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Collaborative Filtering
Using Data Mining and
Analysis

Vishal Bhatnagar
Ambedkar Institute of Advanced Communication Technologies and Research,
India

A volume in the Advances in Data Mining and

Database Management (ADMDM) Book Series
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Title: Collaborative filtering using data mining and analysis / Vishal
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Description: Hershey, PA : Information Science Reference, [2017] | Includes
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Identifiers: LCCN 2016012755| ISBN 9781522504894 (hardcover) | ISBN
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Subjects: LCSH: Data mining. | Recommender systems (Information filtering) |
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Editorial Advisory Board
Manish Kumar, IIIT Allahabad, India
Rakesh E. M., IBM India, India
Rashmi Malhotra, Saint Joseph’s University, USA
Latesh Malik, G.H. Raisoni College of Engineering, India
Tarun Srivastava, Deloitte India, India
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Toyohide Watanabe, Nagoya Industrial Science Research Institute, Japan
Jie Yan, Stanford University, USA
Yudong Zhang, Columbia University, USA & New York State Psychiatric Institute, USA


Table of Contents

Foreword............................................................................................................................................... xv

Preface.................................................................................................................................................. xvi

Acknowledgment............................................................................................................................... xxiv

Section 1
Data Mining Techniques and Analysis: An Overview

Chapter 1
Review of Data Mining Techniques and Parameters for Recommendation of Effective Adaptive
E-Learning System.................................................................................................................................. 1
Renuka Mahajan, Amity University UP, India

Chapter 2
Modified Single Pass Clustering Algorithm Based on Median as a Threshold Similarity Value......... 24
Mamta Mittal, G. B. Pant Govt. Engineering College, India
R. K. Sharma, Thapar University, India
V.P. Singh, Thapar University, India
Lalit Mohan Goyal, Bharati Vidyapeeth College of Enineering, India

Chapter 3
Dimensionality Reduction Techniques for Text Mining........................................................................ 49
Neethu Akkarapatty, SCMS School of Engineering and Technology, India
Anjaly Muralidharan, SCMS School of Engineering and Technology, India
Nisha S. Raj, SCMS School of Engineering and Technology, India
Vinod P., SCMS School of Engineering and Technology, India

Section 2
Collaborative Filtering: An Introduction

Chapter 4
History and Overview of the Recommender Systems........................................................................... 74
Venkatesan M., Government Arts College (Autonomous), India
Thangadurai K., Government Arts College (Autonomous), India





Chapter 5
A Classification Framework Towards Application of Data Mining in Collaborative Filtering........... 100
Neeti Sangwan, Maharaja Surajmal Institute of Technology, India
Naveen Dahiya, Maharaja Surajmal Institute of Technology, India

Chapter 6
Collaborative Filtering Based Data Mining for Large Data................................................................. 115
Amrit Pal, Indian Institute of Information Technology Allahabad, India
Manish Kumar, Indian Institute of Information Technology Allahabad, India

Chapter 7
Big Data Mining Using Collaborative Filtering.................................................................................. 128
Anu Saini, G.B. Pant Engineering College, India

Section 3
Applications of Data Mining Techniques and Data Analysis in Collaborative Filtering

Chapter 8
Collaborative and Clustering Based Strategy in Big Data................................................................... 140
Arushi Jain, Ambedkar Institute of Advanced Communication Technologies and Research,
India
Vishal Bhatnagar, Ambedkar Institute of Advanced Communication Technologies and
Research, India
Pulkit Sharma, Ambedkar Institute of Advanced Communication Technologies and Research,
India

Chapter 9
Association Rule Mining in Collaborative Filtering............................................................................ 159
Carson K. Leung, University of Manitoba, Canada
Fan Jiang, University of Manitoba, Canada
Edson M. Dela Cruz, University of Manitoba, Canada
Vijay Sekar Elango, University of Manitoba, Canada

Chapter 10
A Classification Framework on Opinion Mining for Effective Recommendation Systems................ 180
Mahima Goyal, Ambedkar Institute of Advanced Communication Technologies and
Research, India
Vishal Bhatnagar, Ambedkar Institute of Advanced Communication Technologies and
Research, India

Chapter 11
Combining User Co-Ratings and Social Trust for Collaborative Recommendation: A Data
Analytics Approach.............................................................................................................................. 195
Sheng-Jhe Ke, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan
Wei-Po Lee, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan
 

Chapter 12
Visual Data Mining for Collaborative Filtering: A State-of-the-Art Survey....................................... 217
Marenglen Biba, University of New York Tirana, Albania
Narasimha Rao Vajjhala, University of New York Tirana, Albania
Lediona Nishani, University of New York Tirana, Albania

Chapter 13
Data Stream Mining Using Ensemble Classifier: A Collaborative Approach of Classifiers............... 236
Snehlata Sewakdas Dongre, Ghrce Nagpur, India
Latesh G. Malik, Ghrce Nagpur, India

Chapter 14
Statistical Relational Learning for Collaborative Filtering a State-of-the-Art Review....................... 250
Lediona Nishani, University of New York Tirana, Albania
Marenglen Biba, University of New York in Tirana, Albania

Compilation of References................................................................................................................ 270

About the Contributors..................................................................................................................... 302

Index.................................................................................................................................................... 307
Detailed Table of Contents

Foreword............................................................................................................................................... xv

Preface.................................................................................................................................................. xvi

Acknowledgment............................................................................................................................... xxiv

Section 1
Data Mining Techniques and Analysis: An Overview

Chapter 1
Review of Data Mining Techniques and Parameters for Recommendation of Effective Adaptive
E-Learning System.................................................................................................................................. 1
Renuka Mahajan, Amity University UP, India

This chapter revolves around the synthesis of three research areas- data mining, personalization,
recommendation systems and adaptive e-Learning systems. It also introduces a comprehensive list of
parameters, extricated by reviewing the existing research intensity during the period of 2000 to October
2014, for understanding what should be essential parameters for adapting an e-learning. In general, we
can consider and answer few questions to answer this body of literature ‘what’ can be adapted? What
can we adapt to? How do we adapt? This review tries to answer on ‘what’ can be adapted. Thus, it
advances earlier personalization studies. The gaps in the previous studies in building adaptive e-learning
systems were also reviewed. It can help in designing new models for adaptation and formulating novel
recommender system techniques. This will provide a foundation to industry experts and scientists for
future research in adaptive e-learning.

Chapter 2
Modified Single Pass Clustering Algorithm Based on Median as a Threshold Similarity Value......... 24
Mamta Mittal, G. B. Pant Govt. Engineering College, India
R. K. Sharma, Thapar University, India
V.P. Singh, Thapar University, India
Lalit Mohan Goyal, Bharati Vidyapeeth College of Enineering, India

Clustering is one of the data mining techniques that investigates these data resources for hidden patterns.
Many clustering algorithms are available in literature. This chapter emphasizes on partitioning based
methods and is an attempt towards developing clustering algorithms that can efficiently detect clusters.
In partitioning based methods, k-means and single pass clustering are popular clustering algorithms but


 

they have several limitations. To overcome the limitations of these algorithms, a Modified Single Pass
Clustering (MSPC) algorithm has been proposed in this work. It revolves around the proposition of a
threshold similarity value. This is not a user defined parameter; instead, it is a function of data objects
left to be clustered. In our experiments, this threshold similarity value is taken as median of the paired
distance of all data objects left to be clustered. To assess the performance of MSPC algorithm, five
experiments for k-means, SPC and MSPC algorithms have been carried out on artificial and real datasets.

Chapter 3
Dimensionality Reduction Techniques for Text Mining........................................................................ 49
Neethu Akkarapatty, SCMS School of Engineering and Technology, India
Anjaly Muralidharan, SCMS School of Engineering and Technology, India
Nisha S. Raj, SCMS School of Engineering and Technology, India
Vinod P., SCMS School of Engineering and Technology, India

Sentiment analysis is an emerging field, concerned with the analysis and understanding of human emotions
from sentences. Sentiment analysis is the process used to determine the attitude/opinion/emotions
expressed by a person about a specific topic based on natural language processing. Proliferation of social
media such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin has fuelled interest in sentiment analysis. As the
real time data is dynamic, the main focus of the chapter is to extract different categories of features and
to analyze which category of attribute performs better. Moreover, classifying the document into positive
and negative category with fewer misclassification rate is the primary investigation performed. The
various approaches employed for feature selection involves TF-IDF, WET, Chi-Square and mRMR on
benchmark dataset pertaining diverse domains.

Section 2
Collaborative Filtering: An Introduction

Chapter 4
History and Overview of the Recommender Systems........................................................................... 74
Venkatesan M., Government Arts College (Autonomous), India
Thangadurai K., Government Arts College (Autonomous), India

This Chapter analyzes the recommender systems, their history and its framework in brief. The current
generation of filtering techniques in recommendation methods can be broadly classified into the following
five categories. Techniques used in these categories are discussed in detail. Data mining algorithms
techniques are implemented in recommender systems to filters user data ratings. Area of application
of Recommender Systems gives broad idea and such as how it gives impact and why it is used in the
e-commerce, Online Social Networks (OSN), and so on. It has shifted the core of Internet applications
from devices to users. In this chapter, issues and recent research in recommender system are also discussed.

Chapter 5
A Classification Framework Towards Application of Data Mining in Collaborative Filtering........... 100
Neeti Sangwan, Maharaja Surajmal Institute of Technology, India
Naveen Dahiya, Maharaja Surajmal Institute of Technology, India

Recommendation making is an important part of the information and e-commerce ecosystem.

Recommendation represent a powerful method that filter large amount of information to provide relevant
choice to end users. To provide recommendations to the users, efficient and cost effective methods needs


to be introduced. Collaborative filtering is an emerging technique used in making recommendations

which makes use of filtering by data mining. This chapter presents a classification framework on the
use of data mining techniques in collaborative filtering to extract the best recommendations to the users
on the basis of their interests.

Chapter 6
Collaborative Filtering Based Data Mining for Large Data................................................................. 115
Amrit Pal, Indian Institute of Information Technology Allahabad, India
Manish Kumar, Indian Institute of Information Technology Allahabad, India

Size of data is increasing, it is creating challenges for its processing and storage. There are cluster based
techniques available for storage and processing of this huge amount of data. Map Reduce provides an
effective programming framework for developing distributed program for performing tasks which results
in terms of key value pair. Collaborative filtering is the process of performing recommendation based on
the previous rating of the user for a particular item or service. There are challenges while implementing
collaborative filtering techniques using these distributed models. Some techniques are available for
implementing collaborative filtering techniques using these models. Cluster based collaborative filtering,
map reduce based collaborative filtering are some of these techniques. Chapter addresses these techniques
and some basics of collaborative filtering.

Chapter 7
Big Data Mining Using Collaborative Filtering.................................................................................. 128
Anu Saini, G.B. Pant Engineering College, India

Today every big company, like Google, Flipkart, Yahoo, Amazon etc., is dealing with the Big Data.
This big data can be used to predict the recommendation for the user on the basis of their past behavior.
Recommendation systems are used to provide the recommendation to the users. The author presents an
overview of various types of recommendation systems and how these systems give recommendation by
using various approaches of Collaborative Filtering. Various research works that employ collaborative
filtering for recommendations systems are reviewed and classified by the authors. Finally, this chapter
focuses on the framework of recommendation system of big data along with the detailed survey on the
use of the Big Data mining in collaborative filtering.

Section 3
Applications of Data Mining Techniques and Data Analysis in Collaborative Filtering

Chapter 8
Collaborative and Clustering Based Strategy in Big Data................................................................... 140
Arushi Jain, Ambedkar Institute of Advanced Communication Technologies and Research,
India
Vishal Bhatnagar, Ambedkar Institute of Advanced Communication Technologies and
Research, India
Pulkit Sharma, Ambedkar Institute of Advanced Communication Technologies and Research,
India

There is a proliferation in the amount of data generated and its volume, which is going to persevere for
many coming years. Big data clustering is the exercise of taking a set of objects and dividing them into
groups in such a way that the objects in the same groups are more similar to each other according to
 

a certain set of parameters than to those in other groups. These groups are known as clusters. Cluster
analysis is one of the main tasks in the field of data mining and is a commonly used technique for statistical
analysis of data. While big data collaborative filtering defined as a technique that filters the information
sought by the user and patterns by collaborating multiple data sets such as viewpoints, multiple agents
and pre-existing data about the users’ behavior stored in matrices. Collaborative filtering is especially
required when a huge data set is present.

Chapter 9
Association Rule Mining in Collaborative Filtering............................................................................ 159
Carson K. Leung, University of Manitoba, Canada
Fan Jiang, University of Manitoba, Canada
Edson M. Dela Cruz, University of Manitoba, Canada
Vijay Sekar Elango, University of Manitoba, Canada

Collaborative filtering uses data mining and analysis to develop a system that helps users make appropriate
decisions in real-life applications by removing redundant information and providing valuable to information
users. Data mining aims to extract from data the implicit, previously unknown and potentially useful
information such as association rules that reveals relationships between frequently co-occurring patterns
in antecedent and consequent parts of association rules. This chapter presents an algorithm called CF-
Miner for collaborative filtering with association rule miner. The CF-Miner algorithm first constructs
bitwise data structures to capture important contents in the data. It then finds frequent patterns from the
bitwise structures. Based on the mined frequent patterns, the algorithm forms association rules. Finally,
the algorithm ranks the mined association rules to recommend appropriate merchandise products, goods
or services to users. Evaluation results show the effectiveness of CF-Miner in using association rule
mining in collaborative filtering.

Chapter 10
A Classification Framework on Opinion Mining for Effective Recommendation Systems................ 180
Mahima Goyal, Ambedkar Institute of Advanced Communication Technologies and
Research, India
Vishal Bhatnagar, Ambedkar Institute of Advanced Communication Technologies and
Research, India

With the recent trend of expressing opinions on the social media platforms like Twitter, Blogs, Reviews
etc., a large amount of data is available for the analysis in the form of opinion mining. This analysis
plays pivotal role in providing recommendation for ecommerce products, services and social networks,
forecasting market movements and competition among businesses, etc. The authors present a literature
review about the different techniques and applications of this field. The primary techniques can be classified
into Data Mining methods, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine learning algorithms.
A classification framework is designed to depict the three levels of opinion mining –document level,
Sentence Level and Aspect Level along with the methods involved in it. A system can be recommended
on the basis of content based and collaborative filtering


Chapter 11
Combining User Co-Ratings and Social Trust for Collaborative Recommendation: A Data
Analytics Approach.............................................................................................................................. 195
Sheng-Jhe Ke, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan
Wei-Po Lee, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan

Traditional collaborative filtering recommendation methods calculate similarity between users to find the
most similar neighbors for a particular user and take into account their opinions to predict item ratings.
Though these methods have some advantages, however, they encounter difficulties in dealing with the
problems of cold start users and data sparsity. To overcome these difficulties, researchers have proposed
to consider social context information in the process of determining similar neighbors. In this chapter,
we present a data analytics approach that combines user preference and social trust for making better
collaborative recommendation. The proposed approach regards the collaborative recommendation as
a classification task. It includes a data analysis procedure to explore the target dataset in terms of user
similarity and trust relationship, and a data classification procedure to extract data features and build
up a model accordingly. A series of experiments are conducted for performance evaluation. The results
show that this approach can be used to enhance the recommendation performance in an adaptive way
for different datasets without an iterative parameter-tuning process.

Chapter 12
Visual Data Mining for Collaborative Filtering: A State-of-the-Art Survey....................................... 217
Marenglen Biba, University of New York Tirana, Albania
Narasimha Rao Vajjhala, University of New York Tirana, Albania
Lediona Nishani, University of New York Tirana, Albania

This book chapter provides a state-of-the-art survey of visual data mining techniques used for collaborative
filtering. The chapter begins with a discussion on various visual data mining techniques along with an
analysis of the state-of-the-art visual data mining techniques used by researchers as well as in the industry.
Collaborative filtering approaches are presented along with an analysis of the state-of-the-art collaborative
filtering approaches currently in use in the industry. Visual data mining can provide benefit to existing
data mining techniques by providing the users with visual exploration and interpretation of data. The
users can use these visual interpretations for further data mining. This chapter dealt with state-of-the-art
visual data mining technologies that are currently in use apart. The chapter also includes the key section
of the discussion on the latest trends in visual data mining for collaborative filtering.

Chapter 13
Data Stream Mining Using Ensemble Classifier: A Collaborative Approach of Classifiers............... 236
Snehlata Sewakdas Dongre, Ghrce Nagpur, India
Latesh G. Malik, Ghrce Nagpur, India

A data stream is giant amount of data which is generated uncontrollably at a rapid rate from many
applications like call detail records, log records, sensors applications etc. Data stream mining has
grasped the attention of so many researchers. A rising problem in Data Streams is the handling of
concept drift. To be a good algorithm it should adapt the changes and handle the concept drift properly.
 

Ensemble classification method is the group of classifiers which works in collaborative manner. Overall
this chapter will cover all the aspects of the data stream classification. The mission of this chapter is
to discuss various techniques which use collaborative filtering for the data stream mining. The main
concern of this chapter is to make reader familiar with the data stream domain and data stream mining.
Instead of single classifier the group of classifiers is used to enhance the accuracy of classification. The
collaborative filtering will play important role here how the different classifiers work collaborative within
the ensemble to achieve a goal.

Chapter 14
Statistical Relational Learning for Collaborative Filtering a State-of-the-Art Review....................... 250
Lediona Nishani, University of New York Tirana, Albania
Marenglen Biba, University of New York in Tirana, Albania

People nowadays base their behavior by making choices through word of mouth, media, public opinion,
surveys, etc. One of the most prominent techniques of recommender systems is Collaborative filtering
(CF), which utilizes the known preferences of several users to develop recommendation for other
users. CF can introduce limitations like new-item problem, new-user problem or data sparsity, which
can be mitigated by employing Statistical Relational Learning (SRLs). This review chapter presents a
comprehensive scientific survey from the basic and traditional techniques to the-state-of-the-art of SRL
algorithms implemented for collaborative filtering issues. Authors provide a comprehensive review of
SRL for CF tasks and demonstrate strong evidence that SRL can be successfully implemented in the
recommender systems domain. Finally, the chapter is concluded with a summarization of the key issues
that SRLs tackle in the collaborative filtering area and suggest further open issues in order to advance
in this field of research.

Compilation of References................................................................................................................ 270

About the Contributors..................................................................................................................... 302

Index.................................................................................................................................................... 307
 Another Random Document on
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Well, it didn't take long to say. "What do you call it but trust that
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me for it. What better proof of your situation and your character
than your possession exactly of such a field for whatever you like, of
such a dish for serving me up? Mr. Bradham, as you know," Gray
continued, "was this morning so good as to pay me a visit, and the
form in which he put your glory to me—because we talked of you
ever so pleasantly—was that, by his appreciation, you know your
way about the place better than all the rest of the knowing put
together."
Horton smiled, smoked, kept his hands in his pockets. "Dear deep
old Davey!"
"Yes," said Gray consistently, "isn't he a wise old specimen? It's
rather horrid for me having thus to mention, as if you had applied to
me for a place, that I've picked up a good 'character' of you, but
since you insist on it he assured me that I couldn't possibly have a
better friend."
"Well, he's a most unscrupulous old person and ought really to be
ashamed. What it comes to," Haughty added, "is that though I've
repeatedly stayed with them they've to the best of his belief never
missed one of the spoons. The fact is that even if they had poor
Davey wouldn't know it."
"He doesn't take care of the spoons?" Gray asked in a tone that
made his friend at once swing round and away. He appeared to note
an unexpectedness in this, yet, "out" as he was for unexpectedness,
it could grow, on the whole, clearly, but to the raising of his spirits.
"Well, I shall take care of my loose valuables and, unwarned by the
Bradhams and likely to have such things to all appearance in greater
number than ever before, what can I do but persist in my notion of
asking you to keep with me, at your convenience, some proper
count of them?" After which as Horton's movement had carried him
quite to the far end of the room, where the force of it even detained
him a little. Gray had him again well in view for his return, and was
prompted thereby to a larger form of pressure. "How can you
pretend to palm off on me that women mustn't in prodigious
numbers 'trust' you?"
Haughty made of his shoulders the most prodigious hunch. "What
importance, under the sun, has the trust of women—in numbers
however prodigious? It's never what's best in a man they trust—it's
exactly what's worst, what's most irrelevant to anything or to any
class but themselves. Their kind of confidence," he further
elucidated, "is concerned only with the effect of their own operations
or with those to which they are subject; it has no light either for a
man's other friends or for his enemies: it proves nothing about him
but in that particular and wholly detached relation. So neither hate
me nor like me, please, for anything any woman may tell you."
Horton's hand had on this renewed and emphasised its proposal of
good-night; to which his host acceded with the remark: "What
superfluous precautions you take!"
"How can you call them superfluous," he asked in answer to this,
"when you've been taking them at such a rate yourself?—in the
interest, I mean, of trying to persuade me that you can't stand on
your feet?"
"It hasn't been to show you that I'm silly about life—which is what
you've just been talking of. It has only been to show you that I'm
silly about affairs," Gray said as they went at last through the big
bedimmed hall to the house doors, which stood open to the warm
summer night under the protection of the sufficient outward
reaches.
"Well, what are affairs but life?" Vinty, at the top of the steps, sought
to know.
"You'll make me feel, no doubt, how much they are—which would be
very good for me. Only life isn't affairs—that's my subtle distinction,"
Gray went on.
"I'm not sure, I'm not sure!" said Horton while he looked at the
stars.
"Oh rot—I am!" Gray happily declared; to which he the next moment
added: "What it makes you contend for, you see, is the fact of my
silliness."
"Well, what is that but the most splendid fact about you, you jolly
old sage?"—and his visitor, getting off, fairly sprang into the shade of
the shrubberies.

BOOK FOURTH

Again and again, during the fortnight that followed his uncle's death,
were his present and his future to strike our young man as an
extraordinary blank cheque signed by Mr. Betterman and which,
from the moment he accepted it at all, he must fill out, according to
his judgment, his courage and his faith, with figures, monstrous,
fantastic, almost cabalistic, that it seemed to him he should never
learn to believe in. It was not so much the wonder of there being in
various New York institutions strange deposits of money, to amounts
that, like familiar mountain masses, appeared to begin at the blue
horizon and, sloping up and up toward him, grew bigger and bigger
the nearer he or they got, till they fairly overhung him with their
purple power to meet whatever drafts upon them he should make; it
was not the tone, the climax of dryness, of that dryest of men Mr.
Crick, whose answering remark as to any and every particular
presumption of credit was "Well, I guess I've fixed it so as you'll find
something there"; that sort of thing was of course fairy-tale enough
in itself, was all the while and in a hundred connections a sweet
assault on his credulity, but was at the same time a phase of
experience comparatively vulgar and that tended to lose its edge
with repetition. The real, the overwhelming sense of his adventure
was much less in the fact that he could lisp in dollars, as it were, and
see the dollars come, than in those vast vague quantities, those
spreading tracts, of his own consciousness itself on which his
kinsman's prodigious perversity had imposed, as for his exploration,
the aspect of a boundless capital. This trust of the dead man in his
having a nature that would show to advantage under a bigger strain
than it had ever dreamed of meeting, and the corresponding
desolate freedom on his own part to read back into the mystery such
refinements either, or such crude candours, of meaning and motive
as might seem best to fit it, that was the huge vague inscribable
sum which ran up into the millions and for which the signature that
lettered itself to the last neatness wherever his mind's eye rested
was "good" enough to reduce any more casual sign in the scheme of
nature or of art to the state of a negligible blur. Mr. Crick's want of
colour, as Gray qualified this gentleman's idiosyncrasy from the
moment he saw how it would be their one point of contact, became,
by the extreme rarity and clarity with which it couldn't but affect
him, the very most gorgeous gem, of the ruby or topaz order, that
the smooth forehead of the actual was for the present to flash upon
him.
For dry did it appear inevitable to take the fact of a person's turning
up, from New York, with no other retinue than an attendant scribe in
a straw hat, a few hours before his uncle's last one, and being
beholden to mere Miss Mumby for simple introduction to Gray as Mr.
Betterman's lawyer. So had such sparenesses and barenesses of
form to register themselves for a mind beset with the tradition that
consequences were always somehow voluminous things; and yet the
dryness was of a sort, Gray soon apprehended, that he might take
up in handfuls, as if it had been the very sand of the Sahara, and
thereby find in it, at the least exposure to light, the collective
shimmer of myriads of fine particles. It was with the substance of
the desert taken as monotonously sparkling under any motion to dig
in it that the abyss of Mr. Crick's functional efficiency was filled. That
efficiency, in respect to the things to be done, would clearly so
answer to any demand upon it within the compass of our young
man's subtlety, that the result for him could only be a couple of days
of inexpressible hesitation as to the outward air he himself should be
best advised to aim at wearing. He reminded himself at this crisis of
the proprietor of a garden, newly acquired, who might walk about
with his gardener and try to combine, in presence of abounding
plants and the vast range of luxuriant nature, an ascertainment of
names and properties and processes with a dissimulation, for decent
appearance, of the positive side of his cockneyism. By no
imagination of a state of mind so unfurnished would the gardener
ever have been visited; such gaping seams in the garment of
knowledge must affect him at the worst as mere proprietary languor,
the offhandedness of repletion; and no effective circumvention of
traditional takings for granted could late-born curiosity therefore
achieve. Gray's hesitation ceased only when he had decided that he
needn't care, comparatively speaking, for what Mr. Crick might think
of him. He was going to care for what others might—this at least he
seemed restlessly to apprehend; he was going to care tremendously,
he felt himself make out, for what Rosanna Gaw might, for what
Horton Vint might—even, it struck him, for what Davey Bradham
might. But in presence of Mr. Crick, who insisted on having no more
personal identity than the omnibus conductor stopping before you
but just long enough to bite into a piece of pasteboard with a pair of
small steel jaws, the question of his having a character either to
keep or to lose declined all relevance—and for the reason in especial
that whichever way it might turn for him would remain perhaps, so
to speak, the most unexpressed thing that should ever have
happened in the world.
The effect producible by him on the persons just named, and
extending possibly to whole groups of which these were members,
would be an effect because somehow expressed and encountered as
expression: when had he in all his life, for example, so lived in the
air of expression and so depended on the help of it, as in that so
thrilling night-hour just spent with the mystifying and apparently
mystified, yet also apparently attached and, with whatever else,
attaching, Vinty? It wasn't that Mr. Crick, whose analogue he had
met on every occasion of his paying his fare in the public
conveyances—where the persons to whom he paid it, without
perhaps in their particulars resembling each other, all managed
nevertheless to be felt as gathered into this reference—wasn't in a
high degree conversible; it was that the more he conversed the less
Gray found out what he thought not only of Mr. Betterman's heir but
of any other subject on which they touched. The gentleman who
would, by Gray's imagination, have been acting for the executors of
his uncle's will had not that precious document appeared to dispense
with every superfluity, could state a fact, under any rash invitation,
and endow it, as a fact, with the greatest conceivable amplitude—
this too moreover not because he was garrulous or gossiping, but
because those facts with which he was acquainted, the only ones on
which you would have dreamed of appealing to him, seemed all
perfect nests or bags of other facts, bristling or bulging thus with
every intensity of the positive and leaving no room in their
interstices for mere appreciation to so much as turn round. They
were themselves appreciation—they became so by the simple force
of their existing for Mr. Crick's arid mention, and they so covered the
ground of his consciousness to the remotest edge that no breath of
the air either of his own mind or of anyone's else could have
pretended to circulate about them. Gray made the reflection—
tending as he now felt himself to waste rather more than less time in
this idle trick—that the different matters of content in some
misunderstandings have so glued themselves together that
separation has quite broken down and one continuous block,
suggestive of dimensional squareness, with mechanical perforations
and other aids to use subsequently introduced, comes to represent
the whole life of the subject. What it amounted to, he might have
gathered, was that Mr. Crick was of such a common commonness as
he had never up to now seen so efficiently embodied, so completely
organised, so securely and protectedly active, in a word—not to say
so garnished and adorned with strange refinements of its own: he
had somehow been used to thinking of the extreme of that quality
as a note of defeated application, just as the extreme of rarity would
have to be. His domestic companion of these days again and again
struck him as most touching the point at issue, and that point alone,
when most proclaiming at every pore that there wasn't a difference,
in all the world, between one thing and another. The refusal of his
whole person to figure as a fact invidiously distinguishable, that of
his aspect to have an identity, of his eyes to have a consciousness,
of his hair to have a colour, of his nose to have a form, of his mouth
to have a motion, of his voice to consent to any separation of
sounds, made intercourse with him at once extremely easy and
extraordinarily empty; it was deprived of the flicker of anything by
the way and resembled the act of moving forward in a perfectly-
rolling carriage with the blind of each window neatly drawn down.
Gray sometimes advanced to the edge of trying him, so to call it, as
to the impression made on him by lack of recognitions assuredly
without precedent in any experience, any, least of all, of the ways of
beneficiaries; but under the necessity on each occasion of our young
man's falling back from the vanity of supposing himself really
presentable or apprehensible. For a grasp of him on such ground to
take place he should have had first to show himself and to catch his
image somehow reflected; simply walking up and down and
shedding bland gratitude didn't convey or exhibit or express him in
this case, as he was sure these things had on the other hand truly
done where everyone else, where his uncle and Rosanna, where Mr.
Gaw and even Miss Mumby, where splendid Vinty, whom he so
looked to, and awfully nice Davey Bradham, whom he so took to,
were concerned. It all came back to the question of terms and to the
perception, in varying degrees, on the part of these persons, of his
own; for there were somehow none by which Mr. Crick was
penetrable that would really tell anything about him, and he could
wonder in freedom if he wasn't then to know too that last immunity
from any tax on his fortune which would consist in his having never
to wince. Against wincing in other relations than this one he was
prepared, he only desired, to take his precautions—visionary
precautions in those connections truly swarming upon him; but
apparently he was during these first days of the mere grossness of
his reality to learn something of the clear state of seeing every fond
sacrifice to superstition that he could think of thrust back at him. If
he could but have brought his visitor to say after twenty-four hours
of him "Well, you're the damnedest little idiot Eve ever had to
pretend to hold commerce with!" that would on the spot have
pressed the spring of his rich sacrificial "Oh I must be, I must be!—
how can I not abjectly and gratefully be?" Something at least would
so have been done to placate the jealous gods. But instead of that
the grossness of his reality just flatly included this supremely useful
friend's perhaps supposing him a vulgar voluptuary, or at least a
mere gaping maw, cynically, which amounted to say frivolously,
indifferent to everything but the general fact of his windfall. Strange
that it should be impossible in any particular whatever to inform or
to correct Mr. Crick, who sat unapproachable in the midst of the only
knowledge that concerned him.
He couldn't help feeling it conveyed in the very breath of the
summer airs that played about him, to his fancy, in a spirit of frolic
still lighter and quicker than they had breathed in other climes, he
couldn't help almost seeing it as the spray of sea-nymphs, or hearing
it as the sounded horn of tritons, emerging, to cast their spell, from
the foam-flecked tides around, that he was regarded as a creature
rather unnaturally "quiet" there on his averted verandahs and in his
darkened halls, even at moments when quite immense things, by his
own measure, were happening to him. Everything, simply, seemed
to be happening, and happening all at once—as he could say to
himself, for instance, by the fact of such a mere matter as his pulling
up at some turn of his now renewedly ceaseless pacing to take in he
could scarce have said what huge though soft collective rumble,
what thick though dispersed exhalation, of the equipped and
appointed life, the life that phrased itself with sufficient assurance as
the multitudinous throb of Newport, borne toward him from vague
regions, from behind and beyond his temporary blest barriers, and
representing for the first time in his experience an appeal directed at
him from a source not somewhat shabbily single. An impression like
that was in itself an event—so repeatedly in his other existence (it
was already his quite unconnectedly other) had the rumour of the
world, the voice of society, the harmonies of possession, been
charged, for his sensibility, with reminders which, so far from
suggesting association, positively waved him off from it. Mr.
Betterman's funeral, for all the rigour of simplicity imposed on it by
his preliminary care, had enacted itself in a ponderous, numerous, in
fact altogether swarming and resounding way; the old local
cemetery on the seaward-looking hillside, as Gray seemed to identify
it, had served for the final scene, and our young man's sense of the
whole thing reached its finest point in an unanswered question as to
whether the New York business world or the New York newspaper
interest were the more copiously present. The business world broke
upon him during the recent rites in large smooth tepid waves—he
was conscious of a kind of generalised or, as they seemed to be
calling it, standardised face, as of sharpness without edge, save
when edge was unexpectedly improvised, bent upon him for a hint
of what might have been better expressed could it but have been
expressed humorously; while the newspaper interest only fed the
more full, he felt even at the time, from the perfectly bare plate
offered its flocking young emissaries by the most recognising eye at
once and the most deprecating dumbness that he could command.
He had asked Vinty, on the morrow of Vinty's evening visit, to "act"
for him in so far as this might be; upon which Vinty had said gaily—
he was unexceptionally gay now—"Do you mean as your best man
at your marriage to the bride who is so little like St. Francis's? much
as you yourself strike me, you know, as resembling the man of
Assisi." Vinty, at his great present ease, constantly put things in such
wonderful ways; which were nothing, however, to the way he mostly
did them during the days he was able to spare before going off
again to other calls, other performances in other places, braver and
breezier places on the bolder northern coast, it mostly seemed: his
allusions to which excited absolutely the more curious interest in his
friend, by an odd law, in proportion as he sketched them, under
pressure, as probably altogether alien to the friend's sympathies.
That was to be for the time, by every indication, his amusing "line"—
his taking so confident and insistent a view of what it must be in
Gray's nature and tradition to like or not to like that, as our young
man for that matter himself assured him, he couldn't have invented
a more successfully insidious way of creating an appetite than by
passing under a fellow's nose every sort of whiff of the indigestible.
One thing at least was clear, namely: that, let his presumption of a
comrade's susceptibilities, his possible reactions, under general or
particular exposure, approve itself or not, the extent to which this
free interpreter was going personally to signify for the savour of the
whole stretched there as a bright assurance. Thus he was all the
while acting indeed—acting so that fond formulations of it could only
become in the promptest way mere redundancies of reference; he
acted because his approach, his look, his touch made somehow, by
their simply projecting themselves, a definite difference for any
question, great or small, in the least subject to them; and this, after
the most extraordinary fashion, not in the least through his pressing
or interfering or even so much as intending, but just as a
consequence of his having a sense and an intelligence of the given
affair, such as it might be, to which, once he was present at it, he
was truly ashamed not to conform. That concentrated passage
between the two men while the author of their situation was still
unburied would of course always hover to memory's eye like a votive
object in the rich gloom of a chapel; but it was now disconnected,
attached to its hook once for all, its whole meaning converted with
such small delay into working, playing force and multiplied tasteable
fruit.
Quiet as he passed for keeping himself, by the impression I have
noted, how could Gray have felt more plunged in history, how could
he by his own sense more have waked up to it each morning and
gone to bed with it each night, sat down to it whenever he did sit
down, which was never for long, whether at a meal, at a book, at a
letter, or at the wasted endeavour to become, by way of a change,
really aware of his consciousness, than through positively missing as
he did the hint of anything in particular to do?—missing and missing
it all the while and yet at no hour paying the least of the penalties
that are supposed to attend the drop of responsibility and the
substituted rule of fatuity. How couldn't it be agitation of a really
sublime order to have it come over one that the personage in the
world one must most resemble at such a pitch would be simply, at
one's choice, the Kaiser or the Czar, potentates who only know their
situation is carried on by attestation of the fact that push it wherever
they will they never find it isn't? Thus they are referred to the
existence of machinery, the working of which machinery is answered
for, they may feel, whenever their eyes rest on one of those figures,
ministerial or ceremonial, who may be, as it is called, in waiting. Mr.
Crick was in waiting, Horton Vint was in waiting, Rosanna Gaw even,
at this moment a hundred miles away, was in waiting, and so was
Davey Bradham, though with but a single appearance at the palace
as yet to his credit. Neither Horton nor Mr. Crick, it was true, were
more materially, more recurrently present than a fellow's nerves, for
the wonder of it all, could bear; but what was it but just being Czar
or Kaiser to keep thrilling on one's own side before the fact that this
made no difference? Vulgar reassurance was the greatest of
vulgarities; monarchs could still be irresponsible, thanks to their
ministers' not being, and Gray repeatedly asked himself how he
should ever have felt as he generally did if it hadn't been so
absolutely exciting that while the scattered moments of Horton's
presence and the fitful snatches of telephonic talk with him lasted
the gage of protection, perfectly certain patronising protection,
added a still pleasanter light to his eye and ring to his voice, casual
and trivial as he clearly might have liked to keep these things. Great
monarchies might be "run," but great monarchs weren't—unless of
course often by the favourite or the mistress; and one hadn't a
mistress yet, goodness knew, and if one was threatened with a
favourite it would be but with a favourite of the people too.
History and the great life surged in upon our hero through such
images as these at their fullest tide, finding him out however he
might have tried to hide from them, and shaking him perhaps even
with no livelier question than when it occurred to him for the first
time within the week, oddly enough, that the guest of the Bradhams
never happened, while his own momentary guest, to meet Mr. Crick,
in his counsels, by so much as an instant's overlapping, any more
than it would chance on a single occasion that he should name his
friend to that gentleman or otherwise hint at his existence, still less
his importance. Was it just that the king was usually shy of
mentioning the favourite to the head of the treasury and that various
decencies attached, by tradition, to keeping public and private
advisers separate? "Oh I absolutely decline to come in, at any point
whatever, between you and him; as if there were any sort of help I
can give you that he won't ever so much better!"—those words had
embodied, on the morrow, Vinty's sole allusion to the main sense of
their first talk, which he had gone on with in no direct fashion. He
had thrown a ludicrous light on his committing himself to any such
atrocity of taste while the empowered person and quite ideally right
man was about; but points would come up more and more, did
come up, in fact already had, that they doubtless might work out
together happily enough; and it took Horton in fine the very fewest
hours to give example after example of his familiar and immediate
wit. Nothing could have better illustrated this than the interest
thrown by him for Gray over a couple of subjects that, with many
others indeed, beguiled three or four rides taken by the friends
along the indented shores and other seaside stretches and reaches
of their low-lying promontory in the freshness of the early morning
and when the scene might figure for themselves alone. Gray,
clinging as yet to his own premises very much even as a stripped
swimmer might loiter to enjoy an air-bath before his dive, had yet
mentioned that he missed exercise and had at once found Vinty full
of resource for his taking it in that pleasantest way. Everything, by
his assurance, was going to be delightful but the generality of the
people; thus, accordingly, was the generality of the people not yet in
evidence, thus at the sweet hour following the cool dawn could the
world he had become possessed of spread about him unspoiled.
It was perhaps in Gray to wonder a little in these conditions what
was then in evidence, with decks so invidiously cleared; this being,
however, a remark he forbore to make, mystified as he had several
times been, and somehow didn't like too much being, by having had
to note that to differ at all from Vinty on occasions apparently
offered was to provoke in him at once a positive excess of
agreement. He always went further, as it were, and Gray himself, as
he might say, didn't want to go those lengths, which were out of the
range of practical politics altogether. Horton's habit, as it seemed to
show itself, was to make out of saving sociability or wanton
ingenuity or whatever, a distinction for which a companion might
care, but for which he himself didn't with any sincerity, and then to
give his own side of it away, from the moment doubt had been
determined, with an almost desolating sweep of surrender. His own
side of it was by that logic no better a side, in a beastly vulgar
world, than any other, and if anyone wanted to mean that such a
mundane basis was deficient why he himself had but meant it from
the first and pretended something else only not to be too shocking.
He was ready to mean the worst—was ready for anything, that is, in
the interest of ceasing from humbug. And if Gray was prepared for
that then il ne s'agissait que de s'entendre. What Gray was prepared
for would really take, this young man frankly opined, some threshing
out; but it wasn't at all in readiness for the worst that he had come
to America—he had come on the contrary to indulge, by God's help,
in appreciations, comparisons, observations, reflections and other
luxuries, that were to minister, fond old prejudice aiding, to life at
the high pitch, the pitch, as who should say, of immortality. If on
occasion, under the dazzle of Horton's facility, he might ask himself
how he tracked through it the silver thread of sincerity—consistency
wasn't pretended to—something at once supervened that was better
than any answer, some benefit of information that the circumstance
required, of judgment that assisted or supported or even amused,
by felicity of contradiction, and that above all pushed the question so
much further, multiplying its relations and so giving it air and colour
and the slap of the brush, that it straightway became a picture and,
for the kind of attention Gray could best render, a conclusive settled
matter. He hated somehow to detract from his friend, wanting so
much more to keep adding to him; but it was after a little as if he
had felt that his loyalty, or whatever he might call it, could yet not be
mean in deciding that Horton's generalisations, his opinions as
distinguished from his perceptions and direct energies and images,
signified little enough: if he would only go on bristling as he
promised with instances and items, would only consent to consist at
the same rate and in his very self of material for history, one might
propose to gather from it all at one's own hours and without
troubling him the occasional big inference.
How good he could be on the particular case appeared for example
after Gray had expressed to him, just subsequently to their first
encounter, a certain light and measured wonderment at Rosanna
Gaw's appearing not to intend to absent herself long enough from
her cares in the other State, immense though these conceivably
were, to do what the rest of them were doing roundabout Mr.
Betterman's grave. Our young man had half taken for granted that
she would have liked, expressing it simply, to assist with him at the
last attentions to a memory that had meant, in the current phrase,
so much for them both—though of course he withal quite
remembered that her interest in it had but rested on his own and
that since his own, as promoted by her, had now taken such effect
there was grossness perhaps in looking to her for further
demonstrations: this at least in view of her being under her filial
stress not unimaginably sated with ritual. He had caught himself at
any rate in the act of dreaming that Rosanna's return for the funeral
would be one of the inevitabilities of her sympathy with his fortune—
every element of which (that was overwhelmingly certain) he owed
to her; and even the due sense that, put her jubilation or whatever
at its highest, it could scarce be expected to dance the same jig as
his, didn't prevent his remarking to his friend that clearly Miss Gaw
would come, since he himself was still in the stage of supposing that
when you had the consciousness of a lot of money you sort of did
violent things. He played with the idea that her arrival for the
interment would partake of this element, proceeding as it might
from the exhilaration of her monstrous advantages, her now assured
state. "Look at the violent things I'm doing," he seemed to observe
with this, "and see how natural I must feel it that any violence
should meet me. Yours, for example"—Gray really went so far
—"recognises how I want, or at least how I enjoy, a harmony;
though at the same time, I assure you, I'm already prepared for any
disgusted snub to the attitude of unlimited concern about me,
gracious goodness, that I may seem to go about taking for granted."
Unlimited concern about him on the part of the people who weren't
up at the cool of dawn save in so far as they here and there hadn't
yet gone to bed—this, in combination with something like it on the
part of numberless others too, had indeed to be faced as the
inveterate essence of Vinty's forecast, and formed perhaps the
hardest nut handed to Gray's vice of cogitation to crack; it was the
thing that he just now most found himself, as they said, up against—
involving as it did some conception of reasons other than ugly for so
much patience with the boring side of him.
An interest founded on the mere beastly fact of his pecuniary luck,
what was that but an ugly thing to see, from the moment his circle,
since a circle he was apparently to have, shouldn't soon be moved to
some decent reaction from it? How was he going himself to like
breathing an air in which the reaction didn't break out, how was he
going not to get sick of finding so large a part played, over the
place, by the mere constatation, in a single voice, a huge monotone
restlessly and untiringly directed, but otherwise without application,
of the state of being worth dollars to inordinate amounts? Was he
really going to want to live with many specimens of the sort of
person who wouldn't presently rather loathe him than know him
blindedly on such terms? would it be possible, for that matter, that
he should feel people unashamed of not providing for their attention
to him any better account of it than his uncle's form of it had
happened to supply, without his by that token coming to regard
them either as very "interested," according to the good old word, or
as themselves much too foredoomed bores to merit tolerance? When
it reached the pitch of his asking himself whether it could be
possible Vinty wouldn't at once see what he meant by that
reservation, he patched the question up but a bit provisionally
perhaps by falling back on a remark about this confidant that was
almost always equally in order. They weren't on the basis yet of any
treatable reality, any that could be directly handled and measured,
other than such as were, so to speak, the very children of accident,
those the old man's still unexplained whim had with its own special
shade of grimness let him in for. Naturally must it come to pass with
time that the better of the set among whom this easy genius was
the best would stop thinking money about him to the point that
prevented their thinking anything else—so that he should only break
off and not go in further after giving them a chance to show in a less
flurried way to what their range of imagination might reach invited
and encouraged. Should they markedly fail to take that chance it
would be all up with them so far as any entertainment that he
should care to offer them was concerned. How could it stick out
more disconcertingly—so his appeal might have run—that a fuss
about him was as yet absolutely a fuss on a vulgar basis? having
begun, by what he gathered, quite before the growth even of such
independent rumours as Horton's testimony, once he was on the
spot, or as Mr. Bradham's range of anecdote, consequent on Mr.
Bradham's call, might give warrant for: it couldn't have behind it, he
felt sure, so much as a word of Rosanna's, of the heralding or
promising sort—he would so have staked his right hand on the last
impossibility of the least rash overflow on that young woman's part.
There was this other young woman, of course, whom he heard of at
these hours for the first time from Haughty and whom he
remembered well enough to have heard praise of from his adopted
father, three or four years previous, on his rejoining the dear man
after a summer's separation. She would be, "Gussy's" charming
friend, Haughty's charming friend, no end of other people's charming
friend, as appeared, the heroine of the charming friendship his own
admirable friend had formed, in a characteristically headlong manner
(some exceptional cluster of graces, in her case, clearly much aiding)
with a young American girl, the very nicest anyone had ever seen,
met at the waters of Ragatz during one of several seasons there and
afterwards described in such extravagant terms as were to make her
remain, between himself and his elder, a subject of humorous
reference and retort. It had had to do with Gray's liking his
companion of those years always better and better that persons
intrinsically distinguished inveterately took to him so naturally—even
if the number of the admirers rallying was kept down a little by the
rarity, of course, of intrinsic distinction. It wasn't, either, as if this
blest associate had been by constitution an elderly flirt, or some
such sorry type, addicted to vain philanderings with young persons
he might have fathered: he liked young persons, small blame to him,
but they had never, under Gray's observation, made a fool of him,
and he was only as much of one about the young lady in question,
Cecilia Foy, yes, of New York, as served to keep all later inquiry and
pleasantry at the proper satiric pitch. She would have been a fine
little creature, by our friend's beguiled conclusion, to have at once so
quickened and so appreciated the accidental relation; for was
anything truly quite so charming in a clever girl as the capacity for
admiring disinterestedly a brave gentleman even to the point of
willingness to take every trouble about him?—when the
disinterestedness dwelt, that is, in the very pleasure she could seek
and find, so much more creditable a matter to her than any she
could give and be complimented for giving, involved as this could be
with whatever vanity, vulgarity or other personal pretence.
Gray remembered even his not having missed by any measure of his
own need or play of his own curiosity the gain of Miss Foy's
acquaintance—so might the felicity of the quaint affair, given the
actual parties, have been too sacred to be breathed on; he in fact
recalled, and could still recall, every aspect of their so excellent time
together reviving now in a thick rich light, how he had inwardly
closed down the cover on his stepfather's accession of fortune—
which the pretty episode really seemed to amount to; extracting
from it himself a particular relief of conscience. He could let him
alone, by this showing, without black cruelty—so little had the day
come for his ceasing to attract admirers, as they said, at public
places or being handed over to the sense of desertion. That left Gray
as little as possible haunted with the young Cecilia's image, so
completely was his interest in her, in her photograph and in her
letters, one of the incidents of his virtually filial solicitude; all the less
in fact no doubt that she had written during the aftermonths
frequently and very advertisedly, though perhaps, in spite of Mr.
Northover's gay exhibition of it, not so very remarkably. She was
apparently one of the bright persons who are not at their brightest
with the pen—which question indeed would perhaps come to the
proof for him, thanks to his having it ever so vividly, not to say
derisively, from Horton that this observer didn't really know what
had stayed her hand, for the past week, from an outpouring to the
one person within her reach who would constitute a link with the
delightful old hero of her European adventure. That so close a
representative of the party to her romance was there in the flesh
and but a mile or two off, was a fact so extraordinary as to have
waked up the romance again in her and produced a state of fancy
from which she couldn't rest—for some shred of the story that might
be still afloat. Gray therefore needn't be surprised to receive some
sign of this commotion, and that he hadn't yet done so was to be
explained, Haughty guessed, by the very intensity of the passions
involved.
One of them, it thus appeared, burnt also in Gussy's breast; devoted
as she was to Cissy, she had taken the fond anecdote that so
occupied them as much under her protection as she had from far
back taken the girl's every other interest, and what for the hour
paralysed their action, that of the excited pair, must simply have
been that Mrs. Bradham couldn't on the one hand listen to anything
so horrid as that her young friend should make an advance
unprepared and unaccompanied, and that the ardent girl, on the
other, had for the occasion, as for all occasions, her ideal of
independence. Gray was not himself impatient—he felt no jump in
him at the chance to discuss so dear a memory in an air still
incongruous; it depended on who might propose to him the delicate
business, let alone its not making for a view of the great Gussy's fine
tact that she should even possibly put herself forward as a proposer.
However, he didn't mind thinking that if Cissy should prove all that
was likely enough their having a subject in common couldn't but
practically conduce; though the moral of it all amounted rather to a
portent, the one that Haughty, by the same token, had done least to
reassure him against, of the extent to which the native jungle
harboured the female specimen and to which its ostensible cover,
the vast level of mixed growths stirred wavingly in whatever breeze,
was apt to be identifiable but as an agitation of the latest redundant
thing in ladies' hats. It was true that when Rosanna had perfectly
failed to rally, merely writing a kind short note to the effect that she
should have to give herself wholly, for she didn't know how long, to
the huge assault of her own questions, that might have seemed to
him to make such a clearance as would count against any number of
positively hovering shades. Horton had answered for her not turning
up, and nothing perhaps had made him feel so right as this did for a
faith in those general undertakings of assurance; only, when at the
end of some days he saw that vessel of light obscured by its swing
back to New York and other ranges of action, the sense of exposure
—even as exposure to nothing worse than the lurking or pouncing
ladies—became sharper through contrast with the late guarded
interval; this to the extent positively of a particular hour at which it
seemed to him he had better turn tail and simply flee, stepping from
under the too vast orb of his fate.
He was alone with that quantity on the September morning after
breakfast as he had not felt himself up to now; he had taken to
pacing the great verandah that had become his own as he had
paced it when it was still his uncle's, and it might truly have been a
rush of nervous apprehension, a sudden determination of terror, that
quickened and yet somehow refused to direct his steps. He had
turned out there for the company of sea and sky and garden, less
conscious than within doors, for some reason, that Horton was a lost
luxury; but that impression was presently to pass with a return of a
queer force in his view of Rosanna as above all somehow wanting,
off and withdrawn verily to the pitch of her having played him some
trick, merely let him in where she was to have seen him through,
failed in fine of a sociability implied in all her preliminaries. He found
his attention caught, in one of his revolutions, by the chair in which
Abel Gaw had sat that first afternoon, pulling him up for their so
unexpectedly intense mutual scrutiny, and when he turned away a
moment after, quitting the spot almost as if the strange little man's
death that very night had already made him apparitional, which was
unpleasant, it was to drop upon the lawn and renew his motion
there. He circled round the house altogether at last, looking at it
more critically than had hitherto seemed relevant, taking the
measure, disconcertedly, of its unabashed ugliness, and at the end
coming to regard it very much as he might have eyed some
monstrous modern machine, one of those his generation was going
to be expected to master, to fly in, to fight in, to take the terrible
women of the future out for airings in, and that mocked at his
incompetence in such matters while he walked round and round it
and gave it, as for dread of what it might do to him, the widest
berth his enclosure allowed. In the midst of all of which, quite
wonderfully, everything changed; he wasn't alone with his monster,
he was in, by this reminder, for connections, nervous ass as he had
just missed writing himself, and connections fairly glittered,
swarming out at him, in the person of Mr. Bradham, who stood at
the top of a flight of steps from the gallery, which he had been
ushered through the house to reach, and there at once, by some
odd felicity of friendliness, some pertinence of presence, of promise,
appeared to make up for whatever was wrong and supply whatever
was absent. It came over him with extraordinary quickness that the
way not to fear the massed ambiguity was to trust it, and this florid,
solid, smiling person, who waved a prodigious gold-coloured straw
hat as if in sign of ancient amity, had come exactly at that moment
to show him how.[2]

[2]This ends the first chapter of Book IV. The MS. breaks off with
an unfinished sentence opening the next chapter: "Not the least
pointed of the reflections Gray was to indulge in a fortnight later
and as by a result of Davey Bradham's intervention in the very
nick was that if he had turned tail that afternoon, at the very
oddest of all his hours, if he had prematurely taken to his heels
and missed the emissary from the wonderful place of his fresh
domestication, the article on which he would most irretrievably
have dished himself . . ."

NOTES FOR THE IVORY TOWER

AUGUSTA BRADHAM, "Gussie" Bradham, for the big social woman.

Basil Hunn I think on the whole for Hero. Graham Rising, which
becomes familiarly Gray Rising, I have considered but incline to keep
for another occasion.
Horton Crimper, among his friends Haughty Crimper, seems to me
right and best, on the whole, for my second young man. I don't
want for him a surname intrinsically pleasing; and this seems to me
of about the good nuance. My Third Man hereby becomes, I seem to
see, Davey Bradham; on which, I think, for the purpose and
association, I can't improve.
My Girl, in the relinquished thing, was Cissy Foy; and this was all
right for the figure there intended, but the girl here is a very
different one, and everything is altered. I want her name moreover,
her Christian one, to be Moyra, and must have some bright
combination with that; the essence of which is a surname of two
syllables and ending in a consonant—also beginning with one. I am
thinking of Moyra Grabham, the latter excellent thing was in the
Times of two or three days ago; its only fault is a little too much
meaning, but the sense here wouldn't be thrown into undue relief,
and I don't want anything pretty or conventionally "pleasing."
Everything of the shade of the real. Remain thus important the big,
the heavy Daughter of the billionaire, with her father; in connection
with whom I think I give up Betterman. That must stand over, and I
want, above all, a single syllable. All the other names have two or
three; and this makes an objection to the Shimple, which I originally
thought of as about odd and ugly enough without being more so
than I want it. But that also will keep, while I see that I have the
monosyllable Hench put down; only put down for another
connection. I see I thought of "Wenty" Hench, short for Wentworth,
as originally good for Second Young Man. If I balance that against
Haughty Crimper, I incline still to the latter, for the small amusement
of the Haughty. On the other hand I am not content with Hench,
though a monosyllable, for the dear Billionaire girl, in the light of
whom it is alone important to consider the question, her Father so
little mattering after she becomes by his death the great Heiress of
the time. And I kind of want to make her Moyra; with which I just
spy in the Times a wonderful and admirable "Chown"; which makes
me think that Moyra Chown may do. Besides which if I keep
Grabham for my "heroine" I feel the Christian name should there be
of one syllable. All my others are of two; and I shall presently make
the ease right for this, finding the good thing. The above provides
for the time for the essential. Yet suddenly I am pulled up—
Grabham, after all, won't at all do if I keep Bradham for the other
connection; which I distinctly prefer: I want nothing with any shade
of a special sense there. Accordingly, I don't know but what I may
go in for a different note altogether and lavish on her the fine
Cantupher; which I don't want however really to waste. When
Cantupher is used there ought to be several of it, and above all
men: no, I see it won't do, and besides I don't want anything
positively fine. I like Wither, and I like Augurer, and I like, in another
note, Damper, and I even see a little Bessie as a combination with it,
though I don't on the whole want a Bessie. At any rate I now get on.
[3]What I want the first Book to do is to present the Gaws, the
Bradhams and Cissy Foy, in Three Chapters or Scenes, call them
Scenes of the Acts, in such a way that I thus present with them the
first immediate facts involved; or in other words present the first
essence of the Situation. What I see is, as I further reflect, that it is
better to get Graham Fielder there within the Act, to have him on
the premises already, and learnt so to be, before it has progressed
beyond the first Scene; though he be not seen till the Second Book.
When Rosanna goes over to her Father it befals before she has had
more than twenty words with him that one of the Nurses who is
most sympathetic to her appears in the long window that opens
from the house on to the verandah, and it is thus at once disclosed
that he has come. Rosanna has taken for granted from the quiet air
of the place that this event hasn't yet occurred; but Gray has in fact
arrived with the early morning, has come on the boat from New
York, the night one, and is there above with, or ready to be with, the
dying man. Perfectly natural and plausible I make it that he doesn't
begin at once to pervade the place; delicacy, discretion, anxiety
naturally operating with him; so that we know only he is there, and
that matters are more or less taking place above, during the rest of
the Book. But the fact in question immediately determines, for
proprieties' and discretions' sake, the withdrawal of Rosanna and her
Father; they return to their own abode; and I see the rest of the
business of the act as taking place partly there and partly, by what I
make out, on the Bradhams' own premises, the field of the Third
Scene. Here is the passage between the two young women that I
require, and my Heroine, I think, must be on a visit of a number of
days to Gussie. I want Davey first with Rosanna, and think I get
something like his having walked over, along the cliff, to their house,
to bring her, at his wife's request, over to tea. Yes, I have Davey's
walk back with Rosanna, and her Father's declining to come, or
saying that he will follow afterward; his real design being to sneak
over again, as I may call it, to the other house, in the exercise of his
intense curiosity. That special founded and motived condition is what
we sufficiently know him by and what he is for the time (which is all
the time we have of him) identified by. I get thus for Book 2 that
Gray, latish in the afternoon, coming down from his uncle's quarter,
finds him, has a passage or scene with him, above all an impression
of him; and this before he has had any other: we learn that he
hasn't seen his uncle yet; the judgment of the doctors about this
being operative and they wishing a further wait. I want Rosanna's
Father for his first very sharp impression; this really making, I think,
Scene First of Book 2. It gives me Scene 2 for what I shall then want
without further delay of his first introduction to his Uncle's room and
his half hour, or whatever, there; with the fact determined of the
non-collapse of the latter, his good effect from the meeting quite
rather, and the duration of him determined to end of Book 2. After
Book 2 he is no more. Scene 3 of Book 2 then can only be, for Gray,
with Rosanna; that scene having functions to be exercised with no
more delay at all, by what I make out, and being put in, straight,
then and there, that we may have the support of it. I by the same
token see Book 3 now as functional entirely for the encounter of
Gray with the two other women and, for the first time, with Davey;
and also as preparing the appearance of Horton Vint, though not
producing it. I see him, in fact, I think, as introduced independently
of his first appearance to Gray, see it as a matter of his relation with
Cissy, and as lighting up what I immediately want of their situation.
In fact don't I see this as Horton's "Act" altogether, as I shall have
seen and treated Book I as Rosanna's, and Book 2 as Gray's. By the
blest operation this time of my Dramatic principle, my law of
successive Aspects, each treated from its own centre, as, though
with qualifications. The Awkward Age, I have the great help of
flexibility and variety; my persons in turn, or at least the three or
four foremost, having control, as it were, of the Act and Aspect, and
so making it his or making it hers. This of course with the great
inevitable and desirable preponderance, in the Series, of Gray's
particular weight. But I seem to make out, to a certainty, at least
another "Act" for Rosanna and probably another for Horton; though
perhaps not more than one, all to herself, for Cissy. I say at least
another for Horton on account of my desire to give Gray as affecting
Horton, only less than I want to give Horton as affecting Gray. It is
true that I get Gray as affecting Horton more or less in Book 3, but
as the situation developes it will make new needs, determinations
and possibilities. All this for feeling my way and making things come,
more and more come. I want an Aspect under control of Davey, at
all events—this I seem pretty definitely to feel; but things will only
come too much. At all events, to retreat, remount, a little there are
my 3 first Books sufficiently started without my having as yet exactly
noted the absolutely fundamental antecedents. But before I do this,
even, I memorise that Gray's Scene with Rosanna for 3 of Book 2
shall be by her coming over to Mr. Betterman's house herself that
evening, all frankly and directly, to see him there; not by his going
over to her. And I seem to want it evening; the summer night
outside, with their moving about on the Terrace and above the sea
etc. Withal, by the same token, I want such interesting things
between them from immediately after the promulgation of Mr.
Betterman's Will; I want that, but of course can easily get it, so far
as anything is easy, in Book 4, the function of which is to present
Gray as face to face with the situation so created for him. This is
obviously, of course, one of Gray's Aspects, and the next will
desirably be, I dare say too; can only be, so far as I can now tell,
when I consider that the Book being my Fourth, only Six of the Ten
which I most devoutly desire to limit the thing to then remain for my
full evolution on the momentum by that time imparted. Certainly, at
all events, the Situation leaves Newport, to come to life, its full life,
in New York, where I seem to see it as going on to the end, unless I
manage to treat myself to some happy and helpful mise-en-scène or
exploitation of my memory of (say) California. The action entirely of
American localisation, as goes without saying, yet making me thus
kind of hanker, for dear "amusement's" sake, to decorate the thing
with a bit of a picture of some American Somewhere that is not
either Newport or N.Y. I even ask myself whether Boston wouldn't
serve for this garniture, serve with a narrower economy than
"dragging in" California. I kind of want to drag in Boston a little,
feeling it as naturally and thriftily workable. But these are details
which will only too much come; and I seem to see already how my
action, however tightly packed down, will strain my Ten Books, most
blessedly, to cracking. That is exactly what I want, the tight packing
and the beautifully audible cracking; the most magnificent masterly
little vivid economy, with a beauty of its own equal to the beauty of
the donnée itself, that ever was.
However, what the devil are, exactly, the little fundamentals in the
past? Fix them, focus them hard; they need only be perfectly
conceivable, but they must be of the most lucid sharpness. I want to
have it that for Gray, and essentially for Rosanna, it's a renewal of an
early, almost, or even quite positively, childish beginning; and for
Gray it's the same with Horton Vint—the impression of Horton
already existing in him, a very strong and "dazzled" one, made in the
quite young time, though in a short compass of days, weeks,
possibly months, or whatever, and having lasted on (always for
Gray) after a fashion that makes virtually a sort of relation already
established, small as it ostensibly is. Such his relation with Rosanna,
such his relation with Horton—but for his relation with Cissy——? Do
I want that to be also a renewal, the residuum of an old impression,
or a fresh thing altogether? What strikes me prima facie is that it's
better to have two such pre-established origins for the affair than
three; the only question is does that sort of connection more
complicate or more simplify for that with Cissy? It more simplifies if I
see myself wanting to give, by my plan, the full effect of a revolution
in her, a revolution marked the more by the germ of the relation
being thrown back, marked the more, that is, in the sense of the
shade of perfidy, treachery, the shade of the particular element and
image that is of the essence, so far as she is concerned, of my
action. How this exactly works I must in a moment go into—hammer
it out clear; but meanwhile there are these other fundamentals. Gray
then is the son of his uncle's half-sister, not sister (on the whole, I
think); whose dissociation from her rich brother, before he was
anything like so rich, must have followed upon her marrying a man
with whom he, Mr. Betterman, was on some peculiarly bad terms
resulting from a business difference or quarrel of one of those
rancorous kinds that such lives (as Mr. Betterman's) are plentifully
bestrown with. The husband has been his victim, and he hasn't
hated him, or objected to him for a brother-in-law, any the less for
that. The objected-to brother-in-law has at all events died early, and
the young wife, with her boy, her scant means, her disconnection
from any advantage to her represented by her half-brother, has
betaken herself to Europe; where the rest of that history has been
enacted. I see the young husband, Gray's father, himself Graham
Fielder the elder or whatever, as dying early, but probably dying in
Europe, through some catastrophe to be determined, two or three
years after their going there. This is better than his dying at home,
for removal of everything from nearness to Mr. Betterman.
Betterman has been married and has had children, a son and a
daughter, this is indispensable, for diminution of the fact of paucity
of children; but he has lost successively these belongings—there is
nothing over strange in it; the death of his son, at 16 or 18 or
thereabouts, having occurred a few years, neither too few nor too
many, before my beginning, and having been the sorest fact of his
life. Well then, young Mrs. Fielder or whoever, becomes thus in
Europe an early widow, with her little boy, and there, after no long
time, marries again, marries an alien, a European of some
nationality to be determined, but probably an Englishman; which
completes the effect of alienation from her brother—easily
conceivable and representable as "in his way," disliking this union;
and indeed as having made known to her, across the sea, that if she
will forbear from it (this when he first hears of it and before it has
taken place) and will come back to America with her boy, he will
"forgive" her and do for her over there what he can. The great fact
is that she declines this condition, the giving up of her new fiancé,
and thereby declines an advantage that may, or might have, become
great for her boy. Not so great then—Betterman not then so rich.
But in fine—With which I cry Eureka, eureka; I have found what I
want for Rosanna's connection, though it will have to make Rosanna
a little older than Gray, 2 or 3 or 3 or 4 years, instead of same age. I
see Gray's mother at any rate, with her small means, in one of the
smaller foreign cities, Florence or Dresden, probably the latter, and
also see there Rosanna and her mother, this preceding by no long
time the latter's death. Mrs. Gaw has come abroad with her
daughter, for advantages, in the American way, while the husband
and father is immersed in business cares at home; and when the
two couples, mother and son, and mother and daughter, meet in a
natural way, a connection is more or less prepared by the fact of Mr.
Gaw having had the business association with Mrs. Fielder's half-
brother, Mr. Betterman, at home, even though the considerably
violent rupture or split between the two men will have already taken
place. Mrs. Gaw is a very good simple, a bewildered and pathetic
rich woman, in delicate health, and is sympathetic to Gray's mother,
on whom she more or less throws herself for comfort and support,
and Gray and Rosanna, Rosanna with a governess and all the
facilities and accessories natural to wealth, while the boy's conditions
are much leaner and plainer—the two, I say, fraternise and are good
friends; he figuring to Rosanna (say he is about 13, while she is 16)
as a tremendously initiated and informed little polyglot European,
knowing France, Germany, Italy etc. from the first. It is at this
juncture that Mrs. Fielder's second marriage has come into view, or
the question and the appearance of it; and that, very simultaneously,
the proposal has come over from her half-brother on some rumour
of it reaching him. As already mentioned, Betterman proposes to her
that if she will come back to America with her boy, and not enter
upon the union that threatens, and which must have particular
elements in it of a nature to displease and irritate him, he will look
after them both, educate the boy at home, do something substantial
for them. Mrs. Fielder takes her American friend into her confidence
in every way, introduces to her the man who desires to marry her,
whom Rosanna sees and with whom the boy himself has made great
friends, so that the dilemma of the poor lady becomes a great and
lively interest to them all; the pretendant himself forming also a very
good relation with the American mother and daughter, the friends of
his friend, and putting to Mrs. Gaw very eagerly the possibility of her
throwing her weight into the scale in his favour. Her meeting, that is
Mrs. Fielder's meeting, the proposition from New York involves
absolutely her breaking off with him; and he is very much in love
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