Henry James

The Tragic Muse Henry James

Book Excerpt: ...asking the fault and conferring on the false quantity the brave appearance of the true. But I am far from pretending that these desperations of ingenuity have not--as through seeming most of the very essence of the problem--their exasperated charm; so far from it that my particular supreme predicament in the Paris hotel, after an undue primary leakage of time, no doubt, over at the great river-spanning museum of the Champ de Mars and the Trocadero, fairly takes on to me now the tender grace of a day that is dead. Re-reading the last chapters of The Tragic Muse I catch again the very odour of Paris, which comes up in the rich rumble of the Rue de la Paix--with which my room itself, for that matter, seems impregnated--and which hangs for reminiscence about the embarrassed effort to "finish," not ignobly, within my already exceeded limits; an effort prolonged each day to those late afternoon hours during which the tone of the terrible city seemed to deepen about one to an effect strangel..