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.