A Writers Recollections, vol 2 | Page 8

at its best, is to be found in those exquisite last words left by Laura Lyttelton for her husband, which the second Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton has, as I think, so rightly published. That unique "will," which for thirty years before it appeared in print was known to a wide circle of persons, many of whom had never seen the living Laura, was the supreme expression of a quality which, in greater or lesser degree, The Souls seemed to demand of one another, and of those who wished to join their band. Yet, combined with this passion, this poetry, this religious feeling, was first the maddest delight in simple things--in open air and physical exercise; then, a headlong joy in literature, art, music, acting; a perpetual spring of fun; and a hatred of all the solemn pretenses that too often make English society a weariness.
No doubt there is something--perhaps much--to be said on the other side. But I do not intend to say it. I was never a Soul, nor could have been. I came from too different a world. But there were a certain number of persons--of whom I was one--who were their "harborers" and spectators. I found delight in watching them. They were quite a new experience to me; and I saw them dramatically, like a scene in a play, full of fresh implications and suggestions. I find in an old letter to my mother an account of an evening at 40 Grosvenor Square, where the Tennants lived.
It was not an evening party--we joined a dinner party there, after dining somewhere else. So that the rooms were empty enough to let one see the pretty creatures gathered in it, to perfection. In the large drawing-room, which is really a ball-room with a polished floor, people were dancing, or thought-reading, or making music, as it pleased them.
Mr. Balfour was there, with whom we had made friends, as fellow-guests, on a week-end visit to Oxford, not long before; Alfred Lyttelton, then in the zenith of his magnificent youth; Lord Curzon, then plain Mr. Curzon, and in the Foreign Office; Mr. Harry Gust; Mr. Rennell Rodd, now the British Ambassador in Rome, and many others--a goodly company of young men in their prime. And among the women there was a very high proportion of beauty, but especially of grace. "The half-lit room, the dresses and the beauty," says my letter, "reminded one of some festa painted by Watteau or Lancret." But with what a difference! For, after all, it was English, through and through.
A little after this evening, Laura Tennant came down to spend a day at Borough Farm with the children and me. Another setting! Our principal drawing-room there in summer was a sand-pit, shaded by an old ash-tree and haunted by innumerable sand-martins. It was Ascension Day, and the commons were a dream of beauty. Our guest, I find, was to have come down "with Mr. Balfour and Mr. Burne-Jones." But in the end she came down alone; and we talked all day, sitting under hawthorns white with bloom, wandering through rushy fields ablaze with marsh marigold and orchis. She wrote to me the same evening after her return to London:
I sit with my eyes resting on the medieval purple of the sweet-breathing orchis you gave me, and my thoughts feasting on the wonderful beauty of the snowy blossom against the blue.... This has been a real Ascension Day.
Later in the year--in November--she wrote to me from Scotland--she was then twenty-one:
I am still in Scotland, but don't pity me, for I love it more than anything else in the wide world. If you could only hear the wind throwing his arm against my window, and sobbing down the glen. I think I shall never have a Lover I am so fond of as the wind. None ever serenaded me so divinely. And when I open my window wide and ask him what he wants, and tell him I am quite ready to elope with him now--this moment--he only moans and sighs thro' my outblown hair--and gives me neuralgia.... I read all day, except when I am out with my Lover, or playing with my little nephew and niece, both of whom I adore--for they are little poets. We have had a houseful ever since August, so I am delighted to get a little calm. It is so dreadful never, never to be alone--and really the housemaid would do just as well! and yet, whenever I go to my sanctum I am routed out as if I was of as much use as plums to plum pudding, and either made to play lawn-tennis or hide-and-seek, or to talk to a young man whose only idea of the Infinite is the Looking-glass. All these are the trials that attend the "young lady"