Inevitably, in such a case as that of "The American," and scarce less indeed in those of "The Portrait of a Lady" and "The Princess Casamassima," each of these efforts so redolent of good intentions baffled by a treacherous vehicle, an expertness too retarded, I could but dream the whole thing over as I went--as I read; and, bathing it, so to speak, (xxii) in that medium, hope that, some still newer and shrewder critic's intelligence subtly operating, I should n't have breathed upon the old catastrophes and accidents, the old wounds and mutilations and disfigurements, wholly in vain. The same is true of the possible effect of this process of re-dreaming on many of these gathered compositions, shorter and longer; I have prayed that the finer air of the better form may sufficiently seem to hang about them and gild them over--at least for readers, however few, at all CURIOUS of questions of air and form. Nothing even at this point, and in these quite final remarks, I confess, could strike me as more pertinent than--with a great wealth of margin--to attempt to scatter here a few gleams of the light in which some of my visions have all sturdily and complacently repeated and others have, according to their kind and law, all joyously and blushingly renewed themselves. These have doubtless both been ways of remaining unshamed; though, for myself, on the whole, as I seem to make out, the interest of the watched renewal has been livelier than that of the accepted repetition.
What has the affair been at the worst, I am most moved to ask, but an earnest invitation to the reader to dream again in my company and in the interest of his own larger absorption of my sense? The prime consequence on one's own part of re-perusal is a sense for ever so many more of the shining silver fish afloat in the deep sea of one's endeavour than the net of widest casting could pretend to gather in; an author's common courtesy dictating thus the best general course for making that sense contagious--so beautifully tangled a web, when not so glorious a crown, does he weave by having at heart, and by cherishing there, the confidence he has invited or imagined.
There is then absolutely no release to his pledged honour on the question of repaying that confidence.
The ideally handsome way is for him to multiply in any given connexion all the possible sources of entertainment--or, more grossly expressing it again, to intensify his whole chance of pleasure. (It all comes back to that, to my and your "fun"--if we but allow the term its full extension; to the production of which no humblest question involved, (xxiii) even to that of the shade of a cadence or the position of a comma, is not richly pertinent.) We have but to think a moment of such a matter as the play of REPRESENTATIONAL values, those that make it a part, and an important part, of our taking offered things in that we should take them as aspects and visibilities--take them to the utmost as appearances, images, figures, objects, so many important, so many contributive items of the furniture of the world--in order to feel immediately the effect of such a condition at every turn of our adventure and every point of the representative surface.