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 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 HENRY W. SAGE 
 
 1891 
 
 FU^D 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PS 2120.M62 1917 
 
 The middle years, 
 
The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022425692 
 
By henry JAMES 
 
 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 
 
 NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER 
 
 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 
 WITH SOME OTHER NOTES 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
THE 
 MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY JAMES 
 
 NEW YORK 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1917 
 
 .1 
 
PS 
 Kt3u 
 
 \^17 
 
 COPTBIGHT, 1917, BY 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 Published November, 1917 
 
EDITOR'S NOTE 
 
 The follovnng pages represent all that Henry James 
 lived to write of a volume of autobiographical reminis- 
 cences to which he had given the name of one of his own 
 short stories. The Middle Years. It was designed to 
 follow on Notes of a Son and Brother and to extend to 
 about the same length. The chapters here printed were 
 dictated during the autumn of 1914- They were laid 
 aside for other work toward the end of the year and were 
 not revised by the author. A few quite evident slips have 
 been corrected and the marking of the paragraphs — which 
 he usually deferred till the final revision — has been com- 
 pleted. 
 
 In dictating The Middle Years he v^ed no notes, 
 
 and beyond an allusion or two in the unfinished volume 
 
 itself there is no indication of the course which the book 
 
 would have taken or the precise period it was intended 
 
 to cover. 
 
 PERCY LUBBOCK. 
 
TF the author of this meandering record has 
 ■*■ noted elsewhere^ that an event occurring 
 early in 1870 was to mark the end of his 
 youth, he is moved here at once to quaUfy 
 in one or two respects that emphasis. Every- 
 thing depends in such a view on what one 
 means by one's youth — ^so shifting a con- 
 sciousness is this, and so related at the same 
 time to many different matters. We are 
 never old, that is we never cease easily to 
 be young, for all life at the same time: youth 
 is an army, the whole battalion of our facul- 
 ties and our freshnesses, our passions and 
 our illusions, on a considerably reluctant 
 march into the enemy's country, the country 
 of the general lost freshness; and I think it 
 throws out at least as many stragglers be- 
 hind as skirmishers ahead — stragglers who 
 often catch up but belatedly with the main 
 body, and even in many a case never catch 
 
 ' " Notes of a Son and Brother," 1914. 
 1 
 
2 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 up at all. Or under another figure it is a 
 book in several volumes, and even at this a 
 mere instalment of the large Hbrary of life, 
 with a volume here and there closing, as 
 something in the clap of its covers may assure 
 us, while another remains either completely 
 agape or kept open by a fond finger thrust 
 in between the leaves. A volume, and a 
 most substantial, had felt its pages very 
 gravely pressed together before the winter's 
 end that I have spoken of, but a restriction 
 may still bear, and blessedly enough, as I 
 gather from memory, on my sense of the 
 whole year then terminated — a year seen by 
 me now in the Hght of agitations, explorations, 
 initiations (I scarce know how endearingly 
 enough to name them!) which I should call 
 fairly infantine in their indifference to pro- 
 portions and aims, had they not still more 
 left with me effects and possessions that 
 even yet lend themselves to estimation. 
 
 It was at any rate impossible to have been 
 younger, in spite of whatever inevitable sub- 
 missions to the rather violent push forward 
 at certain particular points and on fines 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 3 
 
 corresponding with them, than I found my- 
 self, from the first day of March 1869, in 
 the face of an opportunity that affected me 
 then and there as the happiest, the most 
 interesting, the most alluring and beguihng, 
 that could ever have opened before a some- 
 what disabled young man who was about to 
 complete his twenty-sixth year. Treasures 
 of susceptibiUty, treasures not only uncon- 
 scious of the remotest approach to exhaustion, 
 but, given the dazzUng possibiUties, posi- 
 tively and ideally intact, I now recognise — 
 I in fact long ago recognised — on the part 
 of that intensely "reacting" small organism; 
 which couldn't have been in higher spirits 
 or made more inward fuss about the matter 
 if it had come into a property measured not 
 by mere impressions and visions, occasions 
 for play of perception and imagination, mind 
 and soul, but by dollars and "shares," lands 
 and houses or flocks and herds. It is to the 
 account of that immense fantastication that 
 I set down a state of mind so out of propor- 
 tion to anything it could point to round 
 about save by the vaguest of fooUsh-looking 
 
4 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 gestures; and it would perhaps in truth be 
 hard to say whether in the mixture of spirit 
 and sense so determined the fact of innocence 
 or that of intelUgence most prevailed. I 
 like to recover this really prodigious flush — 
 as my reader, clearly, must pterceive I do; 
 I Uke fairly to hang about a particular small 
 hour of that momentous March day — which 
 I have glanced at too, I beUeve, on some 
 other and less separated page than this — ^for 
 the sake of the extraordinary gage of experi- 
 ence that it seemed on the spot to oflfer, and 
 that I had but to take straight up: my Ufe, 
 on so complacently near a view as I now 
 treat myself to, having veritably consisted 
 but in the prolongation of that act. I took 
 up the gage, and as I look back the fullest 
 as well as simplest account of the interval 
 till now strikes me as being that I have never, 
 in common honour, let it drop again. And 
 the small horn* was just that of my having 
 landed at Liverpool in the gusty, cloudy, 
 overwhelmingly English morning and pur- 
 sued, with immediate intensities of appreci- 
 ation, as I may call the muflBed accompani- 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 5 
 
 ment for fear of almost indecently ovemaming 
 it, a course which had seated me at a late 
 breakfast in the coffee-room of the old Adelphi 
 Hotel ("Radley's," as I had to deplore its 
 lately having ceased to be dubbed,) and 
 handed me over without a scruple to my 
 fate. This doom of inordinate exposure to 
 appearances, aspects, images, every protru- 
 sive item almost, in the great beheld sum of 
 things, I regard in other words as having 
 settled upon me once for all while I observed 
 for instance that in England the plate of 
 buttered muffin and its cover were sacredly 
 set upon the slop-bowl after hot water had 
 been ingenuously poured into the same, and 
 had seen that circumstance in a perfect cloud 
 of accompaniments. I must have had with 
 my tea and my muffin a boiled egg or two 
 and a dab of marmalade, but it was from a 
 far other store of condiments I most liberally 
 helped myself. I was lucidly aware of so 
 gorging — esoterically, as it were, while I 
 drew out the gustatory process; and I must 
 have said in that lost reference to this scene 
 of my dedication which , I mentioned above 
 
6 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 that I was again and again in the aftertime 
 to win back the homeliest notes of the im- 
 pression, the damp and darksome light washed 
 in from the steep, black, bricky street, the 
 crackle of the strong draught of the British 
 "sea-coal" fire, much more confident of its 
 function, I thought, than the fires I had left, 
 the rustle of the thick, stiff, loudly unfolded 
 and refolded "Times," the incomparable 
 truth to type of the waiter, truth to history, 
 to literature, to poetry, to Dickens, to 
 Thackeray, positively to Smollett and to 
 Hogarth, to every connection that could help 
 me to appropriate him and his setting, an 
 arrangement of things hanging together with 
 a romantic Tightness that had the force of a 
 revelation. 
 
 To what end appropriation became thus 
 eager and romance thus easy one could have 
 asked one's self only if the idea of connecti- 
 biUty as stretching away and away hadn't of 
 a sudden taken on such a wealth of sugges- 
 tion; it represented at once a chain stretch- 
 ing off to heaven knew where, but far into 
 one's future at least, one's possibilities of 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 7 
 
 life, and every link and pulse of which it 
 was going accordingly to be indispensable, 
 besides being delightful and wonderful, to 
 recognise. Recognition, I dare say, was 
 what remained, through the adventure of 
 the months to come, the Uveliest principle 
 at work; both as bearing on the already 
 known, on things unforgotten and of a sense 
 intensely cultivated and cherished from my 
 younger time, and on the imagined, the un- 
 imagined and the unimaginable, a quantity 
 that divided itself somehow into the double 
 muster of its elements, an endless vista or 
 waiting array, down the middle of which I 
 should inconceivably pass — ^inconceivably 
 save for being sure of some thrilled arrest, 
 some exchange of assurance and response, 
 at every step. Obviously half the charm, 
 as I can but thinly describe it, of the sub- 
 stantially continuous experience the first 
 passages of which I thus note was in the 
 fact that, immensely moved by it as I was, 
 and having so to deal with it — ^in the antic- 
 ipatory way or to the whatevers and wher- 
 evers and whenevers within me that should 
 
8 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 find it in order — I yet felt it in no degree as 
 strange or obscure, baflfling or unrecognising 
 on its own side; everything was so far from 
 impenetrable that my most general notion was 
 the very ecstasy of imderstanding and that 
 really wherever I looked, and still more wher- 
 ever I pressed, I sank in and in up to my nose. 
 This in particular was of the perfect felicity, 
 that while the fact of difference all round 
 me was inunense the embarrassment of it 
 was nil — as if the getting into relation with 
 the least waste had been prepared from so 
 far back that a sort of divine economy now 
 fairly ruled. It was doubtless a part of the 
 total fatuity, and perhaps its sublimest mark, 
 that I knew what everything meant, not 
 simply then but for weeks and months after, 
 and was to know less only with increase of 
 knowledge. That must indeed have been of 
 the essence of the general effect and the 
 particular felicity — only not grotesque be- 
 cause, for want of occasion, not immediately 
 exhibited: a consciousness not other than 
 that of a person abruptly introduced into a 
 preoccupied and animated circle and yet so 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 9 
 
 miraculously aware of the matters conversed 
 about as to need no word of explanation 
 before joining in. To say of such a person 
 that he hadn't lost time would, I knew, be 
 feebly to express his advantage; my likeness 
 to him, at any rate, probably fell short of 
 an absurd one through the chapter of acci- 
 dents, mostly of the happiest in their way 
 too, which, restraining the personal impulse 
 for me, kept appearances and pretensions 
 down. The feast, as it more and more opened 
 out, was all of the objective, as we have 
 learned so comfortably to say; or at least of 
 its convenient opposite only in so far as this 
 undertook to interpret it for myself alone. 
 
 To return at all across the years to the 
 gates of the paradise of the first larger initia- 
 tions is to be ever so tempted to pass them, 
 to push in again and breathe the air of this, 
 that and the other plot of rising ground par- 
 ticularly associated, for memory and grat- 
 itude, with the quickening process. The 
 trouble is that with these sacred spots, to 
 later appreciation, the garden of youth is 
 apt inordinately to bristle, and that one's 
 
10 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 account of them has to shake them together 
 fairly hard, making a coherent thing of them, 
 to profit by the contribution of each. In 
 speaking of my earliest renewal of the vision 
 of Europe, if I may give so grand a name to 
 a scarce more than merely enlarged and up- 
 lifted gape, I have, I confess, truly to jerk 
 myself over the ground, to wrench myself 
 with violence from memories and images, 
 stages and phases and branching arms, that 
 catch and hold me as I pass them by. Such 
 a matter as my recovery of contact with 
 London for a few weeks, the contact broken 
 off some nine years before, lays so many 
 plausible traps for me that discretion half 
 warns me to stand off the groimd and walk 
 round it altogether. I stop my ears to the 
 advice, however, under the pleading reminder 
 that just those days began a business for me 
 that was to go ever so much further than I 
 then dreamed and planted a seed that was, 
 by my own measure, singularly to sprout 
 and flourish — ^the harvest of which, I almost 
 permit myself to beheve, has even yet not 
 all been gathered. I foresee moreover how 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 11 
 
 little I shall be able to resist, throughout 
 these Notes, the force of persuasion expressed 
 in the individual vivid image of the past wher- 
 ever encountered, these images having al- 
 ways such terms of their own, such subtle 
 secrets and insidious arts for keeping us in 
 relation with them, for bribing us by the 
 beauty, the authority, the wonder of their 
 saved intensity. They have saved it, they 
 seem to say to us, from such a welter of death 
 and darkness and ruin that this alone makes 
 a value and a Ught and a dignity for them, 
 something indeed of an argmnent that our 
 story, since we attempt to tell one, has lapses 
 and gaps without them. Not to be denied 
 also, over and above this, is the downright 
 pleasure of the illusion yet again created, 
 the apparent transfer from the past to the 
 present of the particular combination of 
 things that did at its hour ever so directly 
 operate and that isn't after all then drained 
 of virtue, wholly wasted and lost, for sensa- 
 tion, for participation in the act of life, in 
 the attesting sights, sounds, smells, the il- 
 lusion, as I say, of the recording senses. 
 
12 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 What began, during the springtime of my 
 actual reference, in a couple of dusky groimd- 
 floor rooms at number 7 Half-Moon Street, 
 was simply an establishment all in a few days 
 of a personal relation with London that was 
 not of course measurable at the moment — I 
 saw in my bedazzled state of comparative 
 freedom too many other relations ahead, a 
 fairly intoxicated vision of choice and range 
 — ^but that none the less set going a more 
 intimately inner consciousness, a wheel within 
 the wheels, and led to my departing, the 
 actual, the general incident closed, in pos- 
 session of a return-ticket "good," as we 
 say, for a longer interval than I could then 
 dream about, and that the first really earnest 
 fumble of after years brought surprisingly to 
 hght. I think it must have been the very 
 proportions themselves of the invitation and 
 the interest that kept down, under the im- 
 mense impression, everything in the nature 
 of calculation and presumption; dark, huge 
 and prodigious the other party to our rela- 
 tion, London's and mine, as I called it, loomed 
 and spread — much too mighty a Goliath for 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 13 
 
 the present in any conceivable ambition even 
 of a fast-growing David. My earlier appre- 
 hension, fed at the season as from a thousand 
 outstretched silver spoons — ^for these all shone 
 to me with that effect of the handsomest 
 hospitaUty — spiled up the monster to such a 
 height that I could somehow only fear him 
 as much as I admired and that his propor- 
 tions in fact reached away quite beyond my 
 expectation. He was always the great figure 
 of London, and I was for no small time, as 
 the years followed, to be kept at my awe- 
 struck distance for taking him on that sort 
 of trust: I had crept about his ankles, I had 
 glanced adventurously up at his knees, and 
 wasn't the moral for the most part the mere 
 question of whether I should ever be big 
 enough to so much as guess where he stopped ? 
 Odd enough was it, I make out, that I 
 was to feel no wonder of that kind or degree 
 play in the coming time over such other social 
 aspects, such superficially more colourable 
 scenes as I paid, in repetition as frequent as 
 possible, my respects and my compHments 
 to: they might meet me with wreathed 
 
14 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 smiles and splendid promises and deep divina- 
 tions of my own desire, a thousand graces 
 and gages, in fine, that I couldn't pretend 
 to have picked up within the circle, however 
 experimentally widened, of which Half -Moon 
 Street was the centre, and nothing therefore 
 could have exceeded the splendour of these 
 successive and multipUed assurances. What 
 it none the less infinitely beguiles me to recog- 
 nise to-day is that such exhibitions, for all 
 their greater direct radiance, and still more 
 for all their general impUcation of a store of 
 meaning and mystery and beauty that they 
 alone, from example to example, from prodigy 
 to prodigy, had to open out, left me com- 
 paratively little crushed by the impression 
 of their concerning me further than my own 
 action perhaps could make good. It was as 
 if I had seen that all there was for me of these 
 great things I should sooner or later take; 
 the amount would be immense, yet, as who 
 should say, all on the same plane and the 
 same connection, the aesthetic, the "artistic," 
 the romantic in the looser sense, or in other 
 words in the air of the passions of the Intel- 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 15 
 
 ligence. What other passions of a deeper 
 strain, whether personal or racial, and there- 
 by more superstitiously importunate, I must 
 have felt involved in the question of an effec- 
 tive experience of EngUsh life I was doubtless 
 then altogether unprepared to say; it prob- 
 ably came, however, I seem actually to make 
 out, very much to this particular percep- 
 tion, exactly, that any penetration of the 
 London scene would be experience after a 
 fashion that an exercise of one's "mere in- 
 tellectual curiosity" wherever else wouldn't 
 begin to represent, glittering as the rewards 
 to such curiosity amid alien peoples of genius 
 might thoroughly appear. On the other 
 hand it was of course going to be nothing 
 less than a superlative help that one would 
 have but to reach out straight and in the 
 full measure of one's passion for these rewards, 
 to find one's self carried all the way by one's 
 active, one's contemplative concern with them 
 — this delightful affair, fraught with increase 
 of hght, of joy and wonder, of possibiUties 
 of adventure for the mind, in fine, inevitably 
 exhausting the relation. 
 
II 
 
 LET. me not here withal appear to pretend 
 ■^ to say how far I then foresaw myself 
 Ukely to proceed, as it were, with the inimi- 
 table 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 compUca- 
 tions 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 
 
 16 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 17 
 
 mere perfection put me up to much of what 
 I should most confidently look for, and that 
 the right lines of observation and enjoy- 
 ment, 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 sug- 
 gestion — ^aware as I now encourage myself 
 to become that the first note of the num- 
 berless 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 Cimiberland (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 
 
18 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 forth from Morley's Hotel in Trafalgar Square 
 to dine at a house of sustaining, of inspiring 
 hospitality in the Kensington quarter. Suc- 
 cumbing 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 Uke 
 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 con- 
 sequence 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 dif- 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 19 
 
 ferences, that I cultivate a free fancy for 
 pronouncing advantageous to it: sunk al- 
 ready was the shaft by which I should descend 
 into the years, and my inspiration is in touch- 
 ing 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 ob- 
 servation and submission at play on the far 
 side of it; I make it fall into the right per- 
 spective, 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 
 diflFered so from those of all the foreign to- 
 gether as to present throughout the straight 
 contradiction to them. That straight con- 
 tradiction, testifying invaluably at every 
 turn, had been from far back the thing, ro- 
 mantically speaking, to clutch and keep the 
 
20 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 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 — ^interest- 
 ing ever in every case by instituting com- 
 parisons, sticking on the contrary to their 
 true instinct and suggesting only contrast. 
 They were the opposite, the assured, the ab- 
 solute, the unashamed, in respect to what- 
 ever might be of a generally similar inten- 
 tion elsewhere: this was their dignity, their 
 beauty and their strength — to look back on 
 which is to wonder if one didn't quite con- 
 sciously 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 dis- 
 concertments, 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 some- 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 21 
 
 how 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, Ught 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 
 
22 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 taken place in quantity, immeasurable 
 quantity, so to speak, and a great stir-up 
 of the imagination been incurred. Un- 
 doubtedly 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 appear- 
 ances 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 — accom- 
 modation to anything but her portentous 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 23 
 
 self, for in that connection she was ever re- 
 markable; and certainly the air of the gen- 
 eralised, the emulous smart modem capital 
 has come to be written upon her larger and 
 larger even while we look. 
 
 The unaccommodating and unaccommo- 
 dated city remains none the less closely 
 consecrated to one's fondest notion of her — 
 the city too indifferent, too proud, too un- 
 aware, 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 perversi- 
 ties 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 
 
24 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 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 imperturb- 
 able in her felicities, and if that is how, re- 
 mounting 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 
 "quahty. 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 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 25 
 
 mid- Victorian London was sincere — that was 
 a vast virtue and a vast appeal; the con- 
 temporary 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 re- 
 coveries, 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. Ex- 
 posing 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 his- 
 tory, 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 
 
26 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 enjoy small self-respect, I think, if that prin- 
 ciple, not to call it that passion, didn't almost 
 furiously ride them. 
 
m 
 
 T WAS at any rate in the midst of sincerities 
 ■*- enough, sincerities of emphasis and "com- 
 position"; perversities, idiosyncrasies, incal- 
 culabiUties, delightful all as densities at first 
 insoluble, deUghtful even indeed as so much 
 mere bewilderment and shock. When was 
 the shock, I ask myself as I look back, not 
 so deadened by the general atmospheric rich- 
 ness as not to melt more or less immediately 
 into some succulence for the mind, something 
 that could feed the historic sense almost to 
 sweetness ? I don't mean that it was a shock 
 to be invited to breakfast — there were 
 stronger ones than that; but was in fact 
 the trait de mosurs that disconnected me with 
 most rapidity and intensity from all I had 
 left on the other side of the sea. To be so 
 disconnected, for the time, and in the most 
 insidious manner, was above all what I had 
 come out for, and every appearance that 
 might help it was to be artfully and grate- 
 
 27 
 
28 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 fully cultivated. I recollect well how many 
 of these combined as I sat at quite punctual 
 fried sole and marmalade in the compara- 
 tively disengaged sitting-room of the second 
 floor — ^the occupancy of the first has remained 
 vague to me; disengaged from the mantle of 
 gloom the folds of which draped most heavily 
 the feet of the house, as it were, and thereby 
 promoted in my own bower the chronic dusk 
 favourable to mural decoration consisting 
 mainly of framed and glazed "coloured" 
 excisions from Christmas numbers of the 
 Illustrated London News that had been at 
 their hour quite modern miracles. Was it 
 for that matter into a sudden splendour of 
 the modern that I ascendingly emerged under 
 the hospitahty of my kind fellow-tenant, or 
 was it rather into the fine classicism of a by- 
 gone age, as literature and the arts had handed 
 down that memory ? Such were the questions 
 whisked at every turn under my nose and re- 
 ducing me by their obscure charm but to 
 bewildered brooding, I fear, when I should 
 have been myself, to repay these attentions, 
 quite forward and informing and aflSrmative. 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 29 
 
 There were eminent gentlemen, as I was 
 sure they could only be, to "meet" and, 
 alas, awfully to interrogate me — ^for vivid 
 has remained to me, as the best of my be- 
 wilderment, the strangeness of finding that 
 I could be of interest to them: not indeed 
 to call it rather the proved humiliation of 
 my impotence. My identity for myseW was 
 all in my sensibility to their own exhibition, 
 with not a scrap left over for a personal show; 
 which made it as inconvenient as it was queer 
 that I should be treated as a specimen and 
 have in the most unexpected manner to 
 prove that I was a good one. I knew myself 
 the very worst conceivable, but how to give 
 to such other persons a decent or coherent 
 reason for my being so required more presence 
 of mind than I could in the least muster — 
 the consequence of which failure had to be 
 for me, I fear, under all that confused first 
 flush, rather an abject acceptance of the air 
 of imbecility. There were, it aippeared, things 
 of interest taking place in America, and I 
 had had, in this absurd manner, to come to 
 England to learn it: I had had over there 
 
30 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 on the ground itself no conception of any 
 such matter — nothing of the smallest in- 
 terest, by any perception of mine, as I sup- 
 pose I should still blush to recall, had taken 
 place in America since the War. How could 
 anything, I really wanted to ask — anything 
 comparable, that is, to what was taking place 
 under my eyes in Half-Moon Street and at 
 dear softly presiding Rutson's table of talk. 
 It doubtless essentially belonged to the ex- 
 actly right type and tone and general figure 
 of my fellow-breakfasters from the Temple, 
 from the Home Office, the Foreign Office, 
 the House of Commons, from goodness knew 
 what other scarce discernible Olympian alti- 
 tudes, it belonged to the very cut of their 
 hair and their waistcoats and their whiskers 
 — ^for it was still more or less a whiskered 
 age — that they should desire from me much 
 distinctness about General Grant's first 
 cabinet, upon the formation of which the 
 light of the newspaper happened then to 
 beat; yet at the same time that I asked 
 myself if it was to such cold communities, 
 such flat frustrations as were so proposed, 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 31 
 
 that I had sought to hft my head again in 
 European air, I found the crisis enriched by 
 sundry other apprehensions. 
 
 They naelted together in it to that increase 
 of savour I have already noted, yet leaving 
 me vividly admonished that the blankness of 
 my mind as to the Washington candidates 
 relegated me to some class unencountered as 
 yet by any one of my conversfers, a class only 
 not perfectly ridiculous because perfectly in- 
 significant. Also that politics walked abroad 
 in England, so that one might supremely 
 bump against them, as much as, by my fond 
 impression, they took their exercise in America 
 but through the back streets and the ways 
 otherwise untrodden and the very darkness 
 of night; that further all lively attestations 
 were ipso facto interesting, and that finally 
 and in the supreme degree, the authenticity 
 of whatever one was going to learn in the 
 world would probably always have for its 
 sign that one got it at some personal cost. 
 To this generaHsation mightn't one even add 
 that in proportion as the cost was great, or 
 became fairly excruciating, the lesson, the 
 
32 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 value acquired would probably be a thing 
 to treasure? I remember really going so far 
 as to wonder if any act of acquisition of the 
 life-loving, life-searching sort that most ap- 
 pealed to me wouldn't mostly be fallacious 
 if unaccompanied by that tag of the price 
 paid in personal discomfort, in some self- 
 exposure and some none too impossible con- 
 sequent discomfiture, for the sake of it. 
 Didn't I even on occasion mount to the very 
 height of seeing it written that these bad 
 moments were the downright consecration 
 of knowledge, that is of perception and, 
 essentially, of exploration, always dangerous 
 and treacherous, and so might afterwards 
 come to figure to memory, each in its order, 
 as the silver nail on the wall of the temple 
 where the trophy is hung up? All of which 
 remark, I freely grant, is a great ado about 
 the long since so bedimmed little Half-Moon 
 Street breakfasts, and is moreover quite wide 
 of the mark if suggesting that the joys of 
 recognition, those of imaginatively, of pro- 
 jectively fitting in and fitting out every piece 
 in the puzzle and every recruit to the force 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 33 
 
 of a further understanding weren't in them- 
 selves a most bustling and cheering business. 
 It was bustling at least, assuredly, if not 
 quite always in the same degree exhilarating, 
 to breakfast out at all, as distinguished from 
 lunching, without its being what the Harvard 
 scene made of it, one of the incidents of 
 "boarding"; it was association at a jump 
 with the ghosts of Byron and Sheridan and 
 Scott and Moore and Lockhart and Rogers 
 and tutti quanti — ^as well as the exciting note 
 of a social order in which everyone wasn't 
 hurled straight, with the momentum of rising, 
 upon an office or a^ store. The mere vision 
 in numbers of persons embodying and in 
 various ways sharply illustrating a clear 
 alternative to that passivity told a tale that 
 would be more and more worth the reading 
 with every turn of the page. So at all events 
 I fantasticated while harassed by my neces-j 
 sity to weave into my general tapestry every 
 thread that would conduce to a pattern, and 
 so the thread for instance of the great Uttle 
 difference of my hterally never having but 
 once "at home" been invited to breakfast 
 
34 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 on types as well as on toast and its accessories 
 could suggest an effect of silk or silver when 
 (absolutely dangled before me. That single 
 occasion at home came back in a light that 
 fairly brought tears to my eyes, for it was 
 touching now to the last wanness that the 
 lady of the winter morn of the Massachusetts 
 Sabbath, one of those, as I recover it, of 1868, 
 to reach whose board we had waded through 
 snowdrifts, had been herself fondling a 
 reminiscence, though I can scarce imagine 
 supposing herself to offer for our consump- 
 tion any other type than her own. It was 
 for that matter but the sweet staleness of 
 her reminiscence that made her a type, and 
 I remember how it had had to do thereby 
 all the work: she, of an age to reach so con- 
 siderably back, had breakfasted out, in 
 London, and with Mr. Rogers himself — that 
 was the point; which I am bound to say did 
 for the hour and on that spot supply richness 
 of reference enough. And I am caught up, 
 I find, in the very act of this claim for my 
 prior scantness of experience by a memory 
 that makes it not a little less perfect and 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 35 
 
 which is oddly enough again associated with 
 a struggle, on an empty stomach, through 
 the massed New England whiteness of the 
 prime Sunday hour. I still cherish the vision, 
 which couldn't then have faded from me, of 
 my having, during the age of innocence — ^I 
 mean of my own — ^breakfasted with W. D. 
 Howells, insidious disturber and fertiliser of 
 that state in me, to "meet" Bayard Taylor 
 and Arthur Sedgwick all in the Venetian 
 manner, the delightful Venetian manner which 
 toward the later 'sixties draped any motion 
 on our host's part as with a habit still ap- 
 propriate. He had risen that morning under 
 the momentum of his but recently concluded 
 consular term in Venice, where margin, if 
 only that of the great loungeable piazza, 
 had a breadth, and though Sedgwick and I 
 had rather, as it were, to take the jump stand- 
 ing, this was yet under the inspiration of 
 feeling the case most special. Only it had 
 been Venetian, snow-shoes and all; I had 
 stored it sacredly away as not American at 
 all, and was of course to learn in Half-Moon 
 Street how little it had been English either. 
 
36 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 What must have seemed to me of a fine 
 international mixture, during those weeks, 
 was my thrilling opportunity to sit one morn- 
 ing, beside Mrs. Charles Norton's tea-urn, 
 in Queen's Gate Terrace, opposite to Frederic 
 Harrison, eminent to me at the moment as 
 one of the subjects of Matthew Arnold's 
 early fine banter, one of his too confidently 
 roaring "young lions" of the periodical press. 
 Has any gilding ray since that happy season 
 rested here and there with the sovereign 
 charm of interest, of drollery, of felicity and 
 infelicity taken on by scattered selected ob- 
 jects in that writer's bright critical dawn? — 
 an element in which we had the sense of sitting 
 gratefully bathed, so that we fairly took out 
 our young minds and dabbled and soaked 
 them in it as we were to do again in no other. 
 The beauty was thus at such a rate that 
 people had references, and that a reference 
 was then, to my mind, whether in a person 
 or an object, the most glittering, the most 
 becoming ornament possible, a style of decora- 
 tion one seemed likely to perceive figures 
 here and there, whether animate or not. 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 37 
 
 quite groan under the accumulation and the 
 weight of. One had scarcely met it before 
 — ^that I now understood; at the same time 
 that there was perhaps a wan joy in one's 
 never having missed it, by all appearance, 
 having on the contrary ever instinctively 
 caught it, on the least gUmmer of its pres- 
 ence. Even when present, or what in the 
 other time I had taken for present, it had 
 been of the thinnest, whereas all about me 
 hereafter it would be by all appearance al- 
 most glutinously thick — ^to the point even 
 of one's on occasion sticking fast in it; that 
 is finding intelligibility smothered in quan- 
 tity. I lost breath in fact, no doubt, again 
 and again, with this latter increase, but was 
 to go on and on for a long time before any 
 first glimmer of reaction against so special 
 a source of interest. It attached itself to 
 objects often, I saw, by no merit or virtue — 
 above all, repeatedly, by no "cleverness" — 
 of their own, but just by the luck of history, 
 by the action of multiplicity of circumstance. 
 Condemned the human particle "over here" ^ 
 was to live, on whatever terms, in thickness 
 
38 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 — ^instead of being free, comparatively, or as 
 I at once ruefully and exquisitely found 
 (myself, only to feel and to think in it. Rue- 
 fully because there were clearly a thousand 
 contacts and sensations, of the strong direct 
 order, that one lost by not so living; ex- 
 quisitely because of the equal number of 
 immunities and independences, blest inde- 
 pendences of perception and judgment, blest 
 Uberties of range for the intellectual adven- 
 tiu-e, that accrued by the same stroke. These 
 at least had the advantage, one of the most 
 distinguished conceivable, that when enjoyed 
 with a certain intensity they might produce 
 the illusion of the other intensity, that of 
 being involved in the composition and the 
 picture itself, in the situations, the complica- 
 tions, the circumstances, admirable and 
 dreadful; while no corresponding illusion, 
 none making for the ideal play of reflection, 
 conclusion, comparison, however one should 
 inchne to appraise the luxury, seemed hkely 
 to attend the immersed or engaged condi- 
 tion. 
 
 Whatever fatuity might at any rate have 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 39 
 
 resided in these complacencies of view, I 
 made them my own with the best conscience 
 in the world, and I meet them again quite 
 to extravagance of interest wherever on the 
 whole extent of the scene my retrospect sets 
 me down. It wasn't in the least at the same 
 time that encountered celebrities only thus 
 provoked the shifting play of my small lamp, 
 and this too even though they were easily 
 celebrated, by my measure, and though from 
 the very first I owed an individual here and 
 there among them, as was highly proper, the 
 benefit of impression at the highest pitch. Orf, 
 the great supporting and enclosing scene itself, 
 the big generalised picture, painted in layer 
 upon layer and tone upon tone, one's fancy 
 was all the while feeding; objects and items, 
 illustrations and aspects might perpetually 
 overlap or mutually interfere, but never 
 without leaving consistency the more marked 
 and character the more unmistakeable. The 
 place, the places, bristled so for every glance 
 with expressive particulars, that I really 
 conversed with them, at happy moments, 
 more than with the figures that moved in 
 
40 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 them, which aflFected me so often as but 
 submissive articles of furniture, "put in" 
 by an artist duly careful of eflfect and yet 
 duly respectful of proportion. The great 
 impression was doubtless no other then and 
 there than what it is under every sky and 
 before every scene that remind one afresh, 
 at the given moment, of all the ways in which 
 producing causes and produced creatures 
 correspond and interdepend; but I think 
 I must have believed at that time that these 
 cross references kept up their game in the 
 English air with a frankness and a good faith 
 that kept the process, in all probability, the 
 I most traceable of its kind on the globe. 
 
 What was the secret of the force of that 
 suggestion? — ^which was not, I may say, to 
 be invalidated, to my eyes, by the further 
 observation of cases and conditions. Was it 
 that the enormous "pull" enjoyed at every 
 point of the general surface the stoutness of 
 the underlying belief in what was behind 
 all surfaces.'* — so that the particular visible, 
 audible, palpable fact, however small and 
 subsidiary, was incomparably absolute, or 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 41 
 
 had, so to speak, such a conscience and a 
 confidence, such an absence of reserve and 
 latent doubts about itseK, as was not else- 
 where to be found. Didn't such elements 
 as that represent, in the heart of things, 
 possibilities of scepticism, of mockery, of 
 irony, of the return of the matter, whatever 
 it might be, on itseK, by some play or other 
 of the questioning spirit, the spirit therefore 
 weakening to entire comfort of aflSrmations? 
 Didn't I see that humour itself, which might 
 seem elsewhere corrosive and subversive, 
 was, as an English faculty, turned outward 
 altogether and never turned inward? — ^by 
 which convenient circumstance subversion, 
 or in other words alteration and variation 
 were not promoted. Such truths were won- 
 drous things to make out in such connec- 
 tions as my experience was then, and for no 
 small time after, to be confined to; but I 
 positively catch myself hstening to them, 
 even with my half-awakened ears, as if they 
 had been all so many sermons of the very 
 stones of London. There, to come back to 
 it, was exactly the force with which these 
 
42 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 stones were to build me capaciously round: 
 I invited them, I besought them, to say aU 
 they would, and — to return to my figure of 
 a while back — it was soon so thoroughly as 
 if they had understood that, once having 
 begun, they were to keep year after year 
 fairly chattering to me. Many of these 
 pages, I fondly foresee, must consist but of 
 the record of their chatter. What was most 
 of all happening, I take it, was that under 
 an absurd special stress I was having, as 
 who should say, to improvise a local medium 
 and to arrange a local consciousness. Against 
 my due appropriation of those originally 
 closest at my hand inevitable accidents had 
 conspired — and, to conclude in respect to all 
 this, if a considerable time was to be wanted, 
 in the event, for ideal certainty of adjust- 
 ment, half the terms required by this could 
 then put forth the touching plea that they 
 had quite achingly waited. 
 
IV 
 
 TT 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 be- 
 take 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 imme- 
 
 43 
 
44 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 diately 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 neces- 
 sary 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 antici- 
 pation 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 estabUshment of the same 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 45 
 
 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, wellnigh 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 pud- 
 ding; 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 
 
46 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 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 Uttle 
 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 seance not to stay the 
 assault of precious conspiring truths, not to 
 break the current of in-rushing telltale sug- 
 gestion. 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 — ^grace- 
 lessly 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 MIDDLE YEARS 47 
 
 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 dis- 
 avowed the low, they did so but thinly and 
 vainly, falhng 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 bor- 
 rowed even glooms, from so much neigh- 
 bouring 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 
 
48 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 sense directed, has nothing to say to the 
 question and that the sense of what we just 
 could confidently Uve by at a given far-away 
 hour is a simple stout fact of rehef. 
 
 Relief, again, I say, from the too enormous 
 present accretions and alternatives — which 
 we witlessly thought so imiumerable then, 
 which we artlessly found so much of the 
 interest of in an immeasurable multipKcity 
 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 com- 
 parative 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 re- 
 mains 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 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 49 
 
 myself in fact at the present writing only 
 too sorry when not able to minimise con- 
 scientiously 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 com- 
 edies 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 
 
50 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 of the aesthetic 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 raifine that were chanted and crooned 
 in the damask-hung temple of the Grosvenor 
 Gallery, was to seem privileged to such im- 
 mensities 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 himiility, 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 ele- 
 ment 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 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 51 
 
 ancient order and contracted state and thick- 
 coloured dimness, all unconscious of rear- 
 rangements and reversals, blighting new lights 
 and invidious shattering comparisons, still 
 prevailed and kept contemplation comfort- 
 ably 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 benighted- 
 ness, 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, with- 
 out feeling it as an immense little act or event 
 of hfe, and as therefore taking place on a 
 scene and in circumstances scarce at all to 
 be separated from its own sense and impact? 
 
52 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 — 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 "composi- 
 tion." 
 
 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 Uttle 
 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 photo- 
 graph 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 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 53 
 
 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 con- 
 stituting on the spot between us, for appre- 
 ciation, 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 1 
 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 wel- 
 come 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. j 
 
54 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 I apply this remark indeed to those ex- 
 tractions of the quintessence that had for 
 their occasion either one's more undirected 
 though never fruitless walks and wander- 
 ings 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 mu- 
 seums in especial, though the South Ken- 
 sington 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 imcertainty 
 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 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 55 
 
 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 
 
56 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 general outcome and picture, so the great 
 sought-out compositions, the Hampton Courts 
 and the Windsors, the Richmonds, the Dul- 
 wiches, 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 Uke 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 imme- 
 diate, 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 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 57 
 
 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. There- 
 by, 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 pro- 
 portionate. 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 for- 
 bear — 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 con- 
 venient, and whence I in fact then saw them 
 flush at me over the cold grey sea with an 
 
58 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 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 oc- 
 casion, for atmosphere, neither more nor 
 less — the young man of the ship, building 
 so much better than he knew, had guaranteed 
 me such a Tightness 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 im- 
 possible to render which interfused the aes- 
 thetic 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 MIDDLE YEARS 59 
 
 The exquisite matter was not the identifica- 
 tion 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 accumula- 
 tions of suffered experience, these, indescrib- 
 ably, 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. 
 
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 speci- 
 men, chosen at hazard, of the prompt activity 
 of a process by which my intelligence after- 
 wards came to find itself more fed, I think, 
 than from any other source at all, or, for 
 that matter, from all other sources put to- 
 gether. 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 con- 
 veniently 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, puU my 
 
 60 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 61 
 
 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 ^r remains over, 
 insisting on its place and hour, its felt dis- 
 tinguishability. 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 occa- 
 sions, after a considerable lapse, were not to 
 overlay the absolute face-value, as I may call 
 it, of all the appearances then and there pre- 
 sented 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 hterature — so settled and consecrated in 
 the individual range of view is many such 
 a case free at last to find itself, free after ups 
 
 -?^ 
 
62 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 and downs, after fluctuations of fame or 
 whatever, which have divested judgment of 
 any relevance that isn't most of all the rele- 
 vance 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 com- 
 fort, 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 httle. 
 
 It was by George Eliot's name that I was 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 63 
 
 to go on knowing, was never to cease to know, 
 a great treasure of beauty and humanity, of 
 applied and achieved art, a testimony, his- 
 toric as well as aesthetic, to the deeper in- 
 terest 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 ap- 
 peared — 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 my- 
 self in presence. I had rejoiced without re- 
 serve in Felix Holt — the illusion of reading 
 which, outstretched on my then too fre- 
 quently inevitable bed at Swampscott during 
 a couple of very hot days of the summer of 
 
64 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 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 
 deUghtful 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 con- 
 scious of absolutely needing it, to work. 
 
 Exquisite the remembrance of how it would- 
 n'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 cooUng of the first glow 
 so little gone back upon it, as we have nowa- 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 65 
 
 days learned to say, had in fact so gone for- 
 ward, 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 
 mediimi. 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 heri- 
 tage 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 oth- 
 erwise mauled him, and, though beaten oflf, 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 some- 
 thing clear and noble in it too, to which, as 
 well as to the extraordinarily interesting 
 dignity of her whole odd personal conforma- 
 
66 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 tion, 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 fomid 
 myself, my life long, attaching value to every 
 noted thing in respect to a great person — ^and 
 George EUot struck me on the spot as some- 
 how illustratively great; never at any rate 
 has the impression of those troubled mo- 
 ments 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, 
 subUme 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 assist- 
 ing us, as it were, to assist her, through un- 
 reUnquished proper talk, due responsible re- 
 mark and report, in the last degree suggestive 
 to me, on a short holiday taken with Mr. 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 67 
 
 Lewes in the south of France, whence they 
 had just returned. Yes indeed, the lightest 
 words of great persons are so Httle 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 ex- 
 cursion, 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 charac- 
 teristic: 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 ap- 
 
68 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 peared, 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 observa- 
 tions of my own making — a conclusion suf- 
 ficiently 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 augu- 
 mented; 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 reUef. 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 mo- 
 mentary wonderful and beautiful conflict I 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 69 
 
 remember how our yielding struck me as 
 crowned with the finest grace it could pos- 
 sibly have, that of the prodigious privilege 
 of humouring, yes literally humouring so re- 
 nowned 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 mo- 
 ment 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 
 ofiF 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 pos- 
 
70 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 sible moment to the rescue. Mrs. Lewes's 
 and our stricken companion's instant ap- 
 preciation 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 propor- 
 tion 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 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 71 
 
 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 inti- 
 mately concerned in my perusal of Middle- 
 march, 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 appropria- 
 tion of the two fictions was experience, in 
 great intensity, and roundabout the field 
 
72 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 was drawn the distinguishable ring of some- 
 thing 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" — Whelped 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 connec- 
 tions, 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 pre- 
 served. I stretch over the years a little to 
 overtake it, and it calls up at once another 
 person, the ornament, or at least the diver- 
 sion, 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 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 73 
 
 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 httle 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 wit- 
 ness. I had driven over with Mrs. Greville 
 from Milford Cottage, in Surrey, to the villa 
 George Ehot and George Lewes had not long 
 before built themselves, and which they much 
 inhabited, at Witley — ^this indeed, I well re- 
 member, in no great flush of assurance that 
 my own measure of our intended felicity 
 
74 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 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, ele- 
 gant, extremely near-sighted and extremely 
 demonstrative lady, whose genius was all for 
 friendship, admiration, declamation and ex- 
 penditure, that one doubted whether in the 
 whole course of her career she had ever once 
 been brought up, as it were, against a recog- 
 nised reaUty; 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 draw- 
 ing-room art, the various contributive ele- 
 ments, hour, scene, persuaded patience and 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 75 
 
 hushed attention, were perforce a precarious 
 quantity. 
 
 It is in that bygone old grace of the un- 
 exploded factitious, the air of a thousand 
 dimmed illusions and more or less early Vic- 
 torian beatitudes on the part of the blandly 
 idle and the supposedly accomplished, that 
 Mrs. Greville, with her exquisite goodnature 
 and her innocent fatuity, is embalmed for 
 me; so that she becomes in that light a truly 
 shining specimen, almost the image or com- 
 pendium 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. Amiabili- 
 ties and absurdities, harmless serenities and 
 
76 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 vanities, pretensions and undertakings un- 
 ashamed, 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 fortimate, 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 beau- 
 tifully for I confess without scruple to have 
 found again and again at that time an at- 
 taching 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 goodhumour, 
 one was willing enough, or at least I was, to 
 be on the side of the gods. Unmistakable 
 too, as I seefia to recover it, was the posi- 
 tive interest of watching and noting, round- 
 about one, for the turn, or rather for the blest 
 continuity, of their benevolence: such an 
 appeal proceeded, in this, that and the other 
 
THE MIDDLE YEAES 77 
 
 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 it- 
 self. 
 
 All of which, I admit, dresses in many re- 
 flections 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 ab- 
 solutely setthng 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 hght, with the autumn 
 gale, the averted reaUty, 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 pos- 
 sibilities of the old tone. Nowhere had the 
 
78 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 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 har- 
 monies 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 
 quaUty of serene anxiety on the part for in- 
 stance of exquisite Mrs. Thellusson, Mrs. 
 Greville's mother, was by itself a plea for any 
 privilege one should fancy her perched upon; 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 79 
 
 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 secon- 
 dary and superfluous small matters alone. 
 It struck me, I remember, as a new and un- 
 expected form of the pathetic altogether; 
 and there was no form of the pathetic, anyv 
 more than of the tragic or the comic, that 
 didn't serve as another pearl for one's length- 
 ening string. And I pass over what was/ 
 doubtless the happiest stroke in the com- 
 position, the fact of its involving, as all-dis- 
 tinguished husband of the other daughter, 
 an illustrious soldier and servant of his sover- 
 eign, of his sovereigns that were successively 
 to be, than against whose patient handsome 
 bearded presence the whole complexus of 
 femininities and futihties 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 
 
80 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 that of the sentiment operating — save in- 
 deed perhaps when the dear lady applied 
 her faculty for frank imitation of the ridic- 
 ulous, 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 goodnature 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 dra- 
 matic 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 magnijScent rightness and 
 beauty, no scrap of the far-scattered prime 
 proposal being left to pick up. 
 
 Which detail of reminiscence has again 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 81 
 
 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 over- 
 took 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 as- 
 sured 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 per- 
 fectly, as she knew no law but that of inno- 
 cent 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 
 
82 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 to the end save for an incident which, with 
 a quite ideal logic, left our adventure an ap- 
 proved 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 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 83 
 
 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 wait- 
 ing carriage, toward which G. H. Lewes him- 
 self all sociably, then above all conversingly, 
 wafted us — ^yet staying me by a sudden re- 
 membrance 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 im- 
 portunate 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 unre- 
 servedly 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 super- 
 fluity. What indeed was this superfluity 
 but the two volumes of my own precious 
 
84 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 "last" — ^we were still in the blest age of 
 volumes — ^presented by its author to the 
 lady of Milford Cottage, and by her, mis- 
 guided votary, dropped with the best eon- 
 science 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 feel- 
 ing for the moment only as sharp, such a 
 mixture of delightful small questions at once 
 salved it over and such a charm in particidar 
 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 con- 
 nected book with author, or author with 
 visitor, or visitor with anything but the 
 convenience of his ridding them of an uncon- 
 sidered 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 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 85 
 
 between us in the brougham on revelation of 
 the identity of the offered treat so emphati- 
 cally 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' in- 
 accessibility to the unattended plea, with the 
 light it seemed to throw on what it was really 
 to he attended. Never, never save as at- 
 tended — ^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 hnks in the chain of associa- 
 tion 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 humiUty in 
 my having enjoyed in my own person adorn- 
 ing 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, de- 
 
86 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 tached by a pitch of intellectual life, from 
 all that made it actual to myself. There 
 was the lift of contemplation, there the in- 
 spiring 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 mis- 
 doubt, 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 pic- 
 ture. But with that thin criticism I wasn't, 
 as I have already intimated, to have a mo- 
 ment'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 com- 
 plication of the stitch. 
 
VI 
 
 T 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 con- 
 
 87 
 
88 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 fusedness out of which Tennyson's own pres- 
 ence 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 pro- 
 miscuous befriending. He must have been 
 of the party, and Mrs. Greville quite inde- 
 pendently must, since I catch again the 
 vision of her, so expansively and volumin- 
 ously 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 gruflf 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 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 89 
 
 been, as could only be probable, the effect 
 of fond prefigurements utterly blighted. 
 
 The fond prefigurements of youthful piety V - 
 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 dis- 
 tinction of whose literary face, with its ex- 
 quisite 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 be- 
 tween 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 
 
90 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 by good fortune already reached such a com- 
 pass 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 im- 
 possible. What comes up in face of the 
 shocks, as I have called them, is the ques- 
 tion 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 in- 
 directly, and if the readjustment, for ac- 
 quaintance, was less diflScult than it was to 
 prove in the case of the reaUsed 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 ap- 
 pealed 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 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 91 
 
 sincerity the kind of beauty so engaged for 
 could be associated. Was it that I had pre- 
 conceived him in that light as pale and pene- 
 trating, 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 considera- 
 tions 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 Ten- 
 nyson was not Tennysonian. The desperate 
 sequel to that was that he thereby changed 
 one's own state too, one's beguiled, one's 
 aesthetic; for what could this strange appre- 
 hension do but reduce the Tennysonian 
 amount altogether ? It dried up, to a certain 
 extent, that is, in my own vessel of sympathy 
 
92 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 — Cleaving 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 pleasant- 
 ness 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 
 fehcity to reckon with; yet still again, as I 
 say, enabled a compromise to work. 
 
 The compromise in fact worked beauti- 
 fully under my renewal of impression — ^for 
 which a second visit at Eaton Place offered 
 occasion; and this even though I had to inter- 
 weave with the scene as best I might a highly 
 compHcating influence. To speak of James 
 Russell Lowell's influence as above aU com- 
 plicating on any scene to the interest of which 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 93 
 
 he contributed may superficially seem a 
 perverse appreciation of it; and yet in the 
 hght of that truth only do I recover the full 
 sense of his value, his interest, the moving 
 moral of his London adventure — ^to find my- 
 self already bumping so straight against 
 which gives me, I confess, a suflSciently por- 
 tentous 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 in- 
 stance 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 Min- 
 
94 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 ister, 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 httle 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 of- 
 fered food, appeared doomed to disconnec- 
 tion 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 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 95 
 
 possible turn or drift of the affair quite 
 dropped — ^I rested then, we aUke rested, I 
 ever felt, in a golden confidence. This last 
 was so definitely not the note of my atten- 
 tion 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 fife 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 unJoiown guest. 
 
96 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 whose identity he had failed to grasp. 
 Nothing, exactly, could have made dear 
 Lowell more "my" Lowell, as I have pre- 
 sumed to figure him, than the stretch of un- 
 certainty 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 fine 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 MIDDLE YEARS 97 
 
 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 con- 
 nections: 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, in- 
 conceivably, he had read — ^and not only read 
 but admired, and not only admired but un- 
 derstandingly referred; referred, time and 
 some accident aiding, the appreciated object, 
 a short tale I had lately put forth, to its ac- 
 tually present author, who could scarce 
 beUeve his ears on hearing the thing super- 
 latively commended; pronounced, that is. 
 
98 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 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 what- 
 ever had bewildered me simply became per- 
 fect: 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 con- 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 99 
 
 fidence 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 Uke G. H. Lewes's vale- 
 dictory hurl back upon us of the printed ap- 
 peal 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 defensive- 
 
100 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 ness 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. Re- 
 membered passages again people, however, 
 in their proportion, the excess of opportunity; 
 each with that conclusive note of the out- 
 right all unadorned. What could have par- 
 taken more of this quaUty 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 men- 
 tion 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 
 efifect 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 — admi- 
 rably for the triumph of simplification — ^to 
 the very greatest length imaginable, as was 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 101 
 
 signally promoted by the fact that clearly 
 no one present, with a single exception, 
 recognised the name or the nature of the scan- 
 dalous, 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 aUke 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 propor- 
 tion between the great spaces and reaches 
 
102 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 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 sensibiUty, and find 
 themselves determined once for all, fortu- 
 nately fixed, all consecrated and consecrating. 
 K 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 doubt- 
 less much over-emphasise; but such, or 
 something like it, was none the less the ex- 
 planation 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 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 103 
 
 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 ex- 
 quisite, 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 growUng 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- 
 
104 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 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 Httle 
 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 oc- 
 casion. 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 MIDDLE YEARS 105 
 
 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 cer- 
 tain 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 aU the while I considered, 
 so detachedly I judged, so dissentingly, to 
 tell the whole truth, I listened; pinching my- 
 self, as I say, not at all to keep from swoon- 
 ing, but much rather to set up some rush of 
 sensibiUty. 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 inter- 
 pretation 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 
 
106 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 felt him as he went on and on lose that char- 
 acter beyond repair, and no efifect of the 
 organ-roll, of monotonous majesty, no sug- 
 gestion 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 intelli- 
 gence, the play of discrimination, I should 
 have taken for granted in it, and thereby, 
 brooding monster that I was, born to dis- 
 criminate a 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 re- 
 peat 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 idiosyn- 
 crasy, to which everything in the man con- 
 formed, but which supplied nothing outside 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 107 
 
 of itself, and which above all was not intel- 
 lectually 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 ex- 
 actly with all the exhibition of point and au- 
 thority, 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 demon- 
 stration, as httle as possible a Bard. He 
 particularised if ever a man did, was hetero- 
 geneous 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 'prme himseK 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? 
 
108 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 It came out almost to harshness; but the 
 result was that what he read showed extraor- 
 dinary life. During that audition at Aid- 
 worth the question seemed on the contrary 
 not of Ufe at all — save, that is, of one's own; 
 which was exactly not the question. With 
 aU 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-conscious- 
 ness. 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 some- 
 thing subtly other than one. I had supposed, 
 probably, such an impossibility, had, to re- 
 peat 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. 
 
VII 
 
 TT 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 confusedlyT' 
 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 Water- 
 ford, who took hers in turn from that com- 
 bination 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 vivid- 
 ness 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 
 
 109 
 
110 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 personal beauty, to say nothing of personal 
 "accomplishment," as our fathers were ap- 
 pointed 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 apprecia- 
 tion, 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 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 111 
 
 great testifying portraits. My private per- 
 versity, as I here glance at it, has had its 
 diflSeulties — ^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 pahu for good looks to those who 
 have reached out to it through the medium of 
 our own history. If the conditions grow bet- 
 ter for them why then should we have almost 
 the habit of thinking better of our handsome 
 folk dead than of our hving.? — and even to 
 the very point of not resenting on the part 
 of others similarly aflfected 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 ex- 
 
112 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 actly 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, unfortimately, 
 without being youthful — unfortunately be- 
 cause the fact of youth, so far from dispelling 
 ambiguity, positively introduced it. One 
 made up one's mind thus that the only sure 
 specimens v/ere, and had to be, those ac- 
 quainted 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 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 113 
 
 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 resist- 
 ing, the gained, cases one found one's self 
 practically averse to old facts or old tradi- 
 tions 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 con- 
 templation during which I could see quite 
 enough for the major interest what was 
 meant by Lady Waterford's great reputa- 
 tion. 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 cur- 
 tain for the light shed by this or that or the 
 other personal presence upon the society 
 more or less intimately concerned in produc- 
 
114 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 ing 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 ad- 
 mirable guest struck me as flooding it; in- 
 debted 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 imagina- 
 tion 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 perti- 
 nently 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 ap- 
 preciation of this fact — taken together, that 
 is, with one's own impression of the work 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 115 
 
 of her hand. There it was that, Hke Mrs. 
 Greville herself, yet in a still higher degree, 
 she bore witness to the fine old feUcity 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 re- 
 member, 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 Uttle earlier one wouldn't have had 
 the light for this perhaps, and a httle 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 — ac- 
 cordingly fails. We all now illustrate to- 
 gether, 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 
 
116 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 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 anden regime 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 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 117 
 
 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 fat- 
 uously 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 perspec- 
 tive 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 un- 
 alarmed. One would have turned away cer- 
 tainly from the sight of any actual catas- 
 trophe, wouldn't have watched the ground 
 nearly fail, in a particular case, without a 
 
118 THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 sense of gross indelicacy. I can scarcely 
 say how vivid I felt the drama so preparing 
 might become — that of the lapse of imme- 
 morial protection, that of the finally com- 
 plete 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 en- 
 actment and which only wanted the attentive 
 enough spectator. Nothing should I ever- 
 more see comparable to the large fond con- 
 sensus 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 im- 
 pression of a cUmax that could only decline, 
 didn't break upon me all at once but spread 
 itself through a couple of subsequent oc- 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 119 
 
 casions into which my remembrance of the 
 dinner at Mrs. Greville's was richly to play* 
 The first of these was a visit to an exhibi- 
 tion 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 splen- 
 didly using for the purpose the very fag-end 
 of the waning time, mixed itself for me with 
 all the "wonderful colour" framed and ar- 
 rayed, 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 
 oflF 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. . .