They "saw," all genially and generously--for I must add that I had made,
to the best of my recollection, no morbid scruple of not blabbing about
Gyp and her strange incitement. I the more boldly held my tongue over
this that the more I, by my intelligence, lived in my arrangement and
moved about in it, the more I sank into satisfaction. It was clearly to
work to a charm and, during this process--by calling at every step for
an exquisite management--"to haunt, to startle and waylay." Each of my
"lamps" would be the light of a single "social occasion" in the history
and intercourse of the characters concerned, and would bring out to the
full the latent colour of the scene in question and cause it to
illustrate, to the last drop, its bearing on my theme. I revelled in
this notion of the Occasion as a thing by itself, really and completely
a scenic thing, and could scarce name it, while crouching amid the thick
arcana of my plan, with a large enough O. The beauty of the conception
was in this approximation of the respective divisions of my form to the
successive Acts of a Play--as to which it was more than ever a case for
charmed capitals. The divine distinction of the act of a play--and a
greater than any other it easily succeeds in arriving at--was, I
reasoned, in its special, its guarded objectivity. This objectivity,
in turn, when achieving its ideal, came from the imposed absence of that
"going behind," to compass explanations and amplifications, to drag out
odds and ends from the "mere" storyteller's great property-shop of aids
to illusion: a resource under denial of which it was equally perplexing
and delightful, for a change, to proceed. Everything, for that matter,
becomes interesting from the moment it has closely to consider, for full
effect positively to bestride, the law of its kind. "Kinds" are the very
life of literature, and truth and strength come from the complete
recognition of them, from abounding to the utmost in their respective
senses and sinking deep into their consistency. I myself have scarcely
to plead the cause of "going behind," which is right and beautiful and