1862: Lord Alban Fitzartur
Private papers
I have spent a week at my father’s estate, which is rather like spending the summer in a cathedral devoted entirely to upholstery. Each room upholstered, incidentally, in guilt and gold. The principal novelty of this visit was his invitation—offered with some ceremony and a decanter of Tokay—to inspect what he called his “domestic arrangements”: a series of chambers adjoining the stables which, to my bewilderment, turned out to constitute his all-male seraglio.
I had expected something out of Tennyson, perhaps—moonlight, mystery, faint sighs through muslin—but found instead a set of comfortably carpeted rooms and a quantity of rather languid young men arranged like ornaments in a Turkish fantasy. Silk cushions, citron light, and the haunting sense of something both elaborate and entirely pointless. My father, who has long mistaken indulgence for imagination, seemed in raptures over the convenience of it all.
“It saves travel”, he said, gesturing to a boy pouring sherbet with tragic attentiveness, “and imports the necessary colour into English life.”
I pointed out that whatever England lacked in colour, it certainly compensated in opportunity. “Surely”, I said, “one might hunt such entertainments as one does foxes—the obstacles being half the pleasure”. He merely smiled and nodded toward the stable door. “We’ve horses for hunting.”
That was the moment, I think, when the curtains dropped on filial obedience. A man cannot live on another man’s fancies, especially if they are arranged by the footman. I resolved to hunt elsewhere—not only flesh but freedom, not only convenience but creation.
So this morning, having made my excuses and distributed the requisite farewells, I have come here to my own small estate at Mallory—a place too ancient to be respectable, too drafty to be fashionable, but very nearly alive. The garden tunnels into its own past; the lake dreams beside the house like a conspiracy. I feel something stirring—something theatrical, perhaps, or at least dramatic.
London calls. I hear its brass and laughter from here, though it lies sixty miles distant. There men dress, disguise, and undress with a purpose nobler than convenience—the performance of the self. Bohemia, they call it; a wilder hunting ground, where one may chase not game, but genius. I think that is where my future lies—amidst the footlights and the painters, the decadent and the damned.
My father may keep his silk-tasselled paradise. I shall make of mine a stage.
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