ment
possible, a style of decoration one seemed likely to perceive figures
here and there, whether animate or not, 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 glimmer of its presence. 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 almost glutinously thick--to the point even of one's on
occasion sticking fast in it; that is finding intelligibility smothered
in quantity. 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--instead of being free, comparatively, or as I at once
ruefully and exquisitely found myself, only to feel and to think in it.
Ruefully because there were clearly a thousand contacts and sensations,
of the strong direct order, that one lost by not so living; exquisitely
because of the equal number of immunities and independences, blest
independences of perception and judgment, blest liberties of range for
the intellectual adventure, 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 complications, the circumstances,
admirable and dreadful; while no corresponding illusion, none making for
the ideal play of reflection, conclusion, comparison, however one should
incline to appraise the luxury, seemed likely to attend the immersed or
engaged condition.

Whatever fatuity might at any rate have 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 se