The more I get into my drama the more magnificent upon my word I seem to see it and feel it; with such a tremendous lot of possibilities in it that I positively quake in dread of the muchness with which they threaten me.
At a moment of less illumination he writes:--
There glimmers and then floats shyly back to me from afar, the sense of something like _this_, a bit difficult to put, though entirely expressible with patience, and as I catch hold of the tip of the tail of it yet again strikes me as adding to my action but another admirable twist.
He continually sees himself catching by the tip of the tail the things that solve his difficulties. And what tiny little animals he sometimes manages to catch by the tip of the tail in some of his trances of inspiration! Thus, at one point, he breaks off excitedly about his hero with:--
As to which, however, on consideration don't I see myself catch a bright betterment by not at all making him use a latch-key?... No, no--no latch-key--but a rat-tat-tat, on his own part, at the big brass knocker.
As the writer searches for the critical action or gesture which is to betray the "abnormalism" of his hero to the 1820 world in which he moves, he cries to himself:--
Find it, find it; get it right, and it will be the making of the story.
At another stage in the story, he comments:--
All that is feasible and convincing; rather beautiful to do being what I mean.
I pull up, too, here, in the midst of my elation--though after a little I shall straighten everything out.
He discusses with himself the question whether Ralph Pendrel, in the 1820 world, is to repeat exactly the experience of the young man in the portrait, and confides to himself:--
Just now, a page or two back, I lost my presence of mind, I let myself be scared, by a momentarily-confused appearance, an assumption, that he doesn't repeat it. I see, on recovery of my wits, not to say of my wit, that he very exactly does.
Nowhere in the "scenario" is the artist's pleasure in his work expressed more finely than in the passage in which Henry James describes his hero at the crisis of his experience, when the latter begins to feel that he is under the observation of his _alter ego_, and is being vaguely threatened. "There must," the author tells himself--
