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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/32649-8.txt b/32649-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9936aac --- /dev/null +++ b/32649-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,2362 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Middle Years, by Henry James + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: The Middle Years + +Author: Henry James + +Editor: Percy Lubbock + +Release Date: June 1, 2010 [EBook #32649] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MIDDLE YEARS *** + + + + +Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was +produced from scanned images of public domain material +from the Google Print project.) + + + + + + + + + +THE +MIDDLE YEARS + +BY +HENRY JAMES + +NEW YORK +CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS + +Published November, 1917 + +[Illustration: From a copyrighted photograph by Elliott and Fry + +Henry James] + + +BY HENRY JAMES + +A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS + +NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER + +THE MIDDLE YEARS + +NOTES ON NOVELISTS +WITH SOME OTHER NOTES + + + + +EDITOR'S NOTE + + +_The following pages represent all that Henry James lived to write of a +volume of autobiographical reminiscences to which he had given the name +of one of his own short stories_, The Middle Years. _It was designed to +follow on_ Notes of a Son and Brother _and to extend to about the same +length. The chapters here printed were dictated during the autumn of +1914. They were laid aside for other work toward the end of the year and +were not revised by the author. A few quite evident slips have been +corrected and the marking of the paragraphs--which he usually deferred +till the final revision--has been completed._ + +_In dictating_ The Middle Years _he used no notes, and beyond an +allusion or two in the unfinished volume itself there is no indication +of the course which the book would have taken or the precise period it +was intended to cover_. + +_PERCY LUBBOCK._ + + + + +I + + +If the author of this meandering record has noted elsewhere[1] that an +event occurring early in 1870 was to mark the end of his youth, he is +moved here at once to qualify in one or two respects that emphasis. +Everything depends in such a view on what one means by one's youth--so +shifting a consciousness is this, and so related at the same time to +many different matters. We are never old, that is we never cease easily +to be young, for _all_ life at the same time: youth is an army, the +whole battalion of our faculties and our freshnesses, our passions and +our illusions, on a considerably reluctant march into the enemy's +country, the country of the general lost freshness; and I think it +throws out at least as many stragglers behind as skirmishers +ahead--stragglers who often catch up but belatedly with the main body, +and even in many a case never catch up at all. Or under another figure +it is a book in several volumes, and even at this a mere instalment of +the large library of life, with a volume here and there closing, as +something in the clap of its covers may assure us, while another remains +either completely agape or kept open by a fond finger thrust in between +the leaves. A volume, and a most substantial, _had_ felt its pages very +gravely pressed together before the winter's end that I have spoken of, +but a restriction may still bear, and blessedly enough, as I gather from +memory, on my sense of the whole year then terminated--a year seen by me +now in the light of agitations, explorations, initiations (I scarce know +how endearingly enough to name them!) which I should call fairly +infantine in their indifference to proportions and aims, had they not +still more left with me effects and possessions that even yet lend +themselves to estimation. + +[1] "Notes of a Son and Brother," 1914. + +It was at any rate impossible to have been younger, in spite of whatever +inevitable submissions to the rather violent push forward at certain +particular points and on lines corresponding with them, than I found +myself, from the first day of March 1869, in the face of an opportunity +that affected me then and there as the happiest, the most interesting, +the most alluring and beguiling, that could ever have opened before a +somewhat disabled young man who was about to complete his twenty-sixth +year. Treasures of susceptibility, treasures not only unconscious of the +remotest approach to exhaustion, but, given the dazzling possibilities, +positively and ideally intact, I now recognise--I in fact long ago +recognised--on the part of that intensely "reacting" small organism; +which couldn't have been in higher spirits or made more inward fuss +about the matter if it had come into a property measured not by mere +impressions and visions, occasions for play of perception and +imagination, mind and soul, but by dollars and "shares," lands and +houses or flocks and herds. It is to the account of that immense +fantastication that I set down a state of mind so out of proportion to +anything it could point to round about save by the vaguest of +foolish-looking gestures; and it would perhaps in truth be hard to say +whether in the mixture of spirit and sense so determined the fact of +innocence or that of intelligence most prevailed. I like to recover this +really prodigious flush--as my reader, clearly, must perceive I do; I +like fairly to hang about a particular small hour of that momentous +March day--which I have glanced at too, I believe, on some other and +less separated page than this--for the sake of the extraordinary gage of +experience that it seemed on the spot to offer, and that I had but to +take straight up: my life, on so complacently near a view as I now treat +myself to, having veritably consisted but in the prolongation of that +act. I took up the gage, and as I look back the fullest as well as +simplest account of the interval till now strikes me as being that I +have never, in common honour, let it drop again. And the small hour was +just that of my having landed at Liverpool in the gusty, cloudy, +overwhelmingly English morning and pursued, with immediate intensities +of appreciation, as I may call the muffled accompaniment for fear of +almost indecently overnaming it, a course which had seated me at a late +breakfast in the coffee-room of the old Adelphi Hotel ("Radley's," as I +had to deplore its lately having ceased to be dubbed,) and handed me +over without a scruple to my fate. This doom of inordinate exposure to +appearances, aspects, images, every protrusive item almost, in the great +beheld sum of things, I regard in other words as having settled upon me +once for all while I observed for instance that in England the plate of +buttered muffin and its cover were sacredly set upon the slop-bowl after +hot water had been ingenuously poured into the same, and had seen that +circumstance in a perfect cloud of accompaniments. I must have had with +my tea and my muffin a boiled egg or two and a dab of marmalade, but it +was from a far other store of condiments I most liberally helped myself. +I was lucidly aware of so gorging--esoterically, as it were, while I +drew out the gustatory process; and I must have said in that lost +reference to this scene of my dedication which I mentioned above that I +was again and again in the aftertime to win back the homeliest notes of +the impression, the damp and darksome light washed in from the steep, +black, bricky street, the crackle of the strong draught of the British +"sea-coal" fire, much more confident of its function, I thought, than +the fires I had left, the rustle of the thick, stiff, loudly unfolded +and refolded "Times," the incomparable truth to type of the waiter, +truth to history, to literature, to poetry, to Dickens, to Thackeray, +positively to Smollett, and to Hogarth, to every connection that could +help me to appropriate him and his setting, an arrangement of things +hanging together with a romantic rightness that had the force of a +revelation. + +To what end appropriation became thus eager and romance thus easy one +could have asked one's self only if the idea of connectibility as +stretching away and away hadn't of a sudden taken on such a wealth of +suggestion; it represented at once a chain stretching off to heaven knew +where, but far into one's future at least, one's possibilities of life, +and every link and pulse of which it was going accordingly to be +indispensable, besides being delightful and wonderful, to recognise. +Recognition, I dare say, was what remained, through the adventure of the +months to come, the liveliest principle at work; both as bearing on the +already known, on things unforgotten and of a sense intensely cultivated +and cherished from my younger time, and on the imagined, the unimagined +and the unimaginable, a quantity that divided itself somehow into the +double muster of its elements, an endless vista or waiting array, down +the middle of which I should inconceivably pass--inconceivably save for +being sure of some thrilled arrest, some exchange of assurance and +response, at every step. Obviously half the charm, as I can but thinly +describe it, of the substantially continuous experience the first +passages of which I thus note was in the fact that, immensely moved by +it as I was, and having so to deal with it--in the anticipatory way or +to the whatevers and wherevers and whenevers within me that should find +it in order--I yet felt it in no degree as strange or obscure, baffling +or unrecognising on its own side; everything was so far from +impenetrable that my most general notion was the very ecstasy of +understanding and that really wherever I looked, and still more wherever +I pressed, I sank in and in up to my nose. This in particular was of the +perfect felicity, that while the fact of difference all round me was +immense the embarrassment of it was nil--as if the getting into relation +with the least waste had been prepared from so far back that a sort of +divine economy now fairly ruled. It was doubtless a part of the total +fatuity, and perhaps its sublimest mark, that I knew what everything +meant, not simply then but for weeks and months after, and was to know +less only with increase of knowledge. That must indeed have been of the +essence of the general effect and the particular felicity--only not +grotesque because, for want of occasion, not immediately exhibited: a +consciousness not other than that of a person abruptly introduced into a +preoccupied and animated circle and yet so miraculously aware of the +matters conversed about as to need no word of explanation before joining +in. To say of such a person that he hadn't lost time would, I knew, be +feebly to express his advantage; my likeness to him, at any rate, +probably fell short of an absurd one through the chapter of accidents, +mostly of the happiest in their way too, which, restraining the personal +impulse for me, kept appearances and pretensions down. The feast, as it +more and more opened out, was all of the objective, as we have learned +so comfortably to say; or at least of its convenient opposite only in so +far as this undertook to interpret it for myself alone. + +To return at all across the years to the gates of the paradise of the +first larger initiations is to be ever so tempted to pass them, to push +in again and breathe the air of this, that and the other plot of rising +ground particularly associated, for memory and gratitude, with the +quickening process. The trouble is that with these sacred spots, to +later appreciation, the garden of youth is apt inordinately to bristle, +and that one's account of them has to shake them together fairly hard, +making a coherent thing of them, to profit by the contribution of each. +In speaking of my earliest renewal of the vision of Europe, if I may +give so grand a name to a scarce more than merely enlarged and uplifted +gape, I have, I confess, truly to jerk myself over the ground, to wrench +myself with violence from memories and images, stages and phases and +branching arms, that catch and hold me as I pass them by. Such a matter +as my recovery of contact with London for a few weeks, the contact +broken off some nine years before, lays so many plausible traps for me +that discretion half warns me to stand off the ground and walk round it +altogether. I stop my ears to the advice, however, under the pleading +reminder that just those days began a business for me that was to go +ever so much further than I then dreamed and planted a seed that was, by +my own measure, singularly to sprout and flourish--the harvest of which, +I almost permit myself to believe, has even yet not all been gathered. I +foresee moreover how little I shall be able to resist, throughout these +Notes, the force of persuasion expressed in the individual _vivid_ image +of the past wherever encountered, these images having always such terms +of their own, such subtle secrets and insidious arts for keeping us in +relation with them, for bribing us by the beauty, the authority, the +wonder of their saved intensity. They have saved it, they seem to say to +us, from such a welter of death and darkness and ruin that this alone +makes a value and a light and a dignity for them, something indeed of an +argument that our story, since we attempt to tell one, has lapses and +gaps without them. Not to be denied also, over and above this, is the +downright pleasure of the illusion yet again created, the _apparent_ +transfer from the past to the present of the particular combination of +things that did at its hour ever so directly operate and that isn't +after all then drained of virtue, wholly wasted and lost, for sensation, +for participation in the act of life, in the attesting sights, sounds, +smells, the illusion, as I say, of the recording senses. + +What began, during the springtime of my actual reference, in a couple of +dusky ground-floor rooms at number 7 Half-Moon Street, was simply an +establishment all in a few days of a personal relation with London that +was not of course measurable at the moment--I saw in my bedazzled state +of comparative freedom too many other relations ahead, a fairly +intoxicated vision of choice and range--but that none the less set going +a more intimately inner consciousness, a wheel within the wheels, and +led to my departing, the actual, the general incident closed, in +possession of a return-ticket "good," as we say, for a longer interval +than I could then dream about, and that the first really earnest fumble +of after years brought surprisingly to light. I think it must have been +the very proportions themselves of the invitation and the interest that +kept down, under the immense impression, everything in the nature of +calculation and presumption; dark, huge and prodigious the other party +to our relation, London's and mine, as I called it, loomed and +spread--much too mighty a Goliath for the present in any conceivable +ambition even of a fast-growing David. My earlier apprehension, fed at +the season as from a thousand outstretched silver spoons--for these all +shone to me with that effect of the handsomest hospitality--piled up the +monster to such a height that I could somehow only fear him as much as I +admired and that his proportions in fact reached away quite beyond my +expectation. He was always the great figure of London, and I was for no +small time, as the years followed, to be kept at my awe-struck distance +for taking him on that sort of trust: I had crept about his ankles, I +had glanced adventurously up at his knees, and wasn't the moral for the +most part the mere question of whether I should ever be big enough to so +much as guess where he stopped? + +Odd enough was it, I make out, that I was to feel no wonder of that kind +or degree play in the coming time over such other social aspects, such +superficially more colourable scenes as I paid, in repetition as +frequent as possible, my respects and my compliments to: they might meet +me with wreathed smiles and splendid promises and deep divinations of +my own desire, a thousand graces and gages, in fine, that I couldn't +pretend to have picked up within the circle, however experimentally +widened, of which Half-Moon Street was the centre, and nothing therefore +could have exceeded the splendour of these successive and multiplied +assurances. What it none the less infinitely beguiles me to recognise +to-day is that such exhibitions, for all their greater direct radiance, +and still more for all their general implication of a store of meaning +and mystery and beauty that they alone, from example to example, from +prodigy to prodigy, had to open out, left me comparatively little +crushed by the impression of their concerning me further than my own +action perhaps could make good. It was as if I had seen that all there +was for me of these great things I should sooner or later take; the +amount would be immense, yet, as who should say, all on the same plane +and the same connection, the ęsthetic, the "artistic," the romantic in +the looser sense, or in other words in the air of the passions of the +intelligence. What other passions of a deeper strain, whether personal +or racial, and thereby more superstitiously importunate, I must have +felt involved in the question of an effective experience of English life +I was doubtless then altogether unprepared to say; it probably came, +however, I seem actually to make out, very much to this particular +perception, exactly, that any penetration of the London scene would _be_ +experience after a fashion that an exercise of one's "mere intellectual +curiosity" wherever else wouldn't begin to represent, glittering as the +rewards to such curiosity amid alien peoples of genius might thoroughly +appear. On the other hand it was of course going to be nothing less than +a superlative help that one would have but to reach out straight and in +the full measure of one's passion for these rewards, to find one's self +carried all the way by one's active, one's contemplative concern with +them--this delightful affair, fraught with increase of light, of joy and +wonder, of possibilities of adventure for the mind, in fine, inevitably +exhausting the relation. + + + + +II + + +Let me not here withal appear to pretend to say how far I then foresaw +myself likely to proceed, as it were, with the inimitable France and the +incomparable Italy; my real point is altogether in the simple fact that +they hovered before me, even in their scrappy foretastes, to a great +effect of ease and inspiration, whereas I shouldn't at all have resented +the charge of fairly hiding behind the lowly door of Mr. Lazarus Fox--so +unmistakeably did it open into complications tremendous. This excellent +man, my Half-Moon Street landlord--I surrender, I can't keep away from +him--figures to me now as but one of the thousand forms of pressure in +the collective assault, but he couldn't have been more carefully chosen +for his office had he consciously undertaken to express to me in a +concentrated manner most of the things I was "after." The case was +rather indeed perhaps that he himself by his own mere perfection put me +up to much of what I should most confidently look for, and that the +right lines of observation and enjoyment, of local and social contact, +as I may call it, were most of all those that started out from him and +came back to him. It was as if nothing I saw could have done without +him, as if nothing he was could have done without everything else. The +very quarters I occupied under his protection happened, for that matter, +to swarm--as I estimated swarming--with intensities of suggestion--aware +as I now encourage myself to become that the first note of the +numberless reverberations I was to pick up in the aftertime had +definitely been struck for me as under the wave of his conducting little +wand. He flourished it modestly enough, ancient worthy of an immemorial +order that he was--old pensioned servant, of course, of a Cumberland (as +I believe) family, a kind, slim, celibate, informing and informed member +of which occupied his second floor apartments; a friend indeed whom I +had met on the very first occasion of my sallying forth from Morley's +Hotel in Trafalgar Square to dine at a house of sustaining, of inspiring +hospitality in the Kensington quarter. Succumbing thus to my tangle of +memories, from which I discern no escape, I recognise further that if +the endlessly befriending Charles Nortons introduced me to Albert +Rutson, and Albert Rutson introduced me to his feudal retainer, so it +was in no small degree through the confidence borrowed from the latter's +interest in the decent appearance I should make, an interest of a +consistency not to have been prefigured by any at all like instance in +my past, that I so far maintained my dizzy balance as to be able to +ascend to the second floor under the thrill of sundry invitations to +breakfast. I dare say it is the invitations to breakfast that hold me at +this moment by their spell--so do they breathe to me across the age the +note of a London world that we have left far behind; in consequence of +which I the more yearningly steal back to it, as on sneaking tiptoe, and +shut myself up there without interference. It is embalmed in +disconnections, in differences, that I cultivate a free fancy for +pronouncing advantageous to it: sunk already was the shaft by which I +should descend into the years, and my inspiration is in touching as many +as possible of the points of the other tradition, retracing as many as +possible of the features of the old face, eventually to be blurred again +even before my own eyes, and with the materials for a portrait thereby +accessible but to those who were present up to the time of the change. + +I don't pretend to date this change which still allows me to catch my +younger observation and submission at play on the far side of it; I make +it fall into the right perspective, however, I think, when I place it +where I began to shudder before a confidence, not to say an impudence, +of diminution in the aspects by which the British capital differed so +from those of all the foreign together as to present throughout the +straight contradiction to them. That straight contradiction, testifying +invaluably at every turn, had been from far back the thing, romantically +speaking, to clutch and keep the clue and the logic of; thanks to it +the whole picture, every element, objects and figures, background and +actors, nature and art, hung consummately together, appealing in their +own light and under their own law--interesting ever in every case by +instituting comparisons, sticking on the contrary to their true instinct +and suggesting only contrast. They were the _opposite_, the assured, the +absolute, the unashamed, in respect to whatever might be of a generally +similar intention elsewhere: this was their dignity, their beauty and +their strength--to look back on which is to wonder if one didn't quite +consciously tremble, before the exhibition, for any menaced or mitigated +symptom in it. I honestly think one did, even in the first flushes of +recognition, more or less so tremble; I remember at least that in spite +of such disconcertments, such dismays, as certain of the most thoroughly +Victorian _choses vues_ originally treated me to, something yet deeper +and finer than observation admonished me to like them just as they were, +or at least not too fatuously to dislike--since it somehow glimmered +upon me that if they had lacked their oddity, their monstrosity, as it +even might be, their unabashed insular conformity, other things that +belong to them, as they belong to these, might have loomed less large +and massed less thick, which effect was wholly to be deprecated. To +catch that secret, I make out the more I think of it, was to have +perhaps the smokiest, but none the less the steadiest, light to walk by; +the "clue," as I have called it, was to be one's appreciation of an +England that should turn its back directly enough, and without fear of +doing it too much, on examples and ideas not strictly homebred--since +she did her own sort of thing with such authority and was even then to +be noted as sometimes trying other people's with a _kind_ of disaster +not recorded, at the worst, among themselves. + +I must of course disavow pretending to have read this vivid philosophy +into my most immediate impressions, and I may in fact perhaps not claim +to have been really aware of its seed till a considerable time had +passed, till apprehensions and reflections had taken place in quantity, +immeasurable quantity, so to speak, and a great stir-up of the +imagination been incurred. Undoubtedly is it in part the new--that is, +more strictly, the elder--acuteness that I touch all the prime profit +with; I didn't know at the time either how much appearances were all the +while in the melting-pot or what wealth of reaction on them I was laying +up. I cherish, for love of the unbroken interest, all the same, the +theory of certain then positive and effective prefigurements, because it +leaves me thus free for remarking that I knew where I was, as I may put +it, from the moment I saw the state of the London to come brought down +with the weight of her abdication of her genius. It not unnaturally may +be said that it hasn't been till to-day that we _see_ her genius in its +fulness--throwing up in a hundred lights, matters we practically +acknowledge, such a plastic side as we had never dreamed she possessed. +The genius of accommodation is what we had last expected of +her--accommodation to anything but her portentous self, for in _that_ +connection she was ever remarkable; and certainly the air of the +generalised, the emulous smart modern capital has come to be written +upon her larger and larger even while we look. + +The unaccommodating and unaccommodated city remains none the less +closely consecrated to one's fondest notion of her--the city too +indifferent, too proud, too unaware, too stupid even if one will, to +enter any lists that involved her moving from her base and that thereby, +when one approached her from the alien _positive_ places (I don't speak +of the American, in those days too negative to be related at all) +enjoyed the enormous "pull," for making her impression, of ignoring +everything but her own perversities and then of driving these home with +an emphasis not to be gainsaid. Since she didn't emulate, as I have +termed it, so she practised her own arts altogether, and both these ways +and these consequences were in the flattest opposition (_that_ was the +happy point!) to foreign felicities or foreign standards, so that the +effect in every case was of the straightest reversal of them--with +black for the foreign white and white for the foreign black, wet for the +foreign dry and dry for the foreign wet, big for the foreign small and +small for the foreign big: I needn't extend the catalogue. _Her_ +idiosyncrasy was never in the least to have been inferred or presumed; +it could only, in general, make the outsider provisionally gape. She sat +thus imperturbable in her felicities, and if that is how, remounting the +stream of time, I like most to think of her, this is because if her +interest is still undeniable--as that of overgrown things goes--it has +yet lost its fineness of quality. Phenomena may be interesting, thank +goodness, without being phenomena of elegant expression or of any other +form of restless smartness, and when once type is strong, when once it +plays up from deep sources, every show of its sincerity delivers us a +message and we hang, to real suspense, on its continuance of energy, on +its again and yet again consistently acquitting itself. So it keeps in +tune, and, as the French adage says, _c'est le ton qui fait la chanson_. +The mid-Victorian London was sincere--that was a vast virtue and a vast +appeal; the contemporary is sceptical, and most so when most plausible; +the turn of the tide could verily be fixed to an hour--the hour at which +the new plausibility began to exceed the old sincerities by so much as a +single sign. They could truly have been arrayed face to face, I think, +for an attentive eye--and I risk even saying that my own, bent upon +them, as was to come to pass, with a habit of anxiety that I should +scarce be able to overstate, had its unrecorded penetrations, its alarms +and recoveries, even perhaps its very lapses of faith, though always +redeemed afresh by still fonder fanaticisms, to a pitch that shall +perhaps present itself, when they expose it all the way, as that of +tiresome extravagance. Exposing it all the way is none the less, I see, +exactly what I plot against it--or, otherwise expressed, in favour of +the fine truth of history, so far as a throb of that awful pulse has +been matter of one's own life; in favour too of the mere returns +derivable from more inordinate curiosity. These Notes would enjoy small +self-respect, I think, if that principle, not to call it that passion, +didn't almost furiously ride them. + + + + +III + + +I was at any rate in the midst of sincerities enough, sincerities of +emphasis and "composition"; perversities, idiosyncrasies, +incalculabilities, delightful all as densities at first insoluble, +delightful even indeed as so much mere bewilderment and shock. When was +the shock, I ask myself as I look back, not so deadened by the general +atmospheric richness as not to melt more or less immediately into some +succulence for the mind, something that could feed the historic sense +almost to sweetness? I don't mean that it was a shock to be invited to +breakfast--there were stronger ones than that; but was in fact the +_trait de moeurs_ that disconnected me with most rapidity and +intensity from all I had left on the other side of the sea. To be so +disconnected, for the time, and in the most insidious manner, was above +all what I had come out for, and every appearance that might help it was +to be artfully and gratefully cultivated. I recollect well how many of +these combined as I sat at quite punctual fried sole and marmalade in +the comparatively disengaged sitting-room of the second floor--the +occupancy of the first has remained vague to me; disengaged from the +mantle of gloom the folds of which draped most heavily the feet of the +house, as it were, and thereby promoted in my own bower the chronic dusk +favourable to mural decoration consisting mainly of framed and glazed +"coloured" excisions from Christmas numbers of the Illustrated London +News that had been at their hour quite modern miracles. Was it for that +matter into a sudden splendour of the modern that I ascendingly emerged +under the hospitality of my kind fellow-tenant, or was it rather into +the fine classicism of a bygone age, as literature and the arts had +handed down that memory? Such were the questions whisked at every turn +under my nose and reducing me by their obscure charm but to bewildered +brooding, I fear, when I should have been myself, to repay these +attentions, quite forward and informing and affirmative. + +There were eminent gentlemen, as I was sure they could only be, to +"meet" and, alas, awfully to interrogate me--for vivid has remained to +me, as the best of my bewilderment, the strangeness of finding that I +could be of interest to _them_: not indeed to call it rather the proved +humiliation of my impotence. My identity for myself was _all_ in my +sensibility to their own exhibition, with not a scrap left over for a +personal show; which made it as inconvenient as it was queer that I +should be treated as a specimen and have in the most unexpected manner +to prove that I was a good one. I knew myself the very worst +conceivable, but how to give to such other persons a decent or coherent +reason for my being so required more presence of mind than I could in +the least muster--the consequence of which failure had to be for me, I +fear, under all that confused first flush, rather an abject acceptance +of the air of imbecility. There were, it appeared, things of interest +taking place in America, and I had had, in this absurd manner, to come +to England to learn it: I had had over there on the ground itself no +conception of any such matter--nothing of the smallest interest, by any +perception of mine, as I suppose I should still blush to recall, had +taken place in America since the War. How _could_ anything, I really +wanted to ask--anything comparable, that is, to what was taking place +under my eyes in Half-Moon Street and at dear softly presiding Rutson's +table of talk. It doubtless essentially belonged to the exactly right +type and tone and general figure of my fellow-breakfasters from the +Temple, from the Home Office, the Foreign Office, the House of Commons, +from goodness knew what other scarce discernible Olympian altitudes, it +belonged to the very cut of their hair and their waistcoats and their +whiskers--for it was still more or less a whiskered age--that they +should desire from me much distinctness about General Grant's first +cabinet, upon the formation of which the light of the newspaper happened +then to beat; yet at the same time that I asked myself if it was to such +cold communities, such flat frustrations as were so proposed, that I +had sought to lift my head again in European air, I found the crisis +enriched by sundry other apprehensions. + +They melted together in it to that increase of savour I have already +noted, yet leaving me vividly admonished that the blankness of my mind +as to the Washington candidates relegated me to some class unencountered +as yet by any one of my conversers, a class only not perfectly +ridiculous because perfectly insignificant. Also that politics walked +abroad in England, so that one might supremely bump against them, as +much as, by my fond impression, they took their exercise in America but +through the back streets and the ways otherwise untrodden and the very +darkness of night; that further all lively attestations were _ipso +facto_ interesting, and that finally and in the supreme degree, the +authenticity of whatever one was going to learn in the world would +probably always have for its sign that one got it at some personal cost. +To this generalisation mightn't one even add that in proportion as the +cost was great, or became fairly excruciating, the lesson, the value +acquired would probably be a thing to treasure? I remember really going +so far as to wonder if any act of acquisition of the life-loving, +life-searching sort that most appealed to me wouldn't mostly be +fallacious if unaccompanied by that tag of the price paid in personal +discomfort, in some self-exposure and some none too impossible +consequent discomfiture, for the sake of it. Didn't I even on occasion +mount to the very height of seeing it written that these bad moments +were the downright consecration of knowledge, that is of perception and, +essentially, of exploration, always dangerous and treacherous, and so +might afterwards come to figure to memory, each in its order, as the +silver nail on the wall of the temple where the trophy is hung up? All +of which remark, I freely grant, is a great ado about the long since so +bedimmed little Half-Moon Street breakfasts, and is moreover quite wide +of the mark if suggesting that the joys of recognition, those of +imaginatively, of projectively fitting in and fitting out every piece in +the puzzle and every recruit to the force of a further understanding +weren't in themselves a most bustling and cheering business. + +It was bustling at least, assuredly, if not quite always in the same +degree exhilarating, to breakfast out at all, as distinguished from +lunching, without its being what the Harvard scene made of it, one of +the incidents of "boarding"; it was association at a jump with the +ghosts of Byron and Sheridan and Scott and Moore and Lockhart and Rogers +and _tutti quanti_--as well as the exciting note of a social order in +which everyone wasn't hurled straight, with the momentum of rising, upon +an office or a store. The mere vision in numbers of persons embodying +and in various ways sharply illustrating a clear alternative to that +passivity told a tale that would be more and more worth the reading with +every turn of the page. So at all events I fantasticated while harassed +by my necessity to weave into my general tapestry every thread that +would conduce to a pattern, and so the thread for instance of the great +little difference of my literally never having but once "at home" been +invited to breakfast on types as well as on toast and its accessories +could suggest an effect of silk or silver when absolutely dangled before +me. That single occasion at home came back in a light that fairly +brought tears to my eyes, for it was touching now to the last wanness +that the lady of the winter morn of the Massachusetts Sabbath, one of +those, as I recover it, of 1868, to reach whose board we had waded +through snowdrifts, had been herself fondling a reminiscence, though I +can scarce imagine supposing herself to offer for our consumption any +other type than her own. It was for that matter but the sweet staleness +of her reminiscence that made her a type, and I remember how it had had +to do thereby all the work: _she_, of an age to reach so considerably +back, had breakfasted out, in London, and with Mr. Rogers himself--that +was the point; which I am bound to say did for the hour and on that spot +supply richness of reference enough. And I am caught up, I find, in the +very act of this claim for my prior scantness of experience by a memory +that makes it not a little less perfect and which is oddly enough again +associated with a struggle, on an empty stomach, through the massed New +England whiteness of the prime Sunday hour. I still cherish the vision, +which couldn't then have faded from me, of my having, during the age of +innocence--I mean of my own--breakfasted with W. D. Howells, insidious +disturber and fertiliser of that state in me, to "meet" Bayard Taylor +and Arthur Sedgwick all in the Venetian manner, the delightful Venetian +manner which toward the later 'sixties draped any motion on our host's +part as with a habit still appropriate. _He_ had risen that morning +under the momentum of his but recently concluded consular term in +Venice, where margin, if only that of the great loungeable piazza, had a +breadth, and though Sedgwick and I had rather, as it were, to take the +jump standing, this was yet under the inspiration of feeling the case +most special. Only it had _been_ Venetian, snow-shoes and all; I had +stored it sacredly away as not American at all, and was of course to +learn in Half-Moon Street how little it had been English either. + +What must have seemed to me of a fine international mixture, during +those weeks, was my thrilling opportunity to sit one morning, beside +Mrs. Charles Norton's tea-urn, in Queen's Gate Terrace, opposite to +Frederic Harrison, eminent to me at the moment as one of the subjects of +Matthew Arnold's early fine banter, one of his too confidently roaring +"young lions" of the periodical press. Has any gilding ray since that +happy season rested here and there with the sovereign charm of interest, +of drollery, of felicity and infelicity taken on by scattered selected +objects in that writer's bright critical dawn?--an element in which we +had the sense of sitting gratefully bathed, so that we fairly took out +our young minds and dabbled and soaked them in it as we were to do again +in no other. The beauty was thus at such a rate that people had +references, and that a reference was then, to my mind, whether in a +person or an object, the most glittering, the most becoming ornament +possible, a style of decoration one seemed likely to perceive figures +here and there, whether animate or not, quite groan under the +accumulation and the weight of. One had scarcely met it before--that I +now understood; at the same time that there was perhaps a wan joy in +one's never having missed it, by all appearance, having on the contrary +ever instinctively caught it, on the least glimmer of its presence. Even +when present, or what in the other time I had taken for present, it had +been of the thinnest, whereas all about me hereafter it would be by all +appearance almost glutinously thick--to the point even of one's on +occasion sticking fast in it; that is finding intelligibility smothered +in quantity. I lost breath in fact, no doubt, again and again, with this +latter increase, but was to go on and on for a long time before any +first glimmer of reaction against so special a source of interest. It +attached itself to objects often, I saw, by no merit or virtue--above +all, repeatedly, by no "cleverness"--of their own, but just by the luck +of history, by the action of multiplicity of circumstance. Condemned the +human particle "over here" was to _live_ on whatever terms, in +thickness--instead of being free, comparatively, or as I at once +ruefully and exquisitely found myself, only to feel and to think in it. +Ruefully because there were clearly a thousand contacts and sensations, +of the strong direct order, that one lost by not so living; exquisitely +because of the equal number of immunities and independences, blest +independences of perception and judgment, blest liberties of range for +the intellectual adventure, that accrued by the same stroke. These at +least had the advantage, one of the most distinguished conceivable, that +when enjoyed with a certain intensity they might produce the illusion of +the other intensity, that of being involved in the composition and the +picture itself, in the situations, the complications, the circumstances, +admirable and dreadful; while no corresponding illusion, none making for +the ideal play of reflection, conclusion, comparison, however one should +incline to appraise the luxury, seemed likely to attend the immersed or +engaged condition. + +Whatever fatuity might at any rate have resided in these complacencies +of view, I made them my own with the best conscience in the world, and I +meet them again quite to extravagance of interest wherever on the whole +extent of the scene my retrospect sets me down. It wasn't in the least +at the same time that encountered celebrities only thus provoked the +shifting play of my small lamp, and this too even though they were +easily celebrated, by my measure, and though from the very first I owed +an individual here and there among them, as was highly proper, the +benefit of impression at the highest pitch. On the great supporting and +enclosing scene itself, the big generalised picture, painted in layer +upon layer and tone upon tone, one's fancy was all the while feeding; +objects and items, illustrations and aspects might perpetually overlap +or mutually interfere, but never without leaving consistency the more +marked and character the more unmistakeable. The place, the places, +bristled so for every glance with expressive particulars, that I really +conversed with them, at happy moments, more than with the figures that +moved in them, which affected me so often as but submissive articles of +furniture, "put in" by an artist duly careful of effect and yet duly +respectful of proportion. The great impression was doubtless no other +then and there than what it is under every sky and before every scene +that remind one afresh, at the given moment, of all the ways in which +producing causes and produced creatures correspond and interdepend; but +I think I must have believed at that time that these cross references +kept up their game in the English air with a frankness and a good faith +that kept the process, in all probability, the most traceable of its +kind on the globe. + +What was the secret of the force of that suggestion?--which was not, I +may say, to be invalidated, to my eyes, by the further observation of +cases and conditions. Was it that the enormous "pull" enjoyed at every +point of the general surface the stoutness of the underlying belief in +what was behind all surfaces?--so that the particular visible, audible, +palpable fact, however small and subsidiary, was incomparably absolute, +or had, so to speak, such a conscience and a confidence, such an +absence of reserve and latent doubts about itself, as was not elsewhere +to be found. Didn't such elements as that represent, in the heart of +things, possibilities of scepticism, of mockery, of irony, of the return +of the matter, whatever it might be, on itself, by some play or other of +the questioning spirit, the spirit therefore weakening to entire comfort +of affirmations? Didn't I see that humour itself, which might seem +elsewhere corrosive and subversive, was, as an English faculty, turned +outward altogether and never turned inward?--by which convenient +circumstance subversion, or in other words alteration and variation were +not promoted. Such truths were wondrous things to make out in such +connections as my experience was then, and for no small time after, to +be confined to; but I positively catch myself listening to them, even +with my half-awakened ears, as if they had been all so many sermons of +the very stones of London. _There_, to come back to it, was exactly the +force with which these stones were to build me capaciously round: I +invited them, I besought them, to say all they would, and--to return to +my figure of a while back--it was soon so thoroughly as if they had +understood that, once having begun, they were to keep year after year +fairly chattering to me. Many of these pages, I fondly foresee, must +consist but of the record of their chatter. What was most of all +happening, I take it, was that under an absurd special stress I was +having, as who should say, to improvise a local medium and to arrange a +local consciousness. Against my due appropriation of those originally +closest at my hand inevitable accidents had conspired--and, to conclude +in respect to all this, if a considerable time was to be wanted, in the +event, for ideal certainty of adjustment, half the terms required by +this could then put forth the touching plea that they had quite achingly +waited. + + + + +IV + + +It may perhaps seem strange that the soil should have been watered by +such an incident as Mr. Lazarus Fox's reply, in the earliest rich dusk, +to my inquiry as to whither, while I occupied his rooms, I had best +betake myself most regularly for my dinner: "Well, there is the Bath +Hotel, sir, a very short walk away, where I should think you would be +very comfortable indeed. Mr. So-and-So dines at his club, sir--but there +is also the Albany in Piccadilly, to which I believe many gentlemen go." +I think I measured on the spot "all that it took" to make my friend most +advisedly--for it was clearly what he did--see me seated in lone state, +for my evening meal, at the heavy mahogany of the stodgy little hotel +that in those days and for long after occupied the north-west corner of +Arlington Street and to which, in common with many compatriots, I +repeatedly resorted during the years immediately following. We +_suffered_, however, on those occasions, the unmitigated coffee-room of +Mr. Fox's prescription--it was part of a strange inevitability, a +concomitant of necessary shelter and we hadn't at least gone forth to +invoke its austere charm. I tried it, in that singular way, at the hour +I speak of--and I well remember forecasting the interest of a social and +moral order in which it could be supposed of me that, having tried it +once, I should sublimely try it again. My success in doing so would +indeed have been sublime, but a finer shade of the quality still +attached somehow to my landlord's confidence in it; and this was one of +the threads that, as I have called them, I was to tuck away for future +picking-up again and unrolling. I fell back on the Albany, which long +ago passed away and which I seem to have brushed with a touch of +reminiscence in some anticipation of the present indulgence that is +itself quite ancient history. It was a small eating-house of the very +old English tradition, as I then supposed at least, just opposite the +much greater establishment of the same name, which latter it had +borrowed, and I remember wondering whether the tenants of the classic +chambers, the beadle-guarded cluster of which was impressive even to the +deprecated approach, found their conception of the "restaurant"--we +still pronounced it in the French manner--met by the small compartments, +narrow as horse-stalls, formed by the high straight backs of hard wooden +benches and accommodating respectively two pairs of feeders, who were +thus so closely face to face as fairly to threaten with knife and fork +each others' more forward features. + +The scene was sordid, the arrangements primitive, the detail of the +procedure, as it struck me, well-nigh of the rudest; yet I remember +rejoicing in it all--as one indeed might perfectly rejoice in the +juiciness of joints and the abundance of accessory pudding; for I said +to myself under every shock and at the hint of every savour that this +was what it was for an exhibition to reek with local colour, and one +could dispense with a napkin, with a crusty roll, with room for one's +elbows or one's feet, with an immunity from intermittence of the "plain +boiled," much better than one could dispense with that. There were +restaurants galore even at that time in New York and in Boston, but I +had never before had to do with an eating-house and had not yet seen the +little old English world of Dickens, let alone of the ever-haunting +Hogarth, of Smollett and of Boswell, drenched with such a flood of +light. As one sat there one _understood_; one drew out the severe séance +not to stay the assault of precious conspiring truths, not to break the +current of in-rushing telltale suggestion. Every face was a documentary +scrap, half a dozen broken words to piece with half a dozen others, and +so on and on; every sound was strong, whether rich and fine or only +queer and coarse; everything in this order drew a positive sweetness +from never being--whatever else it was--gracelessly flat. The very +rudeness was ripe, the very commonness was conscious--that is not +related to mere other forms of the same, but to matters as different as +possible, into which it shaded off and off or up and up; the image in +fine was organic, rounded and complete, as definite as a Dutch picture +of low life hung on a museum wall. "Low" I say in respect to the life; +but that was the point for me, that whereas the smartness and newness +beyond the sea supposedly disavowed the low, they did so but thinly and +vainly, falling markedly short of the high; which the little boxed and +boiled Albany attained to some effect of, after a fashion of its own, +just by having its so thoroughly appreciable note-value in a scheme of +manners. It was imbedded, so to speak, in the scheme, and it borrowed +lights, it borrowed even glooms, from so much neighbouring distinction. +The places across the sea, as they to my then eyes faintly after-glowed, +had no impinging borders but those of the desert to borrow _from_. And +if it be asked of me whether all the while I insist, for demonstration +of the complacency with which I desire to revert, on not regretting the +disappearance of such too long surviving sordidries as those I have +evoked, I can but answer that blind emotion, in whichever sense +directed, has nothing to say to the question and that the sense of what +we just _could_ confidently live by at a given far-away hour is a simple +stout fact of relief. + +Relief, again, I say, from the too enormous present accretions and +alternatives--which we witlessly thought so innumerable then, which we +artlessly found so much of the interest of _in_ an immeasurable +multiplicity and which I now feel myself thus grope for ghostly touch of +in the name, neither more nor less, of poetic justice. I wasn't +doubtless at the time so very sure, after all, of the comparative +felicity of our state, that of the rare _moment_ for the fond fancy--I +doubtless even a bit greedily missed certain quantities, not to call +them certain qualities, here and there, and the best of my actual +purpose is to make amends for that blasphemy. There isn't a thing I can +imagine having missed that I don't quite ache to miss again; and it +remains at all events an odd stroke that, having of old most felt the +thrill of the place in its mighty muchness, I have lived to adore it +backward for its sweet simplicity. I find myself in fact at the present +writing only too sorry when not able to minimise conscientiously this, +that or the other of the old sources of impression. The thing is indeed +admirably possible in a _general_ way, though much of the exhibition was +none the less undeniably, was absolutely large: how can I for instance +recall the great cab-rank, mainly formed of delightful hansoms, that +stretched along Piccadilly from the top of the Green Park unendingly +down, without having to take it for unsurpassably modern and majestic? +How can I think--I select my examples at hazard--of the "run" of the +more successful of Mr. Robertson's comedies at the "dear little old" +Prince of Wales's Theatre in Tottenham Court Road as anything less than +one of the wonders of our age? How, by the same token, can I not lose +myself still more in the glory of a time that was to watch the drawn-out +procession of Henry Irving's Shakespearean splendours at the +transcendent Lyceum? or how, in the same general line, not recognise +that to live through the extravagant youth of the ęsthetic era, whether +as embodied in the then apparently inexhaustible vein of the Gilbert and +Sullivan operas or as more monotonously expressed in those "last words" +of the _raffiné_ that were chanted and crooned in the damask-hung temple +of the Grosvenor Gallery, was to seem privileged to such immensities as +history would find left to her to record but with bated breath? + +These latter triumphs of taste, however, though lost in the abysm now, +had then a good many years to wait and I alight for illustrative support +of my present mild thesis on the comparative humility, say, of the +inward aspects, in a large measure, of the old National Gallery, where +memory mixes for me together so many elements of the sense of an antique +world. The great element was of course that I well-nigh incredibly stood +again in the immediate presence of Titian and Rembrandt, of Rubens and +Paul Veronese, and that the cup of sensation was thereby filled to +overflowing; but I look at it to-day as concomitantly warm and closed-in +and, as who should say, cosy that the ancient order and contracted +state and thick-coloured dimness, all unconscious of rearrangements and +reversals, blighting new lights and invidious shattering comparisons, +still prevailed and kept contemplation comfortably confused and serenely +superstitious, when not indeed at its sharpest moments quite fevered +with incoherences. The place looks to me across the half century richly +dim, yet at the same time both perversely plain and heavily +violent--violent through indifference to the separations and selections +that have become a tribute to modern nerves; but I cherish exactly those +facts of benightedness, seeming as they do to have positively and +blessedly conditioned the particular sweetness of wonder with which I +haunted the Family of Darius, the Bacchus and Ariadne, or the so-called +portrait of Ariosto. Could one in those days feel anything with force, +whether for pleasure or for pain, without feeling it as an immense +little act or event of life, and as therefore taking place on a scene +and in circumstances scarce at all to be separated from its own sense +and impact?--so that to recover it is to recover the whole medium, the +material pressure of things, and find it most marked for preservation as +an aspect, even, distinguishably, a "composition." + +_What_ a composition, for instance again I am capable at this hour of +exclaiming, the conditions of felicity in which I became aware, one +afternoon during a renewed gape before the Bacchus and Ariadne, first +that a little gentleman beside me and talking with the greatest vivacity +to another gentleman was extremely remarkable, second that he had the +largest and most _chevelu_ auburn head I had ever seen perched on a +scarce perceptible body, third that I held some scrap of a clue to his +identity, which couldn't fail to be eminent, fourth that this tag of +association was with nothing less than a small photograph sent me +westward across the sea a few months before, and fifth that the sitter +for the photograph had been the author of Atalanta in Calydon and Poems +and Ballads! I thrilled, it perfectly comes back to me, with the prodigy +of this circumstance that I should be admiring Titian in the same +breath with Mr. Swinburne--that is in the same breath in which _he_ +admired Titian and in which I also admired _him_, the whole constituting +on the spot between us, for appreciation, that is for mine, a fact of +intercourse, such a fact as could stamp and colour the whole passage +ineffaceably, and this even though the more illustrious party to it had +within the minute turned off and left me shaken. I was shaken, but I was +satisfied--that was the point; I didn't ask more to interweave another +touch in my pattern, and as I once more gather in the impression I am +struck with my having deserved truly as many of the like as possible. I +was welcome to them, it may well be said, on such easy terms--and yet I +ask myself whether, after all, it didn't take on my own part some doing, +as we nowadays say, to make them so well worth having. They themselves +took, I even at the time felt, little enough trouble for it, and the +virtue of the business was repeatedly, no doubt, a good deal more in +what I brought than in what I took. + +I apply this remark indeed to those extractions of the quintessence that +had for their occasion either one's more undirected though never +fruitless walks and wanderings or one's earnest, one's positively pious +approach to whatever consecrated ground or shrine of pilgrimage that +might be at the moment in order. There was not a regular prescribed +"sight" that I during those weeks neglected--I remember haunting the +museums in especial, though the South Kensington was then scarce more +than embryonic, with a sense of duty and of excitement that I was never +again to know combined in equal measure, I think, and that it might +really have taken some element of personal danger to account for. There +_was_ the element, in a manner, to season the cup with sharpness--the +danger, all the while, that my freedom might be brief and my experience +broken, that I was under the menace of uncertainty and subject in fine +to interruption. The fact of having been so long gravely unwell sufficed +by itself to keep apprehension alive; it was our idea, or at least quite +intensely mine, that what I was doing, could I but put it through, +would be intimately good for me--only the putting it through was the +difficulty, and I sometimes faltered by the way. This makes now for a +general air on the part of all the objects of vision that I recover, and +almost as much in those of accidental encounter as in the breathlessly +invoked, of being looked at for the last time and giving out their +message and story as with the still, collected passion of an only +chance. This feeling about them, not to say, as I might have imputed it, +_in_ them, wonderfully helped, as may be believed, the extraction of +quintessences--which sprang at me of themselves, for that matter, out of +any appearance that confessed to the least value in the compound, the +least office in the harmony. If the commonest street-vista was a fairly +heart-shaking contributive image, if the incidents of the thick +renascent light anywhere, and the perpetual excitement of never knowing, +between it and the historic and determined gloom, which was which and +which one would most "back" for the general outcome and picture, so the +great sought-out compositions, the Hampton Courts and the Windsors, the +Richmonds, the Dulwiches, even the very Hampstead Heaths and Putney +Commons, to say nothing of the Towers, the Temples, the Cathedrals and +the strange penetrabilities of the City, ranged themselves like the rows +of great figures in a sum, an amount immeasurably huge, that one would +draw on if not quite as long as one lived, yet as soon as ever one +should seriously get to work. That, to a tune of the most beautiful +melancholy--at least as I catch it again now--was the way all values +came out: they were charged somehow with a useability the most +immediate, the most urgent, and which, I seemed to see, would keep me +restless till I should have done something of my very own with them. + +This was indeed perhaps what most painted them over with the admonitory +appeal: there were truly moments at which they seemed not to answer for +it that I should get all the good of them, and the finest--what I was +so extravagantly, so fantastically after--unless I could somehow at once +indite my sonnet and prove my title. The difficulty was all in there +being so much of them--I might myself have been less restless if they +could only have been less vivid. This they absolutely declined at any +moment and in any connection to be, and it was ever so long till they +abated a jot of the refusal. Thereby, in consequence, as may easily be +judged, they were to keep me in alarms to which my measures practically +taken, my catastrophes anxiously averted, remained not quite +proportionate. I recall a most interesting young man who had been my +shipmate on the homeward-bound "China," shortly before--I could go at +length into my reasons for having been so struck with him, but I +forbear--who, on our talking, to my intense trepidation of curiosity, of +where I might advisedly "go" in London, let me know that he always went +to Craven Street Strand, where bachelor lodgings were highly convenient, +and whence I in fact then saw them flush at me over the cold grey sea +with an authenticity almost fierce. I didn't in the event, as has been +seen, go to Craven Street for rooms, but I did go, on the very first +occasion, for atmosphere, neither more nor less--the young man of the +ship, building so much better than he knew, had guaranteed me such a +rightness of that; and it belongs to this reminiscence, for the +triviality of which I should apologize did I find myself at my present +pitch capable of apologizing for anything, that I had on the very spot +there one of those hallucinations as to the precious effect dreadful to +lose and yet impossible to render which interfused the ęsthetic dream in +presence of its subject with the mortal drop of despair (as I should +insist at least didn't the despair itself seem to have acted here as the +preservative). The precious effect in the case of Craven Street was that +it absolutely reeked, to my fond fancy, with associations born of the +particular ancient piety embodied in one's private altar to Dickens; and +that this upstart little truth alone would revel in explanations that I +should for the time have feverishly to forego. The exquisite matter was +not the identification with the scene of special shades or names; it was +just that the whole Dickens procession marched up and down, the whole +Dickens world looked out of its queer, quite sinister windows--for it +was the socially sinister Dickens, I am afraid, rather than the socially +encouraging or confoundingly comic who still at that moment was most apt +to meet me with his reasons. Such a reason was just that look of the +inscrutable riverward street, packed to blackness with accumulations of +suffered experience, these, indescribably, disavowed and confessed at +one and the same time, and with the fact of its blocked old Thames-side +termination, a mere fact of more oppressive enclosure now, telling all +sorts of vague loose stories about it. + + + + +V + + +Why, however, should I pick up so small a crumb from that mere brief +first course at a banquet of initiation which was in the event to +prolong itself through years and years?--unless indeed as a scrap of a +specimen, chosen at hazard, of the prompt activity of a process by which +my intelligence afterwards came to find itself more fed, I think, than +from any other source at all, or, for that matter, from all other +sources put together. A hundred more suchlike modest memories breathe +upon me, each with its own dim little plea, as I turn to face them, but +my idea is to deal somehow more conveniently with the whole gathered +mass of my subsequent impressions in this order, a fruitage that I feel +to have been only too abundantly stored. Half a dozen of those of a +larger and more immediate dignity, incidents more particularly of the +rather invidiously so-called social contact, pull my sleeve as I pass; +but the long, backward-drawn train of the later life drags them along +with it, lost and smothered in its spread--only one of them stands out +or remains over, insisting on its place and hour, its felt +distinguishability. To this day I feel again _that_ roused emotion, my +unsurpassably prized admission to the presence of the great George +Eliot, whom I was taken to see, by one of the kind door-opening Norton +ladies, by whom Mrs. Lewes's guarded portal at North Bank appeared +especially penetrable, on a Sunday afternoon of April '69. Later +occasions, after a considerable lapse, were not to overlay the absolute +face-value, as I may call it, of all the appearances then and there +presented me--which were taken home by a young spirit almost abjectly +grateful, at any rate all devoutly prepared, for them. I find it idle +even to wonder what "place" the author of Silas Marner and Middlemarch +may be conceived to have in the pride of our literature--so settled and +consecrated in the individual range of view is many such a case free at +last to find itself, free after ups and downs, after fluctuations of +fame or whatever, which have divested judgment of any relevance that +isn't most of all the relevance of a living and recorded _relation_. It +has ceased then to know itself in any degree as an estimate, has shaken +off the anxieties of circumspection and comparison and just grown happy +to act as an attachment pure and simple, an effect of life's own logic, +but in the ashes of which the wonted fires of youth need but to be blown +upon for betrayal of a glow. Reflective appreciation may have originally +been concerned, whether at its most or at its least, but it is well +over, to our infinite relief--yes, to our immortal comfort, I think; the +interval back cannot again be bridged. We simply sit with our enjoyed +gain, our residual rounded possession in our lap; a safe old treasure, +which has ceased to shrink, if indeed also perhaps greatly to swell, and +all that further touches it is the fine vibration set up if the name we +know it all by is called into question--perhaps however little. + +It was by George Eliot's name that I was to go on knowing, was never to +cease to know, a great treasure of beauty and humanity, of applied and +achieved art, a testimony, historic as well as ęsthetic, to the deeper +interest of the intricate English aspects; and I now allow the +vibration, as I have called it, all its play--quite as if I had been +wronged even by my own hesitation as to whether to pick up my anecdote. +That scruple wholly fades with the sense of how I must at the very time +have foreseen that here was one of those associations that would +determine in the far future an exquisite inability to revise it. +Middlemarch had not then appeared--we of the faith were still to enjoy +that saturation, and Felix Holt the radical was upwards of three years +old; the impetus proceeding from this work, however, was still fresh +enough in my pulses to have quickened the palpitation of my finding +myself in presence. I had rejoiced without reserve in Felix Holt--the +illusion of reading which, outstretched on my then too frequently +inevitable bed at Swampscott during a couple of very hot days of the +summer of 1866, comes back to me, followed by that in sooth of sitting +up again, at no great ease, to indite with all promptness a review of +the delightful thing, the place of appearance of which nothing could now +induce me to name, shameless about the general fact as I may have been +at the hour itself: over such a feast of fine rich natural tone did I +feel myself earnestly bend. Quite unforgettable to me the art and truth +with which the note of this tone was struck in the beautiful prologue +and the bygone appearances, a hundred of the outward and visible signs +of the author's own young rural and midmost England, made to hold us by +their harmony. The book was not, if I rightly remember, altogether +genially greeted, but I was to hold fast to the charm I had thankfully +suffered it, I had been conscious of absolutely needing it, to work. + +Exquisite the remembrance of how it wouldn't have "done" for me at all, +in relation to other inward matters, not to strain from the case the +last drop of its happiest sense. And I had even with the cooling of the +first glow so little gone back upon it, as we have nowadays learned to +say, had in fact so gone forward, floated by its wave of superlative +intended benignity, that, once in the cool quiet drawing-room at North +Bank I knew myself steeped in still deeper depths of the medium. G. H. +Lewes was absent for the time on an urgent errand; one of his sons, on a +visit at the house, had been suddenly taken with a violent attack of +pain, the heritage of a bad accident not long before in the West Indies, +a suffered onset from an angry bull, I seem to recall, who had tossed or +otherwise mauled him, and, though beaten off, left him considerably +compromised--these facts being promptly imparted to us, in no small +flutter, by our distinguished lady, who came in to us from another room, +where she had been with the hapless young man while his father appealed +to the nearest good chemist for some known specific. It infinitely moved +me to see so great a celebrity quite humanly and familiarly +agitated--even with something clear and noble in it too, to which, as +well as to the extraordinarily interesting dignity of her whole odd +personal conformation, I remember thinking her black silk dress and the +lace mantilla attached to her head and keeping company on either side +with the low-falling thickness of her dark hair effectively contributed. +I have found myself, my life long, attaching value to every noted thing +in respect to a great person--and George Eliot struck me on the spot as +somehow _illustratively_ great; never at any rate has the impression of +those troubled moments faded from me, nor that at once of a certain high +grace in her anxiety and a frank immediate appreciation of our presence, +modest embarrassed folk as we were. It took me no long time to thrill +with the sense, sublime in its unexpectedness, that we were perhaps, or +indeed quite clearly, helping her to pass the time till Mr. Lewes's +return--after which he would again post off for Mr. Paget the +pre-eminent surgeon; and I see involved with this the perfect amenity of +her assisting us, as it were, to assist her, through unrelinquished +proper talk, due responsible remark and report, in the last degree +suggestive to me, on a short holiday taken with Mr. Lewes in the south +of France, whence they had just returned. Yes indeed, the lightest words +of great persons are so little as any words of others are that I catch +myself again inordinately struck with her dropping it off-hand that the +mistral, scourge of their excursion, had blown them into Avignon, where +they had gone, I think, to see J. S. Mill, only to blow them straight +out again--the figure put it so before us; as well as with the moral +interest, the absence of the _banal_, in their having, on the whole +scene, found pleasure further poisoned by the frequency in all those +parts of "evil faces: oh the evil faces!" _That_ recorded source of +suffering enormously affected me--I felt it as beautifully +characteristic: I had never heard an _impression de voyage_ so little +tainted with the superficial or the vulgar. I was myself at the time in +the thick of impressions, and it was true that they would have seemed to +me rather to fail of life, of their own doubtless inferior kind, if +submitting beyond a certain point to be touched with that sad or, as who +should say, that grey colour: Mrs. Lewes's were, it appeared, +predominantly so touched, and I could at once admire it in them and +wonder if they didn't pay for this by some lack of intensity on other +sides. Why I didn't more impute to her, or to them, that possible lack +is more than I can say, since under the law of moral earnestness the +vulgar and the trivial would be then involved in the poor observations +of my own making--a conclusion sufficiently depressing. + +However, I didn't find myself depressed, and I didn't find the great +mind that was so good as to shine upon us at that awkward moment however +dimly anything but augmented; what was its sensibility to the evil faces +but part of the large old tenderness which the occasion had caused to +overflow and on which we were presently floated back into the room she +had left?--where we might perhaps beguile a little the impatience of the +sufferer waiting for relief. We ventured in our flutter to doubt whether +we _should_ beguile, we held back with a certain delicacy from this +irruption, and if there was a momentary wonderful and beautiful conflict +I remember how our yielding struck me as crowned with the finest grace +it could possibly have, that of the prodigious privilege of humouring, +yes literally humouring so renowned a spirit at a moment when we could +really match our judgment with hers. For the injured young man, in the +other and the larger room, simply lay stretched on his back on the +floor, the posture apparently least painful to him--though painful +enough at the best I easily saw on kneeling beside him, after my first +dismay, to ask if I could in any way ease him. I see his face again, +fair and young and flushed, with its vague little smile and its moist +brow; I recover the moment or two during which we sought to make natural +conversation in his presence, and my question as to what conversation +_was_ natural; and then as his father's return still failed my having +the inspiration that at once terminated the strain of the scene and yet +prolonged the sublime connection. Mightn't _I_ then hurry off for Mr. +Paget?--on whom, as fast as a cab could carry me, I would wait with the +request that he would come at the first possible moment to the rescue. +Mrs. Lewes's and our stricken companion's instant appreciation of this +offer lent me wings on which I again feel myself borne very much as if +suddenly acting as a messenger of the gods--surely I had never come so +near to performing in that character. I shook off my fellow visitor for +swifter cleaving of the air, and I recall still feeling that I cleft it +even in the dull four-wheeler of other days which, on getting out of the +house, I recognised as the only object animating, at a distance, the +long blank Sunday vista beside the walled-out Regent's Park. I crawled +to Hanover Square--or was it Cavendish? I let the question stand--and, +after learning at the great man's door that though he was not at home he +was soon expected back and would receive my message without delay, +cherished for the rest of the day the particular quality of my +vibration. + +It was doubtless even excessive in proportion to its cause--yet in what +else but that consisted the force and the use of vibrations? It was by +their excess that one knew them for such, as one for that matter only +knew things in general worth knowing. I didn't know what I had expected +as an effect of our offered homage, but I had somehow not, at the best, +expected a relation--and now a relation had been dramatically +determined. It would exist for me if I should never again in all the +world ask a feather's weight of it; for myself, that is, it would simply +never be able not somehow to act. Its virtue was not in truth at all +flagrantly to be put to the proof--any opportunity for that underwent at +the best a considerable lapse; but why wasn't it intensely acting, none +the less, during the time when, before being in London again for any +length of stay, I found it intimately concerned in my perusal of +Middlemarch, so soon then to appear, and even in that of Deronda, its +intervention on behalf of which defied any chill of time? And to these +references I can but subjoin that they obviously most illustrate the +operation of a sense for drama. The process of appropriation of the two +fictions was experience, in great intensity, and roundabout the field +was drawn the distinguishable ring of something that belonged equally to +this condition and that embraced and further vivified the imaged mass, +playing in upon it lights of surpassing fineness. So it was, at any +rate, that my "relation"--for I didn't go so far as to call it +"ours"--helped me to squeeze further values from the intrinsic substance +of the copious final productions I have named, a weight of variety, +dignity and beauty of which I have never allowed my measure to shrink. + +Even this example of a rage for connections, I may also remark, doesn't +deter me from the mention here, somewhat out of its order of time, of +another of those in which my whole privilege of reference to Mrs. Lewes, +such as it remained, was to look to be preserved. I stretch over the +years a little to overtake it, and it calls up at once another person, +the ornament, or at least the diversion, of a society long since extinct +to me, but who, in common with every bearer of a name I yield to the +temptation of writing, insists on profiting promptly by the fact of +inscription--very much as if first tricking me into it and then proving +it upon me. The extinct societies that once were so sure of themselves, +how can they _not_ stir again if the right touch, that of a hand they +actually knew, however little they may have happened to heed it, reaches +tenderly back to them? The touch _is_ the retrieval, so far as it goes, +setting up as it does heaven knows what undefeated continuity. I must +have been present among the faithful at North Bank during a Sunday +afternoon or two of the winter of '77 and '78--I was to see the great +lady alone but on a single occasion before her death; but those +attestations are all but lost to me now in the livelier pitch of a +scene, as I can only call it, of which I feel myself again, all +amusedly, rather as sacrificed witness. I had driven over with Mrs. +Greville from Milford Cottage, in Surrey, to the villa George Eliot and +George Lewes had not long before built themselves, and which they much +inhabited, at Witley--this indeed, I well remember, in no great flush of +assurance that my own measure of our intended felicity would be quite +that of my buoyant hostess. But here exactly comes, with my memory of +Mrs. Greville, from which numberless by-memories dangle, the interesting +question that makes for my recall why things happened, under her +much-waved wing, not in any too coherent fashion--and this even though +it was never once given her, I surmise, to guess that they anywhere fell +short. So gently used, all round indeed, was this large, elegant, +extremely near-sighted and extremely demonstrative lady, whose genius +was all for friendship, admiration, declamation and expenditure, that +one doubted whether in the whole course of her career she had ever once +been brought up, as it were, against a recognised reality; other at +least perhaps than the tiresome cost of the materially agreeable in life +and the perverse appearance, at times, that though she "said" things, +otherwise recited choice morceaux, whether French or English, with a +marked oddity of manner, of "attack," a general incongruity of +drawing-room art, the various contributive elements, hour, scene, +persuaded patience and hushed attention, were perforce a precarious +quantity. + +It is in that bygone old grace of the unexploded factitious, the air of +a thousand dimmed illusions and more or less early Victorian beatitudes +on the part of the blandly idle and the supposedly accomplished, that +Mrs. Greville, with her exquisite good-nature and her innocent fatuity, +is embalmed for me; so that she becomes in that light a truly shining +specimen, almost the image or compendium of a whole side of a social +order. Just so she has happy suggestion; just so, whether or no by a +twist of my mind toward the enviability of certain complacencies of +faith and taste that we would yet neither live back into if we could, +nor can catch again if we would. I see my forgotten friend of that moist +autumn afternoon of our call, and of another, on the morrow, which I +shall not pass over, as having rustled and gushed and protested and +performed through her term under a kind of protection by the easy-going +gods that is not of this fierce age. Amiabilities and absurdities, +harmless serenities and vanities, pretensions and undertakings +unashamed, still profited by the mildness of the critical air and the +benignity of the social--on the right side at least of the social line. +It had struck me from the first that nowhere so much as in England was +it fortunate to _be_ fortunate, and that against that condition, once it +had somehow been handed down and determined, a number of the sharp +truths that one might privately apprehend beat themselves beautifully in +vain. I say beautifully for I confess without scruple to have found +again and again at that time an attaching charm in the general +exhibition of enjoyed immunity, paid for as it was almost always by the +personal amenity, the practice of all sorts of pleasantness; if it kept +the gods themselves for the time in good-humour, one was willing enough, +or at least I was, to be on the side of the gods. Unmistakable too, as I +seem to recover it, was the positive interest of watching and noting, +roundabout one, for the turn, or rather for the blest continuity, of +their benevolence: such an appeal proceeded, in this, that and the +other particular case, from the fool's paradise really rounded and +preserved, before one's eyes, for those who were so good as to animate +it. There was always the question of how long they would be left to, and +the growth of one's fine suspense, not to say one's frank little +gratitude, as the miracle repeated itself. + +All of which, I admit, dresses in many reflections the small +circumstance that Milford Cottage, with its innumerable red candles and +candle-shades, had affected me as the most embowered retreat for social +innocence that it was possible to conceive, and as absolutely settling +the question of whether the practice of pleasantness mightn't quite +ideally pay for the fantastic protectedness. The red candles in the red +shades have remained with me, inexplicably, as a vivid note of this +pitch, shedding their rosy light, with the autumn gale, the averted +reality, all shut out, upon such felicities of feminine helplessness as +I couldn't have prefigured in advance and as exemplified, for further +gathering in, the possibilities of the old tone. Nowhere had the +evening curtains seemed so drawn, nowhere the copious service so soft, +nowhere the second volume of the new novel, "half-uncut," so close to +one's hand, nowhere the exquisite head and incomparable brush of the +domesticated collie such an attestation of _that_ standard at least, +nowhere the harmonies of accident--of intention was more than one could +say--so incapable of a wrong deflection. That society would lack the +highest finish without some such distributed clusters of the thoroughly +gentle, the mildly presumptuous and the inveterately mistaken, was +brought home to me there, in fine, to a tune with which I had no +quarrel, perverse enough as I had been from an early time to know but +the impulse to egg on society to the fullest discharge of any material +stirring within its breast and not making for cruelty or brutality, mere +baseness or mere stupidity, that would fall into a picture or a scene. +The quality of serene anxiety on the part for instance of exquisite Mrs. +Thellusson, Mrs. Greville's mother, was by itself a plea for any +privilege one should fancy her perched upon; and I scarce know if this +be more or be less true because the anxiety--at least as I culled its +fragrance--was all about the most secondary and superfluous small +matters alone. It struck me, I remember, as a new and unexpected form of +the pathetic altogether; and there was no form of the pathetic, any more +than of the tragic or the comic, that didn't serve as another pearl for +one's lengthening string. And I pass over what was doubtless the +happiest stroke in the composition, the fact of its involving, as +all-distinguished husband of the other daughter, an illustrious soldier +and servant of his sovereign, of his sovereigns that were successively +to be, than against whose patient handsome bearded presence the whole +complexus of femininities and futilities couldn't have been left in more +tolerated and more contrasted relief; pass it over to remind myself of +how, in my particular friend of the three, the comic and the tragic were +presented in a confusion that made the least intended of them at any +moment take effectively the place of the most. The impression, that is, +was never that of the sentiment operating--save indeed perhaps when the +dear lady applied her faculty for frank imitation of the ridiculous, +which she then quite directly and remarkably achieved; but that she +could be comic, that she _was_ comic, was what least appeased her +unrest, and there were reasons enough, in a word, why her failure of the +grand manner or the penetrating note should evoke the idea of their +opposites perfectly achieved. She sat, alike in adoration and emulation, +at the feet of my admirable old friend Fanny Kemble, the good-nature of +whose consent to "hear" her was equalled only by the immediately +consequent action of the splendidly corrective spring on the part of +that unsurpassed subject of the dramatic afflatus fairly, or, as I +should perhaps above all say, contradictiously provoked. Then aspirant +and auditor, rash adventurer and shy alarmist, were swept away together +in the gust of magnificent rightness and beauty, no scrap of the +far-scattered prime proposal being left to pick up. + +Which detail of reminiscence has again stayed my course to the Witley +Villa, when even on the way I quaked a little with my sense of what +_generally_ most awaited or overtook my companion's prime proposals. +What had come most to characterise the Leweses to my apprehension was +that there couldn't be a thing in the world about which they weren't, +and on the most conceded and assured grounds, almost scientifically +particular; which presumption, however, only added to the relevance of +one's learning how such a matter as their relation with Mrs. Greville +could in accordance with noble consistencies be carried on. I could +trust _her_ for it perfectly, as she knew no law but that of innocent +and exquisite aberration, never wanting and never less than +consecrating, and I fear I but took refuge for the rest in declining all +responsibility. I remember trying to say to myself that, even such as we +were, our visit couldn't but scatter a little the weight of cloud on the +Olympus we scaled--given the dreadful drenching afternoon we were after +all an imaginable short solace there; and this indeed would have borne +me through to the end save for an incident which, with a quite ideal +logic, left our adventure an approved ruin. I see again our bland, +benign, commiserating hostess beside the fire in a chill desert of a +room where the master of the house guarded the opposite hearthstone, and +I catch once more the impression of no occurrence of anything at all +appreciable but their liking us to have come, with our terribly trivial +contribution, mainly from a prevision of how they should more devoutly +like it when we departed. It is remarkable, but the occasion yields me +no single echo of a remark on the part of any of us--nothing more than +the sense that our great author herself peculiarly suffered from the +fury of the elements, and that they had about them rather the minimum of +the paraphernalia of reading and writing, not to speak of that of tea, a +conceivable feature of the hour, but which was not provided for. Again I +felt touched with privilege, but not, as in '69, with a form of it +redeemed from barrenness by a motion of my own, and the taste of +barrenness was in fact in my mouth under the effect of our taking +leave. We did so with considerable flourish till we had passed out to +the hall again, indeed to the door of the waiting carriage, toward which +G. H. Lewes himself all sociably, _then_ above all conversingly, wafted +us--yet staying me by a sudden remembrance before I had entered the +brougham and signing me to wait while he repaired his omission. I +returned to the doorstep, whence I still see him reissue from the room +we had just left and hurry toward me across the hall shaking high the +pair of blue-bound volumes his allusion to the uninvited, the verily +importunate loan of which by Mrs. Greville had lingered on the air after +his dash in quest of them; "Ah those books--take them away, please, +away, away!" I hear him unreservedly plead while he thrusts them again +at me, and I scurry back into our conveyance, where, and where only, +settled afresh with my companion, I venture to assure myself of the +horrid truth that had squinted at me as I relieved our good friend of +his superfluity. What indeed was this superfluity but the two volumes of +my own precious "last"--we were still in the blest age of +volumes--presented by its author to the lady of Milford Cottage, and by +her, misguided votary, dropped with the best conscience in the world +into the Witley abyss, out of which it had jumped with violence, under +the touch of accident, straight up again into my own exposed face? + +The bruise inflicted there I remember feeling for the moment only as +sharp, such a mixture of delightful small questions at once salved it +over and such a charm in particular for me to my recognising that this +particular wrong--inflicted all unawares, which exactly made it +sublime--was the only rightness of our visit. Our hosts hadn't so much +as connected book with author, or author with visitor, or visitor with +anything but the convenience of his ridding them of an unconsidered +trifle; grudging as they so justifiedly did the impingement of such +matters on their consciousness. The vivid demonstration of one's failure +to penetrate there had been in the sweep of Lewes's gesture, which could +scarce have been bettered by his actually wielding a broom. I think +nothing passed between us in the brougham on revelation of the identity +of the offered treat so emphatically declined--I see that I couldn't +have laughed at it to the confusion of my gentle neighbour. But I quite +recall my grasp of the _interest_ of our distinguished friends' +inaccessibility to the unattended plea, with the light it seemed to +throw on what it was really to _be_ attended. Never, never save as +attended--by presumptions, that is, far other than any then hanging +about one--would one so much as desire _not_ to be pushed out of sight. +I needn't attempt, however, to supply all the links in the chain of +association which led to my finally just qualified beatitude: I had been +served right enough in all conscience, but the pity was that Mrs. +Greville had been. This I never wanted for her; and I may add, in the +connection, that I discover now no grain of false humility in my having +enjoyed in my own person adorning such a tale. There was positively a +fine high thrill in thinking of persons--or at least of a person, for +any fact about Lewes was but derivative--engaged in my own pursuit and +yet detached, by what I conceived, detached by a pitch of intellectual +life, from all that made it actual to myself. _There_ was the lift of +contemplation, there the inspiring image and the big supporting truth; +the pitch of intellectual life in the very fact of which we seemed, my +hostess and I, to have caught our celebrities sitting in that queer +bleak way wouldn't have bullied me in the least if it hadn't been the +centre of such a circle of gorgeous creation. It was the fashion among +the profane in short either to misdoubt, before George Eliot's canvas, +the latter's backing of rich thought, or else to hold that this matter +of philosophy, and even if but of the philosophic vocabulary, thrust +itself through to the confounding of the picture. But with that thin +criticism I wasn't, as I have already intimated, to have a moment's +patience; I was to become, I was to remain--I take pleasure in +repeating--even a very Derondist of Derondists, for my own wanton joy: +which amounts to saying that I found the figured, coloured tapestry +_always_ vivid enough to brave no matter what complication of the +stitch. + + + + +VI + + +I take courage to confess moreover that I am carried further still by +the current on which Mrs. Greville, friend of the super-eminent, happens +to have launched me; for I can neither forbear a glance at one or two of +the other adventures promoted by her, nor in the least dissociate her +from that long aftertaste of them, such as they were, which I have +positively cultivated. I ask myself first, however, whether or no our +drive to Aldworth, on the noble height of Blackdown, had been preceded +by the couple of occasions in London on which I was to feel I saw the +Laureate most at his ease, yet on reflection concluding that the first +of these--and the fewest days must have separated them--formed my prime +introduction to the poet I had earliest known and best loved. The +revelational evening I speak of is peopled, to my memory, not a little, +yet with a confusedness out of which Tennyson's own presence doesn't at +all distinctly emerge; he was occupying a house in Eaton Place, as +appeared then his wont, for the earlier weeks of the spring, and I seem +to recover that I had "gone on" to it, after dining somewhere else, +under protection of my supremely kind old friend the late Lord Houghton, +to whom I was indebted in those years for a most promiscuous +befriending. He must have been of the party, and Mrs. Greville quite +independently must, since I catch again the vision of her, so +expansively and voluminously seated that she might fairly have been +couchant, so to say, for the proposed characteristic act--there was a +deliberation about it that precluded the idea of a spring; that, namely, +of addressing something of the Laureate's very own to the Laureate's +very face. Beyond the sense that he took these things with a gruff +philosophy--and could always repay them, on the spot, in +heavily-shovelled coin of the same mint, since it _was_ a question of +his genius--I gather in again no determined impression, unless it may +have been, as could only be probable, the effect of fond prefigurements +utterly blighted. + +The fond prefigurements of youthful piety are predestined more often +than not, I think, experience interfering, to strange and violent +shocks; from which no general appeal is conceivable save by the prompt +preclusion either of faith or of knowledge, a sad choice at the best. No +other such illustration recurs to me of the possible refusal of those +two conditions of an acquaintance to recognise each other at a given +hour as the silent crash of which I was to be conscious several years +later, in Paris, when placed in presence of M. Ernest Renan, from the +surpassing distinction of whose literary face, with its exquisite finish +of every feature, I had from far back extracted every sort of shining +gage, a presumption general and positive. Widely enough to sink all +interest--that was the dreadful thing--opened there the chasm between +the implied, as I had taken it, and the attested, as I had, at the first +blush, to take it; so that one was in fact scarce to know what might +have happened if interest hadn't by good fortune already reached such a +compass as to stick half way down the descent. What interest _can_ +survive becomes thus, surely, as much one of the lessons of life as the +number of ways in which it remains impossible. What comes up in face of +the shocks, as I have called them, is the question of a shift of every +supposition, a change of base under fire, as it were; which must take +place successfully if one's advance be not abandoned altogether. I +remember that I saw the Tennyson directly presented as just utterly +other than the Tennyson indirectly, and if the readjustment, for +acquaintance, was less difficult than it was to prove in the case of the +realised Renan the obligation to accept the difference--wholly as +difference and without reference to strict loss or gain--was like a rap +on the knuckles of a sweet superstition. Fine, fine, fine could he only +be--fine in the sense of that quality in the texture of his verse, which +had appealed all along by its most inward principle to one's taste, and +had by the same stroke shown with what a force of lyric energy and +sincerity the kind of beauty so engaged for could be associated. Was it +that I had preconceived him in that light as pale and penetrating, as +emphasising in every aspect the fact that he was fastidious? was it that +I had supposed him more fastidious than really _could_ have been--at the +best for that effect? was it that the grace of the man _couldn't_, by my +measure, but march somehow with the grace of the poet, given a +perfection of this grace? was it in fine that style of a particular +kind, when so highly developed, seemed logically to leave no room for +other quite contradictious kinds? These were considerations of which I +recall the pressure, at the same time that I fear I have no account of +them to give after they have fairly faced the full, the monstrous +demonstration that Tennyson was not Tennysonian. The desperate sequel to +that was that he thereby changed one's own state too, one's beguiled, +one's ęsthetic; for what _could_ this strange apprehension do but reduce +the Tennysonian amount altogether? It dried up, to a certain extent, +that is, in my own vessel of sympathy--leaving me so to ask whether it +was before or after that I should take myself for the bigger fool. There +had been folly somewhere; yet let me add that once I recognised this, +once I felt the old fond pitch drop of itself, not alone inevitably, but +very soon quite conveniently and while I magnanimously granted that the +error had been mine and nobody's else at all, an odd prosaic +pleasantness set itself straight up, substitutionally, over the whole +ground, which it swept clear of every single premeditated effect. It +made one's perceptive condition purely profane, reduced it somehow to +having rather the excess of awkwardness than the excess of felicity to +reckon with; yet still again, as I say, enabled a compromise to work. + +The compromise in fact worked beautifully under my renewal of +impression--for which a second visit at Eaton Place offered occasion; +and this even though I had to interweave with the scene as best I might +a highly complicating influence. To speak of James Russell Lowell's +influence as above all complicating on any scene to the interest of +which he contributed may superficially seem a perverse appreciation of +it; and yet in the light of that truth only do I recover the full sense +of his value, his interest, the moving moral of his London adventure--to +find myself already bumping so straight against which gives me, I +confess, a sufficiently portentous shake. He comes in, as it were, by a +force not to be denied, as soon as I look at him again--as soon as I +find him for instance on the doorstep in Eaton Place at the hour of my +too approaching it for luncheon as he had just done. There he is, with +the whole question of him, at once before me, and literally superimposed +by that fact on any minor essence. I quake, positively, with the +apprehension of the commemorative dance he may lead me; but for the +moment, just here, I steady myself with an effort and go in with him to +his having the Laureate's personal acquaintance, by every symptom, and +rather to my surprise, all to make. Mrs. Tennyson's luncheon table was +an open feast, with places for possible when not assured guests; and no +one but the American Minister, scarce more than just installed, and his +extremely attached compatriot sat down at first with our gracious +hostess. The board considerably stretched, and after it had been +indicated to Lowell that he had best sit at the end near the window, +where the Bard would presently join him, I remained, near our hostess, +separated from him for some little time by an unpeopled waste. Hallam +came in all genially and auspiciously, yet only to brush us with his +blessing and say he was lunching elsewhere, and my wonder meanwhile hung +about the representative of my country, who, though partaking of offered +food, appeared doomed to disconnection from us. I may say at once that +my wonder was always unable _not_ to hang about this admired and +cherished friend when other persons, especially of the eminent order, +were concerned in the scene. The case was quite other for the unshared +relation, or when it was shared by one or other of three or four of our +common friends who had the gift of determining happily the pitch of +ease; suspense, not to say anxiety, as to the possible turn or drift of +the affair quite dropped--I rested then, we alike rested, I ever felt, +in a golden confidence. This last was so definitely not the note of my +attention to him, so far as I might indulge it, in the wider social +world, that I shall not scruple, occasion offering, to inquire into the +reasons of the difference. For I can only see the ghosts of my friends, +by this token, as "my" J. R. L. and whoever; which means that my +imagination, of the wanton life of which these remarks pretend but to +form the record, had appropriated them, under the prime contact--from +the moment the prime contact had successfully worked--once for all, and +contributed the light in which they were constantly exposed. + +Yes, delightful I shall undertake finding it, and perhaps even making +it, to read J. R. L.'s exposure back into _its_ light; which I in fact +see begin to shine for me more amply during those very minutes of our +wait for our distinguished host and even the several that followed the +latter's arrival and his seating himself opposite the unknown guest, +whose identity he had failed to grasp. Nothing, exactly, could have made +dear Lowell more "my" Lowell, as I have presumed to figure him, than the +stretch of uncertainty so supervening and which, in its form of silence +at first completely unbroken between the two poets, rapidly took on for +me monstrous proportions. I conversed with my gentle neighbour during +what seemed an eternity--really but hearing, as the minutes sped, all +that Tennyson didn't say to Lowell and all that Lowell wouldn't on any +such compulsion as that say to Tennyson. I like, however, to hang again +upon the hush--for the sweetness of the relief of its break by the fine +Tennysonian growl. I had never dreamed, no, of a growling Tennyson--I +had too utterly otherwise fantasticated; but no line of Locksley Hall +rolled out as I was to happen soon after to hear it, could have been +sweeter than the interrogative sound of "Do you know anything about +_Lowell_?" launched on the chance across the table and crowned at once +by Mrs. Tennyson's anxious quaver: "Why, my dear, this _is_ Mr. +Lowell!" The clearance took place successfully enough, and the +incident, I am quite aware, seems to shrink with it; in spite of which I +still cherish the reduced reminiscence for its connections: so far as my +vision of Lowell was concerned they began at that moment so to multiply. +A belated guest or two more came in, and I wish I could for my modesty's +sake refer to this circumstance alone the fact that nothing more of the +occasion survives for me save the intense but restricted glow of certain +instants, in another room, to which we had adjourned for smoking and +where my alarmed sense of the Bard's restriction to giving what he had +as a bard only became under a single turn of his hand a vision of quite +general munificence. Incredibly, inconceivably, he had _read_--and not +only read but admired, and not only admired but understandingly +referred; referred, time and some accident aiding, the appreciated +object, a short tale I had lately put forth, to its actually present +author, who could scarce believe his ears on hearing the thing +superlatively commended; pronounced, that is, by the illustrious +speaker, more to his taste than no matter what other like attempt. +Nothing would induce me to disclose the title of the piece, which has +little to do with the matter; my point is but in its having on the spot +been matter of pure romance to me that I was there and positively so +addressed. For it was a solution, the happiest in the world, and from +which I at once extracted enormities of pleasure: my relation to +whatever had bewildered me simply became perfect: the author of In +Memoriam had "liked" my own twenty pages, and his doing so was a gage of +his grace in which I felt I should rest forever--in which I have in fact +rested to this hour. My own basis of liking--such a blessed supersession +of all worryings and wonderings!--was accordingly established, and has +met every demand made of it. + +Greatest was to have been, I dare say, the demand to which I felt it +exposed by the drive over to Aldworth with Mrs. Greville which I noted +above and which took place, if I am not mistaken, on the morrow of our +drive to Witley. A different shade of confidence and comfort, I make +out, accompanied this experiment: I believed more, for reasons I shall +not now attempt to recover, in the furthermost maintenance of our flying +bridge, the final piers of which, it was indubitable, _had_ at Witley +given way. What could have been moreover less like G. H. Lewes's +valedictory hurl back upon us of the printed appeal in which I was +primarily concerned than that so recent and so directly opposed passage +of the Eaton Place smoking-room, thanks to which I could nurse a +certified security all along the road? I surrendered to security, I +perhaps even grossly took my ease in it; and I was to breathe from +beginning to end of our visit, which began with our sitting again at +luncheon, an air--so unlike that of Witley!--in which it seemed to me +frankly that nothing but the blest obvious, or at least the blest +outright, could so much as attempt to live. These elements hung sociably +and all auspiciously about us--it was a large and simple and almost +empty occasion; yet empty without embarrassment, rather as from a +certain high guardedness or defensiveness of situation, literally +indeed from the material, the local sublimity, the fact of our all +upliftedly hanging together over one of the grandest sweeps of view in +England. Remembered passages again people, however, in their proportion, +the excess of opportunity; each with that conclusive note of the +outright all unadorned. What could have partaken more of this quality +for instance than the question I was startled to hear launched before we +had left the table by the chance of Mrs. Greville's having happened to +mention in some connection one of her French relatives, Mademoiselle +Laure de Sade? It had fallen on my own ear--the mention at least +had--with a certain effect of unconscious provocation; but this was as +nothing to its effect on the ear of our host. "De Sade?" he at once +exclaimed with interest--and with the consequence, I may frankly add, of +my wondering almost to ecstasy, that is to the ecstasy of curiosity, to +what length he would proceed. He proceeded admirably--admirably for the +triumph of simplification--to the very greatest length imaginable, as +was signally promoted by the fact that clearly no one present, with a +single exception, recognised the name or the nature of the scandalous, +the long ignored, the at last all but unnameable author; least of all +the gentle relative of Mademoiselle Laure, who listened with the +blankest grace to her friend's enumeration of his titles to infamy, +among which that of his most notorious work was pronounced. It was the +homeliest, frankest, most domestic passage, as who should say, and most +remarkable for leaving none of us save myself, by my impression, in the +least embarrassed or bewildered; largely, I think, because of the +failure--a failure the most charmingly flat--of all measure on the part +of auditors and speaker alike of what might be intended or understood, +of what, in fine, the latter was talking about. + +He struck me in truth as neither knowing nor communicating knowledge, +and I recall how I felt this note in his own case to belong to that +general intimation with which the whole air was charged of the want of +proportion between the great spaces and reaches and echoes commanded, +the great eminence attained, and the quantity and variety of experience +supposable. So to discriminate was in a manner to put one's hand on the +key, and thereby to find one's self in presence of a rare and anomalous, +but still scarcely the less beautiful fact. The assured and achieved +conditions, the serenity, the security, the success, to put it vulgarly, +shone in the light of their easiest law--that by which they emerge early +from the complication of life, the great adventure of sensibility, and +find themselves determined once for all, fortunately fixed, all +consecrated and consecrating. If I should speak of this impression as +that of glory without history, that of the poetic character more worn +than paid for, or at least more saved than spent, I should doubtless +much over-emphasise; but such, or something like it, was none the less +the explanation that met one's own fond fancy of the scene after one had +cast about for it. For I allow myself thus to repeat that I was so moved +to cast about, and perhaps at no moment more than during the friendly +analysis of the reputation of M. de Sade. Was I not present at some +undreamed-of demonstration of the absence of the remoter real, the real +other than immediate and exquisite, other than guaranteed and enclosed, +in landscape, friendship, fame, above all in consciousness of awaited +and admired and self-consistent inspiration? + +The question was indeed to be effectively answered for me, and +everything meanwhile continued to play into this prevision--even to the +pleasant growling note heard behind me, as the Bard followed with Mrs. +Greville, who had permitted herself apparently some mild extravagance of +homage: "Oh yes, you may do what you like--so long as you don't kiss me +before the cabman!" The allusion was explained for us, if I remember--a +matter of some more or less recent leave-taking of admirer and admired +in London on his putting her down at her door after being taken to the +play or wherever; between the rugged humour of which reference and the +other just commemorated there wasn't a pin to choose, it struck me, for +a certain old-time Lincolnshire ease or comfortable stay-at-home +license. But it was later on, when, my introductress having accompanied +us, I sat upstairs with him in his study, that he might read to us some +poem of his own that we should venture to propose, it was then that +mystifications dropped, that everything in the least dislocated fell +into its place, and that image and picture stamped themselves strongly +and finally, or to the point even, as I recover it, of leaving me almost +too little to wonder about. He had not got a third of the way through +Locksley Hall, which, my choice given me, I had made bold to suggest he +should spout--for I had already heard him spout in Eaton Place--before I +had begun to wonder that I didn't wonder, didn't at least wonder more +consumedly; as a very little while back I should have made sure of my +doing on any such prodigious occasion. I sat at one of the windows that +hung over space, noting how the windy, watery autumn day, sometimes +sheeting it all with rain, called up the dreary, dreary moorland or the +long dun wolds; I pinched myself for the determination of my identity +and hung on the reader's deep-voiced chant for the credibility of his: I +asked myself in fine why, in complete deviation from everything that +would have seemed from far back certain for the case, I failed to swoon +away under the heaviest pressure I had doubtless ever known the romantic +situation bring to bear. So lucidly all the while I considered, so +detachedly I judged, so dissentingly, to tell the whole truth, I +listened; pinching myself, as I say, not at all to keep from swooning, +but much rather to set up some rush of sensibility. It was all +interesting, it was at least all odd; but why in the name of poetic +justice had one anciently heaved and flushed with one's own recital of +the splendid stuff if one was now only to sigh in secret "Oh dear, oh +dear"? The author lowered the whole pitch, that of expression, that of +interpretation above all; I heard him, in cool surprise, take even more +out of his verse than he had put in, and so bring me back to the point I +had immediately and privately made, the point that he wasn't +Tennysonian. I felt him as he went on and on lose that character beyond +repair, and no effect of the organ-roll, of monotonous majesty, no +suggestion of the long echo, availed at all to save it. What the case +came to for me, I take it--and by the case I mean the intellectual, the +artistic--was that it lacked the intelligence, the play of +discrimination, I should have taken for granted in it, and thereby, +brooding monster that I was, born to discriminate _ą tout propos_, +lacked the interest. + +Detached I have mentioned that I had become, and it was doubtless at +such a rate high time for that; though I hasten to repeat that with the +close of the incident I was happily able to feel a new sense in the +whole connection established. My critical reaction hadn't in the least +invalidated our great man's being a Bard--it had in fact made him and +left him more a Bard than ever: it had only settled to my perception as +not before what a Bard might and mightn't be. The character was just a +rigid idiosyncrasy, to which everything in the man conformed, but which +supplied nothing outside of itself, and which above all was not +intellectually wasteful or heterogeneous, conscious as it could only be +of its intrinsic breadth and weight. On two or three occasions of the +aftertime I was to hear Browning read out certain of his finest pages, +and this exactly with all the exhibition of point and authority, the +expressive particularisation, so to speak, that I had missed on the part +of the Laureate; an observation through which the author of Men and +Women appeared, in spite of the beauty and force of his demonstration, +as little as possible a Bard. He particularised if ever a man did, was +heterogeneous and profane, composed of pieces and patches that betrayed +some creak of joints, and addicted to the excursions from which these +were brought home; so that he had to _prove_ himself a poet, almost +against all presumptions, and with all the assurance and all the +character he could use. Was not this last in especial, the character, so +close to the surface, with which Browning fairly bristled, what was most +to come out in his personal delivery of the fruit of his genius? It +came out almost to harshness; but the result was that what he read +showed extraordinary life. During that audition at Aldworth the question +seemed on the contrary not of life at all--save, that is, of one's own; +which was exactly not the question. With all the resonance of the chant, +the whole thing was yet _still_, with all the long swing of its motion +it yet remained where it was--heaving doubtless grandly enough up and +down and beautiful to watch as through the superposed veils of its long +self-consciousness. By all of which I don't mean to say that I was not, +on the day at Aldworth, thoroughly reconciled to learning what a Bard +consisted of; for that came as soon as I had swallowed my own +mistake--the mistake of having supposed Tennyson something subtly other +than one. I had supposed, probably, such an impossibility, had, to +repeat my term, so absurdly fantasticated, that the long journey round +and about the truth no more than served me right; just as after all it +at last left me quite content. + + + + +VII + + +It left me moreover, I become aware--or at least it now leaves +me--fingering the loose ends of this particular free stretch of my +tapestry; so that, with my perhaps even extravagant aversion to loose +ends, I can but try for a moment to interweave them. There dangles again +for me least confusedly, I think, the vision of a dinner at Mrs. +Greville's--and I like even to remember that Cadogan Place, where +memories hang thick for me, was the scene of it--which took its light +from the presence of Louisa Lady Waterford, who took hers in turn from +that combination of rare beauty with rare talent which the previous +Victorian age had for many years not ceased to acclaim. It insists on +coming back to me with the utmost vividness that Lady Waterford was +illustrational, historically, preciously so, meeting one's largest +demand for the blest recovery, when possible, of some glimmer of the +sense of personal beauty, to say nothing of personal "accomplishment," +as our fathers were appointed to enjoy it. Scarce to be sated that form +of wonder, to my own imagination, I confess--so that I fairly believe +there was no moment at which I wouldn't have been ready to turn my back +for the time even on the most triumphant actuality of form and feature +if a chance apprehension of a like force as it played on the sensibility +of the past had competed. And this for a reason I fear I can scarce +explain--unless, when I come to consider it, by the perversity of a +conviction that the conditions of beauty have improved, though those of +character, in the fine old sense, may not, and that with these the +measure of it is more just, the appreciation, as who should say, more +competent and the effect more completely attained. + +What the question seems thus to come to would be a consuming curiosity +as to any cited old case of the spell in the very interest of one's +catching it comparatively "out"; in the interest positively of the +likelihood of one's doing so, and this in the face of so many great +testifying portraits. My private perversity, as I here glance at it, has +had its difficulties--most of all possibly that of one's addiction, in +growing older, to allowing a supreme force to one's earlier, even one's +earliest, estimates of physical felicity; or in other words that of the +felt impulse to leave the palm for good looks to those who have reached +out to it through the medium of our own history. If the conditions +_grow_ better for them why then should we have almost the habit of +thinking better of our handsome folk dead than of our living?--and even +to the very point of not resenting on the part of others similarly +affected the wail of wonder as to what has strangely "become" of the +happy types _d'antan_. I dodge that inquiry just now--we may meet it +again; noting simply the fact that "old" pretenders to the particular +crown I speak of--and in the sense especially of the pretension made +rather for than by them--offered to my eyes a greater interest than the +new, whom I was ready enough to take for granted, as one for the most +part easily could; belonging as it exactly did on the other hand to the +interest of their elders that _this_ couldn't be so taken. That was just +the attraction of the latter claim--that the grounds of it had to be +made out, puzzled out verily on occasion, but that when they were +recognised they had a force all their own. One would have liked to be +able to clear the distinction between the new and the old of all +ambiguity--explain, that is, how little the superficially invidious term +was sometimes noted as having in common with the elderly: so much was it +a clear light held up to the question that truly beautiful persons might +be old without being elderly. Their juniors couldn't be new, +unfortunately, without being youthful--unfortunately because the fact of +youth, so far from dispelling ambiguity, positively introduced it. One +made up one's mind thus that the only sure specimens were, and had to +be, those acquainted with time, and with whom time, on its side, was +acquainted; those in fine who had borne the test and still looked at it +face to face. These were of one's own period of course--one looked at +_them_ face to, face; one blessedly hadn't to consider them by hearsay +or to refer to any portrait of them for proof: indeed in presence of the +resisting, the gained, cases one found one's self practically averse to +old facts or old traditions of portraiture, accompanied by no matter +what names. + +All of which leads by an avenue I trust not unduly majestic up to that +hour of contemplation during which I could see quite enough for the +major interest what was meant by Lady Waterford's great reputation. +Nothing could in fact have been more informing than so to see what was +meant, than so copiously to share with admirers who had had their vision +and passed on; for if I spoke above of her image as illustrational this +is because it affected me on the spot as so diffusing information. My +impression was of course but the old story--to which my reader will feel +himself treated, I fear, to satiety: when once I had drawn the curtain +for the light shed by this or that or the other personal presence upon +the society more or less intimately concerned in producing it the last +thing I could think of was to darken the scene again. For this right or +this wrong reason then Mrs. Greville's admirable guest struck me as +flooding it; indebted in the highest degree to every art by which a +commended appearance may have formed the habit of still suggesting +commendation, she certainly--to my imagination at least--triumphed over +time in the sense that if the years, in their generosity, went on +helping her to live, her grace returned the favour by paying life back +to them. I mean that she reanimated for the fond analyst the age in +which persons of her type could so greatly flourish--it being ever so +pertinently of her type, or at least of that of the age, that she was +regarded as having cast the spell of genius as well as of beauty. She +painted, and on the largest scale, with all confidence and facility, and +nothing could have contributed more, by my sense, to what I glance at +again as her illustrational value than the apparently widespread +appreciation of this fact--taken together, that is, with one's own +impression of the work of her hand. There it was that, like Mrs. +Greville herself, yet in a still higher degree, she bore witness to the +fine old felicity of the fortunate and the "great" under the "old" order +which would have made it so good then to live could one but have been in +their shoes. She determined in me, I remember, a renewed perception of +the old order, a renewed insistence on one's having come just in time to +see it begin to stretch back: a little earlier one wouldn't have had the +light for this perhaps, and a little later it would have receded too +much. + +The precious persons, the surviving figures, who held up, as I may call +it, the light were still here and there to be met; my sense being that +the last of them, at least for any vision of mine, has now quite gone +and that illustration--not to let that term slip--accordingly fails. We +all now illustrate together, in higgledy-piggledy fashion, or as a vast +monotonous mob, our own wonderful period and order, and nothing else; +whereby the historic imagination, under its acuter need of facing +backward, gropes before it with a vain gesture, missing, or all but +missing, the concrete _other_, always other, specimen which has volumes +to give where hearsay has only snippets. The old, as we call it, I +recognise, doesn't disappear all at once; the _ancien régime_ of our +commonest reference survived the Revolution of our most horrific in +patches and scraps, and I bring myself to say that even at my present +writing I am aware of more than one individual on the scene about me +touched _comparatively_ with the elder grace. (I think of the difference +between these persons and so nearly all other persons as a grace for +reasons that become perfectly clear in the immediate presence of the +former, but of which a generalising account is difficult.) None the less +it used to be one of the finest of pleasures to acclaim and cherish, in +case of meeting them, one and another of the _complete_ examples of the +conditions irrecoverable, even if, as I have already noted, they were +themselves least intelligently conscious of these; and for the enjoyment +of that critical emotion to draw one's own wanton line between the past +and the present. The happy effect of such apparitions as Lady +Waterford, to whom I thus undisseverably cling, though I might give her +after all much like company, was that they made one draw it just where +they might most profit from it. They profited in that they recruited my +group of the fatuously fortunate, the class, as I seemed to see it, that +had had the longest and happiest innings in history--happier and longer, +on the whole, even than their congeners of the old French time--and for +whom the future wasn't going to be, by most signs, anything like as +bland and benedictory as the past. They placed _themselves_ in the right +perspective for appreciation, and did it quite without knowing, which +was half the interest; did it simply by showing themselves with all the +right grace and the right assurance. It was as if they had come up to +the very edge of the ground that was going to begin to fail them; yet +looking over it, looking on and on always, with a confidence still +unalarmed. One would have turned away certainly from the sight of any +actual catastrophe, wouldn't have watched the ground nearly fail, in a +particular case, without a sense of gross indelicacy. I can scarcely +say how vivid I felt the drama so preparing might become--that of the +lapse of immemorial protection, that of the finally complete exposure of +the immemorially protected. It might take place rather more intensely +before the footlights of one's inner vision than on the trodden stage of +Cadogan Place or wherever, but it corresponded none the less to +realities all the while in course of enactment and which only wanted the +attentive enough spectator. Nothing should I evermore see comparable to +the large fond consensus of admiration enjoyed by my beatific +fellow-guest's imputed command of the very palette of the Venetian and +other masters--Titian's, Bonifazio's, Rubens's, where did the delightful +agreement on the subject stop? and never again should a noble lady be +lifted so still further aloft on the ecstatic breath of connoisseurship. + +This last consciousness, confirming my impression of a climax that could +only decline, didn't break upon me all at once but spread itself through +a couple of subsequent occasions into which my remembrance of the +dinner at Mrs. Greville's was richly to play. The first of these was a +visit to an exhibition of Lady Waterford's paintings held, in Carlton +House Terrace, under the roof of a friend of the artist, and, as it +enriched the hour also to be able to feel, a friend, one of the most +generously gracious, of my own; during which the reflection that "they" +had indeed had their innings, and were still splendidly using for the +purpose the very fag-end of the waning time, mixed itself for me with +all the "wonderful colour" framed and arrayed, that blazed from the +walls of the kindly great room, lent for the advantage of a charity, and +lost itself in the general chorus of immense comparison and tender +consecration. Later on a few days spent at a house of the greatest +beauty and interest in Northumberland did wonders to round off my view; +the place, occupied for the time by genial tenants, belonged to the +family of Lady Waterford's husband and fairly bristled, it might be +said, with coloured designs from her brush.... + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Middle Years, by Henry James + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MIDDLE YEARS *** + +***** This file should be named 32649-8.txt or 32649-8.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/3/2/6/4/32649/ + +Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was +produced from scanned images of public domain material +from the Google Print project.) + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: The Middle Years + +Author: Henry James + +Editor: Percy Lubbock + +Release Date: June 1, 2010 [EBook #32649] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MIDDLE YEARS *** + + + + +Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was +produced from scanned images of public domain material +from the Google Print project.) + + + + + + +</pre> + +<hr /> +<div class="image" style="width: 369px;"> +<img src="images/ill_book_cover.jpg" width="369" height="550" alt="book's cover" title="book's cover" /> +</div> + +<h1>THE<br /> +MIDDLE YEARS</h1> + +<h3>BY<br /> +HENRY JAMES</h3> + +<p class="c top15"><b>NEW YORK<br /> +CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS<br />Published November, 1917</b></p> + +<div class="image" style="width: 405px;border:2px double gray;border-width:10px;padding:5%;"> +<a href="images/ill_portrait.jpg"> +<img src="images/ill_portrait_thumb.jpg" width="405" height="550" alt="From a copyrighted photograph by Elliott and Fry +Henry James" title="photograph of Henry James" /></a> +<span class="caption">From a copyrighted photograph by Elliott and Fry +<br /><br /> +<b>Henry James</b></span> +</div> + +<table summary="author's books" +cellspacing="0" +cellpadding="4"> +<tr><td><span class="smcap">By</span> HENRY JAMES</td></tr> +<tr><td>——</td></tr> +<tr><td>A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS</td></tr> + +<tr><td>NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER</td></tr> + +<tr><td>THE MIDDLE YEARS</td></tr> + +<tr><td>NOTES ON NOVELISTS<br /> +WITH SOME OTHER NOTES</td></tr> +</table> + +<table summary="toc" +style="border:double 3px gray;padding:2%;"><tr><td><a href="#I"><b>I, </b></a> +<a href="#II"><b>II, </b></a> +<a href="#III"><b>III, </b></a> +<a href="#IV"><b>IV, </b></a> +<a href="#V"><b>V, </b></a> +<a href="#VI"><b>VI, </b></a> +<a href="#VII"><b>VII</b></a></td></tr></table> + +<h3>EDITOR'S NOTE</h3> + +<p><i>The following pages represent all that Henry James lived to write of a +volume of autobiographical reminiscences to which he had given the name +of one of his own short stories</i>, The Middle Years. <i>It was designed to +follow on</i> Notes of a Son and Brother <i>and to extend to about the same +length. The chapters here printed were dictated during the autumn of +1914. They were laid aside for other work toward the end of the year and +were not revised by the author. A few quite evident slips have been +corrected and the marking of the paragraphs—which he usually deferred +till the final revision—has been completed.</i></p> + +<p><i>In dictating</i> The Middle Years <i>he used no notes, and beyond an +allusion or two in the unfinished volume itself there is no indication +of the course which the book would have taken or the precise period it +was intended to cover</i>.</p> + +<p class="r"><i>PERCY LUBBOCK.</i></p> + +<h3><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h3> + +<p>If the author of this meandering record has noted elsewhere<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> that an +event occurring early in 1870 was to mark the end of his youth, he is +moved here at once to qualify in one or two respects that emphasis. +Everything depends in such a view on what one means by one's youth—so +shifting a consciousness is this, and so related at the same time to +many different matters. We are never old, that is we never cease easily +to be young, for <i>all</i> life at the same time: youth is an army, the +whole battalion of our faculties and our freshnesses, our passions and +our illusions, on a considerably reluctant march into the enemy's +country, the country of the general lost freshness; and I think it +throws out at least as many stragglers behind as skirmishers +ahead—stragglers who often catch up but belatedly with the main body, +and even in many a case never catch<a name="page_002" id="page_002"></a> up at all. Or under another figure +it is a book in several volumes, and even at this a mere instalment of +the large library of life, with a volume here and there closing, as +something in the clap of its covers may assure us, while another remains +either completely agape or kept open by a fond finger thrust in between +the leaves. A volume, and a most substantial, <i>had</i> felt its pages very +gravely pressed together before the winter's end that I have spoken of, +but a restriction may still bear, and blessedly enough, as I gather from +memory, on my sense of the whole year then terminated—a year seen by me +now in the light of agitations, explorations, initiations (I scarce know +how endearingly enough to name them!) which I should call fairly +infantine in their indifference to proportions and aims, had they not +still more left with me effects and possessions that even yet lend +themselves to estimation.</p> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> "Notes of a Son and Brother," 1914.</p></div> + +<p>It was at any rate impossible to have been younger, in spite of whatever +inevitable submissions to the rather violent push forward at certain +particular points and on lines<a name="page_003" id="page_003"></a> corresponding with them, than I found +myself, from the first day of March 1869, in the face of an opportunity +that affected me then and there as the happiest, the most interesting, +the most alluring and beguiling, that could ever have opened before a +somewhat disabled young man who was about to complete his twenty-sixth +year. Treasures of susceptibility, treasures not only unconscious of the +remotest approach to exhaustion, but, given the dazzling possibilities, +positively and ideally intact, I now recognise—I in fact long ago +recognised—on the part of that intensely "reacting" small organism; +which couldn't have been in higher spirits or made more inward fuss +about the matter if it had come into a property measured not by mere +impressions and visions, occasions for play of perception and +imagination, mind and soul, but by dollars and "shares," lands and +houses or flocks and herds. It is to the account of that immense +fantastication that I set down a state of mind so out of proportion to +anything it could point to round about save by the vaguest of +foolish-looking<a name="page_004" id="page_004"></a> gestures; and it would perhaps in truth be hard to say +whether in the mixture of spirit and sense so determined the fact of +innocence or that of intelligence most prevailed. I like to recover this +really prodigious flush—as my reader, clearly, must perceive I do; I +like fairly to hang about a particular small hour of that momentous +March day—which I have glanced at too, I believe, on some other and +less separated page than this—for the sake of the extraordinary gage of +experience that it seemed on the spot to offer, and that I had but to +take straight up: my life, on so complacently near a view as I now treat +myself to, having veritably consisted but in the prolongation of that +act. I took up the gage, and as I look back the fullest as well as +simplest account of the interval till now strikes me as being that I +have never, in common honour, let it drop again. And the small hour was +just that of my having landed at Liverpool in the gusty, cloudy, +overwhelmingly English morning and pursued, with immediate intensities +of appreciation, as I may call the muffled accompaniment<a name="page_005" id="page_005"></a> for fear of +almost indecently overnaming it, a course which had seated me at a late +breakfast in the coffee-room of the old Adelphi Hotel ("Radley's," as I +had to deplore its lately having ceased to be dubbed,) and handed me +over without a scruple to my fate. This doom of inordinate exposure to +appearances, aspects, images, every protrusive item almost, in the great +beheld sum of things, I regard in other words as having settled upon me +once for all while I observed for instance that in England the plate of +buttered muffin and its cover were sacredly set upon the slop-bowl after +hot water had been ingenuously poured into the same, and had seen that +circumstance in a perfect cloud of accompaniments. I must have had with +my tea and my muffin a boiled egg or two and a dab of marmalade, but it +was from a far other store of condiments I most liberally helped myself. +I was lucidly aware of so gorging—esoterically, as it were, while I +drew out the gustatory process; and I must have said in that lost +reference to this scene of my dedication which I mentioned above<a name="page_006" id="page_006"></a> that I +was again and again in the aftertime to win back the homeliest notes of +the impression, the damp and darksome light washed in from the steep, +black, bricky street, the crackle of the strong draught of the British +"sea-coal" fire, much more confident of its function, I thought, than +the fires I had left, the rustle of the thick, stiff, loudly unfolded +and refolded "Times," the incomparable truth to type of the waiter, +truth to history, to literature, to poetry, to Dickens, to Thackeray, +positively to Smollett, and to Hogarth, to every connection that could +help me to appropriate him and his setting, an arrangement of things +hanging together with a romantic rightness that had the force of a +revelation.</p> + +<p>To what end appropriation became thus eager and romance thus easy one +could have asked one's self only if the idea of connectibility as +stretching away and away hadn't of a sudden taken on such a wealth of +suggestion; it represented at once a chain stretching off to heaven knew +where, but far into one's future at least, one's possibilities of<a name="page_007" id="page_007"></a> life, +and every link and pulse of which it was going accordingly to be +indispensable, besides being delightful and wonderful, to recognise. +Recognition, I dare say, was what remained, through the adventure of the +months to come, the liveliest principle at work; both as bearing on the +already known, on things unforgotten and of a sense intensely cultivated +and cherished from my younger time, and on the imagined, the unimagined +and the unimaginable, a quantity that divided itself somehow into the +double muster of its elements, an endless vista or waiting array, down +the middle of which I should inconceivably pass—inconceivably save for +being sure of some thrilled arrest, some exchange of assurance and +response, at every step. Obviously half the charm, as I can but thinly +describe it, of the substantially continuous experience the first +passages of which I thus note was in the fact that, immensely moved by +it as I was, and having so to deal with it—in the anticipatory way or +to the whatevers and wherevers and whenevers within me that should<a name="page_008" id="page_008"></a> find +it in order—I yet felt it in no degree as strange or obscure, baffling +or unrecognising on its own side; everything was so far from +impenetrable that my most general notion was the very ecstasy of +understanding and that really wherever I looked, and still more wherever +I pressed, I sank in and in up to my nose. This in particular was of the +perfect felicity, that while the fact of difference all round me was +immense the embarrassment of it was nil—as if the getting into relation +with the least waste had been prepared from so far back that a sort of +divine economy now fairly ruled. It was doubtless a part of the total +fatuity, and perhaps its sublimest mark, that I knew what everything +meant, not simply then but for weeks and months after, and was to know +less only with increase of knowledge. That must indeed have been of the +essence of the general effect and the particular felicity—only not +grotesque because, for want of occasion, not immediately exhibited: a +consciousness not other than that of a person abruptly introduced into a +preoccupied and animated circle and yet so<a name="page_009" id="page_009"></a> miraculously aware of the +matters conversed about as to need no word of explanation before joining +in. To say of such a person that he hadn't lost time would, I knew, be +feebly to express his advantage; my likeness to him, at any rate, +probably fell short of an absurd one through the chapter of accidents, +mostly of the happiest in their way too, which, restraining the personal +impulse for me, kept appearances and pretensions down. The feast, as it +more and more opened out, was all of the objective, as we have learned +so comfortably to say; or at least of its convenient opposite only in so +far as this undertook to interpret it for myself alone.</p> + +<p>To return at all across the years to the gates of the paradise of the +first larger initiations is to be ever so tempted to pass them, to push +in again and breathe the air of this, that and the other plot of rising +ground particularly associated, for memory and gratitude, with the +quickening process. The trouble is that with these sacred spots, to +later appreciation, the garden of youth is apt inordinately to bristle, +and that one's<a name="page_010" id="page_010"></a> account of them has to shake them together fairly hard, +making a coherent thing of them, to profit by the contribution of each. +In speaking of my earliest renewal of the vision of Europe, if I may +give so grand a name to a scarce more than merely enlarged and uplifted +gape, I have, I confess, truly to jerk myself over the ground, to wrench +myself with violence from memories and images, stages and phases and +branching arms, that catch and hold me as I pass them by. Such a matter +as my recovery of contact with London for a few weeks, the contact +broken off some nine years before, lays so many plausible traps for me +that discretion half warns me to stand off the ground and walk round it +altogether. I stop my ears to the advice, however, under the pleading +reminder that just those days began a business for me that was to go +ever so much further than I then dreamed and planted a seed that was, by +my own measure, singularly to sprout and flourish—the harvest of which, +I almost permit myself to believe, has even yet not all been gathered. I +foresee moreover how<a name="page_011" id="page_011"></a> little I shall be able to resist, throughout these +Notes, the force of persuasion expressed in the individual <i>vivid</i> image +of the past wherever encountered, these images having always such terms +of their own, such subtle secrets and insidious arts for keeping us in +relation with them, for bribing us by the beauty, the authority, the +wonder of their saved intensity. They have saved it, they seem to say to +us, from such a welter of death and darkness and ruin that this alone +makes a value and a light and a dignity for them, something indeed of an +argument that our story, since we attempt to tell one, has lapses and +gaps without them. Not to be denied also, over and above this, is the +downright pleasure of the illusion yet again created, the <i>apparent</i> +transfer from the past to the present of the particular combination of +things that did at its hour ever so directly operate and that isn't +after all then drained of virtue, wholly wasted and lost, for sensation, +for participation in the act of life, in the attesting sights, sounds, +smells, the illusion, as I say, of the recording senses.<a name="page_012" id="page_012"></a></p> + +<p>What began, during the springtime of my actual reference, in a couple of +dusky ground-floor rooms at number 7 Half-Moon Street, was simply an +establishment all in a few days of a personal relation with London that +was not of course measurable at the moment—I saw in my bedazzled state +of comparative freedom too many other relations ahead, a fairly +intoxicated vision of choice and range—but that none the less set going +a more intimately inner consciousness, a wheel within the wheels, and +led to my departing, the actual, the general incident closed, in +possession of a return-ticket "good," as we say, for a longer interval +than I could then dream about, and that the first really earnest fumble +of after years brought surprisingly to light. I think it must have been +the very proportions themselves of the invitation and the interest that +kept down, under the immense impression, everything in the nature of +calculation and presumption; dark, huge and prodigious the other party +to our relation, London's and mine, as I called it, loomed and +spread—much too mighty a Goliath for<a name="page_013" id="page_013"></a> the present in any conceivable +ambition even of a fast-growing David. My earlier apprehension, fed at +the season as from a thousand outstretched silver spoons—for these all +shone to me with that effect of the handsomest hospitality—piled up the +monster to such a height that I could somehow only fear him as much as I +admired and that his proportions in fact reached away quite beyond my +expectation. He was always the great figure of London, and I was for no +small time, as the years followed, to be kept at my awe-struck distance +for taking him on that sort of trust: I had crept about his ankles, I +had glanced adventurously up at his knees, and wasn't the moral for the +most part the mere question of whether I should ever be big enough to so +much as guess where he stopped?</p> + +<p>Odd enough was it, I make out, that I was to feel no wonder of that kind +or degree play in the coming time over such other social aspects, such +superficially more colourable scenes as I paid, in repetition as +frequent as possible, my respects and my compliments to: they might meet +me with wreathed<a name="page_014" id="page_014"></a> smiles and splendid promises and deep divinations of +my own desire, a thousand graces and gages, in fine, that I couldn't +pretend to have picked up within the circle, however experimentally +widened, of which Half-Moon Street was the centre, and nothing therefore +could have exceeded the splendour of these successive and multiplied +assurances. What it none the less infinitely beguiles me to recognise +to-day is that such exhibitions, for all their greater direct radiance, +and still more for all their general implication of a store of meaning +and mystery and beauty that they alone, from example to example, from +prodigy to prodigy, had to open out, left me comparatively little +crushed by the impression of their concerning me further than my own +action perhaps could make good. It was as if I had seen that all there +was for me of these great things I should sooner or later take; the +amount would be immense, yet, as who should say, all on the same plane +and the same connection, the ęsthetic, the "artistic," the romantic in +the looser sense, or in other words in the air of the passions of the +intelligence.<a name="page_015" id="page_015"></a> What other passions of a deeper strain, whether personal +or racial, and thereby more superstitiously importunate, I must have +felt involved in the question of an effective experience of English life +I was doubtless then altogether unprepared to say; it probably came, +however, I seem actually to make out, very much to this particular +perception, exactly, that any penetration of the London scene would <i>be</i> +experience after a fashion that an exercise of one's "mere intellectual +curiosity" wherever else wouldn't begin to represent, glittering as the +rewards to such curiosity amid alien peoples of genius might thoroughly +appear. On the other hand it was of course going to be nothing less than +a superlative help that one would have but to reach out straight and in +the full measure of one's passion for these rewards, to find one's self +carried all the way by one's active, one's contemplative concern with +them—this delightful affair, fraught with increase of light, of joy and +wonder, of possibilities of adventure for the mind, in fine, inevitably +exhausting the relation.<a name="page_016" id="page_016"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h3> + +<p>Let me not here withal appear to pretend to say how far I then foresaw +myself likely to proceed, as it were, with the inimitable France and the +incomparable Italy; my real point is altogether in the simple fact that +they hovered before me, even in their scrappy foretastes, to a great +effect of ease and inspiration, whereas I shouldn't at all have resented +the charge of fairly hiding behind the lowly door of Mr. Lazarus Fox—so +unmistakeably did it open into complications tremendous. This excellent +man, my Half-Moon Street landlord—I surrender, I can't keep away from +him—figures to me now as but one of the thousand forms of pressure in +the collective assault, but he couldn't have been more carefully chosen +for his office had he consciously undertaken to express to me in a +concentrated manner most of the things I was "after." The case was +rather indeed perhaps that he himself by his own<a name="page_017" id="page_017"></a> mere perfection put me +up to much of what I should most confidently look for, and that the +right lines of observation and enjoyment, of local and social contact, +as I may call it, were most of all those that started out from him and +came back to him. It was as if nothing I saw could have done without +him, as if nothing he was could have done without everything else. The +very quarters I occupied under his protection happened, for that matter, +to swarm—as I estimated swarming—with intensities of suggestion—aware +as I now encourage myself to become that the first note of the +numberless reverberations I was to pick up in the aftertime had +definitely been struck for me as under the wave of his conducting little +wand. He flourished it modestly enough, ancient worthy of an immemorial +order that he was—old pensioned servant, of course, of a Cumberland (as +I believe) family, a kind, slim, celibate, informing and informed member +of which occupied his second floor apartments; a friend indeed whom I +had met on the very first occasion of my sallying<a name="page_018" id="page_018"></a> forth from Morley's +Hotel in Trafalgar Square to dine at a house of sustaining, of inspiring +hospitality in the Kensington quarter. Succumbing thus to my tangle of +memories, from which I discern no escape, I recognise further that if +the endlessly befriending Charles Nortons introduced me to Albert +Rutson, and Albert Rutson introduced me to his feudal retainer, so it +was in no small degree through the confidence borrowed from the latter's +interest in the decent appearance I should make, an interest of a +consistency not to have been prefigured by any at all like instance in +my past, that I so far maintained my dizzy balance as to be able to +ascend to the second floor under the thrill of sundry invitations to +breakfast. I dare say it is the invitations to breakfast that hold me at +this moment by their spell—so do they breathe to me across the age the +note of a London world that we have left far behind; in consequence of +which I the more yearningly steal back to it, as on sneaking tiptoe, and +shut myself up there without interference. It is embalmed in +disconnections, in differences,<a name="page_019" id="page_019"></a> that I cultivate a free fancy for +pronouncing advantageous to it: sunk already was the shaft by which I +should descend into the years, and my inspiration is in touching as many +as possible of the points of the other tradition, retracing as many as +possible of the features of the old face, eventually to be blurred again +even before my own eyes, and with the materials for a portrait thereby +accessible but to those who were present up to the time of the change.</p> + +<p>I don't pretend to date this change which still allows me to catch my +younger observation and submission at play on the far side of it; I make +it fall into the right perspective, however, I think, when I place it +where I began to shudder before a confidence, not to say an impudence, +of diminution in the aspects by which the British capital differed so +from those of all the foreign together as to present throughout the +straight contradiction to them. That straight contradiction, testifying +invaluably at every turn, had been from far back the thing, romantically +speaking, to clutch and keep the<a name="page_020" id="page_020"></a> clue and the logic of; thanks to it +the whole picture, every element, objects and figures, background and +actors, nature and art, hung consummately together, appealing in their +own light and under their own law—interesting ever in every case by +instituting comparisons, sticking on the contrary to their true instinct +and suggesting only contrast. They were the <i>opposite</i>, the assured, the +absolute, the unashamed, in respect to whatever might be of a generally +similar intention elsewhere: this was their dignity, their beauty and +their strength—to look back on which is to wonder if one didn't quite +consciously tremble, before the exhibition, for any menaced or mitigated +symptom in it. I honestly think one did, even in the first flushes of +recognition, more or less so tremble; I remember at least that in spite +of such disconcertments, such dismays, as certain of the most thoroughly +Victorian <i>choses vues</i> originally treated me to, something yet deeper +and finer than observation admonished me to like them just as they were, +or at least not too fatuously to dislike—since it somehow<a name="page_021" id="page_021"></a> glimmered +upon me that if they had lacked their oddity, their monstrosity, as it +even might be, their unabashed insular conformity, other things that +belong to them, as they belong to these, might have loomed less large +and massed less thick, which effect was wholly to be deprecated. To +catch that secret, I make out the more I think of it, was to have +perhaps the smokiest, but none the less the steadiest, light to walk by; +the "clue," as I have called it, was to be one's appreciation of an +England that should turn its back directly enough, and without fear of +doing it too much, on examples and ideas not strictly homebred—since +she did her own sort of thing with such authority and was even then to +be noted as sometimes trying other people's with a <i>kind</i> of disaster +not recorded, at the worst, among themselves.</p> + +<p>I must of course disavow pretending to have read this vivid philosophy +into my most immediate impressions, and I may in fact perhaps not claim +to have been really aware of its seed till a considerable time had +passed, till apprehensions and reflections had<a name="page_022" id="page_022"></a> taken place in quantity, +immeasurable quantity, so to speak, and a great stir-up of the +imagination been incurred. Undoubtedly is it in part the new—that is, +more strictly, the elder—acuteness that I touch all the prime profit +with; I didn't know at the time either how much appearances were all the +while in the melting-pot or what wealth of reaction on them I was laying +up. I cherish, for love of the unbroken interest, all the same, the +theory of certain then positive and effective prefigurements, because it +leaves me thus free for remarking that I knew where I was, as I may put +it, from the moment I saw the state of the London to come brought down +with the weight of her abdication of her genius. It not unnaturally may +be said that it hasn't been till to-day that we <i>see</i> her genius in its +fulness—throwing up in a hundred lights, matters we practically +acknowledge, such a plastic side as we had never dreamed she possessed. +The genius of accommodation is what we had last expected of +her—accommodation to anything but her portentous<a name="page_023" id="page_023"></a> self, for in <i>that</i> +connection she was ever remarkable; and certainly the air of the +generalised, the emulous smart modern capital has come to be written +upon her larger and larger even while we look.</p> + +<p>The unaccommodating and unaccommodated city remains none the less +closely consecrated to one's fondest notion of her—the city too +indifferent, too proud, too unaware, too stupid even if one will, to +enter any lists that involved her moving from her base and that thereby, +when one approached her from the alien <i>positive</i> places (I don't speak +of the American, in those days too negative to be related at all) +enjoyed the enormous "pull," for making her impression, of ignoring +everything but her own perversities and then of driving these home with +an emphasis not to be gainsaid. Since she didn't emulate, as I have +termed it, so she practised her own arts altogether, and both these ways +and these consequences were in the flattest opposition (<i>that</i> was the +happy point!) to foreign felicities or foreign standards, so that the +effect in every case was of the<a name="page_024" id="page_024"></a> straightest reversal of them—with +black for the foreign white and white for the foreign black, wet for the +foreign dry and dry for the foreign wet, big for the foreign small and +small for the foreign big: I needn't extend the catalogue. <i>Her</i> +idiosyncrasy was never in the least to have been inferred or presumed; +it could only, in general, make the outsider provisionally gape. She sat +thus imperturbable in her felicities, and if that is how, remounting the +stream of time, I like most to think of her, this is because if her +interest is still undeniable—as that of overgrown things goes—it has +yet lost its fineness of quality. Phenomena may be interesting, thank +goodness, without being phenomena of elegant expression or of any other +form of restless smartness, and when once type is strong, when once it +plays up from deep sources, every show of its sincerity delivers us a +message and we hang, to real suspense, on its continuance of energy, on +its again and yet again consistently acquitting itself. So it keeps in +tune, and, as the French adage says, <i>c'est le ton qui fait la chanson</i>. +The<a name="page_025" id="page_025"></a> mid-Victorian London was sincere—that was a vast virtue and a vast +appeal; the contemporary is sceptical, and most so when most plausible; +the turn of the tide could verily be fixed to an hour—the hour at which +the new plausibility began to exceed the old sincerities by so much as a +single sign. They could truly have been arrayed face to face, I think, +for an attentive eye—and I risk even saying that my own, bent upon +them, as was to come to pass, with a habit of anxiety that I should +scarce be able to overstate, had its unrecorded penetrations, its alarms +and recoveries, even perhaps its very lapses of faith, though always +redeemed afresh by still fonder fanaticisms, to a pitch that shall +perhaps present itself, when they expose it all the way, as that of +tiresome extravagance. Exposing it all the way is none the less, I see, +exactly what I plot against it—or, otherwise expressed, in favour of +the fine truth of history, so far as a throb of that awful pulse has +been matter of one's own life; in favour too of the mere returns +derivable from more inordinate curiosity. These Notes would<a name="page_026" id="page_026"></a> enjoy small +self-respect, I think, if that principle, not to call it that passion, +didn't almost furiously ride them.<a name="page_027" id="page_027"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h3> + +<p>I was at any rate in the midst of sincerities enough, sincerities of +emphasis and "composition"; perversities, idiosyncrasies, +incalculabilities, delightful all as densities at first insoluble, +delightful even indeed as so much mere bewilderment and shock. When was +the shock, I ask myself as I look back, not so deadened by the general +atmospheric richness as not to melt more or less immediately into some +succulence for the mind, something that could feed the historic sense +almost to sweetness? I don't mean that it was a shock to be invited to +breakfast—there were stronger ones than that; but was in fact the +<i>trait de mœurs</i> that disconnected me with most rapidity and +intensity from all I had left on the other side of the sea. To be so +disconnected, for the time, and in the most insidious manner, was above +all what I had come out for, and every appearance that might help it was +to be artfully and gratefully<a name="page_028" id="page_028"></a> cultivated. I recollect well how many of +these combined as I sat at quite punctual fried sole and marmalade in +the comparatively disengaged sitting-room of the second floor—the +occupancy of the first has remained vague to me; disengaged from the +mantle of gloom the folds of which draped most heavily the feet of the +house, as it were, and thereby promoted in my own bower the chronic dusk +favourable to mural decoration consisting mainly of framed and glazed +"coloured" excisions from Christmas numbers of the Illustrated London +News that had been at their hour quite modern miracles. Was it for that +matter into a sudden splendour of the modern that I ascendingly emerged +under the hospitality of my kind fellow-tenant, or was it rather into +the fine classicism of a bygone age, as literature and the arts had +handed down that memory? Such were the questions whisked at every turn +under my nose and reducing me by their obscure charm but to bewildered +brooding, I fear, when I should have been myself, to repay these +attentions, quite forward and informing and affirmative.<a name="page_029" id="page_029"></a></p> + +<p>There were eminent gentlemen, as I was sure they could only be, to +"meet" and, alas, awfully to interrogate me—for vivid has remained to +me, as the best of my bewilderment, the strangeness of finding that I +could be of interest to <i>them</i>: not indeed to call it rather the proved +humiliation of my impotence. My identity for myself was <i>all</i> in my +sensibility to their own exhibition, with not a scrap left over for a +personal show; which made it as inconvenient as it was queer that I +should be treated as a specimen and have in the most unexpected manner +to prove that I was a good one. I knew myself the very worst +conceivable, but how to give to such other persons a decent or coherent +reason for my being so required more presence of mind than I could in +the least muster—the consequence of which failure had to be for me, I +fear, under all that confused first flush, rather an abject acceptance +of the air of imbecility. There were, it appeared, things of interest +taking place in America, and I had had, in this absurd manner, to come +to England to learn it: I had had over there<a name="page_030" id="page_030"></a> on the ground itself no +conception of any such matter—nothing of the smallest interest, by any +perception of mine, as I suppose I should still blush to recall, had +taken place in America since the War. How <i>could</i> anything, I really +wanted to ask—anything comparable, that is, to what was taking place +under my eyes in Half-Moon Street and at dear softly presiding Rutson's +table of talk. It doubtless essentially belonged to the exactly right +type and tone and general figure of my fellow-breakfasters from the +Temple, from the Home Office, the Foreign Office, the House of Commons, +from goodness knew what other scarce discernible Olympian altitudes, it +belonged to the very cut of their hair and their waistcoats and their +whiskers—for it was still more or less a whiskered age—that they +should desire from me much distinctness about General Grant's first +cabinet, upon the formation of which the light of the newspaper happened +then to beat; yet at the same time that I asked myself if it was to such +cold communities, such flat frustrations as were so proposed,<a name="page_031" id="page_031"></a> that I +had sought to lift my head again in European air, I found the crisis +enriched by sundry other apprehensions.</p> + +<p>They melted together in it to that increase of savour I have already +noted, yet leaving me vividly admonished that the blankness of my mind +as to the Washington candidates relegated me to some class unencountered +as yet by any one of my conversers, a class only not perfectly +ridiculous because perfectly insignificant. Also that politics walked +abroad in England, so that one might supremely bump against them, as +much as, by my fond impression, they took their exercise in America but +through the back streets and the ways otherwise untrodden and the very +darkness of night; that further all lively attestations were <i>ipso +facto</i> interesting, and that finally and in the supreme degree, the +authenticity of whatever one was going to learn in the world would +probably always have for its sign that one got it at some personal cost. +To this generalisation mightn't one even add that in proportion as the +cost was great, or became fairly excruciating, the lesson, the<a name="page_032" id="page_032"></a> value +acquired would probably be a thing to treasure? I remember really going +so far as to wonder if any act of acquisition of the life-loving, +life-searching sort that most appealed to me wouldn't mostly be +fallacious if unaccompanied by that tag of the price paid in personal +discomfort, in some self-exposure and some none too impossible +consequent discomfiture, for the sake of it. Didn't I even on occasion +mount to the very height of seeing it written that these bad moments +were the downright consecration of knowledge, that is of perception and, +essentially, of exploration, always dangerous and treacherous, and so +might afterwards come to figure to memory, each in its order, as the +silver nail on the wall of the temple where the trophy is hung up? All +of which remark, I freely grant, is a great ado about the long since so +bedimmed little Half-Moon Street breakfasts, and is moreover quite wide +of the mark if suggesting that the joys of recognition, those of +imaginatively, of projectively fitting in and fitting out every piece in +the puzzle and every recruit to the force<a name="page_033" id="page_033"></a> of a further understanding +weren't in themselves a most bustling and cheering business.</p> + +<p>It was bustling at least, assuredly, if not quite always in the same +degree exhilarating, to breakfast out at all, as distinguished from +lunching, without its being what the Harvard scene made of it, one of +the incidents of "boarding"; it was association at a jump with the +ghosts of Byron and Sheridan and Scott and Moore and Lockhart and Rogers +and <i>tutti quanti</i>—as well as the exciting note of a social order in +which everyone wasn't hurled straight, with the momentum of rising, upon +an office or a store. The mere vision in numbers of persons embodying +and in various ways sharply illustrating a clear alternative to that +passivity told a tale that would be more and more worth the reading with +every turn of the page. So at all events I fantasticated while harassed +by my necessity to weave into my general tapestry every thread that +would conduce to a pattern, and so the thread for instance of the great +little difference of my literally never having but once "at home" been +invited to breakfast<a name="page_034" id="page_034"></a> on types as well as on toast and its accessories +could suggest an effect of silk or silver when absolutely dangled before +me. That single occasion at home came back in a light that fairly +brought tears to my eyes, for it was touching now to the last wanness +that the lady of the winter morn of the Massachusetts Sabbath, one of +those, as I recover it, of 1868, to reach whose board we had waded +through snowdrifts, had been herself fondling a reminiscence, though I +can scarce imagine supposing herself to offer for our consumption any +other type than her own. It was for that matter but the sweet staleness +of her reminiscence that made her a type, and I remember how it had had +to do thereby all the work: <i>she</i>, of an age to reach so considerably +back, had breakfasted out, in London, and with Mr. Rogers himself—that +was the point; which I am bound to say did for the hour and on that spot +supply richness of reference enough. And I am caught up, I find, in the +very act of this claim for my prior scantness of experience by a memory +that makes it not a little less perfect and<a name="page_035" id="page_035"></a> which is oddly enough again +associated with a struggle, on an empty stomach, through the massed New +England whiteness of the prime Sunday hour. I still cherish the vision, +which couldn't then have faded from me, of my having, during the age of +innocence—I mean of my own—breakfasted with W. D. Howells, insidious +disturber and fertiliser of that state in me, to "meet" Bayard Taylor +and Arthur Sedgwick all in the Venetian manner, the delightful Venetian +manner which toward the later 'sixties draped any motion on our host's +part as with a habit still appropriate. <i>He</i> had risen that morning +under the momentum of his but recently concluded consular term in +Venice, where margin, if only that of the great loungeable piazza, had a +breadth, and though Sedgwick and I had rather, as it were, to take the +jump standing, this was yet under the inspiration of feeling the case +most special. Only it had <i>been</i> Venetian, snow-shoes and all; I had +stored it sacredly away as not American at all, and was of course to +learn in Half-Moon Street how little it had been English either.<a name="page_036" id="page_036"></a></p> + +<p>What must have seemed to me of a fine international mixture, during +those weeks, was my thrilling opportunity to sit one morning, beside +Mrs. Charles Norton's tea-urn, in Queen's Gate Terrace, opposite to +Frederic Harrison, eminent to me at the moment as one of the subjects of +Matthew Arnold's early fine banter, one of his too confidently roaring +"young lions" of the periodical press. Has any gilding ray since that +happy season rested here and there with the sovereign charm of interest, +of drollery, of felicity and infelicity taken on by scattered selected +objects in that writer's bright critical dawn?—an element in which we +had the sense of sitting gratefully bathed, so that we fairly took out +our young minds and dabbled and soaked them in it as we were to do again +in no other. The beauty was thus at such a rate that people had +references, and that a reference was then, to my mind, whether in a +person or an object, the most glittering, the most becoming ornament +possible, a style of decoration one seemed likely to perceive figures +here and there, whether animate or not,<a name="page_037" id="page_037"></a> quite groan under the +accumulation and the weight of. One had scarcely met it before—that I +now understood; at the same time that there was perhaps a wan joy in +one's never having missed it, by all appearance, having on the contrary +ever instinctively caught it, on the least glimmer of its presence. Even +when present, or what in the other time I had taken for present, it had +been of the thinnest, whereas all about me hereafter it would be by all +appearance almost glutinously thick—to the point even of one's on +occasion sticking fast in it; that is finding intelligibility smothered +in quantity. I lost breath in fact, no doubt, again and again, with this +latter increase, but was to go on and on for a long time before any +first glimmer of reaction against so special a source of interest. It +attached itself to objects often, I saw, by no merit or virtue—above +all, repeatedly, by no "cleverness"—of their own, but just by the luck +of history, by the action of multiplicity of circumstance. Condemned the +human particle "over here" was to <i>live</i> on whatever terms, in +thickness<a name="page_038" id="page_038"></a>—instead of being free, comparatively, or as I at once +ruefully and exquisitely found myself, only to feel and to think in it. +Ruefully because there were clearly a thousand contacts and sensations, +of the strong direct order, that one lost by not so living; exquisitely +because of the equal number of immunities and independences, blest +independences of perception and judgment, blest liberties of range for +the intellectual adventure, that accrued by the same stroke. These at +least had the advantage, one of the most distinguished conceivable, that +when enjoyed with a certain intensity they might produce the illusion of +the other intensity, that of being involved in the composition and the +picture itself, in the situations, the complications, the circumstances, +admirable and dreadful; while no corresponding illusion, none making for +the ideal play of reflection, conclusion, comparison, however one should +incline to appraise the luxury, seemed likely to attend the immersed or +engaged condition.</p> + +<p>Whatever fatuity might at any rate have<a name="page_039" id="page_039"></a> resided in these complacencies +of view, I made them my own with the best conscience in the world, and I +meet them again quite to extravagance of interest wherever on the whole +extent of the scene my retrospect sets me down. It wasn't in the least +at the same time that encountered celebrities only thus provoked the +shifting play of my small lamp, and this too even though they were +easily celebrated, by my measure, and though from the very first I owed +an individual here and there among them, as was highly proper, the +benefit of impression at the highest pitch. On the great supporting and +enclosing scene itself, the big generalised picture, painted in layer +upon layer and tone upon tone, one's fancy was all the while feeding; +objects and items, illustrations and aspects might perpetually overlap +or mutually interfere, but never without leaving consistency the more +marked and character the more unmistakeable. The place, the places, +bristled so for every glance with expressive particulars, that I really +conversed with them, at happy moments, more than with the figures that +moved in<a name="page_040" id="page_040"></a> them, which affected me so often as but submissive articles of +furniture, "put in" by an artist duly careful of effect and yet duly +respectful of proportion. The great impression was doubtless no other +then and there than what it is under every sky and before every scene +that remind one afresh, at the given moment, of all the ways in which +producing causes and produced creatures correspond and interdepend; but +I think I must have believed at that time that these cross references +kept up their game in the English air with a frankness and a good faith +that kept the process, in all probability, the most traceable of its +kind on the globe.</p> + +<p>What was the secret of the force of that suggestion?—which was not, I +may say, to be invalidated, to my eyes, by the further observation of +cases and conditions. Was it that the enormous "pull" enjoyed at every +point of the general surface the stoutness of the underlying belief in +what was behind all surfaces?—so that the particular visible, audible, +palpable fact, however small and subsidiary, was incomparably absolute, +or<a name="page_041" id="page_041"></a> had, so to speak, such a conscience and a confidence, such an +absence of reserve and latent doubts about itself, as was not elsewhere +to be found. Didn't such elements as that represent, in the heart of +things, possibilities of scepticism, of mockery, of irony, of the return +of the matter, whatever it might be, on itself, by some play or other of +the questioning spirit, the spirit therefore weakening to entire comfort +of affirmations? Didn't I see that humour itself, which might seem +elsewhere corrosive and subversive, was, as an English faculty, turned +outward altogether and never turned inward?—by which convenient +circumstance subversion, or in other words alteration and variation were +not promoted. Such truths were wondrous things to make out in such +connections as my experience was then, and for no small time after, to +be confined to; but I positively catch myself listening to them, even +with my half-awakened ears, as if they had been all so many sermons of +the very stones of London. <i>There</i>, to come back to it, was exactly the +force with which these<a name="page_042" id="page_042"></a> stones were to build me capaciously round: I +invited them, I besought them, to say all they would, and—to return to +my figure of a while back—it was soon so thoroughly as if they had +understood that, once having begun, they were to keep year after year +fairly chattering to me. Many of these pages, I fondly foresee, must +consist but of the record of their chatter. What was most of all +happening, I take it, was that under an absurd special stress I was +having, as who should say, to improvise a local medium and to arrange a +local consciousness. Against my due appropriation of those originally +closest at my hand inevitable accidents had conspired—and, to conclude +in respect to all this, if a considerable time was to be wanted, in the +event, for ideal certainty of adjustment, half the terms required by +this could then put forth the touching plea that they had quite achingly +waited.<a name="page_043" id="page_043"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h3> + +<p>It may perhaps seem strange that the soil should have been watered by +such an incident as Mr. Lazarus Fox's reply, in the earliest rich dusk, +to my inquiry as to whither, while I occupied his rooms, I had best +betake myself most regularly for my dinner: "Well, there is the Bath +Hotel, sir, a very short walk away, where I should think you would be +very comfortable indeed. Mr. So-and-So dines at his club, sir—but there +is also the Albany in Piccadilly, to which I believe many gentlemen go." +I think I measured on the spot "all that it took" to make my friend most +advisedly—for it was clearly what he did—see me seated in lone state, +for my evening meal, at the heavy mahogany of the stodgy little hotel +that in those days and for long after occupied the north-west corner of +Arlington Street and to which, in common with many compatriots, I +repeatedly resorted during the years immediately<a name="page_044" id="page_044"></a> following. We +<i>suffered</i>, however, on those occasions, the unmitigated coffee-room of +Mr. Fox's prescription—it was part of a strange inevitability, a +concomitant of necessary shelter and we hadn't at least gone forth to +invoke its austere charm. I tried it, in that singular way, at the hour +I speak of—and I well remember forecasting the interest of a social and +moral order in which it could be supposed of me that, having tried it +once, I should sublimely try it again. My success in doing so would +indeed have been sublime, but a finer shade of the quality still +attached somehow to my landlord's confidence in it; and this was one of +the threads that, as I have called them, I was to tuck away for future +picking-up again and unrolling. I fell back on the Albany, which long +ago passed away and which I seem to have brushed with a touch of +reminiscence in some anticipation of the present indulgence that is +itself quite ancient history. It was a small eating-house of the very +old English tradition, as I then supposed at least, just opposite the +much greater establishment of the same<a name="page_045" id="page_045"></a> name, which latter it had +borrowed, and I remember wondering whether the tenants of the classic +chambers, the beadle-guarded cluster of which was impressive even to the +deprecated approach, found their conception of the "restaurant"—we +still pronounced it in the French manner—met by the small compartments, +narrow as horse-stalls, formed by the high straight backs of hard wooden +benches and accommodating respectively two pairs of feeders, who were +thus so closely face to face as fairly to threaten with knife and fork +each others' more forward features.</p> + +<p>The scene was sordid, the arrangements primitive, the detail of the +procedure, as it struck me, well-nigh of the rudest; yet I remember +rejoicing in it all—as one indeed might perfectly rejoice in the +juiciness of joints and the abundance of accessory pudding; for I said +to myself under every shock and at the hint of every savour that this +was what it was for an exhibition to reek with local colour, and one +could dispense with a napkin, with a crusty roll, with room for one's +elbows or one's feet, with an immunity<a name="page_046" id="page_046"></a> from intermittence of the "plain +boiled," much better than one could dispense with that. There were +restaurants galore even at that time in New York and in Boston, but I +had never before had to do with an eating-house and had not yet seen the +little old English world of Dickens, let alone of the ever-haunting +Hogarth, of Smollett and of Boswell, drenched with such a flood of +light. As one sat there one <i>understood</i>; one drew out the severe séance +not to stay the assault of precious conspiring truths, not to break the +current of in-rushing telltale suggestion. Every face was a documentary +scrap, half a dozen broken words to piece with half a dozen others, and +so on and on; every sound was strong, whether rich and fine or only +queer and coarse; everything in this order drew a positive sweetness +from never being—whatever else it was—gracelessly flat. The very +rudeness was ripe, the very commonness was conscious—that is not +related to mere other forms of the same, but to matters as different as +possible, into which it shaded off and off or up and up;<a name="page_047" id="page_047"></a> the image in +fine was organic, rounded and complete, as definite as a Dutch picture +of low life hung on a museum wall. "Low" I say in respect to the life; +but that was the point for me, that whereas the smartness and newness +beyond the sea supposedly disavowed the low, they did so but thinly and +vainly, falling markedly short of the high; which the little boxed and +boiled Albany attained to some effect of, after a fashion of its own, +just by having its so thoroughly appreciable note-value in a scheme of +manners. It was imbedded, so to speak, in the scheme, and it borrowed +lights, it borrowed even glooms, from so much neighbouring distinction. +The places across the sea, as they to my then eyes faintly after-glowed, +had no impinging borders but those of the desert to borrow <i>from</i>. And +if it be asked of me whether all the while I insist, for demonstration +of the complacency with which I desire to revert, on not regretting the +disappearance of such too long surviving sordidries as those I have +evoked, I can but answer that blind emotion, in whichever<a name="page_048" id="page_048"></a> sense +directed, has nothing to say to the question and that the sense of what +we just <i>could</i> confidently live by at a given far-away hour is a simple +stout fact of relief.</p> + +<p>Relief, again, I say, from the too enormous present accretions and +alternatives—which we witlessly thought so innumerable then, which we +artlessly found so much of the interest of <i>in</i> an immeasurable +multiplicity and which I now feel myself thus grope for ghostly touch of +in the name, neither more nor less, of poetic justice. I wasn't +doubtless at the time so very sure, after all, of the comparative +felicity of our state, that of the rare <i>moment</i> for the fond fancy—I +doubtless even a bit greedily missed certain quantities, not to call +them certain qualities, here and there, and the best of my actual +purpose is to make amends for that blasphemy. There isn't a thing I can +imagine having missed that I don't quite ache to miss again; and it +remains at all events an odd stroke that, having of old most felt the +thrill of the place in its mighty muchness, I have lived to adore it +backward for its sweet simplicity. I find<a name="page_049" id="page_049"></a> myself in fact at the present +writing only too sorry when not able to minimise conscientiously this, +that or the other of the old sources of impression. The thing is indeed +admirably possible in a <i>general</i> way, though much of the exhibition was +none the less undeniably, was absolutely large: how can I for instance +recall the great cab-rank, mainly formed of delightful hansoms, that +stretched along Piccadilly from the top of the Green Park unendingly +down, without having to take it for unsurpassably modern and majestic? +How can I think—I select my examples at hazard—of the "run" of the +more successful of Mr. Robertson's comedies at the "dear little old" +Prince of Wales's Theatre in Tottenham Court Road as anything less than +one of the wonders of our age? How, by the same token, can I not lose +myself still more in the glory of a time that was to watch the drawn-out +procession of Henry Irving's Shakespearean splendours at the +transcendent Lyceum? or how, in the same general line, not recognise +that to live through the extravagant youth<a name="page_050" id="page_050"></a> of the ęsthetic era, whether +as embodied in the then apparently inexhaustible vein of the Gilbert and +Sullivan operas or as more monotonously expressed in those "last words" +of the <i>raffiné</i> that were chanted and crooned in the damask-hung temple +of the Grosvenor Gallery, was to seem privileged to such immensities as +history would find left to her to record but with bated breath?</p> + +<p>These latter triumphs of taste, however, though lost in the abysm now, +had then a good many years to wait and I alight for illustrative support +of my present mild thesis on the comparative humility, say, of the +inward aspects, in a large measure, of the old National Gallery, where +memory mixes for me together so many elements of the sense of an antique +world. The great element was of course that I well-nigh incredibly stood +again in the immediate presence of Titian and Rembrandt, of Rubens and +Paul Veronese, and that the cup of sensation was thereby filled to +overflowing; but I look at it to-day as concomitantly warm and closed-in +and, as who should say, cosy that the<a name="page_051" id="page_051"></a> ancient order and contracted +state and thick-coloured dimness, all unconscious of rearrangements and +reversals, blighting new lights and invidious shattering comparisons, +still prevailed and kept contemplation comfortably confused and serenely +superstitious, when not indeed at its sharpest moments quite fevered +with incoherences. The place looks to me across the half century richly +dim, yet at the same time both perversely plain and heavily +violent—violent through indifference to the separations and selections +that have become a tribute to modern nerves; but I cherish exactly those +facts of benightedness, seeming as they do to have positively and +blessedly conditioned the particular sweetness of wonder with which I +haunted the Family of Darius, the Bacchus and Ariadne, or the so-called +portrait of Ariosto. Could one in those days feel anything with force, +whether for pleasure or for pain, without feeling it as an immense +little act or event of life, and as therefore taking place on a scene +and in circumstances scarce at all to be separated from its own sense +and impact?<a name="page_052" id="page_052"></a>—so that to recover it is to recover the whole medium, the +material pressure of things, and find it most marked for preservation as +an aspect, even, distinguishably, a "composition."</p> + +<p><i>What</i> a composition, for instance again I am capable at this hour of +exclaiming, the conditions of felicity in which I became aware, one +afternoon during a renewed gape before the Bacchus and Ariadne, first +that a little gentleman beside me and talking with the greatest vivacity +to another gentleman was extremely remarkable, second that he had the +largest and most <i>chevelu</i> auburn head I had ever seen perched on a +scarce perceptible body, third that I held some scrap of a clue to his +identity, which couldn't fail to be eminent, fourth that this tag of +association was with nothing less than a small photograph sent me +westward across the sea a few months before, and fifth that the sitter +for the photograph had been the author of Atalanta in Calydon and Poems +and Ballads! I thrilled, it perfectly comes back to me, with the prodigy +of this circumstance that<a name="page_053" id="page_053"></a> I should be admiring Titian in the same +breath with Mr. Swinburne—that is in the same breath in which <i>he</i> +admired Titian and in which I also admired <i>him</i>, the whole constituting +on the spot between us, for appreciation, that is for mine, a fact of +intercourse, such a fact as could stamp and colour the whole passage +ineffaceably, and this even though the more illustrious party to it had +within the minute turned off and left me shaken. I was shaken, but I was +satisfied—that was the point; I didn't ask more to interweave another +touch in my pattern, and as I once more gather in the impression I am +struck with my having deserved truly as many of the like as possible. I +was welcome to them, it may well be said, on such easy terms—and yet I +ask myself whether, after all, it didn't take on my own part some doing, +as we nowadays say, to make them so well worth having. They themselves +took, I even at the time felt, little enough trouble for it, and the +virtue of the business was repeatedly, no doubt, a good deal more in +what I brought than in what I took.<a name="page_054" id="page_054"></a></p> + +<p>I apply this remark indeed to those extractions of the quintessence that +had for their occasion either one's more undirected though never +fruitless walks and wanderings or one's earnest, one's positively pious +approach to whatever consecrated ground or shrine of pilgrimage that +might be at the moment in order. There was not a regular prescribed +"sight" that I during those weeks neglected—I remember haunting the +museums in especial, though the South Kensington was then scarce more +than embryonic, with a sense of duty and of excitement that I was never +again to know combined in equal measure, I think, and that it might +really have taken some element of personal danger to account for. There +<i>was</i> the element, in a manner, to season the cup with sharpness—the +danger, all the while, that my freedom might be brief and my experience +broken, that I was under the menace of uncertainty and subject in fine +to interruption. The fact of having been so long gravely unwell sufficed +by itself to keep apprehension alive; it was our idea, or at least quite +intensely<a name="page_055" id="page_055"></a> mine, that what I was doing, could I but put it through, +would be intimately good for me—only the putting it through was the +difficulty, and I sometimes faltered by the way. This makes now for a +general air on the part of all the objects of vision that I recover, and +almost as much in those of accidental encounter as in the breathlessly +invoked, of being looked at for the last time and giving out their +message and story as with the still, collected passion of an only +chance. This feeling about them, not to say, as I might have imputed it, +<i>in</i> them, wonderfully helped, as may be believed, the extraction of +quintessences—which sprang at me of themselves, for that matter, out of +any appearance that confessed to the least value in the compound, the +least office in the harmony. If the commonest street-vista was a fairly +heart-shaking contributive image, if the incidents of the thick +renascent light anywhere, and the perpetual excitement of never knowing, +between it and the historic and determined gloom, which was which and +which one would most "back" for the<a name="page_056" id="page_056"></a> general outcome and picture, so the +great sought-out compositions, the Hampton Courts and the Windsors, the +Richmonds, the Dulwiches, even the very Hampstead Heaths and Putney +Commons, to say nothing of the Towers, the Temples, the Cathedrals and +the strange penetrabilities of the City, ranged themselves like the rows +of great figures in a sum, an amount immeasurably huge, that one would +draw on if not quite as long as one lived, yet as soon as ever one +should seriously get to work. That, to a tune of the most beautiful +melancholy—at least as I catch it again now—was the way all values +came out: they were charged somehow with a useability the most +immediate, the most urgent, and which, I seemed to see, would keep me +restless till I should have done something of my very own with them.</p> + +<p>This was indeed perhaps what most painted them over with the admonitory +appeal: there were truly moments at which they seemed not to answer for +it that I should get all the good of them, and the finest—what I was<a name="page_057" id="page_057"></a> +so extravagantly, so fantastically after—unless I could somehow at once +indite my sonnet and prove my title. The difficulty was all in there +being so much of them—I might myself have been less restless if they +could only have been less vivid. This they absolutely declined at any +moment and in any connection to be, and it was ever so long till they +abated a jot of the refusal. Thereby, in consequence, as may easily be +judged, they were to keep me in alarms to which my measures practically +taken, my catastrophes anxiously averted, remained not quite +proportionate. I recall a most interesting young man who had been my +shipmate on the homeward-bound "China," shortly before—I could go at +length into my reasons for having been so struck with him, but I +forbear—who, on our talking, to my intense trepidation of curiosity, of +where I might advisedly "go" in London, let me know that he always went +to Craven Street Strand, where bachelor lodgings were highly convenient, +and whence I in fact then saw them flush at me over the cold grey sea +with an<a name="page_058" id="page_058"></a> authenticity almost fierce. I didn't in the event, as has been +seen, go to Craven Street for rooms, but I did go, on the very first +occasion, for atmosphere, neither more nor less—the young man of the +ship, building so much better than he knew, had guaranteed me such a +rightness of that; and it belongs to this reminiscence, for the +triviality of which I should apologize did I find myself at my present +pitch capable of apologizing for anything, that I had on the very spot +there one of those hallucinations as to the precious effect dreadful to +lose and yet impossible to render which interfused the ęsthetic dream in +presence of its subject with the mortal drop of despair (as I should +insist at least didn't the despair itself seem to have acted here as the +preservative). The precious effect in the case of Craven Street was that +it absolutely reeked, to my fond fancy, with associations born of the +particular ancient piety embodied in one's private altar to Dickens; and +that this upstart little truth alone would revel in explanations that I +should for the time have feverishly to forego.<a name="page_059" id="page_059"></a> The exquisite matter was +not the identification with the scene of special shades or names; it was +just that the whole Dickens procession marched up and down, the whole +Dickens world looked out of its queer, quite sinister windows—for it +was the socially sinister Dickens, I am afraid, rather than the socially +encouraging or confoundingly comic who still at that moment was most apt +to meet me with his reasons. Such a reason was just that look of the +inscrutable riverward street, packed to blackness with accumulations of +suffered experience, these, indescribably, disavowed and confessed at +one and the same time, and with the fact of its blocked old Thames-side +termination, a mere fact of more oppressive enclosure now, telling all +sorts of vague loose stories about it.<a name="page_060" id="page_060"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h3> + +<p>Why, however, should I pick up so small a crumb from that mere brief +first course at a banquet of initiation which was in the event to +prolong itself through years and years?—unless indeed as a scrap of a +specimen, chosen at hazard, of the prompt activity of a process by which +my intelligence afterwards came to find itself more fed, I think, than +from any other source at all, or, for that matter, from all other +sources put together. A hundred more suchlike modest memories breathe +upon me, each with its own dim little plea, as I turn to face them, but +my idea is to deal somehow more conveniently with the whole gathered +mass of my subsequent impressions in this order, a fruitage that I feel +to have been only too abundantly stored. Half a dozen of those of a +larger and more immediate dignity, incidents more particularly of the +rather invidiously so-called social contact, pull my<a name="page_061" id="page_061"></a> sleeve as I pass; +but the long, backward-drawn train of the later life drags them along +with it, lost and smothered in its spread—only one of them stands out +or remains over, insisting on its place and hour, its felt +distinguishability. To this day I feel again <i>that</i> roused emotion, my +unsurpassably prized admission to the presence of the great George +Eliot, whom I was taken to see, by one of the kind door-opening Norton +ladies, by whom Mrs. Lewes's guarded portal at North Bank appeared +especially penetrable, on a Sunday afternoon of April '69. Later +occasions, after a considerable lapse, were not to overlay the absolute +face-value, as I may call it, of all the appearances then and there +presented me—which were taken home by a young spirit almost abjectly +grateful, at any rate all devoutly prepared, for them. I find it idle +even to wonder what "place" the author of Silas Marner and Middlemarch +may be conceived to have in the pride of our literature—so settled and +consecrated in the individual range of view is many such a case free at +last to find itself, free after ups<a name="page_062" id="page_062"></a> and downs, after fluctuations of +fame or whatever, which have divested judgment of any relevance that +isn't most of all the relevance of a living and recorded <i>relation</i>. It +has ceased then to know itself in any degree as an estimate, has shaken +off the anxieties of circumspection and comparison and just grown happy +to act as an attachment pure and simple, an effect of life's own logic, +but in the ashes of which the wonted fires of youth need but to be blown +upon for betrayal of a glow. Reflective appreciation may have originally +been concerned, whether at its most or at its least, but it is well +over, to our infinite relief—yes, to our immortal comfort, I think; the +interval back cannot again be bridged. We simply sit with our enjoyed +gain, our residual rounded possession in our lap; a safe old treasure, +which has ceased to shrink, if indeed also perhaps greatly to swell, and +all that further touches it is the fine vibration set up if the name we +know it all by is called into question—perhaps however little.</p> + +<p>It was by George Eliot's name that I was<a name="page_063" id="page_063"></a> to go on knowing, was never to +cease to know, a great treasure of beauty and humanity, of applied and +achieved art, a testimony, historic as well as ęsthetic, to the deeper +interest of the intricate English aspects; and I now allow the +vibration, as I have called it, all its play—quite as if I had been +wronged even by my own hesitation as to whether to pick up my anecdote. +That scruple wholly fades with the sense of how I must at the very time +have foreseen that here was one of those associations that would +determine in the far future an exquisite inability to revise it. +Middlemarch had not then appeared—we of the faith were still to enjoy +that saturation, and Felix Holt the radical was upwards of three years +old; the impetus proceeding from this work, however, was still fresh +enough in my pulses to have quickened the palpitation of my finding +myself in presence. I had rejoiced without reserve in Felix Holt—the +illusion of reading which, outstretched on my then too frequently +inevitable bed at Swampscott during a couple of very hot days of the +summer of<a name="page_064" id="page_064"></a> 1866, comes back to me, followed by that in sooth of sitting +up again, at no great ease, to indite with all promptness a review of +the delightful thing, the place of appearance of which nothing could now +induce me to name, shameless about the general fact as I may have been +at the hour itself: over such a feast of fine rich natural tone did I +feel myself earnestly bend. Quite unforgettable to me the art and truth +with which the note of this tone was struck in the beautiful prologue +and the bygone appearances, a hundred of the outward and visible signs +of the author's own young rural and midmost England, made to hold us by +their harmony. The book was not, if I rightly remember, altogether +genially greeted, but I was to hold fast to the charm I had thankfully +suffered it, I had been conscious of absolutely needing it, to work.</p> + +<p>Exquisite the remembrance of how it wouldn't have "done" for me at all, +in relation to other inward matters, not to strain from the case the +last drop of its happiest sense. And I had even with the cooling of the +first glow so little gone back upon it, as we have nowadays<a name="page_065" id="page_065"></a> learned to +say, had in fact so gone forward, floated by its wave of superlative +intended benignity, that, once in the cool quiet drawing-room at North +Bank I knew myself steeped in still deeper depths of the medium. G. H. +Lewes was absent for the time on an urgent errand; one of his sons, on a +visit at the house, had been suddenly taken with a violent attack of +pain, the heritage of a bad accident not long before in the West Indies, +a suffered onset from an angry bull, I seem to recall, who had tossed or +otherwise mauled him, and, though beaten off, left him considerably +compromised—these facts being promptly imparted to us, in no small +flutter, by our distinguished lady, who came in to us from another room, +where she had been with the hapless young man while his father appealed +to the nearest good chemist for some known specific. It infinitely moved +me to see so great a celebrity quite humanly and familiarly +agitated—even with something clear and noble in it too, to which, as +well as to the extraordinarily interesting dignity of her whole odd +personal conformation,<a name="page_066" id="page_066"></a> I remember thinking her black silk dress and the +lace mantilla attached to her head and keeping company on either side +with the low-falling thickness of her dark hair effectively contributed. +I have found myself, my life long, attaching value to every noted thing +in respect to a great person—and George Eliot struck me on the spot as +somehow <i>illustratively</i> great; never at any rate has the impression of +those troubled moments faded from me, nor that at once of a certain high +grace in her anxiety and a frank immediate appreciation of our presence, +modest embarrassed folk as we were. It took me no long time to thrill +with the sense, sublime in its unexpectedness, that we were perhaps, or +indeed quite clearly, helping her to pass the time till Mr. Lewes's +return—after which he would again post off for Mr. Paget the +pre-eminent surgeon; and I see involved with this the perfect amenity of +her assisting us, as it were, to assist her, through unrelinquished +proper talk, due responsible remark and report, in the last degree +suggestive to me, on a short holiday taken with Mr.<a name="page_067" id="page_067"></a> Lewes in the south +of France, whence they had just returned. Yes indeed, the lightest words +of great persons are so little as any words of others are that I catch +myself again inordinately struck with her dropping it off-hand that the +mistral, scourge of their excursion, had blown them into Avignon, where +they had gone, I think, to see J. S. Mill, only to blow them straight +out again—the figure put it so before us; as well as with the moral +interest, the absence of the <i>banal</i>, in their having, on the whole +scene, found pleasure further poisoned by the frequency in all those +parts of "evil faces: oh the evil faces!" <i>That</i> recorded source of +suffering enormously affected me—I felt it as beautifully +characteristic: I had never heard an <i>impression de voyage</i> so little +tainted with the superficial or the vulgar. I was myself at the time in +the thick of impressions, and it was true that they would have seemed to +me rather to fail of life, of their own doubtless inferior kind, if +submitting beyond a certain point to be touched with that sad or, as who +should say, that grey colour: Mrs. Lewes's were, it appeared,<a name="page_068" id="page_068"></a> +predominantly so touched, and I could at once admire it in them and +wonder if they didn't pay for this by some lack of intensity on other +sides. Why I didn't more impute to her, or to them, that possible lack +is more than I can say, since under the law of moral earnestness the +vulgar and the trivial would be then involved in the poor observations +of my own making—a conclusion sufficiently depressing.</p> + +<p>However, I didn't find myself depressed, and I didn't find the great +mind that was so good as to shine upon us at that awkward moment however +dimly anything but augmented; what was its sensibility to the evil faces +but part of the large old tenderness which the occasion had caused to +overflow and on which we were presently floated back into the room she +had left?—where we might perhaps beguile a little the impatience of the +sufferer waiting for relief. We ventured in our flutter to doubt whether +we <i>should</i> beguile, we held back with a certain delicacy from this +irruption, and if there was a momentary wonderful and beautiful conflict +I<a name="page_069" id="page_069"></a> remember how our yielding struck me as crowned with the finest grace +it could possibly have, that of the prodigious privilege of humouring, +yes literally humouring so renowned a spirit at a moment when we could +really match our judgment with hers. For the injured young man, in the +other and the larger room, simply lay stretched on his back on the +floor, the posture apparently least painful to him—though painful +enough at the best I easily saw on kneeling beside him, after my first +dismay, to ask if I could in any way ease him. I see his face again, +fair and young and flushed, with its vague little smile and its moist +brow; I recover the moment or two during which we sought to make natural +conversation in his presence, and my question as to what conversation +<i>was</i> natural; and then as his father's return still failed my having +the inspiration that at once terminated the strain of the scene and yet +prolonged the sublime connection. Mightn't <i>I</i> then hurry off for Mr. +Paget?—on whom, as fast as a cab could carry me, I would wait with the +request that he would come at the first possible<a name="page_070" id="page_070"></a> moment to the rescue. +Mrs. Lewes's and our stricken companion's instant appreciation of this +offer lent me wings on which I again feel myself borne very much as if +suddenly acting as a messenger of the gods—surely I had never come so +near to performing in that character. I shook off my fellow visitor for +swifter cleaving of the air, and I recall still feeling that I cleft it +even in the dull four-wheeler of other days which, on getting out of the +house, I recognised as the only object animating, at a distance, the +long blank Sunday vista beside the walled-out Regent's Park. I crawled +to Hanover Square—or was it Cavendish? I let the question stand—and, +after learning at the great man's door that though he was not at home he +was soon expected back and would receive my message without delay, +cherished for the rest of the day the particular quality of my +vibration.</p> + +<p>It was doubtless even excessive in proportion to its cause—yet in what +else but that consisted the force and the use of vibrations? It was by +their excess that one knew them<a name="page_071" id="page_071"></a> for such, as one for that matter only +knew things in general worth knowing. I didn't know what I had expected +as an effect of our offered homage, but I had somehow not, at the best, +expected a relation—and now a relation had been dramatically +determined. It would exist for me if I should never again in all the +world ask a feather's weight of it; for myself, that is, it would simply +never be able not somehow to act. Its virtue was not in truth at all +flagrantly to be put to the proof—any opportunity for that underwent at +the best a considerable lapse; but why wasn't it intensely acting, none +the less, during the time when, before being in London again for any +length of stay, I found it intimately concerned in my perusal of +Middlemarch, so soon then to appear, and even in that of Deronda, its +intervention on behalf of which defied any chill of time? And to these +references I can but subjoin that they obviously most illustrate the +operation of a sense for drama. The process of appropriation of the two +fictions was experience, in great intensity, and roundabout the field<a name="page_072" id="page_072"></a> +was drawn the distinguishable ring of something that belonged equally to +this condition and that embraced and further vivified the imaged mass, +playing in upon it lights of surpassing fineness. So it was, at any +rate, that my "relation"—for I didn't go so far as to call it +"ours"—helped me to squeeze further values from the intrinsic substance +of the copious final productions I have named, a weight of variety, +dignity and beauty of which I have never allowed my measure to shrink.</p> + +<p>Even this example of a rage for connections, I may also remark, doesn't +deter me from the mention here, somewhat out of its order of time, of +another of those in which my whole privilege of reference to Mrs. Lewes, +such as it remained, was to look to be preserved. I stretch over the +years a little to overtake it, and it calls up at once another person, +the ornament, or at least the diversion, of a society long since extinct +to me, but who, in common with every bearer of a name I yield to the +temptation of writing, insists on profiting promptly by the fact of<a name="page_073" id="page_073"></a> +inscription—very much as if first tricking me into it and then proving +it upon me. The extinct societies that once were so sure of themselves, +how can they <i>not</i> stir again if the right touch, that of a hand they +actually knew, however little they may have happened to heed it, reaches +tenderly back to them? The touch <i>is</i> the retrieval, so far as it goes, +setting up as it does heaven knows what undefeated continuity. I must +have been present among the faithful at North Bank during a Sunday +afternoon or two of the winter of '77 and '78—I was to see the great +lady alone but on a single occasion before her death; but those +attestations are all but lost to me now in the livelier pitch of a +scene, as I can only call it, of which I feel myself again, all +amusedly, rather as sacrificed witness. I had driven over with Mrs. +Greville from Milford Cottage, in Surrey, to the villa George Eliot and +George Lewes had not long before built themselves, and which they much +inhabited, at Witley—this indeed, I well remember, in no great flush of +assurance that my own measure of our intended felicity<a name="page_074" id="page_074"></a> would be quite +that of my buoyant hostess. But here exactly comes, with my memory of +Mrs. Greville, from which numberless by-memories dangle, the interesting +question that makes for my recall why things happened, under her +much-waved wing, not in any too coherent fashion—and this even though +it was never once given her, I surmise, to guess that they anywhere fell +short. So gently used, all round indeed, was this large, elegant, +extremely near-sighted and extremely demonstrative lady, whose genius +was all for friendship, admiration, declamation and expenditure, that +one doubted whether in the whole course of her career she had ever once +been brought up, as it were, against a recognised reality; other at +least perhaps than the tiresome cost of the materially agreeable in life +and the perverse appearance, at times, that though she "said" things, +otherwise recited choice morceaux, whether French or English, with a +marked oddity of manner, of "attack," a general incongruity of +drawing-room art, the various contributive elements, hour, scene, +persuaded patience and<a name="page_075" id="page_075"></a> hushed attention, were perforce a precarious +quantity.</p> + +<p>It is in that bygone old grace of the unexploded factitious, the air of +a thousand dimmed illusions and more or less early Victorian beatitudes +on the part of the blandly idle and the supposedly accomplished, that +Mrs. Greville, with her exquisite good-nature and her innocent fatuity, +is embalmed for me; so that she becomes in that light a truly shining +specimen, almost the image or compendium of a whole side of a social +order. Just so she has happy suggestion; just so, whether or no by a +twist of my mind toward the enviability of certain complacencies of +faith and taste that we would yet neither live back into if we could, +nor can catch again if we would. I see my forgotten friend of that moist +autumn afternoon of our call, and of another, on the morrow, which I +shall not pass over, as having rustled and gushed and protested and +performed through her term under a kind of protection by the easy-going +gods that is not of this fierce age. Amiabilities and absurdities, +harmless serenities and<a name="page_076" id="page_076"></a> vanities, pretensions and undertakings +unashamed, still profited by the mildness of the critical air and the +benignity of the social—on the right side at least of the social line. +It had struck me from the first that nowhere so much as in England was +it fortunate to <i>be</i> fortunate, and that against that condition, once it +had somehow been handed down and determined, a number of the sharp +truths that one might privately apprehend beat themselves beautifully in +vain. I say beautifully for I confess without scruple to have found +again and again at that time an attaching charm in the general +exhibition of enjoyed immunity, paid for as it was almost always by the +personal amenity, the practice of all sorts of pleasantness; if it kept +the gods themselves for the time in good-humour, one was willing enough, +or at least I was, to be on the side of the gods. Unmistakable too, as I +seem to recover it, was the positive interest of watching and noting, +roundabout one, for the turn, or rather for the blest continuity, of +their benevolence: such an appeal proceeded, in this, that and the +other<a name="page_077" id="page_077"></a> particular case, from the fool's paradise really rounded and +preserved, before one's eyes, for those who were so good as to animate +it. There was always the question of how long they would be left to, and +the growth of one's fine suspense, not to say one's frank little +gratitude, as the miracle repeated itself.</p> + +<p>All of which, I admit, dresses in many reflections the small +circumstance that Milford Cottage, with its innumerable red candles and +candle-shades, had affected me as the most embowered retreat for social +innocence that it was possible to conceive, and as absolutely settling +the question of whether the practice of pleasantness mightn't quite +ideally pay for the fantastic protectedness. The red candles in the red +shades have remained with me, inexplicably, as a vivid note of this +pitch, shedding their rosy light, with the autumn gale, the averted +reality, all shut out, upon such felicities of feminine helplessness as +I couldn't have prefigured in advance and as exemplified, for further +gathering in, the possibilities of the old tone. Nowhere had the<a name="page_078" id="page_078"></a> +evening curtains seemed so drawn, nowhere the copious service so soft, +nowhere the second volume of the new novel, "half-uncut," so close to +one's hand, nowhere the exquisite head and incomparable brush of the +domesticated collie such an attestation of <i>that</i> standard at least, +nowhere the harmonies of accident—of intention was more than one could +say—so incapable of a wrong deflection. That society would lack the +highest finish without some such distributed clusters of the thoroughly +gentle, the mildly presumptuous and the inveterately mistaken, was +brought home to me there, in fine, to a tune with which I had no +quarrel, perverse enough as I had been from an early time to know but +the impulse to egg on society to the fullest discharge of any material +stirring within its breast and not making for cruelty or brutality, mere +baseness or mere stupidity, that would fall into a picture or a scene. +The quality of serene anxiety on the part for instance of exquisite Mrs. +Thellusson, Mrs. Greville's mother, was by itself a plea for any +privilege one should fancy her perched upon;<a name="page_079" id="page_079"></a> and I scarce know if this +be more or be less true because the anxiety—at least as I culled its +fragrance—was all about the most secondary and superfluous small +matters alone. It struck me, I remember, as a new and unexpected form of +the pathetic altogether; and there was no form of the pathetic, any more +than of the tragic or the comic, that didn't serve as another pearl for +one's lengthening string. And I pass over what was doubtless the +happiest stroke in the composition, the fact of its involving, as +all-distinguished husband of the other daughter, an illustrious soldier +and servant of his sovereign, of his sovereigns that were successively +to be, than against whose patient handsome bearded presence the whole +complexus of femininities and futilities couldn't have been left in more +tolerated and more contrasted relief; pass it over to remind myself of +how, in my particular friend of the three, the comic and the tragic were +presented in a confusion that made the least intended of them at any +moment take effectively the place of the most. The impression, that is, +was never<a name="page_080" id="page_080"></a> that of the sentiment operating—save indeed perhaps when the +dear lady applied her faculty for frank imitation of the ridiculous, +which she then quite directly and remarkably achieved; but that she +could be comic, that she <i>was</i> comic, was what least appeased her +unrest, and there were reasons enough, in a word, why her failure of the +grand manner or the penetrating note should evoke the idea of their +opposites perfectly achieved. She sat, alike in adoration and emulation, +at the feet of my admirable old friend Fanny Kemble, the good-nature of +whose consent to "hear" her was equalled only by the immediately +consequent action of the splendidly corrective spring on the part of +that unsurpassed subject of the dramatic afflatus fairly, or, as I +should perhaps above all say, contradictiously provoked. Then aspirant +and auditor, rash adventurer and shy alarmist, were swept away together +in the gust of magnificent rightness and beauty, no scrap of the +far-scattered prime proposal being left to pick up.</p> + +<p>Which detail of reminiscence has again<a name="page_081" id="page_081"></a> stayed my course to the Witley +Villa, when even on the way I quaked a little with my sense of what +<i>generally</i> most awaited or overtook my companion's prime proposals. +What had come most to characterise the Leweses to my apprehension was +that there couldn't be a thing in the world about which they weren't, +and on the most conceded and assured grounds, almost scientifically +particular; which presumption, however, only added to the relevance of +one's learning how such a matter as their relation with Mrs. Greville +could in accordance with noble consistencies be carried on. I could +trust <i>her</i> for it perfectly, as she knew no law but that of innocent +and exquisite aberration, never wanting and never less than +consecrating, and I fear I but took refuge for the rest in declining all +responsibility. I remember trying to say to myself that, even such as we +were, our visit couldn't but scatter a little the weight of cloud on the +Olympus we scaled—given the dreadful drenching afternoon we were after +all an imaginable short solace there; and this indeed would have borne +me through<a name="page_082" id="page_082"></a> to the end save for an incident which, with a quite ideal +logic, left our adventure an approved ruin. I see again our bland, +benign, commiserating hostess beside the fire in a chill desert of a +room where the master of the house guarded the opposite hearthstone, and +I catch once more the impression of no occurrence of anything at all +appreciable but their liking us to have come, with our terribly trivial +contribution, mainly from a prevision of how they should more devoutly +like it when we departed. It is remarkable, but the occasion yields me +no single echo of a remark on the part of any of us—nothing more than +the sense that our great author herself peculiarly suffered from the +fury of the elements, and that they had about them rather the minimum of +the paraphernalia of reading and writing, not to speak of that of tea, a +conceivable feature of the hour, but which was not provided for. Again I +felt touched with privilege, but not, as in '69, with a form of it +redeemed from barrenness by a motion of my own, and the taste of +barrenness was in fact in my mouth under the<a name="page_083" id="page_083"></a> effect of our taking +leave. We did so with considerable flourish till we had passed out to +the hall again, indeed to the door of the waiting carriage, toward which +G. H. Lewes himself all sociably, <i>then</i> above all conversingly, wafted +us—yet staying me by a sudden remembrance before I had entered the +brougham and signing me to wait while he repaired his omission. I +returned to the doorstep, whence I still see him reissue from the room +we had just left and hurry toward me across the hall shaking high the +pair of blue-bound volumes his allusion to the uninvited, the verily +importunate loan of which by Mrs. Greville had lingered on the air after +his dash in quest of them; "Ah those books—take them away, please, +away, away!" I hear him unreservedly plead while he thrusts them again +at me, and I scurry back into our conveyance, where, and where only, +settled afresh with my companion, I venture to assure myself of the +horrid truth that had squinted at me as I relieved our good friend of +his superfluity. What indeed was this superfluity but the two volumes of +my own precious<a name="page_084" id="page_084"></a> "last"—we were still in the blest age of +volumes—presented by its author to the lady of Milford Cottage, and by +her, misguided votary, dropped with the best conscience in the world +into the Witley abyss, out of which it had jumped with violence, under +the touch of accident, straight up again into my own exposed face?</p> + +<p>The bruise inflicted there I remember feeling for the moment only as +sharp, such a mixture of delightful small questions at once salved it +over and such a charm in particular for me to my recognising that this +particular wrong—inflicted all unawares, which exactly made it +sublime—was the only rightness of our visit. Our hosts hadn't so much +as connected book with author, or author with visitor, or visitor with +anything but the convenience of his ridding them of an unconsidered +trifle; grudging as they so justifiedly did the impingement of such +matters on their consciousness. The vivid demonstration of one's failure +to penetrate there had been in the sweep of Lewes's gesture, which could +scarce have been bettered by his actually wielding a broom. I think +nothing passed<a name="page_085" id="page_085"></a> between us in the brougham on revelation of the identity +of the offered treat so emphatically declined—I see that I couldn't +have laughed at it to the confusion of my gentle neighbour. But I quite +recall my grasp of the <i>interest</i> of our distinguished friends' +inaccessibility to the unattended plea, with the light it seemed to +throw on what it was really to <i>be</i> attended. Never, never save as +attended—by presumptions, that is, far other than any then hanging +about one—would one so much as desire <i>not</i> to be pushed out of sight. +I needn't attempt, however, to supply all the links in the chain of +association which led to my finally just qualified beatitude: I had been +served right enough in all conscience, but the pity was that Mrs. +Greville had been. This I never wanted for her; and I may add, in the +connection, that I discover now no grain of false humility in my having +enjoyed in my own person adorning such a tale. There was positively a +fine high thrill in thinking of persons—or at least of a person, for +any fact about Lewes was but derivative—engaged in my own pursuit and +yet detached, by what I conceived, detached<a name="page_086" id="page_086"></a> by a pitch of intellectual +life, from all that made it actual to myself. <i>There</i> was the lift of +contemplation, there the inspiring image and the big supporting truth; +the pitch of intellectual life in the very fact of which we seemed, my +hostess and I, to have caught our celebrities sitting in that queer +bleak way wouldn't have bullied me in the least if it hadn't been the +centre of such a circle of gorgeous creation. It was the fashion among +the profane in short either to misdoubt, before George Eliot's canvas, +the latter's backing of rich thought, or else to hold that this matter +of philosophy, and even if but of the philosophic vocabulary, thrust +itself through to the confounding of the picture. But with that thin +criticism I wasn't, as I have already intimated, to have a moment's +patience; I was to become, I was to remain—I take pleasure in +repeating—even a very Derondist of Derondists, for my own wanton joy: +which amounts to saying that I found the figured, coloured tapestry +<i>always</i> vivid enough to brave no matter what complication of the +stitch.<a name="page_087" id="page_087"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h3> + +<p>I take courage to confess moreover that I am carried further still by +the current on which Mrs. Greville, friend of the super-eminent, happens +to have launched me; for I can neither forbear a glance at one or two of +the other adventures promoted by her, nor in the least dissociate her +from that long aftertaste of them, such as they were, which I have +positively cultivated. I ask myself first, however, whether or no our +drive to Aldworth, on the noble height of Blackdown, had been preceded +by the couple of occasions in London on which I was to feel I saw the +Laureate most at his ease, yet on reflection concluding that the first +of these—and the fewest days must have separated them—formed my prime +introduction to the poet I had earliest known and best loved. The +revelational evening I speak of is peopled, to my memory, not a little, +yet with a confusedness<a name="page_088" id="page_088"></a> out of which Tennyson's own presence doesn't at +all distinctly emerge; he was occupying a house in Eaton Place, as +appeared then his wont, for the earlier weeks of the spring, and I seem +to recover that I had "gone on" to it, after dining somewhere else, +under protection of my supremely kind old friend the late Lord Houghton, +to whom I was indebted in those years for a most promiscuous +befriending. He must have been of the party, and Mrs. Greville quite +independently must, since I catch again the vision of her, so +expansively and voluminously seated that she might fairly have been +couchant, so to say, for the proposed characteristic act—there was a +deliberation about it that precluded the idea of a spring; that, namely, +of addressing something of the Laureate's very own to the Laureate's +very face. Beyond the sense that he took these things with a gruff +philosophy—and could always repay them, on the spot, in +heavily-shovelled coin of the same mint, since it <i>was</i> a question of +his genius—I gather in again no determined impression, unless it may +have<a name="page_089" id="page_089"></a> been, as could only be probable, the effect of fond prefigurements +utterly blighted.</p> + +<p>The fond prefigurements of youthful piety are predestined more often +than not, I think, experience interfering, to strange and violent +shocks; from which no general appeal is conceivable save by the prompt +preclusion either of faith or of knowledge, a sad choice at the best. No +other such illustration recurs to me of the possible refusal of those +two conditions of an acquaintance to recognise each other at a given +hour as the silent crash of which I was to be conscious several years +later, in Paris, when placed in presence of M. Ernest Renan, from the +surpassing distinction of whose literary face, with its exquisite finish +of every feature, I had from far back extracted every sort of shining +gage, a presumption general and positive. Widely enough to sink all +interest—that was the dreadful thing—opened there the chasm between +the implied, as I had taken it, and the attested, as I had, at the first +blush, to take it; so that one was in fact scarce to know what might +have happened if interest hadn't<a name="page_090" id="page_090"></a> by good fortune already reached such a +compass as to stick half way down the descent. What interest <i>can</i> +survive becomes thus, surely, as much one of the lessons of life as the +number of ways in which it remains impossible. What comes up in face of +the shocks, as I have called them, is the question of a shift of every +supposition, a change of base under fire, as it were; which must take +place successfully if one's advance be not abandoned altogether. I +remember that I saw the Tennyson directly presented as just utterly +other than the Tennyson indirectly, and if the readjustment, for +acquaintance, was less difficult than it was to prove in the case of the +realised Renan the obligation to accept the difference—wholly as +difference and without reference to strict loss or gain—was like a rap +on the knuckles of a sweet superstition. Fine, fine, fine could he only +be—fine in the sense of that quality in the texture of his verse, which +had appealed all along by its most inward principle to one's taste, and +had by the same stroke shown with what a force of lyric energy and<a name="page_091" id="page_091"></a> +sincerity the kind of beauty so engaged for could be associated. Was it +that I had preconceived him in that light as pale and penetrating, as +emphasising in every aspect the fact that he was fastidious? was it that +I had supposed him more fastidious than really <i>could</i> have been—at the +best for that effect? was it that the grace of the man <i>couldn't</i>, by my +measure, but march somehow with the grace of the poet, given a +perfection of this grace? was it in fine that style of a particular +kind, when so highly developed, seemed logically to leave no room for +other quite contradictious kinds? These were considerations of which I +recall the pressure, at the same time that I fear I have no account of +them to give after they have fairly faced the full, the monstrous +demonstration that Tennyson was not Tennysonian. The desperate sequel to +that was that he thereby changed one's own state too, one's beguiled, +one's ęsthetic; for what <i>could</i> this strange apprehension do but reduce +the Tennysonian amount altogether? It dried up, to a certain extent, +that is, in my own vessel of sympathy<a name="page_092" id="page_092"></a>—leaving me so to ask whether it +was before or after that I should take myself for the bigger fool. There +had been folly somewhere; yet let me add that once I recognised this, +once I felt the old fond pitch drop of itself, not alone inevitably, but +very soon quite conveniently and while I magnanimously granted that the +error had been mine and nobody's else at all, an odd prosaic +pleasantness set itself straight up, substitutionally, over the whole +ground, which it swept clear of every single premeditated effect. It +made one's perceptive condition purely profane, reduced it somehow to +having rather the excess of awkwardness than the excess of felicity to +reckon with; yet still again, as I say, enabled a compromise to work.</p> + +<p>The compromise in fact worked beautifully under my renewal of +impression—for which a second visit at Eaton Place offered occasion; +and this even though I had to interweave with the scene as best I might +a highly complicating influence. To speak of James Russell Lowell's +influence as above all complicating on any scene to the interest of +which<a name="page_093" id="page_093"></a> he contributed may superficially seem a perverse appreciation of +it; and yet in the light of that truth only do I recover the full sense +of his value, his interest, the moving moral of his London adventure—to +find myself already bumping so straight against which gives me, I +confess, a sufficiently portentous shake. He comes in, as it were, by a +force not to be denied, as soon as I look at him again—as soon as I +find him for instance on the doorstep in Eaton Place at the hour of my +too approaching it for luncheon as he had just done. There he is, with +the whole question of him, at once before me, and literally superimposed +by that fact on any minor essence. I quake, positively, with the +apprehension of the commemorative dance he may lead me; but for the +moment, just here, I steady myself with an effort and go in with him to +his having the Laureate's personal acquaintance, by every symptom, and +rather to my surprise, all to make. Mrs. Tennyson's luncheon table was +an open feast, with places for possible when not assured guests; and no +one but the American Minister,<a name="page_094" id="page_094"></a> scarce more than just installed, and his +extremely attached compatriot sat down at first with our gracious +hostess. The board considerably stretched, and after it had been +indicated to Lowell that he had best sit at the end near the window, +where the Bard would presently join him, I remained, near our hostess, +separated from him for some little time by an unpeopled waste. Hallam +came in all genially and auspiciously, yet only to brush us with his +blessing and say he was lunching elsewhere, and my wonder meanwhile hung +about the representative of my country, who, though partaking of offered +food, appeared doomed to disconnection from us. I may say at once that +my wonder was always unable <i>not</i> to hang about this admired and +cherished friend when other persons, especially of the eminent order, +were concerned in the scene. The case was quite other for the unshared +relation, or when it was shared by one or other of three or four of our +common friends who had the gift of determining happily the pitch of +ease; suspense, not to say anxiety, as to the<a name="page_095" id="page_095"></a> possible turn or drift of +the affair quite dropped—I rested then, we alike rested, I ever felt, +in a golden confidence. This last was so definitely not the note of my +attention to him, so far as I might indulge it, in the wider social +world, that I shall not scruple, occasion offering, to inquire into the +reasons of the difference. For I can only see the ghosts of my friends, +by this token, as "my" J. R. L. and whoever; which means that my +imagination, of the wanton life of which these remarks pretend but to +form the record, had appropriated them, under the prime contact—from +the moment the prime contact had successfully worked—once for all, and +contributed the light in which they were constantly exposed.</p> + +<p>Yes, delightful I shall undertake finding it, and perhaps even making +it, to read J. R. L.'s exposure back into <i>its</i> light; which I in fact +see begin to shine for me more amply during those very minutes of our +wait for our distinguished host and even the several that followed the +latter's arrival and his seating himself opposite the unknown guest,<a name="page_096" id="page_096"></a> +whose identity he had failed to grasp. Nothing, exactly, could have made +dear Lowell more "my" Lowell, as I have presumed to figure him, than the +stretch of uncertainty so supervening and which, in its form of silence +at first completely unbroken between the two poets, rapidly took on for +me monstrous proportions. I conversed with my gentle neighbour during +what seemed an eternity—really but hearing, as the minutes sped, all +that Tennyson didn't say to Lowell and all that Lowell wouldn't on any +such compulsion as that say to Tennyson. I like, however, to hang again +upon the hush—for the sweetness of the relief of its break by the fine +Tennysonian growl. I had never dreamed, no, of a growling Tennyson—I +had too utterly otherwise fantasticated; but no line of Locksley Hall +rolled out as I was to happen soon after to hear it, could have been +sweeter than the interrogative sound of "Do you know anything about +<i>Lowell</i>?" launched on the chance across the table and crowned at once +by Mrs. Tennyson's anxious quaver: "Why, my dear, this <i>is</i> Mr. +Lowell!"<a name="page_097" id="page_097"></a> The clearance took place successfully enough, and the +incident, I am quite aware, seems to shrink with it; in spite of which I +still cherish the reduced reminiscence for its connections: so far as my +vision of Lowell was concerned they began at that moment so to multiply. +A belated guest or two more came in, and I wish I could for my modesty's +sake refer to this circumstance alone the fact that nothing more of the +occasion survives for me save the intense but restricted glow of certain +instants, in another room, to which we had adjourned for smoking and +where my alarmed sense of the Bard's restriction to giving what he had +as a bard only became under a single turn of his hand a vision of quite +general munificence. Incredibly, inconceivably, he had <i>read</i>—and not +only read but admired, and not only admired but understandingly +referred; referred, time and some accident aiding, the appreciated +object, a short tale I had lately put forth, to its actually present +author, who could scarce believe his ears on hearing the thing +superlatively commended; pronounced, that is,<a name="page_098" id="page_098"></a> by the illustrious +speaker, more to his taste than no matter what other like attempt. +Nothing would induce me to disclose the title of the piece, which has +little to do with the matter; my point is but in its having on the spot +been matter of pure romance to me that I was there and positively so +addressed. For it was a solution, the happiest in the world, and from +which I at once extracted enormities of pleasure: my relation to +whatever had bewildered me simply became perfect: the author of In +Memoriam had "liked" my own twenty pages, and his doing so was a gage of +his grace in which I felt I should rest forever—in which I have in fact +rested to this hour. My own basis of liking—such a blessed supersession +of all worryings and wonderings!—was accordingly established, and has +met every demand made of it.</p> + +<p>Greatest was to have been, I dare say, the demand to which I felt it +exposed by the drive over to Aldworth with Mrs. Greville which I noted +above and which took place, if I am not mistaken, on the morrow of our +drive to Witley. A different shade of confidence<a name="page_099" id="page_099"></a> and comfort, I make +out, accompanied this experiment: I believed more, for reasons I shall +not now attempt to recover, in the furthermost maintenance of our flying +bridge, the final piers of which, it was indubitable, <i>had</i> at Witley +given way. What could have been moreover less like G. H. Lewes's +valedictory hurl back upon us of the printed appeal in which I was +primarily concerned than that so recent and so directly opposed passage +of the Eaton Place smoking-room, thanks to which I could nurse a +certified security all along the road? I surrendered to security, I +perhaps even grossly took my ease in it; and I was to breathe from +beginning to end of our visit, which began with our sitting again at +luncheon, an air—so unlike that of Witley!—in which it seemed to me +frankly that nothing but the blest obvious, or at least the blest +outright, could so much as attempt to live. These elements hung sociably +and all auspiciously about us—it was a large and simple and almost +empty occasion; yet empty without embarrassment, rather as from a +certain high guardedness or defensiveness<a name="page_100" id="page_100"></a> of situation, literally +indeed from the material, the local sublimity, the fact of our all +upliftedly hanging together over one of the grandest sweeps of view in +England. Remembered passages again people, however, in their proportion, +the excess of opportunity; each with that conclusive note of the +outright all unadorned. What could have partaken more of this quality +for instance than the question I was startled to hear launched before we +had left the table by the chance of Mrs. Greville's having happened to +mention in some connection one of her French relatives, Mademoiselle +Laure de Sade? It had fallen on my own ear—the mention at least +had—with a certain effect of unconscious provocation; but this was as +nothing to its effect on the ear of our host. "De Sade?" he at once +exclaimed with interest—and with the consequence, I may frankly add, of +my wondering almost to ecstasy, that is to the ecstasy of curiosity, to +what length he would proceed. He proceeded admirably—admirably for the +triumph of simplification—to the very greatest length imaginable, as +was<a name="page_101" id="page_101"></a> signally promoted by the fact that clearly no one present, with a +single exception, recognised the name or the nature of the scandalous, +the long ignored, the at last all but unnameable author; least of all +the gentle relative of Mademoiselle Laure, who listened with the +blankest grace to her friend's enumeration of his titles to infamy, +among which that of his most notorious work was pronounced. It was the +homeliest, frankest, most domestic passage, as who should say, and most +remarkable for leaving none of us save myself, by my impression, in the +least embarrassed or bewildered; largely, I think, because of the +failure—a failure the most charmingly flat—of all measure on the part +of auditors and speaker alike of what might be intended or understood, +of what, in fine, the latter was talking about.</p> + +<p>He struck me in truth as neither knowing nor communicating knowledge, +and I recall how I felt this note in his own case to belong to that +general intimation with which the whole air was charged of the want of +proportion between the great spaces and reaches<a name="page_102" id="page_102"></a> and echoes commanded, +the great eminence attained, and the quantity and variety of experience +supposable. So to discriminate was in a manner to put one's hand on the +key, and thereby to find one's self in presence of a rare and anomalous, +but still scarcely the less beautiful fact. The assured and achieved +conditions, the serenity, the security, the success, to put it vulgarly, +shone in the light of their easiest law—that by which they emerge early +from the complication of life, the great adventure of sensibility, and +find themselves determined once for all, fortunately fixed, all +consecrated and consecrating. If I should speak of this impression as +that of glory without history, that of the poetic character more worn +than paid for, or at least more saved than spent, I should doubtless +much over-emphasise; but such, or something like it, was none the less +the explanation that met one's own fond fancy of the scene after one had +cast about for it. For I allow myself thus to repeat that I was so moved +to cast about, and perhaps at no moment more than during the friendly<a name="page_103" id="page_103"></a> +analysis of the reputation of M. de Sade. Was I not present at some +undreamed-of demonstration of the absence of the remoter real, the real +other than immediate and exquisite, other than guaranteed and enclosed, +in landscape, friendship, fame, above all in consciousness of awaited +and admired and self-consistent inspiration?</p> + +<p>The question was indeed to be effectively answered for me, and +everything meanwhile continued to play into this prevision—even to the +pleasant growling note heard behind me, as the Bard followed with Mrs. +Greville, who had permitted herself apparently some mild extravagance of +homage: "Oh yes, you may do what you like—so long as you don't kiss me +before the cabman!" The allusion was explained for us, if I remember—a +matter of some more or less recent leave-taking of admirer and admired +in London on his putting her down at her door after being taken to the +play or wherever; between the rugged humour of which reference and the +other just commemorated there wasn't a pin to choose, it struck me, for +a certain old<a name="page_104" id="page_104"></a>-time Lincolnshire ease or comfortable stay-at-home +license. But it was later on, when, my introductress having accompanied +us, I sat upstairs with him in his study, that he might read to us some +poem of his own that we should venture to propose, it was then that +mystifications dropped, that everything in the least dislocated fell +into its place, and that image and picture stamped themselves strongly +and finally, or to the point even, as I recover it, of leaving me almost +too little to wonder about. He had not got a third of the way through +Locksley Hall, which, my choice given me, I had made bold to suggest he +should spout—for I had already heard him spout in Eaton Place—before I +had begun to wonder that I didn't wonder, didn't at least wonder more +consumedly; as a very little while back I should have made sure of my +doing on any such prodigious occasion. I sat at one of the windows that +hung over space, noting how the windy, watery autumn day, sometimes +sheeting it all with rain, called up the dreary, dreary moorland or the +long dun wolds; I pinched myself for<a name="page_105" id="page_105"></a> the determination of my identity +and hung on the reader's deep-voiced chant for the credibility of his: I +asked myself in fine why, in complete deviation from everything that +would have seemed from far back certain for the case, I failed to swoon +away under the heaviest pressure I had doubtless ever known the romantic +situation bring to bear. So lucidly all the while I considered, so +detachedly I judged, so dissentingly, to tell the whole truth, I +listened; pinching myself, as I say, not at all to keep from swooning, +but much rather to set up some rush of sensibility. It was all +interesting, it was at least all odd; but why in the name of poetic +justice had one anciently heaved and flushed with one's own recital of +the splendid stuff if one was now only to sigh in secret "Oh dear, oh +dear"? The author lowered the whole pitch, that of expression, that of +interpretation above all; I heard him, in cool surprise, take even more +out of his verse than he had put in, and so bring me back to the point I +had immediately and privately made, the point that he wasn't +Tennysonian. I<a name="page_106" id="page_106"></a> felt him as he went on and on lose that character beyond +repair, and no effect of the organ-roll, of monotonous majesty, no +suggestion of the long echo, availed at all to save it. What the case +came to for me, I take it—and by the case I mean the intellectual, the +artistic—was that it lacked the intelligence, the play of +discrimination, I should have taken for granted in it, and thereby, +brooding monster that I was, born to discriminate <i>ą tout propos</i>, +lacked the interest.</p> + +<p>Detached I have mentioned that I had become, and it was doubtless at +such a rate high time for that; though I hasten to repeat that with the +close of the incident I was happily able to feel a new sense in the +whole connection established. My critical reaction hadn't in the least +invalidated our great man's being a Bard—it had in fact made him and +left him more a Bard than ever: it had only settled to my perception as +not before what a Bard might and mightn't be. The character was just a +rigid idiosyncrasy, to which everything in the man conformed, but which +supplied nothing outside<a name="page_107" id="page_107"></a> of itself, and which above all was not +intellectually wasteful or heterogeneous, conscious as it could only be +of its intrinsic breadth and weight. On two or three occasions of the +aftertime I was to hear Browning read out certain of his finest pages, +and this exactly with all the exhibition of point and authority, the +expressive particularisation, so to speak, that I had missed on the part +of the Laureate; an observation through which the author of Men and +Women appeared, in spite of the beauty and force of his demonstration, +as little as possible a Bard. He particularised if ever a man did, was +heterogeneous and profane, composed of pieces and patches that betrayed +some creak of joints, and addicted to the excursions from which these +were brought home; so that he had to <i>prove</i> himself a poet, almost +against all presumptions, and with all the assurance and all the +character he could use. Was not this last in especial, the character, so +close to the surface, with which Browning fairly bristled, what was most +to come out in his personal delivery of the fruit of his genius?<a name="page_108" id="page_108"></a> It +came out almost to harshness; but the result was that what he read +showed extraordinary life. During that audition at Aldworth the question +seemed on the contrary not of life at all—save, that is, of one's own; +which was exactly not the question. With all the resonance of the chant, +the whole thing was yet <i>still</i>, with all the long swing of its motion +it yet remained where it was—heaving doubtless grandly enough up and +down and beautiful to watch as through the superposed veils of its long +self-consciousness. By all of which I don't mean to say that I was not, +on the day at Aldworth, thoroughly reconciled to learning what a Bard +consisted of; for that came as soon as I had swallowed my own +mistake—the mistake of having supposed Tennyson something subtly other +than one. I had supposed, probably, such an impossibility, had, to +repeat my term, so absurdly fantasticated, that the long journey round +and about the truth no more than served me right; just as after all it +at last left me quite content.<a name="page_109" id="page_109"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII</h3> + +<p>It left me moreover, I become aware—or at least it now leaves +me—fingering the loose ends of this particular free stretch of my +tapestry; so that, with my perhaps even extravagant aversion to loose +ends, I can but try for a moment to interweave them. There dangles again +for me least confusedly, I think, the vision of a dinner at Mrs. +Greville's—and I like even to remember that Cadogan Place, where +memories hang thick for me, was the scene of it—which took its light +from the presence of Louisa Lady Waterford, who took hers in turn from +that combination of rare beauty with rare talent which the previous +Victorian age had for many years not ceased to acclaim. It insists on +coming back to me with the utmost vividness that Lady Waterford was +illustrational, historically, preciously so, meeting one's largest +demand for the blest recovery, when possible, of some glimmer of the +sense of<a name="page_110" id="page_110"></a> personal beauty, to say nothing of personal "accomplishment," +as our fathers were appointed to enjoy it. Scarce to be sated that form +of wonder, to my own imagination, I confess—so that I fairly believe +there was no moment at which I wouldn't have been ready to turn my back +for the time even on the most triumphant actuality of form and feature +if a chance apprehension of a like force as it played on the sensibility +of the past had competed. And this for a reason I fear I can scarce +explain—unless, when I come to consider it, by the perversity of a +conviction that the conditions of beauty have improved, though those of +character, in the fine old sense, may not, and that with these the +measure of it is more just, the appreciation, as who should say, more +competent and the effect more completely attained.</p> + +<p>What the question seems thus to come to would be a consuming curiosity +as to any cited old case of the spell in the very interest of one's +catching it comparatively "out"; in the interest positively of the +likelihood of one's doing so, and this in the face of so many<a name="page_111" id="page_111"></a> great +testifying portraits. My private perversity, as I here glance at it, has +had its difficulties—most of all possibly that of one's addiction, in +growing older, to allowing a supreme force to one's earlier, even one's +earliest, estimates of physical felicity; or in other words that of the +felt impulse to leave the palm for good looks to those who have reached +out to it through the medium of our own history. If the conditions +<i>grow</i> better for them why then should we have almost the habit of +thinking better of our handsome folk dead than of our living?—and even +to the very point of not resenting on the part of others similarly +affected the wail of wonder as to what has strangely "become" of the +happy types <i>d'antan</i>. I dodge that inquiry just now—we may meet it +again; noting simply the fact that "old" pretenders to the particular +crown I speak of—and in the sense especially of the pretension made +rather for than by them—offered to my eyes a greater interest than the +new, whom I was ready enough to take for granted, as one for the most +part easily could; belonging as it exactly<a name="page_112" id="page_112"></a> did on the other hand to the +interest of their elders that <i>this</i> couldn't be so taken. That was just +the attraction of the latter claim—that the grounds of it had to be +made out, puzzled out verily on occasion, but that when they were +recognised they had a force all their own. One would have liked to be +able to clear the distinction between the new and the old of all +ambiguity—explain, that is, how little the superficially invidious term +was sometimes noted as having in common with the elderly: so much was it +a clear light held up to the question that truly beautiful persons might +be old without being elderly. Their juniors couldn't be new, +unfortunately, without being youthful—unfortunately because the fact of +youth, so far from dispelling ambiguity, positively introduced it. One +made up one's mind thus that the only sure specimens were, and had to +be, those acquainted with time, and with whom time, on its side, was +acquainted; those in fine who had borne the test and still looked at it +face to face. These were of one's own period of course—one looked at +<i>them</i> face to,<a name="page_113" id="page_113"></a> face; one blessedly hadn't to consider them by hearsay +or to refer to any portrait of them for proof: indeed in presence of the +resisting, the gained, cases one found one's self practically averse to +old facts or old traditions of portraiture, accompanied by no matter +what names.</p> + +<p>All of which leads by an avenue I trust not unduly majestic up to that +hour of contemplation during which I could see quite enough for the +major interest what was meant by Lady Waterford's great reputation. +Nothing could in fact have been more informing than so to see what was +meant, than so copiously to share with admirers who had had their vision +and passed on; for if I spoke above of her image as illustrational this +is because it affected me on the spot as so diffusing information. My +impression was of course but the old story—to which my reader will feel +himself treated, I fear, to satiety: when once I had drawn the curtain +for the light shed by this or that or the other personal presence upon +the society more or less intimately concerned in producing<a name="page_114" id="page_114"></a> it the last +thing I could think of was to darken the scene again. For this right or +this wrong reason then Mrs. Greville's admirable guest struck me as +flooding it; indebted in the highest degree to every art by which a +commended appearance may have formed the habit of still suggesting +commendation, she certainly—to my imagination at least—triumphed over +time in the sense that if the years, in their generosity, went on +helping her to live, her grace returned the favour by paying life back +to them. I mean that she reanimated for the fond analyst the age in +which persons of her type could so greatly flourish—it being ever so +pertinently of her type, or at least of that of the age, that she was +regarded as having cast the spell of genius as well as of beauty. She +painted, and on the largest scale, with all confidence and facility, and +nothing could have contributed more, by my sense, to what I glance at +again as her illustrational value than the apparently widespread +appreciation of this fact—taken together, that is, with one's own +impression of the work<a name="page_115" id="page_115"></a> of her hand. There it was that, like Mrs. +Greville herself, yet in a still higher degree, she bore witness to the +fine old felicity of the fortunate and the "great" under the "old" order +which would have made it so good then to live could one but have been in +their shoes. She determined in me, I remember, a renewed perception of +the old order, a renewed insistence on one's having come just in time to +see it begin to stretch back: a little earlier one wouldn't have had the +light for this perhaps, and a little later it would have receded too +much.</p> + +<p>The precious persons, the surviving figures, who held up, as I may call +it, the light were still here and there to be met; my sense being that +the last of them, at least for any vision of mine, has now quite gone +and that illustration—not to let that term slip—accordingly fails. We +all now illustrate together, in higgledy-piggledy fashion, or as a vast +monotonous mob, our own wonderful period and order, and nothing else; +whereby the historic imagination, under its acuter need of facing +backward, gropes before it<a name="page_116" id="page_116"></a> with a vain gesture, missing, or all but +missing, the concrete <i>other</i>, always other, specimen which has volumes +to give where hearsay has only snippets. The old, as we call it, I +recognise, doesn't disappear all at once; the <i>ancien régime</i> of our +commonest reference survived the Revolution of our most horrific in +patches and scraps, and I bring myself to say that even at my present +writing I am aware of more than one individual on the scene about me +touched <i>comparatively</i> with the elder grace. (I think of the difference +between these persons and so nearly all other persons as a grace for +reasons that become perfectly clear in the immediate presence of the +former, but of which a generalising account is difficult.) None the less +it used to be one of the finest of pleasures to acclaim and cherish, in +case of meeting them, one and another of the <i>complete</i> examples of the +conditions irrecoverable, even if, as I have already noted, they were +themselves least intelligently conscious of these; and for the enjoyment +of that critical emotion to draw one's own wanton line between the past +and the present. The happy effect of such<a name="page_117" id="page_117"></a> apparitions as Lady +Waterford, to whom I thus undisseverably cling, though I might give her +after all much like company, was that they made one draw it just where +they might most profit from it. They profited in that they recruited my +group of the fatuously fortunate, the class, as I seemed to see it, that +had had the longest and happiest innings in history—happier and longer, +on the whole, even than their congeners of the old French time—and for +whom the future wasn't going to be, by most signs, anything like as +bland and benedictory as the past. They placed <i>themselves</i> in the right +perspective for appreciation, and did it quite without knowing, which +was half the interest; did it simply by showing themselves with all the +right grace and the right assurance. It was as if they had come up to +the very edge of the ground that was going to begin to fail them; yet +looking over it, looking on and on always, with a confidence still +unalarmed. One would have turned away certainly from the sight of any +actual catastrophe, wouldn't have watched the ground nearly fail, in a +particular case, without a<a name="page_118" id="page_118"></a> sense of gross indelicacy. I can scarcely +say how vivid I felt the drama so preparing might become—that of the +lapse of immemorial protection, that of the finally complete exposure of +the immemorially protected. It might take place rather more intensely +before the footlights of one's inner vision than on the trodden stage of +Cadogan Place or wherever, but it corresponded none the less to +realities all the while in course of enactment and which only wanted the +attentive enough spectator. Nothing should I evermore see comparable to +the large fond consensus of admiration enjoyed by my beatific +fellow-guest's imputed command of the very palette of the Venetian and +other masters—Titian's, Bonifazio's, Rubens's, where did the delightful +agreement on the subject stop? and never again should a noble lady be +lifted so still further aloft on the ecstatic breath of connoisseurship.</p> + +<p>This last consciousness, confirming my impression of a climax that could +only decline, didn't break upon me all at once but spread itself through +a couple of subsequent occasions<a name="page_119" id="page_119"></a> into which my remembrance of the +dinner at Mrs. Greville's was richly to play. The first of these was a +visit to an exhibition of Lady Waterford's paintings held, in Carlton +House Terrace, under the roof of a friend of the artist, and, as it +enriched the hour also to be able to feel, a friend, one of the most +generously gracious, of my own; during which the reflection that "they" +had indeed had their innings, and were still splendidly using for the +purpose the very fag-end of the waning time, mixed itself for me with +all the "wonderful colour" framed and arrayed, that blazed from the +walls of the kindly great room, lent for the advantage of a charity, and +lost itself in the general chorus of immense comparison and tender +consecration. Later on a few days spent at a house of the greatest +beauty and interest in Northumberland did wonders to round off my view; +the place, occupied for the time by genial tenants, belonged to the +family of Lady Waterford's husband and fairly bristled, it might be +said, with coloured designs from her brush....</p> + + + + + + + + +<pre> + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Middle Years, by Henry James + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MIDDLE YEARS *** + +***** This file should be named 32649-h.htm or 32649-h.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/3/2/6/4/32649/ + +Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was +produced from scanned images of public domain material +from the Google Print project.) + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: The Middle Years + +Author: Henry James + +Editor: Percy Lubbock + +Release Date: June 1, 2010 [EBook #32649] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MIDDLE YEARS *** + + + + +Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was +produced from scanned images of public domain material +from the Google Print project.) + + + + + + + + + +THE +MIDDLE YEARS + +BY +HENRY JAMES + +NEW YORK +CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS + +Published November, 1917 + +[Illustration: From a copyrighted photograph by Elliott and Fry + +Henry James] + + +BY HENRY JAMES + +A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS + +NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER + +THE MIDDLE YEARS + +NOTES ON NOVELISTS +WITH SOME OTHER NOTES + + + + +EDITOR'S NOTE + + +_The following pages represent all that Henry James lived to write of a +volume of autobiographical reminiscences to which he had given the name +of one of his own short stories_, The Middle Years. _It was designed to +follow on_ Notes of a Son and Brother _and to extend to about the same +length. The chapters here printed were dictated during the autumn of +1914. They were laid aside for other work toward the end of the year and +were not revised by the author. A few quite evident slips have been +corrected and the marking of the paragraphs--which he usually deferred +till the final revision--has been completed._ + +_In dictating_ The Middle Years _he used no notes, and beyond an +allusion or two in the unfinished volume itself there is no indication +of the course which the book would have taken or the precise period it +was intended to cover_. + +_PERCY LUBBOCK._ + + + + +I + + +If the author of this meandering record has noted elsewhere[1] that an +event occurring early in 1870 was to mark the end of his youth, he is +moved here at once to qualify in one or two respects that emphasis. +Everything depends in such a view on what one means by one's youth--so +shifting a consciousness is this, and so related at the same time to +many different matters. We are never old, that is we never cease easily +to be young, for _all_ life at the same time: youth is an army, the +whole battalion of our faculties and our freshnesses, our passions and +our illusions, on a considerably reluctant march into the enemy's +country, the country of the general lost freshness; and I think it +throws out at least as many stragglers behind as skirmishers +ahead--stragglers who often catch up but belatedly with the main body, +and even in many a case never catch up at all. Or under another figure +it is a book in several volumes, and even at this a mere instalment of +the large library of life, with a volume here and there closing, as +something in the clap of its covers may assure us, while another remains +either completely agape or kept open by a fond finger thrust in between +the leaves. A volume, and a most substantial, _had_ felt its pages very +gravely pressed together before the winter's end that I have spoken of, +but a restriction may still bear, and blessedly enough, as I gather from +memory, on my sense of the whole year then terminated--a year seen by me +now in the light of agitations, explorations, initiations (I scarce know +how endearingly enough to name them!) which I should call fairly +infantine in their indifference to proportions and aims, had they not +still more left with me effects and possessions that even yet lend +themselves to estimation. + +[1] "Notes of a Son and Brother," 1914. + +It was at any rate impossible to have been younger, in spite of whatever +inevitable submissions to the rather violent push forward at certain +particular points and on lines corresponding with them, than I found +myself, from the first day of March 1869, in the face of an opportunity +that affected me then and there as the happiest, the most interesting, +the most alluring and beguiling, that could ever have opened before a +somewhat disabled young man who was about to complete his twenty-sixth +year. Treasures of susceptibility, treasures not only unconscious of the +remotest approach to exhaustion, but, given the dazzling possibilities, +positively and ideally intact, I now recognise--I in fact long ago +recognised--on the part of that intensely "reacting" small organism; +which couldn't have been in higher spirits or made more inward fuss +about the matter if it had come into a property measured not by mere +impressions and visions, occasions for play of perception and +imagination, mind and soul, but by dollars and "shares," lands and +houses or flocks and herds. It is to the account of that immense +fantastication that I set down a state of mind so out of proportion to +anything it could point to round about save by the vaguest of +foolish-looking gestures; and it would perhaps in truth be hard to say +whether in the mixture of spirit and sense so determined the fact of +innocence or that of intelligence most prevailed. I like to recover this +really prodigious flush--as my reader, clearly, must perceive I do; I +like fairly to hang about a particular small hour of that momentous +March day--which I have glanced at too, I believe, on some other and +less separated page than this--for the sake of the extraordinary gage of +experience that it seemed on the spot to offer, and that I had but to +take straight up: my life, on so complacently near a view as I now treat +myself to, having veritably consisted but in the prolongation of that +act. I took up the gage, and as I look back the fullest as well as +simplest account of the interval till now strikes me as being that I +have never, in common honour, let it drop again. And the small hour was +just that of my having landed at Liverpool in the gusty, cloudy, +overwhelmingly English morning and pursued, with immediate intensities +of appreciation, as I may call the muffled accompaniment for fear of +almost indecently overnaming it, a course which had seated me at a late +breakfast in the coffee-room of the old Adelphi Hotel ("Radley's," as I +had to deplore its lately having ceased to be dubbed,) and handed me +over without a scruple to my fate. This doom of inordinate exposure to +appearances, aspects, images, every protrusive item almost, in the great +beheld sum of things, I regard in other words as having settled upon me +once for all while I observed for instance that in England the plate of +buttered muffin and its cover were sacredly set upon the slop-bowl after +hot water had been ingenuously poured into the same, and had seen that +circumstance in a perfect cloud of accompaniments. I must have had with +my tea and my muffin a boiled egg or two and a dab of marmalade, but it +was from a far other store of condiments I most liberally helped myself. +I was lucidly aware of so gorging--esoterically, as it were, while I +drew out the gustatory process; and I must have said in that lost +reference to this scene of my dedication which I mentioned above that I +was again and again in the aftertime to win back the homeliest notes of +the impression, the damp and darksome light washed in from the steep, +black, bricky street, the crackle of the strong draught of the British +"sea-coal" fire, much more confident of its function, I thought, than +the fires I had left, the rustle of the thick, stiff, loudly unfolded +and refolded "Times," the incomparable truth to type of the waiter, +truth to history, to literature, to poetry, to Dickens, to Thackeray, +positively to Smollett, and to Hogarth, to every connection that could +help me to appropriate him and his setting, an arrangement of things +hanging together with a romantic rightness that had the force of a +revelation. + +To what end appropriation became thus eager and romance thus easy one +could have asked one's self only if the idea of connectibility as +stretching away and away hadn't of a sudden taken on such a wealth of +suggestion; it represented at once a chain stretching off to heaven knew +where, but far into one's future at least, one's possibilities of life, +and every link and pulse of which it was going accordingly to be +indispensable, besides being delightful and wonderful, to recognise. +Recognition, I dare say, was what remained, through the adventure of the +months to come, the liveliest principle at work; both as bearing on the +already known, on things unforgotten and of a sense intensely cultivated +and cherished from my younger time, and on the imagined, the unimagined +and the unimaginable, a quantity that divided itself somehow into the +double muster of its elements, an endless vista or waiting array, down +the middle of which I should inconceivably pass--inconceivably save for +being sure of some thrilled arrest, some exchange of assurance and +response, at every step. Obviously half the charm, as I can but thinly +describe it, of the substantially continuous experience the first +passages of which I thus note was in the fact that, immensely moved by +it as I was, and having so to deal with it--in the anticipatory way or +to the whatevers and wherevers and whenevers within me that should find +it in order--I yet felt it in no degree as strange or obscure, baffling +or unrecognising on its own side; everything was so far from +impenetrable that my most general notion was the very ecstasy of +understanding and that really wherever I looked, and still more wherever +I pressed, I sank in and in up to my nose. This in particular was of the +perfect felicity, that while the fact of difference all round me was +immense the embarrassment of it was nil--as if the getting into relation +with the least waste had been prepared from so far back that a sort of +divine economy now fairly ruled. It was doubtless a part of the total +fatuity, and perhaps its sublimest mark, that I knew what everything +meant, not simply then but for weeks and months after, and was to know +less only with increase of knowledge. That must indeed have been of the +essence of the general effect and the particular felicity--only not +grotesque because, for want of occasion, not immediately exhibited: a +consciousness not other than that of a person abruptly introduced into a +preoccupied and animated circle and yet so miraculously aware of the +matters conversed about as to need no word of explanation before joining +in. To say of such a person that he hadn't lost time would, I knew, be +feebly to express his advantage; my likeness to him, at any rate, +probably fell short of an absurd one through the chapter of accidents, +mostly of the happiest in their way too, which, restraining the personal +impulse for me, kept appearances and pretensions down. The feast, as it +more and more opened out, was all of the objective, as we have learned +so comfortably to say; or at least of its convenient opposite only in so +far as this undertook to interpret it for myself alone. + +To return at all across the years to the gates of the paradise of the +first larger initiations is to be ever so tempted to pass them, to push +in again and breathe the air of this, that and the other plot of rising +ground particularly associated, for memory and gratitude, with the +quickening process. The trouble is that with these sacred spots, to +later appreciation, the garden of youth is apt inordinately to bristle, +and that one's account of them has to shake them together fairly hard, +making a coherent thing of them, to profit by the contribution of each. +In speaking of my earliest renewal of the vision of Europe, if I may +give so grand a name to a scarce more than merely enlarged and uplifted +gape, I have, I confess, truly to jerk myself over the ground, to wrench +myself with violence from memories and images, stages and phases and +branching arms, that catch and hold me as I pass them by. Such a matter +as my recovery of contact with London for a few weeks, the contact +broken off some nine years before, lays so many plausible traps for me +that discretion half warns me to stand off the ground and walk round it +altogether. I stop my ears to the advice, however, under the pleading +reminder that just those days began a business for me that was to go +ever so much further than I then dreamed and planted a seed that was, by +my own measure, singularly to sprout and flourish--the harvest of which, +I almost permit myself to believe, has even yet not all been gathered. I +foresee moreover how little I shall be able to resist, throughout these +Notes, the force of persuasion expressed in the individual _vivid_ image +of the past wherever encountered, these images having always such terms +of their own, such subtle secrets and insidious arts for keeping us in +relation with them, for bribing us by the beauty, the authority, the +wonder of their saved intensity. They have saved it, they seem to say to +us, from such a welter of death and darkness and ruin that this alone +makes a value and a light and a dignity for them, something indeed of an +argument that our story, since we attempt to tell one, has lapses and +gaps without them. Not to be denied also, over and above this, is the +downright pleasure of the illusion yet again created, the _apparent_ +transfer from the past to the present of the particular combination of +things that did at its hour ever so directly operate and that isn't +after all then drained of virtue, wholly wasted and lost, for sensation, +for participation in the act of life, in the attesting sights, sounds, +smells, the illusion, as I say, of the recording senses. + +What began, during the springtime of my actual reference, in a couple of +dusky ground-floor rooms at number 7 Half-Moon Street, was simply an +establishment all in a few days of a personal relation with London that +was not of course measurable at the moment--I saw in my bedazzled state +of comparative freedom too many other relations ahead, a fairly +intoxicated vision of choice and range--but that none the less set going +a more intimately inner consciousness, a wheel within the wheels, and +led to my departing, the actual, the general incident closed, in +possession of a return-ticket "good," as we say, for a longer interval +than I could then dream about, and that the first really earnest fumble +of after years brought surprisingly to light. I think it must have been +the very proportions themselves of the invitation and the interest that +kept down, under the immense impression, everything in the nature of +calculation and presumption; dark, huge and prodigious the other party +to our relation, London's and mine, as I called it, loomed and +spread--much too mighty a Goliath for the present in any conceivable +ambition even of a fast-growing David. My earlier apprehension, fed at +the season as from a thousand outstretched silver spoons--for these all +shone to me with that effect of the handsomest hospitality--piled up the +monster to such a height that I could somehow only fear him as much as I +admired and that his proportions in fact reached away quite beyond my +expectation. He was always the great figure of London, and I was for no +small time, as the years followed, to be kept at my awe-struck distance +for taking him on that sort of trust: I had crept about his ankles, I +had glanced adventurously up at his knees, and wasn't the moral for the +most part the mere question of whether I should ever be big enough to so +much as guess where he stopped? + +Odd enough was it, I make out, that I was to feel no wonder of that kind +or degree play in the coming time over such other social aspects, such +superficially more colourable scenes as I paid, in repetition as +frequent as possible, my respects and my compliments to: they might meet +me with wreathed smiles and splendid promises and deep divinations of +my own desire, a thousand graces and gages, in fine, that I couldn't +pretend to have picked up within the circle, however experimentally +widened, of which Half-Moon Street was the centre, and nothing therefore +could have exceeded the splendour of these successive and multiplied +assurances. What it none the less infinitely beguiles me to recognise +to-day is that such exhibitions, for all their greater direct radiance, +and still more for all their general implication of a store of meaning +and mystery and beauty that they alone, from example to example, from +prodigy to prodigy, had to open out, left me comparatively little +crushed by the impression of their concerning me further than my own +action perhaps could make good. It was as if I had seen that all there +was for me of these great things I should sooner or later take; the +amount would be immense, yet, as who should say, all on the same plane +and the same connection, the aesthetic, the "artistic," the romantic in +the looser sense, or in other words in the air of the passions of the +intelligence. What other passions of a deeper strain, whether personal +or racial, and thereby more superstitiously importunate, I must have +felt involved in the question of an effective experience of English life +I was doubtless then altogether unprepared to say; it probably came, +however, I seem actually to make out, very much to this particular +perception, exactly, that any penetration of the London scene would _be_ +experience after a fashion that an exercise of one's "mere intellectual +curiosity" wherever else wouldn't begin to represent, glittering as the +rewards to such curiosity amid alien peoples of genius might thoroughly +appear. On the other hand it was of course going to be nothing less than +a superlative help that one would have but to reach out straight and in +the full measure of one's passion for these rewards, to find one's self +carried all the way by one's active, one's contemplative concern with +them--this delightful affair, fraught with increase of light, of joy and +wonder, of possibilities of adventure for the mind, in fine, inevitably +exhausting the relation. + + + + +II + + +Let me not here withal appear to pretend to say how far I then foresaw +myself likely to proceed, as it were, with the inimitable France and the +incomparable Italy; my real point is altogether in the simple fact that +they hovered before me, even in their scrappy foretastes, to a great +effect of ease and inspiration, whereas I shouldn't at all have resented +the charge of fairly hiding behind the lowly door of Mr. Lazarus Fox--so +unmistakeably did it open into complications tremendous. This excellent +man, my Half-Moon Street landlord--I surrender, I can't keep away from +him--figures to me now as but one of the thousand forms of pressure in +the collective assault, but he couldn't have been more carefully chosen +for his office had he consciously undertaken to express to me in a +concentrated manner most of the things I was "after." The case was +rather indeed perhaps that he himself by his own mere perfection put me +up to much of what I should most confidently look for, and that the +right lines of observation and enjoyment, of local and social contact, +as I may call it, were most of all those that started out from him and +came back to him. It was as if nothing I saw could have done without +him, as if nothing he was could have done without everything else. The +very quarters I occupied under his protection happened, for that matter, +to swarm--as I estimated swarming--with intensities of suggestion--aware +as I now encourage myself to become that the first note of the +numberless reverberations I was to pick up in the aftertime had +definitely been struck for me as under the wave of his conducting little +wand. He flourished it modestly enough, ancient worthy of an immemorial +order that he was--old pensioned servant, of course, of a Cumberland (as +I believe) family, a kind, slim, celibate, informing and informed member +of which occupied his second floor apartments; a friend indeed whom I +had met on the very first occasion of my sallying forth from Morley's +Hotel in Trafalgar Square to dine at a house of sustaining, of inspiring +hospitality in the Kensington quarter. Succumbing thus to my tangle of +memories, from which I discern no escape, I recognise further that if +the endlessly befriending Charles Nortons introduced me to Albert +Rutson, and Albert Rutson introduced me to his feudal retainer, so it +was in no small degree through the confidence borrowed from the latter's +interest in the decent appearance I should make, an interest of a +consistency not to have been prefigured by any at all like instance in +my past, that I so far maintained my dizzy balance as to be able to +ascend to the second floor under the thrill of sundry invitations to +breakfast. I dare say it is the invitations to breakfast that hold me at +this moment by their spell--so do they breathe to me across the age the +note of a London world that we have left far behind; in consequence of +which I the more yearningly steal back to it, as on sneaking tiptoe, and +shut myself up there without interference. It is embalmed in +disconnections, in differences, that I cultivate a free fancy for +pronouncing advantageous to it: sunk already was the shaft by which I +should descend into the years, and my inspiration is in touching as many +as possible of the points of the other tradition, retracing as many as +possible of the features of the old face, eventually to be blurred again +even before my own eyes, and with the materials for a portrait thereby +accessible but to those who were present up to the time of the change. + +I don't pretend to date this change which still allows me to catch my +younger observation and submission at play on the far side of it; I make +it fall into the right perspective, however, I think, when I place it +where I began to shudder before a confidence, not to say an impudence, +of diminution in the aspects by which the British capital differed so +from those of all the foreign together as to present throughout the +straight contradiction to them. That straight contradiction, testifying +invaluably at every turn, had been from far back the thing, romantically +speaking, to clutch and keep the clue and the logic of; thanks to it +the whole picture, every element, objects and figures, background and +actors, nature and art, hung consummately together, appealing in their +own light and under their own law--interesting ever in every case by +instituting comparisons, sticking on the contrary to their true instinct +and suggesting only contrast. They were the _opposite_, the assured, the +absolute, the unashamed, in respect to whatever might be of a generally +similar intention elsewhere: this was their dignity, their beauty and +their strength--to look back on which is to wonder if one didn't quite +consciously tremble, before the exhibition, for any menaced or mitigated +symptom in it. I honestly think one did, even in the first flushes of +recognition, more or less so tremble; I remember at least that in spite +of such disconcertments, such dismays, as certain of the most thoroughly +Victorian _choses vues_ originally treated me to, something yet deeper +and finer than observation admonished me to like them just as they were, +or at least not too fatuously to dislike--since it somehow glimmered +upon me that if they had lacked their oddity, their monstrosity, as it +even might be, their unabashed insular conformity, other things that +belong to them, as they belong to these, might have loomed less large +and massed less thick, which effect was wholly to be deprecated. To +catch that secret, I make out the more I think of it, was to have +perhaps the smokiest, but none the less the steadiest, light to walk by; +the "clue," as I have called it, was to be one's appreciation of an +England that should turn its back directly enough, and without fear of +doing it too much, on examples and ideas not strictly homebred--since +she did her own sort of thing with such authority and was even then to +be noted as sometimes trying other people's with a _kind_ of disaster +not recorded, at the worst, among themselves. + +I must of course disavow pretending to have read this vivid philosophy +into my most immediate impressions, and I may in fact perhaps not claim +to have been really aware of its seed till a considerable time had +passed, till apprehensions and reflections had taken place in quantity, +immeasurable quantity, so to speak, and a great stir-up of the +imagination been incurred. Undoubtedly is it in part the new--that is, +more strictly, the elder--acuteness that I touch all the prime profit +with; I didn't know at the time either how much appearances were all the +while in the melting-pot or what wealth of reaction on them I was laying +up. I cherish, for love of the unbroken interest, all the same, the +theory of certain then positive and effective prefigurements, because it +leaves me thus free for remarking that I knew where I was, as I may put +it, from the moment I saw the state of the London to come brought down +with the weight of her abdication of her genius. It not unnaturally may +be said that it hasn't been till to-day that we _see_ her genius in its +fulness--throwing up in a hundred lights, matters we practically +acknowledge, such a plastic side as we had never dreamed she possessed. +The genius of accommodation is what we had last expected of +her--accommodation to anything but her portentous self, for in _that_ +connection she was ever remarkable; and certainly the air of the +generalised, the emulous smart modern capital has come to be written +upon her larger and larger even while we look. + +The unaccommodating and unaccommodated city remains none the less +closely consecrated to one's fondest notion of her--the city too +indifferent, too proud, too unaware, too stupid even if one will, to +enter any lists that involved her moving from her base and that thereby, +when one approached her from the alien _positive_ places (I don't speak +of the American, in those days too negative to be related at all) +enjoyed the enormous "pull," for making her impression, of ignoring +everything but her own perversities and then of driving these home with +an emphasis not to be gainsaid. Since she didn't emulate, as I have +termed it, so she practised her own arts altogether, and both these ways +and these consequences were in the flattest opposition (_that_ was the +happy point!) to foreign felicities or foreign standards, so that the +effect in every case was of the straightest reversal of them--with +black for the foreign white and white for the foreign black, wet for the +foreign dry and dry for the foreign wet, big for the foreign small and +small for the foreign big: I needn't extend the catalogue. _Her_ +idiosyncrasy was never in the least to have been inferred or presumed; +it could only, in general, make the outsider provisionally gape. She sat +thus imperturbable in her felicities, and if that is how, remounting the +stream of time, I like most to think of her, this is because if her +interest is still undeniable--as that of overgrown things goes--it has +yet lost its fineness of quality. Phenomena may be interesting, thank +goodness, without being phenomena of elegant expression or of any other +form of restless smartness, and when once type is strong, when once it +plays up from deep sources, every show of its sincerity delivers us a +message and we hang, to real suspense, on its continuance of energy, on +its again and yet again consistently acquitting itself. So it keeps in +tune, and, as the French adage says, _c'est le ton qui fait la chanson_. +The mid-Victorian London was sincere--that was a vast virtue and a vast +appeal; the contemporary is sceptical, and most so when most plausible; +the turn of the tide could verily be fixed to an hour--the hour at which +the new plausibility began to exceed the old sincerities by so much as a +single sign. They could truly have been arrayed face to face, I think, +for an attentive eye--and I risk even saying that my own, bent upon +them, as was to come to pass, with a habit of anxiety that I should +scarce be able to overstate, had its unrecorded penetrations, its alarms +and recoveries, even perhaps its very lapses of faith, though always +redeemed afresh by still fonder fanaticisms, to a pitch that shall +perhaps present itself, when they expose it all the way, as that of +tiresome extravagance. Exposing it all the way is none the less, I see, +exactly what I plot against it--or, otherwise expressed, in favour of +the fine truth of history, so far as a throb of that awful pulse has +been matter of one's own life; in favour too of the mere returns +derivable from more inordinate curiosity. These Notes would enjoy small +self-respect, I think, if that principle, not to call it that passion, +didn't almost furiously ride them. + + + + +III + + +I was at any rate in the midst of sincerities enough, sincerities of +emphasis and "composition"; perversities, idiosyncrasies, +incalculabilities, delightful all as densities at first insoluble, +delightful even indeed as so much mere bewilderment and shock. When was +the shock, I ask myself as I look back, not so deadened by the general +atmospheric richness as not to melt more or less immediately into some +succulence for the mind, something that could feed the historic sense +almost to sweetness? I don't mean that it was a shock to be invited to +breakfast--there were stronger ones than that; but was in fact the +_trait de moeurs_ that disconnected me with most rapidity and +intensity from all I had left on the other side of the sea. To be so +disconnected, for the time, and in the most insidious manner, was above +all what I had come out for, and every appearance that might help it was +to be artfully and gratefully cultivated. I recollect well how many of +these combined as I sat at quite punctual fried sole and marmalade in +the comparatively disengaged sitting-room of the second floor--the +occupancy of the first has remained vague to me; disengaged from the +mantle of gloom the folds of which draped most heavily the feet of the +house, as it were, and thereby promoted in my own bower the chronic dusk +favourable to mural decoration consisting mainly of framed and glazed +"coloured" excisions from Christmas numbers of the Illustrated London +News that had been at their hour quite modern miracles. Was it for that +matter into a sudden splendour of the modern that I ascendingly emerged +under the hospitality of my kind fellow-tenant, or was it rather into +the fine classicism of a bygone age, as literature and the arts had +handed down that memory? Such were the questions whisked at every turn +under my nose and reducing me by their obscure charm but to bewildered +brooding, I fear, when I should have been myself, to repay these +attentions, quite forward and informing and affirmative. + +There were eminent gentlemen, as I was sure they could only be, to +"meet" and, alas, awfully to interrogate me--for vivid has remained to +me, as the best of my bewilderment, the strangeness of finding that I +could be of interest to _them_: not indeed to call it rather the proved +humiliation of my impotence. My identity for myself was _all_ in my +sensibility to their own exhibition, with not a scrap left over for a +personal show; which made it as inconvenient as it was queer that I +should be treated as a specimen and have in the most unexpected manner +to prove that I was a good one. I knew myself the very worst +conceivable, but how to give to such other persons a decent or coherent +reason for my being so required more presence of mind than I could in +the least muster--the consequence of which failure had to be for me, I +fear, under all that confused first flush, rather an abject acceptance +of the air of imbecility. There were, it appeared, things of interest +taking place in America, and I had had, in this absurd manner, to come +to England to learn it: I had had over there on the ground itself no +conception of any such matter--nothing of the smallest interest, by any +perception of mine, as I suppose I should still blush to recall, had +taken place in America since the War. How _could_ anything, I really +wanted to ask--anything comparable, that is, to what was taking place +under my eyes in Half-Moon Street and at dear softly presiding Rutson's +table of talk. It doubtless essentially belonged to the exactly right +type and tone and general figure of my fellow-breakfasters from the +Temple, from the Home Office, the Foreign Office, the House of Commons, +from goodness knew what other scarce discernible Olympian altitudes, it +belonged to the very cut of their hair and their waistcoats and their +whiskers--for it was still more or less a whiskered age--that they +should desire from me much distinctness about General Grant's first +cabinet, upon the formation of which the light of the newspaper happened +then to beat; yet at the same time that I asked myself if it was to such +cold communities, such flat frustrations as were so proposed, that I +had sought to lift my head again in European air, I found the crisis +enriched by sundry other apprehensions. + +They melted together in it to that increase of savour I have already +noted, yet leaving me vividly admonished that the blankness of my mind +as to the Washington candidates relegated me to some class unencountered +as yet by any one of my conversers, a class only not perfectly +ridiculous because perfectly insignificant. Also that politics walked +abroad in England, so that one might supremely bump against them, as +much as, by my fond impression, they took their exercise in America but +through the back streets and the ways otherwise untrodden and the very +darkness of night; that further all lively attestations were _ipso +facto_ interesting, and that finally and in the supreme degree, the +authenticity of whatever one was going to learn in the world would +probably always have for its sign that one got it at some personal cost. +To this generalisation mightn't one even add that in proportion as the +cost was great, or became fairly excruciating, the lesson, the value +acquired would probably be a thing to treasure? I remember really going +so far as to wonder if any act of acquisition of the life-loving, +life-searching sort that most appealed to me wouldn't mostly be +fallacious if unaccompanied by that tag of the price paid in personal +discomfort, in some self-exposure and some none too impossible +consequent discomfiture, for the sake of it. Didn't I even on occasion +mount to the very height of seeing it written that these bad moments +were the downright consecration of knowledge, that is of perception and, +essentially, of exploration, always dangerous and treacherous, and so +might afterwards come to figure to memory, each in its order, as the +silver nail on the wall of the temple where the trophy is hung up? All +of which remark, I freely grant, is a great ado about the long since so +bedimmed little Half-Moon Street breakfasts, and is moreover quite wide +of the mark if suggesting that the joys of recognition, those of +imaginatively, of projectively fitting in and fitting out every piece in +the puzzle and every recruit to the force of a further understanding +weren't in themselves a most bustling and cheering business. + +It was bustling at least, assuredly, if not quite always in the same +degree exhilarating, to breakfast out at all, as distinguished from +lunching, without its being what the Harvard scene made of it, one of +the incidents of "boarding"; it was association at a jump with the +ghosts of Byron and Sheridan and Scott and Moore and Lockhart and Rogers +and _tutti quanti_--as well as the exciting note of a social order in +which everyone wasn't hurled straight, with the momentum of rising, upon +an office or a store. The mere vision in numbers of persons embodying +and in various ways sharply illustrating a clear alternative to that +passivity told a tale that would be more and more worth the reading with +every turn of the page. So at all events I fantasticated while harassed +by my necessity to weave into my general tapestry every thread that +would conduce to a pattern, and so the thread for instance of the great +little difference of my literally never having but once "at home" been +invited to breakfast on types as well as on toast and its accessories +could suggest an effect of silk or silver when absolutely dangled before +me. That single occasion at home came back in a light that fairly +brought tears to my eyes, for it was touching now to the last wanness +that the lady of the winter morn of the Massachusetts Sabbath, one of +those, as I recover it, of 1868, to reach whose board we had waded +through snowdrifts, had been herself fondling a reminiscence, though I +can scarce imagine supposing herself to offer for our consumption any +other type than her own. It was for that matter but the sweet staleness +of her reminiscence that made her a type, and I remember how it had had +to do thereby all the work: _she_, of an age to reach so considerably +back, had breakfasted out, in London, and with Mr. Rogers himself--that +was the point; which I am bound to say did for the hour and on that spot +supply richness of reference enough. And I am caught up, I find, in the +very act of this claim for my prior scantness of experience by a memory +that makes it not a little less perfect and which is oddly enough again +associated with a struggle, on an empty stomach, through the massed New +England whiteness of the prime Sunday hour. I still cherish the vision, +which couldn't then have faded from me, of my having, during the age of +innocence--I mean of my own--breakfasted with W. D. Howells, insidious +disturber and fertiliser of that state in me, to "meet" Bayard Taylor +and Arthur Sedgwick all in the Venetian manner, the delightful Venetian +manner which toward the later 'sixties draped any motion on our host's +part as with a habit still appropriate. _He_ had risen that morning +under the momentum of his but recently concluded consular term in +Venice, where margin, if only that of the great loungeable piazza, had a +breadth, and though Sedgwick and I had rather, as it were, to take the +jump standing, this was yet under the inspiration of feeling the case +most special. Only it had _been_ Venetian, snow-shoes and all; I had +stored it sacredly away as not American at all, and was of course to +learn in Half-Moon Street how little it had been English either. + +What must have seemed to me of a fine international mixture, during +those weeks, was my thrilling opportunity to sit one morning, beside +Mrs. Charles Norton's tea-urn, in Queen's Gate Terrace, opposite to +Frederic Harrison, eminent to me at the moment as one of the subjects of +Matthew Arnold's early fine banter, one of his too confidently roaring +"young lions" of the periodical press. Has any gilding ray since that +happy season rested here and there with the sovereign charm of interest, +of drollery, of felicity and infelicity taken on by scattered selected +objects in that writer's bright critical dawn?--an element in which we +had the sense of sitting gratefully bathed, so that we fairly took out +our young minds and dabbled and soaked them in it as we were to do again +in no other. The beauty was thus at such a rate that people had +references, and that a reference was then, to my mind, whether in a +person or an object, the most glittering, the most becoming ornament +possible, a style of decoration one seemed likely to perceive figures +here and there, whether animate or not, quite groan under the +accumulation and the weight of. One had scarcely met it before--that I +now understood; at the same time that there was perhaps a wan joy in +one's never having missed it, by all appearance, having on the contrary +ever instinctively caught it, on the least glimmer of its presence. Even +when present, or what in the other time I had taken for present, it had +been of the thinnest, whereas all about me hereafter it would be by all +appearance almost glutinously thick--to the point even of one's on +occasion sticking fast in it; that is finding intelligibility smothered +in quantity. I lost breath in fact, no doubt, again and again, with this +latter increase, but was to go on and on for a long time before any +first glimmer of reaction against so special a source of interest. It +attached itself to objects often, I saw, by no merit or virtue--above +all, repeatedly, by no "cleverness"--of their own, but just by the luck +of history, by the action of multiplicity of circumstance. Condemned the +human particle "over here" was to _live_ on whatever terms, in +thickness--instead of being free, comparatively, or as I at once +ruefully and exquisitely found myself, only to feel and to think in it. +Ruefully because there were clearly a thousand contacts and sensations, +of the strong direct order, that one lost by not so living; exquisitely +because of the equal number of immunities and independences, blest +independences of perception and judgment, blest liberties of range for +the intellectual adventure, that accrued by the same stroke. These at +least had the advantage, one of the most distinguished conceivable, that +when enjoyed with a certain intensity they might produce the illusion of +the other intensity, that of being involved in the composition and the +picture itself, in the situations, the complications, the circumstances, +admirable and dreadful; while no corresponding illusion, none making for +the ideal play of reflection, conclusion, comparison, however one should +incline to appraise the luxury, seemed likely to attend the immersed or +engaged condition. + +Whatever fatuity might at any rate have resided in these complacencies +of view, I made them my own with the best conscience in the world, and I +meet them again quite to extravagance of interest wherever on the whole +extent of the scene my retrospect sets me down. It wasn't in the least +at the same time that encountered celebrities only thus provoked the +shifting play of my small lamp, and this too even though they were +easily celebrated, by my measure, and though from the very first I owed +an individual here and there among them, as was highly proper, the +benefit of impression at the highest pitch. On the great supporting and +enclosing scene itself, the big generalised picture, painted in layer +upon layer and tone upon tone, one's fancy was all the while feeding; +objects and items, illustrations and aspects might perpetually overlap +or mutually interfere, but never without leaving consistency the more +marked and character the more unmistakeable. The place, the places, +bristled so for every glance with expressive particulars, that I really +conversed with them, at happy moments, more than with the figures that +moved in them, which affected me so often as but submissive articles of +furniture, "put in" by an artist duly careful of effect and yet duly +respectful of proportion. The great impression was doubtless no other +then and there than what it is under every sky and before every scene +that remind one afresh, at the given moment, of all the ways in which +producing causes and produced creatures correspond and interdepend; but +I think I must have believed at that time that these cross references +kept up their game in the English air with a frankness and a good faith +that kept the process, in all probability, the most traceable of its +kind on the globe. + +What was the secret of the force of that suggestion?--which was not, I +may say, to be invalidated, to my eyes, by the further observation of +cases and conditions. Was it that the enormous "pull" enjoyed at every +point of the general surface the stoutness of the underlying belief in +what was behind all surfaces?--so that the particular visible, audible, +palpable fact, however small and subsidiary, was incomparably absolute, +or had, so to speak, such a conscience and a confidence, such an +absence of reserve and latent doubts about itself, as was not elsewhere +to be found. Didn't such elements as that represent, in the heart of +things, possibilities of scepticism, of mockery, of irony, of the return +of the matter, whatever it might be, on itself, by some play or other of +the questioning spirit, the spirit therefore weakening to entire comfort +of affirmations? Didn't I see that humour itself, which might seem +elsewhere corrosive and subversive, was, as an English faculty, turned +outward altogether and never turned inward?--by which convenient +circumstance subversion, or in other words alteration and variation were +not promoted. Such truths were wondrous things to make out in such +connections as my experience was then, and for no small time after, to +be confined to; but I positively catch myself listening to them, even +with my half-awakened ears, as if they had been all so many sermons of +the very stones of London. _There_, to come back to it, was exactly the +force with which these stones were to build me capaciously round: I +invited them, I besought them, to say all they would, and--to return to +my figure of a while back--it was soon so thoroughly as if they had +understood that, once having begun, they were to keep year after year +fairly chattering to me. Many of these pages, I fondly foresee, must +consist but of the record of their chatter. What was most of all +happening, I take it, was that under an absurd special stress I was +having, as who should say, to improvise a local medium and to arrange a +local consciousness. Against my due appropriation of those originally +closest at my hand inevitable accidents had conspired--and, to conclude +in respect to all this, if a considerable time was to be wanted, in the +event, for ideal certainty of adjustment, half the terms required by +this could then put forth the touching plea that they had quite achingly +waited. + + + + +IV + + +It may perhaps seem strange that the soil should have been watered by +such an incident as Mr. Lazarus Fox's reply, in the earliest rich dusk, +to my inquiry as to whither, while I occupied his rooms, I had best +betake myself most regularly for my dinner: "Well, there is the Bath +Hotel, sir, a very short walk away, where I should think you would be +very comfortable indeed. Mr. So-and-So dines at his club, sir--but there +is also the Albany in Piccadilly, to which I believe many gentlemen go." +I think I measured on the spot "all that it took" to make my friend most +advisedly--for it was clearly what he did--see me seated in lone state, +for my evening meal, at the heavy mahogany of the stodgy little hotel +that in those days and for long after occupied the north-west corner of +Arlington Street and to which, in common with many compatriots, I +repeatedly resorted during the years immediately following. We +_suffered_, however, on those occasions, the unmitigated coffee-room of +Mr. Fox's prescription--it was part of a strange inevitability, a +concomitant of necessary shelter and we hadn't at least gone forth to +invoke its austere charm. I tried it, in that singular way, at the hour +I speak of--and I well remember forecasting the interest of a social and +moral order in which it could be supposed of me that, having tried it +once, I should sublimely try it again. My success in doing so would +indeed have been sublime, but a finer shade of the quality still +attached somehow to my landlord's confidence in it; and this was one of +the threads that, as I have called them, I was to tuck away for future +picking-up again and unrolling. I fell back on the Albany, which long +ago passed away and which I seem to have brushed with a touch of +reminiscence in some anticipation of the present indulgence that is +itself quite ancient history. It was a small eating-house of the very +old English tradition, as I then supposed at least, just opposite the +much greater establishment of the same name, which latter it had +borrowed, and I remember wondering whether the tenants of the classic +chambers, the beadle-guarded cluster of which was impressive even to the +deprecated approach, found their conception of the "restaurant"--we +still pronounced it in the French manner--met by the small compartments, +narrow as horse-stalls, formed by the high straight backs of hard wooden +benches and accommodating respectively two pairs of feeders, who were +thus so closely face to face as fairly to threaten with knife and fork +each others' more forward features. + +The scene was sordid, the arrangements primitive, the detail of the +procedure, as it struck me, well-nigh of the rudest; yet I remember +rejoicing in it all--as one indeed might perfectly rejoice in the +juiciness of joints and the abundance of accessory pudding; for I said +to myself under every shock and at the hint of every savour that this +was what it was for an exhibition to reek with local colour, and one +could dispense with a napkin, with a crusty roll, with room for one's +elbows or one's feet, with an immunity from intermittence of the "plain +boiled," much better than one could dispense with that. There were +restaurants galore even at that time in New York and in Boston, but I +had never before had to do with an eating-house and had not yet seen the +little old English world of Dickens, let alone of the ever-haunting +Hogarth, of Smollett and of Boswell, drenched with such a flood of +light. As one sat there one _understood_; one drew out the severe seance +not to stay the assault of precious conspiring truths, not to break the +current of in-rushing telltale suggestion. Every face was a documentary +scrap, half a dozen broken words to piece with half a dozen others, and +so on and on; every sound was strong, whether rich and fine or only +queer and coarse; everything in this order drew a positive sweetness +from never being--whatever else it was--gracelessly flat. The very +rudeness was ripe, the very commonness was conscious--that is not +related to mere other forms of the same, but to matters as different as +possible, into which it shaded off and off or up and up; the image in +fine was organic, rounded and complete, as definite as a Dutch picture +of low life hung on a museum wall. "Low" I say in respect to the life; +but that was the point for me, that whereas the smartness and newness +beyond the sea supposedly disavowed the low, they did so but thinly and +vainly, falling markedly short of the high; which the little boxed and +boiled Albany attained to some effect of, after a fashion of its own, +just by having its so thoroughly appreciable note-value in a scheme of +manners. It was imbedded, so to speak, in the scheme, and it borrowed +lights, it borrowed even glooms, from so much neighbouring distinction. +The places across the sea, as they to my then eyes faintly after-glowed, +had no impinging borders but those of the desert to borrow _from_. And +if it be asked of me whether all the while I insist, for demonstration +of the complacency with which I desire to revert, on not regretting the +disappearance of such too long surviving sordidries as those I have +evoked, I can but answer that blind emotion, in whichever sense +directed, has nothing to say to the question and that the sense of what +we just _could_ confidently live by at a given far-away hour is a simple +stout fact of relief. + +Relief, again, I say, from the too enormous present accretions and +alternatives--which we witlessly thought so innumerable then, which we +artlessly found so much of the interest of _in_ an immeasurable +multiplicity and which I now feel myself thus grope for ghostly touch of +in the name, neither more nor less, of poetic justice. I wasn't +doubtless at the time so very sure, after all, of the comparative +felicity of our state, that of the rare _moment_ for the fond fancy--I +doubtless even a bit greedily missed certain quantities, not to call +them certain qualities, here and there, and the best of my actual +purpose is to make amends for that blasphemy. There isn't a thing I can +imagine having missed that I don't quite ache to miss again; and it +remains at all events an odd stroke that, having of old most felt the +thrill of the place in its mighty muchness, I have lived to adore it +backward for its sweet simplicity. I find myself in fact at the present +writing only too sorry when not able to minimise conscientiously this, +that or the other of the old sources of impression. The thing is indeed +admirably possible in a _general_ way, though much of the exhibition was +none the less undeniably, was absolutely large: how can I for instance +recall the great cab-rank, mainly formed of delightful hansoms, that +stretched along Piccadilly from the top of the Green Park unendingly +down, without having to take it for unsurpassably modern and majestic? +How can I think--I select my examples at hazard--of the "run" of the +more successful of Mr. Robertson's comedies at the "dear little old" +Prince of Wales's Theatre in Tottenham Court Road as anything less than +one of the wonders of our age? How, by the same token, can I not lose +myself still more in the glory of a time that was to watch the drawn-out +procession of Henry Irving's Shakespearean splendours at the +transcendent Lyceum? or how, in the same general line, not recognise +that to live through the extravagant youth of the aesthetic era, whether +as embodied in the then apparently inexhaustible vein of the Gilbert and +Sullivan operas or as more monotonously expressed in those "last words" +of the _raffine_ that were chanted and crooned in the damask-hung temple +of the Grosvenor Gallery, was to seem privileged to such immensities as +history would find left to her to record but with bated breath? + +These latter triumphs of taste, however, though lost in the abysm now, +had then a good many years to wait and I alight for illustrative support +of my present mild thesis on the comparative humility, say, of the +inward aspects, in a large measure, of the old National Gallery, where +memory mixes for me together so many elements of the sense of an antique +world. The great element was of course that I well-nigh incredibly stood +again in the immediate presence of Titian and Rembrandt, of Rubens and +Paul Veronese, and that the cup of sensation was thereby filled to +overflowing; but I look at it to-day as concomitantly warm and closed-in +and, as who should say, cosy that the ancient order and contracted +state and thick-coloured dimness, all unconscious of rearrangements and +reversals, blighting new lights and invidious shattering comparisons, +still prevailed and kept contemplation comfortably confused and serenely +superstitious, when not indeed at its sharpest moments quite fevered +with incoherences. The place looks to me across the half century richly +dim, yet at the same time both perversely plain and heavily +violent--violent through indifference to the separations and selections +that have become a tribute to modern nerves; but I cherish exactly those +facts of benightedness, seeming as they do to have positively and +blessedly conditioned the particular sweetness of wonder with which I +haunted the Family of Darius, the Bacchus and Ariadne, or the so-called +portrait of Ariosto. Could one in those days feel anything with force, +whether for pleasure or for pain, without feeling it as an immense +little act or event of life, and as therefore taking place on a scene +and in circumstances scarce at all to be separated from its own sense +and impact?--so that to recover it is to recover the whole medium, the +material pressure of things, and find it most marked for preservation as +an aspect, even, distinguishably, a "composition." + +_What_ a composition, for instance again I am capable at this hour of +exclaiming, the conditions of felicity in which I became aware, one +afternoon during a renewed gape before the Bacchus and Ariadne, first +that a little gentleman beside me and talking with the greatest vivacity +to another gentleman was extremely remarkable, second that he had the +largest and most _chevelu_ auburn head I had ever seen perched on a +scarce perceptible body, third that I held some scrap of a clue to his +identity, which couldn't fail to be eminent, fourth that this tag of +association was with nothing less than a small photograph sent me +westward across the sea a few months before, and fifth that the sitter +for the photograph had been the author of Atalanta in Calydon and Poems +and Ballads! I thrilled, it perfectly comes back to me, with the prodigy +of this circumstance that I should be admiring Titian in the same +breath with Mr. Swinburne--that is in the same breath in which _he_ +admired Titian and in which I also admired _him_, the whole constituting +on the spot between us, for appreciation, that is for mine, a fact of +intercourse, such a fact as could stamp and colour the whole passage +ineffaceably, and this even though the more illustrious party to it had +within the minute turned off and left me shaken. I was shaken, but I was +satisfied--that was the point; I didn't ask more to interweave another +touch in my pattern, and as I once more gather in the impression I am +struck with my having deserved truly as many of the like as possible. I +was welcome to them, it may well be said, on such easy terms--and yet I +ask myself whether, after all, it didn't take on my own part some doing, +as we nowadays say, to make them so well worth having. They themselves +took, I even at the time felt, little enough trouble for it, and the +virtue of the business was repeatedly, no doubt, a good deal more in +what I brought than in what I took. + +I apply this remark indeed to those extractions of the quintessence that +had for their occasion either one's more undirected though never +fruitless walks and wanderings or one's earnest, one's positively pious +approach to whatever consecrated ground or shrine of pilgrimage that +might be at the moment in order. There was not a regular prescribed +"sight" that I during those weeks neglected--I remember haunting the +museums in especial, though the South Kensington was then scarce more +than embryonic, with a sense of duty and of excitement that I was never +again to know combined in equal measure, I think, and that it might +really have taken some element of personal danger to account for. There +_was_ the element, in a manner, to season the cup with sharpness--the +danger, all the while, that my freedom might be brief and my experience +broken, that I was under the menace of uncertainty and subject in fine +to interruption. The fact of having been so long gravely unwell sufficed +by itself to keep apprehension alive; it was our idea, or at least quite +intensely mine, that what I was doing, could I but put it through, +would be intimately good for me--only the putting it through was the +difficulty, and I sometimes faltered by the way. This makes now for a +general air on the part of all the objects of vision that I recover, and +almost as much in those of accidental encounter as in the breathlessly +invoked, of being looked at for the last time and giving out their +message and story as with the still, collected passion of an only +chance. This feeling about them, not to say, as I might have imputed it, +_in_ them, wonderfully helped, as may be believed, the extraction of +quintessences--which sprang at me of themselves, for that matter, out of +any appearance that confessed to the least value in the compound, the +least office in the harmony. If the commonest street-vista was a fairly +heart-shaking contributive image, if the incidents of the thick +renascent light anywhere, and the perpetual excitement of never knowing, +between it and the historic and determined gloom, which was which and +which one would most "back" for the general outcome and picture, so the +great sought-out compositions, the Hampton Courts and the Windsors, the +Richmonds, the Dulwiches, even the very Hampstead Heaths and Putney +Commons, to say nothing of the Towers, the Temples, the Cathedrals and +the strange penetrabilities of the City, ranged themselves like the rows +of great figures in a sum, an amount immeasurably huge, that one would +draw on if not quite as long as one lived, yet as soon as ever one +should seriously get to work. That, to a tune of the most beautiful +melancholy--at least as I catch it again now--was the way all values +came out: they were charged somehow with a useability the most +immediate, the most urgent, and which, I seemed to see, would keep me +restless till I should have done something of my very own with them. + +This was indeed perhaps what most painted them over with the admonitory +appeal: there were truly moments at which they seemed not to answer for +it that I should get all the good of them, and the finest--what I was +so extravagantly, so fantastically after--unless I could somehow at once +indite my sonnet and prove my title. The difficulty was all in there +being so much of them--I might myself have been less restless if they +could only have been less vivid. This they absolutely declined at any +moment and in any connection to be, and it was ever so long till they +abated a jot of the refusal. Thereby, in consequence, as may easily be +judged, they were to keep me in alarms to which my measures practically +taken, my catastrophes anxiously averted, remained not quite +proportionate. I recall a most interesting young man who had been my +shipmate on the homeward-bound "China," shortly before--I could go at +length into my reasons for having been so struck with him, but I +forbear--who, on our talking, to my intense trepidation of curiosity, of +where I might advisedly "go" in London, let me know that he always went +to Craven Street Strand, where bachelor lodgings were highly convenient, +and whence I in fact then saw them flush at me over the cold grey sea +with an authenticity almost fierce. I didn't in the event, as has been +seen, go to Craven Street for rooms, but I did go, on the very first +occasion, for atmosphere, neither more nor less--the young man of the +ship, building so much better than he knew, had guaranteed me such a +rightness of that; and it belongs to this reminiscence, for the +triviality of which I should apologize did I find myself at my present +pitch capable of apologizing for anything, that I had on the very spot +there one of those hallucinations as to the precious effect dreadful to +lose and yet impossible to render which interfused the aesthetic dream in +presence of its subject with the mortal drop of despair (as I should +insist at least didn't the despair itself seem to have acted here as the +preservative). The precious effect in the case of Craven Street was that +it absolutely reeked, to my fond fancy, with associations born of the +particular ancient piety embodied in one's private altar to Dickens; and +that this upstart little truth alone would revel in explanations that I +should for the time have feverishly to forego. The exquisite matter was +not the identification with the scene of special shades or names; it was +just that the whole Dickens procession marched up and down, the whole +Dickens world looked out of its queer, quite sinister windows--for it +was the socially sinister Dickens, I am afraid, rather than the socially +encouraging or confoundingly comic who still at that moment was most apt +to meet me with his reasons. Such a reason was just that look of the +inscrutable riverward street, packed to blackness with accumulations of +suffered experience, these, indescribably, disavowed and confessed at +one and the same time, and with the fact of its blocked old Thames-side +termination, a mere fact of more oppressive enclosure now, telling all +sorts of vague loose stories about it. + + + + +V + + +Why, however, should I pick up so small a crumb from that mere brief +first course at a banquet of initiation which was in the event to +prolong itself through years and years?--unless indeed as a scrap of a +specimen, chosen at hazard, of the prompt activity of a process by which +my intelligence afterwards came to find itself more fed, I think, than +from any other source at all, or, for that matter, from all other +sources put together. A hundred more suchlike modest memories breathe +upon me, each with its own dim little plea, as I turn to face them, but +my idea is to deal somehow more conveniently with the whole gathered +mass of my subsequent impressions in this order, a fruitage that I feel +to have been only too abundantly stored. Half a dozen of those of a +larger and more immediate dignity, incidents more particularly of the +rather invidiously so-called social contact, pull my sleeve as I pass; +but the long, backward-drawn train of the later life drags them along +with it, lost and smothered in its spread--only one of them stands out +or remains over, insisting on its place and hour, its felt +distinguishability. To this day I feel again _that_ roused emotion, my +unsurpassably prized admission to the presence of the great George +Eliot, whom I was taken to see, by one of the kind door-opening Norton +ladies, by whom Mrs. Lewes's guarded portal at North Bank appeared +especially penetrable, on a Sunday afternoon of April '69. Later +occasions, after a considerable lapse, were not to overlay the absolute +face-value, as I may call it, of all the appearances then and there +presented me--which were taken home by a young spirit almost abjectly +grateful, at any rate all devoutly prepared, for them. I find it idle +even to wonder what "place" the author of Silas Marner and Middlemarch +may be conceived to have in the pride of our literature--so settled and +consecrated in the individual range of view is many such a case free at +last to find itself, free after ups and downs, after fluctuations of +fame or whatever, which have divested judgment of any relevance that +isn't most of all the relevance of a living and recorded _relation_. It +has ceased then to know itself in any degree as an estimate, has shaken +off the anxieties of circumspection and comparison and just grown happy +to act as an attachment pure and simple, an effect of life's own logic, +but in the ashes of which the wonted fires of youth need but to be blown +upon for betrayal of a glow. Reflective appreciation may have originally +been concerned, whether at its most or at its least, but it is well +over, to our infinite relief--yes, to our immortal comfort, I think; the +interval back cannot again be bridged. We simply sit with our enjoyed +gain, our residual rounded possession in our lap; a safe old treasure, +which has ceased to shrink, if indeed also perhaps greatly to swell, and +all that further touches it is the fine vibration set up if the name we +know it all by is called into question--perhaps however little. + +It was by George Eliot's name that I was to go on knowing, was never to +cease to know, a great treasure of beauty and humanity, of applied and +achieved art, a testimony, historic as well as aesthetic, to the deeper +interest of the intricate English aspects; and I now allow the +vibration, as I have called it, all its play--quite as if I had been +wronged even by my own hesitation as to whether to pick up my anecdote. +That scruple wholly fades with the sense of how I must at the very time +have foreseen that here was one of those associations that would +determine in the far future an exquisite inability to revise it. +Middlemarch had not then appeared--we of the faith were still to enjoy +that saturation, and Felix Holt the radical was upwards of three years +old; the impetus proceeding from this work, however, was still fresh +enough in my pulses to have quickened the palpitation of my finding +myself in presence. I had rejoiced without reserve in Felix Holt--the +illusion of reading which, outstretched on my then too frequently +inevitable bed at Swampscott during a couple of very hot days of the +summer of 1866, comes back to me, followed by that in sooth of sitting +up again, at no great ease, to indite with all promptness a review of +the delightful thing, the place of appearance of which nothing could now +induce me to name, shameless about the general fact as I may have been +at the hour itself: over such a feast of fine rich natural tone did I +feel myself earnestly bend. Quite unforgettable to me the art and truth +with which the note of this tone was struck in the beautiful prologue +and the bygone appearances, a hundred of the outward and visible signs +of the author's own young rural and midmost England, made to hold us by +their harmony. The book was not, if I rightly remember, altogether +genially greeted, but I was to hold fast to the charm I had thankfully +suffered it, I had been conscious of absolutely needing it, to work. + +Exquisite the remembrance of how it wouldn't have "done" for me at all, +in relation to other inward matters, not to strain from the case the +last drop of its happiest sense. And I had even with the cooling of the +first glow so little gone back upon it, as we have nowadays learned to +say, had in fact so gone forward, floated by its wave of superlative +intended benignity, that, once in the cool quiet drawing-room at North +Bank I knew myself steeped in still deeper depths of the medium. G. H. +Lewes was absent for the time on an urgent errand; one of his sons, on a +visit at the house, had been suddenly taken with a violent attack of +pain, the heritage of a bad accident not long before in the West Indies, +a suffered onset from an angry bull, I seem to recall, who had tossed or +otherwise mauled him, and, though beaten off, left him considerably +compromised--these facts being promptly imparted to us, in no small +flutter, by our distinguished lady, who came in to us from another room, +where she had been with the hapless young man while his father appealed +to the nearest good chemist for some known specific. It infinitely moved +me to see so great a celebrity quite humanly and familiarly +agitated--even with something clear and noble in it too, to which, as +well as to the extraordinarily interesting dignity of her whole odd +personal conformation, I remember thinking her black silk dress and the +lace mantilla attached to her head and keeping company on either side +with the low-falling thickness of her dark hair effectively contributed. +I have found myself, my life long, attaching value to every noted thing +in respect to a great person--and George Eliot struck me on the spot as +somehow _illustratively_ great; never at any rate has the impression of +those troubled moments faded from me, nor that at once of a certain high +grace in her anxiety and a frank immediate appreciation of our presence, +modest embarrassed folk as we were. It took me no long time to thrill +with the sense, sublime in its unexpectedness, that we were perhaps, or +indeed quite clearly, helping her to pass the time till Mr. Lewes's +return--after which he would again post off for Mr. Paget the +pre-eminent surgeon; and I see involved with this the perfect amenity of +her assisting us, as it were, to assist her, through unrelinquished +proper talk, due responsible remark and report, in the last degree +suggestive to me, on a short holiday taken with Mr. Lewes in the south +of France, whence they had just returned. Yes indeed, the lightest words +of great persons are so little as any words of others are that I catch +myself again inordinately struck with her dropping it off-hand that the +mistral, scourge of their excursion, had blown them into Avignon, where +they had gone, I think, to see J. S. Mill, only to blow them straight +out again--the figure put it so before us; as well as with the moral +interest, the absence of the _banal_, in their having, on the whole +scene, found pleasure further poisoned by the frequency in all those +parts of "evil faces: oh the evil faces!" _That_ recorded source of +suffering enormously affected me--I felt it as beautifully +characteristic: I had never heard an _impression de voyage_ so little +tainted with the superficial or the vulgar. I was myself at the time in +the thick of impressions, and it was true that they would have seemed to +me rather to fail of life, of their own doubtless inferior kind, if +submitting beyond a certain point to be touched with that sad or, as who +should say, that grey colour: Mrs. Lewes's were, it appeared, +predominantly so touched, and I could at once admire it in them and +wonder if they didn't pay for this by some lack of intensity on other +sides. Why I didn't more impute to her, or to them, that possible lack +is more than I can say, since under the law of moral earnestness the +vulgar and the trivial would be then involved in the poor observations +of my own making--a conclusion sufficiently depressing. + +However, I didn't find myself depressed, and I didn't find the great +mind that was so good as to shine upon us at that awkward moment however +dimly anything but augmented; what was its sensibility to the evil faces +but part of the large old tenderness which the occasion had caused to +overflow and on which we were presently floated back into the room she +had left?--where we might perhaps beguile a little the impatience of the +sufferer waiting for relief. We ventured in our flutter to doubt whether +we _should_ beguile, we held back with a certain delicacy from this +irruption, and if there was a momentary wonderful and beautiful conflict +I remember how our yielding struck me as crowned with the finest grace +it could possibly have, that of the prodigious privilege of humouring, +yes literally humouring so renowned a spirit at a moment when we could +really match our judgment with hers. For the injured young man, in the +other and the larger room, simply lay stretched on his back on the +floor, the posture apparently least painful to him--though painful +enough at the best I easily saw on kneeling beside him, after my first +dismay, to ask if I could in any way ease him. I see his face again, +fair and young and flushed, with its vague little smile and its moist +brow; I recover the moment or two during which we sought to make natural +conversation in his presence, and my question as to what conversation +_was_ natural; and then as his father's return still failed my having +the inspiration that at once terminated the strain of the scene and yet +prolonged the sublime connection. Mightn't _I_ then hurry off for Mr. +Paget?--on whom, as fast as a cab could carry me, I would wait with the +request that he would come at the first possible moment to the rescue. +Mrs. Lewes's and our stricken companion's instant appreciation of this +offer lent me wings on which I again feel myself borne very much as if +suddenly acting as a messenger of the gods--surely I had never come so +near to performing in that character. I shook off my fellow visitor for +swifter cleaving of the air, and I recall still feeling that I cleft it +even in the dull four-wheeler of other days which, on getting out of the +house, I recognised as the only object animating, at a distance, the +long blank Sunday vista beside the walled-out Regent's Park. I crawled +to Hanover Square--or was it Cavendish? I let the question stand--and, +after learning at the great man's door that though he was not at home he +was soon expected back and would receive my message without delay, +cherished for the rest of the day the particular quality of my +vibration. + +It was doubtless even excessive in proportion to its cause--yet in what +else but that consisted the force and the use of vibrations? It was by +their excess that one knew them for such, as one for that matter only +knew things in general worth knowing. I didn't know what I had expected +as an effect of our offered homage, but I had somehow not, at the best, +expected a relation--and now a relation had been dramatically +determined. It would exist for me if I should never again in all the +world ask a feather's weight of it; for myself, that is, it would simply +never be able not somehow to act. Its virtue was not in truth at all +flagrantly to be put to the proof--any opportunity for that underwent at +the best a considerable lapse; but why wasn't it intensely acting, none +the less, during the time when, before being in London again for any +length of stay, I found it intimately concerned in my perusal of +Middlemarch, so soon then to appear, and even in that of Deronda, its +intervention on behalf of which defied any chill of time? And to these +references I can but subjoin that they obviously most illustrate the +operation of a sense for drama. The process of appropriation of the two +fictions was experience, in great intensity, and roundabout the field +was drawn the distinguishable ring of something that belonged equally to +this condition and that embraced and further vivified the imaged mass, +playing in upon it lights of surpassing fineness. So it was, at any +rate, that my "relation"--for I didn't go so far as to call it +"ours"--helped me to squeeze further values from the intrinsic substance +of the copious final productions I have named, a weight of variety, +dignity and beauty of which I have never allowed my measure to shrink. + +Even this example of a rage for connections, I may also remark, doesn't +deter me from the mention here, somewhat out of its order of time, of +another of those in which my whole privilege of reference to Mrs. Lewes, +such as it remained, was to look to be preserved. I stretch over the +years a little to overtake it, and it calls up at once another person, +the ornament, or at least the diversion, of a society long since extinct +to me, but who, in common with every bearer of a name I yield to the +temptation of writing, insists on profiting promptly by the fact of +inscription--very much as if first tricking me into it and then proving +it upon me. The extinct societies that once were so sure of themselves, +how can they _not_ stir again if the right touch, that of a hand they +actually knew, however little they may have happened to heed it, reaches +tenderly back to them? The touch _is_ the retrieval, so far as it goes, +setting up as it does heaven knows what undefeated continuity. I must +have been present among the faithful at North Bank during a Sunday +afternoon or two of the winter of '77 and '78--I was to see the great +lady alone but on a single occasion before her death; but those +attestations are all but lost to me now in the livelier pitch of a +scene, as I can only call it, of which I feel myself again, all +amusedly, rather as sacrificed witness. I had driven over with Mrs. +Greville from Milford Cottage, in Surrey, to the villa George Eliot and +George Lewes had not long before built themselves, and which they much +inhabited, at Witley--this indeed, I well remember, in no great flush of +assurance that my own measure of our intended felicity would be quite +that of my buoyant hostess. But here exactly comes, with my memory of +Mrs. Greville, from which numberless by-memories dangle, the interesting +question that makes for my recall why things happened, under her +much-waved wing, not in any too coherent fashion--and this even though +it was never once given her, I surmise, to guess that they anywhere fell +short. So gently used, all round indeed, was this large, elegant, +extremely near-sighted and extremely demonstrative lady, whose genius +was all for friendship, admiration, declamation and expenditure, that +one doubted whether in the whole course of her career she had ever once +been brought up, as it were, against a recognised reality; other at +least perhaps than the tiresome cost of the materially agreeable in life +and the perverse appearance, at times, that though she "said" things, +otherwise recited choice morceaux, whether French or English, with a +marked oddity of manner, of "attack," a general incongruity of +drawing-room art, the various contributive elements, hour, scene, +persuaded patience and hushed attention, were perforce a precarious +quantity. + +It is in that bygone old grace of the unexploded factitious, the air of +a thousand dimmed illusions and more or less early Victorian beatitudes +on the part of the blandly idle and the supposedly accomplished, that +Mrs. Greville, with her exquisite good-nature and her innocent fatuity, +is embalmed for me; so that she becomes in that light a truly shining +specimen, almost the image or compendium of a whole side of a social +order. Just so she has happy suggestion; just so, whether or no by a +twist of my mind toward the enviability of certain complacencies of +faith and taste that we would yet neither live back into if we could, +nor can catch again if we would. I see my forgotten friend of that moist +autumn afternoon of our call, and of another, on the morrow, which I +shall not pass over, as having rustled and gushed and protested and +performed through her term under a kind of protection by the easy-going +gods that is not of this fierce age. Amiabilities and absurdities, +harmless serenities and vanities, pretensions and undertakings +unashamed, still profited by the mildness of the critical air and the +benignity of the social--on the right side at least of the social line. +It had struck me from the first that nowhere so much as in England was +it fortunate to _be_ fortunate, and that against that condition, once it +had somehow been handed down and determined, a number of the sharp +truths that one might privately apprehend beat themselves beautifully in +vain. I say beautifully for I confess without scruple to have found +again and again at that time an attaching charm in the general +exhibition of enjoyed immunity, paid for as it was almost always by the +personal amenity, the practice of all sorts of pleasantness; if it kept +the gods themselves for the time in good-humour, one was willing enough, +or at least I was, to be on the side of the gods. Unmistakable too, as I +seem to recover it, was the positive interest of watching and noting, +roundabout one, for the turn, or rather for the blest continuity, of +their benevolence: such an appeal proceeded, in this, that and the +other particular case, from the fool's paradise really rounded and +preserved, before one's eyes, for those who were so good as to animate +it. There was always the question of how long they would be left to, and +the growth of one's fine suspense, not to say one's frank little +gratitude, as the miracle repeated itself. + +All of which, I admit, dresses in many reflections the small +circumstance that Milford Cottage, with its innumerable red candles and +candle-shades, had affected me as the most embowered retreat for social +innocence that it was possible to conceive, and as absolutely settling +the question of whether the practice of pleasantness mightn't quite +ideally pay for the fantastic protectedness. The red candles in the red +shades have remained with me, inexplicably, as a vivid note of this +pitch, shedding their rosy light, with the autumn gale, the averted +reality, all shut out, upon such felicities of feminine helplessness as +I couldn't have prefigured in advance and as exemplified, for further +gathering in, the possibilities of the old tone. Nowhere had the +evening curtains seemed so drawn, nowhere the copious service so soft, +nowhere the second volume of the new novel, "half-uncut," so close to +one's hand, nowhere the exquisite head and incomparable brush of the +domesticated collie such an attestation of _that_ standard at least, +nowhere the harmonies of accident--of intention was more than one could +say--so incapable of a wrong deflection. That society would lack the +highest finish without some such distributed clusters of the thoroughly +gentle, the mildly presumptuous and the inveterately mistaken, was +brought home to me there, in fine, to a tune with which I had no +quarrel, perverse enough as I had been from an early time to know but +the impulse to egg on society to the fullest discharge of any material +stirring within its breast and not making for cruelty or brutality, mere +baseness or mere stupidity, that would fall into a picture or a scene. +The quality of serene anxiety on the part for instance of exquisite Mrs. +Thellusson, Mrs. Greville's mother, was by itself a plea for any +privilege one should fancy her perched upon; and I scarce know if this +be more or be less true because the anxiety--at least as I culled its +fragrance--was all about the most secondary and superfluous small +matters alone. It struck me, I remember, as a new and unexpected form of +the pathetic altogether; and there was no form of the pathetic, any more +than of the tragic or the comic, that didn't serve as another pearl for +one's lengthening string. And I pass over what was doubtless the +happiest stroke in the composition, the fact of its involving, as +all-distinguished husband of the other daughter, an illustrious soldier +and servant of his sovereign, of his sovereigns that were successively +to be, than against whose patient handsome bearded presence the whole +complexus of femininities and futilities couldn't have been left in more +tolerated and more contrasted relief; pass it over to remind myself of +how, in my particular friend of the three, the comic and the tragic were +presented in a confusion that made the least intended of them at any +moment take effectively the place of the most. The impression, that is, +was never that of the sentiment operating--save indeed perhaps when the +dear lady applied her faculty for frank imitation of the ridiculous, +which she then quite directly and remarkably achieved; but that she +could be comic, that she _was_ comic, was what least appeased her +unrest, and there were reasons enough, in a word, why her failure of the +grand manner or the penetrating note should evoke the idea of their +opposites perfectly achieved. She sat, alike in adoration and emulation, +at the feet of my admirable old friend Fanny Kemble, the good-nature of +whose consent to "hear" her was equalled only by the immediately +consequent action of the splendidly corrective spring on the part of +that unsurpassed subject of the dramatic afflatus fairly, or, as I +should perhaps above all say, contradictiously provoked. Then aspirant +and auditor, rash adventurer and shy alarmist, were swept away together +in the gust of magnificent rightness and beauty, no scrap of the +far-scattered prime proposal being left to pick up. + +Which detail of reminiscence has again stayed my course to the Witley +Villa, when even on the way I quaked a little with my sense of what +_generally_ most awaited or overtook my companion's prime proposals. +What had come most to characterise the Leweses to my apprehension was +that there couldn't be a thing in the world about which they weren't, +and on the most conceded and assured grounds, almost scientifically +particular; which presumption, however, only added to the relevance of +one's learning how such a matter as their relation with Mrs. Greville +could in accordance with noble consistencies be carried on. I could +trust _her_ for it perfectly, as she knew no law but that of innocent +and exquisite aberration, never wanting and never less than +consecrating, and I fear I but took refuge for the rest in declining all +responsibility. I remember trying to say to myself that, even such as we +were, our visit couldn't but scatter a little the weight of cloud on the +Olympus we scaled--given the dreadful drenching afternoon we were after +all an imaginable short solace there; and this indeed would have borne +me through to the end save for an incident which, with a quite ideal +logic, left our adventure an approved ruin. I see again our bland, +benign, commiserating hostess beside the fire in a chill desert of a +room where the master of the house guarded the opposite hearthstone, and +I catch once more the impression of no occurrence of anything at all +appreciable but their liking us to have come, with our terribly trivial +contribution, mainly from a prevision of how they should more devoutly +like it when we departed. It is remarkable, but the occasion yields me +no single echo of a remark on the part of any of us--nothing more than +the sense that our great author herself peculiarly suffered from the +fury of the elements, and that they had about them rather the minimum of +the paraphernalia of reading and writing, not to speak of that of tea, a +conceivable feature of the hour, but which was not provided for. Again I +felt touched with privilege, but not, as in '69, with a form of it +redeemed from barrenness by a motion of my own, and the taste of +barrenness was in fact in my mouth under the effect of our taking +leave. We did so with considerable flourish till we had passed out to +the hall again, indeed to the door of the waiting carriage, toward which +G. H. Lewes himself all sociably, _then_ above all conversingly, wafted +us--yet staying me by a sudden remembrance before I had entered the +brougham and signing me to wait while he repaired his omission. I +returned to the doorstep, whence I still see him reissue from the room +we had just left and hurry toward me across the hall shaking high the +pair of blue-bound volumes his allusion to the uninvited, the verily +importunate loan of which by Mrs. Greville had lingered on the air after +his dash in quest of them; "Ah those books--take them away, please, +away, away!" I hear him unreservedly plead while he thrusts them again +at me, and I scurry back into our conveyance, where, and where only, +settled afresh with my companion, I venture to assure myself of the +horrid truth that had squinted at me as I relieved our good friend of +his superfluity. What indeed was this superfluity but the two volumes of +my own precious "last"--we were still in the blest age of +volumes--presented by its author to the lady of Milford Cottage, and by +her, misguided votary, dropped with the best conscience in the world +into the Witley abyss, out of which it had jumped with violence, under +the touch of accident, straight up again into my own exposed face? + +The bruise inflicted there I remember feeling for the moment only as +sharp, such a mixture of delightful small questions at once salved it +over and such a charm in particular for me to my recognising that this +particular wrong--inflicted all unawares, which exactly made it +sublime--was the only rightness of our visit. Our hosts hadn't so much +as connected book with author, or author with visitor, or visitor with +anything but the convenience of his ridding them of an unconsidered +trifle; grudging as they so justifiedly did the impingement of such +matters on their consciousness. The vivid demonstration of one's failure +to penetrate there had been in the sweep of Lewes's gesture, which could +scarce have been bettered by his actually wielding a broom. I think +nothing passed between us in the brougham on revelation of the identity +of the offered treat so emphatically declined--I see that I couldn't +have laughed at it to the confusion of my gentle neighbour. But I quite +recall my grasp of the _interest_ of our distinguished friends' +inaccessibility to the unattended plea, with the light it seemed to +throw on what it was really to _be_ attended. Never, never save as +attended--by presumptions, that is, far other than any then hanging +about one--would one so much as desire _not_ to be pushed out of sight. +I needn't attempt, however, to supply all the links in the chain of +association which led to my finally just qualified beatitude: I had been +served right enough in all conscience, but the pity was that Mrs. +Greville had been. This I never wanted for her; and I may add, in the +connection, that I discover now no grain of false humility in my having +enjoyed in my own person adorning such a tale. There was positively a +fine high thrill in thinking of persons--or at least of a person, for +any fact about Lewes was but derivative--engaged in my own pursuit and +yet detached, by what I conceived, detached by a pitch of intellectual +life, from all that made it actual to myself. _There_ was the lift of +contemplation, there the inspiring image and the big supporting truth; +the pitch of intellectual life in the very fact of which we seemed, my +hostess and I, to have caught our celebrities sitting in that queer +bleak way wouldn't have bullied me in the least if it hadn't been the +centre of such a circle of gorgeous creation. It was the fashion among +the profane in short either to misdoubt, before George Eliot's canvas, +the latter's backing of rich thought, or else to hold that this matter +of philosophy, and even if but of the philosophic vocabulary, thrust +itself through to the confounding of the picture. But with that thin +criticism I wasn't, as I have already intimated, to have a moment's +patience; I was to become, I was to remain--I take pleasure in +repeating--even a very Derondist of Derondists, for my own wanton joy: +which amounts to saying that I found the figured, coloured tapestry +_always_ vivid enough to brave no matter what complication of the +stitch. + + + + +VI + + +I take courage to confess moreover that I am carried further still by +the current on which Mrs. Greville, friend of the super-eminent, happens +to have launched me; for I can neither forbear a glance at one or two of +the other adventures promoted by her, nor in the least dissociate her +from that long aftertaste of them, such as they were, which I have +positively cultivated. I ask myself first, however, whether or no our +drive to Aldworth, on the noble height of Blackdown, had been preceded +by the couple of occasions in London on which I was to feel I saw the +Laureate most at his ease, yet on reflection concluding that the first +of these--and the fewest days must have separated them--formed my prime +introduction to the poet I had earliest known and best loved. The +revelational evening I speak of is peopled, to my memory, not a little, +yet with a confusedness out of which Tennyson's own presence doesn't at +all distinctly emerge; he was occupying a house in Eaton Place, as +appeared then his wont, for the earlier weeks of the spring, and I seem +to recover that I had "gone on" to it, after dining somewhere else, +under protection of my supremely kind old friend the late Lord Houghton, +to whom I was indebted in those years for a most promiscuous +befriending. He must have been of the party, and Mrs. Greville quite +independently must, since I catch again the vision of her, so +expansively and voluminously seated that she might fairly have been +couchant, so to say, for the proposed characteristic act--there was a +deliberation about it that precluded the idea of a spring; that, namely, +of addressing something of the Laureate's very own to the Laureate's +very face. Beyond the sense that he took these things with a gruff +philosophy--and could always repay them, on the spot, in +heavily-shovelled coin of the same mint, since it _was_ a question of +his genius--I gather in again no determined impression, unless it may +have been, as could only be probable, the effect of fond prefigurements +utterly blighted. + +The fond prefigurements of youthful piety are predestined more often +than not, I think, experience interfering, to strange and violent +shocks; from which no general appeal is conceivable save by the prompt +preclusion either of faith or of knowledge, a sad choice at the best. No +other such illustration recurs to me of the possible refusal of those +two conditions of an acquaintance to recognise each other at a given +hour as the silent crash of which I was to be conscious several years +later, in Paris, when placed in presence of M. Ernest Renan, from the +surpassing distinction of whose literary face, with its exquisite finish +of every feature, I had from far back extracted every sort of shining +gage, a presumption general and positive. Widely enough to sink all +interest--that was the dreadful thing--opened there the chasm between +the implied, as I had taken it, and the attested, as I had, at the first +blush, to take it; so that one was in fact scarce to know what might +have happened if interest hadn't by good fortune already reached such a +compass as to stick half way down the descent. What interest _can_ +survive becomes thus, surely, as much one of the lessons of life as the +number of ways in which it remains impossible. What comes up in face of +the shocks, as I have called them, is the question of a shift of every +supposition, a change of base under fire, as it were; which must take +place successfully if one's advance be not abandoned altogether. I +remember that I saw the Tennyson directly presented as just utterly +other than the Tennyson indirectly, and if the readjustment, for +acquaintance, was less difficult than it was to prove in the case of the +realised Renan the obligation to accept the difference--wholly as +difference and without reference to strict loss or gain--was like a rap +on the knuckles of a sweet superstition. Fine, fine, fine could he only +be--fine in the sense of that quality in the texture of his verse, which +had appealed all along by its most inward principle to one's taste, and +had by the same stroke shown with what a force of lyric energy and +sincerity the kind of beauty so engaged for could be associated. Was it +that I had preconceived him in that light as pale and penetrating, as +emphasising in every aspect the fact that he was fastidious? was it that +I had supposed him more fastidious than really _could_ have been--at the +best for that effect? was it that the grace of the man _couldn't_, by my +measure, but march somehow with the grace of the poet, given a +perfection of this grace? was it in fine that style of a particular +kind, when so highly developed, seemed logically to leave no room for +other quite contradictious kinds? These were considerations of which I +recall the pressure, at the same time that I fear I have no account of +them to give after they have fairly faced the full, the monstrous +demonstration that Tennyson was not Tennysonian. The desperate sequel to +that was that he thereby changed one's own state too, one's beguiled, +one's aesthetic; for what _could_ this strange apprehension do but reduce +the Tennysonian amount altogether? It dried up, to a certain extent, +that is, in my own vessel of sympathy--leaving me so to ask whether it +was before or after that I should take myself for the bigger fool. There +had been folly somewhere; yet let me add that once I recognised this, +once I felt the old fond pitch drop of itself, not alone inevitably, but +very soon quite conveniently and while I magnanimously granted that the +error had been mine and nobody's else at all, an odd prosaic +pleasantness set itself straight up, substitutionally, over the whole +ground, which it swept clear of every single premeditated effect. It +made one's perceptive condition purely profane, reduced it somehow to +having rather the excess of awkwardness than the excess of felicity to +reckon with; yet still again, as I say, enabled a compromise to work. + +The compromise in fact worked beautifully under my renewal of +impression--for which a second visit at Eaton Place offered occasion; +and this even though I had to interweave with the scene as best I might +a highly complicating influence. To speak of James Russell Lowell's +influence as above all complicating on any scene to the interest of +which he contributed may superficially seem a perverse appreciation of +it; and yet in the light of that truth only do I recover the full sense +of his value, his interest, the moving moral of his London adventure--to +find myself already bumping so straight against which gives me, I +confess, a sufficiently portentous shake. He comes in, as it were, by a +force not to be denied, as soon as I look at him again--as soon as I +find him for instance on the doorstep in Eaton Place at the hour of my +too approaching it for luncheon as he had just done. There he is, with +the whole question of him, at once before me, and literally superimposed +by that fact on any minor essence. I quake, positively, with the +apprehension of the commemorative dance he may lead me; but for the +moment, just here, I steady myself with an effort and go in with him to +his having the Laureate's personal acquaintance, by every symptom, and +rather to my surprise, all to make. Mrs. Tennyson's luncheon table was +an open feast, with places for possible when not assured guests; and no +one but the American Minister, scarce more than just installed, and his +extremely attached compatriot sat down at first with our gracious +hostess. The board considerably stretched, and after it had been +indicated to Lowell that he had best sit at the end near the window, +where the Bard would presently join him, I remained, near our hostess, +separated from him for some little time by an unpeopled waste. Hallam +came in all genially and auspiciously, yet only to brush us with his +blessing and say he was lunching elsewhere, and my wonder meanwhile hung +about the representative of my country, who, though partaking of offered +food, appeared doomed to disconnection from us. I may say at once that +my wonder was always unable _not_ to hang about this admired and +cherished friend when other persons, especially of the eminent order, +were concerned in the scene. The case was quite other for the unshared +relation, or when it was shared by one or other of three or four of our +common friends who had the gift of determining happily the pitch of +ease; suspense, not to say anxiety, as to the possible turn or drift of +the affair quite dropped--I rested then, we alike rested, I ever felt, +in a golden confidence. This last was so definitely not the note of my +attention to him, so far as I might indulge it, in the wider social +world, that I shall not scruple, occasion offering, to inquire into the +reasons of the difference. For I can only see the ghosts of my friends, +by this token, as "my" J. R. L. and whoever; which means that my +imagination, of the wanton life of which these remarks pretend but to +form the record, had appropriated them, under the prime contact--from +the moment the prime contact had successfully worked--once for all, and +contributed the light in which they were constantly exposed. + +Yes, delightful I shall undertake finding it, and perhaps even making +it, to read J. R. L.'s exposure back into _its_ light; which I in fact +see begin to shine for me more amply during those very minutes of our +wait for our distinguished host and even the several that followed the +latter's arrival and his seating himself opposite the unknown guest, +whose identity he had failed to grasp. Nothing, exactly, could have made +dear Lowell more "my" Lowell, as I have presumed to figure him, than the +stretch of uncertainty so supervening and which, in its form of silence +at first completely unbroken between the two poets, rapidly took on for +me monstrous proportions. I conversed with my gentle neighbour during +what seemed an eternity--really but hearing, as the minutes sped, all +that Tennyson didn't say to Lowell and all that Lowell wouldn't on any +such compulsion as that say to Tennyson. I like, however, to hang again +upon the hush--for the sweetness of the relief of its break by the fine +Tennysonian growl. I had never dreamed, no, of a growling Tennyson--I +had too utterly otherwise fantasticated; but no line of Locksley Hall +rolled out as I was to happen soon after to hear it, could have been +sweeter than the interrogative sound of "Do you know anything about +_Lowell_?" launched on the chance across the table and crowned at once +by Mrs. Tennyson's anxious quaver: "Why, my dear, this _is_ Mr. +Lowell!" The clearance took place successfully enough, and the +incident, I am quite aware, seems to shrink with it; in spite of which I +still cherish the reduced reminiscence for its connections: so far as my +vision of Lowell was concerned they began at that moment so to multiply. +A belated guest or two more came in, and I wish I could for my modesty's +sake refer to this circumstance alone the fact that nothing more of the +occasion survives for me save the intense but restricted glow of certain +instants, in another room, to which we had adjourned for smoking and +where my alarmed sense of the Bard's restriction to giving what he had +as a bard only became under a single turn of his hand a vision of quite +general munificence. Incredibly, inconceivably, he had _read_--and not +only read but admired, and not only admired but understandingly +referred; referred, time and some accident aiding, the appreciated +object, a short tale I had lately put forth, to its actually present +author, who could scarce believe his ears on hearing the thing +superlatively commended; pronounced, that is, by the illustrious +speaker, more to his taste than no matter what other like attempt. +Nothing would induce me to disclose the title of the piece, which has +little to do with the matter; my point is but in its having on the spot +been matter of pure romance to me that I was there and positively so +addressed. For it was a solution, the happiest in the world, and from +which I at once extracted enormities of pleasure: my relation to +whatever had bewildered me simply became perfect: the author of In +Memoriam had "liked" my own twenty pages, and his doing so was a gage of +his grace in which I felt I should rest forever--in which I have in fact +rested to this hour. My own basis of liking--such a blessed supersession +of all worryings and wonderings!--was accordingly established, and has +met every demand made of it. + +Greatest was to have been, I dare say, the demand to which I felt it +exposed by the drive over to Aldworth with Mrs. Greville which I noted +above and which took place, if I am not mistaken, on the morrow of our +drive to Witley. A different shade of confidence and comfort, I make +out, accompanied this experiment: I believed more, for reasons I shall +not now attempt to recover, in the furthermost maintenance of our flying +bridge, the final piers of which, it was indubitable, _had_ at Witley +given way. What could have been moreover less like G. H. Lewes's +valedictory hurl back upon us of the printed appeal in which I was +primarily concerned than that so recent and so directly opposed passage +of the Eaton Place smoking-room, thanks to which I could nurse a +certified security all along the road? I surrendered to security, I +perhaps even grossly took my ease in it; and I was to breathe from +beginning to end of our visit, which began with our sitting again at +luncheon, an air--so unlike that of Witley!--in which it seemed to me +frankly that nothing but the blest obvious, or at least the blest +outright, could so much as attempt to live. These elements hung sociably +and all auspiciously about us--it was a large and simple and almost +empty occasion; yet empty without embarrassment, rather as from a +certain high guardedness or defensiveness of situation, literally +indeed from the material, the local sublimity, the fact of our all +upliftedly hanging together over one of the grandest sweeps of view in +England. Remembered passages again people, however, in their proportion, +the excess of opportunity; each with that conclusive note of the +outright all unadorned. What could have partaken more of this quality +for instance than the question I was startled to hear launched before we +had left the table by the chance of Mrs. Greville's having happened to +mention in some connection one of her French relatives, Mademoiselle +Laure de Sade? It had fallen on my own ear--the mention at least +had--with a certain effect of unconscious provocation; but this was as +nothing to its effect on the ear of our host. "De Sade?" he at once +exclaimed with interest--and with the consequence, I may frankly add, of +my wondering almost to ecstasy, that is to the ecstasy of curiosity, to +what length he would proceed. He proceeded admirably--admirably for the +triumph of simplification--to the very greatest length imaginable, as +was signally promoted by the fact that clearly no one present, with a +single exception, recognised the name or the nature of the scandalous, +the long ignored, the at last all but unnameable author; least of all +the gentle relative of Mademoiselle Laure, who listened with the +blankest grace to her friend's enumeration of his titles to infamy, +among which that of his most notorious work was pronounced. It was the +homeliest, frankest, most domestic passage, as who should say, and most +remarkable for leaving none of us save myself, by my impression, in the +least embarrassed or bewildered; largely, I think, because of the +failure--a failure the most charmingly flat--of all measure on the part +of auditors and speaker alike of what might be intended or understood, +of what, in fine, the latter was talking about. + +He struck me in truth as neither knowing nor communicating knowledge, +and I recall how I felt this note in his own case to belong to that +general intimation with which the whole air was charged of the want of +proportion between the great spaces and reaches and echoes commanded, +the great eminence attained, and the quantity and variety of experience +supposable. So to discriminate was in a manner to put one's hand on the +key, and thereby to find one's self in presence of a rare and anomalous, +but still scarcely the less beautiful fact. The assured and achieved +conditions, the serenity, the security, the success, to put it vulgarly, +shone in the light of their easiest law--that by which they emerge early +from the complication of life, the great adventure of sensibility, and +find themselves determined once for all, fortunately fixed, all +consecrated and consecrating. If I should speak of this impression as +that of glory without history, that of the poetic character more worn +than paid for, or at least more saved than spent, I should doubtless +much over-emphasise; but such, or something like it, was none the less +the explanation that met one's own fond fancy of the scene after one had +cast about for it. For I allow myself thus to repeat that I was so moved +to cast about, and perhaps at no moment more than during the friendly +analysis of the reputation of M. de Sade. Was I not present at some +undreamed-of demonstration of the absence of the remoter real, the real +other than immediate and exquisite, other than guaranteed and enclosed, +in landscape, friendship, fame, above all in consciousness of awaited +and admired and self-consistent inspiration? + +The question was indeed to be effectively answered for me, and +everything meanwhile continued to play into this prevision--even to the +pleasant growling note heard behind me, as the Bard followed with Mrs. +Greville, who had permitted herself apparently some mild extravagance of +homage: "Oh yes, you may do what you like--so long as you don't kiss me +before the cabman!" The allusion was explained for us, if I remember--a +matter of some more or less recent leave-taking of admirer and admired +in London on his putting her down at her door after being taken to the +play or wherever; between the rugged humour of which reference and the +other just commemorated there wasn't a pin to choose, it struck me, for +a certain old-time Lincolnshire ease or comfortable stay-at-home +license. But it was later on, when, my introductress having accompanied +us, I sat upstairs with him in his study, that he might read to us some +poem of his own that we should venture to propose, it was then that +mystifications dropped, that everything in the least dislocated fell +into its place, and that image and picture stamped themselves strongly +and finally, or to the point even, as I recover it, of leaving me almost +too little to wonder about. He had not got a third of the way through +Locksley Hall, which, my choice given me, I had made bold to suggest he +should spout--for I had already heard him spout in Eaton Place--before I +had begun to wonder that I didn't wonder, didn't at least wonder more +consumedly; as a very little while back I should have made sure of my +doing on any such prodigious occasion. I sat at one of the windows that +hung over space, noting how the windy, watery autumn day, sometimes +sheeting it all with rain, called up the dreary, dreary moorland or the +long dun wolds; I pinched myself for the determination of my identity +and hung on the reader's deep-voiced chant for the credibility of his: I +asked myself in fine why, in complete deviation from everything that +would have seemed from far back certain for the case, I failed to swoon +away under the heaviest pressure I had doubtless ever known the romantic +situation bring to bear. So lucidly all the while I considered, so +detachedly I judged, so dissentingly, to tell the whole truth, I +listened; pinching myself, as I say, not at all to keep from swooning, +but much rather to set up some rush of sensibility. It was all +interesting, it was at least all odd; but why in the name of poetic +justice had one anciently heaved and flushed with one's own recital of +the splendid stuff if one was now only to sigh in secret "Oh dear, oh +dear"? The author lowered the whole pitch, that of expression, that of +interpretation above all; I heard him, in cool surprise, take even more +out of his verse than he had put in, and so bring me back to the point I +had immediately and privately made, the point that he wasn't +Tennysonian. I felt him as he went on and on lose that character beyond +repair, and no effect of the organ-roll, of monotonous majesty, no +suggestion of the long echo, availed at all to save it. What the case +came to for me, I take it--and by the case I mean the intellectual, the +artistic--was that it lacked the intelligence, the play of +discrimination, I should have taken for granted in it, and thereby, +brooding monster that I was, born to discriminate _a tout propos_, +lacked the interest. + +Detached I have mentioned that I had become, and it was doubtless at +such a rate high time for that; though I hasten to repeat that with the +close of the incident I was happily able to feel a new sense in the +whole connection established. My critical reaction hadn't in the least +invalidated our great man's being a Bard--it had in fact made him and +left him more a Bard than ever: it had only settled to my perception as +not before what a Bard might and mightn't be. The character was just a +rigid idiosyncrasy, to which everything in the man conformed, but which +supplied nothing outside of itself, and which above all was not +intellectually wasteful or heterogeneous, conscious as it could only be +of its intrinsic breadth and weight. On two or three occasions of the +aftertime I was to hear Browning read out certain of his finest pages, +and this exactly with all the exhibition of point and authority, the +expressive particularisation, so to speak, that I had missed on the part +of the Laureate; an observation through which the author of Men and +Women appeared, in spite of the beauty and force of his demonstration, +as little as possible a Bard. He particularised if ever a man did, was +heterogeneous and profane, composed of pieces and patches that betrayed +some creak of joints, and addicted to the excursions from which these +were brought home; so that he had to _prove_ himself a poet, almost +against all presumptions, and with all the assurance and all the +character he could use. Was not this last in especial, the character, so +close to the surface, with which Browning fairly bristled, what was most +to come out in his personal delivery of the fruit of his genius? It +came out almost to harshness; but the result was that what he read +showed extraordinary life. During that audition at Aldworth the question +seemed on the contrary not of life at all--save, that is, of one's own; +which was exactly not the question. With all the resonance of the chant, +the whole thing was yet _still_, with all the long swing of its motion +it yet remained where it was--heaving doubtless grandly enough up and +down and beautiful to watch as through the superposed veils of its long +self-consciousness. By all of which I don't mean to say that I was not, +on the day at Aldworth, thoroughly reconciled to learning what a Bard +consisted of; for that came as soon as I had swallowed my own +mistake--the mistake of having supposed Tennyson something subtly other +than one. I had supposed, probably, such an impossibility, had, to +repeat my term, so absurdly fantasticated, that the long journey round +and about the truth no more than served me right; just as after all it +at last left me quite content. + + + + +VII + + +It left me moreover, I become aware--or at least it now leaves +me--fingering the loose ends of this particular free stretch of my +tapestry; so that, with my perhaps even extravagant aversion to loose +ends, I can but try for a moment to interweave them. There dangles again +for me least confusedly, I think, the vision of a dinner at Mrs. +Greville's--and I like even to remember that Cadogan Place, where +memories hang thick for me, was the scene of it--which took its light +from the presence of Louisa Lady Waterford, who took hers in turn from +that combination of rare beauty with rare talent which the previous +Victorian age had for many years not ceased to acclaim. It insists on +coming back to me with the utmost vividness that Lady Waterford was +illustrational, historically, preciously so, meeting one's largest +demand for the blest recovery, when possible, of some glimmer of the +sense of personal beauty, to say nothing of personal "accomplishment," +as our fathers were appointed to enjoy it. Scarce to be sated that form +of wonder, to my own imagination, I confess--so that I fairly believe +there was no moment at which I wouldn't have been ready to turn my back +for the time even on the most triumphant actuality of form and feature +if a chance apprehension of a like force as it played on the sensibility +of the past had competed. And this for a reason I fear I can scarce +explain--unless, when I come to consider it, by the perversity of a +conviction that the conditions of beauty have improved, though those of +character, in the fine old sense, may not, and that with these the +measure of it is more just, the appreciation, as who should say, more +competent and the effect more completely attained. + +What the question seems thus to come to would be a consuming curiosity +as to any cited old case of the spell in the very interest of one's +catching it comparatively "out"; in the interest positively of the +likelihood of one's doing so, and this in the face of so many great +testifying portraits. My private perversity, as I here glance at it, has +had its difficulties--most of all possibly that of one's addiction, in +growing older, to allowing a supreme force to one's earlier, even one's +earliest, estimates of physical felicity; or in other words that of the +felt impulse to leave the palm for good looks to those who have reached +out to it through the medium of our own history. If the conditions +_grow_ better for them why then should we have almost the habit of +thinking better of our handsome folk dead than of our living?--and even +to the very point of not resenting on the part of others similarly +affected the wail of wonder as to what has strangely "become" of the +happy types _d'antan_. I dodge that inquiry just now--we may meet it +again; noting simply the fact that "old" pretenders to the particular +crown I speak of--and in the sense especially of the pretension made +rather for than by them--offered to my eyes a greater interest than the +new, whom I was ready enough to take for granted, as one for the most +part easily could; belonging as it exactly did on the other hand to the +interest of their elders that _this_ couldn't be so taken. That was just +the attraction of the latter claim--that the grounds of it had to be +made out, puzzled out verily on occasion, but that when they were +recognised they had a force all their own. One would have liked to be +able to clear the distinction between the new and the old of all +ambiguity--explain, that is, how little the superficially invidious term +was sometimes noted as having in common with the elderly: so much was it +a clear light held up to the question that truly beautiful persons might +be old without being elderly. Their juniors couldn't be new, +unfortunately, without being youthful--unfortunately because the fact of +youth, so far from dispelling ambiguity, positively introduced it. One +made up one's mind thus that the only sure specimens were, and had to +be, those acquainted with time, and with whom time, on its side, was +acquainted; those in fine who had borne the test and still looked at it +face to face. These were of one's own period of course--one looked at +_them_ face to, face; one blessedly hadn't to consider them by hearsay +or to refer to any portrait of them for proof: indeed in presence of the +resisting, the gained, cases one found one's self practically averse to +old facts or old traditions of portraiture, accompanied by no matter +what names. + +All of which leads by an avenue I trust not unduly majestic up to that +hour of contemplation during which I could see quite enough for the +major interest what was meant by Lady Waterford's great reputation. +Nothing could in fact have been more informing than so to see what was +meant, than so copiously to share with admirers who had had their vision +and passed on; for if I spoke above of her image as illustrational this +is because it affected me on the spot as so diffusing information. My +impression was of course but the old story--to which my reader will feel +himself treated, I fear, to satiety: when once I had drawn the curtain +for the light shed by this or that or the other personal presence upon +the society more or less intimately concerned in producing it the last +thing I could think of was to darken the scene again. For this right or +this wrong reason then Mrs. Greville's admirable guest struck me as +flooding it; indebted in the highest degree to every art by which a +commended appearance may have formed the habit of still suggesting +commendation, she certainly--to my imagination at least--triumphed over +time in the sense that if the years, in their generosity, went on +helping her to live, her grace returned the favour by paying life back +to them. I mean that she reanimated for the fond analyst the age in +which persons of her type could so greatly flourish--it being ever so +pertinently of her type, or at least of that of the age, that she was +regarded as having cast the spell of genius as well as of beauty. She +painted, and on the largest scale, with all confidence and facility, and +nothing could have contributed more, by my sense, to what I glance at +again as her illustrational value than the apparently widespread +appreciation of this fact--taken together, that is, with one's own +impression of the work of her hand. There it was that, like Mrs. +Greville herself, yet in a still higher degree, she bore witness to the +fine old felicity of the fortunate and the "great" under the "old" order +which would have made it so good then to live could one but have been in +their shoes. She determined in me, I remember, a renewed perception of +the old order, a renewed insistence on one's having come just in time to +see it begin to stretch back: a little earlier one wouldn't have had the +light for this perhaps, and a little later it would have receded too +much. + +The precious persons, the surviving figures, who held up, as I may call +it, the light were still here and there to be met; my sense being that +the last of them, at least for any vision of mine, has now quite gone +and that illustration--not to let that term slip--accordingly fails. We +all now illustrate together, in higgledy-piggledy fashion, or as a vast +monotonous mob, our own wonderful period and order, and nothing else; +whereby the historic imagination, under its acuter need of facing +backward, gropes before it with a vain gesture, missing, or all but +missing, the concrete _other_, always other, specimen which has volumes +to give where hearsay has only snippets. The old, as we call it, I +recognise, doesn't disappear all at once; the _ancien regime_ of our +commonest reference survived the Revolution of our most horrific in +patches and scraps, and I bring myself to say that even at my present +writing I am aware of more than one individual on the scene about me +touched _comparatively_ with the elder grace. (I think of the difference +between these persons and so nearly all other persons as a grace for +reasons that become perfectly clear in the immediate presence of the +former, but of which a generalising account is difficult.) None the less +it used to be one of the finest of pleasures to acclaim and cherish, in +case of meeting them, one and another of the _complete_ examples of the +conditions irrecoverable, even if, as I have already noted, they were +themselves least intelligently conscious of these; and for the enjoyment +of that critical emotion to draw one's own wanton line between the past +and the present. The happy effect of such apparitions as Lady +Waterford, to whom I thus undisseverably cling, though I might give her +after all much like company, was that they made one draw it just where +they might most profit from it. They profited in that they recruited my +group of the fatuously fortunate, the class, as I seemed to see it, that +had had the longest and happiest innings in history--happier and longer, +on the whole, even than their congeners of the old French time--and for +whom the future wasn't going to be, by most signs, anything like as +bland and benedictory as the past. They placed _themselves_ in the right +perspective for appreciation, and did it quite without knowing, which +was half the interest; did it simply by showing themselves with all the +right grace and the right assurance. It was as if they had come up to +the very edge of the ground that was going to begin to fail them; yet +looking over it, looking on and on always, with a confidence still +unalarmed. One would have turned away certainly from the sight of any +actual catastrophe, wouldn't have watched the ground nearly fail, in a +particular case, without a sense of gross indelicacy. I can scarcely +say how vivid I felt the drama so preparing might become--that of the +lapse of immemorial protection, that of the finally complete exposure of +the immemorially protected. It might take place rather more intensely +before the footlights of one's inner vision than on the trodden stage of +Cadogan Place or wherever, but it corresponded none the less to +realities all the while in course of enactment and which only wanted the +attentive enough spectator. Nothing should I evermore see comparable to +the large fond consensus of admiration enjoyed by my beatific +fellow-guest's imputed command of the very palette of the Venetian and +other masters--Titian's, Bonifazio's, Rubens's, where did the delightful +agreement on the subject stop? and never again should a noble lady be +lifted so still further aloft on the ecstatic breath of connoisseurship. + +This last consciousness, confirming my impression of a climax that could +only decline, didn't break upon me all at once but spread itself through +a couple of subsequent occasions into which my remembrance of the +dinner at Mrs. Greville's was richly to play. The first of these was a +visit to an exhibition of Lady Waterford's paintings held, in Carlton +House Terrace, under the roof of a friend of the artist, and, as it +enriched the hour also to be able to feel, a friend, one of the most +generously gracious, of my own; during which the reflection that "they" +had indeed had their innings, and were still splendidly using for the +purpose the very fag-end of the waning time, mixed itself for me with +all the "wonderful colour" framed and arrayed, that blazed from the +walls of the kindly great room, lent for the advantage of a charity, and +lost itself in the general chorus of immense comparison and tender +consecration. Later on a few days spent at a house of the greatest +beauty and interest in Northumberland did wonders to round off my view; +the place, occupied for the time by genial tenants, belonged to the +family of Lady Waterford's husband and fairly bristled, it might be +said, with coloured designs from her brush.... + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Middle Years, by Henry James + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MIDDLE YEARS *** + +***** This file should be named 32649.txt or 32649.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/3/2/6/4/32649/ + +Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was +produced from scanned images of public domain material +from the Google Print project.) + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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