mine, has now quite gone
and that illustration--not to let that term slip--accordingly fails. We
all now illustrate together, in higgledy-piggledy fashion, or as a vast
monotonous mob, our own wonderful period and order, and nothing else;
whereby the historic imagination, under its acuter need of facing
backward, gropes before it with a vain gesture, missing, or all but
missing, the concrete _other_, always other, specimen which has volumes
to give where hearsay has only snippets. The old, as we call it, I
recognise, doesn't disappear all at once; the _ancien 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 apparitions as Lady
Waterford, to whom I thus undisseverably cling, though I might give her
after all much like company, was that they made one draw it just where
they might most profit from it. They profited in that they recruited my
group of the fatuously fortunate, the class, as I seemed to see it, that
had had the longest and happiest innings in history--happier and longer,
on the whole, even than their congeners of the old French time--and for
whom the future wasn't going to be, by most signs, anything like as
bland and benedictory as the past. They placed _themselves_ in the right
perspective for appreciation, and did it quite without knowing, which
was half the interest; did it simply by showing themselves with all the
right grace and the right assurance. It was as if they had come up to
the very edge of the ground that was going to begin to fail them; yet
looking over it, looking on and on always, with a confidence still
unalarmed. One would have turned away certainly f