nt, even to the point of causing him to
crawl about on all fours and covered with her shawl after the fashion of
a horse-blanket. That delightful impression was then unconscious of the
blight to come--that of my apprehending, years after, that the
brilliant comedietta was the tribute of our Anglo-Saxon taste to Alfred
de Musset's elegant proverb of the Porte Ouverte ou Fermee, in which
nothing could find itself less at home than the horseplay of the English
version. Miss Laura Keene, with a native grace at the start, a fresh and
delicate inspiration, I infer from the kind of pleasure she appears to
have begun with giving, was to live to belie her promise and, becoming
hard and raddled, forfeit (on the evidence) all claim to the higher
distinction; a fact not surprising under the lurid light projected by
such a sign of the atmosphere of ineptitude as an accepted and condoned
perversion to vulgarity of Musset's perfect little work. How _could_
quality of talent consort with so dire an absence of quality in the
material offered it? where could such lapses lead but to dust and
desolation and what happy instinct not be smothered in an air so
dismally non-conducting? Is it a foolish fallacy that these matters may
have been on occasion, at that time, worth speaking of? is it only
presumable that everything was perfectly cheap and common and everyone
perfectly bad and barbarous and that even the least corruptible of our
typical spectators were too easily beguiled and too helplessly kind? The
beauty of the main truth as to any remembered matter looked at in due
detachment, or in other words through the haze of time, is that
comprehension has then become one with criticism, compassion, as it may
really be called, one with musing vision, and the whole company of the
anciently restless, with their elations and mistakes, their sincerities
and fallacies and vanities and triumphs, embalmed for us in the mild
essence of their collective submission to fate. We needn't be strenuous
about them unless we particularly want to, and are glad to remember in
season all that this would imply of the strenuous about our own
_origines_, our muddled initiations. If nothing is more certain for us
than that many persons, within our recollection, couldn't help being
rather generally unadmonished and unaware, so nothing is more in the
note of peace than that such a perceived state, pushed to a point, makes
our scales of judgment but ridiculously rattle. _