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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Small Boy and Others, by Henry James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Small Boy and Others
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: July 24, 2008 [EBook #26115]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif, Martin Pettit, University of
+Toronto Libraries. and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS
+
+[Illustration: Henry James and his Father
+From a daguerreotype taken in 1854]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+              BOOKS BY HENRY JAMES
+
+       PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+
+     A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS        _net_ $2.50
+     THE OUTCRY                    _net_  1.25
+     THE FINER GRAIN               _net_  1.25
+     THE SACRED FOUNT                     1.50
+     THE WINGS OF THE DOVE, 2 vols.       2.50
+     THE BETTER SORT                      1.50
+     THE GOLDEN BOWL, 2 vols.             2.50
+
+         NOVELS AND TALES. NEW YORK EDITION
+              24 vols., _net_ $48.00
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS
+
+BY
+
+HENRY JAMES
+
+NEW YORK
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+1913
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+
+Published March, 1913
+
+[Illustration: Publisher's logo]
+
+
+
+
+A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+In the attempt to place together some particulars of the early life of
+William James and present him in his setting, his immediate native and
+domestic air, so that any future gathered memorials of him might become
+the more intelligible and interesting, I found one of the consequences
+of my interrogation of the past assert itself a good deal at the expense
+of some of the others. For it was to memory in the first place that my
+main appeal for particulars had to be made; I had been too near a
+witness of my brother's beginnings of life, and too close a participant,
+by affection, admiration and sympathy, in whatever touched and moved
+him, not to feel myself in possession even of a greater quantity of
+significant truth, a larger handful of the fine substance of history,
+than I could hope to express or apply. To recover anything like the full
+treasure of scattered, wasted circumstance was at the same time to live
+over the spent experience itself, so deep and rich and rare, with
+whatever sadder and sorer intensities, even with whatever poorer and
+thinner passages, after the manner of every one's experience; and the
+effect of this in turn was to find discrimination among the parts of my
+subject again and again difficult--so inseparably and beautifully they
+seemed to hang together and the comprehensive case to decline mutilation
+or refuse to be treated otherwise than handsomely. This meant that
+aspects began to multiply and images to swarm, so far at least as they
+showed, to appreciation, as true terms and happy values; and that I
+might positively and exceedingly rejoice in my relation to most of them,
+using it for all that, as the phrase is, it should be worth. To knock at
+the door of the past was in a word to see it open to me quite wide--to
+see the world within begin to "compose" with a grace of its own round
+the primary figure, see it people itself vividly and insistently. Such
+then is the circle of my commemoration and so much these free and
+copious notes a labour of love and loyalty. We were, to my sense, the
+blest group of us, such a company of characters and such a picture of
+differences, and withal so fused and united and interlocked, that each
+of us, to that fond fancy, pleads for preservation, and that in respect
+to what I speak of myself as possessing I think I shall be ashamed, as
+of a cold impiety, to find any element altogether negligible. To which I
+may add perhaps that I struggle under the drawback, innate and inbred,
+of seeing the whole content of memory and affection in each enacted and
+recovered moment, as who should say, in the vivid image and the very
+scene; the light of the only terms in which life has treated me to
+experience. And I cherish the moment and evoke the image and repaint the
+scene; though meanwhile indeed scarce able to convey how prevailingly
+and almost exclusively, during years and years, the field was animated
+and the adventure conditioned for me by my brother's nearness and that
+play of genius in him of which I had never had a doubt from the first.
+
+The "first" then--since I retrace our steps to the start, for the
+pleasure, strangely mixed though it be, of feeling our small feet plant
+themselves afresh and artlessly stumble forward again--the first began
+long ago, far off, and yet glimmers at me there as out of a thin golden
+haze, with all the charm, for imagination and memory, of pressing
+pursuit rewarded, of distinctness in the dimness, of the flush of life
+in the grey, of the wonder of consciousness in everything; everything
+having naturally been all the while but the abject little matter of
+course. Partly doubtless as the effect of a life, now getting to be a
+tolerably long one, spent in the older world, I see the world of our
+childhood as very young indeed, young with its own juvenility as well as
+with ours; as if it wore the few and light garments and had gathered in
+but the scant properties and breakable toys of the tenderest age, or
+were at the most a very unformed young person, even a boisterous
+hobbledehoy. It exhaled at any rate a simple freshness, and I catch its
+pure breath, at our infantile Albany, as the very air of long summer
+afternoons--occasions tasting of ample leisure, still bookless, yet
+beginning to be bedless, or cribless; tasting of accessible garden
+peaches in a liberal backward territory that was still almost part of a
+country town; tasting of many-sized uncles, aunts, cousins, of strange
+legendary domestics, inveterately but archaically Irish, and whose
+familiar remarks and "criticism of life" were handed down, as well as of
+dim family ramifications and local allusions--mystifications
+always--that flowered into anecdote as into small hard plums; tasting
+above all of a big much-shaded savoury house in which a softly-sighing
+widowed grandmother, Catherine Barber by birth, whose attitude was a
+resigned consciousness of complications and accretions, dispensed an
+hospitality seemingly as joyless as it was certainly boundless. What she
+_liked_, dear gentle lady of many cares and anxieties, was the "fiction
+of the day," the novels, at that time promptly pirated, of Mrs. Trollope
+and Mrs. Gore, of Mrs. Marsh, Mrs. Hubback and the Misses Kavanagh and
+Aguilar, whose very names are forgotten now, but which used to drive
+her away to quiet corners whence her figure comes back to me bent
+forward on a table with the book held out at a distance and a tall
+single candle placed, apparently not at all to her discomfort, in that
+age of sparer and braver habits, straight between the page and her eyes.
+There is a very animated allusion to one or two of her aspects in the
+fragment of a "spiritual autobiography," the reminiscences of a
+so-called Stephen Dewhurst printed by W. J. (1885) in The Literary
+Remains of Henry James; a reference which has the interest of being very
+nearly as characteristic of my father himself (which his references in
+almost any connection were wont to be) as of the person or the occasion
+evoked. I had reached my sixteenth year when she died, and as my only
+remembered grandparent she touches the chord of attachment to a
+particular vibration. She represented for us in our generation the only
+English blood--that of both her own parents--flowing in our veins; I
+confess that out of that association, for reasons and reasons, I feel
+her image most beneficently bend. We were, as to three parts, of two
+other stocks; and I recall how from far back I reflected--for I see I
+must have been always reflecting--that, mixed as such a mixture, our
+Scotch with our Irish, might be, it had had still a grace to borrow from
+the third infusion or dimension. If I could freely have chosen moreover
+it was precisely from my father's mother that, fond votary of the finest
+faith in the vivifying and characterising force of mothers, I should
+have wished to borrow it; even while conscious that Catherine Barber's
+own people had drawn breath in American air for at least two generations
+before her. Our father's father, William James, an Irishman and a
+Protestant born (of county Cavan) had come to America, a very young man
+and then sole of his family, shortly after the Revolutionary War; my
+father, the second son of the third of the marriages to which the
+country of his adoption was liberally to help him, had been born in
+Albany in 1811. Our maternal greatgrandfather on the father's side, Hugh
+Walsh, had reached our shores from a like Irish home, Killyleagh, county
+Down, somewhat earlier, in 1764, he being then nineteen; he had settled
+at Newburgh-on-the-Hudson, half way to Albany, where some of his
+descendants till lately lingered. Our maternal greatgrandfather on the
+mother's side--that is our mother's mother's father, Alexander Robertson
+of Polmont near Edinburgh--had likewise crossed the sea in the
+mid-century and prospered in New York very much as Hugh Walsh was
+prospering and William James was still more markedly to prosper, further
+up the Hudson; as unanimous and fortunate beholders of the course of
+which admirable stream I like to think of them. I find Alexander
+Robertson inscribed in a wee New York directory of the close of the
+century as Merchant; and our childhood in that city was passed, as to
+some of its aspects, in a sense of the afterglow, reduced and
+circumscribed, it is true, but by no means wholly inanimate, of his
+shining solidity.
+
+The sweet taste of Albany probably lurked most in its being our admired
+antithesis to New York; it was holiday, whereas New York was home; at
+least that presently came to be the relation, for to my very very first
+fleeting vision, I apprehend, Albany itself must have been the scene
+exhibited. Our parents had gone there for a year or two to be near our
+grandmother on their return from their first (that is our mother's
+first) visit to Europe, which had quite immediately followed my birth,
+which appears to have lasted some year and a half, and of which I shall
+have another word to say. The Albany experiment would have been then
+their first founded housekeeping, since I make them out to have betaken
+themselves for the winter following their marriage to the ancient Astor
+House--not indeed at that time ancient, but the great and appointed
+modern hotel of New York, the only one of such pretensions, and which
+somehow continued to project its massive image, that of a great square
+block of granite with vast dark warm interiors, across some of the later
+and more sensitive stages of my infancy. Clearly--or I should perhaps
+rather say dimly--recourse to that hospitality was again occasionally
+had by our parents; who had originally had it to such a happy end that
+on January 9th, 1842, my elder brother had come into the world there. It
+remained a tradition with him that our father's friend from an early
+time, R. W. Emerson, then happening to be in New York and under that
+convenient roof, was proudly and pressingly "taken upstairs" to admire
+and give his blessing to the lately-born babe who was to become the
+second American William James. The blessing was to be renewed, I may
+mention, in the sense that among the impressions of the next early years
+I easily distinguish that of the great and urbane Emerson's occasional
+presence in Fourteenth Street, a centre of many images, where the
+parental tent was before long to pitch itself and rest awhile. I am
+interested for the moment, however, in identifying the scene of our very
+first perceptions--of my very own at least, which I can here best speak
+for.
+
+One of these, and probably the promptest in order, was that of my
+brother's occupying a place in the world to which I couldn't at all
+aspire--to any approach to which in truth I seem to myself ever
+conscious of having signally forfeited a title. It glimmers back to me
+that I quite definitely and resignedly thought of him as in the most
+exemplary manner already beforehand with me, already seated at his task
+when the attempt to drag me crying and kicking to the first hour of my
+education failed on the threshold of the Dutch House in Albany after the
+fashion I have glanced at in a collection of other pages than these
+(just as I remember to have once borrowed a hint from our grandmother's
+"interior" in a work of imagination). That failure of my powers or that
+indifference to them, my retreat shrieking from the Dutch House, was to
+leave him once for all already there an embodied demonstration of the
+possible--already wherever it might be that there was a question of my
+arriving, when arriving at all, belatedly and ruefully; as if he had
+gained such an advance of me in his sixteen months' experience of the
+world before mine began that I never for all the time of childhood and
+youth in the least caught up with him or overtook him. He was always
+round the corner and out of sight, coming back into view but at his
+hours of extremest ease. We were never in the same schoolroom, in the
+same game, scarce even in step together or in the same phase at the same
+time; when our phases overlapped, that is, it was only for a moment--he
+was clean out before I had got well in. How far he had really at any
+moment dashed forward it is not for me now to attempt to say; what
+comes to me is that I at least hung inveterately and woefully back, and
+that this relation alike to our interests and to each other seemed
+proper and preappointed. I lose myself in wonder at the loose ways, the
+strange process of waste, through which nature and fortune may deal on
+occasion with those whose faculty for application is all and only in
+their imagination and their sensibility. There may be during those
+bewildered and brooding years so little for them to "show" that I liken
+the individual dunce--as he so often must appear--to some commercial
+traveller who has lost the key to his packed case of samples and can but
+pass for a fool while other exhibitions go forward.
+
+I achieve withal a dim remembrance of my final submission, though it is
+the faintest ghost of an impression and consists but of the bright blur
+of a dame's schoolroom, a mere medium for small piping shuffling sound
+and suffered heat, as well as for the wistfulness produced by
+"glimmering squares" that were fitfully screened, though not to any
+revival of cheer, by a huge swaying, yet dominant object. This dominant
+object, the shepherdess of the flock, was Miss Bayou or Bayhoo--I
+recover but the alien sound of her name, which memory caresses only
+because she may have been of like race with her temple of learning,
+which faced my grandmother's house in North Pearl Street and really
+justified its exotic claim by its yellow archaic gable-end: I think of
+the same as of brick baked in the land of dykes and making a series of
+small steps from the base of the gable to the point. These images are
+subject, I confess, to a soft confusion--which is somehow consecrated,
+none the less, and out of which, with its shade of contributory truth,
+some sort of scene insists on glancing. The very flush of the uneven
+bricks of the pavement lives in it, the very smell of the street
+cobbles, the imputed grace of the arching umbrage--I see it all as from
+under trees; the form of Steuben Street, which crossed our view, as
+steep even to the very essence of adventure, with a summit, and still
+more with a nethermost and riskiest incline, very far away. There lives
+in it the aspect of the other house--the other and much smaller than my
+grandmother's, conveniently near it and within sight; which was
+pinkish-red picked out with white, whereas my grandmother's was
+greyish-brown and very grave, and which must have stood back a little
+from the street, as I seem even now to swing, or at least to perch, on a
+relaxed gate of approach that was conceived to work by an iron chain
+weighted with a big ball; all under a spreading tree again and with the
+high, oh so high white stone steps (mustn't they have been marble?) and
+fan-lighted door of the pinkish-red front behind me. I lose myself in
+ravishment before the marble and the pink. There were other houses
+too--one of them the occasion of the first "paid" visit that struggles
+with my twilight of social consciousness; a call with my father,
+conveying me presumably for fond exhibition (since if my powers were not
+exhibitional my appearance and my long fair curls, of which I distinctly
+remember the lachrymose sacrifice, suppositiously were), on one of our
+aunts, the youngest of his three sisters, lately married and who,
+predestined to an early death, hovers there for me, softly spectral, in
+long light "front" ringlets, the fashion of the time and the capital
+sign of all our paternal aunts seemingly; with the remembered
+enhancement of her living in Elk Street, the name itself vaguely
+portentous, as through beasts of the forest not yet wholly exorcised,
+and more or less under the high brow of that Capitol which, as aloft
+somewhere and beneath the thickest shades of all, loomed, familiar yet
+impressive, at the end of almost any Albany vista of reference. I have
+seen other capitols since, but the whole majesty of the matter must have
+been then distilled into my mind--even though the connection was
+indirect and the concrete image, that of the primitive structure, long
+since pretentiously and insecurely superseded--so that, later on, the
+impression was to find itself, as the phrase is, discounted. Had it not
+moreover been reinforced at the time, for that particular Capitoline
+hour, by the fact that our uncle, our aunt's husband, was a son of Mr.
+Martin Van Buren, and that _he_ was the President? This at least led the
+imagination on--or leads in any case my present imagination of that one;
+ministering to what I have called the soft confusion.
+
+The confusion clears, however, though the softness remains, when,
+ceasing to press too far backward, I meet the ampler light of conscious
+and educated little returns to the place; for the education of New York,
+enjoyed up to my twelfth year, failed to blight its romantic appeal. The
+images I really distinguish flush through the maturer medium, but with
+the sense of them only the more wondrous. The other house, the house of
+my parents' limited early sojourn, becomes that of those of our cousins,
+numerous at that time, who pre-eminently figured for us; the various
+brood presided over by my father's second sister, Catherine James, who
+had married at a very early age Captain Robert Temple, U.S.A. Both these
+parents were to die young, and their children, six in number, the two
+eldest boys, were very markedly to people our preliminary scene; this
+being true in particular of three of them, the sharply differing
+brothers and the second sister, Mary Temple, radiant and rare,
+extinguished in her first youth, but after having made an impression on
+many persons, and on ourselves not least, which was to become in the
+harmonious circle, for all time, matter of sacred legend and reference,
+of associated piety. Those and others with them were the numerous
+dawnings on which in many cases the deepening and final darknesses were
+so soon to follow: our father's family was to offer such a chronicle of
+early deaths, arrested careers, broken promises, orphaned children. It
+sounds cold-blooded, but part of the charm of our grandmother's house
+for us--or I should perhaps but speak for myself--was in its being so
+much and so sociably a nurseried and playroomed orphanage. The children
+of her lost daughters and daughters-in-law overflowed there, mainly as
+girls; on whom the surviving sons-in-law and sons occasionally and most
+trustingly looked in. Parentally bereft cousins were somehow more
+thrilling than parentally provided ones; and most thrilling when, in the
+odd fashion of that time, they were sent to school in New York as a
+preliminary to their being sent to school in Europe. They spent scraps
+of holidays with us in Fourteenth Street, and I think my first childish
+conception of the enviable lot, formed amid these associations, was to
+be so little fathered or mothered, so little sunk in the short range,
+that the romance of life seemed to lie in some constant improvisation,
+by vague overhovering authorities, of new situations and horizons. We
+were intensely domesticated, yet for the very reason perhaps that we
+felt our young bonds easy; and they were so easy compared to other small
+plights of which we had stray glimpses that my first assured conception
+of true richness was that we should be sent separately off among cold or
+even cruel aliens in order to be there thrillingly homesick.
+Homesickness was a luxury I remember craving from the tenderest age--a
+luxury of which I was unnaturally, or at least prosaically, deprived.
+Our motherless cousin Augustus Barker came up from Albany to the
+Institution Charlier--unless it was, as I suspect, a still earlier
+specimen, with a name that fades from me, of that type of French
+establishment for boys which then and for years after so incongruously
+flourished in New York; and though he professed a complete satisfaction
+with pleasures tasted in our innocent society I felt that he was engaged
+in a brave and strenuous adventure while we but hugged the comparatively
+safe shore.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+We were day-boys, William and I, at dispensaries of learning the number
+and succession of which to-day excite my wonder; we couldn't have
+changed oftener, it strikes me as I look back, if our presence had been
+inveterately objected to, and yet I enjoy an inward certainty that, my
+brother being vividly bright and I quite blankly innocuous, this
+reproach was never brought home to our house. It was an humiliation to
+me at first, small boys though we were, that our instructors kept being
+instructresses and thereby a grave reflection both on our attainments
+and our spirit. A bevy of these educative ladies passes before me, I
+still possess their names; as for instance that of Mrs. Daly and that of
+Miss Rogers (previously of the "Chelsea Female Institute," though at the
+moment of Sixth Avenue this latter), whose benches indeed my brother
+didn't haunt, but who handled us literally with gloves--I still see the
+elegant objects as Miss Rogers beat time with a long black ferule to
+some species of droning chant or chorus in which we spent most of our
+hours; just as I see her very tall and straight and spare, in a light
+blue dress, her firm face framed in long black glossy ringlets and the
+stamp of the Chelsea Female Institute all over her. Mrs. Daly, clearly
+the immediate successor to the nebulous Miss Bayou, remains quite
+substantial--perhaps because the sphere of her small influence has
+succeeded in not passing away, up to this present writing; so that in
+certain notes on New York published a few years since I was moved to
+refer to it with emotion as one of the small red houses on the south
+side of Waverley Place that really carry the imagination back to a
+vanished social order. They carry mine to a stout red-faced lady with
+grey hair and a large apron, the latter convenience somehow suggesting,
+as she stood about with a resolute air, that she viewed her little
+pupils as so many small slices cut from the loaf of life and on which
+she was to dab the butter of arithmetic and spelling, accompanied by way
+of jam with a light application of the practice of prize-giving. I
+recall an occasion indeed, I must in justice mention, when the jam
+really was thick--my only memory of a schoolfeast, strange to say,
+throughout our young annals: something uncanny in the air of the
+schoolroom at the unwonted evening or late afternoon hour, and tables
+that seemed to me prodigiously long and on which the edibles were chunky
+and sticky. The stout red-faced lady must have been Irish, as the name
+she bore imported--or do I think so but from the indescribably Irish
+look of her revisited house? It refers itself at any rate to a New York
+age in which a little more or a little less of the colour was scarce
+notable in the general flush.
+
+Of pure unimported strain, however, were Miss Sedgwick and Mrs. Wright
+(Lavinia D.), the next figures in the procession--the procession that
+was to wind up indeed with two foreign recruits, small brown snappy
+Mademoiselle Delavigne, who plied us with the French tongue at home and
+who had been introduced to us as the niece--or could it have been the
+grandniece?--of the celebrated Casimir, and a large Russian lady in an
+extraordinarily short cape (I like to recall the fashion of short capes)
+of the same stuff as her dress, and Merovingian sidebraids that seemed
+to require the royal crown of Frédégonde or Brunéhaut to complete their
+effect. This final and aggravational representative of the compromising
+sex looms to my mind's eye, I should add, but as the creature of an
+hour, in spite of her having been domiciled with us; whereas I think of
+Mademoiselle Delavigne as flitting in and out on quick, fine, more or
+less cloth-shod feet of exemplary neatness, the flat-soled feet of Louis
+Philippe and of the female figures in those volumes of Gavarni then
+actual, then contemporaneous, which were kept in a piece of furniture
+that stood between the front-parlour windows in Fourteenth Street,
+together with a set of Béranger enriched by steel engravings to the
+strange imagery of which I so wonderingly responded that all other art
+of illustration, ever since, has been for me comparatively weak and
+cold. These volumes and the tall entrancing folios of Nash's
+lithographed Mansions of England in the Olden Time formed a store
+lending itself particularly to distribution on the drawingroom carpet,
+with concomitant pressure to the same surface of the small student's
+stomach and relieving agitation of his backward heels. I make out that
+it had decidedly been given to Mlle. Delavigne to represent to my first
+perception personal France; she was, besides not being at all pink or
+shy, oval and fluent and mistress somehow of the step--the step of
+levity that involved a whisk of her short skirts; there she was, to the
+life, on the page of Gavarni, attesting its reality, and there again did
+that page in return (I speak not of course of the unplumbed depths of
+the appended text) attest her own felicity. I was later on to feel--that
+is I was to learn--how many impressions and appearances, how large a
+sense of things, her type and tone prefigured. The evanescence of the
+large Russian lady, whom I think of as rather rank, I can't express it
+otherwise, may have been owing to some question of the purity of her
+accent in French; it was one of her attributes and her grounds of appeal
+to us that she had come straight from Siberia, and it is distinct to me
+that the purity was challenged by a friend of the house, and
+without--pathetically enough!--provoking the only answer, the plea that
+the missing Atticism would have been wasted on young barbarians. The
+Siberian note, on our inmate's part, may perhaps have been the least of
+her incongruities; she was above all too big for a little job, towered
+over us doubtless too heroically; and her proportions hover but to lose
+themselves--with the successors to her function awaiting us a little
+longer.
+
+Meanwhile, to revert an instant, if the depressed consciousness of our
+still more or less quailing, educationally, beneath the female eye--and
+there was as well the deeper depth, there was the degrading fact, that
+with us literally consorted and contended Girls, that we sat and strove,
+even though we drew the line at playing with them and at knowing them,
+when not of the swarming cousinship, at home--if that felt awkwardness
+didn't exactly coincide with the ironic effect of "Gussy's" appearances,
+his emergence from rich mystery and his return to it, our state was but
+comparatively the braver: he always had so much more to tell us than we
+could possibly have to tell him. On reflection I see that the most
+completely rueful period couldn't after all greatly have prolonged
+itself; since the female eye last bent on us would have been that of
+Lavinia D. Wright, to our connection with whom a small odd reminiscence
+attaches a date. A little schoolmate displayed to me with pride, while
+the connection lasted, a beautiful coloured, a positively iridescent and
+gilded card representing the first of all the "great exhibitions" of our
+age, the London Crystal Palace of 1851--his father having lately gone
+out to it and sent him the dazzling memento. In 1851 I was eight years
+old and my brother scarce more than nine; in addition to which it is
+distinct to me in the first place that we were never faithful long, or
+for more than one winter, to the same studious scene, and in the second
+that among our instructors Mrs. Lavinia had no successor of her own sex
+unless I count Mrs. Vredenburg, of New Brighton, where we spent the
+summer of 1854, when I had reached the age of eleven and found myself
+bewildered by recognition of the part that "attendance at school" was so
+meanly to play in the hitherto unclouded long vacation. This was true at
+least for myself and my next younger brother, Wilky, who, under the
+presumption now dawning of his "community of pursuits" with my own, was
+from that moment, off and on, for a few years, my extremely easy
+yokefellow and playfellow. On William, charged with learning--I thought
+of him inveterately from our younger time as charged with learning--no
+such trick was played; he rested or roamed, that summer, on his
+accumulations; a fact which, as I was sure I saw these more and more
+richly accumulate, didn't in the least make me wonder. It comes back to
+me in truth that I had been prepared for anything by his having said to
+me toward the end of our time at Lavinia D's and with characteristic
+authority--his enjoyment of it coming from my character, I mean, quite
+as much as from his own--that that lady was a very able woman, as shown
+by the Experiments upstairs. He was upstairs of course, and I was down,
+and I scarce even knew what Experiments were, beyond their indeed
+requiring capability. The region of their performance was William's
+natural sphere, though I recall that I had a sense of peeping into it to
+a thrilled effect on seeing our instructress illustrate the proper way
+to extinguish a candle. She firmly pressed the flame between her thumb
+and her two forefingers, and, on my remarking that I didn't see how she
+could do it, promptly replied that I of course couldn't do it myself (as
+_he_ could) because I should be afraid.
+
+That reflection on my courage awakes another echo of the same scant
+season--since the test involved must have been that of our taking our
+way home through Fourth Avenue from some point up town, and Mrs.
+Wright's situation in East Twenty-first Street was such a point. The
+Hudson River Railroad was then in course of construction, or was being
+made to traverse the upper reaches of the city, through that part of
+which raged, to my young sense, a riot of explosion and a great shouting
+and waving of red flags when the gunpowder introduced into the rocky
+soil was about to take effect. It was our theory that our passage there,
+in the early afternoon, was beset with danger, and our impression that
+we saw fragments of rock hurtle through the air and smite to the earth
+another and yet another of the persons engaged or exposed. The point of
+honour, among several of us, was of course nobly to defy the danger, and
+I feel again the emotion with which I both hoped and feared that the red
+flags, lurid signals descried from afar, would enable or compel us to
+renew the feat. That I didn't for myself inveterately renew it I seem to
+infer from the memory of other perambulations of the period--as to which
+I am divided between their still present freshness and my sense of
+perhaps making too much of these tiny particles of history. My stronger
+rule, however, I confess, and the one by which I must here consistently
+be guided, is that, from the moment it is a question of projecting a
+picture, no particle that counts for memory or is appreciable to the
+spirit _can_ be too tiny, and that experience, in the name of which one
+speaks, is all compact of them and shining with them. There was at any
+rate another way home, with other appeals, which consisted of getting
+straight along westward to Broadway, a sphere of a different order of
+fascination and bristling, as I seem to recall, with more vivid aspects,
+greater curiosities and wonderments. _The_ curiosity was of course the
+country-place, as I supposed it to be, on the northeast corner of
+Eighteenth Street, if I am not mistaken; a big brown house in "grounds"
+peopled with animal life, which, little as its site may appear to know
+it to-day, lingered on into considerably later years. I have but to
+close my eyes in order to open them inwardly again, while I lean against
+the tall brown iron rails and peer through, to a romantic view of
+browsing and pecking and parading creatures, not numerous, but all of
+distinguished appearance: two or three elegant little cows of refined
+form and colour, two or three nibbling fawns and a larger company, above
+all, of peacocks and guineafowl, with, doubtless--though as to this I am
+vague--some of the commoner ornaments of the barnyard. I recognise that
+the scene as I evoke it fails of grandeur; but it none the less had for
+me the note of greatness--all of which but shows of course what a very
+town-bred small person I was, and was to remain.
+
+I see myself moreover as somehow always alone in these and like New York
+_flâneries_ and contemplations, and feel how the sense of my being so,
+being at any rate master of my short steps, such as they were, through
+all the beguiling streets, was probably the very savour of each of my
+chance feasts. Which stirs in me at the same time some wonder at the
+liberty of range and opportunity of adventure allowed to my tender age;
+though the puzzle may very well drop, after all, as I ruefully reflect
+that I couldn't have been judged at home reckless or adventurous. What I
+look back to as my infant license can only have had for its ground some
+timely conviction on the part of my elders that the only form of riot or
+revel ever known to me would be that of the visiting mind. Wasn't I
+myself for that matter even at that time all acutely and yet resignedly,
+even quite fatalistically, aware of what to think of this? I at any rate
+watch the small boy dawdle and gape again. I smell the cold dusty paint
+and iron as the rails of the Eighteenth Street corner rub his
+contemplative nose, and, feeling him foredoomed, withhold from him no
+grain of my sympathy. He is a convenient little image or warning of all
+that was to be for him, and he might well have been even happier than he
+was. For there was the very pattern and measure of all he was to demand:
+just to _be_ somewhere--almost anywhere would do--and somehow receive an
+impression or an accession, feel a relation or a vibration. He was to go
+without many things, ever so many--as all persons do in whom
+contemplation takes so much the place of action; but everywhere, in the
+years that came soon after, and that in fact continued long, in the
+streets of great towns, in New York still for some time, and then for a
+while in London, in Paris, in Geneva, wherever it might be, he was to
+enjoy more than anything the so far from showy practice of wondering and
+dawdling and gaping: he was really, I think, much to profit by it. What
+it at all appreciably gave him--that is gave him in producible
+form--would be difficult to state; but it seems to him, as he even now
+thus indulges himself, an education like another: feeling, as he has
+come to do more and more, that no education avails for the intelligence
+that doesn't stir in it some subjective passion, and that on the other
+hand almost anything that does so act is largely educative, however
+small a figure the process might make in a scheme of training. Strange
+indeed, furthermore, are some of the things that _have_ stirred a
+subjective passion--stirred it, I mean, in young persons predisposed to
+a more or less fine inspired application.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+But I positively dawdle and gape here--I catch myself in the act; so
+that I take up the thread of fond reflection that guides me through that
+mystification of the summer school, which I referred to a little way
+back, at the time when the Summer School as known in America to-day was
+so deep in the bosom of the future. The seat of acquisition I speak of
+must have been contiguous to the house we occupied--I recall it as most
+intimately and objectionably near--and carried on in the interest of
+those parents from New York who, in villeggiatura under the queer
+conditions of those days, with the many modern mitigations of the
+gregarious lot still unrevealed and the many refinements on the
+individual one still undeveloped, welcomed almost any influence that
+might help at all to form their children to civility. Yet I remember
+that particular influence as more noisy and drowsy and dusty than
+anything else--as to which it must have partaken strongly of the general
+nature of New Brighton; a neighbourhood that no apt agency whatever had
+up to that time concerned itself to fashion, and that was indeed to
+remain shabbily shapeless for years; since I recall almost as dire an
+impression of it received in the summer of 1875. I seem more or less to
+have begun life, for that matter, with impressions of New Brighton;
+there comes back to me another, considerably more infantile than that of
+1854, so infantile indeed that I wonder at its having stuck--that of a
+place called the Pavilion, which must have been an hotel sheltering us
+for July and August, and the form of which to childish retrospect,
+unprejudiced by later experience, was that of a great Greek temple
+shining over blue waters in the splendour of a white colonnade and a
+great yellow pediment. The elegant image remained, though imprinted in a
+child so small as to be easily portable by a stout nurse, I remember,
+and not less easily duckable; I gasp again, and was long to gasp, with
+the sense of salt immersion received at her strong hands. Wonderful
+altogether in fact, I find as I write, the quantity, the intensity of
+picture recoverable from even the blankest and tenderest state of the
+little canvas.
+
+I connect somehow with the Pavilion period a visit paid with my
+father--who decidedly must have liked to take me about, I feel so rich
+in that general reminiscence--to a family whom we reached in what struck
+me as a quite lovely embowered place, on a very hot day, and among whom
+luxuries and eccentricities flourished together. They were numerous, the
+members of this family, they were beautiful, they partook of their
+meals, or were at the moment partaking of one, out of doors, and the
+then pre-eminent figure in the group was a very big Newfoundland dog on
+whose back I was put to ride. That must have been my first vision of the
+liberal life--though I further ask myself what my age could possibly
+have been when my weight was so fantastically far from hinting at later
+developments. But the romance of the hour was particularly in what I
+have called the eccentric note, the fact that the children, my
+entertainers, riveted my gaze to stockingless and shoeless legs and
+feet, conveying somehow at the same time that they were not poor and
+destitute but rich and provided--just as I took their garden-feast for a
+sign of overflowing food--and that their state as of children of nature
+was a refinement of freedom and grace. They were to become great and
+beautiful, the household of that glimmering vision, they were to figure
+historically, heroically, and serve great public ends; but always, to my
+remembering eyes and fond fancy, they were to move through life as with
+the bare white feet of that original preferred fairness and wildness.
+This is rank embroidery, but the old surface itself insists on
+spreading--it waits at least with an air of its own. The rest is
+silence; I can--extraordinary encumbrance even for the most doating of
+parents on a morning call--but have returned with my father to "our
+hotel"; since I feel that I must not only to this but to a still further
+extent face the historic truth that we were for considerable periods,
+during our earliest time, nothing less than hotel children. Between the
+far-off and the later phases at New Brighton stretched a series of
+summers that had seen us all regularly installed for a couple of months
+at an establishment passing in the view of that simpler age for a vast
+caravansery--the Hamilton House, on the south Long Island shore, so
+called from its nearness to the Fort of that name, which had Fort
+Lafayette, the Bastille of the Civil War, out in the channel before it
+and which probably cast a stronger spell upon the spirit of our
+childhood, William's and mine at least, than any scene presented to us
+up to our reaching our teens.
+
+I find that I draw from the singularly unobliterated memory of the
+particulars of all that experience the power quite to glory in our
+shame; of so entrancing an interest did I feel it at the time to _be_ an
+hotel child, and so little would I have exchanged my lot with that of
+any small person more privately bred. We were private enough in all
+conscience, I think I must have felt, the rest of the year; and at what
+age mustn't I quite have succumbed to the charm of the world seen in a
+larger way? For there, incomparably, was the chance to dawdle and gape;
+there were human appearances in endless variety and on the
+exhibition-stage of a piazza that my gape measured almost as by miles;
+it was even as if I had become positively conscious that the social
+scene so peopled would pretty well always say more to me than anything
+else. What it did say I of course but scantly understood; but I none the
+less knew it spoke, and I listened to its voice, I seem to recall, very
+much as "young Edwin," in Dr. Beattie's poem, listened to the roar of
+tempests and torrents from the nobler eminence of beetling crags and in
+exposure to still deeper abysses. I cling for the moment, however, to
+the small story of our Vredenburg summer, as we were for long afterwards
+invidiously to brand it; the more that it so plays its part in
+illustration, under the light of a later and happier age, of the growth,
+when not rather of the arrest, of manners and customs roundabout our
+birthplace. I think we had never been so much as during these particular
+months disinherited of the general and public amenities that reinforce
+for the young private precept and example--disinherited in favour of
+dust and glare and mosquitoes and pigs and shanties and rumshops, of no
+walks and scarce more drives, of a repeated no less than of a strong
+emphasis on the more sordid sides of the Irish aspect in things. There
+was a castellated residence on the hill above us--very high I remember
+supposing the hill and very stately the structure; it had towers and
+views and pretensions and belonged to a Colonel, whom we thought very
+handsome and very costumed, (as if befrogged and high-booted, which he
+couldn't have been at all, only _ought_ to have been, would even
+certainly have been at a higher pitch of social effect,) and whose son
+and heir, also very handsome and known familiarly and endearingly as
+Chick, had a velvet coat and a pony and I think spurs, all luxuries we
+were without, and was cousin to boys, the De Coppets, whom we had come
+to know at our school of the previous winter and who somehow--doubtless
+partly as guests of the opulent Chick--hovered again about the field of
+idleness.
+
+The De Coppets, particularly in the person of the first-born Louis, had
+been a value to us, or at any rate to me--for though I was, in common
+with my elders then, unacquainted with the application of that word as I
+use it here, what was my incipient sense of persons and things, what
+were my first stirred observant and imaginative reactions,
+discriminations and categories, but a vague groping for it? The De
+Coppets (again as more especially and most impressively interpreted by
+the subtle Louis) enjoyed the pre-eminence of being European; they had
+dropped during the scholastic term of 1853-4 straight from the lake of
+Geneva into the very bosom of Mr. Richard Pulling Jenks's select resort
+for young gentlemen, then situated in Broadway below Fourth Street; and
+had lately been present at an historic pageant--whether or no
+celebrating the annals of the town of Coppet I know not--in which
+representatives of their family had figured in armour and on horseback
+as the Barons (to our comprehension) de Coup or Cou. Their father was
+thus of the Canton de Vaud--only their mother had been native among
+ourselves and sister to the Colonel of the castellations. But what was
+the most vivid mark of the brothers, and vividest on the part of the
+supersubtle Louis, was his French treatment of certain of our native
+local names, Ohio and Iowa for instance, which he rendered, as to their
+separate vowels, with a daintiness and a delicacy invidious and
+imperturbable, so that he might have been Chateaubriand declaiming Les
+Natchez at Madame Récamier's--O-ee-oh and Ee-o-wah; a proceeding in him,
+a violence offered to his serried circle of little staring and glaring
+New Yorkers supplied with the usual allowance of fists and boot-toes,
+which, as it was clearly conscious, I recollect thinking unsurpassed for
+cool calm courage. Those _were_ the right names--which we owed wholly to
+the French explorers and Jesuit Fathers; so much the worse for us if we
+vulgarly didn't know it. I lose myself in admiration of the consistency,
+the superiority, the sublimity, of the not at all game-playing, yet in
+his own way so singularly sporting, Louis. He was naturally and
+incorruptibly French--as, so oddly, I have known other persons of both
+sexes to be whose English was naturally and incorruptibly American; the
+appearance being thus that the possession of indigenous English alone
+forms the adequate barrier and the assured racial ground. (Oh the queer
+reversions observed on the part of Latinized compatriots in the course
+of a long life--the remarkable drops from the quite current French or
+Italian to the comparatively improvised native idiom, with the resulting
+effect of the foreign tongue used as a domestic and the domestic, that
+is the original American, used as a foreign tongue, or without inherited
+confidence!)
+
+Louis De Coppet, though theoretically American and domiciled, was
+_naturally_ French, and so pressed further home to me that "sense of
+Europe" to which I feel that my very earliest consciousness waked--a
+perversity that will doubtless appear to ask for all the justification I
+can supply and some of which I shall presently attempt to give. He
+opened vistas, and I count ever as precious anyone, everyone, who
+betimes does that for the small straining vision; performing this office
+never so much, doubtless, as when, during that summer, he invited me to
+collaborate with him in the production of a romance which _il se fit
+fort_ to get printed, to get published, when success, or in other words
+completion, should crown our effort. Our effort, alas, failed of the
+crown, in spite of sundry solemn and mysterious meetings--so much
+devoted, I seem to remember, to the publishing question that others more
+fundamental dreadfully languished; leaving me convinced, however, that
+my friend would have got our fiction published if he could only have got
+it written. I think of my participation in this vain dream as of the
+very first gage of visiting approval offered to the exercise of a
+gift--though quite unable to conceive my companion's ground for
+suspecting a gift of which I must at that time quite have failed to
+exhibit a single in the least "phenomenal" symptom. It had none the less
+by his overtures been handsomely _imputed_ to me; that was in a manner a
+beginning--a small start, yet not wholly unattended with bravery. Louis
+De Coppet, I must add, brought to light later on, so far as I know, no
+compositions of his own; we met him long after in Switzerland and
+eventually heard of his having married a young Russian lady and settled
+at Nice. If I drop on his memory this apology for a bay-leaf it is from
+the fact of his having given the earliest, or at least the most
+personal, tap to that pointed prefigurement of the manners of "Europe,"
+which, inserted wedge-like, if not to say peg-like, into my young
+allegiance, was to split the tender organ into such unequal halves. His
+the toy hammer that drove in the very point of the golden nail.
+
+It was as if there had been a mild magic in that breath, however scant,
+of another world; but when I ask myself what element of the pleasing or
+the agreeable may have glimmered through the then general, the outer and
+enveloping conditions, I recover many more of the connections in which
+forms and civilities lapsed beyond repair than of those in which they
+struggled at all successfully. It is for some record of the question of
+taste, of the consciousness of an æsthetic appeal, as reflected in forms
+and aspects, that I shall like best to testify; as the promise and the
+development of these things on our earlier American scene are the more
+interesting to trace for their doubtless demanding a degree of the finer
+attention. The plain and happy profusions and advances and successes, as
+one looks back, reflect themselves at every turn; the quick beats of
+material increase and multiplication, with plenty of people to tell of
+them and throw up their caps for them; but the edifying matters to
+recapture would be the adventures of the "higher criticism" so far as
+there was any--and so far too as it might bear on the real quality and
+virtue of things; the state of manners, the terms of intercourse, the
+care for excellence, the sense of appearances, the intellectual reaction
+generally. However, any breasting of those deep waters must be but in
+the form for me of an occasional dip. It meanwhile fairly overtakes and
+arrests me here as a contributive truth that our general medium of life
+in the situation I speak of was such as to make a large defensive
+verandah, which seems to have very stoutly and completely surrounded us,
+play more or less the part of a raft of rescue in too high a tide--too
+high a tide there beneath us, as I recover it, of the ugly and the
+graceless. My particular perspective may magnify a little wildly--when
+it doesn't even more weirdly diminish; but I read into the great hooded
+and guarded resource in question an evidential force: as if it must
+really have played for us, so far as its narrowness and its exposure
+permitted, the part of a buffer-state against the wilderness immediately
+near, that of the empty, the unlovely and the mean. Interposing a little
+ease, didn't it interpose almost all the ease we knew?--so that when
+amiable friends, arriving from New York by the boat, came to see us,
+there was no rural view for them but that of our great shame, a view of
+the pigs and the shanties and the loose planks and scattered refuse and
+rude public ways; never even a field-path for a gentle walk or a garden
+nook in afternoon shade. I recall my prompt distaste, a strange
+precocity of criticism, for so much aridity--since of what lost Arcadia,
+at that age, had I really had the least glimpse?
+
+Our scant margin must have affected me more nobly, I should in justice
+add, when old Mrs. L. passed or hovered, for she sometimes caustically
+joined the circle and sometimes, during the highest temperatures, which
+were very high that summer, but flitted across it in a single flowing
+garment, as we amazedly conceived; one of the signs of that grand
+impertinence, I supposed, which belonged to "dowagers"--dowagers who
+were recognised characters and free speakers, doing and saying what they
+liked. This ancient lady was lodged in some outlying tract of the
+many-roomed house, which in more than one quarter stretched away into
+mystery; but the piazza, to which she had access, was unbroken, and
+whenever she strayed from her own territory she swam afresh into ours. I
+definitely remember that, having heard and perhaps read of dowagers,
+who, as I was aware, had scarce been provided for in our social scheme,
+I said to myself at first sight of our emphatic neighbour, a person
+clearly used to exceptional deference, "This must be a perfect
+specimen;" which was somehow very wonderful. The absolute first sight,
+however, had preceded the New Brighton summer, and it makes me lose
+myself in a queer dim vision, all the obscurities attendant on my having
+been present, as a very small boy indeed, at an evening entertainment
+where Mrs. L. figured in an attire that is still vivid to me: a blue
+satin gown, a long black lace shawl and a head-dress consisting in
+equally striking parts of a brown wig, a plume of some sort waving over
+it and a band or fillet, whether of some precious metal or not I forget,
+keeping it in place by the aid of a precious stone which adorned the
+centre of her brow. Such was my first view of the _féronnière_ of our
+grandmothers, when not of our greatgrandmothers. I see its wearer at
+this day bend that burdened brow upon me in a manner sufficiently awful,
+while her knuckly white gloves toyed with a large fan and a vinaigrette
+attached to her thumb by a chain; and as she was known to us afterwards
+for a friend of my Albany grandmother's it may have been as a tribute to
+this tie that she allowed me momentarily to engage her attention. _Then_
+it predominantly must have been that I knew her for a dowager--though
+this was a light in which I had never considered my grandmother herself;
+but what I have quite lost the clue to is the question of my
+extraordinary footing in such an assembly, the occasion of a dance of my
+elders, youthful elders but young married people, into which, really, my
+mother, as a participant, must have introduced me.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+It took place in the house of our cousins Robert and Kitty Emmet the
+elder--for we were to have two cousin Kittys of that ilk and yet another
+consanguineous Robert at least; the latter name being naturally, among
+them all, of a pious, indeed of a glorious, tradition, and three of my
+father's nieces marrying three Emmet brothers, the first of these the
+Robert aforesaid. Catherine James, daughter of my uncle Augustus, his
+then quite recent and, as I remember her, animated and attractive bride,
+whose fair hair framed her pointed smile in full and far-drooping
+"front" curls, I easily evoke as my first apprehended image of the free
+and happy young woman of fashion, a sign of the wondrous fact that
+ladies might live for pleasure, pleasure always, pleasure alone. She was
+distinguished for nothing whatever so much as for an insatiable love of
+the dance; that passion in which I think of the "good," the best, New
+York society of the time as having capered and champagned itself away.
+Her younger sister Gertrude, afterwards married to James--or more
+inveterately Jim--Pendleton, of Virginia, followed close upon her heels,
+literally speaking, and though emulating her in other respects too, was
+to last, through many troubles, much longer (looking extraordinarily the
+while like the younger portraits of Queen Victoria) and to have much
+hospitality, showing it, and showing everything, in a singularly natural
+way, for a considerable collection of young hobbledehoy kinsmen. But I
+am solicited a moment longer by the queer little issues involved--as if
+a social light would somehow stream from them--in my having been taken,
+a mere mite of observation, to Kitty Emmet's "grown-up" assembly. Was it
+that my mother really felt that to the scrap that I was other scraps
+would perhaps strangely adhere, to the extent thus of something to
+distinguish me by, nothing else probably having as yet declared
+itself--such a scrap for instance as the fine germ of this actual
+ferment of memory and play of fancy, a retroactive vision almost intense
+of the faded hour and a fond surrender to the questions with which it
+bristles? All the female relatives on my father's side who reappear to
+me in these evocations strike me as having been intensely and admirably,
+but at the same time almost indescribably, _natural_; which fact
+connects itself for the brooding painter and fond analyst with fifty
+other matters and impressions, his vision of a whole social order--if
+the American scene might indeed have been said at that time to be
+positively ordered. Wasn't the fact that the dancing passion was so out
+of proportion to any social resource just one of the signs of the
+natural?--and for that matter in both sexes alike of the artless
+kindred. It was shining to us that Jim Pendleton had a yacht--though I
+was not smuggled aboard it; there the line was drawn--but the deck must
+have been more used for the "German" than for other manoeuvres, often
+doubtless under the lead of our cousin Robert, the eldest of the many
+light irresponsibles to whom my father was uncle: distinct to me still
+being the image of that phenomenally lean and nimble choreographic hero,
+"Bob" James to us always, who, almost ghost-fashion, led the cotillion
+on from generation to generation, his skull-like smile, with its accent
+from the stiff points of his long moustache and the brightly hollow
+orbits of his eyes, helping to make of him an immemorial elegant
+skeleton.
+
+It is at all events to the sound of fiddles and the popping of corks
+that I see even young brides, as well as young grooms, originally so
+formed to please and to prosper as our hosts of the restless little
+occasion I have glanced at, vanish untimely, become mysterious and
+legendary, with such unfathomed silences and significant headshakes
+replacing the earlier concert; so that I feel how one's impression of so
+much foredoomed youthful levity received constant and quite thrilling
+increase. It was of course an impression then obscurely gathered, but
+into which one was later on to read strange pages--to some of which I
+may find myself moved to revert. Mere mite of observation though I have
+dubbed myself, I won't pretend to have deciphered any of them amid the
+bacchanal sounds that, on the evening so suggestively spent, floated out
+into the region of Washington Place. It is round that general centre
+that my richest memories of the "gay" little life in general cluster--as
+if it had been, for the circle in which I seem justified in pretending
+to have "moved," of the finer essence of "town"; covering as it did the
+stretch of Broadway down to Canal Street, with, closer at hand, the New
+York Hotel, which figured somehow inordinately in our family annals (the
+two newer ones, the glory of their brief and discredited, their flouted
+and demolished age, the brown Metropolitan and the white St. Nicholas,
+were much further down) and rising northward to the Ultima Thule of
+Twenty-third Street, only second then in the supposedly ample scheme of
+the regular ninth "wide" street. I can't indeed have moved much on that
+night of revelations and yet of enigmas over which I still hang
+fascinated; I must have kept intensely still in my corner, all wondering
+and all fearing--fearing notice most; and in a definite way I but
+remember the formidable interest of my so convincing dowager (to hark
+back for a second to _her_) and the fact that a great smooth white cloth
+was spread across the denuded room, converted thus into a field of
+frolic the prospect of which much excited my curiosity. I but recover
+the preparations, however, without recovering the performance; Mrs. L.
+and I must have been the only persons not shaking a foot, and premature
+unconsciousness clearly in my case supervened. Out of it peeps again the
+riddle, the so quaint _trait de moeurs_, of my infant participation.
+But I set that down as representative and interesting, and have done
+with it.
+
+The manners of the time had obviously a _bonhomie_ of their
+own--certainly so on our particularly indulgent and humane little field;
+as to which general proposition the later applications and
+transformations of the bonhomie would be interesting to trace. It has
+lingered and fermented and earned other names, but I seem on the track
+of its prime evidence with that note of the sovereign ease of all the
+young persons with whom we grew up. In the after-time, as our view took
+in, with new climes and new scenes, other examples of the class, these
+were always to affect us as more formed and finished, more tutored and
+governessed, warned and armed at more points for, and doubtless often
+against, the social relation; so that this prepared state on their part,
+and which at first appeared but a preparation for shyness or silence or
+whatever other ideal of the unconversable, came to be for us the normal,
+since it was the relative and not the positive, still less the
+superlative, state. No charming creatures of the growing girl sort were
+ever to be natural in the degree of these nearer and remoter ornaments
+of our family circle in youth; when after intervals and absences the
+impression was renewed we saw how right we had been about it, and I feel
+as if we had watched it for years under the apprehension and the vision
+of some inevitable change, wondering with an affectionate interest what
+effect the general improvement in manners might, perhaps all
+unfortunately, have upon it. I make out as I look back that it was
+really to succumb at no point to this complication, that it was to keep
+its really quite inimitable freshness to the end, or, in other words,
+when it had been the first free growth of the old conditions, was to
+pass away but with the passing of those themselves for whom it had been
+the sole possible expression. For it was as of an altogether special
+shade and sort that the New York young naturalness of our prime was
+touchingly to linger with us--so that to myself, at present, with only
+the gentle ghosts of the so numerous exemplars of it before me, it
+becomes the very stuff of the soft cerements in which their general mild
+mortality is laid away. We used to have in the after-time, amid fresh
+recognitions and reminders, the kindest "old New York" identifications
+for it. The special shade of its identity was thus that it was not
+conscious--really not conscious of anything in the world; or was
+conscious of so few possibilities at least, and these so immediate and
+so a matter of course, that it came almost to the same thing. That was
+the testimony that the slight subjects in question strike me as having
+borne to their surrounding medium--the fact that their unconsciousness
+could be so preserved. They played about in it so happily and serenely
+and sociably, as unembarrassed and loquacious as they were unadmonished
+and uninformed--only aware at the most that a good many people within
+their horizon were "dissipated"; as in point of fact, alas, a good many
+_were_. What it was to be dissipated--that, however, was but in the most
+limited degree a feature of their vision; they would have held, under
+pressure, that it consisted more than anything else in getting tipsy.
+
+Infinitely queer and quaint, almost incongruously droll, the sense
+somehow begotten in ourselves, as very young persons, of our being
+surrounded by a slightly remote, yet dimly rich, outer and quite kindred
+circle of the tipsy. I remember how, once, as a very small boy, after
+meeting in the hall a most amiable and irreproachable gentleman, all
+but closely consanguineous, who had come to call on my mother, I
+anticipated his further entrance by slipping in to report to that parent
+that I thought _he_ must be tipsy. And I was to recall perfectly
+afterwards the impression I so made on her--in which the general
+proposition that the gentlemen of a certain group or connection might on
+occasion be best described by the term I had used sought to destroy the
+particular presumption that our visitor wouldn't, by his ordinary
+measure, show himself for one of those. He didn't, to all appearance,
+for I was afterwards disappointed at the lapse of lurid evidence: that
+memory remained with me, as well as a considerable subsequent wonder at
+my having leaped to so baseless a view. The truth was indeed that we had
+too, in the most innocent way in the world, our sense of "dissipation"
+as an abounding element in family histories; a sense fed quite directly
+by our fondness for making our father--I can at any rate testify for the
+urgency of my own appeal to him--tell us stories of the world of his
+youth. He regaled us with no scandals, yet it somehow rarely failed to
+come out that each contemporary on his younger scene, each hero of each
+thrilling adventure, had, in spite of brilliant promise and romantic
+charm, ended badly, as badly as possible. This became our gaping
+generalisation--it gaped even under the moral that the anecdote was
+always, and so familiarly, humanly and vividly, designed to convey:
+everyone in the little old Albany of the Dutch houses and the steep
+streets and the recurrent family names--Townsends, Clintons, Van
+Rensselaers, Pruyns: I pick them up again at hazard, and all
+uninvidiously, out of reverberations long since still--everyone without
+exception had at last taken a turn as far as possible from edifying. And
+what they had most in common, the hovering presences, the fitful
+apparitions that, speaking for myself, so engaged my imagination, was
+just the fine old Albany drama--in the light of which a ring of mystery
+as to their lives (mainly carried on at the New York Hotel aforesaid)
+surrounded them, and their charm, inveterate, as I believed, shone out
+as through vaguely-apprehended storm-clouds. Their charm was in various
+marks of which I shall have more to say--for as I breathe all this
+hushed air again even the more broken things give out touching human
+values and faint sweet scents of character, flushes of old beauty and
+good-will.
+
+The grim little generalisation remained, none the less, and I may speak
+of it--since I speak of everything--as still standing: the striking
+evidence that scarce aught but disaster _could_, in that so unformed and
+unseasoned society, overtake young men who were in the least exposed.
+Not to have been immediately launched in business of a rigorous sort
+was to _be_ exposed--in the absence I mean of some fairly abnormal
+predisposition to virtue; since it was a world so simply constituted
+that whatever wasn't business, or exactly an office or a "store," places
+in which people sat close and made money, was just simply pleasure,
+sought, and sought only, in places in which people got tipsy. There was
+clearly no mean, least of all the golden one, for it was just the ready,
+even when the moderate, possession of gold that determined, that hurried
+on, disaster. There were whole sets and groups, there were
+"sympathetic," though too susceptible, races, that seemed scarce to
+recognise or to find possible any practical application of moneyed, that
+is of transmitted, ease, however limited, but to go more or less rapidly
+to the bad with it--which meant even then going as often as possible to
+Paris. The bright and empty air was as void of "careers" for a choice as
+of cathedral towers for a sketcher, and I passed my younger time, till
+within a year or two of the Civil War, with an absolute vagueness of
+impression as to how the political life of the country was carried on.
+The field was strictly covered, to my young eyes, I make out, by three
+classes, the busy, the tipsy, and Daniel Webster. This last great man
+must have represented for us a class in himself; as if to be "political"
+was just to _be_ Daniel Webster in his proper person and with room left
+over for nobody else. That he should have filled the sky of public life
+from pole to pole, even to a childish consciousness not formed in New
+England and for which that strenuous section was but a name in the
+geography-book, is probably indeed a sign of how large, in the general
+air, he comparatively loomed. The public scene was otherwise a blank to
+our young vision, I discern, till, later on, in Paris, I saw--for at
+that unimproved period we of the unfledged didn't suppose ourselves to
+"meet"--Charles Sumner; with whose name indeed there further connects
+itself the image of a thrilled hour in the same city some months before:
+the gathering of a group of indignant persons on the terrace of a small
+old-world _hôtel_ or pavilion looking out on the Avenue des Champs
+Elysées, slightly above the Rond-Point and just opposite the
+antediluvian Jardin d'Hiver (who remembers the Jardin d'Hiver, who
+remembers the ancient lodges of the _octroi_, the pair of them facing
+each other at the Barrière de l'Étoile?) and among them a passionate
+lady in tears over the news, fresh that morning, of the assault on
+Sumner by the South Carolina ruffian of the House. The wounded Senator,
+injured in health, had come to Europe later on to recuperate, and he
+offered me my first view, to the best of my belief, not only of a
+"statesman," but of any person whomsoever concerned in political life. I
+distinguish in the earlier twilight of Fourteenth Street my father's
+return to us one November day--we knew he had been out to vote--with the
+news that General Winfield Scott, his and the then "Whig" candidate, had
+been defeated for the Presidency; just as I rescue from the same limbo
+my afterwards proud little impression of having "met" that high-piled
+hero of the Mexican War, whom the Civil War was so soon and with so
+little ceremony to extinguish, literally met him, at my father's side,
+in Fifth Avenue, where he had just emerged from a cross-street. I remain
+vague as to what had then happened and scarce suppose I was, at the age
+probably of eight or nine, "presented"; but we must have been for some
+moments face to face while from under the vast amplitude of a dark blue
+military cloak with a big velvet collar and loosened silver clasp, which
+spread about him like a symbol of the tented field, he greeted my
+parent--so clear is my sense of the time it took me to gape _all_ the
+way up to where he towered aloft.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+The not very glorious smoke of the Mexican War, I note for another
+touch, had been in the air when I was a still smaller boy, and I have an
+association with it that hovers between the definite and the dim, a
+vision of our uncle (Captain as he then was) Robert Temple, U.S.A., in
+regimentals, either on his way to the scene of action or on the return
+from it. I see him as a person half asleep sees some large object across
+the room and against the window-light--even if to the effect of my now
+asking myself why, so far from the scene of action, he was in panoply of
+war. I seem to see him cock-hatted and feathered too--an odd vision of
+dancing superior plumes which doesn't fit if he was only a captain.
+However, I cultivate the wavering shade merely for its value as my
+earliest glimpse of any circumstance of the public order--unless indeed
+another, the reminiscence to which I owe to-day my sharpest sense of
+personal antiquity, had already given me the historic thrill. The scene
+of this latter stir of consciousness is, for memory, an apartment in one
+of the three Fifth Avenue houses that were not long afterward swallowed
+up in the present Brevoort Hotel, and consists of the admired
+appearance of my uncles "Gus" and John James to announce to my father
+that the Revolution had triumphed in Paris and Louis Philippe had fled
+to England. These last words, the flight of the king, linger on my ear
+at this hour even as they fell there; we had somehow waked early to a
+perception of Paris, and a vibration of my very most infantine
+sensibility under its sky had by the same stroke got itself preserved
+for subsequent wondering reference. I had been there for a short time in
+the second year of my life, and I was to communicate to my parents later
+on that as a baby in long clothes, seated opposite to them in a carriage
+and on the lap of another person, I had been impressed with the view,
+framed by the clear window of the vehicle as we passed, of a great
+stately square surrounded with high-roofed houses and having in its
+centre a tall and glorious column. I had naturally caused them to
+marvel, but I had also, under cross-questioning, forced them to compare
+notes, as it were, and reconstitute the miracle. They knew what my
+observation of monumental squares had been--and alas hadn't; neither New
+York nor Albany could have offered me the splendid perspective, and, for
+that matter, neither could London, which moreover I had known at a
+younger age still. Conveyed along the Rue St.-Honoré while I waggled my
+small feet, as I definitely remember doing, under my flowing robe, I had
+crossed the Rue de Castiglione and taken in, for all my time, the
+admirable aspect of the Place and the Colonne Vendôme. I don't now
+pretend to measure the extent to which my interest in the events of
+1848--I was five years old--was quickened by that _souvenir_, a
+tradition further reinforced, I should add, by the fact that some
+relative or other, some member of our circle, was always either "there"
+("there" being of course generally Europe, but particularly and
+pointedly Paris) or going there or coming back from there: I at any rate
+revert to the sound of the rich words on my uncles' lips as to my
+positive initiation into History. It was as if I had been ready for them
+and could catch on; I had heard of kings presumably, and also of
+fleeing: but that kings had sometimes to flee was a new and striking
+image, to which the apparent consternation of my elders added dramatic
+force. So much, in any case, for what I may claim--perhaps too idly--on
+behalf of my backward reach.
+
+It has carried me far from my rather evident proposition that if we saw
+the "natural" so happily embodied about us--and in female maturity, or
+comparative maturity, scarce less than in female adolescence--this was
+because the artificial, or in other words the complicated, was so
+little there to threaten it. The complicated, as we were later on to
+define it, was but another name for those more massed and violent
+assaults upon the social sense that we were to recognise subsequently by
+their effects--observing thus that a sense more subtly social had so
+been created, and that it quite differed from that often almost complete
+inward blankness, in respect to any circumjacent, any constituted, order
+to the exhibition of which our earlier air and our family scene had
+inimitably treated us. We came more or less to see that our young
+contemporaries of another world, the trained and admonished, the
+disciplined and governessed, or in a word the formed, relatively
+speaking, had been made aware of many things of which those at home
+hadn't been; yet we were also to note--so far as we may be conceived as
+so precociously "noting," though we were certainly incorrigible
+observers--that, the awareness in question remaining at the best
+imperfect, our little friends as distinguished from our companions of
+the cousinship, greater and less, advanced and presumed but to flounder
+and recede, elated at once and abashed and on the whole but _feebly_
+sophisticated. The cousinship, on the other hand, all unalarmed and
+unsuspecting and unembarrassed, lived by pure serenity, sociability and
+loquacity; the oddest fact about its members being withal that it didn't
+make them bores, I seem to feel as I look back, or at least not worse
+bores than sundry specimens of the other growth. There can surely never
+have been anything like their good faith and, generally speaking, their
+amiability. I should have but to let myself go a little to wish to cite
+examples--save that in doing so I should lose sight of my point; which
+is to recall again that whether we were all amiable or not (and,
+frankly, I claim it in a high degree for most of us) the scene on which
+we so freely bloomed does strike me, when I reckon up, as
+extraordinarily unfurnished. How came it then that for the most part so
+simple we yet weren't more inane? This was doubtless by reason of the
+quantity of our inward life--ours of our father's house in especial I
+mean--which made an excellent, in some cases almost an incomparable,
+_fond_ for a thicker civility to mix with when growing experience should
+begin to take that in. It was also quaint, among us, I may be reminded,
+to have _begun_ with the inward life; but we began, after the manner of
+all men, as we could, and I hold that if it comes to that we might have
+begun much worse.
+
+I was in my seventeenth year when the raid and the capture of John
+Brown, of Harper's Ferry fame, enjoyed its sharp reverberation among us,
+though we were then on the other side of the world; and I count this as
+the very first reminder that reached me of our living, on our side, in
+a political order: I had perfectly taken in from the pages of "Punch,"
+which contributed in the highest degree to our education, that the
+peoples on the other side so lived. As there was no American "Punch,"
+and to this time has been none, to give small boys the sense and the
+imagination of living with their public administrators, Daniel Webster
+and Charles Sumner had never become, for my fancy, members of a class, a
+class which numbered in England, by John Leech's showing, so many other
+members still than Lords Brougham, Palmerston and John Russell. The war
+of Secession, soon arriving, was to cause the field to bristle with
+features and the sense of the State, in our generation, infinitely to
+quicken; but that alarm came upon the country like a thief at night, and
+we might all have been living in a land in which there seemed at least
+nothing save a comparatively small amount of quite private property to
+steal. Even private property in other than the most modest amounts
+scarce figured for our particular selves; which doubtless came partly
+from the fact that amid all the Albany issue there was ease, with the
+habit of ease, thanks to our grandfather's fine old ability--he had
+decently provided for so large a generation; but our consciousness was
+positively disfurnished, as that of young Americans went, of the
+actualities of "business" in a world of business. As to that we all
+formed together quite a monstrous exception; business in a world of
+business was the thing we most agreed (differ as we might on minor
+issues) in knowing nothing about. We touched it and it touched us
+neither directly nor otherwise, and I think our fond detachment, not to
+say our helpless ignorance and on occasion (since I can speak for one
+fine instance) our settled density of understanding, made us an
+unexampled and probably, for the ironic "smart" gods of the American
+heaven, a lamentable case. Of course even the office and the "store"
+leave much of the provision for an approximately complete scheme of
+manners to be accounted for; still there must have been vast numbers of
+people about us for whom, under the usages, the assault on the
+imagination from without was much stronger and the filling-in of the
+general picture much richer. It was exactly by the lack of that
+filling-in that we--we more especially who lived at near view of my
+father's admirable example--had been thrown so upon the inward life. No
+one could ever have taken to it, even in the face of discouragement,
+more kindly and naturally than he; but the situation had at least that
+charm that, in default of so many kinds of the outward, people had their
+choice of as many kinds of the inward as they would, and might practise
+those kinds with whatever consistency, intensity and brilliancy. Of our
+father's perfect gift for practising _his_ kind I shall have more to
+say; but I meanwhile glance yet again at those felicities of destitution
+which kept us, collectively, so genially interested in almost nothing
+but each other and which come over me now as one of the famous blessings
+in disguise.
+
+There were "artists" in the prospect--didn't Mr. Tom Hicks and Mr. Paul
+Duggan and Mr. C. P. Cranch and Mr. Felix Darley, this last worthy of a
+wider reputation, capable perhaps even of a finer development, than he
+attained, more or less haunt our friendly fireside, and give us also the
+sense of others, landscapist Cropseys and Coles and Kensetts, and
+bust-producing Iveses and Powerses and Moziers, hovering in an outer
+circle? There were authors not less, some of them vague and female and
+in this case, as a rule, glossily ringletted and monumentally
+breastpinned, but mostly frequent and familiar, after the manner of
+George Curtis and Parke Godwin and George Ripley and Charles Dana and N.
+P. Willis and, for brighter lights or those that in our then comparative
+obscurity almost deceived the morn, Mr. Bryant, Washington Irving and E.
+A. Poe--the last-named of whom I cite not so much because he was
+personally present (the extremity of personal absence had just overtaken
+him) as by reason of that predominant lustre in him which our small
+opening minds themselves already recognised and which makes me wonder
+to-day at the legend of the native neglect of him. Was he not even at
+that time on all lips, had not my brother, promptly master of the
+subject, beckoned on my lagging mind with a recital of The Gold-Bug and
+The Pit and the Pendulum?--both of which, however, I was soon enough to
+read for myself, adding to them The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Were we
+not also forever mounting on little platforms at our infant schools to
+"speak" The Raven and Lenore and the verses in which we phrased the
+heroine as Annabellee?--falling thus into the trap the poet had so
+recklessly laid for us, as he had laid one for our interminable droning,
+not less, in the other pieces I have named. So far from misprizing our
+ill-starred magician we acclaimed him surely at every turn; he lay upon
+our tables and resounded in our mouths, while we communed to satiety,
+even for boyish appetites, over the thrill of his choicest pages. Don't
+I just recognise the ghost of a dim memory of a children's Christmas
+party at the house of Fourteenth Street neighbours--they come back to me
+as "the Beans": who and what and whence and whither the kindly
+Beans?--where I admired over the chimney piece the full-length portrait
+of a lady seated on the ground in a Turkish dress, with hair flowing
+loose from a cap which was not as the caps of ladies known to me, and I
+think with a tambourine, who was somehow identified to my enquiring
+mind as the wife of the painter of the piece, Mr. Osgood, and the so
+ministering friend of the unhappy Mr. Poe. There she throned in honour,
+like Queen Constance on the "huge firm earth"--all for _that_ and her
+tambourine; and surely we could none of us have done more for the
+connection.
+
+Washington Irving I "met," with infant promptitude, very much as I had
+met General Scott; only this time it was on a steamboat that I
+apprehended the great man; my father, under whose ever-patient
+protection I then was--during the summer afternoon's sail from New York
+to Fort Hamilton--having named him to me, for this long preservation,
+before they greeted and talked, and having a fact of still more moment
+to mention, with the greatest concern, afterwards: Mr. Irving had given
+him the news of the shipwreck of Margaret Fuller in those very waters
+(Fire Island at least was but just without our big Bay) during the great
+August storm that had within the day or two passed over us. The
+unfortunate lady was essentially of the Boston connection; but she must
+have been, and probably through Emerson, a friend of my parents--mustn't
+she have held "conversations," in the finest exotic Bostonese, in New
+York, Emerson himself lecturing there to admiration?--since the more I
+squeeze the sponge of memory the more its stored secretions flow, to
+remind me here again that, being with those elders late one evening at
+an exhibition of pictures, possibly that of the National Academy, then
+confined to scant quarters, I was shown a small full-length portrait of
+Miss Fuller, seated as now appears to me and wrapped in a long white
+shawl, the failure of which to do justice to its original my companions
+denounced with some emphasis. Was this work from the hand of Mr. Tom
+Hicks aforesaid, or was that artist concerned only with the life-sized,
+the enormous (as I took it to be) the full-length, the violently
+protruded accessories in which come back to me with my infant sense of
+the wonder and the beauty of them, as expressed above all in the image
+of a very long and lovely lady, the new bride of the artist, standing at
+a window before a row of plants or bulbs in tall coloured glasses. The
+light of the window playing over the figure and the "treatment" of its
+glass and of the flower-pots and the other furniture, passed, by my
+impression, for the sign of the master hand; and _was_ it all brave and
+charming, or was it only very hard and stiff, quite ugly and helpless? I
+put these questions as to a vanished world and by way of pressing back
+into it only the more clingingly and tenderly--wholly regardless in
+other words of whether the answers to them at all matter. They matter
+doubtless but for fond evocation, and if one tries to evoke one must
+neglect none of the arts, one must do it with all the forms. Why I
+_should_ so like to do it is another matter--and what "outside
+interest" I may suppose myself to create perhaps still another: I
+fatuously proceed at any rate, I make so far as I can the small warm
+dusky homogeneous New York world of the mid-century close about us.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+I see a small and compact and ingenuous society, screened in somehow
+conveniently from north and west, but open wide to the east and
+comparatively to the south and, though perpetually moving up Broadway,
+none the less constantly and delightfully walking down it. Broadway was
+the feature and the artery, the joy and the adventure of one's
+childhood, and it stretched, and prodigiously, from Union Square to
+Barnum's great American Museum by the City Hall--or only went further on
+the Saturday mornings (absurdly and deplorably frequent alas) when we
+were swept off by a loving aunt, our mother's only sister, then much
+domesticated with us and to whom the ruthless care had assigned itself
+from the first, to Wall Street and the torture chamber of Dr. Parkhurst,
+our tremendously respectable dentist, who was so old and so empurpled
+and so polite, in his stock and dress-coat and dark and glossy wig, that
+he had been our mother's and our aunt's haunting fear in _their_ youth
+as well, since, in their quiet Warren Street, not far off, they were,
+dreadful to think, comparatively under his thumb. He extremely
+resembles, to my mind's eye, certain figures in Phiz's illustrations to
+Dickens, and it was clear to us through our long ordeal that our elders
+must, by some mistaken law of compensation, some refinement of the
+vindictive, be making us "pay" for what they in like helplessness had
+suffered from him: as if _we_ had done them any harm! Our analysis was
+muddled, yet in a manner relieving, and for us too there were
+compensations, which we grudged indeed to allow, but which I could
+easily, even if shyly, have named. One of these was Godey's Lady's Book,
+a sallow pile of which (it shows to me for sallow in the warmer and less
+stony light of the Wall Street of those days and through the smell of
+ancient anodynes) lay on Joey Bagstock's table for our beguilement while
+we waited: I was to encounter in Phiz's Dombey and Son that design for
+our tormentor's type. There is no doubt whatever that I succumbed to the
+spell of Godey, who, unlike the present essences, was an anodyne before
+the fact as well as after; since I remember poring, in his pages, over
+tales of fashionable life in Philadelphia while awaiting my turn in the
+chair, not less than doing so when my turn was over and to the music of
+my brother's groans. This must have been at the hours when we were left
+discreetly to our own fortitude, through our aunt's availing herself of
+the relative proximity to go and shop at Stewart's and then come back
+for us; the ladies' great shop, vast, marmorean, plate-glassy and
+notoriously fatal to the female nerve (we ourselves had wearily trailed
+through it, hanging on the skirts, very literally, of indecision) which
+bravely waylaid custom on the Broadway corner of Chambers Street. Wasn't
+part of the charm of life--since I assume that there _was_ such a
+charm--in its being then (I allude to life itself) so much more
+down-towny, on the supposition at least that our young gravitation in
+that sense for most of the larger joys consorted with something of the
+general habit? The joy that had to be fished out, like Truth, from the
+very bottom of the well was attendance at Trinity Church, still in that
+age supereminent, pointedly absolute, the finest feature of the
+southward scene; to the privilege of which the elder Albany cousins were
+apt to be treated when they came on to stay with us; an indulgence
+making their enjoyment of our city as down-towny as possible too, for I
+seem otherwise to see them but as returning with the familiar Stewart
+headache from the prolonged strain of selection.
+
+The great reward dispensed to us for our sessions in the house of
+pain--as to which it became our subsequent theory that we had been
+regularly dragged there on alternate Saturdays--was our being carried on
+the return to the house of delight, or to one of them, for there were
+specifically two, where we partook of ice-cream, deemed sovereign for
+sore mouths, deemed sovereign in fact, all through our infancy, for
+everything. Two great establishments for the service of it graced the
+prospect, one Thompson's and the other Taylor's, the former, I perfectly
+recall, grave and immemorial, the latter upstart but dazzling, and
+having together the effect that whichever we went to we wondered if we
+hadn't better have gone to the other--with that capacity of childhood
+for making the most of its adventures after a fashion that may look so
+like making the least. It is in our father's company indeed that, as I
+press the responsive spring, I see the bedizened saucers heaped up for
+our fond consumption (they bore the Taylor-title painted in blue and
+gilded, with the Christian name, as parentally pointed out to us,
+perverted to "Jhon" for John, whereas the Thompson-name scorned such
+vulgar and above all such misspelt appeals;) whence I infer that still
+other occasions for that experience waited on us--as almost any would
+serve, and a paternal presence so associated with them was not in the
+least conceivable in the Wall Street _repaire_. That presence is in fact
+not associated for me, to any effect of distinctness, with the least of
+our suffered shocks or penalties--though partly doubtless because our
+acquaintance with such was of the most limited; a conclusion I form even
+while judging it to have been on the whole sufficient for our virtue.
+This sounds perhaps as if we had borne ourselves as prodigies or
+prigs--which was as far as possible from being the case; we were bred in
+horror of _conscious_ propriety, of what my father was fond of calling
+"flagrant" morality; what I myself at any rate read back into our rare
+educational ease, for the memory of some sides of which I was ever to be
+thankful, is, besides the _general_ humanisation of our apprehended
+world and our "social" tone, the unmistakeable appearance that my father
+was again and again accompanied in public by his small second son: so
+many young impressions come back to me as gathered at his side and in
+his personal haunts. Not that he mustn't have offered his firstborn at
+least equal opportunities; but I make out that he seldom led us forth,
+such as we were, together, and my brother must have had in _his_ turn
+many a mild adventure of which the secret--I like to put it so--perished
+with him. He was to remember, as I perceived later on, many things that
+I didn't, impressions I sometimes wished, as with a retracing jealousy,
+or at least envy, that I might also have fallen direct heir to; but he
+professed amazement, and even occasionally impatience, at my reach of
+reminiscence--liking as he did to brush away old moral scraps in favour
+of new rather than to hoard and so complacently exhibit them. If in my
+way I collected the new as well I yet cherished the old; the ragbag of
+memory hung on its nail in my closet, though I learnt with time to
+control the habit of bringing it forth. And I say that with a due sense
+of my doubtless now appearing to empty it into these pages.
+
+I keep picking out at hazard those passages of our earliest age that
+help to reconstruct for me even by tiny touches the experience of our
+parents, any shade of which seems somehow to signify. I cherish, to the
+extent of here reproducing, an old daguerreotype all the circumstances
+of the taking of which I intensely recall--though as I was lately turned
+twelve when I figured for it the feat of memory is perhaps not
+remarkable. It documents for me in so welcome and so definite a manner
+my father's cultivation of my company. It documents at the same time the
+absurdest little legend of my small boyhood--the romantic tradition of
+the value of being taken up from wherever we were staying to the queer
+empty dusty smelly New York of midsummer: I apply that last term because
+we always arrived by boat and I have still in my nostril the sense of
+the _abords_ of the hot town, the rank and rubbishy waterside quarters,
+where big loose cobbles, for the least of all the base items, lay
+wrenched from their sockets of pungent black mud and where the dependent
+streets managed by a law of their own to be all corners and the corners
+to be all groceries; groceries indeed largely of the "green" order, so
+far as greenness could persist in the torrid air, and that bristled, in
+glorious defiance of traffic, with the overflow of their wares and
+implements. Carts and barrows and boxes and baskets, sprawling or
+stacked, familiarly elbowed in its course the bumping hack (the
+comprehensive "carriage" of other days, the only vehicle of hire then
+known to us) while the situation was accepted by the loose citizen in
+the garb of a freeman save for the brass star on his breast--and the New
+York garb of the period was, as I remember it, an immense attestation of
+liberty. Why the throb of romance should have beat time for me to such
+visions I can scarce explain, or can explain only by the fact that the
+squalor was a squalor wonderfully mixed and seasoned, and that I should
+wrong the whole impression if I didn't figure it first and foremost as
+that of some vast succulent cornucopia. What did the stacked boxes and
+baskets of our youth represent but the boundless fruitage of that more
+bucolic age of the American world, and what was after all of so strong
+an assault as the rankness of such a harvest? Where is that fruitage
+now, where in particular are the peaches _d'antan_? where the mounds of
+Isabella grapes and Seckel pears in the sticky sweetness of which our
+childhood seems to have been steeped? It was surely, save perhaps for
+oranges, a more informally and familiarly fruit-eating time, and bushels
+of peaches in particular, peaches big and peaches small, peaches white
+and peaches yellow, played a part in life from which they have somehow
+been deposed; every garden, almost every bush and the very boys' pockets
+grew them; they were "cut up" and eaten with cream at every meal;
+domestically "brandied" they figured, the rest of the year, scarce less
+freely--if they were rather a "party dish" it was because they made the
+party whenever they appeared, and when ice-cream was added, or they were
+added _to_ it, they formed the highest revel we knew. Above all the
+public heaps of them, the high-piled receptacles at every turn, touched
+the street as with a sort of southern plenty; the note of the rejected
+and scattered fragments, the memory of the slippery skins and rinds and
+kernels with which the old dislocated flags were bestrown, is itself
+endeared to me and contributes a further pictorial grace. We ate
+everything in those days by the bushel and the barrel, as from stores
+that were infinite; we handled watermelons as freely as cocoanuts, and
+the amount of stomach-ache involved was negligible in the general
+Eden-like consciousness.
+
+The glow of this consciousness even in so small an organism was part of
+the charm of these retreats offered me cityward upon our base of
+provisions; a part of the rest of which, I disengage, was in my fond
+perception of that almost eccentrically home-loving habit in my father
+which furnished us with half the household humour of our
+childhood--besides furnishing _him_ with any quantity of extravagant
+picture of his so prompt pangs of anguish in absence for celebration of
+his precipitate returns. It was traditional for us later on, and
+especially on the European scene, that for him to leave us in pursuit of
+some advantage or convenience, some improvement of our condition, some
+enlargement of our view, was for him breathlessly to reappear, after the
+shortest possible interval, with no account at all to give of the
+benefit aimed at, but instead of this a moving representation, a far
+richer recital, of his spiritual adventures at the horrid inhuman inns
+and amid the hard alien races which had stayed his advance. He reacted,
+he rebounded, in favour of his fireside, from whatever brief
+explorations or curiosities; these passionate spontaneities were the
+pulse of his life and quite some of the principal events of ours; and,
+as he was nothing if not expressive, whatever happened to him for inward
+intensity happened abundantly to us for pity and terror, as it were, as
+well as for an ease and a quality of amusement among ourselves that was
+really always to fail us among others. Comparatively late in life, after
+his death, I had occasion to visit, in lieu of my brother, then in
+Europe, an American city in which he had had, since his own father's
+death, interests that were of importance to us all. On my asking the
+agent in charge when the owner had last taken personal cognisance of his
+property that gentleman replied only half to my surprise that he had
+never in all his years of possession performed such an act. Then it was
+perhaps that I most took the measure of his fine faith in human
+confidence as an administrative function. He had to have a _relation_,
+somehow expressed--and as he was the vividest and happiest of
+letter-writers it rarely failed of coming; but once it was established
+it served him, in every case, much better than fussy challenges, which
+had always the drawback of involving lapses and inattentions in regard
+to solicitudes more pressing. He incurably took for granted--incurably
+because whenever he did so the process succeeded; with which
+association, however, I perhaps overdrench my complacent vision of our
+summer snatches at town. Through a grave accident in early life country
+walks on rough roads were, in spite of his great constitutional
+soundness, tedious and charmless to him; he liked on the other hand the
+peopled pavement, the thought of which made him restless when away.
+Hence the fidelities and sociabilities, however superficial, that he
+couldn't _not_ reaffirm--if he could only reaffirm the others, the
+really intimate and still more communicable, soon enough afterwards.
+
+It was these of the improvised and casual sort that I shared with him
+thus indelibly; for truly if we took the boat to town to do things I did
+them quite as much as he, and so that a little boy could scarce have
+done them more. My part may indeed but have been to surround his part
+with a thick imaginative aura; but that constituted for me an activity
+than which I could dream of none braver or wilder. We went to the office
+of The New York Tribune--my father's relations with that journal were
+actual and close; and that was a wonderful world indeed, with strange
+steepnesses and machineries and noises and hurrying bare-armed,
+bright-eyed men, and amid the agitation clever, easy, kindly, jocular,
+partly undressed gentlemen (it was always July or August) some of whom I
+knew at home, taking it all as if it were the most natural place in the
+world. It was big to me, big to me with the breath of great vague
+connections, and I supposed the gentlemen very old, though since aware
+that they must have been, for the connections, remarkably young; and the
+conversation of one of them, the one I saw oftenest up town, who
+attained to great local and to considerable national eminence
+afterwards, and who talked often and thrillingly about the theatres, I
+retain as many bright fragments of as if I had been another little
+Boswell. It was as if he had dropped into my mind the germ of certain
+interests that were long afterwards to flower--as for instance on his
+announcing the receipt from Paris of news of the appearance at the
+Théâtre Français of an actress, Madame Judith, who was formidably to
+compete with her coreligionary Rachel and to endanger that artist's
+laurels. Why should Madame Judith's name have stuck to me through all
+the years, since I was never to see her and she is as forgotten as
+Rachel is remembered? Why should that scrap of gossip have made a date
+for my consciousness, turning it to the Comédie with an intensity that
+was long afterwards to culminate? Why was it equally to abide for me
+that the same gentleman had on one of these occasions mentioned his
+having just come back from a wonderful city of the West, Chicago, which,
+though but a year or two old, with plank sidewalks when there were any,
+and holes and humps where there were none, and shanties where there were
+not big blocks, and everything where there had yesterday been nothing,
+had already developed a huge energy and curiosity, and also an appetite
+for lectures? I became aware of the Comédie, I became aware of Chicago;
+I also became aware that even the most alluring fiction was not always
+for little boys to read. It was mentioned at the Tribune office that one
+of its reporters, Mr. Solon Robinson, had put forth a novel rather oddly
+entitled "Hot Corn" and more or less having for its subject the career
+of a little girl who hawked that familiar American luxury in the
+streets. The volume, I think, was put into my father's hand, and I
+recall my prompt desire to make acquaintance with it no less than the
+remark, as promptly addressed to my companion, that the work, however
+engaging, was not one that should be left accessible to an innocent
+child. The pang occasioned by this warning has scarcely yet died out for
+me, nor my sense of my first wonder at the discrimination--so great
+became from that moment the mystery of the tabooed book, of whatever
+identity; the question, in my breast, of why, if it was to be so right
+for others, it was only to be wrong for me. I remember the soreness of
+the thought that it was I rather who was wrong for the book--which was
+somehow humiliating: in that amount of discredit one couldn't but be
+involved. Neither then nor afterwards was the secret of "Hot Corn"
+revealed to me, and the sense of privation was to be more prolonged, I
+fear, than the vogue of the tale, which even as a success of scandal
+couldn't have been great.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+Dimly queer and "pathetic" to me were to remain through much of the
+after time indeed most of those early indigenous vogues and literary
+flurries: so few of those that brushed by my childhood had been other
+than a tinkling that suddenly stopped. I am afraid I mean that what was
+touching was rather the fact that the tinkle _could_ penetrate than the
+fact that it died away; the light of criticism might have beat so
+straight--if the sense of proportion and the fact of compassion hadn't
+waved it away--on the æsthetic phase during which the appeal was mainly
+_by_ the tinkle. The Scarlet Letter and The Seven Gables had the deep
+tone as much as one would; but of the current efforts of the imagination
+they were alone in having it till Walt Whitman broke out in the later
+fifties--and I was to know nothing of that happy genius till long after.
+An absorbed perusal of The Lamplighter was what I was to achieve at the
+fleeting hour I continue to circle round; that romance was on every
+one's lips, and I recollect it as more or less thrust upon me in amends
+for the imposed sacrifice of a ranker actuality--that of the improper
+Mr. Robinson, I mean, as to whom there revives in me the main question
+of where his impropriety, in so general a platitude of the bourgeois,
+could possibly have dwelt. It was to be true indeed that Walt Whitman
+achieved an impropriety of the first magnitude; that success, however,
+but showed us the platitude returning in a genial rage upon itself and
+getting out of control by generic excess. There was no rage at any rate
+in The Lamplighter, over which I fondly hung and which would have been
+my first "grown-up" novel--it had been soothingly offered me for
+that--had I consented to take it as really and truly grown-up. I
+couldn't have said what it lacked for the character, I only had my
+secret reserves, and when one blest afternoon on the New Brighton boat I
+waded into The Initials I saw how right I had been. The Initials _was_
+grown-up and the difference thereby exquisite; it came over me with the
+very first page, assimilated in the fluttered little cabin to which I
+had retired with it--all in spite of the fact too that my attention was
+distracted by a pair of remarkable little girls who lurked there out of
+more public view as to hint that they weren't to be seen for nothing.
+
+That must have been a rich hour, for I mix the marvel of the Boon
+Children, strange pale little flowers of the American theatre, with my
+conscious joy in bringing back to my mother, from our forage in New
+York, a gift of such happy promise as the history of the long-legged Mr.
+Hamilton and his two Bavarian beauties, the elder of whom, Hildegarde,
+was to figure for our small generation as the very type of the haughty
+as distinguished from the forward heroine (since I think our categories
+really came to no more than those). I couldn't have got very far with
+Hildegarde in moments so scant, but I memorably felt that romance was
+thick round me--everything, at such a crisis, seeming to make for it at
+once. The Boon Children, conveyed thus to New Brighton under care of a
+lady in whose aspect the strain of the resolute triumphed over the note
+of the battered, though the showy in it rather succumbed at the same
+time to the dowdy, were already "billed," as infant phenomena, for a
+performance that night at the Pavilion, where our attendance, it was a
+shock to feel, couldn't be promised; and in gazing without charge at the
+pair of weary and sleepy little mountebanks I found the histrionic
+character and the dramatic profession for the first time revealed to me.
+They filled me with fascination and yet with fear; they expressed a
+melancholy grace and a sort of peevish refinement, yet seemed awfully
+detached and indifferent, indifferent perhaps even to being pinched and
+slapped, for art's sake, at home; they honoured me with no notice
+whatever and regarded me doubtless as no better than one of the little
+louts peeping through the tent of the show. In return I judged their
+appearance dissipated though fascinating, and sought consolation for the
+memory of their scorn and the loss of their exhibition, as time went on,
+in noting that the bounds of their fame seemed somehow to have been
+stayed. I neither "met" them nor heard of them again. The little
+Batemans must have obscured their comparatively dim lustre, flourishing
+at the same period and with a larger command of the pictorial poster and
+the other primitive symbols in Broadway--such posters and such symbols
+as they were at that time!--the little Batemans who were to be reserved,
+in maturer form, for my much later and more grateful appreciation.
+
+This weak reminiscence has obstructed, however, something more to the
+purpose, the retained impression of those choicest of our loiterings
+that took place, still far down-town, at the Bookstore, home of delights
+and haunt of fancy. It was at the Bookstore we had called on the day of
+The Initials and the Boon Children--and it was thence we were returning
+with our spoil, of which the charming novel must have been but a
+fragment. My impression composed itself of many pieces; a great and
+various practice of burying my nose in the half-open book for the strong
+smell of paper and printer's ink, known to us as the English smell, was
+needed to account for it. _That_ was the exercise of the finest sense
+that hung about us, my brother and me--or of one at least but little
+less fine than the sense for the satisfaction of which we resorted to
+Thompson's and to Taylor's: it bore me company during all our returns
+from forages and left me persuaded that I had only to snuff up hard
+enough, fresh uncut volume in hand, to taste of the very substance of
+London. All our books in that age were English, at least all our
+down-town ones--I personally recall scarce any that were not; and I take
+the perception of that quality in them to have associated itself with
+more fond dreams and glimmering pictures than any other one principle of
+growth. It was all a result of the deeply _infected_ state: I had been
+prematurely poisoned--as I shall presently explain. The Bookstore,
+fondest of my father's resorts, though I remember no more of its public
+identity than that it further enriched the brave depth of Broadway, was
+overwhelmingly and irresistibly English, as not less tonically English
+was our principal host there, with whom we had moreover, my father and
+I, thanks to his office, such personal and genial relations that I
+recall seeing him grace our board at home, in company with his wife,
+whose vocal strain and complexion and coiffure and flounces I found none
+the less informing, none the less "racial," for my not being then versed
+in the language of analysis.
+
+The true inwardness of these rich meanings--those above all of the
+Bookstore itself--was that a tradition was thus fed, a presumption thus
+created, a vague vision thus filled in: all expression is clumsy for so
+mystic a process. What else can have happened but that, having taken
+over, under suggestion and with singular infant promptitude, a
+particular throbbing consciousness, I had become aware of the source at
+which it could best be refreshed? That consciousness, so communicated,
+was just simply of certain impressions, certain _sources_ of impression
+again, proceeding from over the sea and situated beyond it--or even much
+rather of my parents' own impression of such, the fruit of a happy time
+spent in and about London with their two babies and reflected in that
+portion of their talk with each other to which I best attended. Had
+_all_ their talk for its subject, in my infant ears, that happy
+time?--did it deal only with London and Piccadilly and the Green Park,
+where, over against their dwelling, their two babies mainly took the air
+under charge of Fanny of Albany, their American nurse, whose remark as
+to the degree to which the British Museum fell short for one who had had
+the privilege of that of Albany was handed down to us? Did it never
+forbear from Windsor and Richmond and Sudbrook and Ham Common, amid the
+rich complexity of which, crowding their discourse with echoes, they
+had spent their summer?--all a scattering of such pearls as it seemed
+that their second-born could most deftly and instinctively pick up. Our
+sole maternal aunt, already mentioned as a devoted and cherished
+presence during those and many later years, was in a position to share
+with them the treasure of these mild memories, which strike me as having
+for the most part, through some bright household habit, overflowed at
+the breakfast-table, where I regularly attended with W. J.; she had
+imbibed betimes in Europe the seeds of a long nostalgia, and I think of
+her as ever so patiently communicative on that score under pressure of
+my artless appeal. That I should have been so inquiring while still so
+destitute of primary data was doubtless rather an anomaly; and it was
+for that matter quite as if my infant divination proceeded by the light
+of nature: I divined that it would matter to me in the future that
+"English life" should be of this or that fashion. My father had
+subscribed for me to a small periodical of quarto form, covered in
+yellow and entitled The Charm, which shed on the question the softest
+lustre, but of which the appearances were sadly intermittent, or then
+struck me as being; inasmuch as many of our visits to the Bookstore were
+to ask for the new number--only to learn with painful frequency that the
+last consignment from London had arrived without it. I feel again the
+pang of that disappointment--as if through the want of what I needed
+most for going on; the English smell was exhaled by The Charm in a
+peculiar degree, and I see myself affected by the failure as by that of
+a vital tonic. It was not, at the same time, by a Charm the more or the
+less that my salvation was to be, as it were, worked out, or my
+imagination at any rate duly convinced; conviction was the result of the
+very air of home, so far as I most consciously inhaled it. This
+represented, no doubt, a failure to read into matters close at hand all
+the interest they were capable of yielding; but I had taken the twist,
+had sipped the poison, as I say, and was to feel it to that end the most
+salutary cup. I saw my parents homesick, as I conceived, for the ancient
+order and distressed and inconvenienced by many of the more immediate
+features of the modern, as the modern pressed upon us, and since their
+theory of our better living was from an early time that we should renew
+the quest of the ancient on the very first possibility I simply grew
+greater in the faith that somehow to manage that would constitute
+success in life. I never found myself deterred from this fond view,
+which was implied in every question I asked, every answer I got, and
+every plan I formed.
+
+Those are great words for the daydream of infant ignorance, yet if
+success in life may perhaps be best defined as the performance in age of
+some intention arrested in youth I may frankly put in a claim to it. To
+press my nose against the sources of the English smell, so different for
+young bibliophiles from any American, was to adopt that sweetness as the
+sign of my "atmosphere"; roundabout might be the course to take, but one
+was in motion from the first and one never lost sight of the goal. The
+very names of places and things in the other world--the marked opposite
+in most ways of that in which New York and Albany, Fort Hamilton and New
+Brighton formed so fallacious a maximum--became to me values and secrets
+and shibboleths; they were probably often on my tongue and employed as
+ignorance determined, but I quite recall being ashamed to use them as
+much as I should have liked. It was New Brighton, I reconstruct (and
+indeed definitely remember) that "finished" us at last--that and our
+final sordid school, W. J.'s and mine, in New York: the ancient order
+_had_ somehow to be invoked when such "advantages" as those were the
+best within our compass and our means. Not further to anticipate, at all
+events, that climax was for a while but vaguely in sight, and the
+illusion of felicity continued from season to season to shut us in. It
+is only of what I took for felicity, however few the years and however
+scant the scene, that I am pretending now to speak; though I shall have
+strained the last drop of romance from this vision of our towny summers
+with the quite sharp reminiscence of my first sitting for my
+daguerreotype. I repaired with my father on an August day to the great
+Broadway establishment of Mr. Brady, supreme in that then beautiful art,
+and it is my impression--the only point vague with me--that though we
+had come up by the Staten Island boat for the purpose we were to keep
+the affair secret till the charming consequence should break, at home,
+upon my mother. Strong is my conviction that our mystery, in the event,
+yielded almost at once to our elation, for no tradition had a brighter
+household life with us than that of our father's headlong impatience. He
+moved in a cloud, if not rather in a high radiance, of precipitation and
+divulgation, a chartered rebel against cold reserves. The good news in
+his hand refused under any persuasion to grow stale, the sense of
+communicable pleasure in his breast was positively explosive; so that we
+saw those "surprises" in which he had conspired with our mother for our
+benefit converted by him in every case, under our shamelessly encouraged
+guesses, into common conspiracies against her--against her knowing, that
+is, how thoroughly we were all compromised. He had a special and
+delightful sophistry at the service of his overflow, and never so fine a
+fancy as in defending it on "human" grounds. He was something very
+different withal from a parent of weak mercies; weakness was never so
+positive and plausible, nor could the attitude of sparing you be more
+handsomely or on occasion even more comically aggressive.
+
+My small point is simply, however, that the secresy of our conjoined
+portrait was probably very soon, by his act, to begin a public and
+shining life and to enjoy it till we received the picture; as to which
+moreover still another remembrance steals on me, a proof of the fact
+that our adventure was improvised. Sharp again is my sense of not being
+so adequately dressed as I should have taken thought for had I foreseen
+my exposure; though the resources of my wardrobe as then constituted
+could surely have left me but few alternatives. The main resource of a
+small New York boy in this line at that time was the little sheath-like
+jacket, tight to the body, closed at the neck and adorned in front with
+a single row of brass buttons--a garment of scant grace assuredly and
+compromised to my consciousness, above all, by a strange ironic light
+from an unforgotten source. It was but a short time before those days
+that the great Mr. Thackeray had come to America to lecture on The
+English Humourists, and still present to me is the voice proceeding from
+my father's library, in which some glimpse of me hovering, at an opening
+of the door, in passage or on staircase, prompted him to the formidable
+words: "Come here, little boy, and show me your extraordinary jacket!"
+My sense of my jacket became from that hour a heavy one--further
+enriched as my vision is by my shyness of posture before the seated, the
+celebrated visitor, who struck me, in the sunny light of the animated
+room, as enormously big and who, though he laid on my shoulder the hand
+of benevolence, bent on my native costume the spectacles of wonder. I
+was to know later on why he had been so amused and why, after asking me
+if this were the common uniform of my age and class, he remarked that in
+England, were I to go there, I should be addressed as "Buttons." It had
+been revealed to me thus in a flash that we were somehow _queer_, and
+though never exactly crushed by it I became aware that I at least felt
+so as I stood with my head in Mr. Brady's vise. Beautiful most decidedly
+the lost art of the daguerreotype; I remember the "exposure" as on this
+occasion interminably long, yet with the result of a facial anguish far
+less harshly reproduced than my suffered snapshots of a later age. Too
+few, I may here interject, were to remain my gathered impressions of the
+great humourist, but one of them, indeed almost the only other, bears
+again on the play of his humour over our perversities of dress. It
+belongs to a later moment, an occasion on which I see him familiarly
+seated with us, in Paris, during the spring of 1857, at some repast at
+which the younger of us too, by that time, habitually flocked, in our
+affluence of five. Our youngest was beside him, a small sister, then not
+quite in her eighth year, and arrayed apparently after the fashion of
+the period and place; and the tradition lingered long of his having
+suddenly laid his hand on her little flounced person and exclaimed with
+ludicrous horror: "Crinoline?--I was suspecting it! So young and so
+depraved!"
+
+A fainter image, that of one of the New York moments, just eludes me,
+pursue it as I will; I recover but the setting and the fact of his brief
+presence in it, with nothing that was said or done beyond my being left
+with my father to watch our distinguished friend's secretary, who was
+also a young artist, establish his easel and proceed to paint. The
+setting, as I recall it, was an odd, oblong, blank "private parlour" at
+the Clarendon Hotel, then the latest thing in hotels, but whose ancient
+corner of Fourth Avenue and--was it Eighteenth Street?--long ago ceased
+to know it; the gentle, very gentle, portraitist was Mr. Eyre Crowe and
+the obliging sitter my father, who sat in response to Mr. Thackeray's
+desire that his protégé should find employment. The protector after a
+little departed, blessing the business, which took the form of a small
+full-length of the model seated, his arm extended and the hand on the
+knob of his cane. The work, it may at this time of day be mentioned,
+fell below its general possibilities; but I note the scene through which
+I must duly have gaped and wondered (for I had as yet seen no one, least
+of all a casual acquaintance in an hotel parlour, "really paint"
+before,) as a happy example again of my parent's positive cultivation of
+my society, it would seem, and thought for my social education. And then
+there are other connections; I recall it as a Sunday morning, I recover
+the place itself as a featureless void--bleak and bare, with its
+developments all to come, the hotel parlour of other New York days--but
+vivid still to me is my conscious assistance for the first time at
+operations that were to mean much for many of my coming years. Those of
+quiet Mr. Crowe held me spellbound--I was to circle so wistfully, as
+from that beginning, round the practice of his art, which in spite of
+these earnest approaches and intentions never on its own part in the
+least acknowledged our acquaintance; scarcely much more than it was ever
+to respond, for that matter, to the overtures of the mild aspirant
+himself, known to my observation long afterwards, in the London years,
+as the most touchingly resigned of the children of disappointment. Not
+only by association was he a Thackerayan figure, but much as if the
+master's hand had stamped him with the outline and the value, with life
+and sweetness and patience--shown, as after the long futility, seated
+in a quiet wait, very long too, for the end. That was sad, one couldn't
+but feel; yet it was in the oddest way impossible to take him for a
+failure. He might have been one of fortune's, strictly; but what was
+that when he was one of Thackeray's own successes?--in the minor line,
+but with such a grace and such a truth, those of some dim second cousin
+to Colonel Newcome.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+I feel that at such a rate I remember too much, and yet this mild
+apparitionism is only part of it. To look back at all is to meet the
+apparitional and to find in its ghostly face the silent stare of an
+appeal. When I fix it, the hovering shade, whether of person or place,
+it fixes me back and seems the less lost--not to my consciousness, for
+that is nothing, but to its own--by my stopping however idly for it. The
+day of the daguerreotype, the August afternoon, what was it if not one
+of the days when we went to Union Square for luncheon and for more
+ice-cream and more peaches and even more, even most, enjoyment of ease
+accompanied by stimulation of wonder? It may have been indeed that a
+visit to Mrs. Cannon rather on that occasion engaged us--memory selects
+a little confusedly from such a wealth of experience. For the wonder was
+the experience, and that was everywhere, even if I didn't so much find
+it as take it with me, to be sure of not falling short. Mrs. Cannon
+lurked near Fourth Street--_that_ I abundantly grasp, not more
+definitely placing her than in what seemed to me a labyrinth of grave
+bye-streets westwardly "back of" Broadway, yet at no great distance
+from it, where she must have occupied a house at a corner, since we
+reached her not by steps that went up to a front door but by others that
+went slightly down and formed clearly an independent side access, a
+feature that affected me as rich and strange. What the steps went down
+to was a spacious room, light and friendly, so that it couldn't have
+been compromised by an "area," which offered the brave mystification,
+amid other mystifications, of being at once a parlour and a shop, a shop
+in particular for the relief of gentlemen in want of
+pockethandkerchiefs, neckties, collars, umbrellas and straw-covered
+bottles of the essence known in old New York as "Cullone"--with a very
+long and big O. Mrs. Cannon was always seated at some delicate white or
+other needlework, as if she herself made the collars and the neckties
+and hemmed the pockethandkerchiefs, though the air of this conflicts
+with the sense of importation from remoter centres of fashion breathed
+by some of the more thrilling of the remarks I heard exchanged, at the
+same time that it quickened the oddity of the place. For the oddity was
+in many things--above all perhaps in there being no counter, no rows of
+shelves and no vulgar till for Mrs. Cannon's commerce; the parlour
+clearly dissimulated the shop--and positively to that extent that I
+might uncannily have wondered what the shop dissimulated. It
+represented, honestly, I made out in the course of visits that seem to
+me to have been delightfully repeated, the more informal of the
+approaches to our friend's brave background or hinterland, the realm of
+her main industry, the array of the furnished apartments for
+gentlemen--gentlemen largely for whom she imported the Eau de Cologne
+and the neckties and who struck me as principally consisting of the ever
+remarkable Uncles, desirous at times, on their restless returns from
+Albany or wherever, of an intimacy of comfort that the New York Hotel
+couldn't yield. Fascinating thus the implications of Mrs. Cannon's
+establishment, where the talk took the turn, in particular, of Mr. John
+and Mr. Edward and Mr. Howard, and where Miss Maggie or Miss Susie, who
+were on the spot in other rocking chairs and with other poised needles,
+made their points as well as the rest of us. The interest of the place
+was that the uncles were somehow always under discussion--as to where
+they at the moment might be, or as to when they were expected, or above
+all as to how (the "how" was the great matter and the fine emphasis)
+they had last appeared and might be conceived as carrying themselves;
+and that their consumption of neckties and Eau de Cologne was somehow
+inordinate: I might have been judging it in my innocence as their only
+_consommation_. I refer to those sources, I say, the charm of the
+scene, the finer part of which must yet have been that it didn't, as it
+regularly lapsed, dispose of _all_ mystifications. If I didn't
+understand, however, the beauty was that Mrs. Cannon understood (that
+was what she did most of all, even more than hem pockethandkerchiefs and
+collars) and my father understood, and each understood that the other
+did, Miss Maggie and Miss Susie being no whit behind. It was only I who
+didn't understand--save in so far as I understood _that_, which was a
+kind of pale joy; and meanwhile there would be more to come from uncles
+so attachingly, so almost portentously, discussable. The vision at any
+rate was to stick by me as through its old-world friendly grace, its
+light on the elder amenity; the prettier manners, the tender personal
+note in the good lady's importations and anxieties, that of the
+hand-made fabric and the discriminating service. Fit to figure as a
+value anywhere--by which I meant in the right corner of any social
+picture, I afterwards said to myself--that refined and composed
+significance of Mrs. Cannon's scene.
+
+Union Square was a different matter, though with the element there also
+that I made out that I _didn't_ make out (my sense of drama was in this
+case, I think, rather more frightened off than led on;) a drawback for
+which, however, I consoled myself by baked apples and custards, an
+inveterate feature of our Sunday luncheon there (those of weekdays
+being various and casual) and by a study of a great store, as it seemed
+to me, of steel-plated volumes, devoted mainly to the heroines of
+Romance, with one in particular, presenting those of Shakespeare, in
+which the plates were so artfully coloured and varnished, and complexion
+and dress thereby so endeared to memory, that it was for long afterwards
+a shock to me at the theatre not to see just those bright images, with
+their peculiar toggeries, come on. I was able but the other day,
+moreover, to renew almost on the very spot the continuity of
+contemplation; large lumpish presences, precarious creations of a day,
+seemed to have elbowed out of the Square all but one or two of the minor
+monuments, pleasant appreciable things, of the other time; yet close to
+University Place the old house of the picture-books and the custards and
+the domestic situation had, though disfigured and overscored, not quite
+received its death-stroke; I disengaged, by a mere identification of
+obscured window and profaned portico, a whole chapter of history; which
+fact should indeed be a warning to penetration, a practical plea here
+for the superficial--by its exhibition of the rate at which the
+relations of any gage of experience multiply and ramify from the moment
+the mind begins to handle it. I pursued a swarm of such relations, on
+the occasion I speak of, up and down West Fourteenth Street and over to
+Seventh Avenue, running most of them to earth with difficulty, but
+finding them at half a dozen points quite confess to a queer stale
+sameness. The gage of experience, as I say, had in these cases been
+strangely spared--the sameness had in two or three of them held out as
+with conscious craft. But these are impressions I shall presently find
+it impossible not to take up again at any cost.
+
+I first "realised" Fourteenth Street at a very tender age, and I
+perfectly recall that flush of initiation, consisting as it did of an
+afternoon call with my father at a house there situated, one of an
+already fairly mature row on the south side and quite near Sixth Avenue.
+It was as "our" house, just acquired by us, that he thus invited my
+approval of it--heaping as that does once more the measure of my small
+adhesiveness. I thoroughly approved--quite as if I had foreseen that the
+place was to become to me for ever so long afterwards a sort of
+anchorage of the spirit, being at the hour as well a fascination for the
+eyes, since it was there I first fondly gaped at the process of
+"decorating." I saw charming men in little caps ingeniously formed of
+folded newspaper--where in the roaring city are those quaint badges of
+the handicrafts now?--mounted on platforms and casting plaster into
+moulds; I saw them in particular paste long strips of yellowish grained
+paper upon walls, and I vividly remember thinking the grain and the
+pattern (for there was a pattern from waist-high down, a complication of
+dragons and sphinxes and scrolls and other fine flourishes) a wonderful
+and sumptuous thing. I would give much, I protest, to recover its lost
+secret, to see what it really was--so interesting ever to retrace, and
+sometimes so difficult of belief, in a community of one's own knowing,
+is the general æsthetic adventure, are the dangers and delusions, the
+all but fatal accidents and mortal ailments, that Taste has smilingly
+survived and after which the fickle creature may still quite brazenly
+look one in the face. Our quarter must have bristled in those years with
+the very worst of the danger-signals--though indeed they figured but as
+coarse complacencies; the age of "brown stone" had just been ushered in,
+and that material, in deplorable, in monstrous form, over all the vacant
+spaces and eligible sites then numerous between the Fifth and Sixth
+Avenues, more and more affronted the day. We seemed to have come up from
+a world of quieter harmonies, the world of Washington Square and
+thereabouts, so decent in its dignity, so instinctively unpretentious.
+There were even there spots of shabbiness that I recall, such as the
+charmless void reaching westward from the two houses that formed the
+Fifth Avenue corner to our grandfather's, our New York grandfather's
+house, itself built by him, with the happiest judgment, not so long
+before, and at no distant time in truth to be solidly but much less
+pleasingly neighboured. The ancient name of the Parade-ground still hung
+about the central space, and the ancient wooden palings, then so
+generally accounted proper for central spaces--the whole image
+infinitely recedes--affected even my innocent childhood as rustic and
+mean. Union Square, at the top of the Avenue--or what practically then
+counted for the top--was encased, more smartly, in iron rails and
+further adorned with a fountain and an aged amateur-looking constable,
+awful to my generation in virtue of his star and his switch. I associate
+less elegance with the Parade-ground, into which we turned for
+recreation from my neighbouring dame's-school and where the parades
+deployed on no scale to check our own evolutions; though indeed the
+switch of office abounded there, for what I best recover in the
+connection is a sense and smell of perpetual autumn, with the ground so
+muffled in the leaves and twigs of the now long defunct ailanthus-tree
+that most of our own motions were a kicking of them up--the semi-sweet
+rankness of the plant was all in the air--and small boys pranced about
+as cavaliers whacking their steeds. There were bigger boys, bolder
+still, to whom this vegetation, or something kindred that escapes me,
+yielded long black beanlike slips which they lighted and smoked, the
+smaller ones staring and impressed; I at any rate think of the small one
+I can best speak for as constantly wading through an Indian summer of
+these _disjecta_, fascinated by the leaf-kicking process, the joy of
+lonely trudges, over a course in which those parts and the slightly more
+northward pleasantly confound themselves. These were the homely joys of
+the nobler neighbourhood, elements that had their match, and more, hard
+by the Fourteenth Street home, in the poplars, the pigs, the poultry,
+and the "Irish houses," two or three in number, exclusive of a very fine
+Dutch one, seated then, this last, almost as among gardens and groves--a
+breadth of territory still apparent, on the spot, in that marginal ease,
+that spread of occupation, to the nearly complete absence of which New
+York aspects owe their general failure of "style."
+
+But there were finer vibrations as well--for the safely-prowling infant,
+though none perhaps so fine as when he stood long and drank deep at
+those founts of romance that gushed from the huge placards of the
+theatre. These announcements, at a day when advertisement was
+contentedly but information, had very much the form of magnified
+playbills; they consisted of vast oblong sheets, yellow or white, pasted
+upon tall wooden screens or into hollow sockets, and acquainting the
+possible playgoer with every circumstance that might seriously interest
+him. These screens rested sociably against trees and lamp-posts as well
+as against walls and fences, to all of which they were, I suppose,
+familiarly attached; but the sweetest note of their confidence was that,
+in parallel lines and the good old way, characters facing performers,
+they gave the whole cast, which in the "palmy days" of the drama often
+involved many names. I catch myself again in the fact of endless
+stations in Fifth Avenue near the southwest corner of Ninth Street, as I
+think it must have been, since the dull long "run" didn't exist then for
+the young _badaud_ and the poster there was constantly and bravely
+renewed. It engaged my attention, whenever I passed, as the canvas of a
+great master in a great gallery holds that of the pious tourist, and
+even though I can't at this day be sure of its special reference I was
+with precocious passion "at home" among the theatres--thanks to our
+parents' fond interest in them (as from this distance I see it flourish
+for the time) and to the liberal law and happy view under which the
+addiction was shared with us, they never caring much for things we
+couldn't care for and generally holding that what was good to them would
+be also good for their children. It had the effect certainly of
+preparing for these, so far as we should incline to cherish it, a
+strange little fund of theatrical reminiscence, a small hoard of
+memories maintaining itself in my own case for a lifetime and causing
+me to wonder to-day, before its abundance, on how many evenings of the
+month, or perhaps even of the week, we were torn from the pursuits of
+home.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+The truth is doubtless, however, much less in the wealth of my
+experience than in the tenacity of my impression, the fact that I have
+lost nothing of what I saw and that though I can't now quite divide the
+total into separate occasions the various items surprisingly swarm for
+me. I shall return to some of them, wishing at present only to make my
+point of when and how the seeds were sown that afterwards so thickly
+sprouted and flowered. I was greatly to love the drama, at its best, as
+a "form"; whatever variations of faith or curiosity I was to know in
+respect to the infirm and inadequate theatre. There was of course
+anciently no question for us of the drama at its best; and indeed while
+I lately by chance looked over a copious collection of theatrical
+portraits, beginning with the earliest age of lithography and
+photography as so applied, and documentary in the highest degree on the
+personalities, as we nowadays say, of the old American stage,
+stupefaction grew sharp in me and scepticism triumphed, so vulgar, so
+barbarous, seemed the array of types, so extraordinarily provincial the
+note of every figure, so less than scant the claim of such
+physiognomies and such reputations. Rather dismal, everywhere, I admit,
+the histrionic image with the artificial lights turned off--the fatigued
+and disconnected face reduced to its mere self and resembling some
+closed and darkened inn with the sign still swung but the place blighted
+for want of custom. That consideration weighs; but what a "gang," all
+the same, when thus left to their own devices, the performers, men and
+women alike, of that world of queer appreciations! I ought perhaps to
+bear on them lightly in view of what in especial comes back to me; the
+sense of the sacred thrill with which I began to watch the green
+curtain, the particular one that was to rise to The Comedy of Errors on
+the occasion that must have been, for what I recall of its almost
+unbearable intensity, the very first of my ever sitting at a play. I
+should have been indebted for the momentous evening in that case to Mr.
+William Burton, whose small theatre in Chambers Street, to the rear of
+Stewart's big shop and hard by the Park, as the Park was at that time
+understood, offered me then my prime initiation. Let me not complain of
+my having owed the adventure to a still greater William as well, nor
+think again without the right intensity, the scarce tolerable throb, of
+the way the torment of the curtain was mixed, half so dark a defiance
+and half so rich a promise. One's eyes bored into it in vain, and yet
+one knew it _would_ rise at the named hour, the only question being if
+one could exist till then. The play had been read to us during the day;
+a celebrated English actor, whose name I inconsistently forget, had
+arrived to match Mr. Burton as the other of the Dromios; and the
+agreeable Mrs. Holman, who had to my relentless vision too retreating a
+chin, was so good as to represent Adriana. I regarded Mrs. Holman as a
+friend, though in no warmer light than that in which I regarded Miss
+Mary Taylor--save indeed that Mrs. Holman had the pull, on one's
+affections, of "coming out" to sing in white satin and quite
+irrelevantly between the acts; an advantage she shared with the younger
+and fairer and more dashing, the dancing, Miss Malvina, who footed it
+and tambourined it and shawled it, irruptively, in lonely state. When
+not admiring Mr. Burton in Shakespeare we admired him as Paul Pry, as
+Mr. Toodles and as Aminadab Sleek in The Serious Family, and we must
+have admired him very much--his huge fat person, his huge fat face and
+his vast slightly pendulous cheek, surmounted by a sort of elephantine
+wink, to which I impute a remarkable baseness, being still perfectly
+present to me.
+
+We discriminated, none the less; we thought Mr. Blake a much finer
+comedian, much more of a gentleman and a scholar--"mellow" Mr. Blake,
+whom with the brave and emphatic Mrs. Blake (_how_ they must have made
+their points!) I connect partly with the Burton scene and partly with
+that, of slightly subsequent creation, which, after flourishing awhile
+slightly further up Broadway under the charmlessly commercial name of
+Brougham's Lyceum (we had almost only Lyceums and Museums and Lecture
+Rooms and Academies of Music for playhouse and opera then,) entered upon
+a long career and a migratory life as Wallack's Theatre. I fail
+doubtless to keep _all_ my associations clear, but what is important, or
+what I desire at least to make pass for such, is that when we most
+admired Mr. Blake we also again admired Miss Mary Taylor; and it was at
+Brougham's, not at Burton's, that we rendered _her_ that
+tribute--reserved for her performance of the fond theatrical daughter in
+the English version of Le Père de la Débutante, where I see the charming
+panting dark-haired creature, in flowing white classically relieved by a
+gold tiara and a golden scarf, rush back from the supposed stage to the
+represented green-room, followed by thunders of applause, and throw
+herself upon the neck of the broken-down old gentleman in a blue coat
+with brass buttons who must have been after all, on second thoughts, Mr.
+Placide. Greater flights or more delicate shades the art of pathetic
+comedy was at that time held not to achieve; only I straighten it out
+that Mr. and Mrs. Blake, not less than Miss Mary Taylor (who
+preponderantly haunts my vision, even to the disadvantage of Miss Kate
+Horn in Nan the Good-for-Nothing, until indeed she is displaced by the
+brilliant Laura Keene) did migrate to Brougham's, where we found them
+all themselves as Goldsmith's Hardcastle pair and other like matters. We
+rallied especially to Blake as Dogberry, on the occasion of my second
+Shakespearean night, for as such I seem to place it, when Laura Keene
+and Mr. Lester--the Lester Wallack that was to be--did Beatrice and
+Benedick. I yield to this further proof that we had our proportion of
+Shakespeare, though perhaps antedating that rapt vision of Much Ado,
+which may have been preceded by the dazzled apprehension of A Midsummer
+Night's Dream at the Broadway (there _was_ a confessed Theatre;) this
+latter now present to me in every bright particular. It supplied us, we
+must have felt, our greatest conceivable adventure--I cannot otherwise
+account for its emerging so clear. Everything here is as of yesterday,
+the identity of the actors, the details of their dress, the charm
+imparted by the sisters Gougenheim, the elegant elder as the infatuated
+Helena and the other, the roguish "Joey" as the mischievous Puck. Hermia
+was Mrs. Nagle, in a short salmon-coloured peplum over a white
+petticoat, the whole bulgingly confined by a girdle of shining gilt and
+forming a contrast to the loose scarves of Helena, while Mr. Nagle, not
+devoid, I seem to remember, of a blue chin and the latency of a fine
+brogue, was either Lysander or Demetrius; Mr. Davidge (also, I surmise,
+with a brogue) was Bottom the weaver and Madame Ponisi Oberon--Madame
+Ponisi whose range must have been wide, since I see her also as the
+white-veiled heroine of The Cataract of the Ganges, where, preferring
+death to dishonour, she dashes up the more or less perpendicular
+waterfall on a fiery black steed and with an effect only a little
+blighted by the chance flutter of a drapery out of which peeps the leg
+of a trouser and a big male foot; and then again, though presumably at a
+somewhat later time or, in strictness, _after_ childhood's fond hour, as
+this and that noble matron or tragedy queen. I descry her at any rate as
+representing all characters alike with a broad brown face framed in
+bands or crowns or other heavy headgear out of which cropped a row of
+very small tight black curls. The Cataract of the Ganges is all there as
+well, a tragedy of temples and idols and wicked rajahs and real water,
+with Davidge and Joey Gougenheim again for comic relief--though all in a
+coarser radiance, thanks to the absence of fairies and Amazons and
+moonlit mechanical effects, the charm above all, so seen, of the play
+within the play; and I rank it in that relation with Green Bushes,
+despite the celebrity in the latter of Madame Céleste, who came to us
+straight out of London and whose admired walk up the stage as Miami the
+huntress, a wonderful majestic and yet voluptuous stride enhanced by a
+short kilt, black velvet leggings and a gun haughtily borne on the
+shoulder, is vividly before me as I write. The piece in question was, I
+recall, from the pen of Mr. Bourcicault, as he then wrote his name--he
+was so early in the field and must have been from long before, inasmuch
+as he now appears to me to have supplied Mr. Brougham, of the Lyceum
+aforesaid, with his choicest productions.
+
+I sit again at London Assurance, with Mrs. Wallack--"Fanny" Wallack, I
+think, not that I quite know who she was--as Lady Gay Spanker, flushed
+and vociferous, first in a riding-habit with a tail yards long and
+afterwards in yellow satin with scarce a tail at all; I am present also
+at Love in a Maze, in which the stage represented, with primitive art I
+fear, a supposedly intricate garden-labyrinth, and in which I admired
+for the first time Mrs. Russell, afterwards long before the public as
+Mrs. Hoey, even if opining that she wanted, especially for the
+low-necked ordeal, less osseous a structure. There are pieces of that
+general association, I admit, the clue to which slips from me; the drama
+of modern life and of French origin--though what was then not of French
+origin?--in which Miss Julia Bennett, fresh from triumphs at the
+Haymarket, made her first appearance, in a very becoming white bonnet,
+either as a brilliant adventuress or as the innocent victim of
+licentious design, I forget which, though with a sense somehow that the
+white bonnet, when of true elegance, was the note at that period of the
+adventuress; Miss Julia Bennett with whom at a later age one was to
+renew acquaintance as the artful and ample Mrs. Barrow, full of manner
+and presence and often Edwin Booth's Portia, Desdemona and Julie de
+Mortemer. I figure her as having in the dimmer phase succeeded to Miss
+Laura Keene at Wallack's on the secession thence of this original
+charmer of our parents, the flutter of whose prime advent is perfectly
+present to me, with the relish expressed for that "English" sweetness of
+her speech (I already wondered why it _shouldn't_ be English) which was
+not as the speech mostly known to us. The Uncles, within my hearing,
+even imitated, for commendation, some of her choicer sounds, to which I
+strained my ear on seeing her afterwards as Mrs. Chillington in the
+refined comedietta of A Morning Call, where she made delightful game of
+Mr. Lester as Sir Edward Ardent, even to the point of causing him to
+crawl about on all fours and covered with her shawl after the fashion of
+a horse-blanket. That delightful impression was then unconscious of the
+blight to come--that of my apprehending, years after, that the
+brilliant comedietta was the tribute of our Anglo-Saxon taste to Alfred
+de Musset's elegant proverb of the Porte Ouverte ou Fermée, in which
+nothing could find itself less at home than the horseplay of the English
+version. Miss Laura Keene, with a native grace at the start, a fresh and
+delicate inspiration, I infer from the kind of pleasure she appears to
+have begun with giving, was to live to belie her promise and, becoming
+hard and raddled, forfeit (on the evidence) all claim to the higher
+distinction; a fact not surprising under the lurid light projected by
+such a sign of the atmosphere of ineptitude as an accepted and condoned
+perversion to vulgarity of Musset's perfect little work. How _could_
+quality of talent consort with so dire an absence of quality in the
+material offered it? where could such lapses lead but to dust and
+desolation and what happy instinct not be smothered in an air so
+dismally non-conducting? Is it a foolish fallacy that these matters may
+have been on occasion, at that time, worth speaking of? is it only
+presumable that everything was perfectly cheap and common and everyone
+perfectly bad and barbarous and that even the least corruptible of our
+typical spectators were too easily beguiled and too helplessly kind? The
+beauty of the main truth as to any remembered matter looked at in due
+detachment, or in other words through the haze of time, is that
+comprehension has then become one with criticism, compassion, as it may
+really be called, one with musing vision, and the whole company of the
+anciently restless, with their elations and mistakes, their sincerities
+and fallacies and vanities and triumphs, embalmed for us in the mild
+essence of their collective submission to fate. We needn't be strenuous
+about them unless we particularly want to, and are glad to remember in
+season all that this would imply of the strenuous about our own
+_origines_, our muddled initiations. If nothing is more certain for us
+than that many persons, within our recollection, couldn't help being
+rather generally unadmonished and unaware, so nothing is more in the
+note of peace than that such a perceived state, pushed to a point, makes
+our scales of judgment but ridiculously rattle. _Our_ admonition, our
+superior awareness, is of many things--and, among these, of how
+infinitely, at the worst, they lived, the pale superseded, and how much
+it was by their virtue.
+
+Which reflections, in the train of such memories as those just gathered,
+may perhaps seem over-strained--though they really to my own eyes cause
+the images to multiply. Still others of these break in upon me and
+refuse to be slighted; reconstituting as I practically am the history of
+my fostered imagination, for whatever it may be worth, I won't pretend
+to a disrespect for _any_ contributive particle. I left myself just
+above staring at the Fifth Avenue poster, and I can't but linger there
+while the vision it evokes insists on swarming. It was the age of the
+arrangements of Dickens for the stage, vamped-up promptly on every scene
+and which must have been the roughest theatrical tinkers' work, but at
+two or three of which we certainly assisted. I associate them with Mr.
+Brougham's temple of the art, yet am at the same time beset with the
+Captain Cuttle of Dombey and Son in the form of the big Burton, who
+never, I earnestly conceive, graced that shrine, so that I wander a
+trifle confusedly. Isn't it he whom I remember as a monstrous Micawber,
+the coarse parody of a charming creation, with the entire baldness of a
+huge Easter egg and collar-points like the sails of Mediterranean
+feluccas? Dire of course for all temperance in these connections was the
+need to conform to the illustrations of Phiz, himself already an
+improvising parodist and happy only so long as not imitated, not
+literally reproduced. Strange enough the "æsthetic" of artists who could
+desire but literally to reproduce. I give the whole question up,
+however, I stray too in the dust, and with a positive sense of having,
+in the first place, but languished at home when my betters admired Miss
+Cushman--terribly out of the picture and the frame we should to-day
+pronounce her, I fear--as the Nancy of Oliver Twist: as far away this
+must have been as the lifetime of the prehistoric "Park," to which it
+was just within my knowledge that my elders went for opera, to come back
+on us sounding those rich old Italian names, Bosio and Badiali, Ronconi
+and Steffanone, I am not sure I have them quite right; signs, of a
+rueful sound to us, that the line as to our infant participation _was_
+somewhere drawn. It had not been drawn, I all the more like to remember,
+when, under proper protection, at Castle Garden, I listened to that
+rarest of infant phenomena, Adelina Patti, poised in an armchair that
+had been pushed to the footlights and announcing her incomparable gift.
+She was about of our own age, she was one of us, even though at the same
+time the most prodigious of fairies, of glittering fables. That
+principle of selection was indeed in abeyance while I sat with my mother
+either at Tripler Hall or at Niblo's--I am vague about the occasion, but
+the names, as for fine old confused reasons, plead alike to my pen--and
+paid a homage quite other than critical, I dare say, to the then
+slightly worn Henrietta Sontag, Countess Rossi, who struck us as
+supremely elegant in pink silk and white lace flounces and with whom
+there had been for certain members of our circle some contact or
+intercourse that I have wonderingly lost. I learned at that hour in any
+case what "acclamation" might mean, and have again before me the vast
+high-piled auditory thundering applause at the beautiful pink lady's
+clear bird-notes; a thrilling, a tremendous experience and my sole other
+memory of concert-going, at that age, save the impression of a strange
+huddled hour in some smaller public place, some very minor hall, under
+dim lamps and again in my mother's company, where we were so near the
+improvised platform that my nose was brushed by the petticoats of the
+distinguished amateur who sang "Casta Diva," a very fine fair woman with
+a great heaving of bosom and flirt of crinoline, and that the ringletted
+Italian gentleman in black velvet and a romantic voluminous cloak who
+represented, or rather who professionally and uncontrollably was, an
+Improvisatore, had for me the effect, as I crouched gaping, of quite
+bellowing down my throat. That occasion, I am clear, was a concert for a
+charity, with the volunteer performance and the social patroness, and it
+had squeezed in where it would--at the same time that I somehow connect
+the place, in Broadway, on the right going down and not much below
+Fourth Street (except that everything seems to me to have been just
+below Fourth Street when not just above,) with the scene of my great
+public exposure somewhat later, the wonderful exhibition of Signor
+Blitz, the peerless conjurer, who, on my attending his entertainment
+with W. J. and our frequent comrade of the early time "Hal" Coster,
+practised on my innocence to seduce me to the stage and there plunge me
+into the shame of my sad failure to account arithmetically for his
+bewilderingly subtracted or added or divided pockethandkerchiefs and
+playing-cards; a paralysis of wit as to which I once more, and with the
+same wan despair, feel my companions' shy telegraphy of relief, their
+snickerings and mouthings and raised numerical fingers, reach me from
+the benches.
+
+The second definite matter in the Dickens connection is the Smike of
+Miss Weston--whose prænomen I frivolously forget (though I fear it was
+Lizzie,) but who was afterwards Mrs. E. L. Davenport and then, sequently
+to some public strife or chatter, Mrs. Charles Matthews--in a version of
+Nicholas Nickleby that gracelessly managed to be all tearful melodrama,
+long-lost foundlings, wicked Ralph Nicklebys and scowling Arthur Grides,
+with other baffled villains, and scarcely at all Crummleses and
+Kenwigses, much less Squeerses; though there must have been something of
+Dotheboys Hall for the proper tragedy of Smike and for the broad
+Yorkshire effect, a precious theatrical value, of John Brodie. The
+ineffaceability was the anguish, to my tender sense, of Nicholas's
+starved and tattered and fawning and whining protégé; in face of my
+sharp retention of which through all the years who shall deny the
+immense authority of the theatre, or that the stage is the mightiest of
+modern engines? Such at least was to be the force of the Dickens
+imprint, however applied, in the soft clay of our generation; it was to
+resist so serenely the wash of the waves of time. To be brought up thus
+against the author of it, or to speak at all of the dawn of one's early
+consciousness of it and of his presence and power, is to begin to tread
+ground at once sacred and boundless, the associations of which, looming
+large, warn us off even while they hold. He did too much for us surely
+ever to leave us free--free of judgment, free of reaction, even should
+we care to be, which heaven forbid: he laid his hand on us in a way to
+undermine as in no other case the power of detached appraisement. We
+react against other productions of the general kind without "liking"
+them the less, but we somehow liked Dickens the more for having
+forfeited half the claim to appreciation. That process belongs to the
+fact that criticism, roundabout him, is somehow futile and tasteless.
+His own taste is easily impugned, but he entered so early into the blood
+and bone of our intelligence that it always remained better than the
+taste of overhauling him. When I take him up to-day and find myself
+holding off, I simply stop: not holding off, that is, but holding on,
+and from the very fear to do so; which sounds, I recognise, like
+perusal, like renewal, of the scantest. I don't renew, I wouldn't renew
+for the world; wouldn't, that is, with one's treasure so hoarded in the
+dusty chamber of youth, let in the intellectual air. Happy the house of
+life in which such chambers still hold out, even with the draught of the
+intellect whistling through the passages. We were practically
+contemporary, contemporary with the issues, the fluttering monthly
+numbers--that was the point; it made for us a good fortune, constituted
+for us in itself romance, on which nothing, to the end, succeeds in
+laying its hands.
+
+The whole question dwells for me in a single small reminiscence, though
+there are others still: that of my having been sent to bed one evening,
+in Fourteenth Street, as a very small boy, at an hour when, in the
+library and under the lamp, one of the elder cousins from Albany, the
+youngest of an orphaned brood of four, of my grandmother's most
+extravagant adoption, had begun to read aloud to my mother the new,
+which must have been the first, instalment of David Copperfield. I had
+feigned to withdraw, but had only retreated to cover close at hand, the
+friendly shade of some screen or drooping table-cloth, folded up behind
+which and glued to the carpet, I held my breath and listened. I listened
+long and drank deep while the wondrous picture grew, but the tense cord
+at last snapped under the strain of the Murdstones and I broke into the
+sobs of sympathy that disclosed my subterfuge. I was this time
+effectively banished, but the ply then taken was ineffaceable. I
+remember indeed just afterwards finding the sequel, in especial the vast
+extrusion of the Micawbers, beyond my actual capacity; which took a few
+years to grow adequate--years in which the general contagious
+consciousness, and our own household response not least, breathed
+heavily through Hard Times, Bleak House and Little Dorrit; the seeds of
+acquaintance with Chuzzlewit and Dombey and Son, these coming thickly
+on, I had found already sown. I was to feel that I had been born, born
+to a rich awareness, under the very meridian; there sprouted in those
+years no such other crop of ready references as the golden harvest of
+Copperfield. Yet if I was to wait to achieve the happier of these
+recognitions I had already pored over Oliver Twist--albeit now uncertain
+of the relation borne by that experience to the incident just recalled.
+When Oliver was new to me, at any rate, he was already old to my
+betters; whose view of his particular adventures and exposures must have
+been concerned, I think, moreover, in the fact of my public and lively
+wonder about them. It was an exhibition deprecated--to infant innocence
+I judge; unless indeed my remembrance of enjoying it only on the terms
+of fitful snatches in another, though a kindred, house is due mainly to
+the existence there of George Cruikshank's splendid form of the work,
+of which our own foreground was clear. It perhaps even seemed to me more
+Cruikshank's than Dickens's; it was a thing of such vividly terrible
+images, and all marked with that peculiarity of Cruikshank that the
+offered flowers or goodnesses, the scenes and figures intended to
+comfort and cheer, present themselves under his hand as but more subtly
+sinister, or more suggestively queer, than the frank badnesses and
+horrors. The nice people and the happy moments, in the plates,
+frightened me almost as much as the low and the awkward; which didn't
+however make the volumes a source of attraction the less toward that
+high and square old back-parlour just westward of Sixth Avenue (as we in
+the same street were related to it) that formed, romantically, half our
+alternative domestic field and offered to our small inquiring steps a
+larger range and privilege. If the Dickens of those years was, as I have
+just called him, the great actuality of the current imagination, so I at
+once meet him in force as a feature even of conditions in which he was
+but indirectly involved.
+
+For the other house, the house we most haunted after our own, was that
+of our cousin Albert, still another of the blest orphans, though this
+time of our mother's kindred; and if it was my habit, as I have hinted,
+to attribute to orphans as orphans a circumstantial charm, a setting
+necessarily more delightful than our father'd and mother'd one, so
+there spread about this appointed comrade, the perfection of the type,
+inasmuch as he alone was neither brother'd nor sister'd, an air of
+possibilities that were none the less vivid for being quite indefinite.
+He was to embody in due course, poor young man, some of these
+possibilities--those that had originally been for me the vaguest of all;
+but to fix his situation from my present view is not so much to wonder
+that it spoke to me of a wild freedom as to see in it the elements of a
+rich and rounded picture. The frame was still there but a short time
+since, cracked and empty, broken and gaping, like those few others, of
+the general overgrown scene, that my late quest had puzzled out; and
+this has somehow helped me to read back into it the old figures and the
+old long story, told as with excellent art. We knew the figures well
+while they lasted and had with them the happiest relation, but without
+doing justice to their truth of outline, their felicity of character and
+force of expression and function, above all to the compositional harmony
+in which they moved. That lives again to my considering eyes, and I
+admire as never before the fine artistry of fate. Our cousin's guardian,
+the natural and the legal, was his aunt, his only one, who was the
+cousin of our mother and our own aunt, virtually _our_ only one, so far
+as a felt and adopted closeness of kinship went; and the three,
+daughters of two sole and much-united sisters, had been so brought up
+together as to have quite all the signs and accents of the same strain
+and the same nest. The cousin Helen of our young prospect was thus all
+but the sister Helen of our mother's lifetime, as was to happen, and was
+scarcely less a stout brave presence and an emphasised character for the
+new generation than for the old; noted here as she is, in particular,
+for her fine old-time value of clearness and straightness. I see in her
+strong simplicity, that of an earlier, quieter world, a New York of
+better manners and better morals and homelier beliefs, the very elements
+of some portrait by a grave Dutch or other truth-seeking master; she
+looks out with some of the strong marks, the anxious honesty, the modest
+humour, the folded resting hands, the dark handsome serious attire, the
+important composed cap, almost the badge of a guild or an order, that
+hang together about the images of past worthies, of whichever sex, who
+have had, as one may say, the courage of their character, and qualify
+them for places in great collections. I note with appreciation that she
+was strenuously, actively good, and have the liveliest impression both
+that no one was ever better, and that her goodness somehow testifies for
+the whole tone of a society, a remarkable cluster of private decencies.
+Her value to my imagination is even most of all perhaps in her mere
+local consistency, her fine old New York ignorance and rigour. Her
+traditions, scant but stiff, had grown there, close to her--they were
+all she needed, and she lived by them candidly and stoutly. That there
+have been persons so little doubtful of duty helps to show us how
+societies grow. A proportionately small amount of absolute conviction
+about it will carry, we thus make out, a vast dead weight of mere
+comparative. She was as anxious over hers indeed as if it had ever been
+in question--which is a proof perhaps that being void of imagination,
+when you are quite entirely void, makes scarcely more for comfort than
+having too much, which only makes in a manner for a homeless freedom or
+even at the worst for a questioned veracity. With a big installed
+conscience there is virtue in a grain of the figurative faculty--it acts
+as oil to the stiff machine.
+
+Yet this life of straight and narrow insistences seated so clearly in
+our view didn't take up all the room in the other house, the house of
+the pictured, the intermittent Oliver, though of the fewer books in
+general than ours, and of the finer proportions and less peopled spaces
+(there were but three persons to fill them) as well as of the more
+turbaned and powdered family portraits, one of these, the most antique,
+a "French pastel," which must have been charming, of a young collateral
+ancestor who had died on the European tour. A vast marginal range
+seemed to me on the contrary to surround the adolescent nephew, who was
+some three years, I judge, beyond me in age and had other horizons and
+prospects than ours. No question of "Europe," for him, but a patriotic
+preparation for acquaintance with the South and West, or what was then
+called the West--he was to "see his own country first," winking at us
+while he did so; though he was, in spite of differences, so nearly and
+naturally neighbour'd and brother'd with us that the extensions of his
+range and the charms of his position counted somehow as the limits and
+the humilities of ours. He went neither to our schools nor to our
+hotels, but hovered out of our view in some other educational air that I
+can't now point to, and had in a remote part of the State a vast wild
+property of his own, known as the Beaverkill, to which, so far from his
+aunt's and his uncle's taking him there, he affably took them, and to
+which also he vainly invited W. J. and me, pointing thereby to us,
+however, though indirectly enough perhaps, the finest childish case we
+were to know for the famous acceptance of the inevitable. It was
+apparently not to be thought of that instead of the inevitable we should
+accept the invitation; the place was in the wilderness, incalculably
+distant, reached by a whole day's rough drive from the railroad, through
+every danger of flood and field, with prowling bears thrown in and
+probable loss of limb, of which there were sad examples, from swinging
+scythes and axes; but we of course measured our privation just by those
+facts, and grew up, so far as we did then grow, to believe that
+pleasures beyond price had been cruelly denied us. I at any rate myself
+grew up sufficiently to wonder if poor Albert's type, as it developed to
+the anxious elder view from the first, mightn't rather have undermined
+countenance; his pleasant foolish face and odd shy air of being
+suspected or convicted on grounds less vague to himself than to us may
+well have appeared symptoms of the course, of the "rig," he was
+eventually to run. I could think of him but as the _fils de famille_
+ideally constituted; not that I could then use for him that designation,
+but that I felt he must belong to an important special class, which he
+in fact formed in his own person. Everything was right, truly, for these
+felicities--to speak of them only as dramatic or pictorial values; since
+if we were present all the while at more of a drama than we knew, so at
+least, to my vague divination, the scene and the figures were there, not
+excluding the chorus, and I must have had the instinct of their being as
+right as possible. I see the actors move again through the high, rather
+bedimmed rooms--it is always a matter of winter twilight, firelight,
+lamplight; each one appointed to his or her part and perfect for the
+picture, which gave a sense of fulness without ever being crowded.
+
+That composition had to wait awhile, in the earliest time, to find its
+proper centre, having been from the free point of view I thus cultivate
+a little encumbered by the presence of the most aged of our relatives,
+the oldest person I remember to have familiarly known--if it can be
+called familiar to have stood off in fear of such strange proofs of
+accomplished time: our Great-aunt Wyckoff, our maternal grandmother's
+elder sister, I infer, and an image of living antiquity, as I figure her
+to-day, that I was never to see surpassed. I invest her in this vision
+with all the idol-quality that may accrue to the venerable--solidly
+seated or even throned, hooded and draped and tucked-in, with big
+protective protrusive ears to her chair which helped it to the effect of
+a shrine, and a large face in which the odd blackness of eyebrow and of
+a couple of other touches suggested the conventional marks of a painted
+image. She signified her wants as divinities do, for I recover from her
+presence neither sound nor stir, remembering of her only that, as
+described by her companions, the pious ministrants, she had "said" so
+and so when she hadn't spoken at all. Was she really, as she seemed, so
+tremendously old, so old that her daughter, our mother's cousin Helen
+and ours, would have had to come to her in middle life to account for
+it, or did antiquity at that time set in earlier and was surrender of
+appearance and dress, matching the intrinsic decay, only more
+complacent, more submissive and, as who should say, more abject? I have
+my choice of these suppositions, each in its way of so lively an
+interest that I scarce know which to prefer, though inclining perhaps a
+little to the idea of the backward reach. If Aunt Wyckoff was, as I
+first remember her, scarce more than seventy, say, the thought fills me
+with one sort of joy, the joy of our modern, our so generally greater
+and nobler effect of duration: who _wouldn't_ more subtly strive for
+that effect and, intelligently so striving, reach it better, than such
+non-questioners of fate?--the moral of whose case is surely that if they
+gave up too soon and too softly we wiser witnesses can reverse the
+process and fight the whole ground. But I apologise to the heavy shade
+in question if she had really drained her conceivable cup, and for that
+matter rather like to suppose it, so rich and strange is the pleasure of
+finding the past--the Past above all--answered for to one's own touch,
+this being our only way to be sure of it. It was the Past that one
+touched in her, the American past of a preponderant unthinkable
+queerness; and great would seem the fortune of helping on the continuity
+at some other far end.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+It was at all events the good lady's disappearance that more markedly
+cleared the decks--cleared them for that long, slow, sustained action
+with which I make out that nothing was afterwards to interfere. She had
+sat there under her stiff old father's portrait, with which her own, on
+the other side of the chimney, mildly balanced; but these presences
+acted from that time but with cautious reserves. A brave, finished,
+clear-eyed image of such properties as the last-named, in particular,
+our already-mentioned Alexander Robertson, a faint and diminished
+replica of whose picture (the really fine original, as I remember it,
+having been long since perverted from our view) I lately renewed
+acquaintance with in a pious institution of his founding, where, after
+more than one push northward and some easy accommodations, he lives on
+into a world that knows him not and of some of the high improvements of
+which he can little enough have dreamed. Of the world he had personally
+known there was a feature or two still extant; the legend of his acres
+and his local concerns, as well as of his solid presence among them, was
+considerably cherished by us, though for ourselves personally the
+relics of his worth were a lean feast to sit at. They were by some
+invidious turn of fate all to help to constitute the heritage of our
+young kinsman, the orphaned and administered _fils de famille_, whose
+father, Alexander Wyckoff, son of our great-aunt and one of the two
+brothers of cousin Helen, just discernibly flushes for me through the
+ominous haze that preceded the worst visitation of cholera New York was
+to know. Alexander, whom, early widowed and a victim of that visitation,
+I evoke as with something of a premature baldness, of a blackness of
+short whisker, of an expanse of light waistcoat and of a harmless pomp
+of manner, appeared to have quite predominantly "come in" for the values
+in question, which he promptly transmitted to his small motherless son
+and which were destined so greatly to increase. There are clues I have
+only lost, not making out in the least to-day why the sons of Aunt
+Wyckoff should have been so happily distinguished. Our great-uncle of
+the name isn't even a dim ghost to me--he had passed away beyond recall
+before I began to take notice; but I hold, rightly, I feel, that it was
+not to his person these advantages were attached. They could have
+descended to our grandmother but in a minor degree--we should otherwise
+have been more closely aware of them. It comes to me that so far as we
+had at all been aware it had mostly gone off in smoke: I have still in
+my ears some rueful allusion to "lands," apparently in the general
+country of the Beaverkill, which had come to my mother and her sister as
+their share of their grandfather Robertson's amplitude, among the
+further-apportioned shares of their four brothers, only to be sacrificed
+later on at some scant appraisement. It is in the nature of "lands" at a
+distance and in regions imperfectly reclaimed to be spoken of always as
+immense, and I at any rate entertained the sense that we should have
+been great proprietors, in the far wilderness, if we had only taken more
+interest. Our interests were peculiarly urban--though not indeed that
+this had helped us much. Something of the mystery of the vanished acres
+hung for me about my maternal uncle, John Walsh, the only one who
+appeared to have been in respect to the dim possessions much on the
+spot, but I too crudely failed of my chance of learning from him what
+had become of them.
+
+Not that they had seen _him_, poor gentleman, very much further, or that
+I had any strong sense of opportunity; I catch at but two or three
+projections of him, and only at one of his standing much at his ease: I
+see him before the fire in the Fourteenth Street library, sturdy, with
+straight black hair and as if the Beaverkill had rather stamped him, but
+clean-shaven, in a "stock" and a black frock-coat--I hear him perhaps
+still more than I see him deliver himself on the then great subject of
+Jenny Lind, whom he seemed to have emerged from the wilderness to listen
+to and as to whom I remember thinking it (strange small critic that I
+must have begun to be) a note of the wilderness in him that he spoke of
+her as "Miss Lind"; albeit I scarce know, and must even less have known
+then, what other form he could have used. The rest of my sense of him is
+tinged with the ancient pity--that of our so exercised response in those
+years to the general sad case of uncles, aunts and cousins obscurely
+afflicted (the uncles in particular) and untimely gathered. Sharp to me
+the memory of a call, one dusky wintry Sunday afternoon, in Clinton
+Place, at the house of my uncle Robertson Walsh, then the head of my
+mother's family, where the hapless younger brother lay dying; whom I was
+taken to the top of the house to see and of the sinister twilight
+grimness of whose lot, stretched there, amid odours of tobacco and of
+drugs, or of some especial strong drug, in one of the chambers of what I
+remember as a remote and unfriended arching attic, probably in fact the
+best place of prescribed quiet, I was to carry away a fast impression.
+All the uncles, of whichever kindred, were to come to seem sooner or
+later to be dying, more or less before our eyes, of melancholy matters;
+and yet their general story, so far as one could read it, appeared the
+story of life. I conceived at any rate that John Walsh, celibate, lonely
+and good-naturedly black-browed, had been sacrificed to the far-off
+Robertson acres, which on their side had been sacrificed to I never knew
+what. The point of my divagation, however, is that the Barmecide banquet
+of another tract of the same _provenance_ was always spread for us
+opposite the other house, from which point it stretched, on the north
+side of the street, to Sixth Avenue; though here we were soon to see it
+diminished at the corner by a structure afterwards known to us as our
+prosiest New York school. This edifice, devoted to-day to other uses,
+but of the same ample insignificance, still left for exploitation at
+that time an uncovered town-territory the transmitted tale of which was
+that our greatgrandfather, living down near the Battery, had had his
+country villa or, more strictly speaking, his farm there, with free
+expanses roundabout. Shrunken though the tract a part of it remained--in
+particular a space that I remember, though with the last faintness, to
+have seen appeal to the public as a tea-garden or open-air café, a haunt
+of dance and song and of other forms of rather ineffective gaiety. The
+subsequent conversion of the site into the premises of the French
+Theatre I was to be able to note more distinctly; resorting there in the
+winter of 1874-5, though not without some wan detachment, to a series
+of more or less exotic performances, and admiring in especial the high
+and hard virtuosity of Madame Ristori, the unfailing instinct for the
+wrong emphasis of the then acclaimed Mrs. Rousby (I still hear the
+assured "Great woman, great woman!" of a knowing friend met as I went
+out,) and the stout fidelity to a losing game, as well as to a truth not
+quite measurable among us, of the late, the but lugubriously-comic, the
+blighted John Toole.
+
+These are glimmering ghosts, though that drama of the scene hard by at
+which I have glanced gives me back its agents with a finer intensity.
+For the long action set in, as I have hinted, with the death of Aunt
+Wyckoff, and, if rather taking its time at first to develop, maintained
+to the end, which was in its full finality but a few years since, the
+finest consistency and unity; with cousin Helen, in rich prominence, for
+the heroine; with the pale adventurous Albert for the hero or young
+protagonist, a little indeed in the sense of a small New York Orestes
+ridden by Furies; with a pair of confidants in the form first of the
+heroine's highly respectable but quite negligible husband and, second,
+of her close friend and quasi-sister our own admirable Aunt; with
+Alexander's younger brother, above all, the odd, the eccentric, the
+attaching Henry, for the stake, as it were, of the game. So for the
+spectator did the figures distribute themselves; the three principal,
+on the large stage--it became a field of such spreading interests--well
+in front, and the accessory pair, all sympathy and zeal, prompt comment
+and rich resonance, hovering in the background, responsive to any call
+and on the spot at a sign: this most particularly true indeed of our
+anything but detached Aunt, much less a passive recipient than a vessel
+constantly brimming, and destined herself to become the outstanding
+agent, almost the _dea ex machina_, in the last act of the story. Her
+colleague of the earlier periods (though to that title she would scarce
+have granted his right) I designate rather as our earnest cousin's
+husband than as our kinsman even by courtesy; since he was "Mr." to his
+own wife, for whom the dread of liberties taken in general included even
+those that might have been allowed to herself: he had not in the least,
+like the others in his case, married into the cousinship with us, and
+this apparently rather by his defect than by ours. His christian name,
+if certainly not for use, was scarce even for ornament--which consorted
+with the felt limits roundabout him of aids to mention and with the fact
+that no man could on his journey through life well have been less
+eagerly designated or apostrophised. If there are persons as to whom the
+"Mr." never comes up at all, so there are those as to whom it never
+subsides; but some of them all keep it by the greatness and others,
+oddly enough, by the smallness of their importance. The subject of my
+present reference, as I think of him, nevertheless--by which I mean in
+spite of his place in the latter group--greatly helps my documentation;
+he must have been of so excellent and consistent a shade of nullity. To
+that value, if value it be, there almost always attaches some question
+of the degree and the position: with adjuncts, with a relation, the zero
+may figure as a numeral--and the neglected zero is mostly, for that
+matter, endowed with a consciousness and subject to irritation. For this
+dim little gentleman, so perfectly a gentleman, no appeal and no
+redress, from the beginning to the end of his career, were made or
+entertained or projected; no question of how to treat him, or of how
+_he_ might see it or feel it, could ever possibly rise; he was blank
+from whatever view, remaining so under application of whatever acid or
+exposure to whatever heat; the one identity he could have was to be part
+of the consensus.
+
+Such a case is rare--that of being no case at all, that of not having
+even the interest of the grievance of not being one: we as a rule catch
+glimpses in the down-trodden of such resentments--they have at least
+sometimes the importance of feeling the weight of our tread. The
+phenomenon was here quite other--that of a natural platitude that had
+never risen to the level of sensibility. When you have been wronged you
+can be righted, when you have suffered you can be soothed; if you have
+that amount of grasp of the "scene," however humble, the drama of your
+life to some extent enacts itself, with the logical consequence of your
+being proportionately its hero and _having_ to be taken for such. Let me
+not dream of attempting to say for what cousin Helen took her spectral
+spouse, though I think it the most marked touch in her portrait that she
+kept us from ever knowing. She was a person about whom you knew
+everything else, but there she was genially inscrutable, and above all
+claimed no damages on the score of slights offered him. She knew nothing
+whatever of these, yet could herself be much wounded or hurt--which
+latter word she sounded in the wondrous old New York manner so
+irreducible to notation. She covered the whole case with a mantle which
+was yet much more probably that of her real simplicity than of a feigned
+unconsciousness; I doubt whether she _knew_ that men could be amiable in
+a different manner from that which had to serve her for supposing her
+husband amiable; when the mould and the men cast in it were very
+different she failed, or at least she feared, to conclude to
+amiability--though _some_ women (as different themselves as such
+stranger men!) might take it for that. Directly interrogated she might
+(such was the innocence of these long-extinct manners) have approved of
+male society in stronger doses or more vivid hues--save where
+consanguinity, or indeed relationship by marriage, to which she greatly
+deferred, had honestly imposed it. The singular thing for the drama to
+which I return was that there it was just consanguinity that had made
+the burden difficult and strange and of a nature to call on great
+decisions and patient plans, even though the most ominous possibilities
+were not involved. I reconstruct and reconstruct of course, but the
+elements had to my childish vision at least nothing at all portentous;
+if any light of the lurid played in for me just a little it was but
+under much later information. What my childish vision was really most
+possessed of, I think, was the figure of the spectral spouse, the dim
+little gentleman, as I have called him, pacing the whole length of the
+two big parlours, in prolonged repetition, much as if they had been the
+deck of one of those ships anciently haunted by him, as "supercargo" or
+whatever, in strange far seas--according to the only legend connected
+with him save that of his early presumption in having approached, such
+as he was, so fine a young woman, and his remarkable luck in having
+approached her successfully; a luck surprisingly renewed for him, since
+it was also part of the legend that he had previously married and lost a
+bride beyond his deserts.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+I am, strictly speaking, at this point, on a visit to Albert, who at
+times sociably condescended to my fewer years--I still appreciate the
+man-of-the-world ease of it; but my host seems for the minute to have
+left me, and I am attached but to the rich perspective in which "Uncle"
+(for Albert too he was only all namelessly Uncle) comes and goes; out of
+the comparative high brownness of the back room, commanding brave
+extensions, as I thought them, a covered piazza over which, in season,
+Isabella grapes accessibly clustered and beyond which stretched,
+further, a "yard" that was as an ample garden compared to ours at home;
+I keep in view his little rounded back, at the base of which his arms
+are interlocked behind him, and I know how his bald head, yet with the
+hair bristling up almost in short-horn fashion at the sides, is thrust
+inquiringly, not to say appealingly, forward; I assist at his emergence,
+where the fine old mahogany doors of separation are rolled back on what
+used to seem to me silver wheels, into the brighter yet colder half of
+the scene, and attend him while he at last looks out awhile into
+Fourteenth Street for news of whatever may be remarkably, objectionably
+or mercifully taking place there; and then I await his regular return,
+preparatory to a renewed advance, far from indifferent as I innocently
+am to his discoveries or his comments. It is cousin Helen however who
+preferentially takes them up, attaching to them the right importance,
+which is for the moment the very greatest that could possibly be
+attached to anything in the world; I for my part occupied with those
+marks of character in our pacing companion--his long, slightly equine
+countenance, his eyebrows ever elevated as in the curiosity of alarm,
+and the so limited play from side to side of his extremely protrusive
+head, as if somehow through tightness of the "wash" neckcloths that he
+habitually wore and that, wound and re-wound in their successive stages,
+made his neck very long without making it in the least thick and reached
+their climax in a proportionately very small knot tied with the neatest
+art. I scarce can have known at the time that this was as complete a
+little old-world figure as any that might then have been noted there,
+far or near; yet if I didn't somehow "subtly" feel it, why am I now so
+convinced that I must have had familiarly before me a masterpiece of the
+great Daumier, say, or Henri Monnier, or any other then contemporary
+projector of Monsieur Prudhomme, the timorous Philistine in a world of
+dangers, with whom I was later on to make acquaintance? I put myself
+the question, of scant importance though it may seem; but there is a
+reflection perhaps more timely than any answer to it. I catch myself in
+the act of seeing poor anonymous "Dear," as cousin Helen confined
+herself, her life long, to calling him, in the light of an image
+arrested by the French genius, and this in truth opens up vistas. I
+scarce know what it _doesn't_ suggest for the fact of sharpness, of
+intensity of type; which fact in turn leads my imagination almost any
+dance, making me ask myself quite most of all whether a person so marked
+by it mustn't really have been a highly finished figure.
+
+That degree of finish was surely rare among us--rare at a time when the
+charm of so much of the cousinship and the uncleship, the kinship
+generally, had to be found in their so engagingly dispensing with any
+finish at all. They happened to be amiable, to be delightful; but--I
+think I have already put the question--what would have become of us all
+if they hadn't been? a question the shudder of which could never have
+been suggested by the presence I am considering. He too was gentle and
+bland, as it happened--and I indeed see it all as a world quite
+unfavourable to arrogance or insolence or any hard and high assumption;
+but the more I think of him (even at the risk of thinking too much) the
+more I make out in him a tone and a manner that deprecated crude ease.
+Plenty of this was already in the air, but if he hadn't so spoken of an
+order in which forms still counted it might scarce have occurred to one
+that there had ever been any. It comes over me therefore that he
+testified--and perhaps quite beautifully; I remember his voice and his
+speech, which were not those of _that_ New York at all, and with the
+echo, faint as it is, arrives the wonder of where he could possibly have
+picked such things up. They were, as forms, adjusted and settled things;
+from what finer civilisation therefore had they come down to him? To
+brood on this the least little bit is verily, as I have said, to open up
+vistas--out of the depths of one of which fairly glimmers the queerest
+of questions. Mayn't we accordingly have been, the rest of us, all
+wrong, and the dim little gentleman the only one among us who was right?
+May not his truth to type have been a matter that, as mostly typeless
+ourselves, we neither perceived nor appreciated?--so that if, as is
+conceivable, he felt and measured the situation and simply chose to be
+bland and quiet and keep his sense to himself, he was a hero without the
+laurel as well as a martyr without the crown. The light of which
+possibility is, however, too fierce; I turn it off, I tear myself from
+the view--noting further but the one fact in his history that, by my
+glimpse of it, quite escapes ambiguity. The youthful Albert, I have
+mentioned, was to resist successfully through those years that
+solicitation of "Europe" our own response to which, both as a general
+and a particular solution, kept breaking out in choral wails; but the
+other house none the less nourished projects so earnest that they could
+invoke the dignity of comparative silence and patience. The other house
+didn't aspire to the tongues, but it aspired to the grand tour, of which
+ours was on many grounds incapable. Only after years and when endless
+things had happened--Albert having long before, in especial, quite taken
+up his stake and ostensibly dropped out of the game--did the great
+adventure get itself enacted, with the effect of one of the liveliest
+illustrations of the irony of fate. What had most of all flushed through
+the dream of it during years was the legend, at last quite antediluvian,
+of the dim little gentleman's early Wanderjahre, that experience of
+distant lands and seas which would find an application none the less
+lively for having had long to wait. It had had to wait in truth half a
+century, yet its confidence had apparently not been impaired when New
+York, on the happy day, began to recede from view. Europe had surprises,
+none the less, and who knows to what extent it may after half a century
+have had shocks? The coming true of the old dream produced at any rate a
+snap of the tense cord, and the ancient worthy my imagination has, in
+the tenderest of intentions, thus played with, disembarked in England
+only to indulge in the last of his startled stares, only to look about
+him in vague deprecation and give it all up. He just landed and died;
+but the grand tour was none the less proceeded with--cousin Helen
+herself, aided by resources personal, social and financial that left
+nothing to desire, triumphantly performed it, though as with a feeling
+of delicacy about it firmly overcome.
+
+But it has taken me quite out of the other house, so that I patch up
+again, at a stroke, that early scene of her double guardianship at which
+my small wonder assisted. It even then glimmered on me, I think, that if
+Albert was, all so romantically, in charge of his aunt--which was a
+perfectly nondescript relation--so his uncle Henry, her odd brother, was
+her more or less legal ward, not less, despite his being so very much
+Albert's senior. In these facts and in the character of each of the
+three persons involved resided the drama; which must more or less have
+begun, as I have hinted, when simple-minded Henry, at a date I seem to
+have seized, definitely emerged from rustication--the Beaverkill had but
+for a certain term protected, or promoted, his simplicity--and began, on
+his side, to pace the well-worn field between the Fourteenth Street
+windows and the piazza of the Isabella grapes. I see him there less
+vividly than his fellow-pedestrian only because he was afterwards to
+loom so much larger, whereas his companion, even while still present,
+was weakly to shrink and fade. At this late day only do I devise for
+that companion a possible history; the simple-minded Henry's annals on
+the other hand grew in interest as soon as they became interesting at
+all. This happened as soon as one took in the ground and some of the
+features of his tutelage. The basis of it all was that, harmless as he
+appeared, he was not to be trusted; I remember how portentous that truth
+soon looked, both in the light of his intense amiability and of sister
+Helen's absolute certitude. He wasn't to be trusted--it was the sole
+very definite fact about him except the fact that he had so kindly come
+down from the far-off Beaverkill to regale us with the perfect
+demonstration, dutifully, resignedly setting himself among us to point
+the whole moral himself. He appeared, from the moment we really took it
+in, to be doing, in the matter, no more than he ought; he exposed
+himself to our invidious gaze, on this ground, with a humility, a quiet
+courtesy and an instinctive dignity that come back to me as simply
+heroic. He had himself accepted, under strenuous suggestion, the
+dreadful view, and I see him to-day, in the light of the grand
+dénouement, deferred for long years, but fairly dazzling when it came,
+as fairly sublime in his decision not to put anyone in the wrong about
+him a day sooner than he could possibly help. The whole circle of us
+would in that event be so dreadfully "sold," as to our wisdom and
+justice, he proving only noble and exquisite. It didn't so immensely
+matter to him as that, the establishment of his true character didn't;
+so he went on as if for all the years--and they really piled themselves
+up: his passing for a dangerous idiot, or at least for a slave of his
+passions from the moment he was allowed the wherewithal in the least to
+indulge them, was a less evil for him than seeing us rudely corrected.
+It was in truth an extraordinary situation and would have offered a
+splendid subject, as we used to say, to the painter of character, the
+novelist or the dramatist, with the hand to treat it. After I had read
+David Copperfield an analogy glimmered--it struck me even in the early
+time: cousin Henry was more or less another Mr. Dick, just as cousin
+Helen was in her relation to him more or less another Miss Trotwood.
+There were disparities indeed: Mr. Dick was the harmless lunatic on that
+lady's premises, but she admired him and appealed to him; lunatics, in
+her generous view, might be oracles, and there is no evidence, if I
+correctly remember, that she kept him low. Our Mr. Dick was suffered to
+indulge his passions but on ten cents a day, while his fortune, under
+conscientious, under admirable care--cousin Helen being no less the
+wise and keen woman of business than the devoted sister--rolled up and
+became large; likewise Miss Trotwood's inmate hadn't at all the
+perplexed brooding brow, with the troubled fold in it, that represented
+poor Henry's only form of criticism of adverse fate. They had alike the
+large smooth open countenance of those for whom life has been
+simplified, and if Mr. Dick had had a fortune he would have remained all
+his days as modestly vague about the figure of it as our relative
+consented to remain. The latter's interests were agricultural, while his
+predecessor's, as we remember, were mainly historical; each at any rate
+had in a general way his Miss Trotwood, not to say his sister Helen.
+
+The good Henry's Miss Trotwood lived and died without an instant's
+visitation of doubt as to the due exercise of her authority, as to what
+would happen if it faltered; her victim waiting in the handsomest manner
+till she had passed away to show us all--all who remained, after so
+long, to do him justice--that nothing but what was charming and touching
+could possibly happen. This was, in part at least, the dazzling
+dénouement I have spoken of: he became, as soon as fortunate
+dispositions could take effect, the care of our admirable Aunt, between
+whom and his sister and himself close cousinship, from far back, had
+practically amounted to sisterhood: by which time the other house had
+long been another house altogether, its ancient site relinquished, its
+contents planted afresh far northward, with new traditions invoked,
+though with that of its great friendliness to all of us, for our
+mother's sake, still confirmed. Here with brief brightness, clouded at
+the very last, the solution emerged; we became aware, not without
+embarrassment, that poor Henry at large and supplied with funds was
+exactly as harmless and blameless as poor Henry stinted and captive; as
+to which if anything had been wanting to our confusion or to his own
+dignity it would have been his supreme abstinence, his suppression of
+the least "Didn't I tell you?" He didn't even pretend to have told us,
+when he so abundantly might, and nothing could exceed the grace with
+which he appeared to have noticed nothing. He "handled" dollars as
+decently, and just as profusely, as he had handled dimes; the only light
+shade on the scene--except of course for its being so belated, which did
+make it pathetically dim--was the question of how nearly he at all
+measured his resources. Not his heart, but his imagination, in the long
+years, had been starved; and though he was now all discreetly and wisely
+encouraged to feel rich, it was rather sadly visible that, thanks to
+almost half a century of over-discipline, he failed quite to rise to his
+estate. He did feel rich, just as he felt generous; the misfortune was
+only in his weak sense for meanings. That, with the whole situation,
+made delicacy of the first importance; as indeed what was perhaps most
+striking in the entire connection was the part played by delicacy from
+the first. It had all been a drama of the delicate: the consummately
+scrupulous and successful administration of his resources for the
+benefit of his virtue, so that they could be handed over, in the event,
+without the leakage of a fraction, what was that but a triumph of
+delicacy? So delicacy conspired, delicacy surrounded him; the case
+having been from the early time that, could he only be regarded as
+sufficiently responsible, could the sources of his bounty be judged
+fairly open to light pressure (there was question of none but the
+lightest) that bounty might blessedly flow. This had been Miss
+Trotwood's own enlightened view, on behalf of one of the oddest and most
+appealing collections of wistful wondering single gentlewomen that a
+great calculating benevolence perhaps ever found arrayed before
+it--ornaments these all of the second and third cousinship and
+interested spectators of the almost inexpressible facts.
+
+I should have liked completely to express them, in spite of the
+difficulty--if not indeed just by reason of that; the difficulty of
+their consisting so much more of "character" than of "incident" (heaven
+save the artless opposition!) though this last element figured bravely
+enough too, thanks to some of the forms taken by our young Albert's wild
+wilfulness. He was so weak--after the most approved fashion of
+distressing young men of means--that his successive exhibitions of it
+had a fine high positive effect, such as would have served beautifully,
+act after act, for the descent of the curtain. The issue, however
+(differing in this from the common theatrical trick) depended less on
+who should die than on who should live; the younger of cousin Helen's
+pair of wards--putting them even only as vessels of her attempted
+earnestness--had violently broken away, but a remedy to this grief, for
+reasons too many to tell, dwelt in the possible duration, could it only
+not be arrested, of two other lives, one of these her own, the second
+the guileless Henry's. The single gentlewomen, to a remarkable number,
+whom she regarded and treated as nieces, though they were only daughters
+of cousins, were such objects of her tender solicitude that, she and
+Henry and Albert being alike childless, the delightful thing to think of
+was, on certain contingencies, the nieces' prospective wealth. There
+were contingencies of course--and they exactly produced the pity and
+terror. Her estate would go at her death to her nearest of kin,
+represented by her brother and nephew; it would be only of her
+savings--fortunately, with her kind eye on the gentlewomen, zealous and
+long continued--that she might dispose by will; and it was but a
+troubled comfort that, should he be living at the time of her death, the
+susceptible Henry would profit no less than the wanton Albert. Henry was
+at any cost to be kept in life that he _might_ profit; the woeful
+question, the question of delicacy, for a woman devoutly conscientious,
+was how could anyone else, how, above all, could fifteen other persons,
+be made to profit by his profiting? She had been as earnest a steward of
+her brother's fortune as if directness of pressure on him, in a sense
+favourable to her interests--that is to her sympathies, which were her
+only interests--had been a matter of course with her; whereas in fact
+she would have held it a crime, given his simplicity, to attempt in the
+least to guide his hand. If he didn't outlive his nephew--and he was
+older, though, as would appear, so much more virtuous--his inherited
+property, she being dead, would accrue to that unedifying person.
+_There_ was the pity; and as for the question of the disposition of
+Henry's savings without the initiative of Henry's intelligence, in that,
+alas, was the terror. Henry's savings--there had been no terror for her,
+naturally, in beautifully husbanding his resources _for_ him--dangled,
+naturally, with no small vividness, before the wistful gentlewomen, to
+whom, if he had but _had_ the initiative, he might have made the most
+princely presents. Such was the oddity, not to say the rather tragic
+drollery, of the situation: that Henry's idea of a present was ten
+cents' worth of popcorn, or some similar homely trifle; and that when
+one had created for him a world of these proportions there was no honest
+way of inspiring him to write cheques for hundreds; all congruous though
+these would be with the generosity of his nature as shown by the
+exuberance of his popcorn. The ideal solution would be his flashing to
+intelligence just long enough to apprehend the case and, of his own
+magnanimous movement, sign away everything; but that was a fairy-tale
+stroke, and the fairies here somehow stood off.
+
+Thus between the wealth of her earnestness and the poverty of her
+courage--her dread, that is, of exposing herself to a legal process for
+undue influence--our good lady was not at peace; or, to be exact, was
+only at such peace as came to her by the free bestowal of her own
+accumulations during her lifetime and after her death. She predeceased
+her brother and had the pang of feeling that if half her residuum would
+be deplorably diverted the other half would be, by the same stroke,
+imperfectly applied; the artless Henry remained at once so well provided
+and so dimly inspired. Here was suspense indeed for a last "curtain" but
+one; and my fancy glows, all expertly, for the disclosure of the final
+scene, than which nothing could well have been happier, on all the
+premises, save for a single flaw: the installation in Forty-fourth
+Street of our admirable aunt, often, through the later years, domiciled
+there, but now settled to community of life with a touching charge and
+representing near him his extinguished, _their_ extinguished, sister.
+The too few years that followed were the good man's Indian summer and a
+very wonderful time--so charmingly it shone forth, for all concerned,
+that he was a person fitted to adorn, as the phrase is, almost any
+position. Our admirable aunt, not less devoted and less disinterested
+than his former protectress, had yet much more imagination; she had
+enough, in a word, for perfect confidence, and under confidence what
+remained of poor Henry's life bloomed like a garden freshly watered. Sad
+alas the fact that so scant a patch was now left. It sufficed, however,
+and he rose, just in time, to every conception; it was, as I have
+already noted, as if he had all the while known, as if he had really
+been a conscious victim to the superstition of his blackness. His final
+companion recognised, as it were, his powers; and it may be imagined
+whether when he absolutely himself proposed to benefit the gentlewomen
+she passed him, or not, the blessed pen. He had taken a year or two to
+publish by his behaviour the perfection of his civility, and so, on that
+safe ground, made use of the pen. His competence was afterwards
+attacked, and it emerged triumphant, exactly as his perfect charity and
+humility and amenity, and his long inward loneliness, of half a century,
+did. He had bowed his head and sometimes softly scratched it during that
+immense period; he had occasionally, after roaming downstairs with the
+troubled fold in his brow and the difficult, the smothered statement on
+his lips (his vocabulary was scant and stiff, the vocabulary of pleading
+explanation, often found too complicated by the witty,) retired once
+more to his room sometimes indeed for hours, to think it all over again;
+but had never failed of sobriety or propriety or punctuality or
+regularity, never failed of one of the virtues his imputed indifference
+to which had been the ground of his discipline. It was very
+extraordinary, and of all the stories I know is I think the most
+beautiful--so far at least as _he_ was concerned! The flaw I have
+mentioned, the one break in the final harmony, was the death of our
+admirable aunt too soon, shortly before his own and while, taken with
+illness at the same time, he lay there deprived of her attention. He had
+that of the gentlewomen, however, two or three of the wisest and
+tenderest being deputed by the others; and if his original estate
+reverted at law they presently none the less had occasion to bless his
+name.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+I turn round again to where I last left myself gaping at the old
+ricketty bill-board in Fifth Avenue; and am almost as sharply aware as
+ever of the main source of its spell, the fact that it most often blazed
+with the rich appeal of Mr. Barnum, whose "lecture-room," attached to
+the Great American Museum, overflowed into posters of all the theatrical
+bravery disavowed by its title. It was my rueful theory of those
+days--though tasteful I may call it too as well as rueful--that on all
+the holidays on which we weren't dragged to the dentist's we attended as
+a matter of course at Barnum's, that is when we were so happy as to be
+able to; which, to my own particular consciousness, wasn't every time
+the case. The case was too often, to my melancholy view, that W. J.,
+quite regularly, on the non-dental Saturdays, repaired to this seat of
+joy with the easy Albert--_he_ at home there and master of the scene to
+a degree at which, somehow, neither of us could at the best arrive; he
+quite moulded, truly, in those years of plasticity, as to the æsthetic
+bent and the determination of curiosity, I seem to make out, by the
+general Barnum association and revelation. It was not, I hasten to add,
+that I too didn't, to the extent of my minor chance, drink at the
+spring; for how else should I have come by the whole undimmed sense of
+the connection?--the weary waiting, in the dusty halls of humbug, amid
+bottled mermaids, "bearded ladies" and chill dioramas, for the
+lecture-room, the true centre of the seat of joy, to open: vivid in
+especial to me is my almost sick wondering of whether I mightn't be rapt
+away before it did open. The impression appears to have been mixed; the
+drinking deep and the holding out, holding out in particular against
+failure of food and of stage-fares, provision for transport to and fro,
+being questions equally intense: the appeal of the lecture-room, in its
+essence a heavy extra, so exhausted our resources that even the
+sustaining doughnut of the refreshment-counter would mock our desire and
+the long homeward crawl, the length of Broadway and further, seem to
+defy repetition. Those desperate days, none the less, affect me now as
+having flushed with the very complexion of romance; their aches and
+inanitions were part of the adventure; the homeward straggle,
+interminable as it appeared, flowered at moments into rapt
+contemplations--that for instance of the painted portrait, large as
+life, of the celebrity of the hour, then "dancing" at the Broadway
+Theatre, Lola Montes, Countess of Lansfeldt, of a dazzling and unreal
+beauty and in a riding-habit lavishly open at the throat.
+
+It was thus quite in order that I should pore longest, there at my
+fondest corner, over the Barnum announcements--my present inability to
+be superficial about which has given in fact the measure of my
+contemporary care. These announcements must have been in their way
+marvels of attractive composition, the placard bristling from top to toe
+with its analytic "synopsis of scenery and incidents"; the synoptical
+view cast its net of fine meshes and the very word savoured of
+incantation. It is odd at the same time that when I question memory as
+to the living hours themselves, those of the stuffed and dim little hall
+of audience, smelling of peppermint and orange-peel, where the curtain
+rose on our gasping but rewarded patience, two performances only stand
+out for me, though these in the highest relief. Love, or the Countess
+and the Serf, by J. Sheridan Knowles--I see that still as the blazonry
+of one of them, just as I see Miss Emily Mestayer, large, red in the
+face, coifed in a tangle of small, fine, damp-looking short curls and
+clad in a light-blue garment edged with swans-down, shout at the top of
+her lungs that a "pur-r-r-se of gold" would be the fair guerdon of the
+minion who should start on the spot to do her bidding at some desperate
+crisis that I forget. I forget Huon the serf, whom I yet recall
+immensely admiring for his nobleness; I forget everyone but Miss
+Mestayer, who gave form to my conception of the tragic actress at her
+highest. She had a hooked nose, a great play of nostril, a vast
+protuberance of bosom and always the "crop" of close moist ringlets; I
+say always, for I was to see her often again, during a much later phase,
+the mid-most years of that Boston Museum which aimed at so vastly higher
+a distinction than the exploded lecture-room had really done, though in
+an age that snickered even abnormally low it still lacked the courage to
+call itself a theatre. She must have been in comedy, which I believe she
+also usefully and fearlessly practised, rather unimaginable; but there
+was no one like her in the Boston time for cursing queens and
+eagle-beaked mothers; the Shakespeare of the Booths and other such would
+have been unproducible without her; she had a rusty, rasping, heaving
+and tossing "authority" of which the bitterness is still in my ears. I
+am revisited by an outer glimpse of her in that after age when she had
+come, comparatively speaking, into her own--the sight of her,
+accidentally incurred, one tremendously hot summer night, as she slowly
+moved from her lodgings or wherever, in the high Bowdoin Street region,
+down to the not distant theatre from which even the temperature had
+given her no reprieve; and well remember how, the queer light of my
+young impression playing up again in her path, she struck me as the
+very image of mere sore histrionic habit and use, a worn and weary, a
+battered even though almost sordidly smoothed, _thing_ of the theatre,
+very much as an old infinitely-handled and greasy violoncello of the
+orchestra might have been. It was but an effect doubtless of the heat
+that she scarcely seemed clad at all; slippered, shuffling and, though
+somehow hatted and vaguely veiled or streamered, wrapt in a gauzy sketch
+of a dressing-gown, she pointed to my extravagant attention the moral of
+thankless personal service, of the reverse of the picture, of the cost
+of "amusing the public" in a case of amusing it, as who should say,
+every hour. And I had thrilled before her as the Countess in
+"Love"--such contrasted combinations! But she carried her head very
+high, as with the habit of crowns and trains and tirades--had in fact
+much the air of some deposed and reduced sovereign living on a scant
+allowance; so that, all invisibly and compassionately, I took off my hat
+to her.
+
+To which I must add the other of my two Barnumite scenic memories, my
+having anciently admired her as the Eliza of Uncle Tom's Cabin, her
+swelling bust encased in a neat cotton gown and her flight across the
+ice-blocks of the Ohio, if I rightly remember the perilous stream,
+intrepidly and gracefully performed. We lived and moved at that time,
+with great intensity, in Mrs. Stowe's novel--which, recalling my prompt
+and charmed acquaintance with it, I should perhaps substitute for The
+Initials, earlier mentioned here, as my first experiment in grown-up
+fiction. There was, however, I think, for that triumphant work no
+classified condition; it was for no sort of reader as distinct from any
+other sort, save indeed for Northern as differing from Southern: it knew
+the large felicity of gathering in alike the small and the simple and
+the big and the wise, and had above all the extraordinary fortune of
+finding itself, for an immense number of people, much less a book than a
+state of vision, of feeling and of consciousness, in which they didn't
+sit and read and appraise and pass the time, but walked and talked and
+laughed and cried and, in a manner of which Mrs. Stowe was the
+irresistible cause, generally conducted themselves. Appreciation and
+judgment, the whole impression, were thus an effect for which there had
+been no process--any process so related having in other cases _had_ to
+be at some point or other critical; nothing in the guise of a written
+book, therefore, a book printed, published, sold, bought and "noticed,"
+probably ever reached its mark, the mark of exciting interest, without
+having at least groped for that goal _as_ a book or by the exposure of
+some literary side. Letters, here, languished unconscious, and Uncle
+Tom, instead of making even one of the cheap short cuts through the
+medium in which books breathe, even as fishes in water, went gaily
+roundabout it altogether, as if a fish, a wonderful "leaping" fish, had
+simply flown through the air. This feat accomplished, the surprising
+creature could naturally fly anywhere, and one of the first things it
+did was thus to flutter down on every stage, literally without
+exception, in America and Europe. If the amount of life represented in
+such a work is measurable by the ease with which representation is taken
+up and carried further, carried even violently furthest, the fate of
+Mrs. Stowe's picture was conclusive: it simply sat down wherever it
+lighted and made itself, so to speak, at home; thither multitudes
+flocked afresh and there, in each case, it rose to its height again and
+went, with all its vivacity and good faith, through all its motions.
+
+These latter were to leave me, however, with a fonder vision still than
+that of the comparatively jejune "lecture-room" version; for the first
+exhibition of them to spring to the front was the fine free rendering
+achieved at a playhouse till then ignored by fashion and culture, the
+National Theatre, deep down on the East side, whence echoes had come
+faintest to ears polite, but where a sincerity vivid though rude was now
+supposed to reward the curious. Our numerous attendance there under this
+spell was my first experience of the "theatre party" as we have enjoyed
+it in our time--each emotion and impression of which is as fresh to me
+as the most recent of the same family. Precious through all indeed
+perhaps is the sense, strange only to later sophistication, of my small
+encouraged state as a free playgoer--a state doubly wondrous while I
+thus evoke the full contingent from Union Square; where, for that
+matter, I think, the wild evening must have been planned. I am lost
+again in all the goodnature from which small boys, on wild evenings,
+could dangle so unchidden--since the state of unchiddenness is what
+comes back to me well-nigh clearest. How without that complacency of
+conscience could every felt impression so live again? It is true that
+for my present sense of the matter snubs and raps would still tingle,
+would count double; just wherefore it is exactly, however, that I mirror
+myself in these depths of propriety. The social scheme, as we knew it,
+was, in its careless charity, worthy of the golden age--though I can't
+sufficiently repeat that we knew it both at its easiest and its safest:
+the fruits dropped right upon the board to which we flocked together,
+the least of us and the greatest, with differences of appetite and of
+reach, doubtless, but not with differences of place and of proportionate
+share. My appetite and my reach in respect to the more full-bodied Uncle
+Tom might have brooked certainly any comparison; I must have partaken
+thoroughly of the feast to have left the various aftertastes so separate
+and so strong. It was a great thing to have a canon to judge by--it
+helped conscious criticism, which was to fit on wings (for use ever
+after) to the shoulders of appreciation. In the light of that advantage
+I could be _sure_ my second Eliza was less dramatic than my first, and
+that my first "Cassy," that of the great and blood-curdling Mrs. Bellamy
+of the lecture-room, touched depths which made the lady at the National
+prosaic and placid (I could already be "down" on a placid Cassy;) just
+as on the other hand the rocking of the ice-floes of the Ohio, with the
+desperate Eliza, infant in arms, balancing for a leap from one to the
+other, had here less of the audible creak of carpentry, emulated a
+trifle more, to my perception, the real water of Mr. Crummles's pump.
+They can't, even at that, have emulated it much, and one almost envies
+(quite making up one's mind not to denounce) the simple faith of an age
+beguiled by arts so rude.
+
+However, the point exactly was that we attended this spectacle just in
+order _not_ to be beguiled, just in order to enjoy with ironic
+detachment and, at the very most, to be amused ourselves at our
+sensibility should it prove to have been trapped and caught. To have
+become thus aware of our collective attitude constituted for one small
+spectator at least a great initiation; he got his first glimpse of that
+possibility of a "free play of mind" over a subject which was to throw
+him with force at a later stage of culture, when subjects had
+considerably multiplied, into the critical arms of Matthew Arnold. So he
+is himself at least interested in seeing the matter--as a progress in
+which the first step was taken, before that crude scenic appeal, by his
+wondering, among his companions, where the absurd, the absurd for
+_them_, ended and the fun, the real fun, which was the gravity, the
+tragedy, the drollery, the beauty, the thing itself, briefly, might be
+legitimately and tastefully held to begin. Uncanny though the remark
+perhaps, I am not sure I wasn't thus more interested in the pulse of our
+party, under my tiny recording thumb, than in the beat of the drama and
+the shock of its opposed forces--vivid and touching as the contrast was
+then found for instance between the tragi-comical Topsy, the slave-girl
+clad in a pinafore of sackcloth and destined to become for Anglo-Saxon
+millions the type of the absolute in the artless, and her little
+mistress the blonde Eva, a figure rather in the Kenwigs tradition of
+pantalettes and pigtails, whom I recall as perching quite suicidally,
+with her elbows out and a preliminary shriek, on that bulwark of the
+Mississippi steamboat which was to facilitate her all but fatal
+immersion in the flood. Why should I have duly noted that no little
+game on her part could well less have resembled or simulated an
+accident, and yet have been no less moved by her reappearance, rescued
+from the river but perfectly dry, in the arms of faithful Tom, who had
+plunged in to save her, without either so much as wetting his shoes,
+than if I had been engaged with her in a reckless romp? I could count
+the white stitches in the loose patchwork, and yet could take it for a
+story rich and harmonious; I could know we had all intellectually
+condescended and that we had yet had the thrill of an æsthetic
+adventure; and this was a brave beginning for a consciousness that was
+to be nothing if not mixed and a curiosity that was to be nothing if not
+restless.
+
+The principle of this prolonged arrest, which I insist on prolonging a
+little further, is doubtless in my instinct to grope for our earliest
+æsthetic seeds. Careless at once and generous the hands by which they
+were sown, but practically appointed none the less to cause that
+peculiarly flurried hare to run--flurried because over ground so little
+native to it--when so many others held back. Is it _that_ air of romance
+that gilds for me then the Barnum background--taking it as a symbol;
+that makes me resist, to this effect of a passionate adverse loyalty,
+any impulse to translate into harsh terms any old sordidities and
+poverties? The Great American Museum, the down-town scenery and aspects
+at large, and even the up-town improvements on them, as then
+flourishing?--why, they must have been for the most part of the last
+meanness: the Barnum picture above all ignoble and awful, its blatant
+face or frame stuck about with innumerable flags that waved, poor
+vulgar-sized ensigns, over spurious relics and catchpenny monsters in
+effigy, to say nothing of the promise within of the still more monstrous
+and abnormal living--from the total impression of which things we
+plucked somehow the flower of the ideal. It grew, I must in justice
+proceed, much more sweetly and naturally at Niblo's, which represented
+in our scheme the ideal evening, while Barnum figured the ideal day; so
+that I ask myself, with that sense of our resorting there under the rich
+cover of night (which was the supreme charm,) how it comes that this
+larger memory hasn't swallowed up all others. For here, absolutely,
+_was_ the flower at its finest and grown as nowhere else--grown in the
+great garden of the Ravel Family and offered again and again to our deep
+inhalation. I see the Ravels, French acrobats, dancers and pantomimists,
+as representing, for our culture, pure grace and charm and civility; so
+that one doubts whether any candid community was ever so much in debt to
+a race of entertainers or had so happy and prolonged, so personal and
+grateful a relation with them. They must have been, with their
+offshoots of Martinettis and others, of three or four generations,
+besides being of a rich theatrical stock generally, and we had our
+particular friends and favourites among them; we seemed to follow them
+through every phase of their career, to assist at their tottering steps
+along the tight-rope as very small children kept in equilibrium by very
+big balancing-poles (caretakers here walking under in case of falls;) to
+greet them as Madame Axel, of robust maturity and in a Spanish costume,
+bounding on the same tense cord more heavily but more assuredly; and
+finally to know the climax of the art with them in Raoul or the
+Night-Owl and Jocko or the Brazilian Ape--and all this in the course of
+our own brief infancy. My impression of them bristles so with memories
+that we seem to have rallied to their different productions with much
+the same regularity with which we formed fresh educational connections;
+and they were so much our property and our pride that they supported us
+handsomely through all fluttered entertainment of the occasional Albany
+cousins. I remember how when one of these visitors, wound up, in honour
+of New York, to the very fever of perception, broke out one evening
+while we waited for the curtain to rise, "Oh don't you hear the cries?
+They're _beating_ them, I'm sure they are; can't it be stopped?" we
+resented the charge as a slur on our very honour; for what our romantic
+relative had heatedly imagined to reach us, in a hushed-up manner from
+behind, was the sounds attendant on the application of blows to some
+acrobatic infant who had "funked" his little job. Impossible such
+horrors in the world of pure poetry opened out to us at Niblo's, a
+temple of illusion, of tragedy and comedy and pathos that, though its
+_abords_ of stony brown Metropolitan Hotel, on the "wrong side," must
+have been bleak and vulgar, flung its glamour forth into Broadway. What
+more pathetic for instance, so that we publicly wept, than the fate of
+wondrous Martinetti Jocko, who, after befriending a hapless French
+family wrecked on the coast of Brazil and bringing back to life a small
+boy rescued from the waves (I see even now, with every detail, this
+inanimate victim supine on the strand) met his death by some cruel
+bullet of which I have forgotten the determinant cause, only remembering
+the final agony as something we could scarce bear and a strain of our
+sensibility to which our parents repeatedly questioned the wisdom of
+exposing us.
+
+These performers and these things were in all probability but of a
+middling skill and splendour--it was the pre-trapèze age, and we were
+caught by mild marvels, even if a friendly good faith in them, something
+sweet and sympathetic, was after all a value, whether of their own
+humanity, their own special quality, or only of our innocence, never to
+be renewed; but I light this taper to the initiators, so to call them,
+whom I remembered, when we had left them behind, as if they had given us
+a silver key to carry off and so to refit, after long years, to sweet
+names never thought of from then till now. Signor Léon Javelli, in whom
+the French and the Italian charm appear to have met, who was he, and
+what did he brilliantly do, and why of a sudden do I thus recall and
+admire him? I am afraid he but danced the tight-rope, the most domestic
+of our friends' resources, as it brought them out, by the far stretch of
+the rope, into the bosom of the house and against our very hearts, where
+they leapt and bounded and wavered and recovered closely face to face
+with us; but I dare say he bounded, brave Signor Léon, to the greatest
+height of all: let this vague agility, in any case, connect him with
+that revelation of the ballet, the sentimental-pastoral, of other years,
+which, in The Four Lovers for example, a pantomimic lesson as in words
+of one syllable, but all quick and gay and droll, would have affected us
+as classic, I am sure, had we then had at our disposal that term of
+appreciation. When we read in English story-books about the pantomimes
+in London, which somehow cropped up in them so often, those were the
+only things that didn't make us yearn; so much we felt we were masters
+of the type, and so almost sufficiently was that a stop-gap for London
+constantly deferred. We hadn't the transformation-scene, it was true,
+though what this really seemed to come to was clown and harlequin taking
+liberties with policemen--these last evidently a sharp note in a
+picturesqueness that we lacked, our own slouchy "officers" saying
+nothing to us of that sort; but we had at Niblo's harlequin and
+columbine, albeit of less pure a tradition, and we knew moreover all
+about clowns, for we went to circuses too, and so repeatedly that when I
+add them to our list of recreations, the good old orthodox circuses
+under tents set up in vacant lots, with which New York appears at that
+time to have bristled, time and place would seem to have shrunken for
+most other pursuits, and not least for that of serious learning. And the
+case is aggravated as I remember Franconi's, which we more or less
+haunted and which, aiming at the grander style and the monumental
+effect, blazed with fresh paint and rang with Roman chariot-races up
+there among the deserts of Twenty-ninth Street or wherever; considerably
+south, perhaps, but only a little east, of the vaster desolations that
+gave scope to the Crystal Palace, second of its name since,
+following--not _passibus æquis_, alas--the London structure of 1851,
+this enterprise forestalled by a year or two the Paris Palais de
+l'Industrie of 1855. Such as it was I feel again its majesty on those
+occasions on which I dragged--if I must here once more speak for myself
+only--after Albany cousins through its courts of edification: I remember
+being very tired and cold and hungry there, in a little light drab and
+very glossy or shiny "talma" breasted with rather troublesome
+buttonhole-embroideries; though concomitantly conscious that I was
+somehow in Europe, since everything about me had been "brought over,"
+which ought to have been consoling, and seems in fact to have been so in
+some degree, inasmuch as both my own pain and the sense of the cousinly,
+the Albany, headaches quite fade in that recovered presence of big
+European Art embodied in Thorwaldsen's enormous Christ and the
+Disciples, a shining marble company ranged in a semicircle of dark
+maroon walls. If this was Europe then Europe was beautiful indeed, and
+we rose to it on the wings of wonder; never were we afterwards to see
+great showy sculpture, in whatever profuse exhibition or of whatever
+period or school, without some renewal of that charmed Thorwaldsen hour,
+some taste again of the almost sugary or confectionery sweetness with
+which the great white images had affected us under their supper-table
+gaslight. The Crystal Palace was vast and various and dense, which was
+what Europe was going to be; it was a deep-down jungle of impressions
+that were somehow challenges, even as we might, helplessly defied, find
+foreign words and practices; over which formidably towered Kiss's
+mounted Amazon attacked by a leopard or whatever, a work judged at that
+day sublime and the glory of the place; so that I felt the journey back
+in the autumn dusk and the Sixth Avenue cars (established just in time)
+a relapse into soothing flatness, a return to the Fourteenth Street
+horizon from a far journey and a hundred looming questions that would
+still, tremendous thought, come up for all the personal answers of which
+one cultivated the seed.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+Let me hurry, however, to catch again that thread I left dangling from
+my glance at our small vague spasms of school--my personal sense of them
+being as vague and small, I mean, in contrast with the fuller and
+stronger cup meted out all round to the Albany cousins, much more
+privileged, I felt, in every stroke of fortune; or at least much more
+interesting, though it might be wicked to call them more happy, through
+those numberless bereavements that had so enriched their existence. I
+mentioned above in particular the enviable consciousness of our little
+red-headed kinsman Gus Barker, who, as by a sharp prevision, snatched
+what gaiety he might from a life to be cut short, in a cavalry dash, by
+one of the Confederate bullets of 1863: he blew out at us, on New York
+Sundays, as I have said, sharp puffs of the atmosphere of the
+Institution Charlier--strong to us, that is, the atmosphere of whose
+institutions was weak; but it was above all during a gregarious visit
+paid him in a livelier field still that I knew myself merely mother'd
+and brother'd. It had been his fate to be but scantly the latter and
+never at all the former--our aunt Janet had not survived his birth; but
+on this day of our collective pilgrimage to Sing-Sing, where he was at a
+"military" school and clad in a fashion that represented to me the very
+panoply of war, he shone with a rare radiance of privation. Ingenuous
+and responsive, of a social disposition, a candour of gaiety, that
+matched his physical activity--the most beautifully made athletic little
+person, and in the highest degree appealing and engaging--he not only
+did us the honours of his dazzling academy (dazzling at least to me) but
+had all the air of showing us over the great State prison which even
+then flourished near at hand and to which he accompanied us; a party of
+a composition that comes back to me as wonderful, the New York and
+Albany cousinships appearing to have converged and met, for the happy
+occasion, with the generations and sexes melting together and moving in
+a loose harmonious band. The party must have been less numerous than by
+the romantic tradition or confused notation of my youth, and what I
+mainly remember of it beyond my sense of our being at once an attendant
+train to my aged and gentle and in general most unadventurous
+grandmother, and a chorus of curiosity and amusement roundabout the
+vivid Gussy, is our collective impression that State prisons were on the
+whole delightful places, vast, bright and breezy, with a gay, free
+circulation in corridors and on stairs, a pleasant prevalence of hot
+soup and fresh crusty rolls, in tins, of which visitors admiringly
+partook, and for the latter, in chance corners and on sunny landings,
+much interesting light brush of gentlemen remarkable but for gentlemanly
+crimes--that is defalcations and malversations to striking and
+impressive amounts.
+
+I recall our coming on such a figure at the foot of a staircase and his
+having been announced to us by our conductor or friend in charge as
+likely to be there; and what a charm I found in his cool loose uniform
+of shining white (as I was afterwards to figure it,) as well as in his
+generally refined and distinguished appearance and in the fact that he
+was engaged, while exposed to our attention, in the commendable act of
+paring his nails with a smart penknife and that he didn't allow us to
+interrupt him. One of my companions, I forget which, had advised me that
+in these contacts with illustrious misfortune I was to be careful not to
+stare; and present to me at this moment is the wonder of whether he
+would think it staring to note that _he_ quite stared, and also that his
+hands were fine and fair and one of them adorned with a signet ring. I
+was to have later in life a glimpse of two or three dismal
+penitentiaries, places affecting me as sordid, as dark and dreadful; but
+if the revelation of Sing-Sing had involved the idea of a timely warning
+to the young mind my small sensibility at least was not reached by the
+lesson. I envied the bold-eyed celebrity in the array of a planter at
+his ease--we might have been _his_ slaves--quite as much as I envied
+Gussy; in connection with which I may remark here that though in that
+early time I seem to have been constantly eager to exchange my lot for
+that of somebody else, on the assumed certainty of gaining by the
+bargain, I fail to remember feeling jealous of such happier persons--in
+the measure open to children of spirit. I had rather a positive lack of
+the passion, and thereby, I suppose, a lack of spirit; since if jealousy
+bears, as I think, on what one sees one's companions able to do--as
+against one's own falling short--envy, as I knew it at least, was simply
+of what they _were_, or in other words of a certain sort of richer
+consciousness supposed, doubtless often too freely supposed, in them.
+They were so _other_--that was what I felt; and to _be_ other, other
+almost anyhow, seemed as good as the probable taste of the bright
+compound wistfully watched in the confectioner's window; unattainable,
+impossible, of course, but as to which just this impossibility and just
+that privation kept those active proceedings in which jealousy seeks
+relief quite out of the question. A platitude of acceptance of the poor
+actual, the absence of all vision of how in any degree to change it,
+combined with a complacency, an acuity of perception of alternatives,
+though a view of them as only through the confectioner's hard
+glass--that is what I recover as the nearest approach to an apology, in
+the soil of my nature, for the springing seed of emulation. I never
+dreamed of competing--a business having in it at the best, for my
+temper, if not for my total failure of temper, a displeasing ferocity.
+If competing was bad snatching was therefore still worse, and jealousy
+was a sort of spiritual snatching. With which, nevertheless, all the
+while, one might have been "like" So-and-So, who had such horizons. A
+helpless little love of horizons I certainly cherished, and could
+sometimes even care for my own. These always shrank, however, under
+almost any suggestion of a further range or finer shade in the purple
+rim offered to other eyes--and that is what I take for the restlessness
+of envy. It wasn't that I wished to change with everyone, with anyone at
+a venture, but that I saw "gifts" everywhere but as mine and that I
+scarce know whether to call the effect of this miserable or monstrous.
+It was the effect at least of self-abandonment--I mean to visions.
+
+There must have been on that occasion of the Sing-Sing day--which it
+deeply interests me to piece together--some state of connection for some
+of us with the hospitalities of Rhinebeck, the place of abode of the
+eldest of the Albany uncles--that is of the three most in our view; for
+there were two others, the eldest of all a half-uncle only, who formed a
+class quite by himself, and the very youngest, who, with lively
+interests of his own, had still less attention for us than either of his
+three brothers. The house at Rhinebeck and all its accessories (which
+struck our young sense as innumerable,) in especial the great bluff of
+the Hudson on which it stood, yields me images scarcely dimmed, though
+as the effect but of snatches of acquaintance; there at all events the
+gently-groaning--ever so gently and dryly--Albany grandmother, with the
+Albany cousins as to whom I here discriminate, her two adopted
+daughters, maturest and mildest of the general tribe, must have paused
+for a stay; a feature of which would be perhaps her juncture with the
+New York contingent, somewhere sociably achieved, for the befriending of
+juvenile Gussy. It shimmers there, the whole circumstance, with I scarce
+know what large innocence of charity and ease; the Gussy-pretext, for
+reunion, all so thin yet so important an appeal, the simplicity of the
+interests and the doings, the assumptions and the concessions, each
+to-day so touching, almost so edifying. We were surely all gentle and
+generous together, floating in such a clean light social order, sweetly
+proof against ennui--unless it be a bad note, as is conceivable, never,
+_never_ to feel bored--and thankful for the smallest æsthetic or
+romantic mercies. My vision loses itself withal in vaster
+connections--above all in my general sense of the then grand newness of
+the Hudson River Railroad; so far at least as its completion to Albany
+was concerned, a modern blessing that even the youngest of us were in a
+position to appraise. The time had been when the steamboat had to
+content us--and I feel how amply it must have done so as I recall the
+thrill of docking in dim early dawns, the whole hour of the Albany
+waterside, the night of huge strange paddling and pattering and
+shrieking and creaking once ended, and contrast with it all certain long
+sessions in the train at an age and in conditions when neither train nor
+traveller had suffered chastening; sessions of a high animation, as I
+recast them, but at the same time of mortal intensities of lassitude.
+The elements here indeed are much confused and mixed--I must have known
+that discipline of the hectic interest and the extravagant strain in
+relation to Rhinebeck only; an _étape_, doubtless, on the way to New
+York, for the Albany kinship, but the limit to our smaller patiences of
+any northward land-journey. And yet not the young fatigue, I repeat, but
+the state of easy wonder, is what most comes back: the stops too
+repeated, but perversely engaging; the heat and the glare too great, but
+the river, by the window, making reaches and glimpses, so that the
+great swing of picture and force of light and colour were themselves a
+constant adventure; the uncles, above all, too pre-eminent, too
+recurrent, to the creation of a positive soreness of sympathy, of
+curiosity, and yet constituting by their presence half the enlargement
+of the time. For the presence of uncles, incoherent Albany uncles, is
+somehow what most gives these hours their stamp for memory. I scarce
+know why, nor do I much, I confess, distinguish occasions--but I see
+what I see: the long, the rattling car of the old open native form and
+the old harsh native exposure; the sense of arrival forever postponed,
+qualified however also by that of having in my hands a volume of M.
+Arsène Houssaye, Philosophes et Comédiennes, remarkably submitted by one
+of my relatives to my judgment. I see them always, the relatives, in
+slow circulation; restless and nervous and casual their note, not less
+than strikingly genial, but with vaguenesses, lapses, eclipses, that
+deprived their society of a tactless weight. They cheered us on, in
+their way; born optimists, clearly, if not logically determined ones,
+they were always reassuring and sustaining, though with a bright brevity
+that must have taken immensities, I think, for granted. They wore their
+hats slightly toward the nose, they strolled, they hung about, they
+reported of progress and of the company, they dropped suggestions, new
+magazines, packets of the edible deprecated for the immature; they
+figured in fine to a small nephew as the principal men of their time
+and, so far as the two younger and more familiar were concerned, the
+most splendid as to aspect and apparel. It was none the less to the
+least shining, though not essentially the least comforting, of this
+social trio that, if I rightly remember, I owed my introduction to the
+_chronique galante_ of the eighteenth century.
+
+There tags itself at any rate to the impression a flutter as of some
+faint, some recaptured, grimace for another of his kindly offices (which
+I associate somehow with the deck of a steamboat:) his production for
+our vague benefit of a literary classic, the Confessions, as he called
+our attention to them, of the celebrated "Rosseau" I catch again the
+echo of the mirth excited, to my surprise, by this communication, and
+recover as well my responsive advance toward a work that seemed so to
+promise; but especially have I it before me that some play of light
+criticism mostly attended, on the part of any circle, this speaker's
+more ambitious remarks. For all that, and in spite of oddities of
+appearance and type, it was Augustus James who spread widest, in default
+of towering highest, to my wistful view of the larger life, and who
+covered definite and accessible ground. This ground, the house and
+precincts of Linwood, at Rhinebeck, harboured our tender years, I
+surmise, but at few and brief moments; but it hadn't taken many of these
+to make it the image of an hospitality liberal as I supposed great
+social situations were liberal; suppositions on this score having in
+childhood (or at least they had in mine) as little as possible to do
+with dry data. Didn't Linwood bristle with great views and other
+glories, with gardens and graperies and black ponies, to say nothing of
+gardeners and grooms who were notoriously and quotedly droll; to say
+nothing, in particular, of our aunt Elizabeth, who had been Miss Bay of
+Albany, who was the mother of the fair and free young waltzing-women in
+New York, and who floats back to me through the Rhinebeck picture,
+aquiline but easy, with an effect of handsome highbrowed, high-nosed
+looseness, of dressing-gowns or streaming shawls (the dowdy, the
+delightful shawl of the period;) and of claws of bright benevolent steel
+that kept nipping for our charmed advantage: roses and grapes and
+peaches and currant-clusters, together with turns of phrase and scraps
+of remark that fell as by quite a like flash of shears. These are mere
+scrapings of gold-dust, but my mind owes her a vibration that, however
+tiny, was to insist all these years on _marking_--on figuring in a whole
+complex of picture and drama, the clearest note of which was that of
+worry and woe: a crisis prolonged, in deep-roofed outer galleries,
+through hot August evenings and amid the dim flare of open windows, to
+the hum of domesticated insects. All but inexpressible the part played,
+in the young mind naturally even though perversely, even though
+inordinately, arranged as a stage for the procession and exhibition of
+appearances, by matters all of a usual cast, contacts and impressions
+not arriving at the dignity of shocks, but happening to be to the taste,
+as one may say, of the little intelligence, happening to be such as the
+fond fancy could assimilate. One's record becomes, under memories of
+this order--and that is the only trouble--a tale of assimilations small
+and fine; out of which refuse, directly interesting to the
+subject-victim only, the most branching vegetations may be conceived as
+having sprung. Such are the absurdities of the poor dear inward
+life--when translated, that is, and perhaps ineffectually translated,
+into terms of the outward and trying at all to flourish on the lines of
+the outward; a reflection that might stay me here weren't it that I
+somehow feel morally affiliated, tied as by knotted fibres, to the
+elements involved.
+
+One of these was assuredly that my father had again, characteristically,
+suffered me to dangle; he having been called to Linwood by the dire
+trouble of his sister, Mrs. Temple, and brought me with him from Staten
+Island--I make the matter out as of the summer of '54. We had come up,
+he and I, to New York; but our doings there, with the journey following,
+are a blank to me; I recover but my sense, on our arrival, of being for
+the first time in the presence of tragedy, which the shining scene,
+roundabout, made more sinister--sharpened even to the point of my
+feeling abashed and irrelevant, wondering why I had come. My aunt, under
+her brother's roof, had left her husband, wasted with consumption, near
+death at Albany; gravely ill herself--she had taken the disease from him
+as it was taken in those days, and was in the event very scantly to
+survive him--she had been ordered away in her own interest, for which
+she cared no scrap, and my father, the person in all his family most
+justly appealed and most anxiously listened to, had been urged to come
+and support her in a separation that she passionately rejected. Vivid to
+me still, as floating across verandahs into the hot afternoon stillness,
+is the wail of her protest and her grief; I remember being scared and
+hushed by it and stealing away beyond its reach. I remember not less
+what resources of high control the whole case imputed, for my
+imagination, to my father; and how, creeping off to the edge of the
+eminence above the Hudson, I somehow felt the great bright harmonies of
+air and space becoming one with my rather proud assurance and
+confidence, that of my own connection, for life, for interest, with
+such sources of light. The great impression, however, the one that has
+brought me so far, was another matter: only that of the close,
+lamp-tempered, outer evening aforesaid, with my parent again, somewhere
+deep within, yet not too far to make us hold our breath for it, tenderly
+opposing his sister's purpose of flight, and the presence at my side of
+my young cousin Marie, youngest daughter of the house, exactly of my own
+age, and named in honour of her having been born in Paris, to the
+influence of which fact her shining black eyes, her small quickness and
+brownness, marking sharply her difference from her sisters, so oddly, so
+almost extravagantly testified. It had come home to me by some voice of
+the air that she was "spoiled," and it made her in the highest degree
+interesting; we ourselves had been so associated, at home, without being
+in the least spoiled (I think we even rather missed it:) so that I knew
+about these subjects of invidious reflection only by literature--mainly,
+no doubt, that of the nursery--in which they formed, quite by
+themselves, a romantic class; and, the fond fancy always predominant, I
+prized even while a little dreading the chance to see the condition at
+work. This chance was given me, it was clear--though I risk in my record
+of it a final anticlimax--by a remark from my uncle Augustus to his
+daughter: seated duskily in our group, which included two or three dim
+dependent forms, he expressed the strong opinion that Marie should go to
+bed--expressed it, that is, with the casual cursory humour that was to
+strike me as the main expressional resource of outstanding members of
+the family and that would perhaps have had under analysis the defect of
+making judgment very personal without quite making authority so.
+Authority they hadn't, of a truth, these all so human outstanding ones;
+they made shift but with light appreciation, sudden suggestion, a
+peculiar variety of happy remark in the air. It had been remarked but in
+the air, I feel sure, that Marie should seek her couch--a truth by the
+dark wing of which I ruefully felt myself brushed; and the words seemed
+therefore to fall with a certain ironic weight. What I have retained of
+their effect, at any rate, is the vague fact of some objection raised by
+my cousin and some sharper point to his sentence supplied by her father;
+promptly merged in a visible commotion, a flutter of my young companion
+across the gallery as for refuge in the maternal arms, a protest and an
+appeal in short which drew from my aunt the simple phrase that was from
+that moment so preposterously to "count" for me. "Come now, my dear;
+don't make a scene--I _insist_ on your not making a scene!" That was all
+the witchcraft the occasion used, but the note was none the less
+epoch-making. The expression, so vivid, so portentous, was one I had
+never heard--it had never been addressed to us at home; and who should
+say now what a world one mightn't at once read into it? It seemed
+freighted to sail so far; it told me so much about life. Life at these
+intensities clearly became "scenes"; but the great thing, the immense
+illumination, was that we could make them or not as we chose. It was a
+long time of course before I began to distinguish between those within
+our compass more particularly as spoiled and those producible on a
+different basis and which should involve detachment, involve presence of
+mind; just the qualities in which Marie's possible output was apparently
+deficient. It didn't in the least matter accordingly whether or no a
+scene _was_ then proceeded to--and I have lost all count of what
+immediately happened. The mark had been made for me and the door flung
+open; the passage, gathering up _all_ the elements of the troubled time,
+had been itself a scene, quite enough of one, and I had become aware
+with it of a rich accession of possibilities.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+It must have been after the Sing-Sing episode that Gussy came to us, in
+New York, for Sundays and holidays, from scarce further off than round
+the corner--his foreign Institution flourishing, I seem to remember, in
+West Tenth Street or wherever--and yet as floated by exotic airs and
+with the scent of the spice-islands hanging about him. He was being
+educated largely with Cubans and Mexicans, in those New York days more
+than half the little flock of the foreign Institutions in general; over
+whom his easy triumphs, while he wagged his little red head for them,
+were abundantly credible; reinforced as my special sense of them was
+moreover by the similar situation of his sister, older than he but also
+steeped in the exotic medium and also sometimes bringing us queer echoes
+of the tongues. I remember being deputed by my mother to go and converse
+with her, on some question of her coming to us, at the establishment of
+Madame Reichhardt (pronounced, à la française, Réchard,) where I felt
+that I had crossed, for the hour, the very threshold of "Europe"; it
+being impressed on me by my cousin, who was tall and handsome and happy,
+with a laugh of more beautiful sound than any laugh we were to know
+again, that French only was speakable on the premises. I sniffed it up
+aromatically, the superior language, in passage and parlour--it took the
+form of some strong savoury soup, an educational _potage Réchard_ that
+must excellently have formed the taste: that was again, I felt as I came
+away, a part of the rich experience of being thrown in tender juvenile
+form upon the world. This genial girl, like her brother, was in the
+grand situation of having no home and of carrying on life, such a
+splendid kind of life, by successive visits to relations; though neither
+she nor Gussy quite achieved the range of their elder brother, "Bob" of
+that ilk, a handsome young man, a just blurred, attractive, illusive
+presence, who hovered a bit beyond our real reach and apparently
+displayed the undomesticated character at its highest. _He_ seemed
+exposed, for his pleasure--if pleasure it was!--and my wonder, to every
+assault of experience; his very name took on, from these imputations, a
+browner glow; and it was all in the right key that, a few years later,
+he should, after "showing some talent for sculpture," have gone the
+hapless way of most of the Albany youth, have become a theme for sad
+vague headshakes (kind and very pitying in his case) and died
+prematurely and pointlessly, or in other words, by my conception,
+picturesquely. The headshakes were heavier and the sighs sharper for
+another slim shade, one of the younger and I believe quite the most
+hapless of those I have called the outstanding ones; he too, several
+years older than we again, a tormenting hoverer and vanisher; he too
+charmingly sister'd, though sister'd only, and succumbing to monstrous
+early trouble after having "shown some talent" for music. The
+ghostliness of these æsthetic manifestations, as I allude to them, is
+the thinnest conceivable chip of stray marble, the faintest far-off
+twang of old chords; I ask myself, for the odd obscurity of it, under
+what inspiration music and sculpture may have tinkled and glimmered to
+the Albany ear and eye (as we at least knew those organs) and with what
+queer and weak delusions our unfortunates may have played. Quite
+ineffably quaint and _falot_ this proposition of _that_ sort of resource
+for the battle of life as it then and there opened; and above all
+beautifully suggestive of our sudden collective disconnectedness (ours
+as the whole kinship's) from _the_ American resource of those days,
+Albanian or other. That precious light was the light of "business" only;
+and we, by a common instinct, artlessly joining hands, went forth into
+the wilderness without so much as a twinkling taper.
+
+Our consensus, on all this ground, was amazing--it brooked no exception;
+the word had been passed, all round, that we didn't, that we couldn't
+and shouldn't, understand these things, questions of arithmetic and of
+fond calculation, questions of the counting-house and the market; and we
+appear to have held to our agreement as loyally and to have accepted our
+doom as serenely as if our faith had been mutually pledged. The rupture
+with my grandfather's tradition and attitude was complete; we were never
+in a single case, I think, for two generations, guilty of a stroke of
+business; the most that could be said of us was that, though about
+equally wanting, all round, in any faculty of acquisition, we happened
+to pay for the amiable weakness less in some connections than in others.
+The point was that we moved so oddly and consistently--as it was our
+only form of consistency--over our limited pasture, never straying to
+nibble in the strange or the steep places. What was the matter with us
+under this spell, and what the moral might have been for our case, are
+issues of small moment, after all, in face of the fact of our mainly so
+brief duration. It was given to but few of us to be taught by the event,
+to be made to wonder with the last intensity what _had_ been the matter.
+This it would be interesting to worry out, might I take the time; for
+the story wouldn't be told, I conceive, by any mere rueful glance at
+other avidities, the preference for ease, the play of the passions, the
+appetite for pleasure. These things have often accompanied the business
+imagination; just as the love of life and the love of other persons, and
+of many of the things of the world, just as quickness of soul and sense,
+have again and again not excluded it. However, it comes back, as I have
+already hinted, to the manner in which the "things of the world" could
+but present themselves; there were not enough of these, and they were
+not fine and fair enough, to engage happily so much unapplied, so much
+loose and crude attention. We hadn't doubtless at all a complete play of
+intelligence--if I may not so far discriminate as to say _they_ hadn't;
+or our lack of the instinct of the market needn't have been so much
+worth speaking of: other curiosities, other sympathies might have
+redressed the balance. I make out our young cousin J. J. as dimly aware
+of this while composing the light melodies that preluded to his
+extinction, and which that catastrophe so tried to admonish us to think
+of as promising; but his image is more present to me still as the great
+incitement, during the few previous years, to our constant dream of
+"educational" relief, of some finer kind of social issue, through
+Europe.
+
+It was to Europe J. J. had been committed; he was over there forging the
+small apologetic arms that were so little to avail him, but it was quite
+enough for us that he pointed the way to the Pension Sillig, at Vevey,
+which shone at us, from afar, as our own more particular solution. It
+was true that the Pension Sillig figured mainly as the solution in cases
+of recognised wildness; there long flourished among New York parents
+whose view of such resources had the proper range a faith in it for that
+complaint; and it was as an act of faith that, failing other remedies,
+our young wifeless uncle, conscious himself of no gift for control or
+for edification, had placed there his difficult son. He returned with
+delight from this judicious course and there was an hour when we
+invoked, to intensity, a similar one in our own interest and when the
+air of home did little but reflect from afar the glitter of blue Swiss
+lakes, the tinkle of cattle-bells in Alpine pastures, the rich
+_bonhomie_ that M. Sillig, dispensing an education all of milk and honey
+and edelweiss and ranz-des-vaches, combined with his celebrated firmness
+for tough subjects. Poor J. J. came back, I fear, much the same subject
+that he went; but he had verily performed his scant office on earth,
+that of having brought our then prospect, our apparent possibility, a
+trifle nearer. He seemed to have been wild even beyond M. Sillig's
+measure--which was highly disappointing; but if we might on the other
+hand be open to the reproach of falling too short of it there were
+establishments adapted to every phase of the American predicament; so
+that our general direction could but gain in vividness. I think with
+compassion, altogether, of the comparative obscurity to which our
+eventual success in gathering the fruits, few and scant though they
+might be, thus relegates those to whom it was given but to toy so
+briefly with the flowers. They make collectively their tragic trio: J.
+J. the elder, most loved, most beautiful, most sacrificed of the Albany
+uncles; J. J. the younger--they were young together, they were luckless
+together, and the combination was as strange as the disaster was
+sweeping; and the daughter and sister, amplest of the "natural," easiest
+of the idle, who lived on to dress their memory with every thread and
+patch of her own perfect temper and then confirm the tradition, after
+all, by too early and woeful an end.
+
+If it comes over me under the brush of multiplied memories that we might
+well have invoked the educational "relief" I just spoke of, I should
+doubtless as promptly add that my own case must have been intrinsically
+of the poorest, and indeed make the point once for all that I should be
+taken as having seen and felt much of the whole queerness through the
+medium of rare inaptitudes. I can only have been inapt, I make out, to
+have retained so positively joyless a sense of it all, to be aware of
+most of it now but as dim confusion, as bewildered anxiety. There was
+interest always, certainly--but it strikes me to-day as interest in
+everything that wasn't supposedly or prescriptively of the question at
+all, and in nothing that _was_ so respectably involved and accredited.
+Without some sharpness of interest I shouldn't now have the memories;
+but these stick to me somehow with none of the hard glue of recovered
+"spirits," recovered vivacities, assurances, successes. I can't have
+had, through it all, I think, a throb of assurance or success; without
+which, at the same time, absurdly and indescribably, I lived and
+wriggled, floundered and failed, lost the clue of everything but a
+general lucid consciousness (lucid, that is, for my tender years;) which
+I clutched with a sense of its value. What happened all the while, I
+conceive, was that I imagined things--and as if quite on system--wholly
+other than as they were, and so carried on in the midst of the actual
+ones an existence that somehow floated and saved me even while cutting
+me off from any degree of direct performance, in fact from any degree of
+direct participation, at all. _There_ presumably was the interest--in
+the intensity and plausibility and variety of the irrelevance: an
+irrelevance which, for instance, made all pastors and masters, and
+especially all fellow-occupants of benches and desks, all elbowing and
+kicking presences within touch or view, so many monsters and horrors, so
+many wonders and splendours and mysteries, but never, so far as I can
+recollect, realities of relation, dispensers either of knowledge or of
+fate, playmates, intimates, mere coævals and coequals. They were
+something better--better above all than the coequal or coæval; they were
+so thoroughly figures and characters, divinities or demons, and endowed
+in this light with a vividness that the mere reality of relation, a
+commoner directness of contact, would have made, I surmise,
+comparatively poor. This superior shade of interest was not, none the
+less, so beguiling that I recall without unmitigated horror, or
+something very like it, a winter passed with my brother at the
+Institution Vergnès; our sorry subjection to which argues to my present
+sense an unmitigated surrounding aridity. To a "French school" must have
+been earnestly imputed the virtue of keeping us in patience till easier
+days should come; infinitely touching our parents' view of that New York
+fetish of our young time, an "acquisition of the languages"--an
+acquisition reinforcing those opportunities which we enjoyed at home, so
+far as they mustered, and at which I have briefly glanced. Charming and
+amusing to me indeed certain faint echoes, wavering images, of this
+superstition as it played about our path: ladies and gentlemen, dimly
+foreign, mere broken syllables of whose names come back to me, attending
+there to converse in tongues and then giving way to others through
+failures of persistence--whether in pupils or preceptors I know not.
+There hovers even Count Adam Gurowski, Polish, patriotic, exiled,
+temporarily famous, with the vision of _his_ being invoked for facility
+and then relinquished for difficulty; though I scarce guess on which of
+his battle-grounds--he was so polyglot that he even had a rich command
+of New Yorkese.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+It is to the Institution Vergnès that my earliest recovery of the sense
+of being in any degree "educated with" W. J. attaches itself; an
+establishment which occupied during the early 'fifties a site in the
+very middle of Broadway, of the lower, the real Broadway, where it could
+throb with the very pulse of the traffic in which we all innocently
+rejoiced--believing it, I surmise, the liveliest conceivable: a fact
+that is by itself, in the light of the present, an odd rococo note. The
+lower Broadway--I allude to the whole Fourth Street and Bond Street
+(where now _is_ the Bond Street of that antiquity?)--was then a seat of
+education, since we had not done with it, as I shall presently show,
+even when we had done with the Institution, a prompt disillusionment;
+and I brood thus over a period which strikes me as long and during which
+my personal hours of diligence were somehow more than anything else
+hours of the pavement and the shopfront, or of such contemplative
+exercise as the very considerable distance, for small legs, between
+those regions and the westward Fourteenth Street might comprise.
+Pedestrian gaping having been in childhood, as I have noted,
+prevailingly my line, fate appeared to have kindly provided for it on no
+small scale; to the extent even that it must have been really my sole
+and single form of athletics. Vague heated competition and agitation in
+the then enclosed Union Square would seem to point a little, among us
+all, to nobler types of motion; but of any basis for recreation,
+anything in the nature of a playground or a breathing-space, the
+Institution itself was serenely innocent. This I take again for a note
+extraordinarily mediæval. It occupied the first and second floors, if I
+rightly remember, of a wide front that, overhanging the endless
+thoroughfare, looked out on bouncing, clattering "stages" and painfully
+dragged carts and the promiscuous human shuffle--the violence of
+repercussions from the New York pavement of those years to be further
+taken into account; and I win it back from every side as, in spite of
+these aspects of garish publicity, a dark and dreadful, and withal quite
+absurd, scene. I see places of that general time, even places of
+confinement, in a dusty golden light that special memories of small
+misery scarce in the least bedim, and this holds true of our next and
+quite neighbouring refuge; the establishment of M. Vergnès alone darkles
+and shrinks to me--a sordidly _black_ interior is my main image for it;
+attenuated only by its having very soon afterwards, as a suffered
+ordeal, altogether lapsed and intermitted. Faintly, in the gloom, I
+distinguish M. Vergnès himself--quite "old," very old indeed as I
+supposed him, and highly irritated and markedly bristling; though of
+nothing in particular that happened to me at his or at anyone's else
+hands have I the scantest remembrance. What really most happened no
+doubt, was that my brother and I should both come away with a mind
+prepared for a perfect assimilation of Alphonse Daudet's chronicle of
+"Jack," years and years later on; to make the acquaintance in that work
+of the "petits pays chauds" among whom Jack learnt the first lessons of
+life was to see the Institution Vergnès at once revive, swarming as it
+did with small homesick Cubans and Mexicans; the complete failure of
+blondness that marks the memory is doubtless the cumulative effect of so
+many of the New York "petits pays chauds," preponderantly brown and
+black and conducing to a greasy gloom. Into this gloom I fear I should
+see all things recede together but for a certain salient note, the fact
+that the whole "staff" appears to have been constantly in a rage; from
+which naturally resulted the accent of shrillness (the only accent we
+could pick up, though we were supposed to be learning, for the extreme
+importance of it, quantities of French) and the sound of high
+vociferation. I remember infuriated ushers, of foreign speech and
+flushed complexion--the tearing across of hapless "exercises" and
+_dictées_ and the hurtle through the air of dodged volumes; only never,
+despite this, the extremity of smiting. There can have been at the
+Institution no blows instructionally dealt--nor even from our hours of
+ease do any such echoes come back to me. Little Cubans and Mexicans, I
+make out, were not to be vulgarly whacked--in deference, presumably, to
+some latent relic or imputed survival of Castilian pride; which would
+impose withal considerations of quite practical prudence. Food for
+reflection and comparison might well have been so suggested; interesting
+at least the element of contrast between such opposed conceptions of
+tone, temper and manner as the passion without whacks, or with whacks
+only of inanimate objects, ruling the scene I have described, and the
+whacks without passion, the grim, impersonal, strictly penal
+applications of the rod, which then generally represented what was still
+involved in our English tradition. It was the two theories of
+sensibility, of personal dignity, that so diverged; but with such other
+divergences now on top of those that the old comparison falls away. We
+to-day go unwhacked altogether--though from a pride other than
+Castilian: it is difficult to say at least what ideal has thus
+triumphed. In the Vergnès air at any rate I seem myself to have sat
+unscathed and unterrified--not alarmed even by so much as a call to the
+blackboard; only protected by my insignificance, which yet covered such
+a sense of our dusky squalor. Queer for us the whole affair, assuredly;
+but how much queerer for the poor petits pays chauds who had come so far
+for their privilege. _We_ had come, comparatively, but from round the
+corner--and that left the "state of education" and the range of
+selection all about as quaint enough. What could these things then have
+been in the various native climes of the petits pays chauds?
+
+It was by some strong wave of reaction, clearly, that we were floated
+next into the quieter haven of Mr. Richard Pulling Jenks--where cleaner
+waters, as I feel their coolness still, must have filled a neater
+though, it was true, slightly more contracted trough. Yet the range of
+selection had been even on this higher plane none too strikingly
+exemplified; our jumping had scant compass--we still grubbed with a good
+conscience in Broadway and sidled about Fourth Street. But I think of
+the higher education as having there, from various causes, none the less
+begun to glimmer for us. A diffused brightness, a kind of high
+crosslight of conflicting windows, rests for me at all events on the
+little realm of Mr. Pulling Jenks and bathes it as with positively sweet
+limitations. Limited must it have been, I feel, with our couple of
+middling rooms, front and back, our close packing, our large
+unaccommodating stove, our grey and gritty oilcloth, and again our
+importunate Broadway; from the aggregation of which elements there
+distils itself, without my being able to account for it, a certain
+perversity of romance. I speak indeed here for myself in particular, and
+keen for romance must I have been in such conditions, I admit; since the
+sense of it had crept into a recreational desert even as utter as that
+of the Institution Vergnès. Up out of Broadway we still scrambled--I can
+smell the steep and cold and dusty wooden staircase; straight into
+Broadway we dropped--I feel again the generalised glare of liberation;
+and I scarce know what tenuity of spirit it argues that I should neither
+have enjoyed nor been aware of missing (speaking again for myself only)
+a space wider than the schoolroom floor to react and knock about in. I
+literally conclude that we must have knocked about in Broadway, and in
+Broadway alone, like perfect little men of the world; we must have been
+let loose there to stretch our legs and fill our lungs, without
+prejudice either to our earlier and later freedoms of going and coming.
+I as strictly infer, at the same time, that Broadway must have been then
+as one of the alleys of Eden, for any sinister contact or consequence
+involved for us; a circumstance that didn't in the least interfere, too,
+as I have noted, with its offer of an entrancing interest. The interest
+verily could have been a _calculated_ thing on the part of our dear
+parents as little as on that of Mr. Jenks himself. Therefore let it be
+recorded as still most odd that we should all have assented to such
+deficiency of landscape, such exiguity of sport. I take the true
+inwardness of the matter to have been in our having such short hours,
+long as they may have appeared at the time, that the day left margin at
+the worst for private inventions. I think we found landscape, for
+ourselves--and wherever I at least found vision I found such sport as I
+was capable of--even between the front and back rooms and the
+conflicting windows; even by the stove which somehow scorched without
+warming, and yet round which Mr. Coe and Mr. Dolmidge, the
+drawing-master and the writing-master, arriving of a winter's day, used
+notedly, and in the case of Mr. Coe lamentedly, to draw out their
+delays. Is the dusty golden light of retrospect in this connection an
+effluence from Mr. Dolmidge and Mr. Coe, whose ministrations come back
+to me as the sole directly desired or invoked ones I was to know in my
+years, such as they were, of pupilage?
+
+I see them in any case as old-world images, figures of an antique stamp;
+products, mustn't they have been, of an order in which some social
+relativity or matter-of-course adjustment, some transmitted form and
+pressure, were still at work? Mr. Dolmidge, inordinately lean,
+clean-shaved, as was comparatively uncommon then, and in a
+swallow-tailed coat and I think a black satin stock, was surely perfect
+in his absolutely functional way, a pure pen-holder of a man, melancholy
+and mild, who taught the most complicated flourishes--great scrolls of
+them met our view in the form of surging seas and beaked and beady-eyed
+eagles, the eagle being so calligraphic a bird--while he might just have
+taught resignation. He was not at all funny--no one out of our immediate
+family circle, in fact almost no one but W. J. himself, who flowered in
+every waste, seems to have struck me as funny in those years; but he was
+to remain with me a picture of somebody in Dickens, one of the Phiz if
+not the Cruikshank pictures. Mr. Coe was another affair, bristling with
+the question of the "hard," but somehow too with the revelation of the
+soft, the deeply attaching; a worthy of immense stature and presence,
+crowned as with the thick white hair of genius, wearing a great gathered
+or puckered cloak, with a vast velvet collar, and resembling, as he
+comes back to me, the General Winfield Scott who lived so much in our
+eyes then. The oddity may well even at that hour have been present to me
+of its taking so towering a person to produce such small
+"drawing-cards"; it was as if some mighty bird had laid diminutive eggs.
+Mr. Coe, of a truth, laid his all over the place, and though they were
+not of more than handy size--very small boys could set them up in state
+on very small desks--they had doubtless a great range of number and
+effect. They were scattered far abroad and I surmise celebrated; they
+represented crooked cottages, feathery trees, browsing and bristling
+beasts and other rural objects; all rendered, as I recall them, in
+little detached dashes that were like stories told in words of one
+syllable, or even more perhaps in short gasps of delight. It must have
+been a stammering art, but I admired its fluency, which swims for me
+moreover in richer though slightly vague associations. Mr. Coe practised
+on a larger scale, in colour, in oils, producing wondrous neat little
+boards that make me to this day think of them and more particularly
+smell them, when I hear of a "panel" picture: a glamour of greatness
+attends them as brought home by W. J. from the master's own place of
+instruction in that old University building which partly formed the east
+side of Washington Square and figures to memory, or to fond imagination,
+as throbbing with more offices and functions, a denser chiaroscuro, than
+any reared hugeness of to-day, where character is so lost in quantity.
+Is there any present structure that plays such a part in proportion to
+its size?--though even as I ask the question I feel how nothing on earth
+is proportioned to present sizes. These alone are proportioned--and to
+mere sky-space and mere amount, amount of steel and stone; which is
+comparatively uninteresting. Perhaps our needs and our elements were
+then absurdly, were then provincially few, and that the patches of
+character in that small grey granite compendium were all we had in
+general to exhibit. Let me add at any rate that some of them were
+exhibitional--even to my tender years, I mean; since I respond even yet
+to my privilege of presence at some Commencement or Commemoration, such
+as might be natural, doubtless, to any "university," where, as under a
+high rich roof, before a Chancellor in a gown and amid serried admirers
+and impressive applause, there was "speaking," of the finest sort, and
+where above all I gathered in as a dazzling example the rare assurance
+of young Winthrop Somebody or Somebody Winthrop, who, though still in
+jackets, held us spellbound by his rendering of Serjeant Buzfuz's
+exposure of Mr. Pickwick. Long was I to marvel at the high sufficiency
+of young Winthrop Somebody or Somebody Winthrop--in which romantic
+impression it is perhaps after all (though with the consecration of one
+or two of the novels of the once-admired Theodore of that name, which so
+remarkably insists, thrown in) the sense of the place is embalmed.
+
+I must not forget indeed that I throw in also Mr. Coe--even if with
+less assured a hand; by way of a note on those higher flights of power
+and promise that I at this time began to see definitely determined in my
+brother. As I catch W. J.'s image, from far back, at its most
+characteristic, he sits drawing and drawing, always drawing, especially
+under the lamplight of the Fourteenth Street back parlour; and not as
+with a plodding patience, which I think would less have affected me, but
+easily, freely and, as who should say, infallibly: always at the stage
+of finishing off, his head dropped from side to side and his tongue
+rubbing his lower lip. I recover a period during which to see him at all
+was so to see him--the other flights and faculties removed him from my
+view. These were a matter of course--he recurred, he passed nearer, but
+in his moments of ease, and I clearly quite accepted the ease of his
+disappearances. Didn't he always when within my view light them up and
+justify them by renewed and enlarged vividness? so that my whole sense
+of him as formed for assimilations scarce conceivable made our gaps of
+contact too natural for me even to be lessons in humility. Humility had
+nothing to do with it--as little even as envy would have had; I was
+below humility, just as we were together outside of competition,
+mutually "hors concours." _His_ competitions were with others--in which
+how wasn't he, how could he not be, successful? while mine were with
+nobody, or nobody's with me, which came to the same thing, as heaven
+knows I neither braved them nor missed them. That winter, as I recover
+it, represents him as sufficiently within view to make his position or
+whereabouts in the upper air definite--I must have taken it for granted
+before, but could now in a manner measure it; and the freshness of this
+sense, something serene in my complacency, had to do, I divine, with the
+effect of our moving, with the rest of our company, which was not
+numerous but practically, but appreciably "select," on a higher and
+fairer plane than ever yet. Predominantly of course we owed this benefit
+to Richard Pulling himself; of whom I recall my brother's saying to me,
+at a considerably later time, and with an authority that affected me as
+absolute, that he had been of all our masters the most truly genial, in
+fact the only one to whom the art of exciting an interest or inspiring a
+sympathy could be in any degree imputed. I take this to have meant that
+he would have adorned a higher sphere--and it may have been, to explain
+his so soon swimming out of our ken, that into a higher sphere he
+rapidly moved; I can account at least for our falling away from him the
+very next year and declining again upon baser things and a lower
+civilisation but by some probability of his flight, just thereafter
+effected, to a greater distance, to one of the far upper reaches of the
+town. Some years must have elapsed and some distinction have crowned
+him when, being briefly in New York together, W. J. and I called on him
+of a Sunday afternoon, to find--what I hadn't been at all sure of--that
+he still quite knew who we were, or handsomely pretended to; handsomely
+in spite of his markedly confirmed identity of appearance with the
+Punch, husband to Judy, of the funny papers and the street show. Bald,
+rotund, of ruddy complexion, with the nose, the chin, the arched eye,
+the paunch and the _barbiche_, to say nothing of the ferule nursed in
+his arms and with which, in the show, such free play is made, Mr. Jenks
+yet seems to me to have preserved a dignity as well as projected an
+image, and in fact have done other things besides. He whacked
+occasionally--he must have been one of the last of the whackers; but I
+don't remember it as ugly or dreadful or droll--don't remember, that is,
+either directly feeling or reflectively enjoying it: it fails somehow to
+break the spell of our civilisation; my share in which, however, comes
+back to me as merely contemplative. It is beyond measure odd, doubtless,
+that my main association with my "studies," whether of the infant or the
+adolescent order, should be with almost anything but the fact of
+learning--of learning, I mean, what I was supposed to learn. I could
+only have been busy, at the same time, with other pursuits--which must
+have borne some superficial likeness at least to the acquisition of
+knowledge of a free irresponsible sort; since I remember few either of
+the inward pangs or the outward pains of a merely graceless state. I
+recognise at the same time that it was perhaps a sorry business to be so
+interested in one didn't know what. Such are, whether at the worst or at
+the best, some of the aspects of that season as Mr. Jenks's image
+presides; in the light of which I _may_ perhaps again rather wonder at
+my imputation to the general picture of so much amenity. Clearly the
+good man was a civiliser--whacks and all; and by some art not now to be
+detected. He was a complacent classic--which was what my brother's claim
+for him, I dare say, mostly represented; though that passed over the
+head of my tenth year. It was a good note for him in this particular
+that, deploring the facile text-books of Doctor Anthon of Columbia
+College, in which there was even more crib than text, and holding fast
+to the sterner discipline of Andrews and Stoddard and of that other more
+conservative commentator (he too doubtless long since superseded) whose
+name I blush to forget. I think in fine of Richard Pulling's small but
+sincere academy as a consistent little protest against its big and easy
+and quite out-distancing rival, the Columbia College school, apparently
+in those days quite the favourite of fortune.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+I must in some degree have felt it a charm there that we were not, under
+his rule, inordinately prepared for "business," but were on the contrary
+to remember that the taste of Cornelius Nepos in the air, even rather
+stale though it may have been, had lacked the black bitterness marking
+our next ordeal and that I conceive to have proceeded from some rank
+predominance of the theory and practice of book-keeping. It had
+consorted with this that we found ourselves, by I know not what
+inconsequence, a pair of the "assets" of a firm; Messrs. Forest and
+Quackenboss, who carried on business at the northwest corner of
+Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue, having for the winter of 1854-5
+taken our education in hand. As their establishment had the style, so I
+was conscious at the time of its having the general stamp and sense, of
+a shop--a shop of long standing, of numerous clients, of lively bustle
+and traffic. The structure itself was to my recent recognition still
+there and more than ever a shop, with improvements and extensions, but
+dealing in other wares than those anciently and as I suppose then quite
+freshly purveyed; so far at least as freshness was imputable to the
+senior member of the firm, who had come down to our generation from a
+legendary past and with a striking resemblance of head and general air
+to Benjamin Franklin. Mr. Forest, under whose more particular attention
+I languished, had lasted on from a plainer age and, having formed, by
+the legend, in their youth, the taste of two or three of our New York
+uncles--though for what it could have been goodness only knew--was still
+of a _trempe_ to whack in the fine old way at their nephews and sons. I
+see him aloft, benevolent and hard, mildly massive, in a black dress
+coat and trousers and a white neckcloth that should have figured, if it
+didn't, a frill, and on the highest rostrum of our experience, whence he
+comes back to me as the dryest of all our founts of knowledge, though
+quite again as a link with far-off manners and forms and as the most
+"historic" figure we had ever had to do with. W. J., as I distinguish,
+had in truth scarcely to do with him--W. J. lost again on upper floors,
+in higher classes, in real pursuits, and connecting me, in an indirect
+and almost deprecated manner, with a strange, curly, glossy, an anointed
+and bearded, Mr. Quackenboss, the junior partner, who conducted the
+classical department and never whacked--only sent down his subjects,
+with every confidence, to his friend. I make out with clearness that Mr.
+Forest was awful and arid, and yet that somehow, by the same stroke, we
+didn't, under his sway, go in terror, only went exceedingly in want;
+even if in want indeed of I scarce (for myself) know what, since it
+might well have been enough for me, in so resounding an air, to escape
+with nothing worse than a failure of thrill. If I didn't feel that
+interest I must clearly not have inspired it, and I marvel afresh, under
+these memories, at the few points at which I appear to have touched
+constituted reality. That, however, is a different connection
+altogether, and I read back into the one I have been noting much of the
+chill, or at least the indifference, of a foreseen and foredoomed
+detachment: it was during that winter that I began to live by
+anticipation in another world and to feel our uneasy connection with New
+York loosen beyond recovery. I remember for how many months, when the
+rupture took place, we had been to my particular consciousness virtually
+in motion; though I regain at the same time the impression of more
+experience on the spot than had marked our small previous history: this,
+however, a branch of the matter that I must for the moment brush aside.
+For it would have been meanwhile odd enough to hold us in arrest a
+moment--that quality of our situation that could suffer such elements as
+those I have glanced at to take so considerably the place of education
+as more usually and conventionally understood, and by that
+understanding more earnestly mapped out; a deficiency, in the whole
+thing, that I fail at all consistently to deplore, however--struck as I
+am with the rare fashion after which, in any small victim of life, the
+inward perversity may work.
+
+It works by converting to its uses things vain and unintended, to the
+great discomposure of their prepared opposites, which it by the same
+stroke so often reduces to naught; with the result indeed that one may
+most of all see it--so at least have I quite exclusively seen it, the
+little life out for its chance--as proceeding by the inveterate process
+of conversion. As I reconsider both my own and my brother's early
+start--even his too, made under stronger propulsions--it is quite for me
+as if the authors of our being and guardians of our youth had virtually
+said to us but one thing, directed our course but by one word, though
+constantly repeated: Convert, convert, convert! With which I have not
+even the sense of any needed appeal in us for further apprehension of
+the particular precious metal our chemistry was to have in view. I taste
+again in that pure air no ghost of a hint, for instance, that the
+precious metal was the refined gold of "success"--a reward of effort for
+which I remember to have heard at home no good word, nor any sort of
+word, ever faintly breathed. It was a case of the presumption that we
+should hear words enough abundantly elsewhere; so that any dignity the
+idea might claim was in the first place not worth insisting on, and in
+the second might well be overstated. We were to convert and convert,
+success--in the sense that was in the general air--or no success; and
+simply everything that should happen to us, every contact, every
+impression and every experience we should know, were to form our soluble
+stuff; with only ourselves to thank should we remain unaware, by the
+time our perceptions were decently developed, of the substance finally
+projected and most desirable. That substance might be just consummately
+Virtue, as a social grace and value--and as a matter furthermore on
+which pretexts for ambiguity of view and of measure were as little as
+possible called upon to flourish. This last luxury therefore quite
+failed us, and we understood no whit the less what was suggested and
+expected because of the highly liberal way in which the pill, if I may
+call it so, was gilded: it had been made up--to emphasise my image--in
+so bright an air of humanity and gaiety, of charity and humour. What I
+speak of is the medium itself, of course, that we were most immediately
+steeped in--I am glancing now at no particular turn of our young
+attitude in it, and I can scarce sufficiently express how little it
+could have conduced to the formation of prigs. Our father's prime
+horror was of _them_--he only cared for virtue that was more or less
+ashamed of itself; and nothing could have been of a happier whimsicality
+than the mixture in him, and in all his walk and conversation, of the
+strongest instinct for the human and the liveliest reaction from the
+literal. The literal played in our education as small a part as it
+perhaps ever played in any, and we wholesomely breathed inconsistency
+and ate and drank contradictions. The presence of paradox was so bright
+among us--though fluttering ever with as light a wing and as short a
+flight as need have been--that we fairly grew used to allow, from an
+early time, for the so many and odd declarations we heard launched, to
+the extent of happily "discounting" them; the moral of all of which was
+that we need never fear not to be good enough if we were only social
+enough: a splendid meaning indeed being attached to the latter term.
+
+Thus we had ever the amusement, since I can really call it nothing less,
+of hearing morality, or moralism, as it was more invidiously worded,
+made hay of in the very interest of character and conduct; these things
+suffering much, it seemed, by their association with the
+conscience--that is the _conscious_ conscience--the very home of the
+literal, the haunt of so many pedantries. Pedantries, on all this
+ground, were anathema; and if our dear parent had at all minded his not
+being consistent, and had entertained about us generally less
+passionate an optimism (not an easy but an arduous state in him
+moreover,) he might have found it difficult to apply to the promotion of
+our studies so free a suspicion of the inhumanity of Method. Method
+certainly never quite raged among us; but it was our fortune
+nevertheless that everything had its turn, and that such indifferences
+were no more pedantic than certain rigours might perhaps have been; of
+all of which odd notes of our situation there would, and possibly will,
+be more to say--my present aim is really but to testify to what most
+comes up for me to-day in the queer educative air I have been trying to
+breathe again. That definite reflection is that if we had not had in us
+to some degree the root of the matter no method, however confessedly or
+aggressively "pedantic," would much have availed for us; and that since
+we apparently did have it, deep down and inert in our small patches of
+virgin soil, the fashion after which it struggled forth was an
+experience as intense as any other and a record of as great a dignity.
+It may be asked me, I recognise, of the root of "what" matter I so
+complacently speak, and if I say "Why, of the matter of our having with
+considerable intensity _proved_ educable, or, if you like better,
+teachable, that is accessible to experience," it may again be retorted:
+"That won't do for a decent account of a young consciousness; for think
+of all the things that the failure of method, of which you make so
+light, didn't put into yours; think of the splendid economy of a
+real--or at least of a planned and attempted education, a 'regular
+course of instruction'--and then think of the waste involved in the so
+inferior substitute of which the pair of you were evidently victims." An
+admonition this on which I brood, less, however, than on the still other
+sense, rising from the whole retrospect, of my now feeling sure, of my
+having mastered the particular history of just that waste--to the point
+of its actually affecting me as blooming with interest, to the point
+even of its making me ask myself how in the world, if the question is of
+the injection of more things into the consciousness (as would seem the
+case,) mine could have "done" with more: thanks to its small trick,
+perhaps vicious I admit, of having felt itself from an early time almost
+uncomfortably stuffed. I see my critic, by whom I mean my representative
+of method at any price, take in this plea only to crush it with his
+confidence--that without the signal effects of method one must have had
+by an inexorable law to resort to shifts and ingenuities, and can
+therefore only have been an artful dodger more or less successfully
+dodging. I take full account of the respectability of the prejudice
+against one or two of the uses to which the intelligence may at a pinch
+be put--the criminal use in particular of falsifying its history, of
+forging its records even, and of appearing greater than the traceable
+grounds warrant. One can but fall back, none the less, on the particular
+_un_traceability of grounds--when it comes to that: cases abound so in
+which, with the grounds all there, the intelligence itself is not to be
+identified. I contend for nothing moreover but the lively interest of
+the view, and above all of the measure, of almost any mental history
+after the fact. Of less interest, comparatively, is that sight of the
+mind _before_--before the demonstration of the fact, that is, and while
+still muffled in theories and presumptions (purple and fine linen, and
+as such highly becoming though these be) of what shall prove best for
+it.
+
+Which doubtless too numerous remarks have been determined by my sense of
+the tenuity of some of my clues: I had begun to count our wavering steps
+from so very far back, and with a lively disposition, I confess, not to
+miss even the vaguest of them. I can scarce indeed overstate the
+vagueness that quite _had_ to attend a great number in presence of the
+fact that our father, caring for our spiritual decency unspeakably more
+than for anything else, anything at all that might be or might become
+ours, would have seemed to regard this cultivation of it as profession
+and career enough for us, had he but betrayed more interest in our
+mastery of _any_ art or craft. It was not certainly that the profession
+of virtue would have been anything less than abhorrent to him, but that,
+singular though the circumstance, there were times when he might have
+struck us as having after all more patience with it than with this, that
+or the other more technical thrifty scheme. Of the beauty of his
+dissimulated anxiety and tenderness on these and various other suchlike
+heads, however, other examples will arise; for I see him now as fairly
+afraid to recognise certain anxieties, fairly declining to dabble in the
+harshness of practical precautions or impositions. The effect of his
+attitude, so little thought out as shrewd or as vulgarly providential,
+but in spite of this so socially and affectionally founded, could only
+be to make life interesting to us at the worst, in default of making it
+extraordinarily "paying." He had a theory that it would somehow or other
+always be paying enough--and this much less by any poor conception of
+our wants (for he delighted in our wants and so sympathetically and
+sketchily and summarily wanted _for_ us) than by a happy and friendly,
+though slightly nebulous, conception of our resources. Delighting ever
+in the truth while generously contemptuous of the facts, so far as we
+might make the difference--the facts having a way of being many and the
+truth remaining but one--he held that there would always be enough;
+since the truth, the true truth, was never ugly and dreadful, and we
+didn't and wouldn't depart from it by any cruelty or stupidity (for he
+wouldn't have had us stupid,) and might therefore depend on it for due
+abundance even of meat and drink and raiment, even of wisdom and wit and
+honour. It is too much to say that our so preponderantly humanised and
+socialised adolescence was to make us look out for these things with a
+subtle indirectness; but I return to my proposition that there may still
+be a charm in seeing such hazards at work through a given, even if not
+in a systematised, case. My cases are of course given, so that economy
+of observation after the fact, as I have called it, becomes inspiring,
+not less than the amusement, or whatever it may be, of the question of
+what might happen, of what in point of fact did happen, to several very
+towny and domesticated little persons, who were confirmed in their
+towniness and fairly enriched in their sensibility, instead of being
+chucked into a scramble or exposed on breezy uplands under the she-wolf
+of competition and discipline. Perhaps any success that attended the
+experiment--which was really, as I have hinted, no plotted thing at all,
+but only an accident of accidents--proceeded just from the fact that the
+small subjects, a defeated Romulus, a prematurely sacrificed Remus, had
+in their very sensibility an asset, as we have come to say, a principle
+of life and even of "fun." Perhaps on the other hand the success would
+have been greater with less of that particular complication or
+facilitation and more of some other which I shall be at a loss to
+identify. What I find in my path happens to be the fact of the
+sensibility, and from the light it sheds the curious, as also the
+common, things that did from occasion to occasion play into it seem each
+to borrow a separate and vivifying glow.
+
+As at the Institution Vergnès and at Mr. Pulling Jenks's, however this
+might be, so at "Forest's," or in other words at the more numerous
+establishment of Messrs. Forest and Quackenboss, where we spent the
+winter of 1854, reality, in the form of multitudinous mates, was to have
+swarmed about me increasingly: at Forest's the prolonged roll-call in
+the morning, as I sit in the vast bright crowded smelly smoky room, in
+which rusty black stove-shafts were the nearest hint of architecture,
+bristles with names, Hoes and Havemeyers, Stokeses, Phelpses, Colgates
+and others, of a subsequently great New York salience. It was sociable
+and gay, it was sordidly spectacular, one was then, by an inch or two, a
+bigger boy--though with crushing superiorities in that line all round;
+and when I wonder why the scene was sterile (which was what I took it
+for at the worst) the reason glooms out again in the dreadful blight of
+arithmetic, which affected me at the time as filling all the air. The
+quantity imposed may not in fact have been positively gross, yet it is
+what I most definitely remember--not, I mean, that I have retained the
+dimmest notion of the science, but only of the dire image of our being
+in one way or another always supposedly addressed to it. I recall
+strange neighbours and deskfellows who, not otherwise too objectionable,
+were uncanny and monstrous through their possession, cultivation,
+imitation of ledgers, daybooks, double-entry, tall pages of figures,
+interspaces streaked with oblique ruled lines that weirdly "balanced,"
+whatever that might mean, and other like horrors. Nothing in truth is
+more distinct to me than the tune to which they were, without exception,
+at their ease on such ground--unless it be my general dazzled,
+humiliated sense, through those years, of the common, the baffling,
+mastery, all round me, of a hundred handy arts and devices. Everyone did
+things and had things--everyone knew how, even when it was a question of
+the small animals, the dormice and grasshoppers, or the hoards of food
+and stationery, that they kept in their desks, just as they kept in
+their heads such secrets for how to do sums--those secrets that I must
+even then have foreseen I should even so late in life as this have
+failed to discover. I may have known things, have by that time learnt a
+few, myself, but I didn't know _that_--what I did know; whereas those
+who surrounded me were all agog, to my vision, with the benefit of their
+knowledge. I see them, in this light, across the years, fairly grin and
+grimace with it; and the presumable vulgarity of some of them, certain
+scattered shades of baseness still discernible, comes to me as but one
+of the appearances of an abounding play of genius. Who was it I ever
+thought stupid?--even when knowing, or at least feeling, that sundry
+expressions of life or force, which I yet had no name for, represented
+somehow art without grace, or (what after a fashion came to the same
+thing) presence without type. All of which, I should add, didn't in the
+least prevent my moving on the plane of the remarkable; so that if, as I
+have noted, the general blank of consciousness, in the conditions of
+that winter, rather tended to spread, this could perhaps have but had
+for its best reason that I was fairly gorged with wonders. They were too
+much of the same kind; the result, that is, of everyone's seeming to
+know everything--to the effect, a little, that everything suffered by
+it. There was a boy called Simpson my juxtaposition to whom I recall as
+uninterruptedly close, and whose origin can only have been, I think,
+quite immediately Irish--and Simpson, I feel sure, was a friendly and
+helpful character. Yet even he reeked, to my sense, with strange
+accomplishment--no single show of which but was accompanied in him by a
+smart protrusion of the lower lip, a crude complacency of power, that
+almost crushed me to sadness. It is as if I had passed in that sadness
+most of those ostensibly animated months; an effect however doubtless in
+some degree proceeding, for later appreciation, from the more
+intelligible nearness of the time--it had brought me to the end of my
+twelfth year; which helps not a little to turn it to prose. How I gave
+to that state, in any case, such an air of occupation as to beguile not
+only myself but my instructors--which I infer I did from their so
+intensely letting me alone--I am quite at a loss to say; I have in truth
+mainly the remembrance of _being_ consistently either ignored or
+exquisitely considered (I know not which to call it;) even if without
+the belief, which would explain it, that I passed for generally
+"wanting" any more than for naturally odious. It was strange, at all
+events--it could only have been--to be so stupid without being more
+brutish and so perceptive without being more keen. Here were a case and
+a problem to which no honest master with other and better cases could
+have felt justified in giving time; he would have had at least to be
+morbidly curious, and I recall from that sphere of rule no instance
+whatever of the least refinement of inquiry. I should even probably have
+missed one of these more flattering shades of attention had I missed
+attention at all; but I think I was never really aware of how little I
+got or how much I did without. I read back into the whole connection
+indeed the chill, or at least the indifference, of a foreseen and
+foredoomed detachment: I have noted how at this desperate juncture the
+mild forces making for our conscious relief, pushing the door to Europe
+definitely open, began at last to be effective. Nothing seemed to matter
+at all but that I should become personally and incredibly acquainted
+with Piccadilly and Richmond Park and Ham Common. I regain at the same
+time the impression of more experience on the spot than had marked our
+small previous history.
+
+Pitiful as it looks to these ampler days the mere little fact that a
+small court for recreation was attached to our academy added something
+of a grace to life. We descended in relays, for "intermission," into a
+paved and walled yard of the scantest size; the only provision for any
+such privilege--not counting the street itself, of which, at the worst
+of other conditions, we must have had free range--that I recover from
+those years. The ground is built over now, but I could still figure, on
+a recent occasion, our small breathing-space; together with my then
+abject little sense that it richly sufficed--or rather, positively, that
+nothing could have been more romantic. For within our limit we freely
+conversed, and at nothing did I assist with more interest than at free
+conversation. Certain boys hover before me, the biggest, the fairest,
+the most worthy of freedom, dominating the scene and scattering upon
+fifty subjects the most surprising lights. One of these heroes, whose
+stature and complexion are still there for me to admire, did tricks of
+legerdemain, with the scant apparatus of a handkerchief, a key, a
+pocket-knife--as to some one of which it is as fresh as yesterday that I
+ingenuously invited him to show me how to do it, and then, on his
+treating me with scorn, renewed without dignity my fond solicitation.
+Fresher even than yesterday, fadelessly fresh for me at this hour, is
+the cutting remark thereupon of another boy, who certainly wasn't
+Simpson and whose identity is lost for me in his mere inspired
+authority: "Oh, oh, oh, I should think you'd be too proud--!" I had
+neither been too proud nor so much as conceived that one might be, but I
+remember well how it flashed on me with this that I had failed thereby
+of a high luxury or privilege--which the whole future, however, might
+help me to make up for. To what extent it _has_ helped is another
+matter, but so fine was the force of the suggestion that I think I have
+never in all the years made certain returns upon my spirit without again
+feeling the pang from the cool little voice of the Fourteenth Street
+yard. Such was the moral exercise it at least allowed us room for. It
+also allowed us room, to be just, for an inordinate consumption of hot
+waffles retailed by a benevolent black "auntie" who presided, with her
+husband's aid as I remember, at a portable stove set up in a passage or
+recess opening from the court; to which we flocked and pushed, in a
+merciless squeeze, with all our coppers, and the products of which, the
+oblong farinaceous compound, faintly yet richly brown, stamped and
+smoking, not crisp nor brittle, but softly absorbent of the syrup dabbed
+upon it for a finish, revealed to me I for a long time, even for a very
+long time supposed, the highest pleasure of sense. We stamped about, we
+freely conversed, we ate sticky waffles by the hundred--I recall no
+worse acts of violence unless I count as such our intermissional rushes
+to Pynsent's of the Avenue, a few doors off, in the particular interest
+of a confection that ran the waffle close, as the phrase is, for
+popularity, while even surpassing it for stickiness. Pynsent's was
+higher up in the row in which Forest's had its front--other and dearer
+names have dropped from me, but Pynsent's adheres with all the force of
+the strong saccharine principle. This principle, at its highest, we
+conceived, was embodied in small amber-coloured mounds of chopped
+cocoanut or whatever other substance, if a finer there be; profusely,
+lusciously endued and distributed on small tin trays in the manner of
+haycocks in a field. We acquired, we appropriated, we transported, we
+enjoyed them, they fairly formed perhaps, after all, our highest
+enjoyment; but with consequences to our pockets--and I speak of those
+other than financial, with an intimacy, a reciprocity of contact at any,
+or at every, personal point, that I lose myself in the thought of.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+I lose myself, of a truth, under the whole pressure of the spring of
+memory proceeding from recent revisitings and recognitions--the action
+of the fact that time until lately had spared hereabouts, and may still
+be sparing, in the most exceptional way, by an anomaly or a mercy of the
+rarest in New York, a whole cluster of landmarks, leaving me to "spot"
+and verify, right and left, the smallest preserved particulars. These
+things, at the pressure, flush together again, interweave their pattern
+and quite thrust it at me, the absurd little fusion of images, for a
+history or a picture of the time--the background of which I see after
+all so much less as the harsh Sixth Avenue corner than as many other
+matters. Those scant shades claimed us but briefly and superficially,
+and it comes back to me that oddly enough, in the light of autumn
+afternoons, our associates, the most animated or at any rate the best
+"put in" little figures of our landscape, were not our comparatively
+obscure schoolmates, who seem mostly to have swum out of our ken between
+any day and its morrow. Our other companions, those we practically knew
+"at home," ignored our school, having better or worse of their own, but
+peopled somehow for us the social scene, which, figuring there for me in
+documentary vividness, bristles with Van Burens, Van Winkles, De
+Peysters, Costers, Senters, Norcoms, Robinsons (these last composing
+round a stone-throwing "Eugene,") Wards, Hunts and _tutti quanti_--to
+whose ranks I must add our invariable Albert, before-mentioned, and who
+swarm from up and down and east and west, appearing to me surely to have
+formed a rich and various society. Our salon, it is true, was mainly the
+street, loose and rude and crude in those days at best--though with a
+rapid increase of redeeming features, to the extent to which the spread
+of micaceous brown stone could redeem: as exhibited especially in the
+ample face of the Scotch Presbyterian church promptly rising just
+opposite our own peculiar row and which it now marks for me somewhat
+grimly a span of life to have seen laboriously rear itself, continuously
+flourish and utterly disappear. While in construction it was only less
+interesting than the dancing-academy of Mr. Edward Ferrero, slightly
+west of it and forming with it, in their embryonic stage, a large and
+delightfully dangerous adjunct to our playground, though with the
+distinction of coming much to surpass it for interest in the final
+phase. While we clambered about on ladders and toyed with the peril of
+unfloored abysses, while we trespassed and pried and pervaded,
+snatching a scant impression from sorry material enough, clearly, the
+sacred edifice enjoyed a credit beyond that of the profane; but when
+both were finished and opened we flocked to the sound of the fiddle more
+freely, it need scarce be said, than to that of the psalm. "Freely"
+indeed, in our particular case, scarce expresses the latter relation;
+since our young liberty in respect to church-going was absolute and we
+might range at will, through the great city, from one place of worship
+and one form of faith to another, or might on occasion ignore them all
+equally, which was what we mainly did; whereas we rallied without a
+break to the halls of Ferrero, a view of the staringly and, as I
+supposed dazzlingly, frescoed walls, the internal economy, the high
+amenity, the general æsthetic and social appeal, of which still hangs in
+its wealth before me. Dr. McElroy, uplifting tight-closed eyes, strange
+long-drawn accents and gaunt scraggy chin, squirming and swaying and
+cushion-thumping in _his_ only a shade more chastely adorned temple, is
+distinct enough too--just as we enjoyed this bleak intensity the more,
+to my personal vision, through the vague legend (and no legend was too
+vague for me to cherish) of his being the next pastor in succession to
+the one under whom our mother, thereto predirected by our good
+greatgrandfather, Alexander Robertson already named, who was nothing if
+not Scotch and Presbyterian and authoritative, as his brave old portrait
+by the elder Jarves attests, had "sat" before her marriage; the marriage
+so lamentedly diverting her indeed from this tradition that, to mark the
+rueful rupture, it had invoked, one evening, with the aid of India
+muslin and a wondrous gold headband, in the maternal, the Washington
+Square "parlours," but the secular nuptial consecration of the then
+Mayor of the city--I think Mr. Varick.
+
+We progeny were of course after this mild convulsion not at all in the
+fold; yet it strikes me as the happy note of a simple age that we were
+practically, of a Sunday at least, wherever we might have chosen to
+enter: since, going forth hand in hand into the sunshine (and I connect
+myself here with my next younger, not with my elder, brother, whose
+orbit was other and larger) we sampled, in modern phrase, as small
+unprejudiced inquirers obeying their inspiration, any resort of any
+congregation detected by us; doing so, I make out moreover, with a sense
+of earnest provision for any contemporary challenge. "What church do you
+go to?"--the challenge took in childish circles that searching form; of
+the form it took among our elders my impression is more vague. To which
+I must add as well that our "fending" in this fashion for ourselves
+didn't so prepare us for invidious remark--remark I mean upon our
+pewless state, which involved, to my imagination, much the same
+discredit that a houseless or a cookless would have done--as to hush in
+my breast the appeal to our parents, not for religious instruction (of
+which we had plenty, and of the most charming and familiar) but simply
+for instruction (a very different thing) as to where we should say we
+"went," in our world, under cold scrutiny or derisive comment. It was
+colder than any criticism, I recall, to hear our father reply that we
+could plead nothing less than the whole privilege of Christendom and
+that there was no communion, even that of the Catholics, even that of
+the Jews, even that of the Swedenborgians, from which we need find
+ourselves excluded. With the freedom we enjoyed our dilemma clearly
+amused him: it would have been impossible, he affirmed, to be
+theologically more _en règle_. How as mere detached unaccompanied
+infants we enjoyed such impunity of range and confidence of welcome is
+beyond comprehension save by the light of the old manners and
+conditions, the old local bonhomie, the comparatively primal innocence,
+the absence of complications; with the several notes of which last
+beatitude my reminiscence surely shines. It was the theory of the time
+and place that the young, were they but young enough, could take
+publicly no harm; to which adds itself moreover, and touchingly enough,
+all the difference of the old importances. It wasn't doubtless that the
+social, or call it simply the human, position of the child was higher
+than to-day--a circumstance not conceivable; it was simply that other
+dignities and values and claims, other social and human positions, were
+less definite and settled, less prescriptive and absolute. A rich
+sophistication is after all a gradual growth, and it would have been
+sophisticated to fear for us, before such bright and vacant vistas, the
+perils of the way or to see us received anywhere even with the irony of
+patronage. We hadn't in fact seats of honour, but that justice was done
+us--that is that we were placed to our advantage--I infer from my having
+liked so to "go," even though my grounds may have been but the love of
+the _exhibition_ in general, thanks to which figures, faces, furniture,
+sounds, smells and colours became for me, wherever enjoyed, and enjoyed
+most where most collected, a positive little orgy of the senses and riot
+of the mind. Let me at the same time make the point that--such may be
+the snobbery of extreme youth--I not only failed quite to rise to the
+parental reasoning, but made out in it rather a certain sophistry; such
+a prevarication for instance as if we had habitually said we kept the
+carriage we observably didn't keep, kept it because we sent when we
+wanted one to University Place, where Mr. Hathorn had his
+livery-stable: a connection, this last, promoted by my father's
+frequent need of the aid to circulate (his walks were limited through an
+injury received in youth) and promoting in turn and at a touch, to my
+consciousness, the stir of small, the smallest remembered things. I
+recall the adventure, no infrequent one, of being despatched to Mr.
+Hathorn to bespeak a conveyance, and the very air and odour, the genial
+warmth, at a fine steaming Irish pitch, of the stables and their
+stamping and backing beasts, their resounding boardedness, their chairs
+tipped up at such an angle for lifted heels, a pair of which latter seek
+the floor again, at my appeal, as those of big bearded Mr. Hathorn
+himself: an impression enriched by the drive home in lolling and bumping
+possession of the great vehicle and associated further with Sunday
+afternoons in spring, with the question of distant Harlem and remoter
+Bloomingdale, with the experience at one of these junctures of far-away
+Hoboken, if it wasn't Williamsburg, which fits in fancifully somewhere;
+when the carriage was reinforced by a ferry and the ferry by something,
+something to my present vision very dim and dusty and archaic, something
+quite ragged and graceless, in the nature of a public tea-garden and
+ices. The finest link here, however, is, for some reason, with the New
+York Hotel, and thereby with Albany uncles; thereby also with Mr.
+Hathorn in person waiting and waiting expensively on his box before the
+house and somehow felt as attuned to Albany uncles even as Mrs. Cannon
+had subtly struck me as being.
+
+Intenser than these vague shades meanwhile is my vision of the halls of
+Ferrero--where the orgy of the senses and even the riot of the mind, of
+which I have just spoken, must quite literally have led me more of a
+dance than anywhere. Let this sketch of a lost order note withal that
+under so scant a general provision for infant exercise, as distinguished
+from infant ease, our hopping and sliding in tune had to be deemed
+urgent. It was the sense for this form of relief that clearly was
+general, superseding as the ampler Ferrero scene did previous limited
+exhibitions; even those, for that matter, coming back to me in the
+ancient person of M. Charriau--I guess at the writing of his name--whom
+I work in but confusedly as a professional visitor, a subject gaped at
+across a gulf of fear, in one of our huddled schools; all the more that
+I perfectly evoke him as resembling, with a difference or two, the
+portraits of the aged Voltaire, and that he had, fiddle in hand and
+_jarret tendu_, incited the young agility of our mother and aunt. Edward
+Ferrero was another matter; in the prime of life, good-looking, romantic
+and moustachio'd, he was suddenly to figure, on the outbreak of the
+Civil War, as a General of volunteers--very much as if he had been one
+of Bonaparte's improvised young marshals; in anticipation of which,
+however, he wasn't at all fierce or superior, to my remembrance, but
+most kind to sprawling youth, in a charming man of the world fashion and
+as if _we_ wanted but a touch to become also men of the world.
+Remarkably good-looking, as I say, by the measure of that period, and
+extraordinarily agile--he could so gracefully leap and bound that his
+bounding into the military saddle, such occasion offering, had all the
+felicity, and only wanted the pink fleshings, of the circus--he was
+still more admired by the mothers, with whom he had to my eyes a most
+elegant relation, than by the pupils; among all of whom, at the frequent
+and delightful soirées, he caused trays laden with lucent syrups
+repeatedly to circulate. The scale of these entertainments, as I figured
+it, and the florid frescoes, just damp though they were with newness,
+and the free lemonade, and the freedom of remark, equally great, with
+the mothers, were the lavish note in him--just as the fact that he never
+himself fiddled, but was followed, over the shining parquet, by
+attendant fiddlers, represented doubtless a shadow the less on his later
+dignity, so far as that dignity was compassed. Dignity marked in full
+measure even at the time the presence of his sister Madame Dubreuil, a
+handsome authoritative person who instructed us equally, in fact
+preponderantly, and who, though comparatively not sympathetic, so
+engaged, physiognomically, my wondering interest, that I hear to this
+hour her shrill Franco-American accent: "Don't look at _me_, little
+boy--look at my feet." I see them now, these somewhat fat members,
+beneath the uplifted skirt, encased in "bronzed" slippers, without heels
+but attached, by graceful cross-bands over her white stockings, to her
+solid ankles--an emphatic sign of the time; not less than I recover my
+surprised sense of their supporting her without loss of balance,
+substantial as she was, in the "first position"; her command of which,
+her ankles clapped close together and her body very erect, was so
+perfect that even with her toes, right and left, fairly turning the
+corner backward, she never fell prone on her face.
+
+It consorted somehow with this wealth of resource in her that she
+appeared at the soirées, or at least at the great fancy-dress soirée in
+which the historic truth of my experience, free lemonade and all, is
+doubtless really shut up, as the "genius of California," a dazzling
+vision of white satin and golden flounces--her brother meanwhile
+maintaining that more distinctively European colour which I feel to have
+been for my young presumption the convincing essence of the scene in the
+character of a mousquetaire de Louis Quinze, highly consonant with his
+type. There hovered in the background a flushed, full-chested and
+tawnily short-bearded M. Dubreuil, who, as a singer of the heavy order,
+at the Opera, carried us off into larger things still--the Opera having
+at last about then, after dwelling for years, down town, in shifty tents
+and tabernacles, set up its own spacious pavilion and reared its head as
+the Academy of Music: all at the end, or what served for the end, of our
+very street, where, though it wasn't exactly near and Union Square
+bristled between, I could yet occasionally gape at the great bills
+beside the portal, in which M. Dubreuil always so serviceably came in at
+the bottom of the cast. A subordinate artist, a "grand utility" at the
+best, I believe, and presently to become, on that scene, slightly ragged
+I fear even in its freshness, permanent stage-manager or, as we say
+nowadays, producer, he had yet eminently, to my imagination, the richer,
+the "European" value; especially for instance when our air thrilled, in
+the sense that our attentive parents re-echoed, with the visit of the
+great Grisi and the great Mario, and I seemed, though the art of
+advertisement was then comparatively so young and so chaste, to see our
+personal acquaintance, as he could almost be called, thickly sandwiched
+between them. Such was one's strange sense for the connections of things
+that they drew out the halls of Ferrero till these too seemed fairly to
+resound with Norma and Lucrezia Borgia, as if opening straight upon the
+stage, and Europe, by the stroke, had come to us in such force that we
+had but to enjoy it on the spot. That could never have been more the
+case than on the occasion of my assuming, for the famous fancy-ball--not
+at the operatic Academy, but at the dancing-school, which came so nearly
+to the same thing--the dress of a débardeur, whatever that might be,
+which carried in its puckered folds of dark green relieved with scarlet
+and silver such an exotic fragrance and appealed to me by such a legend.
+The legend had come round to us, it was true, by way of Albany, whence
+we learned at the moment of our need, that one of the adventures, one of
+the least lamentable, of our cousin Johnny had been his figuring as a
+débardeur at some Parisian revel; the elegant evidence of which, neatly
+packed, though with but vague instructions for use, was helpfully sent
+on to us. The instructions for use were in fact so vague that I was
+afterward to become a bit ruefully conscious of having sadly
+dishonoured, or at least abbreviated, my model. I fell, that is I stood,
+short of my proper form by no less than half a leg; the essence of the
+débardeur being, it appeared, that he emerged at the knees, in white
+silk stockings and with neat calves, from the beribboned breeches which
+I artlessly suffered to flap at my ankles. The discovery, after the
+fact, was disconcerting--yet had been best made withal, too late; for
+it would have seemed, I conceive, a less monstrous act to attempt to
+lengthen my legs than to shorten Johnny's _culotte_. The trouble had
+been that we hadn't really known what a débardeur _was_, and I am not
+sure indeed that I know to this day. It had been more fatal still that
+even fond Albany couldn't tell us.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+I have nevertheless the memory of a restless relish of all that time--by
+which I mean of those final months of New York, even with so scant a
+record of other positive successes to console me. I had but one success,
+always--that of endlessly supposing, wondering, admiring: I was sunk in
+that luxury, which had never yet been so great, and it might well make
+up for anything. It made up perfectly, and more particularly as the
+stopgap as which I have already defined it, for the scantness of the
+period immediately round us; since how could I have wanted richer when
+the limits of reality, as I advanced upon them, seemed ever to recede
+and recede? It is true that but the other day, on the scene revisited, I
+was to be struck rather as by their weird immobility: there on the north
+side, still untenanted after sixty years, a tremendous span in the life
+of New York, was the vacant lot, undiminished, in which a friendly goat
+or two used to browse, whom we fed perversely with scraps of paper, just
+as perversely appreciated indeed, through the relaxed wooden palings.
+There hovers for me an impression of the glass roofs of a florist, a
+suffered squatter for a while; but florists and goats have alike
+disappeared and the barrenness of the place is as sordid as only
+untended gaps in great cities can seem. One of its boundaries, however,
+still breathes associations--the home of the Wards, the more eastward of
+a pair of houses then and still isolated has remained the same through
+all vicissitudes, only now quite shabbily mellow and, like everything
+else, much smaller than one had remembered it; yet this too without
+prejudice to the large, the lustrous part played in our prospect by that
+interesting family. I saddle their mild memory a bit "subjectively"
+perhaps with the burden of that character--making out that they were
+interesting really in spite of themselves and as unwittingly as M.
+Jourdain expressed himself in prose; owing their wild savour as they did
+to that New England stamp which we took to be strong upon them and no
+other exhibition of which we had yet enjoyed. It made them different,
+made them, in their homely grace, rather aridly romantic: I pored in
+those days over the freshness of the Franconia Stories of the brothers
+Abbott, then immediately sequent to the sweet Rollo series and even more
+admired; and there hung about the Wards, to my sense, that atmosphere of
+apples and nuts and cheese, of pies and jack-knives and "squrruls," of
+domestic Bible-reading and attendance at "evening lecture," of the fear
+of parental discipline and the cultivated art of dodging it, combined
+with great personal toughness and hardihood, an almost envied liability
+to warts on hard brown hands, a familiarity with garments domestically
+wrought, a brave rusticity in short that yet hadn't prevented the
+annexation of whole tracts of town life unexplored by ourselves and
+achieved by the brothers since their relatively recent migration from
+Connecticut--which State in general, with the city of Hartford in
+particular, hung as a hazy, fruity, rivery background, the very essence
+of Indian summer, in the rear of their discourse. Three in number,
+Johnny and Charley and Freddy, with castigating elders, even to the
+second and third generation back, dimly discerned through closed
+window-panes, they didn't at all haunt the halls of Ferrero--it was a
+part of their homely grace and their social tone, if not of their want
+of the latter, that this couldn't in the least be in question for them;
+on the other hand they frequented, Charley and Freddy at least, the Free
+School, which was round in Thirteenth Street--Johnny, the eldest, having
+entered the Free Academy, an institution that loomed large to us and
+that I see as towered or castellated or otherwise impressively
+embellished in vague vignettes, in stray representations, perhaps only
+of the grey schoolbook order, which are yet associated for me with those
+fond images of lovely ladies, "hand-painted," decorating at either end
+the interior of the old omnibusses. We must have been in relation with
+no other feeders at the public trough of learning--I can't account
+otherwise for the glamour as of envied privilege and strange experience
+that surrounded the Wards; they mixed, to the great sharpening of the
+edge of their wit, in the wild life _of_ the people, beside which the
+life at Mr. Pulling Jenks's and even at the Institution Vergnès was
+colourless and commonplace. Somehow they were of the people, and still
+were full of family forms--which seemed, one dimly made out through the
+false perspective of all the cousinships, the stronger and clearer note
+of New England; the note that had already determined a shy yearning
+under perusal of the Rollo and Franconia chronicles. The special mark of
+these friends was perhaps however that of being socially young while
+they were annually old; little Freddy in particular, very short, very
+inured and very popular, though less curiously wrinkled about eyes and
+mouth than Charley, confessed to monstrous birthdays even while
+crouching or hopping, even while racing or roaring, as a high
+superiority in the games of the street prescribed. It was to strike me
+later on, when reading or hearing of young Americans of those parts who
+had turned "hard" or reckless by reaction from excessive discipline,
+theologic and economic, and had gone to sea or to California or to the
+"bad," that Freddy and Charley were typical of the race, even if their
+fortunes had taken, as I hoped, a happier form. That, I said to myself
+for the interest of it, _that_, the stuff of the Wards, their homely
+grace, was all New England--so far at least as New England wasn't
+Emerson and Margaret Fuller and Mr. Channing and the "best Boston"
+families. Such, in small very plastic minds, is the intensity, if not
+the value, of early impressions.
+
+And yet how can such visions not have paled in the southern glow of the
+Norcoms, who had lately arrived _en masse_ from Louisville and had
+improvised a fine old Kentucky home in the last house of our row--the
+one to be occupied so differently, after their strange and precipitate
+flight, as I dimly make out, by the Ladies of the Sacred Heart; those
+who presently, if I mistake not, moved out to Bloomingdale, if they were
+not already in part established there. Next us westward were the Ogdens,
+three slim and fair sisters, who soared far above us in age and general
+amenity; then came the Van Winkles, two sisters, I think, and a
+brother--he much the most serious and judicious, as well as the most
+educated, of our friends; and so at last the Norcoms, during their brief
+but concentrated, most vivid and momentous, reign, a matter, as I recall
+it, of a couple of breathless winters. We were provided by their
+presence with as happy a foil as we could have wished to the plainness
+and dryness of the Wards; their homely grace was all their own and was
+also embodied in three brothers, Eugene, Reginald, Albert, whose ages
+would have corresponded, I surmise, with those of Johnny, Charley and
+Freddy if these latter hadn't, in their way, as I have hinted, defied
+any close notation. Elder sons--there were to my recollection no
+daughters--moved too as with their heads in the clouds; notably
+"Stiffy," eldest of all, whom we supposed gorgeous, who affected us as
+sublime and unapproachable and to whom we thus applied the term in use
+among us before we had acquired for reference to such types the notion
+of the _nuance_, the dandy, the dude, the masher. (Divided I was, I
+recall, between the dread and the glory of being so greeted, "Well,
+Stiffy--!" as a penalty of the least attempt at personal adornment.) The
+higher intensity for our sense of the Norcoms came from the large, the
+lavish, ease of their hospitality; whereas our intercourse with the
+Wards was mainly in the street or at most the "yard"--and it was a
+wonder how intimacy _could_ to that degree consort with publicity. A
+glazed southern gallery, known to its occupants as the "poo'ch" and to
+the rake of which their innermost penetralia seemed ever to stand open,
+encompasses my other memories. Everything took place on the poo'ch,
+including the free, quite the profuse, consumption of hot cakes and
+molasses, including even the domestic manufacture of sausages, testified
+to by a strange machine that was worked like a handorgan and by the
+casual halves, when not the wholes, of stark stiff hogs fresh from
+Kentucky stores. We must have been for a time constantly engaged with
+this delightful group, who never ceased to welcome us or to feed us, and
+yet of the presence of whose members under other roofs than their own,
+by a return of hospitality received, I retain no image. They didn't
+count and didn't grudge--the sausage-mill kept turning and the molasses
+flowing for all who came; that was the expression of their southern
+grace, especially embodied in Albert, my exact contemporary and chosen
+friend (Reggie had but crushed my fingers under the hinge of a closing
+door, the mark of which act of inadvertence I was to carry through
+life,) who had profuse and tightly-crinkled hair, and the moral of whose
+queer little triangular brown teeth, casting verily a shade on my
+attachment to him, was pointed for me, not by himself, as the error of a
+Kentucky diet.
+
+The great Kentucky error, however, had been the introduction into a free
+State of two pieces of precious property which our friends were to fail
+to preserve, the pair of affectionate black retainers whose presence
+contributed most to their exotic note. We revelled in the fact that Davy
+and Aunt Sylvia (pronounced An'silvy,) a light-brown lad with
+extraordinarily shining eyes and his straight, grave, deeper-coloured
+mother, not radiant as to anything but her vivid turban, had been born
+and kept in slavery of the most approved pattern and such as this
+intensity of their condition made them a joy, a joy to the curious mind,
+to consort with. Davy mingled in our sports and talk, he enriched, he
+adorned them with a personal, a pictorial lustre that none of us could
+emulate, and servitude in the absolute thus did more for him socially
+than we had ever seen done, above stairs or below, for victims of its
+lighter forms. What was not our dismay therefore when we suddenly
+learnt--it must have blown right up and down the street--that mother and
+son had fled, in the dead of night, from bondage? had taken advantage of
+their visit to the North simply to leave the house and not return,
+covering their tracks, successfully disappearing. They had never been
+for us so beautifully slaves as in this achievement of their freedom;
+for they did brilliantly achieve it--they escaped, on northern soil,
+beyond recall or recovery. I think we had already then, on the spot, the
+sense of some degree of presence at the making of history; the question
+of what persons of colour and of their condition might or mightn't do
+was intensely in the air; this was exactly the season of the freshness
+of Mrs. Stowe's great novel. It must have come out at the moment of our
+fondest acquaintance with our neighbours, though I have no recollection
+of hearing them remark upon it--any remark they made would have been
+sure to be so strong. I suspect they hadn't read it, as they certainly
+wouldn't have allowed it in the house; any more indeed than they had
+read or were likely ever to read any other work of fiction; I doubt
+whether the house contained a printed volume, unless its head had had in
+hand a law-book or so: I to some extent recover Mr. Norcom as a lawyer
+who had come north on important, difficult business, on contentious,
+precarious grounds--a large bald political-looking man, very loose and
+ungirt, just as his wife was a desiccated, depressed lady who mystified
+me by always wearing her nightcap, a feebly-frilled but tightly-tied and
+unmistakable one, and the compass of whose maternal figure beneath a
+large long collarless cape or mantle defined imperfectly for me of
+course its connection with the further increase of Albert's little
+brothers and sisters, there being already, by my impression, two or
+three of these in the background. Had Davy and An'silvy at least read
+Uncle Tom?--that question might well come up for us, with the certainty
+at any rate that they ignored him less than their owners were doing.
+These latter good people, who had been so fond of their humble
+dependents and supposed this affection returned, were shocked at such
+ingratitude, though I remember taking a vague little inward Northern
+comfort in their inability, in their discreet decision, not to raise the
+hue and cry. Wasn't one even just dimly aware of the heavy hush that, in
+the glazed gallery, among the sausages and the johnny-cakes, had
+followed the first gasp of resentment? I think the honest Norcoms were
+in any case astonished, let alone being much incommoded; just as _we_
+were, for that matter, when the genial family itself, installed so at
+its ease, failed us with an effect of abruptness, simply ceased, in
+their multitude, to be there. I don't remember their going, nor any
+pangs of parting; I remember only knowing with wonderment that they had
+gone, that obscurity had somehow engulfed them; and how afterwards, in
+the light of later things, memory and fancy attended them, figured their
+history as the public complication grew and the great intersectional
+plot thickened; felt even, absurdly and disproportionately, that they
+had helped one to "know Southerners." The slim, the sallow, the
+straight-haired and dark-eyed Eugene in particular haunted my
+imagination; he had not been my comrade of election--he was too much my
+senior; but I cherished the thought of the fine fearless young
+fire-eater he would have become and, when the War had broken out, I know
+not what dark but pitying vision of him stretched stark after a battle.
+
+All of which sounds certainly like a meagre range--which heaven knows it
+was; but with a plea for the several attics, already glanced at, and the
+positive æsthetic reach that came to us through those dim resorts, quite
+worth making. They were scattered and they constituted on the part of
+such of our friends as had license to lead us up to them a ground of
+authority and glory proportioned exactly to the size of the field. This
+extent was at cousin Helen's, with a large house and few inmates, vast
+and free, so that no hospitality, under the eaves, might have matched
+that offered us by the young Albert--if only that heir of all the ages
+had had rather more imagination. He had, I think, as little as was
+possible--which would have counted in fact for an unmitigated blank had
+not W. J., among us, on that spot and elsewhere, supplied this motive
+force in any quantity required. He imagined--that was the point--the
+comprehensive comedies we were to prepare and to act; comprehensive by
+the fact that each one of us, even to the God-fearing but
+surreptitiously law-breaking Wards, was in fairness to be enabled to
+figure. Not one of us but was somehow to be provided with a part, though
+I recall my brother as the constant comic star. The attics were thus in
+a word our respective temples of the drama--temples in which the stage,
+the green-room and the wardrobe, however, strike me as having consumed
+most of our margin. I remember, that is, up and down the street--and the
+association is mainly with its far westward reaches--so much more
+preparation than performance, so much more conversation and costume than
+active rehearsal, and, on the part of some of us, especially doubtless
+on my own, so much more eager denudation, both of body and mind, than of
+achieved or inspired assumption. We shivered unclad and impatient both
+as to our persons and to our aims, waiting alike for ideas and for
+breeches; we were supposed to make our dresses no less than to create
+our characters, and our material was in each direction apt to run short.
+I remember how far ahead of us my brother seemed to keep, announcing a
+"motive," producing a figure, throwing off into space conceptions that I
+could stare at across the interval but couldn't appropriate; so that my
+vision of him in these connections is not so much of his coming toward
+me, or toward any of us, as of his moving rapidly away in fantastic garb
+and with his back turned, as if to perform to some other and more
+assured public. There were indeed other publics, publics downstairs, who
+glimmer before me seated at the open folding-doors of ancient parlours,
+but all from the point of view of an absolute supernumerary, more or
+less squashed into the wing but never coming on. Who were the copious
+Hunts?--whose ample house, on the north side, toward Seventh Avenue,
+still stands, next or near that of the De Peysters, so that I perhaps
+confound some of the attributes of each, though clear as to the blond
+Beekman, or "Beek," of the latter race, not less than to the robust
+George and the stout, the very stout, Henry of the former, whom I see
+bounding before a gathered audience for the execution of a _pas seul_,
+clad in a garment of "Turkey red" fashioned by his own hands and giving
+way at the seams, to a complete absence of _dessous_, under the strain
+of too fine a figure: this too though I make out in those connections,
+that is in the twilight of Hunt and De Peyster garrets, our command of a
+comparative welter of draperies; so that I am reduced to the surmise
+that Henry indeed had contours.
+
+I recover, further, some sense of the high places of the Van Winkles,
+but think of them as pervaded for us by the upper air of the
+proprieties, the proprieties that were so numerous, it would appear,
+when once one had had a glimpse of them, rather than by the crude fruits
+of young improvisation. Wonderful must it clearly have been still to fed
+amid laxities and vaguenesses such a difference of _milieux_ and, as
+they used to say, of atmospheres. This was a word of those
+days--atmospheres were a thing to recognise and cultivate, for people
+really wanted them, gasped for them; which was why they took them, on
+the whole, on easy terms, never exposing them, under an apparent flush,
+to the last analysis. Did we at any rate really vibrate to one social
+tone after another, or are these adventures for me now but fond
+imaginations? No, we vibrated--or I'll be hanged, as I may say, if _I_
+didn't; little as I could tell it or may have known it, little as anyone
+else may have known. There were shades, after all, in our democratic
+order; in fact as I brood back to it I recognise oppositions the
+sharpest, contrasts the most intense. It wasn't given to us all to have
+a social tone, but the Costers surely had one and kept it in constant
+use; whereas the Wards, next door to them, were possessed of no approach
+to any, and indeed had the case been other, had they had such a
+consciousness, would never have employed it, would have put it away on a
+high shelf, as they put the last-baked pie, out of Freddy's and
+Charley's reach--heaven knows what _they_ two would have done with it.
+The Van Winkles on the other hand were distinctly so provided, but with
+the special note that their provision was one, so to express it, with
+their educational, their informational, call it even their professional:
+Mr. Van Winkle, if I mistake not, was an eminent lawyer, and the note of
+our own house was the absence of any profession, to the quickening of
+our general as distinguished from our special sensibility. There was no
+Turkey red among those particular neighbours at all events, and if there
+had been it wouldn't have gaped at the seams. I didn't then know it, but
+I sipped at a fount of culture; in the sense, that is, that, our
+connection with the house being through Edgar, he knew about
+things--inordinately, as it struck me. So, for that matter, did little
+public Freddy Ward; but the things one of them knew about differed
+wholly from the objects of knowledge of the other: all of which was
+splendid for giving one exactly a sense of things. It intimated more and
+more how many such there would be altogether. And part of the interest
+was that while Freddy gathered his among the wild wastes Edgar walked in
+a regular maze of culture. I didn't then know about culture, but Edgar
+must promptly have known. This impression was promoted by his moving in
+a distant, a higher sphere of study, amid scenes vague to me; I dimly
+descry him as appearing at Jenks's and vanishing again, as if even that
+hadn't been good enough--though I may be here at fault, and indeed can
+scarce say on what arduous heights I supposed him, as a day-scholar, to
+dwell. I took the unknown always easily for the magnificent and was sure
+only of the limits of what I saw. It wasn't that the boys swarming for
+us at school were not often, to my vision, unlimited, but that those
+peopling our hours of ease, as I have already noted, were almost
+inveterately so--they seemed to describe always, out of view, so much
+larger circles. I linger thus on Edgar by reason of its having somehow
+seemed to us that he described--was it at Doctor Anthon's?--the largest
+of all. If there was a bigger place than Doctor Anthon's it was there he
+would have been. I break down, as to the detail of the matter, in any
+push toward vaster suppositions. But let me cease to stir this
+imponderable dust.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+I try at least to recover here, however, some closer notation of W. J.'s
+aspects--yet only with the odd effect of my either quite losing him or
+but apprehending him again at seated play with his pencil under the
+lamp. When I see him he is intently, though summarily, rapidly drawing,
+his head critically balanced and his eyebrows working, and when I don't
+see him it is because I have resignedly relinquished him. I can't have
+been often for him a deprecated, still less an actively rebuffed suitor,
+because, as I say again, such aggressions were so little in order for
+me; but I remember that on my once offering him my company in
+conditions, those of some planned excursion, in which it wasn't desired,
+his putting the question of our difference at rest, with the minimum of
+explanation, by the responsible remark: "_I_ play with boys who curse
+and swear!" I had sadly to recognise that I didn't, that I couldn't
+pretend to have come to that yet--and truly, as I look back, either the
+unadvisedness and inexpertness of my young contemporaries on all that
+ground must have been complete (an interesting note on our general
+manners after all,) or my personal failure to grasp must have been.
+Besides which I wonder scarce less now than I wondered then in just what
+company my brother's privilege was exercised; though if he had but
+richly wished to be discouraging he quite succeeded. It wasn't that I
+mightn't have been drawn to the boys in question, but that I simply
+wasn't qualified. All boys, I rather found, were difficult to play
+with--unless it was that they rather found _me_; but who would have been
+so difficult as these? They account but little, moreover, I make out,
+for W. J.'s eclipses; so that I take refuge easily enough in the memory
+of my own pursuits, absorbing enough at times to have excluded other
+views. I also plied the pencil, or to be more exact the pen--even if
+neither implement critically, rapidly or summarily. I was so often
+engaged at that period, it strikes me, in literary--or, to be more
+precise in dramatic, accompanied by pictorial composition--that I must
+again and again have delightfully lost myself. I had not on any occasion
+personally succeeded, amid our theatric strife, in reaching the
+footlights; but how could I have doubted, nevertheless, with our large
+theatrical experience, of the nature, and of my understanding, of the
+dramatic form? I sacrificed to it with devotion--by the aid of certain
+quarto sheets of ruled paper bought in Sixth Avenue for the purpose (my
+father's store, though I held him a great fancier of the article in
+general, supplied but the unruled;) grateful in particular for the happy
+provision by which each fourth page of the folded sheet was left blank.
+When the drama itself had covered three pages the last one, over which I
+most laboured, served for the illustration of what I had verbally
+presented. Every scene had thus its explanatory picture, and as each
+act--though I am not positively certain I arrived at acts--would have
+had its vivid climax. Addicted in that degree to fictive evocation, I
+yet recall, on my part, no practice whatever of narrative prose or any
+sort of verse. I cherished the "scene"--as I had so vibrated to the idea
+of it that evening at Linwood; I thought, I lisped, at any rate I
+composed, in scenes; though how much, or how far, the scenes "came" is
+another affair. Entrances, exits, the indication of "business," the
+animation of dialogue, the multiplication of designated characters, were
+things delightful in themselves--while I panted toward the canvas on
+which I should fling my figures; which it took me longer to fill than it
+had taken me to write what went with it, but which had on the other hand
+something of the interest of the dramatist's casting of his _personæ_,
+and must have helped me to believe in the validity of my subject.
+
+From where on these occasions that subject can have dropped for me I am
+at a loss to say, and indeed have a strong impression that I didn't at
+any moment quite know what I was writing about: I am sure I couldn't
+otherwise have written so much. With scenes, when I think, what
+certitude did I want more?--scenes being the root of the matter,
+especially when they bristled with proper names and noted movements;
+especially, above all, when they flowered at every pretext into the very
+optic and perspective of the stage, where the boards diverged correctly,
+from a central point of vision, even as the lashes from an eyelid,
+straight down to the footlights. Let this reminiscence remind us of how
+rarely in those days the real stage was carpeted. The difficulty of
+composition was naught; the one difficulty was in so placing my figures
+on the fourth page that these radiations could be marked without making
+lines through them. The odd part of all of which was that whereas my
+cultivation of the picture was maintained my practice of the play, my
+addiction to scenes, presently quite dropped. I was capable of learning,
+though with inordinate slowness, to express ideas in scenes, and was not
+capable, with whatever patience, of making proper pictures; yet I
+aspired to this form of design to the prejudice of any other, and long
+after those primitive hours was still wasting time in attempts at it. I
+cared so much for nothing else, and that vaguely redressed, as to a
+point, my general failure of acuteness. I nursed the conviction, or at
+least I tried to, that if my clutch of the pencil or of the watercolour
+brush should once become intense enough it would make up for other
+weaknesses of grasp--much as that would certainly give it to do. This
+was a very false scent, which had however the excuse that my brother's
+example really couldn't but act upon me--the scent was apparently so
+true for _him_; from the moment my small "interest in art," that is my
+bent for gaping at illustrations and exhibitions, was absorbing and
+genuine. There were elements in the case that made it natural: the
+picture, the representative design, directly and strongly appealed to
+me, and was to appeal all my days, and I was only slow to recognise the
+_kind_, in this order, that appealed most. My face was turned from the
+first to the idea of representation--that of the gain of charm,
+interest, mystery, dignity, distinction, gain of importance in fine, on
+the part of the represented thing (over the thing of accident, of mere
+actuality, still unappropriated;) but in the house of representation
+there were many chambers, each with its own lock, and long was to be the
+business of sorting and trying the keys. When I at last found deep in my
+pocket the one I could more or less work, it was to feel, with
+reassurance, that the picture was still after all in essence one's aim.
+So there had been in a manner continuity, been not so much waste as one
+had sometimes ruefully figured; so many wastes are sweetened for memory
+as by the taste of the economy they have led to or imposed and from the
+vantage of which they could scarce look better if they had been current
+and blatant profit. Wasn't the very bareness of the field itself
+moreover a challenge, in a degree, to design?--not, I mean, that there
+seemed to one's infant eyes too few things to paint: as to that there
+were always plenty--but for the very reason that there were more than
+anyone noticed, and that a hunger was thus engendered which one cast
+about to gratify. The gratification nearest home was the imitative, the
+emulative--that is on my part: W. J., I see, needed no reasons, no
+consciousness other than that of being easily able. So he drew because
+he could, while I did so in the main only because he did; though I think
+we cast about, as I say, alike, making the most of every image within
+view. I doubt if he made more than I even then did, though earlier able
+to account for what he made. Afterwards, on other ground and in richer
+air, I admit, the challenge was in the fulness and not in the bareness
+of aspects, with their natural result of hunger appeased; exhibitions,
+illustrations abounded in Paris and London--the reflected image hung
+everywhere about; so that if there we daubed afresh and with more
+confidence it was not because no-one but because everyone did. In fact
+when I call our appetite appeased I speak less of our browsing vision,
+which was tethered and insatiable, than of our sense of the quite normal
+character of our own proceedings. In Europe we knew there was Art, just
+as there were soldiers and lodgings and concierges and little boys in
+the streets who stared at us, especially at our hats and boots, as at
+things of derision--just as, to put it negatively, there were
+practically no hot rolls and no iced water. Perhaps too, I should add,
+we didn't enjoy the works of Mr. Benjamin Haydon, then clustered at the
+Pantheon in Oxford Street, which in due course became our favourite
+haunt, so infinitely more, after all, than we had enjoyed those arrayed
+at the Düsseldorf collection in Broadway; whence the huge canvas of the
+Martyrdom of John Huss comes back to me in fact as a revelation of
+representational brightness and charm that pitched once for all in these
+matters my young sense of what should be.
+
+Ineffable, unsurpassable those hours of initiation which the Broadway of
+the 'fifties had been, when all was said, so adequate to supply. If one
+wanted pictures there _were_ pictures, as large, I seem to remember, as
+the side of a house, and of a bravery of colour and lustre of surface
+that I was never afterwards to see surpassed. We were shown without
+doubt, under our genial law here too, everything there was, and as I
+cast up the items I wonder, I confess, what ampler fare we could have
+dealt with. The Düsseldorf school commanded the market, and I think of
+its exhibition as firmly seated, going on from year to year--New York,
+judging now to such another tune, must have been a brave patron of that
+manufacture; I believe that scandal even was on occasion not evaded,
+rather was boldly invoked, though of what particular sacrifices to the
+pure plastic or undraped shocks to bourgeois prejudice the comfortable
+German genius of that period may have been capable history has kept no
+record. New accessions, at any rate, vividly new ones, in which the
+freshness and brightness of the paint, particularly lustrous in our
+copious light, enhanced from time to time the show, which I have the
+sense of our thus repeatedly and earnestly visiting and which comes back
+to me with some vagueness as installed in a disaffected church, where
+gothic excrescences and an ecclesiastical roof of a mild order helped
+the importance. No impression here, however, was half so momentous as
+that of the epoch-making masterpiece of Mr. Leutze, which showed us
+Washington crossing the Delaware in a wondrous flare of projected
+gaslight and with the effect of a revelation to my young sight of the
+capacity of accessories to "stand out." I live again in the thrill of
+that evening--which was the greater of course for my feeling it, in my
+parents' company, when I should otherwise have been in bed. We went
+down, after dinner, in the Fourteenth Street stage, quite as if going to
+the theatre; the scene of exhibition was near the Stuyvesant Institute
+(a circumstance stirring up somehow a swarm of associations, echoes
+probably of lectures discussed at home, yet at which my attendance had
+doubtless conveniently lapsed,) but Mr. Leutze's drama left behind any
+paler proscenium. We gaped responsive to every item, lost in the marvel
+of the wintry light, of the sharpness of the ice-blocks, of the sickness
+of the sick soldier, of the protrusion of the minor objects, that of the
+strands of the rope and the nails of the boots, that, I say, on the part
+of everything, of its determined purpose of standing out; but that,
+above all, of the profiled national hero's purpose, as might be said, of
+standing _up_, as much as possible, even indeed of doing it almost on
+one leg, in such difficulties, and successfully balancing. So memorable
+was that evening to remain for me that nothing could be more strange, in
+connection with it, than the illustration by the admired work, on its in
+after years again coming before me, of the cold cruelty with which time
+may turn and devour its children. The picture, more or less entombed in
+its relegation, was lividly dead--and that was bad enough. But half the
+substance of one's youth seemed buried with it. There were other
+pictorial evenings, I may add, not all of which had the thrill. Deep the
+disappointment, on my own part, I remember, at Bryan's Gallery of
+Christian Art, to which also, as for great emotions, we had taken the
+omnibus after dinner. It cast a chill, this collection of worm-eaten
+diptychs and triptychs, of angular saints and seraphs, of black Madonnas
+and obscure Bambinos, of such marked and approved "primitives" as had
+never yet been shipped to our shores. Mr. Bryan's shipment was presently
+to fall, I believe, under grave suspicion, was to undergo in fact fatal
+exposure; but it appealed at the moment in apparent good faith, and I
+have not forgotten how, conscious that it was fresh from Europe--"fresh"
+was beautiful in the connection!--I felt that my yearning should all
+have gone out to it. With that inconsequence to handle I doubt whether I
+proclaimed that it bored me--any more than I have ever noted till now
+that it made me begin badly with Christian art. I like to think that the
+collection consisted without abatement of frauds and "fakes" and that if
+these had been honest things my perception wouldn't so have slumbered;
+yet the principle of interest had been somehow compromised, and I think
+I have never since stood before a real Primitive, a primitive of the
+primitives, without having first to shake off the grey mantle of that
+night. The main disconcertment had been its ugly twist to the name of
+Italy, already sweet to me for all its dimness--even could dimness have
+prevailed in my felt measure of the pictorial testimony of home,
+testimony that dropped for us from the ample canvas of Mr. Cole, "the
+American Turner" which covered half a side of our front parlour, and in
+which, though not an object represented in it began to stand out after
+the manner of Mr. Leutze, I could always lose myself as soon as look. It
+depicted Florence from one of the neighbouring hills--I have often since
+wondered which, the picture being long ago lost to our sight; Florence
+with her domes and towers and old walls, the old walls Mr. Cole had
+engaged for, but which I was ruefully to miss on coming to know and love
+the place in after years. Then it was I felt how long before my
+attachment had started on its course--that closer vision was no
+beginning, it only took up the tale; just as it comes to me again
+to-day, at the end of time, that the contemplative monk seated on a
+terrace in the foreground, a constant friend of my childhood, must have
+been of the convent of San Miniato, which gives me the site from which
+the painter wrought. We had Italy again in the corresponding room
+behind--a great abundance of Italy I was free to think while I revolved
+between another large landscape over the sofa and the classic marble
+bust on a pedestal between the two back windows, the figure, a part of
+the figure, of a lady with her head crowned with vine-leaves and her
+hair disposed with a laxity that was emulated by the front of her dress,
+as my next younger brother exposed himself to my derision by calling the
+bit of brocade (simulated by the chisel) that, depending from a single
+shoulder-strap, so imperfectly covered her. This image was known and
+admired among us as the Bacchante; she had come to us straight from an
+American studio in Rome, and I see my horizon flush again with the first
+faint dawn of conscious appreciation, or in other words of the critical
+spirit, while two or three of the more restrictive friends of the house
+find our marble lady very "cold" for a Bacchante. Cold indeed she must
+have been--quite as of the tombstone temperament; but that objection
+would drop if she might only be called a Nymph, since nymphs were mild
+and moderate, and since discussion of a work of art mainly hung in those
+days on that issue of the producible _name_. I fondly recall, by the
+same token, that playing on a certain occasion over the landscape above
+the sofa, restrictive criticism, uttered in my indulged hearing,
+introduced me to what had probably been my very first chance, on such
+ground, for active participation. The picture, from the hand of a
+French painter, M. Lefèvre, and of but slightly scanter extent than the
+work of Mr. Cole, represented in frank rich colours and as a so-called
+"view in Tuscany" a rural scene of some exuberance, a broken and
+precipitous place, amid mountains and forests, where two or three
+bare-legged peasants or woodmen were engaged, with much emphasis of
+posture, in felling a badly gashed but spreading oak by means of a tense
+rope attached to an upper limb and at which they pulled together.
+"Tuscany?--are you sure it's Tuscany?" said the voice of restrictive
+criticism, that of the friend of the house who in the golden age of the
+precursors, though we were still pretty much precursors, had lived
+longest in Italy. And then on my father's challenge of this demur: "Oh
+in Tuscany, you know, the colours are much softer--there would be a
+certain haze in the atmosphere." "Why, of course," I can hear myself now
+blushingly but triumphantly intermingle--"the softness and the haze of
+our Florence there: isn't Florence in Tuscany?" It had to be parentally
+admitted that Florence was--besides which our friend had been there and
+knew; so that thereafter, within our walls, a certain _malaise_ reigned,
+for if the Florence was "like it" then the Lefèvre couldn't be, and if
+the Lefèvre was like it then the Florence couldn't: a lapse from old
+convenience--as from the moment we couldn't name the Lefèvre where were
+we? All of which it might have been open to me to feel I had uncannily
+promoted.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+My own sense of the great matter, meanwhile--that is of our
+possibilities, still more than of our actualities, of Italy in general
+and of Florence in particular--was a perfectly recoverable little
+awareness, as I find, of certain mild soft irregular breathings thence
+on the part of an absent pair in whom our parents were closely
+interested and whose communications, whose Roman, Sorrentine, Florentine
+letters, letters in especial from the Baths of Lucca, kept open, in our
+air, more than any other sweet irritation, that "question of Europe"
+which was to have after all, in the immediate years, so limited, so
+shortened, a solution. Mary Temple the elder had, early in our
+Fourteenth Street period, married Edmund Tweedy, a haunter of that
+neighbourhood and of our house in it from the first, but never more than
+during a winter spent with us there by that quasi-relative, who, by an
+extension of interest and admiration--she was in those years quite
+exceedingly handsome--ranked for us with the Albany aunts, adding so a
+twist, as it were, to our tie with the Temple cousins, her own close
+kin. This couple must have been, putting real relatives aside, my
+parents' best friends in Europe, twitching thereby hardest the fine firm
+thread attached at one end to our general desire and at the other to
+their supposed felicity. The real relatives, those planted out in the
+same countries, are a chapter by themselves, whose effect on us, whose
+place in our vision, I should like to trace: that of the Kings, for
+instance, of my mother's kin, that of the Masons, of my father's--the
+Kings who cultivated, for years, the highest instructional, social and
+moral possibilities at Geneva, the Masons, above all, less strenuous but
+more sympathetic, who reported themselves to us hauntingly, during a
+considerable period, as enjoying every conceivable _agrément_ at Tours
+and at the then undeveloped Trouville, even the winter Trouville, on the
+lowest possible terms. Fain would I, as for the "mere pleasure" of it,
+under the temptation to delineate, gather into my loose net the
+singularly sharp and rounded image of our cousin Charlotte of the former
+name, who figured for us, on the field of Europe, wherever we looked,
+and all the rest of time, as a character of characters and a marvel of
+placid consistency; through my vague remembrance of her return from
+China after the arrest of a commercial career there by her husband's
+death in the Red Sea--which somehow sounded like a dreadful form of
+death, and my scarce less faint recovery of some Christmas treat of our
+childhood under her roof in Gramercy Park, amid dim chinoiseries and, in
+that twilight of time, dimmer offspring, Vernon, Anne, Arthur, marked to
+us always, in the distincter years, as of all our young relatives the
+most intensely educated and most pointedly proper--an occasion followed
+by her permanent and invidious withdrawal from her own country. I would
+keep her in my eye through the Genevese age and on to the crisis of the
+Civil War, in which Vernon, unforgiven by her stiff conservatism for his
+Northern loyalty, laid down before Petersburg a young life of
+understanding and pain, uncommemorated as to the gallantry of its
+end--he had insistently returned to the front, after a recovery from
+first wounds, as under his mother's malediction--on the stone beneath
+which he lies in the old burial ground at Newport, the cradle of his
+father's family. I should further pursue my subject through other
+periods and places, other constantly "quiet" but vivid exhibitions, to
+the very end of the story--which for myself was the impression, first,
+of a little lonely, soft-voiced, gentle, relentless lady, in a dull
+Surrey garden of a summer afternoon, more than half blind and all
+dependent on the _dame de compagnie_ who read aloud to her that Saturday
+Review which had ever been the prop and mirror of her opinions and to
+which she remained faithful, her children estranged and outworn, dead
+and ignored; and the vision, second and for a climax, of an old-world
+rez-de-chaussée at Versailles, goal of my final pilgrimage, almost in
+presence of the end (end of her very personal career, I mean, but not of
+her perfectly firm spirit or of her charmingly smooth address).
+
+I confess myself embarrassed by my very ease of re-capture of my young
+consciousness; so that I perforce try to encourage lapses and keep my
+abundance down. The place for the lapse consents with difficulty,
+however, to be _any_ particular point of the past at which I catch
+myself (easily caught as I am) looking about me; it has certainly
+nothing in common with that coign of vantage enjoyed by me one June
+afternoon of 1855 in the form of the minor share of the box of a
+carriage that conveyed us for the first time since our babyhood, W. J.'s
+and mine, through so much of a vast portentous London. I was an item in
+the overflow of a vehicle completely occupied, and I thrilled with the
+spectacle my seat beside the coachman so amply commanded--without
+knowing at this moment why, amid other claims, I had been marked for
+such an eminence. I so far justify my privilege at least as still to
+feel that prime impression, of extreme intensity, underlie, deep down,
+the whole mass of later observation. There are London aspects which, so
+far as they still touch me, after all the years, touch me as just
+sensible reminders of this hour of early apprehension, so penetrated for
+me as to have kept its ineffaceable stamp. For at last we had come to
+Europe--we had disembarked at Liverpool, but a couple of days before,
+from that steamer Atlantic, of the Collins line, then active but so soon
+to be utterly undone, of which I had kept a romantic note ever since a
+certain evening of a winter or two before. I had on that occasion
+assisted with my parents at a varied theatrical exhibition--the theatre
+is distinct to me as Brougham's--one of the features of which was the at
+that time flourishing farce of Betsy Baker, a picture of some
+predicament, supposed droll, of its hero Mr. Mouser, whose wife, if I am
+correct, carries on a laundry and controls as she may a train of young
+assistants. A feature of the piece comes back to me as the pursuit of
+Mr. Mouser round and round the premises by the troop of laundresses,
+shouting his name in chorus, capture by them being abject, though
+whether through fear of their endearments or of their harsher violence I
+fail to remember. It was enough that the public nerve had at the moment
+been tried by the non-arrival of the Atlantic, several days overdue, to
+the pitch at last of extreme anxiety; so that, when after the fall of
+the curtain on the farce the distracted Mr. Mouser, still breathless,
+reappeared at the footlights, where I can see him now abate by his
+plight no jot of the dignity of his announcement, "Ladies and
+gentlemen, I rejoice to be able to tell you that the good ship Atlantic
+is safe!" the house broke into such plaudits, so huge and prolonged a
+roar of relief, as I had never heard the like of and which gave me my
+first measure of a great immediate public emotion--even as the incident
+itself to-day reminds me of the family-party smallness of the old New
+York, those happy limits that could make us all care, and care to fond
+vociferation, for the same thing at once. It was a moment of the golden
+age--representing too but a snatch of elation, since the wretched Arctic
+had gone down in mortal woe and her other companion, the Pacific,
+leaving England a few months later and under the interested eyes of our
+family group, then temporarily settled in London, was never heard of
+more. Let all of which show again what traps are laid about me for
+unguarded acute reminiscence.
+
+I meet another of these, though I positively try to avoid it, in the
+sense of a day spent on the great fusty curtained bed, a mediæval
+four-poster such as I had never seen, of the hotel at the London and
+North-Western station, where it appeared, to our great inconvenience,
+that I had during the previous months somewhere perversely absorbed
+(probably on Staten Island upwards of a year before) the dull seed of
+malaria, which now suddenly broke out in chills and fever. This
+condition, of the intermittent order, hampered our movements but left
+alternate days on which we could travel, and as present to me as ever is
+the apprehended interest of my important and determinant state and of
+our complicated prospect while I lay, much at my ease--for I recall in
+particular certain short sweet times when I could be left alone--with
+the thick and heavy suggestions of the London room about me, the very
+smell of which was ancient, strange and impressive, a new revelation
+altogether, and the window open to the English June and the far off hum
+of a thousand possibilities. I consciously took them in, these last, and
+must then, I think, have first tasted the very greatest pleasure perhaps
+I was ever to know--that of almost holding my breath in presence of
+certain aspects to the end of so taking in. It was as if in those hours
+that precious fine art had been disclosed to me--scantly as the poor
+place and the small occasion might have seemed of an order to promote
+it. We seize our property by an avid instinct wherever we find it, and I
+must have kept seizing mine at the absurdest little rate, and all by
+this deeply dissimulative process of taking in, through the whole
+succession of those summer days. The next application of it that stands
+out for me, or the next that I make room for here, since I note after
+all so much less than I remember, is the intensity of a fond
+apprehension of Paris, a few days later, from the balcony of an hotel
+that hung, through the soft summer night, over the Rue de la Paix. I
+hung with the balcony, and doubtless with my brothers and my sister,
+though I recover what I felt as so much relation and response to the
+larger, the largest appeal only, that of the whole perfect Parisianism I
+seemed to myself always to have possessed mentally--even if I had but
+just turned twelve!--and that now filled out its frame or case for me
+from every lighted window, up and down, as if each of these had been,
+for strength of sense, a word in some immortal quotation, the very
+breath of civilised lips. How I had anciently gathered such stores of
+preconception is more than I shall undertake an account of--though I
+believe I should be able to scrape one together; certain it is at any
+rate that half the beauty of the whole exposed second floor of a
+_modiste_ just opposite, for instance, with the fittings and figurings,
+as well as the intent immobilities, of busy young women descried through
+frank, and, as it were, benignant apertures, and of such bright fine
+strain that they but asked to work far into the night, came from the
+effect on the part of these things of so exactly crowning and comforting
+I couldn't have said what momentous young dream. I might have been
+_right_ to myself--as against some danger of being wrong, and if I had
+uttered my main comment on it all this must certainly have been "I told
+you so, I told you so!" What I had told myself was of course that the
+impression would be of the richest and at the same time of the most
+insinuating, and this after all didn't sail very close; but I had had
+before me from far back a picture (which might have been hung in the
+very sky,) and here was every touch in it repeated with a charm. Had I
+ever till then known what a charm _was_?--a large, a local, a social
+charm, leaving out that of a few individuals. It was at all events, this
+mystery, one's property--that of one's mind; and so, once for all, I
+helped myself to it from my balcony and tucked it away. It counted all
+immensely for practice in taking in.
+
+I profited by that, no doubt, still a few days later, at an hour that
+has never ceased to recur to me all my life as crucial, as supremely
+determinant. The travelling-carriage had stopped at a village on the way
+from Lyons to Geneva, between which places there was then no railway; a
+village now nameless to me and which was not yet Nantua, in the Jura,
+where we were to spend the night. I was stretched at my ease on a couch
+formed by a plank laid from seat to seat and covered by a small mattress
+and other draperies; an indulgence founded on my visitation of fever,
+which, though not now checking our progress, assured me, in our little
+band, these invidious luxuries. It may have been that as my body was
+pampered so I was moved equally to pamper my spirit, for my
+appropriative instinct had neglected no item of our case from the
+first--by which I mean from the moment of our getting under way, that
+morning, with much elaboration, in the court of the old Hôtel de
+l'Univers at Lyons, where we had arrived two days before and awaited my
+good pleasure during forty-eight hours that overflowed for us perhaps
+somewhat less than any pair of days yet, but as regards which it was
+afterwards my complacent theory that my contemplative rest at the
+ancient inn, with all the voices and graces of the past, of the court,
+of the French scheme of manners in general and of ancient inns, as such,
+in particular, had prepared me not a little, when I should in due course
+hear of it, for what was meant by the _vie de province_--that expression
+which was to become later on so _toned_, as old fine colour and old fine
+opinion are toned. It was the romance of travel, and it was the
+_suggested_ romance, flushed with suppositions and echoes, with
+implications and memories, memories of one's "reading," save the mark!
+all the more that our proper bestowal required two carriages, in which
+we were to "post," ineffable thought, and which bristled with every kind
+of contradiction of common experience. The postilion, in a costume
+rather recalling, from the halls of Ferrero, that of my débardeur,
+bobbed up and down, the Italian courier, Jean Nadali, black-whiskered
+and acquired in London, sat in the rumble along with Annette Godefroi of
+Metz, fresh-coloured, broad-faced and fair-braided, a "bonne Lorraine"
+if ever there was, acquired in New York: I enjoy the echo of their very
+names, neither unprecedented nor irreproducible, yet which melt together
+for me, to intensification, with all the rest; with the recovered
+moment, above all, of our pause at the inn-door in the cool sunshine--we
+had mounted and mounted--during which, in my absurdly cushioned state, I
+took in, as I have hinted, by a long slow swig that testified to some
+power of elbow, a larger draught of the wine of perception than any I
+had ever before owed to a single throb of that faculty. The village
+street, which was not as village streets hitherto known to me, opened
+out, beyond an interval, into a high place on which perched an object
+also a fresh revelation and that I recognised with a deep joy--though a
+joy that was doubtless partly the sense of fantastic ease, of abated
+illness and of cold chicken--as at once a castle and a ruin. The only
+castle within my ken had been, by my impression, the machicolated villa
+above us the previous summer at New Brighton, and as I had seen no
+structure rise beyond that majesty so I had seen none abased to the
+dignity of ruin. Loose boards were no expression of this latter phase,
+and I was already somehow aware of a deeper note in the crumbled castle
+than any note of the solid one--little experience as I had had either of
+solidity. At a point in the interval, at any rate, below the slope on
+which this memento stood, was a woman in a black bodice, a white shirt
+and a red petticoat, engaged in some sort of field labour, the effect of
+whose intervention just then is almost beyond my notation. I knew her
+for a peasant in sabots--the first peasant I had ever beheld, or beheld
+at least to such advantage. She had in the whole aspect an enormous
+value, emphasising with her petticoat's tonic strength the truth that
+sank in as I lay--the truth of one's embracing there, in all the
+presented character of the scene, an amount of character I had felt no
+scene present, not even the one I had raked from the Hôtel Westminster;
+the sort of thing that, even as mere fulness and mere weight, would sit
+most warmly in the mind. Supremely, in that ecstatic vision, was
+"Europe," sublime synthesis, expressed and guaranteed to me--as if by a
+mystic gage, which spread all through the summer air, that I should now,
+only now, never lose it, hold the whole consistency of it: up to that
+time it might have been but mockingly whisked before me. Europe mightn't
+have been flattered, it was true, at my finding her thus most signified
+and summarised in a sordid old woman scraping a mean living and an
+uninhabitable tower abandoned to the owls; that was but the momentary
+measure of a small sick boy, however, and the virtue of the impression
+was proportioned to my capacity. It made a bridge over to more things
+than I then knew.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+How shall I render certain other impressions coming back to me from that
+summer, which were doubtless involved in my having still for a time, on
+the alternate days when my complaint was active, to lie up on various
+couches and, for my main comfort, consider the situation? I considered
+it best, I think, gathering in the fruits of a quickened sensibility to
+it, in certain umbrageous apartments in which my parents had settled
+themselves near Geneva; an old house, in ample grounds and among great
+spreading trees that pleasantly brushed our windows in the summer heats
+and airs, known, if I am not mistaken, as the Campagne Gerebsoff--which
+its mistress, an invalid Russian lady, had partly placed at our
+disposition while she reclined in her own quarter of the garden, on a
+chaise longue and under a mushroom hat with a green veil, and I, in the
+course of the mild excursions appointed as my limit, considered her from
+afar in the light of the legends supplied to me, as to her identity,
+history, general practices and proceedings, by my younger brother Wilky,
+who, according to his nature, or I may say to his genius, had made
+without loss of time great advances of acquaintance with her and
+quickened thereby my sense of his superior talent for life. Wilky's age
+followed closely on mine, and from that time on we conversed and
+consorted, though with lapses and disparities; I being on the whole,
+during the succession of those years, in the grateful, the really
+fortunate position of having one exposure, rather the northward, as it
+were, to the view of W. J., and the other, perhaps the more immediately
+sunned surface, to the genial glow of my junior. Of this I shall have
+more to say, but to meet in memory meanwhile even this early flicker of
+him is to know again something of the sense that I attached all along
+our boyhood to his successful sociability, his instinct for intercourse,
+his genius (as I have used the word) for making friends. It was the only
+genius he had, declaring itself from his tenderest years, never knowing
+the shadow of defeat, and giving me, above all, from as far back and by
+the very radiation of the fact, endlessly much to think of. For I had in
+a manner, thanks to the radiation, much of the benefit; his geniality
+was absolutely such that the friends he made were made almost less for
+himself, so to speak, than for other friends--of whom indeed we, his own
+adjuncts, were easily first--so far at least as he discriminated. At
+night all cats are grey, and in this brother's easy view all his
+acquaintance were his family. The trail of his sociability was over us
+all alike--though it here concerns me but to the effect, as I recover
+it, of its weight on my comparatively so indirect faculty for what is
+called taking life. I must have already at the Campagne Gerebsoff begun
+to see him take it with all his directness--begun in fact to be a trifle
+tormentedly aware that, though there might be many ways of so doing, we
+are condemned practically to a choice, not made free of them all;
+reduced to the use of but one, at the best, which it is to our interest
+to make the most of, since we may indeed sometimes make much. There was
+a small sad charm, I should doubtless add, in this operation of the
+contrast of the case before me with my own case; it was positively as if
+Wilky's were supplying me on occasion with the most immediate matter for
+my own. That was particularly marked after he had, with our elder
+brother, been placed at school, the Pensionnat Roediger, at Châtelaine,
+then much esteemed and where I was supposedly to join them on my
+complete recovery: I recall sociable, irrepressibly sociable _sorties_
+thence on the part of the pair as promptly breaking out, not less than I
+recall sociable afternoon visits to the establishment on the part of the
+rest of us: it was my brothers' first boarding school, but as we had in
+the New York conditions kept punctually rejoining our family, so in
+these pleasant Genevese ones our family returned the attention. Of this
+also more anon; my particular point is just the wealth of Wilky's
+contribution to my rich current consciousness--the consciousness fairly
+_made_ rich by my taking in, as aforesaid, at reflective hours, hours
+when I was in a manner alone with it, our roomy and shadowy, our almost
+haunted interior.
+
+Admirable the scale and solidity, in general, of the ancient villas
+planted about Geneva, and our house affected me as so massive and so
+spacious that even our own half of it seemed vast. I had never before
+lived so long in anything so old and, as I somehow felt, so deep; depth,
+depth upon depth, was what came out for me at certain times of my
+waiting above, in my immense room of thick embrasures and rather prompt
+obscurity, while the summer afternoon waned and my companions, often
+below at dinner, lingered and left me just perhaps a bit overwhelmed.
+That was the sense of it--the _character_, in the whole place, pressed
+upon me with a force I hadn't met and that was beyond my analysis--which
+is but another way of saying how directly notified I felt that such
+material conditions as I _had_ known could have had no depth at all. My
+depth was a vague measure, no doubt, but it made space, in the twilight,
+for an occasional small sound of voice or step from the garden or the
+rooms of which the great homely, the opaque green shutters opened there
+softly to echo in--mixed with reverberations finer and more momentous,
+personal, experimental, if they might be called so; which I much
+encouraged (they borrowed such tone from our new surrounding medium) and
+half of which were reducible to Wilky's personalities and Wilky's
+experience: these latter, irrepressibly communicated, being ever,
+enviably, though a trifle bewilderingly and even formidably, _of_
+personalities. There was the difference and the opposition, as I really
+believe I was already aware--that one way of taking life was to go in
+for everything and everyone, which kept you abundantly occupied, and the
+other way was to be as occupied, quite as occupied, just with the sense
+and the image of it all, and on only a fifth of the actual immersion: a
+circumstance extremely strange. Life was taken almost equally both
+ways--that, I mean, seemed the strangeness; mere brute quantity and
+number being so much less in one case than the other. These latter were
+what I should have _liked_ to go in for, had I but had the intrinsic
+faculties; that more than ever came home to me on those occasions when,
+as I could move further and stay out longer, I accompanied my parents on
+afternoon visits to Châtelaine and the Campagne Roediger, a scene that
+has remained with me as nobly placid and pastoral. The great trees stood
+about, casting afternoon shadows; the old thick-walled green-shuttered
+villa and its dépendances had the air of the happiest home; the big
+bearded bonhomie of M. Roediger among his little polyglot charges--no
+petits pays chauds these--appeared to justify, and more, the fond New
+York theory of Swiss education, the kind _à la portée_ of young New
+Yorkers, as a beautifully genialised, humanised, civilised, even
+romanticised thing, in which, amid lawny mountain slopes, "the
+languages" flowed into so many beaming recipients on a stream of milk
+and honey, and "the relation," above all, the relation from master to
+pupil and back again, was of an amenity that wouldn't have been of this
+world save for the providential arrangement of a perfect pedagogic
+Switzerland. "Did you notice the relation--how charming it was?" our
+parents were apt to say to each other after these visits, in reference
+to some observed show of confidence between instructor and instructed;
+while, as for myself, I was lost in the wonder of _all_ the
+relations--my younger brother seemed to live, and to his own ingenuous
+relish as well, in such a happy hum of them. The languages had reason to
+prosper--they were so copiously represented; the English jostled the
+American, the Russian the German, and there even trickled through a
+little funny French.
+
+A great Geneva school of those days was the Institution Haccius, to
+which generations of our young countrymen had been dedicated and our own
+faces first turned--under correction, however, by the perceived truth
+that if the languages were in question the American reigned there almost
+unchallenged. The establishment chosen for our experiment must have
+appealed by some intimate and insinuating side, and as less patronised
+by the rich and the sophisticated--for even in those days some Americans
+were rich and several sophisticated; little indeed as it was all to
+matter in the event, so short a course had the experiment just then to
+run. What it mainly brings back to me is the fine old candour and
+queerness of the New York state of mind, begotten really not a little, I
+think, under our own roof, by the mere charmed perusal of Rodolphe
+Toeppfer's Voyages en Zigzag, the two goodly octavo volumes of which
+delightful work, an adorable book, taken with its illustrations, had
+come out early in the 'fifties and had engaged our fondest study. It is
+the copious chronicle, by a schoolmaster o£ endless humour and
+sympathy--of what degree and form of "authority" it never occurred to
+one even to ask--of his holiday excursions with his pupils, mainly on
+foot and with staff and knapsack, through the incomparable Switzerland
+of the time before the railways and the "rush," before the monster
+hotels, the desecrated summits, the vulgarised valleys, the circular
+tours, the perforating tubes, the funiculars, the hordes, the horrors.
+To turn back to Toeppfer's pages to-day is to get the sense of a lost
+paradise, and the effect for me even yet of having pored over them in my
+childhood is to steep in sweetness and quaintness some of the
+pictures--his own illustrations are of the pleasantest and drollest, and
+the association makes that faded Swiss master of landscape Calame, of
+the so-called calamités, a quite sufficient Ruysdael. It must have been
+conceived for us that we would lead in these conditions--always in
+pursuit of an education--a life not too dissimilar to that of the
+storied exiles in the forest of Arden; though one would fain not press,
+after all, upon ideals of culture so little organised, so little
+conscious, up to that moment, of our ferocities of comparison and
+competition, of imposed preparation. This particular loose ideal reached
+out from the desert--or what might under discouragement pass for such;
+it invoked the light, but a simplicity of view which was somehow one
+with the beauty of other convictions accompanied its effort; and though
+a glance at the social "psychology" of some of its cheerful estimates,
+its relative importances, assumed and acted upon, might here seem
+indicated, there are depths of the ancient serenity that nothing would
+induce me to sound.
+
+I need linger the less, moreover, since we in fact, oddly enough,
+lingered so little; so very little, for reasons doubtless well known to
+ourselves at the time but which I at present fail to recapture, that
+what next stands vividly out for me is our renewed passage through Paris
+on the way to London for the winter; a turn of our situation invested at
+the time with nothing whatever of the wonderful, yet which would again
+half prompt me to soundings were I not to recognise in it that mark of
+the fitful, that accent of the improvised, that general quality of
+earnest and reasoned, yet at the same time almost passionate, impatience
+which was to devote us for some time to variety, almost to incoherency,
+of interest. We had fared across the sea under the glamour of the Swiss
+school in the abstract, but the Swiss school in the concrete soon turned
+stale on our hands; a fact over which I remember myself as no further
+critical than to feel, not without zest, that, since one was all eyes
+and the world decidedly, at such a pace, all images, it ministered to
+the panoramic. It ministered, to begin with, through our very early
+start for Lyons again in the October dawn--without Nadali or the
+carriages this time, but on the basis of the malle-poste, vast, yellow
+and rumbling, which we availed wholly to fill and of which the high
+haughtiness was such that it could stop, even for an instant, only at
+appointed and much dissevered places--to the effect, I recall, of its
+vainly attempted arrest by our cousin Charlotte King, beforementioned,
+whom I see now suddenly emerge, fresh, confident and pretty, from some
+rural retreat by the road, a scene of simple villeggiatura, "rien que
+pour saluer ces dames," as she pleaded to the conductor; whom she
+practically, if not permittedly, overmastered, leaving with me still the
+wonder of her happy fusion of opposites. The coach had not, in the
+event, paused, but so neither had she, and as it ignored flush and
+flurry quite as it defied delay, she was equally a match for it in these
+particulars, blandly achieving her visit to us while it rumbled on,
+making a perfect success and a perfect grace of her idea. She dropped as
+elegantly out as she had gymnastically floated in, and "ces dames" must
+much have wished they could emulate her art. Save for this my view of
+that migration has faded, though to shine out again to the sense of our
+early morning arrival in Paris a couple of days later, and our hunt
+there, vain at first, for an hotel that would put us numerously up; vain
+till we had sat awhile, in the Rue du Helder, I think, before that of an
+Albany uncle, luckily on the scene and finally invoked, who after some
+delay descended to us with a very foreign air, I fancied, and no
+possibility, to his regret, of placing us under his own roof; as if
+indeed, I remember reflecting, we could, such as we were, have been
+desired to share his foreign interests--such as _they_ were. He espoused
+our cause, however, with gay goodnature--while I wondered, in my
+admiration for him and curiosity about him, how he really liked us, and
+(a bit doubtfully) whether I should have liked us had I been in his
+place; and after some further adventure installed us at the Hôtel de la
+Ville de Paris in the Rue de la Ville-l'Evèque, a resort now long since
+extinct, though it lingered on for some years, and which I think of as
+rather huddled and disappointingly private, to the abatement of
+spectacle, and standing obliquely beyond a wall, a high gateway and a
+more or less cobbled court.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+Little else of that Parisian passage remains with me--it was probably of
+the briefest; I recover only a visit with my father to the Palais de
+l'Industrie, where the first of the great French Exhibitions, on the
+model, much reduced, of the English Crystal Palace of 1851, was still
+open, a fact explaining the crowded inns; and from that visit win back
+but the department of the English pictures and our stopping long before
+The Order of Release of a young English painter, J. E. Millais, who had
+just leaped into fame, and my impression of the rare treatment of whose
+baby's bare legs, pendent from its mother's arms, is still as vivid to
+me as if from yesterday. The vivid yields again to the vague--I scarce
+know why so utterly--till consciousness, waking up in London, renews
+itself, late one evening and very richly, at the Gloucester Hotel (or
+Coffee-House, as I think it was then still called,) which occupied that
+corner of Piccadilly and Berkeley Street where more modern
+establishments have since succeeded it, but where a fatigued and
+famished American family found on that occasion a fine old British
+virtue in cold roast beef and bread and cheese and ale; their expert
+acclamation of which echoes even now in my memory. It keeps company
+there with other matters equally British and, as we say now, early
+Victorian; the thick gloom of the inn rooms, the faintness of the
+glimmering tapers, the blest inexhaustibility of the fine joint,
+surpassed only by that of the grave waiter's reserve--plain, immutably
+plain fare all, but prompting in our elders an emphasis of relief and
+relish, the "There's nothing like it after all!" tone, which re-excited
+expectation, which in fact seemed this time to re-announce a basis for
+faith and joy.
+
+That basis presently shrank to the scale of a small house hard by the
+hotel, at the entrance of Berkeley Square--expeditiously lighted on, it
+would thus appear, which again has been expensively superseded, but to
+the ancient little facts of which I fondly revert, since I owe them what
+I feel to have been, in the far past, the prime faint revelation, the
+small broken expression, of the London I was afterwards to know. The
+place wears on the spot, to this day, no very different face; the house
+that has risen on the site of ours is still immediately neighboured at
+the left by the bookseller, the circulating-librarian and news-agent,
+who modestly flourished in our time under the same name; the great
+establishment of Mr. Gunter, just further along, is as soberly and
+solidly seated; the mews behind the whole row, from the foot of Hay Hill
+at the right, wanders away to Bruton Street with the irregular grace
+that spoke to my young fancy; Hay Hill itself is somehow less sharply
+precipitous, besides being no longer paved, as I seem to recall its
+having been, with big boulders, and I was on the point of saying that
+its antique charm in some degree abides. Nothing, however, could be
+further from the truth; its antique charm quite succumbed, years ago, to
+that erection of lumpish "mansions" which followed the demolition of the
+old-world town-residence, as the house-agents say, standing, on the
+south side, between court and I suppose garden, where Dover Street gives
+way to Grafton; a house of many histories, of vague importances and cold
+reserves and deep suggestions, I used to think after scaling the steep
+quite on purpose to wonder about it. A whole chapter of life was
+condensed, for our young sensibility, I make out, into the couple of
+months--they can scarce have been more--spent by us in these quarters,
+which must have proved too narrow and too towny; but it can have had no
+passage so lively as the occurrences at once sequent to my father's
+having too candidly made known in some public print, probably The Times,
+that an American gentleman, at such an address, desired to arrange with
+a competent young man for the tuition at home of his three sons. The
+effect of his rash failure to invite application by letter only was the
+assault of an army of visitors who filled us with consternation; they
+hung about the door, cumbered the hall, choked the staircase and sat
+grimly individual in odd corners. How they were dealt with, given my
+father's precipitate and general charity, I can but feebly imagine; our
+own concern, in the event, was with a sole selected presence, that of
+Scotch Mr. Robert Thompson, who gave us his care from breakfast to
+luncheon each morning that winter, who afterwards carried on a school at
+Edinburgh, and whom, in years long subsequent, I happened to help R. L.
+Stevenson to recognise gaily as _his_ early pedagogue. He was so deeply
+solicitous, yet withal so mild and kind and shy, with no harsher
+injunction to us ever than "Come now, be getting on!" that one could but
+think well of a world in which so gentle a spirit might flourish; while
+it is doubtless to the credit of his temper that remembrance is a blank
+in respect to his closer ministrations. I recall vividly his fresh
+complexion, his very round clear eyes, his tendency to trip over his own
+legs or feet while thoughtfully circling about us, and his constant
+dress-coat, worn with trousers of a lighter hue, which was perhaps the
+prescribed uniform of a daily tutor then; but I ask myself in vain what
+I can have "studied" with him, there remaining with me afterwards, to
+testify--this putting any scrap of stored learning aside--no single
+textbook save the Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare, which was given me as
+(of all things in the world) a reward. A reward for what I am again at a
+loss to say--not certainly for having "got on" to anything like the tune
+plaintively, for the most part, piped to me. It is a very odd and yet to
+myself very rich and full reminiscence, though I remember how, looking
+back at it from after days, W. J. denounced it to me, and with it the
+following year and more spent in Paris, as a poor and arid and
+lamentable time, in which, missing such larger chances and connections
+as we might have reached out to, we had done nothing, he and I, but walk
+about together, in a state of the direst propriety, little "high" black
+hats and inveterate gloves, the childish costume of the place and
+period, to stare at grey street-scenery (that of early Victorian London
+had tones of a neutrality!) dawdle at shop-windows and buy water-colours
+and brushes with which to bedaub eternal drawing-blocks. We might, I
+dare say, have felt higher impulses and carried out larger plans--though
+indeed present to me for this, on my brother's so expressing himself, is
+my then quick recognition of the deeper stirrings and braver needs he at
+least must have known, and my perfect if rueful sense of having myself
+had no such quarrel with our conditions: embalmed for me did they even
+to that shorter retrospect appear in a sort of fatalism of patience,
+spiritless in a manner, no doubt, yet with an inwardly active,
+productive and ingenious side.
+
+It was just the fact of our having so walked and dawdled and dodged that
+made the charm of memory; in addition to which what could one have asked
+more than to be steeped in a medium so dense that whole elements of it,
+forms of amusement, interest and wonder, soaked through to some
+appreciative faculty and made one fail at the most of nothing but one's
+lessons? My brother was right in so far as that my question--the one I
+have just reproduced--could have been asked only by a person
+incorrigible in throwing himself back upon substitutes for lost causes,
+substitutes that might _temporarily_ have appeared queer and small; a
+person so haunted, even from an early age, with visions of life, that
+aridities, for him, were half a terror and half an impossibility, and
+that the said substitutes, the economies and ingenuities that protested,
+in their dumb vague way, against weakness of situation or of direct and
+applied faculty, were in themselves really a revel of spirit and
+thought. It _had_ indeed again an effect of almost pathetic incoherence
+that our brave quest of "the languages," suffering so prompt and for the
+time at least so accepted and now so inscrutably irrecoverable a check,
+should have contented itself with settling us by that Christmas in a
+house, more propitious to our development, in St. John's Wood, where we
+enjoyed a considerable garden and wistful view, though by that windowed
+privilege alone, of a large green expanse in which ladies and gentlemen
+practised archery. Just _that_--and not the art even, but the mere
+spectacle--might have been one of the substitutes in question; if not
+for the languages at least for one or another of the romantic
+connections we seemed a little to have missed: it was such a whiff of
+the old world of Robin Hood as we could never have looked up from the
+mere thumbed "story," in Fourteenth Street at any rate, to any soft
+confidence of. More than I can begin to say, that is by a greater number
+of queer small channels, did the world about us, thus continuous with
+the old world of Robin Hood, steal into my sense--a constant state of
+subjection to which fact is no bad instance of those refinements of
+surrender that I just named as my fond practice. I seem to see to-day
+that the London of the 'fifties was even to the weak perception of
+childhood a much less generalised, a much more eccentrically and
+variously characterised place, than the present great accommodated and
+accommodating city; it had fewer resources but it had many more
+features, scarce one of which failed to help the whole to bristle with
+what a little gaping American could take for an intensity of difference
+from _his_ supposed order. It was extraordinarily the picture and the
+scene of Dickens, now so changed and superseded; it offered to my
+presumptuous vision still more the reflection of Thackeray--and where is
+the _detail_ of the reflection of Thackeray now?--so that as I trod the
+vast length of Baker Street, the Thackerayan vista of other days, I
+throbbed with the pride of a vastly enlarged acquaintance.
+
+I dare say our perambulations of Baker Street in our little "top" hats
+and other neatnesses must have been what W. J. meant by our poverty of
+life--whereas it was probably one of the very things most expressive to
+myself of the charm and the colour of history and (from the point of
+view of the picturesque) of society. We were often in Baker Street by
+reason of those stretched-out walks, at the remembered frequency and
+long-drawn push of which I am to-day amazed; recalling at the same time,
+however, that save for Robert Thompson's pitching ball with us in the
+garden they took for us the place of all other agilities. I can't but
+feel them to have been marked in their way by a rare curiosity and
+energy. Good Mr. Thompson had followed us in our move, occupying
+quarters, not far off, above a baker's shop on a Terrace--a group of
+objects still untouched by time--where we occasionally by way of change
+attended for our lessons and where not the least of our inspirations was
+the confidence, again and again justified, that our mid-morning "break"
+would determine the appearance of a self-conscious stale cake, straight
+from below, received by us all each time as if it had been a sudden
+happy thought, and ushered in by a little girl who might have been a
+Dickens foundling or "orfling." Our being reduced to mumble cake in a
+suburban lodging by way of reaction from the strain of study would have
+been perhaps a pathetic picture, but we had field-days too, when we
+accompanied our excellent friend to the Tower, the Thames Tunnel, St.
+Paul's and the Abbey, to say nothing of the Zoological Gardens, almost
+close at hand and with which we took in that age of lingering forms no
+liberty of abbreviation; to say nothing either of Madame Tussaud's, then
+in our interminable but so amiable Baker Street, the only shade on the
+amiability of which was just that gruesome association with the portal
+of the Bazaar--since Madame Tussaud had, of all her treasures, most
+vividly revealed to me the Mrs. Manning and the Burke and Hare of the
+Chamber of Horrors which lurked just within it; whom, for days after
+making their acquaintance (and prolonging it no further than our
+conscientious friend thought advisable) I half expected, when alone, to
+meet quite dreadfully on the staircase or on opening a door. All this
+experience was valuable, but it was not the languages--save in so far
+indeed as it was the English, which we hadn't in advance so much aimed
+at, yet which more or less, and very interestingly, came; it at any rate
+perhaps broke our fall a little that French, of a sort, continued to be
+with us in the remarkably erect person of Mademoiselle Cusin, the Swiss
+governess who had accompanied us from Geneva, whose quite sharply
+extrusive but on the whole exhilarating presence I associate with this
+winter, and who led in that longish procession of more or less similar
+domesticated presences which was to keep the torch, that is the accent,
+among us, fairly alight. The variety and frequency of the arrivals and
+departures of these ladies--whose ghostly names, again, so far as I
+recall them, I like piously to preserve, Augustine Danse, Amélie Fortin,
+Marie Guyard, Marie Bonningue, Félicie Bonningue, Clarisse
+Bader--mystifies me in much the same degree as our own academic
+vicissitudes in New York; I can no more imagine why, sociable and
+charitable, we so often changed governesses than I had contemporaneously
+grasped the principle of our succession of schools: the whole group of
+phenomena reflected, I gather, as a rule, much more the extreme
+promptitude of the parental optimism than any disproportionate habit of
+impatience. The optimism begot precipitation, and the precipitation had
+too often to confess itself. What is instructive, what is historic, is
+the probability that young persons offering themselves at that time as
+guides and communicators--the requirements of our small sister were for
+long modest enough--quite conceivably lacked preparedness, and were so
+thrown back on the extempore, which in turn lacked abundance. One of
+these figures, that of Mademoiselle Danse, the most Parisian, and
+prodigiously so, was afterwards to stand out for us quite luridly--a
+cloud of revelations succeeding her withdrawal; a cloud which, thick as
+it was, never obscured our impression of her genius and her charm. The
+daughter of a political proscript who had but just escaped, by the
+legend, being seized in his bed on the terrible night of the
+Deux-Décembre, and who wrote her micawberish letters from Gallipolis,
+Ohio, she subsequently figured to my imagination (in the light, that is,
+of the divined revelations, too dreadful for our young ears,) as the
+most brilliant and most genial of irregular characters, exhibiting the
+Parisian "mentality" at its highest, or perhaps rather its deepest, and
+more remarkable for nothing than for the consummate little art and grace
+with which she had for a whole year draped herself in the mantle of our
+innocent air. It was exciting, it was really valuable, to have to that
+extent rubbed shoulders with an "adventuress"; it showed one that for
+the adventuress there might on occasion be much to be said.
+
+Those, however, were later things--extensions of view hampered for the
+present, as I have noted, by our mere London street-scenery, which had
+much to build out for us. I see again that we but endlessly walked and
+endlessly daubed, and that our walks, with an obsession of their own,
+constantly abetted our daubing. We knew no other boys at all, and we
+even saw no others, I seem to remember, save the essentially rude ones,
+rude with a kind of mediæval rudeness for which our clear New York
+experience had given us no precedent, and of which the great and
+constant sign was the artless, invidious wonder produced in them, on our
+public appearances, by the alien stamp in us that, for our comfort, we
+vainly sought to dissimulate. We conformed in each particular, so far as
+we could, to the prevailing fashion and standard, of a narrow range in
+those days, but in our very plumage--putting our _ramage_ aside--our
+wood-note wild must have seemed to sound, so sharply we challenged, when
+abroad, the attention of our native contemporaries, and even sometimes
+of their elders, pulled up at sight of us in the from-head-to-foot
+stare, a curiosity void of sympathy and that attached itself for some
+reason especially to our feet, which were not abnormally large. The
+London people had for themselves, at the same time, an exuberance of
+type; we found it in particular a world of costume, often of very odd
+costume--the most intimate notes of which were the postmen in their
+frock-coats of military red and their black beaver hats; the milkwomen,
+in hats that often emulated these, in little shawls and strange short,
+full frocks, revealing enormous boots, with their pails swung from their
+shoulders on wooden yokes; the inveterate footmen hooked behind the
+coaches of the rich, frequently in pairs and carrying staves, together
+with the mounted and belted grooms without the attendance of whom
+riders, of whichever sex--and riders then were much more
+numerous--almost never went forth. The range of character, on the other
+hand, reached rather dreadfully down; there were embodied and
+exemplified "horrors" in the streets beside which any present exhibition
+is pale, and I well remember the almost terrified sense of their
+salience produced in me a couple of years later, on the occasion of a
+flying return from the Continent with my father, by a long, an
+interminable drive westward from the London Bridge railway-station. It
+was a soft June evening, with a lingering light and swarming crowds, as
+they then seemed to me, of figures reminding me of George Cruikshank's
+Artful Dodger and his Bill Sikes and his Nancy, only with the bigger
+brutality of life, which pressed upon the cab, the early-Victorian
+fourwheeler, as we jogged over the Bridge, and cropped up in more and
+more gas-lit patches for all our course, culminating, somewhere far to
+the west, in the vivid picture, framed by the cab-window, of a woman
+reeling backward as a man felled her to the ground with a blow in the
+face. The London view at large had in fact more than a Cruikshank, there
+still survived in it quite a Hogarth, side--which I had of course then
+no name for, but which I was so sharply to recognise on coming back
+years later that it fixed for me the veracity of the great pictorial
+chronicler. Hogarth's mark is even yet not wholly overlaid; though time
+has _per contra_ dealt with that stale servility of address which most
+expressed to our young minds the rich burden of a Past, the consequence
+of too much history. I liked for my own part a lot of history, but felt
+in face of certain queer old obsequiosities and appeals, whinings and
+sidlings and hand-rubbings and curtsey-droppings, the general play of
+apology and humility, behind which the great dim social complexity
+seemed to mass itself, that one didn't quite want so inordinate a
+quantity. Of that particular light and shade, however, the big broom of
+change has swept the scene bare; more history still has been after all
+what it wanted. Quite another order, in the whole connection, strikes
+me as reigning to-day--though not without the reminder from it that the
+relations in which manner, as a generalised thing, in which "tone," is
+_positively_ pleasant, is really assured and sound, clear and
+interesting, are numerous and definite only when it has had in its past
+some strange phases and much misadventure.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+We were still being but vaguely "formed," yet it was a vagueness
+preferred apparently by our parents to the only definiteness in any
+degree open to us, that of the English school away from home (the London
+private school near home they would absolutely none of;) which they saw
+as a fearful and wonderful, though seemingly effective, preparation of
+the young for English life and an English career, but related to that
+situation only, so little related in fact to any other as to make it, in
+a differing case, an educational cul-de-sac, the worst of economies.
+They had doubtless heard claimed for it just that no other method for
+boys _was_ so splendidly general, but they had, I judge, their own sense
+of the matter--which would have been that it all depended on what was
+meant by this. The truth was, above all, that to them the formative
+forces most closely bearing on us were not in the least vague, but very
+definite by _their_ measure and intention; there were "advantages,"
+generally much belauded, that appealed to them scantly, and other
+matters, conceptions of character and opportunity, ideals, values,
+importances, enjoying no great common credit but for which it was their
+belief that they, under whatever difficulties, more or less provided. In
+respect of which I further remind myself of the blest fewness, as yet,
+of our years; and I come back to my own sense, benighted though it may
+have been, of a highly-coloured and remarkably active life. I recognise
+our immediate, our practical ferment even in our decent perambulations,
+our discussions, W. J.'s and mine, of whether we had in a given case
+best apply for a renewal of our "artists' materials" to Messrs. Rowney
+or to Messrs. Windsor and Newton, and in our pious resort, on these
+determinations, to Rathbone Place, more beset by our steps, probably,
+than any other single corner of the town, and the short but charged
+vista of which lives for me again in the tempered light of those old
+winter afternoons. Of scarce less moment than these were our frequent
+visits, in the same general connection, to the old Pantheon of Oxford
+Street, now fallen from its high estate, but during that age a place of
+fine rococo traditions, a bazaar, an exhibition, an opportunity, at the
+end of long walks, for the consumption of buns and ginger-beer, and
+above all a monument to the genius of that wonderful painter B. R.
+Haydon. We must at one time quite have haunted the Pantheon, where we
+doubtless could better than elsewhere sink to contemplative, to
+ruminative rest: Haydon's huge canvases covered the walls--I wonder
+what has become now of The Banishment of Aristides, attended to the city
+gate by his wife and babe, every attitude and figure in which,
+especially that of the foreshortened boy picking up stones to shy at the
+all-too-just, stares out at me still. We found in these works remarkable
+interest and beauty, the reason of which was partly, no doubt, that we
+hung, to fascination, at home, over the three volumes of the hapless
+artist's Autobiography, then a new book, which our father, indulgent to
+our preoccupation, had provided us with; but I blush to risk the further
+surmise that the grand manner, the heroic and the classic, in Haydon,
+came home to us more warmly and humanly than in the masters commended as
+"old," who, at the National Gallery, seemed to meet us so little
+half-way, to hold out the hand of fellowship or suggest something that
+_we_ could do, or could at least want to. The beauty of Haydon was just
+that he was new, shiningly new, and if he hinted that we might perhaps
+in some happy future emulate his big bravery there was nothing so
+impossible about it. If we adored daubing we preferred it _fresh_, and
+the genius of the Pantheon was fresh, whereas, strange to say, Rubens
+and Titian were not. Even the charm of the Pantheon yielded, however, to
+that of the English collection, the Vernon bequest to the nation, then
+arrayed at Marlborough House and to which the great plumed and draped
+and dusty funeral car of the Duke of Wellington formed an attractive
+adjunct. The ground-floor chambers there, none of them at that time
+royally inhabited, come back to me as altogether bleak and bare and as
+owing their only dignity to Maclise, Mulready and Landseer, to David
+Wilkie and Charles Leslie. _They_ were, by some deep-seated English
+mystery, the real unattainable, just as they were none the less the
+directly inspiring and the endlessly delightful. I could never have
+enough of Maclise's Play-scene in Hamlet, which I supposed the finest
+composition in the world (though Ophelia did look a little as if cut in
+silhouette out of white paper and pasted on;) while as I gazed, and
+gazed again, at Leslie's Sancho Panza and his Duchess I pushed through
+the great hall of romance to the central or private apartments.
+Trafalgar Square had its straight message for us only in the May-time
+exhibition, the Royal Academy of those days having, without a home of
+its own, to borrow space from the National Gallery--space partly
+occupied, in the summer of 1856, by the first fresh fruits of the
+Pre-Raphaelite efflorescence, among which I distinguish Millais's Vale
+of Rest, his Autumn Leaves and, if I am not mistaken, his prodigious
+Blind Girl. The very word Pre-Raphaelite wore for us that intensity of
+meaning, not less than of mystery, that thrills us in its perfection but
+for one season, the prime hour of first initiations, and I may perhaps
+somewhat mix the order of our great little passages of perception.
+Momentous to us again was to be the Academy show of 1858, where there
+were, from the same wide source, still other challenges to wonder,
+Holman Hunt's Scapegoat most of all, which I remember finding so charged
+with the awful that I was glad I saw it in company--_it_ in company and
+I the same: I believed, or tried to believe, I should have feared to
+face it all alone in a room. By that time moreover--I mean by 1858--we
+had been more fully indoctrinated, or such was the case at least with
+W. J., for whom, in Paris, during the winter of 1857, instruction at the
+atelier of M. Léon Coigniet, of a limited order and adapted to his
+years, had been candidly provided--that M. Léon Coigniet whose Marius
+meditating among the Ruins of Carthage impressed us the more, at the
+Luxembourg (even more haunted by us in due course than the Pantheon had
+been,) in consequence of this family connection.
+
+Let me not, however, nip the present thread of our æsthetic evolution
+without a glance at that comparatively spare but deeply appreciated
+experience of the London theatric privilege which, so far as occasion
+favoured us, also pressed the easy spring. The New York familiarities
+had to drop; going to the play presented itself in London as a serious,
+ponderous business: a procession of two throbbing and heaving cabs over
+vast foggy tracts of the town, after much arrangement in advance and
+with a renewal of far peregrination, through twisting passages and
+catacombs, even after crossing the magic threshold. We sat in strange
+places, with still stranger ones behind or beside; we felt walls and
+partitions, in our rear, getting so hot that we wondered if the house
+was to burst into flame; I recall in especial our being arrayed, to the
+number of nine persons, all of our contingent, in a sort of rustic
+balcony or verandah which, simulating the outer gallery of a Swiss
+cottage framed in creepers, formed a feature of Mr. Albert Smith's
+once-famous representation of the Tour of Mont Blanc. Big, bearded,
+rattling, chattering, mimicking Albert Smith again charms my senses,
+though subject to the reflection that his type and presence,
+superficially so important, so ample, were somehow at odds with such
+ingratiations, with the reckless levity of his performance--a
+performance one of the great effects of which was, as I remember it, the
+very brief stop and re-departure of the train at Épernay, with the
+ringing of bells, the bawling of guards, the cries of travellers, the
+slamming of doors and the tremendous pop as of a colossal
+champagne-cork, made all simultaneous and vivid by Mr. Smith's mere
+personal resources and graces. But it is the publicity of our situation
+as a happy family that I best remember, and how, to our embarrassment,
+we seemed put forward in our illustrative châlet as part of the
+boisterous show and of what had been paid for by the house. Two other
+great evenings stand out for me as not less collectively enjoyed, one of
+these at the Princess's, then under the management of Charles Kean, the
+unprecedented (as he was held) Shakespearean revivalist, the other at
+the Olympic, where Alfred Wigan, the extraordinary and too short-lived
+Robson and the shrewd and handsome Mrs. Stirling were the high
+attraction. Our enjoyment of Charles Kean's presentation of Henry the
+Eighth figures to me as a momentous date in our lives: we did nothing
+for weeks afterwards but try to reproduce in water-colours Queen
+Katharine's dream-vision of the beckoning, consoling angels, a radiant
+group let down from the skies by machinery then thought marvellous--when
+indeed we were not parading across our schoolroom stage as the
+portentous Cardinal and impressively alternating his last speech to
+Cromwell with Buckingham's, that is with Mr. Ryder's, address on the way
+to the scaffold. The spectacle had seemed to us prodigious--as it was
+doubtless at its time the last word of costly scenic science; though as
+I look back from the high ground of an age that has mastered tone and
+fusion I seem to see it as comparatively garish and violent, after the
+manner of the complacently approved stained-glass church-windows of the
+same period. I was to have my impression of Charles Kean renewed later
+on--ten years later, in America--without a rag of scenic reinforcement;
+when I was struck with the fact that no actor so little graced by nature
+probably ever went so far toward repairing it by a kind of cold rage of
+endeavour. Were he and his wife really not _coercively_ interesting on
+that Boston night of Macbeth in particular, hadn't their art a
+distinction that triumphed over battered age and sorry harshness, or was
+I but too easily beguiled by the old association? I have enjoyed and
+forgotten numberless rich hours of spectatorship, but somehow still find
+hooked to the wall of memory the picture of this hushed couple in the
+castle court, with the knocking at the gate, with Macbeth's stare of
+pitiful horror at his unused daggers and with the grand manner, up to
+the height of the argument, of Mrs. Kean's coldly portentous snatch of
+them. What I especially owe that lady is my sense of what she had in
+common, as a queer hooped and hook-nosed figure, of large circumference
+and archaic attire, strange tasteless toggery, with those performers of
+the past who are preserved for us on the small canvases of Hogarth and
+Zoffany; she helped one back at that time of her life to a vision of
+the Mrs. Cibbers and the Mrs. Pritchards--so affecting may often be such
+recovered links.
+
+I see the evening at the Olympic as really itself partaking of that
+antiquity, even though Still Waters Run Deep, then in its flourishing
+freshness and as to which I remember my fine old friend Fanny Kemble's
+mentioning to me in the distant after-time that she had directed Tom
+Taylor to Charles de Bernard's novel of Un Gendre for the subject of it,
+passed at the moment for a highly modern "social study." It is perhaps
+in particular through the memory of our dismal approach to the theatre,
+the squalid slum of Wych Street, then incredibly brutal and barbarous as
+an avenue to joy, an avenue even sometimes for the muffled coach of
+Royalty, that the episode affects me as antedating some of the
+conditions of the mid-Victorian age; the general credit of which, I
+should add, was highly re-established for us by the consummately quiet
+and natural art, as we expertly pronounced it, of Alfred Wigan's John
+Mildmay and the breadth and sincerity of the representative of the rash
+mother-in-law whom he so imperturbably puts in her place. This was an
+exhibition supposed in its day to leave its spectators little to envy in
+the highest finish reached by the French theatre. At a remarkable
+height, in a different direction, moved the strange and vivid little
+genius of Robson, a master of fantastic intensity, unforgettable for
+us, we felt that night, in Planché's extravaganza of The Discreet
+Princess, a Christmas production preluding to the immemorial
+harlequinade. I still see Robson slide across the stage, in one sidelong
+wriggle, as the small black sinister Prince Richcraft of the fairy-tale,
+everything he did at once very dreadful and very droll, thoroughly true
+and yet none the less _macabre_, the great point of it all its parody of
+Charles Kean in The Corsican Brothers; a vision filled out a couple of
+years further on by his Daddy Hardacre in a two-acts version of a
+Parisian piece thriftily and coarsely extracted from Balzac's Eugénie
+Grandet. This occasion must have given the real and the finer measure of
+his highly original talent; so present to me, despite the interval, is
+the distinctiveness of his little concentrated rustic miser whose
+daughter helps herself from his money-box so that her cousin and lover
+shall save a desperate father, her paternal uncle, from bankruptcy; and
+the prodigious effect of Robson's appalled descent, from an upper floor,
+his literal headlong tumble and rattle of dismay down a steep staircase
+occupying the centre of the stage, on his discovery of the rifling of
+his chest. Long was I to have in my ears the repeated shriek of his
+alarm, followed by a panting babble of wonder and rage as his impetus
+hurled him, a prostrate scrap of despair (he was a tiny figure, yet "so
+held the stage" that in his company you could see nobody else) half way
+across the room. I associate a little uncertainly with the same night
+the sight of Charles Matthews in Sheridan's Critic and in a comedy
+botched from the French, like everything else in those days that was not
+either Sheridan or Shakespeare, called Married for Money; an example
+above all, this association, of the heaped measure of the old
+bills--vast and various enumerations as they were, of the size of but
+slightly reduced placards and with a strange and delightful greasy feel
+and redolence of printer's ink, intensely theatrical ink somehow, in
+their big black lettering. Charles Matthews must have been then in his
+mid-career, and him too, wasted and aged, infinitely "marked," I was to
+see again, ever so long after, in America; an impression reminding me,
+as I recover it, of how one took his talent so thoroughly for granted
+that he seemed somehow to get but half the credit of it: this at least
+in all save parts of mere farce and "patter," which were on a footing,
+and no very interesting one, of their own. The other effect, that of a
+naturalness so easy and immediate, so friendly and intimate, that one's
+relation with the artist lost itself in one's relation with the
+character, the artist thereby somehow positively suffering while the
+character gained, or at least while the spectator did--this comes back
+to me quite as a part even of my earlier experience and as attesting on
+behalf of the actor a remarkable genius; since there are no more
+charming artistic cases than those of the frank result, when it is frank
+_enough_, and the dissimulated process, when the dissimulation has been
+deep. To drop, or appear to drop, machinery and yet keep, or at least
+gain, intensity, the interesting intensity separated by a gulf from a
+mere unbought coincidence of aspect or organ, is really to do something.
+In spite of which, at the same time, what I perhaps most retain, by the
+light of the present, of the sense of that big and rather dusky night of
+Drury Lane is not so much the felt degree of anyone's talent as the fact
+that personality and artistry, _with_ their intensity, could work their
+spell in such a material desert, in conditions intrinsically so
+charmless, so bleak and bare. The conditions gave nothing of what we
+regard to-day as most indispensable--since our present fine conception
+is but to reduce and fill in the material desert, to people and carpet
+and curtain it. We may be right, so far as that goes, but our
+predecessors were, with their eye on the essence, not wrong; thanks to
+which they wear the crown of our now thinking of them--if we do think of
+them--as in their way giants and heroes. What their successors were to
+become is another question; very much better dressed, beyond all doubt.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+Good Robert Thompson was followed by _fin_ M. Lerambert--who was surely
+good too, in his different way; good at least for feigning an interest
+he could scarce have rejoicingly felt and that he yet somehow managed to
+give a due impression of: that artifice being, as we must dimly have
+divined at the time (in fact I make bold to say that I personally did
+divine it,) exactly a sign of his _finesse_. Of no such uncanny engine
+had Mr. Thompson, luckily, known a need--luckily since to what arsenal
+could he possibly have resorted for it? None capable of supplying it
+could ever have met his sight, and we ourselves should at a pinch have
+had to help him toward it. He was easily interested, or at least took an
+easy view, on such ground as we offered him, of what it was to be so;
+whereas his successor attached to the condition a different value--one
+recognising no secondary substitute. Perhaps this was why our connection
+with M. Lerambert can have lasted but four or five months--time even for
+his sharp subterfuge to have ceased entirely to serve him; though indeed
+even as I say this I vaguely recall that our separation was attended
+with friction, that it took him unaware and that he had been prepared
+(or so represented himself) for further sacrifices. It could have been
+no great one, assuredly, to deal with so intensely living a young mind
+as my elder brother's, it could have been but a happy impression
+constantly renewed; but we two juniors, Wilky and I, were a
+drag--Wilky's powers most displayed at that time in his preference for
+ingenuous talk over any other pursuit whatever, and my own aptitude
+showing for nil, according to our poor gentleman's report of me when a
+couple of months had sped, save as to rendering La Fontaine's fables
+into English with a certain corresponding felicity of idiom. I remember
+perfectly the parental communication to me of this fell judgment, I
+remember as well the interest with which its so quite definite character
+inspired me--that character had such beauty and distinctness; yet, and
+ever so strangely, I recover no sense of having been crushed, and this
+even though destitute, utterly, of any ground of appeal. The fact leaves
+me at a loss, since I also remember my not having myself thought
+particularly well, in the connection allowed, of my "rendering" faculty.
+"Oh," I seem inwardly to have said, "if it were to be, if it only could
+be, _really_ a question of rendering--!" and so, without confusion,
+though in vague, very vague, mystification to have left it: as if so
+many things, intrinsic and extrinsic, would have to change and operate,
+so many would have to happen, so much water have to flow under the
+bridge, before I could give primary application to such a thought, much
+more finish such a sentence.
+
+All of which is but a way of saying that we had since the beginning of
+the summer settled ourselves in Paris, and that M. Lerambert--by what
+agency invoked, by what revelation vouchsafed, I quite forget--was at
+this time attending us in a so-called pavilion, of middling size, that,
+between the Rond-Point and the Rue du Colisée, hung, at no great height,
+over the Avenue des Champs-Elysées; hung, that is, from the vantage of
+its own considerable terrace, surmounted as the parapet of the latter
+was with iron railings rising sufficiently to protect the place for
+familiar use and covert contemplation (we ever so fondly used it,) and
+yet not to the point of fencing out life. A blest little old-world
+refuge it must have seemed to us, with its protuberantly-paved and
+peculiarly resonant small court and idle _communs_ beside it, accessible
+by a high grille where the jangle of the bell and the clatter of
+response across the stones might have figured a comprehensive echo of
+all old Paris. Old Paris then even there considerably lingered; I
+recapture much of its presence, for that matter, within our odd relic
+of a house, the property of an American southerner from whom our
+parents had briefly hired it and who appeared to divide his time, poor
+unadmonished gentleman of the eve of the Revolution, between Louisiana
+and France. What association could have breathed more from the queer
+graces and the queer incommodities alike, from the diffused glassy
+polish of floor and perilous staircase, from the redundancy of mirror
+and clock and ormolu vase, from the irrepressibility of the white and
+gold panel, from that merciless elegance of tense red damask, above all,
+which made the gilt-framed backs of sofa and chair as sumptuous, no
+doubt, but as sumptuously stiff, as the brocaded walls? It was amid
+these refinements that we presently resumed our studies--even explicitly
+far from arduous at first, as the Champs-Elysées were perforce that year
+our summer habitation and some deference was due to the place and the
+season, lessons of any sort being at best an infraction of the latter.
+M. Lerambert, who was spare and tightly black-coated, spectacled, pale
+and prominently intellectual, who lived in the Rue Jacob with his mother
+and sister, exactly as he should have done to accentuate prophetically
+his resemblance, save for the spectacles, to some hero of Victor
+Cherbuliez, and who, in fine, was conscious, not unimpressively, of his
+authorship of a volume of meditative verse sympathetically mentioned by
+the Sainte-Beuve of the Causeries in a review of the young poets of the
+hour ("M. Lerambert too has loved, M. Lerambert too has suffered, M.
+Lerambert too has sung!" or words to that effect:) this subtle
+personality, really a high form of sensibility I surmise, and as
+qualified for other and intenser relations as any Cherbuliez figure of
+them all, was naturally not to be counted on to lead us gapingly forth
+as good Mr. Thompson had done; so that my reminiscence of warm
+somniferous mornings by the windows that opened to the clattery, plashy
+court is quite, so far as my record goes, relievingly unbroken.
+
+The afternoons, however, glimmer back to me shamelessly different, for
+our circle had promptly been joined by the all-knowing and all-imposing
+Mademoiselle Danse aforesaid, her of the so flexible _taille_ and the so
+salient smiling eyes, than which even those of Miss Rebecca Sharp, that
+other epic governess, were not more pleasingly green; who provided with
+high efficiency for our immediate looser needs--mine and Wilky's and
+those of our small brother Bob (l'ingénieux petit Robertson as she was
+to dub him,) and of our still smaller sister at least--our first fine
+_flâneries_ of curiosity. Her brave Vaudoise predecessor had been
+bequeathed by us in London to a higher sphere than service with mere
+earnest nomads could represent; but had left us clinging and weeping
+and was for a long time afterwards to write to us, faithfully, in the
+most beautiful copper-plate hand, out of the midst of her "rise"; with
+details that brought home to us as we had never known it brought the
+material and institutional difference between the nomadic and the
+solidly, the spreadingly seated. A couple of years later, on an occasion
+of our being again for a while in London, she hastened to call on us,
+and, on departing, amiably invited me to walk back with her, for a
+gossip--it was a bustling day of June--across a long stretch of the
+town; when I left her at a glittering portal with the impression of my
+having in our transit seen much of Society (the old London "season"
+filled the measure, had length and breadth and thickness, to an extent
+now foregone,) and, more particularly, achieved a small psychologic
+study, noted the action of the massive English machinery directed to its
+end, which had been in this case effectually to tame the presumptuous
+and "work over" the crude. I remember on that occasion retracing my
+steps from Eaton Square to Devonshire Street with a lively sense of
+observation exercised by the way, a perfect gleaning of golden straws.
+Our guide and philosopher of the summer days in Paris was no such
+character as that; she had arrived among us full-fledged and consummate,
+fortunately for the case altogether--as our mere candid humanity would
+otherwise have had scant practical pressure to bring. Thackeray's novel
+contains a plate from his own expressive hand representing Miss Sharp
+lost in a cynical day-dream while her neglected pupils are locked in a
+scrimmage on the floor; but the marvel of _our_ exemplar of the Becky
+type was exactly that though her larger, her more interested and
+sophisticated views had a range that she not only permitted us to guess
+but agreeably invited us to follow almost to their furthest limits, we
+never for a moment ceased to be aware of her solicitude. We might, we
+must, so tremendously have bored her, but no ironic artist could have
+caught her at any juncture in the posture of disgust: really, I imagine,
+because her own ironies would have been too fine for him and too
+numerous and too mixed. And this remarkable creature vouchsafed us all
+information for the free enjoyment--on the terms proper to our tender
+years--of her beautiful city.
+
+It was not by the common measure then so beautiful as now; the second
+Empire, too lately installed, was still more or less feeling its way,
+with the great free hand soon to be allowed to Baron Haussmann marked as
+yet but in the light preliminary flourish. Its connections with the
+past, however, still hung thickly on; its majesties and symmetries,
+comparatively vague and general, were subject to the happy accident, the
+charming lapse and the odd extrusion, a bonhomie of chance composition
+and colour now quite purged away. The whole region of the
+Champs-Elysées, where we must after all at first have principally
+prowled, was another world from the actual huge centre of repeated
+radiations; the splendid Avenue, as we of course already thought it,
+carried the eye from the Tuileries to the Arch, but pleasant old places
+abutted on it by the way, gardens and terraces and hôtels of another
+time, pavilions still braver than ours, cabarets and cafés of homely,
+almost of rural type, with a relative and doubtless rather dusty
+ruralism, spreading away to the River and the Wood. What was the Jardin
+d'Hiver, a place of entertainment standing quite over against us and
+that looped itself at night with little coloured oil-lamps, a mere
+twinkling grin upon the face of pleasure? Dim my impression of having
+been admitted--or rather, I suppose, conducted, though under
+conductorship now vague to me--to view it by colourless day, when it
+must have worn the stamp of an auction-room quite void of the "lots."
+More distinct on the other hand the image of the bustling barrière at
+the top of the Avenue, on the hither side of the Arch, where the old
+loose-girt _banlieue_ began at once and the two matched lodges of the
+octroi, highly, that is expressly even if humbly, architectural, guarded
+the entrance, on either side, with such a suggestion of the generations
+and dynasties and armies, the revolutions and restorations they had
+seen come and go. But the Avenue of the Empress, now, so much more
+thinly, but of the Wood itself, had already been traced, as the Empress
+herself, young, more than young, attestedly and agreeably _new_, and
+fair and shining, was, up and down the vista, constantly on exhibition;
+with the thrill of that surpassed for us, however, by the incomparable
+passage, as we judged it, of the baby Prince Imperial borne forth for
+his airing or his progress to Saint-Cloud in the splendid coach that
+gave a glimpse of appointed and costumed nursing breasts and laps, and
+beside which the _cent-gardes_, all light-blue and silver and intensely
+erect quick jolt, rattled with pistols raised and cocked. Was a public
+holiday ever more splendid than that of the Prince's baptism at Notre
+Dame, the fête of Saint-Napoléon, or was any ever more immortalised, as
+we say, than this one was to be by the wonderfully ample and vivid
+picture of it in the Eugène Rougon of Emile Zola, who must have taken it
+in, on the spot, as a boy of about our own number of years, though of so
+much more implanted and predestined an evocatory gift? The sense of that
+interminable hot day, a day of hanging about and waiting and shuffling
+in dust, in crowds, in fatigue, amid booths and pedlars and performers
+and false alarms and expectations and renewed reactions and rushes, all
+transfigured at the last, withal, by the biggest and brightest
+illumination up to that time offered even the Parisians, the blinding
+glare of the new Empire effectually symbolised--the vision of the whole,
+I say, comes back to me quite in the form of a chapter from the
+Rougon-Macquart, with its effect of something long and dense and heavy,
+without shades or undertones, but immensely kept-up and done. I dare say
+that for those months our contemplations, our daily exercise in general,
+strayed little beyond the Champs-Elysées, though I recall confusedly as
+well certain excursions to Passy and Auteuil, where we foregathered with
+small resident compatriots the easy gutturalism of whose French, an
+unpremeditated art, was a revelation, an initiation, and whence we
+roamed, for purposes of picnic, into parts of the Bois de Boulogne that,
+oddly enough, figured to us the virgin forest better than anything at
+our own American door had done.
+
+It was the social aspect of our situation that most appealed to me, none
+the less--for I detect myself, as I woo it all back, disengaging a
+social aspect again, and more than ever, from the phenomena disclosed to
+my reflective gape or to otherwise associated strolls; perceptive
+passages not wholly independent even of the occupancy of two-sous chairs
+within the charmed circle of Guignol and of Gringalet. I suppose I
+should have blushed to confess it, but Polichinelle and his puppets, in
+the afternoons, under an umbrage sparse till evening fell, had still
+their spell to cast--as part and parcel, that is, of the general
+intensity of animation and variety of feature. The "amusement," the
+æsthetic and human appeal, of Paris had in those days less the air of a
+great shining conspiracy to please, the machinery in movement confessed
+less to its huge purpose; but manners and types and traditions, the
+detail of the scene, its pointed particulars, went their way with a
+straighter effect, as well as often with a homelier grace--character,
+temper and tone had lost comparatively little of their emphasis. These
+scattered accents were matter for our eyes and ears--not a little even
+already for our respective imaginations; though it is only as the season
+waned and we set up our fireside afresh and for the winter that I
+connect my small revolution with a wider field and with the company of
+W. J. Again for that summer he was to be in eclipse to me; Guignol and
+Gringalet failed to claim his attention, and Mademoiselle Danse, I make
+out, deprecated his theory of exact knowledge, besides thinking him
+perhaps a little of an _ours_--which came to the same thing. We
+adjourned that autumn to quarters not far off, a wide-faced apartment in
+the street then bravely known as the Rue d'Angoulême-St.-Honoré and now,
+after other mutations, as the Rue La Boëtie; which we were again to
+exchange a year later for an abode in the Rue Montaigne, this last
+after a summer's absence at Boulogne-sur-Mer; the earlier migration
+setting up for me the frame of a considerably animated picture. Animated
+at best it was with the spirit and the modest facts of our family life,
+among which I number the cold finality of M. Lerambert, reflected in
+still other testimonies--that is till the date of our definite but
+respectful rupture with him, followed as the spring came on by our
+ineluctable phase at the Institution Fezandié in the Rue Balzac; of
+which latter there will be even more to say than I shall take freedom
+for. With the Rue d'Angoulême came extensions--even the mere immediate
+view of opposite intimacies and industries, the subdivided aspects and
+neat ingenuities of the applied Parisian genius counting as such: our
+many-windowed _premier_, above an entresol of no great height, hung over
+the narrow and, during the winter months, not a little dusky channel,
+with endless movement and interest in the vivid exhibition it supplied.
+What faced us was a series of subjects, with the baker, at the corner,
+for the first--the impeccable dispenser of the so softly-crusty
+crescent-rolls that we woke up each morning to hunger for afresh, with
+our weak café-au-lait, as for the one form of "European" breakfast-bread
+fit to be named even with the feeblest of our American forms. Then came
+the small crêmerie, white picked out with blue, which, by some secret
+of its own keeping, afforded, within the compass of a few feet square,
+prolonged savoury meals to working men, white-frocked or blue-frocked,
+to uniformed cabmen, stout or spare, but all more or less audibly
+_bavards_ and discernibly critical; and next the compact embrasure of
+the écaillère or oyster-lady, she and her paraphernalia fitted into
+their interstice much as the mollusc itself into its shell; neighboured
+in turn by the marchand-de-bois, peeping from as narrow a cage, his neat
+faggots and chopped logs stacked beside him and above him in his
+sentry-box quite as the niches of saints, in early Italian pictures, are
+framed with tightly-packed fruits and flowers. Space and remembrance
+fail me for the rest of the series, the attaching note of which comes
+back as the note of diffused sociability and domestic, in fact more or
+less æsthetic, ingenuity, with the street a perpetual parlour or
+household centre for the flitting, pausing, conversing little bourgeoise
+or ouvrière to sport, on every pretext and in every errand, her fluted
+cap, her composed head, her neat ankles and her ready wit. Which is to
+say indeed but that life and manners were more pointedly and
+harmoniously expressed, under our noses there, than we had perhaps found
+them anywhere save in the most salient passages of "stories"; though I
+must in spite of it not write as if these trifles were all our fare.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+That autumn renewed, I make out, our long and beguiled walks, my own
+with W. J. in especial; at the same time that I have somehow the sense
+of the whole more broken appeal on the part of Paris, the scanter
+confidence and ease it inspired in us, the perhaps more numerous and
+composite, but obscurer and more baffled intimations. Not indeed--for
+all my brother's later vision of an accepted flatness in it--that there
+was not some joy and some grasp; why else were we forever (as I seem to
+conceive we were) measuring the great space that separated us from the
+gallery of the Luxembourg, every step of which, either way we took it,
+fed us with some interesting, some admirable image, kept us in relation
+to something nobly intended? That particular walk was not prescribed us,
+yet we appear to have hugged it, across the Champs-Elysées to the river,
+and so over the nearest bridge and the quays of the left bank to the Rue
+de Seine, as if it somehow held the secret of our future; to the extent
+even of my more or less sneaking off on occasion to take it by myself,
+to taste of it with a due undiverted intensity and the throb as of the
+finest, which _could_ only mean the most Parisian, adventure. The
+further quays, with their innumerable old bookshops and print-shops, the
+long cases of each of these commodities, exposed on the parapets in
+especial, must have come to know us almost as well as we knew them; with
+plot thickening and emotion deepening steadily, however, as we mounted
+the long, black Rue de Seine--_such_ a stretch of perspective, _such_ an
+intensity of tone as it offered in those days; where every low-browed
+vitrine waylaid us and we moved in a world of which the dark message,
+expressed in we couldn't have said what sinister way too, might have
+been "Art, art, art, don't you see? Learn, little gaping pilgrims, what
+_that_ is!" Oh we learned, that is we tried to, as hard as ever we
+could, and were fairly well at it, I always felt, even by the time we
+had passed up into that comparatively short but wider and finer vista of
+the Rue de Tournon, which in those days more abruptly crowned the more
+compressed approach and served in a manner as a great outer vestibule to
+the Palace. Style, dimly described, looked down there, as with conscious
+encouragement, from the high grey-headed, clear-faced, straight-standing
+old houses--very much as if wishing to say "Yes, small staring jeune
+homme, we are dignity and memory and measure, we are conscience and
+proportion and taste, not to mention strong sense too: for all of which
+good things take us--you won't find one of them when you find (as you're
+going soon to begin to at such a rate) vulgarity." This, I admit, was an
+abundance of remark to such young ears; but it did all, I maintain,
+tremble in the air, with the sense that the Rue de Tournon, cobbled and
+a little grass-grown, might more or less have figured some fine old
+street _de province_: I cherished in short its very name and think I
+really hadn't to wait to prefer the then, the unmenaced, the inviolate
+Café Foyot of the left hand corner, the much-loved and so haunted Café
+Foyot of the old Paris, to its--well, to its roaring successor. The wide
+mouth of the present Boulevard Saint-Michel, a short way round the
+corner, had not yet been forced open to the exhibition of more or less
+glittering fangs; old Paris still pressed round the Palace and its
+gardens, which formed the right, the sober social antithesis to the
+"elegant" Tuileries, and which in fine, with these renewals of our young
+confidence, reinforced both in a general and in a particular way one of
+the fondest of our literary curiosities of that time, the conscientious
+study of Les Français Peints par Eux-Mêmes, rich in wood-cuts of
+Gavarni, of Grandville, of Henri-Monnier, which we held it rather our
+duty to admire and W. J. even a little his opportunity to copy in
+pen-and-ink. This gilt-edged and double-columned octavo it was that
+first disclosed to me, forestalling a better ground of acquaintance, the
+great name of Balzac, who, in common with every other "light" writer of
+his day, contributed to its pages: hadn't I pored over his exposition
+there of the contrasted types of L'Habituée des Tuileries and L'Habituée
+du Luxembourg?--finding it very _serré_, in fact what I didn't then know
+enough to call very stodgy, but flavoured withal and a trifle lubricated
+by Gavarni's two drawings, which had somehow so much, in general, to
+say.
+
+Let me not however dally by the way, when nothing, at those hours, I
+make out, so much spoke to us as the animated pictured halls within the
+Palace, primarily those of the Senate of the Empire, but then also
+forming, as with extensions they still and much more copiously form, the
+great Paris museum of contemporary art. This array was at that stage a
+comparatively (though only comparatively) small affair; in spite of
+which fact we supposed it vast and final--so that it would have shocked
+us to foreknow how in many a case, and of the most cherished cases, the
+finality was to break down. Most of the works of the modern schools that
+we most admired are begging their bread, I fear, from door to door--that
+is from one provincial museum or dim back seat to another; though we
+were on much-subsequent returns to draw a long breath for the saved
+state of some of the great things as to which our faith had been
+clearest. It had been clearer for none, I recover, than for Couture's
+Romains de la Décadence, recently acclaimed, at that time, as the last
+word of the grand manner, but of the grand manner modernised, humanised,
+philosophised, redeemed from academic death; so that it was to this
+master's school that the young American contemporary flutter taught its
+wings to fly straightest, and that I could never, in the long aftertime,
+face his masterpiece and all its old meanings and marvels without a rush
+of memories and a stir of ghosts. William Hunt, the New Englander of
+genius, the "Boston painter" whose authority was greatest during the
+thirty years from 1857 or so, and with whom for a time in the early
+period W. J. was to work all devotedly, had prolonged his studies in
+Paris under the inspiration of Couture and of Edouard Frère; masters in
+a group completed by three or four of the so finely interesting
+landscapists of that and the directly previous age, Troyon, Rousseau,
+Daubigny, even Lambinet and others, and which summed up for the American
+collector and in the New York and Boston markets the idea of the modern
+in the masterly. It was a comfortable time--when appreciation could go
+so straight, could rise, and rise higher, without critical contortions;
+when we could, I mean, be both so intelligent and so "quiet." We were
+in our immediate circle to know Couture himself a little toward the end
+of his life, and I was somewhat to wonder then where he had picked up
+the æsthetic hint for the beautiful Page with a Falcon, if I have the
+designation right, his other great bid for style and capture of
+it--which we were long to continue to suppose perhaps the rarest of all
+modern pictures. The feasting Romans were conceivable enough, I mean
+_as_ a conception; no mystery hung about them--in the sense of one's
+asking one's self whence they had come and by what romantic or
+roundabout or nobly-dangerous journey; which is that air of the poetic
+shaken out as from strong wings when great presences, in any one of the
+arts, appear to alight. What I remember, on the other hand, of the
+splendid fair youth in black velvet and satin or whatever who, while he
+mounts the marble staircase, shows off the great bird on his forefinger
+with a grace that shows _him_ off, was that it failed to help us to
+divine, during that after-lapse of the glory of which I speak, by what
+rare chance, for the obscured old ex-celebrity we visited, the heavens
+had once opened. Poetry had swooped down, breathed on him for an hour
+and fled. Such at any rate are the see-saws of reputations--which it
+contributes to the interest of any observational lingering on this
+planet to have caught so repeatedly in their weird motion; the question
+of what may happen, under one's eyes, in particular cases, before that
+motion sinks to rest, whether at the up or at the down end, being really
+a bribe to one's own non-departure. Especially great the interest of
+having noted all the rises and falls and of being able to compare the
+final point--so far as any certainty may go as to that--either with the
+greatest or the least previous altitudes; since it is only when there
+have been exaltations (which is what is not commonest), that our
+attention is most rewarded.
+
+If the see-saw was to have operated indeed for Eugène Delacroix, our
+next young admiration, though much more intelligently my brother's than
+mine, that had already taken place and settled, for we were to go on
+seeing him, and to the end, in firm possession of his crown, and to take
+even, I think, a harmless pleasure in our sense of having from so far
+back been sure of it. I was sure of it, I must properly add, but as an
+effect of my brother's sureness; since I must, by what I remember, have
+been as sure of Paul Delaroche--for whom the pendulum was at last to be
+arrested at a very different point. I could see in a manner, for all the
+queerness, what W. J. meant by that beauty and, above all, that living
+interest in La Barque du Dante, where the queerness, according to him,
+was perhaps what contributed most; see it doubtless in particular when
+he reproduced the work, at home, from a memory aided by a lithograph.
+Yet Les Enfants d'Edouard thrilled me to a different tune, and I
+couldn't doubt that the long-drawn odd face of the elder prince, sad and
+sore and sick, with his wide crimped side-locks of fair hair and his
+violet legs marked by the Garter and dangling from the bed, was a
+reconstitution of far-off history of the subtlest and most "last word"
+modern or psychologic kind. I had never heard of psychology in art or
+anywhere else--scarcely anyone then had; but I truly felt the nameless
+force at play. Thus if I also in my way "subtly" admired, one's noted
+practice of that virtue (mainly regarded indeed, I judge, as a vice)
+would appear to have at the time I refer to set in, under such
+encouragements, once for all; and I can surely have enjoyed up to then
+no formal exhibition of anything as I at one of those seasons enjoyed
+the commemorative show of Delaroche given, soon after his death, in one
+of the rather bleak salles of the École des Beaux-Arts to which access
+was had from the quay. _There_ was reconstituted history if one would,
+in the straw-littered scaffold, the distracted ladies with
+three-cornered coifs and those immense hanging sleeves that made them
+look as if they had bath-towels over their arms; in the block, the
+headsman, the bandaged eyes and groping hands, of Lady Jane Grey--not
+less than in the noble indifference of Charles the First, compromised
+king but perfect gentleman, at his inscrutable ease in his chair and as
+if on his throne, while the Puritan soldiers insult and badger him: the
+thrill of which was all the greater from its pertaining to that English
+lore which the good Robert Thompson had, to my responsive delight,
+rubbed into us more than anything else and all from a fine old
+conservative and monarchical point of view. Yet of these things W. J.
+attempted no reproduction, though I remember his repeatedly laying his
+hand on Delacroix, whom he found always and everywhere interesting--to
+the point of trying effects, with charcoal and crayon, in his manner;
+and not less in the manner of Decamps, whom we regarded as more or less
+of a genius of the same rare family. They were touched with the
+ineffable, the inscrutable, and Delacroix in especial with the
+incalculable; categories these toward which we had even then, by a happy
+transition, begun to yearn and languish. We were not yet aware of style,
+though on the way to become so, but were aware of mystery, which indeed
+was one of its forms--while we saw all the others, without exception,
+exhibited at the Louvre, where at first they simply overwhelmed and
+bewildered me.
+
+It was as if they had gathered there into a vast deafening chorus; I
+shall never forget how--speaking, that is, for my own sense--they
+filled those vast halls with the influence rather of some complicated
+sound, diffused and reverberant, than of such visibilities as one could
+directly deal with. To distinguish among these, in the charged and
+coloured and confounding air, was difficult--it discouraged and defied;
+which was doubtless why my impression originally best entertained was
+that of those magnificent parts of the great gallery simply not inviting
+us to distinguish. They only arched over us in the wonder of their
+endless golden riot and relief, figured and flourished in perpetual
+revolution, breaking into great high-hung circles and symmetries of
+squandered picture, opening into deep outward embrasures that threw off
+the rest of monumental Paris somehow as a told story, a sort of wrought
+effect or bold ambiguity for a vista, and yet held it there, at every
+point, as a vast bright gage, even at moments a felt adventure, of
+experience. This comes to saying that in those beginnings I felt myself
+most happily cross that bridge over to Style constituted by the wondrous
+Galerie d'Apollon, drawn out for me as a long but assured initiation and
+seeming to form with its supreme coved ceiling and inordinately shining
+parquet a prodigious tube or tunnel through which I inhaled little by
+little, that is again and again, a general sense of _glory_. The glory
+meant ever so many things at once, not only beauty and art and supreme
+design, but history and fame and power, the world in fine raised to the
+richest and noblest expression. The world there was at the same time, by
+an odd extension or intensification, the local present fact, to my small
+imagination, of the Second Empire, which was (for my notified
+consciousness) new and queer and perhaps even wrong, but on the spot so
+amply radiant and elegant that it took to itself, took under its
+protection with a splendour of insolence, the state and ancientry of the
+whole scene, profiting thus, to one's dim historic vision, confusedly
+though it might be, by the unparalleled luxury and variety of its
+heritage. But who shall count the sources at which an intense young
+fancy (when a young fancy _is_ intense) capriciously, absurdly
+drinks?--so that the effect is, in twenty connections, that of a
+love-philtre or fear-philtre which fixes for the senses their supreme
+symbol of the fair or the strange. The Galerie d'Apollon became for
+years what I can only term a splendid scene of things, even of the quite
+irrelevant or, as might be, almost unworthy; and I recall to this hour,
+with the last vividness, what a precious part it played for me, and
+exactly by that continuity of honour, on my awaking, in a summer dawn
+many years later, to the fortunate, the instantaneous recovery and
+capture of the most appalling yet most admirable nightmare of my life.
+The climax of this extraordinary experience--which stands alone for me
+as a dream-adventure founded in the deepest, quickest, clearest act of
+cogitation and comparison, act indeed of life-saving energy, as well as
+in unutterable fear--was the sudden pursuit, through an open door, along
+a huge high saloon, of a just dimly-descried figure that retreated in
+terror before my rush and dash (a glare of inspired reaction from
+irresistible but shameful dread,) out of the room I had a moment before
+been desperately, and all the more abjectly, defending by the push of my
+shoulder against hard pressure on lock and bar from the other side. The
+lucidity, not to say the sublimity, of the crisis had consisted of the
+great thought that I, in my appalled state, was probably still more
+appalling than the awful agent, creature or presence, whatever he was,
+whom I had guessed, in the suddenest wild start from sleep, the sleep
+within my sleep, to be making for my place of rest. The triumph of my
+impulse, perceived in a flash as I acted on it by myself at a bound,
+forcing the door outward, was the grand thing, but the great point of
+the whole was the wonder of my final recognition. Routed, dismayed, the
+tables turned upon him by my so surpassing him for straight aggression
+and dire intention, my visitant was already but a diminished spot in the
+long perspective, the tremendous, glorious hall, as I say, over the
+far-gleaming floor of which, cleared for the occasion of its great line
+of priceless vitrines down the middle, he sped for _his_ life, while a
+great storm of thunder and lightning played through the deep embrasures
+of high windows at the right. The lightning that revealed the retreat
+revealed also the wondrous place and, by the same amazing play, my young
+imaginative life in it of long before, the sense of which, deep within
+me, had kept it whole, preserved it to this thrilling use; for what in
+the world were the deep embrasures and the so polished floor but those
+of the Galerie d'Apollon of my childhood? The "scene of something" I had
+vaguely then felt it? Well I might, since it was to be the scene of that
+immense hallucination.
+
+Of what, at the same time, in those years, were the great rooms of the
+Louvre almost equally, above and below, not the scene, from the moment
+they so wrought, stage by stage, upon our perceptions?--literally on
+almost all of these, in one way and another; quite in such a manner, I
+more and more see, as to have been educative, formative, fertilising, in
+a degree which no other "intellectual experience" our youth was to know
+could pretend, as a comprehensive, conducive thing, to rival. The sharp
+and strange, the quite heart-shaking little prevision had come to me,
+for myself, I make out, on the occasion of our very first visit of all,
+my brother's and mine, under conduct of the good Jean Nadali,
+before-mentioned, trustfully deputed by our parents, in the Rue de la
+Paix, on the morrow of our first arrival in Paris (July 1855) and while
+they were otherwise concerned. I hang again, appalled but uplifted, on
+brave Nadali's arm--his professional acquaintance with the splendours
+about us added for me on the spot to the charm of his "European"
+character: I cling to him while I gape at Géricault's Radeau de la
+Méduse, _the_ sensation, for splendour and terror of interest, of that
+juncture to me, and ever afterwards to be associated, along with two or
+three other more or less contemporary products, Guérin's Burial of
+Atala, Prudhon's Cupid and Psyche, David's helmetted Romanisms, Madame
+Vigée-Lebrun's "ravishing" portrait of herself and her little girl, with
+how can I say what foretaste (as determined by that instant as if the
+hour had struck from a clock) of all the fun, confusedly speaking, that
+one was going to have, and the kind of life, always of the queer
+so-called inward sort, tremendously "sporting" in its way--though that
+description didn't then wait upon it, that one was going to lead. It
+came of itself, this almost awful apprehension in all the presences,
+under our courier's protection and in my brother's company--it came just
+there and so; there was alarm in it somehow as well as bliss. The bliss
+in fact I think scarce disengaged itself at all, but only the sense of
+a freedom of contact and appreciation really too big for one, and
+leaving such a mark on the very place, the pictures, the frames
+themselves, the figures within them, the particular parts and features
+of each, the look of the rich light, the smell of the massively enclosed
+air, that I have never since renewed the old exposure without renewing
+again the old emotion and taking up the small scared consciousness.
+_That_, with so many of the conditions repeated, is the charm--to feel
+afresh the beginning of so much that was to be. The beginning in short
+was with Géricault and David, but it went on and on and slowly spread;
+so that one's stretched, one's even strained, perceptions, one's
+discoveries and extensions piece by piece, come back, on the great
+premises, almost as so many explorations of the house of life, so many
+circlings and hoverings round the image of the world. I have dim
+reminiscences of permitted independent visits, uncorrectedly juvenile
+though I might still be, during which the house of life and the palace
+of art became so mixed and interchangeable--the Louvre being, under a
+general description, the most peopled of all scenes not less than the
+most hushed of all temples--that an excursion to look at pictures would
+have but half expressed my afternoon. I had looked at pictures, looked
+and looked again, at the vast Veronese, at Murillo's moon-borne
+Madonna, at Leonardo's almost unholy dame with the folded hands,
+treasures of the Salon Carré as that display was then composed; but I
+had also looked at France and looked at Europe, looked even at America
+as Europe itself might be conceived so to look, looked at history, as a
+still-felt past and a complacently personal future, at society, manners,
+types, characters, possibilities and prodigies and mysteries of fifty
+sorts; and all in the light of being splendidly "on my own," as I
+supposed it, though we hadn't then that perfection of slang, and of (in
+especial) going and coming along that interminable and incomparable
+Seine-side front of the Palace against which young sensibility felt
+itself almost rub, for endearment and consecration, as a cat invokes the
+friction of a protective piece of furniture. Such were at any rate some
+of the vague processes--I see for how utterly vague they must show--of
+picking up an education; and I was, in spite of the vagueness, so far
+from agreeing with my brother afterwards that we didn't pick one up and
+that that never _is_ done, in any sense not negligible, and also that an
+education might, or should, in particular, have picked _us_ up, and yet
+didn't--I was so far dissentient, I say, that I think I quite came to
+glorify such passages and see them as part of an order really fortunate.
+If we had been little asses, I seem to have reasoned, a higher
+intention driving us wouldn't have made us less so--to any point worth
+mentioning; and as we extracted such impressions, to put it at the
+worst, from redemptive accidents (to call Louvres and Luxembourgs
+nothing better) why we weren't little asses, but something wholly other:
+which appeared all I needed to contend for. Above all it would have been
+stupid and ignoble, an attested and lasting dishonour, not, with our
+chance, to have followed our straggling clues, as many as we could and
+disengaging as we happily did, I felt, the gold and the silver ones,
+whatever the others might have been--not to have followed them and not
+to have arrived by them, so far as we were to arrive. Instinctively, for
+any dim designs we might have nourished, we picked out the silver and
+the gold, attenuated threads though they must have been, and I
+positively feel that there were more of these, far more, casually
+interwoven, than will reward any present patience for my unravelling of
+the too fine tissue.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+I allude of course in particular here to the æsthetic clue in general,
+with which it was that we most (or that I at any rate most) fumbled,
+without our in the least having then, as I have already noted, any such
+rare name for it. There were sides on which it fairly dangled about us,
+involving our small steps and wits; though others too where I could, for
+my own part, but clutch at it in the void. Our experience of the theatre
+for instance, which had played such a part for us at home, almost wholly
+dropped in just the most propitious air: an anomaly indeed half
+explained by the fact that life in general, all round us, was
+perceptibly more theatrical. And there were other reasons, whether
+definitely set before us or not, which we grasped in proportion as we
+gathered, by depressing hearsay, that the French drama, great, strange
+and important, was as much out of relation to our time of life, our so
+little native strain and our cultivated innocence, as the American and
+English had been directly addressed to them. To the Cirque d'Été, the
+Cirque d'Hiver, the Théâtre du Cirque we were on occasion conducted--we
+had fallen so to the level of circuses, and that name appeared a
+safety; in addition to which the big theatre most bravely bearing it,
+the especial home at that time of the glittering and multitudinous
+_féerie_, did seem to lift the whole scenic possibility, for our eyes,
+into a higher sphere of light and grace than any previously disclosed. I
+recall Le Diable d'Argent as in particular a radiant revelation--kept
+before us a whole long evening and as an almost blinding glare; which
+was quite right for the _donnée_, the gradual shrinkage of the Shining
+One, the money-monster hugely inflated at first, to all the successive
+degrees of loose bagginess as he leads the reckless young man he has
+originally contracted with from dazzling pleasure to pleasure, till at
+last he is a mere shrivelled silver string such as you could almost draw
+through a keyhole. That was the striking moral, for the young man,
+however regaled, had been somehow "sold"; which _we_ hadn't in the least
+been, who had had all his pleasures and none of his penalty, whatever
+this was to be. I was to repine a little, in these connections, at a
+much later time, on reflecting that had we only been "taken" in the
+Paris of that period as we had been taken in New York we might have come
+in for celebrities--supremely fine, perhaps supremely rank, flowers of
+the histrionic temperament, springing as they did from the soil of the
+richest romanticism and adding to its richness--who practised that
+braver art and finer finish which a comparatively homogenous public,
+forming a compact critical body, still left possible. Rachel was alive,
+but dying; the memory of Mademoiselle Mars, at her latest, was still in
+the air; Mademoiselle Georges, a massive, a monstrous antique, had
+withal returned for a season to the stage; but we missed her, as we
+missed Déjazet and Frédéric Lemâitre and Mélingue and Samson; to say
+nothing of others of the age before the flood--taking for the flood that
+actual high tide of the outer barbarian presence, the general alien and
+polyglot, in stalls and boxes, which I remember to have heard Gustave
+Flaubert lament as the ruin of the theatre through the assumption of
+judgeship by a bench to whom the very values of the speech of author and
+actor were virtually closed, or at the best uncertain.
+
+I enjoyed but two snatches of the older representational art--no
+particular of either of which, however, has faded from me; the earlier
+and rarer of these an evening at the Gymnase for a _spectacle coupé_,
+with Mesdames Rose Chéri, Mélanie, Delaporte and Victoria (afterwards
+Victoria-La-fontaine). I squeeze again with my mother, my aunt and my
+brother into the stuffy baignoire, and I take to my memory in especial
+Madame de Girardin's Une Femme qui Déteste son Mari; the thrilling
+story, as I judged it, of an admirable lady who, to save her loyalist
+husband, during the Revolution, feigns the most Jacobin opinions,
+represents herself a citoyenne of citoyennes, in order to keep him the
+more safely concealed in her house. He flattens himself, to almost
+greater peril of life, behind a panel of the wainscot, which she has a
+secret for opening when he requires air and food and they may for a
+fearful fleeting instant be alone together; and the point of the picture
+is in the contrast between these melting moments and the heroine's
+_tenue_ under the tremendous strain of receiving on the one side the
+invading, investigating Terrorist commissaries, sharply suspicious but
+successfully baffled, and on the other her noble relatives, her
+husband's mother and sister if I rightly remember, who are not in the
+secret and whom, for perfect prudence, she keeps out of it, though alone
+with her, and themselves in hourly danger, they might be trusted, and
+who, believing him concealed elsewhere and terribly tracked, treat her,
+in her republican rage, as lost to all honour and all duty. One's sense
+of such things after so long a time has of course scant authority for
+others; but I myself trust my vision of Rose Chéri's fine play just as I
+trust that of her _physique ingrat_, her at first extremely odd and
+positively osseous appearance; an emaciated woman with a high bulging
+forehead, somewhat of the form of Rachel's, for whom the triumphs of
+produced illusion, as in the second, third and fourth great dramas of
+the younger Dumas, had to be triumphs indeed. My one other reminiscence
+of this order connects itself, and quite three years later, with the old
+dingy Vaudeville of the Place de la Bourse, where I saw in my brother's
+company a rhymed domestic drama of the then still admired Ponsard, Ce
+qui Plaît aux Femmes; a piece that enjoyed, I believe, scant success,
+but that was to leave with me ineffaceable images. How was it possible,
+I wondered, to have more grace and talent, a rarer, cooler art, than
+Mademoiselle Fargeuil, the heroine?--the fine lady whom a pair of rival
+lovers, seeking to win her hand by offering her what will most please
+her, treat, in the one case, to a brilliant fête, a little play within a
+play, at which we assist, and in the other to the inside view of an
+attic of misery, into which the more cunning suitor introduces her just
+in time to save a poor girl, the tenant of the place, from being
+ruinously, that is successfully, tempted by a terrible old woman, a
+prowling _revendeuse_, who dangles before her the condition on which so
+pretty a person may enjoy every comfort. Her happier sister, the courted
+young widow, intervenes in time, reinforces her tottering virtue, opens
+for her an account with baker and butcher, and, doubting no longer which
+flame is to be crowned, charmingly shows us that what pleases women most
+is the exercise of charity.
+
+Then it was I first beheld that extraordinary veteran of the stage,
+Mademoiselle Pierson, almost immemorially attached, for later
+generations, to the Théâtre Français, the span of whose career thus
+strikes me as fabulous, though she figured as a very juvenile beauty in
+the small _féerie_ or allegory forming M. Ponsard's second act. She has
+been playing mothers and aunts this many and many a year--and still
+indeed much as a juvenile beauty. Not that light circumstance, however,
+pleads for commemoration, nor yet the further fact that I was to admire
+Mademoiselle Fargeuil, in the after-time, the time after she had given
+all Sardou's earlier successes the help of her shining firmness, when
+she had passed from interesting comedy and even from romantic drama--not
+less, perhaps still more, interesting, with Sardou's Patrie as a
+bridge--to the use of the bigger brush of the Ambigu and other homes of
+melodrama. The sense, such as it is, that I extract from the pair of
+modest memories in question is rather their value as a glimpse of the
+old order that spoke so much less of our hundred modern material
+resources, matters the stage of to-day appears mainly to live by, and
+such volumes more of the one thing that was then, and that, given
+various other things, had to be, of the essence. That one thing was the
+quality, to say nothing of the quantity, of the actor's personal
+resource, technical history, tested temper, proved experience; on which
+almost everything had to depend, and the thought of which makes the mere
+starved scene and medium of the period, the _rest_ of the picture, a
+more confessed and more heroic battle-ground. They have been more and
+more eased off, the scene and medium, for our couple of generations, so
+much so in fact that the rest of the picture has become almost _all_ the
+picture: the author and the producer, among us, lift the weight of the
+play from the performer--particularly of the play dealing with our
+immediate life and manners and aspects--after a fashion which does half
+the work, thus reducing the "personal equation," the demand for the
+maximum of individual doing, to a contribution mostly of the loosest and
+sparest. As a sop to historic curiosity at all events may even so short
+an impression serve; impression of the strenuous age and its fine old
+masterful _assouplissement_ of its victims--who were not the expert
+spectators. The spectators were so expert, so broken in to material
+suffering for the sake of their passion, that, as the suffering was only
+material, they found the æsthetic reward, the critical relish of the
+essence, all adequate; a fact that seems in a sort to point a moral of
+large application. Everything but the "interpretation," the personal, in
+the French theatre of those days, had kinds and degrees of weakness and
+futility, say even falsity, of which our modern habit is wholly
+impatient--let alone other conditions still that were detestable even at
+the time, and some of which, forms of discomfort and annoyance, linger
+on to this day. The playhouse, in short, was almost a place of physical
+torture, and it is still rarely in Paris a place of physical ease. Add
+to this the old thinness of the school of Scribe and the old emptiness
+of the thousand vaudevillistes; which part of the exhibition, till
+modern comedy began, under the younger Dumas and Augier, had for its
+counterpart but the terrible dead weight, or at least the prodigious
+prolixity and absurdity, of much, not to say of most, of the romantic
+and melodramatic "output." It _paid_ apparently, in the golden age of
+acting, to sit through interminable evenings in impossible places--since
+to assume that the age _was_ in that particular respect golden (for
+which we have in fact a good deal of evidence) alone explains the
+patience of the public. With the public the _actors_ were, according to
+their seasoned strength, almost exclusively appointed to deal, just as
+in the conditions most familiar to-day to ourselves this charge is laid
+on almost everyone concerned in the case save the representatives of the
+parts. And far more other people are now concerned than of old; not
+least those who have learned to make the playhouse endurable. All of
+which leaves us with this interesting vision of a possibly great truth,
+the truth that you can't have more than one kind of intensity--intensity
+worthy of the name--at once. The intensity of the golden age of the
+histrion was the intensity of _his_ good faith. The intensity of our
+period is that of the "producer's" and machinist's, to which add even
+that of architect, author and critic. Between which derivative kind of
+that article, as we may call it, and the other, the immediate kind, it
+would appear that you have absolutely to choose.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+I see much of the rest of that particular Paris time in the light of the
+Institution Fezandié, and I see the Institution Fezandié, Rue Balzac, in
+the light, if not quite of Alphonse Daudet's lean asylum for the _petits
+pays chauds_, of which I have felt the previous institutions of New York
+sketchily remind me, at least in that of certain other of his studies in
+that field of the precarious, the ambiguous Paris over parts of which
+the great Arch at the top of the Champs-Elysées flings, at its hours, by
+its wide protective plausible shadow, a precious mantle of "tone." They
+gather, these chequered parts, into its vast paternal presence and enjoy
+at its expense a degree of reflected dignity. It was to the big square
+villa of the Rue Balzac that we turned, as pupils not unacquainted with
+vicissitudes, from a scene swept bare of M. Lerambert, an establishment
+that strikes me, at this distance of time, as of the oddest and most
+indescribable--or as describable at best in some of the finer turns and
+touches of Daudet's best method. The picture indeed should not be
+invidious--it so little needs that, I feel, for its due measure of the
+vivid, the queer, the droll, all coming back to me without prejudice to
+its air as of an equally futile felicity. I see it as bright and loose
+and vague, as confused and embarrassed and helpless; I see it, I fear,
+as quite ridiculous, but as wholly harmless to my brothers and me at
+least, and as having left us with a fund of human impressions; it played
+before us such a variety of figure and character and so relieved us of a
+sense of untoward discipline or of the pursuit of abstract knowledge. It
+was a recreational, or at least a social, rather than a tuitional house;
+which fact had, I really believe, weighed favourably with our parents,
+when, bereft of M. Lerambert, they asked themselves, with their
+considerable practice, how next to bestow us. Our father, like so many
+free spirits of that time in New York and Boston, had been much
+interested in the writings of Charles Fourier and in his scheme of the
+"phalanstery" as the solution of human troubles, and it comes to me that
+he must have met or in other words heard of M. Fezandié as an active and
+sympathetic ex-Fourierist (I think there were only ex-Fourierists by
+that time,) who was embarking, not far from us, on an experiment if not
+absolutely phalansteric at least inspired, or at any rate enriched, by a
+bold idealism. I like to think of the Institution as all but
+phalansteric--it so corrects any fear that such places might be dreary.
+I recall this one as positively gay--bristling and bustling and
+resonant, untouched by the strenuous note, for instance, of Hawthorne's
+co-operative Blithedale. I like to think that, in its then still almost
+suburban, its pleasantly heterogeneous quarter, now oppressively
+uniform, it was close to where Balzac had ended his life, though I
+question its identity--as for a while I tried not to--with the scene
+itself of the great man's catastrophe. Round its high-walled garden at
+all events he would have come and gone--a throb of inference that had
+for some years indeed to be postponed for me; though an association
+displacing to-day, over the whole spot, every other interest. I in any
+case can't pretend not to have been most appealed to by that especial
+phase of our education from which the pedagogic process as commonly
+understood was most fantastically absent. It excelled in this respect,
+the Fezandié phase, even others exceptionally appointed, heaven knows,
+for the supremacy; and yet its glory is that it was no poor blank, but
+that it fairly creaked and groaned, heatedly overflowed, with its
+wealth. We were _externes_, the three of us, but we remained in general
+to luncheon; coming home then, late in the afternoon, with an almost
+sore experience of multiplicity and vivacity of contact. For the beauty
+of it all was that the Institution was, speaking technically, not more a
+_pensionnat_, with prevailingly English and American pupils, than a
+_pension_, with mature beneficiaries of both sexes, and that our two
+categories were shaken up together to the liveliest effect. This had
+been M. Fezandié's grand conception; a son of the south, bald and
+slightly replete, with a delicate beard, a quick but anxious, rather
+melancholy eye and a slim, graceful, juvenile wife, who multiplied
+herself, though scarce knowing at moments, I think, where or how to
+turn; I see him as a Daudet _méridional_, but of the sensitive, not the
+sensual, type, as something of a rolling stone, rolling rather down
+hill--he had enjoyed some arrested, possibly blighted, connection in
+America--and as ready always again for some new application of faith and
+funds. If fondly failing in the least to see why the particular
+application in the Rue Balzac--the body of pensioners ranging from
+infancy to hoary eld--shouldn't have been a bright success could have
+made it one, it would have been a most original triumph.
+
+I recover it as for ourselves a beautifully mixed adventure, a brave
+little seeing of the world on the happy pretext of "lessons." We _had_
+lessons from time to time, but had them in company with ladies and
+gentlemen, young men and young women of the Anglo-Saxon family, who sat
+at long boards of green cloth with us and with several of our
+contemporaries, English and American boys, taking _dictées_ from the
+head of the house himself or from the aged and most remarkable M.
+Bonnefons, whom we believed to have been a superannuated actor (he above
+all such a model for Daudet!) and who interrupted our abashed readings
+aloud to him of the French classics older and newer by wondrous
+reminiscences and even imitations of Talma. He moved among us in a cloud
+of legend, the wigged and wrinkled, the impassioned, though I think alas
+underfed, M. Bonnefons: it was our belief that he "went back," beyond
+the first Empire, to the scenes of the Revolution--this perhaps partly
+by reason, in the first place, of his scorn of our pronunciation, when
+we met it, of the sovereign word _liberté_, the poverty of which, our
+deplorable "libbeté," without r's, he mimicked and derided, sounding the
+right, the revolutionary form out splendidly, with thirty r's, the
+prolonged beat of a drum. And then we believed him, if artistically
+conservative, politically obnoxious to the powers that then were, though
+knowing that those so marked had to walk, and even to breathe,
+cautiously for fear of the _mouchards_ of the tyrant; we knew all about
+mouchards and talked of them as we do to-day of aviators or
+suffragettes--to remember which in an age so candidly unconscious of
+them is to feel how much history we have seen unrolled. There were times
+when he but paced up and down and round the long table--I see him as
+never seated, but always on the move, a weary Wandering Jew of the
+_classe_; but in particular I hear him recite to us the combat with the
+Moors from Le Cid and show us how Talma, describing it, seemed to crouch
+down on his haunches in order to spring up again terrifically to the
+height of "Nous nous levons alors!" which M. Bonnefons rendered as if on
+the carpet there fifty men at least had leaped to their feet. But he
+threw off these broken lights with a quick relapse to indifference; he
+didn't like the Anglo-Saxon--of the children of Albion at least his view
+was low; on his American specimens he had, I observed, more mercy; and
+this imperfection of sympathy (the question of Waterloo apart) rested,
+it was impossible not to feel, on his so resenting the dishonour
+suffered at our hands by his beautiful tongue, to which, as the great
+field of elocution, he was patriotically devoted. I think he fairly
+loathed our closed English vowels and confused consonants, our
+destitution of sounds that he recognised as sounds; though why in this
+connection he put up best with our own compatriots, embroiled at that
+time often in even stranger vocables than now, is more than I can say. I
+think that would be explained perhaps by his feeling in them as an old
+equalitarian certain accessibilities _quand même_. Besides, we of the
+younger persuasion at least must have done his ear less violence than
+those earnest ladies from beyond the sea and than those young Englishmen
+qualifying for examinations and careers who flocked with us both to the
+plausibly spread and the severely disgarnished table, and on whose part
+I seem to see it again an effort of anguish to "pick up" the happy idiom
+that we had unconsciously acquired. French, in the fine old formula of
+those days, so much diffused, "was the language of the family"; but I
+think it must have appeared to these students in general a family of
+which the youngest members were but scantly kept in their place. We
+piped with a greater facility and to a richer meed of recognition; which
+sounds as if we might have become, in these strange collocations, fairly
+offensive little prigs. That was none the less not the case, for there
+were, oddly enough, a few French boys as well, to whom on the lingual or
+the "family" ground, we felt ourselves feebly relative, and in
+comparison with whom, for that matter, or with one of whom, I remember
+an occasion of my having to sink to insignificance. There was at the
+Institution little of a staff--besides waiters and bonnes; but it
+embraced, such as it was, M. Mesnard as well as M. Bonnefons--M. Mesnard
+of the new generation, instructor in whatever it might be, among the
+arts, that didn't consist of our rolling our r's, and with them, to help
+us out, more or less our eyes. It is significant that this elegant
+branch is now quite vague to me; and I recall M. Mesnard, in fine, as no
+less modern and cheap than M. Bonnefons was rare and unappraiseable. He
+had nevertheless given me his attention, one morning, doubtless
+patiently enough, in some corner of the villa that we had for the moment
+practically to ourselves--I seem to see a small empty room looking on
+the garden; when there entered to us, benevolently ushered by Madame
+Fezandié, a small boy of very fair and romantic aspect, as it struck me,
+a pupil newly arrived. I remember of him mainly that he had a sort of
+nimbus of light curls, a face delicate and pale and that deeply hoarse
+voice with which French children used to excite our wonder. M. Mesnard
+asked of him at once, with interest, his name, and on his pronouncing it
+sought to know, with livelier attention, if he were then the son of M.
+Arsène Houssaye, lately director of the Théâtre Français. To this
+distinction the boy confessed--all to such intensification of our
+répétiteur's interest that I knew myself quite dropped, in comparison,
+from his scheme of things. Such an origin as our little visitor's
+affected him visibly as dazzling, and I felt justified after a while, in
+stealing away into the shade. The beautiful little boy was to live to be
+the late M. Henry Houssaye, the shining hellenist and historian. I have
+never forgotten the ecstasy of hope in M. Mesnard's question--as a
+light on the reverence then entertained for the institution M. Houssaye
+the elder had administered.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+There comes to me, in spite of these memories of an extended connection,
+a sense as of some shrinkage or decline in the _beaux jours_ of the
+Institution; which seems to have found its current run a bit thick and
+troubled, rather than with the pleasant plash in which we at first
+appeared all equally to bathe. I gather, as I try to reconstitute, that
+the general enterprise simply proved a fantasy not workable, and that at
+any rate the elders, and often such queer elders, tended to outnumber
+the candid _jeunesse_; so that I wonder by the same token on what theory
+of the Castalian spring, as taught there to trickle, if not to flow, M.
+Houssaye, holding his small son by the heel as it were, may have been
+moved to dip him into our well. Shall I blush to relate that my own
+impression of its virtue must have come exactly from this uncanny turn
+taken--and quite in spite of the high Fezandié ideals--by the
+_invraisemblable_ house of entertainment where the assimilation of no
+form of innocence was doubted of by reason of the forms of experience
+that insisted somehow on cropping up, and no form of experience too
+directly deprecated by reason of the originally plotted tender growths
+of innocence. And some of these shapes were precisely those from which
+our good principal may well have first drawn his liveliest reassurance:
+I seem to remember such ancient American virgins in especial and such
+odd and either distinctively long-necked or more particularly
+long-haired and chinless compatriots, in black frock-coats of no type or
+"cut," no suggested application at all as garments--application, that
+is, to anything in the nature of character or circumstance, function or
+position--gathered about in the groups that M. Bonnefons almost
+terrorised by his refusal to recognise, among the barbarous races, any
+approach to his view of the great principle of Diction. I remember
+deeply and privately enjoying some of his shades of scorn and seeing
+how, given his own background, they were thoroughly founded; I remember
+above all as burnt in by the impression he gave me of the creature
+_wholly_ animated and containing no waste expressional spaces, no
+imaginative flatnesses, the notion of the luxury of life, though indeed
+of the amount of trouble of it too, when _none_ of the letters of the
+alphabet of sensibility might be dropped, involved in being a Frenchman.
+The liveliest lesson I must have drawn, however, from that source makes
+in any case, at the best, an odd educational connection, given the kind
+of concentration at which education, even such as ours, is supposed
+especially to aim: I speak of that direct promiscuity of insights which
+might easily have been pronounced profitless, with their attendant
+impressions and quickened sensibilities--yielding, as these last did,
+harvests of apparitions. I positively cherish at the present hour the
+fond fancy that we all soaked in some such sublime element as might
+still have hung about there--I mean on the very spot--from the vital
+presence, so lately extinct, of the prodigious Balzac; which had
+involved, as by its mere respiration, so dense a cloud of other
+presences, so arrayed an army of interrelated shades, that the air was
+still thick as with the fumes of witchcraft, with infinite seeing and
+supposing and creating, with a whole imaginative traffic. The Pension
+Vauquer, then but lately existent, according to Le Père Goriot, on the
+other side of the Seine, was still to be revealed to me; but the figures
+peopling it are not to-day essentially more intense (that is as a matter
+of the marked and featured, the terrible and the touching, as compared
+with the paleness of the conned page in general,) than I persuade
+myself, with so little difficulty, that I found the more numerous and
+more shifting, though properly doubtless less inspiring, constituents of
+the Pension Fezandié. Fantastic and all "subjective" that I should
+attribute a part of their interest, or that of the scene spreading round
+them, to any competent perception, in the small-boy mind, that the
+general or public moment had a rarity and a brevity, a sharp intensity,
+of its own; ruffling all things, as they came, with the morning breath
+of the Second Empire and making them twinkle back with a light of
+resigned acceptance, a freshness of cynicism, the force of a great
+grimacing example. The grimace might have been legibly there in the air,
+to the young apprehension, and could I but simplify this record enough I
+should represent everything as part of it. I seemed at any rate
+meanwhile to think of the Fezandié young men, young Englishmen mostly,
+who were getting up their French, in that many-coloured air, for what I
+supposed, in my candour, to be appointments and "posts," diplomatic,
+commercial, vaguely official, and who, as I now infer, though I didn't
+altogether embrace it at the time, must, under the loose rule of the
+establishment, have been amusing themselves not a little. It was as a
+side-wind of their free criticism, I take it, that I felt the first
+chill of an apprehended decline of the establishment, some pang of
+prevision of what might come, and come as with a crash, of the general
+fine fallacy on which it rested. Their criticism was for that matter
+free enough, causing me to admire it even while it terrified. They
+expressed themselves in terms of magnificent scorn--such as might
+naturally proceed, I think I felt, from a mightier race; they spoke of
+poor old Bonnefons, they spoke of our good Fezandié himself, they spoke
+more or less of everyone within view, as beggars and beasts, and I
+remember to have heard on their lips no qualification of any dish served
+to us at dêjeuner (and still more at the later meal, of which my
+brothers and I didn't partake) but as rotten. These were expressions,
+absent from our domestic, our American air either of fonder
+discriminations or vaguer estimates, which fairly extended for me the
+range of intellectual, or at least of social resource; and as the
+general tone of them to-day comes back to me it floods somehow with
+light the image of the fine old insular confidence (so intellectually
+unregenerate then that such a name scarce covers it, though inward
+stirrings and the growth of a _comparative_ sense of things have now
+begun unnaturally to agitate and disfigure it,) in which the general
+outward concussion of the English "abroad" with the fact of being abroad
+took place. The Fezandié young men were as much abroad as might be, and
+yet figured to me--largely by the upsetting force of that confidence,
+all but physically exercised--as the finest, handsomest, knowingest
+creatures; so that when I met them of an afternoon descending the
+Champs-Elysées with fine long strides and in the costume of the period,
+for which we can always refer to contemporary numbers of "Punch," the
+fact that I was for the most part walking sedately either with my mother
+or my aunt, or even with my sister and her governess, caused the spark
+of my vision that they were armed for conquest, or at the least for
+adventure, more expansively to glow. I am not sure whether as a general
+thing they honoured me at such instants with a sign of recognition; but
+I recover in especial the sense of an evening hour during which I had
+accompanied my mother to the Hôtel Meurice, where one of the New York
+cousins aforementioned, daughter of one of the Albany uncles--that is of
+the Rhinebeck member of the group--had perched for a time, so
+incongruously, one already seemed to feel, after the sorriest stroke of
+fate. I see again the gaslit glare of the Rue de Rivoli in the spring or
+the autumn evening (I forget which, for our year of the Rue d'Angoulême
+had been followed by a migration to the Rue Montaigne, with a period, or
+rather with two periods, of Boulogne-sur-mer interwoven, and we might
+have made our beguiled way from either domicile); and the whole
+impression seemed to hang too numerous lamps and too glittering
+_vitrines_ about the poor Pendletons' bereavement, their loss of their
+only, their so sturdily handsome, little boy, and to suffuse their state
+with the warm rich exhalations of subterraneous cookery with which I
+find my recall of Paris from those years so disproportionately and so
+quite other than stomachically charged. The point of all of which is
+simply that just as we had issued from the hotel, my mother anxiously
+urging me through the cross currents and queer contacts, as it were, of
+the great bazaar (of which the Rue de Rivoli was then a much more
+bristling avenue than now) rather than depending on me for support and
+protection, there swung into view the most splendid, as I at least
+esteemed him, of my elders and betters in the Rue Balzac, who had left
+the questions there supposedly engaging us far behind, and, with his
+high hat a trifle askew and his cigar actively alight, revealed to me at
+a glance what it was to be in full possession of Paris. There was speed
+in his step, assurance in his air, he was visibly, impatiently on the
+way; and he gave me thereby my first full image of what it was exactly
+to _be_ on the way. He gave it the more, doubtless, through the fact
+that, with a flourish of the aforesaid high hat (from which the
+Englishman of that age was so singularly inseparable) he testified to
+the act of recognition, and to deference to my companion, but with a
+grand big-boy good-humour that--as I remember from childhood the so
+frequent effect of an easy patronage, compared with a top-most
+overlooking, on the part of an admired senior--only gave an accent to
+the difference. As if he cared, or could have, that I but went forth
+through the Paris night in the hand of my mamma; while he had greeted us
+with a grace that was as a beat of the very wings of freedom! Of such
+shreds, at any rate, proves to be woven the stuff of young
+sensibility--when memory (if sensibility has at all existed for it)
+rummages over our old trunkful of spiritual duds and, drawing forth ever
+so tenderly this, that and the other tattered web, holds up the pattern
+to the light. I find myself in this connection so restlessly and
+tenderly rummage that the tatters, however thin, come out in handsful
+and every shred seems tangled with another.
+
+Gertrude Pendleton's mere name, for instance, becomes, and very
+preferably, the frame of another and a better picture, drawing to it
+cognate associations, those of that element of the New York cousinship
+which had originally operated to place there in a shining and even, as
+it were, an economic light a "preference for Paris"--which preference,
+during the period of the Rue d'Angoulême and the Rue Montaigne, we
+wistfully saw at play, the very lightest and freest, on the part of the
+inimitable Masons. Their earlier days of Tours and Trouville were over;
+a period of relative rigour at the Florence of the still encircling
+walls, the still so existent abuses and felicities, was also, I seem to
+gather, a thing of the past; great accessions, consciously awaited
+during the previous leaner time, had beautifully befallen them, and my
+own whole consciousness of the general air--so insistently I
+discriminate for that alone--was coloured by a familiar view of their
+enjoyment of these on a tremendously draped and festooned _premier_ of
+the Rue-St.-Honoré, bristling with ormolu and Pradier statuettes and
+looking almost straight across to the British Embassy; rather a low
+premier, after the manner of an entresol, as I remember it, and where
+the closed windows, which but scantly distinguished between our own
+sounds and those of the sociable, and yet the terrible, street of
+records and memories, seemed to maintain an air and a light thick with a
+mixture of every sort of queer old Parisian amenity and reference: as if
+to look or to listen or to touch were somehow at the same time to probe,
+to recover and communicate, to behold, to taste and even to smell--to
+one's greater assault by suggestion, no doubt, but also to the effect of
+some sweet and strange repletion, as from the continued consumption,
+say, out of flounced and puckered boxes, of serried rows of chocolate
+and other bonbons. I must have felt the whole thing as something for
+one's developed senses to live up to and make light of, and have been
+rather ashamed of my own for just a little sickishly staggering under
+it. This goes, however, with the fondest recall of our cousins' inbred
+ease, from far back, in all such assumable relations; and of how, four
+of the simplest, sweetest, best-natured girls as they were (with the
+eldest, a charming beauty, to settle on the general ground, after
+marriage and widowhood, and still to be blooming there), they were
+possessed of the scene and its great reaches and resources and
+possibilities in a degree that reduced us to small provincialism and a
+hanging on their lips when they told us, that is when the gentlest of
+mammas and the lovely daughter who was "out" did, of presentations at
+the Tuileries to the then all-wonderful, the ineffable Empress: reports
+touchingly qualified, on the part of our so exposed, yet after all so
+scantily indurated relatives, by the question of whether occasions so
+great didn't perhaps nevertheless profane the Sundays for which they
+were usually appointed. There was something of an implication in the air
+of those days, when young Americans were more numerously lovely than
+now, or at least more wide-eyed, it would fairly appear, that some
+account of the only tradition they had ever been rumoured to observe
+(that of the Lord's day) might have been taken even at the Tuileries.
+
+But what most comes back to me as the very note and fragrance of the New
+York cousinship in this general connection is a time that I remember to
+have glanced at on a page distinct from these, when the particular
+cousins I now speak of had conceived, under the influence of I know not
+what unextinguished morning star, the liveliest taste for the earliest
+possible rambles and researches, in which they were so good as to allow
+me, when I was otherwise allowed, to participate: health-giving walks,
+of an extraordinarily _matinal_ character, at the hour of the meticulous
+rag-pickers and exceptionally French polishers known to the Paris dawns
+of the Second Empire as at no time since; which made us all feel
+together, under the conduct of Honorine, bright child of the pavement
+herself, as if _we_, in our fresh curiosity and admiration, had also
+something to say to the great show presently to be opened, and were
+free, throughout the place, as those are free of a house who know its
+aspects of attic and cellar or how it looks from behind. I call our
+shepherdess Honorine even though perhaps not infallibly naming the
+sociable soubrette who might, with all her gay bold confidence, have
+been an official inspectress in person, and to whose easy care or, more
+particularly, expert sensibility and candour of sympathy and curiosity,
+our flock was freely confided. If she wasn't Honorine she was Clémentine
+or Augustine--which is a trifle; since what I thus recover, in any case,
+of these brushings of the strange Parisian dew, is those communities of
+contemplation that made us most hang about the jewellers' windows in the
+Palais Royal and the public playbills of the theatres on the Boulevard.
+The Palais Royal, now so dishonoured and disavowed, was then the very
+Paris of Paris; the shutters of the shops seemed taken down, at that
+hour, for our especial benefit, and I remember well how, the "dressing"
+of so large a number of the compact and richly condensed fronts being
+more often than not a matter of diamonds and pearls, rubies and
+sapphires, that represented, in their ingenuities of combination and
+contortion, the highest taste of the time, I found open to me any amount
+of superior study of the fact that the spell of gems seemed for the
+feminine nature almost alarmingly boundless. I stared too, it comes back
+to me, at these exhibitions, and perhaps even thought it became a young
+man of the world to express as to this or that object a refined and
+intelligent preference; but what I really most had before me was the
+chorus of abjection, as I might well have called it, led, at the highest
+pitch, by Honorine and vaguely suggesting to me, by the crudity, so to
+say, of its wistfulness, a natural frankness of passion--goodness knew
+in fact (for my small intelligence really didn't) what depths of
+corruptibility. Droll enough, as I win them again, these queer dim plays
+of consciousness: my sense that my innocent companions, Honorine _en
+tête_, would have done anything or everything for the richest ruby, and
+that though one couldn't one's self be decently dead to that richness
+one didn't at all know what "anything" might be or in the least what
+"everything" was. The gushing cousins, at the same time, assuredly knew
+still less of that, and Honorine's brave gloss of a whole range alike of
+possibilities and actualities was in itself a true social grace.
+
+They all enjoyed, in fine, while I somehow but wastefully mused--which
+was after all my form of enjoyment; I was shy for it, though it was a
+truth and perhaps odd enough withal, that I didn't really at all care
+for gems, that rubies and pearls, in no matter what collocations, left
+me comparatively cold; that I actually cared for them about as little
+as, monstrously, secretly, painfully, I cared for flowers. Later on I
+was to become aware that I "adored" trees and architectural
+marbles--that for a sufficient slab of a sufficiently rare, sufficiently
+bestreaked or empurpled marble in particular I would have given a bag of
+rubies; but by then the time had passed for my being troubled to make
+out what in that case would represent on a small boy's part the
+corruptibility, so to call it, proclaimed, before the _vitrines_, by the
+cousins. That hadn't, as a question, later on, its actuality; but it had
+so much at the time that if it had been frankly put to me I must have
+quite confessed my inability to say--and must, I gather, by the same
+stroke, have been ashamed of such inward penury; feeling that as a boy I
+showed more poorly than girls. There was a difference meanwhile for such
+puzzlements before the porticos of the theatres; all questions melted
+for me there into the single depth of envy--envy of the equal, the
+beatific command of the evening hour, in the _régime_ of Honorine's
+young train, who were fresh for the early sparrow and the chiffonier
+even after shedding buckets of tears the night before, and not so much
+as for the first or the second time, over the beautiful story of La Dame
+aux Camélias. There indeed was another humiliation, but by my weakness
+of position much more than of nature: whatever doing of "everything"
+might have been revealed to me as a means to the end, I would certainly
+have done it for a sight of Madame Doche and Fechter in Dumas's
+triumphant idyll--now enjoying the fullest honours of innocuous
+classicism; with which, as with the merits of its interpreters,
+Honorine's happy charges had become perfectly and if not quite serenely,
+at least ever so responsively and feelingly, familiar. Of a wondrous
+mixed sweetness and sharpness and queerness of uneffaced reminiscence is
+all that aspect of the cousins and the rambles and the overlapping
+nights melting along the odorously bedamped and retouched streets and
+arcades; bright in the ineffable morning light, above all, of our
+peculiar young culture and candour!
+
+All of which again has too easily led me to drop for a moment my more
+leading clue of that radiation of goodnature from Gertrude Pendleton and
+her headlong hospitalities in which we perhaps most complacently basked.
+The becraped passage at Meurice's alluded to a little back was of a
+later season, and the radiation, as I recall it, had been, that first
+winter, mainly from a _petit hôtel_ somewhere "on the other side," as
+we used with a large sketchiness to say, of the Champs Elysées; a region
+at that time reduced to no regularity, but figuring to my fond fancy as
+a chaos of accidents and contrasts where _petits hôtels_ of archaic type
+were elbowed by woodyards and cabarets, and pavilions ever so
+characteristic, yet ever so indefinable, snuggled between frank
+industries and vulgarities--all brightened these indeed by the sociable
+note of Paris, be it only that of chaffering or of other _bavardise_.
+The great consistencies of arch-refinement, now of so large a harmony,
+were still to come, so that it seemed rather original to live there; in
+spite of which the attraction of the hazard of it on the part of our
+then so uniformly natural young kinswoman, not so much ingeniously, or
+even expressively, as just gesticulatively and helplessly gay--since
+that earlier pitch of New York parlance scarce arrived at, or for that
+matter pretended to, enunciation--was quite in what I at least took to
+be the glitter of her very conventions and traditions themselves;
+exemplified for instance by a bright nocturnal christening-party in
+honour of the small son of all hopes whom she was so precipitately to
+lose: an occasion which, as we had, in our way, known the act of baptism
+but as so abbreviated and in fact so tacit a business, had the effect
+for us of one of the great "forms" of a society taking itself with
+typical seriousness. We were much more serious than the Pendletons,
+but, paradoxically enough, there was that weakness in our state of our
+being able to make no such attestation of it. The evening can have been
+but of the friendliest, easiest and least pompous nature, with small
+guests, in congruity with its small hero, as well as large; but I must
+have found myself more than ever yet in presence of a "rite," one of
+those round which as many kinds of circumstance as possible
+clustered--so that the more of these there were the more one might
+imagine a great social order observed. How shall I now pretend to say
+how many kinds of circumstance I supposed I recognised?--with the
+remarkable one, to begin with, and which led fancy so far afield, that
+the "religious ceremony" was at the same time a "party," of twinkling
+lustres and disposed flowers and ladies with bare shoulders (that
+platitudinous bareness of the period that suggested somehow the moral
+line, drawn as with a ruler and a firm pencil); with little English
+girls, daughters of a famous physician of that nationality then pursuing
+a Parisian career (he must have helped the little victim into the
+world), and whose emphasised type much impressed itself; with round
+glazed and beribboned boxes of multi-coloured sugared almonds, dragées
+de baptême above all, which we harvested, in their heaps, as we might
+have gathered apples from a shaken tree, and which symbolised as nothing
+else the ritual dignity. Perhaps this grand impression really came back
+but to the dragées de baptême, not strictly more immemorial to our young
+appreciation than the New Year's cake and the "Election" cake known to
+us in New York, yet immensely more official and of the nature of
+scattered largesse; partly through the days and days, as it seemed to
+me, that our life was to be furnished, reinforced and almost encumbered
+with them. It wasn't simply that they were so toothsome, but that they
+were somehow so important and so historic.
+
+It was with no such frippery, however, that I connected the occasional
+presence among us of the young member of the cousinship (in this case of
+the maternal) who most moved me to wistfulness of wonder, though not at
+all, with his then marked difference of age, by inviting my free
+approach. Vernon King, to whom I have in another part of this record
+alluded, at that time doing his baccalauréat on the other side of the
+Seine and coming over to our world at scraps of moments (for I recall my
+awe of the tremendous nature, as I supposed it, of his toil), as to
+quite a make-believe and gingerbread place, the lightest of substitutes
+for the "Europe" in which he had been from the first so technically
+plunged. His mother and sister, also on an earlier page referred to,
+had, from their distance, committed him to the great city to be
+"finished," educationally, to the point that for our strenuous cousin
+Charlotte was the only proper one--and I feel sure he can have acquitted
+himself in this particular in a manner that would have passed for
+brilliant if such lights didn't, thanks to her stiff little standards,
+always tend to burn low in her presence. These ladies were to develop
+more and more the practice of living in odd places for abstract inhuman
+reasons--at Marseilles, at Düsseldorf (if I rightly recall their
+principal German sojourn), at Naples, above all, for a long stage;
+where, in particular, their grounds of residence were somehow not as
+those of others, even though I recollect, from a much later time,
+attending them there at the opera, an experience which, in their
+fashion, they succeeded in despoiling for me of every element of the
+concrete, or at least of the pleasantly vulgar. Later impressions, few
+but firm, were so to enhance one's tenderness for Vernon's own image,
+the most interesting surely in all the troop of our young kinsmen early
+baffled and gathered, that he glances at me out of the Paris period,
+fresh-coloured, just blond-bearded, always smiling and catching his
+breath a little as from a mixture of eagerness and shyness, with such an
+appeal to the right idealisation, or to belated justice, as makes of
+mere evocation a sort of exercise of loyalty. It seemed quite richly
+laid upon me at the time--I get it all back--that he, two or three years
+older than my elder brother and dipped more early, as well as held more
+firmly, in the deep, the refining waters the virtue of which we all
+together, though with our differences of consistency, recognised, was
+the positive and living proof of what the process, comparatively poor
+for ourselves, could do at its best and with clay originally and
+domestically kneaded to the right plasticity; besides which he shone, to
+my fancy, and all the more for its seeming so brightly and quietly in
+his very grain, with the vague, the supposititious, but the intensely
+accent-giving stamp of the Latin quarter, which we so thinly imagined
+and so superficially brushed on our pious walks to the Luxembourg and
+through the parts where the glamour might have hung thickest. We were to
+see him a little--but two or three times--three or four years later,
+when, just before our own return, he had come back to America for the
+purpose, if my memory serves, of entering the Harvard Law School; and to
+see him still always with the smile that was essentially as facial, as
+livingly and loosely fixed, somehow, as his fresh complexion itself;
+always too with the air of caring so little for what he had been put
+through that, under any appeal to give out, more or less wonderfully,
+some sample or echo of it, as who should say, he still mostly panted as
+from a laughing mental embarrassment: he had been put through too much;
+it was all stale to him, and he wouldn't have known where to begin. He
+did give out, a little, on occasion--speaking, that is, on my different
+plane, as it were, and by the roundabout report of my brother; he gave
+out, it appeared, as they walked together across shining Newport sands,
+some fragment, some beginning of a very youthful poem that "Europe" had,
+with other results, moved him to, and a faint thin shred of which was to
+stick in my remembrance for reasons independent of its quality:
+
+
+     "Harold, rememberest thou the day,
+       We rode along the Appian Way?
+     Neglected tomb and altar cast
+       Their lengthening shadow o'er the plain,
+     And while we talked the mighty past
+       Around us lived and breathed again!"
+
+
+That was European enough, and yet he had returned to America really to
+find himself, even with every effort made immediately near him to defeat
+the discovery. He found himself, with the outbreak of the War, simply as
+the American soldier, and not under any bribe, however dim, of the
+epaulette or the girt sword; but just as the common enlisting native,
+which he smiled and gasped--to the increase of his happy shortness of
+breath, as from a repletion of culture, since it suggested no lack of
+personal soundness--at feeling himself so _like_ to be. As strange, yet
+as still more touching than strange, I recall the sight, even at a
+distance, of the drop straight off him of all his layers of educational
+varnish, the possession of the "advantages," the tongues, the degrees,
+the diplomas, the reminiscences, a saturation too that had all sunk
+in--a sacrifice of precious attributes that might almost have been
+viewed as a wild bonfire. So his prodigious mother, whom I have perhaps
+sufficiently presented for my reader to understand, didn't fail to view
+it--judging it also, sharply hostile to the action of the North as the
+whole dreadful situation found her, with deep and resentful displeasure.
+I remember how I thought of Vernon himself, during the business, as at
+once so despoiled, so diverted, and above all so resistantly bright, as
+vaguely to suggest something more in him still, some deep-down reaction,
+some extremity of indifference and defiance, some exhibition of a young
+character too long pressed and impressed, too long prescribed to and
+with too much expected of it, and all under too firmer a will; so that
+the public pretext had given him a lift, or lent him wings, which
+without its greatness might have failed him. As the case was to turn
+nothing--that is nothing he most wanted and, remarkably, most
+enjoyed--did fail him at all. I forget with which of the possible
+States, New York, Massachusetts or Rhode Island (though I think the
+first) he had taken service; only seeming to remember that this all went
+on for him at the start in McClellan's and later on in Grant's army,
+and that, badly wounded in a Virginia battle, he came home to be nursed
+by his mother, recently restored to America for a brief stay. She held,
+I believe, in the event, that he had, under her care, given her his vow
+that, his term being up, he would not, should he get sufficiently well,
+re-engage. The question here was between them, but it was definite that,
+materially speaking, she was in no degree dependent on him. The old, the
+irrepressible adage, however, was to live again between them: when the
+devil was sick the devil a saint would be; when the devil was well the
+devil a saint was he!
+
+The devil a saint, at all events, was Vernon, who denied that he had
+passed his word, and who, as soon as he had surmounted his first
+disablement, passionately and quite admirably re-enlisted. At once
+restored to the front and to what now gave life for him its
+indispensable relish, he was in the thick, again, of the great carnage
+roundabout Richmond, where, again gravely wounded, he (as I figure still
+incorrigibly smiling) succumbed. His mother had by this time indignantly
+returned to Europe, accompanied by her daughter and her younger son--the
+former of whom accepted, for our great pity, a little later on, the
+office of closing the story. Anne King, young and frail, but not less
+firm, under stress, than the others of her blood, came back, on her
+brother's death, and, quietest, most colourless Electra of a lucidest
+Orestes, making her difficult way amid massed armies and battle-drenched
+fields, got possession of his buried body and bore it for reinterment to
+Newport, the old habitation, as I have mentioned, of their father's
+people, both Vernons and Kings. It must have been to see my mother, as
+well as to sail again for Europe, that she afterwards came to Boston,
+where I remember going down with her, at the last, to the dock of the
+English steamer, some black and tub-like Cunarder, an archaic "Africa"
+or "Asia" sufficing to the Boston service of those days. I saw her off
+drearily and helplessly enough, I well remember, and even at that moment
+found for her another image: what was she most like, though in a still
+sparer and dryer form, but some low-toned, some employed little Brontë
+heroine?--though more indeed a Lucy Snowe than a Jane Eyre, and with no
+shade of a Brontë hero within sight. To this all the fine privilege and
+fine culture of all the fine countries (collective matter, from far
+back, of our intimated envy) had "amounted"; just as it had amounted for
+Vernon to the bare headstone on the Newport hillside where, by his
+mother's decree, as I have already noted, there figured no hint of the
+manner of his death. So grand, so finely personal a manner it appeared
+to me at the time, and has indeed appeared ever since, that this brief
+record irrepressibly springs from that. His mother, as I have equally
+noted, was however, with her views, to find no grace in it so long as
+she lived; and his sister went back to her, and to Marseille, as they
+always called it, but prematurely to die.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+
+I feel that much might be made of my memories of Boulogne-sur-Mer had I
+but here left room for the vast little subject; in which I should
+probably, once started, wander to and fro as exploringly, as
+perceivingly, as discoveringly, I am fairly tempted to call it, as might
+really give the measure of my small operations at the time. I was almost
+wholly reduced there to operations of that mere inward and superficially
+idle order at which we have already so freely assisted; reduced by a
+cause I shall presently mention, the production of a great blur,
+well-nigh after the fashion of some mild domestic but quite considerably
+spreading grease-spot, in respect to the world of action, such as it
+was, more or less immediately about me. I must personally have lived
+during this pale predicament almost only by seeing what I could, after
+my incorrigible ambulant fashion--a practice that may well have made me
+pass for bringing home nothing in the least exhibitional--rather than by
+pursuing the inquiries and interests that agitated, to whatever
+intensity, our on the whole widening little circle. The images I speak
+of as matter for more evocation that I can spare them were the fruit of
+two different periods at Boulogne, a shorter and a longer; this second
+appearing to us all, at the time, I gather, too endlessly and
+blightingly prolonged: so sharply, before it was over, did I at any rate
+come to yearn for the Rue Montaigne again, the Rue Montaigne "sublet"
+for a term under a flurry produced in my parents' breasts by a
+"financial crisis" of great violence to which the American world, as a
+matter now of recorded history, I believe, had tragically fallen victim,
+and which had imperilled or curtailed for some months our moderate means
+of existence. We were to recover, I make out, our disturbed balance, and
+were to pursue awhile further our chase of the alien, the somehow
+repeatedly postponed _real_ opportunity; and the second, the
+comparatively cramped and depressed connection with the classic refuge,
+as it then was, of spasmodic thrift, when not of settled indigence, for
+the embarrassed of our race in the largest sense of this matter, was to
+be shuffled off at last with no scant relief and reaction. This is
+perhaps exactly why the whole picture of our existence at the
+Pas-de-Calais watering place pleads to me now for the full indulgence,
+what would be in other words every touch of tenderness workable, after
+all the years, over the lost and confused and above all, on their own
+side, poor ultimately rather vulgarised and violated little sources of
+impression: items and aspects these which while they in their degree
+and after their sort flourished we only asked to admire, or at least to
+appreciate, for their rewarding extreme queerness. The very centre of my
+particular consciousness of the place turned too soon to the fact of my
+coming in there for the gravest illness of my life, an all but mortal
+attack of the malignant typhus of old days; which, after laying me as
+low as I could well be laid for many weeks, condemned me to a
+convalescence so arduous that I saw my apparently scant possibilities,
+by the measure of them then taken, even as through a glass darkly, or
+through the expansive blur for which I found just above a homely image.
+
+This experience was to become when I had emerged from it the great
+reminiscence or circumstance of old Boulogne for me, and I was to regard
+it, with much intelligence, I should have maintained, as the marked
+limit of my state of being a small boy. I took on, when I had decently,
+and all the more because I had so retardedly, recovered, the sense of
+being a boy of other dimensions somehow altogether, and even with a new
+dimension introduced and acquired; a dimension that I was eventually to
+think of as a stretch in the direction of essential change or of living
+straight into a part of myself previously quite unvisited and now made
+accessible as by the sharp forcing of a closed door. The blur of
+consciousness imaged by my grease-spot was not, I hasten to declare,
+without its relenting edges and even, during its major insistence,
+fainter thicknesses; short of which, I see, my picture, the picture I
+was always so incurably "after," would have failed of animation
+altogether--quite have failed to bristle with characteristics, with
+figures and objects and scenic facts, particular passages and moments,
+the stuff, in short, of that scrap of minor gain which I have spoken of
+as our multiplied memories. Wasn't I even at the time, and much more
+later on, to feel how we had been, through the thick and thin of the
+whole adventure, assaulted as never before in so concentrated a way by
+local and social character? Such was the fashion after which the
+Boulogne of long ago--I have known next to nothing of it since--could
+come forth, come more than half-way, as we say, to meet the imagination
+open to such advances. It was, taking one thing with another, so verily
+drenched in character that I see myself catching this fine flagrancy
+almost equally in everything; unless indeed I may have felt it rather
+smothered than presented on the comparatively sordid scene of the
+Collège Communal, not long afterwards to expand, I believe, into the
+local Lycée, to which the inimitable process of our education promptly
+introduced us. I was to have less of the Collège than my elder and my
+younger brother, thanks to the interrupting illness that placed me so
+long, with its trail of after-effects, half complacently, half ruefully
+apart; but I suffered for a few early weeks the mainly malodorous sense
+of the braver life, produced as this was by a deeply democratic
+institution from which no small son even of the most soapless home could
+possibly know exclusion. Odd, I recognise, that I should inhale the air
+of the place so particularly, so almost only, to that dismal effect;
+since character was there too, for whom it should concern, and my view
+of some of the material conditions, of the general collegiate presence
+toward the top of the steepish Grand' Rue, on the right and not much
+short, as it comes back to me, of the then closely clustered and
+inviolate haute ville, the more or less surviving old town, the idle
+grey rampart, the moated and towered citadel, the tree-shaded bastion
+for strolling and sitting "immortalised" by Thackeray, achieved the
+monumental, in its degree, after a fashion never yet associated for us
+with the pursuit of learning. Didn't the Campaigner, suffering indigence
+at the misapplied hands of Colonel Newcome, rage at that hushed victim
+supremely and dreadfully just thereabouts--by which I mean in the _haute
+ville_--over some question of a sacrificed sweetbread or a cold hacked
+joint that somebody had been "at"? Beside such builded approaches to an
+education as we had elsewhere known the Collège exhibited, with whatever
+reserves, the measure of style which almost any French accident of the
+administratively architectural order more easily rises to than fails
+of; even if the matter be but a question of the shyest similitude of a
+_cour d'honneur_, the court disconnecting the scene, by intention at
+least, from the basely bourgeois and giving value to the whole effect of
+opposed and windowed wall and important, or balanced and "placed,"
+_perron_. These are many words for the dull precinct, as then presented,
+I admit, and they are perhaps half prompted by a special association,
+too ghostly now quite to catch again--the sense of certain Sundays,
+distinct from the grim, that is the flatly instructional, body of the
+week, when I seem to myself to have successfully flouted the whole
+constituted field by passing across it and from it to some quite ideally
+old-world little annexed _musée de province_, as inviolate in its way as
+the grey rampart and bare citadel, and very like them in unrelieved
+tone, where I repeatedly, and without another presence to hinder, looked
+about me at goodness knows what weird ancientries of stale academic art.
+Not one of these treasures, in its habit as it lived, do I recall; yet
+the sense and the "note" of them was at the time, none the less, not so
+elusive that I didn't somehow draw straight from them intimations of the
+interesting, that is revelations of the æsthetic, the historic, the
+critical mystery and charm of things (of such things taken altogether),
+that added to my small loose handful of the seed of culture.
+
+That apprehension was, in its way, of our house of learning too, and
+yet I recall how, on the scant and simple terms I have glanced at, I
+quite revelled in it; whereas other impressions of my brief ordeal
+shrink, for anything in the nature of interest, but to three or four
+recovered marks of the social composition of the school. There were the
+sons of all the small shop-keepers and not less, by my remembrance, of
+certain of the mechanics and artisans; but there was also the English
+contingent, these predominantly _internes_ and uniformed, blue-jacketed
+and brass-buttoned, even to an effect of odd redundancy, who by my
+conceit gave our association a lift. Vivid still to me is the summer
+morning on which, in the wide court--as wide, that is, as I liked to
+suppose it, and where we hung about helplessly enough for recreation--a
+brownish black-eyed youth, of about my own degree of youthfulness,
+mentioned to me with an air that comes back as that of the liveliest
+informational resource the outbreak, just heard of, of an awful Mutiny
+in India, where his military parents, who had not so long before sent
+him over thence, with such weakness of imagination, as I measured it, to
+the poor spot on which we stood, were in mortal danger of their lives;
+so that news of their having been killed would perhaps be already on the
+way. They might well have been military, these impressively exposed
+characters, since my friend's name was Napier, or Nappié as he was
+called at the school, and since, I may add also, there attached to him,
+in my eyes, the glamour of an altogether new emphasis of type. The
+English boys within our ken since our coming abroad had been of the
+fewest--the Fezandié youths, whether English or American, besides being
+but scantly boys, had been so lost, on that scene, in our heap of
+disparities; and it pressed upon me after a fashion of its own that
+those we had known in New York, and all aware of their varieties and
+"personalities" as one had supposed one's self, had in no case
+challenged the restless "placing" impulse with any such force as the
+finished little Nappié. They had not been, as he was by the very
+perversity of his finish, resultants of forces at all--or comparatively
+speaking; it was as if their producing elements had been simple and few,
+whereas behind this more mixed and, as we have learnt to say, evolved
+companion (his very simplicities, his gaps of possibility, being still
+evolved), there massed itself I couldn't have said what protective
+social order, what tangled creative complexity. Why I should have
+thought him almost Indian of stamp and hue because his English parents
+were of the so general Indian peril is more than I can say; yet I have
+his exotic and above all his bold, his imaginably even "bad," young
+face, finely unacquainted with law, before me at this hour quite
+undimmed--announcing, as I conceived it, and quite as a shock, any
+awful adventure one would, as well as something that I must even at the
+time have vaguely taken as the play of the "passions." He vanishes, and
+I dare say I but make him over, as I make everything; and he must have
+led his life, whatever it was to become, with the least possible waiting
+on the hour or the major consequence and no waste of energy at all in
+mooning, no patience with any substitute for his very own humour. We had
+another schoolmate, this one native to the soil, whose references were
+with the last vividness local and who was yet to escape with brilliancy
+in the aftertime the smallest shadow of effacement. His most direct
+reference at that season was to the principal pastry-cook's of the town,
+an establishment we then found supreme for little criss-crossed apple
+tartlets and melting _babas_--young Coquelin's home life amid which we
+the more acutely envied that the upward cock of his so all-important
+nose testified, for my fancy, to the largest range of free familiar
+sniffing. C.-B. Coquelin is personally most present to me, in the form
+of that hour, by the value, as we were to learn to put it, of this nose,
+the fine assurance and impudence of which fairly made it a trumpet for
+promises; yet in spite of that, the very gage, as it were, of his long
+career as the most interesting and many-sided comedian, or at least most
+unsurpassed dramatic _diseur_ of his time, I failed to doubt that, with
+the rich recesses of the parental industry for his background, his
+subtlest identity was in his privilege, or perhaps even in his expertest
+trick, of helping himself well.
+
+These images, however, were but drops in the bucket of my sense of
+catching character, roundabout us, as I say, at every turn and in every
+aspect; character that began even, as I was pleased to think, in our own
+habitation, the most spacious and pompous Europe had yet treated us to,
+in spite of its fronting on the Rue Neuve Chaussée, a street of lively
+shopping, by the measure of that innocent age, and with its own
+ground-floor occupied by a bristling exhibition of indescribably futile
+_articles de Paris_. Modern and commodious itself, it looked from its
+balcony at serried and mismatched and quaintly-named haunts of old
+provincial, of sedately passive rather than confidently eager, traffic;
+but this made, among us, for much harmless inquisitory life--while we
+were fairly assaulted, at home, by the scale and some of the striking
+notes of our fine modernity. The young, the agreeable (agreeable to
+anything), the apparently opulent M. Prosper Sauvage--wasn't it?--had
+not long before, unless I mistake, inherited the place as a monument of
+"family," quite modestly local yet propitious family, ambition; with an
+ample extension in the rear, and across the clearest prettiest court,
+for his own dwelling, which thus became elegant, _entre cour et
+jardin_, and showed all the happy symmetries and proper conventions.
+Here flourished, or rather, I surmise at this time of day, here
+languished, a domestic drama of which we enjoyed the murmurous overflow:
+frankly astounding to me, I confess, how I remain still in sensitive
+presence of our resigned proprietor's domestic drama, in and out of
+which I see a pair of figures quite up to the dramatic mark flit again
+with their air of the very rightest finish. I must but note these
+things, none the less, and pass; for scarce another item of the whole
+Boulogne concert of salient images failed, after all, of a significance
+either still more strangely social or more distinctively spectacular.
+These appearances indeed melt together for my interest, I once more
+feel, as, during the interminable stretch of the prescribed and for the
+most part solitary airings and outings involved in my slow convalescence
+from the extremity of fever, I approached that straitened and somewhat
+bedarkened issue of the Rue de l'Écu (was it?) toward the
+bright-coloured, strongly-peopled Port just where Merridew's English
+Library, solace of my vacuous hours and temple, in its degree too, of
+deep initiations, mounted guard at the right. Here, frankly,
+discrimination drops--every particular in the impression once so quick
+and fresh sits interlinked with every other in the large lap of the
+whole. The motley, sunny, breezy, bustling Port, with its classic, its
+admirable fisher-folk of both sexes, models of type and tone and of what
+might be handsomest in the thoroughly weathered condition, would have
+seemed the straightest appeal to curiosity had not the old Thackerayan
+side, as I may comprehensively call it, and the scattered wealth of
+illustration of _his_ sharpest satiric range, not so constantly
+interposed and competed with it. The scene bristled, as I look back at
+it, with images from Men's Wives, from the society of Mr. Deuceace and
+that of fifty other figures of the same creation, with Bareacreses and
+Rawdon Crawleys and of course with Mrs. Macks, with Roseys of a more or
+less crumpled freshness and blighted bloom, with battered and bent,
+though doubtless never quite so fine, Colonel Newcomes not less; with
+more reminders in short than I can now gather in. Of those forms of the
+seedy, the subtly sinister, the vainly "genteel," the generally damaged
+and desperate, and in particular perhaps the invincibly impudent, all
+the marks, I feel sure, were stronger and straighter than such as we
+meet in generally like cases under our present levelling light. Such
+anointed and whiskered and eked-out, such brazen, bluffing, swaggering
+gentlemen, such floridly repaired ladies, their mates, all looking as
+hard as they could as if they were there for mere harmless amusement--it
+was as good, among them, as just _being_ Arthur Pendennis to know so
+well, or at least to guess so fearfully, who and what they might be.
+They were floated on the tide of the manners then prevailing, I judge,
+with a rich processional effect that so many of our own grand lapses,
+when not of our mere final flatnesses, leave no material for; so that
+the living note of Boulogne was really, on a more sustained view, the
+opposition between a native race the most happily tempered, the most
+becomingly seasoned and salted and self-dependent, and a shifting
+colony--so far as the persons composing it _could_ either urgently or
+speculatively shift--inimitably at odds with any active freshness. And
+the stale and the light, even though so scantly rebounding, the too
+densely socialised, group was the English, and the "positive" and hardy
+and steady and wind-washed the French; and it was all as flushed with
+colour and patched with costume and referable to record and picture, to
+literature and history, as a more easily amusing and less earnestly
+uniform age could make it. When I speak of this opposition indeed I see
+it again most take effect in an antithesis that, on one side and the
+other, swallowed all differences at a gulp. The general British show, as
+we had it there, in the artless mid-Victorian desert, had, I think, for
+its most sweeping sign the high assurance of its dowdiness; whereas one
+had only to glance about at the sea-faring and fisher-folk who were the
+real strength of the place to feel them shed at every step and by their
+every instinct of appearance the perfect lesson of taste. There it was
+to be learnt and taken home--with never a moral, none the less, drawn
+from it by the "higher types." I speak of course in particular of the
+tanned and trussed and kerchiefed, the active and productive women, all
+so short-skirted and free-limbed under stress; for as by the rule of the
+dowdy their sex is ever the finer example, so where the sense of the
+suitable, of the charmingly and harmoniously right prevails, they
+preserve the pitch even as a treasure committed to their piety. To hit
+that happy mean of rightness amid the mixed occupations of a home-mother
+and a fishwife, to be in especial both so bravely stripped below and so
+perfectly enveloped above as the deep-wading, far-striding,
+shrimp-netting, crab-gathering matrons or maidens who played,
+waist-high, with the tides and racily quickened the market, was to make
+grace thoroughly practical and discretion thoroughly vivid. These
+attributes had with them all, for the eye, however, a range too great
+for me to follow, since, as their professional undress was a turn-out
+positively self-consistent, so their household, or more responsibly
+public, or altogether festal, array played through the varied essentials
+of fluted coif and folded kerchief and sober skirt and tense, dark,
+displayed stocking and clicking wooden slipper, to say nothing of long
+gold ear-drop or solid short-hung pectoral cross, with a respect for
+the rigour of conventions that had the beauty of self-respect.
+
+I owe to no season of the general period such a preserved sense of
+innumerable unaccompanied walks--at the reason of which luxury of
+freedom I have glanced; which as often as not were through the steep and
+low-browed and brightly-daubed _ruelles_ of the fishing-town and either
+across and along the level sea-marge and sustained cliff beyond; this
+latter the site of the first Napoleon's so tremendously mustered camp of
+invasion, with a monument as futile, by my remembrance, as that
+enterprise itself had proved, to give it all the special accent I could
+ask for. Or I was as free for the _haute ville_ and the ramparts and the
+scattered, battered benches of reverie--if I may so honour my use of
+them; they kept me not less complacently in touch with those of the so
+anciently odd and mainly contracted houses over which the stiff citadel
+and the ghost of Catherine de Médicis, who had dismally sojourned in it,
+struck me as throwing such a chill, and one of which precisely must have
+witnessed the never-to-be-forgotten Campaigner's passage in respect to
+her cold beef. Far from extinct for me is my small question of those
+hours, doubtless so mentally, so shamelessly wanton, as to what human
+life might be tucked away in such retreats, which expressed the last
+acceptance whether of desired or of imposed quiet; so absolutely
+appointed and obliged did I feel to make out, so far as I could, what,
+in so significant a world, they on their part _represented_. I think the
+force mainly sustaining me at that rather dreary time--as I see it can
+only show for--was this lively felt need that everything should
+represent something more than what immediately and all too blankly met
+the eye; I seem to myself to have carried it about everywhere and,
+though of course only without outward signs that might have betrayed my
+fatuity, and insistently, quite yearningly applied it. What I wanted, in
+my presumption, was that the object, the place, the person, the
+unreduced impression, often doubtless so difficult or so impossible to
+reduce, should give out to me something of a situation; living as I did
+in confused and confusing situations and thus hooking them on, however
+awkwardly, to almost any at all living surface I chanced to meet. My
+memory of Boulogne is that we had almost no society of any sort at
+home--there appearing to be about us but one sort, and that of far too
+great, or too fearful, an immediate bravery. Yet there were occasional
+figures that I recover from our scant circle and that I associate,
+whatever links I may miss, with the small still houses on the rampart;
+figures of the quaintest, quite perhaps the frowsiest, little English
+ladies in such mushroom hats, such extremely circular and bestriped
+scarlet petticoats, such perpetual tight gauntlets, such explicit
+claims to long descent, which showed them for everything that everyone
+else at Boulogne was not. These mid-Victorian samples of a perfect
+consistency "represented," by my measure, as hard as ever they
+could--and represented, of all things, literature and history and
+society. The literature was that of the three-volume novel, then, and
+for much after, enjoying its loosest and serenest spread; for they
+separately and anxiously and awfully "wrote"--and that must almost by
+itself have amounted in them to all the history I evoked.
+
+The dreary months, as I am content that in their second phase especially
+they should be called, are subject, I repeat, to the perversion, quite
+perhaps to the obscuration, of my temporarily hindered health--which
+should keep me from being too sure of these small _proportions_ of
+experience--I was to look back afterwards as over so grey a desert;
+through which, none the less, there flush as sharp little certainties,
+not to be disallowed, such matters as the general romance of Merridew,
+the English Librarian, before mentioned, at the mouth of the Port; a
+connection that thrusts itself upon me now as after all the truest
+centre of my perceptions--waylaying my steps at the time, as I came and
+went, more than any other object or impression. The question of what
+_that_ spot represented, or could be encouraged, could be aided and
+abetted, to represent, may well have supremely engaged me--for depth
+within depth there could only open before me. The place "meant," on
+these terms, to begin with, frank and licensed fiction, licensed to my
+recordedly relaxed state; and what this particular luxury represented it
+might have taken me even more time than I had to give to make out. The
+blest novel in three volumes exercised through its form, to my sense, on
+grounds lying deeper for me to-day than my deepest sounding, an appeal
+that fairly made it do with me what it would. Possibly a drivelling
+confession, and the more drivelling perhaps the more development I
+should attempt for it; from which, however, the very difficulty of the
+case saves me. Too many associations, too much of the ferment of memory
+and fancy, are somehow stirred; they beset me again, they hover and
+whirl about me while I stand, as I used to stand, within the positively
+sanctified walls of the shop (so of the _vieux temps_ now their aspect
+and fashion and worked system: by which I mean again of the frumpiest
+and civillest mid-Victorian), and surrender to the vision of the shelves
+packed with their rich individual trinities. Why should it have affected
+me so that my choice, so difficult in such a dazzle, could only be for a
+trinity? I am unable fully to say--such a magic dwelt in the mere rich
+fact of the trio. When the novel of that age was "bad," as it so
+helplessly, so abjectly and prevailingly consented to be, the three
+volumes still did something for it, a something that was, all strangely,
+not an aggravation of its case. When it was "good" (our analysis, our
+terms of appreciation, had a simplicity that has lingered on) they made
+it copiously, opulently better; so that when, after the span of the
+years, my relation with them became, from that of comparatively artless
+reader, and to the effect of a superior fondness and acuteness, that of
+complacent author, the tradition of infatuated youth still flung over
+them its mantle: this at least till _all_ relation, by one of the very
+rudest turns of life we of the profession were to have known, broke off,
+in clumsy interfering hands and with almost no notice given, in a day,
+in an hour. Besides connecting me with the lost but unforgotten note of
+waiting service and sympathy that quavered on the Merridew air, they
+represented just for intrinsic charm more than I could at any moment
+have given a plain account of; they fell, by their ineffable history,
+every trio I ever touched, into the category of such prized phenomena as
+my memory, for instance, of fairly hanging about the Rue des Vieillards,
+at the season I speak of, through the apprehension that something vague
+and sweet--if I shouldn't indeed rather say something of infinite future
+point and application--would come of it. This is a reminiscence that
+nothing would induce me to verify, as for example by any revisiting
+light; but it was going to be good for me, good, that is, for what I was
+pleased to regard as my intelligence or my imagination, in fine for my
+obscurely specific sense of things, that I _should_ so have hung about.
+The name of the street was by itself of so gentle and intimate a
+persuasion that I must have been ashamed not to proceed, for the very
+grace of it, to some shade of active response. And there was always a
+place of particular arrest in the vista brief and blank, but inclusively
+blank, blank _after_ ancient, settled, more and more subsiding things,
+blank almost, in short, with all Matthew Arnold's "ennui of the middle
+ages," rather than, poorly and meanly and emptily, before such states,
+which was previously what I had most known of blankness. This determined
+pause was at the window of a spare and solitary shop, a place of no
+amplitude at all, but as of an inveterate cheerful confidence, where,
+among a few artists' materials, an exhibited water-colour from some
+native and possibly then admired hand was changed but once in ever so
+long. That was perhaps after all the pivot of my revolution--the
+question of whether or no I should at a given moment find the old
+picture replaced. I made this, when I had the luck, pass for an
+event--yet an event which would _have_ to have had for its scene the
+precious Rue des Vieillards, and pale though may be the recital of such
+pleasures I lose myself in depths of kindness for my strain of
+ingenuity.
+
+All of which, and to that extent to be corrected, leaves small allowance
+for my service to good M. Ansiot, rendered while my elder and younger
+brothers--the younger completing our group of the ungovernessed--were
+continuously subject to collegial durance. Their ordeal was, I still
+blush to think, appreciably the heavier, as compared with mine, during
+our longer term of thrifty exile from Paris--the time of stress, as I
+find I recall it, when we had turned our backs on the Rue Montaigne and
+my privilege was so to roam on the winter and the spring afternoons.
+Mild M. Ansiot, "under" whom I for some three hours each forenoon sat
+sole and underided--and actually by himself too--was a curiosity, a
+benignity, a futility even, I gather; but save for a felt and remembered
+impulse in me to open the window of our scene of study as soon as he had
+gone was in no degree an ideal. He might rise here, could I do him
+justice, as the rarest of my poor evocations; for he it was, to be
+frank, who most literally smelt of the vieux temps--as to which I have
+noted myself as wondering and musing as much as might be, with recovered
+scraps and glimpses and other intimations, only never yet for such a
+triumph of that particular sense. To be still frank, he was little less
+than a monster--for mere unresisting or unresilient mass of personal
+presence I mean; so that I fairly think of him as a form of bland
+porpoise, violently blowing in an age not his own, as by having had to
+exchange deep water for thin air. Thus he impressed me as with an
+absolute ancientry of type, of tone, of responsible taste, above all;
+this last I mean in literature, since it was literature we sociably
+explored, to my at once charmed and shamed apprehension of the several
+firm traditions, the pure proprieties, the discussabilities, in the
+oddest way both so many and so few, of that field as they prevailed to
+his pious view. I must have had hold, in this mere sovereign sample of
+the accidentally, the quite unconsciously and unpretentiously, the all
+negligibly or superfluously handed-down, of a rare case of the
+provincial and academic _cuistre_; though even while I record it I see
+the good man as too helpless and unaggressive, too smothered in his poor
+facts of person and circumstance, of overgrown time of life alone, to
+incur with justness the harshness of classification. He rested with a
+weight I scarce even felt--such easy terms he made, without scruple, for
+both of us--on the cheerful innocence of my barbarism; and though our
+mornings were short and subject, I think, to quite drowsy lapses and
+other honest aridities, we did scumble together, I make out, by the aid
+of the collected extracts from the truly and academically great which
+formed his sole resource and which he had, in a small portable and
+pocketed library rather greasily preserved, some patch of picture of a
+saving as distinguished from a losing classicism. The point remains for
+me that when all was said--and even with everything that might directly
+have counted unsaid--he discharged for me such an office that I was to
+remain to this far-off hour in a state of possession of him that is the
+very opposite of a blank: quite after the fashion again in which I had
+all along and elsewhere suffered and resisted, and yet so perversely and
+intimately appropriated, tutoring; which was with as little as ever to
+show for my profit of his own express showings. The blank he fills out
+crowds itself with a wealth of value, since I shouldn't without him have
+been able to claim, for whatever it may be worth, a tenth (at that let
+me handsomely put it), of my "working" sense of the vieux temps. How can
+I allow then that we hadn't planted together, with a loose felicity,
+some of the seed of work?--even though the sprouting was so long put
+off. Everything, I have mentioned, had come at this time to be
+acceptedly, though far from braggingly, put off; and the ministrations
+of M. Ansiot really wash themselves over with the weak mixture that had
+begun to spread for me, to immensity, during that summer day or two of
+our earlier residence when, betraying strange pains and apprehensions, I
+was with all decision put to bed. Present to me still is the fact of my
+sharper sense, after an hour or two, of my being there in distress and,
+as happened for the moment, alone; present to me are the sounds of the
+soft afternoon, the mild animation of the Boulogne street through the
+half-open windows; present to me above all the strange sense that
+something had begun that would make more difference to me, directly and
+indirectly, than anything had ever yet made. I might verily, on the
+spot, have seen, as in a fading of day and a change to something
+suddenly queer, the whole large extent of it. I must thus, much
+impressed but half scared, have wanted to appeal; to which end I
+tumbled, all too weakly, out of bed and wavered toward the bell just
+across the room. The question of whether I really reached and rang it
+was to remain lost afterwards in the strong sick whirl of everything
+about me, under which I fell into a lapse of consciousness that I shall
+conveniently here treat as a considerable gap.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Small Boy and Others, by Henry James
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+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of A Small Boy and Others, by Henry James.
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+/*<![CDATA[  XML blockout */
+<!--
+    p {  margin-top: .75em;
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+    .pagenum  { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */
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+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Small Boy and Others, by Henry James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Small Boy and Others
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: July 24, 2008 [EBook #26115]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif, Martin Pettit, University of
+Toronto Libraries. and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h1>A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS</h1>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h2>BOOKS BY HENRY JAMES</h2>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Published by Charles Scribner's Sons</span></h4>
+
+<table summary="Books By Henry James">
+  <tr>
+    <td><span class="smcap">A Small Boy and Others</span></td>
+    <td class="right"><i>net</i> $2.50</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Outcry</span></td>
+    <td class="right"><i>net</i>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;1.25</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Finer Grain</span></td>
+    <td class="right"><i>net</i>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;1.25</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Sacred Fount</span></td>
+    <td class="right">1.50</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Wings of the Dove</span>, 2 vols.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="right">2.50</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Better Sort</span></td>
+    <td class="right">1.50</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Golden Bowl</span>, 2 vols.</td>
+    <td class="right">2.50</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Novels and Tales. New York Edition</span><br />24 vols., <i>net</i> $48.00</h4>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="center"><img src="images/jamesphoto.jpg" width='446' height='700' alt="Henry James and his Father From a daguerreotype taken in 1854" /></div>
+
+<h4>Henry James and his Father<br />From a daguerreotype taken in 1854</h4>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h1>A SMALL BOY<br />AND OTHERS</h1>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>HENRY JAMES</h2>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h4>NEW YORK<br />CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS<br />1913</h4>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Copyright, 1913, by</span><br />
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS<br />Published March, 1913</h4>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="center"><img src="images/logo.jpg" width='89' height='100' alt="Publisher's logo" /></div>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<p class="center"><a href="#I">I</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#II">II</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+<a href="#III">III</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#IV">IV</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#V">V</a>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#VI">VI</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#VII">VII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#VIII">VIII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+<a href="#IX">IX</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#X">X</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#XI">XI</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+<a href="#XII">XII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#XIII">XIII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#XIV">XIV</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+<a href="#XV">XV</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#XVI">XVI</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#XVII">XVII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+<a href="#XVIII">XVIII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#XIX">XIX</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#XX">XX</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+<a href="#XXI">XXI</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#XXII">XXII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#XXIII">XXIII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+<a href="#XXIV">XXIV</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#XXV">XXV</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#XXVI">XXVI</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+<a href="#XXVII">XXVII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#XXVIII">XXVIII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#XXIX">XXIX</a></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h1>A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS</h1>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2>
+
+<p>In the attempt to place together some particulars of the early life of
+William James and present him in his setting, his immediate native and
+domestic air, so that any future gathered memorials of him might become
+the more intelligible and interesting, I found one of the consequences
+of my interrogation of the past assert itself a good deal at the expense
+of some of the others. For it was to memory in the first place that my
+main appeal for particulars had to be made; I had been too near a
+witness of my brother's beginnings of life, and too close a participant,
+by affection, admiration and sympathy, in whatever touched and moved
+him, not to feel myself in possession even of a greater quantity of
+significant truth, a larger handful of the fine substance of history,
+than I could hope to express or apply. To recover anything like the full
+treasure of scattered, wasted circumstance was at the same time to live
+over the spent experience itself, so deep and rich and rare, with
+whatever sadder and sorer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> intensities, even with whatever poorer and
+thinner passages, after the manner of every one's experience; and the
+effect of this in turn was to find discrimination among the parts of my
+subject again and again difficult&mdash;so inseparably and beautifully they
+seemed to hang together and the comprehensive case to decline mutilation
+or refuse to be treated otherwise than handsomely. This meant that
+aspects began to multiply and images to swarm, so far at least as they
+showed, to appreciation, as true terms and happy values; and that I
+might positively and exceedingly rejoice in my relation to most of them,
+using it for all that, as the phrase is, it should be worth. To knock at
+the door of the past was in a word to see it open to me quite wide&mdash;to
+see the world within begin to "compose" with a grace of its own round
+the primary figure, see it people itself vividly and insistently. Such
+then is the circle of my commemoration and so much these free and
+copious notes a labour of love and loyalty. We were, to my sense, the
+blest group of us, such a company of characters and such a picture of
+differences, and withal so fused and united and interlocked, that each
+of us, to that fond fancy, pleads for preservation, and that in respect
+to what I speak of myself as possessing I think I shall be ashamed, as
+of a cold impiety, to find any element altogether negligible. To which I
+may add perhaps<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span> that I struggle under the drawback, innate and inbred,
+of seeing the whole content of memory and affection in each enacted and
+recovered moment, as who should say, in the vivid image and the very
+scene; the light of the only terms in which life has treated me to
+experience. And I cherish the moment and evoke the image and repaint the
+scene; though meanwhile indeed scarce able to convey how prevailingly
+and almost exclusively, during years and years, the field was animated
+and the adventure conditioned for me by my brother's nearness and that
+play of genius in him of which I had never had a doubt from the first.</p>
+
+<p>The "first" then&mdash;since I retrace our steps to the start, for the
+pleasure, strangely mixed though it be, of feeling our small feet plant
+themselves afresh and artlessly stumble forward again&mdash;the first began
+long ago, far off, and yet glimmers at me there as out of a thin golden
+haze, with all the charm, for imagination and memory, of pressing
+pursuit rewarded, of distinctness in the dimness, of the flush of life
+in the grey, of the wonder of consciousness in everything; everything
+having naturally been all the while but the abject little matter of
+course. Partly doubtless as the effect of a life, now getting to be a
+tolerably long one, spent in the older world, I see the world of our
+childhood as very young indeed, young with its own juvenility as well as
+with ours; as if it wore<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> the few and light garments and had gathered in
+but the scant properties and breakable toys of the tenderest age, or
+were at the most a very unformed young person, even a boisterous
+hobbledehoy. It exhaled at any rate a simple freshness, and I catch its
+pure breath, at our infantile Albany, as the very air of long summer
+afternoons&mdash;occasions tasting of ample leisure, still bookless, yet
+beginning to be bedless, or cribless; tasting of accessible garden
+peaches in a liberal backward territory that was still almost part of a
+country town; tasting of many-sized uncles, aunts, cousins, of strange
+legendary domestics, inveterately but archaically Irish, and whose
+familiar remarks and "criticism of life" were handed down, as well as of
+dim family ramifications and local allusions&mdash;mystifications
+always&mdash;that flowered into anecdote as into small hard plums; tasting
+above all of a big much-shaded savoury house in which a softly-sighing
+widowed grandmother, Catherine Barber by birth, whose attitude was a
+resigned consciousness of complications and accretions, dispensed an
+hospitality seemingly as joyless as it was certainly boundless. What she
+<i>liked</i>, dear gentle lady of many cares and anxieties, was the "fiction
+of the day," the novels, at that time promptly pirated, of Mrs. Trollope
+and Mrs. Gore, of Mrs. Marsh, Mrs. Hubback and the Misses Kavanagh and
+Aguilar, whose very names are <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>forgotten now, but which used to drive
+her away to quiet corners whence her figure comes back to me bent
+forward on a table with the book held out at a distance and a tall
+single candle placed, apparently not at all to her discomfort, in that
+age of sparer and braver habits, straight between the page and her eyes.
+There is a very animated allusion to one or two of her aspects in the
+fragment of a "spiritual autobiography," the reminiscences of a
+so-called Stephen Dewhurst printed by W. J. (1885) in The Literary
+Remains of Henry James; a reference which has the interest of being very
+nearly as characteristic of my father himself (which his references in
+almost any connection were wont to be) as of the person or the occasion
+evoked. I had reached my sixteenth year when she died, and as my only
+remembered grandparent she touches the chord of attachment to a
+particular vibration. She represented for us in our generation the only
+English blood&mdash;that of both her own parents&mdash;flowing in our veins; I
+confess that out of that association, for reasons and reasons, I feel
+her image most beneficently bend. We were, as to three parts, of two
+other stocks; and I recall how from far back I reflected&mdash;for I see I
+must have been always reflecting&mdash;that, mixed as such a mixture, our
+Scotch with our Irish, might be, it had had still a grace to borrow from
+the third infusion or dimension. If I could freely have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> chosen moreover
+it was precisely from my father's mother that, fond votary of the finest
+faith in the vivifying and characterising force of mothers, I should
+have wished to borrow it; even while conscious that Catherine Barber's
+own people had drawn breath in American air for at least two generations
+before her. Our father's father, William James, an Irishman and a
+Protestant born (of county Cavan) had come to America, a very young man
+and then sole of his family, shortly after the Revolutionary War; my
+father, the second son of the third of the marriages to which the
+country of his adoption was liberally to help him, had been born in
+Albany in 1811. Our maternal greatgrandfather on the father's side, Hugh
+Walsh, had reached our shores from a like Irish home, Killyleagh, county
+Down, somewhat earlier, in 1764, he being then nineteen; he had settled
+at Newburgh-on-the-Hudson, half way to Albany, where some of his
+descendants till lately lingered. Our maternal greatgrandfather on the
+mother's side&mdash;that is our mother's mother's father, Alexander Robertson
+of Polmont near Edinburgh&mdash;had likewise crossed the sea in the
+mid-century and prospered in New York very much as Hugh Walsh was
+prospering and William James was still more markedly to prosper, further
+up the Hudson; as unanimous and fortunate beholders of the course of
+which admirable stream I like to think<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> of them. I find Alexander
+Robertson inscribed in a wee New York directory of the close of the
+century as Merchant; and our childhood in that city was passed, as to
+some of its aspects, in a sense of the afterglow, reduced and
+circumscribed, it is true, but by no means wholly inanimate, of his
+shining solidity.</p>
+
+<p>The sweet taste of Albany probably lurked most in its being our admired
+antithesis to New York; it was holiday, whereas New York was home; at
+least that presently came to be the relation, for to my very very first
+fleeting vision, I apprehend, Albany itself must have been the scene
+exhibited. Our parents had gone there for a year or two to be near our
+grandmother on their return from their first (that is our mother's
+first) visit to Europe, which had quite immediately followed my birth,
+which appears to have lasted some year and a half, and of which I shall
+have another word to say. The Albany experiment would have been then
+their first founded housekeeping, since I make them out to have betaken
+themselves for the winter following their marriage to the ancient Astor
+House&mdash;not indeed at that time ancient, but the great and appointed
+modern hotel of New York, the only one of such pretensions, and which
+somehow continued to project its massive image, that of a great square
+block of granite with vast dark warm interiors, across some of the later
+and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> more sensitive stages of my infancy. Clearly&mdash;or I should perhaps
+rather say dimly&mdash;recourse to that hospitality was again occasionally
+had by our parents; who had originally had it to such a happy end that
+on January 9th, 1842, my elder brother had come into the world there. It
+remained a tradition with him that our father's friend from an early
+time, R. W. Emerson, then happening to be in New York and under that
+convenient roof, was proudly and pressingly "taken upstairs" to admire
+and give his blessing to the lately-born babe who was to become the
+second American William James. The blessing was to be renewed, I may
+mention, in the sense that among the impressions of the next early years
+I easily distinguish that of the great and urbane Emerson's occasional
+presence in Fourteenth Street, a centre of many images, where the
+parental tent was before long to pitch itself and rest awhile. I am
+interested for the moment, however, in identifying the scene of our very
+first perceptions&mdash;of my very own at least, which I can here best speak
+for.</p>
+
+<p>One of these, and probably the promptest in order, was that of my
+brother's occupying a place in the world to which I couldn't at all
+aspire&mdash;to any approach to which in truth I seem to myself ever
+conscious of having signally forfeited a title. It glimmers back to me
+that I quite definitely and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> resignedly thought of him as in the most
+exemplary manner already beforehand with me, already seated at his task
+when the attempt to drag me crying and kicking to the first hour of my
+education failed on the threshold of the Dutch House in Albany after the
+fashion I have glanced at in a collection of other pages than these
+(just as I remember to have once borrowed a hint from our grandmother's
+"interior" in a work of imagination). That failure of my powers or that
+indifference to them, my retreat shrieking from the Dutch House, was to
+leave him once for all already there an embodied demonstration of the
+possible&mdash;already wherever it might be that there was a question of my
+arriving, when arriving at all, belatedly and ruefully; as if he had
+gained such an advance of me in his sixteen months' experience of the
+world before mine began that I never for all the time of childhood and
+youth in the least caught up with him or overtook him. He was always
+round the corner and out of sight, coming back into view but at his
+hours of extremest ease. We were never in the same schoolroom, in the
+same game, scarce even in step together or in the same phase at the same
+time; when our phases overlapped, that is, it was only for a moment&mdash;he
+was clean out before I had got well in. How far he had really at any
+moment dashed forward it is not for me now to attempt to say; what
+comes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> to me is that I at least hung inveterately and woefully back, and
+that this relation alike to our interests and to each other seemed
+proper and preappointed. I lose myself in wonder at the loose ways, the
+strange process of waste, through which nature and fortune may deal on
+occasion with those whose faculty for application is all and only in
+their imagination and their sensibility. There may be during those
+bewildered and brooding years so little for them to "show" that I liken
+the individual dunce&mdash;as he so often must appear&mdash;to some commercial
+traveller who has lost the key to his packed case of samples and can but
+pass for a fool while other exhibitions go forward.</p>
+
+<p>I achieve withal a dim remembrance of my final submission, though it is
+the faintest ghost of an impression and consists but of the bright blur
+of a dame's schoolroom, a mere medium for small piping shuffling sound
+and suffered heat, as well as for the wistfulness produced by
+"glimmering squares" that were fitfully screened, though not to any
+revival of cheer, by a huge swaying, yet dominant object. This dominant
+object, the shepherdess of the flock, was Miss Bayou or Bayhoo&mdash;I
+recover but the alien sound of her name, which memory caresses only
+because she may have been of like race with her temple of learning,
+which faced my grandmother's house in North Pearl<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> Street and really
+justified its exotic claim by its yellow archaic gable-end: I think of
+the same as of brick baked in the land of dykes and making a series of
+small steps from the base of the gable to the point. These images are
+subject, I confess, to a soft confusion&mdash;which is somehow consecrated,
+none the less, and out of which, with its shade of contributory truth,
+some sort of scene insists on glancing. The very flush of the uneven
+bricks of the pavement lives in it, the very smell of the street
+cobbles, the imputed grace of the arching umbrage&mdash;I see it all as from
+under trees; the form of Steuben Street, which crossed our view, as
+steep even to the very essence of adventure, with a summit, and still
+more with a nethermost and riskiest incline, very far away. There lives
+in it the aspect of the other house&mdash;the other and much smaller than my
+grandmother's, conveniently near it and within sight; which was
+pinkish-red picked out with white, whereas my grandmother's was
+greyish-brown and very grave, and which must have stood back a little
+from the street, as I seem even now to swing, or at least to perch, on a
+relaxed gate of approach that was conceived to work by an iron chain
+weighted with a big ball; all under a spreading tree again and with the
+high, oh so high white stone steps (mustn't they have been marble?) and
+fan-lighted door of the pinkish-red front behind me. I lose myself<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> in
+ravishment before the marble and the pink. There were other houses
+too&mdash;one of them the occasion of the first "paid" visit that struggles
+with my twilight of social consciousness; a call with my father,
+conveying me presumably for fond exhibition (since if my powers were not
+exhibitional my appearance and my long fair curls, of which I distinctly
+remember the lachrymose sacrifice, suppositiously were), on one of our
+aunts, the youngest of his three sisters, lately married and who,
+predestined to an early death, hovers there for me, softly spectral, in
+long light "front" ringlets, the fashion of the time and the capital
+sign of all our paternal aunts seemingly; with the remembered
+enhancement of her living in Elk Street, the name itself vaguely
+portentous, as through beasts of the forest not yet wholly exorcised,
+and more or less under the high brow of that Capitol which, as aloft
+somewhere and beneath the thickest shades of all, loomed, familiar yet
+impressive, at the end of almost any Albany vista of reference. I have
+seen other capitols since, but the whole majesty of the matter must have
+been then distilled into my mind&mdash;even though the connection was
+indirect and the concrete image, that of the primitive structure, long
+since pretentiously and insecurely superseded&mdash;so that, later on, the
+impression was to find itself, as the phrase is, discounted. Had it not
+moreover been <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>reinforced at the time, for that particular Capitoline
+hour, by the fact that our uncle, our aunt's husband, was a son of Mr.
+Martin Van Buren, and that <i>he</i> was the President? This at least led the
+imagination on&mdash;or leads in any case my present imagination of that one;
+ministering to what I have called the soft confusion.</p>
+
+<p>The confusion clears, however, though the softness remains, when,
+ceasing to press too far backward, I meet the ampler light of conscious
+and educated little returns to the place; for the education of New York,
+enjoyed up to my twelfth year, failed to blight its romantic appeal. The
+images I really distinguish flush through the maturer medium, but with
+the sense of them only the more wondrous. The other house, the house of
+my parents' limited early sojourn, becomes that of those of our cousins,
+numerous at that time, who pre-eminently figured for us; the various
+brood presided over by my father's second sister, Catherine James, who
+had married at a very early age Captain Robert Temple, U.S.A. Both these
+parents were to die young, and their children, six in number, the two
+eldest boys, were very markedly to people our preliminary scene; this
+being true in particular of three of them, the sharply differing
+brothers and the second sister, Mary Temple, radiant and rare,
+extinguished in her first youth, but after having made an impression on
+many<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> persons, and on ourselves not least, which was to become in the
+harmonious circle, for all time, matter of sacred legend and reference,
+of associated piety. Those and others with them were the numerous
+dawnings on which in many cases the deepening and final darknesses were
+so soon to follow: our father's family was to offer such a chronicle of
+early deaths, arrested careers, broken promises, orphaned children. It
+sounds cold-blooded, but part of the charm of our grandmother's house
+for us&mdash;or I should perhaps but speak for myself&mdash;was in its being so
+much and so sociably a nurseried and playroomed orphanage. The children
+of her lost daughters and daughters-in-law overflowed there, mainly as
+girls; on whom the surviving sons-in-law and sons occasionally and most
+trustingly looked in. Parentally bereft cousins were somehow more
+thrilling than parentally provided ones; and most thrilling when, in the
+odd fashion of that time, they were sent to school in New York as a
+preliminary to their being sent to school in Europe. They spent scraps
+of holidays with us in Fourteenth Street, and I think my first childish
+conception of the enviable lot, formed amid these associations, was to
+be so little fathered or mothered, so little sunk in the short range,
+that the romance of life seemed to lie in some constant improvisation,
+by vague overhovering authorities, of new situations and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> horizons. We
+were intensely domesticated, yet for the very reason perhaps that we
+felt our young bonds easy; and they were so easy compared to other small
+plights of which we had stray glimpses that my first assured conception
+of true richness was that we should be sent separately off among cold or
+even cruel aliens in order to be there thrillingly homesick.
+Homesickness was a luxury I remember craving from the tenderest age&mdash;a
+luxury of which I was unnaturally, or at least prosaically, deprived.
+Our motherless cousin Augustus Barker came up from Albany to the
+Institution Charlier&mdash;unless it was, as I suspect, a still earlier
+specimen, with a name that fades from me, of that type of French
+establishment for boys which then and for years after so incongruously
+flourished in New York; and though he professed a complete satisfaction
+with pleasures tasted in our innocent society I felt that he was engaged
+in a brave and strenuous adventure while we but hugged the comparatively
+safe shore.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2>
+
+<p>We were day-boys, William and I, at dispensaries of learning the number
+and succession of which to-day excite my wonder; we couldn't have
+changed oftener, it strikes me as I look back, if our presence had been
+inveterately objected to, and yet I enjoy an inward certainty that, my
+brother being vividly bright and I quite blankly innocuous, this
+reproach was never brought home to our house. It was an humiliation to
+me at first, small boys though we were, that our instructors kept being
+instructresses and thereby a grave reflection both on our attainments
+and our spirit. A bevy of these educative ladies passes before me, I
+still possess their names; as for instance that of Mrs. Daly and that of
+Miss Rogers (previously of the "Chelsea Female Institute," though at the
+moment of Sixth Avenue this latter), whose benches indeed my brother
+didn't haunt, but who handled us literally with gloves&mdash;I still see the
+elegant objects as Miss Rogers beat time with a long black ferule to
+some species of droning chant or chorus in which we spent most of our
+hours; just as I see her very tall and straight and spare, in a light
+blue dress, her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> firm face framed in long black glossy ringlets and the
+stamp of the Chelsea Female Institute all over her. Mrs. Daly, clearly
+the immediate successor to the nebulous Miss Bayou, remains quite
+substantial&mdash;perhaps because the sphere of her small influence has
+succeeded in not passing away, up to this present writing; so that in
+certain notes on New York published a few years since I was moved to
+refer to it with emotion as one of the small red houses on the south
+side of Waverley Place that really carry the imagination back to a
+vanished social order. They carry mine to a stout red-faced lady with
+grey hair and a large apron, the latter convenience somehow suggesting,
+as she stood about with a resolute air, that she viewed her little
+pupils as so many small slices cut from the loaf of life and on which
+she was to dab the butter of arithmetic and spelling, accompanied by way
+of jam with a light application of the practice of prize-giving. I
+recall an occasion indeed, I must in justice mention, when the jam
+really was thick&mdash;my only memory of a schoolfeast, strange to say,
+throughout our young annals: something uncanny in the air of the
+schoolroom at the unwonted evening or late afternoon hour, and tables
+that seemed to me prodigiously long and on which the edibles were chunky
+and sticky. The stout red-faced lady must have been Irish, as the name
+she bore imported&mdash;or do I think so but from the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> indescribably Irish
+look of her revisited house? It refers itself at any rate to a New York
+age in which a little more or a little less of the colour was scarce
+notable in the general flush.</p>
+
+<p>Of pure unimported strain, however, were Miss Sedgwick and Mrs. Wright
+(Lavinia D.), the next figures in the procession&mdash;the procession that
+was to wind up indeed with two foreign recruits, small brown snappy
+Mademoiselle Delavigne, who plied us with the French tongue at home and
+who had been introduced to us as the niece&mdash;or could it have been the
+grandniece?&mdash;of the celebrated Casimir, and a large Russian lady in an
+extraordinarily short cape (I like to recall the fashion of short capes)
+of the same stuff as her dress, and Merovingian sidebraids that seemed
+to require the royal crown of Fr&eacute;d&eacute;gonde or Brun&eacute;haut to complete their
+effect. This final and aggravational representative of the compromising
+sex looms to my mind's eye, I should add, but as the creature of an
+hour, in spite of her having been domiciled with us; whereas I think of
+Mademoiselle Delavigne as flitting in and out on quick, fine, more or
+less cloth-shod feet of exemplary neatness, the flat-soled feet of Louis
+Philippe and of the female figures in those volumes of Gavarni then
+actual, then contemporaneous, which were kept in a piece of furniture
+that stood between the front-parlour windows in Fourteenth Street,
+together with a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> set of B&eacute;ranger enriched by steel engravings to the
+strange imagery of which I so wonderingly responded that all other art
+of illustration, ever since, has been for me comparatively weak and
+cold. These volumes and the tall entrancing folios of Nash's
+lithographed Mansions of England in the Olden Time formed a store
+lending itself particularly to distribution on the drawingroom carpet,
+with concomitant pressure to the same surface of the small student's
+stomach and relieving agitation of his backward heels. I make out that
+it had decidedly been given to Mlle. Delavigne to represent to my first
+perception personal France; she was, besides not being at all pink or
+shy, oval and fluent and mistress somehow of the step&mdash;the step of
+levity that involved a whisk of her short skirts; there she was, to the
+life, on the page of Gavarni, attesting its reality, and there again did
+that page in return (I speak not of course of the unplumbed depths of
+the appended text) attest her own felicity. I was later on to feel&mdash;that
+is I was to learn&mdash;how many impressions and appearances, how large a
+sense of things, her type and tone prefigured. The evanescence of the
+large Russian lady, whom I think of as rather rank, I can't express it
+otherwise, may have been owing to some question of the purity of her
+accent in French; it was one of her attributes and her grounds of appeal
+to us that she had come<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> straight from Siberia, and it is distinct to me
+that the purity was challenged by a friend of the house, and
+without&mdash;pathetically enough!&mdash;provoking the only answer, the plea that
+the missing Atticism would have been wasted on young barbarians. The
+Siberian note, on our inmate's part, may perhaps have been the least of
+her incongruities; she was above all too big for a little job, towered
+over us doubtless too heroically; and her proportions hover but to lose
+themselves&mdash;with the successors to her function awaiting us a little
+longer.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, to revert an instant, if the depressed consciousness of our
+still more or less quailing, educationally, beneath the female eye&mdash;and
+there was as well the deeper depth, there was the degrading fact, that
+with us literally consorted and contended Girls, that we sat and strove,
+even though we drew the line at playing with them and at knowing them,
+when not of the swarming cousinship, at home&mdash;if that felt awkwardness
+didn't exactly coincide with the ironic effect of "Gussy's" appearances,
+his emergence from rich mystery and his return to it, our state was but
+comparatively the braver: he always had so much more to tell us than we
+could possibly have to tell him. On reflection I see that the most
+completely rueful period couldn't after all greatly have prolonged
+itself; since the female eye last bent on us would have been that of
+Lavinia D. Wright, to our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> connection with whom a small odd reminiscence
+attaches a date. A little schoolmate displayed to me with pride, while
+the connection lasted, a beautiful coloured, a positively iridescent and
+gilded card representing the first of all the "great exhibitions" of our
+age, the London Crystal Palace of 1851&mdash;his father having lately gone
+out to it and sent him the dazzling memento. In 1851 I was eight years
+old and my brother scarce more than nine; in addition to which it is
+distinct to me in the first place that we were never faithful long, or
+for more than one winter, to the same studious scene, and in the second
+that among our instructors Mrs. Lavinia had no successor of her own sex
+unless I count Mrs. Vredenburg, of New Brighton, where we spent the
+summer of 1854, when I had reached the age of eleven and found myself
+bewildered by recognition of the part that "attendance at school" was so
+meanly to play in the hitherto unclouded long vacation. This was true at
+least for myself and my next younger brother, Wilky, who, under the
+presumption now dawning of his "community of pursuits" with my own, was
+from that moment, off and on, for a few years, my extremely easy
+yokefellow and playfellow. On William, charged with learning&mdash;I thought
+of him inveterately from our younger time as charged with learning&mdash;no
+such trick was played; he rested or roamed, that summer, on his
+accumulations; a fact which, as I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> was sure I saw these more and more
+richly accumulate, didn't in the least make me wonder. It comes back to
+me in truth that I had been prepared for anything by his having said to
+me toward the end of our time at Lavinia D's and with characteristic
+authority&mdash;his enjoyment of it coming from my character, I mean, quite
+as much as from his own&mdash;that that lady was a very able woman, as shown
+by the Experiments upstairs. He was upstairs of course, and I was down,
+and I scarce even knew what Experiments were, beyond their indeed
+requiring capability. The region of their performance was William's
+natural sphere, though I recall that I had a sense of peeping into it to
+a thrilled effect on seeing our instructress illustrate the proper way
+to extinguish a candle. She firmly pressed the flame between her thumb
+and her two forefingers, and, on my remarking that I didn't see how she
+could do it, promptly replied that I of course couldn't do it myself (as
+<i>he</i> could) because I should be afraid.</p>
+
+<p>That reflection on my courage awakes another echo of the same scant
+season&mdash;since the test involved must have been that of our taking our
+way home through Fourth Avenue from some point up town, and Mrs.
+Wright's situation in East Twenty-first Street was such a point. The
+Hudson River Railroad was then in course of construction, or was being
+made to traverse the upper<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> reaches of the city, through that part of
+which raged, to my young sense, a riot of explosion and a great shouting
+and waving of red flags when the gunpowder introduced into the rocky
+soil was about to take effect. It was our theory that our passage there,
+in the early afternoon, was beset with danger, and our impression that
+we saw fragments of rock hurtle through the air and smite to the earth
+another and yet another of the persons engaged or exposed. The point of
+honour, among several of us, was of course nobly to defy the danger, and
+I feel again the emotion with which I both hoped and feared that the red
+flags, lurid signals descried from afar, would enable or compel us to
+renew the feat. That I didn't for myself inveterately renew it I seem to
+infer from the memory of other perambulations of the period&mdash;as to which
+I am divided between their still present freshness and my sense of
+perhaps making too much of these tiny particles of history. My stronger
+rule, however, I confess, and the one by which I must here consistently
+be guided, is that, from the moment it is a question of projecting a
+picture, no particle that counts for memory or is appreciable to the
+spirit <i>can</i> be too tiny, and that experience, in the name of which one
+speaks, is all compact of them and shining with them. There was at any
+rate another way home, with other appeals, which consisted of getting
+straight along<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> westward to Broadway, a sphere of a different order of
+fascination and bristling, as I seem to recall, with more vivid aspects,
+greater curiosities and wonderments. <i>The</i> curiosity was of course the
+country-place, as I supposed it to be, on the northeast corner of
+Eighteenth Street, if I am not mistaken; a big brown house in "grounds"
+peopled with animal life, which, little as its site may appear to know
+it to-day, lingered on into considerably later years. I have but to
+close my eyes in order to open them inwardly again, while I lean against
+the tall brown iron rails and peer through, to a romantic view of
+browsing and pecking and parading creatures, not numerous, but all of
+distinguished appearance: two or three elegant little cows of refined
+form and colour, two or three nibbling fawns and a larger company, above
+all, of peacocks and guineafowl, with, doubtless&mdash;though as to this I am
+vague&mdash;some of the commoner ornaments of the barnyard. I recognise that
+the scene as I evoke it fails of grandeur; but it none the less had for
+me the note of greatness&mdash;all of which but shows of course what a very
+town-bred small person I was, and was to remain.</p>
+
+<p>I see myself moreover as somehow always alone in these and like New York
+<i>fl&acirc;neries</i> and contemplations, and feel how the sense of my being so,
+being at any rate master of my short steps, such as they were, through
+all the beguiling streets, was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> probably the very savour of each of my
+chance feasts. Which stirs in me at the same time some wonder at the
+liberty of range and opportunity of adventure allowed to my tender age;
+though the puzzle may very well drop, after all, as I ruefully reflect
+that I couldn't have been judged at home reckless or adventurous. What I
+look back to as my infant license can only have had for its ground some
+timely conviction on the part of my elders that the only form of riot or
+revel ever known to me would be that of the visiting mind. Wasn't I
+myself for that matter even at that time all acutely and yet resignedly,
+even quite fatalistically, aware of what to think of this? I at any rate
+watch the small boy dawdle and gape again. I smell the cold dusty paint
+and iron as the rails of the Eighteenth Street corner rub his
+contemplative nose, and, feeling him foredoomed, withhold from him no
+grain of my sympathy. He is a convenient little image or warning of all
+that was to be for him, and he might well have been even happier than he
+was. For there was the very pattern and measure of all he was to demand:
+just to <i>be</i> somewhere&mdash;almost anywhere would do&mdash;and somehow receive an
+impression or an accession, feel a relation or a vibration. He was to go
+without many things, ever so many&mdash;as all persons do in whom
+contemplation takes so much the place of action; but everywhere, in the
+years that came<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> soon after, and that in fact continued long, in the
+streets of great towns, in New York still for some time, and then for a
+while in London, in Paris, in Geneva, wherever it might be, he was to
+enjoy more than anything the so far from showy practice of wondering and
+dawdling and gaping: he was really, I think, much to profit by it. What
+it at all appreciably gave him&mdash;that is gave him in producible
+form&mdash;would be difficult to state; but it seems to him, as he even now
+thus indulges himself, an education like another: feeling, as he has
+come to do more and more, that no education avails for the intelligence
+that doesn't stir in it some subjective passion, and that on the other
+hand almost anything that does so act is largely educative, however
+small a figure the process might make in a scheme of training. Strange
+indeed, furthermore, are some of the things that <i>have</i> stirred a
+subjective passion&mdash;stirred it, I mean, in young persons predisposed to
+a more or less fine inspired application.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+
+<p>But I positively dawdle and gape here&mdash;I catch myself in the act; so
+that I take up the thread of fond reflection that guides me through that
+mystification of the summer school, which I referred to a little way
+back, at the time when the Summer School as known in America to-day was
+so deep in the bosom of the future. The seat of acquisition I speak of
+must have been contiguous to the house we occupied&mdash;I recall it as most
+intimately and objectionably near&mdash;and carried on in the interest of
+those parents from New York who, in villeggiatura under the queer
+conditions of those days, with the many modern mitigations of the
+gregarious lot still unrevealed and the many refinements on the
+individual one still undeveloped, welcomed almost any influence that
+might help at all to form their children to civility. Yet I remember
+that particular influence as more noisy and drowsy and dusty than
+anything else&mdash;as to which it must have partaken strongly of the general
+nature of New Brighton; a neighbourhood that no apt agency whatever had
+up to that time concerned itself to fashion, and that was indeed to
+remain shabbily shapeless for years;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> since I recall almost as dire an
+impression of it received in the summer of 1875. I seem more or less to
+have begun life, for that matter, with impressions of New Brighton;
+there comes back to me another, considerably more infantile than that of
+1854, so infantile indeed that I wonder at its having stuck&mdash;that of a
+place called the Pavilion, which must have been an hotel sheltering us
+for July and August, and the form of which to childish retrospect,
+unprejudiced by later experience, was that of a great Greek temple
+shining over blue waters in the splendour of a white colonnade and a
+great yellow pediment. The elegant image remained, though imprinted in a
+child so small as to be easily portable by a stout nurse, I remember,
+and not less easily duckable; I gasp again, and was long to gasp, with
+the sense of salt immersion received at her strong hands. Wonderful
+altogether in fact, I find as I write, the quantity, the intensity of
+picture recoverable from even the blankest and tenderest state of the
+little canvas.</p>
+
+<p>I connect somehow with the Pavilion period a visit paid with my
+father&mdash;who decidedly must have liked to take me about, I feel so rich
+in that general reminiscence&mdash;to a family whom we reached in what struck
+me as a quite lovely embowered place, on a very hot day, and among whom
+luxuries and eccentricities flourished together. They were numerous, the
+members of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> this family, they were beautiful, they partook of their
+meals, or were at the moment partaking of one, out of doors, and the
+then pre-eminent figure in the group was a very big Newfoundland dog on
+whose back I was put to ride. That must have been my first vision of the
+liberal life&mdash;though I further ask myself what my age could possibly
+have been when my weight was so fantastically far from hinting at later
+developments. But the romance of the hour was particularly in what I
+have called the eccentric note, the fact that the children, my
+entertainers, riveted my gaze to stockingless and shoeless legs and
+feet, conveying somehow at the same time that they were not poor and
+destitute but rich and provided&mdash;just as I took their garden-feast for a
+sign of overflowing food&mdash;and that their state as of children of nature
+was a refinement of freedom and grace. They were to become great and
+beautiful, the household of that glimmering vision, they were to figure
+historically, heroically, and serve great public ends; but always, to my
+remembering eyes and fond fancy, they were to move through life as with
+the bare white feet of that original preferred fairness and wildness.
+This is rank embroidery, but the old surface itself insists on
+spreading&mdash;it waits at least with an air of its own. The rest is
+silence; I can&mdash;extraordinary encumbrance even for the most doating of
+parents on a morning call&mdash;but have returned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> with my father to "our
+hotel"; since I feel that I must not only to this but to a still further
+extent face the historic truth that we were for considerable periods,
+during our earliest time, nothing less than hotel children. Between the
+far-off and the later phases at New Brighton stretched a series of
+summers that had seen us all regularly installed for a couple of months
+at an establishment passing in the view of that simpler age for a vast
+caravansery&mdash;the Hamilton House, on the south Long Island shore, so
+called from its nearness to the Fort of that name, which had Fort
+Lafayette, the Bastille of the Civil War, out in the channel before it
+and which probably cast a stronger spell upon the spirit of our
+childhood, William's and mine at least, than any scene presented to us
+up to our reaching our teens.</p>
+
+<p>I find that I draw from the singularly unobliterated memory of the
+particulars of all that experience the power quite to glory in our
+shame; of so entrancing an interest did I feel it at the time to <i>be</i> an
+hotel child, and so little would I have exchanged my lot with that of
+any small person more privately bred. We were private enough in all
+conscience, I think I must have felt, the rest of the year; and at what
+age mustn't I quite have succumbed to the charm of the world seen in a
+larger way? For there, incomparably, was the chance to dawdle and gape;
+there were human appearances<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> in endless variety and on the
+exhibition-stage of a piazza that my gape measured almost as by miles;
+it was even as if I had become positively conscious that the social
+scene so peopled would pretty well always say more to me than anything
+else. What it did say I of course but scantly understood; but I none the
+less knew it spoke, and I listened to its voice, I seem to recall, very
+much as "young Edwin," in Dr. Beattie's poem, listened to the roar of
+tempests and torrents from the nobler eminence of beetling crags and in
+exposure to still deeper abysses. I cling for the moment, however, to
+the small story of our Vredenburg summer, as we were for long afterwards
+invidiously to brand it; the more that it so plays its part in
+illustration, under the light of a later and happier age, of the growth,
+when not rather of the arrest, of manners and customs roundabout our
+birthplace. I think we had never been so much as during these particular
+months disinherited of the general and public amenities that reinforce
+for the young private precept and example&mdash;disinherited in favour of
+dust and glare and mosquitoes and pigs and shanties and rumshops, of no
+walks and scarce more drives, of a repeated no less than of a strong
+emphasis on the more sordid sides of the Irish aspect in things. There
+was a castellated residence on the hill above us&mdash;very high I remember
+supposing the hill and very stately the structure; it had towers and
+views<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> and pretensions and belonged to a Colonel, whom we thought very
+handsome and very costumed, (as if befrogged and high-booted, which he
+couldn't have been at all, only <i>ought</i> to have been, would even
+certainly have been at a higher pitch of social effect,) and whose son
+and heir, also very handsome and known familiarly and endearingly as
+Chick, had a velvet coat and a pony and I think spurs, all luxuries we
+were without, and was cousin to boys, the De Coppets, whom we had come
+to know at our school of the previous winter and who somehow&mdash;doubtless
+partly as guests of the opulent Chick&mdash;hovered again about the field of
+idleness.</p>
+
+<p>The De Coppets, particularly in the person of the first-born Louis, had
+been a value to us, or at any rate to me&mdash;for though I was, in common
+with my elders then, unacquainted with the application of that word as I
+use it here, what was my incipient sense of persons and things, what
+were my first stirred observant and imaginative reactions,
+discriminations and categories, but a vague groping for it? The De
+Coppets (again as more especially and most impressively interpreted by
+the subtle Louis) enjoyed the pre-eminence of being European; they had
+dropped during the scholastic term of 1853-4 straight from the lake of
+Geneva into the very bosom of Mr. Richard Pulling Jenks's select resort
+for young gentlemen, then situated in Broadway below Fourth Street;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> and
+had lately been present at an historic pageant&mdash;whether or no
+celebrating the annals of the town of Coppet I know not&mdash;in which
+representatives of their family had figured in armour and on horseback
+as the Barons (to our comprehension) de Coup or Cou. Their father was
+thus of the Canton de Vaud&mdash;only their mother had been native among
+ourselves and sister to the Colonel of the castellations. But what was
+the most vivid mark of the brothers, and vividest on the part of the
+supersubtle Louis, was his French treatment of certain of our native
+local names, Ohio and Iowa for instance, which he rendered, as to their
+separate vowels, with a daintiness and a delicacy invidious and
+imperturbable, so that he might have been Chateaubriand declaiming Les
+Natchez at Madame R&eacute;camier's&mdash;O-ee-oh and Ee-o-wah; a proceeding in him,
+a violence offered to his serried circle of little staring and glaring
+New Yorkers supplied with the usual allowance of fists and boot-toes,
+which, as it was clearly conscious, I recollect thinking unsurpassed for
+cool calm courage. Those <i>were</i> the right names&mdash;which we owed wholly to
+the French explorers and Jesuit Fathers; so much the worse for us if we
+vulgarly didn't know it. I lose myself in admiration of the consistency,
+the superiority, the sublimity, of the not at all game-playing, yet in
+his own way so singularly sporting, Louis. He was naturally and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>incorruptibly French&mdash;as, so oddly, I have known other persons of both
+sexes to be whose English was naturally and incorruptibly American; the
+appearance being thus that the possession of indigenous English alone
+forms the adequate barrier and the assured racial ground. (Oh the queer
+reversions observed on the part of Latinized compatriots in the course
+of a long life&mdash;the remarkable drops from the quite current French or
+Italian to the comparatively improvised native idiom, with the resulting
+effect of the foreign tongue used as a domestic and the domestic, that
+is the original American, used as a foreign tongue, or without inherited
+confidence!)</p>
+
+<p>Louis De Coppet, though theoretically American and domiciled, was
+<i>naturally</i> French, and so pressed further home to me that "sense of
+Europe" to which I feel that my very earliest consciousness waked&mdash;a
+perversity that will doubtless appear to ask for all the justification I
+can supply and some of which I shall presently attempt to give. He
+opened vistas, and I count ever as precious anyone, everyone, who
+betimes does that for the small straining vision; performing this office
+never so much, doubtless, as when, during that summer, he invited me to
+collaborate with him in the production of a romance which <i>il se fit
+fort</i> to get printed, to get published, when success, or in other words
+completion, should crown our effort. Our effort,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> alas, failed of the
+crown, in spite of sundry solemn and mysterious meetings&mdash;so much
+devoted, I seem to remember, to the publishing question that others more
+fundamental dreadfully languished; leaving me convinced, however, that
+my friend would have got our fiction published if he could only have got
+it written. I think of my participation in this vain dream as of the
+very first gage of visiting approval offered to the exercise of a
+gift&mdash;though quite unable to conceive my companion's ground for
+suspecting a gift of which I must at that time quite have failed to
+exhibit a single in the least "phenomenal" symptom. It had none the less
+by his overtures been handsomely <i>imputed</i> to me; that was in a manner a
+beginning&mdash;a small start, yet not wholly unattended with bravery. Louis
+De Coppet, I must add, brought to light later on, so far as I know, no
+compositions of his own; we met him long after in Switzerland and
+eventually heard of his having married a young Russian lady and settled
+at Nice. If I drop on his memory this apology for a bay-leaf it is from
+the fact of his having given the earliest, or at least the most
+personal, tap to that pointed prefigurement of the manners of "Europe,"
+which, inserted wedge-like, if not to say peg-like, into my young
+allegiance, was to split the tender organ into such unequal halves. His
+the toy hammer that drove in the very point of the golden nail.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span></p><p>It was as if there had been a mild magic in that breath, however scant,
+of another world; but when I ask myself what element of the pleasing or
+the agreeable may have glimmered through the then general, the outer and
+enveloping conditions, I recover many more of the connections in which
+forms and civilities lapsed beyond repair than of those in which they
+struggled at all successfully. It is for some record of the question of
+taste, of the consciousness of an &aelig;sthetic appeal, as reflected in forms
+and aspects, that I shall like best to testify; as the promise and the
+development of these things on our earlier American scene are the more
+interesting to trace for their doubtless demanding a degree of the finer
+attention. The plain and happy profusions and advances and successes, as
+one looks back, reflect themselves at every turn; the quick beats of
+material increase and multiplication, with plenty of people to tell of
+them and throw up their caps for them; but the edifying matters to
+recapture would be the adventures of the "higher criticism" so far as
+there was any&mdash;and so far too as it might bear on the real quality and
+virtue of things; the state of manners, the terms of intercourse, the
+care for excellence, the sense of appearances, the intellectual reaction
+generally. However, any breasting of those deep waters must be but in
+the form for me of an occasional dip. It meanwhile fairly <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>overtakes and
+arrests me here as a contributive truth that our general medium of life
+in the situation I speak of was such as to make a large defensive
+verandah, which seems to have very stoutly and completely surrounded us,
+play more or less the part of a raft of rescue in too high a tide&mdash;too
+high a tide there beneath us, as I recover it, of the ugly and the
+graceless. My particular perspective may magnify a little wildly&mdash;when
+it doesn't even more weirdly diminish; but I read into the great hooded
+and guarded resource in question an evidential force: as if it must
+really have played for us, so far as its narrowness and its exposure
+permitted, the part of a buffer-state against the wilderness immediately
+near, that of the empty, the unlovely and the mean. Interposing a little
+ease, didn't it interpose almost all the ease we knew?&mdash;so that when
+amiable friends, arriving from New York by the boat, came to see us,
+there was no rural view for them but that of our great shame, a view of
+the pigs and the shanties and the loose planks and scattered refuse and
+rude public ways; never even a field-path for a gentle walk or a garden
+nook in afternoon shade. I recall my prompt distaste, a strange
+precocity of criticism, for so much aridity&mdash;since of what lost Arcadia,
+at that age, had I really had the least glimpse?</p>
+
+<p>Our scant margin must have affected me more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> nobly, I should in justice
+add, when old Mrs. L. passed or hovered, for she sometimes caustically
+joined the circle and sometimes, during the highest temperatures, which
+were very high that summer, but flitted across it in a single flowing
+garment, as we amazedly conceived; one of the signs of that grand
+impertinence, I supposed, which belonged to "dowagers"&mdash;dowagers who
+were recognised characters and free speakers, doing and saying what they
+liked. This ancient lady was lodged in some outlying tract of the
+many-roomed house, which in more than one quarter stretched away into
+mystery; but the piazza, to which she had access, was unbroken, and
+whenever she strayed from her own territory she swam afresh into ours. I
+definitely remember that, having heard and perhaps read of dowagers,
+who, as I was aware, had scarce been provided for in our social scheme,
+I said to myself at first sight of our emphatic neighbour, a person
+clearly used to exceptional deference, "This must be a perfect
+specimen;" which was somehow very wonderful. The absolute first sight,
+however, had preceded the New Brighton summer, and it makes me lose
+myself in a queer dim vision, all the obscurities attendant on my having
+been present, as a very small boy indeed, at an evening entertainment
+where Mrs. L. figured in an attire that is still vivid to me: a blue
+satin gown, a long black lace shawl<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> and a head-dress consisting in
+equally striking parts of a brown wig, a plume of some sort waving over
+it and a band or fillet, whether of some precious metal or not I forget,
+keeping it in place by the aid of a precious stone which adorned the
+centre of her brow. Such was my first view of the <i>f&eacute;ronni&egrave;re</i> of our
+grandmothers, when not of our greatgrandmothers. I see its wearer at
+this day bend that burdened brow upon me in a manner sufficiently awful,
+while her knuckly white gloves toyed with a large fan and a vinaigrette
+attached to her thumb by a chain; and as she was known to us afterwards
+for a friend of my Albany grandmother's it may have been as a tribute to
+this tie that she allowed me momentarily to engage her attention. <i>Then</i>
+it predominantly must have been that I knew her for a dowager&mdash;though
+this was a light in which I had never considered my grandmother herself;
+but what I have quite lost the clue to is the question of my
+extraordinary footing in such an assembly, the occasion of a dance of my
+elders, youthful elders but young married people, into which, really, my
+mother, as a participant, must have introduced me.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+
+<p>It took place in the house of our cousins Robert and Kitty Emmet the
+elder&mdash;for we were to have two cousin Kittys of that ilk and yet another
+consanguineous Robert at least; the latter name being naturally, among
+them all, of a pious, indeed of a glorious, tradition, and three of my
+father's nieces marrying three Emmet brothers, the first of these the
+Robert aforesaid. Catherine James, daughter of my uncle Augustus, his
+then quite recent and, as I remember her, animated and attractive bride,
+whose fair hair framed her pointed smile in full and far-drooping
+"front" curls, I easily evoke as my first apprehended image of the free
+and happy young woman of fashion, a sign of the wondrous fact that
+ladies might live for pleasure, pleasure always, pleasure alone. She was
+distinguished for nothing whatever so much as for an insatiable love of
+the dance; that passion in which I think of the "good," the best, New
+York society of the time as having capered and champagned itself away.
+Her younger sister Gertrude, afterwards married to James&mdash;or more
+inveterately Jim&mdash;Pendleton, of Virginia, followed close upon her heels,
+literally speaking,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> and though emulating her in other respects too, was
+to last, through many troubles, much longer (looking extraordinarily the
+while like the younger portraits of Queen Victoria) and to have much
+hospitality, showing it, and showing everything, in a singularly natural
+way, for a considerable collection of young hobbledehoy kinsmen. But I
+am solicited a moment longer by the queer little issues involved&mdash;as if
+a social light would somehow stream from them&mdash;in my having been taken,
+a mere mite of observation, to Kitty Emmet's "grown-up" assembly. Was it
+that my mother really felt that to the scrap that I was other scraps
+would perhaps strangely adhere, to the extent thus of something to
+distinguish me by, nothing else probably having as yet declared
+itself&mdash;such a scrap for instance as the fine germ of this actual
+ferment of memory and play of fancy, a retroactive vision almost intense
+of the faded hour and a fond surrender to the questions with which it
+bristles? All the female relatives on my father's side who reappear to
+me in these evocations strike me as having been intensely and admirably,
+but at the same time almost indescribably, <i>natural</i>; which fact
+connects itself for the brooding painter and fond analyst with fifty
+other matters and impressions, his vision of a whole social order&mdash;if
+the American scene might indeed have been said at that time to be
+positively ordered. Wasn't the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> fact that the dancing passion was so out
+of proportion to any social resource just one of the signs of the
+natural?&mdash;and for that matter in both sexes alike of the artless
+kindred. It was shining to us that Jim Pendleton had a yacht&mdash;though I
+was not smuggled aboard it; there the line was drawn&mdash;but the deck must
+have been more used for the "German" than for other man&oelig;uvres, often
+doubtless under the lead of our cousin Robert, the eldest of the many
+light irresponsibles to whom my father was uncle: distinct to me still
+being the image of that phenomenally lean and nimble choreographic hero,
+"Bob" James to us always, who, almost ghost-fashion, led the cotillion
+on from generation to generation, his skull-like smile, with its accent
+from the stiff points of his long moustache and the brightly hollow
+orbits of his eyes, helping to make of him an immemorial elegant
+skeleton.</p>
+
+<p>It is at all events to the sound of fiddles and the popping of corks
+that I see even young brides, as well as young grooms, originally so
+formed to please and to prosper as our hosts of the restless little
+occasion I have glanced at, vanish untimely, become mysterious and
+legendary, with such unfathomed silences and significant headshakes
+replacing the earlier concert; so that I feel how one's impression of so
+much foredoomed youthful levity received constant and quite thrilling
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>increase. It was of course an impression then obscurely gathered, but
+into which one was later on to read strange pages&mdash;to some of which I
+may find myself moved to revert. Mere mite of observation though I have
+dubbed myself, I won't pretend to have deciphered any of them amid the
+bacchanal sounds that, on the evening so suggestively spent, floated out
+into the region of Washington Place. It is round that general centre
+that my richest memories of the "gay" little life in general cluster&mdash;as
+if it had been, for the circle in which I seem justified in pretending
+to have "moved," of the finer essence of "town"; covering as it did the
+stretch of Broadway down to Canal Street, with, closer at hand, the New
+York Hotel, which figured somehow inordinately in our family annals (the
+two newer ones, the glory of their brief and discredited, their flouted
+and demolished age, the brown Metropolitan and the white St. Nicholas,
+were much further down) and rising northward to the Ultima Thule of
+Twenty-third Street, only second then in the supposedly ample scheme of
+the regular ninth "wide" street. I can't indeed have moved much on that
+night of revelations and yet of enigmas over which I still hang
+fascinated; I must have kept intensely still in my corner, all wondering
+and all fearing&mdash;fearing notice most; and in a definite way I but
+remember the formidable interest of my so <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>convincing dowager (to hark
+back for a second to <i>her</i>) and the fact that a great smooth white cloth
+was spread across the denuded room, converted thus into a field of
+frolic the prospect of which much excited my curiosity. I but recover
+the preparations, however, without recovering the performance; Mrs. L.
+and I must have been the only persons not shaking a foot, and premature
+unconsciousness clearly in my case supervened. Out of it peeps again the
+riddle, the so quaint <i>trait de m&oelig;urs</i>, of my infant participation.
+But I set that down as representative and interesting, and have done
+with it.</p>
+
+<p>The manners of the time had obviously a <i>bonhomie</i> of their
+own&mdash;certainly so on our particularly indulgent and humane little field;
+as to which general proposition the later applications and
+transformations of the bonhomie would be interesting to trace. It has
+lingered and fermented and earned other names, but I seem on the track
+of its prime evidence with that note of the sovereign ease of all the
+young persons with whom we grew up. In the after-time, as our view took
+in, with new climes and new scenes, other examples of the class, these
+were always to affect us as more formed and finished, more tutored and
+governessed, warned and armed at more points for, and doubtless often
+against, the social relation; so that this prepared state on their part,
+and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> which at first appeared but a preparation for shyness or silence or
+whatever other ideal of the unconversable, came to be for us the normal,
+since it was the relative and not the positive, still less the
+superlative, state. No charming creatures of the growing girl sort were
+ever to be natural in the degree of these nearer and remoter ornaments
+of our family circle in youth; when after intervals and absences the
+impression was renewed we saw how right we had been about it, and I feel
+as if we had watched it for years under the apprehension and the vision
+of some inevitable change, wondering with an affectionate interest what
+effect the general improvement in manners might, perhaps all
+unfortunately, have upon it. I make out as I look back that it was
+really to succumb at no point to this complication, that it was to keep
+its really quite inimitable freshness to the end, or, in other words,
+when it had been the first free growth of the old conditions, was to
+pass away but with the passing of those themselves for whom it had been
+the sole possible expression. For it was as of an altogether special
+shade and sort that the New York young naturalness of our prime was
+touchingly to linger with us&mdash;so that to myself, at present, with only
+the gentle ghosts of the so numerous exemplars of it before me, it
+becomes the very stuff of the soft cerements in which their general mild
+mortality is laid away. We used to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> have in the after-time, amid fresh
+recognitions and reminders, the kindest "old New York" identifications
+for it. The special shade of its identity was thus that it was not
+conscious&mdash;really not conscious of anything in the world; or was
+conscious of so few possibilities at least, and these so immediate and
+so a matter of course, that it came almost to the same thing. That was
+the testimony that the slight subjects in question strike me as having
+borne to their surrounding medium&mdash;the fact that their unconsciousness
+could be so preserved. They played about in it so happily and serenely
+and sociably, as unembarrassed and loquacious as they were unadmonished
+and uninformed&mdash;only aware at the most that a good many people within
+their horizon were "dissipated"; as in point of fact, alas, a good many
+<i>were</i>. What it was to be dissipated&mdash;that, however, was but in the most
+limited degree a feature of their vision; they would have held, under
+pressure, that it consisted more than anything else in getting tipsy.</p>
+
+<p>Infinitely queer and quaint, almost incongruously droll, the sense
+somehow begotten in ourselves, as very young persons, of our being
+surrounded by a slightly remote, yet dimly rich, outer and quite kindred
+circle of the tipsy. I remember how, once, as a very small boy, after
+meeting in the hall a most amiable and irreproachable <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>gentleman, all
+but closely consanguineous, who had come to call on my mother, I
+anticipated his further entrance by slipping in to report to that parent
+that I thought <i>he</i> must be tipsy. And I was to recall perfectly
+afterwards the impression I so made on her&mdash;in which the general
+proposition that the gentlemen of a certain group or connection might on
+occasion be best described by the term I had used sought to destroy the
+particular presumption that our visitor wouldn't, by his ordinary
+measure, show himself for one of those. He didn't, to all appearance,
+for I was afterwards disappointed at the lapse of lurid evidence: that
+memory remained with me, as well as a considerable subsequent wonder at
+my having leaped to so baseless a view. The truth was indeed that we had
+too, in the most innocent way in the world, our sense of "dissipation"
+as an abounding element in family histories; a sense fed quite directly
+by our fondness for making our father&mdash;I can at any rate testify for the
+urgency of my own appeal to him&mdash;tell us stories of the world of his
+youth. He regaled us with no scandals, yet it somehow rarely failed to
+come out that each contemporary on his younger scene, each hero of each
+thrilling adventure, had, in spite of brilliant promise and romantic
+charm, ended badly, as badly as possible. This became our gaping
+generalisation&mdash;it gaped even under the moral that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> the anecdote was
+always, and so familiarly, humanly and vividly, designed to convey:
+everyone in the little old Albany of the Dutch houses and the steep
+streets and the recurrent family names&mdash;Townsends, Clintons, Van
+Rensselaers, Pruyns: I pick them up again at hazard, and all
+uninvidiously, out of reverberations long since still&mdash;everyone without
+exception had at last taken a turn as far as possible from edifying. And
+what they had most in common, the hovering presences, the fitful
+apparitions that, speaking for myself, so engaged my imagination, was
+just the fine old Albany drama&mdash;in the light of which a ring of mystery
+as to their lives (mainly carried on at the New York Hotel aforesaid)
+surrounded them, and their charm, inveterate, as I believed, shone out
+as through vaguely-apprehended storm-clouds. Their charm was in various
+marks of which I shall have more to say&mdash;for as I breathe all this
+hushed air again even the more broken things give out touching human
+values and faint sweet scents of character, flushes of old beauty and
+good-will.</p>
+
+<p>The grim little generalisation remained, none the less, and I may speak
+of it&mdash;since I speak of everything&mdash;as still standing: the striking
+evidence that scarce aught but disaster <i>could</i>, in that so unformed and
+unseasoned society, overtake young men who were in the least exposed.
+Not to have been immediately launched in business of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> rigorous sort
+was to <i>be</i> exposed&mdash;in the absence I mean of some fairly abnormal
+predisposition to virtue; since it was a world so simply constituted
+that whatever wasn't business, or exactly an office or a "store," places
+in which people sat close and made money, was just simply pleasure,
+sought, and sought only, in places in which people got tipsy. There was
+clearly no mean, least of all the golden one, for it was just the ready,
+even when the moderate, possession of gold that determined, that hurried
+on, disaster. There were whole sets and groups, there were
+"sympathetic," though too susceptible, races, that seemed scarce to
+recognise or to find possible any practical application of moneyed, that
+is of transmitted, ease, however limited, but to go more or less rapidly
+to the bad with it&mdash;which meant even then going as often as possible to
+Paris. The bright and empty air was as void of "careers" for a choice as
+of cathedral towers for a sketcher, and I passed my younger time, till
+within a year or two of the Civil War, with an absolute vagueness of
+impression as to how the political life of the country was carried on.
+The field was strictly covered, to my young eyes, I make out, by three
+classes, the busy, the tipsy, and Daniel Webster. This last great man
+must have represented for us a class in himself; as if to be "political"
+was just to <i>be</i> Daniel Webster in his proper person and with room left
+over for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> nobody else. That he should have filled the sky of public life
+from pole to pole, even to a childish consciousness not formed in New
+England and for which that strenuous section was but a name in the
+geography-book, is probably indeed a sign of how large, in the general
+air, he comparatively loomed. The public scene was otherwise a blank to
+our young vision, I discern, till, later on, in Paris, I saw&mdash;for at
+that unimproved period we of the unfledged didn't suppose ourselves to
+"meet"&mdash;Charles Sumner; with whose name indeed there further connects
+itself the image of a thrilled hour in the same city some months before:
+the gathering of a group of indignant persons on the terrace of a small
+old-world <i>h&ocirc;tel</i> or pavilion looking out on the Avenue des Champs
+Elys&eacute;es, slightly above the Rond-Point and just opposite the
+antediluvian Jardin d'Hiver (who remembers the Jardin d'Hiver, who
+remembers the ancient lodges of the <i>octroi</i>, the pair of them facing
+each other at the Barri&egrave;re de l'&Eacute;toile?) and among them a passionate
+lady in tears over the news, fresh that morning, of the assault on
+Sumner by the South Carolina ruffian of the House. The wounded Senator,
+injured in health, had come to Europe later on to recuperate, and he
+offered me my first view, to the best of my belief, not only of a
+"statesman," but of any person whomsoever concerned in political life. I
+distinguish in the earlier twilight<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> of Fourteenth Street my father's
+return to us one November day&mdash;we knew he had been out to vote&mdash;with the
+news that General Winfield Scott, his and the then "Whig" candidate, had
+been defeated for the Presidency; just as I rescue from the same limbo
+my afterwards proud little impression of having "met" that high-piled
+hero of the Mexican War, whom the Civil War was so soon and with so
+little ceremony to extinguish, literally met him, at my father's side,
+in Fifth Avenue, where he had just emerged from a cross-street. I remain
+vague as to what had then happened and scarce suppose I was, at the age
+probably of eight or nine, "presented"; but we must have been for some
+moments face to face while from under the vast amplitude of a dark blue
+military cloak with a big velvet collar and loosened silver clasp, which
+spread about him like a symbol of the tented field, he greeted my
+parent&mdash;so clear is my sense of the time it took me to gape <i>all</i> the
+way up to where he towered aloft.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+
+<p>The not very glorious smoke of the Mexican War, I note for another
+touch, had been in the air when I was a still smaller boy, and I have an
+association with it that hovers between the definite and the dim, a
+vision of our uncle (Captain as he then was) Robert Temple, U.S.A., in
+regimentals, either on his way to the scene of action or on the return
+from it. I see him as a person half asleep sees some large object across
+the room and against the window-light&mdash;even if to the effect of my now
+asking myself why, so far from the scene of action, he was in panoply of
+war. I seem to see him cock-hatted and feathered too&mdash;an odd vision of
+dancing superior plumes which doesn't fit if he was only a captain.
+However, I cultivate the wavering shade merely for its value as my
+earliest glimpse of any circumstance of the public order&mdash;unless indeed
+another, the reminiscence to which I owe to-day my sharpest sense of
+personal antiquity, had already given me the historic thrill. The scene
+of this latter stir of consciousness is, for memory, an apartment in one
+of the three Fifth Avenue houses that were not long afterward swallowed
+up<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> in the present Brevoort Hotel, and consists of the admired
+appearance of my uncles "Gus" and John James to announce to my father
+that the Revolution had triumphed in Paris and Louis Philippe had fled
+to England. These last words, the flight of the king, linger on my ear
+at this hour even as they fell there; we had somehow waked early to a
+perception of Paris, and a vibration of my very most infantine
+sensibility under its sky had by the same stroke got itself preserved
+for subsequent wondering reference. I had been there for a short time in
+the second year of my life, and I was to communicate to my parents later
+on that as a baby in long clothes, seated opposite to them in a carriage
+and on the lap of another person, I had been impressed with the view,
+framed by the clear window of the vehicle as we passed, of a great
+stately square surrounded with high-roofed houses and having in its
+centre a tall and glorious column. I had naturally caused them to
+marvel, but I had also, under cross-questioning, forced them to compare
+notes, as it were, and reconstitute the miracle. They knew what my
+observation of monumental squares had been&mdash;and alas hadn't; neither New
+York nor Albany could have offered me the splendid perspective, and, for
+that matter, neither could London, which moreover I had known at a
+younger age still. Conveyed along the Rue St.-Honor&eacute; while I <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>waggled my
+small feet, as I definitely remember doing, under my flowing robe, I had
+crossed the Rue de Castiglione and taken in, for all my time, the
+admirable aspect of the Place and the Colonne Vend&ocirc;me. I don't now
+pretend to measure the extent to which my interest in the events of
+1848&mdash;I was five years old&mdash;was quickened by that <i>souvenir</i>, a
+tradition further reinforced, I should add, by the fact that some
+relative or other, some member of our circle, was always either "there"
+("there" being of course generally Europe, but particularly and
+pointedly Paris) or going there or coming back from there: I at any rate
+revert to the sound of the rich words on my uncles' lips as to my
+positive initiation into History. It was as if I had been ready for them
+and could catch on; I had heard of kings presumably, and also of
+fleeing: but that kings had sometimes to flee was a new and striking
+image, to which the apparent consternation of my elders added dramatic
+force. So much, in any case, for what I may claim&mdash;perhaps too idly&mdash;on
+behalf of my backward reach.</p>
+
+<p>It has carried me far from my rather evident proposition that if we saw
+the "natural" so happily embodied about us&mdash;and in female maturity, or
+comparative maturity, scarce less than in female adolescence&mdash;this was
+because the artificial, or in other words the complicated, was so
+little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> there to threaten it. The complicated, as we were later on to
+define it, was but another name for those more massed and violent
+assaults upon the social sense that we were to recognise subsequently by
+their effects&mdash;observing thus that a sense more subtly social had so
+been created, and that it quite differed from that often almost complete
+inward blankness, in respect to any circumjacent, any constituted, order
+to the exhibition of which our earlier air and our family scene had
+inimitably treated us. We came more or less to see that our young
+contemporaries of another world, the trained and admonished, the
+disciplined and governessed, or in a word the formed, relatively
+speaking, had been made aware of many things of which those at home
+hadn't been; yet we were also to note&mdash;so far as we may be conceived as
+so precociously "noting," though we were certainly incorrigible
+observers&mdash;that, the awareness in question remaining at the best
+imperfect, our little friends as distinguished from our companions of
+the cousinship, greater and less, advanced and presumed but to flounder
+and recede, elated at once and abashed and on the whole but <i>feebly</i>
+sophisticated. The cousinship, on the other hand, all unalarmed and
+unsuspecting and unembarrassed, lived by pure serenity, sociability and
+loquacity; the oddest fact about its members being withal that it didn't
+make them bores, I seem to feel as I look back, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> at least not worse
+bores than sundry specimens of the other growth. There can surely never
+have been anything like their good faith and, generally speaking, their
+amiability. I should have but to let myself go a little to wish to cite
+examples&mdash;save that in doing so I should lose sight of my point; which
+is to recall again that whether we were all amiable or not (and,
+frankly, I claim it in a high degree for most of us) the scene on which
+we so freely bloomed does strike me, when I reckon up, as
+extraordinarily unfurnished. How came it then that for the most part so
+simple we yet weren't more inane? This was doubtless by reason of the
+quantity of our inward life&mdash;ours of our father's house in especial I
+mean&mdash;which made an excellent, in some cases almost an incomparable,
+<i>fond</i> for a thicker civility to mix with when growing experience should
+begin to take that in. It was also quaint, among us, I may be reminded,
+to have <i>begun</i> with the inward life; but we began, after the manner of
+all men, as we could, and I hold that if it comes to that we might have
+begun much worse.</p>
+
+<p>I was in my seventeenth year when the raid and the capture of John
+Brown, of Harper's Ferry fame, enjoyed its sharp reverberation among us,
+though we were then on the other side of the world; and I count this as
+the very first reminder that reached me of our living, on our side, in
+a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> political order: I had perfectly taken in from the pages of "Punch,"
+which contributed in the highest degree to our education, that the
+peoples on the other side so lived. As there was no American "Punch,"
+and to this time has been none, to give small boys the sense and the
+imagination of living with their public administrators, Daniel Webster
+and Charles Sumner had never become, for my fancy, members of a class, a
+class which numbered in England, by John Leech's showing, so many other
+members still than Lords Brougham, Palmerston and John Russell. The war
+of Secession, soon arriving, was to cause the field to bristle with
+features and the sense of the State, in our generation, infinitely to
+quicken; but that alarm came upon the country like a thief at night, and
+we might all have been living in a land in which there seemed at least
+nothing save a comparatively small amount of quite private property to
+steal. Even private property in other than the most modest amounts
+scarce figured for our particular selves; which doubtless came partly
+from the fact that amid all the Albany issue there was ease, with the
+habit of ease, thanks to our grandfather's fine old ability&mdash;he had
+decently provided for so large a generation; but our consciousness was
+positively disfurnished, as that of young Americans went, of the
+actualities of "business" in a world of business. As to that we all
+formed together quite<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> a monstrous exception; business in a world of
+business was the thing we most agreed (differ as we might on minor
+issues) in knowing nothing about. We touched it and it touched us
+neither directly nor otherwise, and I think our fond detachment, not to
+say our helpless ignorance and on occasion (since I can speak for one
+fine instance) our settled density of understanding, made us an
+unexampled and probably, for the ironic "smart" gods of the American
+heaven, a lamentable case. Of course even the office and the "store"
+leave much of the provision for an approximately complete scheme of
+manners to be accounted for; still there must have been vast numbers of
+people about us for whom, under the usages, the assault on the
+imagination from without was much stronger and the filling-in of the
+general picture much richer. It was exactly by the lack of that
+filling-in that we&mdash;we more especially who lived at near view of my
+father's admirable example&mdash;had been thrown so upon the inward life. No
+one could ever have taken to it, even in the face of discouragement,
+more kindly and naturally than he; but the situation had at least that
+charm that, in default of so many kinds of the outward, people had their
+choice of as many kinds of the inward as they would, and might practise
+those kinds with whatever consistency, intensity and brilliancy. Of our
+father's perfect gift for practising <i>his</i> kind I shall have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> more to
+say; but I meanwhile glance yet again at those felicities of destitution
+which kept us, collectively, so genially interested in almost nothing
+but each other and which come over me now as one of the famous blessings
+in disguise.</p>
+
+<p>There were "artists" in the prospect&mdash;didn't Mr. Tom Hicks and Mr. Paul
+Duggan and Mr. C. P. Cranch and Mr. Felix Darley, this last worthy of a
+wider reputation, capable perhaps even of a finer development, than he
+attained, more or less haunt our friendly fireside, and give us also the
+sense of others, landscapist Cropseys and Coles and Kensetts, and
+bust-producing Iveses and Powerses and Moziers, hovering in an outer
+circle? There were authors not less, some of them vague and female and
+in this case, as a rule, glossily ringletted and monumentally
+breastpinned, but mostly frequent and familiar, after the manner of
+George Curtis and Parke Godwin and George Ripley and Charles Dana and N.
+P. Willis and, for brighter lights or those that in our then comparative
+obscurity almost deceived the morn, Mr. Bryant, Washington Irving and E.
+A. Poe&mdash;the last-named of whom I cite not so much because he was
+personally present (the extremity of personal absence had just overtaken
+him) as by reason of that predominant lustre in him which our small
+opening minds themselves already recognised and which makes me wonder
+to-day at the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> legend of the native neglect of him. Was he not even at
+that time on all lips, had not my brother, promptly master of the
+subject, beckoned on my lagging mind with a recital of The Gold-Bug and
+The Pit and the Pendulum?&mdash;both of which, however, I was soon enough to
+read for myself, adding to them The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Were we
+not also forever mounting on little platforms at our infant schools to
+"speak" The Raven and Lenore and the verses in which we phrased the
+heroine as Annabellee?&mdash;falling thus into the trap the poet had so
+recklessly laid for us, as he had laid one for our interminable droning,
+not less, in the other pieces I have named. So far from misprizing our
+ill-starred magician we acclaimed him surely at every turn; he lay upon
+our tables and resounded in our mouths, while we communed to satiety,
+even for boyish appetites, over the thrill of his choicest pages. Don't
+I just recognise the ghost of a dim memory of a children's Christmas
+party at the house of Fourteenth Street neighbours&mdash;they come back to me
+as "the Beans": who and what and whence and whither the kindly
+Beans?&mdash;where I admired over the chimney piece the full-length portrait
+of a lady seated on the ground in a Turkish dress, with hair flowing
+loose from a cap which was not as the caps of ladies known to me, and I
+think with a tambourine, who was somehow identified to my enquiring
+mind<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> as the wife of the painter of the piece, Mr. Osgood, and the so
+ministering friend of the unhappy Mr. Poe. There she throned in honour,
+like Queen Constance on the "huge firm earth"&mdash;all for <i>that</i> and her
+tambourine; and surely we could none of us have done more for the
+connection.</p>
+
+<p>Washington Irving I "met," with infant promptitude, very much as I had
+met General Scott; only this time it was on a steamboat that I
+apprehended the great man; my father, under whose ever-patient
+protection I then was&mdash;during the summer afternoon's sail from New York
+to Fort Hamilton&mdash;having named him to me, for this long preservation,
+before they greeted and talked, and having a fact of still more moment
+to mention, with the greatest concern, afterwards: Mr. Irving had given
+him the news of the shipwreck of Margaret Fuller in those very waters
+(Fire Island at least was but just without our big Bay) during the great
+August storm that had within the day or two passed over us. The
+unfortunate lady was essentially of the Boston connection; but she must
+have been, and probably through Emerson, a friend of my parents&mdash;mustn't
+she have held "conversations," in the finest exotic Bostonese, in New
+York, Emerson himself lecturing there to admiration?&mdash;since the more I
+squeeze the sponge of memory the more its stored secretions flow, to
+remind me here again that, being with those elders late one evening at
+an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> exhibition of pictures, possibly that of the National Academy, then
+confined to scant quarters, I was shown a small full-length portrait of
+Miss Fuller, seated as now appears to me and wrapped in a long white
+shawl, the failure of which to do justice to its original my companions
+denounced with some emphasis. Was this work from the hand of Mr. Tom
+Hicks aforesaid, or was that artist concerned only with the life-sized,
+the enormous (as I took it to be) the full-length, the violently
+protruded accessories in which come back to me with my infant sense of
+the wonder and the beauty of them, as expressed above all in the image
+of a very long and lovely lady, the new bride of the artist, standing at
+a window before a row of plants or bulbs in tall coloured glasses. The
+light of the window playing over the figure and the "treatment" of its
+glass and of the flower-pots and the other furniture, passed, by my
+impression, for the sign of the master hand; and <i>was</i> it all brave and
+charming, or was it only very hard and stiff, quite ugly and helpless? I
+put these questions as to a vanished world and by way of pressing back
+into it only the more clingingly and tenderly&mdash;wholly regardless in
+other words of whether the answers to them at all matter. They matter
+doubtless but for fond evocation, and if one tries to evoke one must
+neglect none of the arts, one must do it with all the forms. Why I
+<i>should</i> so like to do it is another<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> matter&mdash;and what "outside
+interest" I may suppose myself to create perhaps still another: I
+fatuously proceed at any rate, I make so far as I can the small warm
+dusky homogeneous New York world of the mid-century close about us.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+
+<p>I see a small and compact and ingenuous society, screened in somehow
+conveniently from north and west, but open wide to the east and
+comparatively to the south and, though perpetually moving up Broadway,
+none the less constantly and delightfully walking down it. Broadway was
+the feature and the artery, the joy and the adventure of one's
+childhood, and it stretched, and prodigiously, from Union Square to
+Barnum's great American Museum by the City Hall&mdash;or only went further on
+the Saturday mornings (absurdly and deplorably frequent alas) when we
+were swept off by a loving aunt, our mother's only sister, then much
+domesticated with us and to whom the ruthless care had assigned itself
+from the first, to Wall Street and the torture chamber of Dr. Parkhurst,
+our tremendously respectable dentist, who was so old and so empurpled
+and so polite, in his stock and dress-coat and dark and glossy wig, that
+he had been our mother's and our aunt's haunting fear in <i>their</i> youth
+as well, since, in their quiet Warren Street, not far off, they were,
+dreadful to think, comparatively under his thumb. He extremely
+resembles, to my mind's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> eye, certain figures in Phiz's illustrations to
+Dickens, and it was clear to us through our long ordeal that our elders
+must, by some mistaken law of compensation, some refinement of the
+vindictive, be making us "pay" for what they in like helplessness had
+suffered from him: as if <i>we</i> had done them any harm! Our analysis was
+muddled, yet in a manner relieving, and for us too there were
+compensations, which we grudged indeed to allow, but which I could
+easily, even if shyly, have named. One of these was Godey's Lady's Book,
+a sallow pile of which (it shows to me for sallow in the warmer and less
+stony light of the Wall Street of those days and through the smell of
+ancient anodynes) lay on Joey Bagstock's table for our beguilement while
+we waited: I was to encounter in Phiz's Dombey and Son that design for
+our tormentor's type. There is no doubt whatever that I succumbed to the
+spell of Godey, who, unlike the present essences, was an anodyne before
+the fact as well as after; since I remember poring, in his pages, over
+tales of fashionable life in Philadelphia while awaiting my turn in the
+chair, not less than doing so when my turn was over and to the music of
+my brother's groans. This must have been at the hours when we were left
+discreetly to our own fortitude, through our aunt's availing herself of
+the relative proximity to go and shop at Stewart's and then come back
+for us; the ladies' great shop,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> vast, marmorean, plate-glassy and
+notoriously fatal to the female nerve (we ourselves had wearily trailed
+through it, hanging on the skirts, very literally, of indecision) which
+bravely waylaid custom on the Broadway corner of Chambers Street. Wasn't
+part of the charm of life&mdash;since I assume that there <i>was</i> such a
+charm&mdash;in its being then (I allude to life itself) so much more
+down-towny, on the supposition at least that our young gravitation in
+that sense for most of the larger joys consorted with something of the
+general habit? The joy that had to be fished out, like Truth, from the
+very bottom of the well was attendance at Trinity Church, still in that
+age supereminent, pointedly absolute, the finest feature of the
+southward scene; to the privilege of which the elder Albany cousins were
+apt to be treated when they came on to stay with us; an indulgence
+making their enjoyment of our city as down-towny as possible too, for I
+seem otherwise to see them but as returning with the familiar Stewart
+headache from the prolonged strain of selection.</p>
+
+<p>The great reward dispensed to us for our sessions in the house of
+pain&mdash;as to which it became our subsequent theory that we had been
+regularly dragged there on alternate Saturdays&mdash;was our being carried on
+the return to the house of delight, or to one of them, for there were
+specifically two, where we partook of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>ice-cream, deemed sovereign for
+sore mouths, deemed sovereign in fact, all through our infancy, for
+everything. Two great establishments for the service of it graced the
+prospect, one Thompson's and the other Taylor's, the former, I perfectly
+recall, grave and immemorial, the latter upstart but dazzling, and
+having together the effect that whichever we went to we wondered if we
+hadn't better have gone to the other&mdash;with that capacity of childhood
+for making the most of its adventures after a fashion that may look so
+like making the least. It is in our father's company indeed that, as I
+press the responsive spring, I see the bedizened saucers heaped up for
+our fond consumption (they bore the Taylor-title painted in blue and
+gilded, with the Christian name, as parentally pointed out to us,
+perverted to "Jhon" for John, whereas the Thompson-name scorned such
+vulgar and above all such misspelt appeals;) whence I infer that still
+other occasions for that experience waited on us&mdash;as almost any would
+serve, and a paternal presence so associated with them was not in the
+least conceivable in the Wall Street <i>repaire</i>. That presence is in fact
+not associated for me, to any effect of distinctness, with the least of
+our suffered shocks or penalties&mdash;though partly doubtless because our
+acquaintance with such was of the most limited; a conclusion I form even
+while judging it to have been on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> whole sufficient for our virtue.
+This sounds perhaps as if we had borne ourselves as prodigies or
+prigs&mdash;which was as far as possible from being the case; we were bred in
+horror of <i>conscious</i> propriety, of what my father was fond of calling
+"flagrant" morality; what I myself at any rate read back into our rare
+educational ease, for the memory of some sides of which I was ever to be
+thankful, is, besides the <i>general</i> humanisation of our apprehended
+world and our "social" tone, the unmistakeable appearance that my father
+was again and again accompanied in public by his small second son: so
+many young impressions come back to me as gathered at his side and in
+his personal haunts. Not that he mustn't have offered his firstborn at
+least equal opportunities; but I make out that he seldom led us forth,
+such as we were, together, and my brother must have had in <i>his</i> turn
+many a mild adventure of which the secret&mdash;I like to put it so&mdash;perished
+with him. He was to remember, as I perceived later on, many things that
+I didn't, impressions I sometimes wished, as with a retracing jealousy,
+or at least envy, that I might also have fallen direct heir to; but he
+professed amazement, and even occasionally impatience, at my reach of
+reminiscence&mdash;liking as he did to brush away old moral scraps in favour
+of new rather than to hoard and so complacently exhibit them. If in my
+way I collected<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> the new as well I yet cherished the old; the ragbag of
+memory hung on its nail in my closet, though I learnt with time to
+control the habit of bringing it forth. And I say that with a due sense
+of my doubtless now appearing to empty it into these pages.</p>
+
+<p>I keep picking out at hazard those passages of our earliest age that
+help to reconstruct for me even by tiny touches the experience of our
+parents, any shade of which seems somehow to signify. I cherish, to the
+extent of here reproducing, an old daguerreotype all the circumstances
+of the taking of which I intensely recall&mdash;though as I was lately turned
+twelve when I figured for it the feat of memory is perhaps not
+remarkable. It documents for me in so welcome and so definite a manner
+my father's cultivation of my company. It documents at the same time the
+absurdest little legend of my small boyhood&mdash;the romantic tradition of
+the value of being taken up from wherever we were staying to the queer
+empty dusty smelly New York of midsummer: I apply that last term because
+we always arrived by boat and I have still in my nostril the sense of
+the <i>abords</i> of the hot town, the rank and rubbishy waterside quarters,
+where big loose cobbles, for the least of all the base items, lay
+wrenched from their sockets of pungent black mud and where the dependent
+streets managed by a law of their own to be all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> corners and the corners
+to be all groceries; groceries indeed largely of the "green" order, so
+far as greenness could persist in the torrid air, and that bristled, in
+glorious defiance of traffic, with the overflow of their wares and
+implements. Carts and barrows and boxes and baskets, sprawling or
+stacked, familiarly elbowed in its course the bumping hack (the
+comprehensive "carriage" of other days, the only vehicle of hire then
+known to us) while the situation was accepted by the loose citizen in
+the garb of a freeman save for the brass star on his breast&mdash;and the New
+York garb of the period was, as I remember it, an immense attestation of
+liberty. Why the throb of romance should have beat time for me to such
+visions I can scarce explain, or can explain only by the fact that the
+squalor was a squalor wonderfully mixed and seasoned, and that I should
+wrong the whole impression if I didn't figure it first and foremost as
+that of some vast succulent cornucopia. What did the stacked boxes and
+baskets of our youth represent but the boundless fruitage of that more
+bucolic age of the American world, and what was after all of so strong
+an assault as the rankness of such a harvest? Where is that fruitage
+now, where in particular are the peaches <i>d'antan</i>? where the mounds of
+Isabella grapes and Seckel pears in the sticky sweetness of which our
+childhood seems to have been steeped? It was surely, save perhaps for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>
+oranges, a more informally and familiarly fruit-eating time, and bushels
+of peaches in particular, peaches big and peaches small, peaches white
+and peaches yellow, played a part in life from which they have somehow
+been deposed; every garden, almost every bush and the very boys' pockets
+grew them; they were "cut up" and eaten with cream at every meal;
+domestically "brandied" they figured, the rest of the year, scarce less
+freely&mdash;if they were rather a "party dish" it was because they made the
+party whenever they appeared, and when ice-cream was added, or they were
+added <i>to</i> it, they formed the highest revel we knew. Above all the
+public heaps of them, the high-piled receptacles at every turn, touched
+the street as with a sort of southern plenty; the note of the rejected
+and scattered fragments, the memory of the slippery skins and rinds and
+kernels with which the old dislocated flags were bestrown, is itself
+endeared to me and contributes a further pictorial grace. We ate
+everything in those days by the bushel and the barrel, as from stores
+that were infinite; we handled watermelons as freely as cocoanuts, and
+the amount of stomach-ache involved was negligible in the general
+Eden-like consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>The glow of this consciousness even in so small an organism was part of
+the charm of these retreats offered me cityward upon our base of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>provisions; a part of the rest of which, I disengage, was in my fond
+perception of that almost eccentrically home-loving habit in my father
+which furnished us with half the household humour of our
+childhood&mdash;besides furnishing <i>him</i> with any quantity of extravagant
+picture of his so prompt pangs of anguish in absence for celebration of
+his precipitate returns. It was traditional for us later on, and
+especially on the European scene, that for him to leave us in pursuit of
+some advantage or convenience, some improvement of our condition, some
+enlargement of our view, was for him breathlessly to reappear, after the
+shortest possible interval, with no account at all to give of the
+benefit aimed at, but instead of this a moving representation, a far
+richer recital, of his spiritual adventures at the horrid inhuman inns
+and amid the hard alien races which had stayed his advance. He reacted,
+he rebounded, in favour of his fireside, from whatever brief
+explorations or curiosities; these passionate spontaneities were the
+pulse of his life and quite some of the principal events of ours; and,
+as he was nothing if not expressive, whatever happened to him for inward
+intensity happened abundantly to us for pity and terror, as it were, as
+well as for an ease and a quality of amusement among ourselves that was
+really always to fail us among others. Comparatively late in life, after
+his death, I had occasion to visit, in lieu of my brother, then<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> in
+Europe, an American city in which he had had, since his own father's
+death, interests that were of importance to us all. On my asking the
+agent in charge when the owner had last taken personal cognisance of his
+property that gentleman replied only half to my surprise that he had
+never in all his years of possession performed such an act. Then it was
+perhaps that I most took the measure of his fine faith in human
+confidence as an administrative function. He had to have a <i>relation</i>,
+somehow expressed&mdash;and as he was the vividest and happiest of
+letter-writers it rarely failed of coming; but once it was established
+it served him, in every case, much better than fussy challenges, which
+had always the drawback of involving lapses and inattentions in regard
+to solicitudes more pressing. He incurably took for granted&mdash;incurably
+because whenever he did so the process succeeded; with which
+association, however, I perhaps overdrench my complacent vision of our
+summer snatches at town. Through a grave accident in early life country
+walks on rough roads were, in spite of his great constitutional
+soundness, tedious and charmless to him; he liked on the other hand the
+peopled pavement, the thought of which made him restless when away.
+Hence the fidelities and sociabilities, however superficial, that he
+couldn't <i>not</i> reaffirm&mdash;if he could only reaffirm the others, the
+really intimate and still more communicable, soon enough afterwards.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span></p><p>It was these of the improvised and casual sort that I shared with him
+thus indelibly; for truly if we took the boat to town to do things I did
+them quite as much as he, and so that a little boy could scarce have
+done them more. My part may indeed but have been to surround his part
+with a thick imaginative aura; but that constituted for me an activity
+than which I could dream of none braver or wilder. We went to the office
+of The New York Tribune&mdash;my father's relations with that journal were
+actual and close; and that was a wonderful world indeed, with strange
+steepnesses and machineries and noises and hurrying bare-armed,
+bright-eyed men, and amid the agitation clever, easy, kindly, jocular,
+partly undressed gentlemen (it was always July or August) some of whom I
+knew at home, taking it all as if it were the most natural place in the
+world. It was big to me, big to me with the breath of great vague
+connections, and I supposed the gentlemen very old, though since aware
+that they must have been, for the connections, remarkably young; and the
+conversation of one of them, the one I saw oftenest up town, who
+attained to great local and to considerable national eminence
+afterwards, and who talked often and thrillingly about the theatres, I
+retain as many bright fragments of as if I had been another little
+Boswell. It was as if he had dropped into my mind the germ of certain
+interests that were long afterwards to flower&mdash;as for instance<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> on his
+announcing the receipt from Paris of news of the appearance at the
+Th&eacute;&acirc;tre Fran&ccedil;ais of an actress, Madame Judith, who was formidably to
+compete with her coreligionary Rachel and to endanger that artist's
+laurels. Why should Madame Judith's name have stuck to me through all
+the years, since I was never to see her and she is as forgotten as
+Rachel is remembered? Why should that scrap of gossip have made a date
+for my consciousness, turning it to the Com&eacute;die with an intensity that
+was long afterwards to culminate? Why was it equally to abide for me
+that the same gentleman had on one of these occasions mentioned his
+having just come back from a wonderful city of the West, Chicago, which,
+though but a year or two old, with plank sidewalks when there were any,
+and holes and humps where there were none, and shanties where there were
+not big blocks, and everything where there had yesterday been nothing,
+had already developed a huge energy and curiosity, and also an appetite
+for lectures? I became aware of the Com&eacute;die, I became aware of Chicago;
+I also became aware that even the most alluring fiction was not always
+for little boys to read. It was mentioned at the Tribune office that one
+of its reporters, Mr. Solon Robinson, had put forth a novel rather oddly
+entitled "Hot Corn" and more or less having for its subject the career
+of a little girl who hawked that familiar American<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> luxury in the
+streets. The volume, I think, was put into my father's hand, and I
+recall my prompt desire to make acquaintance with it no less than the
+remark, as promptly addressed to my companion, that the work, however
+engaging, was not one that should be left accessible to an innocent
+child. The pang occasioned by this warning has scarcely yet died out for
+me, nor my sense of my first wonder at the discrimination&mdash;so great
+became from that moment the mystery of the tabooed book, of whatever
+identity; the question, in my breast, of why, if it was to be so right
+for others, it was only to be wrong for me. I remember the soreness of
+the thought that it was I rather who was wrong for the book&mdash;which was
+somehow humiliating: in that amount of discredit one couldn't but be
+involved. Neither then nor afterwards was the secret of "Hot Corn"
+revealed to me, and the sense of privation was to be more prolonged, I
+fear, than the vogue of the tale, which even as a success of scandal
+couldn't have been great.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII</h2>
+
+<p>Dimly queer and "pathetic" to me were to remain through much of the
+after time indeed most of those early indigenous vogues and literary
+flurries: so few of those that brushed by my childhood had been other
+than a tinkling that suddenly stopped. I am afraid I mean that what was
+touching was rather the fact that the tinkle <i>could</i> penetrate than the
+fact that it died away; the light of criticism might have beat so
+straight&mdash;if the sense of proportion and the fact of compassion hadn't
+waved it away&mdash;on the &aelig;sthetic phase during which the appeal was mainly
+<i>by</i> the tinkle. The Scarlet Letter and The Seven Gables had the deep
+tone as much as one would; but of the current efforts of the imagination
+they were alone in having it till Walt Whitman broke out in the later
+fifties&mdash;and I was to know nothing of that happy genius till long after.
+An absorbed perusal of The Lamplighter was what I was to achieve at the
+fleeting hour I continue to circle round; that romance was on every
+one's lips, and I recollect it as more or less thrust upon me in amends
+for the imposed sacrifice of a ranker actuality&mdash;that of the improper<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>
+Mr. Robinson, I mean, as to whom there revives in me the main question
+of where his impropriety, in so general a platitude of the bourgeois,
+could possibly have dwelt. It was to be true indeed that Walt Whitman
+achieved an impropriety of the first magnitude; that success, however,
+but showed us the platitude returning in a genial rage upon itself and
+getting out of control by generic excess. There was no rage at any rate
+in The Lamplighter, over which I fondly hung and which would have been
+my first "grown-up" novel&mdash;it had been soothingly offered me for
+that&mdash;had I consented to take it as really and truly grown-up. I
+couldn't have said what it lacked for the character, I only had my
+secret reserves, and when one blest afternoon on the New Brighton boat I
+waded into The Initials I saw how right I had been. The Initials <i>was</i>
+grown-up and the difference thereby exquisite; it came over me with the
+very first page, assimilated in the fluttered little cabin to which I
+had retired with it&mdash;all in spite of the fact too that my attention was
+distracted by a pair of remarkable little girls who lurked there out of
+more public view as to hint that they weren't to be seen for nothing.</p>
+
+<p>That must have been a rich hour, for I mix the marvel of the Boon
+Children, strange pale little flowers of the American theatre, with my
+conscious joy in bringing back to my mother, from our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> forage in New
+York, a gift of such happy promise as the history of the long-legged Mr.
+Hamilton and his two Bavarian beauties, the elder of whom, Hildegarde,
+was to figure for our small generation as the very type of the haughty
+as distinguished from the forward heroine (since I think our categories
+really came to no more than those). I couldn't have got very far with
+Hildegarde in moments so scant, but I memorably felt that romance was
+thick round me&mdash;everything, at such a crisis, seeming to make for it at
+once. The Boon Children, conveyed thus to New Brighton under care of a
+lady in whose aspect the strain of the resolute triumphed over the note
+of the battered, though the showy in it rather succumbed at the same
+time to the dowdy, were already "billed," as infant phenomena, for a
+performance that night at the Pavilion, where our attendance, it was a
+shock to feel, couldn't be promised; and in gazing without charge at the
+pair of weary and sleepy little mountebanks I found the histrionic
+character and the dramatic profession for the first time revealed to me.
+They filled me with fascination and yet with fear; they expressed a
+melancholy grace and a sort of peevish refinement, yet seemed awfully
+detached and indifferent, indifferent perhaps even to being pinched and
+slapped, for art's sake, at home; they honoured me with no notice
+whatever and regarded me doubtless as no better than one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> of the little
+louts peeping through the tent of the show. In return I judged their
+appearance dissipated though fascinating, and sought consolation for the
+memory of their scorn and the loss of their exhibition, as time went on,
+in noting that the bounds of their fame seemed somehow to have been
+stayed. I neither "met" them nor heard of them again. The little
+Batemans must have obscured their comparatively dim lustre, flourishing
+at the same period and with a larger command of the pictorial poster and
+the other primitive symbols in Broadway&mdash;such posters and such symbols
+as they were at that time!&mdash;the little Batemans who were to be reserved,
+in maturer form, for my much later and more grateful appreciation.</p>
+
+<p>This weak reminiscence has obstructed, however, something more to the
+purpose, the retained impression of those choicest of our loiterings
+that took place, still far down-town, at the Bookstore, home of delights
+and haunt of fancy. It was at the Bookstore we had called on the day of
+The Initials and the Boon Children&mdash;and it was thence we were returning
+with our spoil, of which the charming novel must have been but a
+fragment. My impression composed itself of many pieces; a great and
+various practice of burying my nose in the half-open book for the strong
+smell of paper and printer's ink, known to us as the English smell, was
+needed to account for it. <i>That</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> was the exercise of the finest sense
+that hung about us, my brother and me&mdash;or of one at least but little
+less fine than the sense for the satisfaction of which we resorted to
+Thompson's and to Taylor's: it bore me company during all our returns
+from forages and left me persuaded that I had only to snuff up hard
+enough, fresh uncut volume in hand, to taste of the very substance of
+London. All our books in that age were English, at least all our
+down-town ones&mdash;I personally recall scarce any that were not; and I take
+the perception of that quality in them to have associated itself with
+more fond dreams and glimmering pictures than any other one principle of
+growth. It was all a result of the deeply <i>infected</i> state: I had been
+prematurely poisoned&mdash;as I shall presently explain. The Bookstore,
+fondest of my father's resorts, though I remember no more of its public
+identity than that it further enriched the brave depth of Broadway, was
+overwhelmingly and irresistibly English, as not less tonically English
+was our principal host there, with whom we had moreover, my father and
+I, thanks to his office, such personal and genial relations that I
+recall seeing him grace our board at home, in company with his wife,
+whose vocal strain and complexion and coiffure and flounces I found none
+the less informing, none the less "racial," for my not being then versed
+in the language of analysis.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span></p><p>The true inwardness of these rich meanings&mdash;those above all of the
+Bookstore itself&mdash;was that a tradition was thus fed, a presumption thus
+created, a vague vision thus filled in: all expression is clumsy for so
+mystic a process. What else can have happened but that, having taken
+over, under suggestion and with singular infant promptitude, a
+particular throbbing consciousness, I had become aware of the source at
+which it could best be refreshed? That consciousness, so communicated,
+was just simply of certain impressions, certain <i>sources</i> of impression
+again, proceeding from over the sea and situated beyond it&mdash;or even much
+rather of my parents' own impression of such, the fruit of a happy time
+spent in and about London with their two babies and reflected in that
+portion of their talk with each other to which I best attended. Had
+<i>all</i> their talk for its subject, in my infant ears, that happy
+time?&mdash;did it deal only with London and Piccadilly and the Green Park,
+where, over against their dwelling, their two babies mainly took the air
+under charge of Fanny of Albany, their American nurse, whose remark as
+to the degree to which the British Museum fell short for one who had had
+the privilege of that of Albany was handed down to us? Did it never
+forbear from Windsor and Richmond and Sudbrook and Ham Common, amid the
+rich complexity of which, crowding their discourse with echoes, they
+had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> spent their summer?&mdash;all a scattering of such pearls as it seemed
+that their second-born could most deftly and instinctively pick up. Our
+sole maternal aunt, already mentioned as a devoted and cherished
+presence during those and many later years, was in a position to share
+with them the treasure of these mild memories, which strike me as having
+for the most part, through some bright household habit, overflowed at
+the breakfast-table, where I regularly attended with W. J.; she had
+imbibed betimes in Europe the seeds of a long nostalgia, and I think of
+her as ever so patiently communicative on that score under pressure of
+my artless appeal. That I should have been so inquiring while still so
+destitute of primary data was doubtless rather an anomaly; and it was
+for that matter quite as if my infant divination proceeded by the light
+of nature: I divined that it would matter to me in the future that
+"English life" should be of this or that fashion. My father had
+subscribed for me to a small periodical of quarto form, covered in
+yellow and entitled The Charm, which shed on the question the softest
+lustre, but of which the appearances were sadly intermittent, or then
+struck me as being; inasmuch as many of our visits to the Bookstore were
+to ask for the new number&mdash;only to learn with painful frequency that the
+last consignment from London had arrived without it. I feel again the
+pang of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> that disappointment&mdash;as if through the want of what I needed
+most for going on; the English smell was exhaled by The Charm in a
+peculiar degree, and I see myself affected by the failure as by that of
+a vital tonic. It was not, at the same time, by a Charm the more or the
+less that my salvation was to be, as it were, worked out, or my
+imagination at any rate duly convinced; conviction was the result of the
+very air of home, so far as I most consciously inhaled it. This
+represented, no doubt, a failure to read into matters close at hand all
+the interest they were capable of yielding; but I had taken the twist,
+had sipped the poison, as I say, and was to feel it to that end the most
+salutary cup. I saw my parents homesick, as I conceived, for the ancient
+order and distressed and inconvenienced by many of the more immediate
+features of the modern, as the modern pressed upon us, and since their
+theory of our better living was from an early time that we should renew
+the quest of the ancient on the very first possibility I simply grew
+greater in the faith that somehow to manage that would constitute
+success in life. I never found myself deterred from this fond view,
+which was implied in every question I asked, every answer I got, and
+every plan I formed.</p>
+
+<p>Those are great words for the daydream of infant ignorance, yet if
+success in life may perhaps be best defined as the performance in age of
+some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> intention arrested in youth I may frankly put in a claim to it. To
+press my nose against the sources of the English smell, so different for
+young bibliophiles from any American, was to adopt that sweetness as the
+sign of my "atmosphere"; roundabout might be the course to take, but one
+was in motion from the first and one never lost sight of the goal. The
+very names of places and things in the other world&mdash;the marked opposite
+in most ways of that in which New York and Albany, Fort Hamilton and New
+Brighton formed so fallacious a maximum&mdash;became to me values and secrets
+and shibboleths; they were probably often on my tongue and employed as
+ignorance determined, but I quite recall being ashamed to use them as
+much as I should have liked. It was New Brighton, I reconstruct (and
+indeed definitely remember) that "finished" us at last&mdash;that and our
+final sordid school, W. J.'s and mine, in New York: the ancient order
+<i>had</i> somehow to be invoked when such "advantages" as those were the
+best within our compass and our means. Not further to anticipate, at all
+events, that climax was for a while but vaguely in sight, and the
+illusion of felicity continued from season to season to shut us in. It
+is only of what I took for felicity, however few the years and however
+scant the scene, that I am pretending now to speak; though I shall have
+strained the last drop of romance from this vision of our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> towny summers
+with the quite sharp reminiscence of my first sitting for my
+daguerreotype. I repaired with my father on an August day to the great
+Broadway establishment of Mr. Brady, supreme in that then beautiful art,
+and it is my impression&mdash;the only point vague with me&mdash;that though we
+had come up by the Staten Island boat for the purpose we were to keep
+the affair secret till the charming consequence should break, at home,
+upon my mother. Strong is my conviction that our mystery, in the event,
+yielded almost at once to our elation, for no tradition had a brighter
+household life with us than that of our father's headlong impatience. He
+moved in a cloud, if not rather in a high radiance, of precipitation and
+divulgation, a chartered rebel against cold reserves. The good news in
+his hand refused under any persuasion to grow stale, the sense of
+communicable pleasure in his breast was positively explosive; so that we
+saw those "surprises" in which he had conspired with our mother for our
+benefit converted by him in every case, under our shamelessly encouraged
+guesses, into common conspiracies against her&mdash;against her knowing, that
+is, how thoroughly we were all compromised. He had a special and
+delightful sophistry at the service of his overflow, and never so fine a
+fancy as in defending it on "human" grounds. He was something very
+different withal from a parent of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> weak mercies; weakness was never so
+positive and plausible, nor could the attitude of sparing you be more
+handsomely or on occasion even more comically aggressive.</p>
+
+<p>My small point is simply, however, that the secresy of our conjoined
+portrait was probably very soon, by his act, to begin a public and
+shining life and to enjoy it till we received the picture; as to which
+moreover still another remembrance steals on me, a proof of the fact
+that our adventure was improvised. Sharp again is my sense of not being
+so adequately dressed as I should have taken thought for had I foreseen
+my exposure; though the resources of my wardrobe as then constituted
+could surely have left me but few alternatives. The main resource of a
+small New York boy in this line at that time was the little sheath-like
+jacket, tight to the body, closed at the neck and adorned in front with
+a single row of brass buttons&mdash;a garment of scant grace assuredly and
+compromised to my consciousness, above all, by a strange ironic light
+from an unforgotten source. It was but a short time before those days
+that the great Mr. Thackeray had come to America to lecture on The
+English Humourists, and still present to me is the voice proceeding from
+my father's library, in which some glimpse of me hovering, at an opening
+of the door, in passage or on staircase, prompted him to the formidable
+words: "Come<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> here, little boy, and show me your extraordinary jacket!"
+My sense of my jacket became from that hour a heavy one&mdash;further
+enriched as my vision is by my shyness of posture before the seated, the
+celebrated visitor, who struck me, in the sunny light of the animated
+room, as enormously big and who, though he laid on my shoulder the hand
+of benevolence, bent on my native costume the spectacles of wonder. I
+was to know later on why he had been so amused and why, after asking me
+if this were the common uniform of my age and class, he remarked that in
+England, were I to go there, I should be addressed as "Buttons." It had
+been revealed to me thus in a flash that we were somehow <i>queer</i>, and
+though never exactly crushed by it I became aware that I at least felt
+so as I stood with my head in Mr. Brady's vise. Beautiful most decidedly
+the lost art of the daguerreotype; I remember the "exposure" as on this
+occasion interminably long, yet with the result of a facial anguish far
+less harshly reproduced than my suffered snapshots of a later age. Too
+few, I may here interject, were to remain my gathered impressions of the
+great humourist, but one of them, indeed almost the only other, bears
+again on the play of his humour over our perversities of dress. It
+belongs to a later moment, an occasion on which I see him familiarly
+seated with us, in Paris, during the spring of 1857, at some repast at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>
+which the younger of us too, by that time, habitually flocked, in our
+affluence of five. Our youngest was beside him, a small sister, then not
+quite in her eighth year, and arrayed apparently after the fashion of
+the period and place; and the tradition lingered long of his having
+suddenly laid his hand on her little flounced person and exclaimed with
+ludicrous horror: "Crinoline?&mdash;I was suspecting it! So young and so
+depraved!"</p>
+
+<p>A fainter image, that of one of the New York moments, just eludes me,
+pursue it as I will; I recover but the setting and the fact of his brief
+presence in it, with nothing that was said or done beyond my being left
+with my father to watch our distinguished friend's secretary, who was
+also a young artist, establish his easel and proceed to paint. The
+setting, as I recall it, was an odd, oblong, blank "private parlour" at
+the Clarendon Hotel, then the latest thing in hotels, but whose ancient
+corner of Fourth Avenue and&mdash;was it Eighteenth Street?&mdash;long ago ceased
+to know it; the gentle, very gentle, portraitist was Mr. Eyre Crowe and
+the obliging sitter my father, who sat in response to Mr. Thackeray's
+desire that his prot&eacute;g&eacute; should find employment. The protector after a
+little departed, blessing the business, which took the form of a small
+full-length of the model seated, his arm extended and the hand on the
+knob of his cane. The work, it may at this time of day<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> be mentioned,
+fell below its general possibilities; but I note the scene through which
+I must duly have gaped and wondered (for I had as yet seen no one, least
+of all a casual acquaintance in an hotel parlour, "really paint"
+before,) as a happy example again of my parent's positive cultivation of
+my society, it would seem, and thought for my social education. And then
+there are other connections; I recall it as a Sunday morning, I recover
+the place itself as a featureless void&mdash;bleak and bare, with its
+developments all to come, the hotel parlour of other New York days&mdash;but
+vivid still to me is my conscious assistance for the first time at
+operations that were to mean much for many of my coming years. Those of
+quiet Mr. Crowe held me spellbound&mdash;I was to circle so wistfully, as
+from that beginning, round the practice of his art, which in spite of
+these earnest approaches and intentions never on its own part in the
+least acknowledged our acquaintance; scarcely much more than it was ever
+to respond, for that matter, to the overtures of the mild aspirant
+himself, known to my observation long afterwards, in the London years,
+as the most touchingly resigned of the children of disappointment. Not
+only by association was he a Thackerayan figure, but much as if the
+master's hand had stamped him with the outline and the value, with life
+and sweetness and patience&mdash;shown, as after the long futility, seated<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>
+in a quiet wait, very long too, for the end. That was sad, one couldn't
+but feel; yet it was in the oddest way impossible to take him for a
+failure. He might have been one of fortune's, strictly; but what was
+that when he was one of Thackeray's own successes?&mdash;in the minor line,
+but with such a grace and such a truth, those of some dim second cousin
+to Colonel Newcome.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII</h2>
+
+<p>I feel that at such a rate I remember too much, and yet this mild
+apparitionism is only part of it. To look back at all is to meet the
+apparitional and to find in its ghostly face the silent stare of an
+appeal. When I fix it, the hovering shade, whether of person or place,
+it fixes me back and seems the less lost&mdash;not to my consciousness, for
+that is nothing, but to its own&mdash;by my stopping however idly for it. The
+day of the daguerreotype, the August afternoon, what was it if not one
+of the days when we went to Union Square for luncheon and for more
+ice-cream and more peaches and even more, even most, enjoyment of ease
+accompanied by stimulation of wonder? It may have been indeed that a
+visit to Mrs. Cannon rather on that occasion engaged us&mdash;memory selects
+a little confusedly from such a wealth of experience. For the wonder was
+the experience, and that was everywhere, even if I didn't so much find
+it as take it with me, to be sure of not falling short. Mrs. Cannon
+lurked near Fourth Street&mdash;<i>that</i> I abundantly grasp, not more
+definitely placing her than in what seemed to me a labyrinth of grave
+bye-streets westwardly "back of" <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>Broadway, yet at no great distance
+from it, where she must have occupied a house at a corner, since we
+reached her not by steps that went up to a front door but by others that
+went slightly down and formed clearly an independent side access, a
+feature that affected me as rich and strange. What the steps went down
+to was a spacious room, light and friendly, so that it couldn't have
+been compromised by an "area," which offered the brave mystification,
+amid other mystifications, of being at once a parlour and a shop, a shop
+in particular for the relief of gentlemen in want of
+pockethandkerchiefs, neckties, collars, umbrellas and straw-covered
+bottles of the essence known in old New York as "Cullone"&mdash;with a very
+long and big O. Mrs. Cannon was always seated at some delicate white or
+other needlework, as if she herself made the collars and the neckties
+and hemmed the pockethandkerchiefs, though the air of this conflicts
+with the sense of importation from remoter centres of fashion breathed
+by some of the more thrilling of the remarks I heard exchanged, at the
+same time that it quickened the oddity of the place. For the oddity was
+in many things&mdash;above all perhaps in there being no counter, no rows of
+shelves and no vulgar till for Mrs. Cannon's commerce; the parlour
+clearly dissimulated the shop&mdash;and positively to that extent that I
+might uncannily have wondered what the shop <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>dissimulated. It
+represented, honestly, I made out in the course of visits that seem to
+me to have been delightfully repeated, the more informal of the
+approaches to our friend's brave background or hinterland, the realm of
+her main industry, the array of the furnished apartments for
+gentlemen&mdash;gentlemen largely for whom she imported the Eau de Cologne
+and the neckties and who struck me as principally consisting of the ever
+remarkable Uncles, desirous at times, on their restless returns from
+Albany or wherever, of an intimacy of comfort that the New York Hotel
+couldn't yield. Fascinating thus the implications of Mrs. Cannon's
+establishment, where the talk took the turn, in particular, of Mr. John
+and Mr. Edward and Mr. Howard, and where Miss Maggie or Miss Susie, who
+were on the spot in other rocking chairs and with other poised needles,
+made their points as well as the rest of us. The interest of the place
+was that the uncles were somehow always under discussion&mdash;as to where
+they at the moment might be, or as to when they were expected, or above
+all as to how (the "how" was the great matter and the fine emphasis)
+they had last appeared and might be conceived as carrying themselves;
+and that their consumption of neckties and Eau de Cologne was somehow
+inordinate: I might have been judging it in my innocence as their only
+<i>consommation</i>. I refer to those sources, I say, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> charm of the
+scene, the finer part of which must yet have been that it didn't, as it
+regularly lapsed, dispose of <i>all</i> mystifications. If I didn't
+understand, however, the beauty was that Mrs. Cannon understood (that
+was what she did most of all, even more than hem pockethandkerchiefs and
+collars) and my father understood, and each understood that the other
+did, Miss Maggie and Miss Susie being no whit behind. It was only I who
+didn't understand&mdash;save in so far as I understood <i>that</i>, which was a
+kind of pale joy; and meanwhile there would be more to come from uncles
+so attachingly, so almost portentously, discussable. The vision at any
+rate was to stick by me as through its old-world friendly grace, its
+light on the elder amenity; the prettier manners, the tender personal
+note in the good lady's importations and anxieties, that of the
+hand-made fabric and the discriminating service. Fit to figure as a
+value anywhere&mdash;by which I meant in the right corner of any social
+picture, I afterwards said to myself&mdash;that refined and composed
+significance of Mrs. Cannon's scene.</p>
+
+<p>Union Square was a different matter, though with the element there also
+that I made out that I <i>didn't</i> make out (my sense of drama was in this
+case, I think, rather more frightened off than led on;) a drawback for
+which, however, I consoled myself by baked apples and custards, an
+inveterate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> feature of our Sunday luncheon there (those of weekdays
+being various and casual) and by a study of a great store, as it seemed
+to me, of steel-plated volumes, devoted mainly to the heroines of
+Romance, with one in particular, presenting those of Shakespeare, in
+which the plates were so artfully coloured and varnished, and complexion
+and dress thereby so endeared to memory, that it was for long afterwards
+a shock to me at the theatre not to see just those bright images, with
+their peculiar toggeries, come on. I was able but the other day,
+moreover, to renew almost on the very spot the continuity of
+contemplation; large lumpish presences, precarious creations of a day,
+seemed to have elbowed out of the Square all but one or two of the minor
+monuments, pleasant appreciable things, of the other time; yet close to
+University Place the old house of the picture-books and the custards and
+the domestic situation had, though disfigured and overscored, not quite
+received its death-stroke; I disengaged, by a mere identification of
+obscured window and profaned portico, a whole chapter of history; which
+fact should indeed be a warning to penetration, a practical plea here
+for the superficial&mdash;by its exhibition of the rate at which the
+relations of any gage of experience multiply and ramify from the moment
+the mind begins to handle it. I pursued a swarm of such relations, on
+the occasion I speak<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> of, up and down West Fourteenth Street and over to
+Seventh Avenue, running most of them to earth with difficulty, but
+finding them at half a dozen points quite confess to a queer stale
+sameness. The gage of experience, as I say, had in these cases been
+strangely spared&mdash;the sameness had in two or three of them held out as
+with conscious craft. But these are impressions I shall presently find
+it impossible not to take up again at any cost.</p>
+
+<p>I first "realised" Fourteenth Street at a very tender age, and I
+perfectly recall that flush of initiation, consisting as it did of an
+afternoon call with my father at a house there situated, one of an
+already fairly mature row on the south side and quite near Sixth Avenue.
+It was as "our" house, just acquired by us, that he thus invited my
+approval of it&mdash;heaping as that does once more the measure of my small
+adhesiveness. I thoroughly approved&mdash;quite as if I had foreseen that the
+place was to become to me for ever so long afterwards a sort of
+anchorage of the spirit, being at the hour as well a fascination for the
+eyes, since it was there I first fondly gaped at the process of
+"decorating." I saw charming men in little caps ingeniously formed of
+folded newspaper&mdash;where in the roaring city are those quaint badges of
+the handicrafts now?&mdash;mounted on platforms and casting plaster into
+moulds; I saw them in particular paste long strips of yellowish grained
+paper<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> upon walls, and I vividly remember thinking the grain and the
+pattern (for there was a pattern from waist-high down, a complication of
+dragons and sphinxes and scrolls and other fine flourishes) a wonderful
+and sumptuous thing. I would give much, I protest, to recover its lost
+secret, to see what it really was&mdash;so interesting ever to retrace, and
+sometimes so difficult of belief, in a community of one's own knowing,
+is the general &aelig;sthetic adventure, are the dangers and delusions, the
+all but fatal accidents and mortal ailments, that Taste has smilingly
+survived and after which the fickle creature may still quite brazenly
+look one in the face. Our quarter must have bristled in those years with
+the very worst of the danger-signals&mdash;though indeed they figured but as
+coarse complacencies; the age of "brown stone" had just been ushered in,
+and that material, in deplorable, in monstrous form, over all the vacant
+spaces and eligible sites then numerous between the Fifth and Sixth
+Avenues, more and more affronted the day. We seemed to have come up from
+a world of quieter harmonies, the world of Washington Square and
+thereabouts, so decent in its dignity, so instinctively unpretentious.
+There were even there spots of shabbiness that I recall, such as the
+charmless void reaching westward from the two houses that formed the
+Fifth Avenue corner to our grandfather's, our New York grandfather's
+house, itself<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> built by him, with the happiest judgment, not so long
+before, and at no distant time in truth to be solidly but much less
+pleasingly neighboured. The ancient name of the Parade-ground still hung
+about the central space, and the ancient wooden palings, then so
+generally accounted proper for central spaces&mdash;the whole image
+infinitely recedes&mdash;affected even my innocent childhood as rustic and
+mean. Union Square, at the top of the Avenue&mdash;or what practically then
+counted for the top&mdash;was encased, more smartly, in iron rails and
+further adorned with a fountain and an aged amateur-looking constable,
+awful to my generation in virtue of his star and his switch. I associate
+less elegance with the Parade-ground, into which we turned for
+recreation from my neighbouring dame's-school and where the parades
+deployed on no scale to check our own evolutions; though indeed the
+switch of office abounded there, for what I best recover in the
+connection is a sense and smell of perpetual autumn, with the ground so
+muffled in the leaves and twigs of the now long defunct ailanthus-tree
+that most of our own motions were a kicking of them up&mdash;the semi-sweet
+rankness of the plant was all in the air&mdash;and small boys pranced about
+as cavaliers whacking their steeds. There were bigger boys, bolder
+still, to whom this vegetation, or something kindred that escapes me,
+yielded long black beanlike<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> slips which they lighted and smoked, the
+smaller ones staring and impressed; I at any rate think of the small one
+I can best speak for as constantly wading through an Indian summer of
+these <i>disjecta</i>, fascinated by the leaf-kicking process, the joy of
+lonely trudges, over a course in which those parts and the slightly more
+northward pleasantly confound themselves. These were the homely joys of
+the nobler neighbourhood, elements that had their match, and more, hard
+by the Fourteenth Street home, in the poplars, the pigs, the poultry,
+and the "Irish houses," two or three in number, exclusive of a very fine
+Dutch one, seated then, this last, almost as among gardens and groves&mdash;a
+breadth of territory still apparent, on the spot, in that marginal ease,
+that spread of occupation, to the nearly complete absence of which New
+York aspects owe their general failure of "style."</p>
+
+<p>But there were finer vibrations as well&mdash;for the safely-prowling infant,
+though none perhaps so fine as when he stood long and drank deep at
+those founts of romance that gushed from the huge placards of the
+theatre. These announcements, at a day when advertisement was
+contentedly but information, had very much the form of magnified
+playbills; they consisted of vast oblong sheets, yellow or white, pasted
+upon tall wooden screens or into hollow sockets, and acquainting the
+possible playgoer with every circumstance that might<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> seriously interest
+him. These screens rested sociably against trees and lamp-posts as well
+as against walls and fences, to all of which they were, I suppose,
+familiarly attached; but the sweetest note of their confidence was that,
+in parallel lines and the good old way, characters facing performers,
+they gave the whole cast, which in the "palmy days" of the drama often
+involved many names. I catch myself again in the fact of endless
+stations in Fifth Avenue near the southwest corner of Ninth Street, as I
+think it must have been, since the dull long "run" didn't exist then for
+the young <i>badaud</i> and the poster there was constantly and bravely
+renewed. It engaged my attention, whenever I passed, as the canvas of a
+great master in a great gallery holds that of the pious tourist, and
+even though I can't at this day be sure of its special reference I was
+with precocious passion "at home" among the theatres&mdash;thanks to our
+parents' fond interest in them (as from this distance I see it flourish
+for the time) and to the liberal law and happy view under which the
+addiction was shared with us, they never caring much for things we
+couldn't care for and generally holding that what was good to them would
+be also good for their children. It had the effect certainly of
+preparing for these, so far as we should incline to cherish it, a
+strange little fund of theatrical reminiscence, a small hoard of
+memories<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> maintaining itself in my own case for a lifetime and causing
+me to wonder to-day, before its abundance, on how many evenings of the
+month, or perhaps even of the week, we were torn from the pursuits of
+home.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>IX</h2>
+
+<p>The truth is doubtless, however, much less in the wealth of my
+experience than in the tenacity of my impression, the fact that I have
+lost nothing of what I saw and that though I can't now quite divide the
+total into separate occasions the various items surprisingly swarm for
+me. I shall return to some of them, wishing at present only to make my
+point of when and how the seeds were sown that afterwards so thickly
+sprouted and flowered. I was greatly to love the drama, at its best, as
+a "form"; whatever variations of faith or curiosity I was to know in
+respect to the infirm and inadequate theatre. There was of course
+anciently no question for us of the drama at its best; and indeed while
+I lately by chance looked over a copious collection of theatrical
+portraits, beginning with the earliest age of lithography and
+photography as so applied, and documentary in the highest degree on the
+personalities, as we nowadays say, of the old American stage,
+stupefaction grew sharp in me and scepticism triumphed, so vulgar, so
+barbarous, seemed the array of types, so extraordinarily provincial the
+note of every figure, so less than scant the claim<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> of such
+physiognomies and such reputations. Rather dismal, everywhere, I admit,
+the histrionic image with the artificial lights turned off&mdash;the fatigued
+and disconnected face reduced to its mere self and resembling some
+closed and darkened inn with the sign still swung but the place blighted
+for want of custom. That consideration weighs; but what a "gang," all
+the same, when thus left to their own devices, the performers, men and
+women alike, of that world of queer appreciations! I ought perhaps to
+bear on them lightly in view of what in especial comes back to me; the
+sense of the sacred thrill with which I began to watch the green
+curtain, the particular one that was to rise to The Comedy of Errors on
+the occasion that must have been, for what I recall of its almost
+unbearable intensity, the very first of my ever sitting at a play. I
+should have been indebted for the momentous evening in that case to Mr.
+William Burton, whose small theatre in Chambers Street, to the rear of
+Stewart's big shop and hard by the Park, as the Park was at that time
+understood, offered me then my prime initiation. Let me not complain of
+my having owed the adventure to a still greater William as well, nor
+think again without the right intensity, the scarce tolerable throb, of
+the way the torment of the curtain was mixed, half so dark a defiance
+and half so rich a promise. One's eyes bored into it in vain, and yet
+one knew<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> it <i>would</i> rise at the named hour, the only question being if
+one could exist till then. The play had been read to us during the day;
+a celebrated English actor, whose name I inconsistently forget, had
+arrived to match Mr. Burton as the other of the Dromios; and the
+agreeable Mrs. Holman, who had to my relentless vision too retreating a
+chin, was so good as to represent Adriana. I regarded Mrs. Holman as a
+friend, though in no warmer light than that in which I regarded Miss
+Mary Taylor&mdash;save indeed that Mrs. Holman had the pull, on one's
+affections, of "coming out" to sing in white satin and quite
+irrelevantly between the acts; an advantage she shared with the younger
+and fairer and more dashing, the dancing, Miss Malvina, who footed it
+and tambourined it and shawled it, irruptively, in lonely state. When
+not admiring Mr. Burton in Shakespeare we admired him as Paul Pry, as
+Mr. Toodles and as Aminadab Sleek in The Serious Family, and we must
+have admired him very much&mdash;his huge fat person, his huge fat face and
+his vast slightly pendulous cheek, surmounted by a sort of elephantine
+wink, to which I impute a remarkable baseness, being still perfectly
+present to me.</p>
+
+<p>We discriminated, none the less; we thought Mr. Blake a much finer
+comedian, much more of a gentleman and a scholar&mdash;"mellow" Mr. Blake,
+whom with the brave and emphatic Mrs. Blake<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> (<i>how</i> they must have made
+their points!) I connect partly with the Burton scene and partly with
+that, of slightly subsequent creation, which, after flourishing awhile
+slightly further up Broadway under the charmlessly commercial name of
+Brougham's Lyceum (we had almost only Lyceums and Museums and Lecture
+Rooms and Academies of Music for playhouse and opera then,) entered upon
+a long career and a migratory life as Wallack's Theatre. I fail
+doubtless to keep <i>all</i> my associations clear, but what is important, or
+what I desire at least to make pass for such, is that when we most
+admired Mr. Blake we also again admired Miss Mary Taylor; and it was at
+Brougham's, not at Burton's, that we rendered <i>her</i> that
+tribute&mdash;reserved for her performance of the fond theatrical daughter in
+the English version of Le P&egrave;re de la D&eacute;butante, where I see the charming
+panting dark-haired creature, in flowing white classically relieved by a
+gold tiara and a golden scarf, rush back from the supposed stage to the
+represented green-room, followed by thunders of applause, and throw
+herself upon the neck of the broken-down old gentleman in a blue coat
+with brass buttons who must have been after all, on second thoughts, Mr.
+Placide. Greater flights or more delicate shades the art of pathetic
+comedy was at that time held not to achieve; only I straighten it out
+that Mr. and Mrs. Blake, not less than Miss Mary<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> Taylor (who
+preponderantly haunts my vision, even to the disadvantage of Miss Kate
+Horn in Nan the Good-for-Nothing, until indeed she is displaced by the
+brilliant Laura Keene) did migrate to Brougham's, where we found them
+all themselves as Goldsmith's Hardcastle pair and other like matters. We
+rallied especially to Blake as Dogberry, on the occasion of my second
+Shakespearean night, for as such I seem to place it, when Laura Keene
+and Mr. Lester&mdash;the Lester Wallack that was to be&mdash;did Beatrice and
+Benedick. I yield to this further proof that we had our proportion of
+Shakespeare, though perhaps antedating that rapt vision of Much Ado,
+which may have been preceded by the dazzled apprehension of A Midsummer
+Night's Dream at the Broadway (there <i>was</i> a confessed Theatre;) this
+latter now present to me in every bright particular. It supplied us, we
+must have felt, our greatest conceivable adventure&mdash;I cannot otherwise
+account for its emerging so clear. Everything here is as of yesterday,
+the identity of the actors, the details of their dress, the charm
+imparted by the sisters Gougenheim, the elegant elder as the infatuated
+Helena and the other, the roguish "Joey" as the mischievous Puck. Hermia
+was Mrs. Nagle, in a short salmon-coloured peplum over a white
+petticoat, the whole bulgingly confined by a girdle of shining gilt and
+forming a contrast to the loose scarves of Helena,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> while Mr. Nagle, not
+devoid, I seem to remember, of a blue chin and the latency of a fine
+brogue, was either Lysander or Demetrius; Mr. Davidge (also, I surmise,
+with a brogue) was Bottom the weaver and Madame Ponisi Oberon&mdash;Madame
+Ponisi whose range must have been wide, since I see her also as the
+white-veiled heroine of The Cataract of the Ganges, where, preferring
+death to dishonour, she dashes up the more or less perpendicular
+waterfall on a fiery black steed and with an effect only a little
+blighted by the chance flutter of a drapery out of which peeps the leg
+of a trouser and a big male foot; and then again, though presumably at a
+somewhat later time or, in strictness, <i>after</i> childhood's fond hour, as
+this and that noble matron or tragedy queen. I descry her at any rate as
+representing all characters alike with a broad brown face framed in
+bands or crowns or other heavy headgear out of which cropped a row of
+very small tight black curls. The Cataract of the Ganges is all there as
+well, a tragedy of temples and idols and wicked rajahs and real water,
+with Davidge and Joey Gougenheim again for comic relief&mdash;though all in a
+coarser radiance, thanks to the absence of fairies and Amazons and
+moonlit mechanical effects, the charm above all, so seen, of the play
+within the play; and I rank it in that relation with Green Bushes,
+despite the celebrity in the latter of Madame C&eacute;leste, who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> came to us
+straight out of London and whose admired walk up the stage as Miami the
+huntress, a wonderful majestic and yet voluptuous stride enhanced by a
+short kilt, black velvet leggings and a gun haughtily borne on the
+shoulder, is vividly before me as I write. The piece in question was, I
+recall, from the pen of Mr. Bourcicault, as he then wrote his name&mdash;he
+was so early in the field and must have been from long before, inasmuch
+as he now appears to me to have supplied Mr. Brougham, of the Lyceum
+aforesaid, with his choicest productions.</p>
+
+<p>I sit again at London Assurance, with Mrs. Wallack&mdash;"Fanny" Wallack, I
+think, not that I quite know who she was&mdash;as Lady Gay Spanker, flushed
+and vociferous, first in a riding-habit with a tail yards long and
+afterwards in yellow satin with scarce a tail at all; I am present also
+at Love in a Maze, in which the stage represented, with primitive art I
+fear, a supposedly intricate garden-labyrinth, and in which I admired
+for the first time Mrs. Russell, afterwards long before the public as
+Mrs. Hoey, even if opining that she wanted, especially for the
+low-necked ordeal, less osseous a structure. There are pieces of that
+general association, I admit, the clue to which slips from me; the drama
+of modern life and of French origin&mdash;though what was then not of French
+origin?&mdash;in which Miss Julia Bennett,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> fresh from triumphs at the
+Haymarket, made her first appearance, in a very becoming white bonnet,
+either as a brilliant adventuress or as the innocent victim of
+licentious design, I forget which, though with a sense somehow that the
+white bonnet, when of true elegance, was the note at that period of the
+adventuress; Miss Julia Bennett with whom at a later age one was to
+renew acquaintance as the artful and ample Mrs. Barrow, full of manner
+and presence and often Edwin Booth's Portia, Desdemona and Julie de
+Mortemer. I figure her as having in the dimmer phase succeeded to Miss
+Laura Keene at Wallack's on the secession thence of this original
+charmer of our parents, the flutter of whose prime advent is perfectly
+present to me, with the relish expressed for that "English" sweetness of
+her speech (I already wondered why it <i>shouldn't</i> be English) which was
+not as the speech mostly known to us. The Uncles, within my hearing,
+even imitated, for commendation, some of her choicer sounds, to which I
+strained my ear on seeing her afterwards as Mrs. Chillington in the
+refined comedietta of A Morning Call, where she made delightful game of
+Mr. Lester as Sir Edward Ardent, even to the point of causing him to
+crawl about on all fours and covered with her shawl after the fashion of
+a horse-blanket. That delightful impression was then unconscious of the
+blight to come&mdash;that of my apprehending, years<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> after, that the
+brilliant comedietta was the tribute of our Anglo-Saxon taste to Alfred
+de Musset's elegant proverb of the Porte Ouverte ou Ferm&eacute;e, in which
+nothing could find itself less at home than the horseplay of the English
+version. Miss Laura Keene, with a native grace at the start, a fresh and
+delicate inspiration, I infer from the kind of pleasure she appears to
+have begun with giving, was to live to belie her promise and, becoming
+hard and raddled, forfeit (on the evidence) all claim to the higher
+distinction; a fact not surprising under the lurid light projected by
+such a sign of the atmosphere of ineptitude as an accepted and condoned
+perversion to vulgarity of Musset's perfect little work. How <i>could</i>
+quality of talent consort with so dire an absence of quality in the
+material offered it? where could such lapses lead but to dust and
+desolation and what happy instinct not be smothered in an air so
+dismally non-conducting? Is it a foolish fallacy that these matters may
+have been on occasion, at that time, worth speaking of? is it only
+presumable that everything was perfectly cheap and common and everyone
+perfectly bad and barbarous and that even the least corruptible of our
+typical spectators were too easily beguiled and too helplessly kind? The
+beauty of the main truth as to any remembered matter looked at in due
+detachment, or in other words through the haze of time, is that
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>comprehension has then become one with criticism, compassion, as it may
+really be called, one with musing vision, and the whole company of the
+anciently restless, with their elations and mistakes, their sincerities
+and fallacies and vanities and triumphs, embalmed for us in the mild
+essence of their collective submission to fate. We needn't be strenuous
+about them unless we particularly want to, and are glad to remember in
+season all that this would imply of the strenuous about our own
+<i>origines</i>, our muddled initiations. If nothing is more certain for us
+than that many persons, within our recollection, couldn't help being
+rather generally unadmonished and unaware, so nothing is more in the
+note of peace than that such a perceived state, pushed to a point, makes
+our scales of judgment but ridiculously rattle. <i>Our</i> admonition, our
+superior awareness, is of many things&mdash;and, among these, of how
+infinitely, at the worst, they lived, the pale superseded, and how much
+it was by their virtue.</p>
+
+<p>Which reflections, in the train of such memories as those just gathered,
+may perhaps seem over-strained&mdash;though they really to my own eyes cause
+the images to multiply. Still others of these break in upon me and
+refuse to be slighted; reconstituting as I practically am the history of
+my fostered imagination, for whatever it may be worth, I won't pretend
+to a disrespect for <i>any</i> <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>contributive particle. I left myself just
+above staring at the Fifth Avenue poster, and I can't but linger there
+while the vision it evokes insists on swarming. It was the age of the
+arrangements of Dickens for the stage, vamped-up promptly on every scene
+and which must have been the roughest theatrical tinkers' work, but at
+two or three of which we certainly assisted. I associate them with Mr.
+Brougham's temple of the art, yet am at the same time beset with the
+Captain Cuttle of Dombey and Son in the form of the big Burton, who
+never, I earnestly conceive, graced that shrine, so that I wander a
+trifle confusedly. Isn't it he whom I remember as a monstrous Micawber,
+the coarse parody of a charming creation, with the entire baldness of a
+huge Easter egg and collar-points like the sails of Mediterranean
+feluccas? Dire of course for all temperance in these connections was the
+need to conform to the illustrations of Phiz, himself already an
+improvising parodist and happy only so long as not imitated, not
+literally reproduced. Strange enough the "&aelig;sthetic" of artists who could
+desire but literally to reproduce. I give the whole question up,
+however, I stray too in the dust, and with a positive sense of having,
+in the first place, but languished at home when my betters admired Miss
+Cushman&mdash;terribly out of the picture and the frame we should to-day
+pronounce her, I fear&mdash;as the Nancy of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> Oliver Twist: as far away this
+must have been as the lifetime of the prehistoric "Park," to which it
+was just within my knowledge that my elders went for opera, to come back
+on us sounding those rich old Italian names, Bosio and Badiali, Ronconi
+and Steffanone, I am not sure I have them quite right; signs, of a
+rueful sound to us, that the line as to our infant participation <i>was</i>
+somewhere drawn. It had not been drawn, I all the more like to remember,
+when, under proper protection, at Castle Garden, I listened to that
+rarest of infant phenomena, Adelina Patti, poised in an armchair that
+had been pushed to the footlights and announcing her incomparable gift.
+She was about of our own age, she was one of us, even though at the same
+time the most prodigious of fairies, of glittering fables. That
+principle of selection was indeed in abeyance while I sat with my mother
+either at Tripler Hall or at Niblo's&mdash;I am vague about the occasion, but
+the names, as for fine old confused reasons, plead alike to my pen&mdash;and
+paid a homage quite other than critical, I dare say, to the then
+slightly worn Henrietta Sontag, Countess Rossi, who struck us as
+supremely elegant in pink silk and white lace flounces and with whom
+there had been for certain members of our circle some contact or
+intercourse that I have wonderingly lost. I learned at that hour in any
+case what "acclamation" might mean, and have again<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> before me the vast
+high-piled auditory thundering applause at the beautiful pink lady's
+clear bird-notes; a thrilling, a tremendous experience and my sole other
+memory of concert-going, at that age, save the impression of a strange
+huddled hour in some smaller public place, some very minor hall, under
+dim lamps and again in my mother's company, where we were so near the
+improvised platform that my nose was brushed by the petticoats of the
+distinguished amateur who sang "Casta Diva," a very fine fair woman with
+a great heaving of bosom and flirt of crinoline, and that the ringletted
+Italian gentleman in black velvet and a romantic voluminous cloak who
+represented, or rather who professionally and uncontrollably was, an
+Improvisatore, had for me the effect, as I crouched gaping, of quite
+bellowing down my throat. That occasion, I am clear, was a concert for a
+charity, with the volunteer performance and the social patroness, and it
+had squeezed in where it would&mdash;at the same time that I somehow connect
+the place, in Broadway, on the right going down and not much below
+Fourth Street (except that everything seems to me to have been just
+below Fourth Street when not just above,) with the scene of my great
+public exposure somewhat later, the wonderful exhibition of Signor
+Blitz, the peerless conjurer, who, on my attending his entertainment
+with W. J. and our frequent comrade of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> the early time "Hal" Coster,
+practised on my innocence to seduce me to the stage and there plunge me
+into the shame of my sad failure to account arithmetically for his
+bewilderingly subtracted or added or divided pockethandkerchiefs and
+playing-cards; a paralysis of wit as to which I once more, and with the
+same wan despair, feel my companions' shy telegraphy of relief, their
+snickerings and mouthings and raised numerical fingers, reach me from
+the benches.</p>
+
+<p>The second definite matter in the Dickens connection is the Smike of
+Miss Weston&mdash;whose pr&aelig;nomen I frivolously forget (though I fear it was
+Lizzie,) but who was afterwards Mrs. E. L. Davenport and then, sequently
+to some public strife or chatter, Mrs. Charles Matthews&mdash;in a version of
+Nicholas Nickleby that gracelessly managed to be all tearful melodrama,
+long-lost foundlings, wicked Ralph Nicklebys and scowling Arthur Grides,
+with other baffled villains, and scarcely at all Crummleses and
+Kenwigses, much less Squeerses; though there must have been something of
+Dotheboys Hall for the proper tragedy of Smike and for the broad
+Yorkshire effect, a precious theatrical value, of John Brodie. The
+ineffaceability was the anguish, to my tender sense, of Nicholas's
+starved and tattered and fawning and whining prot&eacute;g&eacute;; in face of my
+sharp retention of which through all the years who shall deny the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>
+immense authority of the theatre, or that the stage is the mightiest of
+modern engines? Such at least was to be the force of the Dickens
+imprint, however applied, in the soft clay of our generation; it was to
+resist so serenely the wash of the waves of time. To be brought up thus
+against the author of it, or to speak at all of the dawn of one's early
+consciousness of it and of his presence and power, is to begin to tread
+ground at once sacred and boundless, the associations of which, looming
+large, warn us off even while they hold. He did too much for us surely
+ever to leave us free&mdash;free of judgment, free of reaction, even should
+we care to be, which heaven forbid: he laid his hand on us in a way to
+undermine as in no other case the power of detached appraisement. We
+react against other productions of the general kind without "liking"
+them the less, but we somehow liked Dickens the more for having
+forfeited half the claim to appreciation. That process belongs to the
+fact that criticism, roundabout him, is somehow futile and tasteless.
+His own taste is easily impugned, but he entered so early into the blood
+and bone of our intelligence that it always remained better than the
+taste of overhauling him. When I take him up to-day and find myself
+holding off, I simply stop: not holding off, that is, but holding on,
+and from the very fear to do so; which sounds, I recognise, like
+perusal, like renewal, of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> scantest. I don't renew, I wouldn't renew
+for the world; wouldn't, that is, with one's treasure so hoarded in the
+dusty chamber of youth, let in the intellectual air. Happy the house of
+life in which such chambers still hold out, even with the draught of the
+intellect whistling through the passages. We were practically
+contemporary, contemporary with the issues, the fluttering monthly
+numbers&mdash;that was the point; it made for us a good fortune, constituted
+for us in itself romance, on which nothing, to the end, succeeds in
+laying its hands.</p>
+
+<p>The whole question dwells for me in a single small reminiscence, though
+there are others still: that of my having been sent to bed one evening,
+in Fourteenth Street, as a very small boy, at an hour when, in the
+library and under the lamp, one of the elder cousins from Albany, the
+youngest of an orphaned brood of four, of my grandmother's most
+extravagant adoption, had begun to read aloud to my mother the new,
+which must have been the first, instalment of David Copperfield. I had
+feigned to withdraw, but had only retreated to cover close at hand, the
+friendly shade of some screen or drooping table-cloth, folded up behind
+which and glued to the carpet, I held my breath and listened. I listened
+long and drank deep while the wondrous picture grew, but the tense cord
+at last snapped under the strain of the Murdstones and I broke into the
+sobs of sympathy that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> disclosed my subterfuge. I was this time
+effectively banished, but the ply then taken was ineffaceable. I
+remember indeed just afterwards finding the sequel, in especial the vast
+extrusion of the Micawbers, beyond my actual capacity; which took a few
+years to grow adequate&mdash;years in which the general contagious
+consciousness, and our own household response not least, breathed
+heavily through Hard Times, Bleak House and Little Dorrit; the seeds of
+acquaintance with Chuzzlewit and Dombey and Son, these coming thickly
+on, I had found already sown. I was to feel that I had been born, born
+to a rich awareness, under the very meridian; there sprouted in those
+years no such other crop of ready references as the golden harvest of
+Copperfield. Yet if I was to wait to achieve the happier of these
+recognitions I had already pored over Oliver Twist&mdash;albeit now uncertain
+of the relation borne by that experience to the incident just recalled.
+When Oliver was new to me, at any rate, he was already old to my
+betters; whose view of his particular adventures and exposures must have
+been concerned, I think, moreover, in the fact of my public and lively
+wonder about them. It was an exhibition deprecated&mdash;to infant innocence
+I judge; unless indeed my remembrance of enjoying it only on the terms
+of fitful snatches in another, though a kindred, house is due mainly to
+the existence there of George<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> Cruikshank's splendid form of the work,
+of which our own foreground was clear. It perhaps even seemed to me more
+Cruikshank's than Dickens's; it was a thing of such vividly terrible
+images, and all marked with that peculiarity of Cruikshank that the
+offered flowers or goodnesses, the scenes and figures intended to
+comfort and cheer, present themselves under his hand as but more subtly
+sinister, or more suggestively queer, than the frank badnesses and
+horrors. The nice people and the happy moments, in the plates,
+frightened me almost as much as the low and the awkward; which didn't
+however make the volumes a source of attraction the less toward that
+high and square old back-parlour just westward of Sixth Avenue (as we in
+the same street were related to it) that formed, romantically, half our
+alternative domestic field and offered to our small inquiring steps a
+larger range and privilege. If the Dickens of those years was, as I have
+just called him, the great actuality of the current imagination, so I at
+once meet him in force as a feature even of conditions in which he was
+but indirectly involved.</p>
+
+<p>For the other house, the house we most haunted after our own, was that
+of our cousin Albert, still another of the blest orphans, though this
+time of our mother's kindred; and if it was my habit, as I have hinted,
+to attribute to orphans as orphans a circumstantial charm, a setting
+necessarily more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> delightful than our father'd and mother'd one, so
+there spread about this appointed comrade, the perfection of the type,
+inasmuch as he alone was neither brother'd nor sister'd, an air of
+possibilities that were none the less vivid for being quite indefinite.
+He was to embody in due course, poor young man, some of these
+possibilities&mdash;those that had originally been for me the vaguest of all;
+but to fix his situation from my present view is not so much to wonder
+that it spoke to me of a wild freedom as to see in it the elements of a
+rich and rounded picture. The frame was still there but a short time
+since, cracked and empty, broken and gaping, like those few others, of
+the general overgrown scene, that my late quest had puzzled out; and
+this has somehow helped me to read back into it the old figures and the
+old long story, told as with excellent art. We knew the figures well
+while they lasted and had with them the happiest relation, but without
+doing justice to their truth of outline, their felicity of character and
+force of expression and function, above all to the compositional harmony
+in which they moved. That lives again to my considering eyes, and I
+admire as never before the fine artistry of fate. Our cousin's guardian,
+the natural and the legal, was his aunt, his only one, who was the
+cousin of our mother and our own aunt, virtually <i>our</i> only one, so far
+as a felt and adopted closeness of kinship<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> went; and the three,
+daughters of two sole and much-united sisters, had been so brought up
+together as to have quite all the signs and accents of the same strain
+and the same nest. The cousin Helen of our young prospect was thus all
+but the sister Helen of our mother's lifetime, as was to happen, and was
+scarcely less a stout brave presence and an emphasised character for the
+new generation than for the old; noted here as she is, in particular,
+for her fine old-time value of clearness and straightness. I see in her
+strong simplicity, that of an earlier, quieter world, a New York of
+better manners and better morals and homelier beliefs, the very elements
+of some portrait by a grave Dutch or other truth-seeking master; she
+looks out with some of the strong marks, the anxious honesty, the modest
+humour, the folded resting hands, the dark handsome serious attire, the
+important composed cap, almost the badge of a guild or an order, that
+hang together about the images of past worthies, of whichever sex, who
+have had, as one may say, the courage of their character, and qualify
+them for places in great collections. I note with appreciation that she
+was strenuously, actively good, and have the liveliest impression both
+that no one was ever better, and that her goodness somehow testifies for
+the whole tone of a society, a remarkable cluster of private decencies.
+Her value to my imagination is even<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> most of all perhaps in her mere
+local consistency, her fine old New York ignorance and rigour. Her
+traditions, scant but stiff, had grown there, close to her&mdash;they were
+all she needed, and she lived by them candidly and stoutly. That there
+have been persons so little doubtful of duty helps to show us how
+societies grow. A proportionately small amount of absolute conviction
+about it will carry, we thus make out, a vast dead weight of mere
+comparative. She was as anxious over hers indeed as if it had ever been
+in question&mdash;which is a proof perhaps that being void of imagination,
+when you are quite entirely void, makes scarcely more for comfort than
+having too much, which only makes in a manner for a homeless freedom or
+even at the worst for a questioned veracity. With a big installed
+conscience there is virtue in a grain of the figurative faculty&mdash;it acts
+as oil to the stiff machine.</p>
+
+<p>Yet this life of straight and narrow insistences seated so clearly in
+our view didn't take up all the room in the other house, the house of
+the pictured, the intermittent Oliver, though of the fewer books in
+general than ours, and of the finer proportions and less peopled spaces
+(there were but three persons to fill them) as well as of the more
+turbaned and powdered family portraits, one of these, the most antique,
+a "French pastel," which must have been charming, of a young collateral
+ancestor who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> had died on the European tour. A vast marginal range
+seemed to me on the contrary to surround the adolescent nephew, who was
+some three years, I judge, beyond me in age and had other horizons and
+prospects than ours. No question of "Europe," for him, but a patriotic
+preparation for acquaintance with the South and West, or what was then
+called the West&mdash;he was to "see his own country first," winking at us
+while he did so; though he was, in spite of differences, so nearly and
+naturally neighbour'd and brother'd with us that the extensions of his
+range and the charms of his position counted somehow as the limits and
+the humilities of ours. He went neither to our schools nor to our
+hotels, but hovered out of our view in some other educational air that I
+can't now point to, and had in a remote part of the State a vast wild
+property of his own, known as the Beaverkill, to which, so far from his
+aunt's and his uncle's taking him there, he affably took them, and to
+which also he vainly invited W. J. and me, pointing thereby to us,
+however, though indirectly enough perhaps, the finest childish case we
+were to know for the famous acceptance of the inevitable. It was
+apparently not to be thought of that instead of the inevitable we should
+accept the invitation; the place was in the wilderness, incalculably
+distant, reached by a whole day's rough drive from the railroad, through
+every danger of flood and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> field, with prowling bears thrown in and
+probable loss of limb, of which there were sad examples, from swinging
+scythes and axes; but we of course measured our privation just by those
+facts, and grew up, so far as we did then grow, to believe that
+pleasures beyond price had been cruelly denied us. I at any rate myself
+grew up sufficiently to wonder if poor Albert's type, as it developed to
+the anxious elder view from the first, mightn't rather have undermined
+countenance; his pleasant foolish face and odd shy air of being
+suspected or convicted on grounds less vague to himself than to us may
+well have appeared symptoms of the course, of the "rig," he was
+eventually to run. I could think of him but as the <i>fils de famille</i>
+ideally constituted; not that I could then use for him that designation,
+but that I felt he must belong to an important special class, which he
+in fact formed in his own person. Everything was right, truly, for these
+felicities&mdash;to speak of them only as dramatic or pictorial values; since
+if we were present all the while at more of a drama than we knew, so at
+least, to my vague divination, the scene and the figures were there, not
+excluding the chorus, and I must have had the instinct of their being as
+right as possible. I see the actors move again through the high, rather
+bedimmed rooms&mdash;it is always a matter of winter twilight, firelight,
+lamplight; each one appointed to his or her part<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> and perfect for the
+picture, which gave a sense of fulness without ever being crowded.</p>
+
+<p>That composition had to wait awhile, in the earliest time, to find its
+proper centre, having been from the free point of view I thus cultivate
+a little encumbered by the presence of the most aged of our relatives,
+the oldest person I remember to have familiarly known&mdash;if it can be
+called familiar to have stood off in fear of such strange proofs of
+accomplished time: our Great-aunt Wyckoff, our maternal grandmother's
+elder sister, I infer, and an image of living antiquity, as I figure her
+to-day, that I was never to see surpassed. I invest her in this vision
+with all the idol-quality that may accrue to the venerable&mdash;solidly
+seated or even throned, hooded and draped and tucked-in, with big
+protective protrusive ears to her chair which helped it to the effect of
+a shrine, and a large face in which the odd blackness of eyebrow and of
+a couple of other touches suggested the conventional marks of a painted
+image. She signified her wants as divinities do, for I recover from her
+presence neither sound nor stir, remembering of her only that, as
+described by her companions, the pious ministrants, she had "said" so
+and so when she hadn't spoken at all. Was she really, as she seemed, so
+tremendously old, so old that her daughter, our mother's cousin Helen
+and ours, would have had to come to her in middle life to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> account for
+it, or did antiquity at that time set in earlier and was surrender of
+appearance and dress, matching the intrinsic decay, only more
+complacent, more submissive and, as who should say, more abject? I have
+my choice of these suppositions, each in its way of so lively an
+interest that I scarce know which to prefer, though inclining perhaps a
+little to the idea of the backward reach. If Aunt Wyckoff was, as I
+first remember her, scarce more than seventy, say, the thought fills me
+with one sort of joy, the joy of our modern, our so generally greater
+and nobler effect of duration: who <i>wouldn't</i> more subtly strive for
+that effect and, intelligently so striving, reach it better, than such
+non-questioners of fate?&mdash;the moral of whose case is surely that if they
+gave up too soon and too softly we wiser witnesses can reverse the
+process and fight the whole ground. But I apologise to the heavy shade
+in question if she had really drained her conceivable cup, and for that
+matter rather like to suppose it, so rich and strange is the pleasure of
+finding the past&mdash;the Past above all&mdash;answered for to one's own touch,
+this being our only way to be sure of it. It was the Past that one
+touched in her, the American past of a preponderant unthinkable
+queerness; and great would seem the fortune of helping on the continuity
+at some other far end.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="X" id="X"></a>X</h2>
+
+<p>It was at all events the good lady's disappearance that more markedly
+cleared the decks&mdash;cleared them for that long, slow, sustained action
+with which I make out that nothing was afterwards to interfere. She had
+sat there under her stiff old father's portrait, with which her own, on
+the other side of the chimney, mildly balanced; but these presences
+acted from that time but with cautious reserves. A brave, finished,
+clear-eyed image of such properties as the last-named, in particular,
+our already-mentioned Alexander Robertson, a faint and diminished
+replica of whose picture (the really fine original, as I remember it,
+having been long since perverted from our view) I lately renewed
+acquaintance with in a pious institution of his founding, where, after
+more than one push northward and some easy accommodations, he lives on
+into a world that knows him not and of some of the high improvements of
+which he can little enough have dreamed. Of the world he had personally
+known there was a feature or two still extant; the legend of his acres
+and his local concerns, as well as of his solid presence among them, was
+considerably cherished by us, though for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>ourselves personally the
+relics of his worth were a lean feast to sit at. They were by some
+invidious turn of fate all to help to constitute the heritage of our
+young kinsman, the orphaned and administered <i>fils de famille</i>, whose
+father, Alexander Wyckoff, son of our great-aunt and one of the two
+brothers of cousin Helen, just discernibly flushes for me through the
+ominous haze that preceded the worst visitation of cholera New York was
+to know. Alexander, whom, early widowed and a victim of that visitation,
+I evoke as with something of a premature baldness, of a blackness of
+short whisker, of an expanse of light waistcoat and of a harmless pomp
+of manner, appeared to have quite predominantly "come in" for the values
+in question, which he promptly transmitted to his small motherless son
+and which were destined so greatly to increase. There are clues I have
+only lost, not making out in the least to-day why the sons of Aunt
+Wyckoff should have been so happily distinguished. Our great-uncle of
+the name isn't even a dim ghost to me&mdash;he had passed away beyond recall
+before I began to take notice; but I hold, rightly, I feel, that it was
+not to his person these advantages were attached. They could have
+descended to our grandmother but in a minor degree&mdash;we should otherwise
+have been more closely aware of them. It comes to me that so far as we
+had at all been aware it had mostly gone off in smoke: I have still<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> in
+my ears some rueful allusion to "lands," apparently in the general
+country of the Beaverkill, which had come to my mother and her sister as
+their share of their grandfather Robertson's amplitude, among the
+further-apportioned shares of their four brothers, only to be sacrificed
+later on at some scant appraisement. It is in the nature of "lands" at a
+distance and in regions imperfectly reclaimed to be spoken of always as
+immense, and I at any rate entertained the sense that we should have
+been great proprietors, in the far wilderness, if we had only taken more
+interest. Our interests were peculiarly urban&mdash;though not indeed that
+this had helped us much. Something of the mystery of the vanished acres
+hung for me about my maternal uncle, John Walsh, the only one who
+appeared to have been in respect to the dim possessions much on the
+spot, but I too crudely failed of my chance of learning from him what
+had become of them.</p>
+
+<p>Not that they had seen <i>him</i>, poor gentleman, very much further, or that
+I had any strong sense of opportunity; I catch at but two or three
+projections of him, and only at one of his standing much at his ease: I
+see him before the fire in the Fourteenth Street library, sturdy, with
+straight black hair and as if the Beaverkill had rather stamped him, but
+clean-shaven, in a "stock" and a black frock-coat&mdash;I hear him perhaps
+still more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> than I see him deliver himself on the then great subject of
+Jenny Lind, whom he seemed to have emerged from the wilderness to listen
+to and as to whom I remember thinking it (strange small critic that I
+must have begun to be) a note of the wilderness in him that he spoke of
+her as "Miss Lind"; albeit I scarce know, and must even less have known
+then, what other form he could have used. The rest of my sense of him is
+tinged with the ancient pity&mdash;that of our so exercised response in those
+years to the general sad case of uncles, aunts and cousins obscurely
+afflicted (the uncles in particular) and untimely gathered. Sharp to me
+the memory of a call, one dusky wintry Sunday afternoon, in Clinton
+Place, at the house of my uncle Robertson Walsh, then the head of my
+mother's family, where the hapless younger brother lay dying; whom I was
+taken to the top of the house to see and of the sinister twilight
+grimness of whose lot, stretched there, amid odours of tobacco and of
+drugs, or of some especial strong drug, in one of the chambers of what I
+remember as a remote and unfriended arching attic, probably in fact the
+best place of prescribed quiet, I was to carry away a fast impression.
+All the uncles, of whichever kindred, were to come to seem sooner or
+later to be dying, more or less before our eyes, of melancholy matters;
+and yet their general story, so far as one could read it,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> appeared the
+story of life. I conceived at any rate that John Walsh, celibate, lonely
+and good-naturedly black-browed, had been sacrificed to the far-off
+Robertson acres, which on their side had been sacrificed to I never knew
+what. The point of my divagation, however, is that the Barmecide banquet
+of another tract of the same <i>provenance</i> was always spread for us
+opposite the other house, from which point it stretched, on the north
+side of the street, to Sixth Avenue; though here we were soon to see it
+diminished at the corner by a structure afterwards known to us as our
+prosiest New York school. This edifice, devoted to-day to other uses,
+but of the same ample insignificance, still left for exploitation at
+that time an uncovered town-territory the transmitted tale of which was
+that our greatgrandfather, living down near the Battery, had had his
+country villa or, more strictly speaking, his farm there, with free
+expanses roundabout. Shrunken though the tract a part of it remained&mdash;in
+particular a space that I remember, though with the last faintness, to
+have seen appeal to the public as a tea-garden or open-air caf&eacute;, a haunt
+of dance and song and of other forms of rather ineffective gaiety. The
+subsequent conversion of the site into the premises of the French
+Theatre I was to be able to note more distinctly; resorting there in the
+winter of 1874-5, though not without some wan detachment, to a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> series
+of more or less exotic performances, and admiring in especial the high
+and hard virtuosity of Madame Ristori, the unfailing instinct for the
+wrong emphasis of the then acclaimed Mrs. Rousby (I still hear the
+assured "Great woman, great woman!" of a knowing friend met as I went
+out,) and the stout fidelity to a losing game, as well as to a truth not
+quite measurable among us, of the late, the but lugubriously-comic, the
+blighted John Toole.</p>
+
+<p>These are glimmering ghosts, though that drama of the scene hard by at
+which I have glanced gives me back its agents with a finer intensity.
+For the long action set in, as I have hinted, with the death of Aunt
+Wyckoff, and, if rather taking its time at first to develop, maintained
+to the end, which was in its full finality but a few years since, the
+finest consistency and unity; with cousin Helen, in rich prominence, for
+the heroine; with the pale adventurous Albert for the hero or young
+protagonist, a little indeed in the sense of a small New York Orestes
+ridden by Furies; with a pair of confidants in the form first of the
+heroine's highly respectable but quite negligible husband and, second,
+of her close friend and quasi-sister our own admirable Aunt; with
+Alexander's younger brother, above all, the odd, the eccentric, the
+attaching Henry, for the stake, as it were, of the game. So for the
+spectator did<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> the figures distribute themselves; the three principal,
+on the large stage&mdash;it became a field of such spreading interests&mdash;well
+in front, and the accessory pair, all sympathy and zeal, prompt comment
+and rich resonance, hovering in the background, responsive to any call
+and on the spot at a sign: this most particularly true indeed of our
+anything but detached Aunt, much less a passive recipient than a vessel
+constantly brimming, and destined herself to become the outstanding
+agent, almost the <i>dea ex machina</i>, in the last act of the story. Her
+colleague of the earlier periods (though to that title she would scarce
+have granted his right) I designate rather as our earnest cousin's
+husband than as our kinsman even by courtesy; since he was "Mr." to his
+own wife, for whom the dread of liberties taken in general included even
+those that might have been allowed to herself: he had not in the least,
+like the others in his case, married into the cousinship with us, and
+this apparently rather by his defect than by ours. His christian name,
+if certainly not for use, was scarce even for ornament&mdash;which consorted
+with the felt limits roundabout him of aids to mention and with the fact
+that no man could on his journey through life well have been less
+eagerly designated or apostrophised. If there are persons as to whom the
+"Mr." never comes up at all, so there are those as to whom it never
+subsides; but some of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> them all keep it by the greatness and others,
+oddly enough, by the smallness of their importance. The subject of my
+present reference, as I think of him, nevertheless&mdash;by which I mean in
+spite of his place in the latter group&mdash;greatly helps my documentation;
+he must have been of so excellent and consistent a shade of nullity. To
+that value, if value it be, there almost always attaches some question
+of the degree and the position: with adjuncts, with a relation, the zero
+may figure as a numeral&mdash;and the neglected zero is mostly, for that
+matter, endowed with a consciousness and subject to irritation. For this
+dim little gentleman, so perfectly a gentleman, no appeal and no
+redress, from the beginning to the end of his career, were made or
+entertained or projected; no question of how to treat him, or of how
+<i>he</i> might see it or feel it, could ever possibly rise; he was blank
+from whatever view, remaining so under application of whatever acid or
+exposure to whatever heat; the one identity he could have was to be part
+of the consensus.</p>
+
+<p>Such a case is rare&mdash;that of being no case at all, that of not having
+even the interest of the grievance of not being one: we as a rule catch
+glimpses in the down-trodden of such resentments&mdash;they have at least
+sometimes the importance of feeling the weight of our tread. The
+phenomenon was here quite other&mdash;that of a natural platitude that had
+never risen to the level of sensibility.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> When you have been wronged you
+can be righted, when you have suffered you can be soothed; if you have
+that amount of grasp of the "scene," however humble, the drama of your
+life to some extent enacts itself, with the logical consequence of your
+being proportionately its hero and <i>having</i> to be taken for such. Let me
+not dream of attempting to say for what cousin Helen took her spectral
+spouse, though I think it the most marked touch in her portrait that she
+kept us from ever knowing. She was a person about whom you knew
+everything else, but there she was genially inscrutable, and above all
+claimed no damages on the score of slights offered him. She knew nothing
+whatever of these, yet could herself be much wounded or hurt&mdash;which
+latter word she sounded in the wondrous old New York manner so
+irreducible to notation. She covered the whole case with a mantle which
+was yet much more probably that of her real simplicity than of a feigned
+unconsciousness; I doubt whether she <i>knew</i> that men could be amiable in
+a different manner from that which had to serve her for supposing her
+husband amiable; when the mould and the men cast in it were very
+different she failed, or at least she feared, to conclude to
+amiability&mdash;though <i>some</i> women (as different themselves as such
+stranger men!) might take it for that. Directly interrogated she might
+(such was the innocence of these long-extinct manners) have approved of
+male society in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> stronger doses or more vivid hues&mdash;save where
+consanguinity, or indeed relationship by marriage, to which she greatly
+deferred, had honestly imposed it. The singular thing for the drama to
+which I return was that there it was just consanguinity that had made
+the burden difficult and strange and of a nature to call on great
+decisions and patient plans, even though the most ominous possibilities
+were not involved. I reconstruct and reconstruct of course, but the
+elements had to my childish vision at least nothing at all portentous;
+if any light of the lurid played in for me just a little it was but
+under much later information. What my childish vision was really most
+possessed of, I think, was the figure of the spectral spouse, the dim
+little gentleman, as I have called him, pacing the whole length of the
+two big parlours, in prolonged repetition, much as if they had been the
+deck of one of those ships anciently haunted by him, as "supercargo" or
+whatever, in strange far seas&mdash;according to the only legend connected
+with him save that of his early presumption in having approached, such
+as he was, so fine a young woman, and his remarkable luck in having
+approached her successfully; a luck surprisingly renewed for him, since
+it was also part of the legend that he had previously married and lost a
+bride beyond his deserts.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XI" id="XI"></a>XI</h2>
+
+<p>I am, strictly speaking, at this point, on a visit to Albert, who at
+times sociably condescended to my fewer years&mdash;I still appreciate the
+man-of-the-world ease of it; but my host seems for the minute to have
+left me, and I am attached but to the rich perspective in which "Uncle"
+(for Albert too he was only all namelessly Uncle) comes and goes; out of
+the comparative high brownness of the back room, commanding brave
+extensions, as I thought them, a covered piazza over which, in season,
+Isabella grapes accessibly clustered and beyond which stretched,
+further, a "yard" that was as an ample garden compared to ours at home;
+I keep in view his little rounded back, at the base of which his arms
+are interlocked behind him, and I know how his bald head, yet with the
+hair bristling up almost in short-horn fashion at the sides, is thrust
+inquiringly, not to say appealingly, forward; I assist at his emergence,
+where the fine old mahogany doors of separation are rolled back on what
+used to seem to me silver wheels, into the brighter yet colder half of
+the scene, and attend him while he at last looks out awhile into
+Fourteenth Street for news of whatever may be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> remarkably, objectionably
+or mercifully taking place there; and then I await his regular return,
+preparatory to a renewed advance, far from indifferent as I innocently
+am to his discoveries or his comments. It is cousin Helen however who
+preferentially takes them up, attaching to them the right importance,
+which is for the moment the very greatest that could possibly be
+attached to anything in the world; I for my part occupied with those
+marks of character in our pacing companion&mdash;his long, slightly equine
+countenance, his eyebrows ever elevated as in the curiosity of alarm,
+and the so limited play from side to side of his extremely protrusive
+head, as if somehow through tightness of the "wash" neckcloths that he
+habitually wore and that, wound and re-wound in their successive stages,
+made his neck very long without making it in the least thick and reached
+their climax in a proportionately very small knot tied with the neatest
+art. I scarce can have known at the time that this was as complete a
+little old-world figure as any that might then have been noted there,
+far or near; yet if I didn't somehow "subtly" feel it, why am I now so
+convinced that I must have had familiarly before me a masterpiece of the
+great Daumier, say, or Henri Monnier, or any other then contemporary
+projector of Monsieur Prudhomme, the timorous Philistine in a world of
+dangers, with whom I was later on to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> make acquaintance? I put myself
+the question, of scant importance though it may seem; but there is a
+reflection perhaps more timely than any answer to it. I catch myself in
+the act of seeing poor anonymous "Dear," as cousin Helen confined
+herself, her life long, to calling him, in the light of an image
+arrested by the French genius, and this in truth opens up vistas. I
+scarce know what it <i>doesn't</i> suggest for the fact of sharpness, of
+intensity of type; which fact in turn leads my imagination almost any
+dance, making me ask myself quite most of all whether a person so marked
+by it mustn't really have been a highly finished figure.</p>
+
+<p>That degree of finish was surely rare among us&mdash;rare at a time when the
+charm of so much of the cousinship and the uncleship, the kinship
+generally, had to be found in their so engagingly dispensing with any
+finish at all. They happened to be amiable, to be delightful; but&mdash;I
+think I have already put the question&mdash;what would have become of us all
+if they hadn't been? a question the shudder of which could never have
+been suggested by the presence I am considering. He too was gentle and
+bland, as it happened&mdash;and I indeed see it all as a world quite
+unfavourable to arrogance or insolence or any hard and high assumption;
+but the more I think of him (even at the risk of thinking too much) the
+more I make out in him a tone and a manner that deprecated crude ease.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>
+Plenty of this was already in the air, but if he hadn't so spoken of an
+order in which forms still counted it might scarce have occurred to one
+that there had ever been any. It comes over me therefore that he
+testified&mdash;and perhaps quite beautifully; I remember his voice and his
+speech, which were not those of <i>that</i> New York at all, and with the
+echo, faint as it is, arrives the wonder of where he could possibly have
+picked such things up. They were, as forms, adjusted and settled things;
+from what finer civilisation therefore had they come down to him? To
+brood on this the least little bit is verily, as I have said, to open up
+vistas&mdash;out of the depths of one of which fairly glimmers the queerest
+of questions. Mayn't we accordingly have been, the rest of us, all
+wrong, and the dim little gentleman the only one among us who was right?
+May not his truth to type have been a matter that, as mostly typeless
+ourselves, we neither perceived nor appreciated?&mdash;so that if, as is
+conceivable, he felt and measured the situation and simply chose to be
+bland and quiet and keep his sense to himself, he was a hero without the
+laurel as well as a martyr without the crown. The light of which
+possibility is, however, too fierce; I turn it off, I tear myself from
+the view&mdash;noting further but the one fact in his history that, by my
+glimpse of it, quite escapes ambiguity. The youthful Albert, I have
+mentioned,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> was to resist successfully through those years that
+solicitation of "Europe" our own response to which, both as a general
+and a particular solution, kept breaking out in choral wails; but the
+other house none the less nourished projects so earnest that they could
+invoke the dignity of comparative silence and patience. The other house
+didn't aspire to the tongues, but it aspired to the grand tour, of which
+ours was on many grounds incapable. Only after years and when endless
+things had happened&mdash;Albert having long before, in especial, quite taken
+up his stake and ostensibly dropped out of the game&mdash;did the great
+adventure get itself enacted, with the effect of one of the liveliest
+illustrations of the irony of fate. What had most of all flushed through
+the dream of it during years was the legend, at last quite antediluvian,
+of the dim little gentleman's early Wanderjahre, that experience of
+distant lands and seas which would find an application none the less
+lively for having had long to wait. It had had to wait in truth half a
+century, yet its confidence had apparently not been impaired when New
+York, on the happy day, began to recede from view. Europe had surprises,
+none the less, and who knows to what extent it may after half a century
+have had shocks? The coming true of the old dream produced at any rate a
+snap of the tense cord, and the ancient worthy my imagination has,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> in
+the tenderest of intentions, thus played with, disembarked in England
+only to indulge in the last of his startled stares, only to look about
+him in vague deprecation and give it all up. He just landed and died;
+but the grand tour was none the less proceeded with&mdash;cousin Helen
+herself, aided by resources personal, social and financial that left
+nothing to desire, triumphantly performed it, though as with a feeling
+of delicacy about it firmly overcome.</p>
+
+<p>But it has taken me quite out of the other house, so that I patch up
+again, at a stroke, that early scene of her double guardianship at which
+my small wonder assisted. It even then glimmered on me, I think, that if
+Albert was, all so romantically, in charge of his aunt&mdash;which was a
+perfectly nondescript relation&mdash;so his uncle Henry, her odd brother, was
+her more or less legal ward, not less, despite his being so very much
+Albert's senior. In these facts and in the character of each of the
+three persons involved resided the drama; which must more or less have
+begun, as I have hinted, when simple-minded Henry, at a date I seem to
+have seized, definitely emerged from rustication&mdash;the Beaverkill had but
+for a certain term protected, or promoted, his simplicity&mdash;and began, on
+his side, to pace the well-worn field between the Fourteenth Street
+windows and the piazza of the Isabella grapes. I see him there less<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>
+vividly than his fellow-pedestrian only because he was afterwards to
+loom so much larger, whereas his companion, even while still present,
+was weakly to shrink and fade. At this late day only do I devise for
+that companion a possible history; the simple-minded Henry's annals on
+the other hand grew in interest as soon as they became interesting at
+all. This happened as soon as one took in the ground and some of the
+features of his tutelage. The basis of it all was that, harmless as he
+appeared, he was not to be trusted; I remember how portentous that truth
+soon looked, both in the light of his intense amiability and of sister
+Helen's absolute certitude. He wasn't to be trusted&mdash;it was the sole
+very definite fact about him except the fact that he had so kindly come
+down from the far-off Beaverkill to regale us with the perfect
+demonstration, dutifully, resignedly setting himself among us to point
+the whole moral himself. He appeared, from the moment we really took it
+in, to be doing, in the matter, no more than he ought; he exposed
+himself to our invidious gaze, on this ground, with a humility, a quiet
+courtesy and an instinctive dignity that come back to me as simply
+heroic. He had himself accepted, under strenuous suggestion, the
+dreadful view, and I see him to-day, in the light of the grand
+d&eacute;nouement, deferred for long years, but fairly dazzling when it came,
+as fairly sublime in his decision not to put<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> anyone in the wrong about
+him a day sooner than he could possibly help. The whole circle of us
+would in that event be so dreadfully "sold," as to our wisdom and
+justice, he proving only noble and exquisite. It didn't so immensely
+matter to him as that, the establishment of his true character didn't;
+so he went on as if for all the years&mdash;and they really piled themselves
+up: his passing for a dangerous idiot, or at least for a slave of his
+passions from the moment he was allowed the wherewithal in the least to
+indulge them, was a less evil for him than seeing us rudely corrected.
+It was in truth an extraordinary situation and would have offered a
+splendid subject, as we used to say, to the painter of character, the
+novelist or the dramatist, with the hand to treat it. After I had read
+David Copperfield an analogy glimmered&mdash;it struck me even in the early
+time: cousin Henry was more or less another Mr. Dick, just as cousin
+Helen was in her relation to him more or less another Miss Trotwood.
+There were disparities indeed: Mr. Dick was the harmless lunatic on that
+lady's premises, but she admired him and appealed to him; lunatics, in
+her generous view, might be oracles, and there is no evidence, if I
+correctly remember, that she kept him low. Our Mr. Dick was suffered to
+indulge his passions but on ten cents a day, while his fortune, under
+conscientious, under admirable care&mdash;cousin Helen being no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> less the
+wise and keen woman of business than the devoted sister&mdash;rolled up and
+became large; likewise Miss Trotwood's inmate hadn't at all the
+perplexed brooding brow, with the troubled fold in it, that represented
+poor Henry's only form of criticism of adverse fate. They had alike the
+large smooth open countenance of those for whom life has been
+simplified, and if Mr. Dick had had a fortune he would have remained all
+his days as modestly vague about the figure of it as our relative
+consented to remain. The latter's interests were agricultural, while his
+predecessor's, as we remember, were mainly historical; each at any rate
+had in a general way his Miss Trotwood, not to say his sister Helen.</p>
+
+<p>The good Henry's Miss Trotwood lived and died without an instant's
+visitation of doubt as to the due exercise of her authority, as to what
+would happen if it faltered; her victim waiting in the handsomest manner
+till she had passed away to show us all&mdash;all who remained, after so
+long, to do him justice&mdash;that nothing but what was charming and touching
+could possibly happen. This was, in part at least, the dazzling
+d&eacute;nouement I have spoken of: he became, as soon as fortunate
+dispositions could take effect, the care of our admirable Aunt, between
+whom and his sister and himself close cousinship, from far back, had
+practically amounted to sisterhood: by which time the other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> house had
+long been another house altogether, its ancient site relinquished, its
+contents planted afresh far northward, with new traditions invoked,
+though with that of its great friendliness to all of us, for our
+mother's sake, still confirmed. Here with brief brightness, clouded at
+the very last, the solution emerged; we became aware, not without
+embarrassment, that poor Henry at large and supplied with funds was
+exactly as harmless and blameless as poor Henry stinted and captive; as
+to which if anything had been wanting to our confusion or to his own
+dignity it would have been his supreme abstinence, his suppression of
+the least "Didn't I tell you?" He didn't even pretend to have told us,
+when he so abundantly might, and nothing could exceed the grace with
+which he appeared to have noticed nothing. He "handled" dollars as
+decently, and just as profusely, as he had handled dimes; the only light
+shade on the scene&mdash;except of course for its being so belated, which did
+make it pathetically dim&mdash;was the question of how nearly he at all
+measured his resources. Not his heart, but his imagination, in the long
+years, had been starved; and though he was now all discreetly and wisely
+encouraged to feel rich, it was rather sadly visible that, thanks to
+almost half a century of over-discipline, he failed quite to rise to his
+estate. He did feel rich, just as he felt generous; the misfortune was
+only in his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> weak sense for meanings. That, with the whole situation,
+made delicacy of the first importance; as indeed what was perhaps most
+striking in the entire connection was the part played by delicacy from
+the first. It had all been a drama of the delicate: the consummately
+scrupulous and successful administration of his resources for the
+benefit of his virtue, so that they could be handed over, in the event,
+without the leakage of a fraction, what was that but a triumph of
+delicacy? So delicacy conspired, delicacy surrounded him; the case
+having been from the early time that, could he only be regarded as
+sufficiently responsible, could the sources of his bounty be judged
+fairly open to light pressure (there was question of none but the
+lightest) that bounty might blessedly flow. This had been Miss
+Trotwood's own enlightened view, on behalf of one of the oddest and most
+appealing collections of wistful wondering single gentlewomen that a
+great calculating benevolence perhaps ever found arrayed before
+it&mdash;ornaments these all of the second and third cousinship and
+interested spectators of the almost inexpressible facts.</p>
+
+<p>I should have liked completely to express them, in spite of the
+difficulty&mdash;if not indeed just by reason of that; the difficulty of
+their consisting so much more of "character" than of "incident" (heaven
+save the artless opposition!) though this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> last element figured bravely
+enough too, thanks to some of the forms taken by our young Albert's wild
+wilfulness. He was so weak&mdash;after the most approved fashion of
+distressing young men of means&mdash;that his successive exhibitions of it
+had a fine high positive effect, such as would have served beautifully,
+act after act, for the descent of the curtain. The issue, however
+(differing in this from the common theatrical trick) depended less on
+who should die than on who should live; the younger of cousin Helen's
+pair of wards&mdash;putting them even only as vessels of her attempted
+earnestness&mdash;had violently broken away, but a remedy to this grief, for
+reasons too many to tell, dwelt in the possible duration, could it only
+not be arrested, of two other lives, one of these her own, the second
+the guileless Henry's. The single gentlewomen, to a remarkable number,
+whom she regarded and treated as nieces, though they were only daughters
+of cousins, were such objects of her tender solicitude that, she and
+Henry and Albert being alike childless, the delightful thing to think of
+was, on certain contingencies, the nieces' prospective wealth. There
+were contingencies of course&mdash;and they exactly produced the pity and
+terror. Her estate would go at her death to her nearest of kin,
+represented by her brother and nephew; it would be only of her
+savings&mdash;fortunately, with her kind eye on the gentlewomen,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> zealous and
+long continued&mdash;that she might dispose by will; and it was but a
+troubled comfort that, should he be living at the time of her death, the
+susceptible Henry would profit no less than the wanton Albert. Henry was
+at any cost to be kept in life that he <i>might</i> profit; the woeful
+question, the question of delicacy, for a woman devoutly conscientious,
+was how could anyone else, how, above all, could fifteen other persons,
+be made to profit by his profiting? She had been as earnest a steward of
+her brother's fortune as if directness of pressure on him, in a sense
+favourable to her interests&mdash;that is to her sympathies, which were her
+only interests&mdash;had been a matter of course with her; whereas in fact
+she would have held it a crime, given his simplicity, to attempt in the
+least to guide his hand. If he didn't outlive his nephew&mdash;and he was
+older, though, as would appear, so much more virtuous&mdash;his inherited
+property, she being dead, would accrue to that unedifying person.
+<i>There</i> was the pity; and as for the question of the disposition of
+Henry's savings without the initiative of Henry's intelligence, in that,
+alas, was the terror. Henry's savings&mdash;there had been no terror for her,
+naturally, in beautifully husbanding his resources <i>for</i> him&mdash;dangled,
+naturally, with no small vividness, before the wistful gentlewomen, to
+whom, if he had but <i>had</i> the initiative, he might have made the most<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>
+princely presents. Such was the oddity, not to say the rather tragic
+drollery, of the situation: that Henry's idea of a present was ten
+cents' worth of popcorn, or some similar homely trifle; and that when
+one had created for him a world of these proportions there was no honest
+way of inspiring him to write cheques for hundreds; all congruous though
+these would be with the generosity of his nature as shown by the
+exuberance of his popcorn. The ideal solution would be his flashing to
+intelligence just long enough to apprehend the case and, of his own
+magnanimous movement, sign away everything; but that was a fairy-tale
+stroke, and the fairies here somehow stood off.</p>
+
+<p>Thus between the wealth of her earnestness and the poverty of her
+courage&mdash;her dread, that is, of exposing herself to a legal process for
+undue influence&mdash;our good lady was not at peace; or, to be exact, was
+only at such peace as came to her by the free bestowal of her own
+accumulations during her lifetime and after her death. She predeceased
+her brother and had the pang of feeling that if half her residuum would
+be deplorably diverted the other half would be, by the same stroke,
+imperfectly applied; the artless Henry remained at once so well provided
+and so dimly inspired. Here was suspense indeed for a last "curtain" but
+one; and my fancy glows, all expertly, for the disclosure of the final
+scene, than which nothing could well<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> have been happier, on all the
+premises, save for a single flaw: the installation in Forty-fourth
+Street of our admirable aunt, often, through the later years, domiciled
+there, but now settled to community of life with a touching charge and
+representing near him his extinguished, <i>their</i> extinguished, sister.
+The too few years that followed were the good man's Indian summer and a
+very wonderful time&mdash;so charmingly it shone forth, for all concerned,
+that he was a person fitted to adorn, as the phrase is, almost any
+position. Our admirable aunt, not less devoted and less disinterested
+than his former protectress, had yet much more imagination; she had
+enough, in a word, for perfect confidence, and under confidence what
+remained of poor Henry's life bloomed like a garden freshly watered. Sad
+alas the fact that so scant a patch was now left. It sufficed, however,
+and he rose, just in time, to every conception; it was, as I have
+already noted, as if he had all the while known, as if he had really
+been a conscious victim to the superstition of his blackness. His final
+companion recognised, as it were, his powers; and it may be imagined
+whether when he absolutely himself proposed to benefit the gentlewomen
+she passed him, or not, the blessed pen. He had taken a year or two to
+publish by his behaviour the perfection of his civility, and so, on that
+safe ground, made use of the pen. His competence was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> afterwards
+attacked, and it emerged triumphant, exactly as his perfect charity and
+humility and amenity, and his long inward loneliness, of half a century,
+did. He had bowed his head and sometimes softly scratched it during that
+immense period; he had occasionally, after roaming downstairs with the
+troubled fold in his brow and the difficult, the smothered statement on
+his lips (his vocabulary was scant and stiff, the vocabulary of pleading
+explanation, often found too complicated by the witty,) retired once
+more to his room sometimes indeed for hours, to think it all over again;
+but had never failed of sobriety or propriety or punctuality or
+regularity, never failed of one of the virtues his imputed indifference
+to which had been the ground of his discipline. It was very
+extraordinary, and of all the stories I know is I think the most
+beautiful&mdash;so far at least as <i>he</i> was concerned! The flaw I have
+mentioned, the one break in the final harmony, was the death of our
+admirable aunt too soon, shortly before his own and while, taken with
+illness at the same time, he lay there deprived of her attention. He had
+that of the gentlewomen, however, two or three of the wisest and
+tenderest being deputed by the others; and if his original estate
+reverted at law they presently none the less had occasion to bless his
+name.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XII" id="XII"></a>XII</h2>
+
+<p>I turn round again to where I last left myself gaping at the old
+ricketty bill-board in Fifth Avenue; and am almost as sharply aware as
+ever of the main source of its spell, the fact that it most often blazed
+with the rich appeal of Mr. Barnum, whose "lecture-room," attached to
+the Great American Museum, overflowed into posters of all the theatrical
+bravery disavowed by its title. It was my rueful theory of those
+days&mdash;though tasteful I may call it too as well as rueful&mdash;that on all
+the holidays on which we weren't dragged to the dentist's we attended as
+a matter of course at Barnum's, that is when we were so happy as to be
+able to; which, to my own particular consciousness, wasn't every time
+the case. The case was too often, to my melancholy view, that W. J.,
+quite regularly, on the non-dental Saturdays, repaired to this seat of
+joy with the easy Albert&mdash;<i>he</i> at home there and master of the scene to
+a degree at which, somehow, neither of us could at the best arrive; he
+quite moulded, truly, in those years of plasticity, as to the &aelig;sthetic
+bent and the determination of curiosity, I seem to make out, by the
+general Barnum association and revelation.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> It was not, I hasten to add,
+that I too didn't, to the extent of my minor chance, drink at the
+spring; for how else should I have come by the whole undimmed sense of
+the connection?&mdash;the weary waiting, in the dusty halls of humbug, amid
+bottled mermaids, "bearded ladies" and chill dioramas, for the
+lecture-room, the true centre of the seat of joy, to open: vivid in
+especial to me is my almost sick wondering of whether I mightn't be rapt
+away before it did open. The impression appears to have been mixed; the
+drinking deep and the holding out, holding out in particular against
+failure of food and of stage-fares, provision for transport to and fro,
+being questions equally intense: the appeal of the lecture-room, in its
+essence a heavy extra, so exhausted our resources that even the
+sustaining doughnut of the refreshment-counter would mock our desire and
+the long homeward crawl, the length of Broadway and further, seem to
+defy repetition. Those desperate days, none the less, affect me now as
+having flushed with the very complexion of romance; their aches and
+inanitions were part of the adventure; the homeward straggle,
+interminable as it appeared, flowered at moments into rapt
+contemplations&mdash;that for instance of the painted portrait, large as
+life, of the celebrity of the hour, then "dancing" at the Broadway
+Theatre, Lola Montes, Countess of Lansfeldt, of a dazzling and unreal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>
+beauty and in a riding-habit lavishly open at the throat.</p>
+
+<p>It was thus quite in order that I should pore longest, there at my
+fondest corner, over the Barnum announcements&mdash;my present inability to
+be superficial about which has given in fact the measure of my
+contemporary care. These announcements must have been in their way
+marvels of attractive composition, the placard bristling from top to toe
+with its analytic "synopsis of scenery and incidents"; the synoptical
+view cast its net of fine meshes and the very word savoured of
+incantation. It is odd at the same time that when I question memory as
+to the living hours themselves, those of the stuffed and dim little hall
+of audience, smelling of peppermint and orange-peel, where the curtain
+rose on our gasping but rewarded patience, two performances only stand
+out for me, though these in the highest relief. Love, or the Countess
+and the Serf, by J. Sheridan Knowles&mdash;I see that still as the blazonry
+of one of them, just as I see Miss Emily Mestayer, large, red in the
+face, coifed in a tangle of small, fine, damp-looking short curls and
+clad in a light-blue garment edged with swans-down, shout at the top of
+her lungs that a "pur-r-r-se of gold" would be the fair guerdon of the
+minion who should start on the spot to do her bidding at some desperate
+crisis that I forget. I forget Huon the serf, whom I yet recall
+immensely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> admiring for his nobleness; I forget everyone but Miss
+Mestayer, who gave form to my conception of the tragic actress at her
+highest. She had a hooked nose, a great play of nostril, a vast
+protuberance of bosom and always the "crop" of close moist ringlets; I
+say always, for I was to see her often again, during a much later phase,
+the mid-most years of that Boston Museum which aimed at so vastly higher
+a distinction than the exploded lecture-room had really done, though in
+an age that snickered even abnormally low it still lacked the courage to
+call itself a theatre. She must have been in comedy, which I believe she
+also usefully and fearlessly practised, rather unimaginable; but there
+was no one like her in the Boston time for cursing queens and
+eagle-beaked mothers; the Shakespeare of the Booths and other such would
+have been unproducible without her; she had a rusty, rasping, heaving
+and tossing "authority" of which the bitterness is still in my ears. I
+am revisited by an outer glimpse of her in that after age when she had
+come, comparatively speaking, into her own&mdash;the sight of her,
+accidentally incurred, one tremendously hot summer night, as she slowly
+moved from her lodgings or wherever, in the high Bowdoin Street region,
+down to the not distant theatre from which even the temperature had
+given her no reprieve; and well remember how, the queer light of my
+young impression playing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> up again in her path, she struck me as the
+very image of mere sore histrionic habit and use, a worn and weary, a
+battered even though almost sordidly smoothed, <i>thing</i> of the theatre,
+very much as an old infinitely-handled and greasy violoncello of the
+orchestra might have been. It was but an effect doubtless of the heat
+that she scarcely seemed clad at all; slippered, shuffling and, though
+somehow hatted and vaguely veiled or streamered, wrapt in a gauzy sketch
+of a dressing-gown, she pointed to my extravagant attention the moral of
+thankless personal service, of the reverse of the picture, of the cost
+of "amusing the public" in a case of amusing it, as who should say,
+every hour. And I had thrilled before her as the Countess in
+"Love"&mdash;such contrasted combinations! But she carried her head very
+high, as with the habit of crowns and trains and tirades&mdash;had in fact
+much the air of some deposed and reduced sovereign living on a scant
+allowance; so that, all invisibly and compassionately, I took off my hat
+to her.</p>
+
+<p>To which I must add the other of my two Barnumite scenic memories, my
+having anciently admired her as the Eliza of Uncle Tom's Cabin, her
+swelling bust encased in a neat cotton gown and her flight across the
+ice-blocks of the Ohio, if I rightly remember the perilous stream,
+intrepidly and gracefully performed. We lived and moved<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> at that time,
+with great intensity, in Mrs. Stowe's novel&mdash;which, recalling my prompt
+and charmed acquaintance with it, I should perhaps substitute for The
+Initials, earlier mentioned here, as my first experiment in grown-up
+fiction. There was, however, I think, for that triumphant work no
+classified condition; it was for no sort of reader as distinct from any
+other sort, save indeed for Northern as differing from Southern: it knew
+the large felicity of gathering in alike the small and the simple and
+the big and the wise, and had above all the extraordinary fortune of
+finding itself, for an immense number of people, much less a book than a
+state of vision, of feeling and of consciousness, in which they didn't
+sit and read and appraise and pass the time, but walked and talked and
+laughed and cried and, in a manner of which Mrs. Stowe was the
+irresistible cause, generally conducted themselves. Appreciation and
+judgment, the whole impression, were thus an effect for which there had
+been no process&mdash;any process so related having in other cases <i>had</i> to
+be at some point or other critical; nothing in the guise of a written
+book, therefore, a book printed, published, sold, bought and "noticed,"
+probably ever reached its mark, the mark of exciting interest, without
+having at least groped for that goal <i>as</i> a book or by the exposure of
+some literary side. Letters, here, languished unconscious, and Uncle
+Tom, instead of making<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> even one of the cheap short cuts through the
+medium in which books breathe, even as fishes in water, went gaily
+roundabout it altogether, as if a fish, a wonderful "leaping" fish, had
+simply flown through the air. This feat accomplished, the surprising
+creature could naturally fly anywhere, and one of the first things it
+did was thus to flutter down on every stage, literally without
+exception, in America and Europe. If the amount of life represented in
+such a work is measurable by the ease with which representation is taken
+up and carried further, carried even violently furthest, the fate of
+Mrs. Stowe's picture was conclusive: it simply sat down wherever it
+lighted and made itself, so to speak, at home; thither multitudes
+flocked afresh and there, in each case, it rose to its height again and
+went, with all its vivacity and good faith, through all its motions.</p>
+
+<p>These latter were to leave me, however, with a fonder vision still than
+that of the comparatively jejune "lecture-room" version; for the first
+exhibition of them to spring to the front was the fine free rendering
+achieved at a playhouse till then ignored by fashion and culture, the
+National Theatre, deep down on the East side, whence echoes had come
+faintest to ears polite, but where a sincerity vivid though rude was now
+supposed to reward the curious. Our numerous attendance there under this
+spell was my first experience of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> the "theatre party" as we have enjoyed
+it in our time&mdash;each emotion and impression of which is as fresh to me
+as the most recent of the same family. Precious through all indeed
+perhaps is the sense, strange only to later sophistication, of my small
+encouraged state as a free playgoer&mdash;a state doubly wondrous while I
+thus evoke the full contingent from Union Square; where, for that
+matter, I think, the wild evening must have been planned. I am lost
+again in all the goodnature from which small boys, on wild evenings,
+could dangle so unchidden&mdash;since the state of unchiddenness is what
+comes back to me well-nigh clearest. How without that complacency of
+conscience could every felt impression so live again? It is true that
+for my present sense of the matter snubs and raps would still tingle,
+would count double; just wherefore it is exactly, however, that I mirror
+myself in these depths of propriety. The social scheme, as we knew it,
+was, in its careless charity, worthy of the golden age&mdash;though I can't
+sufficiently repeat that we knew it both at its easiest and its safest:
+the fruits dropped right upon the board to which we flocked together,
+the least of us and the greatest, with differences of appetite and of
+reach, doubtless, but not with differences of place and of proportionate
+share. My appetite and my reach in respect to the more full-bodied Uncle
+Tom might have brooked<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> certainly any comparison; I must have partaken
+thoroughly of the feast to have left the various aftertastes so separate
+and so strong. It was a great thing to have a canon to judge by&mdash;it
+helped conscious criticism, which was to fit on wings (for use ever
+after) to the shoulders of appreciation. In the light of that advantage
+I could be <i>sure</i> my second Eliza was less dramatic than my first, and
+that my first "Cassy," that of the great and blood-curdling Mrs. Bellamy
+of the lecture-room, touched depths which made the lady at the National
+prosaic and placid (I could already be "down" on a placid Cassy;) just
+as on the other hand the rocking of the ice-floes of the Ohio, with the
+desperate Eliza, infant in arms, balancing for a leap from one to the
+other, had here less of the audible creak of carpentry, emulated a
+trifle more, to my perception, the real water of Mr. Crummles's pump.
+They can't, even at that, have emulated it much, and one almost envies
+(quite making up one's mind not to denounce) the simple faith of an age
+beguiled by arts so rude.</p>
+
+<p>However, the point exactly was that we attended this spectacle just in
+order <i>not</i> to be beguiled, just in order to enjoy with ironic
+detachment and, at the very most, to be amused ourselves at our
+sensibility should it prove to have been trapped and caught. To have
+become thus aware of our collective attitude constituted for one small
+spectator<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> at least a great initiation; he got his first glimpse of that
+possibility of a "free play of mind" over a subject which was to throw
+him with force at a later stage of culture, when subjects had
+considerably multiplied, into the critical arms of Matthew Arnold. So he
+is himself at least interested in seeing the matter&mdash;as a progress in
+which the first step was taken, before that crude scenic appeal, by his
+wondering, among his companions, where the absurd, the absurd for
+<i>them</i>, ended and the fun, the real fun, which was the gravity, the
+tragedy, the drollery, the beauty, the thing itself, briefly, might be
+legitimately and tastefully held to begin. Uncanny though the remark
+perhaps, I am not sure I wasn't thus more interested in the pulse of our
+party, under my tiny recording thumb, than in the beat of the drama and
+the shock of its opposed forces&mdash;vivid and touching as the contrast was
+then found for instance between the tragi-comical Topsy, the slave-girl
+clad in a pinafore of sackcloth and destined to become for Anglo-Saxon
+millions the type of the absolute in the artless, and her little
+mistress the blonde Eva, a figure rather in the Kenwigs tradition of
+pantalettes and pigtails, whom I recall as perching quite suicidally,
+with her elbows out and a preliminary shriek, on that bulwark of the
+Mississippi steamboat which was to facilitate her all but fatal
+immersion in the flood. Why should I have duly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> noted that no little
+game on her part could well less have resembled or simulated an
+accident, and yet have been no less moved by her reappearance, rescued
+from the river but perfectly dry, in the arms of faithful Tom, who had
+plunged in to save her, without either so much as wetting his shoes,
+than if I had been engaged with her in a reckless romp? I could count
+the white stitches in the loose patchwork, and yet could take it for a
+story rich and harmonious; I could know we had all intellectually
+condescended and that we had yet had the thrill of an &aelig;sthetic
+adventure; and this was a brave beginning for a consciousness that was
+to be nothing if not mixed and a curiosity that was to be nothing if not
+restless.</p>
+
+<p>The principle of this prolonged arrest, which I insist on prolonging a
+little further, is doubtless in my instinct to grope for our earliest
+&aelig;sthetic seeds. Careless at once and generous the hands by which they
+were sown, but practically appointed none the less to cause that
+peculiarly flurried hare to run&mdash;flurried because over ground so little
+native to it&mdash;when so many others held back. Is it <i>that</i> air of romance
+that gilds for me then the Barnum background&mdash;taking it as a symbol;
+that makes me resist, to this effect of a passionate adverse loyalty,
+any impulse to translate into harsh terms any old sordidities and
+poverties? The Great American Museum, the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>down-town scenery and aspects
+at large, and even the up-town improvements on them, as then
+flourishing?&mdash;why, they must have been for the most part of the last
+meanness: the Barnum picture above all ignoble and awful, its blatant
+face or frame stuck about with innumerable flags that waved, poor
+vulgar-sized ensigns, over spurious relics and catchpenny monsters in
+effigy, to say nothing of the promise within of the still more monstrous
+and abnormal living&mdash;from the total impression of which things we
+plucked somehow the flower of the ideal. It grew, I must in justice
+proceed, much more sweetly and naturally at Niblo's, which represented
+in our scheme the ideal evening, while Barnum figured the ideal day; so
+that I ask myself, with that sense of our resorting there under the rich
+cover of night (which was the supreme charm,) how it comes that this
+larger memory hasn't swallowed up all others. For here, absolutely,
+<i>was</i> the flower at its finest and grown as nowhere else&mdash;grown in the
+great garden of the Ravel Family and offered again and again to our deep
+inhalation. I see the Ravels, French acrobats, dancers and pantomimists,
+as representing, for our culture, pure grace and charm and civility; so
+that one doubts whether any candid community was ever so much in debt to
+a race of entertainers or had so happy and prolonged, so personal and
+grateful a relation with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> them. They must have been, with their
+offshoots of Martinettis and others, of three or four generations,
+besides being of a rich theatrical stock generally, and we had our
+particular friends and favourites among them; we seemed to follow them
+through every phase of their career, to assist at their tottering steps
+along the tight-rope as very small children kept in equilibrium by very
+big balancing-poles (caretakers here walking under in case of falls;) to
+greet them as Madame Axel, of robust maturity and in a Spanish costume,
+bounding on the same tense cord more heavily but more assuredly; and
+finally to know the climax of the art with them in Raoul or the
+Night-Owl and Jocko or the Brazilian Ape&mdash;and all this in the course of
+our own brief infancy. My impression of them bristles so with memories
+that we seem to have rallied to their different productions with much
+the same regularity with which we formed fresh educational connections;
+and they were so much our property and our pride that they supported us
+handsomely through all fluttered entertainment of the occasional Albany
+cousins. I remember how when one of these visitors, wound up, in honour
+of New York, to the very fever of perception, broke out one evening
+while we waited for the curtain to rise, "Oh don't you hear the cries?
+They're <i>beating</i> them, I'm sure they are; can't it be stopped?" we
+resented the charge as a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> slur on our very honour; for what our romantic
+relative had heatedly imagined to reach us, in a hushed-up manner from
+behind, was the sounds attendant on the application of blows to some
+acrobatic infant who had "funked" his little job. Impossible such
+horrors in the world of pure poetry opened out to us at Niblo's, a
+temple of illusion, of tragedy and comedy and pathos that, though its
+<i>abords</i> of stony brown Metropolitan Hotel, on the "wrong side," must
+have been bleak and vulgar, flung its glamour forth into Broadway. What
+more pathetic for instance, so that we publicly wept, than the fate of
+wondrous Martinetti Jocko, who, after befriending a hapless French
+family wrecked on the coast of Brazil and bringing back to life a small
+boy rescued from the waves (I see even now, with every detail, this
+inanimate victim supine on the strand) met his death by some cruel
+bullet of which I have forgotten the determinant cause, only remembering
+the final agony as something we could scarce bear and a strain of our
+sensibility to which our parents repeatedly questioned the wisdom of
+exposing us.</p>
+
+<p>These performers and these things were in all probability but of a
+middling skill and splendour&mdash;it was the pre-trap&egrave;ze age, and we were
+caught by mild marvels, even if a friendly good faith in them, something
+sweet and sympathetic, was after all a value, whether of their own
+humanity, their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> own special quality, or only of our innocence, never to
+be renewed; but I light this taper to the initiators, so to call them,
+whom I remembered, when we had left them behind, as if they had given us
+a silver key to carry off and so to refit, after long years, to sweet
+names never thought of from then till now. Signor L&eacute;on Javelli, in whom
+the French and the Italian charm appear to have met, who was he, and
+what did he brilliantly do, and why of a sudden do I thus recall and
+admire him? I am afraid he but danced the tight-rope, the most domestic
+of our friends' resources, as it brought them out, by the far stretch of
+the rope, into the bosom of the house and against our very hearts, where
+they leapt and bounded and wavered and recovered closely face to face
+with us; but I dare say he bounded, brave Signor L&eacute;on, to the greatest
+height of all: let this vague agility, in any case, connect him with
+that revelation of the ballet, the sentimental-pastoral, of other years,
+which, in The Four Lovers for example, a pantomimic lesson as in words
+of one syllable, but all quick and gay and droll, would have affected us
+as classic, I am sure, had we then had at our disposal that term of
+appreciation. When we read in English story-books about the pantomimes
+in London, which somehow cropped up in them so often, those were the
+only things that didn't make us yearn; so much we felt we were masters
+of the type, and so almost<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> sufficiently was that a stop-gap for London
+constantly deferred. We hadn't the transformation-scene, it was true,
+though what this really seemed to come to was clown and harlequin taking
+liberties with policemen&mdash;these last evidently a sharp note in a
+picturesqueness that we lacked, our own slouchy "officers" saying
+nothing to us of that sort; but we had at Niblo's harlequin and
+columbine, albeit of less pure a tradition, and we knew moreover all
+about clowns, for we went to circuses too, and so repeatedly that when I
+add them to our list of recreations, the good old orthodox circuses
+under tents set up in vacant lots, with which New York appears at that
+time to have bristled, time and place would seem to have shrunken for
+most other pursuits, and not least for that of serious learning. And the
+case is aggravated as I remember Franconi's, which we more or less
+haunted and which, aiming at the grander style and the monumental
+effect, blazed with fresh paint and rang with Roman chariot-races up
+there among the deserts of Twenty-ninth Street or wherever; considerably
+south, perhaps, but only a little east, of the vaster desolations that
+gave scope to the Crystal Palace, second of its name since,
+following&mdash;not <i>passibus &aelig;quis</i>, alas&mdash;the London structure of 1851,
+this enterprise forestalled by a year or two the Paris Palais de
+l'Industrie of 1855. Such as it was I feel again its majesty on those<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>
+occasions on which I dragged&mdash;if I must here once more speak for myself
+only&mdash;after Albany cousins through its courts of edification: I remember
+being very tired and cold and hungry there, in a little light drab and
+very glossy or shiny "talma" breasted with rather troublesome
+buttonhole-embroideries; though concomitantly conscious that I was
+somehow in Europe, since everything about me had been "brought over,"
+which ought to have been consoling, and seems in fact to have been so in
+some degree, inasmuch as both my own pain and the sense of the cousinly,
+the Albany, headaches quite fade in that recovered presence of big
+European Art embodied in Thorwaldsen's enormous Christ and the
+Disciples, a shining marble company ranged in a semicircle of dark
+maroon walls. If this was Europe then Europe was beautiful indeed, and
+we rose to it on the wings of wonder; never were we afterwards to see
+great showy sculpture, in whatever profuse exhibition or of whatever
+period or school, without some renewal of that charmed Thorwaldsen hour,
+some taste again of the almost sugary or confectionery sweetness with
+which the great white images had affected us under their supper-table
+gaslight. The Crystal Palace was vast and various and dense, which was
+what Europe was going to be; it was a deep-down jungle of impressions
+that were somehow challenges, even as we might, helplessly defied, find<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>
+foreign words and practices; over which formidably towered Kiss's
+mounted Amazon attacked by a leopard or whatever, a work judged at that
+day sublime and the glory of the place; so that I felt the journey back
+in the autumn dusk and the Sixth Avenue cars (established just in time)
+a relapse into soothing flatness, a return to the Fourteenth Street
+horizon from a far journey and a hundred looming questions that would
+still, tremendous thought, come up for all the personal answers of which
+one cultivated the seed.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XIII" id="XIII"></a>XIII</h2>
+
+<p>Let me hurry, however, to catch again that thread I left dangling from
+my glance at our small vague spasms of school&mdash;my personal sense of them
+being as vague and small, I mean, in contrast with the fuller and
+stronger cup meted out all round to the Albany cousins, much more
+privileged, I felt, in every stroke of fortune; or at least much more
+interesting, though it might be wicked to call them more happy, through
+those numberless bereavements that had so enriched their existence. I
+mentioned above in particular the enviable consciousness of our little
+red-headed kinsman Gus Barker, who, as by a sharp prevision, snatched
+what gaiety he might from a life to be cut short, in a cavalry dash, by
+one of the Confederate bullets of 1863: he blew out at us, on New York
+Sundays, as I have said, sharp puffs of the atmosphere of the
+Institution Charlier&mdash;strong to us, that is, the atmosphere of whose
+institutions was weak; but it was above all during a gregarious visit
+paid him in a livelier field still that I knew myself merely mother'd
+and brother'd. It had been his fate to be but scantly the latter and
+never at all the former&mdash;our aunt Janet had not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> survived his birth; but
+on this day of our collective pilgrimage to Sing-Sing, where he was at a
+"military" school and clad in a fashion that represented to me the very
+panoply of war, he shone with a rare radiance of privation. Ingenuous
+and responsive, of a social disposition, a candour of gaiety, that
+matched his physical activity&mdash;the most beautifully made athletic little
+person, and in the highest degree appealing and engaging&mdash;he not only
+did us the honours of his dazzling academy (dazzling at least to me) but
+had all the air of showing us over the great State prison which even
+then flourished near at hand and to which he accompanied us; a party of
+a composition that comes back to me as wonderful, the New York and
+Albany cousinships appearing to have converged and met, for the happy
+occasion, with the generations and sexes melting together and moving in
+a loose harmonious band. The party must have been less numerous than by
+the romantic tradition or confused notation of my youth, and what I
+mainly remember of it beyond my sense of our being at once an attendant
+train to my aged and gentle and in general most unadventurous
+grandmother, and a chorus of curiosity and amusement roundabout the
+vivid Gussy, is our collective impression that State prisons were on the
+whole delightful places, vast, bright and breezy, with a gay, free
+circulation in corridors and on stairs, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> pleasant prevalence of hot
+soup and fresh crusty rolls, in tins, of which visitors admiringly
+partook, and for the latter, in chance corners and on sunny landings,
+much interesting light brush of gentlemen remarkable but for gentlemanly
+crimes&mdash;that is defalcations and malversations to striking and
+impressive amounts.</p>
+
+<p>I recall our coming on such a figure at the foot of a staircase and his
+having been announced to us by our conductor or friend in charge as
+likely to be there; and what a charm I found in his cool loose uniform
+of shining white (as I was afterwards to figure it,) as well as in his
+generally refined and distinguished appearance and in the fact that he
+was engaged, while exposed to our attention, in the commendable act of
+paring his nails with a smart penknife and that he didn't allow us to
+interrupt him. One of my companions, I forget which, had advised me that
+in these contacts with illustrious misfortune I was to be careful not to
+stare; and present to me at this moment is the wonder of whether he
+would think it staring to note that <i>he</i> quite stared, and also that his
+hands were fine and fair and one of them adorned with a signet ring. I
+was to have later in life a glimpse of two or three dismal
+penitentiaries, places affecting me as sordid, as dark and dreadful; but
+if the revelation of Sing-Sing had involved the idea of a timely warning
+to the young mind my small sensibility at least<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> was not reached by the
+lesson. I envied the bold-eyed celebrity in the array of a planter at
+his ease&mdash;we might have been <i>his</i> slaves&mdash;quite as much as I envied
+Gussy; in connection with which I may remark here that though in that
+early time I seem to have been constantly eager to exchange my lot for
+that of somebody else, on the assumed certainty of gaining by the
+bargain, I fail to remember feeling jealous of such happier persons&mdash;in
+the measure open to children of spirit. I had rather a positive lack of
+the passion, and thereby, I suppose, a lack of spirit; since if jealousy
+bears, as I think, on what one sees one's companions able to do&mdash;as
+against one's own falling short&mdash;envy, as I knew it at least, was simply
+of what they <i>were</i>, or in other words of a certain sort of richer
+consciousness supposed, doubtless often too freely supposed, in them.
+They were so <i>other</i>&mdash;that was what I felt; and to <i>be</i> other, other
+almost anyhow, seemed as good as the probable taste of the bright
+compound wistfully watched in the confectioner's window; unattainable,
+impossible, of course, but as to which just this impossibility and just
+that privation kept those active proceedings in which jealousy seeks
+relief quite out of the question. A platitude of acceptance of the poor
+actual, the absence of all vision of how in any degree to change it,
+combined with a complacency, an acuity of perception of alternatives,
+though a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> view of them as only through the confectioner's hard
+glass&mdash;that is what I recover as the nearest approach to an apology, in
+the soil of my nature, for the springing seed of emulation. I never
+dreamed of competing&mdash;a business having in it at the best, for my
+temper, if not for my total failure of temper, a displeasing ferocity.
+If competing was bad snatching was therefore still worse, and jealousy
+was a sort of spiritual snatching. With which, nevertheless, all the
+while, one might have been "like" So-and-So, who had such horizons. A
+helpless little love of horizons I certainly cherished, and could
+sometimes even care for my own. These always shrank, however, under
+almost any suggestion of a further range or finer shade in the purple
+rim offered to other eyes&mdash;and that is what I take for the restlessness
+of envy. It wasn't that I wished to change with everyone, with anyone at
+a venture, but that I saw "gifts" everywhere but as mine and that I
+scarce know whether to call the effect of this miserable or monstrous.
+It was the effect at least of self-abandonment&mdash;I mean to visions.</p>
+
+<p>There must have been on that occasion of the Sing-Sing day&mdash;which it
+deeply interests me to piece together&mdash;some state of connection for some
+of us with the hospitalities of Rhinebeck, the place of abode of the
+eldest of the Albany uncles&mdash;that is of the three most in our view;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> for
+there were two others, the eldest of all a half-uncle only, who formed a
+class quite by himself, and the very youngest, who, with lively
+interests of his own, had still less attention for us than either of his
+three brothers. The house at Rhinebeck and all its accessories (which
+struck our young sense as innumerable,) in especial the great bluff of
+the Hudson on which it stood, yields me images scarcely dimmed, though
+as the effect but of snatches of acquaintance; there at all events the
+gently-groaning&mdash;ever so gently and dryly&mdash;Albany grandmother, with the
+Albany cousins as to whom I here discriminate, her two adopted
+daughters, maturest and mildest of the general tribe, must have paused
+for a stay; a feature of which would be perhaps her juncture with the
+New York contingent, somewhere sociably achieved, for the befriending of
+juvenile Gussy. It shimmers there, the whole circumstance, with I scarce
+know what large innocence of charity and ease; the Gussy-pretext, for
+reunion, all so thin yet so important an appeal, the simplicity of the
+interests and the doings, the assumptions and the concessions, each
+to-day so touching, almost so edifying. We were surely all gentle and
+generous together, floating in such a clean light social order, sweetly
+proof against ennui&mdash;unless it be a bad note, as is conceivable, never,
+<i>never</i> to feel bored&mdash;and thankful for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> the smallest &aelig;sthetic or
+romantic mercies. My vision loses itself withal in vaster
+connections&mdash;above all in my general sense of the then grand newness of
+the Hudson River Railroad; so far at least as its completion to Albany
+was concerned, a modern blessing that even the youngest of us were in a
+position to appraise. The time had been when the steamboat had to
+content us&mdash;and I feel how amply it must have done so as I recall the
+thrill of docking in dim early dawns, the whole hour of the Albany
+waterside, the night of huge strange paddling and pattering and
+shrieking and creaking once ended, and contrast with it all certain long
+sessions in the train at an age and in conditions when neither train nor
+traveller had suffered chastening; sessions of a high animation, as I
+recast them, but at the same time of mortal intensities of lassitude.
+The elements here indeed are much confused and mixed&mdash;I must have known
+that discipline of the hectic interest and the extravagant strain in
+relation to Rhinebeck only; an <i>&eacute;tape</i>, doubtless, on the way to New
+York, for the Albany kinship, but the limit to our smaller patiences of
+any northward land-journey. And yet not the young fatigue, I repeat, but
+the state of easy wonder, is what most comes back: the stops too
+repeated, but perversely engaging; the heat and the glare too great, but
+the river, by the window, making reaches and glimpses, so that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> the
+great swing of picture and force of light and colour were themselves a
+constant adventure; the uncles, above all, too pre-eminent, too
+recurrent, to the creation of a positive soreness of sympathy, of
+curiosity, and yet constituting by their presence half the enlargement
+of the time. For the presence of uncles, incoherent Albany uncles, is
+somehow what most gives these hours their stamp for memory. I scarce
+know why, nor do I much, I confess, distinguish occasions&mdash;but I see
+what I see: the long, the rattling car of the old open native form and
+the old harsh native exposure; the sense of arrival forever postponed,
+qualified however also by that of having in my hands a volume of M.
+Ars&egrave;ne Houssaye, Philosophes et Com&eacute;diennes, remarkably submitted by one
+of my relatives to my judgment. I see them always, the relatives, in
+slow circulation; restless and nervous and casual their note, not less
+than strikingly genial, but with vaguenesses, lapses, eclipses, that
+deprived their society of a tactless weight. They cheered us on, in
+their way; born optimists, clearly, if not logically determined ones,
+they were always reassuring and sustaining, though with a bright brevity
+that must have taken immensities, I think, for granted. They wore their
+hats slightly toward the nose, they strolled, they hung about, they
+reported of progress and of the company, they dropped suggestions, new
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>magazines, packets of the edible deprecated for the immature; they
+figured in fine to a small nephew as the principal men of their time
+and, so far as the two younger and more familiar were concerned, the
+most splendid as to aspect and apparel. It was none the less to the
+least shining, though not essentially the least comforting, of this
+social trio that, if I rightly remember, I owed my introduction to the
+<i>chronique galante</i> of the eighteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>There tags itself at any rate to the impression a flutter as of some
+faint, some recaptured, grimace for another of his kindly offices (which
+I associate somehow with the deck of a steamboat:) his production for
+our vague benefit of a literary classic, the Confessions, as he called
+our attention to them, of the celebrated "Rosseau" I catch again the
+echo of the mirth excited, to my surprise, by this communication, and
+recover as well my responsive advance toward a work that seemed so to
+promise; but especially have I it before me that some play of light
+criticism mostly attended, on the part of any circle, this speaker's
+more ambitious remarks. For all that, and in spite of oddities of
+appearance and type, it was Augustus James who spread widest, in default
+of towering highest, to my wistful view of the larger life, and who
+covered definite and accessible ground. This ground, the house and
+precincts of Linwood, at Rhinebeck,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> harboured our tender years, I
+surmise, but at few and brief moments; but it hadn't taken many of these
+to make it the image of an hospitality liberal as I supposed great
+social situations were liberal; suppositions on this score having in
+childhood (or at least they had in mine) as little as possible to do
+with dry data. Didn't Linwood bristle with great views and other
+glories, with gardens and graperies and black ponies, to say nothing of
+gardeners and grooms who were notoriously and quotedly droll; to say
+nothing, in particular, of our aunt Elizabeth, who had been Miss Bay of
+Albany, who was the mother of the fair and free young waltzing-women in
+New York, and who floats back to me through the Rhinebeck picture,
+aquiline but easy, with an effect of handsome highbrowed, high-nosed
+looseness, of dressing-gowns or streaming shawls (the dowdy, the
+delightful shawl of the period;) and of claws of bright benevolent steel
+that kept nipping for our charmed advantage: roses and grapes and
+peaches and currant-clusters, together with turns of phrase and scraps
+of remark that fell as by quite a like flash of shears. These are mere
+scrapings of gold-dust, but my mind owes her a vibration that, however
+tiny, was to insist all these years on <i>marking</i>&mdash;on figuring in a whole
+complex of picture and drama, the clearest note of which was that of
+worry and woe: a crisis prolonged, in deep-roofed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> outer galleries,
+through hot August evenings and amid the dim flare of open windows, to
+the hum of domesticated insects. All but inexpressible the part played,
+in the young mind naturally even though perversely, even though
+inordinately, arranged as a stage for the procession and exhibition of
+appearances, by matters all of a usual cast, contacts and impressions
+not arriving at the dignity of shocks, but happening to be to the taste,
+as one may say, of the little intelligence, happening to be such as the
+fond fancy could assimilate. One's record becomes, under memories of
+this order&mdash;and that is the only trouble&mdash;a tale of assimilations small
+and fine; out of which refuse, directly interesting to the
+subject-victim only, the most branching vegetations may be conceived as
+having sprung. Such are the absurdities of the poor dear inward
+life&mdash;when translated, that is, and perhaps ineffectually translated,
+into terms of the outward and trying at all to flourish on the lines of
+the outward; a reflection that might stay me here weren't it that I
+somehow feel morally affiliated, tied as by knotted fibres, to the
+elements involved.</p>
+
+<p>One of these was assuredly that my father had again, characteristically,
+suffered me to dangle; he having been called to Linwood by the dire
+trouble of his sister, Mrs. Temple, and brought me with him from Staten
+Island&mdash;I make the matter out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> as of the summer of '54. We had come up,
+he and I, to New York; but our doings there, with the journey following,
+are a blank to me; I recover but my sense, on our arrival, of being for
+the first time in the presence of tragedy, which the shining scene,
+roundabout, made more sinister&mdash;sharpened even to the point of my
+feeling abashed and irrelevant, wondering why I had come. My aunt, under
+her brother's roof, had left her husband, wasted with consumption, near
+death at Albany; gravely ill herself&mdash;she had taken the disease from him
+as it was taken in those days, and was in the event very scantly to
+survive him&mdash;she had been ordered away in her own interest, for which
+she cared no scrap, and my father, the person in all his family most
+justly appealed and most anxiously listened to, had been urged to come
+and support her in a separation that she passionately rejected. Vivid to
+me still, as floating across verandahs into the hot afternoon stillness,
+is the wail of her protest and her grief; I remember being scared and
+hushed by it and stealing away beyond its reach. I remember not less
+what resources of high control the whole case imputed, for my
+imagination, to my father; and how, creeping off to the edge of the
+eminence above the Hudson, I somehow felt the great bright harmonies of
+air and space becoming one with my rather proud assurance and
+confidence, that of my own <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>connection, for life, for interest, with
+such sources of light. The great impression, however, the one that has
+brought me so far, was another matter: only that of the close,
+lamp-tempered, outer evening aforesaid, with my parent again, somewhere
+deep within, yet not too far to make us hold our breath for it, tenderly
+opposing his sister's purpose of flight, and the presence at my side of
+my young cousin Marie, youngest daughter of the house, exactly of my own
+age, and named in honour of her having been born in Paris, to the
+influence of which fact her shining black eyes, her small quickness and
+brownness, marking sharply her difference from her sisters, so oddly, so
+almost extravagantly testified. It had come home to me by some voice of
+the air that she was "spoiled," and it made her in the highest degree
+interesting; we ourselves had been so associated, at home, without being
+in the least spoiled (I think we even rather missed it:) so that I knew
+about these subjects of invidious reflection only by literature&mdash;mainly,
+no doubt, that of the nursery&mdash;in which they formed, quite by
+themselves, a romantic class; and, the fond fancy always predominant, I
+prized even while a little dreading the chance to see the condition at
+work. This chance was given me, it was clear&mdash;though I risk in my record
+of it a final anticlimax&mdash;by a remark from my uncle Augustus to his
+daughter: seated duskily in our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> group, which included two or three dim
+dependent forms, he expressed the strong opinion that Marie should go to
+bed&mdash;expressed it, that is, with the casual cursory humour that was to
+strike me as the main expressional resource of outstanding members of
+the family and that would perhaps have had under analysis the defect of
+making judgment very personal without quite making authority so.
+Authority they hadn't, of a truth, these all so human outstanding ones;
+they made shift but with light appreciation, sudden suggestion, a
+peculiar variety of happy remark in the air. It had been remarked but in
+the air, I feel sure, that Marie should seek her couch&mdash;a truth by the
+dark wing of which I ruefully felt myself brushed; and the words seemed
+therefore to fall with a certain ironic weight. What I have retained of
+their effect, at any rate, is the vague fact of some objection raised by
+my cousin and some sharper point to his sentence supplied by her father;
+promptly merged in a visible commotion, a flutter of my young companion
+across the gallery as for refuge in the maternal arms, a protest and an
+appeal in short which drew from my aunt the simple phrase that was from
+that moment so preposterously to "count" for me. "Come now, my dear;
+don't make a scene&mdash;I <i>insist</i> on your not making a scene!" That was all
+the witchcraft the occasion used, but the note was none the less
+epoch-making.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> The expression, so vivid, so portentous, was one I had
+never heard&mdash;it had never been addressed to us at home; and who should
+say now what a world one mightn't at once read into it? It seemed
+freighted to sail so far; it told me so much about life. Life at these
+intensities clearly became "scenes"; but the great thing, the immense
+illumination, was that we could make them or not as we chose. It was a
+long time of course before I began to distinguish between those within
+our compass more particularly as spoiled and those producible on a
+different basis and which should involve detachment, involve presence of
+mind; just the qualities in which Marie's possible output was apparently
+deficient. It didn't in the least matter accordingly whether or no a
+scene <i>was</i> then proceeded to&mdash;and I have lost all count of what
+immediately happened. The mark had been made for me and the door flung
+open; the passage, gathering up <i>all</i> the elements of the troubled time,
+had been itself a scene, quite enough of one, and I had become aware
+with it of a rich accession of possibilities.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XIV" id="XIV"></a>XIV</h2>
+
+<p>It must have been after the Sing-Sing episode that Gussy came to us, in
+New York, for Sundays and holidays, from scarce further off than round
+the corner&mdash;his foreign Institution flourishing, I seem to remember, in
+West Tenth Street or wherever&mdash;and yet as floated by exotic airs and
+with the scent of the spice-islands hanging about him. He was being
+educated largely with Cubans and Mexicans, in those New York days more
+than half the little flock of the foreign Institutions in general; over
+whom his easy triumphs, while he wagged his little red head for them,
+were abundantly credible; reinforced as my special sense of them was
+moreover by the similar situation of his sister, older than he but also
+steeped in the exotic medium and also sometimes bringing us queer echoes
+of the tongues. I remember being deputed by my mother to go and converse
+with her, on some question of her coming to us, at the establishment of
+Madame Reichhardt (pronounced, &agrave; la fran&ccedil;aise, R&eacute;chard,) where I felt
+that I had crossed, for the hour, the very threshold of "Europe"; it
+being impressed on me by my cousin, who was tall and handsome and happy,
+with a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> laugh of more beautiful sound than any laugh we were to know
+again, that French only was speakable on the premises. I sniffed it up
+aromatically, the superior language, in passage and parlour&mdash;it took the
+form of some strong savoury soup, an educational <i>potage R&eacute;chard</i> that
+must excellently have formed the taste: that was again, I felt as I came
+away, a part of the rich experience of being thrown in tender juvenile
+form upon the world. This genial girl, like her brother, was in the
+grand situation of having no home and of carrying on life, such a
+splendid kind of life, by successive visits to relations; though neither
+she nor Gussy quite achieved the range of their elder brother, "Bob" of
+that ilk, a handsome young man, a just blurred, attractive, illusive
+presence, who hovered a bit beyond our real reach and apparently
+displayed the undomesticated character at its highest. <i>He</i> seemed
+exposed, for his pleasure&mdash;if pleasure it was!&mdash;and my wonder, to every
+assault of experience; his very name took on, from these imputations, a
+browner glow; and it was all in the right key that, a few years later,
+he should, after "showing some talent for sculpture," have gone the
+hapless way of most of the Albany youth, have become a theme for sad
+vague headshakes (kind and very pitying in his case) and died
+prematurely and pointlessly, or in other words, by my conception,
+picturesquely. The headshakes were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> heavier and the sighs sharper for
+another slim shade, one of the younger and I believe quite the most
+hapless of those I have called the outstanding ones; he too, several
+years older than we again, a tormenting hoverer and vanisher; he too
+charmingly sister'd, though sister'd only, and succumbing to monstrous
+early trouble after having "shown some talent" for music. The
+ghostliness of these &aelig;sthetic manifestations, as I allude to them, is
+the thinnest conceivable chip of stray marble, the faintest far-off
+twang of old chords; I ask myself, for the odd obscurity of it, under
+what inspiration music and sculpture may have tinkled and glimmered to
+the Albany ear and eye (as we at least knew those organs) and with what
+queer and weak delusions our unfortunates may have played. Quite
+ineffably quaint and <i>falot</i> this proposition of <i>that</i> sort of resource
+for the battle of life as it then and there opened; and above all
+beautifully suggestive of our sudden collective disconnectedness (ours
+as the whole kinship's) from <i>the</i> American resource of those days,
+Albanian or other. That precious light was the light of "business" only;
+and we, by a common instinct, artlessly joining hands, went forth into
+the wilderness without so much as a twinkling taper.</p>
+
+<p>Our consensus, on all this ground, was amazing&mdash;it brooked no exception;
+the word had been passed, all round, that we didn't, that we couldn't<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>
+and shouldn't, understand these things, questions of arithmetic and of
+fond calculation, questions of the counting-house and the market; and we
+appear to have held to our agreement as loyally and to have accepted our
+doom as serenely as if our faith had been mutually pledged. The rupture
+with my grandfather's tradition and attitude was complete; we were never
+in a single case, I think, for two generations, guilty of a stroke of
+business; the most that could be said of us was that, though about
+equally wanting, all round, in any faculty of acquisition, we happened
+to pay for the amiable weakness less in some connections than in others.
+The point was that we moved so oddly and consistently&mdash;as it was our
+only form of consistency&mdash;over our limited pasture, never straying to
+nibble in the strange or the steep places. What was the matter with us
+under this spell, and what the moral might have been for our case, are
+issues of small moment, after all, in face of the fact of our mainly so
+brief duration. It was given to but few of us to be taught by the event,
+to be made to wonder with the last intensity what <i>had</i> been the matter.
+This it would be interesting to worry out, might I take the time; for
+the story wouldn't be told, I conceive, by any mere rueful glance at
+other avidities, the preference for ease, the play of the passions, the
+appetite for pleasure. These things have often <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>accompanied the business
+imagination; just as the love of life and the love of other persons, and
+of many of the things of the world, just as quickness of soul and sense,
+have again and again not excluded it. However, it comes back, as I have
+already hinted, to the manner in which the "things of the world" could
+but present themselves; there were not enough of these, and they were
+not fine and fair enough, to engage happily so much unapplied, so much
+loose and crude attention. We hadn't doubtless at all a complete play of
+intelligence&mdash;if I may not so far discriminate as to say <i>they</i> hadn't;
+or our lack of the instinct of the market needn't have been so much
+worth speaking of: other curiosities, other sympathies might have
+redressed the balance. I make out our young cousin J. J. as dimly aware
+of this while composing the light melodies that preluded to his
+extinction, and which that catastrophe so tried to admonish us to think
+of as promising; but his image is more present to me still as the great
+incitement, during the few previous years, to our constant dream of
+"educational" relief, of some finer kind of social issue, through
+Europe.</p>
+
+<p>It was to Europe J. J. had been committed; he was over there forging the
+small apologetic arms that were so little to avail him, but it was quite
+enough for us that he pointed the way to the Pension Sillig, at Vevey,
+which shone at us, from afar,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> as our own more particular solution. It
+was true that the Pension Sillig figured mainly as the solution in cases
+of recognised wildness; there long flourished among New York parents
+whose view of such resources had the proper range a faith in it for that
+complaint; and it was as an act of faith that, failing other remedies,
+our young wifeless uncle, conscious himself of no gift for control or
+for edification, had placed there his difficult son. He returned with
+delight from this judicious course and there was an hour when we
+invoked, to intensity, a similar one in our own interest and when the
+air of home did little but reflect from afar the glitter of blue Swiss
+lakes, the tinkle of cattle-bells in Alpine pastures, the rich
+<i>bonhomie</i> that M. Sillig, dispensing an education all of milk and honey
+and edelweiss and ranz-des-vaches, combined with his celebrated firmness
+for tough subjects. Poor J. J. came back, I fear, much the same subject
+that he went; but he had verily performed his scant office on earth,
+that of having brought our then prospect, our apparent possibility, a
+trifle nearer. He seemed to have been wild even beyond M. Sillig's
+measure&mdash;which was highly disappointing; but if we might on the other
+hand be open to the reproach of falling too short of it there were
+establishments adapted to every phase of the American predicament; so
+that our general direction could but gain in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>vividness. I think with
+compassion, altogether, of the comparative obscurity to which our
+eventual success in gathering the fruits, few and scant though they
+might be, thus relegates those to whom it was given but to toy so
+briefly with the flowers. They make collectively their tragic trio: J.
+J. the elder, most loved, most beautiful, most sacrificed of the Albany
+uncles; J. J. the younger&mdash;they were young together, they were luckless
+together, and the combination was as strange as the disaster was
+sweeping; and the daughter and sister, amplest of the "natural," easiest
+of the idle, who lived on to dress their memory with every thread and
+patch of her own perfect temper and then confirm the tradition, after
+all, by too early and woeful an end.</p>
+
+<p>If it comes over me under the brush of multiplied memories that we might
+well have invoked the educational "relief" I just spoke of, I should
+doubtless as promptly add that my own case must have been intrinsically
+of the poorest, and indeed make the point once for all that I should be
+taken as having seen and felt much of the whole queerness through the
+medium of rare inaptitudes. I can only have been inapt, I make out, to
+have retained so positively joyless a sense of it all, to be aware of
+most of it now but as dim confusion, as bewildered anxiety. There was
+interest always, certainly&mdash;but it strikes me to-day as interest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> in
+everything that wasn't supposedly or prescriptively of the question at
+all, and in nothing that <i>was</i> so respectably involved and accredited.
+Without some sharpness of interest I shouldn't now have the memories;
+but these stick to me somehow with none of the hard glue of recovered
+"spirits," recovered vivacities, assurances, successes. I can't have
+had, through it all, I think, a throb of assurance or success; without
+which, at the same time, absurdly and indescribably, I lived and
+wriggled, floundered and failed, lost the clue of everything but a
+general lucid consciousness (lucid, that is, for my tender years;) which
+I clutched with a sense of its value. What happened all the while, I
+conceive, was that I imagined things&mdash;and as if quite on system&mdash;wholly
+other than as they were, and so carried on in the midst of the actual
+ones an existence that somehow floated and saved me even while cutting
+me off from any degree of direct performance, in fact from any degree of
+direct participation, at all. <i>There</i> presumably was the interest&mdash;in
+the intensity and plausibility and variety of the irrelevance: an
+irrelevance which, for instance, made all pastors and masters, and
+especially all fellow-occupants of benches and desks, all elbowing and
+kicking presences within touch or view, so many monsters and horrors, so
+many wonders and splendours and mysteries, but never, so far as I can
+recollect, realities of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>relation, dispensers either of knowledge or of
+fate, playmates, intimates, mere co&aelig;vals and coequals. They were
+something better&mdash;better above all than the coequal or co&aelig;val; they were
+so thoroughly figures and characters, divinities or demons, and endowed
+in this light with a vividness that the mere reality of relation, a
+commoner directness of contact, would have made, I surmise,
+comparatively poor. This superior shade of interest was not, none the
+less, so beguiling that I recall without unmitigated horror, or
+something very like it, a winter passed with my brother at the
+Institution Vergn&egrave;s; our sorry subjection to which argues to my present
+sense an unmitigated surrounding aridity. To a "French school" must have
+been earnestly imputed the virtue of keeping us in patience till easier
+days should come; infinitely touching our parents' view of that New York
+fetish of our young time, an "acquisition of the languages"&mdash;an
+acquisition reinforcing those opportunities which we enjoyed at home, so
+far as they mustered, and at which I have briefly glanced. Charming and
+amusing to me indeed certain faint echoes, wavering images, of this
+superstition as it played about our path: ladies and gentlemen, dimly
+foreign, mere broken syllables of whose names come back to me, attending
+there to converse in tongues and then giving way to others through
+failures of persistence&mdash;whether<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> in pupils or preceptors I know not.
+There hovers even Count Adam Gurowski, Polish, patriotic, exiled,
+temporarily famous, with the vision of <i>his</i> being invoked for facility
+and then relinquished for difficulty; though I scarce guess on which of
+his battle-grounds&mdash;he was so polyglot that he even had a rich command
+of New Yorkese.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XV" id="XV"></a>XV</h2>
+
+<p>It is to the Institution Vergn&egrave;s that my earliest recovery of the sense
+of being in any degree "educated with" W. J. attaches itself; an
+establishment which occupied during the early 'fifties a site in the
+very middle of Broadway, of the lower, the real Broadway, where it could
+throb with the very pulse of the traffic in which we all innocently
+rejoiced&mdash;believing it, I surmise, the liveliest conceivable: a fact
+that is by itself, in the light of the present, an odd rococo note. The
+lower Broadway&mdash;I allude to the whole Fourth Street and Bond Street
+(where now <i>is</i> the Bond Street of that antiquity?)&mdash;was then a seat of
+education, since we had not done with it, as I shall presently show,
+even when we had done with the Institution, a prompt disillusionment;
+and I brood thus over a period which strikes me as long and during which
+my personal hours of diligence were somehow more than anything else
+hours of the pavement and the shopfront, or of such contemplative
+exercise as the very considerable distance, for small legs, between
+those regions and the westward Fourteenth Street might comprise.
+Pedestrian gaping having been in childhood, as I have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> noted,
+prevailingly my line, fate appeared to have kindly provided for it on no
+small scale; to the extent even that it must have been really my sole
+and single form of athletics. Vague heated competition and agitation in
+the then enclosed Union Square would seem to point a little, among us
+all, to nobler types of motion; but of any basis for recreation,
+anything in the nature of a playground or a breathing-space, the
+Institution itself was serenely innocent. This I take again for a note
+extraordinarily medi&aelig;val. It occupied the first and second floors, if I
+rightly remember, of a wide front that, overhanging the endless
+thoroughfare, looked out on bouncing, clattering "stages" and painfully
+dragged carts and the promiscuous human shuffle&mdash;the violence of
+repercussions from the New York pavement of those years to be further
+taken into account; and I win it back from every side as, in spite of
+these aspects of garish publicity, a dark and dreadful, and withal quite
+absurd, scene. I see places of that general time, even places of
+confinement, in a dusty golden light that special memories of small
+misery scarce in the least bedim, and this holds true of our next and
+quite neighbouring refuge; the establishment of M. Vergn&egrave;s alone darkles
+and shrinks to me&mdash;a sordidly <i>black</i> interior is my main image for it;
+attenuated only by its having very soon afterwards, as a suffered
+ordeal, altogether lapsed and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> intermitted. Faintly, in the gloom, I
+distinguish M. Vergn&egrave;s himself&mdash;quite "old," very old indeed as I
+supposed him, and highly irritated and markedly bristling; though of
+nothing in particular that happened to me at his or at anyone's else
+hands have I the scantest remembrance. What really most happened no
+doubt, was that my brother and I should both come away with a mind
+prepared for a perfect assimilation of Alphonse Daudet's chronicle of
+"Jack," years and years later on; to make the acquaintance in that work
+of the "petits pays chauds" among whom Jack learnt the first lessons of
+life was to see the Institution Vergn&egrave;s at once revive, swarming as it
+did with small homesick Cubans and Mexicans; the complete failure of
+blondness that marks the memory is doubtless the cumulative effect of so
+many of the New York "petits pays chauds," preponderantly brown and
+black and conducing to a greasy gloom. Into this gloom I fear I should
+see all things recede together but for a certain salient note, the fact
+that the whole "staff" appears to have been constantly in a rage; from
+which naturally resulted the accent of shrillness (the only accent we
+could pick up, though we were supposed to be learning, for the extreme
+importance of it, quantities of French) and the sound of high
+vociferation. I remember infuriated ushers, of foreign speech and
+flushed complexion&mdash;the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> tearing across of hapless "exercises" and
+<i>dict&eacute;es</i> and the hurtle through the air of dodged volumes; only never,
+despite this, the extremity of smiting. There can have been at the
+Institution no blows instructionally dealt&mdash;nor even from our hours of
+ease do any such echoes come back to me. Little Cubans and Mexicans, I
+make out, were not to be vulgarly whacked&mdash;in deference, presumably, to
+some latent relic or imputed survival of Castilian pride; which would
+impose withal considerations of quite practical prudence. Food for
+reflection and comparison might well have been so suggested; interesting
+at least the element of contrast between such opposed conceptions of
+tone, temper and manner as the passion without whacks, or with whacks
+only of inanimate objects, ruling the scene I have described, and the
+whacks without passion, the grim, impersonal, strictly penal
+applications of the rod, which then generally represented what was still
+involved in our English tradition. It was the two theories of
+sensibility, of personal dignity, that so diverged; but with such other
+divergences now on top of those that the old comparison falls away. We
+to-day go unwhacked altogether&mdash;though from a pride other than
+Castilian: it is difficult to say at least what ideal has thus
+triumphed. In the Vergn&egrave;s air at any rate I seem myself to have sat
+unscathed and unterrified&mdash;not alarmed even<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> by so much as a call to the
+blackboard; only protected by my insignificance, which yet covered such
+a sense of our dusky squalor. Queer for us the whole affair, assuredly;
+but how much queerer for the poor petits pays chauds who had come so far
+for their privilege. <i>We</i> had come, comparatively, but from round the
+corner&mdash;and that left the "state of education" and the range of
+selection all about as quaint enough. What could these things then have
+been in the various native climes of the petits pays chauds?</p>
+
+<p>It was by some strong wave of reaction, clearly, that we were floated
+next into the quieter haven of Mr. Richard Pulling Jenks&mdash;where cleaner
+waters, as I feel their coolness still, must have filled a neater
+though, it was true, slightly more contracted trough. Yet the range of
+selection had been even on this higher plane none too strikingly
+exemplified; our jumping had scant compass&mdash;we still grubbed with a good
+conscience in Broadway and sidled about Fourth Street. But I think of
+the higher education as having there, from various causes, none the less
+begun to glimmer for us. A diffused brightness, a kind of high
+crosslight of conflicting windows, rests for me at all events on the
+little realm of Mr. Pulling Jenks and bathes it as with positively sweet
+limitations. Limited must it have been, I feel, with our couple of
+middling rooms, front and back, our close <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>packing, our large
+unaccommodating stove, our grey and gritty oilcloth, and again our
+importunate Broadway; from the aggregation of which elements there
+distils itself, without my being able to account for it, a certain
+perversity of romance. I speak indeed here for myself in particular, and
+keen for romance must I have been in such conditions, I admit; since the
+sense of it had crept into a recreational desert even as utter as that
+of the Institution Vergn&egrave;s. Up out of Broadway we still scrambled&mdash;I can
+smell the steep and cold and dusty wooden staircase; straight into
+Broadway we dropped&mdash;I feel again the generalised glare of liberation;
+and I scarce know what tenuity of spirit it argues that I should neither
+have enjoyed nor been aware of missing (speaking again for myself only)
+a space wider than the schoolroom floor to react and knock about in. I
+literally conclude that we must have knocked about in Broadway, and in
+Broadway alone, like perfect little men of the world; we must have been
+let loose there to stretch our legs and fill our lungs, without
+prejudice either to our earlier and later freedoms of going and coming.
+I as strictly infer, at the same time, that Broadway must have been then
+as one of the alleys of Eden, for any sinister contact or consequence
+involved for us; a circumstance that didn't in the least interfere, too,
+as I have noted, with its offer of an entrancing interest.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> The interest
+verily could have been a <i>calculated</i> thing on the part of our dear
+parents as little as on that of Mr. Jenks himself. Therefore let it be
+recorded as still most odd that we should all have assented to such
+deficiency of landscape, such exiguity of sport. I take the true
+inwardness of the matter to have been in our having such short hours,
+long as they may have appeared at the time, that the day left margin at
+the worst for private inventions. I think we found landscape, for
+ourselves&mdash;and wherever I at least found vision I found such sport as I
+was capable of&mdash;even between the front and back rooms and the
+conflicting windows; even by the stove which somehow scorched without
+warming, and yet round which Mr. Coe and Mr. Dolmidge, the
+drawing-master and the writing-master, arriving of a winter's day, used
+notedly, and in the case of Mr. Coe lamentedly, to draw out their
+delays. Is the dusty golden light of retrospect in this connection an
+effluence from Mr. Dolmidge and Mr. Coe, whose ministrations come back
+to me as the sole directly desired or invoked ones I was to know in my
+years, such as they were, of pupilage?</p>
+
+<p>I see them in any case as old-world images, figures of an antique stamp;
+products, mustn't they have been, of an order in which some social
+relativity or matter-of-course adjustment, some transmitted form and
+pressure, were still at work? Mr.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> Dolmidge, inordinately lean,
+clean-shaved, as was comparatively uncommon then, and in a
+swallow-tailed coat and I think a black satin stock, was surely perfect
+in his absolutely functional way, a pure pen-holder of a man, melancholy
+and mild, who taught the most complicated flourishes&mdash;great scrolls of
+them met our view in the form of surging seas and beaked and beady-eyed
+eagles, the eagle being so calligraphic a bird&mdash;while he might just have
+taught resignation. He was not at all funny&mdash;no one out of our immediate
+family circle, in fact almost no one but W. J. himself, who flowered in
+every waste, seems to have struck me as funny in those years; but he was
+to remain with me a picture of somebody in Dickens, one of the Phiz if
+not the Cruikshank pictures. Mr. Coe was another affair, bristling with
+the question of the "hard," but somehow too with the revelation of the
+soft, the deeply attaching; a worthy of immense stature and presence,
+crowned as with the thick white hair of genius, wearing a great gathered
+or puckered cloak, with a vast velvet collar, and resembling, as he
+comes back to me, the General Winfield Scott who lived so much in our
+eyes then. The oddity may well even at that hour have been present to me
+of its taking so towering a person to produce such small
+"drawing-cards"; it was as if some mighty bird had laid diminutive eggs.
+Mr. Coe, of a truth, laid his all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> over the place, and though they were
+not of more than handy size&mdash;very small boys could set them up in state
+on very small desks&mdash;they had doubtless a great range of number and
+effect. They were scattered far abroad and I surmise celebrated; they
+represented crooked cottages, feathery trees, browsing and bristling
+beasts and other rural objects; all rendered, as I recall them, in
+little detached dashes that were like stories told in words of one
+syllable, or even more perhaps in short gasps of delight. It must have
+been a stammering art, but I admired its fluency, which swims for me
+moreover in richer though slightly vague associations. Mr. Coe practised
+on a larger scale, in colour, in oils, producing wondrous neat little
+boards that make me to this day think of them and more particularly
+smell them, when I hear of a "panel" picture: a glamour of greatness
+attends them as brought home by W. J. from the master's own place of
+instruction in that old University building which partly formed the east
+side of Washington Square and figures to memory, or to fond imagination,
+as throbbing with more offices and functions, a denser chiaroscuro, than
+any reared hugeness of to-day, where character is so lost in quantity.
+Is there any present structure that plays such a part in proportion to
+its size?&mdash;though even as I ask the question I feel how nothing on earth
+is proportioned to present sizes.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> These alone are proportioned&mdash;and to
+mere sky-space and mere amount, amount of steel and stone; which is
+comparatively uninteresting. Perhaps our needs and our elements were
+then absurdly, were then provincially few, and that the patches of
+character in that small grey granite compendium were all we had in
+general to exhibit. Let me add at any rate that some of them were
+exhibitional&mdash;even to my tender years, I mean; since I respond even yet
+to my privilege of presence at some Commencement or Commemoration, such
+as might be natural, doubtless, to any "university," where, as under a
+high rich roof, before a Chancellor in a gown and amid serried admirers
+and impressive applause, there was "speaking," of the finest sort, and
+where above all I gathered in as a dazzling example the rare assurance
+of young Winthrop Somebody or Somebody Winthrop, who, though still in
+jackets, held us spellbound by his rendering of Serjeant Buzfuz's
+exposure of Mr. Pickwick. Long was I to marvel at the high sufficiency
+of young Winthrop Somebody or Somebody Winthrop&mdash;in which romantic
+impression it is perhaps after all (though with the consecration of one
+or two of the novels of the once-admired Theodore of that name, which so
+remarkably insists, thrown in) the sense of the place is embalmed.</p>
+
+<p>I must not forget indeed that I throw in also<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> Mr. Coe&mdash;even if with
+less assured a hand; by way of a note on those higher flights of power
+and promise that I at this time began to see definitely determined in my
+brother. As I catch W. J.'s image, from far back, at its most
+characteristic, he sits drawing and drawing, always drawing, especially
+under the lamplight of the Fourteenth Street back parlour; and not as
+with a plodding patience, which I think would less have affected me, but
+easily, freely and, as who should say, infallibly: always at the stage
+of finishing off, his head dropped from side to side and his tongue
+rubbing his lower lip. I recover a period during which to see him at all
+was so to see him&mdash;the other flights and faculties removed him from my
+view. These were a matter of course&mdash;he recurred, he passed nearer, but
+in his moments of ease, and I clearly quite accepted the ease of his
+disappearances. Didn't he always when within my view light them up and
+justify them by renewed and enlarged vividness? so that my whole sense
+of him as formed for assimilations scarce conceivable made our gaps of
+contact too natural for me even to be lessons in humility. Humility had
+nothing to do with it&mdash;as little even as envy would have had; I was
+below humility, just as we were together outside of competition,
+mutually "hors concours." <i>His</i> competitions were with others&mdash;in which
+how wasn't he, how could he not be, successful? while mine were with
+nobody,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> or nobody's with me, which came to the same thing, as heaven
+knows I neither braved them nor missed them. That winter, as I recover
+it, represents him as sufficiently within view to make his position or
+whereabouts in the upper air definite&mdash;I must have taken it for granted
+before, but could now in a manner measure it; and the freshness of this
+sense, something serene in my complacency, had to do, I divine, with the
+effect of our moving, with the rest of our company, which was not
+numerous but practically, but appreciably "select," on a higher and
+fairer plane than ever yet. Predominantly of course we owed this benefit
+to Richard Pulling himself; of whom I recall my brother's saying to me,
+at a considerably later time, and with an authority that affected me as
+absolute, that he had been of all our masters the most truly genial, in
+fact the only one to whom the art of exciting an interest or inspiring a
+sympathy could be in any degree imputed. I take this to have meant that
+he would have adorned a higher sphere&mdash;and it may have been, to explain
+his so soon swimming out of our ken, that into a higher sphere he
+rapidly moved; I can account at least for our falling away from him the
+very next year and declining again upon baser things and a lower
+civilisation but by some probability of his flight, just thereafter
+effected, to a greater distance, to one of the far upper reaches of the
+town. Some years must have elapsed and some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> distinction have crowned
+him when, being briefly in New York together, W. J. and I called on him
+of a Sunday afternoon, to find&mdash;what I hadn't been at all sure of&mdash;that
+he still quite knew who we were, or handsomely pretended to; handsomely
+in spite of his markedly confirmed identity of appearance with the
+Punch, husband to Judy, of the funny papers and the street show. Bald,
+rotund, of ruddy complexion, with the nose, the chin, the arched eye,
+the paunch and the <i>barbiche</i>, to say nothing of the ferule nursed in
+his arms and with which, in the show, such free play is made, Mr. Jenks
+yet seems to me to have preserved a dignity as well as projected an
+image, and in fact have done other things besides. He whacked
+occasionally&mdash;he must have been one of the last of the whackers; but I
+don't remember it as ugly or dreadful or droll&mdash;don't remember, that is,
+either directly feeling or reflectively enjoying it: it fails somehow to
+break the spell of our civilisation; my share in which, however, comes
+back to me as merely contemplative. It is beyond measure odd, doubtless,
+that my main association with my "studies," whether of the infant or the
+adolescent order, should be with almost anything but the fact of
+learning&mdash;of learning, I mean, what I was supposed to learn. I could
+only have been busy, at the same time, with other pursuits&mdash;which must
+have borne some superficial likeness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> at least to the acquisition of
+knowledge of a free irresponsible sort; since I remember few either of
+the inward pangs or the outward pains of a merely graceless state. I
+recognise at the same time that it was perhaps a sorry business to be so
+interested in one didn't know what. Such are, whether at the worst or at
+the best, some of the aspects of that season as Mr. Jenks's image
+presides; in the light of which I <i>may</i> perhaps again rather wonder at
+my imputation to the general picture of so much amenity. Clearly the
+good man was a civiliser&mdash;whacks and all; and by some art not now to be
+detected. He was a complacent classic&mdash;which was what my brother's claim
+for him, I dare say, mostly represented; though that passed over the
+head of my tenth year. It was a good note for him in this particular
+that, deploring the facile text-books of Doctor Anthon of Columbia
+College, in which there was even more crib than text, and holding fast
+to the sterner discipline of Andrews and Stoddard and of that other more
+conservative commentator (he too doubtless long since superseded) whose
+name I blush to forget. I think in fine of Richard Pulling's small but
+sincere academy as a consistent little protest against its big and easy
+and quite out-distancing rival, the Columbia College school, apparently
+in those days quite the favourite of fortune.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XVI" id="XVI"></a>XVI</h2>
+
+<p>I must in some degree have felt it a charm there that we were not, under
+his rule, inordinately prepared for "business," but were on the contrary
+to remember that the taste of Cornelius Nepos in the air, even rather
+stale though it may have been, had lacked the black bitterness marking
+our next ordeal and that I conceive to have proceeded from some rank
+predominance of the theory and practice of book-keeping. It had
+consorted with this that we found ourselves, by I know not what
+inconsequence, a pair of the "assets" of a firm; Messrs. Forest and
+Quackenboss, who carried on business at the northwest corner of
+Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue, having for the winter of 1854-5
+taken our education in hand. As their establishment had the style, so I
+was conscious at the time of its having the general stamp and sense, of
+a shop&mdash;a shop of long standing, of numerous clients, of lively bustle
+and traffic. The structure itself was to my recent recognition still
+there and more than ever a shop, with improvements and extensions, but
+dealing in other wares than those anciently and as I suppose then quite
+freshly purveyed; so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> far at least as freshness was imputable to the
+senior member of the firm, who had come down to our generation from a
+legendary past and with a striking resemblance of head and general air
+to Benjamin Franklin. Mr. Forest, under whose more particular attention
+I languished, had lasted on from a plainer age and, having formed, by
+the legend, in their youth, the taste of two or three of our New York
+uncles&mdash;though for what it could have been goodness only knew&mdash;was still
+of a <i>trempe</i> to whack in the fine old way at their nephews and sons. I
+see him aloft, benevolent and hard, mildly massive, in a black dress
+coat and trousers and a white neckcloth that should have figured, if it
+didn't, a frill, and on the highest rostrum of our experience, whence he
+comes back to me as the dryest of all our founts of knowledge, though
+quite again as a link with far-off manners and forms and as the most
+"historic" figure we had ever had to do with. W. J., as I distinguish,
+had in truth scarcely to do with him&mdash;W. J. lost again on upper floors,
+in higher classes, in real pursuits, and connecting me, in an indirect
+and almost deprecated manner, with a strange, curly, glossy, an anointed
+and bearded, Mr. Quackenboss, the junior partner, who conducted the
+classical department and never whacked&mdash;only sent down his subjects,
+with every confidence, to his friend. I make out with clearness that Mr.
+Forest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> was awful and arid, and yet that somehow, by the same stroke, we
+didn't, under his sway, go in terror, only went exceedingly in want;
+even if in want indeed of I scarce (for myself) know what, since it
+might well have been enough for me, in so resounding an air, to escape
+with nothing worse than a failure of thrill. If I didn't feel that
+interest I must clearly not have inspired it, and I marvel afresh, under
+these memories, at the few points at which I appear to have touched
+constituted reality. That, however, is a different connection
+altogether, and I read back into the one I have been noting much of the
+chill, or at least the indifference, of a foreseen and foredoomed
+detachment: it was during that winter that I began to live by
+anticipation in another world and to feel our uneasy connection with New
+York loosen beyond recovery. I remember for how many months, when the
+rupture took place, we had been to my particular consciousness virtually
+in motion; though I regain at the same time the impression of more
+experience on the spot than had marked our small previous history: this,
+however, a branch of the matter that I must for the moment brush aside.
+For it would have been meanwhile odd enough to hold us in arrest a
+moment&mdash;that quality of our situation that could suffer such elements as
+those I have glanced at to take so considerably the place of education
+as more usually<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> and conventionally understood, and by that
+understanding more earnestly mapped out; a deficiency, in the whole
+thing, that I fail at all consistently to deplore, however&mdash;struck as I
+am with the rare fashion after which, in any small victim of life, the
+inward perversity may work.</p>
+
+<p>It works by converting to its uses things vain and unintended, to the
+great discomposure of their prepared opposites, which it by the same
+stroke so often reduces to naught; with the result indeed that one may
+most of all see it&mdash;so at least have I quite exclusively seen it, the
+little life out for its chance&mdash;as proceeding by the inveterate process
+of conversion. As I reconsider both my own and my brother's early
+start&mdash;even his too, made under stronger propulsions&mdash;it is quite for me
+as if the authors of our being and guardians of our youth had virtually
+said to us but one thing, directed our course but by one word, though
+constantly repeated: Convert, convert, convert! With which I have not
+even the sense of any needed appeal in us for further apprehension of
+the particular precious metal our chemistry was to have in view. I taste
+again in that pure air no ghost of a hint, for instance, that the
+precious metal was the refined gold of "success"&mdash;a reward of effort for
+which I remember to have heard at home no good word, nor any sort of
+word, ever faintly breathed. It was a case of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span>presumption that we
+should hear words enough abundantly elsewhere; so that any dignity the
+idea might claim was in the first place not worth insisting on, and in
+the second might well be overstated. We were to convert and convert,
+success&mdash;in the sense that was in the general air&mdash;or no success; and
+simply everything that should happen to us, every contact, every
+impression and every experience we should know, were to form our soluble
+stuff; with only ourselves to thank should we remain unaware, by the
+time our perceptions were decently developed, of the substance finally
+projected and most desirable. That substance might be just consummately
+Virtue, as a social grace and value&mdash;and as a matter furthermore on
+which pretexts for ambiguity of view and of measure were as little as
+possible called upon to flourish. This last luxury therefore quite
+failed us, and we understood no whit the less what was suggested and
+expected because of the highly liberal way in which the pill, if I may
+call it so, was gilded: it had been made up&mdash;to emphasise my image&mdash;in
+so bright an air of humanity and gaiety, of charity and humour. What I
+speak of is the medium itself, of course, that we were most immediately
+steeped in&mdash;I am glancing now at no particular turn of our young
+attitude in it, and I can scarce sufficiently express how little it
+could have conduced to the formation of prigs. Our father's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> prime
+horror was of <i>them</i>&mdash;he only cared for virtue that was more or less
+ashamed of itself; and nothing could have been of a happier whimsicality
+than the mixture in him, and in all his walk and conversation, of the
+strongest instinct for the human and the liveliest reaction from the
+literal. The literal played in our education as small a part as it
+perhaps ever played in any, and we wholesomely breathed inconsistency
+and ate and drank contradictions. The presence of paradox was so bright
+among us&mdash;though fluttering ever with as light a wing and as short a
+flight as need have been&mdash;that we fairly grew used to allow, from an
+early time, for the so many and odd declarations we heard launched, to
+the extent of happily "discounting" them; the moral of all of which was
+that we need never fear not to be good enough if we were only social
+enough: a splendid meaning indeed being attached to the latter term.</p>
+
+<p>Thus we had ever the amusement, since I can really call it nothing less,
+of hearing morality, or moralism, as it was more invidiously worded,
+made hay of in the very interest of character and conduct; these things
+suffering much, it seemed, by their association with the
+conscience&mdash;that is the <i>conscious</i> conscience&mdash;the very home of the
+literal, the haunt of so many pedantries. Pedantries, on all this
+ground, were anathema; and if our dear parent had at all minded his not
+being consistent,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> and had entertained about us generally less
+passionate an optimism (not an easy but an arduous state in him
+moreover,) he might have found it difficult to apply to the promotion of
+our studies so free a suspicion of the inhumanity of Method. Method
+certainly never quite raged among us; but it was our fortune
+nevertheless that everything had its turn, and that such indifferences
+were no more pedantic than certain rigours might perhaps have been; of
+all of which odd notes of our situation there would, and possibly will,
+be more to say&mdash;my present aim is really but to testify to what most
+comes up for me to-day in the queer educative air I have been trying to
+breathe again. That definite reflection is that if we had not had in us
+to some degree the root of the matter no method, however confessedly or
+aggressively "pedantic," would much have availed for us; and that since
+we apparently did have it, deep down and inert in our small patches of
+virgin soil, the fashion after which it struggled forth was an
+experience as intense as any other and a record of as great a dignity.
+It may be asked me, I recognise, of the root of "what" matter I so
+complacently speak, and if I say "Why, of the matter of our having with
+considerable intensity <i>proved</i> educable, or, if you like better,
+teachable, that is accessible to experience," it may again be retorted:
+"That won't do for a decent account of a young <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span>consciousness; for think
+of all the things that the failure of method, of which you make so
+light, didn't put into yours; think of the splendid economy of a
+real&mdash;or at least of a planned and attempted education, a 'regular
+course of instruction'&mdash;and then think of the waste involved in the so
+inferior substitute of which the pair of you were evidently victims." An
+admonition this on which I brood, less, however, than on the still other
+sense, rising from the whole retrospect, of my now feeling sure, of my
+having mastered the particular history of just that waste&mdash;to the point
+of its actually affecting me as blooming with interest, to the point
+even of its making me ask myself how in the world, if the question is of
+the injection of more things into the consciousness (as would seem the
+case,) mine could have "done" with more: thanks to its small trick,
+perhaps vicious I admit, of having felt itself from an early time almost
+uncomfortably stuffed. I see my critic, by whom I mean my representative
+of method at any price, take in this plea only to crush it with his
+confidence&mdash;that without the signal effects of method one must have had
+by an inexorable law to resort to shifts and ingenuities, and can
+therefore only have been an artful dodger more or less successfully
+dodging. I take full account of the respectability of the prejudice
+against one or two of the uses to which the intelligence may at a pinch
+be put&mdash;the criminal use in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>particular of falsifying its history, of
+forging its records even, and of appearing greater than the traceable
+grounds warrant. One can but fall back, none the less, on the particular
+<i>un</i>traceability of grounds&mdash;when it comes to that: cases abound so in
+which, with the grounds all there, the intelligence itself is not to be
+identified. I contend for nothing moreover but the lively interest of
+the view, and above all of the measure, of almost any mental history
+after the fact. Of less interest, comparatively, is that sight of the
+mind <i>before</i>&mdash;before the demonstration of the fact, that is, and while
+still muffled in theories and presumptions (purple and fine linen, and
+as such highly becoming though these be) of what shall prove best for
+it.</p>
+
+<p>Which doubtless too numerous remarks have been determined by my sense of
+the tenuity of some of my clues: I had begun to count our wavering steps
+from so very far back, and with a lively disposition, I confess, not to
+miss even the vaguest of them. I can scarce indeed overstate the
+vagueness that quite <i>had</i> to attend a great number in presence of the
+fact that our father, caring for our spiritual decency unspeakably more
+than for anything else, anything at all that might be or might become
+ours, would have seemed to regard this cultivation of it as profession
+and career enough for us, had he but betrayed more interest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> in our
+mastery of <i>any</i> art or craft. It was not certainly that the profession
+of virtue would have been anything less than abhorrent to him, but that,
+singular though the circumstance, there were times when he might have
+struck us as having after all more patience with it than with this, that
+or the other more technical thrifty scheme. Of the beauty of his
+dissimulated anxiety and tenderness on these and various other suchlike
+heads, however, other examples will arise; for I see him now as fairly
+afraid to recognise certain anxieties, fairly declining to dabble in the
+harshness of practical precautions or impositions. The effect of his
+attitude, so little thought out as shrewd or as vulgarly providential,
+but in spite of this so socially and affectionally founded, could only
+be to make life interesting to us at the worst, in default of making it
+extraordinarily "paying." He had a theory that it would somehow or other
+always be paying enough&mdash;and this much less by any poor conception of
+our wants (for he delighted in our wants and so sympathetically and
+sketchily and summarily wanted <i>for</i> us) than by a happy and friendly,
+though slightly nebulous, conception of our resources. Delighting ever
+in the truth while generously contemptuous of the facts, so far as we
+might make the difference&mdash;the facts having a way of being many and the
+truth remaining but one&mdash;he held that there would always be enough;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>
+since the truth, the true truth, was never ugly and dreadful, and we
+didn't and wouldn't depart from it by any cruelty or stupidity (for he
+wouldn't have had us stupid,) and might therefore depend on it for due
+abundance even of meat and drink and raiment, even of wisdom and wit and
+honour. It is too much to say that our so preponderantly humanised and
+socialised adolescence was to make us look out for these things with a
+subtle indirectness; but I return to my proposition that there may still
+be a charm in seeing such hazards at work through a given, even if not
+in a systematised, case. My cases are of course given, so that economy
+of observation after the fact, as I have called it, becomes inspiring,
+not less than the amusement, or whatever it may be, of the question of
+what might happen, of what in point of fact did happen, to several very
+towny and domesticated little persons, who were confirmed in their
+towniness and fairly enriched in their sensibility, instead of being
+chucked into a scramble or exposed on breezy uplands under the she-wolf
+of competition and discipline. Perhaps any success that attended the
+experiment&mdash;which was really, as I have hinted, no plotted thing at all,
+but only an accident of accidents&mdash;proceeded just from the fact that the
+small subjects, a defeated Romulus, a prematurely sacrificed Remus, had
+in their very sensibility an asset, as we have come to say, a principle
+of life<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> and even of "fun." Perhaps on the other hand the success would
+have been greater with less of that particular complication or
+facilitation and more of some other which I shall be at a loss to
+identify. What I find in my path happens to be the fact of the
+sensibility, and from the light it sheds the curious, as also the
+common, things that did from occasion to occasion play into it seem each
+to borrow a separate and vivifying glow.</p>
+
+<p>As at the Institution Vergn&egrave;s and at Mr. Pulling Jenks's, however this
+might be, so at "Forest's," or in other words at the more numerous
+establishment of Messrs. Forest and Quackenboss, where we spent the
+winter of 1854, reality, in the form of multitudinous mates, was to have
+swarmed about me increasingly: at Forest's the prolonged roll-call in
+the morning, as I sit in the vast bright crowded smelly smoky room, in
+which rusty black stove-shafts were the nearest hint of architecture,
+bristles with names, Hoes and Havemeyers, Stokeses, Phelpses, Colgates
+and others, of a subsequently great New York salience. It was sociable
+and gay, it was sordidly spectacular, one was then, by an inch or two, a
+bigger boy&mdash;though with crushing superiorities in that line all round;
+and when I wonder why the scene was sterile (which was what I took it
+for at the worst) the reason glooms out again in the dreadful blight of
+arithmetic, which affected me at the time as filling<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> all the air. The
+quantity imposed may not in fact have been positively gross, yet it is
+what I most definitely remember&mdash;not, I mean, that I have retained the
+dimmest notion of the science, but only of the dire image of our being
+in one way or another always supposedly addressed to it. I recall
+strange neighbours and deskfellows who, not otherwise too objectionable,
+were uncanny and monstrous through their possession, cultivation,
+imitation of ledgers, daybooks, double-entry, tall pages of figures,
+interspaces streaked with oblique ruled lines that weirdly "balanced,"
+whatever that might mean, and other like horrors. Nothing in truth is
+more distinct to me than the tune to which they were, without exception,
+at their ease on such ground&mdash;unless it be my general dazzled,
+humiliated sense, through those years, of the common, the baffling,
+mastery, all round me, of a hundred handy arts and devices. Everyone did
+things and had things&mdash;everyone knew how, even when it was a question of
+the small animals, the dormice and grasshoppers, or the hoards of food
+and stationery, that they kept in their desks, just as they kept in
+their heads such secrets for how to do sums&mdash;those secrets that I must
+even then have foreseen I should even so late in life as this have
+failed to discover. I may have known things, have by that time learnt a
+few, myself, but I didn't know <i>that</i>&mdash;what I did know; whereas<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> those
+who surrounded me were all agog, to my vision, with the benefit of their
+knowledge. I see them, in this light, across the years, fairly grin and
+grimace with it; and the presumable vulgarity of some of them, certain
+scattered shades of baseness still discernible, comes to me as but one
+of the appearances of an abounding play of genius. Who was it I ever
+thought stupid?&mdash;even when knowing, or at least feeling, that sundry
+expressions of life or force, which I yet had no name for, represented
+somehow art without grace, or (what after a fashion came to the same
+thing) presence without type. All of which, I should add, didn't in the
+least prevent my moving on the plane of the remarkable; so that if, as I
+have noted, the general blank of consciousness, in the conditions of
+that winter, rather tended to spread, this could perhaps have but had
+for its best reason that I was fairly gorged with wonders. They were too
+much of the same kind; the result, that is, of everyone's seeming to
+know everything&mdash;to the effect, a little, that everything suffered by
+it. There was a boy called Simpson my juxtaposition to whom I recall as
+uninterruptedly close, and whose origin can only have been, I think,
+quite immediately Irish&mdash;and Simpson, I feel sure, was a friendly and
+helpful character. Yet even he reeked, to my sense, with strange
+accomplishment&mdash;no single show of which but was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> accompanied in him by a
+smart protrusion of the lower lip, a crude complacency of power, that
+almost crushed me to sadness. It is as if I had passed in that sadness
+most of those ostensibly animated months; an effect however doubtless in
+some degree proceeding, for later appreciation, from the more
+intelligible nearness of the time&mdash;it had brought me to the end of my
+twelfth year; which helps not a little to turn it to prose. How I gave
+to that state, in any case, such an air of occupation as to beguile not
+only myself but my instructors&mdash;which I infer I did from their so
+intensely letting me alone&mdash;I am quite at a loss to say; I have in truth
+mainly the remembrance of <i>being</i> consistently either ignored or
+exquisitely considered (I know not which to call it;) even if without
+the belief, which would explain it, that I passed for generally
+"wanting" any more than for naturally odious. It was strange, at all
+events&mdash;it could only have been&mdash;to be so stupid without being more
+brutish and so perceptive without being more keen. Here were a case and
+a problem to which no honest master with other and better cases could
+have felt justified in giving time; he would have had at least to be
+morbidly curious, and I recall from that sphere of rule no instance
+whatever of the least refinement of inquiry. I should even probably have
+missed one of these more flattering shades of attention had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> I missed
+attention at all; but I think I was never really aware of how little I
+got or how much I did without. I read back into the whole connection
+indeed the chill, or at least the indifference, of a foreseen and
+foredoomed detachment: I have noted how at this desperate juncture the
+mild forces making for our conscious relief, pushing the door to Europe
+definitely open, began at last to be effective. Nothing seemed to matter
+at all but that I should become personally and incredibly acquainted
+with Piccadilly and Richmond Park and Ham Common. I regain at the same
+time the impression of more experience on the spot than had marked our
+small previous history.</p>
+
+<p>Pitiful as it looks to these ampler days the mere little fact that a
+small court for recreation was attached to our academy added something
+of a grace to life. We descended in relays, for "intermission," into a
+paved and walled yard of the scantest size; the only provision for any
+such privilege&mdash;not counting the street itself, of which, at the worst
+of other conditions, we must have had free range&mdash;that I recover from
+those years. The ground is built over now, but I could still figure, on
+a recent occasion, our small breathing-space; together with my then
+abject little sense that it richly sufficed&mdash;or rather, positively, that
+nothing could have been more romantic. For within our limit we freely
+conversed, and at nothing did<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> I assist with more interest than at free
+conversation. Certain boys hover before me, the biggest, the fairest,
+the most worthy of freedom, dominating the scene and scattering upon
+fifty subjects the most surprising lights. One of these heroes, whose
+stature and complexion are still there for me to admire, did tricks of
+legerdemain, with the scant apparatus of a handkerchief, a key, a
+pocket-knife&mdash;as to some one of which it is as fresh as yesterday that I
+ingenuously invited him to show me how to do it, and then, on his
+treating me with scorn, renewed without dignity my fond solicitation.
+Fresher even than yesterday, fadelessly fresh for me at this hour, is
+the cutting remark thereupon of another boy, who certainly wasn't
+Simpson and whose identity is lost for me in his mere inspired
+authority: "Oh, oh, oh, I should think you'd be too proud&mdash;!" I had
+neither been too proud nor so much as conceived that one might be, but I
+remember well how it flashed on me with this that I had failed thereby
+of a high luxury or privilege&mdash;which the whole future, however, might
+help me to make up for. To what extent it <i>has</i> helped is another
+matter, but so fine was the force of the suggestion that I think I have
+never in all the years made certain returns upon my spirit without again
+feeling the pang from the cool little voice of the Fourteenth Street
+yard. Such was the moral exercise it at least<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> allowed us room for. It
+also allowed us room, to be just, for an inordinate consumption of hot
+waffles retailed by a benevolent black "auntie" who presided, with her
+husband's aid as I remember, at a portable stove set up in a passage or
+recess opening from the court; to which we flocked and pushed, in a
+merciless squeeze, with all our coppers, and the products of which, the
+oblong farinaceous compound, faintly yet richly brown, stamped and
+smoking, not crisp nor brittle, but softly absorbent of the syrup dabbed
+upon it for a finish, revealed to me I for a long time, even for a very
+long time supposed, the highest pleasure of sense. We stamped about, we
+freely conversed, we ate sticky waffles by the hundred&mdash;I recall no
+worse acts of violence unless I count as such our intermissional rushes
+to Pynsent's of the Avenue, a few doors off, in the particular interest
+of a confection that ran the waffle close, as the phrase is, for
+popularity, while even surpassing it for stickiness. Pynsent's was
+higher up in the row in which Forest's had its front&mdash;other and dearer
+names have dropped from me, but Pynsent's adheres with all the force of
+the strong saccharine principle. This principle, at its highest, we
+conceived, was embodied in small amber-coloured mounds of chopped
+cocoanut or whatever other substance, if a finer there be; profusely,
+lusciously endued and distributed on small tin trays in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> manner of
+haycocks in a field. We acquired, we appropriated, we transported, we
+enjoyed them, they fairly formed perhaps, after all, our highest
+enjoyment; but with consequences to our pockets&mdash;and I speak of those
+other than financial, with an intimacy, a reciprocity of contact at any,
+or at every, personal point, that I lose myself in the thought of.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XVII" id="XVII"></a>XVII</h2>
+
+<p>I lose myself, of a truth, under the whole pressure of the spring of
+memory proceeding from recent revisitings and recognitions&mdash;the action
+of the fact that time until lately had spared hereabouts, and may still
+be sparing, in the most exceptional way, by an anomaly or a mercy of the
+rarest in New York, a whole cluster of landmarks, leaving me to "spot"
+and verify, right and left, the smallest preserved particulars. These
+things, at the pressure, flush together again, interweave their pattern
+and quite thrust it at me, the absurd little fusion of images, for a
+history or a picture of the time&mdash;the background of which I see after
+all so much less as the harsh Sixth Avenue corner than as many other
+matters. Those scant shades claimed us but briefly and superficially,
+and it comes back to me that oddly enough, in the light of autumn
+afternoons, our associates, the most animated or at any rate the best
+"put in" little figures of our landscape, were not our comparatively
+obscure schoolmates, who seem mostly to have swum out of our ken between
+any day and its morrow. Our other companions, those we practically knew
+"at home," ignored our school,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> having better or worse of their own, but
+peopled somehow for us the social scene, which, figuring there for me in
+documentary vividness, bristles with Van Burens, Van Winkles, De
+Peysters, Costers, Senters, Norcoms, Robinsons (these last composing
+round a stone-throwing "Eugene,") Wards, Hunts and <i>tutti quanti</i>&mdash;to
+whose ranks I must add our invariable Albert, before-mentioned, and who
+swarm from up and down and east and west, appearing to me surely to have
+formed a rich and various society. Our salon, it is true, was mainly the
+street, loose and rude and crude in those days at best&mdash;though with a
+rapid increase of redeeming features, to the extent to which the spread
+of micaceous brown stone could redeem: as exhibited especially in the
+ample face of the Scotch Presbyterian church promptly rising just
+opposite our own peculiar row and which it now marks for me somewhat
+grimly a span of life to have seen laboriously rear itself, continuously
+flourish and utterly disappear. While in construction it was only less
+interesting than the dancing-academy of Mr. Edward Ferrero, slightly
+west of it and forming with it, in their embryonic stage, a large and
+delightfully dangerous adjunct to our playground, though with the
+distinction of coming much to surpass it for interest in the final
+phase. While we clambered about on ladders and toyed with the peril of
+unfloored abysses, while<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> we trespassed and pried and pervaded,
+snatching a scant impression from sorry material enough, clearly, the
+sacred edifice enjoyed a credit beyond that of the profane; but when
+both were finished and opened we flocked to the sound of the fiddle more
+freely, it need scarce be said, than to that of the psalm. "Freely"
+indeed, in our particular case, scarce expresses the latter relation;
+since our young liberty in respect to church-going was absolute and we
+might range at will, through the great city, from one place of worship
+and one form of faith to another, or might on occasion ignore them all
+equally, which was what we mainly did; whereas we rallied without a
+break to the halls of Ferrero, a view of the staringly and, as I
+supposed dazzlingly, frescoed walls, the internal economy, the high
+amenity, the general &aelig;sthetic and social appeal, of which still hangs in
+its wealth before me. Dr. McElroy, uplifting tight-closed eyes, strange
+long-drawn accents and gaunt scraggy chin, squirming and swaying and
+cushion-thumping in <i>his</i> only a shade more chastely adorned temple, is
+distinct enough too&mdash;just as we enjoyed this bleak intensity the more,
+to my personal vision, through the vague legend (and no legend was too
+vague for me to cherish) of his being the next pastor in succession to
+the one under whom our mother, thereto predirected by our good
+greatgrandfather, Alexander Robertson already named,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> who was nothing if
+not Scotch and Presbyterian and authoritative, as his brave old portrait
+by the elder Jarves attests, had "sat" before her marriage; the marriage
+so lamentedly diverting her indeed from this tradition that, to mark the
+rueful rupture, it had invoked, one evening, with the aid of India
+muslin and a wondrous gold headband, in the maternal, the Washington
+Square "parlours," but the secular nuptial consecration of the then
+Mayor of the city&mdash;I think Mr. Varick.</p>
+
+<p>We progeny were of course after this mild convulsion not at all in the
+fold; yet it strikes me as the happy note of a simple age that we were
+practically, of a Sunday at least, wherever we might have chosen to
+enter: since, going forth hand in hand into the sunshine (and I connect
+myself here with my next younger, not with my elder, brother, whose
+orbit was other and larger) we sampled, in modern phrase, as small
+unprejudiced inquirers obeying their inspiration, any resort of any
+congregation detected by us; doing so, I make out moreover, with a sense
+of earnest provision for any contemporary challenge. "What church do you
+go to?"&mdash;the challenge took in childish circles that searching form; of
+the form it took among our elders my impression is more vague. To which
+I must add as well that our "fending" in this fashion for ourselves
+didn't so prepare us for invidious remark&mdash;remark I mean upon our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>
+pewless state, which involved, to my imagination, much the same
+discredit that a houseless or a cookless would have done&mdash;as to hush in
+my breast the appeal to our parents, not for religious instruction (of
+which we had plenty, and of the most charming and familiar) but simply
+for instruction (a very different thing) as to where we should say we
+"went," in our world, under cold scrutiny or derisive comment. It was
+colder than any criticism, I recall, to hear our father reply that we
+could plead nothing less than the whole privilege of Christendom and
+that there was no communion, even that of the Catholics, even that of
+the Jews, even that of the Swedenborgians, from which we need find
+ourselves excluded. With the freedom we enjoyed our dilemma clearly
+amused him: it would have been impossible, he affirmed, to be
+theologically more <i>en r&egrave;gle</i>. How as mere detached unaccompanied
+infants we enjoyed such impunity of range and confidence of welcome is
+beyond comprehension save by the light of the old manners and
+conditions, the old local bonhomie, the comparatively primal innocence,
+the absence of complications; with the several notes of which last
+beatitude my reminiscence surely shines. It was the theory of the time
+and place that the young, were they but young enough, could take
+publicly no harm; to which adds itself moreover, and touchingly enough,
+all the difference of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> old importances. It wasn't doubtless that the
+social, or call it simply the human, position of the child was higher
+than to-day&mdash;a circumstance not conceivable; it was simply that other
+dignities and values and claims, other social and human positions, were
+less definite and settled, less prescriptive and absolute. A rich
+sophistication is after all a gradual growth, and it would have been
+sophisticated to fear for us, before such bright and vacant vistas, the
+perils of the way or to see us received anywhere even with the irony of
+patronage. We hadn't in fact seats of honour, but that justice was done
+us&mdash;that is that we were placed to our advantage&mdash;I infer from my having
+liked so to "go," even though my grounds may have been but the love of
+the <i>exhibition</i> in general, thanks to which figures, faces, furniture,
+sounds, smells and colours became for me, wherever enjoyed, and enjoyed
+most where most collected, a positive little orgy of the senses and riot
+of the mind. Let me at the same time make the point that&mdash;such may be
+the snobbery of extreme youth&mdash;I not only failed quite to rise to the
+parental reasoning, but made out in it rather a certain sophistry; such
+a prevarication for instance as if we had habitually said we kept the
+carriage we observably didn't keep, kept it because we sent when we
+wanted one to University Place, where Mr. Hathorn had his
+livery-stable:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> a connection, this last, promoted by my father's
+frequent need of the aid to circulate (his walks were limited through an
+injury received in youth) and promoting in turn and at a touch, to my
+consciousness, the stir of small, the smallest remembered things. I
+recall the adventure, no infrequent one, of being despatched to Mr.
+Hathorn to bespeak a conveyance, and the very air and odour, the genial
+warmth, at a fine steaming Irish pitch, of the stables and their
+stamping and backing beasts, their resounding boardedness, their chairs
+tipped up at such an angle for lifted heels, a pair of which latter seek
+the floor again, at my appeal, as those of big bearded Mr. Hathorn
+himself: an impression enriched by the drive home in lolling and bumping
+possession of the great vehicle and associated further with Sunday
+afternoons in spring, with the question of distant Harlem and remoter
+Bloomingdale, with the experience at one of these junctures of far-away
+Hoboken, if it wasn't Williamsburg, which fits in fancifully somewhere;
+when the carriage was reinforced by a ferry and the ferry by something,
+something to my present vision very dim and dusty and archaic, something
+quite ragged and graceless, in the nature of a public tea-garden and
+ices. The finest link here, however, is, for some reason, with the New
+York Hotel, and thereby with Albany uncles; thereby also with Mr.
+Hathorn in person waiting and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>waiting expensively on his box before the
+house and somehow felt as attuned to Albany uncles even as Mrs. Cannon
+had subtly struck me as being.</p>
+
+<p>Intenser than these vague shades meanwhile is my vision of the halls of
+Ferrero&mdash;where the orgy of the senses and even the riot of the mind, of
+which I have just spoken, must quite literally have led me more of a
+dance than anywhere. Let this sketch of a lost order note withal that
+under so scant a general provision for infant exercise, as distinguished
+from infant ease, our hopping and sliding in tune had to be deemed
+urgent. It was the sense for this form of relief that clearly was
+general, superseding as the ampler Ferrero scene did previous limited
+exhibitions; even those, for that matter, coming back to me in the
+ancient person of M. Charriau&mdash;I guess at the writing of his name&mdash;whom
+I work in but confusedly as a professional visitor, a subject gaped at
+across a gulf of fear, in one of our huddled schools; all the more that
+I perfectly evoke him as resembling, with a difference or two, the
+portraits of the aged Voltaire, and that he had, fiddle in hand and
+<i>jarret tendu</i>, incited the young agility of our mother and aunt. Edward
+Ferrero was another matter; in the prime of life, good-looking, romantic
+and moustachio'd, he was suddenly to figure, on the outbreak of the
+Civil War, as a General of volunteers&mdash;very much as if he had been one
+of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>Bonaparte's improvised young marshals; in anticipation of which,
+however, he wasn't at all fierce or superior, to my remembrance, but
+most kind to sprawling youth, in a charming man of the world fashion and
+as if <i>we</i> wanted but a touch to become also men of the world.
+Remarkably good-looking, as I say, by the measure of that period, and
+extraordinarily agile&mdash;he could so gracefully leap and bound that his
+bounding into the military saddle, such occasion offering, had all the
+felicity, and only wanted the pink fleshings, of the circus&mdash;he was
+still more admired by the mothers, with whom he had to my eyes a most
+elegant relation, than by the pupils; among all of whom, at the frequent
+and delightful soir&eacute;es, he caused trays laden with lucent syrups
+repeatedly to circulate. The scale of these entertainments, as I figured
+it, and the florid frescoes, just damp though they were with newness,
+and the free lemonade, and the freedom of remark, equally great, with
+the mothers, were the lavish note in him&mdash;just as the fact that he never
+himself fiddled, but was followed, over the shining parquet, by
+attendant fiddlers, represented doubtless a shadow the less on his later
+dignity, so far as that dignity was compassed. Dignity marked in full
+measure even at the time the presence of his sister Madame Dubreuil, a
+handsome authoritative person who instructed us equally, in fact
+preponderantly, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> who, though comparatively not sympathetic, so
+engaged, physiognomically, my wondering interest, that I hear to this
+hour her shrill Franco-American accent: "Don't look at <i>me</i>, little
+boy&mdash;look at my feet." I see them now, these somewhat fat members,
+beneath the uplifted skirt, encased in "bronzed" slippers, without heels
+but attached, by graceful cross-bands over her white stockings, to her
+solid ankles&mdash;an emphatic sign of the time; not less than I recover my
+surprised sense of their supporting her without loss of balance,
+substantial as she was, in the "first position"; her command of which,
+her ankles clapped close together and her body very erect, was so
+perfect that even with her toes, right and left, fairly turning the
+corner backward, she never fell prone on her face.</p>
+
+<p>It consorted somehow with this wealth of resource in her that she
+appeared at the soir&eacute;es, or at least at the great fancy-dress soir&eacute;e in
+which the historic truth of my experience, free lemonade and all, is
+doubtless really shut up, as the "genius of California," a dazzling
+vision of white satin and golden flounces&mdash;her brother meanwhile
+maintaining that more distinctively European colour which I feel to have
+been for my young presumption the convincing essence of the scene in the
+character of a mousquetaire de Louis Quinze, highly consonant with his
+type. There hovered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> in the background a flushed, full-chested and
+tawnily short-bearded M. Dubreuil, who, as a singer of the heavy order,
+at the Opera, carried us off into larger things still&mdash;the Opera having
+at last about then, after dwelling for years, down town, in shifty tents
+and tabernacles, set up its own spacious pavilion and reared its head as
+the Academy of Music: all at the end, or what served for the end, of our
+very street, where, though it wasn't exactly near and Union Square
+bristled between, I could yet occasionally gape at the great bills
+beside the portal, in which M. Dubreuil always so serviceably came in at
+the bottom of the cast. A subordinate artist, a "grand utility" at the
+best, I believe, and presently to become, on that scene, slightly ragged
+I fear even in its freshness, permanent stage-manager or, as we say
+nowadays, producer, he had yet eminently, to my imagination, the richer,
+the "European" value; especially for instance when our air thrilled, in
+the sense that our attentive parents re-echoed, with the visit of the
+great Grisi and the great Mario, and I seemed, though the art of
+advertisement was then comparatively so young and so chaste, to see our
+personal acquaintance, as he could almost be called, thickly sandwiched
+between them. Such was one's strange sense for the connections of things
+that they drew out the halls of Ferrero till these too seemed fairly to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span>resound with Norma and Lucrezia Borgia, as if opening straight upon the
+stage, and Europe, by the stroke, had come to us in such force that we
+had but to enjoy it on the spot. That could never have been more the
+case than on the occasion of my assuming, for the famous fancy-ball&mdash;not
+at the operatic Academy, but at the dancing-school, which came so nearly
+to the same thing&mdash;the dress of a d&eacute;bardeur, whatever that might be,
+which carried in its puckered folds of dark green relieved with scarlet
+and silver such an exotic fragrance and appealed to me by such a legend.
+The legend had come round to us, it was true, by way of Albany, whence
+we learned at the moment of our need, that one of the adventures, one of
+the least lamentable, of our cousin Johnny had been his figuring as a
+d&eacute;bardeur at some Parisian revel; the elegant evidence of which, neatly
+packed, though with but vague instructions for use, was helpfully sent
+on to us. The instructions for use were in fact so vague that I was
+afterward to become a bit ruefully conscious of having sadly
+dishonoured, or at least abbreviated, my model. I fell, that is I stood,
+short of my proper form by no less than half a leg; the essence of the
+d&eacute;bardeur being, it appeared, that he emerged at the knees, in white
+silk stockings and with neat calves, from the beribboned breeches which
+I artlessly suffered to flap at my ankles. The discovery, after the
+fact,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> was disconcerting&mdash;yet had been best made withal, too late; for
+it would have seemed, I conceive, a less monstrous act to attempt to
+lengthen my legs than to shorten Johnny's <i>culotte</i>. The trouble had
+been that we hadn't really known what a d&eacute;bardeur <i>was</i>, and I am not
+sure indeed that I know to this day. It had been more fatal still that
+even fond Albany couldn't tell us.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XVIII" id="XVIII"></a>XVIII</h2>
+
+<p>I have nevertheless the memory of a restless relish of all that time&mdash;by
+which I mean of those final months of New York, even with so scant a
+record of other positive successes to console me. I had but one success,
+always&mdash;that of endlessly supposing, wondering, admiring: I was sunk in
+that luxury, which had never yet been so great, and it might well make
+up for anything. It made up perfectly, and more particularly as the
+stopgap as which I have already defined it, for the scantness of the
+period immediately round us; since how could I have wanted richer when
+the limits of reality, as I advanced upon them, seemed ever to recede
+and recede? It is true that but the other day, on the scene revisited, I
+was to be struck rather as by their weird immobility: there on the north
+side, still untenanted after sixty years, a tremendous span in the life
+of New York, was the vacant lot, undiminished, in which a friendly goat
+or two used to browse, whom we fed perversely with scraps of paper, just
+as perversely appreciated indeed, through the relaxed wooden palings.
+There hovers for me an impression of the glass roofs of a florist, a
+suffered squatter for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> a while; but florists and goats have alike
+disappeared and the barrenness of the place is as sordid as only
+untended gaps in great cities can seem. One of its boundaries, however,
+still breathes associations&mdash;the home of the Wards, the more eastward of
+a pair of houses then and still isolated has remained the same through
+all vicissitudes, only now quite shabbily mellow and, like everything
+else, much smaller than one had remembered it; yet this too without
+prejudice to the large, the lustrous part played in our prospect by that
+interesting family. I saddle their mild memory a bit "subjectively"
+perhaps with the burden of that character&mdash;making out that they were
+interesting really in spite of themselves and as unwittingly as M.
+Jourdain expressed himself in prose; owing their wild savour as they did
+to that New England stamp which we took to be strong upon them and no
+other exhibition of which we had yet enjoyed. It made them different,
+made them, in their homely grace, rather aridly romantic: I pored in
+those days over the freshness of the Franconia Stories of the brothers
+Abbott, then immediately sequent to the sweet Rollo series and even more
+admired; and there hung about the Wards, to my sense, that atmosphere of
+apples and nuts and cheese, of pies and jack-knives and "squrruls," of
+domestic Bible-reading and attendance at "evening lecture," of the fear
+of parental discipline and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> the cultivated art of dodging it, combined
+with great personal toughness and hardihood, an almost envied liability
+to warts on hard brown hands, a familiarity with garments domestically
+wrought, a brave rusticity in short that yet hadn't prevented the
+annexation of whole tracts of town life unexplored by ourselves and
+achieved by the brothers since their relatively recent migration from
+Connecticut&mdash;which State in general, with the city of Hartford in
+particular, hung as a hazy, fruity, rivery background, the very essence
+of Indian summer, in the rear of their discourse. Three in number,
+Johnny and Charley and Freddy, with castigating elders, even to the
+second and third generation back, dimly discerned through closed
+window-panes, they didn't at all haunt the halls of Ferrero&mdash;it was a
+part of their homely grace and their social tone, if not of their want
+of the latter, that this couldn't in the least be in question for them;
+on the other hand they frequented, Charley and Freddy at least, the Free
+School, which was round in Thirteenth Street&mdash;Johnny, the eldest, having
+entered the Free Academy, an institution that loomed large to us and
+that I see as towered or castellated or otherwise impressively
+embellished in vague vignettes, in stray representations, perhaps only
+of the grey schoolbook order, which are yet associated for me with those
+fond images of lovely ladies, "hand-painted," <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span>decorating at either end
+the interior of the old omnibusses. We must have been in relation with
+no other feeders at the public trough of learning&mdash;I can't account
+otherwise for the glamour as of envied privilege and strange experience
+that surrounded the Wards; they mixed, to the great sharpening of the
+edge of their wit, in the wild life <i>of</i> the people, beside which the
+life at Mr. Pulling Jenks's and even at the Institution Vergn&egrave;s was
+colourless and commonplace. Somehow they were of the people, and still
+were full of family forms&mdash;which seemed, one dimly made out through the
+false perspective of all the cousinships, the stronger and clearer note
+of New England; the note that had already determined a shy yearning
+under perusal of the Rollo and Franconia chronicles. The special mark of
+these friends was perhaps however that of being socially young while
+they were annually old; little Freddy in particular, very short, very
+inured and very popular, though less curiously wrinkled about eyes and
+mouth than Charley, confessed to monstrous birthdays even while
+crouching or hopping, even while racing or roaring, as a high
+superiority in the games of the street prescribed. It was to strike me
+later on, when reading or hearing of young Americans of those parts who
+had turned "hard" or reckless by reaction from excessive discipline,
+theologic and economic, and had gone to sea or to California or to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> the
+"bad," that Freddy and Charley were typical of the race, even if their
+fortunes had taken, as I hoped, a happier form. That, I said to myself
+for the interest of it, <i>that</i>, the stuff of the Wards, their homely
+grace, was all New England&mdash;so far at least as New England wasn't
+Emerson and Margaret Fuller and Mr. Channing and the "best Boston"
+families. Such, in small very plastic minds, is the intensity, if not
+the value, of early impressions.</p>
+
+<p>And yet how can such visions not have paled in the southern glow of the
+Norcoms, who had lately arrived <i>en masse</i> from Louisville and had
+improvised a fine old Kentucky home in the last house of our row&mdash;the
+one to be occupied so differently, after their strange and precipitate
+flight, as I dimly make out, by the Ladies of the Sacred Heart; those
+who presently, if I mistake not, moved out to Bloomingdale, if they were
+not already in part established there. Next us westward were the Ogdens,
+three slim and fair sisters, who soared far above us in age and general
+amenity; then came the Van Winkles, two sisters, I think, and a
+brother&mdash;he much the most serious and judicious, as well as the most
+educated, of our friends; and so at last the Norcoms, during their brief
+but concentrated, most vivid and momentous, reign, a matter, as I recall
+it, of a couple of breathless winters. We were provided by their
+presence with as happy a foil<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> as we could have wished to the plainness
+and dryness of the Wards; their homely grace was all their own and was
+also embodied in three brothers, Eugene, Reginald, Albert, whose ages
+would have corresponded, I surmise, with those of Johnny, Charley and
+Freddy if these latter hadn't, in their way, as I have hinted, defied
+any close notation. Elder sons&mdash;there were to my recollection no
+daughters&mdash;moved too as with their heads in the clouds; notably
+"Stiffy," eldest of all, whom we supposed gorgeous, who affected us as
+sublime and unapproachable and to whom we thus applied the term in use
+among us before we had acquired for reference to such types the notion
+of the <i>nuance</i>, the dandy, the dude, the masher. (Divided I was, I
+recall, between the dread and the glory of being so greeted, "Well,
+Stiffy&mdash;!" as a penalty of the least attempt at personal adornment.) The
+higher intensity for our sense of the Norcoms came from the large, the
+lavish, ease of their hospitality; whereas our intercourse with the
+Wards was mainly in the street or at most the "yard"&mdash;and it was a
+wonder how intimacy <i>could</i> to that degree consort with publicity. A
+glazed southern gallery, known to its occupants as the "poo'ch" and to
+the rake of which their innermost penetralia seemed ever to stand open,
+encompasses my other memories. Everything took place on the poo'ch,
+including the free, quite the profuse, consumption<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> of hot cakes and
+molasses, including even the domestic manufacture of sausages, testified
+to by a strange machine that was worked like a handorgan and by the
+casual halves, when not the wholes, of stark stiff hogs fresh from
+Kentucky stores. We must have been for a time constantly engaged with
+this delightful group, who never ceased to welcome us or to feed us, and
+yet of the presence of whose members under other roofs than their own,
+by a return of hospitality received, I retain no image. They didn't
+count and didn't grudge&mdash;the sausage-mill kept turning and the molasses
+flowing for all who came; that was the expression of their southern
+grace, especially embodied in Albert, my exact contemporary and chosen
+friend (Reggie had but crushed my fingers under the hinge of a closing
+door, the mark of which act of inadvertence I was to carry through
+life,) who had profuse and tightly-crinkled hair, and the moral of whose
+queer little triangular brown teeth, casting verily a shade on my
+attachment to him, was pointed for me, not by himself, as the error of a
+Kentucky diet.</p>
+
+<p>The great Kentucky error, however, had been the introduction into a free
+State of two pieces of precious property which our friends were to fail
+to preserve, the pair of affectionate black retainers whose presence
+contributed most to their exotic note. We revelled in the fact that Davy
+and Aunt<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> Sylvia (pronounced An'silvy,) a light-brown lad with
+extraordinarily shining eyes and his straight, grave, deeper-coloured
+mother, not radiant as to anything but her vivid turban, had been born
+and kept in slavery of the most approved pattern and such as this
+intensity of their condition made them a joy, a joy to the curious mind,
+to consort with. Davy mingled in our sports and talk, he enriched, he
+adorned them with a personal, a pictorial lustre that none of us could
+emulate, and servitude in the absolute thus did more for him socially
+than we had ever seen done, above stairs or below, for victims of its
+lighter forms. What was not our dismay therefore when we suddenly
+learnt&mdash;it must have blown right up and down the street&mdash;that mother and
+son had fled, in the dead of night, from bondage? had taken advantage of
+their visit to the North simply to leave the house and not return,
+covering their tracks, successfully disappearing. They had never been
+for us so beautifully slaves as in this achievement of their freedom;
+for they did brilliantly achieve it&mdash;they escaped, on northern soil,
+beyond recall or recovery. I think we had already then, on the spot, the
+sense of some degree of presence at the making of history; the question
+of what persons of colour and of their condition might or mightn't do
+was intensely in the air; this was exactly the season of the freshness
+of Mrs. Stowe's great novel.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> It must have come out at the moment of our
+fondest acquaintance with our neighbours, though I have no recollection
+of hearing them remark upon it&mdash;any remark they made would have been
+sure to be so strong. I suspect they hadn't read it, as they certainly
+wouldn't have allowed it in the house; any more indeed than they had
+read or were likely ever to read any other work of fiction; I doubt
+whether the house contained a printed volume, unless its head had had in
+hand a law-book or so: I to some extent recover Mr. Norcom as a lawyer
+who had come north on important, difficult business, on contentious,
+precarious grounds&mdash;a large bald political-looking man, very loose and
+ungirt, just as his wife was a desiccated, depressed lady who mystified
+me by always wearing her nightcap, a feebly-frilled but tightly-tied and
+unmistakable one, and the compass of whose maternal figure beneath a
+large long collarless cape or mantle defined imperfectly for me of
+course its connection with the further increase of Albert's little
+brothers and sisters, there being already, by my impression, two or
+three of these in the background. Had Davy and An'silvy at least read
+Uncle Tom?&mdash;that question might well come up for us, with the certainty
+at any rate that they ignored him less than their owners were doing.
+These latter good people, who had been so fond of their humble
+dependents<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> and supposed this affection returned, were shocked at such
+ingratitude, though I remember taking a vague little inward Northern
+comfort in their inability, in their discreet decision, not to raise the
+hue and cry. Wasn't one even just dimly aware of the heavy hush that, in
+the glazed gallery, among the sausages and the johnny-cakes, had
+followed the first gasp of resentment? I think the honest Norcoms were
+in any case astonished, let alone being much incommoded; just as <i>we</i>
+were, for that matter, when the genial family itself, installed so at
+its ease, failed us with an effect of abruptness, simply ceased, in
+their multitude, to be there. I don't remember their going, nor any
+pangs of parting; I remember only knowing with wonderment that they had
+gone, that obscurity had somehow engulfed them; and how afterwards, in
+the light of later things, memory and fancy attended them, figured their
+history as the public complication grew and the great intersectional
+plot thickened; felt even, absurdly and disproportionately, that they
+had helped one to "know Southerners." The slim, the sallow, the
+straight-haired and dark-eyed Eugene in particular haunted my
+imagination; he had not been my comrade of election&mdash;he was too much my
+senior; but I cherished the thought of the fine fearless young
+fire-eater he would have become and, when the War had broken out, I know
+not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span> what dark but pitying vision of him stretched stark after a battle.</p>
+
+<p>All of which sounds certainly like a meagre range&mdash;which heaven knows it
+was; but with a plea for the several attics, already glanced at, and the
+positive &aelig;sthetic reach that came to us through those dim resorts, quite
+worth making. They were scattered and they constituted on the part of
+such of our friends as had license to lead us up to them a ground of
+authority and glory proportioned exactly to the size of the field. This
+extent was at cousin Helen's, with a large house and few inmates, vast
+and free, so that no hospitality, under the eaves, might have matched
+that offered us by the young Albert&mdash;if only that heir of all the ages
+had had rather more imagination. He had, I think, as little as was
+possible&mdash;which would have counted in fact for an unmitigated blank had
+not W. J., among us, on that spot and elsewhere, supplied this motive
+force in any quantity required. He imagined&mdash;that was the point&mdash;the
+comprehensive comedies we were to prepare and to act; comprehensive by
+the fact that each one of us, even to the God-fearing but
+surreptitiously law-breaking Wards, was in fairness to be enabled to
+figure. Not one of us but was somehow to be provided with a part, though
+I recall my brother as the constant comic star. The attics were thus in
+a word our respective temples of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> drama&mdash;temples in which the stage,
+the green-room and the wardrobe, however, strike me as having consumed
+most of our margin. I remember, that is, up and down the street&mdash;and the
+association is mainly with its far westward reaches&mdash;so much more
+preparation than performance, so much more conversation and costume than
+active rehearsal, and, on the part of some of us, especially doubtless
+on my own, so much more eager denudation, both of body and mind, than of
+achieved or inspired assumption. We shivered unclad and impatient both
+as to our persons and to our aims, waiting alike for ideas and for
+breeches; we were supposed to make our dresses no less than to create
+our characters, and our material was in each direction apt to run short.
+I remember how far ahead of us my brother seemed to keep, announcing a
+"motive," producing a figure, throwing off into space conceptions that I
+could stare at across the interval but couldn't appropriate; so that my
+vision of him in these connections is not so much of his coming toward
+me, or toward any of us, as of his moving rapidly away in fantastic garb
+and with his back turned, as if to perform to some other and more
+assured public. There were indeed other publics, publics downstairs, who
+glimmer before me seated at the open folding-doors of ancient parlours,
+but all from the point of view of an absolute supernumerary, more or
+less squashed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> into the wing but never coming on. Who were the copious
+Hunts?&mdash;whose ample house, on the north side, toward Seventh Avenue,
+still stands, next or near that of the De Peysters, so that I perhaps
+confound some of the attributes of each, though clear as to the blond
+Beekman, or "Beek," of the latter race, not less than to the robust
+George and the stout, the very stout, Henry of the former, whom I see
+bounding before a gathered audience for the execution of a <i>pas seul</i>,
+clad in a garment of "Turkey red" fashioned by his own hands and giving
+way at the seams, to a complete absence of <i>dessous</i>, under the strain
+of too fine a figure: this too though I make out in those connections,
+that is in the twilight of Hunt and De Peyster garrets, our command of a
+comparative welter of draperies; so that I am reduced to the surmise
+that Henry indeed had contours.</p>
+
+<p>I recover, further, some sense of the high places of the Van Winkles,
+but think of them as pervaded for us by the upper air of the
+proprieties, the proprieties that were so numerous, it would appear,
+when once one had had a glimpse of them, rather than by the crude fruits
+of young improvisation. Wonderful must it clearly have been still to fed
+amid laxities and vaguenesses such a difference of <i>milieux</i> and, as
+they used to say, of atmospheres. This was a word of those
+days&mdash;atmospheres were a thing to recognise and cultivate, for people<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span>
+really wanted them, gasped for them; which was why they took them, on
+the whole, on easy terms, never exposing them, under an apparent flush,
+to the last analysis. Did we at any rate really vibrate to one social
+tone after another, or are these adventures for me now but fond
+imaginations? No, we vibrated&mdash;or I'll be hanged, as I may say, if <i>I</i>
+didn't; little as I could tell it or may have known it, little as anyone
+else may have known. There were shades, after all, in our democratic
+order; in fact as I brood back to it I recognise oppositions the
+sharpest, contrasts the most intense. It wasn't given to us all to have
+a social tone, but the Costers surely had one and kept it in constant
+use; whereas the Wards, next door to them, were possessed of no approach
+to any, and indeed had the case been other, had they had such a
+consciousness, would never have employed it, would have put it away on a
+high shelf, as they put the last-baked pie, out of Freddy's and
+Charley's reach&mdash;heaven knows what <i>they</i> two would have done with it.
+The Van Winkles on the other hand were distinctly so provided, but with
+the special note that their provision was one, so to express it, with
+their educational, their informational, call it even their professional:
+Mr. Van Winkle, if I mistake not, was an eminent lawyer, and the note of
+our own house was the absence of any profession, to the quickening of
+our <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span>general as distinguished from our special sensibility. There was no
+Turkey red among those particular neighbours at all events, and if there
+had been it wouldn't have gaped at the seams. I didn't then know it, but
+I sipped at a fount of culture; in the sense, that is, that, our
+connection with the house being through Edgar, he knew about
+things&mdash;inordinately, as it struck me. So, for that matter, did little
+public Freddy Ward; but the things one of them knew about differed
+wholly from the objects of knowledge of the other: all of which was
+splendid for giving one exactly a sense of things. It intimated more and
+more how many such there would be altogether. And part of the interest
+was that while Freddy gathered his among the wild wastes Edgar walked in
+a regular maze of culture. I didn't then know about culture, but Edgar
+must promptly have known. This impression was promoted by his moving in
+a distant, a higher sphere of study, amid scenes vague to me; I dimly
+descry him as appearing at Jenks's and vanishing again, as if even that
+hadn't been good enough&mdash;though I may be here at fault, and indeed can
+scarce say on what arduous heights I supposed him, as a day-scholar, to
+dwell. I took the unknown always easily for the magnificent and was sure
+only of the limits of what I saw. It wasn't that the boys swarming for
+us at school were not often, to my vision, unlimited, but that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> those
+peopling our hours of ease, as I have already noted, were almost
+inveterately so&mdash;they seemed to describe always, out of view, so much
+larger circles. I linger thus on Edgar by reason of its having somehow
+seemed to us that he described&mdash;was it at Doctor Anthon's?&mdash;the largest
+of all. If there was a bigger place than Doctor Anthon's it was there he
+would have been. I break down, as to the detail of the matter, in any
+push toward vaster suppositions. But let me cease to stir this
+imponderable dust.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XIX" id="XIX"></a>XIX</h2>
+
+<p>I try at least to recover here, however, some closer notation of W. J.'s
+aspects&mdash;yet only with the odd effect of my either quite losing him or
+but apprehending him again at seated play with his pencil under the
+lamp. When I see him he is intently, though summarily, rapidly drawing,
+his head critically balanced and his eyebrows working, and when I don't
+see him it is because I have resignedly relinquished him. I can't have
+been often for him a deprecated, still less an actively rebuffed suitor,
+because, as I say again, such aggressions were so little in order for
+me; but I remember that on my once offering him my company in
+conditions, those of some planned excursion, in which it wasn't desired,
+his putting the question of our difference at rest, with the minimum of
+explanation, by the responsible remark: "<i>I</i> play with boys who curse
+and swear!" I had sadly to recognise that I didn't, that I couldn't
+pretend to have come to that yet&mdash;and truly, as I look back, either the
+unadvisedness and inexpertness of my young contemporaries on all that
+ground must have been complete (an interesting note on our general
+manners after all,)<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> or my personal failure to grasp must have been.
+Besides which I wonder scarce less now than I wondered then in just what
+company my brother's privilege was exercised; though if he had but
+richly wished to be discouraging he quite succeeded. It wasn't that I
+mightn't have been drawn to the boys in question, but that I simply
+wasn't qualified. All boys, I rather found, were difficult to play
+with&mdash;unless it was that they rather found <i>me</i>; but who would have been
+so difficult as these? They account but little, moreover, I make out,
+for W. J.'s eclipses; so that I take refuge easily enough in the memory
+of my own pursuits, absorbing enough at times to have excluded other
+views. I also plied the pencil, or to be more exact the pen&mdash;even if
+neither implement critically, rapidly or summarily. I was so often
+engaged at that period, it strikes me, in literary&mdash;or, to be more
+precise in dramatic, accompanied by pictorial composition&mdash;that I must
+again and again have delightfully lost myself. I had not on any occasion
+personally succeeded, amid our theatric strife, in reaching the
+footlights; but how could I have doubted, nevertheless, with our large
+theatrical experience, of the nature, and of my understanding, of the
+dramatic form? I sacrificed to it with devotion&mdash;by the aid of certain
+quarto sheets of ruled paper bought in Sixth Avenue for the purpose (my
+father's store,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> though I held him a great fancier of the article in
+general, supplied but the unruled;) grateful in particular for the happy
+provision by which each fourth page of the folded sheet was left blank.
+When the drama itself had covered three pages the last one, over which I
+most laboured, served for the illustration of what I had verbally
+presented. Every scene had thus its explanatory picture, and as each
+act&mdash;though I am not positively certain I arrived at acts&mdash;would have
+had its vivid climax. Addicted in that degree to fictive evocation, I
+yet recall, on my part, no practice whatever of narrative prose or any
+sort of verse. I cherished the "scene"&mdash;as I had so vibrated to the idea
+of it that evening at Linwood; I thought, I lisped, at any rate I
+composed, in scenes; though how much, or how far, the scenes "came" is
+another affair. Entrances, exits, the indication of "business," the
+animation of dialogue, the multiplication of designated characters, were
+things delightful in themselves&mdash;while I panted toward the canvas on
+which I should fling my figures; which it took me longer to fill than it
+had taken me to write what went with it, but which had on the other hand
+something of the interest of the dramatist's casting of his <i>person&aelig;</i>,
+and must have helped me to believe in the validity of my subject.</p>
+
+<p>From where on these occasions that subject can<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> have dropped for me I am
+at a loss to say, and indeed have a strong impression that I didn't at
+any moment quite know what I was writing about: I am sure I couldn't
+otherwise have written so much. With scenes, when I think, what
+certitude did I want more?&mdash;scenes being the root of the matter,
+especially when they bristled with proper names and noted movements;
+especially, above all, when they flowered at every pretext into the very
+optic and perspective of the stage, where the boards diverged correctly,
+from a central point of vision, even as the lashes from an eyelid,
+straight down to the footlights. Let this reminiscence remind us of how
+rarely in those days the real stage was carpeted. The difficulty of
+composition was naught; the one difficulty was in so placing my figures
+on the fourth page that these radiations could be marked without making
+lines through them. The odd part of all of which was that whereas my
+cultivation of the picture was maintained my practice of the play, my
+addiction to scenes, presently quite dropped. I was capable of learning,
+though with inordinate slowness, to express ideas in scenes, and was not
+capable, with whatever patience, of making proper pictures; yet I
+aspired to this form of design to the prejudice of any other, and long
+after those primitive hours was still wasting time in attempts at it. I
+cared so much for nothing else, and that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> vaguely redressed, as to a
+point, my general failure of acuteness. I nursed the conviction, or at
+least I tried to, that if my clutch of the pencil or of the watercolour
+brush should once become intense enough it would make up for other
+weaknesses of grasp&mdash;much as that would certainly give it to do. This
+was a very false scent, which had however the excuse that my brother's
+example really couldn't but act upon me&mdash;the scent was apparently so
+true for <i>him</i>; from the moment my small "interest in art," that is my
+bent for gaping at illustrations and exhibitions, was absorbing and
+genuine. There were elements in the case that made it natural: the
+picture, the representative design, directly and strongly appealed to
+me, and was to appeal all my days, and I was only slow to recognise the
+<i>kind</i>, in this order, that appealed most. My face was turned from the
+first to the idea of representation&mdash;that of the gain of charm,
+interest, mystery, dignity, distinction, gain of importance in fine, on
+the part of the represented thing (over the thing of accident, of mere
+actuality, still unappropriated;) but in the house of representation
+there were many chambers, each with its own lock, and long was to be the
+business of sorting and trying the keys. When I at last found deep in my
+pocket the one I could more or less work, it was to feel, with
+reassurance, that the picture was still after all in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span>essence one's aim.
+So there had been in a manner continuity, been not so much waste as one
+had sometimes ruefully figured; so many wastes are sweetened for memory
+as by the taste of the economy they have led to or imposed and from the
+vantage of which they could scarce look better if they had been current
+and blatant profit. Wasn't the very bareness of the field itself
+moreover a challenge, in a degree, to design?&mdash;not, I mean, that there
+seemed to one's infant eyes too few things to paint: as to that there
+were always plenty&mdash;but for the very reason that there were more than
+anyone noticed, and that a hunger was thus engendered which one cast
+about to gratify. The gratification nearest home was the imitative, the
+emulative&mdash;that is on my part: W. J., I see, needed no reasons, no
+consciousness other than that of being easily able. So he drew because
+he could, while I did so in the main only because he did; though I think
+we cast about, as I say, alike, making the most of every image within
+view. I doubt if he made more than I even then did, though earlier able
+to account for what he made. Afterwards, on other ground and in richer
+air, I admit, the challenge was in the fulness and not in the bareness
+of aspects, with their natural result of hunger appeased; exhibitions,
+illustrations abounded in Paris and London&mdash;the reflected image hung
+everywhere about; so that if there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> we daubed afresh and with more
+confidence it was not because no-one but because everyone did. In fact
+when I call our appetite appeased I speak less of our browsing vision,
+which was tethered and insatiable, than of our sense of the quite normal
+character of our own proceedings. In Europe we knew there was Art, just
+as there were soldiers and lodgings and concierges and little boys in
+the streets who stared at us, especially at our hats and boots, as at
+things of derision&mdash;just as, to put it negatively, there were
+practically no hot rolls and no iced water. Perhaps too, I should add,
+we didn't enjoy the works of Mr. Benjamin Haydon, then clustered at the
+Pantheon in Oxford Street, which in due course became our favourite
+haunt, so infinitely more, after all, than we had enjoyed those arrayed
+at the D&uuml;sseldorf collection in Broadway; whence the huge canvas of the
+Martyrdom of John Huss comes back to me in fact as a revelation of
+representational brightness and charm that pitched once for all in these
+matters my young sense of what should be.</p>
+
+<p>Ineffable, unsurpassable those hours of initiation which the Broadway of
+the 'fifties had been, when all was said, so adequate to supply. If one
+wanted pictures there <i>were</i> pictures, as large, I seem to remember, as
+the side of a house, and of a bravery of colour and lustre of surface
+that I was never afterwards to see surpassed. We were shown <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span>without
+doubt, under our genial law here too, everything there was, and as I
+cast up the items I wonder, I confess, what ampler fare we could have
+dealt with. The D&uuml;sseldorf school commanded the market, and I think of
+its exhibition as firmly seated, going on from year to year&mdash;New York,
+judging now to such another tune, must have been a brave patron of that
+manufacture; I believe that scandal even was on occasion not evaded,
+rather was boldly invoked, though of what particular sacrifices to the
+pure plastic or undraped shocks to bourgeois prejudice the comfortable
+German genius of that period may have been capable history has kept no
+record. New accessions, at any rate, vividly new ones, in which the
+freshness and brightness of the paint, particularly lustrous in our
+copious light, enhanced from time to time the show, which I have the
+sense of our thus repeatedly and earnestly visiting and which comes back
+to me with some vagueness as installed in a disaffected church, where
+gothic excrescences and an ecclesiastical roof of a mild order helped
+the importance. No impression here, however, was half so momentous as
+that of the epoch-making masterpiece of Mr. Leutze, which showed us
+Washington crossing the Delaware in a wondrous flare of projected
+gaslight and with the effect of a revelation to my young sight of the
+capacity of accessories to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> "stand out." I live again in the thrill of
+that evening&mdash;which was the greater of course for my feeling it, in my
+parents' company, when I should otherwise have been in bed. We went
+down, after dinner, in the Fourteenth Street stage, quite as if going to
+the theatre; the scene of exhibition was near the Stuyvesant Institute
+(a circumstance stirring up somehow a swarm of associations, echoes
+probably of lectures discussed at home, yet at which my attendance had
+doubtless conveniently lapsed,) but Mr. Leutze's drama left behind any
+paler proscenium. We gaped responsive to every item, lost in the marvel
+of the wintry light, of the sharpness of the ice-blocks, of the sickness
+of the sick soldier, of the protrusion of the minor objects, that of the
+strands of the rope and the nails of the boots, that, I say, on the part
+of everything, of its determined purpose of standing out; but that,
+above all, of the profiled national hero's purpose, as might be said, of
+standing <i>up</i>, as much as possible, even indeed of doing it almost on
+one leg, in such difficulties, and successfully balancing. So memorable
+was that evening to remain for me that nothing could be more strange, in
+connection with it, than the illustration by the admired work, on its in
+after years again coming before me, of the cold cruelty with which time
+may turn and devour its children. The picture, more or less entombed in
+its relegation, was lividly <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span>dead&mdash;and that was bad enough. But half the
+substance of one's youth seemed buried with it. There were other
+pictorial evenings, I may add, not all of which had the thrill. Deep the
+disappointment, on my own part, I remember, at Bryan's Gallery of
+Christian Art, to which also, as for great emotions, we had taken the
+omnibus after dinner. It cast a chill, this collection of worm-eaten
+diptychs and triptychs, of angular saints and seraphs, of black Madonnas
+and obscure Bambinos, of such marked and approved "primitives" as had
+never yet been shipped to our shores. Mr. Bryan's shipment was presently
+to fall, I believe, under grave suspicion, was to undergo in fact fatal
+exposure; but it appealed at the moment in apparent good faith, and I
+have not forgotten how, conscious that it was fresh from Europe&mdash;"fresh"
+was beautiful in the connection!&mdash;I felt that my yearning should all
+have gone out to it. With that inconsequence to handle I doubt whether I
+proclaimed that it bored me&mdash;any more than I have ever noted till now
+that it made me begin badly with Christian art. I like to think that the
+collection consisted without abatement of frauds and "fakes" and that if
+these had been honest things my perception wouldn't so have slumbered;
+yet the principle of interest had been somehow compromised, and I think
+I have never since stood before a real Primitive, a primitive of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span>primitives, without having first to shake off the grey mantle of that
+night. The main disconcertment had been its ugly twist to the name of
+Italy, already sweet to me for all its dimness&mdash;even could dimness have
+prevailed in my felt measure of the pictorial testimony of home,
+testimony that dropped for us from the ample canvas of Mr. Cole, "the
+American Turner" which covered half a side of our front parlour, and in
+which, though not an object represented in it began to stand out after
+the manner of Mr. Leutze, I could always lose myself as soon as look. It
+depicted Florence from one of the neighbouring hills&mdash;I have often since
+wondered which, the picture being long ago lost to our sight; Florence
+with her domes and towers and old walls, the old walls Mr. Cole had
+engaged for, but which I was ruefully to miss on coming to know and love
+the place in after years. Then it was I felt how long before my
+attachment had started on its course&mdash;that closer vision was no
+beginning, it only took up the tale; just as it comes to me again
+to-day, at the end of time, that the contemplative monk seated on a
+terrace in the foreground, a constant friend of my childhood, must have
+been of the convent of San Miniato, which gives me the site from which
+the painter wrought. We had Italy again in the corresponding room
+behind&mdash;a great abundance of Italy I was free to think while I revolved
+between <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span>another large landscape over the sofa and the classic marble
+bust on a pedestal between the two back windows, the figure, a part of
+the figure, of a lady with her head crowned with vine-leaves and her
+hair disposed with a laxity that was emulated by the front of her dress,
+as my next younger brother exposed himself to my derision by calling the
+bit of brocade (simulated by the chisel) that, depending from a single
+shoulder-strap, so imperfectly covered her. This image was known and
+admired among us as the Bacchante; she had come to us straight from an
+American studio in Rome, and I see my horizon flush again with the first
+faint dawn of conscious appreciation, or in other words of the critical
+spirit, while two or three of the more restrictive friends of the house
+find our marble lady very "cold" for a Bacchante. Cold indeed she must
+have been&mdash;quite as of the tombstone temperament; but that objection
+would drop if she might only be called a Nymph, since nymphs were mild
+and moderate, and since discussion of a work of art mainly hung in those
+days on that issue of the producible <i>name</i>. I fondly recall, by the
+same token, that playing on a certain occasion over the landscape above
+the sofa, restrictive criticism, uttered in my indulged hearing,
+introduced me to what had probably been my very first chance, on such
+ground, for active participation. The picture, from the hand of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>
+French painter, M. Lef&egrave;vre, and of but slightly scanter extent than the
+work of Mr. Cole, represented in frank rich colours and as a so-called
+"view in Tuscany" a rural scene of some exuberance, a broken and
+precipitous place, amid mountains and forests, where two or three
+bare-legged peasants or woodmen were engaged, with much emphasis of
+posture, in felling a badly gashed but spreading oak by means of a tense
+rope attached to an upper limb and at which they pulled together.
+"Tuscany?&mdash;are you sure it's Tuscany?" said the voice of restrictive
+criticism, that of the friend of the house who in the golden age of the
+precursors, though we were still pretty much precursors, had lived
+longest in Italy. And then on my father's challenge of this demur: "Oh
+in Tuscany, you know, the colours are much softer&mdash;there would be a
+certain haze in the atmosphere." "Why, of course," I can hear myself now
+blushingly but triumphantly intermingle&mdash;"the softness and the haze of
+our Florence there: isn't Florence in Tuscany?" It had to be parentally
+admitted that Florence was&mdash;besides which our friend had been there and
+knew; so that thereafter, within our walls, a certain <i>malaise</i> reigned,
+for if the Florence was "like it" then the Lef&egrave;vre couldn't be, and if
+the Lef&egrave;vre was like it then the Florence couldn't: a lapse from old
+convenience&mdash;as from the moment we couldn't name the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> Lef&egrave;vre where were
+we? All of which it might have been open to me to feel I had uncannily
+promoted.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XX" id="XX"></a>XX</h2>
+
+<p>My own sense of the great matter, meanwhile&mdash;that is of our
+possibilities, still more than of our actualities, of Italy in general
+and of Florence in particular&mdash;was a perfectly recoverable little
+awareness, as I find, of certain mild soft irregular breathings thence
+on the part of an absent pair in whom our parents were closely
+interested and whose communications, whose Roman, Sorrentine, Florentine
+letters, letters in especial from the Baths of Lucca, kept open, in our
+air, more than any other sweet irritation, that "question of Europe"
+which was to have after all, in the immediate years, so limited, so
+shortened, a solution. Mary Temple the elder had, early in our
+Fourteenth Street period, married Edmund Tweedy, a haunter of that
+neighbourhood and of our house in it from the first, but never more than
+during a winter spent with us there by that quasi-relative, who, by an
+extension of interest and admiration&mdash;she was in those years quite
+exceedingly handsome&mdash;ranked for us with the Albany aunts, adding so a
+twist, as it were, to our tie with the Temple cousins, her own close
+kin. This couple must have been, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span>putting real relatives aside, my
+parents' best friends in Europe, twitching thereby hardest the fine firm
+thread attached at one end to our general desire and at the other to
+their supposed felicity. The real relatives, those planted out in the
+same countries, are a chapter by themselves, whose effect on us, whose
+place in our vision, I should like to trace: that of the Kings, for
+instance, of my mother's kin, that of the Masons, of my father's&mdash;the
+Kings who cultivated, for years, the highest instructional, social and
+moral possibilities at Geneva, the Masons, above all, less strenuous but
+more sympathetic, who reported themselves to us hauntingly, during a
+considerable period, as enjoying every conceivable <i>agr&eacute;ment</i> at Tours
+and at the then undeveloped Trouville, even the winter Trouville, on the
+lowest possible terms. Fain would I, as for the "mere pleasure" of it,
+under the temptation to delineate, gather into my loose net the
+singularly sharp and rounded image of our cousin Charlotte of the former
+name, who figured for us, on the field of Europe, wherever we looked,
+and all the rest of time, as a character of characters and a marvel of
+placid consistency; through my vague remembrance of her return from
+China after the arrest of a commercial career there by her husband's
+death in the Red Sea&mdash;which somehow sounded like a dreadful form of
+death, and my scarce less faint recovery of some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> Christmas treat of our
+childhood under her roof in Gramercy Park, amid dim chinoiseries and, in
+that twilight of time, dimmer offspring, Vernon, Anne, Arthur, marked to
+us always, in the distincter years, as of all our young relatives the
+most intensely educated and most pointedly proper&mdash;an occasion followed
+by her permanent and invidious withdrawal from her own country. I would
+keep her in my eye through the Genevese age and on to the crisis of the
+Civil War, in which Vernon, unforgiven by her stiff conservatism for his
+Northern loyalty, laid down before Petersburg a young life of
+understanding and pain, uncommemorated as to the gallantry of its
+end&mdash;he had insistently returned to the front, after a recovery from
+first wounds, as under his mother's malediction&mdash;on the stone beneath
+which he lies in the old burial ground at Newport, the cradle of his
+father's family. I should further pursue my subject through other
+periods and places, other constantly "quiet" but vivid exhibitions, to
+the very end of the story&mdash;which for myself was the impression, first,
+of a little lonely, soft-voiced, gentle, relentless lady, in a dull
+Surrey garden of a summer afternoon, more than half blind and all
+dependent on the <i>dame de compagnie</i> who read aloud to her that Saturday
+Review which had ever been the prop and mirror of her opinions and to
+which she remained faithful, her children estranged and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> outworn, dead
+and ignored; and the vision, second and for a climax, of an old-world
+rez-de-chauss&eacute;e at Versailles, goal of my final pilgrimage, almost in
+presence of the end (end of her very personal career, I mean, but not of
+her perfectly firm spirit or of her charmingly smooth address).</p>
+
+<p>I confess myself embarrassed by my very ease of re-capture of my young
+consciousness; so that I perforce try to encourage lapses and keep my
+abundance down. The place for the lapse consents with difficulty,
+however, to be <i>any</i> particular point of the past at which I catch
+myself (easily caught as I am) looking about me; it has certainly
+nothing in common with that coign of vantage enjoyed by me one June
+afternoon of 1855 in the form of the minor share of the box of a
+carriage that conveyed us for the first time since our babyhood, W. J.'s
+and mine, through so much of a vast portentous London. I was an item in
+the overflow of a vehicle completely occupied, and I thrilled with the
+spectacle my seat beside the coachman so amply commanded&mdash;without
+knowing at this moment why, amid other claims, I had been marked for
+such an eminence. I so far justify my privilege at least as still to
+feel that prime impression, of extreme intensity, underlie, deep down,
+the whole mass of later observation. There are London aspects which, so
+far as they still touch me, after all the years, touch me as just<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span>
+sensible reminders of this hour of early apprehension, so penetrated for
+me as to have kept its ineffaceable stamp. For at last we had come to
+Europe&mdash;we had disembarked at Liverpool, but a couple of days before,
+from that steamer Atlantic, of the Collins line, then active but so soon
+to be utterly undone, of which I had kept a romantic note ever since a
+certain evening of a winter or two before. I had on that occasion
+assisted with my parents at a varied theatrical exhibition&mdash;the theatre
+is distinct to me as Brougham's&mdash;one of the features of which was the at
+that time flourishing farce of Betsy Baker, a picture of some
+predicament, supposed droll, of its hero Mr. Mouser, whose wife, if I am
+correct, carries on a laundry and controls as she may a train of young
+assistants. A feature of the piece comes back to me as the pursuit of
+Mr. Mouser round and round the premises by the troop of laundresses,
+shouting his name in chorus, capture by them being abject, though
+whether through fear of their endearments or of their harsher violence I
+fail to remember. It was enough that the public nerve had at the moment
+been tried by the non-arrival of the Atlantic, several days overdue, to
+the pitch at last of extreme anxiety; so that, when after the fall of
+the curtain on the farce the distracted Mr. Mouser, still breathless,
+reappeared at the footlights, where I can see him now abate by his
+plight<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> no jot of the dignity of his announcement, "Ladies and
+gentlemen, I rejoice to be able to tell you that the good ship Atlantic
+is safe!" the house broke into such plaudits, so huge and prolonged a
+roar of relief, as I had never heard the like of and which gave me my
+first measure of a great immediate public emotion&mdash;even as the incident
+itself to-day reminds me of the family-party smallness of the old New
+York, those happy limits that could make us all care, and care to fond
+vociferation, for the same thing at once. It was a moment of the golden
+age&mdash;representing too but a snatch of elation, since the wretched Arctic
+had gone down in mortal woe and her other companion, the Pacific,
+leaving England a few months later and under the interested eyes of our
+family group, then temporarily settled in London, was never heard of
+more. Let all of which show again what traps are laid about me for
+unguarded acute reminiscence.</p>
+
+<p>I meet another of these, though I positively try to avoid it, in the
+sense of a day spent on the great fusty curtained bed, a medi&aelig;val
+four-poster such as I had never seen, of the hotel at the London and
+North-Western station, where it appeared, to our great inconvenience,
+that I had during the previous months somewhere perversely absorbed
+(probably on Staten Island upwards of a year before) the dull seed of
+malaria, which now suddenly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span> broke out in chills and fever. This
+condition, of the intermittent order, hampered our movements but left
+alternate days on which we could travel, and as present to me as ever is
+the apprehended interest of my important and determinant state and of
+our complicated prospect while I lay, much at my ease&mdash;for I recall in
+particular certain short sweet times when I could be left alone&mdash;with
+the thick and heavy suggestions of the London room about me, the very
+smell of which was ancient, strange and impressive, a new revelation
+altogether, and the window open to the English June and the far off hum
+of a thousand possibilities. I consciously took them in, these last, and
+must then, I think, have first tasted the very greatest pleasure perhaps
+I was ever to know&mdash;that of almost holding my breath in presence of
+certain aspects to the end of so taking in. It was as if in those hours
+that precious fine art had been disclosed to me&mdash;scantly as the poor
+place and the small occasion might have seemed of an order to promote
+it. We seize our property by an avid instinct wherever we find it, and I
+must have kept seizing mine at the absurdest little rate, and all by
+this deeply dissimulative process of taking in, through the whole
+succession of those summer days. The next application of it that stands
+out for me, or the next that I make room for here, since I note after
+all so much less than I remember,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> is the intensity of a fond
+apprehension of Paris, a few days later, from the balcony of an hotel
+that hung, through the soft summer night, over the Rue de la Paix. I
+hung with the balcony, and doubtless with my brothers and my sister,
+though I recover what I felt as so much relation and response to the
+larger, the largest appeal only, that of the whole perfect Parisianism I
+seemed to myself always to have possessed mentally&mdash;even if I had but
+just turned twelve!&mdash;and that now filled out its frame or case for me
+from every lighted window, up and down, as if each of these had been,
+for strength of sense, a word in some immortal quotation, the very
+breath of civilised lips. How I had anciently gathered such stores of
+preconception is more than I shall undertake an account of&mdash;though I
+believe I should be able to scrape one together; certain it is at any
+rate that half the beauty of the whole exposed second floor of a
+<i>modiste</i> just opposite, for instance, with the fittings and figurings,
+as well as the intent immobilities, of busy young women descried through
+frank, and, as it were, benignant apertures, and of such bright fine
+strain that they but asked to work far into the night, came from the
+effect on the part of these things of so exactly crowning and comforting
+I couldn't have said what momentous young dream. I might have been
+<i>right</i> to myself&mdash;as against some danger of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> being wrong, and if I had
+uttered my main comment on it all this must certainly have been "I told
+you so, I told you so!" What I had told myself was of course that the
+impression would be of the richest and at the same time of the most
+insinuating, and this after all didn't sail very close; but I had had
+before me from far back a picture (which might have been hung in the
+very sky,) and here was every touch in it repeated with a charm. Had I
+ever till then known what a charm <i>was</i>?&mdash;a large, a local, a social
+charm, leaving out that of a few individuals. It was at all events, this
+mystery, one's property&mdash;that of one's mind; and so, once for all, I
+helped myself to it from my balcony and tucked it away. It counted all
+immensely for practice in taking in.</p>
+
+<p>I profited by that, no doubt, still a few days later, at an hour that
+has never ceased to recur to me all my life as crucial, as supremely
+determinant. The travelling-carriage had stopped at a village on the way
+from Lyons to Geneva, between which places there was then no railway; a
+village now nameless to me and which was not yet Nantua, in the Jura,
+where we were to spend the night. I was stretched at my ease on a couch
+formed by a plank laid from seat to seat and covered by a small mattress
+and other draperies; an indulgence founded on my visitation of fever,
+which, though not now checking our progress, assured<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> me, in our little
+band, these invidious luxuries. It may have been that as my body was
+pampered so I was moved equally to pamper my spirit, for my
+appropriative instinct had neglected no item of our case from the
+first&mdash;by which I mean from the moment of our getting under way, that
+morning, with much elaboration, in the court of the old H&ocirc;tel de
+l'Univers at Lyons, where we had arrived two days before and awaited my
+good pleasure during forty-eight hours that overflowed for us perhaps
+somewhat less than any pair of days yet, but as regards which it was
+afterwards my complacent theory that my contemplative rest at the
+ancient inn, with all the voices and graces of the past, of the court,
+of the French scheme of manners in general and of ancient inns, as such,
+in particular, had prepared me not a little, when I should in due course
+hear of it, for what was meant by the <i>vie de province</i>&mdash;that expression
+which was to become later on so <i>toned</i>, as old fine colour and old fine
+opinion are toned. It was the romance of travel, and it was the
+<i>suggested</i> romance, flushed with suppositions and echoes, with
+implications and memories, memories of one's "reading," save the mark!
+all the more that our proper bestowal required two carriages, in which
+we were to "post," ineffable thought, and which bristled with every kind
+of contradiction of common experience. The <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span>postilion, in a costume
+rather recalling, from the halls of Ferrero, that of my d&eacute;bardeur,
+bobbed up and down, the Italian courier, Jean Nadali, black-whiskered
+and acquired in London, sat in the rumble along with Annette Godefroi of
+Metz, fresh-coloured, broad-faced and fair-braided, a "bonne Lorraine"
+if ever there was, acquired in New York: I enjoy the echo of their very
+names, neither unprecedented nor irreproducible, yet which melt together
+for me, to intensification, with all the rest; with the recovered
+moment, above all, of our pause at the inn-door in the cool sunshine&mdash;we
+had mounted and mounted&mdash;during which, in my absurdly cushioned state, I
+took in, as I have hinted, by a long slow swig that testified to some
+power of elbow, a larger draught of the wine of perception than any I
+had ever before owed to a single throb of that faculty. The village
+street, which was not as village streets hitherto known to me, opened
+out, beyond an interval, into a high place on which perched an object
+also a fresh revelation and that I recognised with a deep joy&mdash;though a
+joy that was doubtless partly the sense of fantastic ease, of abated
+illness and of cold chicken&mdash;as at once a castle and a ruin. The only
+castle within my ken had been, by my impression, the machicolated villa
+above us the previous summer at New Brighton, and as I had seen no
+structure rise beyond that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> majesty so I had seen none abased to the
+dignity of ruin. Loose boards were no expression of this latter phase,
+and I was already somehow aware of a deeper note in the crumbled castle
+than any note of the solid one&mdash;little experience as I had had either of
+solidity. At a point in the interval, at any rate, below the slope on
+which this memento stood, was a woman in a black bodice, a white shirt
+and a red petticoat, engaged in some sort of field labour, the effect of
+whose intervention just then is almost beyond my notation. I knew her
+for a peasant in sabots&mdash;the first peasant I had ever beheld, or beheld
+at least to such advantage. She had in the whole aspect an enormous
+value, emphasising with her petticoat's tonic strength the truth that
+sank in as I lay&mdash;the truth of one's embracing there, in all the
+presented character of the scene, an amount of character I had felt no
+scene present, not even the one I had raked from the H&ocirc;tel Westminster;
+the sort of thing that, even as mere fulness and mere weight, would sit
+most warmly in the mind. Supremely, in that ecstatic vision, was
+"Europe," sublime synthesis, expressed and guaranteed to me&mdash;as if by a
+mystic gage, which spread all through the summer air, that I should now,
+only now, never lose it, hold the whole consistency of it: up to that
+time it might have been but mockingly whisked before me. Europe mightn't
+have been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span> flattered, it was true, at my finding her thus most signified
+and summarised in a sordid old woman scraping a mean living and an
+uninhabitable tower abandoned to the owls; that was but the momentary
+measure of a small sick boy, however, and the virtue of the impression
+was proportioned to my capacity. It made a bridge over to more things
+than I then knew.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XXI" id="XXI"></a>XXI</h2>
+
+<p>How shall I render certain other impressions coming back to me from that
+summer, which were doubtless involved in my having still for a time, on
+the alternate days when my complaint was active, to lie up on various
+couches and, for my main comfort, consider the situation? I considered
+it best, I think, gathering in the fruits of a quickened sensibility to
+it, in certain umbrageous apartments in which my parents had settled
+themselves near Geneva; an old house, in ample grounds and among great
+spreading trees that pleasantly brushed our windows in the summer heats
+and airs, known, if I am not mistaken, as the Campagne Gerebsoff&mdash;which
+its mistress, an invalid Russian lady, had partly placed at our
+disposition while she reclined in her own quarter of the garden, on a
+chaise longue and under a mushroom hat with a green veil, and I, in the
+course of the mild excursions appointed as my limit, considered her from
+afar in the light of the legends supplied to me, as to her identity,
+history, general practices and proceedings, by my younger brother Wilky,
+who, according to his nature, or I may say to his genius,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> had made
+without loss of time great advances of acquaintance with her and
+quickened thereby my sense of his superior talent for life. Wilky's age
+followed closely on mine, and from that time on we conversed and
+consorted, though with lapses and disparities; I being on the whole,
+during the succession of those years, in the grateful, the really
+fortunate position of having one exposure, rather the northward, as it
+were, to the view of W. J., and the other, perhaps the more immediately
+sunned surface, to the genial glow of my junior. Of this I shall have
+more to say, but to meet in memory meanwhile even this early flicker of
+him is to know again something of the sense that I attached all along
+our boyhood to his successful sociability, his instinct for intercourse,
+his genius (as I have used the word) for making friends. It was the only
+genius he had, declaring itself from his tenderest years, never knowing
+the shadow of defeat, and giving me, above all, from as far back and by
+the very radiation of the fact, endlessly much to think of. For I had in
+a manner, thanks to the radiation, much of the benefit; his geniality
+was absolutely such that the friends he made were made almost less for
+himself, so to speak, than for other friends&mdash;of whom indeed we, his own
+adjuncts, were easily first&mdash;so far at least as he discriminated. At
+night all cats are grey, and in this brother's easy view all his
+acquaintance<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> were his family. The trail of his sociability was over us
+all alike&mdash;though it here concerns me but to the effect, as I recover
+it, of its weight on my comparatively so indirect faculty for what is
+called taking life. I must have already at the Campagne Gerebsoff begun
+to see him take it with all his directness&mdash;begun in fact to be a trifle
+tormentedly aware that, though there might be many ways of so doing, we
+are condemned practically to a choice, not made free of them all;
+reduced to the use of but one, at the best, which it is to our interest
+to make the most of, since we may indeed sometimes make much. There was
+a small sad charm, I should doubtless add, in this operation of the
+contrast of the case before me with my own case; it was positively as if
+Wilky's were supplying me on occasion with the most immediate matter for
+my own. That was particularly marked after he had, with our elder
+brother, been placed at school, the Pensionnat Roediger, at Ch&acirc;telaine,
+then much esteemed and where I was supposedly to join them on my
+complete recovery: I recall sociable, irrepressibly sociable <i>sorties</i>
+thence on the part of the pair as promptly breaking out, not less than I
+recall sociable afternoon visits to the establishment on the part of the
+rest of us: it was my brothers' first boarding school, but as we had in
+the New York conditions kept punctually rejoining our family, so in
+these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> pleasant Genevese ones our family returned the attention. Of this
+also more anon; my particular point is just the wealth of Wilky's
+contribution to my rich current consciousness&mdash;the consciousness fairly
+<i>made</i> rich by my taking in, as aforesaid, at reflective hours, hours
+when I was in a manner alone with it, our roomy and shadowy, our almost
+haunted interior.</p>
+
+<p>Admirable the scale and solidity, in general, of the ancient villas
+planted about Geneva, and our house affected me as so massive and so
+spacious that even our own half of it seemed vast. I had never before
+lived so long in anything so old and, as I somehow felt, so deep; depth,
+depth upon depth, was what came out for me at certain times of my
+waiting above, in my immense room of thick embrasures and rather prompt
+obscurity, while the summer afternoon waned and my companions, often
+below at dinner, lingered and left me just perhaps a bit overwhelmed.
+That was the sense of it&mdash;the <i>character</i>, in the whole place, pressed
+upon me with a force I hadn't met and that was beyond my analysis&mdash;which
+is but another way of saying how directly notified I felt that such
+material conditions as I <i>had</i> known could have had no depth at all. My
+depth was a vague measure, no doubt, but it made space, in the twilight,
+for an occasional small sound of voice or step from the garden or the
+rooms of which the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> great homely, the opaque green shutters opened there
+softly to echo in&mdash;mixed with reverberations finer and more momentous,
+personal, experimental, if they might be called so; which I much
+encouraged (they borrowed such tone from our new surrounding medium) and
+half of which were reducible to Wilky's personalities and Wilky's
+experience: these latter, irrepressibly communicated, being ever,
+enviably, though a trifle bewilderingly and even formidably, <i>of</i>
+personalities. There was the difference and the opposition, as I really
+believe I was already aware&mdash;that one way of taking life was to go in
+for everything and everyone, which kept you abundantly occupied, and the
+other way was to be as occupied, quite as occupied, just with the sense
+and the image of it all, and on only a fifth of the actual immersion: a
+circumstance extremely strange. Life was taken almost equally both
+ways&mdash;that, I mean, seemed the strangeness; mere brute quantity and
+number being so much less in one case than the other. These latter were
+what I should have <i>liked</i> to go in for, had I but had the intrinsic
+faculties; that more than ever came home to me on those occasions when,
+as I could move further and stay out longer, I accompanied my parents on
+afternoon visits to Ch&acirc;telaine and the Campagne Roediger, a scene that
+has remained with me as nobly placid and pastoral. The great trees stood
+about, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span>casting afternoon shadows; the old thick-walled green-shuttered
+villa and its d&eacute;pendances had the air of the happiest home; the big
+bearded bonhomie of M. Roediger among his little polyglot charges&mdash;no
+petits pays chauds these&mdash;appeared to justify, and more, the fond New
+York theory of Swiss education, the kind <i>&agrave; la port&eacute;e</i> of young New
+Yorkers, as a beautifully genialised, humanised, civilised, even
+romanticised thing, in which, amid lawny mountain slopes, "the
+languages" flowed into so many beaming recipients on a stream of milk
+and honey, and "the relation," above all, the relation from master to
+pupil and back again, was of an amenity that wouldn't have been of this
+world save for the providential arrangement of a perfect pedagogic
+Switzerland. "Did you notice the relation&mdash;how charming it was?" our
+parents were apt to say to each other after these visits, in reference
+to some observed show of confidence between instructor and instructed;
+while, as for myself, I was lost in the wonder of <i>all</i> the
+relations&mdash;my younger brother seemed to live, and to his own ingenuous
+relish as well, in such a happy hum of them. The languages had reason to
+prosper&mdash;they were so copiously represented; the English jostled the
+American, the Russian the German, and there even trickled through a
+little funny French.</p>
+
+<p>A great Geneva school of those days was the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> Institution Haccius, to
+which generations of our young countrymen had been dedicated and our own
+faces first turned&mdash;under correction, however, by the perceived truth
+that if the languages were in question the American reigned there almost
+unchallenged. The establishment chosen for our experiment must have
+appealed by some intimate and insinuating side, and as less patronised
+by the rich and the sophisticated&mdash;for even in those days some Americans
+were rich and several sophisticated; little indeed as it was all to
+matter in the event, so short a course had the experiment just then to
+run. What it mainly brings back to me is the fine old candour and
+queerness of the New York state of mind, begotten really not a little, I
+think, under our own roof, by the mere charmed perusal of Rodolphe
+Toeppfer's Voyages en Zigzag, the two goodly octavo volumes of which
+delightful work, an adorable book, taken with its illustrations, had
+come out early in the 'fifties and had engaged our fondest study. It is
+the copious chronicle, by a schoolmaster o&pound; endless humour and
+sympathy&mdash;of what degree and form of "authority" it never occurred to
+one even to ask&mdash;of his holiday excursions with his pupils, mainly on
+foot and with staff and knapsack, through the incomparable Switzerland
+of the time before the railways and the "rush," before the monster
+hotels, the desecrated summits, the vulgarised <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span>valleys, the circular
+tours, the perforating tubes, the funiculars, the hordes, the horrors.
+To turn back to Toeppfer's pages to-day is to get the sense of a lost
+paradise, and the effect for me even yet of having pored over them in my
+childhood is to steep in sweetness and quaintness some of the
+pictures&mdash;his own illustrations are of the pleasantest and drollest, and
+the association makes that faded Swiss master of landscape Calame, of
+the so-called calamit&eacute;s, a quite sufficient Ruysdael. It must have been
+conceived for us that we would lead in these conditions&mdash;always in
+pursuit of an education&mdash;a life not too dissimilar to that of the
+storied exiles in the forest of Arden; though one would fain not press,
+after all, upon ideals of culture so little organised, so little
+conscious, up to that moment, of our ferocities of comparison and
+competition, of imposed preparation. This particular loose ideal reached
+out from the desert&mdash;or what might under discouragement pass for such;
+it invoked the light, but a simplicity of view which was somehow one
+with the beauty of other convictions accompanied its effort; and though
+a glance at the social "psychology" of some of its cheerful estimates,
+its relative importances, assumed and acted upon, might here seem
+indicated, there are depths of the ancient serenity that nothing would
+induce me to sound.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span></p><p>I need linger the less, moreover, since we in fact, oddly enough,
+lingered so little; so very little, for reasons doubtless well known to
+ourselves at the time but which I at present fail to recapture, that
+what next stands vividly out for me is our renewed passage through Paris
+on the way to London for the winter; a turn of our situation invested at
+the time with nothing whatever of the wonderful, yet which would again
+half prompt me to soundings were I not to recognise in it that mark of
+the fitful, that accent of the improvised, that general quality of
+earnest and reasoned, yet at the same time almost passionate, impatience
+which was to devote us for some time to variety, almost to incoherency,
+of interest. We had fared across the sea under the glamour of the Swiss
+school in the abstract, but the Swiss school in the concrete soon turned
+stale on our hands; a fact over which I remember myself as no further
+critical than to feel, not without zest, that, since one was all eyes
+and the world decidedly, at such a pace, all images, it ministered to
+the panoramic. It ministered, to begin with, through our very early
+start for Lyons again in the October dawn&mdash;without Nadali or the
+carriages this time, but on the basis of the malle-poste, vast, yellow
+and rumbling, which we availed wholly to fill and of which the high
+haughtiness was such that it could stop, even for an instant, only at
+appointed and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> much dissevered places&mdash;to the effect, I recall, of its
+vainly attempted arrest by our cousin Charlotte King, beforementioned,
+whom I see now suddenly emerge, fresh, confident and pretty, from some
+rural retreat by the road, a scene of simple villeggiatura, "rien que
+pour saluer ces dames," as she pleaded to the conductor; whom she
+practically, if not permittedly, overmastered, leaving with me still the
+wonder of her happy fusion of opposites. The coach had not, in the
+event, paused, but so neither had she, and as it ignored flush and
+flurry quite as it defied delay, she was equally a match for it in these
+particulars, blandly achieving her visit to us while it rumbled on,
+making a perfect success and a perfect grace of her idea. She dropped as
+elegantly out as she had gymnastically floated in, and "ces dames" must
+much have wished they could emulate her art. Save for this my view of
+that migration has faded, though to shine out again to the sense of our
+early morning arrival in Paris a couple of days later, and our hunt
+there, vain at first, for an hotel that would put us numerously up; vain
+till we had sat awhile, in the Rue du Helder, I think, before that of an
+Albany uncle, luckily on the scene and finally invoked, who after some
+delay descended to us with a very foreign air, I fancied, and no
+possibility, to his regret, of placing us under his own roof; as if
+indeed, I remember reflecting, we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> could, such as we were, have been
+desired to share his foreign interests&mdash;such as <i>they</i> were. He espoused
+our cause, however, with gay goodnature&mdash;while I wondered, in my
+admiration for him and curiosity about him, how he really liked us, and
+(a bit doubtfully) whether I should have liked us had I been in his
+place; and after some further adventure installed us at the H&ocirc;tel de la
+Ville de Paris in the Rue de la Ville-l'Ev&egrave;que, a resort now long since
+extinct, though it lingered on for some years, and which I think of as
+rather huddled and disappointingly private, to the abatement of
+spectacle, and standing obliquely beyond a wall, a high gateway and a
+more or less cobbled court.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XXII" id="XXII"></a>XXII</h2>
+
+<p>Little else of that Parisian passage remains with me&mdash;it was probably of
+the briefest; I recover only a visit with my father to the Palais de
+l'Industrie, where the first of the great French Exhibitions, on the
+model, much reduced, of the English Crystal Palace of 1851, was still
+open, a fact explaining the crowded inns; and from that visit win back
+but the department of the English pictures and our stopping long before
+The Order of Release of a young English painter, J. E. Millais, who had
+just leaped into fame, and my impression of the rare treatment of whose
+baby's bare legs, pendent from its mother's arms, is still as vivid to
+me as if from yesterday. The vivid yields again to the vague&mdash;I scarce
+know why so utterly&mdash;till consciousness, waking up in London, renews
+itself, late one evening and very richly, at the Gloucester Hotel (or
+Coffee-House, as I think it was then still called,) which occupied that
+corner of Piccadilly and Berkeley Street where more modern
+establishments have since succeeded it, but where a fatigued and
+famished American family found on that occasion a fine old British
+virtue in cold roast beef and bread<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> and cheese and ale; their expert
+acclamation of which echoes even now in my memory. It keeps company
+there with other matters equally British and, as we say now, early
+Victorian; the thick gloom of the inn rooms, the faintness of the
+glimmering tapers, the blest inexhaustibility of the fine joint,
+surpassed only by that of the grave waiter's reserve&mdash;plain, immutably
+plain fare all, but prompting in our elders an emphasis of relief and
+relish, the "There's nothing like it after all!" tone, which re-excited
+expectation, which in fact seemed this time to re-announce a basis for
+faith and joy.</p>
+
+<p>That basis presently shrank to the scale of a small house hard by the
+hotel, at the entrance of Berkeley Square&mdash;expeditiously lighted on, it
+would thus appear, which again has been expensively superseded, but to
+the ancient little facts of which I fondly revert, since I owe them what
+I feel to have been, in the far past, the prime faint revelation, the
+small broken expression, of the London I was afterwards to know. The
+place wears on the spot, to this day, no very different face; the house
+that has risen on the site of ours is still immediately neighboured at
+the left by the bookseller, the circulating-librarian and news-agent,
+who modestly flourished in our time under the same name; the great
+establishment of Mr. Gunter, just further along, is as soberly and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span>
+solidly seated; the mews behind the whole row, from the foot of Hay Hill
+at the right, wanders away to Bruton Street with the irregular grace
+that spoke to my young fancy; Hay Hill itself is somehow less sharply
+precipitous, besides being no longer paved, as I seem to recall its
+having been, with big boulders, and I was on the point of saying that
+its antique charm in some degree abides. Nothing, however, could be
+further from the truth; its antique charm quite succumbed, years ago, to
+that erection of lumpish "mansions" which followed the demolition of the
+old-world town-residence, as the house-agents say, standing, on the
+south side, between court and I suppose garden, where Dover Street gives
+way to Grafton; a house of many histories, of vague importances and cold
+reserves and deep suggestions, I used to think after scaling the steep
+quite on purpose to wonder about it. A whole chapter of life was
+condensed, for our young sensibility, I make out, into the couple of
+months&mdash;they can scarce have been more&mdash;spent by us in these quarters,
+which must have proved too narrow and too towny; but it can have had no
+passage so lively as the occurrences at once sequent to my father's
+having too candidly made known in some public print, probably The Times,
+that an American gentleman, at such an address, desired to arrange with
+a competent young man for the tuition at home of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> three sons. The
+effect of his rash failure to invite application by letter only was the
+assault of an army of visitors who filled us with consternation; they
+hung about the door, cumbered the hall, choked the staircase and sat
+grimly individual in odd corners. How they were dealt with, given my
+father's precipitate and general charity, I can but feebly imagine; our
+own concern, in the event, was with a sole selected presence, that of
+Scotch Mr. Robert Thompson, who gave us his care from breakfast to
+luncheon each morning that winter, who afterwards carried on a school at
+Edinburgh, and whom, in years long subsequent, I happened to help R. L.
+Stevenson to recognise gaily as <i>his</i> early pedagogue. He was so deeply
+solicitous, yet withal so mild and kind and shy, with no harsher
+injunction to us ever than "Come now, be getting on!" that one could but
+think well of a world in which so gentle a spirit might flourish; while
+it is doubtless to the credit of his temper that remembrance is a blank
+in respect to his closer ministrations. I recall vividly his fresh
+complexion, his very round clear eyes, his tendency to trip over his own
+legs or feet while thoughtfully circling about us, and his constant
+dress-coat, worn with trousers of a lighter hue, which was perhaps the
+prescribed uniform of a daily tutor then; but I ask myself in vain what
+I can have "studied" with him, there remaining<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> with me afterwards, to
+testify&mdash;this putting any scrap of stored learning aside&mdash;no single
+textbook save the Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare, which was given me as
+(of all things in the world) a reward. A reward for what I am again at a
+loss to say&mdash;not certainly for having "got on" to anything like the tune
+plaintively, for the most part, piped to me. It is a very odd and yet to
+myself very rich and full reminiscence, though I remember how, looking
+back at it from after days, W. J. denounced it to me, and with it the
+following year and more spent in Paris, as a poor and arid and
+lamentable time, in which, missing such larger chances and connections
+as we might have reached out to, we had done nothing, he and I, but walk
+about together, in a state of the direst propriety, little "high" black
+hats and inveterate gloves, the childish costume of the place and
+period, to stare at grey street-scenery (that of early Victorian London
+had tones of a neutrality!) dawdle at shop-windows and buy water-colours
+and brushes with which to bedaub eternal drawing-blocks. We might, I
+dare say, have felt higher impulses and carried out larger plans&mdash;though
+indeed present to me for this, on my brother's so expressing himself, is
+my then quick recognition of the deeper stirrings and braver needs he at
+least must have known, and my perfect if rueful sense of having myself
+had no such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> quarrel with our conditions: embalmed for me did they even
+to that shorter retrospect appear in a sort of fatalism of patience,
+spiritless in a manner, no doubt, yet with an inwardly active,
+productive and ingenious side.</p>
+
+<p>It was just the fact of our having so walked and dawdled and dodged that
+made the charm of memory; in addition to which what could one have asked
+more than to be steeped in a medium so dense that whole elements of it,
+forms of amusement, interest and wonder, soaked through to some
+appreciative faculty and made one fail at the most of nothing but one's
+lessons? My brother was right in so far as that my question&mdash;the one I
+have just reproduced&mdash;could have been asked only by a person
+incorrigible in throwing himself back upon substitutes for lost causes,
+substitutes that might <i>temporarily</i> have appeared queer and small; a
+person so haunted, even from an early age, with visions of life, that
+aridities, for him, were half a terror and half an impossibility, and
+that the said substitutes, the economies and ingenuities that protested,
+in their dumb vague way, against weakness of situation or of direct and
+applied faculty, were in themselves really a revel of spirit and
+thought. It <i>had</i> indeed again an effect of almost pathetic incoherence
+that our brave quest of "the languages," suffering so prompt and for the
+time at least so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> accepted and now so inscrutably irrecoverable a check,
+should have contented itself with settling us by that Christmas in a
+house, more propitious to our development, in St. John's Wood, where we
+enjoyed a considerable garden and wistful view, though by that windowed
+privilege alone, of a large green expanse in which ladies and gentlemen
+practised archery. Just <i>that</i>&mdash;and not the art even, but the mere
+spectacle&mdash;might have been one of the substitutes in question; if not
+for the languages at least for one or another of the romantic
+connections we seemed a little to have missed: it was such a whiff of
+the old world of Robin Hood as we could never have looked up from the
+mere thumbed "story," in Fourteenth Street at any rate, to any soft
+confidence of. More than I can begin to say, that is by a greater number
+of queer small channels, did the world about us, thus continuous with
+the old world of Robin Hood, steal into my sense&mdash;a constant state of
+subjection to which fact is no bad instance of those refinements of
+surrender that I just named as my fond practice. I seem to see to-day
+that the London of the 'fifties was even to the weak perception of
+childhood a much less generalised, a much more eccentrically and
+variously characterised place, than the present great accommodated and
+accommodating city; it had fewer resources but it had many more
+features, scarce<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> one of which failed to help the whole to bristle with
+what a little gaping American could take for an intensity of difference
+from <i>his</i> supposed order. It was extraordinarily the picture and the
+scene of Dickens, now so changed and superseded; it offered to my
+presumptuous vision still more the reflection of Thackeray&mdash;and where is
+the <i>detail</i> of the reflection of Thackeray now?&mdash;so that as I trod the
+vast length of Baker Street, the Thackerayan vista of other days, I
+throbbed with the pride of a vastly enlarged acquaintance.</p>
+
+<p>I dare say our perambulations of Baker Street in our little "top" hats
+and other neatnesses must have been what W. J. meant by our poverty of
+life&mdash;whereas it was probably one of the very things most expressive to
+myself of the charm and the colour of history and (from the point of
+view of the picturesque) of society. We were often in Baker Street by
+reason of those stretched-out walks, at the remembered frequency and
+long-drawn push of which I am to-day amazed; recalling at the same time,
+however, that save for Robert Thompson's pitching ball with us in the
+garden they took for us the place of all other agilities. I can't but
+feel them to have been marked in their way by a rare curiosity and
+energy. Good Mr. Thompson had followed us in our move, occupying
+quarters, not far off, above a baker's shop on a Terrace&mdash;a group of
+objects still <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span>untouched by time&mdash;where we occasionally by way of change
+attended for our lessons and where not the least of our inspirations was
+the confidence, again and again justified, that our mid-morning "break"
+would determine the appearance of a self-conscious stale cake, straight
+from below, received by us all each time as if it had been a sudden
+happy thought, and ushered in by a little girl who might have been a
+Dickens foundling or "orfling." Our being reduced to mumble cake in a
+suburban lodging by way of reaction from the strain of study would have
+been perhaps a pathetic picture, but we had field-days too, when we
+accompanied our excellent friend to the Tower, the Thames Tunnel, St.
+Paul's and the Abbey, to say nothing of the Zoological Gardens, almost
+close at hand and with which we took in that age of lingering forms no
+liberty of abbreviation; to say nothing either of Madame Tussaud's, then
+in our interminable but so amiable Baker Street, the only shade on the
+amiability of which was just that gruesome association with the portal
+of the Bazaar&mdash;since Madame Tussaud had, of all her treasures, most
+vividly revealed to me the Mrs. Manning and the Burke and Hare of the
+Chamber of Horrors which lurked just within it; whom, for days after
+making their acquaintance (and prolonging it no further than our
+conscientious friend thought advisable) I half expected,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span> when alone, to
+meet quite dreadfully on the staircase or on opening a door. All this
+experience was valuable, but it was not the languages&mdash;save in so far
+indeed as it was the English, which we hadn't in advance so much aimed
+at, yet which more or less, and very interestingly, came; it at any rate
+perhaps broke our fall a little that French, of a sort, continued to be
+with us in the remarkably erect person of Mademoiselle Cusin, the Swiss
+governess who had accompanied us from Geneva, whose quite sharply
+extrusive but on the whole exhilarating presence I associate with this
+winter, and who led in that longish procession of more or less similar
+domesticated presences which was to keep the torch, that is the accent,
+among us, fairly alight. The variety and frequency of the arrivals and
+departures of these ladies&mdash;whose ghostly names, again, so far as I
+recall them, I like piously to preserve, Augustine Danse, Am&eacute;lie Fortin,
+Marie Guyard, Marie Bonningue, F&eacute;licie Bonningue, Clarisse
+Bader&mdash;mystifies me in much the same degree as our own academic
+vicissitudes in New York; I can no more imagine why, sociable and
+charitable, we so often changed governesses than I had contemporaneously
+grasped the principle of our succession of schools: the whole group of
+phenomena reflected, I gather, as a rule, much more the extreme
+promptitude of the parental optimism than any <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span>disproportionate habit of
+impatience. The optimism begot precipitation, and the precipitation had
+too often to confess itself. What is instructive, what is historic, is
+the probability that young persons offering themselves at that time as
+guides and communicators&mdash;the requirements of our small sister were for
+long modest enough&mdash;quite conceivably lacked preparedness, and were so
+thrown back on the extempore, which in turn lacked abundance. One of
+these figures, that of Mademoiselle Danse, the most Parisian, and
+prodigiously so, was afterwards to stand out for us quite luridly&mdash;a
+cloud of revelations succeeding her withdrawal; a cloud which, thick as
+it was, never obscured our impression of her genius and her charm. The
+daughter of a political proscript who had but just escaped, by the
+legend, being seized in his bed on the terrible night of the
+Deux-D&eacute;cembre, and who wrote her micawberish letters from Gallipolis,
+Ohio, she subsequently figured to my imagination (in the light, that is,
+of the divined revelations, too dreadful for our young ears,) as the
+most brilliant and most genial of irregular characters, exhibiting the
+Parisian "mentality" at its highest, or perhaps rather its deepest, and
+more remarkable for nothing than for the consummate little art and grace
+with which she had for a whole year draped herself in the mantle of our
+innocent air. It was exciting, it was really<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span> valuable, to have to that
+extent rubbed shoulders with an "adventuress"; it showed one that for
+the adventuress there might on occasion be much to be said.</p>
+
+<p>Those, however, were later things&mdash;extensions of view hampered for the
+present, as I have noted, by our mere London street-scenery, which had
+much to build out for us. I see again that we but endlessly walked and
+endlessly daubed, and that our walks, with an obsession of their own,
+constantly abetted our daubing. We knew no other boys at all, and we
+even saw no others, I seem to remember, save the essentially rude ones,
+rude with a kind of medi&aelig;val rudeness for which our clear New York
+experience had given us no precedent, and of which the great and
+constant sign was the artless, invidious wonder produced in them, on our
+public appearances, by the alien stamp in us that, for our comfort, we
+vainly sought to dissimulate. We conformed in each particular, so far as
+we could, to the prevailing fashion and standard, of a narrow range in
+those days, but in our very plumage&mdash;putting our <i>ramage</i> aside&mdash;our
+wood-note wild must have seemed to sound, so sharply we challenged, when
+abroad, the attention of our native contemporaries, and even sometimes
+of their elders, pulled up at sight of us in the from-head-to-foot
+stare, a curiosity void of sympathy and that attached itself for some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span>
+reason especially to our feet, which were not abnormally large. The
+London people had for themselves, at the same time, an exuberance of
+type; we found it in particular a world of costume, often of very odd
+costume&mdash;the most intimate notes of which were the postmen in their
+frock-coats of military red and their black beaver hats; the milkwomen,
+in hats that often emulated these, in little shawls and strange short,
+full frocks, revealing enormous boots, with their pails swung from their
+shoulders on wooden yokes; the inveterate footmen hooked behind the
+coaches of the rich, frequently in pairs and carrying staves, together
+with the mounted and belted grooms without the attendance of whom
+riders, of whichever sex&mdash;and riders then were much more
+numerous&mdash;almost never went forth. The range of character, on the other
+hand, reached rather dreadfully down; there were embodied and
+exemplified "horrors" in the streets beside which any present exhibition
+is pale, and I well remember the almost terrified sense of their
+salience produced in me a couple of years later, on the occasion of a
+flying return from the Continent with my father, by a long, an
+interminable drive westward from the London Bridge railway-station. It
+was a soft June evening, with a lingering light and swarming crowds, as
+they then seemed to me, of figures reminding me of George Cruikshank's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>
+Artful Dodger and his Bill Sikes and his Nancy, only with the bigger
+brutality of life, which pressed upon the cab, the early-Victorian
+fourwheeler, as we jogged over the Bridge, and cropped up in more and
+more gas-lit patches for all our course, culminating, somewhere far to
+the west, in the vivid picture, framed by the cab-window, of a woman
+reeling backward as a man felled her to the ground with a blow in the
+face. The London view at large had in fact more than a Cruikshank, there
+still survived in it quite a Hogarth, side&mdash;which I had of course then
+no name for, but which I was so sharply to recognise on coming back
+years later that it fixed for me the veracity of the great pictorial
+chronicler. Hogarth's mark is even yet not wholly overlaid; though time
+has <i>per contra</i> dealt with that stale servility of address which most
+expressed to our young minds the rich burden of a Past, the consequence
+of too much history. I liked for my own part a lot of history, but felt
+in face of certain queer old obsequiosities and appeals, whinings and
+sidlings and hand-rubbings and curtsey-droppings, the general play of
+apology and humility, behind which the great dim social complexity
+seemed to mass itself, that one didn't quite want so inordinate a
+quantity. Of that particular light and shade, however, the big broom of
+change has swept the scene bare; more history still has been after all
+what it wanted.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> Quite another order, in the whole connection, strikes
+me as reigning to-day&mdash;though not without the reminder from it that the
+relations in which manner, as a generalised thing, in which "tone," is
+<i>positively</i> pleasant, is really assured and sound, clear and
+interesting, are numerous and definite only when it has had in its past
+some strange phases and much misadventure.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XXIII" id="XXIII"></a>XXIII</h2>
+
+<p>We were still being but vaguely "formed," yet it was a vagueness
+preferred apparently by our parents to the only definiteness in any
+degree open to us, that of the English school away from home (the London
+private school near home they would absolutely none of;) which they saw
+as a fearful and wonderful, though seemingly effective, preparation of
+the young for English life and an English career, but related to that
+situation only, so little related in fact to any other as to make it, in
+a differing case, an educational cul-de-sac, the worst of economies.
+They had doubtless heard claimed for it just that no other method for
+boys <i>was</i> so splendidly general, but they had, I judge, their own sense
+of the matter&mdash;which would have been that it all depended on what was
+meant by this. The truth was, above all, that to them the formative
+forces most closely bearing on us were not in the least vague, but very
+definite by <i>their</i> measure and intention; there were "advantages,"
+generally much belauded, that appealed to them scantly, and other
+matters, conceptions of character and opportunity, ideals, values,
+importances, enjoying no great common<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> credit but for which it was their
+belief that they, under whatever difficulties, more or less provided. In
+respect of which I further remind myself of the blest fewness, as yet,
+of our years; and I come back to my own sense, benighted though it may
+have been, of a highly-coloured and remarkably active life. I recognise
+our immediate, our practical ferment even in our decent perambulations,
+our discussions, W. J.'s and mine, of whether we had in a given case
+best apply for a renewal of our "artists' materials" to Messrs. Rowney
+or to Messrs. Windsor and Newton, and in our pious resort, on these
+determinations, to Rathbone Place, more beset by our steps, probably,
+than any other single corner of the town, and the short but charged
+vista of which lives for me again in the tempered light of those old
+winter afternoons. Of scarce less moment than these were our frequent
+visits, in the same general connection, to the old Pantheon of Oxford
+Street, now fallen from its high estate, but during that age a place of
+fine rococo traditions, a bazaar, an exhibition, an opportunity, at the
+end of long walks, for the consumption of buns and ginger-beer, and
+above all a monument to the genius of that wonderful painter B. R.
+Haydon. We must at one time quite have haunted the Pantheon, where we
+doubtless could better than elsewhere sink to contemplative, to
+ruminative rest: Haydon's huge canvases covered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span> the walls&mdash;I wonder
+what has become now of The Banishment of Aristides, attended to the city
+gate by his wife and babe, every attitude and figure in which,
+especially that of the foreshortened boy picking up stones to shy at the
+all-too-just, stares out at me still. We found in these works remarkable
+interest and beauty, the reason of which was partly, no doubt, that we
+hung, to fascination, at home, over the three volumes of the hapless
+artist's Autobiography, then a new book, which our father, indulgent to
+our preoccupation, had provided us with; but I blush to risk the further
+surmise that the grand manner, the heroic and the classic, in Haydon,
+came home to us more warmly and humanly than in the masters commended as
+"old," who, at the National Gallery, seemed to meet us so little
+half-way, to hold out the hand of fellowship or suggest something that
+<i>we</i> could do, or could at least want to. The beauty of Haydon was just
+that he was new, shiningly new, and if he hinted that we might perhaps
+in some happy future emulate his big bravery there was nothing so
+impossible about it. If we adored daubing we preferred it <i>fresh</i>, and
+the genius of the Pantheon was fresh, whereas, strange to say, Rubens
+and Titian were not. Even the charm of the Pantheon yielded, however, to
+that of the English collection, the Vernon bequest to the nation, then
+arrayed at Marlborough House and to which the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span> great plumed and draped
+and dusty funeral car of the Duke of Wellington formed an attractive
+adjunct. The ground-floor chambers there, none of them at that time
+royally inhabited, come back to me as altogether bleak and bare and as
+owing their only dignity to Maclise, Mulready and Landseer, to David
+Wilkie and Charles Leslie. <i>They</i> were, by some deep-seated English
+mystery, the real unattainable, just as they were none the less the
+directly inspiring and the endlessly delightful. I could never have
+enough of Maclise's Play-scene in Hamlet, which I supposed the finest
+composition in the world (though Ophelia did look a little as if cut in
+silhouette out of white paper and pasted on;) while as I gazed, and
+gazed again, at Leslie's Sancho Panza and his Duchess I pushed through
+the great hall of romance to the central or private apartments.
+Trafalgar Square had its straight message for us only in the May-time
+exhibition, the Royal Academy of those days having, without a home of
+its own, to borrow space from the National Gallery&mdash;space partly
+occupied, in the summer of 1856, by the first fresh fruits of the
+Pre-Raphaelite efflorescence, among which I distinguish Millais's Vale
+of Rest, his Autumn Leaves and, if I am not mistaken, his prodigious
+Blind Girl. The very word Pre-Raphaelite wore for us that intensity of
+meaning, not less than of mystery, that thrills us in its perfection but
+for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> one season, the prime hour of first initiations, and I may perhaps
+somewhat mix the order of our great little passages of perception.
+Momentous to us again was to be the Academy show of 1858, where there
+were, from the same wide source, still other challenges to wonder,
+Holman Hunt's Scapegoat most of all, which I remember finding so charged
+with the awful that I was glad I saw it in company&mdash;<i>it</i> in company and
+I the same: I believed, or tried to believe, I should have feared to
+face it all alone in a room. By that time moreover&mdash;I mean by 1858&mdash;we
+had been more fully indoctrinated, or such was the case at least with W.
+J., for whom, in Paris, during the winter of 1857, instruction at the
+atelier of M. L&eacute;on Coigniet, of a limited order and adapted to his
+years, had been candidly provided&mdash;that M. L&eacute;on Coigniet whose Marius
+meditating among the Ruins of Carthage impressed us the more, at the
+Luxembourg (even more haunted by us in due course than the Pantheon had
+been,) in consequence of this family connection.</p>
+
+<p>Let me not, however, nip the present thread of our &aelig;sthetic evolution
+without a glance at that comparatively spare but deeply appreciated
+experience of the London theatric privilege which, so far as occasion
+favoured us, also pressed the easy spring. The New York familiarities
+had to drop; going to the play presented itself in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span>London as a serious,
+ponderous business: a procession of two throbbing and heaving cabs over
+vast foggy tracts of the town, after much arrangement in advance and
+with a renewal of far peregrination, through twisting passages and
+catacombs, even after crossing the magic threshold. We sat in strange
+places, with still stranger ones behind or beside; we felt walls and
+partitions, in our rear, getting so hot that we wondered if the house
+was to burst into flame; I recall in especial our being arrayed, to the
+number of nine persons, all of our contingent, in a sort of rustic
+balcony or verandah which, simulating the outer gallery of a Swiss
+cottage framed in creepers, formed a feature of Mr. Albert Smith's
+once-famous representation of the Tour of Mont Blanc. Big, bearded,
+rattling, chattering, mimicking Albert Smith again charms my senses,
+though subject to the reflection that his type and presence,
+superficially so important, so ample, were somehow at odds with such
+ingratiations, with the reckless levity of his performance&mdash;a
+performance one of the great effects of which was, as I remember it, the
+very brief stop and re-departure of the train at &Eacute;pernay, with the
+ringing of bells, the bawling of guards, the cries of travellers, the
+slamming of doors and the tremendous pop as of a colossal
+champagne-cork, made all simultaneous and vivid by Mr. Smith's mere
+personal resources and graces. But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> it is the publicity of our situation
+as a happy family that I best remember, and how, to our embarrassment,
+we seemed put forward in our illustrative ch&acirc;let as part of the
+boisterous show and of what had been paid for by the house. Two other
+great evenings stand out for me as not less collectively enjoyed, one of
+these at the Princess's, then under the management of Charles Kean, the
+unprecedented (as he was held) Shakespearean revivalist, the other at
+the Olympic, where Alfred Wigan, the extraordinary and too short-lived
+Robson and the shrewd and handsome Mrs. Stirling were the high
+attraction. Our enjoyment of Charles Kean's presentation of Henry the
+Eighth figures to me as a momentous date in our lives: we did nothing
+for weeks afterwards but try to reproduce in water-colours Queen
+Katharine's dream-vision of the beckoning, consoling angels, a radiant
+group let down from the skies by machinery then thought marvellous&mdash;when
+indeed we were not parading across our schoolroom stage as the
+portentous Cardinal and impressively alternating his last speech to
+Cromwell with Buckingham's, that is with Mr. Ryder's, address on the way
+to the scaffold. The spectacle had seemed to us prodigious&mdash;as it was
+doubtless at its time the last word of costly scenic science; though as
+I look back from the high ground of an age that has mastered tone and
+fusion I seem to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span> see it as comparatively garish and violent, after the
+manner of the complacently approved stained-glass church-windows of the
+same period. I was to have my impression of Charles Kean renewed later
+on&mdash;ten years later, in America&mdash;without a rag of scenic reinforcement;
+when I was struck with the fact that no actor so little graced by nature
+probably ever went so far toward repairing it by a kind of cold rage of
+endeavour. Were he and his wife really not <i>coercively</i> interesting on
+that Boston night of Macbeth in particular, hadn't their art a
+distinction that triumphed over battered age and sorry harshness, or was
+I but too easily beguiled by the old association? I have enjoyed and
+forgotten numberless rich hours of spectatorship, but somehow still find
+hooked to the wall of memory the picture of this hushed couple in the
+castle court, with the knocking at the gate, with Macbeth's stare of
+pitiful horror at his unused daggers and with the grand manner, up to
+the height of the argument, of Mrs. Kean's coldly portentous snatch of
+them. What I especially owe that lady is my sense of what she had in
+common, as a queer hooped and hook-nosed figure, of large circumference
+and archaic attire, strange tasteless toggery, with those performers of
+the past who are preserved for us on the small canvases of Hogarth and
+Zoffany; she helped one back at that time of her life to a vision<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span> of
+the Mrs. Cibbers and the Mrs. Pritchards&mdash;so affecting may often be such
+recovered links.</p>
+
+<p>I see the evening at the Olympic as really itself partaking of that
+antiquity, even though Still Waters Run Deep, then in its flourishing
+freshness and as to which I remember my fine old friend Fanny Kemble's
+mentioning to me in the distant after-time that she had directed Tom
+Taylor to Charles de Bernard's novel of Un Gendre for the subject of it,
+passed at the moment for a highly modern "social study." It is perhaps
+in particular through the memory of our dismal approach to the theatre,
+the squalid slum of Wych Street, then incredibly brutal and barbarous as
+an avenue to joy, an avenue even sometimes for the muffled coach of
+Royalty, that the episode affects me as antedating some of the
+conditions of the mid-Victorian age; the general credit of which, I
+should add, was highly re-established for us by the consummately quiet
+and natural art, as we expertly pronounced it, of Alfred Wigan's John
+Mildmay and the breadth and sincerity of the representative of the rash
+mother-in-law whom he so imperturbably puts in her place. This was an
+exhibition supposed in its day to leave its spectators little to envy in
+the highest finish reached by the French theatre. At a remarkable
+height, in a different direction, moved the strange and vivid little
+genius of Robson, a master of fantastic <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span>intensity, unforgettable for
+us, we felt that night, in Planch&eacute;'s extravaganza of The Discreet
+Princess, a Christmas production preluding to the immemorial
+harlequinade. I still see Robson slide across the stage, in one sidelong
+wriggle, as the small black sinister Prince Richcraft of the fairy-tale,
+everything he did at once very dreadful and very droll, thoroughly true
+and yet none the less <i>macabre</i>, the great point of it all its parody of
+Charles Kean in The Corsican Brothers; a vision filled out a couple of
+years further on by his Daddy Hardacre in a two-acts version of a
+Parisian piece thriftily and coarsely extracted from Balzac's Eug&eacute;nie
+Grandet. This occasion must have given the real and the finer measure of
+his highly original talent; so present to me, despite the interval, is
+the distinctiveness of his little concentrated rustic miser whose
+daughter helps herself from his money-box so that her cousin and lover
+shall save a desperate father, her paternal uncle, from bankruptcy; and
+the prodigious effect of Robson's appalled descent, from an upper floor,
+his literal headlong tumble and rattle of dismay down a steep staircase
+occupying the centre of the stage, on his discovery of the rifling of
+his chest. Long was I to have in my ears the repeated shriek of his
+alarm, followed by a panting babble of wonder and rage as his impetus
+hurled him, a prostrate scrap of despair (he was a tiny figure, yet "so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span>
+held the stage" that in his company you could see nobody else) half way
+across the room. I associate a little uncertainly with the same night
+the sight of Charles Matthews in Sheridan's Critic and in a comedy
+botched from the French, like everything else in those days that was not
+either Sheridan or Shakespeare, called Married for Money; an example
+above all, this association, of the heaped measure of the old
+bills&mdash;vast and various enumerations as they were, of the size of but
+slightly reduced placards and with a strange and delightful greasy feel
+and redolence of printer's ink, intensely theatrical ink somehow, in
+their big black lettering. Charles Matthews must have been then in his
+mid-career, and him too, wasted and aged, infinitely "marked," I was to
+see again, ever so long after, in America; an impression reminding me,
+as I recover it, of how one took his talent so thoroughly for granted
+that he seemed somehow to get but half the credit of it: this at least
+in all save parts of mere farce and "patter," which were on a footing,
+and no very interesting one, of their own. The other effect, that of a
+naturalness so easy and immediate, so friendly and intimate, that one's
+relation with the artist lost itself in one's relation with the
+character, the artist thereby somehow positively suffering while the
+character gained, or at least while the spectator did&mdash;this comes back
+to me quite as a part<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span> even of my earlier experience and as attesting on
+behalf of the actor a remarkable genius; since there are no more
+charming artistic cases than those of the frank result, when it is frank
+<i>enough</i>, and the dissimulated process, when the dissimulation has been
+deep. To drop, or appear to drop, machinery and yet keep, or at least
+gain, intensity, the interesting intensity separated by a gulf from a
+mere unbought coincidence of aspect or organ, is really to do something.
+In spite of which, at the same time, what I perhaps most retain, by the
+light of the present, of the sense of that big and rather dusky night of
+Drury Lane is not so much the felt degree of anyone's talent as the fact
+that personality and artistry, <i>with</i> their intensity, could work their
+spell in such a material desert, in conditions intrinsically so
+charmless, so bleak and bare. The conditions gave nothing of what we
+regard to-day as most indispensable&mdash;since our present fine conception
+is but to reduce and fill in the material desert, to people and carpet
+and curtain it. We may be right, so far as that goes, but our
+predecessors were, with their eye on the essence, not wrong; thanks to
+which they wear the crown of our now thinking of them&mdash;if we do think of
+them&mdash;as in their way giants and heroes. What their successors were to
+become is another question; very much better dressed, beyond all doubt.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XXIV" id="XXIV"></a>XXIV</h2>
+
+<p>Good Robert Thompson was followed by <i>fin</i> M. Lerambert&mdash;who was surely
+good too, in his different way; good at least for feigning an interest
+he could scarce have rejoicingly felt and that he yet somehow managed to
+give a due impression of: that artifice being, as we must dimly have
+divined at the time (in fact I make bold to say that I personally did
+divine it,) exactly a sign of his <i>finesse</i>. Of no such uncanny engine
+had Mr. Thompson, luckily, known a need&mdash;luckily since to what arsenal
+could he possibly have resorted for it? None capable of supplying it
+could ever have met his sight, and we ourselves should at a pinch have
+had to help him toward it. He was easily interested, or at least took an
+easy view, on such ground as we offered him, of what it was to be so;
+whereas his successor attached to the condition a different value&mdash;one
+recognising no secondary substitute. Perhaps this was why our connection
+with M. Lerambert can have lasted but four or five months&mdash;time even for
+his sharp subterfuge to have ceased entirely to serve him; though indeed
+even as I say this I vaguely recall that our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span> separation was attended
+with friction, that it took him unaware and that he had been prepared
+(or so represented himself) for further sacrifices. It could have been
+no great one, assuredly, to deal with so intensely living a young mind
+as my elder brother's, it could have been but a happy impression
+constantly renewed; but we two juniors, Wilky and I, were a
+drag&mdash;Wilky's powers most displayed at that time in his preference for
+ingenuous talk over any other pursuit whatever, and my own aptitude
+showing for nil, according to our poor gentleman's report of me when a
+couple of months had sped, save as to rendering La Fontaine's fables
+into English with a certain corresponding felicity of idiom. I remember
+perfectly the parental communication to me of this fell judgment, I
+remember as well the interest with which its so quite definite character
+inspired me&mdash;that character had such beauty and distinctness; yet, and
+ever so strangely, I recover no sense of having been crushed, and this
+even though destitute, utterly, of any ground of appeal. The fact leaves
+me at a loss, since I also remember my not having myself thought
+particularly well, in the connection allowed, of my "rendering" faculty.
+"Oh," I seem inwardly to have said, "if it were to be, if it only could
+be, <i>really</i> a question of rendering&mdash;!" and so, without confusion,
+though in vague, very vague, mystification to have left it:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> as if so
+many things, intrinsic and extrinsic, would have to change and operate,
+so many would have to happen, so much water have to flow under the
+bridge, before I could give primary application to such a thought, much
+more finish such a sentence.</p>
+
+<p>All of which is but a way of saying that we had since the beginning of
+the summer settled ourselves in Paris, and that M. Lerambert&mdash;by what
+agency invoked, by what revelation vouchsafed, I quite forget&mdash;was at
+this time attending us in a so-called pavilion, of middling size, that,
+between the Rond-Point and the Rue du Colis&eacute;e, hung, at no great height,
+over the Avenue des Champs-Elys&eacute;es; hung, that is, from the vantage of
+its own considerable terrace, surmounted as the parapet of the latter
+was with iron railings rising sufficiently to protect the place for
+familiar use and covert contemplation (we ever so fondly used it,) and
+yet not to the point of fencing out life. A blest little old-world
+refuge it must have seemed to us, with its protuberantly-paved and
+peculiarly resonant small court and idle <i>communs</i> beside it, accessible
+by a high grille where the jangle of the bell and the clatter of
+response across the stones might have figured a comprehensive echo of
+all old Paris. Old Paris then even there considerably lingered; I
+recapture much of its presence, for that matter, within our odd relic
+of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span> a house, the property of an American southerner from whom our
+parents had briefly hired it and who appeared to divide his time, poor
+unadmonished gentleman of the eve of the Revolution, between Louisiana
+and France. What association could have breathed more from the queer
+graces and the queer incommodities alike, from the diffused glassy
+polish of floor and perilous staircase, from the redundancy of mirror
+and clock and ormolu vase, from the irrepressibility of the white and
+gold panel, from that merciless elegance of tense red damask, above all,
+which made the gilt-framed backs of sofa and chair as sumptuous, no
+doubt, but as sumptuously stiff, as the brocaded walls? It was amid
+these refinements that we presently resumed our studies&mdash;even explicitly
+far from arduous at first, as the Champs-Elys&eacute;es were perforce that year
+our summer habitation and some deference was due to the place and the
+season, lessons of any sort being at best an infraction of the latter.
+M. Lerambert, who was spare and tightly black-coated, spectacled, pale
+and prominently intellectual, who lived in the Rue Jacob with his mother
+and sister, exactly as he should have done to accentuate prophetically
+his resemblance, save for the spectacles, to some hero of Victor
+Cherbuliez, and who, in fine, was conscious, not unimpressively, of his
+authorship of a volume of meditative verse <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span>sympathetically mentioned by
+the Sainte-Beuve of the Causeries in a review of the young poets of the
+hour ("M. Lerambert too has loved, M. Lerambert too has suffered, M.
+Lerambert too has sung!" or words to that effect:) this subtle
+personality, really a high form of sensibility I surmise, and as
+qualified for other and intenser relations as any Cherbuliez figure of
+them all, was naturally not to be counted on to lead us gapingly forth
+as good Mr. Thompson had done; so that my reminiscence of warm
+somniferous mornings by the windows that opened to the clattery, plashy
+court is quite, so far as my record goes, relievingly unbroken.</p>
+
+<p>The afternoons, however, glimmer back to me shamelessly different, for
+our circle had promptly been joined by the all-knowing and all-imposing
+Mademoiselle Danse aforesaid, her of the so flexible <i>taille</i> and the so
+salient smiling eyes, than which even those of Miss Rebecca Sharp, that
+other epic governess, were not more pleasingly green; who provided with
+high efficiency for our immediate looser needs&mdash;mine and Wilky's and
+those of our small brother Bob (l'ing&eacute;nieux petit Robertson as she was
+to dub him,) and of our still smaller sister at least&mdash;our first fine
+<i>fl&acirc;neries</i> of curiosity. Her brave Vaudoise predecessor had been
+bequeathed by us in London to a higher sphere than service with mere
+earnest nomads could represent; but had left us clinging and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span>weeping
+and was for a long time afterwards to write to us, faithfully, in the
+most beautiful copper-plate hand, out of the midst of her "rise"; with
+details that brought home to us as we had never known it brought the
+material and institutional difference between the nomadic and the
+solidly, the spreadingly seated. A couple of years later, on an occasion
+of our being again for a while in London, she hastened to call on us,
+and, on departing, amiably invited me to walk back with her, for a
+gossip&mdash;it was a bustling day of June&mdash;across a long stretch of the
+town; when I left her at a glittering portal with the impression of my
+having in our transit seen much of Society (the old London "season"
+filled the measure, had length and breadth and thickness, to an extent
+now foregone,) and, more particularly, achieved a small psychologic
+study, noted the action of the massive English machinery directed to its
+end, which had been in this case effectually to tame the presumptuous
+and "work over" the crude. I remember on that occasion retracing my
+steps from Eaton Square to Devonshire Street with a lively sense of
+observation exercised by the way, a perfect gleaning of golden straws.
+Our guide and philosopher of the summer days in Paris was no such
+character as that; she had arrived among us full-fledged and consummate,
+fortunately for the case altogether&mdash;as our mere candid humanity would
+otherwise<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> have had scant practical pressure to bring. Thackeray's novel
+contains a plate from his own expressive hand representing Miss Sharp
+lost in a cynical day-dream while her neglected pupils are locked in a
+scrimmage on the floor; but the marvel of <i>our</i> exemplar of the Becky
+type was exactly that though her larger, her more interested and
+sophisticated views had a range that she not only permitted us to guess
+but agreeably invited us to follow almost to their furthest limits, we
+never for a moment ceased to be aware of her solicitude. We might, we
+must, so tremendously have bored her, but no ironic artist could have
+caught her at any juncture in the posture of disgust: really, I imagine,
+because her own ironies would have been too fine for him and too
+numerous and too mixed. And this remarkable creature vouchsafed us all
+information for the free enjoyment&mdash;on the terms proper to our tender
+years&mdash;of her beautiful city.</p>
+
+<p>It was not by the common measure then so beautiful as now; the second
+Empire, too lately installed, was still more or less feeling its way,
+with the great free hand soon to be allowed to Baron Haussmann marked as
+yet but in the light preliminary flourish. Its connections with the
+past, however, still hung thickly on; its majesties and symmetries,
+comparatively vague and general, were subject to the happy accident, the
+charming lapse and the odd extrusion, a bonhomie of chance <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span>composition
+and colour now quite purged away. The whole region of the
+Champs-Elys&eacute;es, where we must after all at first have principally
+prowled, was another world from the actual huge centre of repeated
+radiations; the splendid Avenue, as we of course already thought it,
+carried the eye from the Tuileries to the Arch, but pleasant old places
+abutted on it by the way, gardens and terraces and h&ocirc;tels of another
+time, pavilions still braver than ours, cabarets and caf&eacute;s of homely,
+almost of rural type, with a relative and doubtless rather dusty
+ruralism, spreading away to the River and the Wood. What was the Jardin
+d'Hiver, a place of entertainment standing quite over against us and
+that looped itself at night with little coloured oil-lamps, a mere
+twinkling grin upon the face of pleasure? Dim my impression of having
+been admitted&mdash;or rather, I suppose, conducted, though under
+conductorship now vague to me&mdash;to view it by colourless day, when it
+must have worn the stamp of an auction-room quite void of the "lots."
+More distinct on the other hand the image of the bustling barri&egrave;re at
+the top of the Avenue, on the hither side of the Arch, where the old
+loose-girt <i>banlieue</i> began at once and the two matched lodges of the
+octroi, highly, that is expressly even if humbly, architectural, guarded
+the entrance, on either side, with such a suggestion of the generations
+and dynasties and armies, the revolutions<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span> and restorations they had
+seen come and go. But the Avenue of the Empress, now, so much more
+thinly, but of the Wood itself, had already been traced, as the Empress
+herself, young, more than young, attestedly and agreeably <i>new</i>, and
+fair and shining, was, up and down the vista, constantly on exhibition;
+with the thrill of that surpassed for us, however, by the incomparable
+passage, as we judged it, of the baby Prince Imperial borne forth for
+his airing or his progress to Saint-Cloud in the splendid coach that
+gave a glimpse of appointed and costumed nursing breasts and laps, and
+beside which the <i>cent-gardes</i>, all light-blue and silver and intensely
+erect quick jolt, rattled with pistols raised and cocked. Was a public
+holiday ever more splendid than that of the Prince's baptism at Notre
+Dame, the f&ecirc;te of Saint-Napol&eacute;on, or was any ever more immortalised, as
+we say, than this one was to be by the wonderfully ample and vivid
+picture of it in the Eug&egrave;ne Rougon of Emile Zola, who must have taken it
+in, on the spot, as a boy of about our own number of years, though of so
+much more implanted and predestined an evocatory gift? The sense of that
+interminable hot day, a day of hanging about and waiting and shuffling
+in dust, in crowds, in fatigue, amid booths and pedlars and performers
+and false alarms and expectations and renewed reactions and rushes, all
+transfigured at the last,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span> withal, by the biggest and brightest
+illumination up to that time offered even the Parisians, the blinding
+glare of the new Empire effectually symbolised&mdash;the vision of the whole,
+I say, comes back to me quite in the form of a chapter from the
+Rougon-Macquart, with its effect of something long and dense and heavy,
+without shades or undertones, but immensely kept-up and done. I dare say
+that for those months our contemplations, our daily exercise in general,
+strayed little beyond the Champs-Elys&eacute;es, though I recall confusedly as
+well certain excursions to Passy and Auteuil, where we foregathered with
+small resident compatriots the easy gutturalism of whose French, an
+unpremeditated art, was a revelation, an initiation, and whence we
+roamed, for purposes of picnic, into parts of the Bois de Boulogne that,
+oddly enough, figured to us the virgin forest better than anything at
+our own American door had done.</p>
+
+<p>It was the social aspect of our situation that most appealed to me, none
+the less&mdash;for I detect myself, as I woo it all back, disengaging a
+social aspect again, and more than ever, from the phenomena disclosed to
+my reflective gape or to otherwise associated strolls; perceptive
+passages not wholly independent even of the occupancy of two-sous chairs
+within the charmed circle of Guignol and of Gringalet. I suppose I
+should have blushed to confess it, but Polichinelle and his puppets, in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span>
+the afternoons, under an umbrage sparse till evening fell, had still
+their spell to cast&mdash;as part and parcel, that is, of the general
+intensity of animation and variety of feature. The "amusement," the
+&aelig;sthetic and human appeal, of Paris had in those days less the air of a
+great shining conspiracy to please, the machinery in movement confessed
+less to its huge purpose; but manners and types and traditions, the
+detail of the scene, its pointed particulars, went their way with a
+straighter effect, as well as often with a homelier grace&mdash;character,
+temper and tone had lost comparatively little of their emphasis. These
+scattered accents were matter for our eyes and ears&mdash;not a little even
+already for our respective imaginations; though it is only as the season
+waned and we set up our fireside afresh and for the winter that I
+connect my small revolution with a wider field and with the company of
+W. J. Again for that summer he was to be in eclipse to me; Guignol and
+Gringalet failed to claim his attention, and Mademoiselle Danse, I make
+out, deprecated his theory of exact knowledge, besides thinking him
+perhaps a little of an <i>ours</i>&mdash;which came to the same thing. We
+adjourned that autumn to quarters not far off, a wide-faced apartment in
+the street then bravely known as the Rue d'Angoul&ecirc;me-St.-Honor&eacute; and now,
+after other mutations, as the Rue La Bo&euml;tie; which we were again to
+exchange a year later for an abode in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span> Rue Montaigne, this last
+after a summer's absence at Boulogne-sur-Mer; the earlier migration
+setting up for me the frame of a considerably animated picture. Animated
+at best it was with the spirit and the modest facts of our family life,
+among which I number the cold finality of M. Lerambert, reflected in
+still other testimonies&mdash;that is till the date of our definite but
+respectful rupture with him, followed as the spring came on by our
+ineluctable phase at the Institution Fezandi&eacute; in the Rue Balzac; of
+which latter there will be even more to say than I shall take freedom
+for. With the Rue d'Angoul&ecirc;me came extensions&mdash;even the mere immediate
+view of opposite intimacies and industries, the subdivided aspects and
+neat ingenuities of the applied Parisian genius counting as such: our
+many-windowed <i>premier</i>, above an entresol of no great height, hung over
+the narrow and, during the winter months, not a little dusky channel,
+with endless movement and interest in the vivid exhibition it supplied.
+What faced us was a series of subjects, with the baker, at the corner,
+for the first&mdash;the impeccable dispenser of the so softly-crusty
+crescent-rolls that we woke up each morning to hunger for afresh, with
+our weak caf&eacute;-au-lait, as for the one form of "European" breakfast-bread
+fit to be named even with the feeblest of our American forms. Then came
+the small cr&ecirc;merie, white picked out with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span> blue, which, by some secret
+of its own keeping, afforded, within the compass of a few feet square,
+prolonged savoury meals to working men, white-frocked or blue-frocked,
+to uniformed cabmen, stout or spare, but all more or less audibly
+<i>bavards</i> and discernibly critical; and next the compact embrasure of
+the &eacute;caill&egrave;re or oyster-lady, she and her paraphernalia fitted into
+their interstice much as the mollusc itself into its shell; neighboured
+in turn by the marchand-de-bois, peeping from as narrow a cage, his neat
+faggots and chopped logs stacked beside him and above him in his
+sentry-box quite as the niches of saints, in early Italian pictures, are
+framed with tightly-packed fruits and flowers. Space and remembrance
+fail me for the rest of the series, the attaching note of which comes
+back as the note of diffused sociability and domestic, in fact more or
+less &aelig;sthetic, ingenuity, with the street a perpetual parlour or
+household centre for the flitting, pausing, conversing little bourgeoise
+or ouvri&egrave;re to sport, on every pretext and in every errand, her fluted
+cap, her composed head, her neat ankles and her ready wit. Which is to
+say indeed but that life and manners were more pointedly and
+harmoniously expressed, under our noses there, than we had perhaps found
+them anywhere save in the most salient passages of "stories"; though I
+must in spite of it not write as if these trifles were all our fare.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XXV" id="XXV"></a>XXV</h2>
+
+<p>That autumn renewed, I make out, our long and beguiled walks, my own
+with W. J. in especial; at the same time that I have somehow the sense
+of the whole more broken appeal on the part of Paris, the scanter
+confidence and ease it inspired in us, the perhaps more numerous and
+composite, but obscurer and more baffled intimations. Not indeed&mdash;for
+all my brother's later vision of an accepted flatness in it&mdash;that there
+was not some joy and some grasp; why else were we forever (as I seem to
+conceive we were) measuring the great space that separated us from the
+gallery of the Luxembourg, every step of which, either way we took it,
+fed us with some interesting, some admirable image, kept us in relation
+to something nobly intended? That particular walk was not prescribed us,
+yet we appear to have hugged it, across the Champs-Elys&eacute;es to the river,
+and so over the nearest bridge and the quays of the left bank to the Rue
+de Seine, as if it somehow held the secret of our future; to the extent
+even of my more or less sneaking off on occasion to take it by myself,
+to taste of it with a due undiverted intensity and the throb as of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span>
+finest, which <i>could</i> only mean the most Parisian, adventure. The
+further quays, with their innumerable old bookshops and print-shops, the
+long cases of each of these commodities, exposed on the parapets in
+especial, must have come to know us almost as well as we knew them; with
+plot thickening and emotion deepening steadily, however, as we mounted
+the long, black Rue de Seine&mdash;<i>such</i> a stretch of perspective, <i>such</i> an
+intensity of tone as it offered in those days; where every low-browed
+vitrine waylaid us and we moved in a world of which the dark message,
+expressed in we couldn't have said what sinister way too, might have
+been "Art, art, art, don't you see? Learn, little gaping pilgrims, what
+<i>that</i> is!" Oh we learned, that is we tried to, as hard as ever we
+could, and were fairly well at it, I always felt, even by the time we
+had passed up into that comparatively short but wider and finer vista of
+the Rue de Tournon, which in those days more abruptly crowned the more
+compressed approach and served in a manner as a great outer vestibule to
+the Palace. Style, dimly described, looked down there, as with conscious
+encouragement, from the high grey-headed, clear-faced, straight-standing
+old houses&mdash;very much as if wishing to say "Yes, small staring jeune
+homme, we are dignity and memory and measure, we are conscience and
+proportion and taste, not to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span>mention strong sense too: for all of which
+good things take us&mdash;you won't find one of them when you find (as you're
+going soon to begin to at such a rate) vulgarity." This, I admit, was an
+abundance of remark to such young ears; but it did all, I maintain,
+tremble in the air, with the sense that the Rue de Tournon, cobbled and
+a little grass-grown, might more or less have figured some fine old
+street <i>de province</i>: I cherished in short its very name and think I
+really hadn't to wait to prefer the then, the unmenaced, the inviolate
+Caf&eacute; Foyot of the left hand corner, the much-loved and so haunted Caf&eacute;
+Foyot of the old Paris, to its&mdash;well, to its roaring successor. The wide
+mouth of the present Boulevard Saint-Michel, a short way round the
+corner, had not yet been forced open to the exhibition of more or less
+glittering fangs; old Paris still pressed round the Palace and its
+gardens, which formed the right, the sober social antithesis to the
+"elegant" Tuileries, and which in fine, with these renewals of our young
+confidence, reinforced both in a general and in a particular way one of
+the fondest of our literary curiosities of that time, the conscientious
+study of Les Fran&ccedil;ais Peints par Eux-M&ecirc;mes, rich in wood-cuts of
+Gavarni, of Grandville, of Henri-Monnier, which we held it rather our
+duty to admire and W. J. even a little his opportunity to copy in
+pen-and-ink. This gilt-edged and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span> double-columned octavo it was that
+first disclosed to me, forestalling a better ground of acquaintance, the
+great name of Balzac, who, in common with every other "light" writer of
+his day, contributed to its pages: hadn't I pored over his exposition
+there of the contrasted types of L'Habitu&eacute;e des Tuileries and L'Habitu&eacute;e
+du Luxembourg?&mdash;finding it very <i>serr&eacute;</i>, in fact what I didn't then know
+enough to call very stodgy, but flavoured withal and a trifle lubricated
+by Gavarni's two drawings, which had somehow so much, in general, to
+say.</p>
+
+<p>Let me not however dally by the way, when nothing, at those hours, I
+make out, so much spoke to us as the animated pictured halls within the
+Palace, primarily those of the Senate of the Empire, but then also
+forming, as with extensions they still and much more copiously form, the
+great Paris museum of contemporary art. This array was at that stage a
+comparatively (though only comparatively) small affair; in spite of
+which fact we supposed it vast and final&mdash;so that it would have shocked
+us to foreknow how in many a case, and of the most cherished cases, the
+finality was to break down. Most of the works of the modern schools that
+we most admired are begging their bread, I fear, from door to door&mdash;that
+is from one provincial museum or dim back seat to another; though we
+were on much-subsequent returns to draw a long breath for the saved
+state<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span> of some of the great things as to which our faith had been
+clearest. It had been clearer for none, I recover, than for Couture's
+Romains de la D&eacute;cadence, recently acclaimed, at that time, as the last
+word of the grand manner, but of the grand manner modernised, humanised,
+philosophised, redeemed from academic death; so that it was to this
+master's school that the young American contemporary flutter taught its
+wings to fly straightest, and that I could never, in the long aftertime,
+face his masterpiece and all its old meanings and marvels without a rush
+of memories and a stir of ghosts. William Hunt, the New Englander of
+genius, the "Boston painter" whose authority was greatest during the
+thirty years from 1857 or so, and with whom for a time in the early
+period W. J. was to work all devotedly, had prolonged his studies in
+Paris under the inspiration of Couture and of Edouard Fr&egrave;re; masters in
+a group completed by three or four of the so finely interesting
+landscapists of that and the directly previous age, Troyon, Rousseau,
+Daubigny, even Lambinet and others, and which summed up for the American
+collector and in the New York and Boston markets the idea of the modern
+in the masterly. It was a comfortable time&mdash;when appreciation could go
+so straight, could rise, and rise higher, without critical contortions;
+when we could, I mean, be both so intelligent and so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> "quiet." We were
+in our immediate circle to know Couture himself a little toward the end
+of his life, and I was somewhat to wonder then where he had picked up
+the &aelig;sthetic hint for the beautiful Page with a Falcon, if I have the
+designation right, his other great bid for style and capture of
+it&mdash;which we were long to continue to suppose perhaps the rarest of all
+modern pictures. The feasting Romans were conceivable enough, I mean
+<i>as</i> a conception; no mystery hung about them&mdash;in the sense of one's
+asking one's self whence they had come and by what romantic or
+roundabout or nobly-dangerous journey; which is that air of the poetic
+shaken out as from strong wings when great presences, in any one of the
+arts, appear to alight. What I remember, on the other hand, of the
+splendid fair youth in black velvet and satin or whatever who, while he
+mounts the marble staircase, shows off the great bird on his forefinger
+with a grace that shows <i>him</i> off, was that it failed to help us to
+divine, during that after-lapse of the glory of which I speak, by what
+rare chance, for the obscured old ex-celebrity we visited, the heavens
+had once opened. Poetry had swooped down, breathed on him for an hour
+and fled. Such at any rate are the see-saws of reputations&mdash;which it
+contributes to the interest of any observational lingering on this
+planet to have caught so repeatedly in their weird motion; the question
+of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span> what may happen, under one's eyes, in particular cases, before that
+motion sinks to rest, whether at the up or at the down end, being really
+a bribe to one's own non-departure. Especially great the interest of
+having noted all the rises and falls and of being able to compare the
+final point&mdash;so far as any certainty may go as to that&mdash;either with the
+greatest or the least previous altitudes; since it is only when there
+have been exaltations (which is what is not commonest), that our
+attention is most rewarded.</p>
+
+<p>If the see-saw was to have operated indeed for Eug&egrave;ne Delacroix, our
+next young admiration, though much more intelligently my brother's than
+mine, that had already taken place and settled, for we were to go on
+seeing him, and to the end, in firm possession of his crown, and to take
+even, I think, a harmless pleasure in our sense of having from so far
+back been sure of it. I was sure of it, I must properly add, but as an
+effect of my brother's sureness; since I must, by what I remember, have
+been as sure of Paul Delaroche&mdash;for whom the pendulum was at last to be
+arrested at a very different point. I could see in a manner, for all the
+queerness, what W. J. meant by that beauty and, above all, that living
+interest in La Barque du Dante, where the queerness, according to him,
+was perhaps what contributed most; see it doubtless in particular when
+he reproduced<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span> the work, at home, from a memory aided by a lithograph.
+Yet Les Enfants d'Edouard thrilled me to a different tune, and I
+couldn't doubt that the long-drawn odd face of the elder prince, sad and
+sore and sick, with his wide crimped side-locks of fair hair and his
+violet legs marked by the Garter and dangling from the bed, was a
+reconstitution of far-off history of the subtlest and most "last word"
+modern or psychologic kind. I had never heard of psychology in art or
+anywhere else&mdash;scarcely anyone then had; but I truly felt the nameless
+force at play. Thus if I also in my way "subtly" admired, one's noted
+practice of that virtue (mainly regarded indeed, I judge, as a vice)
+would appear to have at the time I refer to set in, under such
+encouragements, once for all; and I can surely have enjoyed up to then
+no formal exhibition of anything as I at one of those seasons enjoyed
+the commemorative show of Delaroche given, soon after his death, in one
+of the rather bleak salles of the &Eacute;cole des Beaux-Arts to which access
+was had from the quay. <i>There</i> was reconstituted history if one would,
+in the straw-littered scaffold, the distracted ladies with
+three-cornered coifs and those immense hanging sleeves that made them
+look as if they had bath-towels over their arms; in the block, the
+headsman, the bandaged eyes and groping hands, of Lady Jane Grey&mdash;not
+less than in the noble indifference of Charles<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span> the First, compromised
+king but perfect gentleman, at his inscrutable ease in his chair and as
+if on his throne, while the Puritan soldiers insult and badger him: the
+thrill of which was all the greater from its pertaining to that English
+lore which the good Robert Thompson had, to my responsive delight,
+rubbed into us more than anything else and all from a fine old
+conservative and monarchical point of view. Yet of these things W. J.
+attempted no reproduction, though I remember his repeatedly laying his
+hand on Delacroix, whom he found always and everywhere interesting&mdash;to
+the point of trying effects, with charcoal and crayon, in his manner;
+and not less in the manner of Decamps, whom we regarded as more or less
+of a genius of the same rare family. They were touched with the
+ineffable, the inscrutable, and Delacroix in especial with the
+incalculable; categories these toward which we had even then, by a happy
+transition, begun to yearn and languish. We were not yet aware of style,
+though on the way to become so, but were aware of mystery, which indeed
+was one of its forms&mdash;while we saw all the others, without exception,
+exhibited at the Louvre, where at first they simply overwhelmed and
+bewildered me.</p>
+
+<p>It was as if they had gathered there into a vast deafening chorus; I
+shall never forget how&mdash;speaking, that is, for my own sense&mdash;they
+filled<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span> those vast halls with the influence rather of some complicated
+sound, diffused and reverberant, than of such visibilities as one could
+directly deal with. To distinguish among these, in the charged and
+coloured and confounding air, was difficult&mdash;it discouraged and defied;
+which was doubtless why my impression originally best entertained was
+that of those magnificent parts of the great gallery simply not inviting
+us to distinguish. They only arched over us in the wonder of their
+endless golden riot and relief, figured and flourished in perpetual
+revolution, breaking into great high-hung circles and symmetries of
+squandered picture, opening into deep outward embrasures that threw off
+the rest of monumental Paris somehow as a told story, a sort of wrought
+effect or bold ambiguity for a vista, and yet held it there, at every
+point, as a vast bright gage, even at moments a felt adventure, of
+experience. This comes to saying that in those beginnings I felt myself
+most happily cross that bridge over to Style constituted by the wondrous
+Galerie d'Apollon, drawn out for me as a long but assured initiation and
+seeming to form with its supreme coved ceiling and inordinately shining
+parquet a prodigious tube or tunnel through which I inhaled little by
+little, that is again and again, a general sense of <i>glory</i>. The glory
+meant ever so many things at once, not only beauty and art and supreme
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span>design, but history and fame and power, the world in fine raised to the
+richest and noblest expression. The world there was at the same time, by
+an odd extension or intensification, the local present fact, to my small
+imagination, of the Second Empire, which was (for my notified
+consciousness) new and queer and perhaps even wrong, but on the spot so
+amply radiant and elegant that it took to itself, took under its
+protection with a splendour of insolence, the state and ancientry of the
+whole scene, profiting thus, to one's dim historic vision, confusedly
+though it might be, by the unparalleled luxury and variety of its
+heritage. But who shall count the sources at which an intense young
+fancy (when a young fancy <i>is</i> intense) capriciously, absurdly
+drinks?&mdash;so that the effect is, in twenty connections, that of a
+love-philtre or fear-philtre which fixes for the senses their supreme
+symbol of the fair or the strange. The Galerie d'Apollon became for
+years what I can only term a splendid scene of things, even of the quite
+irrelevant or, as might be, almost unworthy; and I recall to this hour,
+with the last vividness, what a precious part it played for me, and
+exactly by that continuity of honour, on my awaking, in a summer dawn
+many years later, to the fortunate, the instantaneous recovery and
+capture of the most appalling yet most admirable nightmare of my life.
+The climax of this extraordinary experience<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span>&mdash;which stands alone for me
+as a dream-adventure founded in the deepest, quickest, clearest act of
+cogitation and comparison, act indeed of life-saving energy, as well as
+in unutterable fear&mdash;was the sudden pursuit, through an open door, along
+a huge high saloon, of a just dimly-descried figure that retreated in
+terror before my rush and dash (a glare of inspired reaction from
+irresistible but shameful dread,) out of the room I had a moment before
+been desperately, and all the more abjectly, defending by the push of my
+shoulder against hard pressure on lock and bar from the other side. The
+lucidity, not to say the sublimity, of the crisis had consisted of the
+great thought that I, in my appalled state, was probably still more
+appalling than the awful agent, creature or presence, whatever he was,
+whom I had guessed, in the suddenest wild start from sleep, the sleep
+within my sleep, to be making for my place of rest. The triumph of my
+impulse, perceived in a flash as I acted on it by myself at a bound,
+forcing the door outward, was the grand thing, but the great point of
+the whole was the wonder of my final recognition. Routed, dismayed, the
+tables turned upon him by my so surpassing him for straight aggression
+and dire intention, my visitant was already but a diminished spot in the
+long perspective, the tremendous, glorious hall, as I say, over the
+far-gleaming floor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span> of which, cleared for the occasion of its great line
+of priceless vitrines down the middle, he sped for <i>his</i> life, while a
+great storm of thunder and lightning played through the deep embrasures
+of high windows at the right. The lightning that revealed the retreat
+revealed also the wondrous place and, by the same amazing play, my young
+imaginative life in it of long before, the sense of which, deep within
+me, had kept it whole, preserved it to this thrilling use; for what in
+the world were the deep embrasures and the so polished floor but those
+of the Galerie d'Apollon of my childhood? The "scene of something" I had
+vaguely then felt it? Well I might, since it was to be the scene of that
+immense hallucination.</p>
+
+<p>Of what, at the same time, in those years, were the great rooms of the
+Louvre almost equally, above and below, not the scene, from the moment
+they so wrought, stage by stage, upon our perceptions?&mdash;literally on
+almost all of these, in one way and another; quite in such a manner, I
+more and more see, as to have been educative, formative, fertilising, in
+a degree which no other "intellectual experience" our youth was to know
+could pretend, as a comprehensive, conducive thing, to rival. The sharp
+and strange, the quite heart-shaking little prevision had come to me,
+for myself, I make out, on the occasion of our very first visit of all,
+my brother's and mine, under<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span> conduct of the good Jean Nadali,
+before-mentioned, trustfully deputed by our parents, in the Rue de la
+Paix, on the morrow of our first arrival in Paris (July 1855) and while
+they were otherwise concerned. I hang again, appalled but uplifted, on
+brave Nadali's arm&mdash;his professional acquaintance with the splendours
+about us added for me on the spot to the charm of his "European"
+character: I cling to him while I gape at G&eacute;ricault's Radeau de la
+M&eacute;duse, <i>the</i> sensation, for splendour and terror of interest, of that
+juncture to me, and ever afterwards to be associated, along with two or
+three other more or less contemporary products, Gu&eacute;rin's Burial of
+Atala, Prudhon's Cupid and Psyche, David's helmetted Romanisms, Madame
+Vig&eacute;e-Lebrun's "ravishing" portrait of herself and her little girl, with
+how can I say what foretaste (as determined by that instant as if the
+hour had struck from a clock) of all the fun, confusedly speaking, that
+one was going to have, and the kind of life, always of the queer
+so-called inward sort, tremendously "sporting" in its way&mdash;though that
+description didn't then wait upon it, that one was going to lead. It
+came of itself, this almost awful apprehension in all the presences,
+under our courier's protection and in my brother's company&mdash;it came just
+there and so; there was alarm in it somehow as well as bliss. The bliss
+in fact I think scarce disengaged itself<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span> at all, but only the sense of
+a freedom of contact and appreciation really too big for one, and
+leaving such a mark on the very place, the pictures, the frames
+themselves, the figures within them, the particular parts and features
+of each, the look of the rich light, the smell of the massively enclosed
+air, that I have never since renewed the old exposure without renewing
+again the old emotion and taking up the small scared consciousness.
+<i>That</i>, with so many of the conditions repeated, is the charm&mdash;to feel
+afresh the beginning of so much that was to be. The beginning in short
+was with G&eacute;ricault and David, but it went on and on and slowly spread;
+so that one's stretched, one's even strained, perceptions, one's
+discoveries and extensions piece by piece, come back, on the great
+premises, almost as so many explorations of the house of life, so many
+circlings and hoverings round the image of the world. I have dim
+reminiscences of permitted independent visits, uncorrectedly juvenile
+though I might still be, during which the house of life and the palace
+of art became so mixed and interchangeable&mdash;the Louvre being, under a
+general description, the most peopled of all scenes not less than the
+most hushed of all temples&mdash;that an excursion to look at pictures would
+have but half expressed my afternoon. I had looked at pictures, looked
+and looked again, at the vast Veronese, at Murillo's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span> moon-borne
+Madonna, at Leonardo's almost unholy dame with the folded hands,
+treasures of the Salon Carr&eacute; as that display was then composed; but I
+had also looked at France and looked at Europe, looked even at America
+as Europe itself might be conceived so to look, looked at history, as a
+still-felt past and a complacently personal future, at society, manners,
+types, characters, possibilities and prodigies and mysteries of fifty
+sorts; and all in the light of being splendidly "on my own," as I
+supposed it, though we hadn't then that perfection of slang, and of (in
+especial) going and coming along that interminable and incomparable
+Seine-side front of the Palace against which young sensibility felt
+itself almost rub, for endearment and consecration, as a cat invokes the
+friction of a protective piece of furniture. Such were at any rate some
+of the vague processes&mdash;I see for how utterly vague they must show&mdash;of
+picking up an education; and I was, in spite of the vagueness, so far
+from agreeing with my brother afterwards that we didn't pick one up and
+that that never <i>is</i> done, in any sense not negligible, and also that an
+education might, or should, in particular, have picked <i>us</i> up, and yet
+didn't&mdash;I was so far dissentient, I say, that I think I quite came to
+glorify such passages and see them as part of an order really fortunate.
+If we had been little asses, I seem to have reasoned, a higher<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span>
+intention driving us wouldn't have made us less so&mdash;to any point worth
+mentioning; and as we extracted such impressions, to put it at the
+worst, from redemptive accidents (to call Louvres and Luxembourgs
+nothing better) why we weren't little asses, but something wholly other:
+which appeared all I needed to contend for. Above all it would have been
+stupid and ignoble, an attested and lasting dishonour, not, with our
+chance, to have followed our straggling clues, as many as we could and
+disengaging as we happily did, I felt, the gold and the silver ones,
+whatever the others might have been&mdash;not to have followed them and not
+to have arrived by them, so far as we were to arrive. Instinctively, for
+any dim designs we might have nourished, we picked out the silver and
+the gold, attenuated threads though they must have been, and I
+positively feel that there were more of these, far more, casually
+interwoven, than will reward any present patience for my unravelling of
+the too fine tissue.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XXVI" id="XXVI"></a>XXVI</h2>
+
+<p>I allude of course in particular here to the &aelig;sthetic clue in general,
+with which it was that we most (or that I at any rate most) fumbled,
+without our in the least having then, as I have already noted, any such
+rare name for it. There were sides on which it fairly dangled about us,
+involving our small steps and wits; though others too where I could, for
+my own part, but clutch at it in the void. Our experience of the theatre
+for instance, which had played such a part for us at home, almost wholly
+dropped in just the most propitious air: an anomaly indeed half
+explained by the fact that life in general, all round us, was
+perceptibly more theatrical. And there were other reasons, whether
+definitely set before us or not, which we grasped in proportion as we
+gathered, by depressing hearsay, that the French drama, great, strange
+and important, was as much out of relation to our time of life, our so
+little native strain and our cultivated innocence, as the American and
+English had been directly addressed to them. To the Cirque d'&Eacute;t&eacute;, the
+Cirque d'Hiver, the Th&eacute;&acirc;tre du Cirque we were on occasion conducted&mdash;we
+had fallen so to the level of circuses, and that name appeared a
+safety;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span> in addition to which the big theatre most bravely bearing it,
+the especial home at that time of the glittering and multitudinous
+<i>f&eacute;erie</i>, did seem to lift the whole scenic possibility, for our eyes,
+into a higher sphere of light and grace than any previously disclosed. I
+recall Le Diable d'Argent as in particular a radiant revelation&mdash;kept
+before us a whole long evening and as an almost blinding glare; which
+was quite right for the <i>donn&eacute;e</i>, the gradual shrinkage of the Shining
+One, the money-monster hugely inflated at first, to all the successive
+degrees of loose bagginess as he leads the reckless young man he has
+originally contracted with from dazzling pleasure to pleasure, till at
+last he is a mere shrivelled silver string such as you could almost draw
+through a keyhole. That was the striking moral, for the young man,
+however regaled, had been somehow "sold"; which <i>we</i> hadn't in the least
+been, who had had all his pleasures and none of his penalty, whatever
+this was to be. I was to repine a little, in these connections, at a
+much later time, on reflecting that had we only been "taken" in the
+Paris of that period as we had been taken in New York we might have come
+in for celebrities&mdash;supremely fine, perhaps supremely rank, flowers of
+the histrionic temperament, springing as they did from the soil of the
+richest romanticism and adding to its richness&mdash;who practised that
+braver art and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span> finer finish which a comparatively homogenous public,
+forming a compact critical body, still left possible. Rachel was alive,
+but dying; the memory of Mademoiselle Mars, at her latest, was still in
+the air; Mademoiselle Georges, a massive, a monstrous antique, had
+withal returned for a season to the stage; but we missed her, as we
+missed D&eacute;jazet and Fr&eacute;d&eacute;ric Lem&acirc;itre and M&eacute;lingue and Samson; to say
+nothing of others of the age before the flood&mdash;taking for the flood that
+actual high tide of the outer barbarian presence, the general alien and
+polyglot, in stalls and boxes, which I remember to have heard Gustave
+Flaubert lament as the ruin of the theatre through the assumption of
+judgeship by a bench to whom the very values of the speech of author and
+actor were virtually closed, or at the best uncertain.</p>
+
+<p>I enjoyed but two snatches of the older representational art&mdash;no
+particular of either of which, however, has faded from me; the earlier
+and rarer of these an evening at the Gymnase for a <i>spectacle coup&eacute;</i>,
+with Mesdames Rose Ch&eacute;ri, M&eacute;lanie, Delaporte and Victoria (afterwards
+Victoria-La-fontaine). I squeeze again with my mother, my aunt and my
+brother into the stuffy baignoire, and I take to my memory in especial
+Madame de Girardin's Une Femme qui D&eacute;teste son Mari; the thrilling
+story, as I judged it, of an admirable lady who, to save her loyalist
+husband, during the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span>Revolution, feigns the most Jacobin opinions,
+represents herself a citoyenne of citoyennes, in order to keep him the
+more safely concealed in her house. He flattens himself, to almost
+greater peril of life, behind a panel of the wainscot, which she has a
+secret for opening when he requires air and food and they may for a
+fearful fleeting instant be alone together; and the point of the picture
+is in the contrast between these melting moments and the heroine's
+<i>tenue</i> under the tremendous strain of receiving on the one side the
+invading, investigating Terrorist commissaries, sharply suspicious but
+successfully baffled, and on the other her noble relatives, her
+husband's mother and sister if I rightly remember, who are not in the
+secret and whom, for perfect prudence, she keeps out of it, though alone
+with her, and themselves in hourly danger, they might be trusted, and
+who, believing him concealed elsewhere and terribly tracked, treat her,
+in her republican rage, as lost to all honour and all duty. One's sense
+of such things after so long a time has of course scant authority for
+others; but I myself trust my vision of Rose Ch&eacute;ri's fine play just as I
+trust that of her <i>physique ingrat</i>, her at first extremely odd and
+positively osseous appearance; an emaciated woman with a high bulging
+forehead, somewhat of the form of Rachel's, for whom the triumphs of
+produced illusion, as in the second, third and fourth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span> great dramas of
+the younger Dumas, had to be triumphs indeed. My one other reminiscence
+of this order connects itself, and quite three years later, with the old
+dingy Vaudeville of the Place de la Bourse, where I saw in my brother's
+company a rhymed domestic drama of the then still admired Ponsard, Ce
+qui Pla&icirc;t aux Femmes; a piece that enjoyed, I believe, scant success,
+but that was to leave with me ineffaceable images. How was it possible,
+I wondered, to have more grace and talent, a rarer, cooler art, than
+Mademoiselle Fargeuil, the heroine?&mdash;the fine lady whom a pair of rival
+lovers, seeking to win her hand by offering her what will most please
+her, treat, in the one case, to a brilliant f&ecirc;te, a little play within a
+play, at which we assist, and in the other to the inside view of an
+attic of misery, into which the more cunning suitor introduces her just
+in time to save a poor girl, the tenant of the place, from being
+ruinously, that is successfully, tempted by a terrible old woman, a
+prowling <i>revendeuse</i>, who dangles before her the condition on which so
+pretty a person may enjoy every comfort. Her happier sister, the courted
+young widow, intervenes in time, reinforces her tottering virtue, opens
+for her an account with baker and butcher, and, doubting no longer which
+flame is to be crowned, charmingly shows us that what pleases women most
+is the exercise of charity.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span></p><p>Then it was I first beheld that extraordinary veteran of the stage,
+Mademoiselle Pierson, almost immemorially attached, for later
+generations, to the Th&eacute;&acirc;tre Fran&ccedil;ais, the span of whose career thus
+strikes me as fabulous, though she figured as a very juvenile beauty in
+the small <i>f&eacute;erie</i> or allegory forming M. Ponsard's second act. She has
+been playing mothers and aunts this many and many a year&mdash;and still
+indeed much as a juvenile beauty. Not that light circumstance, however,
+pleads for commemoration, nor yet the further fact that I was to admire
+Mademoiselle Fargeuil, in the after-time, the time after she had given
+all Sardou's earlier successes the help of her shining firmness, when
+she had passed from interesting comedy and even from romantic drama&mdash;not
+less, perhaps still more, interesting, with Sardou's Patrie as a
+bridge&mdash;to the use of the bigger brush of the Ambigu and other homes of
+melodrama. The sense, such as it is, that I extract from the pair of
+modest memories in question is rather their value as a glimpse of the
+old order that spoke so much less of our hundred modern material
+resources, matters the stage of to-day appears mainly to live by, and
+such volumes more of the one thing that was then, and that, given
+various other things, had to be, of the essence. That one thing was the
+quality, to say nothing of the quantity, of the actor's personal
+resource,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span> technical history, tested temper, proved experience; on which
+almost everything had to depend, and the thought of which makes the mere
+starved scene and medium of the period, the <i>rest</i> of the picture, a
+more confessed and more heroic battle-ground. They have been more and
+more eased off, the scene and medium, for our couple of generations, so
+much so in fact that the rest of the picture has become almost <i>all</i> the
+picture: the author and the producer, among us, lift the weight of the
+play from the performer&mdash;particularly of the play dealing with our
+immediate life and manners and aspects&mdash;after a fashion which does half
+the work, thus reducing the "personal equation," the demand for the
+maximum of individual doing, to a contribution mostly of the loosest and
+sparest. As a sop to historic curiosity at all events may even so short
+an impression serve; impression of the strenuous age and its fine old
+masterful <i>assouplissement</i> of its victims&mdash;who were not the expert
+spectators. The spectators were so expert, so broken in to material
+suffering for the sake of their passion, that, as the suffering was only
+material, they found the &aelig;sthetic reward, the critical relish of the
+essence, all adequate; a fact that seems in a sort to point a moral of
+large application. Everything but the "interpretation," the personal, in
+the French theatre of those days, had kinds and degrees of weakness and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span>futility, say even falsity, of which our modern habit is wholly
+impatient&mdash;let alone other conditions still that were detestable even at
+the time, and some of which, forms of discomfort and annoyance, linger
+on to this day. The playhouse, in short, was almost a place of physical
+torture, and it is still rarely in Paris a place of physical ease. Add
+to this the old thinness of the school of Scribe and the old emptiness
+of the thousand vaudevillistes; which part of the exhibition, till
+modern comedy began, under the younger Dumas and Augier, had for its
+counterpart but the terrible dead weight, or at least the prodigious
+prolixity and absurdity, of much, not to say of most, of the romantic
+and melodramatic "output." It <i>paid</i> apparently, in the golden age of
+acting, to sit through interminable evenings in impossible places&mdash;since
+to assume that the age <i>was</i> in that particular respect golden (for
+which we have in fact a good deal of evidence) alone explains the
+patience of the public. With the public the <i>actors</i> were, according to
+their seasoned strength, almost exclusively appointed to deal, just as
+in the conditions most familiar to-day to ourselves this charge is laid
+on almost everyone concerned in the case save the representatives of the
+parts. And far more other people are now concerned than of old; not
+least those who have learned to make the playhouse endurable. All of
+which leaves us<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span> with this interesting vision of a possibly great truth,
+the truth that you can't have more than one kind of intensity&mdash;intensity
+worthy of the name&mdash;at once. The intensity of the golden age of the
+histrion was the intensity of <i>his</i> good faith. The intensity of our
+period is that of the "producer's" and machinist's, to which add even
+that of architect, author and critic. Between which derivative kind of
+that article, as we may call it, and the other, the immediate kind, it
+would appear that you have absolutely to choose.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XXVII" id="XXVII"></a>XXVII</h2>
+
+<p>I see much of the rest of that particular Paris time in the light of the
+Institution Fezandi&eacute;, and I see the Institution Fezandi&eacute;, Rue Balzac, in
+the light, if not quite of Alphonse Daudet's lean asylum for the <i>petits
+pays chauds</i>, of which I have felt the previous institutions of New York
+sketchily remind me, at least in that of certain other of his studies in
+that field of the precarious, the ambiguous Paris over parts of which
+the great Arch at the top of the Champs-Elys&eacute;es flings, at its hours, by
+its wide protective plausible shadow, a precious mantle of "tone." They
+gather, these chequered parts, into its vast paternal presence and enjoy
+at its expense a degree of reflected dignity. It was to the big square
+villa of the Rue Balzac that we turned, as pupils not unacquainted with
+vicissitudes, from a scene swept bare of M. Lerambert, an establishment
+that strikes me, at this distance of time, as of the oddest and most
+indescribable&mdash;or as describable at best in some of the finer turns and
+touches of Daudet's best method. The picture indeed should not be
+invidious&mdash;it so little needs that, I feel, for its due<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span> measure of the
+vivid, the queer, the droll, all coming back to me without prejudice to
+its air as of an equally futile felicity. I see it as bright and loose
+and vague, as confused and embarrassed and helpless; I see it, I fear,
+as quite ridiculous, but as wholly harmless to my brothers and me at
+least, and as having left us with a fund of human impressions; it played
+before us such a variety of figure and character and so relieved us of a
+sense of untoward discipline or of the pursuit of abstract knowledge. It
+was a recreational, or at least a social, rather than a tuitional house;
+which fact had, I really believe, weighed favourably with our parents,
+when, bereft of M. Lerambert, they asked themselves, with their
+considerable practice, how next to bestow us. Our father, like so many
+free spirits of that time in New York and Boston, had been much
+interested in the writings of Charles Fourier and in his scheme of the
+"phalanstery" as the solution of human troubles, and it comes to me that
+he must have met or in other words heard of M. Fezandi&eacute; as an active and
+sympathetic ex-Fourierist (I think there were only ex-Fourierists by
+that time,) who was embarking, not far from us, on an experiment if not
+absolutely phalansteric at least inspired, or at any rate enriched, by a
+bold idealism. I like to think of the Institution as all but
+phalansteric&mdash;it so corrects any fear that such places might be dreary.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span>
+I recall this one as positively gay&mdash;bristling and bustling and
+resonant, untouched by the strenuous note, for instance, of Hawthorne's
+co-operative Blithedale. I like to think that, in its then still almost
+suburban, its pleasantly heterogeneous quarter, now oppressively
+uniform, it was close to where Balzac had ended his life, though I
+question its identity&mdash;as for a while I tried not to&mdash;with the scene
+itself of the great man's catastrophe. Round its high-walled garden at
+all events he would have come and gone&mdash;a throb of inference that had
+for some years indeed to be postponed for me; though an association
+displacing to-day, over the whole spot, every other interest. I in any
+case can't pretend not to have been most appealed to by that especial
+phase of our education from which the pedagogic process as commonly
+understood was most fantastically absent. It excelled in this respect,
+the Fezandi&eacute; phase, even others exceptionally appointed, heaven knows,
+for the supremacy; and yet its glory is that it was no poor blank, but
+that it fairly creaked and groaned, heatedly overflowed, with its
+wealth. We were <i>externes</i>, the three of us, but we remained in general
+to luncheon; coming home then, late in the afternoon, with an almost
+sore experience of multiplicity and vivacity of contact. For the beauty
+of it all was that the Institution was, speaking technically, not more a
+<i>pensionnat</i>, with <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span>prevailingly English and American pupils, than a
+<i>pension</i>, with mature beneficiaries of both sexes, and that our two
+categories were shaken up together to the liveliest effect. This had
+been M. Fezandi&eacute;'s grand conception; a son of the south, bald and
+slightly replete, with a delicate beard, a quick but anxious, rather
+melancholy eye and a slim, graceful, juvenile wife, who multiplied
+herself, though scarce knowing at moments, I think, where or how to
+turn; I see him as a Daudet <i>m&eacute;ridional</i>, but of the sensitive, not the
+sensual, type, as something of a rolling stone, rolling rather down
+hill&mdash;he had enjoyed some arrested, possibly blighted, connection in
+America&mdash;and as ready always again for some new application of faith and
+funds. If fondly failing in the least to see why the particular
+application in the Rue Balzac&mdash;the body of pensioners ranging from
+infancy to hoary eld&mdash;shouldn't have been a bright success could have
+made it one, it would have been a most original triumph.</p>
+
+<p>I recover it as for ourselves a beautifully mixed adventure, a brave
+little seeing of the world on the happy pretext of "lessons." We <i>had</i>
+lessons from time to time, but had them in company with ladies and
+gentlemen, young men and young women of the Anglo-Saxon family, who sat
+at long boards of green cloth with us and with several of our
+contemporaries, English and American<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span> boys, taking <i>dict&eacute;es</i> from the
+head of the house himself or from the aged and most remarkable M.
+Bonnefons, whom we believed to have been a superannuated actor (he above
+all such a model for Daudet!) and who interrupted our abashed readings
+aloud to him of the French classics older and newer by wondrous
+reminiscences and even imitations of Talma. He moved among us in a cloud
+of legend, the wigged and wrinkled, the impassioned, though I think alas
+underfed, M. Bonnefons: it was our belief that he "went back," beyond
+the first Empire, to the scenes of the Revolution&mdash;this perhaps partly
+by reason, in the first place, of his scorn of our pronunciation, when
+we met it, of the sovereign word <i>libert&eacute;</i>, the poverty of which, our
+deplorable "libbet&eacute;," without r's, he mimicked and derided, sounding the
+right, the revolutionary form out splendidly, with thirty r's, the
+prolonged beat of a drum. And then we believed him, if artistically
+conservative, politically obnoxious to the powers that then were, though
+knowing that those so marked had to walk, and even to breathe,
+cautiously for fear of the <i>mouchards</i> of the tyrant; we knew all about
+mouchards and talked of them as we do to-day of aviators or
+suffragettes&mdash;to remember which in an age so candidly unconscious of
+them is to feel how much history we have seen unrolled. There were times
+when he but paced up and down and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span> round the long table&mdash;I see him as
+never seated, but always on the move, a weary Wandering Jew of the
+<i>classe</i>; but in particular I hear him recite to us the combat with the
+Moors from Le Cid and show us how Talma, describing it, seemed to crouch
+down on his haunches in order to spring up again terrifically to the
+height of "Nous nous levons alors!" which M. Bonnefons rendered as if on
+the carpet there fifty men at least had leaped to their feet. But he
+threw off these broken lights with a quick relapse to indifference; he
+didn't like the Anglo-Saxon&mdash;of the children of Albion at least his view
+was low; on his American specimens he had, I observed, more mercy; and
+this imperfection of sympathy (the question of Waterloo apart) rested,
+it was impossible not to feel, on his so resenting the dishonour
+suffered at our hands by his beautiful tongue, to which, as the great
+field of elocution, he was patriotically devoted. I think he fairly
+loathed our closed English vowels and confused consonants, our
+destitution of sounds that he recognised as sounds; though why in this
+connection he put up best with our own compatriots, embroiled at that
+time often in even stranger vocables than now, is more than I can say. I
+think that would be explained perhaps by his feeling in them as an old
+equalitarian certain accessibilities <i>quand m&ecirc;me</i>. Besides, we of the
+younger persuasion at least must have done his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span> ear less violence than
+those earnest ladies from beyond the sea and than those young Englishmen
+qualifying for examinations and careers who flocked with us both to the
+plausibly spread and the severely disgarnished table, and on whose part
+I seem to see it again an effort of anguish to "pick up" the happy idiom
+that we had unconsciously acquired. French, in the fine old formula of
+those days, so much diffused, "was the language of the family"; but I
+think it must have appeared to these students in general a family of
+which the youngest members were but scantly kept in their place. We
+piped with a greater facility and to a richer meed of recognition; which
+sounds as if we might have become, in these strange collocations, fairly
+offensive little prigs. That was none the less not the case, for there
+were, oddly enough, a few French boys as well, to whom on the lingual or
+the "family" ground, we felt ourselves feebly relative, and in
+comparison with whom, for that matter, or with one of whom, I remember
+an occasion of my having to sink to insignificance. There was at the
+Institution little of a staff&mdash;besides waiters and bonnes; but it
+embraced, such as it was, M. Mesnard as well as M. Bonnefons&mdash;M. Mesnard
+of the new generation, instructor in whatever it might be, among the
+arts, that didn't consist of our rolling our r's, and with them, to help
+us out, more or less our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span> eyes. It is significant that this elegant
+branch is now quite vague to me; and I recall M. Mesnard, in fine, as no
+less modern and cheap than M. Bonnefons was rare and unappraiseable. He
+had nevertheless given me his attention, one morning, doubtless
+patiently enough, in some corner of the villa that we had for the moment
+practically to ourselves&mdash;I seem to see a small empty room looking on
+the garden; when there entered to us, benevolently ushered by Madame
+Fezandi&eacute;, a small boy of very fair and romantic aspect, as it struck me,
+a pupil newly arrived. I remember of him mainly that he had a sort of
+nimbus of light curls, a face delicate and pale and that deeply hoarse
+voice with which French children used to excite our wonder. M. Mesnard
+asked of him at once, with interest, his name, and on his pronouncing it
+sought to know, with livelier attention, if he were then the son of M.
+Ars&egrave;ne Houssaye, lately director of the Th&eacute;&acirc;tre Fran&ccedil;ais. To this
+distinction the boy confessed&mdash;all to such intensification of our
+r&eacute;p&eacute;titeur's interest that I knew myself quite dropped, in comparison,
+from his scheme of things. Such an origin as our little visitor's
+affected him visibly as dazzling, and I felt justified after a while, in
+stealing away into the shade. The beautiful little boy was to live to be
+the late M. Henry Houssaye, the shining hellenist and historian. I have
+never forgotten<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span> the ecstasy of hope in M. Mesnard's question&mdash;as a
+light on the reverence then entertained for the institution M. Houssaye
+the elder had administered.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XXVIII" id="XXVIII"></a>XXVIII</h2>
+
+<p>There comes to me, in spite of these memories of an extended connection,
+a sense as of some shrinkage or decline in the <i>beaux jours</i> of the
+Institution; which seems to have found its current run a bit thick and
+troubled, rather than with the pleasant plash in which we at first
+appeared all equally to bathe. I gather, as I try to reconstitute, that
+the general enterprise simply proved a fantasy not workable, and that at
+any rate the elders, and often such queer elders, tended to outnumber
+the candid <i>jeunesse</i>; so that I wonder by the same token on what theory
+of the Castalian spring, as taught there to trickle, if not to flow, M.
+Houssaye, holding his small son by the heel as it were, may have been
+moved to dip him into our well. Shall I blush to relate that my own
+impression of its virtue must have come exactly from this uncanny turn
+taken&mdash;and quite in spite of the high Fezandi&eacute; ideals&mdash;by the
+<i>invraisemblable</i> house of entertainment where the assimilation of no
+form of innocence was doubted of by reason of the forms of experience
+that insisted somehow on cropping up, and no form of experience too
+directly deprecated by reason of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span>originally plotted tender growths
+of innocence. And some of these shapes were precisely those from which
+our good principal may well have first drawn his liveliest reassurance:
+I seem to remember such ancient American virgins in especial and such
+odd and either distinctively long-necked or more particularly
+long-haired and chinless compatriots, in black frock-coats of no type or
+"cut," no suggested application at all as garments&mdash;application, that
+is, to anything in the nature of character or circumstance, function or
+position&mdash;gathered about in the groups that M. Bonnefons almost
+terrorised by his refusal to recognise, among the barbarous races, any
+approach to his view of the great principle of Diction. I remember
+deeply and privately enjoying some of his shades of scorn and seeing
+how, given his own background, they were thoroughly founded; I remember
+above all as burnt in by the impression he gave me of the creature
+<i>wholly</i> animated and containing no waste expressional spaces, no
+imaginative flatnesses, the notion of the luxury of life, though indeed
+of the amount of trouble of it too, when <i>none</i> of the letters of the
+alphabet of sensibility might be dropped, involved in being a Frenchman.
+The liveliest lesson I must have drawn, however, from that source makes
+in any case, at the best, an odd educational connection, given the kind
+of concentration at which education, even such as ours, is supposed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span>
+especially to aim: I speak of that direct promiscuity of insights which
+might easily have been pronounced profitless, with their attendant
+impressions and quickened sensibilities&mdash;yielding, as these last did,
+harvests of apparitions. I positively cherish at the present hour the
+fond fancy that we all soaked in some such sublime element as might
+still have hung about there&mdash;I mean on the very spot&mdash;from the vital
+presence, so lately extinct, of the prodigious Balzac; which had
+involved, as by its mere respiration, so dense a cloud of other
+presences, so arrayed an army of interrelated shades, that the air was
+still thick as with the fumes of witchcraft, with infinite seeing and
+supposing and creating, with a whole imaginative traffic. The Pension
+Vauquer, then but lately existent, according to Le P&egrave;re Goriot, on the
+other side of the Seine, was still to be revealed to me; but the figures
+peopling it are not to-day essentially more intense (that is as a matter
+of the marked and featured, the terrible and the touching, as compared
+with the paleness of the conned page in general,) than I persuade
+myself, with so little difficulty, that I found the more numerous and
+more shifting, though properly doubtless less inspiring, constituents of
+the Pension Fezandi&eacute;. Fantastic and all "subjective" that I should
+attribute a part of their interest, or that of the scene spreading round
+them, to any competent <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span>perception, in the small-boy mind, that the
+general or public moment had a rarity and a brevity, a sharp intensity,
+of its own; ruffling all things, as they came, with the morning breath
+of the Second Empire and making them twinkle back with a light of
+resigned acceptance, a freshness of cynicism, the force of a great
+grimacing example. The grimace might have been legibly there in the air,
+to the young apprehension, and could I but simplify this record enough I
+should represent everything as part of it. I seemed at any rate
+meanwhile to think of the Fezandi&eacute; young men, young Englishmen mostly,
+who were getting up their French, in that many-coloured air, for what I
+supposed, in my candour, to be appointments and "posts," diplomatic,
+commercial, vaguely official, and who, as I now infer, though I didn't
+altogether embrace it at the time, must, under the loose rule of the
+establishment, have been amusing themselves not a little. It was as a
+side-wind of their free criticism, I take it, that I felt the first
+chill of an apprehended decline of the establishment, some pang of
+prevision of what might come, and come as with a crash, of the general
+fine fallacy on which it rested. Their criticism was for that matter
+free enough, causing me to admire it even while it terrified. They
+expressed themselves in terms of magnificent scorn&mdash;such as might
+naturally proceed, I think I felt, from a mightier race; they spoke of
+poor old <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span>Bonnefons, they spoke of our good Fezandi&eacute; himself, they spoke
+more or less of everyone within view, as beggars and beasts, and I
+remember to have heard on their lips no qualification of any dish served
+to us at d&ecirc;jeuner (and still more at the later meal, of which my
+brothers and I didn't partake) but as rotten. These were expressions,
+absent from our domestic, our American air either of fonder
+discriminations or vaguer estimates, which fairly extended for me the
+range of intellectual, or at least of social resource; and as the
+general tone of them to-day comes back to me it floods somehow with
+light the image of the fine old insular confidence (so intellectually
+unregenerate then that such a name scarce covers it, though inward
+stirrings and the growth of a <i>comparative</i> sense of things have now
+begun unnaturally to agitate and disfigure it,) in which the general
+outward concussion of the English "abroad" with the fact of being abroad
+took place. The Fezandi&eacute; young men were as much abroad as might be, and
+yet figured to me&mdash;largely by the upsetting force of that confidence,
+all but physically exercised&mdash;as the finest, handsomest, knowingest
+creatures; so that when I met them of an afternoon descending the
+Champs-Elys&eacute;es with fine long strides and in the costume of the period,
+for which we can always refer to contemporary numbers of "Punch," the
+fact that I was for the most part walking sedately either with my mother
+or my aunt, or even<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[Pg 377]</a></span> with my sister and her governess, caused the spark
+of my vision that they were armed for conquest, or at the least for
+adventure, more expansively to glow. I am not sure whether as a general
+thing they honoured me at such instants with a sign of recognition; but
+I recover in especial the sense of an evening hour during which I had
+accompanied my mother to the H&ocirc;tel Meurice, where one of the New York
+cousins aforementioned, daughter of one of the Albany uncles&mdash;that is of
+the Rhinebeck member of the group&mdash;had perched for a time, so
+incongruously, one already seemed to feel, after the sorriest stroke of
+fate. I see again the gaslit glare of the Rue de Rivoli in the spring or
+the autumn evening (I forget which, for our year of the Rue d'Angoul&ecirc;me
+had been followed by a migration to the Rue Montaigne, with a period, or
+rather with two periods, of Boulogne-sur-mer interwoven, and we might
+have made our beguiled way from either domicile); and the whole
+impression seemed to hang too numerous lamps and too glittering
+<i>vitrines</i> about the poor Pendletons' bereavement, their loss of their
+only, their so sturdily handsome, little boy, and to suffuse their state
+with the warm rich exhalations of subterraneous cookery with which I
+find my recall of Paris from those years so disproportionately and so
+quite other than stomachically charged. The point of all of which is
+simply that just as we had issued<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[Pg 378]</a></span> from the hotel, my mother anxiously
+urging me through the cross currents and queer contacts, as it were, of
+the great bazaar (of which the Rue de Rivoli was then a much more
+bristling avenue than now) rather than depending on me for support and
+protection, there swung into view the most splendid, as I at least
+esteemed him, of my elders and betters in the Rue Balzac, who had left
+the questions there supposedly engaging us far behind, and, with his
+high hat a trifle askew and his cigar actively alight, revealed to me at
+a glance what it was to be in full possession of Paris. There was speed
+in his step, assurance in his air, he was visibly, impatiently on the
+way; and he gave me thereby my first full image of what it was exactly
+to <i>be</i> on the way. He gave it the more, doubtless, through the fact
+that, with a flourish of the aforesaid high hat (from which the
+Englishman of that age was so singularly inseparable) he testified to
+the act of recognition, and to deference to my companion, but with a
+grand big-boy good-humour that&mdash;as I remember from childhood the so
+frequent effect of an easy patronage, compared with a top-most
+overlooking, on the part of an admired senior&mdash;only gave an accent to
+the difference. As if he cared, or could have, that I but went forth
+through the Paris night in the hand of my mamma; while he had greeted us
+with a grace that was as a beat of the very wings of freedom! Of such
+shreds, at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[Pg 379]</a></span> any rate, proves to be woven the stuff of young
+sensibility&mdash;when memory (if sensibility has at all existed for it)
+rummages over our old trunkful of spiritual duds and, drawing forth ever
+so tenderly this, that and the other tattered web, holds up the pattern
+to the light. I find myself in this connection so restlessly and
+tenderly rummage that the tatters, however thin, come out in handsful
+and every shred seems tangled with another.</p>
+
+<p>Gertrude Pendleton's mere name, for instance, becomes, and very
+preferably, the frame of another and a better picture, drawing to it
+cognate associations, those of that element of the New York cousinship
+which had originally operated to place there in a shining and even, as
+it were, an economic light a "preference for Paris"&mdash;which preference,
+during the period of the Rue d'Angoul&ecirc;me and the Rue Montaigne, we
+wistfully saw at play, the very lightest and freest, on the part of the
+inimitable Masons. Their earlier days of Tours and Trouville were over;
+a period of relative rigour at the Florence of the still encircling
+walls, the still so existent abuses and felicities, was also, I seem to
+gather, a thing of the past; great accessions, consciously awaited
+during the previous leaner time, had beautifully befallen them, and my
+own whole consciousness of the general air&mdash;so insistently I
+discriminate for that alone&mdash;was coloured by a familiar view of their
+enjoyment of these on a tremendously<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[Pg 380]</a></span> draped and festooned <i>premier</i> of
+the Rue-St.-Honor&eacute;, bristling with ormolu and Pradier statuettes and
+looking almost straight across to the British Embassy; rather a low
+premier, after the manner of an entresol, as I remember it, and where
+the closed windows, which but scantly distinguished between our own
+sounds and those of the sociable, and yet the terrible, street of
+records and memories, seemed to maintain an air and a light thick with a
+mixture of every sort of queer old Parisian amenity and reference: as if
+to look or to listen or to touch were somehow at the same time to probe,
+to recover and communicate, to behold, to taste and even to smell&mdash;to
+one's greater assault by suggestion, no doubt, but also to the effect of
+some sweet and strange repletion, as from the continued consumption,
+say, out of flounced and puckered boxes, of serried rows of chocolate
+and other bonbons. I must have felt the whole thing as something for
+one's developed senses to live up to and make light of, and have been
+rather ashamed of my own for just a little sickishly staggering under
+it. This goes, however, with the fondest recall of our cousins' inbred
+ease, from far back, in all such assumable relations; and of how, four
+of the simplest, sweetest, best-natured girls as they were (with the
+eldest, a charming beauty, to settle on the general ground, after
+marriage and widowhood, and still to be blooming there), they were
+possessed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[Pg 381]</a></span> of the scene and its great reaches and resources and
+possibilities in a degree that reduced us to small provincialism and a
+hanging on their lips when they told us, that is when the gentlest of
+mammas and the lovely daughter who was "out" did, of presentations at
+the Tuileries to the then all-wonderful, the ineffable Empress: reports
+touchingly qualified, on the part of our so exposed, yet after all so
+scantily indurated relatives, by the question of whether occasions so
+great didn't perhaps nevertheless profane the Sundays for which they
+were usually appointed. There was something of an implication in the air
+of those days, when young Americans were more numerously lovely than
+now, or at least more wide-eyed, it would fairly appear, that some
+account of the only tradition they had ever been rumoured to observe
+(that of the Lord's day) might have been taken even at the Tuileries.</p>
+
+<p>But what most comes back to me as the very note and fragrance of the New
+York cousinship in this general connection is a time that I remember to
+have glanced at on a page distinct from these, when the particular
+cousins I now speak of had conceived, under the influence of I know not
+what unextinguished morning star, the liveliest taste for the earliest
+possible rambles and researches, in which they were so good as to allow
+me, when I was otherwise allowed, to participate: health-giving<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[Pg 382]</a></span> walks,
+of an extraordinarily <i>matinal</i> character, at the hour of the meticulous
+rag-pickers and exceptionally French polishers known to the Paris dawns
+of the Second Empire as at no time since; which made us all feel
+together, under the conduct of Honorine, bright child of the pavement
+herself, as if <i>we</i>, in our fresh curiosity and admiration, had also
+something to say to the great show presently to be opened, and were
+free, throughout the place, as those are free of a house who know its
+aspects of attic and cellar or how it looks from behind. I call our
+shepherdess Honorine even though perhaps not infallibly naming the
+sociable soubrette who might, with all her gay bold confidence, have
+been an official inspectress in person, and to whose easy care or, more
+particularly, expert sensibility and candour of sympathy and curiosity,
+our flock was freely confided. If she wasn't Honorine she was Cl&eacute;mentine
+or Augustine&mdash;which is a trifle; since what I thus recover, in any case,
+of these brushings of the strange Parisian dew, is those communities of
+contemplation that made us most hang about the jewellers' windows in the
+Palais Royal and the public playbills of the theatres on the Boulevard.
+The Palais Royal, now so dishonoured and disavowed, was then the very
+Paris of Paris; the shutters of the shops seemed taken down, at that
+hour, for our especial benefit, and I remember well how, the "dressing"
+of so large a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[Pg 383]</a></span> number of the compact and richly condensed fronts being
+more often than not a matter of diamonds and pearls, rubies and
+sapphires, that represented, in their ingenuities of combination and
+contortion, the highest taste of the time, I found open to me any amount
+of superior study of the fact that the spell of gems seemed for the
+feminine nature almost alarmingly boundless. I stared too, it comes back
+to me, at these exhibitions, and perhaps even thought it became a young
+man of the world to express as to this or that object a refined and
+intelligent preference; but what I really most had before me was the
+chorus of abjection, as I might well have called it, led, at the highest
+pitch, by Honorine and vaguely suggesting to me, by the crudity, so to
+say, of its wistfulness, a natural frankness of passion&mdash;goodness knew
+in fact (for my small intelligence really didn't) what depths of
+corruptibility. Droll enough, as I win them again, these queer dim plays
+of consciousness: my sense that my innocent companions, Honorine <i>en
+t&ecirc;te</i>, would have done anything or everything for the richest ruby, and
+that though one couldn't one's self be decently dead to that richness
+one didn't at all know what "anything" might be or in the least what
+"everything" was. The gushing cousins, at the same time, assuredly knew
+still less of that, and Honorine's brave gloss of a whole range alike of
+possibilities and actualities was in itself a true social grace.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[Pg 384]</a></span></p><p>They all enjoyed, in fine, while I somehow but wastefully mused&mdash;which
+was after all my form of enjoyment; I was shy for it, though it was a
+truth and perhaps odd enough withal, that I didn't really at all care
+for gems, that rubies and pearls, in no matter what collocations, left
+me comparatively cold; that I actually cared for them about as little
+as, monstrously, secretly, painfully, I cared for flowers. Later on I
+was to become aware that I "adored" trees and architectural
+marbles&mdash;that for a sufficient slab of a sufficiently rare, sufficiently
+bestreaked or empurpled marble in particular I would have given a bag of
+rubies; but by then the time had passed for my being troubled to make
+out what in that case would represent on a small boy's part the
+corruptibility, so to call it, proclaimed, before the <i>vitrines</i>, by the
+cousins. That hadn't, as a question, later on, its actuality; but it had
+so much at the time that if it had been frankly put to me I must have
+quite confessed my inability to say&mdash;and must, I gather, by the same
+stroke, have been ashamed of such inward penury; feeling that as a boy I
+showed more poorly than girls. There was a difference meanwhile for such
+puzzlements before the porticos of the theatres; all questions melted
+for me there into the single depth of envy&mdash;envy of the equal, the
+beatific command of the evening hour, in the <i>r&eacute;gime</i> of Honorine's
+young train, who were fresh for the early sparrow and the chiffonier
+even<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[Pg 385]</a></span> after shedding buckets of tears the night before, and not so much
+as for the first or the second time, over the beautiful story of La Dame
+aux Cam&eacute;lias. There indeed was another humiliation, but by my weakness
+of position much more than of nature: whatever doing of "everything"
+might have been revealed to me as a means to the end, I would certainly
+have done it for a sight of Madame Doche and Fechter in Dumas's
+triumphant idyll&mdash;now enjoying the fullest honours of innocuous
+classicism; with which, as with the merits of its interpreters,
+Honorine's happy charges had become perfectly and if not quite serenely,
+at least ever so responsively and feelingly, familiar. Of a wondrous
+mixed sweetness and sharpness and queerness of uneffaced reminiscence is
+all that aspect of the cousins and the rambles and the overlapping
+nights melting along the odorously bedamped and retouched streets and
+arcades; bright in the ineffable morning light, above all, of our
+peculiar young culture and candour!</p>
+
+<p>All of which again has too easily led me to drop for a moment my more
+leading clue of that radiation of goodnature from Gertrude Pendleton and
+her headlong hospitalities in which we perhaps most complacently basked.
+The becraped passage at Meurice's alluded to a little back was of a
+later season, and the radiation, as I recall it, had been, that first
+winter, mainly from a <i>petit h&ocirc;tel</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[Pg 386]</a></span> somewhere "on the other side," as
+we used with a large sketchiness to say, of the Champs Elys&eacute;es; a region
+at that time reduced to no regularity, but figuring to my fond fancy as
+a chaos of accidents and contrasts where <i>petits h&ocirc;tels</i> of archaic type
+were elbowed by woodyards and cabarets, and pavilions ever so
+characteristic, yet ever so indefinable, snuggled between frank
+industries and vulgarities&mdash;all brightened these indeed by the sociable
+note of Paris, be it only that of chaffering or of other <i>bavardise</i>.
+The great consistencies of arch-refinement, now of so large a harmony,
+were still to come, so that it seemed rather original to live there; in
+spite of which the attraction of the hazard of it on the part of our
+then so uniformly natural young kinswoman, not so much ingeniously, or
+even expressively, as just gesticulatively and helplessly gay&mdash;since
+that earlier pitch of New York parlance scarce arrived at, or for that
+matter pretended to, enunciation&mdash;was quite in what I at least took to
+be the glitter of her very conventions and traditions themselves;
+exemplified for instance by a bright nocturnal christening-party in
+honour of the small son of all hopes whom she was so precipitately to
+lose: an occasion which, as we had, in our way, known the act of baptism
+but as so abbreviated and in fact so tacit a business, had the effect
+for us of one of the great "forms" of a society taking itself with
+typical seriousness.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[Pg 387]</a></span> We were much more serious than the Pendletons,
+but, paradoxically enough, there was that weakness in our state of our
+being able to make no such attestation of it. The evening can have been
+but of the friendliest, easiest and least pompous nature, with small
+guests, in congruity with its small hero, as well as large; but I must
+have found myself more than ever yet in presence of a "rite," one of
+those round which as many kinds of circumstance as possible
+clustered&mdash;so that the more of these there were the more one might
+imagine a great social order observed. How shall I now pretend to say
+how many kinds of circumstance I supposed I recognised?&mdash;with the
+remarkable one, to begin with, and which led fancy so far afield, that
+the "religious ceremony" was at the same time a "party," of twinkling
+lustres and disposed flowers and ladies with bare shoulders (that
+platitudinous bareness of the period that suggested somehow the moral
+line, drawn as with a ruler and a firm pencil); with little English
+girls, daughters of a famous physician of that nationality then pursuing
+a Parisian career (he must have helped the little victim into the
+world), and whose emphasised type much impressed itself; with round
+glazed and beribboned boxes of multi-coloured sugared almonds, drag&eacute;es
+de bapt&ecirc;me above all, which we harvested, in their heaps, as we might
+have gathered apples from a shaken tree, and which symbolised as nothing
+else the ritual<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[Pg 388]</a></span> dignity. Perhaps this grand impression really came back
+but to the drag&eacute;es de bapt&ecirc;me, not strictly more immemorial to our young
+appreciation than the New Year's cake and the "Election" cake known to
+us in New York, yet immensely more official and of the nature of
+scattered largesse; partly through the days and days, as it seemed to
+me, that our life was to be furnished, reinforced and almost encumbered
+with them. It wasn't simply that they were so toothsome, but that they
+were somehow so important and so historic.</p>
+
+<p>It was with no such frippery, however, that I connected the occasional
+presence among us of the young member of the cousinship (in this case of
+the maternal) who most moved me to wistfulness of wonder, though not at
+all, with his then marked difference of age, by inviting my free
+approach. Vernon King, to whom I have in another part of this record
+alluded, at that time doing his baccalaur&eacute;at on the other side of the
+Seine and coming over to our world at scraps of moments (for I recall my
+awe of the tremendous nature, as I supposed it, of his toil), as to
+quite a make-believe and gingerbread place, the lightest of substitutes
+for the "Europe" in which he had been from the first so technically
+plunged. His mother and sister, also on an earlier page referred to,
+had, from their distance, committed him to the great city to be
+"finished," educationally, to the point that for our strenuous<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[Pg 389]</a></span> cousin
+Charlotte was the only proper one&mdash;and I feel sure he can have acquitted
+himself in this particular in a manner that would have passed for
+brilliant if such lights didn't, thanks to her stiff little standards,
+always tend to burn low in her presence. These ladies were to develop
+more and more the practice of living in odd places for abstract inhuman
+reasons&mdash;at Marseilles, at D&uuml;sseldorf (if I rightly recall their
+principal German sojourn), at Naples, above all, for a long stage;
+where, in particular, their grounds of residence were somehow not as
+those of others, even though I recollect, from a much later time,
+attending them there at the opera, an experience which, in their
+fashion, they succeeded in despoiling for me of every element of the
+concrete, or at least of the pleasantly vulgar. Later impressions, few
+but firm, were so to enhance one's tenderness for Vernon's own image,
+the most interesting surely in all the troop of our young kinsmen early
+baffled and gathered, that he glances at me out of the Paris period,
+fresh-coloured, just blond-bearded, always smiling and catching his
+breath a little as from a mixture of eagerness and shyness, with such an
+appeal to the right idealisation, or to belated justice, as makes of
+mere evocation a sort of exercise of loyalty. It seemed quite richly
+laid upon me at the time&mdash;I get it all back&mdash;that he, two or three years
+older than my elder brother and dipped more early, as well as held more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[Pg 390]</a></span>
+firmly, in the deep, the refining waters the virtue of which we all
+together, though with our differences of consistency, recognised, was
+the positive and living proof of what the process, comparatively poor
+for ourselves, could do at its best and with clay originally and
+domestically kneaded to the right plasticity; besides which he shone, to
+my fancy, and all the more for its seeming so brightly and quietly in
+his very grain, with the vague, the supposititious, but the intensely
+accent-giving stamp of the Latin quarter, which we so thinly imagined
+and so superficially brushed on our pious walks to the Luxembourg and
+through the parts where the glamour might have hung thickest. We were to
+see him a little&mdash;but two or three times&mdash;three or four years later,
+when, just before our own return, he had come back to America for the
+purpose, if my memory serves, of entering the Harvard Law School; and to
+see him still always with the smile that was essentially as facial, as
+livingly and loosely fixed, somehow, as his fresh complexion itself;
+always too with the air of caring so little for what he had been put
+through that, under any appeal to give out, more or less wonderfully,
+some sample or echo of it, as who should say, he still mostly panted as
+from a laughing mental embarrassment: he had been put through too much;
+it was all stale to him, and he wouldn't have known where to begin. He
+did give out, a little, on <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[Pg 391]</a></span>occasion&mdash;speaking, that is, on my different
+plane, as it were, and by the roundabout report of my brother; he gave
+out, it appeared, as they walked together across shining Newport sands,
+some fragment, some beginning of a very youthful poem that "Europe" had,
+with other results, moved him to, and a faint thin shred of which was to
+stick in my remembrance for reasons independent of its quality:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"Harold, rememberest thou the day,</div>
+<div class="i1">We rode along the Appian Way?</div>
+<div>Neglected tomb and altar cast</div>
+<div class="i1">Their lengthening shadow o'er the plain,</div>
+<div>And while we talked the mighty past</div>
+<div class="i1">Around us lived and breathed again!"</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>That was European enough, and yet he had returned to America really to
+find himself, even with every effort made immediately near him to defeat
+the discovery. He found himself, with the outbreak of the War, simply as
+the American soldier, and not under any bribe, however dim, of the
+epaulette or the girt sword; but just as the common enlisting native,
+which he smiled and gasped&mdash;to the increase of his happy shortness of
+breath, as from a repletion of culture, since it suggested no lack of
+personal soundness&mdash;at feeling himself so <i>like</i> to be. As strange, yet
+as still more touching than strange, I recall the sight, even at a
+distance,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[Pg 392]</a></span> of the drop straight off him of all his layers of educational
+varnish, the possession of the "advantages," the tongues, the degrees,
+the diplomas, the reminiscences, a saturation too that had all sunk
+in&mdash;a sacrifice of precious attributes that might almost have been
+viewed as a wild bonfire. So his prodigious mother, whom I have perhaps
+sufficiently presented for my reader to understand, didn't fail to view
+it&mdash;judging it also, sharply hostile to the action of the North as the
+whole dreadful situation found her, with deep and resentful displeasure.
+I remember how I thought of Vernon himself, during the business, as at
+once so despoiled, so diverted, and above all so resistantly bright, as
+vaguely to suggest something more in him still, some deep-down reaction,
+some extremity of indifference and defiance, some exhibition of a young
+character too long pressed and impressed, too long prescribed to and
+with too much expected of it, and all under too firmer a will; so that
+the public pretext had given him a lift, or lent him wings, which
+without its greatness might have failed him. As the case was to turn
+nothing&mdash;that is nothing he most wanted and, remarkably, most
+enjoyed&mdash;did fail him at all. I forget with which of the possible
+States, New York, Massachusetts or Rhode Island (though I think the
+first) he had taken service; only seeming to remember that this all went
+on for him at the start in McClellan's and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[Pg 393]</a></span> later on in Grant's army,
+and that, badly wounded in a Virginia battle, he came home to be nursed
+by his mother, recently restored to America for a brief stay. She held,
+I believe, in the event, that he had, under her care, given her his vow
+that, his term being up, he would not, should he get sufficiently well,
+re-engage. The question here was between them, but it was definite that,
+materially speaking, she was in no degree dependent on him. The old, the
+irrepressible adage, however, was to live again between them: when the
+devil was sick the devil a saint would be; when the devil was well the
+devil a saint was he!</p>
+
+<p>The devil a saint, at all events, was Vernon, who denied that he had
+passed his word, and who, as soon as he had surmounted his first
+disablement, passionately and quite admirably re-enlisted. At once
+restored to the front and to what now gave life for him its
+indispensable relish, he was in the thick, again, of the great carnage
+roundabout Richmond, where, again gravely wounded, he (as I figure still
+incorrigibly smiling) succumbed. His mother had by this time indignantly
+returned to Europe, accompanied by her daughter and her younger son&mdash;the
+former of whom accepted, for our great pity, a little later on, the
+office of closing the story. Anne King, young and frail, but not less
+firm, under stress, than the others of her blood, came back, on her
+brother's death, and, quietest,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[Pg 394]</a></span> most colourless Electra of a lucidest
+Orestes, making her difficult way amid massed armies and battle-drenched
+fields, got possession of his buried body and bore it for reinterment to
+Newport, the old habitation, as I have mentioned, of their father's
+people, both Vernons and Kings. It must have been to see my mother, as
+well as to sail again for Europe, that she afterwards came to Boston,
+where I remember going down with her, at the last, to the dock of the
+English steamer, some black and tub-like Cunarder, an archaic "Africa"
+or "Asia" sufficing to the Boston service of those days. I saw her off
+drearily and helplessly enough, I well remember, and even at that moment
+found for her another image: what was she most like, though in a still
+sparer and dryer form, but some low-toned, some employed little Bront&euml;
+heroine?&mdash;though more indeed a Lucy Snowe than a Jane Eyre, and with no
+shade of a Bront&euml; hero within sight. To this all the fine privilege and
+fine culture of all the fine countries (collective matter, from far
+back, of our intimated envy) had "amounted"; just as it had amounted for
+Vernon to the bare headstone on the Newport hillside where, by his
+mother's decree, as I have already noted, there figured no hint of the
+manner of his death. So grand, so finely personal a manner it appeared
+to me at the time, and has indeed appeared ever since, that this brief
+record irrepressibly springs from that. His mother,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[Pg 395]</a></span> as I have equally
+noted, was however, with her views, to find no grace in it so long as
+she lived; and his sister went back to her, and to Marseille, as they
+always called it, but prematurely to die.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[Pg 396]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XXIX" id="XXIX"></a>XXIX</h2>
+
+<p>I feel that much might be made of my memories of Boulogne-sur-Mer had I
+but here left room for the vast little subject; in which I should
+probably, once started, wander to and fro as exploringly, as
+perceivingly, as discoveringly, I am fairly tempted to call it, as might
+really give the measure of my small operations at the time. I was almost
+wholly reduced there to operations of that mere inward and superficially
+idle order at which we have already so freely assisted; reduced by a
+cause I shall presently mention, the production of a great blur,
+well-nigh after the fashion of some mild domestic but quite considerably
+spreading grease-spot, in respect to the world of action, such as it
+was, more or less immediately about me. I must personally have lived
+during this pale predicament almost only by seeing what I could, after
+my incorrigible ambulant fashion&mdash;a practice that may well have made me
+pass for bringing home nothing in the least exhibitional&mdash;rather than by
+pursuing the inquiries and interests that agitated, to whatever
+intensity, our on the whole widening little circle. The images I speak
+of as matter for more evocation that I can spare them were the fruit<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[Pg 397]</a></span> of
+two different periods at Boulogne, a shorter and a longer; this second
+appearing to us all, at the time, I gather, too endlessly and
+blightingly prolonged: so sharply, before it was over, did I at any rate
+come to yearn for the Rue Montaigne again, the Rue Montaigne "sublet"
+for a term under a flurry produced in my parents' breasts by a
+"financial crisis" of great violence to which the American world, as a
+matter now of recorded history, I believe, had tragically fallen victim,
+and which had imperilled or curtailed for some months our moderate means
+of existence. We were to recover, I make out, our disturbed balance, and
+were to pursue awhile further our chase of the alien, the somehow
+repeatedly postponed <i>real</i> opportunity; and the second, the
+comparatively cramped and depressed connection with the classic refuge,
+as it then was, of spasmodic thrift, when not of settled indigence, for
+the embarrassed of our race in the largest sense of this matter, was to
+be shuffled off at last with no scant relief and reaction. This is
+perhaps exactly why the whole picture of our existence at the
+Pas-de-Calais watering place pleads to me now for the full indulgence,
+what would be in other words every touch of tenderness workable, after
+all the years, over the lost and confused and above all, on their own
+side, poor ultimately rather vulgarised and violated little sources of
+impression: items and aspects these which while they in their degree
+and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[Pg 398]</a></span> after their sort flourished we only asked to admire, or at least to
+appreciate, for their rewarding extreme queerness. The very centre of my
+particular consciousness of the place turned too soon to the fact of my
+coming in there for the gravest illness of my life, an all but mortal
+attack of the malignant typhus of old days; which, after laying me as
+low as I could well be laid for many weeks, condemned me to a
+convalescence so arduous that I saw my apparently scant possibilities,
+by the measure of them then taken, even as through a glass darkly, or
+through the expansive blur for which I found just above a homely image.</p>
+
+<p>This experience was to become when I had emerged from it the great
+reminiscence or circumstance of old Boulogne for me, and I was to regard
+it, with much intelligence, I should have maintained, as the marked
+limit of my state of being a small boy. I took on, when I had decently,
+and all the more because I had so retardedly, recovered, the sense of
+being a boy of other dimensions somehow altogether, and even with a new
+dimension introduced and acquired; a dimension that I was eventually to
+think of as a stretch in the direction of essential change or of living
+straight into a part of myself previously quite unvisited and now made
+accessible as by the sharp forcing of a closed door. The blur of
+consciousness imaged by my grease-spot was not, I hasten to declare,
+without its <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">[Pg 399]</a></span>relenting edges and even, during its major insistence,
+fainter thicknesses; short of which, I see, my picture, the picture I
+was always so incurably "after," would have failed of animation
+altogether&mdash;quite have failed to bristle with characteristics, with
+figures and objects and scenic facts, particular passages and moments,
+the stuff, in short, of that scrap of minor gain which I have spoken of
+as our multiplied memories. Wasn't I even at the time, and much more
+later on, to feel how we had been, through the thick and thin of the
+whole adventure, assaulted as never before in so concentrated a way by
+local and social character? Such was the fashion after which the
+Boulogne of long ago&mdash;I have known next to nothing of it since&mdash;could
+come forth, come more than half-way, as we say, to meet the imagination
+open to such advances. It was, taking one thing with another, so verily
+drenched in character that I see myself catching this fine flagrancy
+almost equally in everything; unless indeed I may have felt it rather
+smothered than presented on the comparatively sordid scene of the
+Coll&egrave;ge Communal, not long afterwards to expand, I believe, into the
+local Lyc&eacute;e, to which the inimitable process of our education promptly
+introduced us. I was to have less of the Coll&egrave;ge than my elder and my
+younger brother, thanks to the interrupting illness that placed me so
+long, with its trail of after-effects, half complacently, half <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">[Pg 400]</a></span>ruefully
+apart; but I suffered for a few early weeks the mainly malodorous sense
+of the braver life, produced as this was by a deeply democratic
+institution from which no small son even of the most soapless home could
+possibly know exclusion. Odd, I recognise, that I should inhale the air
+of the place so particularly, so almost only, to that dismal effect;
+since character was there too, for whom it should concern, and my view
+of some of the material conditions, of the general collegiate presence
+toward the top of the steepish Grand' Rue, on the right and not much
+short, as it comes back to me, of the then closely clustered and
+inviolate haute ville, the more or less surviving old town, the idle
+grey rampart, the moated and towered citadel, the tree-shaded bastion
+for strolling and sitting "immortalised" by Thackeray, achieved the
+monumental, in its degree, after a fashion never yet associated for us
+with the pursuit of learning. Didn't the Campaigner, suffering indigence
+at the misapplied hands of Colonel Newcome, rage at that hushed victim
+supremely and dreadfully just thereabouts&mdash;by which I mean in the <i>haute
+ville</i>&mdash;over some question of a sacrificed sweetbread or a cold hacked
+joint that somebody had been "at"? Beside such builded approaches to an
+education as we had elsewhere known the Coll&egrave;ge exhibited, with whatever
+reserves, the measure of style which almost any French accident of the
+administratively <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">[Pg 401]</a></span>architectural order more easily rises to than fails
+of; even if the matter be but a question of the shyest similitude of a
+<i>cour d'honneur</i>, the court disconnecting the scene, by intention at
+least, from the basely bourgeois and giving value to the whole effect of
+opposed and windowed wall and important, or balanced and "placed,"
+<i>perron</i>. These are many words for the dull precinct, as then presented,
+I admit, and they are perhaps half prompted by a special association,
+too ghostly now quite to catch again&mdash;the sense of certain Sundays,
+distinct from the grim, that is the flatly instructional, body of the
+week, when I seem to myself to have successfully flouted the whole
+constituted field by passing across it and from it to some quite ideally
+old-world little annexed <i>mus&eacute;e de province</i>, as inviolate in its way as
+the grey rampart and bare citadel, and very like them in unrelieved
+tone, where I repeatedly, and without another presence to hinder, looked
+about me at goodness knows what weird ancientries of stale academic art.
+Not one of these treasures, in its habit as it lived, do I recall; yet
+the sense and the "note" of them was at the time, none the less, not so
+elusive that I didn't somehow draw straight from them intimations of the
+interesting, that is revelations of the &aelig;sthetic, the historic, the
+critical mystery and charm of things (of such things taken altogether),
+that added to my small loose handful of the seed of culture.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">[Pg 402]</a></span></p><p>That apprehension was, in its way, of our house of learning too, and
+yet I recall how, on the scant and simple terms I have glanced at, I
+quite revelled in it; whereas other impressions of my brief ordeal
+shrink, for anything in the nature of interest, but to three or four
+recovered marks of the social composition of the school. There were the
+sons of all the small shop-keepers and not less, by my remembrance, of
+certain of the mechanics and artisans; but there was also the English
+contingent, these predominantly <i>internes</i> and uniformed, blue-jacketed
+and brass-buttoned, even to an effect of odd redundancy, who by my
+conceit gave our association a lift. Vivid still to me is the summer
+morning on which, in the wide court&mdash;as wide, that is, as I liked to
+suppose it, and where we hung about helplessly enough for recreation&mdash;a
+brownish black-eyed youth, of about my own degree of youthfulness,
+mentioned to me with an air that comes back as that of the liveliest
+informational resource the outbreak, just heard of, of an awful Mutiny
+in India, where his military parents, who had not so long before sent
+him over thence, with such weakness of imagination, as I measured it, to
+the poor spot on which we stood, were in mortal danger of their lives;
+so that news of their having been killed would perhaps be already on the
+way. They might well have been military, these impressively exposed
+characters, since my friend's name<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">[Pg 403]</a></span> was Napier, or Nappi&eacute; as he was
+called at the school, and since, I may add also, there attached to him,
+in my eyes, the glamour of an altogether new emphasis of type. The
+English boys within our ken since our coming abroad had been of the
+fewest&mdash;the Fezandi&eacute; youths, whether English or American, besides being
+but scantly boys, had been so lost, on that scene, in our heap of
+disparities; and it pressed upon me after a fashion of its own that
+those we had known in New York, and all aware of their varieties and
+"personalities" as one had supposed one's self, had in no case
+challenged the restless "placing" impulse with any such force as the
+finished little Nappi&eacute;. They had not been, as he was by the very
+perversity of his finish, resultants of forces at all&mdash;or comparatively
+speaking; it was as if their producing elements had been simple and few,
+whereas behind this more mixed and, as we have learnt to say, evolved
+companion (his very simplicities, his gaps of possibility, being still
+evolved), there massed itself I couldn't have said what protective
+social order, what tangled creative complexity. Why I should have
+thought him almost Indian of stamp and hue because his English parents
+were of the so general Indian peril is more than I can say; yet I have
+his exotic and above all his bold, his imaginably even "bad," young
+face, finely unacquainted with law, before me at this hour quite
+undimmed&mdash;announcing, as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">[Pg 404]</a></span> I conceived it, and quite as a shock, any
+awful adventure one would, as well as something that I must even at the
+time have vaguely taken as the play of the "passions." He vanishes, and
+I dare say I but make him over, as I make everything; and he must have
+led his life, whatever it was to become, with the least possible waiting
+on the hour or the major consequence and no waste of energy at all in
+mooning, no patience with any substitute for his very own humour. We had
+another schoolmate, this one native to the soil, whose references were
+with the last vividness local and who was yet to escape with brilliancy
+in the aftertime the smallest shadow of effacement. His most direct
+reference at that season was to the principal pastry-cook's of the town,
+an establishment we then found supreme for little criss-crossed apple
+tartlets and melting <i>babas</i>&mdash;young Coquelin's home life amid which we
+the more acutely envied that the upward cock of his so all-important
+nose testified, for my fancy, to the largest range of free familiar
+sniffing. C.-B. Coquelin is personally most present to me, in the form
+of that hour, by the value, as we were to learn to put it, of this nose,
+the fine assurance and impudence of which fairly made it a trumpet for
+promises; yet in spite of that, the very gage, as it were, of his long
+career as the most interesting and many-sided comedian, or at least most
+unsurpassed dramatic <i>diseur</i> of his time, I failed to doubt that,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">[Pg 405]</a></span> with
+the rich recesses of the parental industry for his background, his
+subtlest identity was in his privilege, or perhaps even in his expertest
+trick, of helping himself well.</p>
+
+<p>These images, however, were but drops in the bucket of my sense of
+catching character, roundabout us, as I say, at every turn and in every
+aspect; character that began even, as I was pleased to think, in our own
+habitation, the most spacious and pompous Europe had yet treated us to,
+in spite of its fronting on the Rue Neuve Chauss&eacute;e, a street of lively
+shopping, by the measure of that innocent age, and with its own
+ground-floor occupied by a bristling exhibition of indescribably futile
+<i>articles de Paris</i>. Modern and commodious itself, it looked from its
+balcony at serried and mismatched and quaintly-named haunts of old
+provincial, of sedately passive rather than confidently eager, traffic;
+but this made, among us, for much harmless inquisitory life&mdash;while we
+were fairly assaulted, at home, by the scale and some of the striking
+notes of our fine modernity. The young, the agreeable (agreeable to
+anything), the apparently opulent M. Prosper Sauvage&mdash;wasn't it?&mdash;had
+not long before, unless I mistake, inherited the place as a monument of
+"family," quite modestly local yet propitious family, ambition; with an
+ample extension in the rear, and across the clearest prettiest court,
+for his own dwelling, which thus<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">[Pg 406]</a></span> became elegant, <i>entre cour et
+jardin</i>, and showed all the happy symmetries and proper conventions.
+Here flourished, or rather, I surmise at this time of day, here
+languished, a domestic drama of which we enjoyed the murmurous overflow:
+frankly astounding to me, I confess, how I remain still in sensitive
+presence of our resigned proprietor's domestic drama, in and out of
+which I see a pair of figures quite up to the dramatic mark flit again
+with their air of the very rightest finish. I must but note these
+things, none the less, and pass; for scarce another item of the whole
+Boulogne concert of salient images failed, after all, of a significance
+either still more strangely social or more distinctively spectacular.
+These appearances indeed melt together for my interest, I once more
+feel, as, during the interminable stretch of the prescribed and for the
+most part solitary airings and outings involved in my slow convalescence
+from the extremity of fever, I approached that straitened and somewhat
+bedarkened issue of the Rue de l'&Eacute;cu (was it?) toward the
+bright-coloured, strongly-peopled Port just where Merridew's English
+Library, solace of my vacuous hours and temple, in its degree too, of
+deep initiations, mounted guard at the right. Here, frankly,
+discrimination drops&mdash;every particular in the impression once so quick
+and fresh sits interlinked with every other in the large lap of the
+whole. The motley, sunny, breezy, bustling<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">[Pg 407]</a></span> Port, with its classic, its
+admirable fisher-folk of both sexes, models of type and tone and of what
+might be handsomest in the thoroughly weathered condition, would have
+seemed the straightest appeal to curiosity had not the old Thackerayan
+side, as I may comprehensively call it, and the scattered wealth of
+illustration of <i>his</i> sharpest satiric range, not so constantly
+interposed and competed with it. The scene bristled, as I look back at
+it, with images from Men's Wives, from the society of Mr. Deuceace and
+that of fifty other figures of the same creation, with Bareacreses and
+Rawdon Crawleys and of course with Mrs. Macks, with Roseys of a more or
+less crumpled freshness and blighted bloom, with battered and bent,
+though doubtless never quite so fine, Colonel Newcomes not less; with
+more reminders in short than I can now gather in. Of those forms of the
+seedy, the subtly sinister, the vainly "genteel," the generally damaged
+and desperate, and in particular perhaps the invincibly impudent, all
+the marks, I feel sure, were stronger and straighter than such as we
+meet in generally like cases under our present levelling light. Such
+anointed and whiskered and eked-out, such brazen, bluffing, swaggering
+gentlemen, such floridly repaired ladies, their mates, all looking as
+hard as they could as if they were there for mere harmless amusement&mdash;it
+was as good, among them, as just <i>being</i> Arthur Pendennis to know so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">[Pg 408]</a></span>
+well, or at least to guess so fearfully, who and what they might be.
+They were floated on the tide of the manners then prevailing, I judge,
+with a rich processional effect that so many of our own grand lapses,
+when not of our mere final flatnesses, leave no material for; so that
+the living note of Boulogne was really, on a more sustained view, the
+opposition between a native race the most happily tempered, the most
+becomingly seasoned and salted and self-dependent, and a shifting
+colony&mdash;so far as the persons composing it <i>could</i> either urgently or
+speculatively shift&mdash;inimitably at odds with any active freshness. And
+the stale and the light, even though so scantly rebounding, the too
+densely socialised, group was the English, and the "positive" and hardy
+and steady and wind-washed the French; and it was all as flushed with
+colour and patched with costume and referable to record and picture, to
+literature and history, as a more easily amusing and less earnestly
+uniform age could make it. When I speak of this opposition indeed I see
+it again most take effect in an antithesis that, on one side and the
+other, swallowed all differences at a gulp. The general British show, as
+we had it there, in the artless mid-Victorian desert, had, I think, for
+its most sweeping sign the high assurance of its dowdiness; whereas one
+had only to glance about at the sea-faring and fisher-folk who were the
+real strength of the place to feel them shed at every<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">[Pg 409]</a></span> step and by their
+every instinct of appearance the perfect lesson of taste. There it was
+to be learnt and taken home&mdash;with never a moral, none the less, drawn
+from it by the "higher types." I speak of course in particular of the
+tanned and trussed and kerchiefed, the active and productive women, all
+so short-skirted and free-limbed under stress; for as by the rule of the
+dowdy their sex is ever the finer example, so where the sense of the
+suitable, of the charmingly and harmoniously right prevails, they
+preserve the pitch even as a treasure committed to their piety. To hit
+that happy mean of rightness amid the mixed occupations of a home-mother
+and a fishwife, to be in especial both so bravely stripped below and so
+perfectly enveloped above as the deep-wading, far-striding,
+shrimp-netting, crab-gathering matrons or maidens who played,
+waist-high, with the tides and racily quickened the market, was to make
+grace thoroughly practical and discretion thoroughly vivid. These
+attributes had with them all, for the eye, however, a range too great
+for me to follow, since, as their professional undress was a turn-out
+positively self-consistent, so their household, or more responsibly
+public, or altogether festal, array played through the varied essentials
+of fluted coif and folded kerchief and sober skirt and tense, dark,
+displayed stocking and clicking wooden slipper, to say nothing of long
+gold ear-drop or solid short-hung <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410">[Pg 410]</a></span>pectoral cross, with a respect for
+the rigour of conventions that had the beauty of self-respect.</p>
+
+<p>I owe to no season of the general period such a preserved sense of
+innumerable unaccompanied walks&mdash;at the reason of which luxury of
+freedom I have glanced; which as often as not were through the steep and
+low-browed and brightly-daubed <i>ruelles</i> of the fishing-town and either
+across and along the level sea-marge and sustained cliff beyond; this
+latter the site of the first Napoleon's so tremendously mustered camp of
+invasion, with a monument as futile, by my remembrance, as that
+enterprise itself had proved, to give it all the special accent I could
+ask for. Or I was as free for the <i>haute ville</i> and the ramparts and the
+scattered, battered benches of reverie&mdash;if I may so honour my use of
+them; they kept me not less complacently in touch with those of the so
+anciently odd and mainly contracted houses over which the stiff citadel
+and the ghost of Catherine de M&eacute;dicis, who had dismally sojourned in it,
+struck me as throwing such a chill, and one of which precisely must have
+witnessed the never-to-be-forgotten Campaigner's passage in respect to
+her cold beef. Far from extinct for me is my small question of those
+hours, doubtless so mentally, so shamelessly wanton, as to what human
+life might be tucked away in such retreats, which expressed the last
+acceptance whether of desired or of imposed quiet; so <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">[Pg 411]</a></span>absolutely
+appointed and obliged did I feel to make out, so far as I could, what,
+in so significant a world, they on their part <i>represented</i>. I think the
+force mainly sustaining me at that rather dreary time&mdash;as I see it can
+only show for&mdash;was this lively felt need that everything should
+represent something more than what immediately and all too blankly met
+the eye; I seem to myself to have carried it about everywhere and,
+though of course only without outward signs that might have betrayed my
+fatuity, and insistently, quite yearningly applied it. What I wanted, in
+my presumption, was that the object, the place, the person, the
+unreduced impression, often doubtless so difficult or so impossible to
+reduce, should give out to me something of a situation; living as I did
+in confused and confusing situations and thus hooking them on, however
+awkwardly, to almost any at all living surface I chanced to meet. My
+memory of Boulogne is that we had almost no society of any sort at
+home&mdash;there appearing to be about us but one sort, and that of far too
+great, or too fearful, an immediate bravery. Yet there were occasional
+figures that I recover from our scant circle and that I associate,
+whatever links I may miss, with the small still houses on the rampart;
+figures of the quaintest, quite perhaps the frowsiest, little English
+ladies in such mushroom hats, such extremely circular and bestriped
+scarlet petticoats, such perpetual tight gauntlets,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">[Pg 412]</a></span> such explicit
+claims to long descent, which showed them for everything that everyone
+else at Boulogne was not. These mid-Victorian samples of a perfect
+consistency "represented," by my measure, as hard as ever they
+could&mdash;and represented, of all things, literature and history and
+society. The literature was that of the three-volume novel, then, and
+for much after, enjoying its loosest and serenest spread; for they
+separately and anxiously and awfully "wrote"&mdash;and that must almost by
+itself have amounted in them to all the history I evoked.</p>
+
+<p>The dreary months, as I am content that in their second phase especially
+they should be called, are subject, I repeat, to the perversion, quite
+perhaps to the obscuration, of my temporarily hindered health&mdash;which
+should keep me from being too sure of these small <i>proportions</i> of
+experience&mdash;I was to look back afterwards as over so grey a desert;
+through which, none the less, there flush as sharp little certainties,
+not to be disallowed, such matters as the general romance of Merridew,
+the English Librarian, before mentioned, at the mouth of the Port; a
+connection that thrusts itself upon me now as after all the truest
+centre of my perceptions&mdash;waylaying my steps at the time, as I came and
+went, more than any other object or impression. The question of what
+<i>that</i> spot represented, or could be encouraged, could be aided<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">[Pg 413]</a></span> and
+abetted, to represent, may well have supremely engaged me&mdash;for depth
+within depth there could only open before me. The place "meant," on
+these terms, to begin with, frank and licensed fiction, licensed to my
+recordedly relaxed state; and what this particular luxury represented it
+might have taken me even more time than I had to give to make out. The
+blest novel in three volumes exercised through its form, to my sense, on
+grounds lying deeper for me to-day than my deepest sounding, an appeal
+that fairly made it do with me what it would. Possibly a drivelling
+confession, and the more drivelling perhaps the more development I
+should attempt for it; from which, however, the very difficulty of the
+case saves me. Too many associations, too much of the ferment of memory
+and fancy, are somehow stirred; they beset me again, they hover and
+whirl about me while I stand, as I used to stand, within the positively
+sanctified walls of the shop (so of the <i>vieux temps</i> now their aspect
+and fashion and worked system: by which I mean again of the frumpiest
+and civillest mid-Victorian), and surrender to the vision of the shelves
+packed with their rich individual trinities. Why should it have affected
+me so that my choice, so difficult in such a dazzle, could only be for a
+trinity? I am unable fully to say&mdash;such a magic dwelt in the mere rich
+fact of the trio. When the novel of that age was "bad," as it so
+helplessly, so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">[Pg 414]</a></span> abjectly and prevailingly consented to be, the three
+volumes still did something for it, a something that was, all strangely,
+not an aggravation of its case. When it was "good" (our analysis, our
+terms of appreciation, had a simplicity that has lingered on) they made
+it copiously, opulently better; so that when, after the span of the
+years, my relation with them became, from that of comparatively artless
+reader, and to the effect of a superior fondness and acuteness, that of
+complacent author, the tradition of infatuated youth still flung over
+them its mantle: this at least till <i>all</i> relation, by one of the very
+rudest turns of life we of the profession were to have known, broke off,
+in clumsy interfering hands and with almost no notice given, in a day,
+in an hour. Besides connecting me with the lost but unforgotten note of
+waiting service and sympathy that quavered on the Merridew air, they
+represented just for intrinsic charm more than I could at any moment
+have given a plain account of; they fell, by their ineffable history,
+every trio I ever touched, into the category of such prized phenomena as
+my memory, for instance, of fairly hanging about the Rue des Vieillards,
+at the season I speak of, through the apprehension that something vague
+and sweet&mdash;if I shouldn't indeed rather say something of infinite future
+point and application&mdash;would come of it. This is a reminiscence that
+nothing would induce me to verify, as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415">[Pg 415]</a></span> for example by any revisiting
+light; but it was going to be good for me, good, that is, for what I was
+pleased to regard as my intelligence or my imagination, in fine for my
+obscurely specific sense of things, that I <i>should</i> so have hung about.
+The name of the street was by itself of so gentle and intimate a
+persuasion that I must have been ashamed not to proceed, for the very
+grace of it, to some shade of active response. And there was always a
+place of particular arrest in the vista brief and blank, but inclusively
+blank, blank <i>after</i> ancient, settled, more and more subsiding things,
+blank almost, in short, with all Matthew Arnold's "ennui of the middle
+ages," rather than, poorly and meanly and emptily, before such states,
+which was previously what I had most known of blankness. This determined
+pause was at the window of a spare and solitary shop, a place of no
+amplitude at all, but as of an inveterate cheerful confidence, where,
+among a few artists' materials, an exhibited water-colour from some
+native and possibly then admired hand was changed but once in ever so
+long. That was perhaps after all the pivot of my revolution&mdash;the
+question of whether or no I should at a given moment find the old
+picture replaced. I made this, when I had the luck, pass for an
+event&mdash;yet an event which would <i>have</i> to have had for its scene the
+precious Rue des Vieillards, and pale though may be the recital of such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416">[Pg 416]</a></span>
+pleasures I lose myself in depths of kindness for my strain of
+ingenuity.</p>
+
+<p>All of which, and to that extent to be corrected, leaves small allowance
+for my service to good M. Ansiot, rendered while my elder and younger
+brothers&mdash;the younger completing our group of the ungovernessed&mdash;were
+continuously subject to collegial durance. Their ordeal was, I still
+blush to think, appreciably the heavier, as compared with mine, during
+our longer term of thrifty exile from Paris&mdash;the time of stress, as I
+find I recall it, when we had turned our backs on the Rue Montaigne and
+my privilege was so to roam on the winter and the spring afternoons.
+Mild M. Ansiot, "under" whom I for some three hours each forenoon sat
+sole and underided&mdash;and actually by himself too&mdash;was a curiosity, a
+benignity, a futility even, I gather; but save for a felt and remembered
+impulse in me to open the window of our scene of study as soon as he had
+gone was in no degree an ideal. He might rise here, could I do him
+justice, as the rarest of my poor evocations; for he it was, to be
+frank, who most literally smelt of the vieux temps&mdash;as to which I have
+noted myself as wondering and musing as much as might be, with recovered
+scraps and glimpses and other intimations, only never yet for such a
+triumph of that particular sense. To be still frank, he was little less
+than a monster&mdash;for mere unresisting or unresilient mass<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417">[Pg 417]</a></span> of personal
+presence I mean; so that I fairly think of him as a form of bland
+porpoise, violently blowing in an age not his own, as by having had to
+exchange deep water for thin air. Thus he impressed me as with an
+absolute ancientry of type, of tone, of responsible taste, above all;
+this last I mean in literature, since it was literature we sociably
+explored, to my at once charmed and shamed apprehension of the several
+firm traditions, the pure proprieties, the discussabilities, in the
+oddest way both so many and so few, of that field as they prevailed to
+his pious view. I must have had hold, in this mere sovereign sample of
+the accidentally, the quite unconsciously and unpretentiously, the all
+negligibly or superfluously handed-down, of a rare case of the
+provincial and academic <i>cuistre</i>; though even while I record it I see
+the good man as too helpless and unaggressive, too smothered in his poor
+facts of person and circumstance, of overgrown time of life alone, to
+incur with justness the harshness of classification. He rested with a
+weight I scarce even felt&mdash;such easy terms he made, without scruple, for
+both of us&mdash;on the cheerful innocence of my barbarism; and though our
+mornings were short and subject, I think, to quite drowsy lapses and
+other honest aridities, we did scumble together, I make out, by the aid
+of the collected extracts from the truly and academically great which
+formed his sole resource and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418">[Pg 418]</a></span> which he had, in a small portable and
+pocketed library rather greasily preserved, some patch of picture of a
+saving as distinguished from a losing classicism. The point remains for
+me that when all was said&mdash;and even with everything that might directly
+have counted unsaid&mdash;he discharged for me such an office that I was to
+remain to this far-off hour in a state of possession of him that is the
+very opposite of a blank: quite after the fashion again in which I had
+all along and elsewhere suffered and resisted, and yet so perversely and
+intimately appropriated, tutoring; which was with as little as ever to
+show for my profit of his own express showings. The blank he fills out
+crowds itself with a wealth of value, since I shouldn't without him have
+been able to claim, for whatever it may be worth, a tenth (at that let
+me handsomely put it), of my "working" sense of the vieux temps. How can
+I allow then that we hadn't planted together, with a loose felicity,
+some of the seed of work?&mdash;even though the sprouting was so long put
+off. Everything, I have mentioned, had come at this time to be
+acceptedly, though far from braggingly, put off; and the ministrations
+of M. Ansiot really wash themselves over with the weak mixture that had
+begun to spread for me, to immensity, during that summer day or two of
+our earlier residence when, betraying strange pains and apprehensions, I
+was with all decision put to bed. Present to me still<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419">[Pg 419]</a></span> is the fact of my
+sharper sense, after an hour or two, of my being there in distress and,
+as happened for the moment, alone; present to me are the sounds of the
+soft afternoon, the mild animation of the Boulogne street through the
+half-open windows; present to me above all the strange sense that
+something had begun that would make more difference to me, directly and
+indirectly, than anything had ever yet made. I might verily, on the
+spot, have seen, as in a fading of day and a change to something
+suddenly queer, the whole large extent of it. I must thus, much
+impressed but half scared, have wanted to appeal; to which end I
+tumbled, all too weakly, out of bed and wavered toward the bell just
+across the room. The question of whether I really reached and rang it
+was to remain lost afterwards in the strong sick whirl of everything
+about me, under which I fell into a lapse of consciousness that I shall
+conveniently here treat as a considerable gap.</p>
+
+<h4>THE END</h4>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
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@@ -0,0 +1,8879 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Small Boy and Others, by Henry James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Small Boy and Others
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: July 24, 2008 [EBook #26115]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif, Martin Pettit, University of
+Toronto Libraries. and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS
+
+[Illustration: Henry James and his Father
+From a daguerreotype taken in 1854]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+              BOOKS BY HENRY JAMES
+
+       PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+
+     A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS        _net_ $2.50
+     THE OUTCRY                    _net_  1.25
+     THE FINER GRAIN               _net_  1.25
+     THE SACRED FOUNT                     1.50
+     THE WINGS OF THE DOVE, 2 vols.       2.50
+     THE BETTER SORT                      1.50
+     THE GOLDEN BOWL, 2 vols.             2.50
+
+         NOVELS AND TALES. NEW YORK EDITION
+              24 vols., _net_ $48.00
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS
+
+BY
+
+HENRY JAMES
+
+NEW YORK
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+1913
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+
+Published March, 1913
+
+[Illustration: Publisher's logo]
+
+
+
+
+A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+In the attempt to place together some particulars of the early life of
+William James and present him in his setting, his immediate native and
+domestic air, so that any future gathered memorials of him might become
+the more intelligible and interesting, I found one of the consequences
+of my interrogation of the past assert itself a good deal at the expense
+of some of the others. For it was to memory in the first place that my
+main appeal for particulars had to be made; I had been too near a
+witness of my brother's beginnings of life, and too close a participant,
+by affection, admiration and sympathy, in whatever touched and moved
+him, not to feel myself in possession even of a greater quantity of
+significant truth, a larger handful of the fine substance of history,
+than I could hope to express or apply. To recover anything like the full
+treasure of scattered, wasted circumstance was at the same time to live
+over the spent experience itself, so deep and rich and rare, with
+whatever sadder and sorer intensities, even with whatever poorer and
+thinner passages, after the manner of every one's experience; and the
+effect of this in turn was to find discrimination among the parts of my
+subject again and again difficult--so inseparably and beautifully they
+seemed to hang together and the comprehensive case to decline mutilation
+or refuse to be treated otherwise than handsomely. This meant that
+aspects began to multiply and images to swarm, so far at least as they
+showed, to appreciation, as true terms and happy values; and that I
+might positively and exceedingly rejoice in my relation to most of them,
+using it for all that, as the phrase is, it should be worth. To knock at
+the door of the past was in a word to see it open to me quite wide--to
+see the world within begin to "compose" with a grace of its own round
+the primary figure, see it people itself vividly and insistently. Such
+then is the circle of my commemoration and so much these free and
+copious notes a labour of love and loyalty. We were, to my sense, the
+blest group of us, such a company of characters and such a picture of
+differences, and withal so fused and united and interlocked, that each
+of us, to that fond fancy, pleads for preservation, and that in respect
+to what I speak of myself as possessing I think I shall be ashamed, as
+of a cold impiety, to find any element altogether negligible. To which I
+may add perhaps that I struggle under the drawback, innate and inbred,
+of seeing the whole content of memory and affection in each enacted and
+recovered moment, as who should say, in the vivid image and the very
+scene; the light of the only terms in which life has treated me to
+experience. And I cherish the moment and evoke the image and repaint the
+scene; though meanwhile indeed scarce able to convey how prevailingly
+and almost exclusively, during years and years, the field was animated
+and the adventure conditioned for me by my brother's nearness and that
+play of genius in him of which I had never had a doubt from the first.
+
+The "first" then--since I retrace our steps to the start, for the
+pleasure, strangely mixed though it be, of feeling our small feet plant
+themselves afresh and artlessly stumble forward again--the first began
+long ago, far off, and yet glimmers at me there as out of a thin golden
+haze, with all the charm, for imagination and memory, of pressing
+pursuit rewarded, of distinctness in the dimness, of the flush of life
+in the grey, of the wonder of consciousness in everything; everything
+having naturally been all the while but the abject little matter of
+course. Partly doubtless as the effect of a life, now getting to be a
+tolerably long one, spent in the older world, I see the world of our
+childhood as very young indeed, young with its own juvenility as well as
+with ours; as if it wore the few and light garments and had gathered in
+but the scant properties and breakable toys of the tenderest age, or
+were at the most a very unformed young person, even a boisterous
+hobbledehoy. It exhaled at any rate a simple freshness, and I catch its
+pure breath, at our infantile Albany, as the very air of long summer
+afternoons--occasions tasting of ample leisure, still bookless, yet
+beginning to be bedless, or cribless; tasting of accessible garden
+peaches in a liberal backward territory that was still almost part of a
+country town; tasting of many-sized uncles, aunts, cousins, of strange
+legendary domestics, inveterately but archaically Irish, and whose
+familiar remarks and "criticism of life" were handed down, as well as of
+dim family ramifications and local allusions--mystifications
+always--that flowered into anecdote as into small hard plums; tasting
+above all of a big much-shaded savoury house in which a softly-sighing
+widowed grandmother, Catherine Barber by birth, whose attitude was a
+resigned consciousness of complications and accretions, dispensed an
+hospitality seemingly as joyless as it was certainly boundless. What she
+_liked_, dear gentle lady of many cares and anxieties, was the "fiction
+of the day," the novels, at that time promptly pirated, of Mrs. Trollope
+and Mrs. Gore, of Mrs. Marsh, Mrs. Hubback and the Misses Kavanagh and
+Aguilar, whose very names are forgotten now, but which used to drive
+her away to quiet corners whence her figure comes back to me bent
+forward on a table with the book held out at a distance and a tall
+single candle placed, apparently not at all to her discomfort, in that
+age of sparer and braver habits, straight between the page and her eyes.
+There is a very animated allusion to one or two of her aspects in the
+fragment of a "spiritual autobiography," the reminiscences of a
+so-called Stephen Dewhurst printed by W. J. (1885) in The Literary
+Remains of Henry James; a reference which has the interest of being very
+nearly as characteristic of my father himself (which his references in
+almost any connection were wont to be) as of the person or the occasion
+evoked. I had reached my sixteenth year when she died, and as my only
+remembered grandparent she touches the chord of attachment to a
+particular vibration. She represented for us in our generation the only
+English blood--that of both her own parents--flowing in our veins; I
+confess that out of that association, for reasons and reasons, I feel
+her image most beneficently bend. We were, as to three parts, of two
+other stocks; and I recall how from far back I reflected--for I see I
+must have been always reflecting--that, mixed as such a mixture, our
+Scotch with our Irish, might be, it had had still a grace to borrow from
+the third infusion or dimension. If I could freely have chosen moreover
+it was precisely from my father's mother that, fond votary of the finest
+faith in the vivifying and characterising force of mothers, I should
+have wished to borrow it; even while conscious that Catherine Barber's
+own people had drawn breath in American air for at least two generations
+before her. Our father's father, William James, an Irishman and a
+Protestant born (of county Cavan) had come to America, a very young man
+and then sole of his family, shortly after the Revolutionary War; my
+father, the second son of the third of the marriages to which the
+country of his adoption was liberally to help him, had been born in
+Albany in 1811. Our maternal greatgrandfather on the father's side, Hugh
+Walsh, had reached our shores from a like Irish home, Killyleagh, county
+Down, somewhat earlier, in 1764, he being then nineteen; he had settled
+at Newburgh-on-the-Hudson, half way to Albany, where some of his
+descendants till lately lingered. Our maternal greatgrandfather on the
+mother's side--that is our mother's mother's father, Alexander Robertson
+of Polmont near Edinburgh--had likewise crossed the sea in the
+mid-century and prospered in New York very much as Hugh Walsh was
+prospering and William James was still more markedly to prosper, further
+up the Hudson; as unanimous and fortunate beholders of the course of
+which admirable stream I like to think of them. I find Alexander
+Robertson inscribed in a wee New York directory of the close of the
+century as Merchant; and our childhood in that city was passed, as to
+some of its aspects, in a sense of the afterglow, reduced and
+circumscribed, it is true, but by no means wholly inanimate, of his
+shining solidity.
+
+The sweet taste of Albany probably lurked most in its being our admired
+antithesis to New York; it was holiday, whereas New York was home; at
+least that presently came to be the relation, for to my very very first
+fleeting vision, I apprehend, Albany itself must have been the scene
+exhibited. Our parents had gone there for a year or two to be near our
+grandmother on their return from their first (that is our mother's
+first) visit to Europe, which had quite immediately followed my birth,
+which appears to have lasted some year and a half, and of which I shall
+have another word to say. The Albany experiment would have been then
+their first founded housekeeping, since I make them out to have betaken
+themselves for the winter following their marriage to the ancient Astor
+House--not indeed at that time ancient, but the great and appointed
+modern hotel of New York, the only one of such pretensions, and which
+somehow continued to project its massive image, that of a great square
+block of granite with vast dark warm interiors, across some of the later
+and more sensitive stages of my infancy. Clearly--or I should perhaps
+rather say dimly--recourse to that hospitality was again occasionally
+had by our parents; who had originally had it to such a happy end that
+on January 9th, 1842, my elder brother had come into the world there. It
+remained a tradition with him that our father's friend from an early
+time, R. W. Emerson, then happening to be in New York and under that
+convenient roof, was proudly and pressingly "taken upstairs" to admire
+and give his blessing to the lately-born babe who was to become the
+second American William James. The blessing was to be renewed, I may
+mention, in the sense that among the impressions of the next early years
+I easily distinguish that of the great and urbane Emerson's occasional
+presence in Fourteenth Street, a centre of many images, where the
+parental tent was before long to pitch itself and rest awhile. I am
+interested for the moment, however, in identifying the scene of our very
+first perceptions--of my very own at least, which I can here best speak
+for.
+
+One of these, and probably the promptest in order, was that of my
+brother's occupying a place in the world to which I couldn't at all
+aspire--to any approach to which in truth I seem to myself ever
+conscious of having signally forfeited a title. It glimmers back to me
+that I quite definitely and resignedly thought of him as in the most
+exemplary manner already beforehand with me, already seated at his task
+when the attempt to drag me crying and kicking to the first hour of my
+education failed on the threshold of the Dutch House in Albany after the
+fashion I have glanced at in a collection of other pages than these
+(just as I remember to have once borrowed a hint from our grandmother's
+"interior" in a work of imagination). That failure of my powers or that
+indifference to them, my retreat shrieking from the Dutch House, was to
+leave him once for all already there an embodied demonstration of the
+possible--already wherever it might be that there was a question of my
+arriving, when arriving at all, belatedly and ruefully; as if he had
+gained such an advance of me in his sixteen months' experience of the
+world before mine began that I never for all the time of childhood and
+youth in the least caught up with him or overtook him. He was always
+round the corner and out of sight, coming back into view but at his
+hours of extremest ease. We were never in the same schoolroom, in the
+same game, scarce even in step together or in the same phase at the same
+time; when our phases overlapped, that is, it was only for a moment--he
+was clean out before I had got well in. How far he had really at any
+moment dashed forward it is not for me now to attempt to say; what
+comes to me is that I at least hung inveterately and woefully back, and
+that this relation alike to our interests and to each other seemed
+proper and preappointed. I lose myself in wonder at the loose ways, the
+strange process of waste, through which nature and fortune may deal on
+occasion with those whose faculty for application is all and only in
+their imagination and their sensibility. There may be during those
+bewildered and brooding years so little for them to "show" that I liken
+the individual dunce--as he so often must appear--to some commercial
+traveller who has lost the key to his packed case of samples and can but
+pass for a fool while other exhibitions go forward.
+
+I achieve withal a dim remembrance of my final submission, though it is
+the faintest ghost of an impression and consists but of the bright blur
+of a dame's schoolroom, a mere medium for small piping shuffling sound
+and suffered heat, as well as for the wistfulness produced by
+"glimmering squares" that were fitfully screened, though not to any
+revival of cheer, by a huge swaying, yet dominant object. This dominant
+object, the shepherdess of the flock, was Miss Bayou or Bayhoo--I
+recover but the alien sound of her name, which memory caresses only
+because she may have been of like race with her temple of learning,
+which faced my grandmother's house in North Pearl Street and really
+justified its exotic claim by its yellow archaic gable-end: I think of
+the same as of brick baked in the land of dykes and making a series of
+small steps from the base of the gable to the point. These images are
+subject, I confess, to a soft confusion--which is somehow consecrated,
+none the less, and out of which, with its shade of contributory truth,
+some sort of scene insists on glancing. The very flush of the uneven
+bricks of the pavement lives in it, the very smell of the street
+cobbles, the imputed grace of the arching umbrage--I see it all as from
+under trees; the form of Steuben Street, which crossed our view, as
+steep even to the very essence of adventure, with a summit, and still
+more with a nethermost and riskiest incline, very far away. There lives
+in it the aspect of the other house--the other and much smaller than my
+grandmother's, conveniently near it and within sight; which was
+pinkish-red picked out with white, whereas my grandmother's was
+greyish-brown and very grave, and which must have stood back a little
+from the street, as I seem even now to swing, or at least to perch, on a
+relaxed gate of approach that was conceived to work by an iron chain
+weighted with a big ball; all under a spreading tree again and with the
+high, oh so high white stone steps (mustn't they have been marble?) and
+fan-lighted door of the pinkish-red front behind me. I lose myself in
+ravishment before the marble and the pink. There were other houses
+too--one of them the occasion of the first "paid" visit that struggles
+with my twilight of social consciousness; a call with my father,
+conveying me presumably for fond exhibition (since if my powers were not
+exhibitional my appearance and my long fair curls, of which I distinctly
+remember the lachrymose sacrifice, suppositiously were), on one of our
+aunts, the youngest of his three sisters, lately married and who,
+predestined to an early death, hovers there for me, softly spectral, in
+long light "front" ringlets, the fashion of the time and the capital
+sign of all our paternal aunts seemingly; with the remembered
+enhancement of her living in Elk Street, the name itself vaguely
+portentous, as through beasts of the forest not yet wholly exorcised,
+and more or less under the high brow of that Capitol which, as aloft
+somewhere and beneath the thickest shades of all, loomed, familiar yet
+impressive, at the end of almost any Albany vista of reference. I have
+seen other capitols since, but the whole majesty of the matter must have
+been then distilled into my mind--even though the connection was
+indirect and the concrete image, that of the primitive structure, long
+since pretentiously and insecurely superseded--so that, later on, the
+impression was to find itself, as the phrase is, discounted. Had it not
+moreover been reinforced at the time, for that particular Capitoline
+hour, by the fact that our uncle, our aunt's husband, was a son of Mr.
+Martin Van Buren, and that _he_ was the President? This at least led the
+imagination on--or leads in any case my present imagination of that one;
+ministering to what I have called the soft confusion.
+
+The confusion clears, however, though the softness remains, when,
+ceasing to press too far backward, I meet the ampler light of conscious
+and educated little returns to the place; for the education of New York,
+enjoyed up to my twelfth year, failed to blight its romantic appeal. The
+images I really distinguish flush through the maturer medium, but with
+the sense of them only the more wondrous. The other house, the house of
+my parents' limited early sojourn, becomes that of those of our cousins,
+numerous at that time, who pre-eminently figured for us; the various
+brood presided over by my father's second sister, Catherine James, who
+had married at a very early age Captain Robert Temple, U.S.A. Both these
+parents were to die young, and their children, six in number, the two
+eldest boys, were very markedly to people our preliminary scene; this
+being true in particular of three of them, the sharply differing
+brothers and the second sister, Mary Temple, radiant and rare,
+extinguished in her first youth, but after having made an impression on
+many persons, and on ourselves not least, which was to become in the
+harmonious circle, for all time, matter of sacred legend and reference,
+of associated piety. Those and others with them were the numerous
+dawnings on which in many cases the deepening and final darknesses were
+so soon to follow: our father's family was to offer such a chronicle of
+early deaths, arrested careers, broken promises, orphaned children. It
+sounds cold-blooded, but part of the charm of our grandmother's house
+for us--or I should perhaps but speak for myself--was in its being so
+much and so sociably a nurseried and playroomed orphanage. The children
+of her lost daughters and daughters-in-law overflowed there, mainly as
+girls; on whom the surviving sons-in-law and sons occasionally and most
+trustingly looked in. Parentally bereft cousins were somehow more
+thrilling than parentally provided ones; and most thrilling when, in the
+odd fashion of that time, they were sent to school in New York as a
+preliminary to their being sent to school in Europe. They spent scraps
+of holidays with us in Fourteenth Street, and I think my first childish
+conception of the enviable lot, formed amid these associations, was to
+be so little fathered or mothered, so little sunk in the short range,
+that the romance of life seemed to lie in some constant improvisation,
+by vague overhovering authorities, of new situations and horizons. We
+were intensely domesticated, yet for the very reason perhaps that we
+felt our young bonds easy; and they were so easy compared to other small
+plights of which we had stray glimpses that my first assured conception
+of true richness was that we should be sent separately off among cold or
+even cruel aliens in order to be there thrillingly homesick.
+Homesickness was a luxury I remember craving from the tenderest age--a
+luxury of which I was unnaturally, or at least prosaically, deprived.
+Our motherless cousin Augustus Barker came up from Albany to the
+Institution Charlier--unless it was, as I suspect, a still earlier
+specimen, with a name that fades from me, of that type of French
+establishment for boys which then and for years after so incongruously
+flourished in New York; and though he professed a complete satisfaction
+with pleasures tasted in our innocent society I felt that he was engaged
+in a brave and strenuous adventure while we but hugged the comparatively
+safe shore.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+We were day-boys, William and I, at dispensaries of learning the number
+and succession of which to-day excite my wonder; we couldn't have
+changed oftener, it strikes me as I look back, if our presence had been
+inveterately objected to, and yet I enjoy an inward certainty that, my
+brother being vividly bright and I quite blankly innocuous, this
+reproach was never brought home to our house. It was an humiliation to
+me at first, small boys though we were, that our instructors kept being
+instructresses and thereby a grave reflection both on our attainments
+and our spirit. A bevy of these educative ladies passes before me, I
+still possess their names; as for instance that of Mrs. Daly and that of
+Miss Rogers (previously of the "Chelsea Female Institute," though at the
+moment of Sixth Avenue this latter), whose benches indeed my brother
+didn't haunt, but who handled us literally with gloves--I still see the
+elegant objects as Miss Rogers beat time with a long black ferule to
+some species of droning chant or chorus in which we spent most of our
+hours; just as I see her very tall and straight and spare, in a light
+blue dress, her firm face framed in long black glossy ringlets and the
+stamp of the Chelsea Female Institute all over her. Mrs. Daly, clearly
+the immediate successor to the nebulous Miss Bayou, remains quite
+substantial--perhaps because the sphere of her small influence has
+succeeded in not passing away, up to this present writing; so that in
+certain notes on New York published a few years since I was moved to
+refer to it with emotion as one of the small red houses on the south
+side of Waverley Place that really carry the imagination back to a
+vanished social order. They carry mine to a stout red-faced lady with
+grey hair and a large apron, the latter convenience somehow suggesting,
+as she stood about with a resolute air, that she viewed her little
+pupils as so many small slices cut from the loaf of life and on which
+she was to dab the butter of arithmetic and spelling, accompanied by way
+of jam with a light application of the practice of prize-giving. I
+recall an occasion indeed, I must in justice mention, when the jam
+really was thick--my only memory of a schoolfeast, strange to say,
+throughout our young annals: something uncanny in the air of the
+schoolroom at the unwonted evening or late afternoon hour, and tables
+that seemed to me prodigiously long and on which the edibles were chunky
+and sticky. The stout red-faced lady must have been Irish, as the name
+she bore imported--or do I think so but from the indescribably Irish
+look of her revisited house? It refers itself at any rate to a New York
+age in which a little more or a little less of the colour was scarce
+notable in the general flush.
+
+Of pure unimported strain, however, were Miss Sedgwick and Mrs. Wright
+(Lavinia D.), the next figures in the procession--the procession that
+was to wind up indeed with two foreign recruits, small brown snappy
+Mademoiselle Delavigne, who plied us with the French tongue at home and
+who had been introduced to us as the niece--or could it have been the
+grandniece?--of the celebrated Casimir, and a large Russian lady in an
+extraordinarily short cape (I like to recall the fashion of short capes)
+of the same stuff as her dress, and Merovingian sidebraids that seemed
+to require the royal crown of Fredegonde or Brunehaut to complete their
+effect. This final and aggravational representative of the compromising
+sex looms to my mind's eye, I should add, but as the creature of an
+hour, in spite of her having been domiciled with us; whereas I think of
+Mademoiselle Delavigne as flitting in and out on quick, fine, more or
+less cloth-shod feet of exemplary neatness, the flat-soled feet of Louis
+Philippe and of the female figures in those volumes of Gavarni then
+actual, then contemporaneous, which were kept in a piece of furniture
+that stood between the front-parlour windows in Fourteenth Street,
+together with a set of Beranger enriched by steel engravings to the
+strange imagery of which I so wonderingly responded that all other art
+of illustration, ever since, has been for me comparatively weak and
+cold. These volumes and the tall entrancing folios of Nash's
+lithographed Mansions of England in the Olden Time formed a store
+lending itself particularly to distribution on the drawingroom carpet,
+with concomitant pressure to the same surface of the small student's
+stomach and relieving agitation of his backward heels. I make out that
+it had decidedly been given to Mlle. Delavigne to represent to my first
+perception personal France; she was, besides not being at all pink or
+shy, oval and fluent and mistress somehow of the step--the step of
+levity that involved a whisk of her short skirts; there she was, to the
+life, on the page of Gavarni, attesting its reality, and there again did
+that page in return (I speak not of course of the unplumbed depths of
+the appended text) attest her own felicity. I was later on to feel--that
+is I was to learn--how many impressions and appearances, how large a
+sense of things, her type and tone prefigured. The evanescence of the
+large Russian lady, whom I think of as rather rank, I can't express it
+otherwise, may have been owing to some question of the purity of her
+accent in French; it was one of her attributes and her grounds of appeal
+to us that she had come straight from Siberia, and it is distinct to me
+that the purity was challenged by a friend of the house, and
+without--pathetically enough!--provoking the only answer, the plea that
+the missing Atticism would have been wasted on young barbarians. The
+Siberian note, on our inmate's part, may perhaps have been the least of
+her incongruities; she was above all too big for a little job, towered
+over us doubtless too heroically; and her proportions hover but to lose
+themselves--with the successors to her function awaiting us a little
+longer.
+
+Meanwhile, to revert an instant, if the depressed consciousness of our
+still more or less quailing, educationally, beneath the female eye--and
+there was as well the deeper depth, there was the degrading fact, that
+with us literally consorted and contended Girls, that we sat and strove,
+even though we drew the line at playing with them and at knowing them,
+when not of the swarming cousinship, at home--if that felt awkwardness
+didn't exactly coincide with the ironic effect of "Gussy's" appearances,
+his emergence from rich mystery and his return to it, our state was but
+comparatively the braver: he always had so much more to tell us than we
+could possibly have to tell him. On reflection I see that the most
+completely rueful period couldn't after all greatly have prolonged
+itself; since the female eye last bent on us would have been that of
+Lavinia D. Wright, to our connection with whom a small odd reminiscence
+attaches a date. A little schoolmate displayed to me with pride, while
+the connection lasted, a beautiful coloured, a positively iridescent and
+gilded card representing the first of all the "great exhibitions" of our
+age, the London Crystal Palace of 1851--his father having lately gone
+out to it and sent him the dazzling memento. In 1851 I was eight years
+old and my brother scarce more than nine; in addition to which it is
+distinct to me in the first place that we were never faithful long, or
+for more than one winter, to the same studious scene, and in the second
+that among our instructors Mrs. Lavinia had no successor of her own sex
+unless I count Mrs. Vredenburg, of New Brighton, where we spent the
+summer of 1854, when I had reached the age of eleven and found myself
+bewildered by recognition of the part that "attendance at school" was so
+meanly to play in the hitherto unclouded long vacation. This was true at
+least for myself and my next younger brother, Wilky, who, under the
+presumption now dawning of his "community of pursuits" with my own, was
+from that moment, off and on, for a few years, my extremely easy
+yokefellow and playfellow. On William, charged with learning--I thought
+of him inveterately from our younger time as charged with learning--no
+such trick was played; he rested or roamed, that summer, on his
+accumulations; a fact which, as I was sure I saw these more and more
+richly accumulate, didn't in the least make me wonder. It comes back to
+me in truth that I had been prepared for anything by his having said to
+me toward the end of our time at Lavinia D's and with characteristic
+authority--his enjoyment of it coming from my character, I mean, quite
+as much as from his own--that that lady was a very able woman, as shown
+by the Experiments upstairs. He was upstairs of course, and I was down,
+and I scarce even knew what Experiments were, beyond their indeed
+requiring capability. The region of their performance was William's
+natural sphere, though I recall that I had a sense of peeping into it to
+a thrilled effect on seeing our instructress illustrate the proper way
+to extinguish a candle. She firmly pressed the flame between her thumb
+and her two forefingers, and, on my remarking that I didn't see how she
+could do it, promptly replied that I of course couldn't do it myself (as
+_he_ could) because I should be afraid.
+
+That reflection on my courage awakes another echo of the same scant
+season--since the test involved must have been that of our taking our
+way home through Fourth Avenue from some point up town, and Mrs.
+Wright's situation in East Twenty-first Street was such a point. The
+Hudson River Railroad was then in course of construction, or was being
+made to traverse the upper reaches of the city, through that part of
+which raged, to my young sense, a riot of explosion and a great shouting
+and waving of red flags when the gunpowder introduced into the rocky
+soil was about to take effect. It was our theory that our passage there,
+in the early afternoon, was beset with danger, and our impression that
+we saw fragments of rock hurtle through the air and smite to the earth
+another and yet another of the persons engaged or exposed. The point of
+honour, among several of us, was of course nobly to defy the danger, and
+I feel again the emotion with which I both hoped and feared that the red
+flags, lurid signals descried from afar, would enable or compel us to
+renew the feat. That I didn't for myself inveterately renew it I seem to
+infer from the memory of other perambulations of the period--as to which
+I am divided between their still present freshness and my sense of
+perhaps making too much of these tiny particles of history. My stronger
+rule, however, I confess, and the one by which I must here consistently
+be guided, is that, from the moment it is a question of projecting a
+picture, no particle that counts for memory or is appreciable to the
+spirit _can_ be too tiny, and that experience, in the name of which one
+speaks, is all compact of them and shining with them. There was at any
+rate another way home, with other appeals, which consisted of getting
+straight along westward to Broadway, a sphere of a different order of
+fascination and bristling, as I seem to recall, with more vivid aspects,
+greater curiosities and wonderments. _The_ curiosity was of course the
+country-place, as I supposed it to be, on the northeast corner of
+Eighteenth Street, if I am not mistaken; a big brown house in "grounds"
+peopled with animal life, which, little as its site may appear to know
+it to-day, lingered on into considerably later years. I have but to
+close my eyes in order to open them inwardly again, while I lean against
+the tall brown iron rails and peer through, to a romantic view of
+browsing and pecking and parading creatures, not numerous, but all of
+distinguished appearance: two or three elegant little cows of refined
+form and colour, two or three nibbling fawns and a larger company, above
+all, of peacocks and guineafowl, with, doubtless--though as to this I am
+vague--some of the commoner ornaments of the barnyard. I recognise that
+the scene as I evoke it fails of grandeur; but it none the less had for
+me the note of greatness--all of which but shows of course what a very
+town-bred small person I was, and was to remain.
+
+I see myself moreover as somehow always alone in these and like New York
+_flaneries_ and contemplations, and feel how the sense of my being so,
+being at any rate master of my short steps, such as they were, through
+all the beguiling streets, was probably the very savour of each of my
+chance feasts. Which stirs in me at the same time some wonder at the
+liberty of range and opportunity of adventure allowed to my tender age;
+though the puzzle may very well drop, after all, as I ruefully reflect
+that I couldn't have been judged at home reckless or adventurous. What I
+look back to as my infant license can only have had for its ground some
+timely conviction on the part of my elders that the only form of riot or
+revel ever known to me would be that of the visiting mind. Wasn't I
+myself for that matter even at that time all acutely and yet resignedly,
+even quite fatalistically, aware of what to think of this? I at any rate
+watch the small boy dawdle and gape again. I smell the cold dusty paint
+and iron as the rails of the Eighteenth Street corner rub his
+contemplative nose, and, feeling him foredoomed, withhold from him no
+grain of my sympathy. He is a convenient little image or warning of all
+that was to be for him, and he might well have been even happier than he
+was. For there was the very pattern and measure of all he was to demand:
+just to _be_ somewhere--almost anywhere would do--and somehow receive an
+impression or an accession, feel a relation or a vibration. He was to go
+without many things, ever so many--as all persons do in whom
+contemplation takes so much the place of action; but everywhere, in the
+years that came soon after, and that in fact continued long, in the
+streets of great towns, in New York still for some time, and then for a
+while in London, in Paris, in Geneva, wherever it might be, he was to
+enjoy more than anything the so far from showy practice of wondering and
+dawdling and gaping: he was really, I think, much to profit by it. What
+it at all appreciably gave him--that is gave him in producible
+form--would be difficult to state; but it seems to him, as he even now
+thus indulges himself, an education like another: feeling, as he has
+come to do more and more, that no education avails for the intelligence
+that doesn't stir in it some subjective passion, and that on the other
+hand almost anything that does so act is largely educative, however
+small a figure the process might make in a scheme of training. Strange
+indeed, furthermore, are some of the things that _have_ stirred a
+subjective passion--stirred it, I mean, in young persons predisposed to
+a more or less fine inspired application.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+But I positively dawdle and gape here--I catch myself in the act; so
+that I take up the thread of fond reflection that guides me through that
+mystification of the summer school, which I referred to a little way
+back, at the time when the Summer School as known in America to-day was
+so deep in the bosom of the future. The seat of acquisition I speak of
+must have been contiguous to the house we occupied--I recall it as most
+intimately and objectionably near--and carried on in the interest of
+those parents from New York who, in villeggiatura under the queer
+conditions of those days, with the many modern mitigations of the
+gregarious lot still unrevealed and the many refinements on the
+individual one still undeveloped, welcomed almost any influence that
+might help at all to form their children to civility. Yet I remember
+that particular influence as more noisy and drowsy and dusty than
+anything else--as to which it must have partaken strongly of the general
+nature of New Brighton; a neighbourhood that no apt agency whatever had
+up to that time concerned itself to fashion, and that was indeed to
+remain shabbily shapeless for years; since I recall almost as dire an
+impression of it received in the summer of 1875. I seem more or less to
+have begun life, for that matter, with impressions of New Brighton;
+there comes back to me another, considerably more infantile than that of
+1854, so infantile indeed that I wonder at its having stuck--that of a
+place called the Pavilion, which must have been an hotel sheltering us
+for July and August, and the form of which to childish retrospect,
+unprejudiced by later experience, was that of a great Greek temple
+shining over blue waters in the splendour of a white colonnade and a
+great yellow pediment. The elegant image remained, though imprinted in a
+child so small as to be easily portable by a stout nurse, I remember,
+and not less easily duckable; I gasp again, and was long to gasp, with
+the sense of salt immersion received at her strong hands. Wonderful
+altogether in fact, I find as I write, the quantity, the intensity of
+picture recoverable from even the blankest and tenderest state of the
+little canvas.
+
+I connect somehow with the Pavilion period a visit paid with my
+father--who decidedly must have liked to take me about, I feel so rich
+in that general reminiscence--to a family whom we reached in what struck
+me as a quite lovely embowered place, on a very hot day, and among whom
+luxuries and eccentricities flourished together. They were numerous, the
+members of this family, they were beautiful, they partook of their
+meals, or were at the moment partaking of one, out of doors, and the
+then pre-eminent figure in the group was a very big Newfoundland dog on
+whose back I was put to ride. That must have been my first vision of the
+liberal life--though I further ask myself what my age could possibly
+have been when my weight was so fantastically far from hinting at later
+developments. But the romance of the hour was particularly in what I
+have called the eccentric note, the fact that the children, my
+entertainers, riveted my gaze to stockingless and shoeless legs and
+feet, conveying somehow at the same time that they were not poor and
+destitute but rich and provided--just as I took their garden-feast for a
+sign of overflowing food--and that their state as of children of nature
+was a refinement of freedom and grace. They were to become great and
+beautiful, the household of that glimmering vision, they were to figure
+historically, heroically, and serve great public ends; but always, to my
+remembering eyes and fond fancy, they were to move through life as with
+the bare white feet of that original preferred fairness and wildness.
+This is rank embroidery, but the old surface itself insists on
+spreading--it waits at least with an air of its own. The rest is
+silence; I can--extraordinary encumbrance even for the most doating of
+parents on a morning call--but have returned with my father to "our
+hotel"; since I feel that I must not only to this but to a still further
+extent face the historic truth that we were for considerable periods,
+during our earliest time, nothing less than hotel children. Between the
+far-off and the later phases at New Brighton stretched a series of
+summers that had seen us all regularly installed for a couple of months
+at an establishment passing in the view of that simpler age for a vast
+caravansery--the Hamilton House, on the south Long Island shore, so
+called from its nearness to the Fort of that name, which had Fort
+Lafayette, the Bastille of the Civil War, out in the channel before it
+and which probably cast a stronger spell upon the spirit of our
+childhood, William's and mine at least, than any scene presented to us
+up to our reaching our teens.
+
+I find that I draw from the singularly unobliterated memory of the
+particulars of all that experience the power quite to glory in our
+shame; of so entrancing an interest did I feel it at the time to _be_ an
+hotel child, and so little would I have exchanged my lot with that of
+any small person more privately bred. We were private enough in all
+conscience, I think I must have felt, the rest of the year; and at what
+age mustn't I quite have succumbed to the charm of the world seen in a
+larger way? For there, incomparably, was the chance to dawdle and gape;
+there were human appearances in endless variety and on the
+exhibition-stage of a piazza that my gape measured almost as by miles;
+it was even as if I had become positively conscious that the social
+scene so peopled would pretty well always say more to me than anything
+else. What it did say I of course but scantly understood; but I none the
+less knew it spoke, and I listened to its voice, I seem to recall, very
+much as "young Edwin," in Dr. Beattie's poem, listened to the roar of
+tempests and torrents from the nobler eminence of beetling crags and in
+exposure to still deeper abysses. I cling for the moment, however, to
+the small story of our Vredenburg summer, as we were for long afterwards
+invidiously to brand it; the more that it so plays its part in
+illustration, under the light of a later and happier age, of the growth,
+when not rather of the arrest, of manners and customs roundabout our
+birthplace. I think we had never been so much as during these particular
+months disinherited of the general and public amenities that reinforce
+for the young private precept and example--disinherited in favour of
+dust and glare and mosquitoes and pigs and shanties and rumshops, of no
+walks and scarce more drives, of a repeated no less than of a strong
+emphasis on the more sordid sides of the Irish aspect in things. There
+was a castellated residence on the hill above us--very high I remember
+supposing the hill and very stately the structure; it had towers and
+views and pretensions and belonged to a Colonel, whom we thought very
+handsome and very costumed, (as if befrogged and high-booted, which he
+couldn't have been at all, only _ought_ to have been, would even
+certainly have been at a higher pitch of social effect,) and whose son
+and heir, also very handsome and known familiarly and endearingly as
+Chick, had a velvet coat and a pony and I think spurs, all luxuries we
+were without, and was cousin to boys, the De Coppets, whom we had come
+to know at our school of the previous winter and who somehow--doubtless
+partly as guests of the opulent Chick--hovered again about the field of
+idleness.
+
+The De Coppets, particularly in the person of the first-born Louis, had
+been a value to us, or at any rate to me--for though I was, in common
+with my elders then, unacquainted with the application of that word as I
+use it here, what was my incipient sense of persons and things, what
+were my first stirred observant and imaginative reactions,
+discriminations and categories, but a vague groping for it? The De
+Coppets (again as more especially and most impressively interpreted by
+the subtle Louis) enjoyed the pre-eminence of being European; they had
+dropped during the scholastic term of 1853-4 straight from the lake of
+Geneva into the very bosom of Mr. Richard Pulling Jenks's select resort
+for young gentlemen, then situated in Broadway below Fourth Street; and
+had lately been present at an historic pageant--whether or no
+celebrating the annals of the town of Coppet I know not--in which
+representatives of their family had figured in armour and on horseback
+as the Barons (to our comprehension) de Coup or Cou. Their father was
+thus of the Canton de Vaud--only their mother had been native among
+ourselves and sister to the Colonel of the castellations. But what was
+the most vivid mark of the brothers, and vividest on the part of the
+supersubtle Louis, was his French treatment of certain of our native
+local names, Ohio and Iowa for instance, which he rendered, as to their
+separate vowels, with a daintiness and a delicacy invidious and
+imperturbable, so that he might have been Chateaubriand declaiming Les
+Natchez at Madame Recamier's--O-ee-oh and Ee-o-wah; a proceeding in him,
+a violence offered to his serried circle of little staring and glaring
+New Yorkers supplied with the usual allowance of fists and boot-toes,
+which, as it was clearly conscious, I recollect thinking unsurpassed for
+cool calm courage. Those _were_ the right names--which we owed wholly to
+the French explorers and Jesuit Fathers; so much the worse for us if we
+vulgarly didn't know it. I lose myself in admiration of the consistency,
+the superiority, the sublimity, of the not at all game-playing, yet in
+his own way so singularly sporting, Louis. He was naturally and
+incorruptibly French--as, so oddly, I have known other persons of both
+sexes to be whose English was naturally and incorruptibly American; the
+appearance being thus that the possession of indigenous English alone
+forms the adequate barrier and the assured racial ground. (Oh the queer
+reversions observed on the part of Latinized compatriots in the course
+of a long life--the remarkable drops from the quite current French or
+Italian to the comparatively improvised native idiom, with the resulting
+effect of the foreign tongue used as a domestic and the domestic, that
+is the original American, used as a foreign tongue, or without inherited
+confidence!)
+
+Louis De Coppet, though theoretically American and domiciled, was
+_naturally_ French, and so pressed further home to me that "sense of
+Europe" to which I feel that my very earliest consciousness waked--a
+perversity that will doubtless appear to ask for all the justification I
+can supply and some of which I shall presently attempt to give. He
+opened vistas, and I count ever as precious anyone, everyone, who
+betimes does that for the small straining vision; performing this office
+never so much, doubtless, as when, during that summer, he invited me to
+collaborate with him in the production of a romance which _il se fit
+fort_ to get printed, to get published, when success, or in other words
+completion, should crown our effort. Our effort, alas, failed of the
+crown, in spite of sundry solemn and mysterious meetings--so much
+devoted, I seem to remember, to the publishing question that others more
+fundamental dreadfully languished; leaving me convinced, however, that
+my friend would have got our fiction published if he could only have got
+it written. I think of my participation in this vain dream as of the
+very first gage of visiting approval offered to the exercise of a
+gift--though quite unable to conceive my companion's ground for
+suspecting a gift of which I must at that time quite have failed to
+exhibit a single in the least "phenomenal" symptom. It had none the less
+by his overtures been handsomely _imputed_ to me; that was in a manner a
+beginning--a small start, yet not wholly unattended with bravery. Louis
+De Coppet, I must add, brought to light later on, so far as I know, no
+compositions of his own; we met him long after in Switzerland and
+eventually heard of his having married a young Russian lady and settled
+at Nice. If I drop on his memory this apology for a bay-leaf it is from
+the fact of his having given the earliest, or at least the most
+personal, tap to that pointed prefigurement of the manners of "Europe,"
+which, inserted wedge-like, if not to say peg-like, into my young
+allegiance, was to split the tender organ into such unequal halves. His
+the toy hammer that drove in the very point of the golden nail.
+
+It was as if there had been a mild magic in that breath, however scant,
+of another world; but when I ask myself what element of the pleasing or
+the agreeable may have glimmered through the then general, the outer and
+enveloping conditions, I recover many more of the connections in which
+forms and civilities lapsed beyond repair than of those in which they
+struggled at all successfully. It is for some record of the question of
+taste, of the consciousness of an aesthetic appeal, as reflected in forms
+and aspects, that I shall like best to testify; as the promise and the
+development of these things on our earlier American scene are the more
+interesting to trace for their doubtless demanding a degree of the finer
+attention. The plain and happy profusions and advances and successes, as
+one looks back, reflect themselves at every turn; the quick beats of
+material increase and multiplication, with plenty of people to tell of
+them and throw up their caps for them; but the edifying matters to
+recapture would be the adventures of the "higher criticism" so far as
+there was any--and so far too as it might bear on the real quality and
+virtue of things; the state of manners, the terms of intercourse, the
+care for excellence, the sense of appearances, the intellectual reaction
+generally. However, any breasting of those deep waters must be but in
+the form for me of an occasional dip. It meanwhile fairly overtakes and
+arrests me here as a contributive truth that our general medium of life
+in the situation I speak of was such as to make a large defensive
+verandah, which seems to have very stoutly and completely surrounded us,
+play more or less the part of a raft of rescue in too high a tide--too
+high a tide there beneath us, as I recover it, of the ugly and the
+graceless. My particular perspective may magnify a little wildly--when
+it doesn't even more weirdly diminish; but I read into the great hooded
+and guarded resource in question an evidential force: as if it must
+really have played for us, so far as its narrowness and its exposure
+permitted, the part of a buffer-state against the wilderness immediately
+near, that of the empty, the unlovely and the mean. Interposing a little
+ease, didn't it interpose almost all the ease we knew?--so that when
+amiable friends, arriving from New York by the boat, came to see us,
+there was no rural view for them but that of our great shame, a view of
+the pigs and the shanties and the loose planks and scattered refuse and
+rude public ways; never even a field-path for a gentle walk or a garden
+nook in afternoon shade. I recall my prompt distaste, a strange
+precocity of criticism, for so much aridity--since of what lost Arcadia,
+at that age, had I really had the least glimpse?
+
+Our scant margin must have affected me more nobly, I should in justice
+add, when old Mrs. L. passed or hovered, for she sometimes caustically
+joined the circle and sometimes, during the highest temperatures, which
+were very high that summer, but flitted across it in a single flowing
+garment, as we amazedly conceived; one of the signs of that grand
+impertinence, I supposed, which belonged to "dowagers"--dowagers who
+were recognised characters and free speakers, doing and saying what they
+liked. This ancient lady was lodged in some outlying tract of the
+many-roomed house, which in more than one quarter stretched away into
+mystery; but the piazza, to which she had access, was unbroken, and
+whenever she strayed from her own territory she swam afresh into ours. I
+definitely remember that, having heard and perhaps read of dowagers,
+who, as I was aware, had scarce been provided for in our social scheme,
+I said to myself at first sight of our emphatic neighbour, a person
+clearly used to exceptional deference, "This must be a perfect
+specimen;" which was somehow very wonderful. The absolute first sight,
+however, had preceded the New Brighton summer, and it makes me lose
+myself in a queer dim vision, all the obscurities attendant on my having
+been present, as a very small boy indeed, at an evening entertainment
+where Mrs. L. figured in an attire that is still vivid to me: a blue
+satin gown, a long black lace shawl and a head-dress consisting in
+equally striking parts of a brown wig, a plume of some sort waving over
+it and a band or fillet, whether of some precious metal or not I forget,
+keeping it in place by the aid of a precious stone which adorned the
+centre of her brow. Such was my first view of the _feronniere_ of our
+grandmothers, when not of our greatgrandmothers. I see its wearer at
+this day bend that burdened brow upon me in a manner sufficiently awful,
+while her knuckly white gloves toyed with a large fan and a vinaigrette
+attached to her thumb by a chain; and as she was known to us afterwards
+for a friend of my Albany grandmother's it may have been as a tribute to
+this tie that she allowed me momentarily to engage her attention. _Then_
+it predominantly must have been that I knew her for a dowager--though
+this was a light in which I had never considered my grandmother herself;
+but what I have quite lost the clue to is the question of my
+extraordinary footing in such an assembly, the occasion of a dance of my
+elders, youthful elders but young married people, into which, really, my
+mother, as a participant, must have introduced me.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+It took place in the house of our cousins Robert and Kitty Emmet the
+elder--for we were to have two cousin Kittys of that ilk and yet another
+consanguineous Robert at least; the latter name being naturally, among
+them all, of a pious, indeed of a glorious, tradition, and three of my
+father's nieces marrying three Emmet brothers, the first of these the
+Robert aforesaid. Catherine James, daughter of my uncle Augustus, his
+then quite recent and, as I remember her, animated and attractive bride,
+whose fair hair framed her pointed smile in full and far-drooping
+"front" curls, I easily evoke as my first apprehended image of the free
+and happy young woman of fashion, a sign of the wondrous fact that
+ladies might live for pleasure, pleasure always, pleasure alone. She was
+distinguished for nothing whatever so much as for an insatiable love of
+the dance; that passion in which I think of the "good," the best, New
+York society of the time as having capered and champagned itself away.
+Her younger sister Gertrude, afterwards married to James--or more
+inveterately Jim--Pendleton, of Virginia, followed close upon her heels,
+literally speaking, and though emulating her in other respects too, was
+to last, through many troubles, much longer (looking extraordinarily the
+while like the younger portraits of Queen Victoria) and to have much
+hospitality, showing it, and showing everything, in a singularly natural
+way, for a considerable collection of young hobbledehoy kinsmen. But I
+am solicited a moment longer by the queer little issues involved--as if
+a social light would somehow stream from them--in my having been taken,
+a mere mite of observation, to Kitty Emmet's "grown-up" assembly. Was it
+that my mother really felt that to the scrap that I was other scraps
+would perhaps strangely adhere, to the extent thus of something to
+distinguish me by, nothing else probably having as yet declared
+itself--such a scrap for instance as the fine germ of this actual
+ferment of memory and play of fancy, a retroactive vision almost intense
+of the faded hour and a fond surrender to the questions with which it
+bristles? All the female relatives on my father's side who reappear to
+me in these evocations strike me as having been intensely and admirably,
+but at the same time almost indescribably, _natural_; which fact
+connects itself for the brooding painter and fond analyst with fifty
+other matters and impressions, his vision of a whole social order--if
+the American scene might indeed have been said at that time to be
+positively ordered. Wasn't the fact that the dancing passion was so out
+of proportion to any social resource just one of the signs of the
+natural?--and for that matter in both sexes alike of the artless
+kindred. It was shining to us that Jim Pendleton had a yacht--though I
+was not smuggled aboard it; there the line was drawn--but the deck must
+have been more used for the "German" than for other manoeuvres, often
+doubtless under the lead of our cousin Robert, the eldest of the many
+light irresponsibles to whom my father was uncle: distinct to me still
+being the image of that phenomenally lean and nimble choreographic hero,
+"Bob" James to us always, who, almost ghost-fashion, led the cotillion
+on from generation to generation, his skull-like smile, with its accent
+from the stiff points of his long moustache and the brightly hollow
+orbits of his eyes, helping to make of him an immemorial elegant
+skeleton.
+
+It is at all events to the sound of fiddles and the popping of corks
+that I see even young brides, as well as young grooms, originally so
+formed to please and to prosper as our hosts of the restless little
+occasion I have glanced at, vanish untimely, become mysterious and
+legendary, with such unfathomed silences and significant headshakes
+replacing the earlier concert; so that I feel how one's impression of so
+much foredoomed youthful levity received constant and quite thrilling
+increase. It was of course an impression then obscurely gathered, but
+into which one was later on to read strange pages--to some of which I
+may find myself moved to revert. Mere mite of observation though I have
+dubbed myself, I won't pretend to have deciphered any of them amid the
+bacchanal sounds that, on the evening so suggestively spent, floated out
+into the region of Washington Place. It is round that general centre
+that my richest memories of the "gay" little life in general cluster--as
+if it had been, for the circle in which I seem justified in pretending
+to have "moved," of the finer essence of "town"; covering as it did the
+stretch of Broadway down to Canal Street, with, closer at hand, the New
+York Hotel, which figured somehow inordinately in our family annals (the
+two newer ones, the glory of their brief and discredited, their flouted
+and demolished age, the brown Metropolitan and the white St. Nicholas,
+were much further down) and rising northward to the Ultima Thule of
+Twenty-third Street, only second then in the supposedly ample scheme of
+the regular ninth "wide" street. I can't indeed have moved much on that
+night of revelations and yet of enigmas over which I still hang
+fascinated; I must have kept intensely still in my corner, all wondering
+and all fearing--fearing notice most; and in a definite way I but
+remember the formidable interest of my so convincing dowager (to hark
+back for a second to _her_) and the fact that a great smooth white cloth
+was spread across the denuded room, converted thus into a field of
+frolic the prospect of which much excited my curiosity. I but recover
+the preparations, however, without recovering the performance; Mrs. L.
+and I must have been the only persons not shaking a foot, and premature
+unconsciousness clearly in my case supervened. Out of it peeps again the
+riddle, the so quaint _trait de moeurs_, of my infant participation.
+But I set that down as representative and interesting, and have done
+with it.
+
+The manners of the time had obviously a _bonhomie_ of their
+own--certainly so on our particularly indulgent and humane little field;
+as to which general proposition the later applications and
+transformations of the bonhomie would be interesting to trace. It has
+lingered and fermented and earned other names, but I seem on the track
+of its prime evidence with that note of the sovereign ease of all the
+young persons with whom we grew up. In the after-time, as our view took
+in, with new climes and new scenes, other examples of the class, these
+were always to affect us as more formed and finished, more tutored and
+governessed, warned and armed at more points for, and doubtless often
+against, the social relation; so that this prepared state on their part,
+and which at first appeared but a preparation for shyness or silence or
+whatever other ideal of the unconversable, came to be for us the normal,
+since it was the relative and not the positive, still less the
+superlative, state. No charming creatures of the growing girl sort were
+ever to be natural in the degree of these nearer and remoter ornaments
+of our family circle in youth; when after intervals and absences the
+impression was renewed we saw how right we had been about it, and I feel
+as if we had watched it for years under the apprehension and the vision
+of some inevitable change, wondering with an affectionate interest what
+effect the general improvement in manners might, perhaps all
+unfortunately, have upon it. I make out as I look back that it was
+really to succumb at no point to this complication, that it was to keep
+its really quite inimitable freshness to the end, or, in other words,
+when it had been the first free growth of the old conditions, was to
+pass away but with the passing of those themselves for whom it had been
+the sole possible expression. For it was as of an altogether special
+shade and sort that the New York young naturalness of our prime was
+touchingly to linger with us--so that to myself, at present, with only
+the gentle ghosts of the so numerous exemplars of it before me, it
+becomes the very stuff of the soft cerements in which their general mild
+mortality is laid away. We used to have in the after-time, amid fresh
+recognitions and reminders, the kindest "old New York" identifications
+for it. The special shade of its identity was thus that it was not
+conscious--really not conscious of anything in the world; or was
+conscious of so few possibilities at least, and these so immediate and
+so a matter of course, that it came almost to the same thing. That was
+the testimony that the slight subjects in question strike me as having
+borne to their surrounding medium--the fact that their unconsciousness
+could be so preserved. They played about in it so happily and serenely
+and sociably, as unembarrassed and loquacious as they were unadmonished
+and uninformed--only aware at the most that a good many people within
+their horizon were "dissipated"; as in point of fact, alas, a good many
+_were_. What it was to be dissipated--that, however, was but in the most
+limited degree a feature of their vision; they would have held, under
+pressure, that it consisted more than anything else in getting tipsy.
+
+Infinitely queer and quaint, almost incongruously droll, the sense
+somehow begotten in ourselves, as very young persons, of our being
+surrounded by a slightly remote, yet dimly rich, outer and quite kindred
+circle of the tipsy. I remember how, once, as a very small boy, after
+meeting in the hall a most amiable and irreproachable gentleman, all
+but closely consanguineous, who had come to call on my mother, I
+anticipated his further entrance by slipping in to report to that parent
+that I thought _he_ must be tipsy. And I was to recall perfectly
+afterwards the impression I so made on her--in which the general
+proposition that the gentlemen of a certain group or connection might on
+occasion be best described by the term I had used sought to destroy the
+particular presumption that our visitor wouldn't, by his ordinary
+measure, show himself for one of those. He didn't, to all appearance,
+for I was afterwards disappointed at the lapse of lurid evidence: that
+memory remained with me, as well as a considerable subsequent wonder at
+my having leaped to so baseless a view. The truth was indeed that we had
+too, in the most innocent way in the world, our sense of "dissipation"
+as an abounding element in family histories; a sense fed quite directly
+by our fondness for making our father--I can at any rate testify for the
+urgency of my own appeal to him--tell us stories of the world of his
+youth. He regaled us with no scandals, yet it somehow rarely failed to
+come out that each contemporary on his younger scene, each hero of each
+thrilling adventure, had, in spite of brilliant promise and romantic
+charm, ended badly, as badly as possible. This became our gaping
+generalisation--it gaped even under the moral that the anecdote was
+always, and so familiarly, humanly and vividly, designed to convey:
+everyone in the little old Albany of the Dutch houses and the steep
+streets and the recurrent family names--Townsends, Clintons, Van
+Rensselaers, Pruyns: I pick them up again at hazard, and all
+uninvidiously, out of reverberations long since still--everyone without
+exception had at last taken a turn as far as possible from edifying. And
+what they had most in common, the hovering presences, the fitful
+apparitions that, speaking for myself, so engaged my imagination, was
+just the fine old Albany drama--in the light of which a ring of mystery
+as to their lives (mainly carried on at the New York Hotel aforesaid)
+surrounded them, and their charm, inveterate, as I believed, shone out
+as through vaguely-apprehended storm-clouds. Their charm was in various
+marks of which I shall have more to say--for as I breathe all this
+hushed air again even the more broken things give out touching human
+values and faint sweet scents of character, flushes of old beauty and
+good-will.
+
+The grim little generalisation remained, none the less, and I may speak
+of it--since I speak of everything--as still standing: the striking
+evidence that scarce aught but disaster _could_, in that so unformed and
+unseasoned society, overtake young men who were in the least exposed.
+Not to have been immediately launched in business of a rigorous sort
+was to _be_ exposed--in the absence I mean of some fairly abnormal
+predisposition to virtue; since it was a world so simply constituted
+that whatever wasn't business, or exactly an office or a "store," places
+in which people sat close and made money, was just simply pleasure,
+sought, and sought only, in places in which people got tipsy. There was
+clearly no mean, least of all the golden one, for it was just the ready,
+even when the moderate, possession of gold that determined, that hurried
+on, disaster. There were whole sets and groups, there were
+"sympathetic," though too susceptible, races, that seemed scarce to
+recognise or to find possible any practical application of moneyed, that
+is of transmitted, ease, however limited, but to go more or less rapidly
+to the bad with it--which meant even then going as often as possible to
+Paris. The bright and empty air was as void of "careers" for a choice as
+of cathedral towers for a sketcher, and I passed my younger time, till
+within a year or two of the Civil War, with an absolute vagueness of
+impression as to how the political life of the country was carried on.
+The field was strictly covered, to my young eyes, I make out, by three
+classes, the busy, the tipsy, and Daniel Webster. This last great man
+must have represented for us a class in himself; as if to be "political"
+was just to _be_ Daniel Webster in his proper person and with room left
+over for nobody else. That he should have filled the sky of public life
+from pole to pole, even to a childish consciousness not formed in New
+England and for which that strenuous section was but a name in the
+geography-book, is probably indeed a sign of how large, in the general
+air, he comparatively loomed. The public scene was otherwise a blank to
+our young vision, I discern, till, later on, in Paris, I saw--for at
+that unimproved period we of the unfledged didn't suppose ourselves to
+"meet"--Charles Sumner; with whose name indeed there further connects
+itself the image of a thrilled hour in the same city some months before:
+the gathering of a group of indignant persons on the terrace of a small
+old-world _hotel_ or pavilion looking out on the Avenue des Champs
+Elysees, slightly above the Rond-Point and just opposite the
+antediluvian Jardin d'Hiver (who remembers the Jardin d'Hiver, who
+remembers the ancient lodges of the _octroi_, the pair of them facing
+each other at the Barriere de l'Etoile?) and among them a passionate
+lady in tears over the news, fresh that morning, of the assault on
+Sumner by the South Carolina ruffian of the House. The wounded Senator,
+injured in health, had come to Europe later on to recuperate, and he
+offered me my first view, to the best of my belief, not only of a
+"statesman," but of any person whomsoever concerned in political life. I
+distinguish in the earlier twilight of Fourteenth Street my father's
+return to us one November day--we knew he had been out to vote--with the
+news that General Winfield Scott, his and the then "Whig" candidate, had
+been defeated for the Presidency; just as I rescue from the same limbo
+my afterwards proud little impression of having "met" that high-piled
+hero of the Mexican War, whom the Civil War was so soon and with so
+little ceremony to extinguish, literally met him, at my father's side,
+in Fifth Avenue, where he had just emerged from a cross-street. I remain
+vague as to what had then happened and scarce suppose I was, at the age
+probably of eight or nine, "presented"; but we must have been for some
+moments face to face while from under the vast amplitude of a dark blue
+military cloak with a big velvet collar and loosened silver clasp, which
+spread about him like a symbol of the tented field, he greeted my
+parent--so clear is my sense of the time it took me to gape _all_ the
+way up to where he towered aloft.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+The not very glorious smoke of the Mexican War, I note for another
+touch, had been in the air when I was a still smaller boy, and I have an
+association with it that hovers between the definite and the dim, a
+vision of our uncle (Captain as he then was) Robert Temple, U.S.A., in
+regimentals, either on his way to the scene of action or on the return
+from it. I see him as a person half asleep sees some large object across
+the room and against the window-light--even if to the effect of my now
+asking myself why, so far from the scene of action, he was in panoply of
+war. I seem to see him cock-hatted and feathered too--an odd vision of
+dancing superior plumes which doesn't fit if he was only a captain.
+However, I cultivate the wavering shade merely for its value as my
+earliest glimpse of any circumstance of the public order--unless indeed
+another, the reminiscence to which I owe to-day my sharpest sense of
+personal antiquity, had already given me the historic thrill. The scene
+of this latter stir of consciousness is, for memory, an apartment in one
+of the three Fifth Avenue houses that were not long afterward swallowed
+up in the present Brevoort Hotel, and consists of the admired
+appearance of my uncles "Gus" and John James to announce to my father
+that the Revolution had triumphed in Paris and Louis Philippe had fled
+to England. These last words, the flight of the king, linger on my ear
+at this hour even as they fell there; we had somehow waked early to a
+perception of Paris, and a vibration of my very most infantine
+sensibility under its sky had by the same stroke got itself preserved
+for subsequent wondering reference. I had been there for a short time in
+the second year of my life, and I was to communicate to my parents later
+on that as a baby in long clothes, seated opposite to them in a carriage
+and on the lap of another person, I had been impressed with the view,
+framed by the clear window of the vehicle as we passed, of a great
+stately square surrounded with high-roofed houses and having in its
+centre a tall and glorious column. I had naturally caused them to
+marvel, but I had also, under cross-questioning, forced them to compare
+notes, as it were, and reconstitute the miracle. They knew what my
+observation of monumental squares had been--and alas hadn't; neither New
+York nor Albany could have offered me the splendid perspective, and, for
+that matter, neither could London, which moreover I had known at a
+younger age still. Conveyed along the Rue St.-Honore while I waggled my
+small feet, as I definitely remember doing, under my flowing robe, I had
+crossed the Rue de Castiglione and taken in, for all my time, the
+admirable aspect of the Place and the Colonne Vendome. I don't now
+pretend to measure the extent to which my interest in the events of
+1848--I was five years old--was quickened by that _souvenir_, a
+tradition further reinforced, I should add, by the fact that some
+relative or other, some member of our circle, was always either "there"
+("there" being of course generally Europe, but particularly and
+pointedly Paris) or going there or coming back from there: I at any rate
+revert to the sound of the rich words on my uncles' lips as to my
+positive initiation into History. It was as if I had been ready for them
+and could catch on; I had heard of kings presumably, and also of
+fleeing: but that kings had sometimes to flee was a new and striking
+image, to which the apparent consternation of my elders added dramatic
+force. So much, in any case, for what I may claim--perhaps too idly--on
+behalf of my backward reach.
+
+It has carried me far from my rather evident proposition that if we saw
+the "natural" so happily embodied about us--and in female maturity, or
+comparative maturity, scarce less than in female adolescence--this was
+because the artificial, or in other words the complicated, was so
+little there to threaten it. The complicated, as we were later on to
+define it, was but another name for those more massed and violent
+assaults upon the social sense that we were to recognise subsequently by
+their effects--observing thus that a sense more subtly social had so
+been created, and that it quite differed from that often almost complete
+inward blankness, in respect to any circumjacent, any constituted, order
+to the exhibition of which our earlier air and our family scene had
+inimitably treated us. We came more or less to see that our young
+contemporaries of another world, the trained and admonished, the
+disciplined and governessed, or in a word the formed, relatively
+speaking, had been made aware of many things of which those at home
+hadn't been; yet we were also to note--so far as we may be conceived as
+so precociously "noting," though we were certainly incorrigible
+observers--that, the awareness in question remaining at the best
+imperfect, our little friends as distinguished from our companions of
+the cousinship, greater and less, advanced and presumed but to flounder
+and recede, elated at once and abashed and on the whole but _feebly_
+sophisticated. The cousinship, on the other hand, all unalarmed and
+unsuspecting and unembarrassed, lived by pure serenity, sociability and
+loquacity; the oddest fact about its members being withal that it didn't
+make them bores, I seem to feel as I look back, or at least not worse
+bores than sundry specimens of the other growth. There can surely never
+have been anything like their good faith and, generally speaking, their
+amiability. I should have but to let myself go a little to wish to cite
+examples--save that in doing so I should lose sight of my point; which
+is to recall again that whether we were all amiable or not (and,
+frankly, I claim it in a high degree for most of us) the scene on which
+we so freely bloomed does strike me, when I reckon up, as
+extraordinarily unfurnished. How came it then that for the most part so
+simple we yet weren't more inane? This was doubtless by reason of the
+quantity of our inward life--ours of our father's house in especial I
+mean--which made an excellent, in some cases almost an incomparable,
+_fond_ for a thicker civility to mix with when growing experience should
+begin to take that in. It was also quaint, among us, I may be reminded,
+to have _begun_ with the inward life; but we began, after the manner of
+all men, as we could, and I hold that if it comes to that we might have
+begun much worse.
+
+I was in my seventeenth year when the raid and the capture of John
+Brown, of Harper's Ferry fame, enjoyed its sharp reverberation among us,
+though we were then on the other side of the world; and I count this as
+the very first reminder that reached me of our living, on our side, in
+a political order: I had perfectly taken in from the pages of "Punch,"
+which contributed in the highest degree to our education, that the
+peoples on the other side so lived. As there was no American "Punch,"
+and to this time has been none, to give small boys the sense and the
+imagination of living with their public administrators, Daniel Webster
+and Charles Sumner had never become, for my fancy, members of a class, a
+class which numbered in England, by John Leech's showing, so many other
+members still than Lords Brougham, Palmerston and John Russell. The war
+of Secession, soon arriving, was to cause the field to bristle with
+features and the sense of the State, in our generation, infinitely to
+quicken; but that alarm came upon the country like a thief at night, and
+we might all have been living in a land in which there seemed at least
+nothing save a comparatively small amount of quite private property to
+steal. Even private property in other than the most modest amounts
+scarce figured for our particular selves; which doubtless came partly
+from the fact that amid all the Albany issue there was ease, with the
+habit of ease, thanks to our grandfather's fine old ability--he had
+decently provided for so large a generation; but our consciousness was
+positively disfurnished, as that of young Americans went, of the
+actualities of "business" in a world of business. As to that we all
+formed together quite a monstrous exception; business in a world of
+business was the thing we most agreed (differ as we might on minor
+issues) in knowing nothing about. We touched it and it touched us
+neither directly nor otherwise, and I think our fond detachment, not to
+say our helpless ignorance and on occasion (since I can speak for one
+fine instance) our settled density of understanding, made us an
+unexampled and probably, for the ironic "smart" gods of the American
+heaven, a lamentable case. Of course even the office and the "store"
+leave much of the provision for an approximately complete scheme of
+manners to be accounted for; still there must have been vast numbers of
+people about us for whom, under the usages, the assault on the
+imagination from without was much stronger and the filling-in of the
+general picture much richer. It was exactly by the lack of that
+filling-in that we--we more especially who lived at near view of my
+father's admirable example--had been thrown so upon the inward life. No
+one could ever have taken to it, even in the face of discouragement,
+more kindly and naturally than he; but the situation had at least that
+charm that, in default of so many kinds of the outward, people had their
+choice of as many kinds of the inward as they would, and might practise
+those kinds with whatever consistency, intensity and brilliancy. Of our
+father's perfect gift for practising _his_ kind I shall have more to
+say; but I meanwhile glance yet again at those felicities of destitution
+which kept us, collectively, so genially interested in almost nothing
+but each other and which come over me now as one of the famous blessings
+in disguise.
+
+There were "artists" in the prospect--didn't Mr. Tom Hicks and Mr. Paul
+Duggan and Mr. C. P. Cranch and Mr. Felix Darley, this last worthy of a
+wider reputation, capable perhaps even of a finer development, than he
+attained, more or less haunt our friendly fireside, and give us also the
+sense of others, landscapist Cropseys and Coles and Kensetts, and
+bust-producing Iveses and Powerses and Moziers, hovering in an outer
+circle? There were authors not less, some of them vague and female and
+in this case, as a rule, glossily ringletted and monumentally
+breastpinned, but mostly frequent and familiar, after the manner of
+George Curtis and Parke Godwin and George Ripley and Charles Dana and N.
+P. Willis and, for brighter lights or those that in our then comparative
+obscurity almost deceived the morn, Mr. Bryant, Washington Irving and E.
+A. Poe--the last-named of whom I cite not so much because he was
+personally present (the extremity of personal absence had just overtaken
+him) as by reason of that predominant lustre in him which our small
+opening minds themselves already recognised and which makes me wonder
+to-day at the legend of the native neglect of him. Was he not even at
+that time on all lips, had not my brother, promptly master of the
+subject, beckoned on my lagging mind with a recital of The Gold-Bug and
+The Pit and the Pendulum?--both of which, however, I was soon enough to
+read for myself, adding to them The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Were we
+not also forever mounting on little platforms at our infant schools to
+"speak" The Raven and Lenore and the verses in which we phrased the
+heroine as Annabellee?--falling thus into the trap the poet had so
+recklessly laid for us, as he had laid one for our interminable droning,
+not less, in the other pieces I have named. So far from misprizing our
+ill-starred magician we acclaimed him surely at every turn; he lay upon
+our tables and resounded in our mouths, while we communed to satiety,
+even for boyish appetites, over the thrill of his choicest pages. Don't
+I just recognise the ghost of a dim memory of a children's Christmas
+party at the house of Fourteenth Street neighbours--they come back to me
+as "the Beans": who and what and whence and whither the kindly
+Beans?--where I admired over the chimney piece the full-length portrait
+of a lady seated on the ground in a Turkish dress, with hair flowing
+loose from a cap which was not as the caps of ladies known to me, and I
+think with a tambourine, who was somehow identified to my enquiring
+mind as the wife of the painter of the piece, Mr. Osgood, and the so
+ministering friend of the unhappy Mr. Poe. There she throned in honour,
+like Queen Constance on the "huge firm earth"--all for _that_ and her
+tambourine; and surely we could none of us have done more for the
+connection.
+
+Washington Irving I "met," with infant promptitude, very much as I had
+met General Scott; only this time it was on a steamboat that I
+apprehended the great man; my father, under whose ever-patient
+protection I then was--during the summer afternoon's sail from New York
+to Fort Hamilton--having named him to me, for this long preservation,
+before they greeted and talked, and having a fact of still more moment
+to mention, with the greatest concern, afterwards: Mr. Irving had given
+him the news of the shipwreck of Margaret Fuller in those very waters
+(Fire Island at least was but just without our big Bay) during the great
+August storm that had within the day or two passed over us. The
+unfortunate lady was essentially of the Boston connection; but she must
+have been, and probably through Emerson, a friend of my parents--mustn't
+she have held "conversations," in the finest exotic Bostonese, in New
+York, Emerson himself lecturing there to admiration?--since the more I
+squeeze the sponge of memory the more its stored secretions flow, to
+remind me here again that, being with those elders late one evening at
+an exhibition of pictures, possibly that of the National Academy, then
+confined to scant quarters, I was shown a small full-length portrait of
+Miss Fuller, seated as now appears to me and wrapped in a long white
+shawl, the failure of which to do justice to its original my companions
+denounced with some emphasis. Was this work from the hand of Mr. Tom
+Hicks aforesaid, or was that artist concerned only with the life-sized,
+the enormous (as I took it to be) the full-length, the violently
+protruded accessories in which come back to me with my infant sense of
+the wonder and the beauty of them, as expressed above all in the image
+of a very long and lovely lady, the new bride of the artist, standing at
+a window before a row of plants or bulbs in tall coloured glasses. The
+light of the window playing over the figure and the "treatment" of its
+glass and of the flower-pots and the other furniture, passed, by my
+impression, for the sign of the master hand; and _was_ it all brave and
+charming, or was it only very hard and stiff, quite ugly and helpless? I
+put these questions as to a vanished world and by way of pressing back
+into it only the more clingingly and tenderly--wholly regardless in
+other words of whether the answers to them at all matter. They matter
+doubtless but for fond evocation, and if one tries to evoke one must
+neglect none of the arts, one must do it with all the forms. Why I
+_should_ so like to do it is another matter--and what "outside
+interest" I may suppose myself to create perhaps still another: I
+fatuously proceed at any rate, I make so far as I can the small warm
+dusky homogeneous New York world of the mid-century close about us.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+I see a small and compact and ingenuous society, screened in somehow
+conveniently from north and west, but open wide to the east and
+comparatively to the south and, though perpetually moving up Broadway,
+none the less constantly and delightfully walking down it. Broadway was
+the feature and the artery, the joy and the adventure of one's
+childhood, and it stretched, and prodigiously, from Union Square to
+Barnum's great American Museum by the City Hall--or only went further on
+the Saturday mornings (absurdly and deplorably frequent alas) when we
+were swept off by a loving aunt, our mother's only sister, then much
+domesticated with us and to whom the ruthless care had assigned itself
+from the first, to Wall Street and the torture chamber of Dr. Parkhurst,
+our tremendously respectable dentist, who was so old and so empurpled
+and so polite, in his stock and dress-coat and dark and glossy wig, that
+he had been our mother's and our aunt's haunting fear in _their_ youth
+as well, since, in their quiet Warren Street, not far off, they were,
+dreadful to think, comparatively under his thumb. He extremely
+resembles, to my mind's eye, certain figures in Phiz's illustrations to
+Dickens, and it was clear to us through our long ordeal that our elders
+must, by some mistaken law of compensation, some refinement of the
+vindictive, be making us "pay" for what they in like helplessness had
+suffered from him: as if _we_ had done them any harm! Our analysis was
+muddled, yet in a manner relieving, and for us too there were
+compensations, which we grudged indeed to allow, but which I could
+easily, even if shyly, have named. One of these was Godey's Lady's Book,
+a sallow pile of which (it shows to me for sallow in the warmer and less
+stony light of the Wall Street of those days and through the smell of
+ancient anodynes) lay on Joey Bagstock's table for our beguilement while
+we waited: I was to encounter in Phiz's Dombey and Son that design for
+our tormentor's type. There is no doubt whatever that I succumbed to the
+spell of Godey, who, unlike the present essences, was an anodyne before
+the fact as well as after; since I remember poring, in his pages, over
+tales of fashionable life in Philadelphia while awaiting my turn in the
+chair, not less than doing so when my turn was over and to the music of
+my brother's groans. This must have been at the hours when we were left
+discreetly to our own fortitude, through our aunt's availing herself of
+the relative proximity to go and shop at Stewart's and then come back
+for us; the ladies' great shop, vast, marmorean, plate-glassy and
+notoriously fatal to the female nerve (we ourselves had wearily trailed
+through it, hanging on the skirts, very literally, of indecision) which
+bravely waylaid custom on the Broadway corner of Chambers Street. Wasn't
+part of the charm of life--since I assume that there _was_ such a
+charm--in its being then (I allude to life itself) so much more
+down-towny, on the supposition at least that our young gravitation in
+that sense for most of the larger joys consorted with something of the
+general habit? The joy that had to be fished out, like Truth, from the
+very bottom of the well was attendance at Trinity Church, still in that
+age supereminent, pointedly absolute, the finest feature of the
+southward scene; to the privilege of which the elder Albany cousins were
+apt to be treated when they came on to stay with us; an indulgence
+making their enjoyment of our city as down-towny as possible too, for I
+seem otherwise to see them but as returning with the familiar Stewart
+headache from the prolonged strain of selection.
+
+The great reward dispensed to us for our sessions in the house of
+pain--as to which it became our subsequent theory that we had been
+regularly dragged there on alternate Saturdays--was our being carried on
+the return to the house of delight, or to one of them, for there were
+specifically two, where we partook of ice-cream, deemed sovereign for
+sore mouths, deemed sovereign in fact, all through our infancy, for
+everything. Two great establishments for the service of it graced the
+prospect, one Thompson's and the other Taylor's, the former, I perfectly
+recall, grave and immemorial, the latter upstart but dazzling, and
+having together the effect that whichever we went to we wondered if we
+hadn't better have gone to the other--with that capacity of childhood
+for making the most of its adventures after a fashion that may look so
+like making the least. It is in our father's company indeed that, as I
+press the responsive spring, I see the bedizened saucers heaped up for
+our fond consumption (they bore the Taylor-title painted in blue and
+gilded, with the Christian name, as parentally pointed out to us,
+perverted to "Jhon" for John, whereas the Thompson-name scorned such
+vulgar and above all such misspelt appeals;) whence I infer that still
+other occasions for that experience waited on us--as almost any would
+serve, and a paternal presence so associated with them was not in the
+least conceivable in the Wall Street _repaire_. That presence is in fact
+not associated for me, to any effect of distinctness, with the least of
+our suffered shocks or penalties--though partly doubtless because our
+acquaintance with such was of the most limited; a conclusion I form even
+while judging it to have been on the whole sufficient for our virtue.
+This sounds perhaps as if we had borne ourselves as prodigies or
+prigs--which was as far as possible from being the case; we were bred in
+horror of _conscious_ propriety, of what my father was fond of calling
+"flagrant" morality; what I myself at any rate read back into our rare
+educational ease, for the memory of some sides of which I was ever to be
+thankful, is, besides the _general_ humanisation of our apprehended
+world and our "social" tone, the unmistakeable appearance that my father
+was again and again accompanied in public by his small second son: so
+many young impressions come back to me as gathered at his side and in
+his personal haunts. Not that he mustn't have offered his firstborn at
+least equal opportunities; but I make out that he seldom led us forth,
+such as we were, together, and my brother must have had in _his_ turn
+many a mild adventure of which the secret--I like to put it so--perished
+with him. He was to remember, as I perceived later on, many things that
+I didn't, impressions I sometimes wished, as with a retracing jealousy,
+or at least envy, that I might also have fallen direct heir to; but he
+professed amazement, and even occasionally impatience, at my reach of
+reminiscence--liking as he did to brush away old moral scraps in favour
+of new rather than to hoard and so complacently exhibit them. If in my
+way I collected the new as well I yet cherished the old; the ragbag of
+memory hung on its nail in my closet, though I learnt with time to
+control the habit of bringing it forth. And I say that with a due sense
+of my doubtless now appearing to empty it into these pages.
+
+I keep picking out at hazard those passages of our earliest age that
+help to reconstruct for me even by tiny touches the experience of our
+parents, any shade of which seems somehow to signify. I cherish, to the
+extent of here reproducing, an old daguerreotype all the circumstances
+of the taking of which I intensely recall--though as I was lately turned
+twelve when I figured for it the feat of memory is perhaps not
+remarkable. It documents for me in so welcome and so definite a manner
+my father's cultivation of my company. It documents at the same time the
+absurdest little legend of my small boyhood--the romantic tradition of
+the value of being taken up from wherever we were staying to the queer
+empty dusty smelly New York of midsummer: I apply that last term because
+we always arrived by boat and I have still in my nostril the sense of
+the _abords_ of the hot town, the rank and rubbishy waterside quarters,
+where big loose cobbles, for the least of all the base items, lay
+wrenched from their sockets of pungent black mud and where the dependent
+streets managed by a law of their own to be all corners and the corners
+to be all groceries; groceries indeed largely of the "green" order, so
+far as greenness could persist in the torrid air, and that bristled, in
+glorious defiance of traffic, with the overflow of their wares and
+implements. Carts and barrows and boxes and baskets, sprawling or
+stacked, familiarly elbowed in its course the bumping hack (the
+comprehensive "carriage" of other days, the only vehicle of hire then
+known to us) while the situation was accepted by the loose citizen in
+the garb of a freeman save for the brass star on his breast--and the New
+York garb of the period was, as I remember it, an immense attestation of
+liberty. Why the throb of romance should have beat time for me to such
+visions I can scarce explain, or can explain only by the fact that the
+squalor was a squalor wonderfully mixed and seasoned, and that I should
+wrong the whole impression if I didn't figure it first and foremost as
+that of some vast succulent cornucopia. What did the stacked boxes and
+baskets of our youth represent but the boundless fruitage of that more
+bucolic age of the American world, and what was after all of so strong
+an assault as the rankness of such a harvest? Where is that fruitage
+now, where in particular are the peaches _d'antan_? where the mounds of
+Isabella grapes and Seckel pears in the sticky sweetness of which our
+childhood seems to have been steeped? It was surely, save perhaps for
+oranges, a more informally and familiarly fruit-eating time, and bushels
+of peaches in particular, peaches big and peaches small, peaches white
+and peaches yellow, played a part in life from which they have somehow
+been deposed; every garden, almost every bush and the very boys' pockets
+grew them; they were "cut up" and eaten with cream at every meal;
+domestically "brandied" they figured, the rest of the year, scarce less
+freely--if they were rather a "party dish" it was because they made the
+party whenever they appeared, and when ice-cream was added, or they were
+added _to_ it, they formed the highest revel we knew. Above all the
+public heaps of them, the high-piled receptacles at every turn, touched
+the street as with a sort of southern plenty; the note of the rejected
+and scattered fragments, the memory of the slippery skins and rinds and
+kernels with which the old dislocated flags were bestrown, is itself
+endeared to me and contributes a further pictorial grace. We ate
+everything in those days by the bushel and the barrel, as from stores
+that were infinite; we handled watermelons as freely as cocoanuts, and
+the amount of stomach-ache involved was negligible in the general
+Eden-like consciousness.
+
+The glow of this consciousness even in so small an organism was part of
+the charm of these retreats offered me cityward upon our base of
+provisions; a part of the rest of which, I disengage, was in my fond
+perception of that almost eccentrically home-loving habit in my father
+which furnished us with half the household humour of our
+childhood--besides furnishing _him_ with any quantity of extravagant
+picture of his so prompt pangs of anguish in absence for celebration of
+his precipitate returns. It was traditional for us later on, and
+especially on the European scene, that for him to leave us in pursuit of
+some advantage or convenience, some improvement of our condition, some
+enlargement of our view, was for him breathlessly to reappear, after the
+shortest possible interval, with no account at all to give of the
+benefit aimed at, but instead of this a moving representation, a far
+richer recital, of his spiritual adventures at the horrid inhuman inns
+and amid the hard alien races which had stayed his advance. He reacted,
+he rebounded, in favour of his fireside, from whatever brief
+explorations or curiosities; these passionate spontaneities were the
+pulse of his life and quite some of the principal events of ours; and,
+as he was nothing if not expressive, whatever happened to him for inward
+intensity happened abundantly to us for pity and terror, as it were, as
+well as for an ease and a quality of amusement among ourselves that was
+really always to fail us among others. Comparatively late in life, after
+his death, I had occasion to visit, in lieu of my brother, then in
+Europe, an American city in which he had had, since his own father's
+death, interests that were of importance to us all. On my asking the
+agent in charge when the owner had last taken personal cognisance of his
+property that gentleman replied only half to my surprise that he had
+never in all his years of possession performed such an act. Then it was
+perhaps that I most took the measure of his fine faith in human
+confidence as an administrative function. He had to have a _relation_,
+somehow expressed--and as he was the vividest and happiest of
+letter-writers it rarely failed of coming; but once it was established
+it served him, in every case, much better than fussy challenges, which
+had always the drawback of involving lapses and inattentions in regard
+to solicitudes more pressing. He incurably took for granted--incurably
+because whenever he did so the process succeeded; with which
+association, however, I perhaps overdrench my complacent vision of our
+summer snatches at town. Through a grave accident in early life country
+walks on rough roads were, in spite of his great constitutional
+soundness, tedious and charmless to him; he liked on the other hand the
+peopled pavement, the thought of which made him restless when away.
+Hence the fidelities and sociabilities, however superficial, that he
+couldn't _not_ reaffirm--if he could only reaffirm the others, the
+really intimate and still more communicable, soon enough afterwards.
+
+It was these of the improvised and casual sort that I shared with him
+thus indelibly; for truly if we took the boat to town to do things I did
+them quite as much as he, and so that a little boy could scarce have
+done them more. My part may indeed but have been to surround his part
+with a thick imaginative aura; but that constituted for me an activity
+than which I could dream of none braver or wilder. We went to the office
+of The New York Tribune--my father's relations with that journal were
+actual and close; and that was a wonderful world indeed, with strange
+steepnesses and machineries and noises and hurrying bare-armed,
+bright-eyed men, and amid the agitation clever, easy, kindly, jocular,
+partly undressed gentlemen (it was always July or August) some of whom I
+knew at home, taking it all as if it were the most natural place in the
+world. It was big to me, big to me with the breath of great vague
+connections, and I supposed the gentlemen very old, though since aware
+that they must have been, for the connections, remarkably young; and the
+conversation of one of them, the one I saw oftenest up town, who
+attained to great local and to considerable national eminence
+afterwards, and who talked often and thrillingly about the theatres, I
+retain as many bright fragments of as if I had been another little
+Boswell. It was as if he had dropped into my mind the germ of certain
+interests that were long afterwards to flower--as for instance on his
+announcing the receipt from Paris of news of the appearance at the
+Theatre Francais of an actress, Madame Judith, who was formidably to
+compete with her coreligionary Rachel and to endanger that artist's
+laurels. Why should Madame Judith's name have stuck to me through all
+the years, since I was never to see her and she is as forgotten as
+Rachel is remembered? Why should that scrap of gossip have made a date
+for my consciousness, turning it to the Comedie with an intensity that
+was long afterwards to culminate? Why was it equally to abide for me
+that the same gentleman had on one of these occasions mentioned his
+having just come back from a wonderful city of the West, Chicago, which,
+though but a year or two old, with plank sidewalks when there were any,
+and holes and humps where there were none, and shanties where there were
+not big blocks, and everything where there had yesterday been nothing,
+had already developed a huge energy and curiosity, and also an appetite
+for lectures? I became aware of the Comedie, I became aware of Chicago;
+I also became aware that even the most alluring fiction was not always
+for little boys to read. It was mentioned at the Tribune office that one
+of its reporters, Mr. Solon Robinson, had put forth a novel rather oddly
+entitled "Hot Corn" and more or less having for its subject the career
+of a little girl who hawked that familiar American luxury in the
+streets. The volume, I think, was put into my father's hand, and I
+recall my prompt desire to make acquaintance with it no less than the
+remark, as promptly addressed to my companion, that the work, however
+engaging, was not one that should be left accessible to an innocent
+child. The pang occasioned by this warning has scarcely yet died out for
+me, nor my sense of my first wonder at the discrimination--so great
+became from that moment the mystery of the tabooed book, of whatever
+identity; the question, in my breast, of why, if it was to be so right
+for others, it was only to be wrong for me. I remember the soreness of
+the thought that it was I rather who was wrong for the book--which was
+somehow humiliating: in that amount of discredit one couldn't but be
+involved. Neither then nor afterwards was the secret of "Hot Corn"
+revealed to me, and the sense of privation was to be more prolonged, I
+fear, than the vogue of the tale, which even as a success of scandal
+couldn't have been great.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+Dimly queer and "pathetic" to me were to remain through much of the
+after time indeed most of those early indigenous vogues and literary
+flurries: so few of those that brushed by my childhood had been other
+than a tinkling that suddenly stopped. I am afraid I mean that what was
+touching was rather the fact that the tinkle _could_ penetrate than the
+fact that it died away; the light of criticism might have beat so
+straight--if the sense of proportion and the fact of compassion hadn't
+waved it away--on the aesthetic phase during which the appeal was mainly
+_by_ the tinkle. The Scarlet Letter and The Seven Gables had the deep
+tone as much as one would; but of the current efforts of the imagination
+they were alone in having it till Walt Whitman broke out in the later
+fifties--and I was to know nothing of that happy genius till long after.
+An absorbed perusal of The Lamplighter was what I was to achieve at the
+fleeting hour I continue to circle round; that romance was on every
+one's lips, and I recollect it as more or less thrust upon me in amends
+for the imposed sacrifice of a ranker actuality--that of the improper
+Mr. Robinson, I mean, as to whom there revives in me the main question
+of where his impropriety, in so general a platitude of the bourgeois,
+could possibly have dwelt. It was to be true indeed that Walt Whitman
+achieved an impropriety of the first magnitude; that success, however,
+but showed us the platitude returning in a genial rage upon itself and
+getting out of control by generic excess. There was no rage at any rate
+in The Lamplighter, over which I fondly hung and which would have been
+my first "grown-up" novel--it had been soothingly offered me for
+that--had I consented to take it as really and truly grown-up. I
+couldn't have said what it lacked for the character, I only had my
+secret reserves, and when one blest afternoon on the New Brighton boat I
+waded into The Initials I saw how right I had been. The Initials _was_
+grown-up and the difference thereby exquisite; it came over me with the
+very first page, assimilated in the fluttered little cabin to which I
+had retired with it--all in spite of the fact too that my attention was
+distracted by a pair of remarkable little girls who lurked there out of
+more public view as to hint that they weren't to be seen for nothing.
+
+That must have been a rich hour, for I mix the marvel of the Boon
+Children, strange pale little flowers of the American theatre, with my
+conscious joy in bringing back to my mother, from our forage in New
+York, a gift of such happy promise as the history of the long-legged Mr.
+Hamilton and his two Bavarian beauties, the elder of whom, Hildegarde,
+was to figure for our small generation as the very type of the haughty
+as distinguished from the forward heroine (since I think our categories
+really came to no more than those). I couldn't have got very far with
+Hildegarde in moments so scant, but I memorably felt that romance was
+thick round me--everything, at such a crisis, seeming to make for it at
+once. The Boon Children, conveyed thus to New Brighton under care of a
+lady in whose aspect the strain of the resolute triumphed over the note
+of the battered, though the showy in it rather succumbed at the same
+time to the dowdy, were already "billed," as infant phenomena, for a
+performance that night at the Pavilion, where our attendance, it was a
+shock to feel, couldn't be promised; and in gazing without charge at the
+pair of weary and sleepy little mountebanks I found the histrionic
+character and the dramatic profession for the first time revealed to me.
+They filled me with fascination and yet with fear; they expressed a
+melancholy grace and a sort of peevish refinement, yet seemed awfully
+detached and indifferent, indifferent perhaps even to being pinched and
+slapped, for art's sake, at home; they honoured me with no notice
+whatever and regarded me doubtless as no better than one of the little
+louts peeping through the tent of the show. In return I judged their
+appearance dissipated though fascinating, and sought consolation for the
+memory of their scorn and the loss of their exhibition, as time went on,
+in noting that the bounds of their fame seemed somehow to have been
+stayed. I neither "met" them nor heard of them again. The little
+Batemans must have obscured their comparatively dim lustre, flourishing
+at the same period and with a larger command of the pictorial poster and
+the other primitive symbols in Broadway--such posters and such symbols
+as they were at that time!--the little Batemans who were to be reserved,
+in maturer form, for my much later and more grateful appreciation.
+
+This weak reminiscence has obstructed, however, something more to the
+purpose, the retained impression of those choicest of our loiterings
+that took place, still far down-town, at the Bookstore, home of delights
+and haunt of fancy. It was at the Bookstore we had called on the day of
+The Initials and the Boon Children--and it was thence we were returning
+with our spoil, of which the charming novel must have been but a
+fragment. My impression composed itself of many pieces; a great and
+various practice of burying my nose in the half-open book for the strong
+smell of paper and printer's ink, known to us as the English smell, was
+needed to account for it. _That_ was the exercise of the finest sense
+that hung about us, my brother and me--or of one at least but little
+less fine than the sense for the satisfaction of which we resorted to
+Thompson's and to Taylor's: it bore me company during all our returns
+from forages and left me persuaded that I had only to snuff up hard
+enough, fresh uncut volume in hand, to taste of the very substance of
+London. All our books in that age were English, at least all our
+down-town ones--I personally recall scarce any that were not; and I take
+the perception of that quality in them to have associated itself with
+more fond dreams and glimmering pictures than any other one principle of
+growth. It was all a result of the deeply _infected_ state: I had been
+prematurely poisoned--as I shall presently explain. The Bookstore,
+fondest of my father's resorts, though I remember no more of its public
+identity than that it further enriched the brave depth of Broadway, was
+overwhelmingly and irresistibly English, as not less tonically English
+was our principal host there, with whom we had moreover, my father and
+I, thanks to his office, such personal and genial relations that I
+recall seeing him grace our board at home, in company with his wife,
+whose vocal strain and complexion and coiffure and flounces I found none
+the less informing, none the less "racial," for my not being then versed
+in the language of analysis.
+
+The true inwardness of these rich meanings--those above all of the
+Bookstore itself--was that a tradition was thus fed, a presumption thus
+created, a vague vision thus filled in: all expression is clumsy for so
+mystic a process. What else can have happened but that, having taken
+over, under suggestion and with singular infant promptitude, a
+particular throbbing consciousness, I had become aware of the source at
+which it could best be refreshed? That consciousness, so communicated,
+was just simply of certain impressions, certain _sources_ of impression
+again, proceeding from over the sea and situated beyond it--or even much
+rather of my parents' own impression of such, the fruit of a happy time
+spent in and about London with their two babies and reflected in that
+portion of their talk with each other to which I best attended. Had
+_all_ their talk for its subject, in my infant ears, that happy
+time?--did it deal only with London and Piccadilly and the Green Park,
+where, over against their dwelling, their two babies mainly took the air
+under charge of Fanny of Albany, their American nurse, whose remark as
+to the degree to which the British Museum fell short for one who had had
+the privilege of that of Albany was handed down to us? Did it never
+forbear from Windsor and Richmond and Sudbrook and Ham Common, amid the
+rich complexity of which, crowding their discourse with echoes, they
+had spent their summer?--all a scattering of such pearls as it seemed
+that their second-born could most deftly and instinctively pick up. Our
+sole maternal aunt, already mentioned as a devoted and cherished
+presence during those and many later years, was in a position to share
+with them the treasure of these mild memories, which strike me as having
+for the most part, through some bright household habit, overflowed at
+the breakfast-table, where I regularly attended with W. J.; she had
+imbibed betimes in Europe the seeds of a long nostalgia, and I think of
+her as ever so patiently communicative on that score under pressure of
+my artless appeal. That I should have been so inquiring while still so
+destitute of primary data was doubtless rather an anomaly; and it was
+for that matter quite as if my infant divination proceeded by the light
+of nature: I divined that it would matter to me in the future that
+"English life" should be of this or that fashion. My father had
+subscribed for me to a small periodical of quarto form, covered in
+yellow and entitled The Charm, which shed on the question the softest
+lustre, but of which the appearances were sadly intermittent, or then
+struck me as being; inasmuch as many of our visits to the Bookstore were
+to ask for the new number--only to learn with painful frequency that the
+last consignment from London had arrived without it. I feel again the
+pang of that disappointment--as if through the want of what I needed
+most for going on; the English smell was exhaled by The Charm in a
+peculiar degree, and I see myself affected by the failure as by that of
+a vital tonic. It was not, at the same time, by a Charm the more or the
+less that my salvation was to be, as it were, worked out, or my
+imagination at any rate duly convinced; conviction was the result of the
+very air of home, so far as I most consciously inhaled it. This
+represented, no doubt, a failure to read into matters close at hand all
+the interest they were capable of yielding; but I had taken the twist,
+had sipped the poison, as I say, and was to feel it to that end the most
+salutary cup. I saw my parents homesick, as I conceived, for the ancient
+order and distressed and inconvenienced by many of the more immediate
+features of the modern, as the modern pressed upon us, and since their
+theory of our better living was from an early time that we should renew
+the quest of the ancient on the very first possibility I simply grew
+greater in the faith that somehow to manage that would constitute
+success in life. I never found myself deterred from this fond view,
+which was implied in every question I asked, every answer I got, and
+every plan I formed.
+
+Those are great words for the daydream of infant ignorance, yet if
+success in life may perhaps be best defined as the performance in age of
+some intention arrested in youth I may frankly put in a claim to it. To
+press my nose against the sources of the English smell, so different for
+young bibliophiles from any American, was to adopt that sweetness as the
+sign of my "atmosphere"; roundabout might be the course to take, but one
+was in motion from the first and one never lost sight of the goal. The
+very names of places and things in the other world--the marked opposite
+in most ways of that in which New York and Albany, Fort Hamilton and New
+Brighton formed so fallacious a maximum--became to me values and secrets
+and shibboleths; they were probably often on my tongue and employed as
+ignorance determined, but I quite recall being ashamed to use them as
+much as I should have liked. It was New Brighton, I reconstruct (and
+indeed definitely remember) that "finished" us at last--that and our
+final sordid school, W. J.'s and mine, in New York: the ancient order
+_had_ somehow to be invoked when such "advantages" as those were the
+best within our compass and our means. Not further to anticipate, at all
+events, that climax was for a while but vaguely in sight, and the
+illusion of felicity continued from season to season to shut us in. It
+is only of what I took for felicity, however few the years and however
+scant the scene, that I am pretending now to speak; though I shall have
+strained the last drop of romance from this vision of our towny summers
+with the quite sharp reminiscence of my first sitting for my
+daguerreotype. I repaired with my father on an August day to the great
+Broadway establishment of Mr. Brady, supreme in that then beautiful art,
+and it is my impression--the only point vague with me--that though we
+had come up by the Staten Island boat for the purpose we were to keep
+the affair secret till the charming consequence should break, at home,
+upon my mother. Strong is my conviction that our mystery, in the event,
+yielded almost at once to our elation, for no tradition had a brighter
+household life with us than that of our father's headlong impatience. He
+moved in a cloud, if not rather in a high radiance, of precipitation and
+divulgation, a chartered rebel against cold reserves. The good news in
+his hand refused under any persuasion to grow stale, the sense of
+communicable pleasure in his breast was positively explosive; so that we
+saw those "surprises" in which he had conspired with our mother for our
+benefit converted by him in every case, under our shamelessly encouraged
+guesses, into common conspiracies against her--against her knowing, that
+is, how thoroughly we were all compromised. He had a special and
+delightful sophistry at the service of his overflow, and never so fine a
+fancy as in defending it on "human" grounds. He was something very
+different withal from a parent of weak mercies; weakness was never so
+positive and plausible, nor could the attitude of sparing you be more
+handsomely or on occasion even more comically aggressive.
+
+My small point is simply, however, that the secresy of our conjoined
+portrait was probably very soon, by his act, to begin a public and
+shining life and to enjoy it till we received the picture; as to which
+moreover still another remembrance steals on me, a proof of the fact
+that our adventure was improvised. Sharp again is my sense of not being
+so adequately dressed as I should have taken thought for had I foreseen
+my exposure; though the resources of my wardrobe as then constituted
+could surely have left me but few alternatives. The main resource of a
+small New York boy in this line at that time was the little sheath-like
+jacket, tight to the body, closed at the neck and adorned in front with
+a single row of brass buttons--a garment of scant grace assuredly and
+compromised to my consciousness, above all, by a strange ironic light
+from an unforgotten source. It was but a short time before those days
+that the great Mr. Thackeray had come to America to lecture on The
+English Humourists, and still present to me is the voice proceeding from
+my father's library, in which some glimpse of me hovering, at an opening
+of the door, in passage or on staircase, prompted him to the formidable
+words: "Come here, little boy, and show me your extraordinary jacket!"
+My sense of my jacket became from that hour a heavy one--further
+enriched as my vision is by my shyness of posture before the seated, the
+celebrated visitor, who struck me, in the sunny light of the animated
+room, as enormously big and who, though he laid on my shoulder the hand
+of benevolence, bent on my native costume the spectacles of wonder. I
+was to know later on why he had been so amused and why, after asking me
+if this were the common uniform of my age and class, he remarked that in
+England, were I to go there, I should be addressed as "Buttons." It had
+been revealed to me thus in a flash that we were somehow _queer_, and
+though never exactly crushed by it I became aware that I at least felt
+so as I stood with my head in Mr. Brady's vise. Beautiful most decidedly
+the lost art of the daguerreotype; I remember the "exposure" as on this
+occasion interminably long, yet with the result of a facial anguish far
+less harshly reproduced than my suffered snapshots of a later age. Too
+few, I may here interject, were to remain my gathered impressions of the
+great humourist, but one of them, indeed almost the only other, bears
+again on the play of his humour over our perversities of dress. It
+belongs to a later moment, an occasion on which I see him familiarly
+seated with us, in Paris, during the spring of 1857, at some repast at
+which the younger of us too, by that time, habitually flocked, in our
+affluence of five. Our youngest was beside him, a small sister, then not
+quite in her eighth year, and arrayed apparently after the fashion of
+the period and place; and the tradition lingered long of his having
+suddenly laid his hand on her little flounced person and exclaimed with
+ludicrous horror: "Crinoline?--I was suspecting it! So young and so
+depraved!"
+
+A fainter image, that of one of the New York moments, just eludes me,
+pursue it as I will; I recover but the setting and the fact of his brief
+presence in it, with nothing that was said or done beyond my being left
+with my father to watch our distinguished friend's secretary, who was
+also a young artist, establish his easel and proceed to paint. The
+setting, as I recall it, was an odd, oblong, blank "private parlour" at
+the Clarendon Hotel, then the latest thing in hotels, but whose ancient
+corner of Fourth Avenue and--was it Eighteenth Street?--long ago ceased
+to know it; the gentle, very gentle, portraitist was Mr. Eyre Crowe and
+the obliging sitter my father, who sat in response to Mr. Thackeray's
+desire that his protege should find employment. The protector after a
+little departed, blessing the business, which took the form of a small
+full-length of the model seated, his arm extended and the hand on the
+knob of his cane. The work, it may at this time of day be mentioned,
+fell below its general possibilities; but I note the scene through which
+I must duly have gaped and wondered (for I had as yet seen no one, least
+of all a casual acquaintance in an hotel parlour, "really paint"
+before,) as a happy example again of my parent's positive cultivation of
+my society, it would seem, and thought for my social education. And then
+there are other connections; I recall it as a Sunday morning, I recover
+the place itself as a featureless void--bleak and bare, with its
+developments all to come, the hotel parlour of other New York days--but
+vivid still to me is my conscious assistance for the first time at
+operations that were to mean much for many of my coming years. Those of
+quiet Mr. Crowe held me spellbound--I was to circle so wistfully, as
+from that beginning, round the practice of his art, which in spite of
+these earnest approaches and intentions never on its own part in the
+least acknowledged our acquaintance; scarcely much more than it was ever
+to respond, for that matter, to the overtures of the mild aspirant
+himself, known to my observation long afterwards, in the London years,
+as the most touchingly resigned of the children of disappointment. Not
+only by association was he a Thackerayan figure, but much as if the
+master's hand had stamped him with the outline and the value, with life
+and sweetness and patience--shown, as after the long futility, seated
+in a quiet wait, very long too, for the end. That was sad, one couldn't
+but feel; yet it was in the oddest way impossible to take him for a
+failure. He might have been one of fortune's, strictly; but what was
+that when he was one of Thackeray's own successes?--in the minor line,
+but with such a grace and such a truth, those of some dim second cousin
+to Colonel Newcome.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+I feel that at such a rate I remember too much, and yet this mild
+apparitionism is only part of it. To look back at all is to meet the
+apparitional and to find in its ghostly face the silent stare of an
+appeal. When I fix it, the hovering shade, whether of person or place,
+it fixes me back and seems the less lost--not to my consciousness, for
+that is nothing, but to its own--by my stopping however idly for it. The
+day of the daguerreotype, the August afternoon, what was it if not one
+of the days when we went to Union Square for luncheon and for more
+ice-cream and more peaches and even more, even most, enjoyment of ease
+accompanied by stimulation of wonder? It may have been indeed that a
+visit to Mrs. Cannon rather on that occasion engaged us--memory selects
+a little confusedly from such a wealth of experience. For the wonder was
+the experience, and that was everywhere, even if I didn't so much find
+it as take it with me, to be sure of not falling short. Mrs. Cannon
+lurked near Fourth Street--_that_ I abundantly grasp, not more
+definitely placing her than in what seemed to me a labyrinth of grave
+bye-streets westwardly "back of" Broadway, yet at no great distance
+from it, where she must have occupied a house at a corner, since we
+reached her not by steps that went up to a front door but by others that
+went slightly down and formed clearly an independent side access, a
+feature that affected me as rich and strange. What the steps went down
+to was a spacious room, light and friendly, so that it couldn't have
+been compromised by an "area," which offered the brave mystification,
+amid other mystifications, of being at once a parlour and a shop, a shop
+in particular for the relief of gentlemen in want of
+pockethandkerchiefs, neckties, collars, umbrellas and straw-covered
+bottles of the essence known in old New York as "Cullone"--with a very
+long and big O. Mrs. Cannon was always seated at some delicate white or
+other needlework, as if she herself made the collars and the neckties
+and hemmed the pockethandkerchiefs, though the air of this conflicts
+with the sense of importation from remoter centres of fashion breathed
+by some of the more thrilling of the remarks I heard exchanged, at the
+same time that it quickened the oddity of the place. For the oddity was
+in many things--above all perhaps in there being no counter, no rows of
+shelves and no vulgar till for Mrs. Cannon's commerce; the parlour
+clearly dissimulated the shop--and positively to that extent that I
+might uncannily have wondered what the shop dissimulated. It
+represented, honestly, I made out in the course of visits that seem to
+me to have been delightfully repeated, the more informal of the
+approaches to our friend's brave background or hinterland, the realm of
+her main industry, the array of the furnished apartments for
+gentlemen--gentlemen largely for whom she imported the Eau de Cologne
+and the neckties and who struck me as principally consisting of the ever
+remarkable Uncles, desirous at times, on their restless returns from
+Albany or wherever, of an intimacy of comfort that the New York Hotel
+couldn't yield. Fascinating thus the implications of Mrs. Cannon's
+establishment, where the talk took the turn, in particular, of Mr. John
+and Mr. Edward and Mr. Howard, and where Miss Maggie or Miss Susie, who
+were on the spot in other rocking chairs and with other poised needles,
+made their points as well as the rest of us. The interest of the place
+was that the uncles were somehow always under discussion--as to where
+they at the moment might be, or as to when they were expected, or above
+all as to how (the "how" was the great matter and the fine emphasis)
+they had last appeared and might be conceived as carrying themselves;
+and that their consumption of neckties and Eau de Cologne was somehow
+inordinate: I might have been judging it in my innocence as their only
+_consommation_. I refer to those sources, I say, the charm of the
+scene, the finer part of which must yet have been that it didn't, as it
+regularly lapsed, dispose of _all_ mystifications. If I didn't
+understand, however, the beauty was that Mrs. Cannon understood (that
+was what she did most of all, even more than hem pockethandkerchiefs and
+collars) and my father understood, and each understood that the other
+did, Miss Maggie and Miss Susie being no whit behind. It was only I who
+didn't understand--save in so far as I understood _that_, which was a
+kind of pale joy; and meanwhile there would be more to come from uncles
+so attachingly, so almost portentously, discussable. The vision at any
+rate was to stick by me as through its old-world friendly grace, its
+light on the elder amenity; the prettier manners, the tender personal
+note in the good lady's importations and anxieties, that of the
+hand-made fabric and the discriminating service. Fit to figure as a
+value anywhere--by which I meant in the right corner of any social
+picture, I afterwards said to myself--that refined and composed
+significance of Mrs. Cannon's scene.
+
+Union Square was a different matter, though with the element there also
+that I made out that I _didn't_ make out (my sense of drama was in this
+case, I think, rather more frightened off than led on;) a drawback for
+which, however, I consoled myself by baked apples and custards, an
+inveterate feature of our Sunday luncheon there (those of weekdays
+being various and casual) and by a study of a great store, as it seemed
+to me, of steel-plated volumes, devoted mainly to the heroines of
+Romance, with one in particular, presenting those of Shakespeare, in
+which the plates were so artfully coloured and varnished, and complexion
+and dress thereby so endeared to memory, that it was for long afterwards
+a shock to me at the theatre not to see just those bright images, with
+their peculiar toggeries, come on. I was able but the other day,
+moreover, to renew almost on the very spot the continuity of
+contemplation; large lumpish presences, precarious creations of a day,
+seemed to have elbowed out of the Square all but one or two of the minor
+monuments, pleasant appreciable things, of the other time; yet close to
+University Place the old house of the picture-books and the custards and
+the domestic situation had, though disfigured and overscored, not quite
+received its death-stroke; I disengaged, by a mere identification of
+obscured window and profaned portico, a whole chapter of history; which
+fact should indeed be a warning to penetration, a practical plea here
+for the superficial--by its exhibition of the rate at which the
+relations of any gage of experience multiply and ramify from the moment
+the mind begins to handle it. I pursued a swarm of such relations, on
+the occasion I speak of, up and down West Fourteenth Street and over to
+Seventh Avenue, running most of them to earth with difficulty, but
+finding them at half a dozen points quite confess to a queer stale
+sameness. The gage of experience, as I say, had in these cases been
+strangely spared--the sameness had in two or three of them held out as
+with conscious craft. But these are impressions I shall presently find
+it impossible not to take up again at any cost.
+
+I first "realised" Fourteenth Street at a very tender age, and I
+perfectly recall that flush of initiation, consisting as it did of an
+afternoon call with my father at a house there situated, one of an
+already fairly mature row on the south side and quite near Sixth Avenue.
+It was as "our" house, just acquired by us, that he thus invited my
+approval of it--heaping as that does once more the measure of my small
+adhesiveness. I thoroughly approved--quite as if I had foreseen that the
+place was to become to me for ever so long afterwards a sort of
+anchorage of the spirit, being at the hour as well a fascination for the
+eyes, since it was there I first fondly gaped at the process of
+"decorating." I saw charming men in little caps ingeniously formed of
+folded newspaper--where in the roaring city are those quaint badges of
+the handicrafts now?--mounted on platforms and casting plaster into
+moulds; I saw them in particular paste long strips of yellowish grained
+paper upon walls, and I vividly remember thinking the grain and the
+pattern (for there was a pattern from waist-high down, a complication of
+dragons and sphinxes and scrolls and other fine flourishes) a wonderful
+and sumptuous thing. I would give much, I protest, to recover its lost
+secret, to see what it really was--so interesting ever to retrace, and
+sometimes so difficult of belief, in a community of one's own knowing,
+is the general aesthetic adventure, are the dangers and delusions, the
+all but fatal accidents and mortal ailments, that Taste has smilingly
+survived and after which the fickle creature may still quite brazenly
+look one in the face. Our quarter must have bristled in those years with
+the very worst of the danger-signals--though indeed they figured but as
+coarse complacencies; the age of "brown stone" had just been ushered in,
+and that material, in deplorable, in monstrous form, over all the vacant
+spaces and eligible sites then numerous between the Fifth and Sixth
+Avenues, more and more affronted the day. We seemed to have come up from
+a world of quieter harmonies, the world of Washington Square and
+thereabouts, so decent in its dignity, so instinctively unpretentious.
+There were even there spots of shabbiness that I recall, such as the
+charmless void reaching westward from the two houses that formed the
+Fifth Avenue corner to our grandfather's, our New York grandfather's
+house, itself built by him, with the happiest judgment, not so long
+before, and at no distant time in truth to be solidly but much less
+pleasingly neighboured. The ancient name of the Parade-ground still hung
+about the central space, and the ancient wooden palings, then so
+generally accounted proper for central spaces--the whole image
+infinitely recedes--affected even my innocent childhood as rustic and
+mean. Union Square, at the top of the Avenue--or what practically then
+counted for the top--was encased, more smartly, in iron rails and
+further adorned with a fountain and an aged amateur-looking constable,
+awful to my generation in virtue of his star and his switch. I associate
+less elegance with the Parade-ground, into which we turned for
+recreation from my neighbouring dame's-school and where the parades
+deployed on no scale to check our own evolutions; though indeed the
+switch of office abounded there, for what I best recover in the
+connection is a sense and smell of perpetual autumn, with the ground so
+muffled in the leaves and twigs of the now long defunct ailanthus-tree
+that most of our own motions were a kicking of them up--the semi-sweet
+rankness of the plant was all in the air--and small boys pranced about
+as cavaliers whacking their steeds. There were bigger boys, bolder
+still, to whom this vegetation, or something kindred that escapes me,
+yielded long black beanlike slips which they lighted and smoked, the
+smaller ones staring and impressed; I at any rate think of the small one
+I can best speak for as constantly wading through an Indian summer of
+these _disjecta_, fascinated by the leaf-kicking process, the joy of
+lonely trudges, over a course in which those parts and the slightly more
+northward pleasantly confound themselves. These were the homely joys of
+the nobler neighbourhood, elements that had their match, and more, hard
+by the Fourteenth Street home, in the poplars, the pigs, the poultry,
+and the "Irish houses," two or three in number, exclusive of a very fine
+Dutch one, seated then, this last, almost as among gardens and groves--a
+breadth of territory still apparent, on the spot, in that marginal ease,
+that spread of occupation, to the nearly complete absence of which New
+York aspects owe their general failure of "style."
+
+But there were finer vibrations as well--for the safely-prowling infant,
+though none perhaps so fine as when he stood long and drank deep at
+those founts of romance that gushed from the huge placards of the
+theatre. These announcements, at a day when advertisement was
+contentedly but information, had very much the form of magnified
+playbills; they consisted of vast oblong sheets, yellow or white, pasted
+upon tall wooden screens or into hollow sockets, and acquainting the
+possible playgoer with every circumstance that might seriously interest
+him. These screens rested sociably against trees and lamp-posts as well
+as against walls and fences, to all of which they were, I suppose,
+familiarly attached; but the sweetest note of their confidence was that,
+in parallel lines and the good old way, characters facing performers,
+they gave the whole cast, which in the "palmy days" of the drama often
+involved many names. I catch myself again in the fact of endless
+stations in Fifth Avenue near the southwest corner of Ninth Street, as I
+think it must have been, since the dull long "run" didn't exist then for
+the young _badaud_ and the poster there was constantly and bravely
+renewed. It engaged my attention, whenever I passed, as the canvas of a
+great master in a great gallery holds that of the pious tourist, and
+even though I can't at this day be sure of its special reference I was
+with precocious passion "at home" among the theatres--thanks to our
+parents' fond interest in them (as from this distance I see it flourish
+for the time) and to the liberal law and happy view under which the
+addiction was shared with us, they never caring much for things we
+couldn't care for and generally holding that what was good to them would
+be also good for their children. It had the effect certainly of
+preparing for these, so far as we should incline to cherish it, a
+strange little fund of theatrical reminiscence, a small hoard of
+memories maintaining itself in my own case for a lifetime and causing
+me to wonder to-day, before its abundance, on how many evenings of the
+month, or perhaps even of the week, we were torn from the pursuits of
+home.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+The truth is doubtless, however, much less in the wealth of my
+experience than in the tenacity of my impression, the fact that I have
+lost nothing of what I saw and that though I can't now quite divide the
+total into separate occasions the various items surprisingly swarm for
+me. I shall return to some of them, wishing at present only to make my
+point of when and how the seeds were sown that afterwards so thickly
+sprouted and flowered. I was greatly to love the drama, at its best, as
+a "form"; whatever variations of faith or curiosity I was to know in
+respect to the infirm and inadequate theatre. There was of course
+anciently no question for us of the drama at its best; and indeed while
+I lately by chance looked over a copious collection of theatrical
+portraits, beginning with the earliest age of lithography and
+photography as so applied, and documentary in the highest degree on the
+personalities, as we nowadays say, of the old American stage,
+stupefaction grew sharp in me and scepticism triumphed, so vulgar, so
+barbarous, seemed the array of types, so extraordinarily provincial the
+note of every figure, so less than scant the claim of such
+physiognomies and such reputations. Rather dismal, everywhere, I admit,
+the histrionic image with the artificial lights turned off--the fatigued
+and disconnected face reduced to its mere self and resembling some
+closed and darkened inn with the sign still swung but the place blighted
+for want of custom. That consideration weighs; but what a "gang," all
+the same, when thus left to their own devices, the performers, men and
+women alike, of that world of queer appreciations! I ought perhaps to
+bear on them lightly in view of what in especial comes back to me; the
+sense of the sacred thrill with which I began to watch the green
+curtain, the particular one that was to rise to The Comedy of Errors on
+the occasion that must have been, for what I recall of its almost
+unbearable intensity, the very first of my ever sitting at a play. I
+should have been indebted for the momentous evening in that case to Mr.
+William Burton, whose small theatre in Chambers Street, to the rear of
+Stewart's big shop and hard by the Park, as the Park was at that time
+understood, offered me then my prime initiation. Let me not complain of
+my having owed the adventure to a still greater William as well, nor
+think again without the right intensity, the scarce tolerable throb, of
+the way the torment of the curtain was mixed, half so dark a defiance
+and half so rich a promise. One's eyes bored into it in vain, and yet
+one knew it _would_ rise at the named hour, the only question being if
+one could exist till then. The play had been read to us during the day;
+a celebrated English actor, whose name I inconsistently forget, had
+arrived to match Mr. Burton as the other of the Dromios; and the
+agreeable Mrs. Holman, who had to my relentless vision too retreating a
+chin, was so good as to represent Adriana. I regarded Mrs. Holman as a
+friend, though in no warmer light than that in which I regarded Miss
+Mary Taylor--save indeed that Mrs. Holman had the pull, on one's
+affections, of "coming out" to sing in white satin and quite
+irrelevantly between the acts; an advantage she shared with the younger
+and fairer and more dashing, the dancing, Miss Malvina, who footed it
+and tambourined it and shawled it, irruptively, in lonely state. When
+not admiring Mr. Burton in Shakespeare we admired him as Paul Pry, as
+Mr. Toodles and as Aminadab Sleek in The Serious Family, and we must
+have admired him very much--his huge fat person, his huge fat face and
+his vast slightly pendulous cheek, surmounted by a sort of elephantine
+wink, to which I impute a remarkable baseness, being still perfectly
+present to me.
+
+We discriminated, none the less; we thought Mr. Blake a much finer
+comedian, much more of a gentleman and a scholar--"mellow" Mr. Blake,
+whom with the brave and emphatic Mrs. Blake (_how_ they must have made
+their points!) I connect partly with the Burton scene and partly with
+that, of slightly subsequent creation, which, after flourishing awhile
+slightly further up Broadway under the charmlessly commercial name of
+Brougham's Lyceum (we had almost only Lyceums and Museums and Lecture
+Rooms and Academies of Music for playhouse and opera then,) entered upon
+a long career and a migratory life as Wallack's Theatre. I fail
+doubtless to keep _all_ my associations clear, but what is important, or
+what I desire at least to make pass for such, is that when we most
+admired Mr. Blake we also again admired Miss Mary Taylor; and it was at
+Brougham's, not at Burton's, that we rendered _her_ that
+tribute--reserved for her performance of the fond theatrical daughter in
+the English version of Le Pere de la Debutante, where I see the charming
+panting dark-haired creature, in flowing white classically relieved by a
+gold tiara and a golden scarf, rush back from the supposed stage to the
+represented green-room, followed by thunders of applause, and throw
+herself upon the neck of the broken-down old gentleman in a blue coat
+with brass buttons who must have been after all, on second thoughts, Mr.
+Placide. Greater flights or more delicate shades the art of pathetic
+comedy was at that time held not to achieve; only I straighten it out
+that Mr. and Mrs. Blake, not less than Miss Mary Taylor (who
+preponderantly haunts my vision, even to the disadvantage of Miss Kate
+Horn in Nan the Good-for-Nothing, until indeed she is displaced by the
+brilliant Laura Keene) did migrate to Brougham's, where we found them
+all themselves as Goldsmith's Hardcastle pair and other like matters. We
+rallied especially to Blake as Dogberry, on the occasion of my second
+Shakespearean night, for as such I seem to place it, when Laura Keene
+and Mr. Lester--the Lester Wallack that was to be--did Beatrice and
+Benedick. I yield to this further proof that we had our proportion of
+Shakespeare, though perhaps antedating that rapt vision of Much Ado,
+which may have been preceded by the dazzled apprehension of A Midsummer
+Night's Dream at the Broadway (there _was_ a confessed Theatre;) this
+latter now present to me in every bright particular. It supplied us, we
+must have felt, our greatest conceivable adventure--I cannot otherwise
+account for its emerging so clear. Everything here is as of yesterday,
+the identity of the actors, the details of their dress, the charm
+imparted by the sisters Gougenheim, the elegant elder as the infatuated
+Helena and the other, the roguish "Joey" as the mischievous Puck. Hermia
+was Mrs. Nagle, in a short salmon-coloured peplum over a white
+petticoat, the whole bulgingly confined by a girdle of shining gilt and
+forming a contrast to the loose scarves of Helena, while Mr. Nagle, not
+devoid, I seem to remember, of a blue chin and the latency of a fine
+brogue, was either Lysander or Demetrius; Mr. Davidge (also, I surmise,
+with a brogue) was Bottom the weaver and Madame Ponisi Oberon--Madame
+Ponisi whose range must have been wide, since I see her also as the
+white-veiled heroine of The Cataract of the Ganges, where, preferring
+death to dishonour, she dashes up the more or less perpendicular
+waterfall on a fiery black steed and with an effect only a little
+blighted by the chance flutter of a drapery out of which peeps the leg
+of a trouser and a big male foot; and then again, though presumably at a
+somewhat later time or, in strictness, _after_ childhood's fond hour, as
+this and that noble matron or tragedy queen. I descry her at any rate as
+representing all characters alike with a broad brown face framed in
+bands or crowns or other heavy headgear out of which cropped a row of
+very small tight black curls. The Cataract of the Ganges is all there as
+well, a tragedy of temples and idols and wicked rajahs and real water,
+with Davidge and Joey Gougenheim again for comic relief--though all in a
+coarser radiance, thanks to the absence of fairies and Amazons and
+moonlit mechanical effects, the charm above all, so seen, of the play
+within the play; and I rank it in that relation with Green Bushes,
+despite the celebrity in the latter of Madame Celeste, who came to us
+straight out of London and whose admired walk up the stage as Miami the
+huntress, a wonderful majestic and yet voluptuous stride enhanced by a
+short kilt, black velvet leggings and a gun haughtily borne on the
+shoulder, is vividly before me as I write. The piece in question was, I
+recall, from the pen of Mr. Bourcicault, as he then wrote his name--he
+was so early in the field and must have been from long before, inasmuch
+as he now appears to me to have supplied Mr. Brougham, of the Lyceum
+aforesaid, with his choicest productions.
+
+I sit again at London Assurance, with Mrs. Wallack--"Fanny" Wallack, I
+think, not that I quite know who she was--as Lady Gay Spanker, flushed
+and vociferous, first in a riding-habit with a tail yards long and
+afterwards in yellow satin with scarce a tail at all; I am present also
+at Love in a Maze, in which the stage represented, with primitive art I
+fear, a supposedly intricate garden-labyrinth, and in which I admired
+for the first time Mrs. Russell, afterwards long before the public as
+Mrs. Hoey, even if opining that she wanted, especially for the
+low-necked ordeal, less osseous a structure. There are pieces of that
+general association, I admit, the clue to which slips from me; the drama
+of modern life and of French origin--though what was then not of French
+origin?--in which Miss Julia Bennett, fresh from triumphs at the
+Haymarket, made her first appearance, in a very becoming white bonnet,
+either as a brilliant adventuress or as the innocent victim of
+licentious design, I forget which, though with a sense somehow that the
+white bonnet, when of true elegance, was the note at that period of the
+adventuress; Miss Julia Bennett with whom at a later age one was to
+renew acquaintance as the artful and ample Mrs. Barrow, full of manner
+and presence and often Edwin Booth's Portia, Desdemona and Julie de
+Mortemer. I figure her as having in the dimmer phase succeeded to Miss
+Laura Keene at Wallack's on the secession thence of this original
+charmer of our parents, the flutter of whose prime advent is perfectly
+present to me, with the relish expressed for that "English" sweetness of
+her speech (I already wondered why it _shouldn't_ be English) which was
+not as the speech mostly known to us. The Uncles, within my hearing,
+even imitated, for commendation, some of her choicer sounds, to which I
+strained my ear on seeing her afterwards as Mrs. Chillington in the
+refined comedietta of A Morning Call, where she made delightful game of
+Mr. Lester as Sir Edward Ardent, even to the point of causing him to
+crawl about on all fours and covered with her shawl after the fashion of
+a horse-blanket. That delightful impression was then unconscious of the
+blight to come--that of my apprehending, years after, that the
+brilliant comedietta was the tribute of our Anglo-Saxon taste to Alfred
+de Musset's elegant proverb of the Porte Ouverte ou Fermee, in which
+nothing could find itself less at home than the horseplay of the English
+version. Miss Laura Keene, with a native grace at the start, a fresh and
+delicate inspiration, I infer from the kind of pleasure she appears to
+have begun with giving, was to live to belie her promise and, becoming
+hard and raddled, forfeit (on the evidence) all claim to the higher
+distinction; a fact not surprising under the lurid light projected by
+such a sign of the atmosphere of ineptitude as an accepted and condoned
+perversion to vulgarity of Musset's perfect little work. How _could_
+quality of talent consort with so dire an absence of quality in the
+material offered it? where could such lapses lead but to dust and
+desolation and what happy instinct not be smothered in an air so
+dismally non-conducting? Is it a foolish fallacy that these matters may
+have been on occasion, at that time, worth speaking of? is it only
+presumable that everything was perfectly cheap and common and everyone
+perfectly bad and barbarous and that even the least corruptible of our
+typical spectators were too easily beguiled and too helplessly kind? The
+beauty of the main truth as to any remembered matter looked at in due
+detachment, or in other words through the haze of time, is that
+comprehension has then become one with criticism, compassion, as it may
+really be called, one with musing vision, and the whole company of the
+anciently restless, with their elations and mistakes, their sincerities
+and fallacies and vanities and triumphs, embalmed for us in the mild
+essence of their collective submission to fate. We needn't be strenuous
+about them unless we particularly want to, and are glad to remember in
+season all that this would imply of the strenuous about our own
+_origines_, our muddled initiations. If nothing is more certain for us
+than that many persons, within our recollection, couldn't help being
+rather generally unadmonished and unaware, so nothing is more in the
+note of peace than that such a perceived state, pushed to a point, makes
+our scales of judgment but ridiculously rattle. _Our_ admonition, our
+superior awareness, is of many things--and, among these, of how
+infinitely, at the worst, they lived, the pale superseded, and how much
+it was by their virtue.
+
+Which reflections, in the train of such memories as those just gathered,
+may perhaps seem over-strained--though they really to my own eyes cause
+the images to multiply. Still others of these break in upon me and
+refuse to be slighted; reconstituting as I practically am the history of
+my fostered imagination, for whatever it may be worth, I won't pretend
+to a disrespect for _any_ contributive particle. I left myself just
+above staring at the Fifth Avenue poster, and I can't but linger there
+while the vision it evokes insists on swarming. It was the age of the
+arrangements of Dickens for the stage, vamped-up promptly on every scene
+and which must have been the roughest theatrical tinkers' work, but at
+two or three of which we certainly assisted. I associate them with Mr.
+Brougham's temple of the art, yet am at the same time beset with the
+Captain Cuttle of Dombey and Son in the form of the big Burton, who
+never, I earnestly conceive, graced that shrine, so that I wander a
+trifle confusedly. Isn't it he whom I remember as a monstrous Micawber,
+the coarse parody of a charming creation, with the entire baldness of a
+huge Easter egg and collar-points like the sails of Mediterranean
+feluccas? Dire of course for all temperance in these connections was the
+need to conform to the illustrations of Phiz, himself already an
+improvising parodist and happy only so long as not imitated, not
+literally reproduced. Strange enough the "aesthetic" of artists who could
+desire but literally to reproduce. I give the whole question up,
+however, I stray too in the dust, and with a positive sense of having,
+in the first place, but languished at home when my betters admired Miss
+Cushman--terribly out of the picture and the frame we should to-day
+pronounce her, I fear--as the Nancy of Oliver Twist: as far away this
+must have been as the lifetime of the prehistoric "Park," to which it
+was just within my knowledge that my elders went for opera, to come back
+on us sounding those rich old Italian names, Bosio and Badiali, Ronconi
+and Steffanone, I am not sure I have them quite right; signs, of a
+rueful sound to us, that the line as to our infant participation _was_
+somewhere drawn. It had not been drawn, I all the more like to remember,
+when, under proper protection, at Castle Garden, I listened to that
+rarest of infant phenomena, Adelina Patti, poised in an armchair that
+had been pushed to the footlights and announcing her incomparable gift.
+She was about of our own age, she was one of us, even though at the same
+time the most prodigious of fairies, of glittering fables. That
+principle of selection was indeed in abeyance while I sat with my mother
+either at Tripler Hall or at Niblo's--I am vague about the occasion, but
+the names, as for fine old confused reasons, plead alike to my pen--and
+paid a homage quite other than critical, I dare say, to the then
+slightly worn Henrietta Sontag, Countess Rossi, who struck us as
+supremely elegant in pink silk and white lace flounces and with whom
+there had been for certain members of our circle some contact or
+intercourse that I have wonderingly lost. I learned at that hour in any
+case what "acclamation" might mean, and have again before me the vast
+high-piled auditory thundering applause at the beautiful pink lady's
+clear bird-notes; a thrilling, a tremendous experience and my sole other
+memory of concert-going, at that age, save the impression of a strange
+huddled hour in some smaller public place, some very minor hall, under
+dim lamps and again in my mother's company, where we were so near the
+improvised platform that my nose was brushed by the petticoats of the
+distinguished amateur who sang "Casta Diva," a very fine fair woman with
+a great heaving of bosom and flirt of crinoline, and that the ringletted
+Italian gentleman in black velvet and a romantic voluminous cloak who
+represented, or rather who professionally and uncontrollably was, an
+Improvisatore, had for me the effect, as I crouched gaping, of quite
+bellowing down my throat. That occasion, I am clear, was a concert for a
+charity, with the volunteer performance and the social patroness, and it
+had squeezed in where it would--at the same time that I somehow connect
+the place, in Broadway, on the right going down and not much below
+Fourth Street (except that everything seems to me to have been just
+below Fourth Street when not just above,) with the scene of my great
+public exposure somewhat later, the wonderful exhibition of Signor
+Blitz, the peerless conjurer, who, on my attending his entertainment
+with W. J. and our frequent comrade of the early time "Hal" Coster,
+practised on my innocence to seduce me to the stage and there plunge me
+into the shame of my sad failure to account arithmetically for his
+bewilderingly subtracted or added or divided pockethandkerchiefs and
+playing-cards; a paralysis of wit as to which I once more, and with the
+same wan despair, feel my companions' shy telegraphy of relief, their
+snickerings and mouthings and raised numerical fingers, reach me from
+the benches.
+
+The second definite matter in the Dickens connection is the Smike of
+Miss Weston--whose praenomen I frivolously forget (though I fear it was
+Lizzie,) but who was afterwards Mrs. E. L. Davenport and then, sequently
+to some public strife or chatter, Mrs. Charles Matthews--in a version of
+Nicholas Nickleby that gracelessly managed to be all tearful melodrama,
+long-lost foundlings, wicked Ralph Nicklebys and scowling Arthur Grides,
+with other baffled villains, and scarcely at all Crummleses and
+Kenwigses, much less Squeerses; though there must have been something of
+Dotheboys Hall for the proper tragedy of Smike and for the broad
+Yorkshire effect, a precious theatrical value, of John Brodie. The
+ineffaceability was the anguish, to my tender sense, of Nicholas's
+starved and tattered and fawning and whining protege; in face of my
+sharp retention of which through all the years who shall deny the
+immense authority of the theatre, or that the stage is the mightiest of
+modern engines? Such at least was to be the force of the Dickens
+imprint, however applied, in the soft clay of our generation; it was to
+resist so serenely the wash of the waves of time. To be brought up thus
+against the author of it, or to speak at all of the dawn of one's early
+consciousness of it and of his presence and power, is to begin to tread
+ground at once sacred and boundless, the associations of which, looming
+large, warn us off even while they hold. He did too much for us surely
+ever to leave us free--free of judgment, free of reaction, even should
+we care to be, which heaven forbid: he laid his hand on us in a way to
+undermine as in no other case the power of detached appraisement. We
+react against other productions of the general kind without "liking"
+them the less, but we somehow liked Dickens the more for having
+forfeited half the claim to appreciation. That process belongs to the
+fact that criticism, roundabout him, is somehow futile and tasteless.
+His own taste is easily impugned, but he entered so early into the blood
+and bone of our intelligence that it always remained better than the
+taste of overhauling him. When I take him up to-day and find myself
+holding off, I simply stop: not holding off, that is, but holding on,
+and from the very fear to do so; which sounds, I recognise, like
+perusal, like renewal, of the scantest. I don't renew, I wouldn't renew
+for the world; wouldn't, that is, with one's treasure so hoarded in the
+dusty chamber of youth, let in the intellectual air. Happy the house of
+life in which such chambers still hold out, even with the draught of the
+intellect whistling through the passages. We were practically
+contemporary, contemporary with the issues, the fluttering monthly
+numbers--that was the point; it made for us a good fortune, constituted
+for us in itself romance, on which nothing, to the end, succeeds in
+laying its hands.
+
+The whole question dwells for me in a single small reminiscence, though
+there are others still: that of my having been sent to bed one evening,
+in Fourteenth Street, as a very small boy, at an hour when, in the
+library and under the lamp, one of the elder cousins from Albany, the
+youngest of an orphaned brood of four, of my grandmother's most
+extravagant adoption, had begun to read aloud to my mother the new,
+which must have been the first, instalment of David Copperfield. I had
+feigned to withdraw, but had only retreated to cover close at hand, the
+friendly shade of some screen or drooping table-cloth, folded up behind
+which and glued to the carpet, I held my breath and listened. I listened
+long and drank deep while the wondrous picture grew, but the tense cord
+at last snapped under the strain of the Murdstones and I broke into the
+sobs of sympathy that disclosed my subterfuge. I was this time
+effectively banished, but the ply then taken was ineffaceable. I
+remember indeed just afterwards finding the sequel, in especial the vast
+extrusion of the Micawbers, beyond my actual capacity; which took a few
+years to grow adequate--years in which the general contagious
+consciousness, and our own household response not least, breathed
+heavily through Hard Times, Bleak House and Little Dorrit; the seeds of
+acquaintance with Chuzzlewit and Dombey and Son, these coming thickly
+on, I had found already sown. I was to feel that I had been born, born
+to a rich awareness, under the very meridian; there sprouted in those
+years no such other crop of ready references as the golden harvest of
+Copperfield. Yet if I was to wait to achieve the happier of these
+recognitions I had already pored over Oliver Twist--albeit now uncertain
+of the relation borne by that experience to the incident just recalled.
+When Oliver was new to me, at any rate, he was already old to my
+betters; whose view of his particular adventures and exposures must have
+been concerned, I think, moreover, in the fact of my public and lively
+wonder about them. It was an exhibition deprecated--to infant innocence
+I judge; unless indeed my remembrance of enjoying it only on the terms
+of fitful snatches in another, though a kindred, house is due mainly to
+the existence there of George Cruikshank's splendid form of the work,
+of which our own foreground was clear. It perhaps even seemed to me more
+Cruikshank's than Dickens's; it was a thing of such vividly terrible
+images, and all marked with that peculiarity of Cruikshank that the
+offered flowers or goodnesses, the scenes and figures intended to
+comfort and cheer, present themselves under his hand as but more subtly
+sinister, or more suggestively queer, than the frank badnesses and
+horrors. The nice people and the happy moments, in the plates,
+frightened me almost as much as the low and the awkward; which didn't
+however make the volumes a source of attraction the less toward that
+high and square old back-parlour just westward of Sixth Avenue (as we in
+the same street were related to it) that formed, romantically, half our
+alternative domestic field and offered to our small inquiring steps a
+larger range and privilege. If the Dickens of those years was, as I have
+just called him, the great actuality of the current imagination, so I at
+once meet him in force as a feature even of conditions in which he was
+but indirectly involved.
+
+For the other house, the house we most haunted after our own, was that
+of our cousin Albert, still another of the blest orphans, though this
+time of our mother's kindred; and if it was my habit, as I have hinted,
+to attribute to orphans as orphans a circumstantial charm, a setting
+necessarily more delightful than our father'd and mother'd one, so
+there spread about this appointed comrade, the perfection of the type,
+inasmuch as he alone was neither brother'd nor sister'd, an air of
+possibilities that were none the less vivid for being quite indefinite.
+He was to embody in due course, poor young man, some of these
+possibilities--those that had originally been for me the vaguest of all;
+but to fix his situation from my present view is not so much to wonder
+that it spoke to me of a wild freedom as to see in it the elements of a
+rich and rounded picture. The frame was still there but a short time
+since, cracked and empty, broken and gaping, like those few others, of
+the general overgrown scene, that my late quest had puzzled out; and
+this has somehow helped me to read back into it the old figures and the
+old long story, told as with excellent art. We knew the figures well
+while they lasted and had with them the happiest relation, but without
+doing justice to their truth of outline, their felicity of character and
+force of expression and function, above all to the compositional harmony
+in which they moved. That lives again to my considering eyes, and I
+admire as never before the fine artistry of fate. Our cousin's guardian,
+the natural and the legal, was his aunt, his only one, who was the
+cousin of our mother and our own aunt, virtually _our_ only one, so far
+as a felt and adopted closeness of kinship went; and the three,
+daughters of two sole and much-united sisters, had been so brought up
+together as to have quite all the signs and accents of the same strain
+and the same nest. The cousin Helen of our young prospect was thus all
+but the sister Helen of our mother's lifetime, as was to happen, and was
+scarcely less a stout brave presence and an emphasised character for the
+new generation than for the old; noted here as she is, in particular,
+for her fine old-time value of clearness and straightness. I see in her
+strong simplicity, that of an earlier, quieter world, a New York of
+better manners and better morals and homelier beliefs, the very elements
+of some portrait by a grave Dutch or other truth-seeking master; she
+looks out with some of the strong marks, the anxious honesty, the modest
+humour, the folded resting hands, the dark handsome serious attire, the
+important composed cap, almost the badge of a guild or an order, that
+hang together about the images of past worthies, of whichever sex, who
+have had, as one may say, the courage of their character, and qualify
+them for places in great collections. I note with appreciation that she
+was strenuously, actively good, and have the liveliest impression both
+that no one was ever better, and that her goodness somehow testifies for
+the whole tone of a society, a remarkable cluster of private decencies.
+Her value to my imagination is even most of all perhaps in her mere
+local consistency, her fine old New York ignorance and rigour. Her
+traditions, scant but stiff, had grown there, close to her--they were
+all she needed, and she lived by them candidly and stoutly. That there
+have been persons so little doubtful of duty helps to show us how
+societies grow. A proportionately small amount of absolute conviction
+about it will carry, we thus make out, a vast dead weight of mere
+comparative. She was as anxious over hers indeed as if it had ever been
+in question--which is a proof perhaps that being void of imagination,
+when you are quite entirely void, makes scarcely more for comfort than
+having too much, which only makes in a manner for a homeless freedom or
+even at the worst for a questioned veracity. With a big installed
+conscience there is virtue in a grain of the figurative faculty--it acts
+as oil to the stiff machine.
+
+Yet this life of straight and narrow insistences seated so clearly in
+our view didn't take up all the room in the other house, the house of
+the pictured, the intermittent Oliver, though of the fewer books in
+general than ours, and of the finer proportions and less peopled spaces
+(there were but three persons to fill them) as well as of the more
+turbaned and powdered family portraits, one of these, the most antique,
+a "French pastel," which must have been charming, of a young collateral
+ancestor who had died on the European tour. A vast marginal range
+seemed to me on the contrary to surround the adolescent nephew, who was
+some three years, I judge, beyond me in age and had other horizons and
+prospects than ours. No question of "Europe," for him, but a patriotic
+preparation for acquaintance with the South and West, or what was then
+called the West--he was to "see his own country first," winking at us
+while he did so; though he was, in spite of differences, so nearly and
+naturally neighbour'd and brother'd with us that the extensions of his
+range and the charms of his position counted somehow as the limits and
+the humilities of ours. He went neither to our schools nor to our
+hotels, but hovered out of our view in some other educational air that I
+can't now point to, and had in a remote part of the State a vast wild
+property of his own, known as the Beaverkill, to which, so far from his
+aunt's and his uncle's taking him there, he affably took them, and to
+which also he vainly invited W. J. and me, pointing thereby to us,
+however, though indirectly enough perhaps, the finest childish case we
+were to know for the famous acceptance of the inevitable. It was
+apparently not to be thought of that instead of the inevitable we should
+accept the invitation; the place was in the wilderness, incalculably
+distant, reached by a whole day's rough drive from the railroad, through
+every danger of flood and field, with prowling bears thrown in and
+probable loss of limb, of which there were sad examples, from swinging
+scythes and axes; but we of course measured our privation just by those
+facts, and grew up, so far as we did then grow, to believe that
+pleasures beyond price had been cruelly denied us. I at any rate myself
+grew up sufficiently to wonder if poor Albert's type, as it developed to
+the anxious elder view from the first, mightn't rather have undermined
+countenance; his pleasant foolish face and odd shy air of being
+suspected or convicted on grounds less vague to himself than to us may
+well have appeared symptoms of the course, of the "rig," he was
+eventually to run. I could think of him but as the _fils de famille_
+ideally constituted; not that I could then use for him that designation,
+but that I felt he must belong to an important special class, which he
+in fact formed in his own person. Everything was right, truly, for these
+felicities--to speak of them only as dramatic or pictorial values; since
+if we were present all the while at more of a drama than we knew, so at
+least, to my vague divination, the scene and the figures were there, not
+excluding the chorus, and I must have had the instinct of their being as
+right as possible. I see the actors move again through the high, rather
+bedimmed rooms--it is always a matter of winter twilight, firelight,
+lamplight; each one appointed to his or her part and perfect for the
+picture, which gave a sense of fulness without ever being crowded.
+
+That composition had to wait awhile, in the earliest time, to find its
+proper centre, having been from the free point of view I thus cultivate
+a little encumbered by the presence of the most aged of our relatives,
+the oldest person I remember to have familiarly known--if it can be
+called familiar to have stood off in fear of such strange proofs of
+accomplished time: our Great-aunt Wyckoff, our maternal grandmother's
+elder sister, I infer, and an image of living antiquity, as I figure her
+to-day, that I was never to see surpassed. I invest her in this vision
+with all the idol-quality that may accrue to the venerable--solidly
+seated or even throned, hooded and draped and tucked-in, with big
+protective protrusive ears to her chair which helped it to the effect of
+a shrine, and a large face in which the odd blackness of eyebrow and of
+a couple of other touches suggested the conventional marks of a painted
+image. She signified her wants as divinities do, for I recover from her
+presence neither sound nor stir, remembering of her only that, as
+described by her companions, the pious ministrants, she had "said" so
+and so when she hadn't spoken at all. Was she really, as she seemed, so
+tremendously old, so old that her daughter, our mother's cousin Helen
+and ours, would have had to come to her in middle life to account for
+it, or did antiquity at that time set in earlier and was surrender of
+appearance and dress, matching the intrinsic decay, only more
+complacent, more submissive and, as who should say, more abject? I have
+my choice of these suppositions, each in its way of so lively an
+interest that I scarce know which to prefer, though inclining perhaps a
+little to the idea of the backward reach. If Aunt Wyckoff was, as I
+first remember her, scarce more than seventy, say, the thought fills me
+with one sort of joy, the joy of our modern, our so generally greater
+and nobler effect of duration: who _wouldn't_ more subtly strive for
+that effect and, intelligently so striving, reach it better, than such
+non-questioners of fate?--the moral of whose case is surely that if they
+gave up too soon and too softly we wiser witnesses can reverse the
+process and fight the whole ground. But I apologise to the heavy shade
+in question if she had really drained her conceivable cup, and for that
+matter rather like to suppose it, so rich and strange is the pleasure of
+finding the past--the Past above all--answered for to one's own touch,
+this being our only way to be sure of it. It was the Past that one
+touched in her, the American past of a preponderant unthinkable
+queerness; and great would seem the fortune of helping on the continuity
+at some other far end.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+It was at all events the good lady's disappearance that more markedly
+cleared the decks--cleared them for that long, slow, sustained action
+with which I make out that nothing was afterwards to interfere. She had
+sat there under her stiff old father's portrait, with which her own, on
+the other side of the chimney, mildly balanced; but these presences
+acted from that time but with cautious reserves. A brave, finished,
+clear-eyed image of such properties as the last-named, in particular,
+our already-mentioned Alexander Robertson, a faint and diminished
+replica of whose picture (the really fine original, as I remember it,
+having been long since perverted from our view) I lately renewed
+acquaintance with in a pious institution of his founding, where, after
+more than one push northward and some easy accommodations, he lives on
+into a world that knows him not and of some of the high improvements of
+which he can little enough have dreamed. Of the world he had personally
+known there was a feature or two still extant; the legend of his acres
+and his local concerns, as well as of his solid presence among them, was
+considerably cherished by us, though for ourselves personally the
+relics of his worth were a lean feast to sit at. They were by some
+invidious turn of fate all to help to constitute the heritage of our
+young kinsman, the orphaned and administered _fils de famille_, whose
+father, Alexander Wyckoff, son of our great-aunt and one of the two
+brothers of cousin Helen, just discernibly flushes for me through the
+ominous haze that preceded the worst visitation of cholera New York was
+to know. Alexander, whom, early widowed and a victim of that visitation,
+I evoke as with something of a premature baldness, of a blackness of
+short whisker, of an expanse of light waistcoat and of a harmless pomp
+of manner, appeared to have quite predominantly "come in" for the values
+in question, which he promptly transmitted to his small motherless son
+and which were destined so greatly to increase. There are clues I have
+only lost, not making out in the least to-day why the sons of Aunt
+Wyckoff should have been so happily distinguished. Our great-uncle of
+the name isn't even a dim ghost to me--he had passed away beyond recall
+before I began to take notice; but I hold, rightly, I feel, that it was
+not to his person these advantages were attached. They could have
+descended to our grandmother but in a minor degree--we should otherwise
+have been more closely aware of them. It comes to me that so far as we
+had at all been aware it had mostly gone off in smoke: I have still in
+my ears some rueful allusion to "lands," apparently in the general
+country of the Beaverkill, which had come to my mother and her sister as
+their share of their grandfather Robertson's amplitude, among the
+further-apportioned shares of their four brothers, only to be sacrificed
+later on at some scant appraisement. It is in the nature of "lands" at a
+distance and in regions imperfectly reclaimed to be spoken of always as
+immense, and I at any rate entertained the sense that we should have
+been great proprietors, in the far wilderness, if we had only taken more
+interest. Our interests were peculiarly urban--though not indeed that
+this had helped us much. Something of the mystery of the vanished acres
+hung for me about my maternal uncle, John Walsh, the only one who
+appeared to have been in respect to the dim possessions much on the
+spot, but I too crudely failed of my chance of learning from him what
+had become of them.
+
+Not that they had seen _him_, poor gentleman, very much further, or that
+I had any strong sense of opportunity; I catch at but two or three
+projections of him, and only at one of his standing much at his ease: I
+see him before the fire in the Fourteenth Street library, sturdy, with
+straight black hair and as if the Beaverkill had rather stamped him, but
+clean-shaven, in a "stock" and a black frock-coat--I hear him perhaps
+still more than I see him deliver himself on the then great subject of
+Jenny Lind, whom he seemed to have emerged from the wilderness to listen
+to and as to whom I remember thinking it (strange small critic that I
+must have begun to be) a note of the wilderness in him that he spoke of
+her as "Miss Lind"; albeit I scarce know, and must even less have known
+then, what other form he could have used. The rest of my sense of him is
+tinged with the ancient pity--that of our so exercised response in those
+years to the general sad case of uncles, aunts and cousins obscurely
+afflicted (the uncles in particular) and untimely gathered. Sharp to me
+the memory of a call, one dusky wintry Sunday afternoon, in Clinton
+Place, at the house of my uncle Robertson Walsh, then the head of my
+mother's family, where the hapless younger brother lay dying; whom I was
+taken to the top of the house to see and of the sinister twilight
+grimness of whose lot, stretched there, amid odours of tobacco and of
+drugs, or of some especial strong drug, in one of the chambers of what I
+remember as a remote and unfriended arching attic, probably in fact the
+best place of prescribed quiet, I was to carry away a fast impression.
+All the uncles, of whichever kindred, were to come to seem sooner or
+later to be dying, more or less before our eyes, of melancholy matters;
+and yet their general story, so far as one could read it, appeared the
+story of life. I conceived at any rate that John Walsh, celibate, lonely
+and good-naturedly black-browed, had been sacrificed to the far-off
+Robertson acres, which on their side had been sacrificed to I never knew
+what. The point of my divagation, however, is that the Barmecide banquet
+of another tract of the same _provenance_ was always spread for us
+opposite the other house, from which point it stretched, on the north
+side of the street, to Sixth Avenue; though here we were soon to see it
+diminished at the corner by a structure afterwards known to us as our
+prosiest New York school. This edifice, devoted to-day to other uses,
+but of the same ample insignificance, still left for exploitation at
+that time an uncovered town-territory the transmitted tale of which was
+that our greatgrandfather, living down near the Battery, had had his
+country villa or, more strictly speaking, his farm there, with free
+expanses roundabout. Shrunken though the tract a part of it remained--in
+particular a space that I remember, though with the last faintness, to
+have seen appeal to the public as a tea-garden or open-air cafe, a haunt
+of dance and song and of other forms of rather ineffective gaiety. The
+subsequent conversion of the site into the premises of the French
+Theatre I was to be able to note more distinctly; resorting there in the
+winter of 1874-5, though not without some wan detachment, to a series
+of more or less exotic performances, and admiring in especial the high
+and hard virtuosity of Madame Ristori, the unfailing instinct for the
+wrong emphasis of the then acclaimed Mrs. Rousby (I still hear the
+assured "Great woman, great woman!" of a knowing friend met as I went
+out,) and the stout fidelity to a losing game, as well as to a truth not
+quite measurable among us, of the late, the but lugubriously-comic, the
+blighted John Toole.
+
+These are glimmering ghosts, though that drama of the scene hard by at
+which I have glanced gives me back its agents with a finer intensity.
+For the long action set in, as I have hinted, with the death of Aunt
+Wyckoff, and, if rather taking its time at first to develop, maintained
+to the end, which was in its full finality but a few years since, the
+finest consistency and unity; with cousin Helen, in rich prominence, for
+the heroine; with the pale adventurous Albert for the hero or young
+protagonist, a little indeed in the sense of a small New York Orestes
+ridden by Furies; with a pair of confidants in the form first of the
+heroine's highly respectable but quite negligible husband and, second,
+of her close friend and quasi-sister our own admirable Aunt; with
+Alexander's younger brother, above all, the odd, the eccentric, the
+attaching Henry, for the stake, as it were, of the game. So for the
+spectator did the figures distribute themselves; the three principal,
+on the large stage--it became a field of such spreading interests--well
+in front, and the accessory pair, all sympathy and zeal, prompt comment
+and rich resonance, hovering in the background, responsive to any call
+and on the spot at a sign: this most particularly true indeed of our
+anything but detached Aunt, much less a passive recipient than a vessel
+constantly brimming, and destined herself to become the outstanding
+agent, almost the _dea ex machina_, in the last act of the story. Her
+colleague of the earlier periods (though to that title she would scarce
+have granted his right) I designate rather as our earnest cousin's
+husband than as our kinsman even by courtesy; since he was "Mr." to his
+own wife, for whom the dread of liberties taken in general included even
+those that might have been allowed to herself: he had not in the least,
+like the others in his case, married into the cousinship with us, and
+this apparently rather by his defect than by ours. His christian name,
+if certainly not for use, was scarce even for ornament--which consorted
+with the felt limits roundabout him of aids to mention and with the fact
+that no man could on his journey through life well have been less
+eagerly designated or apostrophised. If there are persons as to whom the
+"Mr." never comes up at all, so there are those as to whom it never
+subsides; but some of them all keep it by the greatness and others,
+oddly enough, by the smallness of their importance. The subject of my
+present reference, as I think of him, nevertheless--by which I mean in
+spite of his place in the latter group--greatly helps my documentation;
+he must have been of so excellent and consistent a shade of nullity. To
+that value, if value it be, there almost always attaches some question
+of the degree and the position: with adjuncts, with a relation, the zero
+may figure as a numeral--and the neglected zero is mostly, for that
+matter, endowed with a consciousness and subject to irritation. For this
+dim little gentleman, so perfectly a gentleman, no appeal and no
+redress, from the beginning to the end of his career, were made or
+entertained or projected; no question of how to treat him, or of how
+_he_ might see it or feel it, could ever possibly rise; he was blank
+from whatever view, remaining so under application of whatever acid or
+exposure to whatever heat; the one identity he could have was to be part
+of the consensus.
+
+Such a case is rare--that of being no case at all, that of not having
+even the interest of the grievance of not being one: we as a rule catch
+glimpses in the down-trodden of such resentments--they have at least
+sometimes the importance of feeling the weight of our tread. The
+phenomenon was here quite other--that of a natural platitude that had
+never risen to the level of sensibility. When you have been wronged you
+can be righted, when you have suffered you can be soothed; if you have
+that amount of grasp of the "scene," however humble, the drama of your
+life to some extent enacts itself, with the logical consequence of your
+being proportionately its hero and _having_ to be taken for such. Let me
+not dream of attempting to say for what cousin Helen took her spectral
+spouse, though I think it the most marked touch in her portrait that she
+kept us from ever knowing. She was a person about whom you knew
+everything else, but there she was genially inscrutable, and above all
+claimed no damages on the score of slights offered him. She knew nothing
+whatever of these, yet could herself be much wounded or hurt--which
+latter word she sounded in the wondrous old New York manner so
+irreducible to notation. She covered the whole case with a mantle which
+was yet much more probably that of her real simplicity than of a feigned
+unconsciousness; I doubt whether she _knew_ that men could be amiable in
+a different manner from that which had to serve her for supposing her
+husband amiable; when the mould and the men cast in it were very
+different she failed, or at least she feared, to conclude to
+amiability--though _some_ women (as different themselves as such
+stranger men!) might take it for that. Directly interrogated she might
+(such was the innocence of these long-extinct manners) have approved of
+male society in stronger doses or more vivid hues--save where
+consanguinity, or indeed relationship by marriage, to which she greatly
+deferred, had honestly imposed it. The singular thing for the drama to
+which I return was that there it was just consanguinity that had made
+the burden difficult and strange and of a nature to call on great
+decisions and patient plans, even though the most ominous possibilities
+were not involved. I reconstruct and reconstruct of course, but the
+elements had to my childish vision at least nothing at all portentous;
+if any light of the lurid played in for me just a little it was but
+under much later information. What my childish vision was really most
+possessed of, I think, was the figure of the spectral spouse, the dim
+little gentleman, as I have called him, pacing the whole length of the
+two big parlours, in prolonged repetition, much as if they had been the
+deck of one of those ships anciently haunted by him, as "supercargo" or
+whatever, in strange far seas--according to the only legend connected
+with him save that of his early presumption in having approached, such
+as he was, so fine a young woman, and his remarkable luck in having
+approached her successfully; a luck surprisingly renewed for him, since
+it was also part of the legend that he had previously married and lost a
+bride beyond his deserts.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+I am, strictly speaking, at this point, on a visit to Albert, who at
+times sociably condescended to my fewer years--I still appreciate the
+man-of-the-world ease of it; but my host seems for the minute to have
+left me, and I am attached but to the rich perspective in which "Uncle"
+(for Albert too he was only all namelessly Uncle) comes and goes; out of
+the comparative high brownness of the back room, commanding brave
+extensions, as I thought them, a covered piazza over which, in season,
+Isabella grapes accessibly clustered and beyond which stretched,
+further, a "yard" that was as an ample garden compared to ours at home;
+I keep in view his little rounded back, at the base of which his arms
+are interlocked behind him, and I know how his bald head, yet with the
+hair bristling up almost in short-horn fashion at the sides, is thrust
+inquiringly, not to say appealingly, forward; I assist at his emergence,
+where the fine old mahogany doors of separation are rolled back on what
+used to seem to me silver wheels, into the brighter yet colder half of
+the scene, and attend him while he at last looks out awhile into
+Fourteenth Street for news of whatever may be remarkably, objectionably
+or mercifully taking place there; and then I await his regular return,
+preparatory to a renewed advance, far from indifferent as I innocently
+am to his discoveries or his comments. It is cousin Helen however who
+preferentially takes them up, attaching to them the right importance,
+which is for the moment the very greatest that could possibly be
+attached to anything in the world; I for my part occupied with those
+marks of character in our pacing companion--his long, slightly equine
+countenance, his eyebrows ever elevated as in the curiosity of alarm,
+and the so limited play from side to side of his extremely protrusive
+head, as if somehow through tightness of the "wash" neckcloths that he
+habitually wore and that, wound and re-wound in their successive stages,
+made his neck very long without making it in the least thick and reached
+their climax in a proportionately very small knot tied with the neatest
+art. I scarce can have known at the time that this was as complete a
+little old-world figure as any that might then have been noted there,
+far or near; yet if I didn't somehow "subtly" feel it, why am I now so
+convinced that I must have had familiarly before me a masterpiece of the
+great Daumier, say, or Henri Monnier, or any other then contemporary
+projector of Monsieur Prudhomme, the timorous Philistine in a world of
+dangers, with whom I was later on to make acquaintance? I put myself
+the question, of scant importance though it may seem; but there is a
+reflection perhaps more timely than any answer to it. I catch myself in
+the act of seeing poor anonymous "Dear," as cousin Helen confined
+herself, her life long, to calling him, in the light of an image
+arrested by the French genius, and this in truth opens up vistas. I
+scarce know what it _doesn't_ suggest for the fact of sharpness, of
+intensity of type; which fact in turn leads my imagination almost any
+dance, making me ask myself quite most of all whether a person so marked
+by it mustn't really have been a highly finished figure.
+
+That degree of finish was surely rare among us--rare at a time when the
+charm of so much of the cousinship and the uncleship, the kinship
+generally, had to be found in their so engagingly dispensing with any
+finish at all. They happened to be amiable, to be delightful; but--I
+think I have already put the question--what would have become of us all
+if they hadn't been? a question the shudder of which could never have
+been suggested by the presence I am considering. He too was gentle and
+bland, as it happened--and I indeed see it all as a world quite
+unfavourable to arrogance or insolence or any hard and high assumption;
+but the more I think of him (even at the risk of thinking too much) the
+more I make out in him a tone and a manner that deprecated crude ease.
+Plenty of this was already in the air, but if he hadn't so spoken of an
+order in which forms still counted it might scarce have occurred to one
+that there had ever been any. It comes over me therefore that he
+testified--and perhaps quite beautifully; I remember his voice and his
+speech, which were not those of _that_ New York at all, and with the
+echo, faint as it is, arrives the wonder of where he could possibly have
+picked such things up. They were, as forms, adjusted and settled things;
+from what finer civilisation therefore had they come down to him? To
+brood on this the least little bit is verily, as I have said, to open up
+vistas--out of the depths of one of which fairly glimmers the queerest
+of questions. Mayn't we accordingly have been, the rest of us, all
+wrong, and the dim little gentleman the only one among us who was right?
+May not his truth to type have been a matter that, as mostly typeless
+ourselves, we neither perceived nor appreciated?--so that if, as is
+conceivable, he felt and measured the situation and simply chose to be
+bland and quiet and keep his sense to himself, he was a hero without the
+laurel as well as a martyr without the crown. The light of which
+possibility is, however, too fierce; I turn it off, I tear myself from
+the view--noting further but the one fact in his history that, by my
+glimpse of it, quite escapes ambiguity. The youthful Albert, I have
+mentioned, was to resist successfully through those years that
+solicitation of "Europe" our own response to which, both as a general
+and a particular solution, kept breaking out in choral wails; but the
+other house none the less nourished projects so earnest that they could
+invoke the dignity of comparative silence and patience. The other house
+didn't aspire to the tongues, but it aspired to the grand tour, of which
+ours was on many grounds incapable. Only after years and when endless
+things had happened--Albert having long before, in especial, quite taken
+up his stake and ostensibly dropped out of the game--did the great
+adventure get itself enacted, with the effect of one of the liveliest
+illustrations of the irony of fate. What had most of all flushed through
+the dream of it during years was the legend, at last quite antediluvian,
+of the dim little gentleman's early Wanderjahre, that experience of
+distant lands and seas which would find an application none the less
+lively for having had long to wait. It had had to wait in truth half a
+century, yet its confidence had apparently not been impaired when New
+York, on the happy day, began to recede from view. Europe had surprises,
+none the less, and who knows to what extent it may after half a century
+have had shocks? The coming true of the old dream produced at any rate a
+snap of the tense cord, and the ancient worthy my imagination has, in
+the tenderest of intentions, thus played with, disembarked in England
+only to indulge in the last of his startled stares, only to look about
+him in vague deprecation and give it all up. He just landed and died;
+but the grand tour was none the less proceeded with--cousin Helen
+herself, aided by resources personal, social and financial that left
+nothing to desire, triumphantly performed it, though as with a feeling
+of delicacy about it firmly overcome.
+
+But it has taken me quite out of the other house, so that I patch up
+again, at a stroke, that early scene of her double guardianship at which
+my small wonder assisted. It even then glimmered on me, I think, that if
+Albert was, all so romantically, in charge of his aunt--which was a
+perfectly nondescript relation--so his uncle Henry, her odd brother, was
+her more or less legal ward, not less, despite his being so very much
+Albert's senior. In these facts and in the character of each of the
+three persons involved resided the drama; which must more or less have
+begun, as I have hinted, when simple-minded Henry, at a date I seem to
+have seized, definitely emerged from rustication--the Beaverkill had but
+for a certain term protected, or promoted, his simplicity--and began, on
+his side, to pace the well-worn field between the Fourteenth Street
+windows and the piazza of the Isabella grapes. I see him there less
+vividly than his fellow-pedestrian only because he was afterwards to
+loom so much larger, whereas his companion, even while still present,
+was weakly to shrink and fade. At this late day only do I devise for
+that companion a possible history; the simple-minded Henry's annals on
+the other hand grew in interest as soon as they became interesting at
+all. This happened as soon as one took in the ground and some of the
+features of his tutelage. The basis of it all was that, harmless as he
+appeared, he was not to be trusted; I remember how portentous that truth
+soon looked, both in the light of his intense amiability and of sister
+Helen's absolute certitude. He wasn't to be trusted--it was the sole
+very definite fact about him except the fact that he had so kindly come
+down from the far-off Beaverkill to regale us with the perfect
+demonstration, dutifully, resignedly setting himself among us to point
+the whole moral himself. He appeared, from the moment we really took it
+in, to be doing, in the matter, no more than he ought; he exposed
+himself to our invidious gaze, on this ground, with a humility, a quiet
+courtesy and an instinctive dignity that come back to me as simply
+heroic. He had himself accepted, under strenuous suggestion, the
+dreadful view, and I see him to-day, in the light of the grand
+denouement, deferred for long years, but fairly dazzling when it came,
+as fairly sublime in his decision not to put anyone in the wrong about
+him a day sooner than he could possibly help. The whole circle of us
+would in that event be so dreadfully "sold," as to our wisdom and
+justice, he proving only noble and exquisite. It didn't so immensely
+matter to him as that, the establishment of his true character didn't;
+so he went on as if for all the years--and they really piled themselves
+up: his passing for a dangerous idiot, or at least for a slave of his
+passions from the moment he was allowed the wherewithal in the least to
+indulge them, was a less evil for him than seeing us rudely corrected.
+It was in truth an extraordinary situation and would have offered a
+splendid subject, as we used to say, to the painter of character, the
+novelist or the dramatist, with the hand to treat it. After I had read
+David Copperfield an analogy glimmered--it struck me even in the early
+time: cousin Henry was more or less another Mr. Dick, just as cousin
+Helen was in her relation to him more or less another Miss Trotwood.
+There were disparities indeed: Mr. Dick was the harmless lunatic on that
+lady's premises, but she admired him and appealed to him; lunatics, in
+her generous view, might be oracles, and there is no evidence, if I
+correctly remember, that she kept him low. Our Mr. Dick was suffered to
+indulge his passions but on ten cents a day, while his fortune, under
+conscientious, under admirable care--cousin Helen being no less the
+wise and keen woman of business than the devoted sister--rolled up and
+became large; likewise Miss Trotwood's inmate hadn't at all the
+perplexed brooding brow, with the troubled fold in it, that represented
+poor Henry's only form of criticism of adverse fate. They had alike the
+large smooth open countenance of those for whom life has been
+simplified, and if Mr. Dick had had a fortune he would have remained all
+his days as modestly vague about the figure of it as our relative
+consented to remain. The latter's interests were agricultural, while his
+predecessor's, as we remember, were mainly historical; each at any rate
+had in a general way his Miss Trotwood, not to say his sister Helen.
+
+The good Henry's Miss Trotwood lived and died without an instant's
+visitation of doubt as to the due exercise of her authority, as to what
+would happen if it faltered; her victim waiting in the handsomest manner
+till she had passed away to show us all--all who remained, after so
+long, to do him justice--that nothing but what was charming and touching
+could possibly happen. This was, in part at least, the dazzling
+denouement I have spoken of: he became, as soon as fortunate
+dispositions could take effect, the care of our admirable Aunt, between
+whom and his sister and himself close cousinship, from far back, had
+practically amounted to sisterhood: by which time the other house had
+long been another house altogether, its ancient site relinquished, its
+contents planted afresh far northward, with new traditions invoked,
+though with that of its great friendliness to all of us, for our
+mother's sake, still confirmed. Here with brief brightness, clouded at
+the very last, the solution emerged; we became aware, not without
+embarrassment, that poor Henry at large and supplied with funds was
+exactly as harmless and blameless as poor Henry stinted and captive; as
+to which if anything had been wanting to our confusion or to his own
+dignity it would have been his supreme abstinence, his suppression of
+the least "Didn't I tell you?" He didn't even pretend to have told us,
+when he so abundantly might, and nothing could exceed the grace with
+which he appeared to have noticed nothing. He "handled" dollars as
+decently, and just as profusely, as he had handled dimes; the only light
+shade on the scene--except of course for its being so belated, which did
+make it pathetically dim--was the question of how nearly he at all
+measured his resources. Not his heart, but his imagination, in the long
+years, had been starved; and though he was now all discreetly and wisely
+encouraged to feel rich, it was rather sadly visible that, thanks to
+almost half a century of over-discipline, he failed quite to rise to his
+estate. He did feel rich, just as he felt generous; the misfortune was
+only in his weak sense for meanings. That, with the whole situation,
+made delicacy of the first importance; as indeed what was perhaps most
+striking in the entire connection was the part played by delicacy from
+the first. It had all been a drama of the delicate: the consummately
+scrupulous and successful administration of his resources for the
+benefit of his virtue, so that they could be handed over, in the event,
+without the leakage of a fraction, what was that but a triumph of
+delicacy? So delicacy conspired, delicacy surrounded him; the case
+having been from the early time that, could he only be regarded as
+sufficiently responsible, could the sources of his bounty be judged
+fairly open to light pressure (there was question of none but the
+lightest) that bounty might blessedly flow. This had been Miss
+Trotwood's own enlightened view, on behalf of one of the oddest and most
+appealing collections of wistful wondering single gentlewomen that a
+great calculating benevolence perhaps ever found arrayed before
+it--ornaments these all of the second and third cousinship and
+interested spectators of the almost inexpressible facts.
+
+I should have liked completely to express them, in spite of the
+difficulty--if not indeed just by reason of that; the difficulty of
+their consisting so much more of "character" than of "incident" (heaven
+save the artless opposition!) though this last element figured bravely
+enough too, thanks to some of the forms taken by our young Albert's wild
+wilfulness. He was so weak--after the most approved fashion of
+distressing young men of means--that his successive exhibitions of it
+had a fine high positive effect, such as would have served beautifully,
+act after act, for the descent of the curtain. The issue, however
+(differing in this from the common theatrical trick) depended less on
+who should die than on who should live; the younger of cousin Helen's
+pair of wards--putting them even only as vessels of her attempted
+earnestness--had violently broken away, but a remedy to this grief, for
+reasons too many to tell, dwelt in the possible duration, could it only
+not be arrested, of two other lives, one of these her own, the second
+the guileless Henry's. The single gentlewomen, to a remarkable number,
+whom she regarded and treated as nieces, though they were only daughters
+of cousins, were such objects of her tender solicitude that, she and
+Henry and Albert being alike childless, the delightful thing to think of
+was, on certain contingencies, the nieces' prospective wealth. There
+were contingencies of course--and they exactly produced the pity and
+terror. Her estate would go at her death to her nearest of kin,
+represented by her brother and nephew; it would be only of her
+savings--fortunately, with her kind eye on the gentlewomen, zealous and
+long continued--that she might dispose by will; and it was but a
+troubled comfort that, should he be living at the time of her death, the
+susceptible Henry would profit no less than the wanton Albert. Henry was
+at any cost to be kept in life that he _might_ profit; the woeful
+question, the question of delicacy, for a woman devoutly conscientious,
+was how could anyone else, how, above all, could fifteen other persons,
+be made to profit by his profiting? She had been as earnest a steward of
+her brother's fortune as if directness of pressure on him, in a sense
+favourable to her interests--that is to her sympathies, which were her
+only interests--had been a matter of course with her; whereas in fact
+she would have held it a crime, given his simplicity, to attempt in the
+least to guide his hand. If he didn't outlive his nephew--and he was
+older, though, as would appear, so much more virtuous--his inherited
+property, she being dead, would accrue to that unedifying person.
+_There_ was the pity; and as for the question of the disposition of
+Henry's savings without the initiative of Henry's intelligence, in that,
+alas, was the terror. Henry's savings--there had been no terror for her,
+naturally, in beautifully husbanding his resources _for_ him--dangled,
+naturally, with no small vividness, before the wistful gentlewomen, to
+whom, if he had but _had_ the initiative, he might have made the most
+princely presents. Such was the oddity, not to say the rather tragic
+drollery, of the situation: that Henry's idea of a present was ten
+cents' worth of popcorn, or some similar homely trifle; and that when
+one had created for him a world of these proportions there was no honest
+way of inspiring him to write cheques for hundreds; all congruous though
+these would be with the generosity of his nature as shown by the
+exuberance of his popcorn. The ideal solution would be his flashing to
+intelligence just long enough to apprehend the case and, of his own
+magnanimous movement, sign away everything; but that was a fairy-tale
+stroke, and the fairies here somehow stood off.
+
+Thus between the wealth of her earnestness and the poverty of her
+courage--her dread, that is, of exposing herself to a legal process for
+undue influence--our good lady was not at peace; or, to be exact, was
+only at such peace as came to her by the free bestowal of her own
+accumulations during her lifetime and after her death. She predeceased
+her brother and had the pang of feeling that if half her residuum would
+be deplorably diverted the other half would be, by the same stroke,
+imperfectly applied; the artless Henry remained at once so well provided
+and so dimly inspired. Here was suspense indeed for a last "curtain" but
+one; and my fancy glows, all expertly, for the disclosure of the final
+scene, than which nothing could well have been happier, on all the
+premises, save for a single flaw: the installation in Forty-fourth
+Street of our admirable aunt, often, through the later years, domiciled
+there, but now settled to community of life with a touching charge and
+representing near him his extinguished, _their_ extinguished, sister.
+The too few years that followed were the good man's Indian summer and a
+very wonderful time--so charmingly it shone forth, for all concerned,
+that he was a person fitted to adorn, as the phrase is, almost any
+position. Our admirable aunt, not less devoted and less disinterested
+than his former protectress, had yet much more imagination; she had
+enough, in a word, for perfect confidence, and under confidence what
+remained of poor Henry's life bloomed like a garden freshly watered. Sad
+alas the fact that so scant a patch was now left. It sufficed, however,
+and he rose, just in time, to every conception; it was, as I have
+already noted, as if he had all the while known, as if he had really
+been a conscious victim to the superstition of his blackness. His final
+companion recognised, as it were, his powers; and it may be imagined
+whether when he absolutely himself proposed to benefit the gentlewomen
+she passed him, or not, the blessed pen. He had taken a year or two to
+publish by his behaviour the perfection of his civility, and so, on that
+safe ground, made use of the pen. His competence was afterwards
+attacked, and it emerged triumphant, exactly as his perfect charity and
+humility and amenity, and his long inward loneliness, of half a century,
+did. He had bowed his head and sometimes softly scratched it during that
+immense period; he had occasionally, after roaming downstairs with the
+troubled fold in his brow and the difficult, the smothered statement on
+his lips (his vocabulary was scant and stiff, the vocabulary of pleading
+explanation, often found too complicated by the witty,) retired once
+more to his room sometimes indeed for hours, to think it all over again;
+but had never failed of sobriety or propriety or punctuality or
+regularity, never failed of one of the virtues his imputed indifference
+to which had been the ground of his discipline. It was very
+extraordinary, and of all the stories I know is I think the most
+beautiful--so far at least as _he_ was concerned! The flaw I have
+mentioned, the one break in the final harmony, was the death of our
+admirable aunt too soon, shortly before his own and while, taken with
+illness at the same time, he lay there deprived of her attention. He had
+that of the gentlewomen, however, two or three of the wisest and
+tenderest being deputed by the others; and if his original estate
+reverted at law they presently none the less had occasion to bless his
+name.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+I turn round again to where I last left myself gaping at the old
+ricketty bill-board in Fifth Avenue; and am almost as sharply aware as
+ever of the main source of its spell, the fact that it most often blazed
+with the rich appeal of Mr. Barnum, whose "lecture-room," attached to
+the Great American Museum, overflowed into posters of all the theatrical
+bravery disavowed by its title. It was my rueful theory of those
+days--though tasteful I may call it too as well as rueful--that on all
+the holidays on which we weren't dragged to the dentist's we attended as
+a matter of course at Barnum's, that is when we were so happy as to be
+able to; which, to my own particular consciousness, wasn't every time
+the case. The case was too often, to my melancholy view, that W. J.,
+quite regularly, on the non-dental Saturdays, repaired to this seat of
+joy with the easy Albert--_he_ at home there and master of the scene to
+a degree at which, somehow, neither of us could at the best arrive; he
+quite moulded, truly, in those years of plasticity, as to the aesthetic
+bent and the determination of curiosity, I seem to make out, by the
+general Barnum association and revelation. It was not, I hasten to add,
+that I too didn't, to the extent of my minor chance, drink at the
+spring; for how else should I have come by the whole undimmed sense of
+the connection?--the weary waiting, in the dusty halls of humbug, amid
+bottled mermaids, "bearded ladies" and chill dioramas, for the
+lecture-room, the true centre of the seat of joy, to open: vivid in
+especial to me is my almost sick wondering of whether I mightn't be rapt
+away before it did open. The impression appears to have been mixed; the
+drinking deep and the holding out, holding out in particular against
+failure of food and of stage-fares, provision for transport to and fro,
+being questions equally intense: the appeal of the lecture-room, in its
+essence a heavy extra, so exhausted our resources that even the
+sustaining doughnut of the refreshment-counter would mock our desire and
+the long homeward crawl, the length of Broadway and further, seem to
+defy repetition. Those desperate days, none the less, affect me now as
+having flushed with the very complexion of romance; their aches and
+inanitions were part of the adventure; the homeward straggle,
+interminable as it appeared, flowered at moments into rapt
+contemplations--that for instance of the painted portrait, large as
+life, of the celebrity of the hour, then "dancing" at the Broadway
+Theatre, Lola Montes, Countess of Lansfeldt, of a dazzling and unreal
+beauty and in a riding-habit lavishly open at the throat.
+
+It was thus quite in order that I should pore longest, there at my
+fondest corner, over the Barnum announcements--my present inability to
+be superficial about which has given in fact the measure of my
+contemporary care. These announcements must have been in their way
+marvels of attractive composition, the placard bristling from top to toe
+with its analytic "synopsis of scenery and incidents"; the synoptical
+view cast its net of fine meshes and the very word savoured of
+incantation. It is odd at the same time that when I question memory as
+to the living hours themselves, those of the stuffed and dim little hall
+of audience, smelling of peppermint and orange-peel, where the curtain
+rose on our gasping but rewarded patience, two performances only stand
+out for me, though these in the highest relief. Love, or the Countess
+and the Serf, by J. Sheridan Knowles--I see that still as the blazonry
+of one of them, just as I see Miss Emily Mestayer, large, red in the
+face, coifed in a tangle of small, fine, damp-looking short curls and
+clad in a light-blue garment edged with swans-down, shout at the top of
+her lungs that a "pur-r-r-se of gold" would be the fair guerdon of the
+minion who should start on the spot to do her bidding at some desperate
+crisis that I forget. I forget Huon the serf, whom I yet recall
+immensely admiring for his nobleness; I forget everyone but Miss
+Mestayer, who gave form to my conception of the tragic actress at her
+highest. She had a hooked nose, a great play of nostril, a vast
+protuberance of bosom and always the "crop" of close moist ringlets; I
+say always, for I was to see her often again, during a much later phase,
+the mid-most years of that Boston Museum which aimed at so vastly higher
+a distinction than the exploded lecture-room had really done, though in
+an age that snickered even abnormally low it still lacked the courage to
+call itself a theatre. She must have been in comedy, which I believe she
+also usefully and fearlessly practised, rather unimaginable; but there
+was no one like her in the Boston time for cursing queens and
+eagle-beaked mothers; the Shakespeare of the Booths and other such would
+have been unproducible without her; she had a rusty, rasping, heaving
+and tossing "authority" of which the bitterness is still in my ears. I
+am revisited by an outer glimpse of her in that after age when she had
+come, comparatively speaking, into her own--the sight of her,
+accidentally incurred, one tremendously hot summer night, as she slowly
+moved from her lodgings or wherever, in the high Bowdoin Street region,
+down to the not distant theatre from which even the temperature had
+given her no reprieve; and well remember how, the queer light of my
+young impression playing up again in her path, she struck me as the
+very image of mere sore histrionic habit and use, a worn and weary, a
+battered even though almost sordidly smoothed, _thing_ of the theatre,
+very much as an old infinitely-handled and greasy violoncello of the
+orchestra might have been. It was but an effect doubtless of the heat
+that she scarcely seemed clad at all; slippered, shuffling and, though
+somehow hatted and vaguely veiled or streamered, wrapt in a gauzy sketch
+of a dressing-gown, she pointed to my extravagant attention the moral of
+thankless personal service, of the reverse of the picture, of the cost
+of "amusing the public" in a case of amusing it, as who should say,
+every hour. And I had thrilled before her as the Countess in
+"Love"--such contrasted combinations! But she carried her head very
+high, as with the habit of crowns and trains and tirades--had in fact
+much the air of some deposed and reduced sovereign living on a scant
+allowance; so that, all invisibly and compassionately, I took off my hat
+to her.
+
+To which I must add the other of my two Barnumite scenic memories, my
+having anciently admired her as the Eliza of Uncle Tom's Cabin, her
+swelling bust encased in a neat cotton gown and her flight across the
+ice-blocks of the Ohio, if I rightly remember the perilous stream,
+intrepidly and gracefully performed. We lived and moved at that time,
+with great intensity, in Mrs. Stowe's novel--which, recalling my prompt
+and charmed acquaintance with it, I should perhaps substitute for The
+Initials, earlier mentioned here, as my first experiment in grown-up
+fiction. There was, however, I think, for that triumphant work no
+classified condition; it was for no sort of reader as distinct from any
+other sort, save indeed for Northern as differing from Southern: it knew
+the large felicity of gathering in alike the small and the simple and
+the big and the wise, and had above all the extraordinary fortune of
+finding itself, for an immense number of people, much less a book than a
+state of vision, of feeling and of consciousness, in which they didn't
+sit and read and appraise and pass the time, but walked and talked and
+laughed and cried and, in a manner of which Mrs. Stowe was the
+irresistible cause, generally conducted themselves. Appreciation and
+judgment, the whole impression, were thus an effect for which there had
+been no process--any process so related having in other cases _had_ to
+be at some point or other critical; nothing in the guise of a written
+book, therefore, a book printed, published, sold, bought and "noticed,"
+probably ever reached its mark, the mark of exciting interest, without
+having at least groped for that goal _as_ a book or by the exposure of
+some literary side. Letters, here, languished unconscious, and Uncle
+Tom, instead of making even one of the cheap short cuts through the
+medium in which books breathe, even as fishes in water, went gaily
+roundabout it altogether, as if a fish, a wonderful "leaping" fish, had
+simply flown through the air. This feat accomplished, the surprising
+creature could naturally fly anywhere, and one of the first things it
+did was thus to flutter down on every stage, literally without
+exception, in America and Europe. If the amount of life represented in
+such a work is measurable by the ease with which representation is taken
+up and carried further, carried even violently furthest, the fate of
+Mrs. Stowe's picture was conclusive: it simply sat down wherever it
+lighted and made itself, so to speak, at home; thither multitudes
+flocked afresh and there, in each case, it rose to its height again and
+went, with all its vivacity and good faith, through all its motions.
+
+These latter were to leave me, however, with a fonder vision still than
+that of the comparatively jejune "lecture-room" version; for the first
+exhibition of them to spring to the front was the fine free rendering
+achieved at a playhouse till then ignored by fashion and culture, the
+National Theatre, deep down on the East side, whence echoes had come
+faintest to ears polite, but where a sincerity vivid though rude was now
+supposed to reward the curious. Our numerous attendance there under this
+spell was my first experience of the "theatre party" as we have enjoyed
+it in our time--each emotion and impression of which is as fresh to me
+as the most recent of the same family. Precious through all indeed
+perhaps is the sense, strange only to later sophistication, of my small
+encouraged state as a free playgoer--a state doubly wondrous while I
+thus evoke the full contingent from Union Square; where, for that
+matter, I think, the wild evening must have been planned. I am lost
+again in all the goodnature from which small boys, on wild evenings,
+could dangle so unchidden--since the state of unchiddenness is what
+comes back to me well-nigh clearest. How without that complacency of
+conscience could every felt impression so live again? It is true that
+for my present sense of the matter snubs and raps would still tingle,
+would count double; just wherefore it is exactly, however, that I mirror
+myself in these depths of propriety. The social scheme, as we knew it,
+was, in its careless charity, worthy of the golden age--though I can't
+sufficiently repeat that we knew it both at its easiest and its safest:
+the fruits dropped right upon the board to which we flocked together,
+the least of us and the greatest, with differences of appetite and of
+reach, doubtless, but not with differences of place and of proportionate
+share. My appetite and my reach in respect to the more full-bodied Uncle
+Tom might have brooked certainly any comparison; I must have partaken
+thoroughly of the feast to have left the various aftertastes so separate
+and so strong. It was a great thing to have a canon to judge by--it
+helped conscious criticism, which was to fit on wings (for use ever
+after) to the shoulders of appreciation. In the light of that advantage
+I could be _sure_ my second Eliza was less dramatic than my first, and
+that my first "Cassy," that of the great and blood-curdling Mrs. Bellamy
+of the lecture-room, touched depths which made the lady at the National
+prosaic and placid (I could already be "down" on a placid Cassy;) just
+as on the other hand the rocking of the ice-floes of the Ohio, with the
+desperate Eliza, infant in arms, balancing for a leap from one to the
+other, had here less of the audible creak of carpentry, emulated a
+trifle more, to my perception, the real water of Mr. Crummles's pump.
+They can't, even at that, have emulated it much, and one almost envies
+(quite making up one's mind not to denounce) the simple faith of an age
+beguiled by arts so rude.
+
+However, the point exactly was that we attended this spectacle just in
+order _not_ to be beguiled, just in order to enjoy with ironic
+detachment and, at the very most, to be amused ourselves at our
+sensibility should it prove to have been trapped and caught. To have
+become thus aware of our collective attitude constituted for one small
+spectator at least a great initiation; he got his first glimpse of that
+possibility of a "free play of mind" over a subject which was to throw
+him with force at a later stage of culture, when subjects had
+considerably multiplied, into the critical arms of Matthew Arnold. So he
+is himself at least interested in seeing the matter--as a progress in
+which the first step was taken, before that crude scenic appeal, by his
+wondering, among his companions, where the absurd, the absurd for
+_them_, ended and the fun, the real fun, which was the gravity, the
+tragedy, the drollery, the beauty, the thing itself, briefly, might be
+legitimately and tastefully held to begin. Uncanny though the remark
+perhaps, I am not sure I wasn't thus more interested in the pulse of our
+party, under my tiny recording thumb, than in the beat of the drama and
+the shock of its opposed forces--vivid and touching as the contrast was
+then found for instance between the tragi-comical Topsy, the slave-girl
+clad in a pinafore of sackcloth and destined to become for Anglo-Saxon
+millions the type of the absolute in the artless, and her little
+mistress the blonde Eva, a figure rather in the Kenwigs tradition of
+pantalettes and pigtails, whom I recall as perching quite suicidally,
+with her elbows out and a preliminary shriek, on that bulwark of the
+Mississippi steamboat which was to facilitate her all but fatal
+immersion in the flood. Why should I have duly noted that no little
+game on her part could well less have resembled or simulated an
+accident, and yet have been no less moved by her reappearance, rescued
+from the river but perfectly dry, in the arms of faithful Tom, who had
+plunged in to save her, without either so much as wetting his shoes,
+than if I had been engaged with her in a reckless romp? I could count
+the white stitches in the loose patchwork, and yet could take it for a
+story rich and harmonious; I could know we had all intellectually
+condescended and that we had yet had the thrill of an aesthetic
+adventure; and this was a brave beginning for a consciousness that was
+to be nothing if not mixed and a curiosity that was to be nothing if not
+restless.
+
+The principle of this prolonged arrest, which I insist on prolonging a
+little further, is doubtless in my instinct to grope for our earliest
+aesthetic seeds. Careless at once and generous the hands by which they
+were sown, but practically appointed none the less to cause that
+peculiarly flurried hare to run--flurried because over ground so little
+native to it--when so many others held back. Is it _that_ air of romance
+that gilds for me then the Barnum background--taking it as a symbol;
+that makes me resist, to this effect of a passionate adverse loyalty,
+any impulse to translate into harsh terms any old sordidities and
+poverties? The Great American Museum, the down-town scenery and aspects
+at large, and even the up-town improvements on them, as then
+flourishing?--why, they must have been for the most part of the last
+meanness: the Barnum picture above all ignoble and awful, its blatant
+face or frame stuck about with innumerable flags that waved, poor
+vulgar-sized ensigns, over spurious relics and catchpenny monsters in
+effigy, to say nothing of the promise within of the still more monstrous
+and abnormal living--from the total impression of which things we
+plucked somehow the flower of the ideal. It grew, I must in justice
+proceed, much more sweetly and naturally at Niblo's, which represented
+in our scheme the ideal evening, while Barnum figured the ideal day; so
+that I ask myself, with that sense of our resorting there under the rich
+cover of night (which was the supreme charm,) how it comes that this
+larger memory hasn't swallowed up all others. For here, absolutely,
+_was_ the flower at its finest and grown as nowhere else--grown in the
+great garden of the Ravel Family and offered again and again to our deep
+inhalation. I see the Ravels, French acrobats, dancers and pantomimists,
+as representing, for our culture, pure grace and charm and civility; so
+that one doubts whether any candid community was ever so much in debt to
+a race of entertainers or had so happy and prolonged, so personal and
+grateful a relation with them. They must have been, with their
+offshoots of Martinettis and others, of three or four generations,
+besides being of a rich theatrical stock generally, and we had our
+particular friends and favourites among them; we seemed to follow them
+through every phase of their career, to assist at their tottering steps
+along the tight-rope as very small children kept in equilibrium by very
+big balancing-poles (caretakers here walking under in case of falls;) to
+greet them as Madame Axel, of robust maturity and in a Spanish costume,
+bounding on the same tense cord more heavily but more assuredly; and
+finally to know the climax of the art with them in Raoul or the
+Night-Owl and Jocko or the Brazilian Ape--and all this in the course of
+our own brief infancy. My impression of them bristles so with memories
+that we seem to have rallied to their different productions with much
+the same regularity with which we formed fresh educational connections;
+and they were so much our property and our pride that they supported us
+handsomely through all fluttered entertainment of the occasional Albany
+cousins. I remember how when one of these visitors, wound up, in honour
+of New York, to the very fever of perception, broke out one evening
+while we waited for the curtain to rise, "Oh don't you hear the cries?
+They're _beating_ them, I'm sure they are; can't it be stopped?" we
+resented the charge as a slur on our very honour; for what our romantic
+relative had heatedly imagined to reach us, in a hushed-up manner from
+behind, was the sounds attendant on the application of blows to some
+acrobatic infant who had "funked" his little job. Impossible such
+horrors in the world of pure poetry opened out to us at Niblo's, a
+temple of illusion, of tragedy and comedy and pathos that, though its
+_abords_ of stony brown Metropolitan Hotel, on the "wrong side," must
+have been bleak and vulgar, flung its glamour forth into Broadway. What
+more pathetic for instance, so that we publicly wept, than the fate of
+wondrous Martinetti Jocko, who, after befriending a hapless French
+family wrecked on the coast of Brazil and bringing back to life a small
+boy rescued from the waves (I see even now, with every detail, this
+inanimate victim supine on the strand) met his death by some cruel
+bullet of which I have forgotten the determinant cause, only remembering
+the final agony as something we could scarce bear and a strain of our
+sensibility to which our parents repeatedly questioned the wisdom of
+exposing us.
+
+These performers and these things were in all probability but of a
+middling skill and splendour--it was the pre-trapeze age, and we were
+caught by mild marvels, even if a friendly good faith in them, something
+sweet and sympathetic, was after all a value, whether of their own
+humanity, their own special quality, or only of our innocence, never to
+be renewed; but I light this taper to the initiators, so to call them,
+whom I remembered, when we had left them behind, as if they had given us
+a silver key to carry off and so to refit, after long years, to sweet
+names never thought of from then till now. Signor Leon Javelli, in whom
+the French and the Italian charm appear to have met, who was he, and
+what did he brilliantly do, and why of a sudden do I thus recall and
+admire him? I am afraid he but danced the tight-rope, the most domestic
+of our friends' resources, as it brought them out, by the far stretch of
+the rope, into the bosom of the house and against our very hearts, where
+they leapt and bounded and wavered and recovered closely face to face
+with us; but I dare say he bounded, brave Signor Leon, to the greatest
+height of all: let this vague agility, in any case, connect him with
+that revelation of the ballet, the sentimental-pastoral, of other years,
+which, in The Four Lovers for example, a pantomimic lesson as in words
+of one syllable, but all quick and gay and droll, would have affected us
+as classic, I am sure, had we then had at our disposal that term of
+appreciation. When we read in English story-books about the pantomimes
+in London, which somehow cropped up in them so often, those were the
+only things that didn't make us yearn; so much we felt we were masters
+of the type, and so almost sufficiently was that a stop-gap for London
+constantly deferred. We hadn't the transformation-scene, it was true,
+though what this really seemed to come to was clown and harlequin taking
+liberties with policemen--these last evidently a sharp note in a
+picturesqueness that we lacked, our own slouchy "officers" saying
+nothing to us of that sort; but we had at Niblo's harlequin and
+columbine, albeit of less pure a tradition, and we knew moreover all
+about clowns, for we went to circuses too, and so repeatedly that when I
+add them to our list of recreations, the good old orthodox circuses
+under tents set up in vacant lots, with which New York appears at that
+time to have bristled, time and place would seem to have shrunken for
+most other pursuits, and not least for that of serious learning. And the
+case is aggravated as I remember Franconi's, which we more or less
+haunted and which, aiming at the grander style and the monumental
+effect, blazed with fresh paint and rang with Roman chariot-races up
+there among the deserts of Twenty-ninth Street or wherever; considerably
+south, perhaps, but only a little east, of the vaster desolations that
+gave scope to the Crystal Palace, second of its name since,
+following--not _passibus aequis_, alas--the London structure of 1851,
+this enterprise forestalled by a year or two the Paris Palais de
+l'Industrie of 1855. Such as it was I feel again its majesty on those
+occasions on which I dragged--if I must here once more speak for myself
+only--after Albany cousins through its courts of edification: I remember
+being very tired and cold and hungry there, in a little light drab and
+very glossy or shiny "talma" breasted with rather troublesome
+buttonhole-embroideries; though concomitantly conscious that I was
+somehow in Europe, since everything about me had been "brought over,"
+which ought to have been consoling, and seems in fact to have been so in
+some degree, inasmuch as both my own pain and the sense of the cousinly,
+the Albany, headaches quite fade in that recovered presence of big
+European Art embodied in Thorwaldsen's enormous Christ and the
+Disciples, a shining marble company ranged in a semicircle of dark
+maroon walls. If this was Europe then Europe was beautiful indeed, and
+we rose to it on the wings of wonder; never were we afterwards to see
+great showy sculpture, in whatever profuse exhibition or of whatever
+period or school, without some renewal of that charmed Thorwaldsen hour,
+some taste again of the almost sugary or confectionery sweetness with
+which the great white images had affected us under their supper-table
+gaslight. The Crystal Palace was vast and various and dense, which was
+what Europe was going to be; it was a deep-down jungle of impressions
+that were somehow challenges, even as we might, helplessly defied, find
+foreign words and practices; over which formidably towered Kiss's
+mounted Amazon attacked by a leopard or whatever, a work judged at that
+day sublime and the glory of the place; so that I felt the journey back
+in the autumn dusk and the Sixth Avenue cars (established just in time)
+a relapse into soothing flatness, a return to the Fourteenth Street
+horizon from a far journey and a hundred looming questions that would
+still, tremendous thought, come up for all the personal answers of which
+one cultivated the seed.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+Let me hurry, however, to catch again that thread I left dangling from
+my glance at our small vague spasms of school--my personal sense of them
+being as vague and small, I mean, in contrast with the fuller and
+stronger cup meted out all round to the Albany cousins, much more
+privileged, I felt, in every stroke of fortune; or at least much more
+interesting, though it might be wicked to call them more happy, through
+those numberless bereavements that had so enriched their existence. I
+mentioned above in particular the enviable consciousness of our little
+red-headed kinsman Gus Barker, who, as by a sharp prevision, snatched
+what gaiety he might from a life to be cut short, in a cavalry dash, by
+one of the Confederate bullets of 1863: he blew out at us, on New York
+Sundays, as I have said, sharp puffs of the atmosphere of the
+Institution Charlier--strong to us, that is, the atmosphere of whose
+institutions was weak; but it was above all during a gregarious visit
+paid him in a livelier field still that I knew myself merely mother'd
+and brother'd. It had been his fate to be but scantly the latter and
+never at all the former--our aunt Janet had not survived his birth; but
+on this day of our collective pilgrimage to Sing-Sing, where he was at a
+"military" school and clad in a fashion that represented to me the very
+panoply of war, he shone with a rare radiance of privation. Ingenuous
+and responsive, of a social disposition, a candour of gaiety, that
+matched his physical activity--the most beautifully made athletic little
+person, and in the highest degree appealing and engaging--he not only
+did us the honours of his dazzling academy (dazzling at least to me) but
+had all the air of showing us over the great State prison which even
+then flourished near at hand and to which he accompanied us; a party of
+a composition that comes back to me as wonderful, the New York and
+Albany cousinships appearing to have converged and met, for the happy
+occasion, with the generations and sexes melting together and moving in
+a loose harmonious band. The party must have been less numerous than by
+the romantic tradition or confused notation of my youth, and what I
+mainly remember of it beyond my sense of our being at once an attendant
+train to my aged and gentle and in general most unadventurous
+grandmother, and a chorus of curiosity and amusement roundabout the
+vivid Gussy, is our collective impression that State prisons were on the
+whole delightful places, vast, bright and breezy, with a gay, free
+circulation in corridors and on stairs, a pleasant prevalence of hot
+soup and fresh crusty rolls, in tins, of which visitors admiringly
+partook, and for the latter, in chance corners and on sunny landings,
+much interesting light brush of gentlemen remarkable but for gentlemanly
+crimes--that is defalcations and malversations to striking and
+impressive amounts.
+
+I recall our coming on such a figure at the foot of a staircase and his
+having been announced to us by our conductor or friend in charge as
+likely to be there; and what a charm I found in his cool loose uniform
+of shining white (as I was afterwards to figure it,) as well as in his
+generally refined and distinguished appearance and in the fact that he
+was engaged, while exposed to our attention, in the commendable act of
+paring his nails with a smart penknife and that he didn't allow us to
+interrupt him. One of my companions, I forget which, had advised me that
+in these contacts with illustrious misfortune I was to be careful not to
+stare; and present to me at this moment is the wonder of whether he
+would think it staring to note that _he_ quite stared, and also that his
+hands were fine and fair and one of them adorned with a signet ring. I
+was to have later in life a glimpse of two or three dismal
+penitentiaries, places affecting me as sordid, as dark and dreadful; but
+if the revelation of Sing-Sing had involved the idea of a timely warning
+to the young mind my small sensibility at least was not reached by the
+lesson. I envied the bold-eyed celebrity in the array of a planter at
+his ease--we might have been _his_ slaves--quite as much as I envied
+Gussy; in connection with which I may remark here that though in that
+early time I seem to have been constantly eager to exchange my lot for
+that of somebody else, on the assumed certainty of gaining by the
+bargain, I fail to remember feeling jealous of such happier persons--in
+the measure open to children of spirit. I had rather a positive lack of
+the passion, and thereby, I suppose, a lack of spirit; since if jealousy
+bears, as I think, on what one sees one's companions able to do--as
+against one's own falling short--envy, as I knew it at least, was simply
+of what they _were_, or in other words of a certain sort of richer
+consciousness supposed, doubtless often too freely supposed, in them.
+They were so _other_--that was what I felt; and to _be_ other, other
+almost anyhow, seemed as good as the probable taste of the bright
+compound wistfully watched in the confectioner's window; unattainable,
+impossible, of course, but as to which just this impossibility and just
+that privation kept those active proceedings in which jealousy seeks
+relief quite out of the question. A platitude of acceptance of the poor
+actual, the absence of all vision of how in any degree to change it,
+combined with a complacency, an acuity of perception of alternatives,
+though a view of them as only through the confectioner's hard
+glass--that is what I recover as the nearest approach to an apology, in
+the soil of my nature, for the springing seed of emulation. I never
+dreamed of competing--a business having in it at the best, for my
+temper, if not for my total failure of temper, a displeasing ferocity.
+If competing was bad snatching was therefore still worse, and jealousy
+was a sort of spiritual snatching. With which, nevertheless, all the
+while, one might have been "like" So-and-So, who had such horizons. A
+helpless little love of horizons I certainly cherished, and could
+sometimes even care for my own. These always shrank, however, under
+almost any suggestion of a further range or finer shade in the purple
+rim offered to other eyes--and that is what I take for the restlessness
+of envy. It wasn't that I wished to change with everyone, with anyone at
+a venture, but that I saw "gifts" everywhere but as mine and that I
+scarce know whether to call the effect of this miserable or monstrous.
+It was the effect at least of self-abandonment--I mean to visions.
+
+There must have been on that occasion of the Sing-Sing day--which it
+deeply interests me to piece together--some state of connection for some
+of us with the hospitalities of Rhinebeck, the place of abode of the
+eldest of the Albany uncles--that is of the three most in our view; for
+there were two others, the eldest of all a half-uncle only, who formed a
+class quite by himself, and the very youngest, who, with lively
+interests of his own, had still less attention for us than either of his
+three brothers. The house at Rhinebeck and all its accessories (which
+struck our young sense as innumerable,) in especial the great bluff of
+the Hudson on which it stood, yields me images scarcely dimmed, though
+as the effect but of snatches of acquaintance; there at all events the
+gently-groaning--ever so gently and dryly--Albany grandmother, with the
+Albany cousins as to whom I here discriminate, her two adopted
+daughters, maturest and mildest of the general tribe, must have paused
+for a stay; a feature of which would be perhaps her juncture with the
+New York contingent, somewhere sociably achieved, for the befriending of
+juvenile Gussy. It shimmers there, the whole circumstance, with I scarce
+know what large innocence of charity and ease; the Gussy-pretext, for
+reunion, all so thin yet so important an appeal, the simplicity of the
+interests and the doings, the assumptions and the concessions, each
+to-day so touching, almost so edifying. We were surely all gentle and
+generous together, floating in such a clean light social order, sweetly
+proof against ennui--unless it be a bad note, as is conceivable, never,
+_never_ to feel bored--and thankful for the smallest aesthetic or
+romantic mercies. My vision loses itself withal in vaster
+connections--above all in my general sense of the then grand newness of
+the Hudson River Railroad; so far at least as its completion to Albany
+was concerned, a modern blessing that even the youngest of us were in a
+position to appraise. The time had been when the steamboat had to
+content us--and I feel how amply it must have done so as I recall the
+thrill of docking in dim early dawns, the whole hour of the Albany
+waterside, the night of huge strange paddling and pattering and
+shrieking and creaking once ended, and contrast with it all certain long
+sessions in the train at an age and in conditions when neither train nor
+traveller had suffered chastening; sessions of a high animation, as I
+recast them, but at the same time of mortal intensities of lassitude.
+The elements here indeed are much confused and mixed--I must have known
+that discipline of the hectic interest and the extravagant strain in
+relation to Rhinebeck only; an _etape_, doubtless, on the way to New
+York, for the Albany kinship, but the limit to our smaller patiences of
+any northward land-journey. And yet not the young fatigue, I repeat, but
+the state of easy wonder, is what most comes back: the stops too
+repeated, but perversely engaging; the heat and the glare too great, but
+the river, by the window, making reaches and glimpses, so that the
+great swing of picture and force of light and colour were themselves a
+constant adventure; the uncles, above all, too pre-eminent, too
+recurrent, to the creation of a positive soreness of sympathy, of
+curiosity, and yet constituting by their presence half the enlargement
+of the time. For the presence of uncles, incoherent Albany uncles, is
+somehow what most gives these hours their stamp for memory. I scarce
+know why, nor do I much, I confess, distinguish occasions--but I see
+what I see: the long, the rattling car of the old open native form and
+the old harsh native exposure; the sense of arrival forever postponed,
+qualified however also by that of having in my hands a volume of M.
+Arsene Houssaye, Philosophes et Comediennes, remarkably submitted by one
+of my relatives to my judgment. I see them always, the relatives, in
+slow circulation; restless and nervous and casual their note, not less
+than strikingly genial, but with vaguenesses, lapses, eclipses, that
+deprived their society of a tactless weight. They cheered us on, in
+their way; born optimists, clearly, if not logically determined ones,
+they were always reassuring and sustaining, though with a bright brevity
+that must have taken immensities, I think, for granted. They wore their
+hats slightly toward the nose, they strolled, they hung about, they
+reported of progress and of the company, they dropped suggestions, new
+magazines, packets of the edible deprecated for the immature; they
+figured in fine to a small nephew as the principal men of their time
+and, so far as the two younger and more familiar were concerned, the
+most splendid as to aspect and apparel. It was none the less to the
+least shining, though not essentially the least comforting, of this
+social trio that, if I rightly remember, I owed my introduction to the
+_chronique galante_ of the eighteenth century.
+
+There tags itself at any rate to the impression a flutter as of some
+faint, some recaptured, grimace for another of his kindly offices (which
+I associate somehow with the deck of a steamboat:) his production for
+our vague benefit of a literary classic, the Confessions, as he called
+our attention to them, of the celebrated "Rosseau" I catch again the
+echo of the mirth excited, to my surprise, by this communication, and
+recover as well my responsive advance toward a work that seemed so to
+promise; but especially have I it before me that some play of light
+criticism mostly attended, on the part of any circle, this speaker's
+more ambitious remarks. For all that, and in spite of oddities of
+appearance and type, it was Augustus James who spread widest, in default
+of towering highest, to my wistful view of the larger life, and who
+covered definite and accessible ground. This ground, the house and
+precincts of Linwood, at Rhinebeck, harboured our tender years, I
+surmise, but at few and brief moments; but it hadn't taken many of these
+to make it the image of an hospitality liberal as I supposed great
+social situations were liberal; suppositions on this score having in
+childhood (or at least they had in mine) as little as possible to do
+with dry data. Didn't Linwood bristle with great views and other
+glories, with gardens and graperies and black ponies, to say nothing of
+gardeners and grooms who were notoriously and quotedly droll; to say
+nothing, in particular, of our aunt Elizabeth, who had been Miss Bay of
+Albany, who was the mother of the fair and free young waltzing-women in
+New York, and who floats back to me through the Rhinebeck picture,
+aquiline but easy, with an effect of handsome highbrowed, high-nosed
+looseness, of dressing-gowns or streaming shawls (the dowdy, the
+delightful shawl of the period;) and of claws of bright benevolent steel
+that kept nipping for our charmed advantage: roses and grapes and
+peaches and currant-clusters, together with turns of phrase and scraps
+of remark that fell as by quite a like flash of shears. These are mere
+scrapings of gold-dust, but my mind owes her a vibration that, however
+tiny, was to insist all these years on _marking_--on figuring in a whole
+complex of picture and drama, the clearest note of which was that of
+worry and woe: a crisis prolonged, in deep-roofed outer galleries,
+through hot August evenings and amid the dim flare of open windows, to
+the hum of domesticated insects. All but inexpressible the part played,
+in the young mind naturally even though perversely, even though
+inordinately, arranged as a stage for the procession and exhibition of
+appearances, by matters all of a usual cast, contacts and impressions
+not arriving at the dignity of shocks, but happening to be to the taste,
+as one may say, of the little intelligence, happening to be such as the
+fond fancy could assimilate. One's record becomes, under memories of
+this order--and that is the only trouble--a tale of assimilations small
+and fine; out of which refuse, directly interesting to the
+subject-victim only, the most branching vegetations may be conceived as
+having sprung. Such are the absurdities of the poor dear inward
+life--when translated, that is, and perhaps ineffectually translated,
+into terms of the outward and trying at all to flourish on the lines of
+the outward; a reflection that might stay me here weren't it that I
+somehow feel morally affiliated, tied as by knotted fibres, to the
+elements involved.
+
+One of these was assuredly that my father had again, characteristically,
+suffered me to dangle; he having been called to Linwood by the dire
+trouble of his sister, Mrs. Temple, and brought me with him from Staten
+Island--I make the matter out as of the summer of '54. We had come up,
+he and I, to New York; but our doings there, with the journey following,
+are a blank to me; I recover but my sense, on our arrival, of being for
+the first time in the presence of tragedy, which the shining scene,
+roundabout, made more sinister--sharpened even to the point of my
+feeling abashed and irrelevant, wondering why I had come. My aunt, under
+her brother's roof, had left her husband, wasted with consumption, near
+death at Albany; gravely ill herself--she had taken the disease from him
+as it was taken in those days, and was in the event very scantly to
+survive him--she had been ordered away in her own interest, for which
+she cared no scrap, and my father, the person in all his family most
+justly appealed and most anxiously listened to, had been urged to come
+and support her in a separation that she passionately rejected. Vivid to
+me still, as floating across verandahs into the hot afternoon stillness,
+is the wail of her protest and her grief; I remember being scared and
+hushed by it and stealing away beyond its reach. I remember not less
+what resources of high control the whole case imputed, for my
+imagination, to my father; and how, creeping off to the edge of the
+eminence above the Hudson, I somehow felt the great bright harmonies of
+air and space becoming one with my rather proud assurance and
+confidence, that of my own connection, for life, for interest, with
+such sources of light. The great impression, however, the one that has
+brought me so far, was another matter: only that of the close,
+lamp-tempered, outer evening aforesaid, with my parent again, somewhere
+deep within, yet not too far to make us hold our breath for it, tenderly
+opposing his sister's purpose of flight, and the presence at my side of
+my young cousin Marie, youngest daughter of the house, exactly of my own
+age, and named in honour of her having been born in Paris, to the
+influence of which fact her shining black eyes, her small quickness and
+brownness, marking sharply her difference from her sisters, so oddly, so
+almost extravagantly testified. It had come home to me by some voice of
+the air that she was "spoiled," and it made her in the highest degree
+interesting; we ourselves had been so associated, at home, without being
+in the least spoiled (I think we even rather missed it:) so that I knew
+about these subjects of invidious reflection only by literature--mainly,
+no doubt, that of the nursery--in which they formed, quite by
+themselves, a romantic class; and, the fond fancy always predominant, I
+prized even while a little dreading the chance to see the condition at
+work. This chance was given me, it was clear--though I risk in my record
+of it a final anticlimax--by a remark from my uncle Augustus to his
+daughter: seated duskily in our group, which included two or three dim
+dependent forms, he expressed the strong opinion that Marie should go to
+bed--expressed it, that is, with the casual cursory humour that was to
+strike me as the main expressional resource of outstanding members of
+the family and that would perhaps have had under analysis the defect of
+making judgment very personal without quite making authority so.
+Authority they hadn't, of a truth, these all so human outstanding ones;
+they made shift but with light appreciation, sudden suggestion, a
+peculiar variety of happy remark in the air. It had been remarked but in
+the air, I feel sure, that Marie should seek her couch--a truth by the
+dark wing of which I ruefully felt myself brushed; and the words seemed
+therefore to fall with a certain ironic weight. What I have retained of
+their effect, at any rate, is the vague fact of some objection raised by
+my cousin and some sharper point to his sentence supplied by her father;
+promptly merged in a visible commotion, a flutter of my young companion
+across the gallery as for refuge in the maternal arms, a protest and an
+appeal in short which drew from my aunt the simple phrase that was from
+that moment so preposterously to "count" for me. "Come now, my dear;
+don't make a scene--I _insist_ on your not making a scene!" That was all
+the witchcraft the occasion used, but the note was none the less
+epoch-making. The expression, so vivid, so portentous, was one I had
+never heard--it had never been addressed to us at home; and who should
+say now what a world one mightn't at once read into it? It seemed
+freighted to sail so far; it told me so much about life. Life at these
+intensities clearly became "scenes"; but the great thing, the immense
+illumination, was that we could make them or not as we chose. It was a
+long time of course before I began to distinguish between those within
+our compass more particularly as spoiled and those producible on a
+different basis and which should involve detachment, involve presence of
+mind; just the qualities in which Marie's possible output was apparently
+deficient. It didn't in the least matter accordingly whether or no a
+scene _was_ then proceeded to--and I have lost all count of what
+immediately happened. The mark had been made for me and the door flung
+open; the passage, gathering up _all_ the elements of the troubled time,
+had been itself a scene, quite enough of one, and I had become aware
+with it of a rich accession of possibilities.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+It must have been after the Sing-Sing episode that Gussy came to us, in
+New York, for Sundays and holidays, from scarce further off than round
+the corner--his foreign Institution flourishing, I seem to remember, in
+West Tenth Street or wherever--and yet as floated by exotic airs and
+with the scent of the spice-islands hanging about him. He was being
+educated largely with Cubans and Mexicans, in those New York days more
+than half the little flock of the foreign Institutions in general; over
+whom his easy triumphs, while he wagged his little red head for them,
+were abundantly credible; reinforced as my special sense of them was
+moreover by the similar situation of his sister, older than he but also
+steeped in the exotic medium and also sometimes bringing us queer echoes
+of the tongues. I remember being deputed by my mother to go and converse
+with her, on some question of her coming to us, at the establishment of
+Madame Reichhardt (pronounced, a la francaise, Rechard,) where I felt
+that I had crossed, for the hour, the very threshold of "Europe"; it
+being impressed on me by my cousin, who was tall and handsome and happy,
+with a laugh of more beautiful sound than any laugh we were to know
+again, that French only was speakable on the premises. I sniffed it up
+aromatically, the superior language, in passage and parlour--it took the
+form of some strong savoury soup, an educational _potage Rechard_ that
+must excellently have formed the taste: that was again, I felt as I came
+away, a part of the rich experience of being thrown in tender juvenile
+form upon the world. This genial girl, like her brother, was in the
+grand situation of having no home and of carrying on life, such a
+splendid kind of life, by successive visits to relations; though neither
+she nor Gussy quite achieved the range of their elder brother, "Bob" of
+that ilk, a handsome young man, a just blurred, attractive, illusive
+presence, who hovered a bit beyond our real reach and apparently
+displayed the undomesticated character at its highest. _He_ seemed
+exposed, for his pleasure--if pleasure it was!--and my wonder, to every
+assault of experience; his very name took on, from these imputations, a
+browner glow; and it was all in the right key that, a few years later,
+he should, after "showing some talent for sculpture," have gone the
+hapless way of most of the Albany youth, have become a theme for sad
+vague headshakes (kind and very pitying in his case) and died
+prematurely and pointlessly, or in other words, by my conception,
+picturesquely. The headshakes were heavier and the sighs sharper for
+another slim shade, one of the younger and I believe quite the most
+hapless of those I have called the outstanding ones; he too, several
+years older than we again, a tormenting hoverer and vanisher; he too
+charmingly sister'd, though sister'd only, and succumbing to monstrous
+early trouble after having "shown some talent" for music. The
+ghostliness of these aesthetic manifestations, as I allude to them, is
+the thinnest conceivable chip of stray marble, the faintest far-off
+twang of old chords; I ask myself, for the odd obscurity of it, under
+what inspiration music and sculpture may have tinkled and glimmered to
+the Albany ear and eye (as we at least knew those organs) and with what
+queer and weak delusions our unfortunates may have played. Quite
+ineffably quaint and _falot_ this proposition of _that_ sort of resource
+for the battle of life as it then and there opened; and above all
+beautifully suggestive of our sudden collective disconnectedness (ours
+as the whole kinship's) from _the_ American resource of those days,
+Albanian or other. That precious light was the light of "business" only;
+and we, by a common instinct, artlessly joining hands, went forth into
+the wilderness without so much as a twinkling taper.
+
+Our consensus, on all this ground, was amazing--it brooked no exception;
+the word had been passed, all round, that we didn't, that we couldn't
+and shouldn't, understand these things, questions of arithmetic and of
+fond calculation, questions of the counting-house and the market; and we
+appear to have held to our agreement as loyally and to have accepted our
+doom as serenely as if our faith had been mutually pledged. The rupture
+with my grandfather's tradition and attitude was complete; we were never
+in a single case, I think, for two generations, guilty of a stroke of
+business; the most that could be said of us was that, though about
+equally wanting, all round, in any faculty of acquisition, we happened
+to pay for the amiable weakness less in some connections than in others.
+The point was that we moved so oddly and consistently--as it was our
+only form of consistency--over our limited pasture, never straying to
+nibble in the strange or the steep places. What was the matter with us
+under this spell, and what the moral might have been for our case, are
+issues of small moment, after all, in face of the fact of our mainly so
+brief duration. It was given to but few of us to be taught by the event,
+to be made to wonder with the last intensity what _had_ been the matter.
+This it would be interesting to worry out, might I take the time; for
+the story wouldn't be told, I conceive, by any mere rueful glance at
+other avidities, the preference for ease, the play of the passions, the
+appetite for pleasure. These things have often accompanied the business
+imagination; just as the love of life and the love of other persons, and
+of many of the things of the world, just as quickness of soul and sense,
+have again and again not excluded it. However, it comes back, as I have
+already hinted, to the manner in which the "things of the world" could
+but present themselves; there were not enough of these, and they were
+not fine and fair enough, to engage happily so much unapplied, so much
+loose and crude attention. We hadn't doubtless at all a complete play of
+intelligence--if I may not so far discriminate as to say _they_ hadn't;
+or our lack of the instinct of the market needn't have been so much
+worth speaking of: other curiosities, other sympathies might have
+redressed the balance. I make out our young cousin J. J. as dimly aware
+of this while composing the light melodies that preluded to his
+extinction, and which that catastrophe so tried to admonish us to think
+of as promising; but his image is more present to me still as the great
+incitement, during the few previous years, to our constant dream of
+"educational" relief, of some finer kind of social issue, through
+Europe.
+
+It was to Europe J. J. had been committed; he was over there forging the
+small apologetic arms that were so little to avail him, but it was quite
+enough for us that he pointed the way to the Pension Sillig, at Vevey,
+which shone at us, from afar, as our own more particular solution. It
+was true that the Pension Sillig figured mainly as the solution in cases
+of recognised wildness; there long flourished among New York parents
+whose view of such resources had the proper range a faith in it for that
+complaint; and it was as an act of faith that, failing other remedies,
+our young wifeless uncle, conscious himself of no gift for control or
+for edification, had placed there his difficult son. He returned with
+delight from this judicious course and there was an hour when we
+invoked, to intensity, a similar one in our own interest and when the
+air of home did little but reflect from afar the glitter of blue Swiss
+lakes, the tinkle of cattle-bells in Alpine pastures, the rich
+_bonhomie_ that M. Sillig, dispensing an education all of milk and honey
+and edelweiss and ranz-des-vaches, combined with his celebrated firmness
+for tough subjects. Poor J. J. came back, I fear, much the same subject
+that he went; but he had verily performed his scant office on earth,
+that of having brought our then prospect, our apparent possibility, a
+trifle nearer. He seemed to have been wild even beyond M. Sillig's
+measure--which was highly disappointing; but if we might on the other
+hand be open to the reproach of falling too short of it there were
+establishments adapted to every phase of the American predicament; so
+that our general direction could but gain in vividness. I think with
+compassion, altogether, of the comparative obscurity to which our
+eventual success in gathering the fruits, few and scant though they
+might be, thus relegates those to whom it was given but to toy so
+briefly with the flowers. They make collectively their tragic trio: J.
+J. the elder, most loved, most beautiful, most sacrificed of the Albany
+uncles; J. J. the younger--they were young together, they were luckless
+together, and the combination was as strange as the disaster was
+sweeping; and the daughter and sister, amplest of the "natural," easiest
+of the idle, who lived on to dress their memory with every thread and
+patch of her own perfect temper and then confirm the tradition, after
+all, by too early and woeful an end.
+
+If it comes over me under the brush of multiplied memories that we might
+well have invoked the educational "relief" I just spoke of, I should
+doubtless as promptly add that my own case must have been intrinsically
+of the poorest, and indeed make the point once for all that I should be
+taken as having seen and felt much of the whole queerness through the
+medium of rare inaptitudes. I can only have been inapt, I make out, to
+have retained so positively joyless a sense of it all, to be aware of
+most of it now but as dim confusion, as bewildered anxiety. There was
+interest always, certainly--but it strikes me to-day as interest in
+everything that wasn't supposedly or prescriptively of the question at
+all, and in nothing that _was_ so respectably involved and accredited.
+Without some sharpness of interest I shouldn't now have the memories;
+but these stick to me somehow with none of the hard glue of recovered
+"spirits," recovered vivacities, assurances, successes. I can't have
+had, through it all, I think, a throb of assurance or success; without
+which, at the same time, absurdly and indescribably, I lived and
+wriggled, floundered and failed, lost the clue of everything but a
+general lucid consciousness (lucid, that is, for my tender years;) which
+I clutched with a sense of its value. What happened all the while, I
+conceive, was that I imagined things--and as if quite on system--wholly
+other than as they were, and so carried on in the midst of the actual
+ones an existence that somehow floated and saved me even while cutting
+me off from any degree of direct performance, in fact from any degree of
+direct participation, at all. _There_ presumably was the interest--in
+the intensity and plausibility and variety of the irrelevance: an
+irrelevance which, for instance, made all pastors and masters, and
+especially all fellow-occupants of benches and desks, all elbowing and
+kicking presences within touch or view, so many monsters and horrors, so
+many wonders and splendours and mysteries, but never, so far as I can
+recollect, realities of relation, dispensers either of knowledge or of
+fate, playmates, intimates, mere coaevals and coequals. They were
+something better--better above all than the coequal or coaeval; they were
+so thoroughly figures and characters, divinities or demons, and endowed
+in this light with a vividness that the mere reality of relation, a
+commoner directness of contact, would have made, I surmise,
+comparatively poor. This superior shade of interest was not, none the
+less, so beguiling that I recall without unmitigated horror, or
+something very like it, a winter passed with my brother at the
+Institution Vergnes; our sorry subjection to which argues to my present
+sense an unmitigated surrounding aridity. To a "French school" must have
+been earnestly imputed the virtue of keeping us in patience till easier
+days should come; infinitely touching our parents' view of that New York
+fetish of our young time, an "acquisition of the languages"--an
+acquisition reinforcing those opportunities which we enjoyed at home, so
+far as they mustered, and at which I have briefly glanced. Charming and
+amusing to me indeed certain faint echoes, wavering images, of this
+superstition as it played about our path: ladies and gentlemen, dimly
+foreign, mere broken syllables of whose names come back to me, attending
+there to converse in tongues and then giving way to others through
+failures of persistence--whether in pupils or preceptors I know not.
+There hovers even Count Adam Gurowski, Polish, patriotic, exiled,
+temporarily famous, with the vision of _his_ being invoked for facility
+and then relinquished for difficulty; though I scarce guess on which of
+his battle-grounds--he was so polyglot that he even had a rich command
+of New Yorkese.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+It is to the Institution Vergnes that my earliest recovery of the sense
+of being in any degree "educated with" W. J. attaches itself; an
+establishment which occupied during the early 'fifties a site in the
+very middle of Broadway, of the lower, the real Broadway, where it could
+throb with the very pulse of the traffic in which we all innocently
+rejoiced--believing it, I surmise, the liveliest conceivable: a fact
+that is by itself, in the light of the present, an odd rococo note. The
+lower Broadway--I allude to the whole Fourth Street and Bond Street
+(where now _is_ the Bond Street of that antiquity?)--was then a seat of
+education, since we had not done with it, as I shall presently show,
+even when we had done with the Institution, a prompt disillusionment;
+and I brood thus over a period which strikes me as long and during which
+my personal hours of diligence were somehow more than anything else
+hours of the pavement and the shopfront, or of such contemplative
+exercise as the very considerable distance, for small legs, between
+those regions and the westward Fourteenth Street might comprise.
+Pedestrian gaping having been in childhood, as I have noted,
+prevailingly my line, fate appeared to have kindly provided for it on no
+small scale; to the extent even that it must have been really my sole
+and single form of athletics. Vague heated competition and agitation in
+the then enclosed Union Square would seem to point a little, among us
+all, to nobler types of motion; but of any basis for recreation,
+anything in the nature of a playground or a breathing-space, the
+Institution itself was serenely innocent. This I take again for a note
+extraordinarily mediaeval. It occupied the first and second floors, if I
+rightly remember, of a wide front that, overhanging the endless
+thoroughfare, looked out on bouncing, clattering "stages" and painfully
+dragged carts and the promiscuous human shuffle--the violence of
+repercussions from the New York pavement of those years to be further
+taken into account; and I win it back from every side as, in spite of
+these aspects of garish publicity, a dark and dreadful, and withal quite
+absurd, scene. I see places of that general time, even places of
+confinement, in a dusty golden light that special memories of small
+misery scarce in the least bedim, and this holds true of our next and
+quite neighbouring refuge; the establishment of M. Vergnes alone darkles
+and shrinks to me--a sordidly _black_ interior is my main image for it;
+attenuated only by its having very soon afterwards, as a suffered
+ordeal, altogether lapsed and intermitted. Faintly, in the gloom, I
+distinguish M. Vergnes himself--quite "old," very old indeed as I
+supposed him, and highly irritated and markedly bristling; though of
+nothing in particular that happened to me at his or at anyone's else
+hands have I the scantest remembrance. What really most happened no
+doubt, was that my brother and I should both come away with a mind
+prepared for a perfect assimilation of Alphonse Daudet's chronicle of
+"Jack," years and years later on; to make the acquaintance in that work
+of the "petits pays chauds" among whom Jack learnt the first lessons of
+life was to see the Institution Vergnes at once revive, swarming as it
+did with small homesick Cubans and Mexicans; the complete failure of
+blondness that marks the memory is doubtless the cumulative effect of so
+many of the New York "petits pays chauds," preponderantly brown and
+black and conducing to a greasy gloom. Into this gloom I fear I should
+see all things recede together but for a certain salient note, the fact
+that the whole "staff" appears to have been constantly in a rage; from
+which naturally resulted the accent of shrillness (the only accent we
+could pick up, though we were supposed to be learning, for the extreme
+importance of it, quantities of French) and the sound of high
+vociferation. I remember infuriated ushers, of foreign speech and
+flushed complexion--the tearing across of hapless "exercises" and
+_dictees_ and the hurtle through the air of dodged volumes; only never,
+despite this, the extremity of smiting. There can have been at the
+Institution no blows instructionally dealt--nor even from our hours of
+ease do any such echoes come back to me. Little Cubans and Mexicans, I
+make out, were not to be vulgarly whacked--in deference, presumably, to
+some latent relic or imputed survival of Castilian pride; which would
+impose withal considerations of quite practical prudence. Food for
+reflection and comparison might well have been so suggested; interesting
+at least the element of contrast between such opposed conceptions of
+tone, temper and manner as the passion without whacks, or with whacks
+only of inanimate objects, ruling the scene I have described, and the
+whacks without passion, the grim, impersonal, strictly penal
+applications of the rod, which then generally represented what was still
+involved in our English tradition. It was the two theories of
+sensibility, of personal dignity, that so diverged; but with such other
+divergences now on top of those that the old comparison falls away. We
+to-day go unwhacked altogether--though from a pride other than
+Castilian: it is difficult to say at least what ideal has thus
+triumphed. In the Vergnes air at any rate I seem myself to have sat
+unscathed and unterrified--not alarmed even by so much as a call to the
+blackboard; only protected by my insignificance, which yet covered such
+a sense of our dusky squalor. Queer for us the whole affair, assuredly;
+but how much queerer for the poor petits pays chauds who had come so far
+for their privilege. _We_ had come, comparatively, but from round the
+corner--and that left the "state of education" and the range of
+selection all about as quaint enough. What could these things then have
+been in the various native climes of the petits pays chauds?
+
+It was by some strong wave of reaction, clearly, that we were floated
+next into the quieter haven of Mr. Richard Pulling Jenks--where cleaner
+waters, as I feel their coolness still, must have filled a neater
+though, it was true, slightly more contracted trough. Yet the range of
+selection had been even on this higher plane none too strikingly
+exemplified; our jumping had scant compass--we still grubbed with a good
+conscience in Broadway and sidled about Fourth Street. But I think of
+the higher education as having there, from various causes, none the less
+begun to glimmer for us. A diffused brightness, a kind of high
+crosslight of conflicting windows, rests for me at all events on the
+little realm of Mr. Pulling Jenks and bathes it as with positively sweet
+limitations. Limited must it have been, I feel, with our couple of
+middling rooms, front and back, our close packing, our large
+unaccommodating stove, our grey and gritty oilcloth, and again our
+importunate Broadway; from the aggregation of which elements there
+distils itself, without my being able to account for it, a certain
+perversity of romance. I speak indeed here for myself in particular, and
+keen for romance must I have been in such conditions, I admit; since the
+sense of it had crept into a recreational desert even as utter as that
+of the Institution Vergnes. Up out of Broadway we still scrambled--I can
+smell the steep and cold and dusty wooden staircase; straight into
+Broadway we dropped--I feel again the generalised glare of liberation;
+and I scarce know what tenuity of spirit it argues that I should neither
+have enjoyed nor been aware of missing (speaking again for myself only)
+a space wider than the schoolroom floor to react and knock about in. I
+literally conclude that we must have knocked about in Broadway, and in
+Broadway alone, like perfect little men of the world; we must have been
+let loose there to stretch our legs and fill our lungs, without
+prejudice either to our earlier and later freedoms of going and coming.
+I as strictly infer, at the same time, that Broadway must have been then
+as one of the alleys of Eden, for any sinister contact or consequence
+involved for us; a circumstance that didn't in the least interfere, too,
+as I have noted, with its offer of an entrancing interest. The interest
+verily could have been a _calculated_ thing on the part of our dear
+parents as little as on that of Mr. Jenks himself. Therefore let it be
+recorded as still most odd that we should all have assented to such
+deficiency of landscape, such exiguity of sport. I take the true
+inwardness of the matter to have been in our having such short hours,
+long as they may have appeared at the time, that the day left margin at
+the worst for private inventions. I think we found landscape, for
+ourselves--and wherever I at least found vision I found such sport as I
+was capable of--even between the front and back rooms and the
+conflicting windows; even by the stove which somehow scorched without
+warming, and yet round which Mr. Coe and Mr. Dolmidge, the
+drawing-master and the writing-master, arriving of a winter's day, used
+notedly, and in the case of Mr. Coe lamentedly, to draw out their
+delays. Is the dusty golden light of retrospect in this connection an
+effluence from Mr. Dolmidge and Mr. Coe, whose ministrations come back
+to me as the sole directly desired or invoked ones I was to know in my
+years, such as they were, of pupilage?
+
+I see them in any case as old-world images, figures of an antique stamp;
+products, mustn't they have been, of an order in which some social
+relativity or matter-of-course adjustment, some transmitted form and
+pressure, were still at work? Mr. Dolmidge, inordinately lean,
+clean-shaved, as was comparatively uncommon then, and in a
+swallow-tailed coat and I think a black satin stock, was surely perfect
+in his absolutely functional way, a pure pen-holder of a man, melancholy
+and mild, who taught the most complicated flourishes--great scrolls of
+them met our view in the form of surging seas and beaked and beady-eyed
+eagles, the eagle being so calligraphic a bird--while he might just have
+taught resignation. He was not at all funny--no one out of our immediate
+family circle, in fact almost no one but W. J. himself, who flowered in
+every waste, seems to have struck me as funny in those years; but he was
+to remain with me a picture of somebody in Dickens, one of the Phiz if
+not the Cruikshank pictures. Mr. Coe was another affair, bristling with
+the question of the "hard," but somehow too with the revelation of the
+soft, the deeply attaching; a worthy of immense stature and presence,
+crowned as with the thick white hair of genius, wearing a great gathered
+or puckered cloak, with a vast velvet collar, and resembling, as he
+comes back to me, the General Winfield Scott who lived so much in our
+eyes then. The oddity may well even at that hour have been present to me
+of its taking so towering a person to produce such small
+"drawing-cards"; it was as if some mighty bird had laid diminutive eggs.
+Mr. Coe, of a truth, laid his all over the place, and though they were
+not of more than handy size--very small boys could set them up in state
+on very small desks--they had doubtless a great range of number and
+effect. They were scattered far abroad and I surmise celebrated; they
+represented crooked cottages, feathery trees, browsing and bristling
+beasts and other rural objects; all rendered, as I recall them, in
+little detached dashes that were like stories told in words of one
+syllable, or even more perhaps in short gasps of delight. It must have
+been a stammering art, but I admired its fluency, which swims for me
+moreover in richer though slightly vague associations. Mr. Coe practised
+on a larger scale, in colour, in oils, producing wondrous neat little
+boards that make me to this day think of them and more particularly
+smell them, when I hear of a "panel" picture: a glamour of greatness
+attends them as brought home by W. J. from the master's own place of
+instruction in that old University building which partly formed the east
+side of Washington Square and figures to memory, or to fond imagination,
+as throbbing with more offices and functions, a denser chiaroscuro, than
+any reared hugeness of to-day, where character is so lost in quantity.
+Is there any present structure that plays such a part in proportion to
+its size?--though even as I ask the question I feel how nothing on earth
+is proportioned to present sizes. These alone are proportioned--and to
+mere sky-space and mere amount, amount of steel and stone; which is
+comparatively uninteresting. Perhaps our needs and our elements were
+then absurdly, were then provincially few, and that the patches of
+character in that small grey granite compendium were all we had in
+general to exhibit. Let me add at any rate that some of them were
+exhibitional--even to my tender years, I mean; since I respond even yet
+to my privilege of presence at some Commencement or Commemoration, such
+as might be natural, doubtless, to any "university," where, as under a
+high rich roof, before a Chancellor in a gown and amid serried admirers
+and impressive applause, there was "speaking," of the finest sort, and
+where above all I gathered in as a dazzling example the rare assurance
+of young Winthrop Somebody or Somebody Winthrop, who, though still in
+jackets, held us spellbound by his rendering of Serjeant Buzfuz's
+exposure of Mr. Pickwick. Long was I to marvel at the high sufficiency
+of young Winthrop Somebody or Somebody Winthrop--in which romantic
+impression it is perhaps after all (though with the consecration of one
+or two of the novels of the once-admired Theodore of that name, which so
+remarkably insists, thrown in) the sense of the place is embalmed.
+
+I must not forget indeed that I throw in also Mr. Coe--even if with
+less assured a hand; by way of a note on those higher flights of power
+and promise that I at this time began to see definitely determined in my
+brother. As I catch W. J.'s image, from far back, at its most
+characteristic, he sits drawing and drawing, always drawing, especially
+under the lamplight of the Fourteenth Street back parlour; and not as
+with a plodding patience, which I think would less have affected me, but
+easily, freely and, as who should say, infallibly: always at the stage
+of finishing off, his head dropped from side to side and his tongue
+rubbing his lower lip. I recover a period during which to see him at all
+was so to see him--the other flights and faculties removed him from my
+view. These were a matter of course--he recurred, he passed nearer, but
+in his moments of ease, and I clearly quite accepted the ease of his
+disappearances. Didn't he always when within my view light them up and
+justify them by renewed and enlarged vividness? so that my whole sense
+of him as formed for assimilations scarce conceivable made our gaps of
+contact too natural for me even to be lessons in humility. Humility had
+nothing to do with it--as little even as envy would have had; I was
+below humility, just as we were together outside of competition,
+mutually "hors concours." _His_ competitions were with others--in which
+how wasn't he, how could he not be, successful? while mine were with
+nobody, or nobody's with me, which came to the same thing, as heaven
+knows I neither braved them nor missed them. That winter, as I recover
+it, represents him as sufficiently within view to make his position or
+whereabouts in the upper air definite--I must have taken it for granted
+before, but could now in a manner measure it; and the freshness of this
+sense, something serene in my complacency, had to do, I divine, with the
+effect of our moving, with the rest of our company, which was not
+numerous but practically, but appreciably "select," on a higher and
+fairer plane than ever yet. Predominantly of course we owed this benefit
+to Richard Pulling himself; of whom I recall my brother's saying to me,
+at a considerably later time, and with an authority that affected me as
+absolute, that he had been of all our masters the most truly genial, in
+fact the only one to whom the art of exciting an interest or inspiring a
+sympathy could be in any degree imputed. I take this to have meant that
+he would have adorned a higher sphere--and it may have been, to explain
+his so soon swimming out of our ken, that into a higher sphere he
+rapidly moved; I can account at least for our falling away from him the
+very next year and declining again upon baser things and a lower
+civilisation but by some probability of his flight, just thereafter
+effected, to a greater distance, to one of the far upper reaches of the
+town. Some years must have elapsed and some distinction have crowned
+him when, being briefly in New York together, W. J. and I called on him
+of a Sunday afternoon, to find--what I hadn't been at all sure of--that
+he still quite knew who we were, or handsomely pretended to; handsomely
+in spite of his markedly confirmed identity of appearance with the
+Punch, husband to Judy, of the funny papers and the street show. Bald,
+rotund, of ruddy complexion, with the nose, the chin, the arched eye,
+the paunch and the _barbiche_, to say nothing of the ferule nursed in
+his arms and with which, in the show, such free play is made, Mr. Jenks
+yet seems to me to have preserved a dignity as well as projected an
+image, and in fact have done other things besides. He whacked
+occasionally--he must have been one of the last of the whackers; but I
+don't remember it as ugly or dreadful or droll--don't remember, that is,
+either directly feeling or reflectively enjoying it: it fails somehow to
+break the spell of our civilisation; my share in which, however, comes
+back to me as merely contemplative. It is beyond measure odd, doubtless,
+that my main association with my "studies," whether of the infant or the
+adolescent order, should be with almost anything but the fact of
+learning--of learning, I mean, what I was supposed to learn. I could
+only have been busy, at the same time, with other pursuits--which must
+have borne some superficial likeness at least to the acquisition of
+knowledge of a free irresponsible sort; since I remember few either of
+the inward pangs or the outward pains of a merely graceless state. I
+recognise at the same time that it was perhaps a sorry business to be so
+interested in one didn't know what. Such are, whether at the worst or at
+the best, some of the aspects of that season as Mr. Jenks's image
+presides; in the light of which I _may_ perhaps again rather wonder at
+my imputation to the general picture of so much amenity. Clearly the
+good man was a civiliser--whacks and all; and by some art not now to be
+detected. He was a complacent classic--which was what my brother's claim
+for him, I dare say, mostly represented; though that passed over the
+head of my tenth year. It was a good note for him in this particular
+that, deploring the facile text-books of Doctor Anthon of Columbia
+College, in which there was even more crib than text, and holding fast
+to the sterner discipline of Andrews and Stoddard and of that other more
+conservative commentator (he too doubtless long since superseded) whose
+name I blush to forget. I think in fine of Richard Pulling's small but
+sincere academy as a consistent little protest against its big and easy
+and quite out-distancing rival, the Columbia College school, apparently
+in those days quite the favourite of fortune.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+I must in some degree have felt it a charm there that we were not, under
+his rule, inordinately prepared for "business," but were on the contrary
+to remember that the taste of Cornelius Nepos in the air, even rather
+stale though it may have been, had lacked the black bitterness marking
+our next ordeal and that I conceive to have proceeded from some rank
+predominance of the theory and practice of book-keeping. It had
+consorted with this that we found ourselves, by I know not what
+inconsequence, a pair of the "assets" of a firm; Messrs. Forest and
+Quackenboss, who carried on business at the northwest corner of
+Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue, having for the winter of 1854-5
+taken our education in hand. As their establishment had the style, so I
+was conscious at the time of its having the general stamp and sense, of
+a shop--a shop of long standing, of numerous clients, of lively bustle
+and traffic. The structure itself was to my recent recognition still
+there and more than ever a shop, with improvements and extensions, but
+dealing in other wares than those anciently and as I suppose then quite
+freshly purveyed; so far at least as freshness was imputable to the
+senior member of the firm, who had come down to our generation from a
+legendary past and with a striking resemblance of head and general air
+to Benjamin Franklin. Mr. Forest, under whose more particular attention
+I languished, had lasted on from a plainer age and, having formed, by
+the legend, in their youth, the taste of two or three of our New York
+uncles--though for what it could have been goodness only knew--was still
+of a _trempe_ to whack in the fine old way at their nephews and sons. I
+see him aloft, benevolent and hard, mildly massive, in a black dress
+coat and trousers and a white neckcloth that should have figured, if it
+didn't, a frill, and on the highest rostrum of our experience, whence he
+comes back to me as the dryest of all our founts of knowledge, though
+quite again as a link with far-off manners and forms and as the most
+"historic" figure we had ever had to do with. W. J., as I distinguish,
+had in truth scarcely to do with him--W. J. lost again on upper floors,
+in higher classes, in real pursuits, and connecting me, in an indirect
+and almost deprecated manner, with a strange, curly, glossy, an anointed
+and bearded, Mr. Quackenboss, the junior partner, who conducted the
+classical department and never whacked--only sent down his subjects,
+with every confidence, to his friend. I make out with clearness that Mr.
+Forest was awful and arid, and yet that somehow, by the same stroke, we
+didn't, under his sway, go in terror, only went exceedingly in want;
+even if in want indeed of I scarce (for myself) know what, since it
+might well have been enough for me, in so resounding an air, to escape
+with nothing worse than a failure of thrill. If I didn't feel that
+interest I must clearly not have inspired it, and I marvel afresh, under
+these memories, at the few points at which I appear to have touched
+constituted reality. That, however, is a different connection
+altogether, and I read back into the one I have been noting much of the
+chill, or at least the indifference, of a foreseen and foredoomed
+detachment: it was during that winter that I began to live by
+anticipation in another world and to feel our uneasy connection with New
+York loosen beyond recovery. I remember for how many months, when the
+rupture took place, we had been to my particular consciousness virtually
+in motion; though I regain at the same time the impression of more
+experience on the spot than had marked our small previous history: this,
+however, a branch of the matter that I must for the moment brush aside.
+For it would have been meanwhile odd enough to hold us in arrest a
+moment--that quality of our situation that could suffer such elements as
+those I have glanced at to take so considerably the place of education
+as more usually and conventionally understood, and by that
+understanding more earnestly mapped out; a deficiency, in the whole
+thing, that I fail at all consistently to deplore, however--struck as I
+am with the rare fashion after which, in any small victim of life, the
+inward perversity may work.
+
+It works by converting to its uses things vain and unintended, to the
+great discomposure of their prepared opposites, which it by the same
+stroke so often reduces to naught; with the result indeed that one may
+most of all see it--so at least have I quite exclusively seen it, the
+little life out for its chance--as proceeding by the inveterate process
+of conversion. As I reconsider both my own and my brother's early
+start--even his too, made under stronger propulsions--it is quite for me
+as if the authors of our being and guardians of our youth had virtually
+said to us but one thing, directed our course but by one word, though
+constantly repeated: Convert, convert, convert! With which I have not
+even the sense of any needed appeal in us for further apprehension of
+the particular precious metal our chemistry was to have in view. I taste
+again in that pure air no ghost of a hint, for instance, that the
+precious metal was the refined gold of "success"--a reward of effort for
+which I remember to have heard at home no good word, nor any sort of
+word, ever faintly breathed. It was a case of the presumption that we
+should hear words enough abundantly elsewhere; so that any dignity the
+idea might claim was in the first place not worth insisting on, and in
+the second might well be overstated. We were to convert and convert,
+success--in the sense that was in the general air--or no success; and
+simply everything that should happen to us, every contact, every
+impression and every experience we should know, were to form our soluble
+stuff; with only ourselves to thank should we remain unaware, by the
+time our perceptions were decently developed, of the substance finally
+projected and most desirable. That substance might be just consummately
+Virtue, as a social grace and value--and as a matter furthermore on
+which pretexts for ambiguity of view and of measure were as little as
+possible called upon to flourish. This last luxury therefore quite
+failed us, and we understood no whit the less what was suggested and
+expected because of the highly liberal way in which the pill, if I may
+call it so, was gilded: it had been made up--to emphasise my image--in
+so bright an air of humanity and gaiety, of charity and humour. What I
+speak of is the medium itself, of course, that we were most immediately
+steeped in--I am glancing now at no particular turn of our young
+attitude in it, and I can scarce sufficiently express how little it
+could have conduced to the formation of prigs. Our father's prime
+horror was of _them_--he only cared for virtue that was more or less
+ashamed of itself; and nothing could have been of a happier whimsicality
+than the mixture in him, and in all his walk and conversation, of the
+strongest instinct for the human and the liveliest reaction from the
+literal. The literal played in our education as small a part as it
+perhaps ever played in any, and we wholesomely breathed inconsistency
+and ate and drank contradictions. The presence of paradox was so bright
+among us--though fluttering ever with as light a wing and as short a
+flight as need have been--that we fairly grew used to allow, from an
+early time, for the so many and odd declarations we heard launched, to
+the extent of happily "discounting" them; the moral of all of which was
+that we need never fear not to be good enough if we were only social
+enough: a splendid meaning indeed being attached to the latter term.
+
+Thus we had ever the amusement, since I can really call it nothing less,
+of hearing morality, or moralism, as it was more invidiously worded,
+made hay of in the very interest of character and conduct; these things
+suffering much, it seemed, by their association with the
+conscience--that is the _conscious_ conscience--the very home of the
+literal, the haunt of so many pedantries. Pedantries, on all this
+ground, were anathema; and if our dear parent had at all minded his not
+being consistent, and had entertained about us generally less
+passionate an optimism (not an easy but an arduous state in him
+moreover,) he might have found it difficult to apply to the promotion of
+our studies so free a suspicion of the inhumanity of Method. Method
+certainly never quite raged among us; but it was our fortune
+nevertheless that everything had its turn, and that such indifferences
+were no more pedantic than certain rigours might perhaps have been; of
+all of which odd notes of our situation there would, and possibly will,
+be more to say--my present aim is really but to testify to what most
+comes up for me to-day in the queer educative air I have been trying to
+breathe again. That definite reflection is that if we had not had in us
+to some degree the root of the matter no method, however confessedly or
+aggressively "pedantic," would much have availed for us; and that since
+we apparently did have it, deep down and inert in our small patches of
+virgin soil, the fashion after which it struggled forth was an
+experience as intense as any other and a record of as great a dignity.
+It may be asked me, I recognise, of the root of "what" matter I so
+complacently speak, and if I say "Why, of the matter of our having with
+considerable intensity _proved_ educable, or, if you like better,
+teachable, that is accessible to experience," it may again be retorted:
+"That won't do for a decent account of a young consciousness; for think
+of all the things that the failure of method, of which you make so
+light, didn't put into yours; think of the splendid economy of a
+real--or at least of a planned and attempted education, a 'regular
+course of instruction'--and then think of the waste involved in the so
+inferior substitute of which the pair of you were evidently victims." An
+admonition this on which I brood, less, however, than on the still other
+sense, rising from the whole retrospect, of my now feeling sure, of my
+having mastered the particular history of just that waste--to the point
+of its actually affecting me as blooming with interest, to the point
+even of its making me ask myself how in the world, if the question is of
+the injection of more things into the consciousness (as would seem the
+case,) mine could have "done" with more: thanks to its small trick,
+perhaps vicious I admit, of having felt itself from an early time almost
+uncomfortably stuffed. I see my critic, by whom I mean my representative
+of method at any price, take in this plea only to crush it with his
+confidence--that without the signal effects of method one must have had
+by an inexorable law to resort to shifts and ingenuities, and can
+therefore only have been an artful dodger more or less successfully
+dodging. I take full account of the respectability of the prejudice
+against one or two of the uses to which the intelligence may at a pinch
+be put--the criminal use in particular of falsifying its history, of
+forging its records even, and of appearing greater than the traceable
+grounds warrant. One can but fall back, none the less, on the particular
+_un_traceability of grounds--when it comes to that: cases abound so in
+which, with the grounds all there, the intelligence itself is not to be
+identified. I contend for nothing moreover but the lively interest of
+the view, and above all of the measure, of almost any mental history
+after the fact. Of less interest, comparatively, is that sight of the
+mind _before_--before the demonstration of the fact, that is, and while
+still muffled in theories and presumptions (purple and fine linen, and
+as such highly becoming though these be) of what shall prove best for
+it.
+
+Which doubtless too numerous remarks have been determined by my sense of
+the tenuity of some of my clues: I had begun to count our wavering steps
+from so very far back, and with a lively disposition, I confess, not to
+miss even the vaguest of them. I can scarce indeed overstate the
+vagueness that quite _had_ to attend a great number in presence of the
+fact that our father, caring for our spiritual decency unspeakably more
+than for anything else, anything at all that might be or might become
+ours, would have seemed to regard this cultivation of it as profession
+and career enough for us, had he but betrayed more interest in our
+mastery of _any_ art or craft. It was not certainly that the profession
+of virtue would have been anything less than abhorrent to him, but that,
+singular though the circumstance, there were times when he might have
+struck us as having after all more patience with it than with this, that
+or the other more technical thrifty scheme. Of the beauty of his
+dissimulated anxiety and tenderness on these and various other suchlike
+heads, however, other examples will arise; for I see him now as fairly
+afraid to recognise certain anxieties, fairly declining to dabble in the
+harshness of practical precautions or impositions. The effect of his
+attitude, so little thought out as shrewd or as vulgarly providential,
+but in spite of this so socially and affectionally founded, could only
+be to make life interesting to us at the worst, in default of making it
+extraordinarily "paying." He had a theory that it would somehow or other
+always be paying enough--and this much less by any poor conception of
+our wants (for he delighted in our wants and so sympathetically and
+sketchily and summarily wanted _for_ us) than by a happy and friendly,
+though slightly nebulous, conception of our resources. Delighting ever
+in the truth while generously contemptuous of the facts, so far as we
+might make the difference--the facts having a way of being many and the
+truth remaining but one--he held that there would always be enough;
+since the truth, the true truth, was never ugly and dreadful, and we
+didn't and wouldn't depart from it by any cruelty or stupidity (for he
+wouldn't have had us stupid,) and might therefore depend on it for due
+abundance even of meat and drink and raiment, even of wisdom and wit and
+honour. It is too much to say that our so preponderantly humanised and
+socialised adolescence was to make us look out for these things with a
+subtle indirectness; but I return to my proposition that there may still
+be a charm in seeing such hazards at work through a given, even if not
+in a systematised, case. My cases are of course given, so that economy
+of observation after the fact, as I have called it, becomes inspiring,
+not less than the amusement, or whatever it may be, of the question of
+what might happen, of what in point of fact did happen, to several very
+towny and domesticated little persons, who were confirmed in their
+towniness and fairly enriched in their sensibility, instead of being
+chucked into a scramble or exposed on breezy uplands under the she-wolf
+of competition and discipline. Perhaps any success that attended the
+experiment--which was really, as I have hinted, no plotted thing at all,
+but only an accident of accidents--proceeded just from the fact that the
+small subjects, a defeated Romulus, a prematurely sacrificed Remus, had
+in their very sensibility an asset, as we have come to say, a principle
+of life and even of "fun." Perhaps on the other hand the success would
+have been greater with less of that particular complication or
+facilitation and more of some other which I shall be at a loss to
+identify. What I find in my path happens to be the fact of the
+sensibility, and from the light it sheds the curious, as also the
+common, things that did from occasion to occasion play into it seem each
+to borrow a separate and vivifying glow.
+
+As at the Institution Vergnes and at Mr. Pulling Jenks's, however this
+might be, so at "Forest's," or in other words at the more numerous
+establishment of Messrs. Forest and Quackenboss, where we spent the
+winter of 1854, reality, in the form of multitudinous mates, was to have
+swarmed about me increasingly: at Forest's the prolonged roll-call in
+the morning, as I sit in the vast bright crowded smelly smoky room, in
+which rusty black stove-shafts were the nearest hint of architecture,
+bristles with names, Hoes and Havemeyers, Stokeses, Phelpses, Colgates
+and others, of a subsequently great New York salience. It was sociable
+and gay, it was sordidly spectacular, one was then, by an inch or two, a
+bigger boy--though with crushing superiorities in that line all round;
+and when I wonder why the scene was sterile (which was what I took it
+for at the worst) the reason glooms out again in the dreadful blight of
+arithmetic, which affected me at the time as filling all the air. The
+quantity imposed may not in fact have been positively gross, yet it is
+what I most definitely remember--not, I mean, that I have retained the
+dimmest notion of the science, but only of the dire image of our being
+in one way or another always supposedly addressed to it. I recall
+strange neighbours and deskfellows who, not otherwise too objectionable,
+were uncanny and monstrous through their possession, cultivation,
+imitation of ledgers, daybooks, double-entry, tall pages of figures,
+interspaces streaked with oblique ruled lines that weirdly "balanced,"
+whatever that might mean, and other like horrors. Nothing in truth is
+more distinct to me than the tune to which they were, without exception,
+at their ease on such ground--unless it be my general dazzled,
+humiliated sense, through those years, of the common, the baffling,
+mastery, all round me, of a hundred handy arts and devices. Everyone did
+things and had things--everyone knew how, even when it was a question of
+the small animals, the dormice and grasshoppers, or the hoards of food
+and stationery, that they kept in their desks, just as they kept in
+their heads such secrets for how to do sums--those secrets that I must
+even then have foreseen I should even so late in life as this have
+failed to discover. I may have known things, have by that time learnt a
+few, myself, but I didn't know _that_--what I did know; whereas those
+who surrounded me were all agog, to my vision, with the benefit of their
+knowledge. I see them, in this light, across the years, fairly grin and
+grimace with it; and the presumable vulgarity of some of them, certain
+scattered shades of baseness still discernible, comes to me as but one
+of the appearances of an abounding play of genius. Who was it I ever
+thought stupid?--even when knowing, or at least feeling, that sundry
+expressions of life or force, which I yet had no name for, represented
+somehow art without grace, or (what after a fashion came to the same
+thing) presence without type. All of which, I should add, didn't in the
+least prevent my moving on the plane of the remarkable; so that if, as I
+have noted, the general blank of consciousness, in the conditions of
+that winter, rather tended to spread, this could perhaps have but had
+for its best reason that I was fairly gorged with wonders. They were too
+much of the same kind; the result, that is, of everyone's seeming to
+know everything--to the effect, a little, that everything suffered by
+it. There was a boy called Simpson my juxtaposition to whom I recall as
+uninterruptedly close, and whose origin can only have been, I think,
+quite immediately Irish--and Simpson, I feel sure, was a friendly and
+helpful character. Yet even he reeked, to my sense, with strange
+accomplishment--no single show of which but was accompanied in him by a
+smart protrusion of the lower lip, a crude complacency of power, that
+almost crushed me to sadness. It is as if I had passed in that sadness
+most of those ostensibly animated months; an effect however doubtless in
+some degree proceeding, for later appreciation, from the more
+intelligible nearness of the time--it had brought me to the end of my
+twelfth year; which helps not a little to turn it to prose. How I gave
+to that state, in any case, such an air of occupation as to beguile not
+only myself but my instructors--which I infer I did from their so
+intensely letting me alone--I am quite at a loss to say; I have in truth
+mainly the remembrance of _being_ consistently either ignored or
+exquisitely considered (I know not which to call it;) even if without
+the belief, which would explain it, that I passed for generally
+"wanting" any more than for naturally odious. It was strange, at all
+events--it could only have been--to be so stupid without being more
+brutish and so perceptive without being more keen. Here were a case and
+a problem to which no honest master with other and better cases could
+have felt justified in giving time; he would have had at least to be
+morbidly curious, and I recall from that sphere of rule no instance
+whatever of the least refinement of inquiry. I should even probably have
+missed one of these more flattering shades of attention had I missed
+attention at all; but I think I was never really aware of how little I
+got or how much I did without. I read back into the whole connection
+indeed the chill, or at least the indifference, of a foreseen and
+foredoomed detachment: I have noted how at this desperate juncture the
+mild forces making for our conscious relief, pushing the door to Europe
+definitely open, began at last to be effective. Nothing seemed to matter
+at all but that I should become personally and incredibly acquainted
+with Piccadilly and Richmond Park and Ham Common. I regain at the same
+time the impression of more experience on the spot than had marked our
+small previous history.
+
+Pitiful as it looks to these ampler days the mere little fact that a
+small court for recreation was attached to our academy added something
+of a grace to life. We descended in relays, for "intermission," into a
+paved and walled yard of the scantest size; the only provision for any
+such privilege--not counting the street itself, of which, at the worst
+of other conditions, we must have had free range--that I recover from
+those years. The ground is built over now, but I could still figure, on
+a recent occasion, our small breathing-space; together with my then
+abject little sense that it richly sufficed--or rather, positively, that
+nothing could have been more romantic. For within our limit we freely
+conversed, and at nothing did I assist with more interest than at free
+conversation. Certain boys hover before me, the biggest, the fairest,
+the most worthy of freedom, dominating the scene and scattering upon
+fifty subjects the most surprising lights. One of these heroes, whose
+stature and complexion are still there for me to admire, did tricks of
+legerdemain, with the scant apparatus of a handkerchief, a key, a
+pocket-knife--as to some one of which it is as fresh as yesterday that I
+ingenuously invited him to show me how to do it, and then, on his
+treating me with scorn, renewed without dignity my fond solicitation.
+Fresher even than yesterday, fadelessly fresh for me at this hour, is
+the cutting remark thereupon of another boy, who certainly wasn't
+Simpson and whose identity is lost for me in his mere inspired
+authority: "Oh, oh, oh, I should think you'd be too proud--!" I had
+neither been too proud nor so much as conceived that one might be, but I
+remember well how it flashed on me with this that I had failed thereby
+of a high luxury or privilege--which the whole future, however, might
+help me to make up for. To what extent it _has_ helped is another
+matter, but so fine was the force of the suggestion that I think I have
+never in all the years made certain returns upon my spirit without again
+feeling the pang from the cool little voice of the Fourteenth Street
+yard. Such was the moral exercise it at least allowed us room for. It
+also allowed us room, to be just, for an inordinate consumption of hot
+waffles retailed by a benevolent black "auntie" who presided, with her
+husband's aid as I remember, at a portable stove set up in a passage or
+recess opening from the court; to which we flocked and pushed, in a
+merciless squeeze, with all our coppers, and the products of which, the
+oblong farinaceous compound, faintly yet richly brown, stamped and
+smoking, not crisp nor brittle, but softly absorbent of the syrup dabbed
+upon it for a finish, revealed to me I for a long time, even for a very
+long time supposed, the highest pleasure of sense. We stamped about, we
+freely conversed, we ate sticky waffles by the hundred--I recall no
+worse acts of violence unless I count as such our intermissional rushes
+to Pynsent's of the Avenue, a few doors off, in the particular interest
+of a confection that ran the waffle close, as the phrase is, for
+popularity, while even surpassing it for stickiness. Pynsent's was
+higher up in the row in which Forest's had its front--other and dearer
+names have dropped from me, but Pynsent's adheres with all the force of
+the strong saccharine principle. This principle, at its highest, we
+conceived, was embodied in small amber-coloured mounds of chopped
+cocoanut or whatever other substance, if a finer there be; profusely,
+lusciously endued and distributed on small tin trays in the manner of
+haycocks in a field. We acquired, we appropriated, we transported, we
+enjoyed them, they fairly formed perhaps, after all, our highest
+enjoyment; but with consequences to our pockets--and I speak of those
+other than financial, with an intimacy, a reciprocity of contact at any,
+or at every, personal point, that I lose myself in the thought of.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+I lose myself, of a truth, under the whole pressure of the spring of
+memory proceeding from recent revisitings and recognitions--the action
+of the fact that time until lately had spared hereabouts, and may still
+be sparing, in the most exceptional way, by an anomaly or a mercy of the
+rarest in New York, a whole cluster of landmarks, leaving me to "spot"
+and verify, right and left, the smallest preserved particulars. These
+things, at the pressure, flush together again, interweave their pattern
+and quite thrust it at me, the absurd little fusion of images, for a
+history or a picture of the time--the background of which I see after
+all so much less as the harsh Sixth Avenue corner than as many other
+matters. Those scant shades claimed us but briefly and superficially,
+and it comes back to me that oddly enough, in the light of autumn
+afternoons, our associates, the most animated or at any rate the best
+"put in" little figures of our landscape, were not our comparatively
+obscure schoolmates, who seem mostly to have swum out of our ken between
+any day and its morrow. Our other companions, those we practically knew
+"at home," ignored our school, having better or worse of their own, but
+peopled somehow for us the social scene, which, figuring there for me in
+documentary vividness, bristles with Van Burens, Van Winkles, De
+Peysters, Costers, Senters, Norcoms, Robinsons (these last composing
+round a stone-throwing "Eugene,") Wards, Hunts and _tutti quanti_--to
+whose ranks I must add our invariable Albert, before-mentioned, and who
+swarm from up and down and east and west, appearing to me surely to have
+formed a rich and various society. Our salon, it is true, was mainly the
+street, loose and rude and crude in those days at best--though with a
+rapid increase of redeeming features, to the extent to which the spread
+of micaceous brown stone could redeem: as exhibited especially in the
+ample face of the Scotch Presbyterian church promptly rising just
+opposite our own peculiar row and which it now marks for me somewhat
+grimly a span of life to have seen laboriously rear itself, continuously
+flourish and utterly disappear. While in construction it was only less
+interesting than the dancing-academy of Mr. Edward Ferrero, slightly
+west of it and forming with it, in their embryonic stage, a large and
+delightfully dangerous adjunct to our playground, though with the
+distinction of coming much to surpass it for interest in the final
+phase. While we clambered about on ladders and toyed with the peril of
+unfloored abysses, while we trespassed and pried and pervaded,
+snatching a scant impression from sorry material enough, clearly, the
+sacred edifice enjoyed a credit beyond that of the profane; but when
+both were finished and opened we flocked to the sound of the fiddle more
+freely, it need scarce be said, than to that of the psalm. "Freely"
+indeed, in our particular case, scarce expresses the latter relation;
+since our young liberty in respect to church-going was absolute and we
+might range at will, through the great city, from one place of worship
+and one form of faith to another, or might on occasion ignore them all
+equally, which was what we mainly did; whereas we rallied without a
+break to the halls of Ferrero, a view of the staringly and, as I
+supposed dazzlingly, frescoed walls, the internal economy, the high
+amenity, the general aesthetic and social appeal, of which still hangs in
+its wealth before me. Dr. McElroy, uplifting tight-closed eyes, strange
+long-drawn accents and gaunt scraggy chin, squirming and swaying and
+cushion-thumping in _his_ only a shade more chastely adorned temple, is
+distinct enough too--just as we enjoyed this bleak intensity the more,
+to my personal vision, through the vague legend (and no legend was too
+vague for me to cherish) of his being the next pastor in succession to
+the one under whom our mother, thereto predirected by our good
+greatgrandfather, Alexander Robertson already named, who was nothing if
+not Scotch and Presbyterian and authoritative, as his brave old portrait
+by the elder Jarves attests, had "sat" before her marriage; the marriage
+so lamentedly diverting her indeed from this tradition that, to mark the
+rueful rupture, it had invoked, one evening, with the aid of India
+muslin and a wondrous gold headband, in the maternal, the Washington
+Square "parlours," but the secular nuptial consecration of the then
+Mayor of the city--I think Mr. Varick.
+
+We progeny were of course after this mild convulsion not at all in the
+fold; yet it strikes me as the happy note of a simple age that we were
+practically, of a Sunday at least, wherever we might have chosen to
+enter: since, going forth hand in hand into the sunshine (and I connect
+myself here with my next younger, not with my elder, brother, whose
+orbit was other and larger) we sampled, in modern phrase, as small
+unprejudiced inquirers obeying their inspiration, any resort of any
+congregation detected by us; doing so, I make out moreover, with a sense
+of earnest provision for any contemporary challenge. "What church do you
+go to?"--the challenge took in childish circles that searching form; of
+the form it took among our elders my impression is more vague. To which
+I must add as well that our "fending" in this fashion for ourselves
+didn't so prepare us for invidious remark--remark I mean upon our
+pewless state, which involved, to my imagination, much the same
+discredit that a houseless or a cookless would have done--as to hush in
+my breast the appeal to our parents, not for religious instruction (of
+which we had plenty, and of the most charming and familiar) but simply
+for instruction (a very different thing) as to where we should say we
+"went," in our world, under cold scrutiny or derisive comment. It was
+colder than any criticism, I recall, to hear our father reply that we
+could plead nothing less than the whole privilege of Christendom and
+that there was no communion, even that of the Catholics, even that of
+the Jews, even that of the Swedenborgians, from which we need find
+ourselves excluded. With the freedom we enjoyed our dilemma clearly
+amused him: it would have been impossible, he affirmed, to be
+theologically more _en regle_. How as mere detached unaccompanied
+infants we enjoyed such impunity of range and confidence of welcome is
+beyond comprehension save by the light of the old manners and
+conditions, the old local bonhomie, the comparatively primal innocence,
+the absence of complications; with the several notes of which last
+beatitude my reminiscence surely shines. It was the theory of the time
+and place that the young, were they but young enough, could take
+publicly no harm; to which adds itself moreover, and touchingly enough,
+all the difference of the old importances. It wasn't doubtless that the
+social, or call it simply the human, position of the child was higher
+than to-day--a circumstance not conceivable; it was simply that other
+dignities and values and claims, other social and human positions, were
+less definite and settled, less prescriptive and absolute. A rich
+sophistication is after all a gradual growth, and it would have been
+sophisticated to fear for us, before such bright and vacant vistas, the
+perils of the way or to see us received anywhere even with the irony of
+patronage. We hadn't in fact seats of honour, but that justice was done
+us--that is that we were placed to our advantage--I infer from my having
+liked so to "go," even though my grounds may have been but the love of
+the _exhibition_ in general, thanks to which figures, faces, furniture,
+sounds, smells and colours became for me, wherever enjoyed, and enjoyed
+most where most collected, a positive little orgy of the senses and riot
+of the mind. Let me at the same time make the point that--such may be
+the snobbery of extreme youth--I not only failed quite to rise to the
+parental reasoning, but made out in it rather a certain sophistry; such
+a prevarication for instance as if we had habitually said we kept the
+carriage we observably didn't keep, kept it because we sent when we
+wanted one to University Place, where Mr. Hathorn had his
+livery-stable: a connection, this last, promoted by my father's
+frequent need of the aid to circulate (his walks were limited through an
+injury received in youth) and promoting in turn and at a touch, to my
+consciousness, the stir of small, the smallest remembered things. I
+recall the adventure, no infrequent one, of being despatched to Mr.
+Hathorn to bespeak a conveyance, and the very air and odour, the genial
+warmth, at a fine steaming Irish pitch, of the stables and their
+stamping and backing beasts, their resounding boardedness, their chairs
+tipped up at such an angle for lifted heels, a pair of which latter seek
+the floor again, at my appeal, as those of big bearded Mr. Hathorn
+himself: an impression enriched by the drive home in lolling and bumping
+possession of the great vehicle and associated further with Sunday
+afternoons in spring, with the question of distant Harlem and remoter
+Bloomingdale, with the experience at one of these junctures of far-away
+Hoboken, if it wasn't Williamsburg, which fits in fancifully somewhere;
+when the carriage was reinforced by a ferry and the ferry by something,
+something to my present vision very dim and dusty and archaic, something
+quite ragged and graceless, in the nature of a public tea-garden and
+ices. The finest link here, however, is, for some reason, with the New
+York Hotel, and thereby with Albany uncles; thereby also with Mr.
+Hathorn in person waiting and waiting expensively on his box before the
+house and somehow felt as attuned to Albany uncles even as Mrs. Cannon
+had subtly struck me as being.
+
+Intenser than these vague shades meanwhile is my vision of the halls of
+Ferrero--where the orgy of the senses and even the riot of the mind, of
+which I have just spoken, must quite literally have led me more of a
+dance than anywhere. Let this sketch of a lost order note withal that
+under so scant a general provision for infant exercise, as distinguished
+from infant ease, our hopping and sliding in tune had to be deemed
+urgent. It was the sense for this form of relief that clearly was
+general, superseding as the ampler Ferrero scene did previous limited
+exhibitions; even those, for that matter, coming back to me in the
+ancient person of M. Charriau--I guess at the writing of his name--whom
+I work in but confusedly as a professional visitor, a subject gaped at
+across a gulf of fear, in one of our huddled schools; all the more that
+I perfectly evoke him as resembling, with a difference or two, the
+portraits of the aged Voltaire, and that he had, fiddle in hand and
+_jarret tendu_, incited the young agility of our mother and aunt. Edward
+Ferrero was another matter; in the prime of life, good-looking, romantic
+and moustachio'd, he was suddenly to figure, on the outbreak of the
+Civil War, as a General of volunteers--very much as if he had been one
+of Bonaparte's improvised young marshals; in anticipation of which,
+however, he wasn't at all fierce or superior, to my remembrance, but
+most kind to sprawling youth, in a charming man of the world fashion and
+as if _we_ wanted but a touch to become also men of the world.
+Remarkably good-looking, as I say, by the measure of that period, and
+extraordinarily agile--he could so gracefully leap and bound that his
+bounding into the military saddle, such occasion offering, had all the
+felicity, and only wanted the pink fleshings, of the circus--he was
+still more admired by the mothers, with whom he had to my eyes a most
+elegant relation, than by the pupils; among all of whom, at the frequent
+and delightful soirees, he caused trays laden with lucent syrups
+repeatedly to circulate. The scale of these entertainments, as I figured
+it, and the florid frescoes, just damp though they were with newness,
+and the free lemonade, and the freedom of remark, equally great, with
+the mothers, were the lavish note in him--just as the fact that he never
+himself fiddled, but was followed, over the shining parquet, by
+attendant fiddlers, represented doubtless a shadow the less on his later
+dignity, so far as that dignity was compassed. Dignity marked in full
+measure even at the time the presence of his sister Madame Dubreuil, a
+handsome authoritative person who instructed us equally, in fact
+preponderantly, and who, though comparatively not sympathetic, so
+engaged, physiognomically, my wondering interest, that I hear to this
+hour her shrill Franco-American accent: "Don't look at _me_, little
+boy--look at my feet." I see them now, these somewhat fat members,
+beneath the uplifted skirt, encased in "bronzed" slippers, without heels
+but attached, by graceful cross-bands over her white stockings, to her
+solid ankles--an emphatic sign of the time; not less than I recover my
+surprised sense of their supporting her without loss of balance,
+substantial as she was, in the "first position"; her command of which,
+her ankles clapped close together and her body very erect, was so
+perfect that even with her toes, right and left, fairly turning the
+corner backward, she never fell prone on her face.
+
+It consorted somehow with this wealth of resource in her that she
+appeared at the soirees, or at least at the great fancy-dress soiree in
+which the historic truth of my experience, free lemonade and all, is
+doubtless really shut up, as the "genius of California," a dazzling
+vision of white satin and golden flounces--her brother meanwhile
+maintaining that more distinctively European colour which I feel to have
+been for my young presumption the convincing essence of the scene in the
+character of a mousquetaire de Louis Quinze, highly consonant with his
+type. There hovered in the background a flushed, full-chested and
+tawnily short-bearded M. Dubreuil, who, as a singer of the heavy order,
+at the Opera, carried us off into larger things still--the Opera having
+at last about then, after dwelling for years, down town, in shifty tents
+and tabernacles, set up its own spacious pavilion and reared its head as
+the Academy of Music: all at the end, or what served for the end, of our
+very street, where, though it wasn't exactly near and Union Square
+bristled between, I could yet occasionally gape at the great bills
+beside the portal, in which M. Dubreuil always so serviceably came in at
+the bottom of the cast. A subordinate artist, a "grand utility" at the
+best, I believe, and presently to become, on that scene, slightly ragged
+I fear even in its freshness, permanent stage-manager or, as we say
+nowadays, producer, he had yet eminently, to my imagination, the richer,
+the "European" value; especially for instance when our air thrilled, in
+the sense that our attentive parents re-echoed, with the visit of the
+great Grisi and the great Mario, and I seemed, though the art of
+advertisement was then comparatively so young and so chaste, to see our
+personal acquaintance, as he could almost be called, thickly sandwiched
+between them. Such was one's strange sense for the connections of things
+that they drew out the halls of Ferrero till these too seemed fairly to
+resound with Norma and Lucrezia Borgia, as if opening straight upon the
+stage, and Europe, by the stroke, had come to us in such force that we
+had but to enjoy it on the spot. That could never have been more the
+case than on the occasion of my assuming, for the famous fancy-ball--not
+at the operatic Academy, but at the dancing-school, which came so nearly
+to the same thing--the dress of a debardeur, whatever that might be,
+which carried in its puckered folds of dark green relieved with scarlet
+and silver such an exotic fragrance and appealed to me by such a legend.
+The legend had come round to us, it was true, by way of Albany, whence
+we learned at the moment of our need, that one of the adventures, one of
+the least lamentable, of our cousin Johnny had been his figuring as a
+debardeur at some Parisian revel; the elegant evidence of which, neatly
+packed, though with but vague instructions for use, was helpfully sent
+on to us. The instructions for use were in fact so vague that I was
+afterward to become a bit ruefully conscious of having sadly
+dishonoured, or at least abbreviated, my model. I fell, that is I stood,
+short of my proper form by no less than half a leg; the essence of the
+debardeur being, it appeared, that he emerged at the knees, in white
+silk stockings and with neat calves, from the beribboned breeches which
+I artlessly suffered to flap at my ankles. The discovery, after the
+fact, was disconcerting--yet had been best made withal, too late; for
+it would have seemed, I conceive, a less monstrous act to attempt to
+lengthen my legs than to shorten Johnny's _culotte_. The trouble had
+been that we hadn't really known what a debardeur _was_, and I am not
+sure indeed that I know to this day. It had been more fatal still that
+even fond Albany couldn't tell us.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+I have nevertheless the memory of a restless relish of all that time--by
+which I mean of those final months of New York, even with so scant a
+record of other positive successes to console me. I had but one success,
+always--that of endlessly supposing, wondering, admiring: I was sunk in
+that luxury, which had never yet been so great, and it might well make
+up for anything. It made up perfectly, and more particularly as the
+stopgap as which I have already defined it, for the scantness of the
+period immediately round us; since how could I have wanted richer when
+the limits of reality, as I advanced upon them, seemed ever to recede
+and recede? It is true that but the other day, on the scene revisited, I
+was to be struck rather as by their weird immobility: there on the north
+side, still untenanted after sixty years, a tremendous span in the life
+of New York, was the vacant lot, undiminished, in which a friendly goat
+or two used to browse, whom we fed perversely with scraps of paper, just
+as perversely appreciated indeed, through the relaxed wooden palings.
+There hovers for me an impression of the glass roofs of a florist, a
+suffered squatter for a while; but florists and goats have alike
+disappeared and the barrenness of the place is as sordid as only
+untended gaps in great cities can seem. One of its boundaries, however,
+still breathes associations--the home of the Wards, the more eastward of
+a pair of houses then and still isolated has remained the same through
+all vicissitudes, only now quite shabbily mellow and, like everything
+else, much smaller than one had remembered it; yet this too without
+prejudice to the large, the lustrous part played in our prospect by that
+interesting family. I saddle their mild memory a bit "subjectively"
+perhaps with the burden of that character--making out that they were
+interesting really in spite of themselves and as unwittingly as M.
+Jourdain expressed himself in prose; owing their wild savour as they did
+to that New England stamp which we took to be strong upon them and no
+other exhibition of which we had yet enjoyed. It made them different,
+made them, in their homely grace, rather aridly romantic: I pored in
+those days over the freshness of the Franconia Stories of the brothers
+Abbott, then immediately sequent to the sweet Rollo series and even more
+admired; and there hung about the Wards, to my sense, that atmosphere of
+apples and nuts and cheese, of pies and jack-knives and "squrruls," of
+domestic Bible-reading and attendance at "evening lecture," of the fear
+of parental discipline and the cultivated art of dodging it, combined
+with great personal toughness and hardihood, an almost envied liability
+to warts on hard brown hands, a familiarity with garments domestically
+wrought, a brave rusticity in short that yet hadn't prevented the
+annexation of whole tracts of town life unexplored by ourselves and
+achieved by the brothers since their relatively recent migration from
+Connecticut--which State in general, with the city of Hartford in
+particular, hung as a hazy, fruity, rivery background, the very essence
+of Indian summer, in the rear of their discourse. Three in number,
+Johnny and Charley and Freddy, with castigating elders, even to the
+second and third generation back, dimly discerned through closed
+window-panes, they didn't at all haunt the halls of Ferrero--it was a
+part of their homely grace and their social tone, if not of their want
+of the latter, that this couldn't in the least be in question for them;
+on the other hand they frequented, Charley and Freddy at least, the Free
+School, which was round in Thirteenth Street--Johnny, the eldest, having
+entered the Free Academy, an institution that loomed large to us and
+that I see as towered or castellated or otherwise impressively
+embellished in vague vignettes, in stray representations, perhaps only
+of the grey schoolbook order, which are yet associated for me with those
+fond images of lovely ladies, "hand-painted," decorating at either end
+the interior of the old omnibusses. We must have been in relation with
+no other feeders at the public trough of learning--I can't account
+otherwise for the glamour as of envied privilege and strange experience
+that surrounded the Wards; they mixed, to the great sharpening of the
+edge of their wit, in the wild life _of_ the people, beside which the
+life at Mr. Pulling Jenks's and even at the Institution Vergnes was
+colourless and commonplace. Somehow they were of the people, and still
+were full of family forms--which seemed, one dimly made out through the
+false perspective of all the cousinships, the stronger and clearer note
+of New England; the note that had already determined a shy yearning
+under perusal of the Rollo and Franconia chronicles. The special mark of
+these friends was perhaps however that of being socially young while
+they were annually old; little Freddy in particular, very short, very
+inured and very popular, though less curiously wrinkled about eyes and
+mouth than Charley, confessed to monstrous birthdays even while
+crouching or hopping, even while racing or roaring, as a high
+superiority in the games of the street prescribed. It was to strike me
+later on, when reading or hearing of young Americans of those parts who
+had turned "hard" or reckless by reaction from excessive discipline,
+theologic and economic, and had gone to sea or to California or to the
+"bad," that Freddy and Charley were typical of the race, even if their
+fortunes had taken, as I hoped, a happier form. That, I said to myself
+for the interest of it, _that_, the stuff of the Wards, their homely
+grace, was all New England--so far at least as New England wasn't
+Emerson and Margaret Fuller and Mr. Channing and the "best Boston"
+families. Such, in small very plastic minds, is the intensity, if not
+the value, of early impressions.
+
+And yet how can such visions not have paled in the southern glow of the
+Norcoms, who had lately arrived _en masse_ from Louisville and had
+improvised a fine old Kentucky home in the last house of our row--the
+one to be occupied so differently, after their strange and precipitate
+flight, as I dimly make out, by the Ladies of the Sacred Heart; those
+who presently, if I mistake not, moved out to Bloomingdale, if they were
+not already in part established there. Next us westward were the Ogdens,
+three slim and fair sisters, who soared far above us in age and general
+amenity; then came the Van Winkles, two sisters, I think, and a
+brother--he much the most serious and judicious, as well as the most
+educated, of our friends; and so at last the Norcoms, during their brief
+but concentrated, most vivid and momentous, reign, a matter, as I recall
+it, of a couple of breathless winters. We were provided by their
+presence with as happy a foil as we could have wished to the plainness
+and dryness of the Wards; their homely grace was all their own and was
+also embodied in three brothers, Eugene, Reginald, Albert, whose ages
+would have corresponded, I surmise, with those of Johnny, Charley and
+Freddy if these latter hadn't, in their way, as I have hinted, defied
+any close notation. Elder sons--there were to my recollection no
+daughters--moved too as with their heads in the clouds; notably
+"Stiffy," eldest of all, whom we supposed gorgeous, who affected us as
+sublime and unapproachable and to whom we thus applied the term in use
+among us before we had acquired for reference to such types the notion
+of the _nuance_, the dandy, the dude, the masher. (Divided I was, I
+recall, between the dread and the glory of being so greeted, "Well,
+Stiffy--!" as a penalty of the least attempt at personal adornment.) The
+higher intensity for our sense of the Norcoms came from the large, the
+lavish, ease of their hospitality; whereas our intercourse with the
+Wards was mainly in the street or at most the "yard"--and it was a
+wonder how intimacy _could_ to that degree consort with publicity. A
+glazed southern gallery, known to its occupants as the "poo'ch" and to
+the rake of which their innermost penetralia seemed ever to stand open,
+encompasses my other memories. Everything took place on the poo'ch,
+including the free, quite the profuse, consumption of hot cakes and
+molasses, including even the domestic manufacture of sausages, testified
+to by a strange machine that was worked like a handorgan and by the
+casual halves, when not the wholes, of stark stiff hogs fresh from
+Kentucky stores. We must have been for a time constantly engaged with
+this delightful group, who never ceased to welcome us or to feed us, and
+yet of the presence of whose members under other roofs than their own,
+by a return of hospitality received, I retain no image. They didn't
+count and didn't grudge--the sausage-mill kept turning and the molasses
+flowing for all who came; that was the expression of their southern
+grace, especially embodied in Albert, my exact contemporary and chosen
+friend (Reggie had but crushed my fingers under the hinge of a closing
+door, the mark of which act of inadvertence I was to carry through
+life,) who had profuse and tightly-crinkled hair, and the moral of whose
+queer little triangular brown teeth, casting verily a shade on my
+attachment to him, was pointed for me, not by himself, as the error of a
+Kentucky diet.
+
+The great Kentucky error, however, had been the introduction into a free
+State of two pieces of precious property which our friends were to fail
+to preserve, the pair of affectionate black retainers whose presence
+contributed most to their exotic note. We revelled in the fact that Davy
+and Aunt Sylvia (pronounced An'silvy,) a light-brown lad with
+extraordinarily shining eyes and his straight, grave, deeper-coloured
+mother, not radiant as to anything but her vivid turban, had been born
+and kept in slavery of the most approved pattern and such as this
+intensity of their condition made them a joy, a joy to the curious mind,
+to consort with. Davy mingled in our sports and talk, he enriched, he
+adorned them with a personal, a pictorial lustre that none of us could
+emulate, and servitude in the absolute thus did more for him socially
+than we had ever seen done, above stairs or below, for victims of its
+lighter forms. What was not our dismay therefore when we suddenly
+learnt--it must have blown right up and down the street--that mother and
+son had fled, in the dead of night, from bondage? had taken advantage of
+their visit to the North simply to leave the house and not return,
+covering their tracks, successfully disappearing. They had never been
+for us so beautifully slaves as in this achievement of their freedom;
+for they did brilliantly achieve it--they escaped, on northern soil,
+beyond recall or recovery. I think we had already then, on the spot, the
+sense of some degree of presence at the making of history; the question
+of what persons of colour and of their condition might or mightn't do
+was intensely in the air; this was exactly the season of the freshness
+of Mrs. Stowe's great novel. It must have come out at the moment of our
+fondest acquaintance with our neighbours, though I have no recollection
+of hearing them remark upon it--any remark they made would have been
+sure to be so strong. I suspect they hadn't read it, as they certainly
+wouldn't have allowed it in the house; any more indeed than they had
+read or were likely ever to read any other work of fiction; I doubt
+whether the house contained a printed volume, unless its head had had in
+hand a law-book or so: I to some extent recover Mr. Norcom as a lawyer
+who had come north on important, difficult business, on contentious,
+precarious grounds--a large bald political-looking man, very loose and
+ungirt, just as his wife was a desiccated, depressed lady who mystified
+me by always wearing her nightcap, a feebly-frilled but tightly-tied and
+unmistakable one, and the compass of whose maternal figure beneath a
+large long collarless cape or mantle defined imperfectly for me of
+course its connection with the further increase of Albert's little
+brothers and sisters, there being already, by my impression, two or
+three of these in the background. Had Davy and An'silvy at least read
+Uncle Tom?--that question might well come up for us, with the certainty
+at any rate that they ignored him less than their owners were doing.
+These latter good people, who had been so fond of their humble
+dependents and supposed this affection returned, were shocked at such
+ingratitude, though I remember taking a vague little inward Northern
+comfort in their inability, in their discreet decision, not to raise the
+hue and cry. Wasn't one even just dimly aware of the heavy hush that, in
+the glazed gallery, among the sausages and the johnny-cakes, had
+followed the first gasp of resentment? I think the honest Norcoms were
+in any case astonished, let alone being much incommoded; just as _we_
+were, for that matter, when the genial family itself, installed so at
+its ease, failed us with an effect of abruptness, simply ceased, in
+their multitude, to be there. I don't remember their going, nor any
+pangs of parting; I remember only knowing with wonderment that they had
+gone, that obscurity had somehow engulfed them; and how afterwards, in
+the light of later things, memory and fancy attended them, figured their
+history as the public complication grew and the great intersectional
+plot thickened; felt even, absurdly and disproportionately, that they
+had helped one to "know Southerners." The slim, the sallow, the
+straight-haired and dark-eyed Eugene in particular haunted my
+imagination; he had not been my comrade of election--he was too much my
+senior; but I cherished the thought of the fine fearless young
+fire-eater he would have become and, when the War had broken out, I know
+not what dark but pitying vision of him stretched stark after a battle.
+
+All of which sounds certainly like a meagre range--which heaven knows it
+was; but with a plea for the several attics, already glanced at, and the
+positive aesthetic reach that came to us through those dim resorts, quite
+worth making. They were scattered and they constituted on the part of
+such of our friends as had license to lead us up to them a ground of
+authority and glory proportioned exactly to the size of the field. This
+extent was at cousin Helen's, with a large house and few inmates, vast
+and free, so that no hospitality, under the eaves, might have matched
+that offered us by the young Albert--if only that heir of all the ages
+had had rather more imagination. He had, I think, as little as was
+possible--which would have counted in fact for an unmitigated blank had
+not W. J., among us, on that spot and elsewhere, supplied this motive
+force in any quantity required. He imagined--that was the point--the
+comprehensive comedies we were to prepare and to act; comprehensive by
+the fact that each one of us, even to the God-fearing but
+surreptitiously law-breaking Wards, was in fairness to be enabled to
+figure. Not one of us but was somehow to be provided with a part, though
+I recall my brother as the constant comic star. The attics were thus in
+a word our respective temples of the drama--temples in which the stage,
+the green-room and the wardrobe, however, strike me as having consumed
+most of our margin. I remember, that is, up and down the street--and the
+association is mainly with its far westward reaches--so much more
+preparation than performance, so much more conversation and costume than
+active rehearsal, and, on the part of some of us, especially doubtless
+on my own, so much more eager denudation, both of body and mind, than of
+achieved or inspired assumption. We shivered unclad and impatient both
+as to our persons and to our aims, waiting alike for ideas and for
+breeches; we were supposed to make our dresses no less than to create
+our characters, and our material was in each direction apt to run short.
+I remember how far ahead of us my brother seemed to keep, announcing a
+"motive," producing a figure, throwing off into space conceptions that I
+could stare at across the interval but couldn't appropriate; so that my
+vision of him in these connections is not so much of his coming toward
+me, or toward any of us, as of his moving rapidly away in fantastic garb
+and with his back turned, as if to perform to some other and more
+assured public. There were indeed other publics, publics downstairs, who
+glimmer before me seated at the open folding-doors of ancient parlours,
+but all from the point of view of an absolute supernumerary, more or
+less squashed into the wing but never coming on. Who were the copious
+Hunts?--whose ample house, on the north side, toward Seventh Avenue,
+still stands, next or near that of the De Peysters, so that I perhaps
+confound some of the attributes of each, though clear as to the blond
+Beekman, or "Beek," of the latter race, not less than to the robust
+George and the stout, the very stout, Henry of the former, whom I see
+bounding before a gathered audience for the execution of a _pas seul_,
+clad in a garment of "Turkey red" fashioned by his own hands and giving
+way at the seams, to a complete absence of _dessous_, under the strain
+of too fine a figure: this too though I make out in those connections,
+that is in the twilight of Hunt and De Peyster garrets, our command of a
+comparative welter of draperies; so that I am reduced to the surmise
+that Henry indeed had contours.
+
+I recover, further, some sense of the high places of the Van Winkles,
+but think of them as pervaded for us by the upper air of the
+proprieties, the proprieties that were so numerous, it would appear,
+when once one had had a glimpse of them, rather than by the crude fruits
+of young improvisation. Wonderful must it clearly have been still to fed
+amid laxities and vaguenesses such a difference of _milieux_ and, as
+they used to say, of atmospheres. This was a word of those
+days--atmospheres were a thing to recognise and cultivate, for people
+really wanted them, gasped for them; which was why they took them, on
+the whole, on easy terms, never exposing them, under an apparent flush,
+to the last analysis. Did we at any rate really vibrate to one social
+tone after another, or are these adventures for me now but fond
+imaginations? No, we vibrated--or I'll be hanged, as I may say, if _I_
+didn't; little as I could tell it or may have known it, little as anyone
+else may have known. There were shades, after all, in our democratic
+order; in fact as I brood back to it I recognise oppositions the
+sharpest, contrasts the most intense. It wasn't given to us all to have
+a social tone, but the Costers surely had one and kept it in constant
+use; whereas the Wards, next door to them, were possessed of no approach
+to any, and indeed had the case been other, had they had such a
+consciousness, would never have employed it, would have put it away on a
+high shelf, as they put the last-baked pie, out of Freddy's and
+Charley's reach--heaven knows what _they_ two would have done with it.
+The Van Winkles on the other hand were distinctly so provided, but with
+the special note that their provision was one, so to express it, with
+their educational, their informational, call it even their professional:
+Mr. Van Winkle, if I mistake not, was an eminent lawyer, and the note of
+our own house was the absence of any profession, to the quickening of
+our general as distinguished from our special sensibility. There was no
+Turkey red among those particular neighbours at all events, and if there
+had been it wouldn't have gaped at the seams. I didn't then know it, but
+I sipped at a fount of culture; in the sense, that is, that, our
+connection with the house being through Edgar, he knew about
+things--inordinately, as it struck me. So, for that matter, did little
+public Freddy Ward; but the things one of them knew about differed
+wholly from the objects of knowledge of the other: all of which was
+splendid for giving one exactly a sense of things. It intimated more and
+more how many such there would be altogether. And part of the interest
+was that while Freddy gathered his among the wild wastes Edgar walked in
+a regular maze of culture. I didn't then know about culture, but Edgar
+must promptly have known. This impression was promoted by his moving in
+a distant, a higher sphere of study, amid scenes vague to me; I dimly
+descry him as appearing at Jenks's and vanishing again, as if even that
+hadn't been good enough--though I may be here at fault, and indeed can
+scarce say on what arduous heights I supposed him, as a day-scholar, to
+dwell. I took the unknown always easily for the magnificent and was sure
+only of the limits of what I saw. It wasn't that the boys swarming for
+us at school were not often, to my vision, unlimited, but that those
+peopling our hours of ease, as I have already noted, were almost
+inveterately so--they seemed to describe always, out of view, so much
+larger circles. I linger thus on Edgar by reason of its having somehow
+seemed to us that he described--was it at Doctor Anthon's?--the largest
+of all. If there was a bigger place than Doctor Anthon's it was there he
+would have been. I break down, as to the detail of the matter, in any
+push toward vaster suppositions. But let me cease to stir this
+imponderable dust.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+I try at least to recover here, however, some closer notation of W. J.'s
+aspects--yet only with the odd effect of my either quite losing him or
+but apprehending him again at seated play with his pencil under the
+lamp. When I see him he is intently, though summarily, rapidly drawing,
+his head critically balanced and his eyebrows working, and when I don't
+see him it is because I have resignedly relinquished him. I can't have
+been often for him a deprecated, still less an actively rebuffed suitor,
+because, as I say again, such aggressions were so little in order for
+me; but I remember that on my once offering him my company in
+conditions, those of some planned excursion, in which it wasn't desired,
+his putting the question of our difference at rest, with the minimum of
+explanation, by the responsible remark: "_I_ play with boys who curse
+and swear!" I had sadly to recognise that I didn't, that I couldn't
+pretend to have come to that yet--and truly, as I look back, either the
+unadvisedness and inexpertness of my young contemporaries on all that
+ground must have been complete (an interesting note on our general
+manners after all,) or my personal failure to grasp must have been.
+Besides which I wonder scarce less now than I wondered then in just what
+company my brother's privilege was exercised; though if he had but
+richly wished to be discouraging he quite succeeded. It wasn't that I
+mightn't have been drawn to the boys in question, but that I simply
+wasn't qualified. All boys, I rather found, were difficult to play
+with--unless it was that they rather found _me_; but who would have been
+so difficult as these? They account but little, moreover, I make out,
+for W. J.'s eclipses; so that I take refuge easily enough in the memory
+of my own pursuits, absorbing enough at times to have excluded other
+views. I also plied the pencil, or to be more exact the pen--even if
+neither implement critically, rapidly or summarily. I was so often
+engaged at that period, it strikes me, in literary--or, to be more
+precise in dramatic, accompanied by pictorial composition--that I must
+again and again have delightfully lost myself. I had not on any occasion
+personally succeeded, amid our theatric strife, in reaching the
+footlights; but how could I have doubted, nevertheless, with our large
+theatrical experience, of the nature, and of my understanding, of the
+dramatic form? I sacrificed to it with devotion--by the aid of certain
+quarto sheets of ruled paper bought in Sixth Avenue for the purpose (my
+father's store, though I held him a great fancier of the article in
+general, supplied but the unruled;) grateful in particular for the happy
+provision by which each fourth page of the folded sheet was left blank.
+When the drama itself had covered three pages the last one, over which I
+most laboured, served for the illustration of what I had verbally
+presented. Every scene had thus its explanatory picture, and as each
+act--though I am not positively certain I arrived at acts--would have
+had its vivid climax. Addicted in that degree to fictive evocation, I
+yet recall, on my part, no practice whatever of narrative prose or any
+sort of verse. I cherished the "scene"--as I had so vibrated to the idea
+of it that evening at Linwood; I thought, I lisped, at any rate I
+composed, in scenes; though how much, or how far, the scenes "came" is
+another affair. Entrances, exits, the indication of "business," the
+animation of dialogue, the multiplication of designated characters, were
+things delightful in themselves--while I panted toward the canvas on
+which I should fling my figures; which it took me longer to fill than it
+had taken me to write what went with it, but which had on the other hand
+something of the interest of the dramatist's casting of his _personae_,
+and must have helped me to believe in the validity of my subject.
+
+From where on these occasions that subject can have dropped for me I am
+at a loss to say, and indeed have a strong impression that I didn't at
+any moment quite know what I was writing about: I am sure I couldn't
+otherwise have written so much. With scenes, when I think, what
+certitude did I want more?--scenes being the root of the matter,
+especially when they bristled with proper names and noted movements;
+especially, above all, when they flowered at every pretext into the very
+optic and perspective of the stage, where the boards diverged correctly,
+from a central point of vision, even as the lashes from an eyelid,
+straight down to the footlights. Let this reminiscence remind us of how
+rarely in those days the real stage was carpeted. The difficulty of
+composition was naught; the one difficulty was in so placing my figures
+on the fourth page that these radiations could be marked without making
+lines through them. The odd part of all of which was that whereas my
+cultivation of the picture was maintained my practice of the play, my
+addiction to scenes, presently quite dropped. I was capable of learning,
+though with inordinate slowness, to express ideas in scenes, and was not
+capable, with whatever patience, of making proper pictures; yet I
+aspired to this form of design to the prejudice of any other, and long
+after those primitive hours was still wasting time in attempts at it. I
+cared so much for nothing else, and that vaguely redressed, as to a
+point, my general failure of acuteness. I nursed the conviction, or at
+least I tried to, that if my clutch of the pencil or of the watercolour
+brush should once become intense enough it would make up for other
+weaknesses of grasp--much as that would certainly give it to do. This
+was a very false scent, which had however the excuse that my brother's
+example really couldn't but act upon me--the scent was apparently so
+true for _him_; from the moment my small "interest in art," that is my
+bent for gaping at illustrations and exhibitions, was absorbing and
+genuine. There were elements in the case that made it natural: the
+picture, the representative design, directly and strongly appealed to
+me, and was to appeal all my days, and I was only slow to recognise the
+_kind_, in this order, that appealed most. My face was turned from the
+first to the idea of representation--that of the gain of charm,
+interest, mystery, dignity, distinction, gain of importance in fine, on
+the part of the represented thing (over the thing of accident, of mere
+actuality, still unappropriated;) but in the house of representation
+there were many chambers, each with its own lock, and long was to be the
+business of sorting and trying the keys. When I at last found deep in my
+pocket the one I could more or less work, it was to feel, with
+reassurance, that the picture was still after all in essence one's aim.
+So there had been in a manner continuity, been not so much waste as one
+had sometimes ruefully figured; so many wastes are sweetened for memory
+as by the taste of the economy they have led to or imposed and from the
+vantage of which they could scarce look better if they had been current
+and blatant profit. Wasn't the very bareness of the field itself
+moreover a challenge, in a degree, to design?--not, I mean, that there
+seemed to one's infant eyes too few things to paint: as to that there
+were always plenty--but for the very reason that there were more than
+anyone noticed, and that a hunger was thus engendered which one cast
+about to gratify. The gratification nearest home was the imitative, the
+emulative--that is on my part: W. J., I see, needed no reasons, no
+consciousness other than that of being easily able. So he drew because
+he could, while I did so in the main only because he did; though I think
+we cast about, as I say, alike, making the most of every image within
+view. I doubt if he made more than I even then did, though earlier able
+to account for what he made. Afterwards, on other ground and in richer
+air, I admit, the challenge was in the fulness and not in the bareness
+of aspects, with their natural result of hunger appeased; exhibitions,
+illustrations abounded in Paris and London--the reflected image hung
+everywhere about; so that if there we daubed afresh and with more
+confidence it was not because no-one but because everyone did. In fact
+when I call our appetite appeased I speak less of our browsing vision,
+which was tethered and insatiable, than of our sense of the quite normal
+character of our own proceedings. In Europe we knew there was Art, just
+as there were soldiers and lodgings and concierges and little boys in
+the streets who stared at us, especially at our hats and boots, as at
+things of derision--just as, to put it negatively, there were
+practically no hot rolls and no iced water. Perhaps too, I should add,
+we didn't enjoy the works of Mr. Benjamin Haydon, then clustered at the
+Pantheon in Oxford Street, which in due course became our favourite
+haunt, so infinitely more, after all, than we had enjoyed those arrayed
+at the Duesseldorf collection in Broadway; whence the huge canvas of the
+Martyrdom of John Huss comes back to me in fact as a revelation of
+representational brightness and charm that pitched once for all in these
+matters my young sense of what should be.
+
+Ineffable, unsurpassable those hours of initiation which the Broadway of
+the 'fifties had been, when all was said, so adequate to supply. If one
+wanted pictures there _were_ pictures, as large, I seem to remember, as
+the side of a house, and of a bravery of colour and lustre of surface
+that I was never afterwards to see surpassed. We were shown without
+doubt, under our genial law here too, everything there was, and as I
+cast up the items I wonder, I confess, what ampler fare we could have
+dealt with. The Duesseldorf school commanded the market, and I think of
+its exhibition as firmly seated, going on from year to year--New York,
+judging now to such another tune, must have been a brave patron of that
+manufacture; I believe that scandal even was on occasion not evaded,
+rather was boldly invoked, though of what particular sacrifices to the
+pure plastic or undraped shocks to bourgeois prejudice the comfortable
+German genius of that period may have been capable history has kept no
+record. New accessions, at any rate, vividly new ones, in which the
+freshness and brightness of the paint, particularly lustrous in our
+copious light, enhanced from time to time the show, which I have the
+sense of our thus repeatedly and earnestly visiting and which comes back
+to me with some vagueness as installed in a disaffected church, where
+gothic excrescences and an ecclesiastical roof of a mild order helped
+the importance. No impression here, however, was half so momentous as
+that of the epoch-making masterpiece of Mr. Leutze, which showed us
+Washington crossing the Delaware in a wondrous flare of projected
+gaslight and with the effect of a revelation to my young sight of the
+capacity of accessories to "stand out." I live again in the thrill of
+that evening--which was the greater of course for my feeling it, in my
+parents' company, when I should otherwise have been in bed. We went
+down, after dinner, in the Fourteenth Street stage, quite as if going to
+the theatre; the scene of exhibition was near the Stuyvesant Institute
+(a circumstance stirring up somehow a swarm of associations, echoes
+probably of lectures discussed at home, yet at which my attendance had
+doubtless conveniently lapsed,) but Mr. Leutze's drama left behind any
+paler proscenium. We gaped responsive to every item, lost in the marvel
+of the wintry light, of the sharpness of the ice-blocks, of the sickness
+of the sick soldier, of the protrusion of the minor objects, that of the
+strands of the rope and the nails of the boots, that, I say, on the part
+of everything, of its determined purpose of standing out; but that,
+above all, of the profiled national hero's purpose, as might be said, of
+standing _up_, as much as possible, even indeed of doing it almost on
+one leg, in such difficulties, and successfully balancing. So memorable
+was that evening to remain for me that nothing could be more strange, in
+connection with it, than the illustration by the admired work, on its in
+after years again coming before me, of the cold cruelty with which time
+may turn and devour its children. The picture, more or less entombed in
+its relegation, was lividly dead--and that was bad enough. But half the
+substance of one's youth seemed buried with it. There were other
+pictorial evenings, I may add, not all of which had the thrill. Deep the
+disappointment, on my own part, I remember, at Bryan's Gallery of
+Christian Art, to which also, as for great emotions, we had taken the
+omnibus after dinner. It cast a chill, this collection of worm-eaten
+diptychs and triptychs, of angular saints and seraphs, of black Madonnas
+and obscure Bambinos, of such marked and approved "primitives" as had
+never yet been shipped to our shores. Mr. Bryan's shipment was presently
+to fall, I believe, under grave suspicion, was to undergo in fact fatal
+exposure; but it appealed at the moment in apparent good faith, and I
+have not forgotten how, conscious that it was fresh from Europe--"fresh"
+was beautiful in the connection!--I felt that my yearning should all
+have gone out to it. With that inconsequence to handle I doubt whether I
+proclaimed that it bored me--any more than I have ever noted till now
+that it made me begin badly with Christian art. I like to think that the
+collection consisted without abatement of frauds and "fakes" and that if
+these had been honest things my perception wouldn't so have slumbered;
+yet the principle of interest had been somehow compromised, and I think
+I have never since stood before a real Primitive, a primitive of the
+primitives, without having first to shake off the grey mantle of that
+night. The main disconcertment had been its ugly twist to the name of
+Italy, already sweet to me for all its dimness--even could dimness have
+prevailed in my felt measure of the pictorial testimony of home,
+testimony that dropped for us from the ample canvas of Mr. Cole, "the
+American Turner" which covered half a side of our front parlour, and in
+which, though not an object represented in it began to stand out after
+the manner of Mr. Leutze, I could always lose myself as soon as look. It
+depicted Florence from one of the neighbouring hills--I have often since
+wondered which, the picture being long ago lost to our sight; Florence
+with her domes and towers and old walls, the old walls Mr. Cole had
+engaged for, but which I was ruefully to miss on coming to know and love
+the place in after years. Then it was I felt how long before my
+attachment had started on its course--that closer vision was no
+beginning, it only took up the tale; just as it comes to me again
+to-day, at the end of time, that the contemplative monk seated on a
+terrace in the foreground, a constant friend of my childhood, must have
+been of the convent of San Miniato, which gives me the site from which
+the painter wrought. We had Italy again in the corresponding room
+behind--a great abundance of Italy I was free to think while I revolved
+between another large landscape over the sofa and the classic marble
+bust on a pedestal between the two back windows, the figure, a part of
+the figure, of a lady with her head crowned with vine-leaves and her
+hair disposed with a laxity that was emulated by the front of her dress,
+as my next younger brother exposed himself to my derision by calling the
+bit of brocade (simulated by the chisel) that, depending from a single
+shoulder-strap, so imperfectly covered her. This image was known and
+admired among us as the Bacchante; she had come to us straight from an
+American studio in Rome, and I see my horizon flush again with the first
+faint dawn of conscious appreciation, or in other words of the critical
+spirit, while two or three of the more restrictive friends of the house
+find our marble lady very "cold" for a Bacchante. Cold indeed she must
+have been--quite as of the tombstone temperament; but that objection
+would drop if she might only be called a Nymph, since nymphs were mild
+and moderate, and since discussion of a work of art mainly hung in those
+days on that issue of the producible _name_. I fondly recall, by the
+same token, that playing on a certain occasion over the landscape above
+the sofa, restrictive criticism, uttered in my indulged hearing,
+introduced me to what had probably been my very first chance, on such
+ground, for active participation. The picture, from the hand of a
+French painter, M. Lefevre, and of but slightly scanter extent than the
+work of Mr. Cole, represented in frank rich colours and as a so-called
+"view in Tuscany" a rural scene of some exuberance, a broken and
+precipitous place, amid mountains and forests, where two or three
+bare-legged peasants or woodmen were engaged, with much emphasis of
+posture, in felling a badly gashed but spreading oak by means of a tense
+rope attached to an upper limb and at which they pulled together.
+"Tuscany?--are you sure it's Tuscany?" said the voice of restrictive
+criticism, that of the friend of the house who in the golden age of the
+precursors, though we were still pretty much precursors, had lived
+longest in Italy. And then on my father's challenge of this demur: "Oh
+in Tuscany, you know, the colours are much softer--there would be a
+certain haze in the atmosphere." "Why, of course," I can hear myself now
+blushingly but triumphantly intermingle--"the softness and the haze of
+our Florence there: isn't Florence in Tuscany?" It had to be parentally
+admitted that Florence was--besides which our friend had been there and
+knew; so that thereafter, within our walls, a certain _malaise_ reigned,
+for if the Florence was "like it" then the Lefevre couldn't be, and if
+the Lefevre was like it then the Florence couldn't: a lapse from old
+convenience--as from the moment we couldn't name the Lefevre where were
+we? All of which it might have been open to me to feel I had uncannily
+promoted.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+My own sense of the great matter, meanwhile--that is of our
+possibilities, still more than of our actualities, of Italy in general
+and of Florence in particular--was a perfectly recoverable little
+awareness, as I find, of certain mild soft irregular breathings thence
+on the part of an absent pair in whom our parents were closely
+interested and whose communications, whose Roman, Sorrentine, Florentine
+letters, letters in especial from the Baths of Lucca, kept open, in our
+air, more than any other sweet irritation, that "question of Europe"
+which was to have after all, in the immediate years, so limited, so
+shortened, a solution. Mary Temple the elder had, early in our
+Fourteenth Street period, married Edmund Tweedy, a haunter of that
+neighbourhood and of our house in it from the first, but never more than
+during a winter spent with us there by that quasi-relative, who, by an
+extension of interest and admiration--she was in those years quite
+exceedingly handsome--ranked for us with the Albany aunts, adding so a
+twist, as it were, to our tie with the Temple cousins, her own close
+kin. This couple must have been, putting real relatives aside, my
+parents' best friends in Europe, twitching thereby hardest the fine firm
+thread attached at one end to our general desire and at the other to
+their supposed felicity. The real relatives, those planted out in the
+same countries, are a chapter by themselves, whose effect on us, whose
+place in our vision, I should like to trace: that of the Kings, for
+instance, of my mother's kin, that of the Masons, of my father's--the
+Kings who cultivated, for years, the highest instructional, social and
+moral possibilities at Geneva, the Masons, above all, less strenuous but
+more sympathetic, who reported themselves to us hauntingly, during a
+considerable period, as enjoying every conceivable _agrement_ at Tours
+and at the then undeveloped Trouville, even the winter Trouville, on the
+lowest possible terms. Fain would I, as for the "mere pleasure" of it,
+under the temptation to delineate, gather into my loose net the
+singularly sharp and rounded image of our cousin Charlotte of the former
+name, who figured for us, on the field of Europe, wherever we looked,
+and all the rest of time, as a character of characters and a marvel of
+placid consistency; through my vague remembrance of her return from
+China after the arrest of a commercial career there by her husband's
+death in the Red Sea--which somehow sounded like a dreadful form of
+death, and my scarce less faint recovery of some Christmas treat of our
+childhood under her roof in Gramercy Park, amid dim chinoiseries and, in
+that twilight of time, dimmer offspring, Vernon, Anne, Arthur, marked to
+us always, in the distincter years, as of all our young relatives the
+most intensely educated and most pointedly proper--an occasion followed
+by her permanent and invidious withdrawal from her own country. I would
+keep her in my eye through the Genevese age and on to the crisis of the
+Civil War, in which Vernon, unforgiven by her stiff conservatism for his
+Northern loyalty, laid down before Petersburg a young life of
+understanding and pain, uncommemorated as to the gallantry of its
+end--he had insistently returned to the front, after a recovery from
+first wounds, as under his mother's malediction--on the stone beneath
+which he lies in the old burial ground at Newport, the cradle of his
+father's family. I should further pursue my subject through other
+periods and places, other constantly "quiet" but vivid exhibitions, to
+the very end of the story--which for myself was the impression, first,
+of a little lonely, soft-voiced, gentle, relentless lady, in a dull
+Surrey garden of a summer afternoon, more than half blind and all
+dependent on the _dame de compagnie_ who read aloud to her that Saturday
+Review which had ever been the prop and mirror of her opinions and to
+which she remained faithful, her children estranged and outworn, dead
+and ignored; and the vision, second and for a climax, of an old-world
+rez-de-chaussee at Versailles, goal of my final pilgrimage, almost in
+presence of the end (end of her very personal career, I mean, but not of
+her perfectly firm spirit or of her charmingly smooth address).
+
+I confess myself embarrassed by my very ease of re-capture of my young
+consciousness; so that I perforce try to encourage lapses and keep my
+abundance down. The place for the lapse consents with difficulty,
+however, to be _any_ particular point of the past at which I catch
+myself (easily caught as I am) looking about me; it has certainly
+nothing in common with that coign of vantage enjoyed by me one June
+afternoon of 1855 in the form of the minor share of the box of a
+carriage that conveyed us for the first time since our babyhood, W. J.'s
+and mine, through so much of a vast portentous London. I was an item in
+the overflow of a vehicle completely occupied, and I thrilled with the
+spectacle my seat beside the coachman so amply commanded--without
+knowing at this moment why, amid other claims, I had been marked for
+such an eminence. I so far justify my privilege at least as still to
+feel that prime impression, of extreme intensity, underlie, deep down,
+the whole mass of later observation. There are London aspects which, so
+far as they still touch me, after all the years, touch me as just
+sensible reminders of this hour of early apprehension, so penetrated for
+me as to have kept its ineffaceable stamp. For at last we had come to
+Europe--we had disembarked at Liverpool, but a couple of days before,
+from that steamer Atlantic, of the Collins line, then active but so soon
+to be utterly undone, of which I had kept a romantic note ever since a
+certain evening of a winter or two before. I had on that occasion
+assisted with my parents at a varied theatrical exhibition--the theatre
+is distinct to me as Brougham's--one of the features of which was the at
+that time flourishing farce of Betsy Baker, a picture of some
+predicament, supposed droll, of its hero Mr. Mouser, whose wife, if I am
+correct, carries on a laundry and controls as she may a train of young
+assistants. A feature of the piece comes back to me as the pursuit of
+Mr. Mouser round and round the premises by the troop of laundresses,
+shouting his name in chorus, capture by them being abject, though
+whether through fear of their endearments or of their harsher violence I
+fail to remember. It was enough that the public nerve had at the moment
+been tried by the non-arrival of the Atlantic, several days overdue, to
+the pitch at last of extreme anxiety; so that, when after the fall of
+the curtain on the farce the distracted Mr. Mouser, still breathless,
+reappeared at the footlights, where I can see him now abate by his
+plight no jot of the dignity of his announcement, "Ladies and
+gentlemen, I rejoice to be able to tell you that the good ship Atlantic
+is safe!" the house broke into such plaudits, so huge and prolonged a
+roar of relief, as I had never heard the like of and which gave me my
+first measure of a great immediate public emotion--even as the incident
+itself to-day reminds me of the family-party smallness of the old New
+York, those happy limits that could make us all care, and care to fond
+vociferation, for the same thing at once. It was a moment of the golden
+age--representing too but a snatch of elation, since the wretched Arctic
+had gone down in mortal woe and her other companion, the Pacific,
+leaving England a few months later and under the interested eyes of our
+family group, then temporarily settled in London, was never heard of
+more. Let all of which show again what traps are laid about me for
+unguarded acute reminiscence.
+
+I meet another of these, though I positively try to avoid it, in the
+sense of a day spent on the great fusty curtained bed, a mediaeval
+four-poster such as I had never seen, of the hotel at the London and
+North-Western station, where it appeared, to our great inconvenience,
+that I had during the previous months somewhere perversely absorbed
+(probably on Staten Island upwards of a year before) the dull seed of
+malaria, which now suddenly broke out in chills and fever. This
+condition, of the intermittent order, hampered our movements but left
+alternate days on which we could travel, and as present to me as ever is
+the apprehended interest of my important and determinant state and of
+our complicated prospect while I lay, much at my ease--for I recall in
+particular certain short sweet times when I could be left alone--with
+the thick and heavy suggestions of the London room about me, the very
+smell of which was ancient, strange and impressive, a new revelation
+altogether, and the window open to the English June and the far off hum
+of a thousand possibilities. I consciously took them in, these last, and
+must then, I think, have first tasted the very greatest pleasure perhaps
+I was ever to know--that of almost holding my breath in presence of
+certain aspects to the end of so taking in. It was as if in those hours
+that precious fine art had been disclosed to me--scantly as the poor
+place and the small occasion might have seemed of an order to promote
+it. We seize our property by an avid instinct wherever we find it, and I
+must have kept seizing mine at the absurdest little rate, and all by
+this deeply dissimulative process of taking in, through the whole
+succession of those summer days. The next application of it that stands
+out for me, or the next that I make room for here, since I note after
+all so much less than I remember, is the intensity of a fond
+apprehension of Paris, a few days later, from the balcony of an hotel
+that hung, through the soft summer night, over the Rue de la Paix. I
+hung with the balcony, and doubtless with my brothers and my sister,
+though I recover what I felt as so much relation and response to the
+larger, the largest appeal only, that of the whole perfect Parisianism I
+seemed to myself always to have possessed mentally--even if I had but
+just turned twelve!--and that now filled out its frame or case for me
+from every lighted window, up and down, as if each of these had been,
+for strength of sense, a word in some immortal quotation, the very
+breath of civilised lips. How I had anciently gathered such stores of
+preconception is more than I shall undertake an account of--though I
+believe I should be able to scrape one together; certain it is at any
+rate that half the beauty of the whole exposed second floor of a
+_modiste_ just opposite, for instance, with the fittings and figurings,
+as well as the intent immobilities, of busy young women descried through
+frank, and, as it were, benignant apertures, and of such bright fine
+strain that they but asked to work far into the night, came from the
+effect on the part of these things of so exactly crowning and comforting
+I couldn't have said what momentous young dream. I might have been
+_right_ to myself--as against some danger of being wrong, and if I had
+uttered my main comment on it all this must certainly have been "I told
+you so, I told you so!" What I had told myself was of course that the
+impression would be of the richest and at the same time of the most
+insinuating, and this after all didn't sail very close; but I had had
+before me from far back a picture (which might have been hung in the
+very sky,) and here was every touch in it repeated with a charm. Had I
+ever till then known what a charm _was_?--a large, a local, a social
+charm, leaving out that of a few individuals. It was at all events, this
+mystery, one's property--that of one's mind; and so, once for all, I
+helped myself to it from my balcony and tucked it away. It counted all
+immensely for practice in taking in.
+
+I profited by that, no doubt, still a few days later, at an hour that
+has never ceased to recur to me all my life as crucial, as supremely
+determinant. The travelling-carriage had stopped at a village on the way
+from Lyons to Geneva, between which places there was then no railway; a
+village now nameless to me and which was not yet Nantua, in the Jura,
+where we were to spend the night. I was stretched at my ease on a couch
+formed by a plank laid from seat to seat and covered by a small mattress
+and other draperies; an indulgence founded on my visitation of fever,
+which, though not now checking our progress, assured me, in our little
+band, these invidious luxuries. It may have been that as my body was
+pampered so I was moved equally to pamper my spirit, for my
+appropriative instinct had neglected no item of our case from the
+first--by which I mean from the moment of our getting under way, that
+morning, with much elaboration, in the court of the old Hotel de
+l'Univers at Lyons, where we had arrived two days before and awaited my
+good pleasure during forty-eight hours that overflowed for us perhaps
+somewhat less than any pair of days yet, but as regards which it was
+afterwards my complacent theory that my contemplative rest at the
+ancient inn, with all the voices and graces of the past, of the court,
+of the French scheme of manners in general and of ancient inns, as such,
+in particular, had prepared me not a little, when I should in due course
+hear of it, for what was meant by the _vie de province_--that expression
+which was to become later on so _toned_, as old fine colour and old fine
+opinion are toned. It was the romance of travel, and it was the
+_suggested_ romance, flushed with suppositions and echoes, with
+implications and memories, memories of one's "reading," save the mark!
+all the more that our proper bestowal required two carriages, in which
+we were to "post," ineffable thought, and which bristled with every kind
+of contradiction of common experience. The postilion, in a costume
+rather recalling, from the halls of Ferrero, that of my debardeur,
+bobbed up and down, the Italian courier, Jean Nadali, black-whiskered
+and acquired in London, sat in the rumble along with Annette Godefroi of
+Metz, fresh-coloured, broad-faced and fair-braided, a "bonne Lorraine"
+if ever there was, acquired in New York: I enjoy the echo of their very
+names, neither unprecedented nor irreproducible, yet which melt together
+for me, to intensification, with all the rest; with the recovered
+moment, above all, of our pause at the inn-door in the cool sunshine--we
+had mounted and mounted--during which, in my absurdly cushioned state, I
+took in, as I have hinted, by a long slow swig that testified to some
+power of elbow, a larger draught of the wine of perception than any I
+had ever before owed to a single throb of that faculty. The village
+street, which was not as village streets hitherto known to me, opened
+out, beyond an interval, into a high place on which perched an object
+also a fresh revelation and that I recognised with a deep joy--though a
+joy that was doubtless partly the sense of fantastic ease, of abated
+illness and of cold chicken--as at once a castle and a ruin. The only
+castle within my ken had been, by my impression, the machicolated villa
+above us the previous summer at New Brighton, and as I had seen no
+structure rise beyond that majesty so I had seen none abased to the
+dignity of ruin. Loose boards were no expression of this latter phase,
+and I was already somehow aware of a deeper note in the crumbled castle
+than any note of the solid one--little experience as I had had either of
+solidity. At a point in the interval, at any rate, below the slope on
+which this memento stood, was a woman in a black bodice, a white shirt
+and a red petticoat, engaged in some sort of field labour, the effect of
+whose intervention just then is almost beyond my notation. I knew her
+for a peasant in sabots--the first peasant I had ever beheld, or beheld
+at least to such advantage. She had in the whole aspect an enormous
+value, emphasising with her petticoat's tonic strength the truth that
+sank in as I lay--the truth of one's embracing there, in all the
+presented character of the scene, an amount of character I had felt no
+scene present, not even the one I had raked from the Hotel Westminster;
+the sort of thing that, even as mere fulness and mere weight, would sit
+most warmly in the mind. Supremely, in that ecstatic vision, was
+"Europe," sublime synthesis, expressed and guaranteed to me--as if by a
+mystic gage, which spread all through the summer air, that I should now,
+only now, never lose it, hold the whole consistency of it: up to that
+time it might have been but mockingly whisked before me. Europe mightn't
+have been flattered, it was true, at my finding her thus most signified
+and summarised in a sordid old woman scraping a mean living and an
+uninhabitable tower abandoned to the owls; that was but the momentary
+measure of a small sick boy, however, and the virtue of the impression
+was proportioned to my capacity. It made a bridge over to more things
+than I then knew.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+How shall I render certain other impressions coming back to me from that
+summer, which were doubtless involved in my having still for a time, on
+the alternate days when my complaint was active, to lie up on various
+couches and, for my main comfort, consider the situation? I considered
+it best, I think, gathering in the fruits of a quickened sensibility to
+it, in certain umbrageous apartments in which my parents had settled
+themselves near Geneva; an old house, in ample grounds and among great
+spreading trees that pleasantly brushed our windows in the summer heats
+and airs, known, if I am not mistaken, as the Campagne Gerebsoff--which
+its mistress, an invalid Russian lady, had partly placed at our
+disposition while she reclined in her own quarter of the garden, on a
+chaise longue and under a mushroom hat with a green veil, and I, in the
+course of the mild excursions appointed as my limit, considered her from
+afar in the light of the legends supplied to me, as to her identity,
+history, general practices and proceedings, by my younger brother Wilky,
+who, according to his nature, or I may say to his genius, had made
+without loss of time great advances of acquaintance with her and
+quickened thereby my sense of his superior talent for life. Wilky's age
+followed closely on mine, and from that time on we conversed and
+consorted, though with lapses and disparities; I being on the whole,
+during the succession of those years, in the grateful, the really
+fortunate position of having one exposure, rather the northward, as it
+were, to the view of W. J., and the other, perhaps the more immediately
+sunned surface, to the genial glow of my junior. Of this I shall have
+more to say, but to meet in memory meanwhile even this early flicker of
+him is to know again something of the sense that I attached all along
+our boyhood to his successful sociability, his instinct for intercourse,
+his genius (as I have used the word) for making friends. It was the only
+genius he had, declaring itself from his tenderest years, never knowing
+the shadow of defeat, and giving me, above all, from as far back and by
+the very radiation of the fact, endlessly much to think of. For I had in
+a manner, thanks to the radiation, much of the benefit; his geniality
+was absolutely such that the friends he made were made almost less for
+himself, so to speak, than for other friends--of whom indeed we, his own
+adjuncts, were easily first--so far at least as he discriminated. At
+night all cats are grey, and in this brother's easy view all his
+acquaintance were his family. The trail of his sociability was over us
+all alike--though it here concerns me but to the effect, as I recover
+it, of its weight on my comparatively so indirect faculty for what is
+called taking life. I must have already at the Campagne Gerebsoff begun
+to see him take it with all his directness--begun in fact to be a trifle
+tormentedly aware that, though there might be many ways of so doing, we
+are condemned practically to a choice, not made free of them all;
+reduced to the use of but one, at the best, which it is to our interest
+to make the most of, since we may indeed sometimes make much. There was
+a small sad charm, I should doubtless add, in this operation of the
+contrast of the case before me with my own case; it was positively as if
+Wilky's were supplying me on occasion with the most immediate matter for
+my own. That was particularly marked after he had, with our elder
+brother, been placed at school, the Pensionnat Roediger, at Chatelaine,
+then much esteemed and where I was supposedly to join them on my
+complete recovery: I recall sociable, irrepressibly sociable _sorties_
+thence on the part of the pair as promptly breaking out, not less than I
+recall sociable afternoon visits to the establishment on the part of the
+rest of us: it was my brothers' first boarding school, but as we had in
+the New York conditions kept punctually rejoining our family, so in
+these pleasant Genevese ones our family returned the attention. Of this
+also more anon; my particular point is just the wealth of Wilky's
+contribution to my rich current consciousness--the consciousness fairly
+_made_ rich by my taking in, as aforesaid, at reflective hours, hours
+when I was in a manner alone with it, our roomy and shadowy, our almost
+haunted interior.
+
+Admirable the scale and solidity, in general, of the ancient villas
+planted about Geneva, and our house affected me as so massive and so
+spacious that even our own half of it seemed vast. I had never before
+lived so long in anything so old and, as I somehow felt, so deep; depth,
+depth upon depth, was what came out for me at certain times of my
+waiting above, in my immense room of thick embrasures and rather prompt
+obscurity, while the summer afternoon waned and my companions, often
+below at dinner, lingered and left me just perhaps a bit overwhelmed.
+That was the sense of it--the _character_, in the whole place, pressed
+upon me with a force I hadn't met and that was beyond my analysis--which
+is but another way of saying how directly notified I felt that such
+material conditions as I _had_ known could have had no depth at all. My
+depth was a vague measure, no doubt, but it made space, in the twilight,
+for an occasional small sound of voice or step from the garden or the
+rooms of which the great homely, the opaque green shutters opened there
+softly to echo in--mixed with reverberations finer and more momentous,
+personal, experimental, if they might be called so; which I much
+encouraged (they borrowed such tone from our new surrounding medium) and
+half of which were reducible to Wilky's personalities and Wilky's
+experience: these latter, irrepressibly communicated, being ever,
+enviably, though a trifle bewilderingly and even formidably, _of_
+personalities. There was the difference and the opposition, as I really
+believe I was already aware--that one way of taking life was to go in
+for everything and everyone, which kept you abundantly occupied, and the
+other way was to be as occupied, quite as occupied, just with the sense
+and the image of it all, and on only a fifth of the actual immersion: a
+circumstance extremely strange. Life was taken almost equally both
+ways--that, I mean, seemed the strangeness; mere brute quantity and
+number being so much less in one case than the other. These latter were
+what I should have _liked_ to go in for, had I but had the intrinsic
+faculties; that more than ever came home to me on those occasions when,
+as I could move further and stay out longer, I accompanied my parents on
+afternoon visits to Chatelaine and the Campagne Roediger, a scene that
+has remained with me as nobly placid and pastoral. The great trees stood
+about, casting afternoon shadows; the old thick-walled green-shuttered
+villa and its dependances had the air of the happiest home; the big
+bearded bonhomie of M. Roediger among his little polyglot charges--no
+petits pays chauds these--appeared to justify, and more, the fond New
+York theory of Swiss education, the kind _a la portee_ of young New
+Yorkers, as a beautifully genialised, humanised, civilised, even
+romanticised thing, in which, amid lawny mountain slopes, "the
+languages" flowed into so many beaming recipients on a stream of milk
+and honey, and "the relation," above all, the relation from master to
+pupil and back again, was of an amenity that wouldn't have been of this
+world save for the providential arrangement of a perfect pedagogic
+Switzerland. "Did you notice the relation--how charming it was?" our
+parents were apt to say to each other after these visits, in reference
+to some observed show of confidence between instructor and instructed;
+while, as for myself, I was lost in the wonder of _all_ the
+relations--my younger brother seemed to live, and to his own ingenuous
+relish as well, in such a happy hum of them. The languages had reason to
+prosper--they were so copiously represented; the English jostled the
+American, the Russian the German, and there even trickled through a
+little funny French.
+
+A great Geneva school of those days was the Institution Haccius, to
+which generations of our young countrymen had been dedicated and our own
+faces first turned--under correction, however, by the perceived truth
+that if the languages were in question the American reigned there almost
+unchallenged. The establishment chosen for our experiment must have
+appealed by some intimate and insinuating side, and as less patronised
+by the rich and the sophisticated--for even in those days some Americans
+were rich and several sophisticated; little indeed as it was all to
+matter in the event, so short a course had the experiment just then to
+run. What it mainly brings back to me is the fine old candour and
+queerness of the New York state of mind, begotten really not a little, I
+think, under our own roof, by the mere charmed perusal of Rodolphe
+Toeppfer's Voyages en Zigzag, the two goodly octavo volumes of which
+delightful work, an adorable book, taken with its illustrations, had
+come out early in the 'fifties and had engaged our fondest study. It is
+the copious chronicle, by a schoolmaster oL endless humour and
+sympathy--of what degree and form of "authority" it never occurred to
+one even to ask--of his holiday excursions with his pupils, mainly on
+foot and with staff and knapsack, through the incomparable Switzerland
+of the time before the railways and the "rush," before the monster
+hotels, the desecrated summits, the vulgarised valleys, the circular
+tours, the perforating tubes, the funiculars, the hordes, the horrors.
+To turn back to Toeppfer's pages to-day is to get the sense of a lost
+paradise, and the effect for me even yet of having pored over them in my
+childhood is to steep in sweetness and quaintness some of the
+pictures--his own illustrations are of the pleasantest and drollest, and
+the association makes that faded Swiss master of landscape Calame, of
+the so-called calamites, a quite sufficient Ruysdael. It must have been
+conceived for us that we would lead in these conditions--always in
+pursuit of an education--a life not too dissimilar to that of the
+storied exiles in the forest of Arden; though one would fain not press,
+after all, upon ideals of culture so little organised, so little
+conscious, up to that moment, of our ferocities of comparison and
+competition, of imposed preparation. This particular loose ideal reached
+out from the desert--or what might under discouragement pass for such;
+it invoked the light, but a simplicity of view which was somehow one
+with the beauty of other convictions accompanied its effort; and though
+a glance at the social "psychology" of some of its cheerful estimates,
+its relative importances, assumed and acted upon, might here seem
+indicated, there are depths of the ancient serenity that nothing would
+induce me to sound.
+
+I need linger the less, moreover, since we in fact, oddly enough,
+lingered so little; so very little, for reasons doubtless well known to
+ourselves at the time but which I at present fail to recapture, that
+what next stands vividly out for me is our renewed passage through Paris
+on the way to London for the winter; a turn of our situation invested at
+the time with nothing whatever of the wonderful, yet which would again
+half prompt me to soundings were I not to recognise in it that mark of
+the fitful, that accent of the improvised, that general quality of
+earnest and reasoned, yet at the same time almost passionate, impatience
+which was to devote us for some time to variety, almost to incoherency,
+of interest. We had fared across the sea under the glamour of the Swiss
+school in the abstract, but the Swiss school in the concrete soon turned
+stale on our hands; a fact over which I remember myself as no further
+critical than to feel, not without zest, that, since one was all eyes
+and the world decidedly, at such a pace, all images, it ministered to
+the panoramic. It ministered, to begin with, through our very early
+start for Lyons again in the October dawn--without Nadali or the
+carriages this time, but on the basis of the malle-poste, vast, yellow
+and rumbling, which we availed wholly to fill and of which the high
+haughtiness was such that it could stop, even for an instant, only at
+appointed and much dissevered places--to the effect, I recall, of its
+vainly attempted arrest by our cousin Charlotte King, beforementioned,
+whom I see now suddenly emerge, fresh, confident and pretty, from some
+rural retreat by the road, a scene of simple villeggiatura, "rien que
+pour saluer ces dames," as she pleaded to the conductor; whom she
+practically, if not permittedly, overmastered, leaving with me still the
+wonder of her happy fusion of opposites. The coach had not, in the
+event, paused, but so neither had she, and as it ignored flush and
+flurry quite as it defied delay, she was equally a match for it in these
+particulars, blandly achieving her visit to us while it rumbled on,
+making a perfect success and a perfect grace of her idea. She dropped as
+elegantly out as she had gymnastically floated in, and "ces dames" must
+much have wished they could emulate her art. Save for this my view of
+that migration has faded, though to shine out again to the sense of our
+early morning arrival in Paris a couple of days later, and our hunt
+there, vain at first, for an hotel that would put us numerously up; vain
+till we had sat awhile, in the Rue du Helder, I think, before that of an
+Albany uncle, luckily on the scene and finally invoked, who after some
+delay descended to us with a very foreign air, I fancied, and no
+possibility, to his regret, of placing us under his own roof; as if
+indeed, I remember reflecting, we could, such as we were, have been
+desired to share his foreign interests--such as _they_ were. He espoused
+our cause, however, with gay goodnature--while I wondered, in my
+admiration for him and curiosity about him, how he really liked us, and
+(a bit doubtfully) whether I should have liked us had I been in his
+place; and after some further adventure installed us at the Hotel de la
+Ville de Paris in the Rue de la Ville-l'Eveque, a resort now long since
+extinct, though it lingered on for some years, and which I think of as
+rather huddled and disappointingly private, to the abatement of
+spectacle, and standing obliquely beyond a wall, a high gateway and a
+more or less cobbled court.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+Little else of that Parisian passage remains with me--it was probably of
+the briefest; I recover only a visit with my father to the Palais de
+l'Industrie, where the first of the great French Exhibitions, on the
+model, much reduced, of the English Crystal Palace of 1851, was still
+open, a fact explaining the crowded inns; and from that visit win back
+but the department of the English pictures and our stopping long before
+The Order of Release of a young English painter, J. E. Millais, who had
+just leaped into fame, and my impression of the rare treatment of whose
+baby's bare legs, pendent from its mother's arms, is still as vivid to
+me as if from yesterday. The vivid yields again to the vague--I scarce
+know why so utterly--till consciousness, waking up in London, renews
+itself, late one evening and very richly, at the Gloucester Hotel (or
+Coffee-House, as I think it was then still called,) which occupied that
+corner of Piccadilly and Berkeley Street where more modern
+establishments have since succeeded it, but where a fatigued and
+famished American family found on that occasion a fine old British
+virtue in cold roast beef and bread and cheese and ale; their expert
+acclamation of which echoes even now in my memory. It keeps company
+there with other matters equally British and, as we say now, early
+Victorian; the thick gloom of the inn rooms, the faintness of the
+glimmering tapers, the blest inexhaustibility of the fine joint,
+surpassed only by that of the grave waiter's reserve--plain, immutably
+plain fare all, but prompting in our elders an emphasis of relief and
+relish, the "There's nothing like it after all!" tone, which re-excited
+expectation, which in fact seemed this time to re-announce a basis for
+faith and joy.
+
+That basis presently shrank to the scale of a small house hard by the
+hotel, at the entrance of Berkeley Square--expeditiously lighted on, it
+would thus appear, which again has been expensively superseded, but to
+the ancient little facts of which I fondly revert, since I owe them what
+I feel to have been, in the far past, the prime faint revelation, the
+small broken expression, of the London I was afterwards to know. The
+place wears on the spot, to this day, no very different face; the house
+that has risen on the site of ours is still immediately neighboured at
+the left by the bookseller, the circulating-librarian and news-agent,
+who modestly flourished in our time under the same name; the great
+establishment of Mr. Gunter, just further along, is as soberly and
+solidly seated; the mews behind the whole row, from the foot of Hay Hill
+at the right, wanders away to Bruton Street with the irregular grace
+that spoke to my young fancy; Hay Hill itself is somehow less sharply
+precipitous, besides being no longer paved, as I seem to recall its
+having been, with big boulders, and I was on the point of saying that
+its antique charm in some degree abides. Nothing, however, could be
+further from the truth; its antique charm quite succumbed, years ago, to
+that erection of lumpish "mansions" which followed the demolition of the
+old-world town-residence, as the house-agents say, standing, on the
+south side, between court and I suppose garden, where Dover Street gives
+way to Grafton; a house of many histories, of vague importances and cold
+reserves and deep suggestions, I used to think after scaling the steep
+quite on purpose to wonder about it. A whole chapter of life was
+condensed, for our young sensibility, I make out, into the couple of
+months--they can scarce have been more--spent by us in these quarters,
+which must have proved too narrow and too towny; but it can have had no
+passage so lively as the occurrences at once sequent to my father's
+having too candidly made known in some public print, probably The Times,
+that an American gentleman, at such an address, desired to arrange with
+a competent young man for the tuition at home of his three sons. The
+effect of his rash failure to invite application by letter only was the
+assault of an army of visitors who filled us with consternation; they
+hung about the door, cumbered the hall, choked the staircase and sat
+grimly individual in odd corners. How they were dealt with, given my
+father's precipitate and general charity, I can but feebly imagine; our
+own concern, in the event, was with a sole selected presence, that of
+Scotch Mr. Robert Thompson, who gave us his care from breakfast to
+luncheon each morning that winter, who afterwards carried on a school at
+Edinburgh, and whom, in years long subsequent, I happened to help R. L.
+Stevenson to recognise gaily as _his_ early pedagogue. He was so deeply
+solicitous, yet withal so mild and kind and shy, with no harsher
+injunction to us ever than "Come now, be getting on!" that one could but
+think well of a world in which so gentle a spirit might flourish; while
+it is doubtless to the credit of his temper that remembrance is a blank
+in respect to his closer ministrations. I recall vividly his fresh
+complexion, his very round clear eyes, his tendency to trip over his own
+legs or feet while thoughtfully circling about us, and his constant
+dress-coat, worn with trousers of a lighter hue, which was perhaps the
+prescribed uniform of a daily tutor then; but I ask myself in vain what
+I can have "studied" with him, there remaining with me afterwards, to
+testify--this putting any scrap of stored learning aside--no single
+textbook save the Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare, which was given me as
+(of all things in the world) a reward. A reward for what I am again at a
+loss to say--not certainly for having "got on" to anything like the tune
+plaintively, for the most part, piped to me. It is a very odd and yet to
+myself very rich and full reminiscence, though I remember how, looking
+back at it from after days, W. J. denounced it to me, and with it the
+following year and more spent in Paris, as a poor and arid and
+lamentable time, in which, missing such larger chances and connections
+as we might have reached out to, we had done nothing, he and I, but walk
+about together, in a state of the direst propriety, little "high" black
+hats and inveterate gloves, the childish costume of the place and
+period, to stare at grey street-scenery (that of early Victorian London
+had tones of a neutrality!) dawdle at shop-windows and buy water-colours
+and brushes with which to bedaub eternal drawing-blocks. We might, I
+dare say, have felt higher impulses and carried out larger plans--though
+indeed present to me for this, on my brother's so expressing himself, is
+my then quick recognition of the deeper stirrings and braver needs he at
+least must have known, and my perfect if rueful sense of having myself
+had no such quarrel with our conditions: embalmed for me did they even
+to that shorter retrospect appear in a sort of fatalism of patience,
+spiritless in a manner, no doubt, yet with an inwardly active,
+productive and ingenious side.
+
+It was just the fact of our having so walked and dawdled and dodged that
+made the charm of memory; in addition to which what could one have asked
+more than to be steeped in a medium so dense that whole elements of it,
+forms of amusement, interest and wonder, soaked through to some
+appreciative faculty and made one fail at the most of nothing but one's
+lessons? My brother was right in so far as that my question--the one I
+have just reproduced--could have been asked only by a person
+incorrigible in throwing himself back upon substitutes for lost causes,
+substitutes that might _temporarily_ have appeared queer and small; a
+person so haunted, even from an early age, with visions of life, that
+aridities, for him, were half a terror and half an impossibility, and
+that the said substitutes, the economies and ingenuities that protested,
+in their dumb vague way, against weakness of situation or of direct and
+applied faculty, were in themselves really a revel of spirit and
+thought. It _had_ indeed again an effect of almost pathetic incoherence
+that our brave quest of "the languages," suffering so prompt and for the
+time at least so accepted and now so inscrutably irrecoverable a check,
+should have contented itself with settling us by that Christmas in a
+house, more propitious to our development, in St. John's Wood, where we
+enjoyed a considerable garden and wistful view, though by that windowed
+privilege alone, of a large green expanse in which ladies and gentlemen
+practised archery. Just _that_--and not the art even, but the mere
+spectacle--might have been one of the substitutes in question; if not
+for the languages at least for one or another of the romantic
+connections we seemed a little to have missed: it was such a whiff of
+the old world of Robin Hood as we could never have looked up from the
+mere thumbed "story," in Fourteenth Street at any rate, to any soft
+confidence of. More than I can begin to say, that is by a greater number
+of queer small channels, did the world about us, thus continuous with
+the old world of Robin Hood, steal into my sense--a constant state of
+subjection to which fact is no bad instance of those refinements of
+surrender that I just named as my fond practice. I seem to see to-day
+that the London of the 'fifties was even to the weak perception of
+childhood a much less generalised, a much more eccentrically and
+variously characterised place, than the present great accommodated and
+accommodating city; it had fewer resources but it had many more
+features, scarce one of which failed to help the whole to bristle with
+what a little gaping American could take for an intensity of difference
+from _his_ supposed order. It was extraordinarily the picture and the
+scene of Dickens, now so changed and superseded; it offered to my
+presumptuous vision still more the reflection of Thackeray--and where is
+the _detail_ of the reflection of Thackeray now?--so that as I trod the
+vast length of Baker Street, the Thackerayan vista of other days, I
+throbbed with the pride of a vastly enlarged acquaintance.
+
+I dare say our perambulations of Baker Street in our little "top" hats
+and other neatnesses must have been what W. J. meant by our poverty of
+life--whereas it was probably one of the very things most expressive to
+myself of the charm and the colour of history and (from the point of
+view of the picturesque) of society. We were often in Baker Street by
+reason of those stretched-out walks, at the remembered frequency and
+long-drawn push of which I am to-day amazed; recalling at the same time,
+however, that save for Robert Thompson's pitching ball with us in the
+garden they took for us the place of all other agilities. I can't but
+feel them to have been marked in their way by a rare curiosity and
+energy. Good Mr. Thompson had followed us in our move, occupying
+quarters, not far off, above a baker's shop on a Terrace--a group of
+objects still untouched by time--where we occasionally by way of change
+attended for our lessons and where not the least of our inspirations was
+the confidence, again and again justified, that our mid-morning "break"
+would determine the appearance of a self-conscious stale cake, straight
+from below, received by us all each time as if it had been a sudden
+happy thought, and ushered in by a little girl who might have been a
+Dickens foundling or "orfling." Our being reduced to mumble cake in a
+suburban lodging by way of reaction from the strain of study would have
+been perhaps a pathetic picture, but we had field-days too, when we
+accompanied our excellent friend to the Tower, the Thames Tunnel, St.
+Paul's and the Abbey, to say nothing of the Zoological Gardens, almost
+close at hand and with which we took in that age of lingering forms no
+liberty of abbreviation; to say nothing either of Madame Tussaud's, then
+in our interminable but so amiable Baker Street, the only shade on the
+amiability of which was just that gruesome association with the portal
+of the Bazaar--since Madame Tussaud had, of all her treasures, most
+vividly revealed to me the Mrs. Manning and the Burke and Hare of the
+Chamber of Horrors which lurked just within it; whom, for days after
+making their acquaintance (and prolonging it no further than our
+conscientious friend thought advisable) I half expected, when alone, to
+meet quite dreadfully on the staircase or on opening a door. All this
+experience was valuable, but it was not the languages--save in so far
+indeed as it was the English, which we hadn't in advance so much aimed
+at, yet which more or less, and very interestingly, came; it at any rate
+perhaps broke our fall a little that French, of a sort, continued to be
+with us in the remarkably erect person of Mademoiselle Cusin, the Swiss
+governess who had accompanied us from Geneva, whose quite sharply
+extrusive but on the whole exhilarating presence I associate with this
+winter, and who led in that longish procession of more or less similar
+domesticated presences which was to keep the torch, that is the accent,
+among us, fairly alight. The variety and frequency of the arrivals and
+departures of these ladies--whose ghostly names, again, so far as I
+recall them, I like piously to preserve, Augustine Danse, Amelie Fortin,
+Marie Guyard, Marie Bonningue, Felicie Bonningue, Clarisse
+Bader--mystifies me in much the same degree as our own academic
+vicissitudes in New York; I can no more imagine why, sociable and
+charitable, we so often changed governesses than I had contemporaneously
+grasped the principle of our succession of schools: the whole group of
+phenomena reflected, I gather, as a rule, much more the extreme
+promptitude of the parental optimism than any disproportionate habit of
+impatience. The optimism begot precipitation, and the precipitation had
+too often to confess itself. What is instructive, what is historic, is
+the probability that young persons offering themselves at that time as
+guides and communicators--the requirements of our small sister were for
+long modest enough--quite conceivably lacked preparedness, and were so
+thrown back on the extempore, which in turn lacked abundance. One of
+these figures, that of Mademoiselle Danse, the most Parisian, and
+prodigiously so, was afterwards to stand out for us quite luridly--a
+cloud of revelations succeeding her withdrawal; a cloud which, thick as
+it was, never obscured our impression of her genius and her charm. The
+daughter of a political proscript who had but just escaped, by the
+legend, being seized in his bed on the terrible night of the
+Deux-Decembre, and who wrote her micawberish letters from Gallipolis,
+Ohio, she subsequently figured to my imagination (in the light, that is,
+of the divined revelations, too dreadful for our young ears,) as the
+most brilliant and most genial of irregular characters, exhibiting the
+Parisian "mentality" at its highest, or perhaps rather its deepest, and
+more remarkable for nothing than for the consummate little art and grace
+with which she had for a whole year draped herself in the mantle of our
+innocent air. It was exciting, it was really valuable, to have to that
+extent rubbed shoulders with an "adventuress"; it showed one that for
+the adventuress there might on occasion be much to be said.
+
+Those, however, were later things--extensions of view hampered for the
+present, as I have noted, by our mere London street-scenery, which had
+much to build out for us. I see again that we but endlessly walked and
+endlessly daubed, and that our walks, with an obsession of their own,
+constantly abetted our daubing. We knew no other boys at all, and we
+even saw no others, I seem to remember, save the essentially rude ones,
+rude with a kind of mediaeval rudeness for which our clear New York
+experience had given us no precedent, and of which the great and
+constant sign was the artless, invidious wonder produced in them, on our
+public appearances, by the alien stamp in us that, for our comfort, we
+vainly sought to dissimulate. We conformed in each particular, so far as
+we could, to the prevailing fashion and standard, of a narrow range in
+those days, but in our very plumage--putting our _ramage_ aside--our
+wood-note wild must have seemed to sound, so sharply we challenged, when
+abroad, the attention of our native contemporaries, and even sometimes
+of their elders, pulled up at sight of us in the from-head-to-foot
+stare, a curiosity void of sympathy and that attached itself for some
+reason especially to our feet, which were not abnormally large. The
+London people had for themselves, at the same time, an exuberance of
+type; we found it in particular a world of costume, often of very odd
+costume--the most intimate notes of which were the postmen in their
+frock-coats of military red and their black beaver hats; the milkwomen,
+in hats that often emulated these, in little shawls and strange short,
+full frocks, revealing enormous boots, with their pails swung from their
+shoulders on wooden yokes; the inveterate footmen hooked behind the
+coaches of the rich, frequently in pairs and carrying staves, together
+with the mounted and belted grooms without the attendance of whom
+riders, of whichever sex--and riders then were much more
+numerous--almost never went forth. The range of character, on the other
+hand, reached rather dreadfully down; there were embodied and
+exemplified "horrors" in the streets beside which any present exhibition
+is pale, and I well remember the almost terrified sense of their
+salience produced in me a couple of years later, on the occasion of a
+flying return from the Continent with my father, by a long, an
+interminable drive westward from the London Bridge railway-station. It
+was a soft June evening, with a lingering light and swarming crowds, as
+they then seemed to me, of figures reminding me of George Cruikshank's
+Artful Dodger and his Bill Sikes and his Nancy, only with the bigger
+brutality of life, which pressed upon the cab, the early-Victorian
+fourwheeler, as we jogged over the Bridge, and cropped up in more and
+more gas-lit patches for all our course, culminating, somewhere far to
+the west, in the vivid picture, framed by the cab-window, of a woman
+reeling backward as a man felled her to the ground with a blow in the
+face. The London view at large had in fact more than a Cruikshank, there
+still survived in it quite a Hogarth, side--which I had of course then
+no name for, but which I was so sharply to recognise on coming back
+years later that it fixed for me the veracity of the great pictorial
+chronicler. Hogarth's mark is even yet not wholly overlaid; though time
+has _per contra_ dealt with that stale servility of address which most
+expressed to our young minds the rich burden of a Past, the consequence
+of too much history. I liked for my own part a lot of history, but felt
+in face of certain queer old obsequiosities and appeals, whinings and
+sidlings and hand-rubbings and curtsey-droppings, the general play of
+apology and humility, behind which the great dim social complexity
+seemed to mass itself, that one didn't quite want so inordinate a
+quantity. Of that particular light and shade, however, the big broom of
+change has swept the scene bare; more history still has been after all
+what it wanted. Quite another order, in the whole connection, strikes
+me as reigning to-day--though not without the reminder from it that the
+relations in which manner, as a generalised thing, in which "tone," is
+_positively_ pleasant, is really assured and sound, clear and
+interesting, are numerous and definite only when it has had in its past
+some strange phases and much misadventure.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+We were still being but vaguely "formed," yet it was a vagueness
+preferred apparently by our parents to the only definiteness in any
+degree open to us, that of the English school away from home (the London
+private school near home they would absolutely none of;) which they saw
+as a fearful and wonderful, though seemingly effective, preparation of
+the young for English life and an English career, but related to that
+situation only, so little related in fact to any other as to make it, in
+a differing case, an educational cul-de-sac, the worst of economies.
+They had doubtless heard claimed for it just that no other method for
+boys _was_ so splendidly general, but they had, I judge, their own sense
+of the matter--which would have been that it all depended on what was
+meant by this. The truth was, above all, that to them the formative
+forces most closely bearing on us were not in the least vague, but very
+definite by _their_ measure and intention; there were "advantages,"
+generally much belauded, that appealed to them scantly, and other
+matters, conceptions of character and opportunity, ideals, values,
+importances, enjoying no great common credit but for which it was their
+belief that they, under whatever difficulties, more or less provided. In
+respect of which I further remind myself of the blest fewness, as yet,
+of our years; and I come back to my own sense, benighted though it may
+have been, of a highly-coloured and remarkably active life. I recognise
+our immediate, our practical ferment even in our decent perambulations,
+our discussions, W. J.'s and mine, of whether we had in a given case
+best apply for a renewal of our "artists' materials" to Messrs. Rowney
+or to Messrs. Windsor and Newton, and in our pious resort, on these
+determinations, to Rathbone Place, more beset by our steps, probably,
+than any other single corner of the town, and the short but charged
+vista of which lives for me again in the tempered light of those old
+winter afternoons. Of scarce less moment than these were our frequent
+visits, in the same general connection, to the old Pantheon of Oxford
+Street, now fallen from its high estate, but during that age a place of
+fine rococo traditions, a bazaar, an exhibition, an opportunity, at the
+end of long walks, for the consumption of buns and ginger-beer, and
+above all a monument to the genius of that wonderful painter B. R.
+Haydon. We must at one time quite have haunted the Pantheon, where we
+doubtless could better than elsewhere sink to contemplative, to
+ruminative rest: Haydon's huge canvases covered the walls--I wonder
+what has become now of The Banishment of Aristides, attended to the city
+gate by his wife and babe, every attitude and figure in which,
+especially that of the foreshortened boy picking up stones to shy at the
+all-too-just, stares out at me still. We found in these works remarkable
+interest and beauty, the reason of which was partly, no doubt, that we
+hung, to fascination, at home, over the three volumes of the hapless
+artist's Autobiography, then a new book, which our father, indulgent to
+our preoccupation, had provided us with; but I blush to risk the further
+surmise that the grand manner, the heroic and the classic, in Haydon,
+came home to us more warmly and humanly than in the masters commended as
+"old," who, at the National Gallery, seemed to meet us so little
+half-way, to hold out the hand of fellowship or suggest something that
+_we_ could do, or could at least want to. The beauty of Haydon was just
+that he was new, shiningly new, and if he hinted that we might perhaps
+in some happy future emulate his big bravery there was nothing so
+impossible about it. If we adored daubing we preferred it _fresh_, and
+the genius of the Pantheon was fresh, whereas, strange to say, Rubens
+and Titian were not. Even the charm of the Pantheon yielded, however, to
+that of the English collection, the Vernon bequest to the nation, then
+arrayed at Marlborough House and to which the great plumed and draped
+and dusty funeral car of the Duke of Wellington formed an attractive
+adjunct. The ground-floor chambers there, none of them at that time
+royally inhabited, come back to me as altogether bleak and bare and as
+owing their only dignity to Maclise, Mulready and Landseer, to David
+Wilkie and Charles Leslie. _They_ were, by some deep-seated English
+mystery, the real unattainable, just as they were none the less the
+directly inspiring and the endlessly delightful. I could never have
+enough of Maclise's Play-scene in Hamlet, which I supposed the finest
+composition in the world (though Ophelia did look a little as if cut in
+silhouette out of white paper and pasted on;) while as I gazed, and
+gazed again, at Leslie's Sancho Panza and his Duchess I pushed through
+the great hall of romance to the central or private apartments.
+Trafalgar Square had its straight message for us only in the May-time
+exhibition, the Royal Academy of those days having, without a home of
+its own, to borrow space from the National Gallery--space partly
+occupied, in the summer of 1856, by the first fresh fruits of the
+Pre-Raphaelite efflorescence, among which I distinguish Millais's Vale
+of Rest, his Autumn Leaves and, if I am not mistaken, his prodigious
+Blind Girl. The very word Pre-Raphaelite wore for us that intensity of
+meaning, not less than of mystery, that thrills us in its perfection but
+for one season, the prime hour of first initiations, and I may perhaps
+somewhat mix the order of our great little passages of perception.
+Momentous to us again was to be the Academy show of 1858, where there
+were, from the same wide source, still other challenges to wonder,
+Holman Hunt's Scapegoat most of all, which I remember finding so charged
+with the awful that I was glad I saw it in company--_it_ in company and
+I the same: I believed, or tried to believe, I should have feared to
+face it all alone in a room. By that time moreover--I mean by 1858--we
+had been more fully indoctrinated, or such was the case at least with
+W. J., for whom, in Paris, during the winter of 1857, instruction at the
+atelier of M. Leon Coigniet, of a limited order and adapted to his
+years, had been candidly provided--that M. Leon Coigniet whose Marius
+meditating among the Ruins of Carthage impressed us the more, at the
+Luxembourg (even more haunted by us in due course than the Pantheon had
+been,) in consequence of this family connection.
+
+Let me not, however, nip the present thread of our aesthetic evolution
+without a glance at that comparatively spare but deeply appreciated
+experience of the London theatric privilege which, so far as occasion
+favoured us, also pressed the easy spring. The New York familiarities
+had to drop; going to the play presented itself in London as a serious,
+ponderous business: a procession of two throbbing and heaving cabs over
+vast foggy tracts of the town, after much arrangement in advance and
+with a renewal of far peregrination, through twisting passages and
+catacombs, even after crossing the magic threshold. We sat in strange
+places, with still stranger ones behind or beside; we felt walls and
+partitions, in our rear, getting so hot that we wondered if the house
+was to burst into flame; I recall in especial our being arrayed, to the
+number of nine persons, all of our contingent, in a sort of rustic
+balcony or verandah which, simulating the outer gallery of a Swiss
+cottage framed in creepers, formed a feature of Mr. Albert Smith's
+once-famous representation of the Tour of Mont Blanc. Big, bearded,
+rattling, chattering, mimicking Albert Smith again charms my senses,
+though subject to the reflection that his type and presence,
+superficially so important, so ample, were somehow at odds with such
+ingratiations, with the reckless levity of his performance--a
+performance one of the great effects of which was, as I remember it, the
+very brief stop and re-departure of the train at Epernay, with the
+ringing of bells, the bawling of guards, the cries of travellers, the
+slamming of doors and the tremendous pop as of a colossal
+champagne-cork, made all simultaneous and vivid by Mr. Smith's mere
+personal resources and graces. But it is the publicity of our situation
+as a happy family that I best remember, and how, to our embarrassment,
+we seemed put forward in our illustrative chalet as part of the
+boisterous show and of what had been paid for by the house. Two other
+great evenings stand out for me as not less collectively enjoyed, one of
+these at the Princess's, then under the management of Charles Kean, the
+unprecedented (as he was held) Shakespearean revivalist, the other at
+the Olympic, where Alfred Wigan, the extraordinary and too short-lived
+Robson and the shrewd and handsome Mrs. Stirling were the high
+attraction. Our enjoyment of Charles Kean's presentation of Henry the
+Eighth figures to me as a momentous date in our lives: we did nothing
+for weeks afterwards but try to reproduce in water-colours Queen
+Katharine's dream-vision of the beckoning, consoling angels, a radiant
+group let down from the skies by machinery then thought marvellous--when
+indeed we were not parading across our schoolroom stage as the
+portentous Cardinal and impressively alternating his last speech to
+Cromwell with Buckingham's, that is with Mr. Ryder's, address on the way
+to the scaffold. The spectacle had seemed to us prodigious--as it was
+doubtless at its time the last word of costly scenic science; though as
+I look back from the high ground of an age that has mastered tone and
+fusion I seem to see it as comparatively garish and violent, after the
+manner of the complacently approved stained-glass church-windows of the
+same period. I was to have my impression of Charles Kean renewed later
+on--ten years later, in America--without a rag of scenic reinforcement;
+when I was struck with the fact that no actor so little graced by nature
+probably ever went so far toward repairing it by a kind of cold rage of
+endeavour. Were he and his wife really not _coercively_ interesting on
+that Boston night of Macbeth in particular, hadn't their art a
+distinction that triumphed over battered age and sorry harshness, or was
+I but too easily beguiled by the old association? I have enjoyed and
+forgotten numberless rich hours of spectatorship, but somehow still find
+hooked to the wall of memory the picture of this hushed couple in the
+castle court, with the knocking at the gate, with Macbeth's stare of
+pitiful horror at his unused daggers and with the grand manner, up to
+the height of the argument, of Mrs. Kean's coldly portentous snatch of
+them. What I especially owe that lady is my sense of what she had in
+common, as a queer hooped and hook-nosed figure, of large circumference
+and archaic attire, strange tasteless toggery, with those performers of
+the past who are preserved for us on the small canvases of Hogarth and
+Zoffany; she helped one back at that time of her life to a vision of
+the Mrs. Cibbers and the Mrs. Pritchards--so affecting may often be such
+recovered links.
+
+I see the evening at the Olympic as really itself partaking of that
+antiquity, even though Still Waters Run Deep, then in its flourishing
+freshness and as to which I remember my fine old friend Fanny Kemble's
+mentioning to me in the distant after-time that she had directed Tom
+Taylor to Charles de Bernard's novel of Un Gendre for the subject of it,
+passed at the moment for a highly modern "social study." It is perhaps
+in particular through the memory of our dismal approach to the theatre,
+the squalid slum of Wych Street, then incredibly brutal and barbarous as
+an avenue to joy, an avenue even sometimes for the muffled coach of
+Royalty, that the episode affects me as antedating some of the
+conditions of the mid-Victorian age; the general credit of which, I
+should add, was highly re-established for us by the consummately quiet
+and natural art, as we expertly pronounced it, of Alfred Wigan's John
+Mildmay and the breadth and sincerity of the representative of the rash
+mother-in-law whom he so imperturbably puts in her place. This was an
+exhibition supposed in its day to leave its spectators little to envy in
+the highest finish reached by the French theatre. At a remarkable
+height, in a different direction, moved the strange and vivid little
+genius of Robson, a master of fantastic intensity, unforgettable for
+us, we felt that night, in Planche's extravaganza of The Discreet
+Princess, a Christmas production preluding to the immemorial
+harlequinade. I still see Robson slide across the stage, in one sidelong
+wriggle, as the small black sinister Prince Richcraft of the fairy-tale,
+everything he did at once very dreadful and very droll, thoroughly true
+and yet none the less _macabre_, the great point of it all its parody of
+Charles Kean in The Corsican Brothers; a vision filled out a couple of
+years further on by his Daddy Hardacre in a two-acts version of a
+Parisian piece thriftily and coarsely extracted from Balzac's Eugenie
+Grandet. This occasion must have given the real and the finer measure of
+his highly original talent; so present to me, despite the interval, is
+the distinctiveness of his little concentrated rustic miser whose
+daughter helps herself from his money-box so that her cousin and lover
+shall save a desperate father, her paternal uncle, from bankruptcy; and
+the prodigious effect of Robson's appalled descent, from an upper floor,
+his literal headlong tumble and rattle of dismay down a steep staircase
+occupying the centre of the stage, on his discovery of the rifling of
+his chest. Long was I to have in my ears the repeated shriek of his
+alarm, followed by a panting babble of wonder and rage as his impetus
+hurled him, a prostrate scrap of despair (he was a tiny figure, yet "so
+held the stage" that in his company you could see nobody else) half way
+across the room. I associate a little uncertainly with the same night
+the sight of Charles Matthews in Sheridan's Critic and in a comedy
+botched from the French, like everything else in those days that was not
+either Sheridan or Shakespeare, called Married for Money; an example
+above all, this association, of the heaped measure of the old
+bills--vast and various enumerations as they were, of the size of but
+slightly reduced placards and with a strange and delightful greasy feel
+and redolence of printer's ink, intensely theatrical ink somehow, in
+their big black lettering. Charles Matthews must have been then in his
+mid-career, and him too, wasted and aged, infinitely "marked," I was to
+see again, ever so long after, in America; an impression reminding me,
+as I recover it, of how one took his talent so thoroughly for granted
+that he seemed somehow to get but half the credit of it: this at least
+in all save parts of mere farce and "patter," which were on a footing,
+and no very interesting one, of their own. The other effect, that of a
+naturalness so easy and immediate, so friendly and intimate, that one's
+relation with the artist lost itself in one's relation with the
+character, the artist thereby somehow positively suffering while the
+character gained, or at least while the spectator did--this comes back
+to me quite as a part even of my earlier experience and as attesting on
+behalf of the actor a remarkable genius; since there are no more
+charming artistic cases than those of the frank result, when it is frank
+_enough_, and the dissimulated process, when the dissimulation has been
+deep. To drop, or appear to drop, machinery and yet keep, or at least
+gain, intensity, the interesting intensity separated by a gulf from a
+mere unbought coincidence of aspect or organ, is really to do something.
+In spite of which, at the same time, what I perhaps most retain, by the
+light of the present, of the sense of that big and rather dusky night of
+Drury Lane is not so much the felt degree of anyone's talent as the fact
+that personality and artistry, _with_ their intensity, could work their
+spell in such a material desert, in conditions intrinsically so
+charmless, so bleak and bare. The conditions gave nothing of what we
+regard to-day as most indispensable--since our present fine conception
+is but to reduce and fill in the material desert, to people and carpet
+and curtain it. We may be right, so far as that goes, but our
+predecessors were, with their eye on the essence, not wrong; thanks to
+which they wear the crown of our now thinking of them--if we do think of
+them--as in their way giants and heroes. What their successors were to
+become is another question; very much better dressed, beyond all doubt.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+Good Robert Thompson was followed by _fin_ M. Lerambert--who was surely
+good too, in his different way; good at least for feigning an interest
+he could scarce have rejoicingly felt and that he yet somehow managed to
+give a due impression of: that artifice being, as we must dimly have
+divined at the time (in fact I make bold to say that I personally did
+divine it,) exactly a sign of his _finesse_. Of no such uncanny engine
+had Mr. Thompson, luckily, known a need--luckily since to what arsenal
+could he possibly have resorted for it? None capable of supplying it
+could ever have met his sight, and we ourselves should at a pinch have
+had to help him toward it. He was easily interested, or at least took an
+easy view, on such ground as we offered him, of what it was to be so;
+whereas his successor attached to the condition a different value--one
+recognising no secondary substitute. Perhaps this was why our connection
+with M. Lerambert can have lasted but four or five months--time even for
+his sharp subterfuge to have ceased entirely to serve him; though indeed
+even as I say this I vaguely recall that our separation was attended
+with friction, that it took him unaware and that he had been prepared
+(or so represented himself) for further sacrifices. It could have been
+no great one, assuredly, to deal with so intensely living a young mind
+as my elder brother's, it could have been but a happy impression
+constantly renewed; but we two juniors, Wilky and I, were a
+drag--Wilky's powers most displayed at that time in his preference for
+ingenuous talk over any other pursuit whatever, and my own aptitude
+showing for nil, according to our poor gentleman's report of me when a
+couple of months had sped, save as to rendering La Fontaine's fables
+into English with a certain corresponding felicity of idiom. I remember
+perfectly the parental communication to me of this fell judgment, I
+remember as well the interest with which its so quite definite character
+inspired me--that character had such beauty and distinctness; yet, and
+ever so strangely, I recover no sense of having been crushed, and this
+even though destitute, utterly, of any ground of appeal. The fact leaves
+me at a loss, since I also remember my not having myself thought
+particularly well, in the connection allowed, of my "rendering" faculty.
+"Oh," I seem inwardly to have said, "if it were to be, if it only could
+be, _really_ a question of rendering--!" and so, without confusion,
+though in vague, very vague, mystification to have left it: as if so
+many things, intrinsic and extrinsic, would have to change and operate,
+so many would have to happen, so much water have to flow under the
+bridge, before I could give primary application to such a thought, much
+more finish such a sentence.
+
+All of which is but a way of saying that we had since the beginning of
+the summer settled ourselves in Paris, and that M. Lerambert--by what
+agency invoked, by what revelation vouchsafed, I quite forget--was at
+this time attending us in a so-called pavilion, of middling size, that,
+between the Rond-Point and the Rue du Colisee, hung, at no great height,
+over the Avenue des Champs-Elysees; hung, that is, from the vantage of
+its own considerable terrace, surmounted as the parapet of the latter
+was with iron railings rising sufficiently to protect the place for
+familiar use and covert contemplation (we ever so fondly used it,) and
+yet not to the point of fencing out life. A blest little old-world
+refuge it must have seemed to us, with its protuberantly-paved and
+peculiarly resonant small court and idle _communs_ beside it, accessible
+by a high grille where the jangle of the bell and the clatter of
+response across the stones might have figured a comprehensive echo of
+all old Paris. Old Paris then even there considerably lingered; I
+recapture much of its presence, for that matter, within our odd relic
+of a house, the property of an American southerner from whom our
+parents had briefly hired it and who appeared to divide his time, poor
+unadmonished gentleman of the eve of the Revolution, between Louisiana
+and France. What association could have breathed more from the queer
+graces and the queer incommodities alike, from the diffused glassy
+polish of floor and perilous staircase, from the redundancy of mirror
+and clock and ormolu vase, from the irrepressibility of the white and
+gold panel, from that merciless elegance of tense red damask, above all,
+which made the gilt-framed backs of sofa and chair as sumptuous, no
+doubt, but as sumptuously stiff, as the brocaded walls? It was amid
+these refinements that we presently resumed our studies--even explicitly
+far from arduous at first, as the Champs-Elysees were perforce that year
+our summer habitation and some deference was due to the place and the
+season, lessons of any sort being at best an infraction of the latter.
+M. Lerambert, who was spare and tightly black-coated, spectacled, pale
+and prominently intellectual, who lived in the Rue Jacob with his mother
+and sister, exactly as he should have done to accentuate prophetically
+his resemblance, save for the spectacles, to some hero of Victor
+Cherbuliez, and who, in fine, was conscious, not unimpressively, of his
+authorship of a volume of meditative verse sympathetically mentioned by
+the Sainte-Beuve of the Causeries in a review of the young poets of the
+hour ("M. Lerambert too has loved, M. Lerambert too has suffered, M.
+Lerambert too has sung!" or words to that effect:) this subtle
+personality, really a high form of sensibility I surmise, and as
+qualified for other and intenser relations as any Cherbuliez figure of
+them all, was naturally not to be counted on to lead us gapingly forth
+as good Mr. Thompson had done; so that my reminiscence of warm
+somniferous mornings by the windows that opened to the clattery, plashy
+court is quite, so far as my record goes, relievingly unbroken.
+
+The afternoons, however, glimmer back to me shamelessly different, for
+our circle had promptly been joined by the all-knowing and all-imposing
+Mademoiselle Danse aforesaid, her of the so flexible _taille_ and the so
+salient smiling eyes, than which even those of Miss Rebecca Sharp, that
+other epic governess, were not more pleasingly green; who provided with
+high efficiency for our immediate looser needs--mine and Wilky's and
+those of our small brother Bob (l'ingenieux petit Robertson as she was
+to dub him,) and of our still smaller sister at least--our first fine
+_flaneries_ of curiosity. Her brave Vaudoise predecessor had been
+bequeathed by us in London to a higher sphere than service with mere
+earnest nomads could represent; but had left us clinging and weeping
+and was for a long time afterwards to write to us, faithfully, in the
+most beautiful copper-plate hand, out of the midst of her "rise"; with
+details that brought home to us as we had never known it brought the
+material and institutional difference between the nomadic and the
+solidly, the spreadingly seated. A couple of years later, on an occasion
+of our being again for a while in London, she hastened to call on us,
+and, on departing, amiably invited me to walk back with her, for a
+gossip--it was a bustling day of June--across a long stretch of the
+town; when I left her at a glittering portal with the impression of my
+having in our transit seen much of Society (the old London "season"
+filled the measure, had length and breadth and thickness, to an extent
+now foregone,) and, more particularly, achieved a small psychologic
+study, noted the action of the massive English machinery directed to its
+end, which had been in this case effectually to tame the presumptuous
+and "work over" the crude. I remember on that occasion retracing my
+steps from Eaton Square to Devonshire Street with a lively sense of
+observation exercised by the way, a perfect gleaning of golden straws.
+Our guide and philosopher of the summer days in Paris was no such
+character as that; she had arrived among us full-fledged and consummate,
+fortunately for the case altogether--as our mere candid humanity would
+otherwise have had scant practical pressure to bring. Thackeray's novel
+contains a plate from his own expressive hand representing Miss Sharp
+lost in a cynical day-dream while her neglected pupils are locked in a
+scrimmage on the floor; but the marvel of _our_ exemplar of the Becky
+type was exactly that though her larger, her more interested and
+sophisticated views had a range that she not only permitted us to guess
+but agreeably invited us to follow almost to their furthest limits, we
+never for a moment ceased to be aware of her solicitude. We might, we
+must, so tremendously have bored her, but no ironic artist could have
+caught her at any juncture in the posture of disgust: really, I imagine,
+because her own ironies would have been too fine for him and too
+numerous and too mixed. And this remarkable creature vouchsafed us all
+information for the free enjoyment--on the terms proper to our tender
+years--of her beautiful city.
+
+It was not by the common measure then so beautiful as now; the second
+Empire, too lately installed, was still more or less feeling its way,
+with the great free hand soon to be allowed to Baron Haussmann marked as
+yet but in the light preliminary flourish. Its connections with the
+past, however, still hung thickly on; its majesties and symmetries,
+comparatively vague and general, were subject to the happy accident, the
+charming lapse and the odd extrusion, a bonhomie of chance composition
+and colour now quite purged away. The whole region of the
+Champs-Elysees, where we must after all at first have principally
+prowled, was another world from the actual huge centre of repeated
+radiations; the splendid Avenue, as we of course already thought it,
+carried the eye from the Tuileries to the Arch, but pleasant old places
+abutted on it by the way, gardens and terraces and hotels of another
+time, pavilions still braver than ours, cabarets and cafes of homely,
+almost of rural type, with a relative and doubtless rather dusty
+ruralism, spreading away to the River and the Wood. What was the Jardin
+d'Hiver, a place of entertainment standing quite over against us and
+that looped itself at night with little coloured oil-lamps, a mere
+twinkling grin upon the face of pleasure? Dim my impression of having
+been admitted--or rather, I suppose, conducted, though under
+conductorship now vague to me--to view it by colourless day, when it
+must have worn the stamp of an auction-room quite void of the "lots."
+More distinct on the other hand the image of the bustling barriere at
+the top of the Avenue, on the hither side of the Arch, where the old
+loose-girt _banlieue_ began at once and the two matched lodges of the
+octroi, highly, that is expressly even if humbly, architectural, guarded
+the entrance, on either side, with such a suggestion of the generations
+and dynasties and armies, the revolutions and restorations they had
+seen come and go. But the Avenue of the Empress, now, so much more
+thinly, but of the Wood itself, had already been traced, as the Empress
+herself, young, more than young, attestedly and agreeably _new_, and
+fair and shining, was, up and down the vista, constantly on exhibition;
+with the thrill of that surpassed for us, however, by the incomparable
+passage, as we judged it, of the baby Prince Imperial borne forth for
+his airing or his progress to Saint-Cloud in the splendid coach that
+gave a glimpse of appointed and costumed nursing breasts and laps, and
+beside which the _cent-gardes_, all light-blue and silver and intensely
+erect quick jolt, rattled with pistols raised and cocked. Was a public
+holiday ever more splendid than that of the Prince's baptism at Notre
+Dame, the fete of Saint-Napoleon, or was any ever more immortalised, as
+we say, than this one was to be by the wonderfully ample and vivid
+picture of it in the Eugene Rougon of Emile Zola, who must have taken it
+in, on the spot, as a boy of about our own number of years, though of so
+much more implanted and predestined an evocatory gift? The sense of that
+interminable hot day, a day of hanging about and waiting and shuffling
+in dust, in crowds, in fatigue, amid booths and pedlars and performers
+and false alarms and expectations and renewed reactions and rushes, all
+transfigured at the last, withal, by the biggest and brightest
+illumination up to that time offered even the Parisians, the blinding
+glare of the new Empire effectually symbolised--the vision of the whole,
+I say, comes back to me quite in the form of a chapter from the
+Rougon-Macquart, with its effect of something long and dense and heavy,
+without shades or undertones, but immensely kept-up and done. I dare say
+that for those months our contemplations, our daily exercise in general,
+strayed little beyond the Champs-Elysees, though I recall confusedly as
+well certain excursions to Passy and Auteuil, where we foregathered with
+small resident compatriots the easy gutturalism of whose French, an
+unpremeditated art, was a revelation, an initiation, and whence we
+roamed, for purposes of picnic, into parts of the Bois de Boulogne that,
+oddly enough, figured to us the virgin forest better than anything at
+our own American door had done.
+
+It was the social aspect of our situation that most appealed to me, none
+the less--for I detect myself, as I woo it all back, disengaging a
+social aspect again, and more than ever, from the phenomena disclosed to
+my reflective gape or to otherwise associated strolls; perceptive
+passages not wholly independent even of the occupancy of two-sous chairs
+within the charmed circle of Guignol and of Gringalet. I suppose I
+should have blushed to confess it, but Polichinelle and his puppets, in
+the afternoons, under an umbrage sparse till evening fell, had still
+their spell to cast--as part and parcel, that is, of the general
+intensity of animation and variety of feature. The "amusement," the
+aesthetic and human appeal, of Paris had in those days less the air of a
+great shining conspiracy to please, the machinery in movement confessed
+less to its huge purpose; but manners and types and traditions, the
+detail of the scene, its pointed particulars, went their way with a
+straighter effect, as well as often with a homelier grace--character,
+temper and tone had lost comparatively little of their emphasis. These
+scattered accents were matter for our eyes and ears--not a little even
+already for our respective imaginations; though it is only as the season
+waned and we set up our fireside afresh and for the winter that I
+connect my small revolution with a wider field and with the company of
+W. J. Again for that summer he was to be in eclipse to me; Guignol and
+Gringalet failed to claim his attention, and Mademoiselle Danse, I make
+out, deprecated his theory of exact knowledge, besides thinking him
+perhaps a little of an _ours_--which came to the same thing. We
+adjourned that autumn to quarters not far off, a wide-faced apartment in
+the street then bravely known as the Rue d'Angouleme-St.-Honore and now,
+after other mutations, as the Rue La Boetie; which we were again to
+exchange a year later for an abode in the Rue Montaigne, this last
+after a summer's absence at Boulogne-sur-Mer; the earlier migration
+setting up for me the frame of a considerably animated picture. Animated
+at best it was with the spirit and the modest facts of our family life,
+among which I number the cold finality of M. Lerambert, reflected in
+still other testimonies--that is till the date of our definite but
+respectful rupture with him, followed as the spring came on by our
+ineluctable phase at the Institution Fezandie in the Rue Balzac; of
+which latter there will be even more to say than I shall take freedom
+for. With the Rue d'Angouleme came extensions--even the mere immediate
+view of opposite intimacies and industries, the subdivided aspects and
+neat ingenuities of the applied Parisian genius counting as such: our
+many-windowed _premier_, above an entresol of no great height, hung over
+the narrow and, during the winter months, not a little dusky channel,
+with endless movement and interest in the vivid exhibition it supplied.
+What faced us was a series of subjects, with the baker, at the corner,
+for the first--the impeccable dispenser of the so softly-crusty
+crescent-rolls that we woke up each morning to hunger for afresh, with
+our weak cafe-au-lait, as for the one form of "European" breakfast-bread
+fit to be named even with the feeblest of our American forms. Then came
+the small cremerie, white picked out with blue, which, by some secret
+of its own keeping, afforded, within the compass of a few feet square,
+prolonged savoury meals to working men, white-frocked or blue-frocked,
+to uniformed cabmen, stout or spare, but all more or less audibly
+_bavards_ and discernibly critical; and next the compact embrasure of
+the ecaillere or oyster-lady, she and her paraphernalia fitted into
+their interstice much as the mollusc itself into its shell; neighboured
+in turn by the marchand-de-bois, peeping from as narrow a cage, his neat
+faggots and chopped logs stacked beside him and above him in his
+sentry-box quite as the niches of saints, in early Italian pictures, are
+framed with tightly-packed fruits and flowers. Space and remembrance
+fail me for the rest of the series, the attaching note of which comes
+back as the note of diffused sociability and domestic, in fact more or
+less aesthetic, ingenuity, with the street a perpetual parlour or
+household centre for the flitting, pausing, conversing little bourgeoise
+or ouvriere to sport, on every pretext and in every errand, her fluted
+cap, her composed head, her neat ankles and her ready wit. Which is to
+say indeed but that life and manners were more pointedly and
+harmoniously expressed, under our noses there, than we had perhaps found
+them anywhere save in the most salient passages of "stories"; though I
+must in spite of it not write as if these trifles were all our fare.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+That autumn renewed, I make out, our long and beguiled walks, my own
+with W. J. in especial; at the same time that I have somehow the sense
+of the whole more broken appeal on the part of Paris, the scanter
+confidence and ease it inspired in us, the perhaps more numerous and
+composite, but obscurer and more baffled intimations. Not indeed--for
+all my brother's later vision of an accepted flatness in it--that there
+was not some joy and some grasp; why else were we forever (as I seem to
+conceive we were) measuring the great space that separated us from the
+gallery of the Luxembourg, every step of which, either way we took it,
+fed us with some interesting, some admirable image, kept us in relation
+to something nobly intended? That particular walk was not prescribed us,
+yet we appear to have hugged it, across the Champs-Elysees to the river,
+and so over the nearest bridge and the quays of the left bank to the Rue
+de Seine, as if it somehow held the secret of our future; to the extent
+even of my more or less sneaking off on occasion to take it by myself,
+to taste of it with a due undiverted intensity and the throb as of the
+finest, which _could_ only mean the most Parisian, adventure. The
+further quays, with their innumerable old bookshops and print-shops, the
+long cases of each of these commodities, exposed on the parapets in
+especial, must have come to know us almost as well as we knew them; with
+plot thickening and emotion deepening steadily, however, as we mounted
+the long, black Rue de Seine--_such_ a stretch of perspective, _such_ an
+intensity of tone as it offered in those days; where every low-browed
+vitrine waylaid us and we moved in a world of which the dark message,
+expressed in we couldn't have said what sinister way too, might have
+been "Art, art, art, don't you see? Learn, little gaping pilgrims, what
+_that_ is!" Oh we learned, that is we tried to, as hard as ever we
+could, and were fairly well at it, I always felt, even by the time we
+had passed up into that comparatively short but wider and finer vista of
+the Rue de Tournon, which in those days more abruptly crowned the more
+compressed approach and served in a manner as a great outer vestibule to
+the Palace. Style, dimly described, looked down there, as with conscious
+encouragement, from the high grey-headed, clear-faced, straight-standing
+old houses--very much as if wishing to say "Yes, small staring jeune
+homme, we are dignity and memory and measure, we are conscience and
+proportion and taste, not to mention strong sense too: for all of which
+good things take us--you won't find one of them when you find (as you're
+going soon to begin to at such a rate) vulgarity." This, I admit, was an
+abundance of remark to such young ears; but it did all, I maintain,
+tremble in the air, with the sense that the Rue de Tournon, cobbled and
+a little grass-grown, might more or less have figured some fine old
+street _de province_: I cherished in short its very name and think I
+really hadn't to wait to prefer the then, the unmenaced, the inviolate
+Cafe Foyot of the left hand corner, the much-loved and so haunted Cafe
+Foyot of the old Paris, to its--well, to its roaring successor. The wide
+mouth of the present Boulevard Saint-Michel, a short way round the
+corner, had not yet been forced open to the exhibition of more or less
+glittering fangs; old Paris still pressed round the Palace and its
+gardens, which formed the right, the sober social antithesis to the
+"elegant" Tuileries, and which in fine, with these renewals of our young
+confidence, reinforced both in a general and in a particular way one of
+the fondest of our literary curiosities of that time, the conscientious
+study of Les Francais Peints par Eux-Memes, rich in wood-cuts of
+Gavarni, of Grandville, of Henri-Monnier, which we held it rather our
+duty to admire and W. J. even a little his opportunity to copy in
+pen-and-ink. This gilt-edged and double-columned octavo it was that
+first disclosed to me, forestalling a better ground of acquaintance, the
+great name of Balzac, who, in common with every other "light" writer of
+his day, contributed to its pages: hadn't I pored over his exposition
+there of the contrasted types of L'Habituee des Tuileries and L'Habituee
+du Luxembourg?--finding it very _serre_, in fact what I didn't then know
+enough to call very stodgy, but flavoured withal and a trifle lubricated
+by Gavarni's two drawings, which had somehow so much, in general, to
+say.
+
+Let me not however dally by the way, when nothing, at those hours, I
+make out, so much spoke to us as the animated pictured halls within the
+Palace, primarily those of the Senate of the Empire, but then also
+forming, as with extensions they still and much more copiously form, the
+great Paris museum of contemporary art. This array was at that stage a
+comparatively (though only comparatively) small affair; in spite of
+which fact we supposed it vast and final--so that it would have shocked
+us to foreknow how in many a case, and of the most cherished cases, the
+finality was to break down. Most of the works of the modern schools that
+we most admired are begging their bread, I fear, from door to door--that
+is from one provincial museum or dim back seat to another; though we
+were on much-subsequent returns to draw a long breath for the saved
+state of some of the great things as to which our faith had been
+clearest. It had been clearer for none, I recover, than for Couture's
+Romains de la Decadence, recently acclaimed, at that time, as the last
+word of the grand manner, but of the grand manner modernised, humanised,
+philosophised, redeemed from academic death; so that it was to this
+master's school that the young American contemporary flutter taught its
+wings to fly straightest, and that I could never, in the long aftertime,
+face his masterpiece and all its old meanings and marvels without a rush
+of memories and a stir of ghosts. William Hunt, the New Englander of
+genius, the "Boston painter" whose authority was greatest during the
+thirty years from 1857 or so, and with whom for a time in the early
+period W. J. was to work all devotedly, had prolonged his studies in
+Paris under the inspiration of Couture and of Edouard Frere; masters in
+a group completed by three or four of the so finely interesting
+landscapists of that and the directly previous age, Troyon, Rousseau,
+Daubigny, even Lambinet and others, and which summed up for the American
+collector and in the New York and Boston markets the idea of the modern
+in the masterly. It was a comfortable time--when appreciation could go
+so straight, could rise, and rise higher, without critical contortions;
+when we could, I mean, be both so intelligent and so "quiet." We were
+in our immediate circle to know Couture himself a little toward the end
+of his life, and I was somewhat to wonder then where he had picked up
+the aesthetic hint for the beautiful Page with a Falcon, if I have the
+designation right, his other great bid for style and capture of
+it--which we were long to continue to suppose perhaps the rarest of all
+modern pictures. The feasting Romans were conceivable enough, I mean
+_as_ a conception; no mystery hung about them--in the sense of one's
+asking one's self whence they had come and by what romantic or
+roundabout or nobly-dangerous journey; which is that air of the poetic
+shaken out as from strong wings when great presences, in any one of the
+arts, appear to alight. What I remember, on the other hand, of the
+splendid fair youth in black velvet and satin or whatever who, while he
+mounts the marble staircase, shows off the great bird on his forefinger
+with a grace that shows _him_ off, was that it failed to help us to
+divine, during that after-lapse of the glory of which I speak, by what
+rare chance, for the obscured old ex-celebrity we visited, the heavens
+had once opened. Poetry had swooped down, breathed on him for an hour
+and fled. Such at any rate are the see-saws of reputations--which it
+contributes to the interest of any observational lingering on this
+planet to have caught so repeatedly in their weird motion; the question
+of what may happen, under one's eyes, in particular cases, before that
+motion sinks to rest, whether at the up or at the down end, being really
+a bribe to one's own non-departure. Especially great the interest of
+having noted all the rises and falls and of being able to compare the
+final point--so far as any certainty may go as to that--either with the
+greatest or the least previous altitudes; since it is only when there
+have been exaltations (which is what is not commonest), that our
+attention is most rewarded.
+
+If the see-saw was to have operated indeed for Eugene Delacroix, our
+next young admiration, though much more intelligently my brother's than
+mine, that had already taken place and settled, for we were to go on
+seeing him, and to the end, in firm possession of his crown, and to take
+even, I think, a harmless pleasure in our sense of having from so far
+back been sure of it. I was sure of it, I must properly add, but as an
+effect of my brother's sureness; since I must, by what I remember, have
+been as sure of Paul Delaroche--for whom the pendulum was at last to be
+arrested at a very different point. I could see in a manner, for all the
+queerness, what W. J. meant by that beauty and, above all, that living
+interest in La Barque du Dante, where the queerness, according to him,
+was perhaps what contributed most; see it doubtless in particular when
+he reproduced the work, at home, from a memory aided by a lithograph.
+Yet Les Enfants d'Edouard thrilled me to a different tune, and I
+couldn't doubt that the long-drawn odd face of the elder prince, sad and
+sore and sick, with his wide crimped side-locks of fair hair and his
+violet legs marked by the Garter and dangling from the bed, was a
+reconstitution of far-off history of the subtlest and most "last word"
+modern or psychologic kind. I had never heard of psychology in art or
+anywhere else--scarcely anyone then had; but I truly felt the nameless
+force at play. Thus if I also in my way "subtly" admired, one's noted
+practice of that virtue (mainly regarded indeed, I judge, as a vice)
+would appear to have at the time I refer to set in, under such
+encouragements, once for all; and I can surely have enjoyed up to then
+no formal exhibition of anything as I at one of those seasons enjoyed
+the commemorative show of Delaroche given, soon after his death, in one
+of the rather bleak salles of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts to which access
+was had from the quay. _There_ was reconstituted history if one would,
+in the straw-littered scaffold, the distracted ladies with
+three-cornered coifs and those immense hanging sleeves that made them
+look as if they had bath-towels over their arms; in the block, the
+headsman, the bandaged eyes and groping hands, of Lady Jane Grey--not
+less than in the noble indifference of Charles the First, compromised
+king but perfect gentleman, at his inscrutable ease in his chair and as
+if on his throne, while the Puritan soldiers insult and badger him: the
+thrill of which was all the greater from its pertaining to that English
+lore which the good Robert Thompson had, to my responsive delight,
+rubbed into us more than anything else and all from a fine old
+conservative and monarchical point of view. Yet of these things W. J.
+attempted no reproduction, though I remember his repeatedly laying his
+hand on Delacroix, whom he found always and everywhere interesting--to
+the point of trying effects, with charcoal and crayon, in his manner;
+and not less in the manner of Decamps, whom we regarded as more or less
+of a genius of the same rare family. They were touched with the
+ineffable, the inscrutable, and Delacroix in especial with the
+incalculable; categories these toward which we had even then, by a happy
+transition, begun to yearn and languish. We were not yet aware of style,
+though on the way to become so, but were aware of mystery, which indeed
+was one of its forms--while we saw all the others, without exception,
+exhibited at the Louvre, where at first they simply overwhelmed and
+bewildered me.
+
+It was as if they had gathered there into a vast deafening chorus; I
+shall never forget how--speaking, that is, for my own sense--they
+filled those vast halls with the influence rather of some complicated
+sound, diffused and reverberant, than of such visibilities as one could
+directly deal with. To distinguish among these, in the charged and
+coloured and confounding air, was difficult--it discouraged and defied;
+which was doubtless why my impression originally best entertained was
+that of those magnificent parts of the great gallery simply not inviting
+us to distinguish. They only arched over us in the wonder of their
+endless golden riot and relief, figured and flourished in perpetual
+revolution, breaking into great high-hung circles and symmetries of
+squandered picture, opening into deep outward embrasures that threw off
+the rest of monumental Paris somehow as a told story, a sort of wrought
+effect or bold ambiguity for a vista, and yet held it there, at every
+point, as a vast bright gage, even at moments a felt adventure, of
+experience. This comes to saying that in those beginnings I felt myself
+most happily cross that bridge over to Style constituted by the wondrous
+Galerie d'Apollon, drawn out for me as a long but assured initiation and
+seeming to form with its supreme coved ceiling and inordinately shining
+parquet a prodigious tube or tunnel through which I inhaled little by
+little, that is again and again, a general sense of _glory_. The glory
+meant ever so many things at once, not only beauty and art and supreme
+design, but history and fame and power, the world in fine raised to the
+richest and noblest expression. The world there was at the same time, by
+an odd extension or intensification, the local present fact, to my small
+imagination, of the Second Empire, which was (for my notified
+consciousness) new and queer and perhaps even wrong, but on the spot so
+amply radiant and elegant that it took to itself, took under its
+protection with a splendour of insolence, the state and ancientry of the
+whole scene, profiting thus, to one's dim historic vision, confusedly
+though it might be, by the unparalleled luxury and variety of its
+heritage. But who shall count the sources at which an intense young
+fancy (when a young fancy _is_ intense) capriciously, absurdly
+drinks?--so that the effect is, in twenty connections, that of a
+love-philtre or fear-philtre which fixes for the senses their supreme
+symbol of the fair or the strange. The Galerie d'Apollon became for
+years what I can only term a splendid scene of things, even of the quite
+irrelevant or, as might be, almost unworthy; and I recall to this hour,
+with the last vividness, what a precious part it played for me, and
+exactly by that continuity of honour, on my awaking, in a summer dawn
+many years later, to the fortunate, the instantaneous recovery and
+capture of the most appalling yet most admirable nightmare of my life.
+The climax of this extraordinary experience--which stands alone for me
+as a dream-adventure founded in the deepest, quickest, clearest act of
+cogitation and comparison, act indeed of life-saving energy, as well as
+in unutterable fear--was the sudden pursuit, through an open door, along
+a huge high saloon, of a just dimly-descried figure that retreated in
+terror before my rush and dash (a glare of inspired reaction from
+irresistible but shameful dread,) out of the room I had a moment before
+been desperately, and all the more abjectly, defending by the push of my
+shoulder against hard pressure on lock and bar from the other side. The
+lucidity, not to say the sublimity, of the crisis had consisted of the
+great thought that I, in my appalled state, was probably still more
+appalling than the awful agent, creature or presence, whatever he was,
+whom I had guessed, in the suddenest wild start from sleep, the sleep
+within my sleep, to be making for my place of rest. The triumph of my
+impulse, perceived in a flash as I acted on it by myself at a bound,
+forcing the door outward, was the grand thing, but the great point of
+the whole was the wonder of my final recognition. Routed, dismayed, the
+tables turned upon him by my so surpassing him for straight aggression
+and dire intention, my visitant was already but a diminished spot in the
+long perspective, the tremendous, glorious hall, as I say, over the
+far-gleaming floor of which, cleared for the occasion of its great line
+of priceless vitrines down the middle, he sped for _his_ life, while a
+great storm of thunder and lightning played through the deep embrasures
+of high windows at the right. The lightning that revealed the retreat
+revealed also the wondrous place and, by the same amazing play, my young
+imaginative life in it of long before, the sense of which, deep within
+me, had kept it whole, preserved it to this thrilling use; for what in
+the world were the deep embrasures and the so polished floor but those
+of the Galerie d'Apollon of my childhood? The "scene of something" I had
+vaguely then felt it? Well I might, since it was to be the scene of that
+immense hallucination.
+
+Of what, at the same time, in those years, were the great rooms of the
+Louvre almost equally, above and below, not the scene, from the moment
+they so wrought, stage by stage, upon our perceptions?--literally on
+almost all of these, in one way and another; quite in such a manner, I
+more and more see, as to have been educative, formative, fertilising, in
+a degree which no other "intellectual experience" our youth was to know
+could pretend, as a comprehensive, conducive thing, to rival. The sharp
+and strange, the quite heart-shaking little prevision had come to me,
+for myself, I make out, on the occasion of our very first visit of all,
+my brother's and mine, under conduct of the good Jean Nadali,
+before-mentioned, trustfully deputed by our parents, in the Rue de la
+Paix, on the morrow of our first arrival in Paris (July 1855) and while
+they were otherwise concerned. I hang again, appalled but uplifted, on
+brave Nadali's arm--his professional acquaintance with the splendours
+about us added for me on the spot to the charm of his "European"
+character: I cling to him while I gape at Gericault's Radeau de la
+Meduse, _the_ sensation, for splendour and terror of interest, of that
+juncture to me, and ever afterwards to be associated, along with two or
+three other more or less contemporary products, Guerin's Burial of
+Atala, Prudhon's Cupid and Psyche, David's helmetted Romanisms, Madame
+Vigee-Lebrun's "ravishing" portrait of herself and her little girl, with
+how can I say what foretaste (as determined by that instant as if the
+hour had struck from a clock) of all the fun, confusedly speaking, that
+one was going to have, and the kind of life, always of the queer
+so-called inward sort, tremendously "sporting" in its way--though that
+description didn't then wait upon it, that one was going to lead. It
+came of itself, this almost awful apprehension in all the presences,
+under our courier's protection and in my brother's company--it came just
+there and so; there was alarm in it somehow as well as bliss. The bliss
+in fact I think scarce disengaged itself at all, but only the sense of
+a freedom of contact and appreciation really too big for one, and
+leaving such a mark on the very place, the pictures, the frames
+themselves, the figures within them, the particular parts and features
+of each, the look of the rich light, the smell of the massively enclosed
+air, that I have never since renewed the old exposure without renewing
+again the old emotion and taking up the small scared consciousness.
+_That_, with so many of the conditions repeated, is the charm--to feel
+afresh the beginning of so much that was to be. The beginning in short
+was with Gericault and David, but it went on and on and slowly spread;
+so that one's stretched, one's even strained, perceptions, one's
+discoveries and extensions piece by piece, come back, on the great
+premises, almost as so many explorations of the house of life, so many
+circlings and hoverings round the image of the world. I have dim
+reminiscences of permitted independent visits, uncorrectedly juvenile
+though I might still be, during which the house of life and the palace
+of art became so mixed and interchangeable--the Louvre being, under a
+general description, the most peopled of all scenes not less than the
+most hushed of all temples--that an excursion to look at pictures would
+have but half expressed my afternoon. I had looked at pictures, looked
+and looked again, at the vast Veronese, at Murillo's moon-borne
+Madonna, at Leonardo's almost unholy dame with the folded hands,
+treasures of the Salon Carre as that display was then composed; but I
+had also looked at France and looked at Europe, looked even at America
+as Europe itself might be conceived so to look, looked at history, as a
+still-felt past and a complacently personal future, at society, manners,
+types, characters, possibilities and prodigies and mysteries of fifty
+sorts; and all in the light of being splendidly "on my own," as I
+supposed it, though we hadn't then that perfection of slang, and of (in
+especial) going and coming along that interminable and incomparable
+Seine-side front of the Palace against which young sensibility felt
+itself almost rub, for endearment and consecration, as a cat invokes the
+friction of a protective piece of furniture. Such were at any rate some
+of the vague processes--I see for how utterly vague they must show--of
+picking up an education; and I was, in spite of the vagueness, so far
+from agreeing with my brother afterwards that we didn't pick one up and
+that that never _is_ done, in any sense not negligible, and also that an
+education might, or should, in particular, have picked _us_ up, and yet
+didn't--I was so far dissentient, I say, that I think I quite came to
+glorify such passages and see them as part of an order really fortunate.
+If we had been little asses, I seem to have reasoned, a higher
+intention driving us wouldn't have made us less so--to any point worth
+mentioning; and as we extracted such impressions, to put it at the
+worst, from redemptive accidents (to call Louvres and Luxembourgs
+nothing better) why we weren't little asses, but something wholly other:
+which appeared all I needed to contend for. Above all it would have been
+stupid and ignoble, an attested and lasting dishonour, not, with our
+chance, to have followed our straggling clues, as many as we could and
+disengaging as we happily did, I felt, the gold and the silver ones,
+whatever the others might have been--not to have followed them and not
+to have arrived by them, so far as we were to arrive. Instinctively, for
+any dim designs we might have nourished, we picked out the silver and
+the gold, attenuated threads though they must have been, and I
+positively feel that there were more of these, far more, casually
+interwoven, than will reward any present patience for my unravelling of
+the too fine tissue.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+I allude of course in particular here to the aesthetic clue in general,
+with which it was that we most (or that I at any rate most) fumbled,
+without our in the least having then, as I have already noted, any such
+rare name for it. There were sides on which it fairly dangled about us,
+involving our small steps and wits; though others too where I could, for
+my own part, but clutch at it in the void. Our experience of the theatre
+for instance, which had played such a part for us at home, almost wholly
+dropped in just the most propitious air: an anomaly indeed half
+explained by the fact that life in general, all round us, was
+perceptibly more theatrical. And there were other reasons, whether
+definitely set before us or not, which we grasped in proportion as we
+gathered, by depressing hearsay, that the French drama, great, strange
+and important, was as much out of relation to our time of life, our so
+little native strain and our cultivated innocence, as the American and
+English had been directly addressed to them. To the Cirque d'Ete, the
+Cirque d'Hiver, the Theatre du Cirque we were on occasion conducted--we
+had fallen so to the level of circuses, and that name appeared a
+safety; in addition to which the big theatre most bravely bearing it,
+the especial home at that time of the glittering and multitudinous
+_feerie_, did seem to lift the whole scenic possibility, for our eyes,
+into a higher sphere of light and grace than any previously disclosed. I
+recall Le Diable d'Argent as in particular a radiant revelation--kept
+before us a whole long evening and as an almost blinding glare; which
+was quite right for the _donnee_, the gradual shrinkage of the Shining
+One, the money-monster hugely inflated at first, to all the successive
+degrees of loose bagginess as he leads the reckless young man he has
+originally contracted with from dazzling pleasure to pleasure, till at
+last he is a mere shrivelled silver string such as you could almost draw
+through a keyhole. That was the striking moral, for the young man,
+however regaled, had been somehow "sold"; which _we_ hadn't in the least
+been, who had had all his pleasures and none of his penalty, whatever
+this was to be. I was to repine a little, in these connections, at a
+much later time, on reflecting that had we only been "taken" in the
+Paris of that period as we had been taken in New York we might have come
+in for celebrities--supremely fine, perhaps supremely rank, flowers of
+the histrionic temperament, springing as they did from the soil of the
+richest romanticism and adding to its richness--who practised that
+braver art and finer finish which a comparatively homogenous public,
+forming a compact critical body, still left possible. Rachel was alive,
+but dying; the memory of Mademoiselle Mars, at her latest, was still in
+the air; Mademoiselle Georges, a massive, a monstrous antique, had
+withal returned for a season to the stage; but we missed her, as we
+missed Dejazet and Frederic Lemaitre and Melingue and Samson; to say
+nothing of others of the age before the flood--taking for the flood that
+actual high tide of the outer barbarian presence, the general alien and
+polyglot, in stalls and boxes, which I remember to have heard Gustave
+Flaubert lament as the ruin of the theatre through the assumption of
+judgeship by a bench to whom the very values of the speech of author and
+actor were virtually closed, or at the best uncertain.
+
+I enjoyed but two snatches of the older representational art--no
+particular of either of which, however, has faded from me; the earlier
+and rarer of these an evening at the Gymnase for a _spectacle coupe_,
+with Mesdames Rose Cheri, Melanie, Delaporte and Victoria (afterwards
+Victoria-La-fontaine). I squeeze again with my mother, my aunt and my
+brother into the stuffy baignoire, and I take to my memory in especial
+Madame de Girardin's Une Femme qui Deteste son Mari; the thrilling
+story, as I judged it, of an admirable lady who, to save her loyalist
+husband, during the Revolution, feigns the most Jacobin opinions,
+represents herself a citoyenne of citoyennes, in order to keep him the
+more safely concealed in her house. He flattens himself, to almost
+greater peril of life, behind a panel of the wainscot, which she has a
+secret for opening when he requires air and food and they may for a
+fearful fleeting instant be alone together; and the point of the picture
+is in the contrast between these melting moments and the heroine's
+_tenue_ under the tremendous strain of receiving on the one side the
+invading, investigating Terrorist commissaries, sharply suspicious but
+successfully baffled, and on the other her noble relatives, her
+husband's mother and sister if I rightly remember, who are not in the
+secret and whom, for perfect prudence, she keeps out of it, though alone
+with her, and themselves in hourly danger, they might be trusted, and
+who, believing him concealed elsewhere and terribly tracked, treat her,
+in her republican rage, as lost to all honour and all duty. One's sense
+of such things after so long a time has of course scant authority for
+others; but I myself trust my vision of Rose Cheri's fine play just as I
+trust that of her _physique ingrat_, her at first extremely odd and
+positively osseous appearance; an emaciated woman with a high bulging
+forehead, somewhat of the form of Rachel's, for whom the triumphs of
+produced illusion, as in the second, third and fourth great dramas of
+the younger Dumas, had to be triumphs indeed. My one other reminiscence
+of this order connects itself, and quite three years later, with the old
+dingy Vaudeville of the Place de la Bourse, where I saw in my brother's
+company a rhymed domestic drama of the then still admired Ponsard, Ce
+qui Plait aux Femmes; a piece that enjoyed, I believe, scant success,
+but that was to leave with me ineffaceable images. How was it possible,
+I wondered, to have more grace and talent, a rarer, cooler art, than
+Mademoiselle Fargeuil, the heroine?--the fine lady whom a pair of rival
+lovers, seeking to win her hand by offering her what will most please
+her, treat, in the one case, to a brilliant fete, a little play within a
+play, at which we assist, and in the other to the inside view of an
+attic of misery, into which the more cunning suitor introduces her just
+in time to save a poor girl, the tenant of the place, from being
+ruinously, that is successfully, tempted by a terrible old woman, a
+prowling _revendeuse_, who dangles before her the condition on which so
+pretty a person may enjoy every comfort. Her happier sister, the courted
+young widow, intervenes in time, reinforces her tottering virtue, opens
+for her an account with baker and butcher, and, doubting no longer which
+flame is to be crowned, charmingly shows us that what pleases women most
+is the exercise of charity.
+
+Then it was I first beheld that extraordinary veteran of the stage,
+Mademoiselle Pierson, almost immemorially attached, for later
+generations, to the Theatre Francais, the span of whose career thus
+strikes me as fabulous, though she figured as a very juvenile beauty in
+the small _feerie_ or allegory forming M. Ponsard's second act. She has
+been playing mothers and aunts this many and many a year--and still
+indeed much as a juvenile beauty. Not that light circumstance, however,
+pleads for commemoration, nor yet the further fact that I was to admire
+Mademoiselle Fargeuil, in the after-time, the time after she had given
+all Sardou's earlier successes the help of her shining firmness, when
+she had passed from interesting comedy and even from romantic drama--not
+less, perhaps still more, interesting, with Sardou's Patrie as a
+bridge--to the use of the bigger brush of the Ambigu and other homes of
+melodrama. The sense, such as it is, that I extract from the pair of
+modest memories in question is rather their value as a glimpse of the
+old order that spoke so much less of our hundred modern material
+resources, matters the stage of to-day appears mainly to live by, and
+such volumes more of the one thing that was then, and that, given
+various other things, had to be, of the essence. That one thing was the
+quality, to say nothing of the quantity, of the actor's personal
+resource, technical history, tested temper, proved experience; on which
+almost everything had to depend, and the thought of which makes the mere
+starved scene and medium of the period, the _rest_ of the picture, a
+more confessed and more heroic battle-ground. They have been more and
+more eased off, the scene and medium, for our couple of generations, so
+much so in fact that the rest of the picture has become almost _all_ the
+picture: the author and the producer, among us, lift the weight of the
+play from the performer--particularly of the play dealing with our
+immediate life and manners and aspects--after a fashion which does half
+the work, thus reducing the "personal equation," the demand for the
+maximum of individual doing, to a contribution mostly of the loosest and
+sparest. As a sop to historic curiosity at all events may even so short
+an impression serve; impression of the strenuous age and its fine old
+masterful _assouplissement_ of its victims--who were not the expert
+spectators. The spectators were so expert, so broken in to material
+suffering for the sake of their passion, that, as the suffering was only
+material, they found the aesthetic reward, the critical relish of the
+essence, all adequate; a fact that seems in a sort to point a moral of
+large application. Everything but the "interpretation," the personal, in
+the French theatre of those days, had kinds and degrees of weakness and
+futility, say even falsity, of which our modern habit is wholly
+impatient--let alone other conditions still that were detestable even at
+the time, and some of which, forms of discomfort and annoyance, linger
+on to this day. The playhouse, in short, was almost a place of physical
+torture, and it is still rarely in Paris a place of physical ease. Add
+to this the old thinness of the school of Scribe and the old emptiness
+of the thousand vaudevillistes; which part of the exhibition, till
+modern comedy began, under the younger Dumas and Augier, had for its
+counterpart but the terrible dead weight, or at least the prodigious
+prolixity and absurdity, of much, not to say of most, of the romantic
+and melodramatic "output." It _paid_ apparently, in the golden age of
+acting, to sit through interminable evenings in impossible places--since
+to assume that the age _was_ in that particular respect golden (for
+which we have in fact a good deal of evidence) alone explains the
+patience of the public. With the public the _actors_ were, according to
+their seasoned strength, almost exclusively appointed to deal, just as
+in the conditions most familiar to-day to ourselves this charge is laid
+on almost everyone concerned in the case save the representatives of the
+parts. And far more other people are now concerned than of old; not
+least those who have learned to make the playhouse endurable. All of
+which leaves us with this interesting vision of a possibly great truth,
+the truth that you can't have more than one kind of intensity--intensity
+worthy of the name--at once. The intensity of the golden age of the
+histrion was the intensity of _his_ good faith. The intensity of our
+period is that of the "producer's" and machinist's, to which add even
+that of architect, author and critic. Between which derivative kind of
+that article, as we may call it, and the other, the immediate kind, it
+would appear that you have absolutely to choose.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+I see much of the rest of that particular Paris time in the light of the
+Institution Fezandie, and I see the Institution Fezandie, Rue Balzac, in
+the light, if not quite of Alphonse Daudet's lean asylum for the _petits
+pays chauds_, of which I have felt the previous institutions of New York
+sketchily remind me, at least in that of certain other of his studies in
+that field of the precarious, the ambiguous Paris over parts of which
+the great Arch at the top of the Champs-Elysees flings, at its hours, by
+its wide protective plausible shadow, a precious mantle of "tone." They
+gather, these chequered parts, into its vast paternal presence and enjoy
+at its expense a degree of reflected dignity. It was to the big square
+villa of the Rue Balzac that we turned, as pupils not unacquainted with
+vicissitudes, from a scene swept bare of M. Lerambert, an establishment
+that strikes me, at this distance of time, as of the oddest and most
+indescribable--or as describable at best in some of the finer turns and
+touches of Daudet's best method. The picture indeed should not be
+invidious--it so little needs that, I feel, for its due measure of the
+vivid, the queer, the droll, all coming back to me without prejudice to
+its air as of an equally futile felicity. I see it as bright and loose
+and vague, as confused and embarrassed and helpless; I see it, I fear,
+as quite ridiculous, but as wholly harmless to my brothers and me at
+least, and as having left us with a fund of human impressions; it played
+before us such a variety of figure and character and so relieved us of a
+sense of untoward discipline or of the pursuit of abstract knowledge. It
+was a recreational, or at least a social, rather than a tuitional house;
+which fact had, I really believe, weighed favourably with our parents,
+when, bereft of M. Lerambert, they asked themselves, with their
+considerable practice, how next to bestow us. Our father, like so many
+free spirits of that time in New York and Boston, had been much
+interested in the writings of Charles Fourier and in his scheme of the
+"phalanstery" as the solution of human troubles, and it comes to me that
+he must have met or in other words heard of M. Fezandie as an active and
+sympathetic ex-Fourierist (I think there were only ex-Fourierists by
+that time,) who was embarking, not far from us, on an experiment if not
+absolutely phalansteric at least inspired, or at any rate enriched, by a
+bold idealism. I like to think of the Institution as all but
+phalansteric--it so corrects any fear that such places might be dreary.
+I recall this one as positively gay--bristling and bustling and
+resonant, untouched by the strenuous note, for instance, of Hawthorne's
+co-operative Blithedale. I like to think that, in its then still almost
+suburban, its pleasantly heterogeneous quarter, now oppressively
+uniform, it was close to where Balzac had ended his life, though I
+question its identity--as for a while I tried not to--with the scene
+itself of the great man's catastrophe. Round its high-walled garden at
+all events he would have come and gone--a throb of inference that had
+for some years indeed to be postponed for me; though an association
+displacing to-day, over the whole spot, every other interest. I in any
+case can't pretend not to have been most appealed to by that especial
+phase of our education from which the pedagogic process as commonly
+understood was most fantastically absent. It excelled in this respect,
+the Fezandie phase, even others exceptionally appointed, heaven knows,
+for the supremacy; and yet its glory is that it was no poor blank, but
+that it fairly creaked and groaned, heatedly overflowed, with its
+wealth. We were _externes_, the three of us, but we remained in general
+to luncheon; coming home then, late in the afternoon, with an almost
+sore experience of multiplicity and vivacity of contact. For the beauty
+of it all was that the Institution was, speaking technically, not more a
+_pensionnat_, with prevailingly English and American pupils, than a
+_pension_, with mature beneficiaries of both sexes, and that our two
+categories were shaken up together to the liveliest effect. This had
+been M. Fezandie's grand conception; a son of the south, bald and
+slightly replete, with a delicate beard, a quick but anxious, rather
+melancholy eye and a slim, graceful, juvenile wife, who multiplied
+herself, though scarce knowing at moments, I think, where or how to
+turn; I see him as a Daudet _meridional_, but of the sensitive, not the
+sensual, type, as something of a rolling stone, rolling rather down
+hill--he had enjoyed some arrested, possibly blighted, connection in
+America--and as ready always again for some new application of faith and
+funds. If fondly failing in the least to see why the particular
+application in the Rue Balzac--the body of pensioners ranging from
+infancy to hoary eld--shouldn't have been a bright success could have
+made it one, it would have been a most original triumph.
+
+I recover it as for ourselves a beautifully mixed adventure, a brave
+little seeing of the world on the happy pretext of "lessons." We _had_
+lessons from time to time, but had them in company with ladies and
+gentlemen, young men and young women of the Anglo-Saxon family, who sat
+at long boards of green cloth with us and with several of our
+contemporaries, English and American boys, taking _dictees_ from the
+head of the house himself or from the aged and most remarkable M.
+Bonnefons, whom we believed to have been a superannuated actor (he above
+all such a model for Daudet!) and who interrupted our abashed readings
+aloud to him of the French classics older and newer by wondrous
+reminiscences and even imitations of Talma. He moved among us in a cloud
+of legend, the wigged and wrinkled, the impassioned, though I think alas
+underfed, M. Bonnefons: it was our belief that he "went back," beyond
+the first Empire, to the scenes of the Revolution--this perhaps partly
+by reason, in the first place, of his scorn of our pronunciation, when
+we met it, of the sovereign word _liberte_, the poverty of which, our
+deplorable "libbete," without r's, he mimicked and derided, sounding the
+right, the revolutionary form out splendidly, with thirty r's, the
+prolonged beat of a drum. And then we believed him, if artistically
+conservative, politically obnoxious to the powers that then were, though
+knowing that those so marked had to walk, and even to breathe,
+cautiously for fear of the _mouchards_ of the tyrant; we knew all about
+mouchards and talked of them as we do to-day of aviators or
+suffragettes--to remember which in an age so candidly unconscious of
+them is to feel how much history we have seen unrolled. There were times
+when he but paced up and down and round the long table--I see him as
+never seated, but always on the move, a weary Wandering Jew of the
+_classe_; but in particular I hear him recite to us the combat with the
+Moors from Le Cid and show us how Talma, describing it, seemed to crouch
+down on his haunches in order to spring up again terrifically to the
+height of "Nous nous levons alors!" which M. Bonnefons rendered as if on
+the carpet there fifty men at least had leaped to their feet. But he
+threw off these broken lights with a quick relapse to indifference; he
+didn't like the Anglo-Saxon--of the children of Albion at least his view
+was low; on his American specimens he had, I observed, more mercy; and
+this imperfection of sympathy (the question of Waterloo apart) rested,
+it was impossible not to feel, on his so resenting the dishonour
+suffered at our hands by his beautiful tongue, to which, as the great
+field of elocution, he was patriotically devoted. I think he fairly
+loathed our closed English vowels and confused consonants, our
+destitution of sounds that he recognised as sounds; though why in this
+connection he put up best with our own compatriots, embroiled at that
+time often in even stranger vocables than now, is more than I can say. I
+think that would be explained perhaps by his feeling in them as an old
+equalitarian certain accessibilities _quand meme_. Besides, we of the
+younger persuasion at least must have done his ear less violence than
+those earnest ladies from beyond the sea and than those young Englishmen
+qualifying for examinations and careers who flocked with us both to the
+plausibly spread and the severely disgarnished table, and on whose part
+I seem to see it again an effort of anguish to "pick up" the happy idiom
+that we had unconsciously acquired. French, in the fine old formula of
+those days, so much diffused, "was the language of the family"; but I
+think it must have appeared to these students in general a family of
+which the youngest members were but scantly kept in their place. We
+piped with a greater facility and to a richer meed of recognition; which
+sounds as if we might have become, in these strange collocations, fairly
+offensive little prigs. That was none the less not the case, for there
+were, oddly enough, a few French boys as well, to whom on the lingual or
+the "family" ground, we felt ourselves feebly relative, and in
+comparison with whom, for that matter, or with one of whom, I remember
+an occasion of my having to sink to insignificance. There was at the
+Institution little of a staff--besides waiters and bonnes; but it
+embraced, such as it was, M. Mesnard as well as M. Bonnefons--M. Mesnard
+of the new generation, instructor in whatever it might be, among the
+arts, that didn't consist of our rolling our r's, and with them, to help
+us out, more or less our eyes. It is significant that this elegant
+branch is now quite vague to me; and I recall M. Mesnard, in fine, as no
+less modern and cheap than M. Bonnefons was rare and unappraiseable. He
+had nevertheless given me his attention, one morning, doubtless
+patiently enough, in some corner of the villa that we had for the moment
+practically to ourselves--I seem to see a small empty room looking on
+the garden; when there entered to us, benevolently ushered by Madame
+Fezandie, a small boy of very fair and romantic aspect, as it struck me,
+a pupil newly arrived. I remember of him mainly that he had a sort of
+nimbus of light curls, a face delicate and pale and that deeply hoarse
+voice with which French children used to excite our wonder. M. Mesnard
+asked of him at once, with interest, his name, and on his pronouncing it
+sought to know, with livelier attention, if he were then the son of M.
+Arsene Houssaye, lately director of the Theatre Francais. To this
+distinction the boy confessed--all to such intensification of our
+repetiteur's interest that I knew myself quite dropped, in comparison,
+from his scheme of things. Such an origin as our little visitor's
+affected him visibly as dazzling, and I felt justified after a while, in
+stealing away into the shade. The beautiful little boy was to live to be
+the late M. Henry Houssaye, the shining hellenist and historian. I have
+never forgotten the ecstasy of hope in M. Mesnard's question--as a
+light on the reverence then entertained for the institution M. Houssaye
+the elder had administered.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+There comes to me, in spite of these memories of an extended connection,
+a sense as of some shrinkage or decline in the _beaux jours_ of the
+Institution; which seems to have found its current run a bit thick and
+troubled, rather than with the pleasant plash in which we at first
+appeared all equally to bathe. I gather, as I try to reconstitute, that
+the general enterprise simply proved a fantasy not workable, and that at
+any rate the elders, and often such queer elders, tended to outnumber
+the candid _jeunesse_; so that I wonder by the same token on what theory
+of the Castalian spring, as taught there to trickle, if not to flow, M.
+Houssaye, holding his small son by the heel as it were, may have been
+moved to dip him into our well. Shall I blush to relate that my own
+impression of its virtue must have come exactly from this uncanny turn
+taken--and quite in spite of the high Fezandie ideals--by the
+_invraisemblable_ house of entertainment where the assimilation of no
+form of innocence was doubted of by reason of the forms of experience
+that insisted somehow on cropping up, and no form of experience too
+directly deprecated by reason of the originally plotted tender growths
+of innocence. And some of these shapes were precisely those from which
+our good principal may well have first drawn his liveliest reassurance:
+I seem to remember such ancient American virgins in especial and such
+odd and either distinctively long-necked or more particularly
+long-haired and chinless compatriots, in black frock-coats of no type or
+"cut," no suggested application at all as garments--application, that
+is, to anything in the nature of character or circumstance, function or
+position--gathered about in the groups that M. Bonnefons almost
+terrorised by his refusal to recognise, among the barbarous races, any
+approach to his view of the great principle of Diction. I remember
+deeply and privately enjoying some of his shades of scorn and seeing
+how, given his own background, they were thoroughly founded; I remember
+above all as burnt in by the impression he gave me of the creature
+_wholly_ animated and containing no waste expressional spaces, no
+imaginative flatnesses, the notion of the luxury of life, though indeed
+of the amount of trouble of it too, when _none_ of the letters of the
+alphabet of sensibility might be dropped, involved in being a Frenchman.
+The liveliest lesson I must have drawn, however, from that source makes
+in any case, at the best, an odd educational connection, given the kind
+of concentration at which education, even such as ours, is supposed
+especially to aim: I speak of that direct promiscuity of insights which
+might easily have been pronounced profitless, with their attendant
+impressions and quickened sensibilities--yielding, as these last did,
+harvests of apparitions. I positively cherish at the present hour the
+fond fancy that we all soaked in some such sublime element as might
+still have hung about there--I mean on the very spot--from the vital
+presence, so lately extinct, of the prodigious Balzac; which had
+involved, as by its mere respiration, so dense a cloud of other
+presences, so arrayed an army of interrelated shades, that the air was
+still thick as with the fumes of witchcraft, with infinite seeing and
+supposing and creating, with a whole imaginative traffic. The Pension
+Vauquer, then but lately existent, according to Le Pere Goriot, on the
+other side of the Seine, was still to be revealed to me; but the figures
+peopling it are not to-day essentially more intense (that is as a matter
+of the marked and featured, the terrible and the touching, as compared
+with the paleness of the conned page in general,) than I persuade
+myself, with so little difficulty, that I found the more numerous and
+more shifting, though properly doubtless less inspiring, constituents of
+the Pension Fezandie. Fantastic and all "subjective" that I should
+attribute a part of their interest, or that of the scene spreading round
+them, to any competent perception, in the small-boy mind, that the
+general or public moment had a rarity and a brevity, a sharp intensity,
+of its own; ruffling all things, as they came, with the morning breath
+of the Second Empire and making them twinkle back with a light of
+resigned acceptance, a freshness of cynicism, the force of a great
+grimacing example. The grimace might have been legibly there in the air,
+to the young apprehension, and could I but simplify this record enough I
+should represent everything as part of it. I seemed at any rate
+meanwhile to think of the Fezandie young men, young Englishmen mostly,
+who were getting up their French, in that many-coloured air, for what I
+supposed, in my candour, to be appointments and "posts," diplomatic,
+commercial, vaguely official, and who, as I now infer, though I didn't
+altogether embrace it at the time, must, under the loose rule of the
+establishment, have been amusing themselves not a little. It was as a
+side-wind of their free criticism, I take it, that I felt the first
+chill of an apprehended decline of the establishment, some pang of
+prevision of what might come, and come as with a crash, of the general
+fine fallacy on which it rested. Their criticism was for that matter
+free enough, causing me to admire it even while it terrified. They
+expressed themselves in terms of magnificent scorn--such as might
+naturally proceed, I think I felt, from a mightier race; they spoke of
+poor old Bonnefons, they spoke of our good Fezandie himself, they spoke
+more or less of everyone within view, as beggars and beasts, and I
+remember to have heard on their lips no qualification of any dish served
+to us at dejeuner (and still more at the later meal, of which my
+brothers and I didn't partake) but as rotten. These were expressions,
+absent from our domestic, our American air either of fonder
+discriminations or vaguer estimates, which fairly extended for me the
+range of intellectual, or at least of social resource; and as the
+general tone of them to-day comes back to me it floods somehow with
+light the image of the fine old insular confidence (so intellectually
+unregenerate then that such a name scarce covers it, though inward
+stirrings and the growth of a _comparative_ sense of things have now
+begun unnaturally to agitate and disfigure it,) in which the general
+outward concussion of the English "abroad" with the fact of being abroad
+took place. The Fezandie young men were as much abroad as might be, and
+yet figured to me--largely by the upsetting force of that confidence,
+all but physically exercised--as the finest, handsomest, knowingest
+creatures; so that when I met them of an afternoon descending the
+Champs-Elysees with fine long strides and in the costume of the period,
+for which we can always refer to contemporary numbers of "Punch," the
+fact that I was for the most part walking sedately either with my mother
+or my aunt, or even with my sister and her governess, caused the spark
+of my vision that they were armed for conquest, or at the least for
+adventure, more expansively to glow. I am not sure whether as a general
+thing they honoured me at such instants with a sign of recognition; but
+I recover in especial the sense of an evening hour during which I had
+accompanied my mother to the Hotel Meurice, where one of the New York
+cousins aforementioned, daughter of one of the Albany uncles--that is of
+the Rhinebeck member of the group--had perched for a time, so
+incongruously, one already seemed to feel, after the sorriest stroke of
+fate. I see again the gaslit glare of the Rue de Rivoli in the spring or
+the autumn evening (I forget which, for our year of the Rue d'Angouleme
+had been followed by a migration to the Rue Montaigne, with a period, or
+rather with two periods, of Boulogne-sur-mer interwoven, and we might
+have made our beguiled way from either domicile); and the whole
+impression seemed to hang too numerous lamps and too glittering
+_vitrines_ about the poor Pendletons' bereavement, their loss of their
+only, their so sturdily handsome, little boy, and to suffuse their state
+with the warm rich exhalations of subterraneous cookery with which I
+find my recall of Paris from those years so disproportionately and so
+quite other than stomachically charged. The point of all of which is
+simply that just as we had issued from the hotel, my mother anxiously
+urging me through the cross currents and queer contacts, as it were, of
+the great bazaar (of which the Rue de Rivoli was then a much more
+bristling avenue than now) rather than depending on me for support and
+protection, there swung into view the most splendid, as I at least
+esteemed him, of my elders and betters in the Rue Balzac, who had left
+the questions there supposedly engaging us far behind, and, with his
+high hat a trifle askew and his cigar actively alight, revealed to me at
+a glance what it was to be in full possession of Paris. There was speed
+in his step, assurance in his air, he was visibly, impatiently on the
+way; and he gave me thereby my first full image of what it was exactly
+to _be_ on the way. He gave it the more, doubtless, through the fact
+that, with a flourish of the aforesaid high hat (from which the
+Englishman of that age was so singularly inseparable) he testified to
+the act of recognition, and to deference to my companion, but with a
+grand big-boy good-humour that--as I remember from childhood the so
+frequent effect of an easy patronage, compared with a top-most
+overlooking, on the part of an admired senior--only gave an accent to
+the difference. As if he cared, or could have, that I but went forth
+through the Paris night in the hand of my mamma; while he had greeted us
+with a grace that was as a beat of the very wings of freedom! Of such
+shreds, at any rate, proves to be woven the stuff of young
+sensibility--when memory (if sensibility has at all existed for it)
+rummages over our old trunkful of spiritual duds and, drawing forth ever
+so tenderly this, that and the other tattered web, holds up the pattern
+to the light. I find myself in this connection so restlessly and
+tenderly rummage that the tatters, however thin, come out in handsful
+and every shred seems tangled with another.
+
+Gertrude Pendleton's mere name, for instance, becomes, and very
+preferably, the frame of another and a better picture, drawing to it
+cognate associations, those of that element of the New York cousinship
+which had originally operated to place there in a shining and even, as
+it were, an economic light a "preference for Paris"--which preference,
+during the period of the Rue d'Angouleme and the Rue Montaigne, we
+wistfully saw at play, the very lightest and freest, on the part of the
+inimitable Masons. Their earlier days of Tours and Trouville were over;
+a period of relative rigour at the Florence of the still encircling
+walls, the still so existent abuses and felicities, was also, I seem to
+gather, a thing of the past; great accessions, consciously awaited
+during the previous leaner time, had beautifully befallen them, and my
+own whole consciousness of the general air--so insistently I
+discriminate for that alone--was coloured by a familiar view of their
+enjoyment of these on a tremendously draped and festooned _premier_ of
+the Rue-St.-Honore, bristling with ormolu and Pradier statuettes and
+looking almost straight across to the British Embassy; rather a low
+premier, after the manner of an entresol, as I remember it, and where
+the closed windows, which but scantly distinguished between our own
+sounds and those of the sociable, and yet the terrible, street of
+records and memories, seemed to maintain an air and a light thick with a
+mixture of every sort of queer old Parisian amenity and reference: as if
+to look or to listen or to touch were somehow at the same time to probe,
+to recover and communicate, to behold, to taste and even to smell--to
+one's greater assault by suggestion, no doubt, but also to the effect of
+some sweet and strange repletion, as from the continued consumption,
+say, out of flounced and puckered boxes, of serried rows of chocolate
+and other bonbons. I must have felt the whole thing as something for
+one's developed senses to live up to and make light of, and have been
+rather ashamed of my own for just a little sickishly staggering under
+it. This goes, however, with the fondest recall of our cousins' inbred
+ease, from far back, in all such assumable relations; and of how, four
+of the simplest, sweetest, best-natured girls as they were (with the
+eldest, a charming beauty, to settle on the general ground, after
+marriage and widowhood, and still to be blooming there), they were
+possessed of the scene and its great reaches and resources and
+possibilities in a degree that reduced us to small provincialism and a
+hanging on their lips when they told us, that is when the gentlest of
+mammas and the lovely daughter who was "out" did, of presentations at
+the Tuileries to the then all-wonderful, the ineffable Empress: reports
+touchingly qualified, on the part of our so exposed, yet after all so
+scantily indurated relatives, by the question of whether occasions so
+great didn't perhaps nevertheless profane the Sundays for which they
+were usually appointed. There was something of an implication in the air
+of those days, when young Americans were more numerously lovely than
+now, or at least more wide-eyed, it would fairly appear, that some
+account of the only tradition they had ever been rumoured to observe
+(that of the Lord's day) might have been taken even at the Tuileries.
+
+But what most comes back to me as the very note and fragrance of the New
+York cousinship in this general connection is a time that I remember to
+have glanced at on a page distinct from these, when the particular
+cousins I now speak of had conceived, under the influence of I know not
+what unextinguished morning star, the liveliest taste for the earliest
+possible rambles and researches, in which they were so good as to allow
+me, when I was otherwise allowed, to participate: health-giving walks,
+of an extraordinarily _matinal_ character, at the hour of the meticulous
+rag-pickers and exceptionally French polishers known to the Paris dawns
+of the Second Empire as at no time since; which made us all feel
+together, under the conduct of Honorine, bright child of the pavement
+herself, as if _we_, in our fresh curiosity and admiration, had also
+something to say to the great show presently to be opened, and were
+free, throughout the place, as those are free of a house who know its
+aspects of attic and cellar or how it looks from behind. I call our
+shepherdess Honorine even though perhaps not infallibly naming the
+sociable soubrette who might, with all her gay bold confidence, have
+been an official inspectress in person, and to whose easy care or, more
+particularly, expert sensibility and candour of sympathy and curiosity,
+our flock was freely confided. If she wasn't Honorine she was Clementine
+or Augustine--which is a trifle; since what I thus recover, in any case,
+of these brushings of the strange Parisian dew, is those communities of
+contemplation that made us most hang about the jewellers' windows in the
+Palais Royal and the public playbills of the theatres on the Boulevard.
+The Palais Royal, now so dishonoured and disavowed, was then the very
+Paris of Paris; the shutters of the shops seemed taken down, at that
+hour, for our especial benefit, and I remember well how, the "dressing"
+of so large a number of the compact and richly condensed fronts being
+more often than not a matter of diamonds and pearls, rubies and
+sapphires, that represented, in their ingenuities of combination and
+contortion, the highest taste of the time, I found open to me any amount
+of superior study of the fact that the spell of gems seemed for the
+feminine nature almost alarmingly boundless. I stared too, it comes back
+to me, at these exhibitions, and perhaps even thought it became a young
+man of the world to express as to this or that object a refined and
+intelligent preference; but what I really most had before me was the
+chorus of abjection, as I might well have called it, led, at the highest
+pitch, by Honorine and vaguely suggesting to me, by the crudity, so to
+say, of its wistfulness, a natural frankness of passion--goodness knew
+in fact (for my small intelligence really didn't) what depths of
+corruptibility. Droll enough, as I win them again, these queer dim plays
+of consciousness: my sense that my innocent companions, Honorine _en
+tete_, would have done anything or everything for the richest ruby, and
+that though one couldn't one's self be decently dead to that richness
+one didn't at all know what "anything" might be or in the least what
+"everything" was. The gushing cousins, at the same time, assuredly knew
+still less of that, and Honorine's brave gloss of a whole range alike of
+possibilities and actualities was in itself a true social grace.
+
+They all enjoyed, in fine, while I somehow but wastefully mused--which
+was after all my form of enjoyment; I was shy for it, though it was a
+truth and perhaps odd enough withal, that I didn't really at all care
+for gems, that rubies and pearls, in no matter what collocations, left
+me comparatively cold; that I actually cared for them about as little
+as, monstrously, secretly, painfully, I cared for flowers. Later on I
+was to become aware that I "adored" trees and architectural
+marbles--that for a sufficient slab of a sufficiently rare, sufficiently
+bestreaked or empurpled marble in particular I would have given a bag of
+rubies; but by then the time had passed for my being troubled to make
+out what in that case would represent on a small boy's part the
+corruptibility, so to call it, proclaimed, before the _vitrines_, by the
+cousins. That hadn't, as a question, later on, its actuality; but it had
+so much at the time that if it had been frankly put to me I must have
+quite confessed my inability to say--and must, I gather, by the same
+stroke, have been ashamed of such inward penury; feeling that as a boy I
+showed more poorly than girls. There was a difference meanwhile for such
+puzzlements before the porticos of the theatres; all questions melted
+for me there into the single depth of envy--envy of the equal, the
+beatific command of the evening hour, in the _regime_ of Honorine's
+young train, who were fresh for the early sparrow and the chiffonier
+even after shedding buckets of tears the night before, and not so much
+as for the first or the second time, over the beautiful story of La Dame
+aux Camelias. There indeed was another humiliation, but by my weakness
+of position much more than of nature: whatever doing of "everything"
+might have been revealed to me as a means to the end, I would certainly
+have done it for a sight of Madame Doche and Fechter in Dumas's
+triumphant idyll--now enjoying the fullest honours of innocuous
+classicism; with which, as with the merits of its interpreters,
+Honorine's happy charges had become perfectly and if not quite serenely,
+at least ever so responsively and feelingly, familiar. Of a wondrous
+mixed sweetness and sharpness and queerness of uneffaced reminiscence is
+all that aspect of the cousins and the rambles and the overlapping
+nights melting along the odorously bedamped and retouched streets and
+arcades; bright in the ineffable morning light, above all, of our
+peculiar young culture and candour!
+
+All of which again has too easily led me to drop for a moment my more
+leading clue of that radiation of goodnature from Gertrude Pendleton and
+her headlong hospitalities in which we perhaps most complacently basked.
+The becraped passage at Meurice's alluded to a little back was of a
+later season, and the radiation, as I recall it, had been, that first
+winter, mainly from a _petit hotel_ somewhere "on the other side," as
+we used with a large sketchiness to say, of the Champs Elysees; a region
+at that time reduced to no regularity, but figuring to my fond fancy as
+a chaos of accidents and contrasts where _petits hotels_ of archaic type
+were elbowed by woodyards and cabarets, and pavilions ever so
+characteristic, yet ever so indefinable, snuggled between frank
+industries and vulgarities--all brightened these indeed by the sociable
+note of Paris, be it only that of chaffering or of other _bavardise_.
+The great consistencies of arch-refinement, now of so large a harmony,
+were still to come, so that it seemed rather original to live there; in
+spite of which the attraction of the hazard of it on the part of our
+then so uniformly natural young kinswoman, not so much ingeniously, or
+even expressively, as just gesticulatively and helplessly gay--since
+that earlier pitch of New York parlance scarce arrived at, or for that
+matter pretended to, enunciation--was quite in what I at least took to
+be the glitter of her very conventions and traditions themselves;
+exemplified for instance by a bright nocturnal christening-party in
+honour of the small son of all hopes whom she was so precipitately to
+lose: an occasion which, as we had, in our way, known the act of baptism
+but as so abbreviated and in fact so tacit a business, had the effect
+for us of one of the great "forms" of a society taking itself with
+typical seriousness. We were much more serious than the Pendletons,
+but, paradoxically enough, there was that weakness in our state of our
+being able to make no such attestation of it. The evening can have been
+but of the friendliest, easiest and least pompous nature, with small
+guests, in congruity with its small hero, as well as large; but I must
+have found myself more than ever yet in presence of a "rite," one of
+those round which as many kinds of circumstance as possible
+clustered--so that the more of these there were the more one might
+imagine a great social order observed. How shall I now pretend to say
+how many kinds of circumstance I supposed I recognised?--with the
+remarkable one, to begin with, and which led fancy so far afield, that
+the "religious ceremony" was at the same time a "party," of twinkling
+lustres and disposed flowers and ladies with bare shoulders (that
+platitudinous bareness of the period that suggested somehow the moral
+line, drawn as with a ruler and a firm pencil); with little English
+girls, daughters of a famous physician of that nationality then pursuing
+a Parisian career (he must have helped the little victim into the
+world), and whose emphasised type much impressed itself; with round
+glazed and beribboned boxes of multi-coloured sugared almonds, dragees
+de bapteme above all, which we harvested, in their heaps, as we might
+have gathered apples from a shaken tree, and which symbolised as nothing
+else the ritual dignity. Perhaps this grand impression really came back
+but to the dragees de bapteme, not strictly more immemorial to our young
+appreciation than the New Year's cake and the "Election" cake known to
+us in New York, yet immensely more official and of the nature of
+scattered largesse; partly through the days and days, as it seemed to
+me, that our life was to be furnished, reinforced and almost encumbered
+with them. It wasn't simply that they were so toothsome, but that they
+were somehow so important and so historic.
+
+It was with no such frippery, however, that I connected the occasional
+presence among us of the young member of the cousinship (in this case of
+the maternal) who most moved me to wistfulness of wonder, though not at
+all, with his then marked difference of age, by inviting my free
+approach. Vernon King, to whom I have in another part of this record
+alluded, at that time doing his baccalaureat on the other side of the
+Seine and coming over to our world at scraps of moments (for I recall my
+awe of the tremendous nature, as I supposed it, of his toil), as to
+quite a make-believe and gingerbread place, the lightest of substitutes
+for the "Europe" in which he had been from the first so technically
+plunged. His mother and sister, also on an earlier page referred to,
+had, from their distance, committed him to the great city to be
+"finished," educationally, to the point that for our strenuous cousin
+Charlotte was the only proper one--and I feel sure he can have acquitted
+himself in this particular in a manner that would have passed for
+brilliant if such lights didn't, thanks to her stiff little standards,
+always tend to burn low in her presence. These ladies were to develop
+more and more the practice of living in odd places for abstract inhuman
+reasons--at Marseilles, at Duesseldorf (if I rightly recall their
+principal German sojourn), at Naples, above all, for a long stage;
+where, in particular, their grounds of residence were somehow not as
+those of others, even though I recollect, from a much later time,
+attending them there at the opera, an experience which, in their
+fashion, they succeeded in despoiling for me of every element of the
+concrete, or at least of the pleasantly vulgar. Later impressions, few
+but firm, were so to enhance one's tenderness for Vernon's own image,
+the most interesting surely in all the troop of our young kinsmen early
+baffled and gathered, that he glances at me out of the Paris period,
+fresh-coloured, just blond-bearded, always smiling and catching his
+breath a little as from a mixture of eagerness and shyness, with such an
+appeal to the right idealisation, or to belated justice, as makes of
+mere evocation a sort of exercise of loyalty. It seemed quite richly
+laid upon me at the time--I get it all back--that he, two or three years
+older than my elder brother and dipped more early, as well as held more
+firmly, in the deep, the refining waters the virtue of which we all
+together, though with our differences of consistency, recognised, was
+the positive and living proof of what the process, comparatively poor
+for ourselves, could do at its best and with clay originally and
+domestically kneaded to the right plasticity; besides which he shone, to
+my fancy, and all the more for its seeming so brightly and quietly in
+his very grain, with the vague, the supposititious, but the intensely
+accent-giving stamp of the Latin quarter, which we so thinly imagined
+and so superficially brushed on our pious walks to the Luxembourg and
+through the parts where the glamour might have hung thickest. We were to
+see him a little--but two or three times--three or four years later,
+when, just before our own return, he had come back to America for the
+purpose, if my memory serves, of entering the Harvard Law School; and to
+see him still always with the smile that was essentially as facial, as
+livingly and loosely fixed, somehow, as his fresh complexion itself;
+always too with the air of caring so little for what he had been put
+through that, under any appeal to give out, more or less wonderfully,
+some sample or echo of it, as who should say, he still mostly panted as
+from a laughing mental embarrassment: he had been put through too much;
+it was all stale to him, and he wouldn't have known where to begin. He
+did give out, a little, on occasion--speaking, that is, on my different
+plane, as it were, and by the roundabout report of my brother; he gave
+out, it appeared, as they walked together across shining Newport sands,
+some fragment, some beginning of a very youthful poem that "Europe" had,
+with other results, moved him to, and a faint thin shred of which was to
+stick in my remembrance for reasons independent of its quality:
+
+
+     "Harold, rememberest thou the day,
+       We rode along the Appian Way?
+     Neglected tomb and altar cast
+       Their lengthening shadow o'er the plain,
+     And while we talked the mighty past
+       Around us lived and breathed again!"
+
+
+That was European enough, and yet he had returned to America really to
+find himself, even with every effort made immediately near him to defeat
+the discovery. He found himself, with the outbreak of the War, simply as
+the American soldier, and not under any bribe, however dim, of the
+epaulette or the girt sword; but just as the common enlisting native,
+which he smiled and gasped--to the increase of his happy shortness of
+breath, as from a repletion of culture, since it suggested no lack of
+personal soundness--at feeling himself so _like_ to be. As strange, yet
+as still more touching than strange, I recall the sight, even at a
+distance, of the drop straight off him of all his layers of educational
+varnish, the possession of the "advantages," the tongues, the degrees,
+the diplomas, the reminiscences, a saturation too that had all sunk
+in--a sacrifice of precious attributes that might almost have been
+viewed as a wild bonfire. So his prodigious mother, whom I have perhaps
+sufficiently presented for my reader to understand, didn't fail to view
+it--judging it also, sharply hostile to the action of the North as the
+whole dreadful situation found her, with deep and resentful displeasure.
+I remember how I thought of Vernon himself, during the business, as at
+once so despoiled, so diverted, and above all so resistantly bright, as
+vaguely to suggest something more in him still, some deep-down reaction,
+some extremity of indifference and defiance, some exhibition of a young
+character too long pressed and impressed, too long prescribed to and
+with too much expected of it, and all under too firmer a will; so that
+the public pretext had given him a lift, or lent him wings, which
+without its greatness might have failed him. As the case was to turn
+nothing--that is nothing he most wanted and, remarkably, most
+enjoyed--did fail him at all. I forget with which of the possible
+States, New York, Massachusetts or Rhode Island (though I think the
+first) he had taken service; only seeming to remember that this all went
+on for him at the start in McClellan's and later on in Grant's army,
+and that, badly wounded in a Virginia battle, he came home to be nursed
+by his mother, recently restored to America for a brief stay. She held,
+I believe, in the event, that he had, under her care, given her his vow
+that, his term being up, he would not, should he get sufficiently well,
+re-engage. The question here was between them, but it was definite that,
+materially speaking, she was in no degree dependent on him. The old, the
+irrepressible adage, however, was to live again between them: when the
+devil was sick the devil a saint would be; when the devil was well the
+devil a saint was he!
+
+The devil a saint, at all events, was Vernon, who denied that he had
+passed his word, and who, as soon as he had surmounted his first
+disablement, passionately and quite admirably re-enlisted. At once
+restored to the front and to what now gave life for him its
+indispensable relish, he was in the thick, again, of the great carnage
+roundabout Richmond, where, again gravely wounded, he (as I figure still
+incorrigibly smiling) succumbed. His mother had by this time indignantly
+returned to Europe, accompanied by her daughter and her younger son--the
+former of whom accepted, for our great pity, a little later on, the
+office of closing the story. Anne King, young and frail, but not less
+firm, under stress, than the others of her blood, came back, on her
+brother's death, and, quietest, most colourless Electra of a lucidest
+Orestes, making her difficult way amid massed armies and battle-drenched
+fields, got possession of his buried body and bore it for reinterment to
+Newport, the old habitation, as I have mentioned, of their father's
+people, both Vernons and Kings. It must have been to see my mother, as
+well as to sail again for Europe, that she afterwards came to Boston,
+where I remember going down with her, at the last, to the dock of the
+English steamer, some black and tub-like Cunarder, an archaic "Africa"
+or "Asia" sufficing to the Boston service of those days. I saw her off
+drearily and helplessly enough, I well remember, and even at that moment
+found for her another image: what was she most like, though in a still
+sparer and dryer form, but some low-toned, some employed little Bronte
+heroine?--though more indeed a Lucy Snowe than a Jane Eyre, and with no
+shade of a Bronte hero within sight. To this all the fine privilege and
+fine culture of all the fine countries (collective matter, from far
+back, of our intimated envy) had "amounted"; just as it had amounted for
+Vernon to the bare headstone on the Newport hillside where, by his
+mother's decree, as I have already noted, there figured no hint of the
+manner of his death. So grand, so finely personal a manner it appeared
+to me at the time, and has indeed appeared ever since, that this brief
+record irrepressibly springs from that. His mother, as I have equally
+noted, was however, with her views, to find no grace in it so long as
+she lived; and his sister went back to her, and to Marseille, as they
+always called it, but prematurely to die.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+
+I feel that much might be made of my memories of Boulogne-sur-Mer had I
+but here left room for the vast little subject; in which I should
+probably, once started, wander to and fro as exploringly, as
+perceivingly, as discoveringly, I am fairly tempted to call it, as might
+really give the measure of my small operations at the time. I was almost
+wholly reduced there to operations of that mere inward and superficially
+idle order at which we have already so freely assisted; reduced by a
+cause I shall presently mention, the production of a great blur,
+well-nigh after the fashion of some mild domestic but quite considerably
+spreading grease-spot, in respect to the world of action, such as it
+was, more or less immediately about me. I must personally have lived
+during this pale predicament almost only by seeing what I could, after
+my incorrigible ambulant fashion--a practice that may well have made me
+pass for bringing home nothing in the least exhibitional--rather than by
+pursuing the inquiries and interests that agitated, to whatever
+intensity, our on the whole widening little circle. The images I speak
+of as matter for more evocation that I can spare them were the fruit of
+two different periods at Boulogne, a shorter and a longer; this second
+appearing to us all, at the time, I gather, too endlessly and
+blightingly prolonged: so sharply, before it was over, did I at any rate
+come to yearn for the Rue Montaigne again, the Rue Montaigne "sublet"
+for a term under a flurry produced in my parents' breasts by a
+"financial crisis" of great violence to which the American world, as a
+matter now of recorded history, I believe, had tragically fallen victim,
+and which had imperilled or curtailed for some months our moderate means
+of existence. We were to recover, I make out, our disturbed balance, and
+were to pursue awhile further our chase of the alien, the somehow
+repeatedly postponed _real_ opportunity; and the second, the
+comparatively cramped and depressed connection with the classic refuge,
+as it then was, of spasmodic thrift, when not of settled indigence, for
+the embarrassed of our race in the largest sense of this matter, was to
+be shuffled off at last with no scant relief and reaction. This is
+perhaps exactly why the whole picture of our existence at the
+Pas-de-Calais watering place pleads to me now for the full indulgence,
+what would be in other words every touch of tenderness workable, after
+all the years, over the lost and confused and above all, on their own
+side, poor ultimately rather vulgarised and violated little sources of
+impression: items and aspects these which while they in their degree
+and after their sort flourished we only asked to admire, or at least to
+appreciate, for their rewarding extreme queerness. The very centre of my
+particular consciousness of the place turned too soon to the fact of my
+coming in there for the gravest illness of my life, an all but mortal
+attack of the malignant typhus of old days; which, after laying me as
+low as I could well be laid for many weeks, condemned me to a
+convalescence so arduous that I saw my apparently scant possibilities,
+by the measure of them then taken, even as through a glass darkly, or
+through the expansive blur for which I found just above a homely image.
+
+This experience was to become when I had emerged from it the great
+reminiscence or circumstance of old Boulogne for me, and I was to regard
+it, with much intelligence, I should have maintained, as the marked
+limit of my state of being a small boy. I took on, when I had decently,
+and all the more because I had so retardedly, recovered, the sense of
+being a boy of other dimensions somehow altogether, and even with a new
+dimension introduced and acquired; a dimension that I was eventually to
+think of as a stretch in the direction of essential change or of living
+straight into a part of myself previously quite unvisited and now made
+accessible as by the sharp forcing of a closed door. The blur of
+consciousness imaged by my grease-spot was not, I hasten to declare,
+without its relenting edges and even, during its major insistence,
+fainter thicknesses; short of which, I see, my picture, the picture I
+was always so incurably "after," would have failed of animation
+altogether--quite have failed to bristle with characteristics, with
+figures and objects and scenic facts, particular passages and moments,
+the stuff, in short, of that scrap of minor gain which I have spoken of
+as our multiplied memories. Wasn't I even at the time, and much more
+later on, to feel how we had been, through the thick and thin of the
+whole adventure, assaulted as never before in so concentrated a way by
+local and social character? Such was the fashion after which the
+Boulogne of long ago--I have known next to nothing of it since--could
+come forth, come more than half-way, as we say, to meet the imagination
+open to such advances. It was, taking one thing with another, so verily
+drenched in character that I see myself catching this fine flagrancy
+almost equally in everything; unless indeed I may have felt it rather
+smothered than presented on the comparatively sordid scene of the
+College Communal, not long afterwards to expand, I believe, into the
+local Lycee, to which the inimitable process of our education promptly
+introduced us. I was to have less of the College than my elder and my
+younger brother, thanks to the interrupting illness that placed me so
+long, with its trail of after-effects, half complacently, half ruefully
+apart; but I suffered for a few early weeks the mainly malodorous sense
+of the braver life, produced as this was by a deeply democratic
+institution from which no small son even of the most soapless home could
+possibly know exclusion. Odd, I recognise, that I should inhale the air
+of the place so particularly, so almost only, to that dismal effect;
+since character was there too, for whom it should concern, and my view
+of some of the material conditions, of the general collegiate presence
+toward the top of the steepish Grand' Rue, on the right and not much
+short, as it comes back to me, of the then closely clustered and
+inviolate haute ville, the more or less surviving old town, the idle
+grey rampart, the moated and towered citadel, the tree-shaded bastion
+for strolling and sitting "immortalised" by Thackeray, achieved the
+monumental, in its degree, after a fashion never yet associated for us
+with the pursuit of learning. Didn't the Campaigner, suffering indigence
+at the misapplied hands of Colonel Newcome, rage at that hushed victim
+supremely and dreadfully just thereabouts--by which I mean in the _haute
+ville_--over some question of a sacrificed sweetbread or a cold hacked
+joint that somebody had been "at"? Beside such builded approaches to an
+education as we had elsewhere known the College exhibited, with whatever
+reserves, the measure of style which almost any French accident of the
+administratively architectural order more easily rises to than fails
+of; even if the matter be but a question of the shyest similitude of a
+_cour d'honneur_, the court disconnecting the scene, by intention at
+least, from the basely bourgeois and giving value to the whole effect of
+opposed and windowed wall and important, or balanced and "placed,"
+_perron_. These are many words for the dull precinct, as then presented,
+I admit, and they are perhaps half prompted by a special association,
+too ghostly now quite to catch again--the sense of certain Sundays,
+distinct from the grim, that is the flatly instructional, body of the
+week, when I seem to myself to have successfully flouted the whole
+constituted field by passing across it and from it to some quite ideally
+old-world little annexed _musee de province_, as inviolate in its way as
+the grey rampart and bare citadel, and very like them in unrelieved
+tone, where I repeatedly, and without another presence to hinder, looked
+about me at goodness knows what weird ancientries of stale academic art.
+Not one of these treasures, in its habit as it lived, do I recall; yet
+the sense and the "note" of them was at the time, none the less, not so
+elusive that I didn't somehow draw straight from them intimations of the
+interesting, that is revelations of the aesthetic, the historic, the
+critical mystery and charm of things (of such things taken altogether),
+that added to my small loose handful of the seed of culture.
+
+That apprehension was, in its way, of our house of learning too, and
+yet I recall how, on the scant and simple terms I have glanced at, I
+quite revelled in it; whereas other impressions of my brief ordeal
+shrink, for anything in the nature of interest, but to three or four
+recovered marks of the social composition of the school. There were the
+sons of all the small shop-keepers and not less, by my remembrance, of
+certain of the mechanics and artisans; but there was also the English
+contingent, these predominantly _internes_ and uniformed, blue-jacketed
+and brass-buttoned, even to an effect of odd redundancy, who by my
+conceit gave our association a lift. Vivid still to me is the summer
+morning on which, in the wide court--as wide, that is, as I liked to
+suppose it, and where we hung about helplessly enough for recreation--a
+brownish black-eyed youth, of about my own degree of youthfulness,
+mentioned to me with an air that comes back as that of the liveliest
+informational resource the outbreak, just heard of, of an awful Mutiny
+in India, where his military parents, who had not so long before sent
+him over thence, with such weakness of imagination, as I measured it, to
+the poor spot on which we stood, were in mortal danger of their lives;
+so that news of their having been killed would perhaps be already on the
+way. They might well have been military, these impressively exposed
+characters, since my friend's name was Napier, or Nappie as he was
+called at the school, and since, I may add also, there attached to him,
+in my eyes, the glamour of an altogether new emphasis of type. The
+English boys within our ken since our coming abroad had been of the
+fewest--the Fezandie youths, whether English or American, besides being
+but scantly boys, had been so lost, on that scene, in our heap of
+disparities; and it pressed upon me after a fashion of its own that
+those we had known in New York, and all aware of their varieties and
+"personalities" as one had supposed one's self, had in no case
+challenged the restless "placing" impulse with any such force as the
+finished little Nappie. They had not been, as he was by the very
+perversity of his finish, resultants of forces at all--or comparatively
+speaking; it was as if their producing elements had been simple and few,
+whereas behind this more mixed and, as we have learnt to say, evolved
+companion (his very simplicities, his gaps of possibility, being still
+evolved), there massed itself I couldn't have said what protective
+social order, what tangled creative complexity. Why I should have
+thought him almost Indian of stamp and hue because his English parents
+were of the so general Indian peril is more than I can say; yet I have
+his exotic and above all his bold, his imaginably even "bad," young
+face, finely unacquainted with law, before me at this hour quite
+undimmed--announcing, as I conceived it, and quite as a shock, any
+awful adventure one would, as well as something that I must even at the
+time have vaguely taken as the play of the "passions." He vanishes, and
+I dare say I but make him over, as I make everything; and he must have
+led his life, whatever it was to become, with the least possible waiting
+on the hour or the major consequence and no waste of energy at all in
+mooning, no patience with any substitute for his very own humour. We had
+another schoolmate, this one native to the soil, whose references were
+with the last vividness local and who was yet to escape with brilliancy
+in the aftertime the smallest shadow of effacement. His most direct
+reference at that season was to the principal pastry-cook's of the town,
+an establishment we then found supreme for little criss-crossed apple
+tartlets and melting _babas_--young Coquelin's home life amid which we
+the more acutely envied that the upward cock of his so all-important
+nose testified, for my fancy, to the largest range of free familiar
+sniffing. C.-B. Coquelin is personally most present to me, in the form
+of that hour, by the value, as we were to learn to put it, of this nose,
+the fine assurance and impudence of which fairly made it a trumpet for
+promises; yet in spite of that, the very gage, as it were, of his long
+career as the most interesting and many-sided comedian, or at least most
+unsurpassed dramatic _diseur_ of his time, I failed to doubt that, with
+the rich recesses of the parental industry for his background, his
+subtlest identity was in his privilege, or perhaps even in his expertest
+trick, of helping himself well.
+
+These images, however, were but drops in the bucket of my sense of
+catching character, roundabout us, as I say, at every turn and in every
+aspect; character that began even, as I was pleased to think, in our own
+habitation, the most spacious and pompous Europe had yet treated us to,
+in spite of its fronting on the Rue Neuve Chaussee, a street of lively
+shopping, by the measure of that innocent age, and with its own
+ground-floor occupied by a bristling exhibition of indescribably futile
+_articles de Paris_. Modern and commodious itself, it looked from its
+balcony at serried and mismatched and quaintly-named haunts of old
+provincial, of sedately passive rather than confidently eager, traffic;
+but this made, among us, for much harmless inquisitory life--while we
+were fairly assaulted, at home, by the scale and some of the striking
+notes of our fine modernity. The young, the agreeable (agreeable to
+anything), the apparently opulent M. Prosper Sauvage--wasn't it?--had
+not long before, unless I mistake, inherited the place as a monument of
+"family," quite modestly local yet propitious family, ambition; with an
+ample extension in the rear, and across the clearest prettiest court,
+for his own dwelling, which thus became elegant, _entre cour et
+jardin_, and showed all the happy symmetries and proper conventions.
+Here flourished, or rather, I surmise at this time of day, here
+languished, a domestic drama of which we enjoyed the murmurous overflow:
+frankly astounding to me, I confess, how I remain still in sensitive
+presence of our resigned proprietor's domestic drama, in and out of
+which I see a pair of figures quite up to the dramatic mark flit again
+with their air of the very rightest finish. I must but note these
+things, none the less, and pass; for scarce another item of the whole
+Boulogne concert of salient images failed, after all, of a significance
+either still more strangely social or more distinctively spectacular.
+These appearances indeed melt together for my interest, I once more
+feel, as, during the interminable stretch of the prescribed and for the
+most part solitary airings and outings involved in my slow convalescence
+from the extremity of fever, I approached that straitened and somewhat
+bedarkened issue of the Rue de l'Ecu (was it?) toward the
+bright-coloured, strongly-peopled Port just where Merridew's English
+Library, solace of my vacuous hours and temple, in its degree too, of
+deep initiations, mounted guard at the right. Here, frankly,
+discrimination drops--every particular in the impression once so quick
+and fresh sits interlinked with every other in the large lap of the
+whole. The motley, sunny, breezy, bustling Port, with its classic, its
+admirable fisher-folk of both sexes, models of type and tone and of what
+might be handsomest in the thoroughly weathered condition, would have
+seemed the straightest appeal to curiosity had not the old Thackerayan
+side, as I may comprehensively call it, and the scattered wealth of
+illustration of _his_ sharpest satiric range, not so constantly
+interposed and competed with it. The scene bristled, as I look back at
+it, with images from Men's Wives, from the society of Mr. Deuceace and
+that of fifty other figures of the same creation, with Bareacreses and
+Rawdon Crawleys and of course with Mrs. Macks, with Roseys of a more or
+less crumpled freshness and blighted bloom, with battered and bent,
+though doubtless never quite so fine, Colonel Newcomes not less; with
+more reminders in short than I can now gather in. Of those forms of the
+seedy, the subtly sinister, the vainly "genteel," the generally damaged
+and desperate, and in particular perhaps the invincibly impudent, all
+the marks, I feel sure, were stronger and straighter than such as we
+meet in generally like cases under our present levelling light. Such
+anointed and whiskered and eked-out, such brazen, bluffing, swaggering
+gentlemen, such floridly repaired ladies, their mates, all looking as
+hard as they could as if they were there for mere harmless amusement--it
+was as good, among them, as just _being_ Arthur Pendennis to know so
+well, or at least to guess so fearfully, who and what they might be.
+They were floated on the tide of the manners then prevailing, I judge,
+with a rich processional effect that so many of our own grand lapses,
+when not of our mere final flatnesses, leave no material for; so that
+the living note of Boulogne was really, on a more sustained view, the
+opposition between a native race the most happily tempered, the most
+becomingly seasoned and salted and self-dependent, and a shifting
+colony--so far as the persons composing it _could_ either urgently or
+speculatively shift--inimitably at odds with any active freshness. And
+the stale and the light, even though so scantly rebounding, the too
+densely socialised, group was the English, and the "positive" and hardy
+and steady and wind-washed the French; and it was all as flushed with
+colour and patched with costume and referable to record and picture, to
+literature and history, as a more easily amusing and less earnestly
+uniform age could make it. When I speak of this opposition indeed I see
+it again most take effect in an antithesis that, on one side and the
+other, swallowed all differences at a gulp. The general British show, as
+we had it there, in the artless mid-Victorian desert, had, I think, for
+its most sweeping sign the high assurance of its dowdiness; whereas one
+had only to glance about at the sea-faring and fisher-folk who were the
+real strength of the place to feel them shed at every step and by their
+every instinct of appearance the perfect lesson of taste. There it was
+to be learnt and taken home--with never a moral, none the less, drawn
+from it by the "higher types." I speak of course in particular of the
+tanned and trussed and kerchiefed, the active and productive women, all
+so short-skirted and free-limbed under stress; for as by the rule of the
+dowdy their sex is ever the finer example, so where the sense of the
+suitable, of the charmingly and harmoniously right prevails, they
+preserve the pitch even as a treasure committed to their piety. To hit
+that happy mean of rightness amid the mixed occupations of a home-mother
+and a fishwife, to be in especial both so bravely stripped below and so
+perfectly enveloped above as the deep-wading, far-striding,
+shrimp-netting, crab-gathering matrons or maidens who played,
+waist-high, with the tides and racily quickened the market, was to make
+grace thoroughly practical and discretion thoroughly vivid. These
+attributes had with them all, for the eye, however, a range too great
+for me to follow, since, as their professional undress was a turn-out
+positively self-consistent, so their household, or more responsibly
+public, or altogether festal, array played through the varied essentials
+of fluted coif and folded kerchief and sober skirt and tense, dark,
+displayed stocking and clicking wooden slipper, to say nothing of long
+gold ear-drop or solid short-hung pectoral cross, with a respect for
+the rigour of conventions that had the beauty of self-respect.
+
+I owe to no season of the general period such a preserved sense of
+innumerable unaccompanied walks--at the reason of which luxury of
+freedom I have glanced; which as often as not were through the steep and
+low-browed and brightly-daubed _ruelles_ of the fishing-town and either
+across and along the level sea-marge and sustained cliff beyond; this
+latter the site of the first Napoleon's so tremendously mustered camp of
+invasion, with a monument as futile, by my remembrance, as that
+enterprise itself had proved, to give it all the special accent I could
+ask for. Or I was as free for the _haute ville_ and the ramparts and the
+scattered, battered benches of reverie--if I may so honour my use of
+them; they kept me not less complacently in touch with those of the so
+anciently odd and mainly contracted houses over which the stiff citadel
+and the ghost of Catherine de Medicis, who had dismally sojourned in it,
+struck me as throwing such a chill, and one of which precisely must have
+witnessed the never-to-be-forgotten Campaigner's passage in respect to
+her cold beef. Far from extinct for me is my small question of those
+hours, doubtless so mentally, so shamelessly wanton, as to what human
+life might be tucked away in such retreats, which expressed the last
+acceptance whether of desired or of imposed quiet; so absolutely
+appointed and obliged did I feel to make out, so far as I could, what,
+in so significant a world, they on their part _represented_. I think the
+force mainly sustaining me at that rather dreary time--as I see it can
+only show for--was this lively felt need that everything should
+represent something more than what immediately and all too blankly met
+the eye; I seem to myself to have carried it about everywhere and,
+though of course only without outward signs that might have betrayed my
+fatuity, and insistently, quite yearningly applied it. What I wanted, in
+my presumption, was that the object, the place, the person, the
+unreduced impression, often doubtless so difficult or so impossible to
+reduce, should give out to me something of a situation; living as I did
+in confused and confusing situations and thus hooking them on, however
+awkwardly, to almost any at all living surface I chanced to meet. My
+memory of Boulogne is that we had almost no society of any sort at
+home--there appearing to be about us but one sort, and that of far too
+great, or too fearful, an immediate bravery. Yet there were occasional
+figures that I recover from our scant circle and that I associate,
+whatever links I may miss, with the small still houses on the rampart;
+figures of the quaintest, quite perhaps the frowsiest, little English
+ladies in such mushroom hats, such extremely circular and bestriped
+scarlet petticoats, such perpetual tight gauntlets, such explicit
+claims to long descent, which showed them for everything that everyone
+else at Boulogne was not. These mid-Victorian samples of a perfect
+consistency "represented," by my measure, as hard as ever they
+could--and represented, of all things, literature and history and
+society. The literature was that of the three-volume novel, then, and
+for much after, enjoying its loosest and serenest spread; for they
+separately and anxiously and awfully "wrote"--and that must almost by
+itself have amounted in them to all the history I evoked.
+
+The dreary months, as I am content that in their second phase especially
+they should be called, are subject, I repeat, to the perversion, quite
+perhaps to the obscuration, of my temporarily hindered health--which
+should keep me from being too sure of these small _proportions_ of
+experience--I was to look back afterwards as over so grey a desert;
+through which, none the less, there flush as sharp little certainties,
+not to be disallowed, such matters as the general romance of Merridew,
+the English Librarian, before mentioned, at the mouth of the Port; a
+connection that thrusts itself upon me now as after all the truest
+centre of my perceptions--waylaying my steps at the time, as I came and
+went, more than any other object or impression. The question of what
+_that_ spot represented, or could be encouraged, could be aided and
+abetted, to represent, may well have supremely engaged me--for depth
+within depth there could only open before me. The place "meant," on
+these terms, to begin with, frank and licensed fiction, licensed to my
+recordedly relaxed state; and what this particular luxury represented it
+might have taken me even more time than I had to give to make out. The
+blest novel in three volumes exercised through its form, to my sense, on
+grounds lying deeper for me to-day than my deepest sounding, an appeal
+that fairly made it do with me what it would. Possibly a drivelling
+confession, and the more drivelling perhaps the more development I
+should attempt for it; from which, however, the very difficulty of the
+case saves me. Too many associations, too much of the ferment of memory
+and fancy, are somehow stirred; they beset me again, they hover and
+whirl about me while I stand, as I used to stand, within the positively
+sanctified walls of the shop (so of the _vieux temps_ now their aspect
+and fashion and worked system: by which I mean again of the frumpiest
+and civillest mid-Victorian), and surrender to the vision of the shelves
+packed with their rich individual trinities. Why should it have affected
+me so that my choice, so difficult in such a dazzle, could only be for a
+trinity? I am unable fully to say--such a magic dwelt in the mere rich
+fact of the trio. When the novel of that age was "bad," as it so
+helplessly, so abjectly and prevailingly consented to be, the three
+volumes still did something for it, a something that was, all strangely,
+not an aggravation of its case. When it was "good" (our analysis, our
+terms of appreciation, had a simplicity that has lingered on) they made
+it copiously, opulently better; so that when, after the span of the
+years, my relation with them became, from that of comparatively artless
+reader, and to the effect of a superior fondness and acuteness, that of
+complacent author, the tradition of infatuated youth still flung over
+them its mantle: this at least till _all_ relation, by one of the very
+rudest turns of life we of the profession were to have known, broke off,
+in clumsy interfering hands and with almost no notice given, in a day,
+in an hour. Besides connecting me with the lost but unforgotten note of
+waiting service and sympathy that quavered on the Merridew air, they
+represented just for intrinsic charm more than I could at any moment
+have given a plain account of; they fell, by their ineffable history,
+every trio I ever touched, into the category of such prized phenomena as
+my memory, for instance, of fairly hanging about the Rue des Vieillards,
+at the season I speak of, through the apprehension that something vague
+and sweet--if I shouldn't indeed rather say something of infinite future
+point and application--would come of it. This is a reminiscence that
+nothing would induce me to verify, as for example by any revisiting
+light; but it was going to be good for me, good, that is, for what I was
+pleased to regard as my intelligence or my imagination, in fine for my
+obscurely specific sense of things, that I _should_ so have hung about.
+The name of the street was by itself of so gentle and intimate a
+persuasion that I must have been ashamed not to proceed, for the very
+grace of it, to some shade of active response. And there was always a
+place of particular arrest in the vista brief and blank, but inclusively
+blank, blank _after_ ancient, settled, more and more subsiding things,
+blank almost, in short, with all Matthew Arnold's "ennui of the middle
+ages," rather than, poorly and meanly and emptily, before such states,
+which was previously what I had most known of blankness. This determined
+pause was at the window of a spare and solitary shop, a place of no
+amplitude at all, but as of an inveterate cheerful confidence, where,
+among a few artists' materials, an exhibited water-colour from some
+native and possibly then admired hand was changed but once in ever so
+long. That was perhaps after all the pivot of my revolution--the
+question of whether or no I should at a given moment find the old
+picture replaced. I made this, when I had the luck, pass for an
+event--yet an event which would _have_ to have had for its scene the
+precious Rue des Vieillards, and pale though may be the recital of such
+pleasures I lose myself in depths of kindness for my strain of
+ingenuity.
+
+All of which, and to that extent to be corrected, leaves small allowance
+for my service to good M. Ansiot, rendered while my elder and younger
+brothers--the younger completing our group of the ungovernessed--were
+continuously subject to collegial durance. Their ordeal was, I still
+blush to think, appreciably the heavier, as compared with mine, during
+our longer term of thrifty exile from Paris--the time of stress, as I
+find I recall it, when we had turned our backs on the Rue Montaigne and
+my privilege was so to roam on the winter and the spring afternoons.
+Mild M. Ansiot, "under" whom I for some three hours each forenoon sat
+sole and underided--and actually by himself too--was a curiosity, a
+benignity, a futility even, I gather; but save for a felt and remembered
+impulse in me to open the window of our scene of study as soon as he had
+gone was in no degree an ideal. He might rise here, could I do him
+justice, as the rarest of my poor evocations; for he it was, to be
+frank, who most literally smelt of the vieux temps--as to which I have
+noted myself as wondering and musing as much as might be, with recovered
+scraps and glimpses and other intimations, only never yet for such a
+triumph of that particular sense. To be still frank, he was little less
+than a monster--for mere unresisting or unresilient mass of personal
+presence I mean; so that I fairly think of him as a form of bland
+porpoise, violently blowing in an age not his own, as by having had to
+exchange deep water for thin air. Thus he impressed me as with an
+absolute ancientry of type, of tone, of responsible taste, above all;
+this last I mean in literature, since it was literature we sociably
+explored, to my at once charmed and shamed apprehension of the several
+firm traditions, the pure proprieties, the discussabilities, in the
+oddest way both so many and so few, of that field as they prevailed to
+his pious view. I must have had hold, in this mere sovereign sample of
+the accidentally, the quite unconsciously and unpretentiously, the all
+negligibly or superfluously handed-down, of a rare case of the
+provincial and academic _cuistre_; though even while I record it I see
+the good man as too helpless and unaggressive, too smothered in his poor
+facts of person and circumstance, of overgrown time of life alone, to
+incur with justness the harshness of classification. He rested with a
+weight I scarce even felt--such easy terms he made, without scruple, for
+both of us--on the cheerful innocence of my barbarism; and though our
+mornings were short and subject, I think, to quite drowsy lapses and
+other honest aridities, we did scumble together, I make out, by the aid
+of the collected extracts from the truly and academically great which
+formed his sole resource and which he had, in a small portable and
+pocketed library rather greasily preserved, some patch of picture of a
+saving as distinguished from a losing classicism. The point remains for
+me that when all was said--and even with everything that might directly
+have counted unsaid--he discharged for me such an office that I was to
+remain to this far-off hour in a state of possession of him that is the
+very opposite of a blank: quite after the fashion again in which I had
+all along and elsewhere suffered and resisted, and yet so perversely and
+intimately appropriated, tutoring; which was with as little as ever to
+show for my profit of his own express showings. The blank he fills out
+crowds itself with a wealth of value, since I shouldn't without him have
+been able to claim, for whatever it may be worth, a tenth (at that let
+me handsomely put it), of my "working" sense of the vieux temps. How can
+I allow then that we hadn't planted together, with a loose felicity,
+some of the seed of work?--even though the sprouting was so long put
+off. Everything, I have mentioned, had come at this time to be
+acceptedly, though far from braggingly, put off; and the ministrations
+of M. Ansiot really wash themselves over with the weak mixture that had
+begun to spread for me, to immensity, during that summer day or two of
+our earlier residence when, betraying strange pains and apprehensions, I
+was with all decision put to bed. Present to me still is the fact of my
+sharper sense, after an hour or two, of my being there in distress and,
+as happened for the moment, alone; present to me are the sounds of the
+soft afternoon, the mild animation of the Boulogne street through the
+half-open windows; present to me above all the strange sense that
+something had begun that would make more difference to me, directly and
+indirectly, than anything had ever yet made. I might verily, on the
+spot, have seen, as in a fading of day and a change to something
+suddenly queer, the whole large extent of it. I must thus, much
+impressed but half scared, have wanted to appeal; to which end I
+tumbled, all too weakly, out of bed and wavered toward the bell just
+across the room. The question of whether I really reached and rang it
+was to remain lost afterwards in the strong sick whirl of everything
+about me, under which I fell into a lapse of consciousness that I shall
+conveniently here treat as a considerable gap.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
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