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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 æsthetic, 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 æsthetic 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 æsthetic 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 æsthetic, 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 æsthetic; 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 _à 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....