Page:The Altar of the Dead, The Beast in the Jungle, The Birthplace, and Other Tales (London, Macmillan, 1922).djvu/20

 I proceed almost eagerly, in any case, to "The Private Life"—and at the cost of reaching for a moment over "The Jolly Corner": I find myself so fondly return to ground on which the history even of small experiments may be more or less written. This mild documentation fairly thickens for me, I confess, the air of the first-mentioned of these tales; the scraps of records flit through that medium, to memory, as with the incalculable brush of wings of the imprisoned bat at eventide. This piece of ingenuity rests for me on such a handful of acute impressions as I may not here tell over at once; so that, to be brief, I select two of the sharpest. Neither of these was, in old London days, I make out, to be resisted even under its single pressure; so that the hour struck with a vengeance for "Dramatise it, dramatise it!" (dramatise, that is, the combination) from the first glimpse of a good way to work together two cases that happened to have been given me. They were those—as distinct as possible save for belonging alike to the "world," the London world of a time when Discrimination still a little lifted its head—of a highly distinguished man, constantly to be encountered, whose fortune and whose peculiarity it was to bear out personally as little as possible (at least to my wondering sense) the high denotements, the rich implications and rare associations, of the genius to which he owed his position and his renown. One may go, naturally, in such a connexion, but by one's own applied measure; and I have never ceased to ask myself, in this particular loud, sound, normal, hearty presence, all so assertive and so whole, all bristling with prompt responses and expected opinions and usual views, radiating all a broad daylight equality of emphasis and impartiality of address (for most relations)—I never ceased, I say, to ask myself what lodgement, on such premises, the rich proud genius xiv