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....