A Writers Recollections, vol 2 | Page 7

westward toward Hyde Park Gate, thinking of a hundred
things at once, this consciousness of _intensification_, of a heightened
meaning in everything--the broad street, the crowd of moving figures
and carriages, the houses looking down upon it--seized upon me with a
rush. "Yes, it is good--the mere living!" Joy in the infinite variety of the
great city as compared with the "cloistered virtue" of Oxford; the sheer
pleasure of novelty, of the kind new faces, and the social discoveries
one felt opening on many sides; the delight of new perceptions, new
powers in oneself--all this seemed to flower for me in those few
minutes of reverie--if one can apply such a word to an experience so
vivid. And meanwhile the same intensity of pleasure from nature that I
had always been capable of flowed in upon me from new scenes; above
all, from solitary moments at Borough Farm, in the heart of the Surrey
commons, when the September heather blazed about me; or the first
signs of spring were on the gorse and the budding trees; or beside some
lonely pool; and always heightened now by the company of my
children. It was a stage--a normal stage, in normal life. But I might
have missed it so easily! The Fates were kind to us in those days.
As to the social scene, let me gather from it first a recollection of pure
romance. One night at a London dinner-party I found myself sent down
with a very stout gentleman, an American Colonel, who proclaimed

himself an "esoteric Buddhist," and provoked in me a rapid and
vehement dislike. I turned my back upon him and examined the table.
Suddenly I became aware of a figure opposite to me, the figure of a
young girl who seemed to me one of the most ravishing creatures I had
ever seen. She was very small, and exquisitely made. Her beautiful
head, with its mass of light-brown hair; the small features and delicate
neck; the clear, pale skin, the lovely eyes with rather heavy lids, which
gave a slight look of melancholy to the face; the grace and fire of every
movement when she talked; the dreamy silence into which she
sometimes fell, without a trace of awkwardness or shyness. But how
vain is any mere catalogue to convey the charm of Laura Tennant--the
first Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton--to those who never saw her!
I asked to be introduced to her as soon as we left the dining-room, and
we spent the evening in a corner together.
I fell in love with her there and then. The rare glimpses of her that her
busy life and mine allowed made one of my chief joys thenceforward,
and her early death was to me--as to so many, many others!--a grief
never forgotten.
The recent biography of Alfred Lyttelton--War Minister in Mr.
Balfour's latest Cabinet--skilfully and beautifully done by his second
wife, has conveyed to the public of thirty years later some idea of
Laura's imperishable charm. And I greatly hope that it may be followed
some day by a collection of her letters, for there are many in existence,
and, young as she was, they would, I believe, throw much light upon a
crowded moment in our national life. Laura was the fourth daughter of
Sir Charles Tennant, a rich Glasgow manufacturer, and the elder sister
of Mrs. Asquith. She and her sisters came upon the scene in the early
'eighties; and without any other extrinsic advantage but that of wealth,
which in this particular case would not have taken them very far, they
made a conquest--the younger two, Laura and Margot, in particular--of
a group of men and women who formed a kind of intellectual and
social _élite_; who were all of them accomplished; possessed, almost
all of them, of conspicuous good looks, or of the charm that counts as
much; and among whom there happened to be a remarkable proportion

of men who have since made their mark on English history. My
generation knew them as "The Souls." "The Souls" were envied,
mocked at, caricatured, by those who were not of them. They had their
follies--why not? They were young, and it was their golden day. Their
dislike of convention and routine had the effect on many--and those not
fools--of making convention and routine seem particularly desirable.
But there was not, I think, a young man or woman admitted to their
inner ranks who did not possess in some measure a certain quality very
difficult to isolate and define. Perhaps, to call it "disinterestedness"
comes nearest. For they were certainly no seekers after wealth, or
courters of the great. It might be said, of course, that they had no
occasion; they had as much birth and wealth as any one need want,
among themselves. But that does not