I had swallowed my own
mistake--the mistake of having supposed Tennyson something subtly other
than one. I had supposed, probably, such an impossibility, had, to
repeat my term, so absurdly fantasticated, that the long journey round
and about the truth no more than served me right; just as after all it
at last left me quite content.

VII

It left me moreover, I become aware--or at least it now leaves
me--fingering the loose ends of this particular free stretch of my
tapestry; so that, with my perhaps even extravagant aversion to loose
ends, I can but try for a moment to interweave them. There dangles again
for me least confusedly, I think, the vision of a dinner at Mrs.
Greville's--and I like even to remember that Cadogan Place, where
memories hang thick for me, was the scene of it--which took its light
from the presence of Louisa Lady Waterford, who took hers in turn from
that combination of rare beauty with rare talent which the previous
Victorian age had for many years not ceased to acclaim. It insists on
coming back to me with the utmost vividness that Lady Waterford was
illustrational, historically, preciously so, meeting one's largest
demand for the blest recovery, when possible, of some glimmer of the
sense of personal beauty, to say nothing of personal "accomplishment,"
as our fathers were appointed to enjoy it. Scarce to be sated that form
of wonder, to my own imagination, I confess--so that I fairly believe
there was no moment at which I wouldn't have been ready to turn my back
for the time even on the most triumphant actuality of form and feature
if a chance apprehension of a like force as it played on the sensibility
of the past had competed. And this for a reason I fear I can scarce
explain--unless, when I come to consider it, by the perversity of a
conviction that the conditions of beauty have improved, though those of
character, in the fine old sense, may not, and that with these the
measure of it is more just, the appreciation, as who should say, more
competent and the effect more completely attained.

What the question seems thus to come to would be a consuming curiosity
as to any cited old case of the spell in the very interest of one's
catching it comparatively "out"; in the interest positively of the
likelihood of one's doing so, and this in the face of so many great
testifying portraits. My private perversity, as I here glance at it, has
had its difficulties--most of all possibly that of