, but the pity was that Mrs.
Greville had been. This I never wanted for her; and I may add, in the
connection, that I discover now no grain of false humility in my having
enjoyed in my own person adorning such a tale. There was positively a
fine high thrill in thinking of persons--or at least of a person, for
any fact about Lewes was but derivative--engaged in my own pursuit and
yet detached, by what I conceived, detached by a pitch of intellectual
life, from all that made it actual to myself. _There_ was the lift of
contemplation, there the inspiring image and the big supporting truth;
the pitch of intellectual life in the very fact of which we seemed, my
hostess and I, to have caught our celebrities sitting in that queer
bleak way wouldn't have bullied me in the least if it hadn't been the
centre of such a circle of gorgeous creation. It was the fashion among
the profane in short either to misdoubt, before George Eliot's canvas,
the latter's backing of rich thought, or else to hold that this matter
of philosophy, and even if but of the philosophic vocabulary, thrust
itself through to the confounding of the picture. But with that thin
criticism I wasn't, as I have already intimated, to have a moment's
patience; I was to become, I was to remain--I take pleasure in
repeating--even a very Derondist of Derondists, for my own wanton joy:
which amounts to saying that I found the figured, coloured tapestry
_always_ vivid enough to brave no matter what complication of the
stitch.

VI

I take courage to confess moreover that I am carried further still by
the current on which Mrs. Greville, friend of the super-eminent, happens
to have launched me; for I can neither forbear a glance at one or two of
the other adventures promoted by her, nor in the least dissociate her
from that long aftertaste of them, such as they were, which I have
positively cultivated. I ask myself first, however, whether or no our
drive to Aldworth, on the noble height of Blackdown, had been preceded
by the couple of occasions in London on which I was to feel I saw the
Laureate most at his ease, yet on reflection concluding that the first
of these--and the fewest days must have separated them--formed my prime
introduction to the poet I had earliest known and best loved. The
revelational evening I speak of is peopled, to my memory, not a little,
yet with a confusedness out of which Tennyson's own presence doesn't at
all distinctly emerge; he was occ