oes--it has
yet lost its fineness of quality. 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 mid-Victorian London was sincere--that was a vast virtue and a vast
appeal; the contemporary 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 recoveries, 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. Exposing 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 history, 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 enjoy small
self-respect, I think, if that principle, not to call it that passion,
didn't almost furiously ride them.

III

I was at any rate in the midst of sincerities enough, sincerities of
emphasis and "composition"; perversities, idiosyncrasies,
incalculabilities, delightful all as densities at first insoluble,
delightful 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 richness 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 moeurs_ that disconnected me with most rapidity and
intensity from all I had left