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.