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.