With which mild memories thus stands out for me too the lively
importance, that winter, of the arrival, from the first number, of the
orange-covered earlier Cornhill--the thrill of each composing item of
that first number especially recoverable in its intensity. Is anything
like that thrill possible to-day--for a submerged and blinded and
deafened generation, a generation so smothered in quantity and number
that discrimination, under the gasp, has neither air to breathe nor room
to turn round? Has any like circumstance now conceivably the value, to
the charmed attention, so far as anything worth naming attention, or any
charm for it, is anywhere left, of the fact that Trollope's Framley
Parsonage there began?--let alone the still other fact that the
Roundabout Papers did and that Thackeray thus appeared to us to
guarantee personally, intimately, with a present audibility that was as
the accent of good company, the new relation with him and with others of
company not much worse, as they then seemed, that such a medium could
establish. To speak of these things, in truth, however, is to feel the
advantage of being able to live back into the time of the more sovereign
periodical appearances much of a compensation for any reduced prospect
of living forward. For these appearances, these strong time-marks in
such stretches of production as that of Dickens, that of Thackeray, that
of George Eliot, had in the first place simply a genial weight and
force, a direct importance, and in the second a command of the permeable
air and the collective sensibility, with which nothing since has begun
to deserve comparison. They were enrichments of life, they were _large_
arrivals, these particular renewals of supply--to which, frankly, I am
moved to add, the early Cornhill giving me a pretext, even the frequent
examples of Anthony Trollope's fine middle period, looked at in the
light of old affection and that of his great heavy shovelfuls of
testimony to constituted English matters; a testimony of course looser
and thinner than Balzac's to _his_ range of facts, but charged with
something of the big Balzac authority. These various, let alone
numerous, deeper-toned strokes of the great Victorian clock were so many
steps in the march of our age, besides being so many notes, full and
far-reverberating, of our having high company to keep--high, I mean, to
cover all the ground, in the sense of the genial pitch of it. So it was,
I remember too, that our parents spoke of their memory of the successive
surpassing attestations of the contemporary presence of Scott; to which
we might have replied, and doubtless after no great space began to
reply, that our state, and even their later one, allowing for a certain
gap, had nothing to envy any other. I witnessed, for that matter, with
all my senses, young as I was, the never-to-be-equalled degree of
difference made, for what may really be called the world-consciousness
happily exposed to it, by the prolonged "coming-out" of The Newcomes,
yellow number by number, and could take the general civilised
participation in the process for a sort of basking in the light of
distinction. The process repeated itself for some years under other
forms and stimuli, but the merciless change was to come--so that through
whatever bristling mazes we may now pick our way it is not to find them
open into any such vales of Arcady. My claim for our old privilege is
that we did then, with our pace of dignity, proceed from vale to vale.