners; and, in fine, moreover, there was this that I absolutely had to save for the love of my subject-matter at large—the special appeal attached to the mild figure of Francina. I need scarcely point out that "round" Francie Dosson the tale is systematically constructed; with which fact was involved for me the clear sense that if I did n't see the Francie Dossons (by whom I mean the general quaint sisterhood, perfectly distinguishable then, but displaced, disfeatured, "discounted" to-day, for all I know) as always and at any cost—at whatever cost of repetition, that is—worth saving, I might as well shut up my international department. For practically—as I have said already more than enough to convey—they were what the American branch of that equation constantly threw me back upon; by reason indeed of a brace of conditions only one of which strictly inhered in the show itself.

In the heavy light of "Europe" thirty or forty years ago, there were more of the Francie Dossons and the Daisy Millers and the Bessie Aldens and the Pandora Days than of all the other attested American objects put together—more of them, of course I mean, from the moment the weird harvester was at all preoccupied with charm, or at all committed to "having to have" it. But quite apart from that truth was always the stiff fact, against which I might have dashed myself in vain, that I had n't the data for a right approach to the minor quantities, such as they might have been made out to be. The minor quantities appeared, consistently, but in a single light—that of promiscuous obscure attendance on the Daisies and Bessies and Francies; a generalised