I recognise at the same time, and in planning _The Princess Casamassima_ felt it highly important to recognise, the danger of filling too full any supposed and above all any obviously limited vessel of consciousness. If persons either tragically or comically embroiled with life allow us the comic or tragic value of their embroilment in proportion as their struggle is a measured and directed one, it is strangely true, none the less, that beyond a certain point they are spoiled for us by this carrying of a due light. They may carry too much of it for our credence, for our compassion, for our derision. They may be shown as knowing too much and feeling too much—not certainly for their remaining remarkable, but for their remaining “natural” and typical, for their having the needful communities with our own precious liability to fall into traps and be bewildered. It seems probable that if we were never bewildered there would never be a story to tell about us; we should partake of the superior nature of the all-knowing immortals whose annals are dreadfully dull so long as flurried humans are not, for the positive relief of bored Olympians, mixed up with them. Therefore it is that the wary reader for the most part warns the novelist against making his characters too _interpretative_ of the muddle of fate, or in other words too divinely, too priggishly clever. “Give us plenty of bewilderment,” this monitor seems to say, “so long as there is plenty of slashing out in the bewilderment too. But don’t, we beseech you, give us too much intelligence; for intelligence—well, _endangers_; endangers not perhaps the slasher himself, but the very slashing, the subject-matter of any self-respecting story. It opens up too many considerations, possibilities, issues; it _may_ lead the slasher into dreary realms where slashing somehow fails and falls to the ground.”