ts me down. It wasn't in the least
at the same time that encountered celebrities only thus provoked the
shifting play of my small lamp, and this too even though they were
easily celebrated, by my measure, and though from the very first I owed
an individual here and there among them, as was highly proper, the
benefit of impression at the highest pitch. On the great supporting and
enclosing scene itself, the big generalised picture, painted in layer
upon layer and tone upon tone, one's fancy was all the while feeding;
objects and items, illustrations and aspects might perpetually overlap
or mutually interfere, but never without leaving consistency the more
marked and character the more unmistakeable. The place, the places,
bristled so for every glance with expressive particulars, that I really
conversed with them, at happy moments, more than with the figures that
moved in them, which affected me so often as but submissive articles of
furniture, "put in" by an artist duly careful of effect and yet duly
respectful of proportion. The great impression was doubtless no other
then and there than what it is under every sky and before every scene
that remind one afresh, at the given moment, of all the ways in which
producing causes and produced creatures correspond and interdepend; but
I think I must have believed at that time that these cross references
kept up their game in the English air with a frankness and a good faith
that kept the process, in all probability, the most traceable of its
kind on the globe.

What was the secret of the force of that suggestion?--which was not, I
may say, to be invalidated, to my eyes, by the further observation of
cases and conditions. Was it that the enormous "pull" enjoyed at every
point of the general surface the stoutness of the underlying belief in
what was behind all surfaces?--so that the particular visible, audible,
palpable fact, however small and subsidiary, was incomparably absolute,
or had, so to speak, such a conscience and a confidence, such an
absence of reserve and latent doubts about itself, as was not elsewhere
to be found. Didn't such elements as that represent, in the heart of
things, possibilities of scepticism, of mockery, of irony, of the return
of the matter, whatever it might be, on itself, by some play or other of
the questioning spirit, the spirit therefore weakening to entire comfort
of affirmations? Didn't I see that humour itself, which might seem
elsewhere corros