Memories
I
A way of life is something more than the shifting relations of bits of matter in space and in time. Life depends upon such external facts. The all-important sesthetic arises out of them, and is deflected by them. But, in abstraction from the atmosphere of feeling, one behaviour pattern is as good as another; and they ate all equally uninteresting. The chief value of memories of infancy and young childhood is that with unconscious naiveté they convey the tonality of the society amid which that childhood was passed. The two generations immediately preceding the present time are so near and so far. We can almost hear the rustle of their clothes as they passed away in the shades. The tones of their voices, their ways of approach, linger, And yet the generation on the younger side of fifty knows so little of them. The blatant emphasis of current literature has done its worst in distortion. Memories shed a quiet light upon ways of feeling which in literature become distorted for the necessities of a story, or of a comparison.
In the autumn of 1864 a small boy three years old was in Paris. He was, however, unconscious of date, of reason, and of personal age. The very notion of the great world of tremendous happenings was absent from his mind. He enjoyed as matter of course the love and petting from the family of parents, children, nutse, and the bright warm days. But one baffling, elusive memory remained throughout life, a thread connecting the child with the onrush of history.
The scene was a bright day, the nurse sitting on a seat facing a broad road, the child playing, a park with its beauty of trees and flowers and shrubs, a palace from which the road came; and whither the road went the child neither knew nor cared. Along the road a glittering regiment ot soldiers marched from the palace, and, passing the seat, vanished into the unknown. That was the whole scene, disconnected from any background of date or place, and yet haunting memory in later years. Throughout boyhood he tried again and again to identify the spot. Each year for two months in the late spring he was living in a London house looking across Green Park towards Buckingham Palace. He knew every seat that faced the roads where companies of Queen Victoria’s Guards marched to and fro from the palace. The Queen herself, as she drove past, was a familiar sight — a little figure in black, belonging to the unquestioned order of the universe, but at that time, toward the end of the decade of the eighteen-sixties, too tetired to be very popular. But the seat of his dream, with its company of soldiers marching from a palace toward the unknown, remained undiscovered.
