These are intimate truths indeed, of which the charm mainly comes out but on experiment and in practice; yet I like to have it well before me here that, after all, _The Tragic Muse_ makes it not easy to say which of the situations concerned in it predominates and rules. What has become in that imperfect order, accordingly, of the famous centre of one's subject? It is surely not in Nick's consciousness--since why, if it be, are we treated to such an intolerable dose of Sherringham's? It can't be in Sherringham's--we have for that altogether an excess of Nick's. How, on the other hand, can it be in Miriam's, given that we have no direct exhibition of hers whatever, that we get at it all inferentially and inductively, seeing it only through a more or less bewildered interpretation of it by others. The emphasis is all on an absolutely objective Miriam, and, this affirmed, how--with such an amount of exposed subjectivity all round her--can so dense a medium be a centre? Such questions as those go straight--thanks to which they are, I profess, delightful; going straight they are of the sort that makes answers possible. Miriam _is_ central then to analysis, in spite of being objective; central in virtue of the fact that the whole thing has visibly, from the first, to get itself done in dramatic, or at least in scenic conditions--though scenic conditions which are as near an approach to the dramatic as the novel may permit itself and which have this in common with the latter, that they move in the light of _alternation_. This imposes a consistency other than that of the novel at its loosest, and, for one's subject, a different view and a different placing of the centre. The charm of the scenic consistency, the consistency of the multiplication of _aspects_, that of making them amusingly various, had haunted the author of _The Tragic Muse_ from far back, and he was in due course to yield to it all luxuriously, too luxuriously perhaps, in _The Awkward Age_, as will doubtless with the extension of these remarks be complacently shown.