A Writers Recollections, vol 2 | Page 7

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 explain it. For push and greed are among the commonest faults of an aristocracy. The immortal pages of Saint Simon are there to show it. "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also," says the Gospel. Now the "treasure" among The Souls was, ultimately--or at least tended to be--something spiritual. The typical expression of it,