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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/38424-8.txt b/38424-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3fe1d19 --- /dev/null +++ b/38424-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11817 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of Notes of a Son and Brother, 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: Notes of a Son and Brother + +Author: Henry James + +Release Date: December 27, 2011 [EBook #38424] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER *** + + + + +Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was +produced from scanned images of public domain material +from the Google Print project.) + + + + + + + + +BY HENRY JAMES + +A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS + +NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER + + + + +NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER + +[Illustration: _Pencil-drawn portrait of William James by himself about +1866_] + + + + +NOTES OF A +SON AND BROTHER + +BY + +HENRY JAMES + +ILLUSTRATED + +NEW YORK + +CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS + +1914 + +COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY +CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS + +Published March, 1914 + + + + +ILLUSTRATIONS + + +Pencil-drawn portrait of William James by himself, about +1866 _Frontispiece_ + +FACING +PAGE + +Louis Osborne. Sketch from a letter of William James +(page 18) 18 + +Portrait in oils of Miss Katherine Temple, 1861 96 + +A leaf from the letter quoted on page 129 130 + +Sketch of G. W. James brought home wounded from the assault +on Fort Wagner 244 + +"The cold water cure at Divonne--excellent for melancholia."--From +a letter of William James (page 447) 448 + + + + +I + + +It may again perhaps betray something of that incorrigible vagueness of +current in our educational drift which I have elsewhere[1] so +unreservedly suffered to reflect itself that, though we had come abroad +in 1855 with an eye to the then supposedly supreme benefits of Swiss +schooling, our most resolute attempt to tap that supply, after twenty +distractions, waited over to the autumn of the fourth year later on, +when we in renewed good faith retraced our steps to Geneva. Our parents +began at that season a long sojourn at the old Hôtel de l'Écu, which now +erects a somewhat diminished head on the edge of the rushing Rhone--its +only rival then was the Hôtel des Bergues opposite, considerably larger +and commanding more or less the view of that profiled crest of +Mont-Blanc which used to be so oddly likened to the head and face of a +singularly supine Napoleon. But on that side the shooting blue flood was +less directly and familiarly under the windows; in our position we +lived with it and hung over it, and its beauty, just where we mainly +congregated, was, I fear, my own sole happy impression during several of +those months. It was of a Sunday that we congregated most; my two +younger brothers had, in general, on that day their _sortie_ from the +Pensionnat Maquelin, a couple of miles out of town, where they were then +established, and W. J., following courses at the Academy, in its present +enriched and amplified form the University, mingled, failing livelier +recreation, in the family circle at the hotel. Livelier recreation, +during the hours of completest ease, consisted mostly, as the period +drew itself out, of those _courses_, along the lake and along the hills, +which offer to student-life in whatever phase, throughout that blest +country, the most romantic of all forms of "a little change"; enjoyed +too in some degree, but much more restrictedly, by myself--this an +effect, as I remember feeling it, of my considerably greater servitude. +I had been placed, separately, at still another Institution, that of M. +Rochette, who carried on an École Préparatoire aux Écoles Spéciales, by +which was meant in particular the Polytechnic School at Zurich, with +whatever other like curricula, always "scientific," might elsewhere be +aimed at; and I had been so disposed of under a flattering misconception +of my aptitudes that leaves me to-day even more wonderstruck than at +that immediate season of my distress. + +I so feared and abhorred mathematics that the simplest arithmetical +operation had always found and kept me helpless and blank--the dire +discipline of the years bringing no relief whatever to my state; and +mathematics unmitigated were at the Institution Rochette the air we +breathed, building us up as they most officiously did for those other +grim ordeals and pursuits, those of the mining and the civil engineer, +those of the architectural aspirant and the technician in still other +fields, to which we were supposed to be addressed. Nothing of the sort +was indeed supposed of me--which is in particular my present +mystification; so that my assault of the preliminaries disclosed, feeble +as it strikingly remained, was mere darkness, waste and anguish. I found +myself able to bite, as the phrase was, into no subject there deemed +savoury; it was hard and bitter fruit all and turned to ashes in my +mouth. More extraordinary however than my good parents' +belief--eccentric on their part too, in the light of their usual +practice and disposition, their habit, for the most part, of liking for +us after a gasp or two whatever we seemed to like--was my own failure to +protest with a frankness proportioned to my horror. The stiffer +intellectual discipline, the discipline of physics and of algebra, +invoked for the benefit of an understanding undisputedly weak and shy, +had been accepted on my side as a blessing perhaps in disguise. It had +come to me by I know not what perversity that if I couldn't tackle the +smallest problem in mechanics or face without dismay at the blackboard +the simplest geometric challenge I ought somehow in decency to make +myself over, oughtn't really to be so inferior to almost everyone else. +That was the pang, as it was also the marvel--that the meanest minds and +the vulgarest types approached these matters without a sign of +trepidation even when they approached them, at the worst, without +positive appetite. My attempt not therefore to remain abnormal wholly +broke down, however, and when I at last withdrew from the scene it was +not even as a conspicuous, it was only as an obscure, a deeply hushed +failure. I joined William, after what had seemed to me an eternity of +woe, at the Academy, where I followed, for too short a time but with a +comparative recovery of confidence, such literary _cours_ as I might. + +I puzzle it out to-day that my parents had simply said to themselves, in +serious concern, that I read too many novels, or at least read them too +attentively--_that_ was the vice; as also that they had by the contagion +of their good faith got me in a manner to agree with them; since I +could almost always enter, to the gain of "horizon" but too often to +the perversion of experience, into any view of my real interests, +so-called, that was presented to me with a dazzling assurance. I didn't +consider certainly that I was so forming my mind, and was doubtless +curious to see whether it mightn't, by a process flourishing in other +applications, get to some extent formed. It wasn't, I think, till I felt +the rapture of that method's arrest that I knew how grotesquely little +it had done for me. And yet I bore it afterwards no malice--resorting +again to that early fatalistic philosophy of which the general sense was +that almost anything, however disagreeable, had been worth while; so +unable was I to claim that it hadn't involved impressions. I positively +felt the impressional harvest rather rich, little as any item of it +might have passed at the time for the sort of thing one exhibits as a +trophy of learning. My small exhibition was all for myself and consisted +on the whole but of a dusty, spotty, ugly picture--I took it for ugly +well-nigh to the pitch of the sinister. Its being a picture at all--and +I clung to that--came from the personal and material facts of the place, +where I was the only scholar of English speech, since my companions, +with a Genevese predominance, were variously polyglot. They wondered, I +couldn't doubt, what I was doing among them, and what lost lamb, almost +audibly bleating, I had been charged to figure. Yet I remember no crude +chaff, no very free relation of any one with any one, no high pitch, +still less any low descent, of young pleasantry or irony; our manners +must have been remarkably formed, and our general tone was that of a +man-of-the-world discretion, or at the worst of a certain small +bourgeois circumspection. The dread in the Genevese of having definitely +to "know" strangers and thereby be at costs for any sort of hospitality +to them comes back to me as written clear; not less than their being of +two sorts or societies, sons of the townspeople pure and simple and sons +of the local aristocracy perched in certain of the fine old houses of +the Cité and enjoying a background of sturdily-seated lakeside villas +and deeply umbrageous campagnes. I remember thinking the difference of +type, complexion and general _allure_ between these groups more marked, +to all the senses, than any "social distinction" I had yet encountered. +But the great thing was that I could so simplify our enclosing scene +itself, round it in and make it compose--the dark, the dreary +Institution, squeezed into a tall, dim, stony-faced and stony-hearted +house at the very top of the Cité and directly in the rear of the +Cathedral, portions of the apse of which seem to me to have straggled +above or protruded toward it, with other odd extraneous masses than +itself pressing still nearer. This simplification, quite luxuriously for +my young mind, was to mere mean blackness of an old-world sordid order. +I recognised _rich_ blackness in other connections, but this was somehow +of a harsh tradition and a tragic economy; sordid and strong was what I +had from the first felt the place, though urging myself always to rub +off history from its stones, and suffering thus, after a fashion, by the +fact that with history it ought to be interesting and that I ought to +know just how and why it was. For that, I think, was ever both the +burden and the joy--the complication, I mean, of interest, and the +sense, in the midst of the ugly and the melancholy, that queer crooked +silent corners behind cathedrals wrought in their way for one, did +something, while one haunted them, to the imagination and the taste; and +that so, once more, since the generalisation had become a habit with me, +I couldn't, seeing and feeling these things, really believe I had picked +up nothing. + +When I sat in a dusky upper chamber and read "French literature" with +blighted M. Toeppfer, son of a happier sire, as I was sure the charming +writer and caricaturist, in spite of cumbrous cares, must have been; or +when, a couple of times a week and in the same eternal twilight (we +groped almost lampless through the winter days, and our glimmering +tapers, when they sparsely appeared, smelt of a past age), I worried out +Virgil and Tite-Live with M. Verchère, or Schiller and Lessing with the +ruddy noisy little professor of German, who sat always, the lesson long, +in a light brown talma, the sides of which he caused violently to flap +for emphasis like agitated wings, I was almost conscious of the breath +of culture as I modestly aspired to culture, and was at any rate safe +for the time from a summons to the blackboard at the hands of awful +little M. Galopin, that dispenser of the paralysing chalk who most +affected me. Extremely diminutive and wearing for the most part a thin +inscrutable smile, the ghost of a tribute to awkwardness happily carried +off, he found in our barren interviews, I believed, a charm to +curiosity, bending afresh each time as over the handful of specimen +dust, unprecedented product at its finest, extracted from the scratched +soil of my intelligence. With M. Toeppfer I was almost happy; with each +of these instructors my hour was unshared, my exploits unwitnessed, by +others; but M. Toeppfer became a friend, shewed himself a _causeur_, +brightened our lesson with memories of his time in Paris, where, if I am +not mistaken, he had made, with great animation, his baccalauréat, and +whence it was my possibly presumptuous impression he had brought back a +state of health, apparently much impaired, which represented contrition +for youthful spirits. He had haunted the parterre of the Théâtre +Français, and when we read Racine his vision of Rachel, whom he had seen +there as often as possible, revived; he was able to say at moments how +she had spoken and moved, and I recall in particular his telling me that +on her entrance as Phèdre, borne down, in her languorous passion, by the +weight of her royal robes--"Que ces vains ornemens, que ces voiles me +pèsent!"--the long lapse of time before she spoke and while she sank +upon a seat filled itself extraordinarily with her visible woe. But +where he most gave me comfort was in bringing home to me that the house +commemorated, immortalised, as we call it, in the first of his father's +Nouvelles Genevoises, La Bibliothèque de mon Oncle, was none other than +the structure facing us where we sat and which so impinged and leaned on +the cathedral walls that he had but to indicate to me certain points +from the window of our room to reconstitute thrillingly the scenery, the +drollery, the whimsical action of the tale. _There_ was a demonstration +I could feel important, votary and victim of the "scene," the scene and +the "atmosphere" only, that I had been formed to be. That I called +interesting lore--called it so at least to myself, though feeling it at +the same time of course so little _directly_ producible that I could +perhaps even then have fronted this actually remote circumstance of my +never having produced it till this moment. There abode in me, I may add, +a sense that on any subject that did appeal and that so found me +ready--such subjects being indeed as yet vague, but immensely suggestive +of number--I should have grasped the confident chalk, welcomed the very +biggest piece, not in the least have feared the blackboard. They were +inscribed, alas for me, in no recognised course. I put my hand straight +on another of them, none the less, if not on a whole group of others, in +my ascent, each morning of the spring or the early summer sémestre, of +the admirable old Rue de la Tour de Boël, pronounced Boisl, which, +dusky, steep and tortuous, formed a short cut to that part of the Grand' +Rue in which the Academy was then seated. + +It was a foul and malodorous way--I sniff again, during the tepid weeks, +its warm close air and that near presence of rank cheese which was in +those days almost everywhere, for the nostril, the note of urban +Switzerland; these things blessed me as I passed, for I passed straight +to freedom and away from M. Galopin; they mixed with the benediction of +the exquisite spring and the rapture, constantly renewed, though for too +short a period, of my now substituting literary, or in other words +romantic, studies for the pursuits of the Institution Rochette. I viewed +them as literary, these new branches of research, though in truth they +were loose enough and followed on loose terms. My dear parents, as if to +make up to me, characteristically, for my recent absurd strain to no +purpose, allowed me now the happiest freedom, left me to attend such +lectures as I preferred, only desiring that I should attend several a +week, and content--cherished memory that it makes of their forms with +me--that these should involve neither examinations nor reports. The +Academic authorities, good-natured in the extreme and accustomed to the +alien amateur, appear to have been equally content, and I was but too +delighted, on such lines, to attend anything or everything. My whole +impression now, with my self-respect re-established, was of something +exquisite: I was put to the proof about nothing; I deeply enjoyed the +confidence shown in my taste, not to say in my honour, and I sat out +lecture after lecture as I might have sat out drama, alternate tragedy +and comedy, beautifully performed--the professor in each case figuring +the hero, and the undergraduates, much more numerous, though not in +general maturer than those of the Institution, where I had been, to my +perception, every one's junior, partaking in an odd fashion of the +nature at once of troupe and spectators. The scientific subjects, in a +large suggestive way, figured tragedy, I seemed to feel, and I pushed +this form to the point of my following, for conscience' sake, though not +with the last regularity, lurid demonstrations, as they affected me, on +anatomy and physiology; these in turn leading to my earnest view, at the +Medical School, of the dissection of a _magnifique gendarme_--which +ordeal brought me to a stand. It was by the literary and even by the +philosophic _leçons_ that the office of bright comedy was discharged, on +the same liberal lines; at the same time that I blush to remember with +how base a blankness I must have several times listened to H. F. Amiel, +admirable writer, analyst, moralist. His name and the fact of his having +been then a mild grave oracle of the shrine are all that remain with me +(I was fit to be coupled with my cousin Anne King, named in another +place, who, on the same Genevese scene, had had early lessons from the +young Victor Cherbuliez, then with all his music in him, and was to live +to mention to me that he had been for her "like any one else"); the +shrine, not to say the temple itself, shining for me truly, all that +season, with a mere confounding blur of light. Was it an effect of my +intensity of reaction from what I had hated? was it to a great extent +the beguiling beauty of a wonderful Swiss spring, into which all things +else soothingly melted, becoming together a harmony without +parts?--whatever the cause, I owed it to some accident only to be +described, I think, as happy, that I moved, those three months, in an +acutely enjoying and yet, as would at present appear, a but scantly +comparing or distinguishing maze of the senses and the fancy. So at +least, to cover this so thin report of my intelligence and my sum of +acquisition and retention, I am reduced to supposing. + +What essentially most operated, I make out, however, was that force of a +renewed sense of William's major activity which always made the +presumption of any degree of importance or success fall, with a sort of +ecstasy of resignation, from my own so minor. Whatever he might happen +to be doing made him so interesting about it, and indeed, with the +quickest concomitance, about everything else, that what I probably most +did, all the while, was but to pick up, and to the effect not a bit of +starving but quite of filling myself, the crumbs of his feast and the +echoes of his life. His life, all this Geneva period, had been more of a +feast than mine, and I recall the sense of this that I had got on the +occasion of my accompanying him, by his invitation, toward the end of +our stay, to a students' celebration or carouse, which was held at such +a distance from the town, at a village or small bourg, up in the Vaud +back-country, that we had, after a considerable journey by boat and in +heterogeneous and primitive conveyances, tightly packed, to spend two +nights there. The Genevese section of the Société de Zoffingue, the +great Swiss students' organisation for brotherhood and beer, as it might +summarily be defined, of which my brother had become a member, was to +meet there certain other sections, now vague to me, but predominantly +from the German-speaking Cantons, and, holding a Commerce, to toast +their reunion in brimming bowls. It had been thought the impression +might amuse, might even interest me--for it was not denied that there +were directions, after all, in which I _could_ perhaps take notice; and +this was doubtless what after a fashion happened, though I felt out in +the cold (and all the more that the cold at the moment happened to be +cruel), as the only participant in view not crowned with the charming +white cap of the society, becoming to most young heads, and still less +girt with the parti-coloured ribbon or complementary scarf, which set +off even the shabby--for shabbiness considerably figured. I participated +vaguely but not too excludedly; I suffered from cold, from hunger and +from scant sleeping-space; I found the Bernese and the Bâlois strange +representatives of the joy of life, some of them the finest gothic +grotesques--but the time none the less very long; all of which, +however, was in the day's work if I might live, by the imagination, in +William's so adaptive skin. To see that he was adaptive, was initiated, +and to what a happy and fruitful effect, that, I recollect, was my +measure of content; which was filled again to overflowing, as I have +hinted, on my finding him so launched at the Academy after our stretch +of virtual separation, and just fancying, with a freedom of fancy, even +if with a great reserve of expression, how much he might be living and +learning, enjoying and feeling, amid work that was the right work for +him and comrades, consecrated comrades, that at the worst weren't the +wrong. What was not indeed, I always asked myself, the right work for +him, or the right thing of any kind, that he took up or looked at or +played with?--failing, as I did more than ever at the time I speak of, +of the least glimpse of his being below an occasion. Whatever he played +with or worked at entered at once into his intelligence, his talk, his +humour, as with the action of colouring-matter dropped into water or +that of the turning-on of a light within a window. Occasions waited on +him, had always done so, to my view; and there he was, that springtime, +on a level with them all: the effect of which recognition had much, had +more than aught else, to say to the charming silver haze just then +wrapped about everything of which I was conscious. He had formed two or +three young friendships that were to continue and to which even the +correspondence of his later years testifies; with which it may have had +something to do that the Swiss _jeunesse_ of the day was, thanks to the +political temperature then prevailing, in a highly inflamed and exalted +state, and particularly sensitive to foreign sympathy, however platonic, +with the national fever. It was the hour at which the French Emperor was +to be paid by Victor Emmanuel the price of the liberation of Lombardy; +the cession of Nice and Savoie were in the air--with the consequence, in +the Genevese breast, of the new immediate neighbourhood thus constituted +for its territory. Small Savoie was to be replaced, close against it, by +enormous and triumphant France, whose power to absorb great mouthfuls +was being so strikingly exhibited. Hence came much hurrying to and fro, +much springing to arms, in the way of exercise, and much flocking to the +standard--"demonstrations," in other words, of the liveliest; one of +which I recall as a huge tented banquet, largely of the white caps, +where I was present under my brother's wing, and, out of a sea of +agitated and vociferous young heads, sprang passionate protests and +toasts and vows and declaimed verses, a storm of local patriotism, +though a flurry happily short-lived. + +All this was thrilling, but the term of it, by our consecrated custom, +already in view; we were transferred at a bound, for the rest of that +summer of 1860, to the care, respectively, of a pair of kindly +pedagogues at Bonn-am-Rhein; as to which rapid phase I find remembrance +again lively, with a letter or two of William's to reinforce it. Yet I +first pick up as I pass several young lines from Geneva, and would fain +pick up too the drawing that accompanied them--this by reason of the +interest of everything of the sort, without exception, that remains to +us from his hand. He at a given moment, which came quite early, as +completely ceased to ply his pencil as he had in his younger time +earnestly and curiously exercised it; and this constitutes exactly the +interest of his case. No stroke of it that I have recovered but +illustrates his aptitude for drawing, his possible real mastery of the +art that was yet, in the light of other interests, so utterly to drop +from him; and the example is rare of being so finely capable only to +become so indifferent. It was thanks to his later indifference that he +made no point of preserving what he had done--a neglect that, still more +lucklessly, communicated itself to his circle; so that we also let +things go, let them again and again stray into the desert, and that what +might be reproducible is but the handful of scraps that have happened +not to perish. "Mother," he writes to his father in absence, "does +nothing but sit and cry for you. She refuses to associate with us and +has one side of the room to herself. She and the Aunt are now in the +Aunt's room. Wilky and Bobby, at home for the day, are at church. It is +a hard grey day. H. is telling a story to Louis Osborne, and I will try +to make a sketch of them. There has been a terrible bise; the two +Cornhill Magazines have come; Mrs. Thomas has been too sick to be at +dinner, and we have seen something of some most extraordinary English +people." Mrs. Thomas, of New York, was a handsome American widow with +handsome children, all from the Avenue Gabriel in Paris, and with the +boys enjoying life, among many little compatriots, at the admired +establishment of M. Haccius, even as our small brothers were doing at +that of M. Maquelin; yet with their destiny of ultimate Europeanisation, +of finally complete absorption into the French system, already rather +written for them--as a like history, for like foredoomed young subjects, +was in those years beginning to be prefigured, through marriages of +daughters and other such beguilements, almost wherever one looked. The +extraordinary English people were perhaps an amiable family of whom I +retain an image as conversing with our parents at the season when the +latter were in their prompt flush of admiration for George Eliot's +first novel, Adam Bede, then just given to the world and their copy of +which they had rejoicingly lent to their fellow Anglo-Saxons. I catch +again the echo of their consternation on receiving it back with the +remark that all attempt at an interest in such people, village +carpenters and Methodists, had proved vain--for that style of +Anglo-Saxon; together with that of my own excited wonder about such +other people, those of the style in question, those somehow prodigiously +presented by so rare a delicacy, so proud a taste, and made thus to +irradiate a strange historic light. It _referred_ them, and to a social +order, making life more interesting and more various; even while our +clear democratic air, that of our little family circle, quivered as with +the monstrosity. It might, this note that made us, in the parlance of +to-day, sit up, fairly have opened to me that great and up to then +unsuspected door of the world from which the general collection of +monstrosities, its existence suddenly brought home to us, would +doubtless stretch grandly away. The story I told Louis Osborne has quite +passed from me, but not little Louis himself, an American child of the +most charming and appealing intelligence, marked by some malady that was +more or less permanently to cripple, or was even cruelly to destroy him, +and whom it was a constant joy to aspire to amuse. His mother was +schooling her elder son in the company of our own brothers, his father +having established them all at Geneva that he might go for a tour in the +East. Vivid to me still is the glimpse I happened to get one Sunday +betimes of the good Maquelin couple, husband and wife, in deep +mourning--a touch of the highest decency--who had come, with faces a +yard long, to announce to Mrs. Osborne the death of her husband in the +Holy Land, communicated to them, by slow letter, in the first instance. +With little Louis on one's knee one didn't at all envy M. and Madame +Maquelin; and than this small faint phantom of sociable helpless little +listening Louis none more exquisite hovers before me. + +[Illustration: Most eternal love from every one, & from Louis Osborne. + +Louis Osborne. Sketch from a letter of William James (page 18).] + +With which mild memories thus stands out for me too the lively +importance, that winter, of the arrival, from the first number, of the +orange-covered earlier Cornhill--the thrill of each composing item of +that first number especially recoverable in its intensity. Is anything +like that thrill possible to-day--for a submerged and blinded and +deafened generation, a generation so smothered in quantity and number +that discrimination, under the gasp, has neither air to breathe nor room +to turn round? Has any like circumstance now conceivably the value, to +the charmed attention, so far as anything worth naming attention, or any +charm for it, is anywhere left, of the fact that Trollope's Framley +Parsonage there began?--let alone the still other fact that the +Roundabout Papers did and that Thackeray thus appeared to us to +guarantee personally, intimately, with a present audibility that was as +the accent of good company, the new relation with him and with others of +company not much worse, as they then seemed, that such a medium could +establish. To speak of these things, in truth, however, is to feel the +advantage of being able to live back into the time of the more sovereign +periodical appearances much of a compensation for any reduced prospect +of living forward. For these appearances, these strong time-marks in +such stretches of production as that of Dickens, that of Thackeray, that +of George Eliot, had in the first place simply a genial weight and +force, a direct importance, and in the second a command of the permeable +air and the collective sensibility, with which nothing since has begun +to deserve comparison. They were enrichments of life, they were _large_ +arrivals, these particular renewals of supply--to which, frankly, I am +moved to add, the early Cornhill giving me a pretext, even the frequent +examples of Anthony Trollope's fine middle period, looked at in the +light of old affection and that of his great heavy shovelfuls of +testimony to constituted English matters; a testimony of course looser +and thinner than Balzac's to _his_ range of facts, but charged with +something of the big Balzac authority. These various, let alone +numerous, deeper-toned strokes of the great Victorian clock were so many +steps in the march of our age, besides being so many notes, full and +far-reverberating, of our having high company to keep--high, I mean, to +cover all the ground, in the sense of the genial pitch of it. So it was, +I remember too, that our parents spoke of their memory of the successive +surpassing attestations of the contemporary presence of Scott; to which +we might have replied, and doubtless after no great space began to +reply, that our state, and even their later one, allowing for a certain +gap, had nothing to envy any other. I witnessed, for that matter, with +all my senses, young as I was, the never-to-be-equalled degree of +difference made, for what may really be called the world-consciousness +happily exposed to it, by the prolonged "coming-out" of The Newcomes, +yellow number by number, and could take the general civilised +participation in the process for a sort of basking in the light of +distinction. The process repeated itself for some years under other +forms and stimuli, but the merciless change was to come--so that through +whatever bristling mazes we may now pick our way it is not to find them +open into any such vales of Arcady. My claim for our old privilege is +that we did then, with our pace of dignity, proceed from vale to vale. + + + + +II + + +My point at any rate, such as it is, would be that even at the age I had +reached in 1860 something of the happier time still lingered--the time +in which a given product of the press might have a situation and an +aspect, a considerability, so to speak, a circumscription and an _aura_; +room to breathe and to show in, margin for the casting of its nets. The +occasion at large was doubtless shrinking, one could note--shrinking +like the unlet "house" on a night of grandest opera, but "standing room +only" was not yet everywhere the sign, and the fine deliberate thing +could here and there find its seat. I really indeed might have held it +the golden age of letters still, and of their fond sister leisure, with +that quiet swim into our ken on its appointed day, during our Bonn +summer, of the charming Once a Week of the prime, the prime of George +Meredith and Charles Reade and J. E. Millais and George du Maurier; +which our father, to bridge our separation from him, sent us, from Paris +and elsewhere, in prompt and characteristic relief of our plotted, our +determined strict servitude to German, and to the embrace of the sweet +slim essence of which the strain of one's muscles round a circular ton +of advertisement was not a condition attached. I should like to say that +I rioted, all that season, on the supreme German classics _and_ on Evan +Harrington, with Charles Reade's A Good Fight, the assured little +prelude to The Cloister and the Hearth, thrown in; and I should indeed +be ready to say it, were not the expression gross for the really hushed +piety of my attitude during those weeks. It was perhaps not quite till +then that I fully emerged from the black shadow of the École +Préparatoire aux Écoles Spéciales, not quite till we had got off beyond +the blest Rhine at Basle that I ceased to hear and feel all but just +behind me, portentous perhaps of another spring, the cold breath of the +monster. The guttery Bonn-Gasse was during those weeks of the year close +and stale, and the house of our good Herr Doctor Humpert, professor at +the Bonn Gymnasium, in which I shared a room with my brother Wilky, +contracted and dim, as well as fragrant through a range of assaults that +differed only in kind and not at all in number from those of the street +itself; and yet I held the period and the whole situation idyllic--the +slightly odd sense of which was one's being to that extent attuned to +the life of letters and of (oh the great thing!) impressions "gone in +for." To feel a unity, a character and a tone in one's impressions, to +feel them related and all harmoniously coloured, that _was_ positively +to face the æsthetic, the creative, even, quite wondrously, the critical +life and almost on the spot to commence author. They had begun, the +impressions--that was what was the matter with them--to scratch quite +audibly at the door of liberation, of extension, of projection; what +they were _of_ one more or less knew, but what they were _for_ was the +question that began to stir, though one was still to be a long time at a +loss directly to answer it. + +There, for the present, was the rub, the dark difficulty at which one +could but secretly stare--secretly because one was somehow ashamed of +its being there and would have quickly removed one's eyes, or tried to +clear them, if caught in the act of watching. Impressions were not +merely all right but were the dearest things in the world; only one +would have gone to the stake rather than in the first place confessed to +some of them, or in the second announced that one really lived by them +and built on them. This failure then to take one's stand in the +connection could but come from the troubled view that they were naught +without a backing, a stout stiff hard-grained underside that would hold +them together and of which the terrible name was simply science, +otherwise learning, and learning exclusively by books, which were at +once the most beautiful and the most dreadful things in the world, some +of them right, strikingly, showily right, some of them disgracefully and +almost unmentionably wrong, that is grossly irrelevant, as for instance +a bound volume of Once a Week would be, but remarkable above all for +overwhelming number and in general for defiance of comprehension. It was +true that one had from time to time the rare adventure of one's surprise +at understanding parts of them none the less--understanding more than a +very little, more than much too little; but there was no practical +support to speak of in that, even the most one could ever hope to +understand being a mere drop in the bucket. Never did I quite strike it +off, I think, that impressions might themselves _be_ science--and this +probably because I didn't then know them, when it came to the point, as +anything but life. I knew them but by that collective and +unpractical--many persons would have said that frivolous--name; which +saw me little further. I was under the impression--this in fact the very +liveliest of what might have been called the lot--that life and +knowledge were simply mutual opposites, one inconsistent with the other; +though hovered about, together, at the same time, by the anomaly that +when knowledge impinged upon life, pushed against her, as it were, and +drove her to the wall, it was all right, and such was knowledge's way +and title; whereas when life played the like tricks with knowledge +nothing but shame for the ruder, even if lighter, party could accrue. +There was to come to me of course in time the due perception that +neither was of the least use--use to myself--without the other; but +meanwhile, and even for much after, the extreme embarrassment continued: +to whichever of the opposites one gave one's self it was with a sense of +all but basely sacrificing the other. However, the conflict and the +drama involved in the question at large was doubtless what was to make +consciousness--under whichever of the two names one preferred to +entertain it--supremely intense and interesting. + +This then is by way of saying that the idyll, as I have called it, of +the happy juncture I glanced at a moment back came from the fact that I +didn't at all know how much I was living, and meanwhile quite supposed I +was considerably learning. When, rising at some extraordinary hour of +the morning, I went forth through the unawakened town (and the Germans, +at that time, heaven knows, were early afoot too), and made for the open +country and the hill, in particular, of the neighbouring Venusberg, +long, low and bosky, where the dews were still fresh and ancient mummies +of an old cloister, as I remember it, somewhere perched and exposed, I +was doing, to my sense, an attuned thing; attuned, that is, to my +coming home to bend double over Schiller's Thirty Years' War in the +strenuous spirit that would keep me at it, or that would vary it with +Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften, till late in the warm afternoon. I found +German prose much tougher than the verse, and thereby more opposed to +"life," as to which I of course couldn't really shake off the sense that +it might be worked as infinitely comprehensive, comprehensive even of +the finest discriminations against it. The felicity, present but +naturally unanalysed, was that the whole thing, our current episode, +_was_ exactly comprehensive of life, presenting it in particular as +characteristically German, and therein freshly vivid--with the great +vividness that, by our parents' vague wish, we were all three after or +out for; in spite of our comparatively restricted use, in those days, of +these verbal graces. Such therefore was the bright unity of our +experience, or at least of my own share in it--this luck that, through +the intensity of my wanting it to, all consciousness, all my own +immediate, _tasted_ German, to the great and delightful quickening of my +imagination. The quickening was of course no such matter as I was to +know nearly ten years later on plunging for the first time over the Alps +into Italy; but, letting alone that I was then so much older, I had +wondered about Italy, to put it embracingly, far more than I was +constitutionally capable of wondering about Germany. It was enough for +me at Bonn that I felt no lack of appetite--had for the time all the +illusion of being on the way to something; to something, I mean, with +which the taste of German might somehow _directly_ mix itself. Every +aspect and object round about was a part, at all events, of the actual +mixture; and when on drowsy afternoons, not a little interspaced indeed, +I attempted the articulate perusal of Hermann und Dorothea with our good +Professor, it was like dreaming, to the hum of bees, if not to the +aftertaste of "good old Rhenish," in some homely fruity +eighteenth-century garden. + +The good old Rhenish is no such false note in this reconstitution; I +seem to see the Frau Doctorin and her ancient mildly-scowling sister +Fräulein Stamm, who reminded me of Hepzibah Pyncheon in The House of the +Seven Gables, perpetually wiping green hock-glasses and holding them up +to our meagre light, as well as setting out long-necked bottles, with +rather chalky cakes, in that forward section of our general +eating-and-living-room which formed our precinct of reception and +conversation. The unbroken space was lighted at either end, from street +and court, and its various effects of tempered shade or, frankly +speaking, of rather greasy gloom, amid which the light touch of +elegance gleamed but from the polish of the glasses and the sloping +shoulders of their bottle, comes back to me as the view of an intensely +internal interior. I recall how oppressively in that apartment, how +congestedly, as in some cage of which the wires had been papered over, I +felt housed and disconnected; I scarce then, I think, knew what the +matter was, but it could only have been that in all those summer weeks, +to the best of my belief, no window was ever once opened. Still, there +was the scene, the thick, the much-mixed chiaroscuro through which the +two ladies of the family emerged from an exiguous retreat just off the +back end of the place with ample platters of food; the almost +impenetrable dusk of the middle zone, where the four or five of us, +seated with our nutcracker-faced pastor, conveyed the food to our mouths +with a confidence mainly borrowed from the play of his own deep-plunging +knife; and then the forward, the festal extension, the privilege of +occasionally lingering in which, or of returning to it for renewed +refreshment, was a recognition both of our general minding of our +business upstairs--left as we were to thumb our Flügel's Dictionary by +the hour so long as we invoked no other oracle. Our drowsy Doctor +invited no such approach; he smiled upon us as if unseen forefingers of +great force had been inserted for the widening of his mouth at the +corners, and I had the sense of his not quite knowing what to make of +our being so very gently barbaric, or rather so informally civilised; he +safely housed and quite rankly fed us, guided us to country walks and to +the swimming-baths by the Rhine-side, introduced us to fruit-gardens +where, on payment of the scantest tribute, we were suffered to consume +off-hand bushels of cherries, plums and pears; suffered us to ascend the +Drachenfels and to partake of coffee at Rolandseck and in other friendly +open-air situations; but flung his gothic shadow as little as possible +over my so passive page at least, and took our rate of acquisition +savingly for granted. + +This, in the optimism of the hour, I have no memory of resenting; the +page, though slow, managed at the same time to be stirring, and I asked +no more of any one or anything but that they should be with all due +gothicism whatever they most easily might. The long vistas of the +beeches and poplars on the other side of the Rhine, after we had crossed +by the funicular ferry, gothically rustled and murmured: I fancied their +saying perpetually "We are German woods, we are German woods--which +makes us very wonderful, do you know? and unlike any others: don't you +feel the spell of the very sound of us and of the beautiful words, 'Old +German woods, old German woods,' even if you can't tell why?" I +couldn't altogether tell why, but took everything on trust as mystically +and valuably gothic--valuably because ministering with peculiar +directness, as I gathered, to culture. I was in, or again I was "out," +in my small way, for culture; which seemed quite to come, come from +everywhere at once, with the most absurd conciliatory rush, pitifully +small as would have been any list of the sources I tapped. The beauty +was in truth that everything was a source, giving me, by the charmingest +breach of logic, more than it at all appeared to hold; which was exactly +what had not been the case at the Institution Rochette, where things had +appeared, or at least had pretended, to hold so much more than they +gave. The oddity was that about us now everything--everything but the +murmur of the German woods and the great flow and magic name of the +Rhine--was more ugly than beautiful, tended in fact to say at every +turn: "You shall suffer, yes, indeed you _are_ doing so (stick up for +your right to!) in your sense of form; which however is quite compatible +with culture, is really one of the finest parts of it, and may decidedly +prove to you that you're getting it." I hadn't, in rubbing, with +whatever weakness, against French and, so far as might be, against +France, and in sinking, very sensibly, more and more into them, +particularly felt that I was getting it _as_ such; what I was getting +as such was decidedly rather my famous "life," and without so much as +thinking of the degree, with it all, of the valuable and the helpful. + +Life meanwhile I had a good deal of at my side in the person of my +brother Wilky, who, as I have had occasion elsewhere to say, contrived +in those years to live, or to have every appearance of so doing, with an +immediacy that left me far in the lurch. I was always still wondering +how, while he had solved the question simply _ambulando_, which was for +him but by the merest sociable stroll. This represented to me +success--success of a kind, but such an assured kind--in a degree that +was my despair; and I have never forgotten how, that summer, when the +Herr Doctor did look in, did settle down a little to have the bristling +page out with us, Wilky's share of the hour took on the spot the form of +his turning at once upon our visitor the tables of earnest inquiry. He +delighted, after this tribute of eagerness, to meet the Doctor's +interrogative advance; but the communication so made was of anything and +everything except the fruit of his reading (the act of reading was +inhuman and repugnant to him), and I amazedly noted while I nursed my +small hoard that anything he offered did in the event quite as well: he +could talk with such charm, such drollery of candour, such +unexpectedness of figure, about what he had done and what he hadn't--or +talk at least before it, behind it and beside it. We had three or four +house-companions, youths from other places attending the Gymnasium and +committed to our Professor's care, as to whom I could somehow but infer +that they were, each in his personal way, inordinately gothic--which +they had to be to supply to my mind a relation, or a substitute for a +relation, with them; whereas my younger brother, without a scrap of a +view of them, a grain of theory or formula, tumbled straight into their +confidence all round. Our air for _him_ was by just so much life as it +couldn't have dreamed of being culture, and he was so far right that +when the son of the house and its only child, the slim and ardent +Theodor, who figured to me but as a case of such classic sensibility, of +the Lieder or the Werther sort, as might have made, with the toss of a +yellow lock or the gleam of a green blouse, the image for an Uhland or a +Heine stanza, had imparted to him an intention of instant suicide under +some resentment of parental misconception, he had been able to use +dissuasion, or otherwise the instinct of then most freely fraternising, +with a success to which my relish for so romantic a stroke as charmingly +in Theodor's character and setting mightn't at all have attained. There +is a small something of each of us in a passage of an ingenuous letter +addressed by him from the midst of these conditions to his parents. I +fondly catch, I confess, at any of these recoverable lights; finding +them at the best too scant for my commemorative purpose. + + Willy got his photograph this morning after three hours' hard work. + From the post-office he was sent to the custom-house, and there was + obliged to sign his name and to go to some neighbouring bookstore + to buy a seal. On returning to the custom-house he was sent back to + the post-office to get some document or other. After obtaining this + article he turned his steps once more to the custom-house, where an + insolent officer told him he must wait an hour. W. informed him + that he would return at the end of the hour, and accordingly for + the third time went to the C.H., and was conducted by the clerk to + a cellar where the packages were kept, and there told to take off + his hat. He obeyed, raging, and then was a fourth time sent to the + P.O.--this time to pay money. Happily he is now in possession of + his property. H. and he took a walk this afternoon to a + fruit-garden, where plums, cherries, gooseberries and currants were + abundant. After half an hour's good work H. left W. finishing + merely the plums--the cherry and gooseberry course to come later. + He was so enchanted that he thought H. a great fool to leave so + soon. How does Paris now strike you? It can't be as nice as Bonn. + You had better write to Bob. + +Bob, our youngest brother, had been left at Geneva with excellent M. +Maquelin and was at that time _en course_, over the Alps, with this +gentleman and their young companions; a most desirable, delicious +excursion, which I remember following in envious fancy, as it included a +descent to the Italian Lakes and a push on as far as Genoa. In reference +to which excursion I cull a line or two from a faded scrap of a letter +addressed a little later by this youngest of us to his "Beloved Brother" +William. "This is about our Grande Course. We started at 5 o'clock in +the morning with our faces and hands all nicely washed and our nails +clean. The morning was superb, and as we waited in the court the soft +balmy air of the mountains came in bringing with it the melodious sound +of the rappel for breakfast. This finished we bade adieu, and I could +see the emotions of the kind and ever-watchful Madame Maquelin as a few +silent drops trickled down her fair cheeks. We at last arrived at the +boat, where we met Mr. Peters, a portly gentleman from the city of +Philadelphia, with his two sweet sons, one twelve, the other seven years +old, the eldest coming from Mr. E.'s school with no very good opinion of +the principal--saying he had seen him in a state of tightness several +times during his stay there." Mr. Peters appears to have been something +of a pessimist, for, when at a later stage "it began to rain hard, and +half the road was a foot deep in water, and the cocher had stopped +somewhere to get lanterns and had at the same time indulged in certain +potations which didn't make him drive any the straighter," this +gentleman "insinuated that we had all better have been with our +mothers." The letter records at some length the early phases of the +affair, but under the weight of the vision of Italy it rather breaks +down and artlessly simplifies. "Genoa is a most lively town, and there +is a continual swarm of sailors in the street. We visited several +palaces, among others that of Victor Emanuel, which is very fine, and +the fruit is very cheap. We stayed there several days, but at last +started for Turin, where we spent a Sunday--a place I didn't much like, +I suppose because of that reason. We left Turin the next day on foot, +but lost our road and had to come back." I recover even in presence of +these light accents my shade of wonder at this odd chance that made the +least developed of us the subject of what seemed to me even then a +privilege of the highest intensity; and there again keeps it company my +sense, through all the after years, that this early glimpse of the blest +old Italy, almost too early though it appears to have but just missed +being, might have done something towards preparing or enriching for Bob +the one little plot of consciousness in which his deeply troubled life +was to find rest. He was in the event also fondly to aim at painting, +like two of his brothers; but whereas they were to fumble with the +lock, in their very differing degree, only in those young years, he was +to keep at it most as he grew older, though always with a perfect +intelligence of the inevitable limits of the relation, the same +intelligence that was so sharp and sad, so extraordinarily free and fine +and detached in fact, as play of mind, play of independent talk and of +pen, for the limits of his relation to many other matters. Singularly +intelligent all round, yet with faculties that had early declined any +consummation of acquaintance with such training as under a different +sort of pressure he might have enjoyed, he had an admirable hand and +eye, and I have known no other such capacity for absorbing or storing up +the minutest truths and shades of landscape fact and giving them out +afterward, in separation from the scene, with full assurance and +felicity. He could do this still better even than he cared to do; I for +my part cared much more that he should than he ever did himself, and +then it was, I dare say, that I made the reflection: "He took in the +picture of Italy, with his firm hard gift, having the chance while +William and I were still, comparatively, small untouched and gaping +barbarians; and it should always be in him to do at some odd fine moment +a certain honour to that." I held to it that that sensibility had played +in him more than by any outward measure at the time; which was perhaps +indeed one of the signs within me of the wasteful habit or trick of a +greater feeling for people's potential propriety or felicity or full +expression than they seemed able to have themselves. At all events I was +absolutely never to cease to remember for Bob, through everything--and +there was much and of the most agitated and agitating--that he had been +dipped as a boy into the sacred stream; to some effect which, thanks to +two or three of his most saving and often so amusing sensibilities, the +turbid sea of his life might never quite wash away. + +William had meanwhile come to Bonn with us, but was domiciled with +another tutor, younger and fairer and more of the world, above all more +ventilated and ventilating, Herr Stromberg, whose defect might in fact +have seemed that, with his constant exhibition of the stamp received by +him from the writings of Lord Macaulay, passages of which he could +recite by heart, and the circumstance that his other pupil, William's +comrade for a time, was of unmitigatedly English, that is of +quasi-Byronic association, he didn't quite rise to the full gothic +standard. Otherwise indeed our brother moved on the higher plane of +light and air and ease, and above all of enjoyed society, that we felt +he naturally must. Present to me yet is the thrill of learning from him +that his English fellow-pupil was the grandson, if I remember rightly +the degree of descent, of Mary Chaworth, Byron's "first love," and my +sense afterwards, in gaping at young Mr. Musters himself, that this +independently romantic contact would have been more to my own private +purpose at least than the most emphasised gothicism. None the less do I +regain it as a part of my current vision that Frau Stromberg, who was +young and fair, wrote tragedies as well as made pancakes--which were +served to each consumer double, a thick confiture within being the +reason of this luxuriance, and being also a note beyond our experience +in the Bonn-Gasse; and that with the printed five acts of a certain +"Cleopatra" before me, read aloud in the first instance to her young +inmates and by my brother passed on to me, I lost myself in the view of +I scarce knew what old-world Germanic grace, positively, or little +court-city practice of the theatre: these things so lived in the small +thick pamphlet, "grey paper with blunt type" and bristling, to my +discomfiture, with descriptive stage directions, vast dense bracketed +tracts, gothic enough in all conscience, as to which I could already +begin to wonder whether such reinforcements of presentation proved more +for or against the true expressional essence of the matter; for or +against, that is, there being nothing at all so dramatic, so chargeable +with meaning and picture, as speech, of whatever sort, made perfect. +Such speculations, I may parenthesise, might well have been fostered, +and doubtless were, by an impression that I find commemorated in a few +lines of a letter of my father's to a friend in America--he having +brought us on to Bonn, introduced us to our respective caretakers and +remained long enough to have had an evening at the theatre, to which we +accompanied him. "We had Ristori to play Mary Stuart for us last +night--which was the vulture counterfeiting Jenny Wren. Every little +while the hoarse exulting voice, the sanguinary beak, the lurid leer of +menace, and the relentless talons looked forth from the feathery mass +and sickened you with disgust. She would do Elizabeth better." I recall +the performance in every feature, as well as my absence of such +reserves, though quite also the point to which I was impressed by the +utterance of them; not that it didn't leave me at the same time free to +feel that the heroine of history represented could scarce have been at +all a dove-like, much less a wren-like person. She had indeed on Madame +Ristori's showing prodigious resources of militant mobility--of what in +fact would be called to-day mobilisation. Several years later on I was +to see the actress play the same part in America; and then, if I am not +mistaken, was to note scarce more than one point; the awful effect on +_any_ histrionic case, even on one so guardedly artful as hers, of +having been dragged round the globe and forced home, so far as might be, +to imperfect comprehensions. The big brush had come fairly to daub the +canvas. Let the above, however, serve in particular to lead in as many +examples of my father's singularly striking and personal habit of +expression and weight of thought as these pages may find room for. + +The one difficulty is that to open that general door into the limbo of +old letters, charged with their exquisite ghostly appeal, is almost to +sink into depths of concession. I yield here for instance to the claim +of a page or two from William, just contemporary and addressed to our +parents in Paris--and yield perhaps but for no better reason than that +of the small historic value or recoverable charm that I am moved to find +in its illustrative items. The reference of its later lines is to a +contemporary cousin, young and blooming, by whom I have already ever so +lightly brushed[2] and who figured quite with the grand air on our young +horizon; the only daughter of the brightest of the Albany uncles (by +that time lost and mourned) now on the tour of Europe with a pair of +protective elders for her entrance upon life and at that hour +surrounding our parents, her uncle and aunt, with a notably voluminous +rustle of fresh Paris clothes, the far-spreading drapery of the more and +more draped and flounced and "sloped" second Empire. This friendly +frou-frou almost reached our ears, so sociable for us was every sound of +her, in our far-off Rhineland. She was with her stature and shape the +finest possible person to carry clothes, and I thought of her, with a +revival of the old yearning envy, as now quite transcendently orphaned +and bereft, dowered, directed and equipped. + + Your hearts, I know, would have been melted if you had had a view + of us this Sunday morning. I went directly after breakfast for the + boys, and though H. had an "iron stomach-ache," as he called it, we + went off together to that low wooded hill which the Aunt could see + from her window when you were here, and walked about till + dinner-time, H. being all the while in great pain. In one part we + found a platform with a stone bench commanding a view of the whole + valley, and, as we were rather tired, sat down on it, H. and Wilky + each with a Once a Week, while I tried to draw the view in my + pocket-book. We wondered what our beloved parents were doing at + that moment, 11.30, and thought you must all have been in your + salon, Alice at the window with her eyes fixed on her novel, but + eating some rich fruit that Father has just brought in for her from + the Palais Royal, and the lovely Mother and Aunt in armchairs, + their hands crossed in front of them, listening to Father, who + walks up and down talking of the superiority of America to these + countries after all, and how much better it is we should have done + with them. We wished, oh we wished we could have been with you to + join in the conversation and partake of the fruit. We got up from + the seat and went on with a heavy sigh, but in a way so fraternal, + presenting such a sweet picture of brotherly unitedness and + affection, that it would have done you good to see us. + + And so it is every day that we meet for our shorter walks and + talks. The German gets on slowly, but I notice a very marked + improvement in talking. I have not kept at it so hard this last + week as before, and I prevent H. from working his eyes out, which + he seems on the whole rather less inclined to do. I am going to + read as much as I can the rest of the time we are here. It seems a + mere process of soaking, requiring no mental effort, but only time + and steady patience. My room is very comfortable now I've got used + to it, and I have a pair of slippers of green plush heavy and + strong enough to last all my life and then be worn by my children. + The photograph of our Zoffingen group has come, which gives me a + moustache big enough for three lifeguardsmen. Tell us something + more about Mary Helen. How long does she expect to stay in Europe, + and who is this Dr. Adams--the man she is engaged to? She directs + me to write to her in his care--so that I wish you would ask her, + as she says she hopes to meet me, whether I shall still address her + as Miss James? Of course it would be painful, but I think I could + do it if Adams weren't there. Let the delicious little grey-eyed + Alice be locked up alone on the day after the receipt of this with + paper and envelopes to write a letter unassisted, uncorrected and + unpunctuated to her loving brothers, who would send her novels and + peaches if they could. What a blessing it is to have such parents, + such a perfect Mother and magnificent Father and dear good Aunt and + splendid little Sister! + +I may mention that Mary Helen was not "engaged" to the gentleman +above-mentioned, and was eventually to marry the late Alfred Grymes, +originally of Louisiana. Also that a letter subsequent to this, +apparently of the first days in September, sounds to his father the +first note of my brother's definite personal preference, as he seemed +lately and increasingly, though not in conditions markedly propitious, +to have become aware of it, for an adoption of the "artistic career." It +was an odd enough circumstance, in respect to the attested blood in our +veins, that no less than three of our father's children, with two of his +grandsons to add to these, and with a collateral addendum representing +seven, in all, of our grandfather's, William James's, descendants in +three generations, should have found the artistic career in general and +the painter's trade in particular irresistibly solicit them. + + I wish you would as you promised set down as clearly as you can on + paper what your idea of the nature of Art _is_, because I do not, + probably, understand it fully, and should like to have it presented + in a form that I might think over at my leisure. I wish you would + do so as fully as you conveniently can, so that I may ruminate + it--and I won't say more about it till I have heard from you again. + As for what your last letter did contain, what can I do but thank + you for every word of it and assure you that they went to the right + spot. Having such a Father with us, how can we be other than in + some measure worthy of him?--if not perhaps as eminently so as the + distance leads his fond heart to imagine. I never value him so much + as when I am away from him. At home I see only his striking + defects, but here he seems all perfection, and I wonder as I write + why I didn't cherish him more when he was beside me. I beg darling + old Mother's forgiveness too for the rude and dastardly way in + which I snub her, and the Aunt for the impatience and violence I + have always shown her. I shall be a perfect sherry-cobbler to both + of them, and to the small Alice too, young as she may be for such + treats. + + I have just got home from dining with the boys and their Humperts; + where I found the Doctor as genial as ever and the two old ladies + perfect characters for Dickens. They have been so shut out from the + world and melting together so long by the kitchen fire that the + minds of both have become fused into one, and then seem to + constitute a sort of two-bodied individual. I never saw anything + more curious than the way they sit mumbling together at the end of + the table, each using simultaneously the same comment if anything + said at our end strikes their ear. H. pegs away pretty stoutly, but + I don't think you need worry about him. He and Wilky appear to get + on in great harmony and enliven themselves occasionally by + brotherly trials of strength, quite good-natured, in their room, + when excess of labour has made them sleepy or heavy. In these + sometimes one, sometimes the other is victorious. They often pay me + a visit here while I am dressing, which of course is highly + convenient--and I have more than once been with _them_ early enough + to be present at Wilky's tumble out of bed and consequent + awakening, with the call on the already-at-work H.: "Why the + mischief didn't you stop me?" Wilky and I walked to Rolandseck + yesterday afternoon, and after a furious race back to the station + found ourselves too late for the train by a second. So we took a + boat and rowed down here, which was delightful. We are going to put + H. through a splashing good walk daily. A thousand thanks to the + cherry-lipped, apricot-nosed, double-chinned little Sister for her + strongly dashed-off letter, which inflamed the hearts of her lonely + brothers with an intense longing to smack her celestial cheeks. + + + + +III + + +I have before me another communication of about the same moment, a +letter addressed to his father in Paris within that month; from which, +in spite of its lively interest as I hold, I cull nothing--and precisely +because of that interest, which prescribes for it a later appearance in +conditions in which it may be given entire. William is from this season +on, to my sense, so livingly and admirably reflected in his letters, +which were happily through much of his career both numerous and highly +characteristic, that I feel them particularly plead, in those cases in +which they most testify to his personal history, for the separate +gathered presentation that happily awaits them. _There_ best may figure +the serious and reasoned reply drawn from him by some assuredly +characteristic enough communication of our parent's own in respect to +his declared preference for a painter's life over any other. Lost is +this original and, in the light of later matters, sufficiently quaint +declaration, and lost the paternal protest answered by my brother from +Bonn and anything _but_ infelicitous, on its side, so far as the truer +apprehension went, under the showing of the time to come. The only +thing was that our father had a wonderful way of being essentially right +without being practically or, as it were, vulgarly, determinant, and +that this relegation of his grounds of contention to the sphere of the +non-immediate, the but indirectly urgent, from the point of view of the +thing really to _do_, couldn't but often cause impatience in young +breasts conscious of gifts or desires or ideals of which the very sign +and warrant, the truth they were known by, was that they were +susceptible of application. It was in no world of close application that +our wondrous parent moved, and his indifference at the first blush to +the manifestation of special and marketable talents and faculties, +restlessly outward purposes of whatever would-be "successful" sort, was +apt to be surpassable only by his delight subsequently taken in our +attested and visible results, the very fruits of application; as to +which the possibility, perhaps even the virtual guarantee, hadn't so +much left him cold in advance as made him adversely and "spiritually" +hot. The sense of that word was the most living thing in the world for +him--to the point that the spiritual simply meant to him the practical +and the successful, so far as he could get into touch with such +denominations, or so far, that is, as he could face them or care for +them _a priori_. Fortunately, as he had observational powers of the +happiest, perceptions--perceptions of character and value, perceptions +of relation and effect, perceptions in short of the whole--turned to the +ground sensibly beneath our feet, as well as a splendid, an +extraordinarily animated and, so far as he himself at least was +concerned, guiding and governing soul, justice and generosity always +eventually played up, the case worked itself happily out, and before we +knew it he had found it quite the rightest of all cases, while we on our +side had had the liveliest, and certainly the most amusing and +civilising, moral or, as he would have insisted, spiritual recreation by +the way. + +My brother challenges him, with a beautiful deference, on the imputed +damage to what might be best in a man by the professional pursuit of +"art"--which he appears to have set forth with characteristic emphasis; +and I take the example for probably one of the rarest in all the so +copious annals of parental opposition to the æsthetic as distinguished +from some other more respectable course. What was marked in our father's +prime uneasiness in presence of any particular form of success we might, +according to our lights as then glimmering, propose to invoke was that +it bravely, or with such inward assurance, dispensed with any suggestion +of an alternative. What we were to do instead was just to _be_ +something, something unconnected with specific doing, something free +and uncommitted, something finer in short than being _that_, whatever it +was, might consist of. The "career of art" has again and again been +deprecated and denounced, on the lips of anxiety or authority, as a +departure from the career of business, of industry and respectability, +the so-called regular life, but it was perhaps never elsewhere to know +dissuasion on the very ground of its failing to uplift the spirit in the +ways it most pretends to. I must in fairness add, however, that if the +uneasiness I here refer to continued, and quite by exception as compared +with the development of other like episodes, during the whole of my +brother's fortunately but little prolonged studio season, it was really +because more alternatives swarmed before our parent's eyes, in the +cause, than he could bring himself to simplify it by naming. He +apprehended ever so deeply and tenderly his eldest son's other +genius--as to which he was to be so justified; though this indeed was +not to alter the fact that when afterwards that subject went in, by a +wondrous reaction, for the pursuit of science, first of chemistry and +then of anatomy and physiology and medicine, with psychology and +philosophy at last piling up the record, the rich _malaise_ at every +turn characteristically betrayed itself, each of these surrenders being, +by the measure of them in the parental imagination, so comparatively +narrowing. That was the nearest approach to any plea for some other +application of the spirit--that they _were_ narrowing. When I myself, +later on, began to "write" it was breathed upon me with the finest +bewildering eloquence, with a power of suggestion in truth which I +fairly now count it a gain to have felt play over me, that this too was +narrowing. On the subsequent history of which high paradox no better +comment could occur to me than my find of a passage in a letter long +subsequently addressed to Mr. James T. Fields, then proprietor and +editor of the Atlantic Monthly magazine--a letter under date of May 1868 +and referring clearly to some published remarks on a certain young +writer which did violence to the blessedly quick paternal prejudice. + + I had no sooner left your sanctum yesterday than I was afflicted to + remember how I had profaned it by my unmeasured talk about poor H. + Please forget it utterly. I don't know how it is with better men, + but the parental sentiment is so fiendish a thing with me that if + anyone attempt to slay my young, especially in a clandestine way, + or out of a pious regard (_e.g_.) to the welfare of the souls + comprised in the diocese of the Atlantic, I can't help devoting him + bag and baggage to the infernal gods. I am not aware of my animus + until I catch, as yesterday, a courteous ear; then the unholy fire + flames forth at such a rate as to leave me no doubt on reflection + where it was originally lighted. + +Almost all my dear father is there, making the faded page to-day +inexpressibly touching to me; his passionate tenderness, his infinite +capacity for reaction on reaction, a force in him fruitful in so many +more directions than any high smoothness of _parti-pris_ could be, and +his beautiful fresh individual utterance, always so stamped with the +very whole of him. The few lines make for me, after all the years, a +sort of silver key, so exquisitely fitting, to the treasure of living +intercourse, of a domestic air quickened and infinitely coloured, +comprised in all our younger time. The renewed sense of which, however, +has carried me for the moment too far from the straighter line of my +narrative. + +The author of the young letter of which I have deferred presentation met +in Paris, shortly after that date, the other party to the discussion; +and the impression of the endless day of our journey, my elder and my +younger brothers' and mine, from Bonn to that city, has scarcely faded +from me. The railway service was so little then what it has become that +I even marvel at our having made our connections between our early rise +in the Bonn-Gasse and our midnight tumble into bed at the Hôtel des +Trois Empereurs in the Place du Palais Royal; a still-felt rapture, a +revelation of the Parisian idea of bed after the rude German conception, +our sore discipline for so many weeks. I remember Cologne and its +cathedral almost in the bland dawn, and our fresh start thence for +Strasbourg, now clearly recognised, alas, as a start back to America, to +which it had been of a sudden settled that we were, still with a fine +inconsequence, to return. We had seen Cologne cathedral by excursion +from Bonn, but we saw Strasbourg, to my sorrow until a far later +occasion soothed it, only as a mild monster behind bars, that is above +chimneys, housetops and fortifications; a loss not made up to me by +other impressions or particulars, vivid and significant as I found +myself none the less supposing several of these. Those were the +September days in which French society, so far as it was of the Empire +at least, moved more or less in its mass upon Homburg and Baden-Baden; +and we met it in expressive samples, and in advance and retreat, during +our incessant stops, those long-time old stops, unknown to the modern +age, when everyone appeared to alight and walk about with the animation +of prisoners suddenly pardoned, and ask for conveniences, and clamour +for food, and get mixed with the always apparently still dustier people +of opposite trains drawn up for the same purposes. We appeared to be +concerned with none but first-class carriages, as an effect of which our +own was partly occupied, the livelong day, by the _gens_ of a noble +French house as to which we thus had frequent revelations--a pair of +footmen and a lady's maid, types of servile impudence taking its ease, +who chattered by the hour for our wonderstruck ears, treating them to +their first echo of the strange underworld, the sustaining vulgarity, of +existences classified as "great." They opened vistas, and I remember how +when, much later, I came to consider the designed picture, first in +Edmond About and then in Alphonse Daudet, of fifty features symptomatic +of the social pace at which the glittering régime hurried to its end, +there came back to me the breath of this sidewind of the frenzied dance +that we had caught during those numerous and so far from edifying hours +in our fine old deep-seated compartment. The impression, I now at any +rate perfectly recover, was one that could feed full enough any optimism +of the appointedly modest condition. It was true that Madame la +Marquise, who was young and good-natured and pretty without beauty, and +unmistakably "great," exhaling from afar, as I encouraged myself to +imagine, the scented air of the Tuileries, came on occasion and looked +in on us and smiled, and even pouted, through her elegant patience; so +that she at least, I recollect, caused to swim before me somehow such a +view of happy privilege at the highest pitch as made me sigh the more +sharply, even if the less professedly, for our turning our backs on the +complex order, the European, fresh to me still, in which contrasts +flared and flourished and through which discrimination could +unexhaustedly riot--pointing so many more morals, withal, if that was +the benefit it was supposed to be, than we should find pretexts for "on +the other side." We were to fall as soon as we were at home again to +reading the Revue des Deux Mondes--though doubtless again I should speak +here, with any emphasis, but for myself; my chin, in Europe, had scarce +risen to the level of that publication; but at Newport in Rhode Island, +our next following place of sojourn, I speedily shot up so as quite to +bend down to it: it took its place therewith as the very headspring of +culture, a mainstay in exile, and as opening wide in especial the doors +of that fictive portrayal of a society which put a price, for the +brooding young reader, on cases, on _cadres_, in the Revue parlance, +already constituted and propitiously lighted. Then it was that the +special tension of the dragged-out day from Cologne to Paris proved, on +the absurdest scale, a preparation, justified itself as a vivid point of +reference: I was to know what the high periodical meant when I +encountered in its _études de moeurs_ the blue-chinned corruptible, +not to say corrupt, _larbin_ and the smart soubrette; it was above all +a blessing to feel myself, in the perusal of M. Octave Feuillet, an +education, as I supposed, of the taste, not at a marked disadvantage; +since who but the Petite Comtesse herself had swung her crinoline in and +out of my prospect, or, to put it better, of my preserved past, on one +of my occasions of acutest receptivity? + +The truth was that acute, that quite desperate receptivity set in for +me, under a law of its own--may really be described as having quite +raged for me--from the moment our general face, by the restless parental +decree (born not a little of parental homesickness and reinforced by a +theory of that complaint on our own part, we having somehow in Europe +"no companions," none but mere parents themselves), had been turned +again to the quarter in which there would assuredly be welcomes and +freedoms and unchecked appropriations, not to say also cousins, of both +sexes and of a more and more engaging time of life, cousins kept and +tended and adorned for us in our absence, together with the solicitation +for our favour of possible, though oh so just barely possible, habitats +before which the range of Europe paled; but which, nevertheless, to my +aching fancy, meant premature abdication, sacrifice and, in one dreadful +word, failure. I had had cousins, naturally, in the countries we were +quitting, but to a limited degree; yet I think I already knew I had had +companions in as full a measure as any I was still to know--inasmuch as +my imagination made out one, in the complex order and the coloured air, +almost wherever I turned; and, inasmuch as, further, to live by the +imagination was to live almost only in that way, so to foresee the +comparative, not to say the absolute, absence of tonic accent in the +appearances complacently awaiting me, as well as to forecast in these +appearances, at the best, a greater paucity, was really to enjoy a sharp +prevision of dearth. Certain it is that those supreme moments of Paris, +those after-days at the Trois Empereurs, were to flush for me, as they +ebbed, with images and visions; judged by any achieved act of possession +I hadn't assuredly much to give up, but intensity of sentiment, resting +on a good disposition, makes for its own sake the most of opportunity, +and I buried my associations, which had been in a manner till lately my +hopes as well, with all decent dignity and tenderness. These more or +less secret obsequies lent to our further brief delay a quality of +suppressed excitement; the "old-world" hours were numbered too +dreadfully--had shrunk but to a handful: I had waked up to that, as with +a passionate even if private need for gathering in and saving, on the +morrow of our reaching our final sticking-place: I had slipped from my +so cushioned sleep, my canopied couch, to hang, from the balcony of our +quatrième, my brothers' and mine, over that Place du Palais Royal and up +against that sculptured and storied façade of the new Louvre which +seemed to me then to represent, in its strength, the capacity and +chiselled rim of some such potent vivifying cup as it might have been +given us, under a happier arrangement, to taste now in its fulness and +with a braver sense for it. Over against us on the great palace wall, as +I make out--if not for that occasion then for some other--were statues +of heroes, Napoleon's young generals, Hoche, Marceau, Desaix or whoever, +such a galaxy as never was or should ever be again for splendid +monumental reference; and what it somehow came to was that here massed +itself the shining second Empire, over which they stood straight aloft +and on guard, like archangels of the sword, and that the whole thing was +a high-pitched wonder and splendour, which we had already, in our small +gaping way, got into a sort of relation with and which would have ever +so much more ever so thrillingly to give us. What it would give us +loomed but vaguely enough out of the great hum and the great toned +perspective, and withal the great noble expense, of which we had +constant reminder; but that we were present at something it would be +always after accounted a privilege to have been concerned with, and that +we were perversely and inconsiderately dropping out of it, and for a +reason, so far as there might be a reason, that was scarcely less than +strange--all this loomed large to me as our interval shrank, and I even +ask myself before the memory of it whether I was ever again in the later +and more encompassing and accommodating years to have in those places so +rich a weight of consciousness to carry or so grand a presumption of +joy. The presumption so boldly entertained was, if you please, of what +the whole thing meant. It meant, immensely, the glittering régime, and +that meant in turn, prodigiously, something that would probably never be +meant quite to any such tune again: so much one positively and however +absurdly said to one's self as one stood up on the high balcony to the +great insolence of the Louvre and to all the history, all the glory +again and all the imposed applause, not to say worship, and not to speak +of the implied inferiority, on the part of everything else, that it +represented. And the sense was of course not less while one haunted at +odd hours the arcades and glass galleries of the Palais Royal close at +hand--as if to store up, for all the world, treasures of impression that +might be gnawed, in seasons or places of want, like winter pears or a +squirrel's hoard of nuts, and so perhaps keep one alive, as to one's +most vital faculty above-mentioned, till one should somehow or other be +able to scramble back. + +The particular ground for our defection, which I obscurely pronounced +mistaken, was that since William was to embrace the artistic career--and +freedom for this experiment had been after all, as I repeat that it was +always in like cases to be, not in the least grudgingly granted him--our +return to America would place him in prompt and happy relation to +William Hunt, then the most distinguished of our painters as well as one +of the most original and delightful of men, and who had cordially +assured us that he would welcome such a pupil. This was judged among us +at large, other considerations aiding, a sound basis for action; but +never surely had so odd a motive operated for a break with the spell of +Paris. We named the motive generally, I think, and to the credit of our +earnest good faith, with confidence--and I am of course not sure how +often our dear father may not explicatively have mentioned the shy fact +that he himself in any case had gradually ceased to "like" Europe. This +affects me at present as in the highest degree natural: it was to be his +fortune for the rest of his life to find himself, as a worker in his own +field and as to what he held most dear, scantly enough heeded, reported +or assimilated even in his own air, no brisk conductor at any time of +his remarkable voice; but in Europe his isolation had been utter--he had +there had the sense of playing his mature and ardent thought over great +dense constituted presences and opaque surfaces that could by their very +nature scarce give back so much as a shudder. No more admirable case of +apostolic energy combined with philosophic patience, of constancy of +conviction and solitary singleness of production unperturbed, can I well +conceive; and I certainly came later on to rejoice in his having had +after a certain date to walk, if there was a preference, rather in the +thin wilderness than in the thick. I dare say that when we returned to +America toward the end of 1860, some five years and a half after our +departure, it may have been with illusions not a few for him about the +nature of the desert, or in other words about the degree of sensibility +of the public, there awaiting him; but the pretext given him by his so +prized and admired eldest son was at the worst, and however eccentric +our action, inspiring: I alone of the family perhaps made bold not to +say quite directly or literally that we went home to learn to paint. +People stared or laughed when we said it, and I disliked their thinking +us so simple--though dreaming too a little perhaps that they might have +been struck with our patriotism. This however conveyed but a chill the +more--since we didn't in the least go to our friend, who had been +Couture's and Frère's pupil, who had spent years in France and of whom +it was the common belief that you couldn't for the life of you tell him +from a French painter, because he was patriotic; but because he was +distinguished and accomplished, charming and kind, and above all known +to us and thereby in a manner guaranteed. He looked, as people get to +look under such enjoyed or even suffered exposures, extremely like a +Frenchman, and, what was noteworthy, still more like a sculptor of the +race than a painter; which doubtless had to do with my personally, +though I hope, in present cultivated anxiety, not too officiously, +sighing at all the explanation the whole thing took. I am bound to add +none the less that later on, repatriated and, as to my few contacts, +reassured, I found this amount, the apprehension of which had haunted +me, no great charge; and seem even to make out that for the first six +months of our Newport phase at least we might have passed for strikingly +wise. For here was, beyond doubt, a genial, an admirable master; and +here also--at such a rate did sparse individuals, scattered notches in +the long plain stick, count--was John La Farge. Here moreover--here and +everywhere about me, before we could quite turn round--was the War, +with its infinite, its truly quite humiliating correction of my (as I +now can but so far call it) fatuous little confidence that +"appearances," on the native scene, would run short. They were in the +event, taking one thing with another, never to hold out for me as they +held during those four years. Wondrous this force in them as I at +present look back--wondrous I mean in view of that indirectness of its +play which my conditions confined me, with such private, though I must +add, alas, such helplessly unapplied resentment, to knowing it by. If +the force was great the attenuation of its reach was none the less +preappointed and constant; so that the case must have come back again +but to the degree--call it too, frankly, the force--of one's +sensibility, or in other words the blest resource, the supremely +breatheable and thereby nourishing and favouring air of one's +imaginative life. There were of a truth during that time probably more +appearances at one's command in the way of felt aspects, images, +apprehended living relations and impressions of the stress of life, than +during any other season one was to know; only doubtless with more of the +work of their figuring to their utmost, their giving all they could, to +do by one's self and, in the last resort, deep within one's breast. The +point to be made just here, in any case, is that if we had not recrossed +the sea, by way, rather, of such an anticlimax, to William Hunt, we +should certainly with brief delay have found ourselves doing it, on the +first alarm of War, for the experience I thus too summarily glance at +and which I don't pretend to speak of as all my own. + + + + +IV + + +Newport, with repatriation accepted, would have been on many grounds +inevitable, I think--as it was to remain inevitable for several years, +and this quite apart from William's having to paint; since if I spoke +just now of the sweep of our view, from over the water, of a continent, +or well-nigh, waiting to receive us, the eligibility of its innumerable +sites was a matter much more of our simplified, our almost distressfully +uninvolved and unconnected state than of the inherent virtue of this, +that or the other particular group of local conditions. Our parents had +for us no definite project but to be liberally "good"--in other words so +good that the presumption of our being so would literally operate +anywhere and anyhow, would really amount in itself to a sort of situated +state, a sufficient prime position, and leave other circumstances +comparatively irrelevant. What would infallibly have occurred at the +best, however, was what did punctually happen--its having to be +definitely gathered that, though we might apparently be good, as I say, +almost on any ground, there was but one place in which we should even +at a restricted pitch be well: Newport imposed itself at that period to +so remarkable a degree as the one right residence, in all our great +country, for those tainted, under whatever attenuations, with the +quality and the effect of detachment. The effect of detachment was the +fact of the experience of Europe. Detachment might of course have come +from many causes, but it truly came in most cases but from one, though +that a fairly merciless: it came from the experience of Europe, and I +think was on the whole regarded as--what it could only have been in the +sphere of intimacy and secrecy felt to be--without an absolute remedy. +As comparatively remedial Newport none the less figured, and this for +sundry reasons into the detail of which I needn't go. Its rare +distinction and precious attribute was that, being a watering-place, a +refuge from summer heats, it had also, were the measure considerably +stretched, possibilities of hibernation. We could, under stress, brave +there the period from November to June; and it was to be under stress +not to know what else to do. That was the pinch to which Europe reduced +you; insidiously, fatally disconnected, you could but make the best, as +a penalty, of the one marked point of reattachment. The philosophy of +all of which was that to confess to disconnection was to confess by the +same stroke to leisure--which involved also an admission, however +rueful at once and deprecatory, of what might still at that time pass in +our unregenerate country for something in the nature of "means." You had +had the means, that is, to _become_, so awkwardly, detached--for you +might then do that cheaply; but the whole basis of the winter life +there, of that spare semblance of the Brighton life, the Folkestone +life, the Bath or the Cheltenham or the Leamington life, was that your +occupation or avocation should be vague enough; or that you shouldn't in +other words be, like everyone you might know save a dozen or so at the +most, in business. I remember well how when we were all young together +we had, under pressure of the American ideal in that matter, then so +rigid, felt it tasteless and even humiliating that the head of our +little family was _not_ in business, and that even among our relatives +on each side we couldn't so much as name proudly anyone who was--with +the sole exception of our maternal uncle Robertson Walsh, who looked, +ever so benevolently, after our father's "affairs," happily for us. Such +had never been the case with the father of any boy of our acquaintance; +the business in which the boy's father gloriously _was_ stood forth +inveterately as the very first note of our comrade's impressiveness. +_We_ had no note of that sort to produce, and I perfectly recover the +effect of my own repeated appeal to our parent for some presentable +account of him that would prove us respectable. Business alone was +respectable--if one meant by it, that is, the calling of a lawyer, a +doctor or a minister (we never spoke of clergymen) as well; I think that +if we had had the Pope among us we should have supposed the Pope in +business, just as I remember my friend Simpson's telling me crushingly, +at one of our New York schools, on my hanging back with the fatal truth +about our credentials, that the author of _his_ being (we spoke no more +of "governors" than we did of "parsons") was in the business of a +stevedore. That struck me as a great card to play--the word was fine and +mysterious; so that "What shall we tell them you _are_, don't you see?" +could but become on our lips at home a more constant appeal. It seemed +wantonly to be prompted for our father, and indeed greatly to amuse him, +that he should put us off with strange unheard-of attributions, such as +would have made us ridiculous in our special circles; his "Say I'm a +philosopher, say I'm a seeker for truth, say I'm a lover of my kind, say +I'm an author of books if you like; or, best of all, just say I'm a +Student," saw us so very little further. Abject it certainly appeared to +be reduced to the "student" plea; and I must have lacked even the +confidence of my brother Bob, who, challenged, in my hearing and the +usual way, was ready not only with the fact that our parent "wrote," but +with the further fact that he had written _Lectures and Miscellanies +James_. I think that when we settled awhile at Newport there was no one +there who had written but Mr. Henry T. Tuckerman, a genial and graceful +poet of the Artless Age, as it might still be called in spite of Poe and +Hawthorne and Longfellow and Lowell, the most characteristic works of +the first and the two last of whom had already appeared; especially as +those most characteristic of Mr. Tuckerman referred themselves to a past +sufficiently ample to have left that gentleman with a certain deafness +and a glossy wig and a portly presence and the reputation, positively, +of the most practised and desired of diners-out. He was to be recognised +at once as a social value on a scene not under that rubric densely +peopled; he constituted indeed such a note as would help to keep others +of the vague definability in countenance. Clearly indeed it might happen +that an association of vaguenesses would arrive in time, by fondly +cleaving together, at the semblance of a common identity; the nature of +the case then demanding, however, that they should be methodically +vague, take their stand on it and work it for all it was worth. That in +truth was made easy by the fact that what I have called our common +disconnectedness positively projected and proclaimed a void; +disconnected from business we could only be connected with the negation +of it, which had as yet no affirmative, no figurative side. This +probably would come; figures, in the void, would one by one spring up; +but what would be thus required for them was that the void should be +ample and, as it were, established. Not to be afraid of it they would +have to feel it clear of everything and everyone they knew in the air +actually peopled. + +William Hunt, for that matter, was already a figure unmmistakable, +superficially speaking unsurpassable, just as John La Farge, already +mentioned, was so soon to prove to be. They were only two indeed, but +they argued the possibility; and so the great thing, as I say, was that, +to stand out, they should have margin and light. We couldn't all be +figures--on a mere margin, the margin of business, and in the light of +the general wonder of our being anything, anything _there_; but we could +at least understand the situation and cultivate the possibilities, watch +and protect the germs. This consciousness, this aim or ideal, had after +all its own intensity--it burned with a pure flame: there is a special +joy, clearly, in the hopeful conversion of the desert into the garden, +of thinness into thickness, a joy to which the conversion of the thick +into the mere dense, of the free into the rank or the close, perhaps +gives no clue. The great need that Newport met was that of a basis of +reconciliation to "America" when the habit, the taking for granted, of +America had been broken or intermitted: it would be hard to say of what +subtle secret or magic the place was possessed toward this end, and by a +common instinct, I think, we didn't attempt to formulate it--we let it +alone, only looking at each other hard, only moving gently, on the brave +hypothesis, only in fine deprecating too rude and impatient, too +precipitate a doubt of the spell that perhaps might work if we waited +and prayed. We did wait and pray, accordingly, scantly-served though the +board we might often have felt we had sat down to, and there was a fair +company of us to do so, friendliest among whom to our particular effort +was my father's excellent friend of many years Edmund Tweedy, already +named in pages preparatory to these and who, with his admirable wife, +presented himself as our main introducer and initiator. He had married, +while we were all young in New York together, a manner of Albany cousin, +Mary Temple the elder, aunt of the younger,[3] and had by this time +"been through" more than anything, more than everything, of which there +could be question for ourselves. The pair had on their marriage gone at +once to Europe to live, had put in several years of Italy and yet had at +last, particular reasons operating, returned to their native, that is to +sterner, realities; those as to which it was our general theory, of so +touching a candour as I look back to it, that they offered themselves at +Newport in a muffling mitigating air. The air, material, moral, social, +was in fact clear and clean to a degree that might well have left us but +dazed at the circumjacent blankness; yet as to that I hasten to add too +that the blowing out of our bubble, the planting of our garden, the +correction of our thinness, the discovery, under stress, of such scraps +of colour and conversation, such saving echoes and redeeming references +as might lurk for us in each other, all formed in themselves an active, +and might at last even grow to suggest an absolutely bustling, process. + +I come back with a real tenderness of memory for instance to that +felicity of the personal, the social, the "literary and artistic," +almost really the romantic, identity responding, after a fashion quite +to bring tears to the eyes, in proportion as it might have seemed to +feel by some divine insufflation what it practically could stand for. +What should one call this but the brave triumph of values conscious of +having to be almost missionary? There were many such that in "Europe" +hadn't had to be missionary at all; in Europe, as it were, one +hadn't--comparatively--seen, if not the forest for the trees, then the +trees for the forest; whereas on this other great vacuous level every +single stem seemed to enjoy for its distinction quite the totality of +the daylight and to rise into the air with a gladness that was itself a +grace. Of some of the personal importances that acted in that way I +should with easier occasion have more to say--I shall as it is have +something; but there could perhaps be no better sample of the effect of +sharpness with which the forces of culture might emerge than, say, the +fairly golden glow of romance investing the mere act of perusal of the +Revue des Deux Mondes. There was the charm--though I grant of course +that I speak here all for myself, constitutionally and, face to face +_with_ myself, quite shamelessly an inquirer, a hunter, for charm--that +whereas the spell cast had more or less inevitable limits in the world +to which such a quality as the best things of the Revue, such a +performance of the intellectual and expressional engagement as these +suggested, was native and was thereby relative to other generally like +phenomena, so it represented among _us_, where it had to take upon +itself what I have already alluded to as all the work, far more than its +face value. Few of the forces about us reached as yet the level of +representation (even if here and there some might have been felt as +trying for it); and this made all the difference. Anything suggestive or +significant, anything promising or interesting, anything in the least +finely charming above all, immensely counted, claimed tendance and +protection, almost claimed, or at any rate enjoyed, worship; as for that +matter anything finely charming does, quite rightly, anywhere. But our +care, our privilege, on occasion our felt felicity, was to foster every +symptom and breathe encouragement to every success; to hang over the +tenderest shoots that betrayed the principle of growth--or in other +words to read devoutly into everything, and as straight as possible, the +very fullest meaning we might hope it would learn to have. So at least +quite at first--and so again very considerably after the large interval +and grim intermission represented by the War; during which interest and +quality, to say nothing of quantity, at the highest pitch, ceased in any +degree to fail us, and what might be "read into" almost any aspect +without exception paled in the light of what was inevitably read out +from it. It must be added at the same time that with its long duration +the War fell into its place as part of life at large, and that when it +was over various other things still than the love of peace were found to +have grown. + +Immediately, at any rate, the Albany cousins, or a particular group of +them, began again to be intensely in question for us; coloured in due +course with reflections of the War as their lives, not less than our +own, were to become--and coloured as well too, for all sorts of notation +and appreciation, from irrepressible private founts. Mrs. Edmund Tweedy, +bereft of her own young children, had at the time I speak of opened her +existence, with the amplest hospitality, to her four orphaned nieces, +who were also our father's and among whom the second in age, Mary Temple +the younger, about in her seventeenth year when she thus renewed her +appearance to our view, shone with vividest lustre, an essence that +preserves her still, more than half a century from the date of her +death, in a memory or two where many a relic once sacred has +comparatively yielded to time. Most of those who knew and loved, I was +going to say adored, her have also yielded--which is a reason the more +why thus much of her, faint echo from too far off though it prove, +should be tenderly saved. If I have spoken of the elements and presences +round about us that "counted," Mary Temple was to count, and in more +lives than can now be named, to an extraordinary degree; count as a +young and shining apparition, a creature who owed to the charm of her +every aspect (her aspects were so many!) and the originality, vivacity, +audacity, generosity, of her spirit, an indescribable grace and +weight--if one might impute weight to a being so imponderable in common +scales. Whatever other values on our scene might, as I have hinted, +appear to fail, she was one of the first order, in the sense of the +immediacy of the impression she produced, and produced altogether as by +the play of her own light spontaneity and curiosity--not, that is, as +through a sense of such a pressure and such a motive, or through a care +for them, in others. "Natural" to an effect of perfect felicity that we +were never to see surpassed is what I have already praised all the +Albany _cousinage_ of those years for being; but in none of the company +was the note so clear as in this rarest, though at the same tune +symptomatically or ominously palest, flower of the stem; who was natural +at more points and about more things, with a greater range of freedom +and ease and reach of horizon than any of the others dreamed of. They +had that way, delightfully, with the small, after all, and the common +matters--while she had it with those too, but with the great and rare +ones over and above; so that she was to remain for us the very figure +and image of a felt interest in life, an interest as magnanimously +far-spread, or as familiarly and exquisitely fixed, as her splendid +shifting sensibility, moral, personal, nervous, and having at once such +noble flights and such touchingly discouraged drops, such graces of +indifference and inconsequence, might at any moment determine. She was +really to remain, for our appreciation, the supreme case of a taste for +life as life, as personal living; of an endlessly active and yet somehow +a careless, an illusionless, a sublimely forewarned curiosity about it: +something that made her, slim and fair and quick, all straightness and +charming tossed head, with long light and yet almost sliding steps and a +large light postponing, renouncing laugh, the very muse or amateur +priestess of rash speculation. To express her in the mere terms of her +restless young mind, one felt from the first, was to place her, by a +perversion of the truth, under the shadow of female "earnestness"--for +which she was much too unliteral and too ironic; so that, superlatively +personal and yet as independent, as "off" into higher spaces, at a +touch, as all the breadth of her sympathy and her courage could send +her, she made it impossible to say whether she was just the most moving +of maidens or a disengaged and dancing flame of thought. No one to come +after her could easily seem to show either a quick inward life or a +brave, or even a bright, outward, either a consistent contempt for +social squalors or a very marked genius for moral reactions. She had in +her brief passage the enthusiasm of humanity--more, assuredly, than any +charming girl who ever circled, and would fain have continued to circle, +round a ballroom. This kept her indeed for a time more interested in the +individual, the immediate human, than in the race or the social order at +large; but that, on the other hand, made her ever so restlessly, or +quite inappeasably, "psychologic." The psychology of others, in her +shadow--I mean their general resort to it--could only for a long time +seem weak and flat and dim, above all not at all amusing. She burned +herself out; she died at twenty-four. + +At the risk perhaps of appearing to make my own scant adventure the +pivot of that early Newport phase I find my reference to William Hunt +and his truly fertilising action on our common life much conditioned by +the fact that, since W. J., for the first six months or so after our +return, daily and devotedly haunted his studio, I myself did no less, +for a shorter stretch, under the irresistible contagion. The clearness +of the whole passage for me, the clearest impression, above all, of the +vivid and whimsical master, an inspirer, during a period that began a +little later on, of numberless devotions and loyalties, is what this +fond memory of my permitted contact and endeavour still has to give me. +Pupils at that time didn't flock to his gates--though they were to do +so in Boston, during years, later on; an earnest lady or two, Boston +precursors, hovered and flitted, but I remember for the rest (and I +speak of a short period) no thorough-going élèves save John La Farge and +my brother. I remember, for that matter, sitting quite in solitude in +one of the grey cool rooms of the studio, which thus comes back to me as +having several, and thinking that I really might get to copy casts +rather well, and might in particular see myself congratulated on my +sympathetic rendering of the sublime uplifted face of Michael Angelo's +"Captive" in the Louvre. I sat over this effort and a few others for +long quiet hours, and seem to feel myself again aware, just to that +tune, of how happy I ought to be. No one disturbed me; the earnest +workers were elsewhere; I had a chamber of the temple all to myself, +with immortal forms and curves, with shadows beautiful and right, +waiting there on blank-eyed faces for me to prove myself not helpless; +and with two or three of Hunt's own fine things, examples of his work in +France, transporting me at once and defying. I believed them great +productions--thought in especial endless good of the large canvas of the +girl with her back presented while she fills her bucket at the spout in +the wall, against which she leans with a tension of young muscle, a +general expression of back, beneath her dress, and with the pressure of +her raised and extended bare arm and flattened hand: this, to my +imagination, could only become the prize of some famous collection, the +light of some museum, for all the odd circumstance that it was company +just then for muddled me and for the queer figures projected by my +crayon. Frankly, intensely--that was the great thing--these were hours +of Art, art definitely named, looking me full in the face and accepting +my stare in return--no longer a tacit implication or a shy subterfuge, +but a flagrant unattenuated aim. I had somehow come into the temple by +the back door, the _porte d'honneur_ opened on another side, and I could +never have believed much at best in the length of my stay; but I was +there, day by day, as much as any one had ever been, and with a sense of +what it "meant" to be there that the most accredited of pupils couldn't +have surpassed; so that the situation to this extent really hummed with +promise. I fail, I confess, to reconstitute the relation borne by my +privilege to that of tuition "in the higher branches," to which it was +quite time I should have mounted, enjoyed at the hands of the Reverend +William C. Leverett, curate to the then "rector," Doctor Mercer, of that +fine old high-spired Trinity Church in which had throbbed, from long +before the Revolution as they used to say, the proud episcopal heart of +Newport; and feel indeed that I must pretty well have shaken off, as a +proved absurd predicament, all submission to my dilemma: all submission +of the mind, that is, for if my share of Mr. Leverett's attention was +less stinted than my share of William Hunt's (and neither had much +duration) it failed to give me the impression that anything worth naming +had opened out to me, whereas in the studio I was at the threshold of a +world. + +It became itself indeed on the spot a rounded satisfying world, the +place did; enclosed within the grounds, as we then regarded them, of the +master's house, circled about with numerous trees, as we then counted +them, and representing a more direct exclusion of vulgar sounds, false +notes and harsh reminders than I had ever known. I fail in the least to +make out where the real work of the studio went forward; it took +somewhere else its earnest course, and our separation--mine from the +real workers, my indulged yet ignored state--kept me somehow the safer, +as if I had taken some mild and quite harmless drug through which +external rubs would reach me from a distance, but which left my own +rubbing power, not to say my own smearing or smutching, quite free. Into +the world so beautifully valid the master would occasionally walk, +inquiring as to what I had done or would do, but bearing on the +question with an easy lightness, a friendliness of tact, a neglect of +conclusion, which it touches me still to remember. It was impossible to +me at that time not so to admire him that his just being to such an +extent, as from top to toe and in every accent and motion, the living +and communicating Artist, made the issue, with his presence, quite cease +to be of how one got on or fell short, and become instead a mere +self-sacrificing vision of the picturesque itself, the constituted +picturesque or treated "subject," in efficient figure, personal form, +vivid human style. I then felt the man the great mystery could mark with +its stamp, when wishing the mark unmistakable, teach me just in himself +the most and best about any art that I should come to find benignantly +concerned with me, for moments however smilingly scant. William Hunt, +all muscular spareness and brownness and absence of waste, all flagrant +physiognomy, brave bony arch of handsome nose, upwardness of strong +eyebrow and glare, almost, of eyes that both recognised and wondered, +strained eyes that played over questions as if they were objects and +objects as if they were questions, might have stood, to the life, for +Don Quixote, if we could associate with that hero a far-spreading beard +already a little grizzled, a manner and range of gesture and broken form +of discourse that was like a restless reference to a palette and that +seemed to take for granted, all about, canvases and models and charming, +amusing things, the "tremendously interesting" in the seen bit or caught +moment, and the general unsayability, in comparison, of anything else. +He never would have perched, it must be added, on Rosinante--he was +fonder of horses even than of the method of Couture, and though with a +shade of resemblance, as all simple and imaginative men have, to the +knight of La Mancha, he least suggested that analogy as he passed in a +spinning buggy, his beard flying, behind a favourite trotter. But what +he perhaps most puts before me to-day is the grim truth of the merciless +manner in which a living and hurrying public educates itself, making and +devouring in a day reputations and values which represent something of +the belief in it that it has had in _them_, but at the memory of which +we wince, almost to horror, as at the legend of victims who have been +buried alive. Oh the cold grey luminaries hung about in odd corners and +back passages, and that we have known shining and warm! They serve at +the most now as beacons warning any step not to come _that_ way, +whatever it does; the various attested ways it may not with felicity +come growing thus all the while in number. + +John La Farge became at once, in breaking on our view, quite the most +interesting person we knew, and for a time remained so; he became a +great many other things beside--a character, above all, if there ever +was one; but he opened up to us, though perhaps to me in particular, who +could absorb all that was given me on those suggestive lines, prospects +and possibilities that made the future flush and swarm. His foreignness, +which seemed great at that time, had gained a sharper accent from a long +stay made in France, where both on his father's and his mother's side he +had relations, and had found, to our hovering envy, all sorts of +charming occasions. He had spent much time in Brittany, among kindred +the most romantically interesting, people and places whose very names, +the De Nanteuils of Saint-Pol-de-Léon, I seem to remember for instance, +cast a spell across comparatively blank Newport sands; he had brought +home with him innumerable water-colour sketches, Breton peasants, +costumes, interiors, bits of villages and landscape; and I supposed him +to have had on such ground the most delightful adventure in the world. +How was one not to suppose it at a time when the best of one's +education, such as that was, had begun to proceed almost altogether by +the aid of the Revue des Deux Mondes, a periodical that supplied to us +then and for several years after (or again I can but speak for myself) +all that was finest in the furniture and the fittings of romance? Those +beginnings of Newport were our first contact with New England--a New +England already comparatively subdued and sophisticated, a Samson shorn +of his strength by the shears of the Southern, and more particularly of +the New York, Delilah; the result of which, still speaking for myself, +was a prompt yearning and reaching out, on the part of the spirit, for +some corrective or antidote to whatever it was that might be going, in +the season to come, least charmingly or informingly or inspiringly to +press upon us. I well recall my small anxious foresight as to a +required, an indispensable provision against either assault or dearth, +as if the question might be of standing an indefinite siege; and how a +certain particular capacious closet in a house we were presently to +occupy took on to my fond fancy the likeness at once of a store of +edibles, both substantial and succulent, and of a hoard of ammunition +for the defence of any breach--the Revue accumulating on its shelves at +last in serried rows and really building up beneath us with its slender +firm salmon-coloured blocks an alternative sphere of habitation. There +will be more to say of this, bristling or rather flowering with precious +particulars, if I stray so far; but the point for the moment was that +one would have pushed into that world of the closet, one would have +wandered or stumbled about in it quite alone if it hadn't been that La +Farge was somehow always in it with us. That was in those years his +admirable function and touch--that he affected me as knowing his way +there as absolutely no one else did, and even as having risen of a +sudden before us to bear us this quickening company. Nobody else, not +another creature, was free of it to that tune; the whole mid-century New +England--as a rough expression of what the general consciousness most +signified--was utterly out of it; which made, you see, a most unequal +division of our little working, or our totally cogitative, universe into +the wondrous esoteric quarter peopled just by us and our friend and our +common references, and the vast remainder of the public at large, the +public of the innumerably uninitiated even when apparently of the most +associated. + +All of which is but a manner of expressing the intensity, as I felt it, +of our Franco-American, our most completely accomplished friend's +presence among us. Out of the safe rich home of the Revue, which opened +away into the vastness of visions, he practically stepped, and into it, +with all his ease, he mysteriously returned again: he came nearer to +being what might have been meant concretely throughout it all--though +meant most of course in its full-charged stream of fiction--than any +other visiting figure. The stream of fiction was so constant an appeal +to the charmed, by which I mean of course the predisposed, mind that it +fairly seemed at moments to overflow its banks and take to its bosom any +recognised, any congruous creature or thing that might happen to be +within reach. La Farge was of the type--the "European," and this gave +him an authority for me that it verily took the length of years to +undermine; so that as the sense of those first of them in especial comes +back to me I find it difficult, even under the appeal to me of the +attempt, to tell how he was to count in my earliest culture. If culture, +as I hold, is a matter of attitude quite as much as of opportunity, and +of the form and substance of the vessel carried to the fountain no less +than of the water-supply itself, there couldn't have been better +conditions for its operating drop by drop. It operates ever much more, I +think, by one's getting whatever there may happen to be out for one's +use than by its conforming to any abstract standard of quantity or +lustre. It may work, as between dispenser and subject, in so +incalculably personal a manner that no chemical analysis shall recover +it, no common estimate of forces or amounts find itself in the least +apply. The case was that La Farge swam into our ingenuous ken as the +figure of figures, and that such an agent, on a stage so unpeopled and +before a scene so unpainted, became salient and vivid almost in spite of +itself. The figure was at a premium, and fit for any glass case that its +vivacity should allow to enclose it--wherein it might be surrounded by +wondering, admiring and often quite inevitably misconceiving observers. +It was not that these too weren't agents in their way, agents in some +especial good cause without the furtherance of which we never should +have done at all; but they were by that very fact specialised and +stiffened, committed to their one attitude, the immediately profitable, +and incapable of that play of gesture in which we recognise +representation. A representative, a rounded figure, however, is as to +none of its relations definable or announceable beforehand; we only know +it, for good or for ill, but with something of the throb of elation +always, when we see it, and then it in general sufficiently accounts for +itself. We often for that matter insist on its being a figure, we +positively make it one, in proportion as we seem to need it--or as in +other words we too acutely miss the active virtue of representation. It +takes some extraordinary set of circumstances or time of life, I think, +either to beguile or to hustle us into indifference to some larger felt +extension roundabout us of "the world"--a sphere the confines of which +move on even as we ourselves move and which is always there, just +beyond us, to twit us with the more it should have to show if we were a +little more "of" it. Sufficiency shuts us in but till the man of the +world--never prefigured, as I say, only welcomed on the spot--appears; +when we see at once how much we have wanted him. When we fail of that +acknowledgment, that sense as of a tension, an anxiety or an indigence +relieved, it is of course but that the extraordinary set of +circumstances, or above all the extraordinary time of life I speak of, +has indeed intervened. + +It was as a man of the world that, for all his youth, La Farge rose or, +still better, bowed, before us, his inclinations of obeisance, his +considerations of address being such as we had never seen and now almost +publicly celebrated. This was what most immediately and most +iridescently showed, the truth being all the while that the character +took on in him particular values without which it often enough, though +then much more grossly, flourishes. It was by these enrichments of +curiosity, of taste and genius, that he became the personality, as we +nowadays say, that I have noted--the full freshness of all of which was +to play but through his younger time, or at least through our younger +apprehension. He was so "intellectual"--that was the flower; it crowned +his being personally so finished and launched. The wealth of his +cultivation, the variety of his initiations, the inveteracy of his +forms, the degree of his _empressement_ (this in itself, I repeat, a +revelation) made him, with those elements of the dandy and the cavalier +to which he struck us as so picturesquely sacrificing, a cluster of +bright promises, a rare original and, though not at all a direct model +for simpler folk, as we then could but feel ourselves, an embodiment of +the gospel of esthetics. Those more resounding forms that our age was to +see this gospel take on were then still to come, but I was to owe them +in the later time not half the thrill that the La Farge of the prime +could set in motion. He was really an artistic, an esthetic nature of +wondrous homogeneity; one was to have known in the future many an +unfolding that went with a larger ease and a shrewder economy, but never +to have seen a subtler mind or a more generously wasteful passion, in +other words a sincerer one, addressed to the problems of the designer +and painter. Of his long later history, full of flights and drops, +advances and retreats, experiment and performance, of the endless +complications of curiosity and perversity, I say nothing here save that +if it was to contradict none of our first impressions it was to qualify +them all by others still more lively; these things belonging quite to +some other record. Yet I may just note that they were to represent in +some degree an eclipse of the so essentially harmonious person round +whom a positive grace of legend had originally formed itself. I see him +at this hour again as that bright apparition; see him, jacketed in black +velvet or clad from top to toe in old-time elegances of cool white and +leaning much forward with his protuberant and over-glazed, his doubting +yet all-seizing vision, dandle along the shining Newport sands in +far-away summer sunsets on a charming chestnut mare whose light legs and +fine head and great sweep of tail showed the Arab strain--quite as if +(what would have been characteristic of him) he had borrowed his mount +from the adorable Fromentin, whom we already knew as a painter, but +whose acquaintance as a writer we were of course so promptly to owe him +that when "Dominique" broke upon us out of the Revue as one of the most +exquisite literary events of our time it found us doubly responsive. + +So, at any rate, he was there, and there to stay--intensely among us but +somehow not withal of us; his being a Catholic, and apparently a "real" +one in spite of so many other omnisciences, making perhaps by itself the +greatest difference. He had been through a Catholic college in Maryland, +the name of which, though I am not assured of it now, exhaled a sort of +educational elegance; but where and when he had so miraculously laid up +his stores of reading and achieved his universal saturation was what we +longest kept asking ourselves. Many of these depths I couldn't pretend +to sound, but it was immediate and appreciable that he revealed to us +Browning for instance; and this, oddly enough, long after Men and Women +had begun (from our Paris time on, if I remember) to lie upon our +parents' book-table. _They_ had not divined in us as yet an aptitude for +that author; whose appeal indeed John reinforced to our eyes by the +reproduction of a beautiful series of illustrative drawings, two or +three of which he was never to surpass--any more than he was to complete +his highly distinguished plan for the full set, not the least faded of +his hundred dreams. Most of all he revealed to us Balzac; having so much +to tell me of what was within that formidably-plated door, in which he +all expertly and insidiously played the key, that to re-read even after +long years the introductory pages of Eugénie Grandet, breathlessly +seized and earnestly absorbed under his instruction, is to see my +initiator's youthful face, so irregular but so refined, look out at me +between the lines as through blurred prison bars. In Mérimée, after the +same fashion, I meet his expository ghost--hovering to remind me of how +he started me on La Vénus d'Ille; so that nothing would do but that I +should translate it, try to render it as lovingly as if it were a +classic and old (both of which things it now indeed is) and send it off +to the New York weekly periodical of that age of crudest categories +which was to do me the honour neither of acknowledging nor printing nor, +clearly, since translations did savingly appear there, in the least +understanding it. These again are mild memories--though not differing in +that respect from most of their associates; yet I cherish them as +ineffaceable dates, sudden milestones, the first distinctly noted, on +the road of so much inward or apprehensive life. Our guest--I call him +our guest because he was so lingeringly, so abidingly and supersedingly +present--began meanwhile to paint, under our eyes, with devotion, with +exquisite perception, and above all as with the implication, a hundred +times beneficent and fertilising, that if one didn't in these +connections consistently take one's stand on supersubtlety of taste one +was a helpless outsider and at the best the basest of vulgarians or +flattest of frauds--a doctrine more salutary at that time in our world +at large than any other that might be sounded. Of all of which ingenuous +intensity and activity I should have been a much scanter witness than +his then close condisciple, my brother, had not his personal kindness, +that of the good-natured and amused elder youth to the enslaved, the +yearningly gullible younger, charmed me often into a degree of +participation. Occasions and accidents come back to me under their wash +of that distilled old Newport light as to which we more and more agreed +that it made altogether exceptionally, on our side of the world, for +possibility of the _nuance_, or in other words for picture and story; +such for example as my felt sense of how unutterably it was the real +thing, the gage of a great future, when I one morning found my +companions of the larger, the serious studio inspired to splendid +performance by the beautiful young manly form of our cousin Gus Barker, +then on a vivid little dash of a visit to us and who, perched on a +pedestal and divested of every garment, was the gayest as well as the +neatest of models. This was my first personal vision of the "life," on a +pedestal and in a pose, that had half gleamed and half gloomed through +the chiaroscuro of our old friend Haydon; and I well recall the crash, +at the sight, of all my inward emulation--so forced was I to recognise +on the spot that I might niggle for months over plaster casts and not +come within miles of any such point of attack. The bravery of my +brother's own in especial dazzled me out of every presumption; since +nothing less than that meant drawing (they were not using colour) and +since our genial kinsman's perfect gymnastic figure meant living truth, +I should certainly best testify to the whole mystery by pocketing my +pencil. + +I secured and preserved for long William's finished rendering of the +happy figure--which was to speak for the original, after his gallant +death, in sharper and finer accents perhaps than aught else that +remained of him; and it wanted but another occasion somewhat later on, +that of the sitting to the pair of pupils under Hunt's direction of a +subject presented as a still larger challenge, to feel that I had +irrecoverably renounced. Very handsome were the head and shoulders of +Katherine Temple, the eldest of those Albany cousins then gathered at +Newport under their, and derivatively our, Aunt Mary's wing, who +afterwards was to become Mrs. Richard Emmet--the Temples and the Emmets +being so much addicted to alliances that a still later generation was to +bristle for us with a delightful Emmetry, each member of it a different +blessing; she sat with endless patience, the serenest of models, and W. +J.'s portrait of her in oils survives (as well as La Farge's, dealing +with her in another view) as a really mature, an almost masterly, piece +of painting, having, as has been happily suggested to me, much the air +of a characteristic Manet. Such demonstrations would throw one back +on regret, so far as my brother was concerned, if subsequent +counter-demonstrations hadn't had it in them so much to check the train. +For myself at the hour, in any case, the beautiful success with Kitty +Temple did nothing but hurry on the future, just as the sight of the +charming thing to-day, not less than that of La Farge's _profil perdu_, +or presented ear and neck and gathered braids of hair, quite as charming +and quite as painted, touchingly reanimates the past. I say touchingly +because of the remembered pang of my acceptance of an admonition so +sharply conveyed. Therefore if somewhat later on I could still so fondly +hang about in that air of production--so far at least as it enveloped +our friend, and particularly after his marriage and his setting up of +his house at Newport, vivid proofs alike, as seemed to us all, of his +consummate, his _raffiné_ taste, even if we hadn't yet, I think, that +epithet for this--it was altogether in the form of mere helpless admirer +and inhaler, led captive in part by the dawning perception that the arts +were after all essentially one and that even with canvas and brush +whisked out of my grasp I still needn't feel disinherited. That was the +luxury of the friend and senior with a literary side--that if there were +futilities that he didn't bring home to me he nevertheless opened more +windows than he closed; since he couldn't have meant nothing by causing +my eyes to plunge so straight into the square and dense little formal +garden of Mérimée. I might occasionally serve for an abundantly idle +young out-of-doors model--as in fact I frequently did, the best perhaps +of his early exhibitions of a rare colour-sense even now attesting it; +but mightn't it become possible that Mérimée would meanwhile serve for +me? Didn't I already see, as I fumbled with a pen, of what the small +dense formal garden might be inspiringly symbolic? It was above all +wonderful in the La Farge of those years that even as he painted and +painted, very slowly and intently and belatedly--his habit of putting +back the clock and ignoring every time-scheme but his own was matched +only by his view of the constant timeliness of talk, talk as talk, for +which no moment, no suspended step, was too odd or too fleeting--he +remained as referentially and unexhaustedly bookish, he turned his back +by the act as little on our theory of his omniscience as he ceased to +disown his job, whatever it might be, while endlessly burying his +salient and reinforced eyes and his visibly active organ of scent in +some minutest rarity of print, some precious ancientry of binding, +mechanically plucked, by the hazard of a touch, from one of the shelves +of a stored collection that easily passed with us for unapproached. + +[Illustration: Portrait in oils of Miss Katherine Temple, 1861.] + +He lost himself on these occasions both by a natural ease and by his +early adoption and application of the principle of the imperturbable, +which promised even from those days to govern his conduct well-nigh to +the exclusion of every other. We were to know surely as time went on no +comparable case of consistency of attitude--no other such prompt grasp +by a nature essentially entire, a settled sovereign self, of the truth +of what would work for it most favourably should it but succeed in never +yielding the first inch of any ground. Immense every ground thus became +by its covering itself from edge to edge with the defence of his +serenity, which, whatever his fathomless private dealings with it, was +never consentingly, I mean publicly, to suffer a grain of abatement. The +artist's serenity, by this conception, was an intellectual and spiritual +capital that must never brook defeat--which it so easily might incur by +a single act of abdication. That was at any rate the case for the +particular artist and the particular nature he felt himself, +armour-proof as they became against the appeal of sacrifice. Sacrifice +was fallibility, and one could only of course be consistent if one +inveterately had hold of the truth. There was no safety or, otherwise, +no inward serenity or even outward--though the outward came +secondly--unless there was no deflection; none into the question, that +is, of what might make for the serenity of others, which was their own +affair and which above all seemed not urgent in comparison with the +supreme artistic. It wasn't that the artist hadn't to pay, to pay for +the general stupidity, perversity and perfidy, from the moment he might +have to deal with these things; that was the inevitable suffering, and +it was always there; but it could be more or less borne if one was +systematically, or rather if one was naturally, or even, better still, +preternaturally, in the right; since this meant the larger, the largest +serenity. That account of so fine a case of inward confidence would +indeed during those very first years have sinned somewhat by +anticipation; yet something of the beauty--that is of the unmatched +virtuosity--of the attitude finally achieved did even at the early time +colour the air of intercourse with him for those who had either few +enough or many enough of their own reserves. The second of these +conditions sprang from a due anxiety for one's own interests, more or +less defined in advance and therefore, as might be, more or less +menaced; the other proviso easily went with vagueness--vagueness as to +what things were one's interests, seeing that the exhibited working of +an esthetic and a moral confidence conjoined on that scale and at play +together unhampered would perhaps prove for the time an attraction +beyond any other. This reflection must verily, in our relation, have +brought about my own quietus--so far as that mild ecstasy could be +divorced from agitation. I recall at all events less of the agitation +than of the ecstasy; the primary months, certain aspects even of the few +following years, look out at me as from fine accommodations, +acceptances, submissions, emotions, all melted together, that one must +have taken for joys of the mind and gains of the imagination so clear as +to cost one practically nothing. They are what I see, and are all I want +to see, as I look back; there hangs about them a charm of thrilled good +faith, the flush and throb of crowding apprehensions, that has scarce +faded and of which I can only wish to give the whole picture the +benefit. I bottle this imponderable extract of the loitering summers of +youth, when every occasion really seemed to stay to be gathered and +tasted, just for the sake of its faint sweetness. + +Some time since, in Boston, I spent an hour before a commemorative +cluster of La Farge's earlier productions, gathered in on the occasion +of his death, with the effect as of a plummet suddenly dropped into +obscure depths long unstirred, that of a remembered participation, it +didn't seem too much to say, in the far-away difficult business of their +getting themselves born. These things, almost all finished studies of +landscape, small and fond celebrations of the modest little Newport +harmonies, the spare felicities and delicacies of a range of aspects +that have ceased to appeal or to "count," called back into life a +hundred memories, laid bare the very footsteps of time, light and +uncertain though so often the imprint. I seemed so to have been there by +the projection of curiosity and sympathy, if not by having literally +looked in, when the greater number of such effects worked themselves +out, that they spoke to me of my own history--through the felt intensity +of my commission, as it were, to speak for my old friend. The terms on +which he was ever ready to draw out for us the interesting hours, terms +of patience as they essentially were for the edified party, lived again +in this record, but with the old supposition of profit, or in other +words the old sense of pleasure, of precious acquisition and intenser +experience, more vivid than anything else. There recurs to me for +instance one of the smallest of adventures, as tiny a thing as could +incur the name and which was of the early stage of our acquaintance, +when he proposed to me that we should drive out to the Glen, some six +miles off, to breakfast, and should afterwards paint--we paint!--in the +bosky open air. It looks at this distance a mythic time, that of felt +inducements to travel so far at such an hour and in a backless buggy on +the supposition of rustic fare. But different ages have different +measures, and I quite remember how ours, that morning, at the neat +hostel in the umbrageous valley, overflowed with coffee and +griddle-cakes that were not as other earthly refreshment, and how a +spell of romance rested for several hours on our invocation of the +genius of the scene: of such material, with the help of the attuned +spirit, may great events consent to be composed. My companion, his easel +and canvas, his palette and stool and other accessories happily placed, +settled to his subject, while I, at a respectful distance, settled to +mine and to the preparation of this strange fruit of time, my having +kept the impression as if it really mattered. It did indeed matter, it +was to continue to have done so, and when I ask myself the reason I find +this in something as rare and deep and beautiful as a passage of old +poetry, a scrap of old legend, in the vagueness of rustling murmuring +green and plashing water and woodland voices and images, flitting +hovering possibilities; the most retained of these last of course being +the chance that one's small daub (for I too had my easel and panel and +palette) might incur appreciation by the eye of friendship. This indeed +was the true source of the spell, that it was in the eye of friendship, +friendship full of character and colour, and full of amusement of its +own, that I lived on any such occasion, and that I had come forth in the +morning cool and had found our breakfast at the inn a thing of ineffable +savour, and that I now sat and flurriedly and fearfully aspired. Yes, +the interesting ineffectual and exquisite array of the Boston "show" +smote for me most the chord of the prime questions, the admirations and +expectations at first so confident, even that of those refinements of +loyalty out of which the last and highest tribute was to spring; the +consideration, I mean, of whether our extraordinary associate, neither +promptly understood nor inveterately accepted, might not eventually be +judged such a colourist and such a poet that owners of his first +felicities, those very ones over which he was actually bending, and with +a touch so inscrutable, such "tonalities" of his own, would find +themselves envied and rich. I remember positively liking to see most +people stupid about him, and to make them out, I dare say, more +numerously stupid than they really were: this perhaps in some degree as +a bright communication of his own spirit--which discerned from so far +off that of the bitterest-sweet cup it was abundantly to taste; and +partly because the case would after that fashion only have its highest +interest. The highest interest, the very highest, it certainly couldn't +fail to have; and the beauty of a final poetic justice, with exquisite +delays, the whole romance of conscious delicacy and heroic patience +intervening, was just what we seemed to see meanwhile stow itself +expectantly away. + +This view of the inevitable fate of distinguished work was thus, on my +part, as it comes before me again, of early development, and I admit +that I should appear to antedate it hadn't I in renewed presence of each +of the particular predestined objects of sacrifice I have glanced at +caught myself in the very act of that invidious apprehension, that +fondest contemporaneity. There were the charming individual things round +the production of which I had so at once elatedly and resignedly +circled; and nothing remained at the end of time but to test the +historic question. _Was_ the quiet chamber of the Boston museum a +constitution of poetic justice long awaited and at last fully +cognisant?--or did the event perhaps fail to give out, after all, the +essence of our far-away forecast? I think that what showed clearest, or +what I, at any rate, most sharply felt, was the very difficulty of +saying; which fact meant of course, I recognise, that the story fell a +little short, alas, of rounding itself off. Poetic justice, when it +comes, I gather, comes ever with a great shining; so that if there is +any doubt about it the source of the doubt is in the very depths of the +case and has been from the first at work there. It literally seems to +me, besides, that there was more history and thereby more interest +recoverable as the matter stood than if every answer to every question +about it hadn't had a fine ambiguity. I like ambiguities and detest +great glares; preferring thus for my critical no less than for my +pedestrian progress the cool and the shade to the sun and dust of the +way. There was an exquisite effort of which I had been peculiarly sure; +the large canvas of the view of the Paradise Rocks over against Newport, +but within the island and beyond the "second beach"--such were our thin +designations! On the high style and the grand manner of this thing, even +though a little uneasy before the absence from it of a certain crânerie +of touch, I would have staked every grain of my grounded sensibility--in +spite of which, on second thoughts, I shall let that faded fact, and no +other contention at all, be my last word about it. For the prevailing +force, within the Boston walls, the supreme magic anything was to +distil, just melted into another connection which flung a soft mantle as +over the whole show. It became, from the question of how even a man of +perceptive genius had painted what we then locally regarded as our +scenery, a question of how we ourselves had felt and cherished that +scenery; which latter of these two memories swept for me everything +before it. The scenery we cherished--by which I really mean, I fear, but +four or five of us--has now been grossly and utterly sacrificed; in the +sense that its range was all for the pedestrian measure, that to +overwalk it was to love it and to love it to overwalk it, and that no +such relation with it as either of these appears possible or thinkable +to-day. We had, the four or five of us, the instinct--the very finest +this must have been--of its scale and constitution, the adorable wise +economy with which nature had handled it and in the light of which the +whole seaward and insular extension of the comparatively futile town, +untrodden, unsuspected, practically all inviolate, offered a course for +the long afternoon ramble more in harmony with the invocations, or for +that matter the evocations, of youth than we most of us, with +appreciation so rooted, were perhaps ever to know. We knew already, we +knew then, that no such range of airs would ever again be played for us +on but two or three silver strings. They were but two or three--the sea +so often as of the isles of Greece, the mildly but perpetually embayed +promontories of mossy rock and wasted thankless pasture, bathed in a +refinement of radiance and a sweetness of solitude which amounted in +themselves to the highest "finish"; and little more than the feeling, +with all this, or rather with no more than this, that possession, +discrimination, far frequentation, were ours alone, and that a grassy +rocky tide-washed, just a bare, though ever so fine-grained, toned and +tinted breast of nature and field of fancy stretched for us to the low +horizon's furthest rim. The vast region--it struck us then as vast--was +practically roadless, but this, far from making it a desert, made it a +kind of boundless empty carpeted saloon. It comes back to me that nobody +in those days walked, nobody but the three or four of us--or indeed I +should say, if pushed, the single pair in particular of whom I was one +and the other Thomas Sargeant Perry, superexcellent and all-reading, +all-engulfing friend of those days and still, sole survivor, of these, I +thus found deeply consecrated that love of the long, again and again of +the very longest possible, walk which was to see me, year after year, +through so many of the twists and past so many of the threatened blocks +of life's road, and which, during the early and American period, was to +make me lone and perverse even in my own sight: so little was it ever +given me then, wherever I scanned the view, to descry a +fellow-pedestrian. The pedestrians came to succumb altogether, at +Newport, to this virtual challenge of their strange agitation--by the +circumstance, that is, of their being offered at last, to importunity, +the vulgar road, under the invasion of which the old rich alternative +miserably dwindled. + + + + +V + + +Nothing meanwhile could have been less logical, yet at the same time +more natural, than that William's interest in the practice of painting +should have suddenly and abruptly ceased; a turn of our affair attended, +however, with no shade of commotion, no repining at proved waste; with +as little of any confessed ruefulness of mistake on one side as of any +elation of wisdom, any resonance of the ready "I told you so" on the +other. The one side would have been, with a different tone about the +matter and a different domestic habit than ours, that of my brother's +awkwardness, accompanying whatever intelligence, of disavowal, and the +other been our father's not unemphatic return to the point that his +doubts, those originally and confidently intimated, had been justified +by the fact. Tempting doubtless in a heavier household air the +opportunity on the latter's part to recall that if he had perfectly +recognised his son's probable progress to a pitch of excellence he had +exactly not granted that an attainment of this pitch was likely in the +least, however uncontested, to satisfy the nature concerned; the +foregone conclusion having all the while been that such a spirit was +competent to something larger and less superficially calculable, +something more expressive of its true inwardness. This was not the way +in which things happened among us, for I really think the committed +mistake was ever discriminated against--certainly by the head of the +family--only to the extent of its acquiring, even if but speedily again +to fade, an interest greater than was obtainable by the too obvious +success. I am not sure indeed that the kind of personal history most +appealing to my father would not have been some kind that should fairly +proceed by mistakes, mistakes more human, more associational, less +angular, less hard for others, that is less exemplary for them (since +righteousness, as mostly understood, was in our parent's view, I think, +the cruellest thing in the world) than straight and smug and declared +felicities. The qualification here, I allow, would be in his scant +measure of the difference, after all, for the life of the soul, between +the marked achievement and the marked shortcoming. He had a manner of +his own of appreciating failure, or of not at least piously rejoicing in +displayed moral, intellectual, or even material, economies, which, had +it not been that his humanity, his generosity and, for the most part, +his gaiety, were always, at the worst, consistent, might sometimes have +left us with our small savings, our little exhibitions and +complacencies, rather on our hands. As the case stood I find myself +thinking of our life in those years as profiting greatly for animation +and curiosity by the interest he shed for us on the whole side of the +human scene usually held least interesting--the element, the appearance, +of waste which plays there such a part and into which he could read +under provocation so much character and colour and charm, so many +implications of the fine and the worthy, that, since the art of missing +or of failing, or of otherwise going astray, did after all in his hands +escape becoming either a matter of real example or of absolute precept, +enlarged not a little our field and our categories of appreciation and +perception. I recover as I look back on all this the sense as of an +extraordinary young confidence, our common support, in our coming round +together, through the immense lubrication of his expressed thought, +often perhaps extravagantly working and playing, to plenty of +unbewildered rightness, a state of comfort that would always +serve--whether after strange openings into a sphere where nothing +practical mattered, or after even still quainter closings in upon us of +unexpected importances and values. Which means, to my memory, that we +breathed somehow an air in which waste, for us at least, couldn't and +didn't live, so certain were aberrations and discussions, adventures, +excursions and alarms of whatever sort, to wind up in a "transformation +scene" or, if the term be not profane, happy harlequinade; a figuration +of each involved issue and item before the footlights of a familiar +idealism, the most socialised and ironised, the most amusedly +generalised, that possibly could be. + +Such an atmosphere was, taking one of its elements with another, +doubtless delightful; yet if it was friendly to the suggested or +imagined thing it promoted among us much less directly, as I have +already hinted, the act of choice--choice as to the "career" for +example, with a view of the usual proceedings thereupon consequent. I +marvel at the manner in which the door appears to have been held or at +least left open to us for experiment, though with a tendency to close, +the oddest yet most inveterately perceptible movement in that sense, +before any very earnest proposition in particular. I have no remembrance +at all of marked prejudices on our father's part, but I recall repeated +cases, in his attitude to our young affairs, of a disparagement +suggested as by stirred memories of his own; the instance most present +to me being his extreme tepidity in the matter of William's, or in fact +of my, going, on our then American basis, to college. I make out in him, +and at the time made out, a great revulsion of spirit from that incurred +experience in his own history, a revulsion I think moreover quite +independent of any particular or instrinsic attributes of the seat of +learning involved in it. Union College, Schenectady, New York, the scene +of his personal experiment and the natural resort, in his youth, of +comparatively adjacent Albanians, might easily have offered at that time +no very rare opportunities--few were the American country colleges that +then had such to offer; but when, after years, the question arose for +his sons he saw it in I scarce know what light of associational or +"subjective" dislike. He had the disadvantage--unless indeed it was much +more we who had it--of his having, after many changes and detachments, +ceased to believe in the Schenectady resource, or to revert to it +sentimentally, without his forming on the other hand, with his boys to +place, any fonder presumption or preference. There comes out to me, much +bedimmed but recognisable, the image of a day of extreme youth on which, +during a stay with our grandmother at Albany, we achieved, William and +I, with some confused and heated railway effort, a pious pilgrimage to +the small scholastic city--pious by reason, I clearly remember, of a +lively persuasion on my brother's part that to Union College, at some +indefinite future time, we should both most naturally and delightedly +repair. We invoked, I gather, among its scattered shades, fairly vague +to me now, the loyalty that our parent appeared to have dropped by the +way--even though our attitude about it can scarce have been prematurely +contentious; the whole vision is at any rate to-day bathed and blurred +for me in the air of some charmed and beguiled dream, that of the +flushed good faith of an hour of crude castle-building. We were helped +to build, on the spot, by an older friend, much older, as I remember +him, even than my brother, already a member of the college and, as it +seemed, greatly enjoying his life and those "society" badges and +trinkets with which he reappears to me as bristling and twinkling quite +to the extinction of his particular identity. This is lost, like +everything else, in the mere golden haze of the little old-time autumn +adventure. Wondrous to our sensibility may well have been the October +glamour--if October it was, and if it was not it ought to have been!--of +that big brave region of the great State over which the shade of +Fenimore Cooper's Mohawks and Mohicans (if this be not a pleonasm) might +still have been felt to hang. The castle we had built, however, +crumbled--there were plenty of others awaiting erection; these too +successively had their hour, but I needn't at this time stoop to pick up +their pieces. I see moreover vividly enough how it might have been that, +at this stage, our parents were left cold by the various appeal, in our +interest, of Columbia, Harvard and Yale. Hard by, at Providence, in the +Newport time, was also "Brown"; but I recover no connection in which +that mystic syllable swept our sky as a name to conjure with. Our +largest licence somehow didn't stray toward Brown. It was to the same +tune not conceivable that we should have been restored for educational +purposes to the swollen city, the New York of our childhood, where we +had then so tumbled in and out of school as to exhaust the measure, or +as at least greatly to deflower the image, of our teachability on that +ground. Yale, off our beat from every point of view, was as little to be +thought of, and there was moreover in our father's imagination no grain +of susceptibility to what might have been, on the general ground, +"socially expected." Even Harvard, clearly--and it was perhaps a trifle +odd--moved him in our interest as little as Schenectady could do; so +that, for authority, the voice of social expectation would have had to +sound with an art or an accent of which it had by no means up to that +time learned roundabout us the trick. This indeed (it comes to saying) +is something that, so far as our parents were concerned, it would never +have learned. They were, from other preoccupations, unaware of any such +pressure; and to become aware would, I think, primarily have been for +them to find it out of all proportion to the general pitch of +prescription. We were not at that time, when it came to such claims, in +presence of persuasive, much less of impressive, social forms and +precedents--at least those of us of the liberated mind and the really +more curious culture were not; the more curious culture, only to be +known by the positive taste of it, was nowhere in the air, nowhere +seated or embodied. + +Which reflections, as I perhaps too loosely gather them in, refresh at +any rate my sense of how we in particular of our father's house actually +profited more than we lost, if the more curious culture was in question, +by the degree to which we were afloat and disconnected; since there were +at least luxuries of the spirit in this quite as much as +drawbacks--given a social order (so far as it _was_ an order) that found +its main ideal in a "strict attention to business," that is to buying +and selling over a counter or a desk, and in such an intensity of the +traffic as made, on the part of all involved, for close localisation. To +attend strictly to business was to be invariably _there_, on a certain +spot in a certain place; just as to be nowhere in particular, to _have_ +to be nowhere, told the queer tale of a lack or of a forfeiture, or +possibly even of a state of intrinsic unworthiness. I have already +expressed how few of these elements of the background we ourselves had +ever had either to add to or to subtract from, and how this of itself +did after a fashion "place" us in the small Newport colony of the +despoiled and disillusioned, the mildly, the reminiscentially desperate. +As easy as might be, for the time, I have also noted, was our footing +there; but I have not, for myself, forgotten, or even now outlived, the +particular shade of satisfaction to be taken in one's thus being in New +England without being of it. To have originally been of it, or still to +have had to be, affected me, I recall, as a case I should have +regretted--unless it be more exact to say that I thought of the +condition as a danger after all escaped. Long would it take to tell why +it figured as a danger, and why that impression was during the several +following years much more to gain than to lose intensity. The question +was to fall into the rear indeed, with ever so many such secondary +others, during the War, and for reasons effective enough; but it was +afterwards to know a luxury of emergence--this, I mean, while one still +"cared," in general, as one was sooner or later to stop caring. +Infinitely interesting to recover, in the history of a mind, for those +concerned, these movements of the spirit, these tides and currents of +growth--though under the inconvenience for the historian of such +ramifications of research that here at any rate I feel myself warned +off. There appeared to us at Newport the most interesting, much, of the +Albany male cousins, William James Temple--coming, oddly enough, first +from Yale and then from Harvard; so that by contact and example the +practicability of a like experience might have been, and doubtless was, +put well before us. "Will" Temple, as we were in his short life too +scantly to know him, had made so luckless, even if so lively a start +under one alma mater that the appeal to a fresh parentship altogether +appears to have been judged the best remedy for his case: he entered +Harvard jumping, if I mistake not, a couple of years of the +undergraduate curriculum, and my personal memory of these reappearances +is a mere recapture of admiration, of prostration, before him. The +dazzled state, under his striking good looks and his manly charm, was +the common state; so that I disengage from it no presumption of a +particular plea playing in our own domestic air for his temporary +Cambridge setting; he was so much too radiant and gallant and personal, +too much a character and a figure, a splendid importance in himself, to +owe the least glamour to settings; an advantage that might have seemed +rather to be shed on whatever scene by himself in consenting to light it +up. He made all life for the hour a foreground, and one that we none of +us would have quitted for a moment while he was there. + +In that form at least I see him, and no revival of those years so puts +to me the interesting question, so often aimlessly returned upon in +later life, of the amount of truth in this or that case of young +confidence in a glory to come--for another than one's self; of the +likelihood of the wonders so flatteringly forecast. Many of our +estimates were monstrous magnifications--though doing us even at that +more good than harm; so that one isn't even sure that the happiest +histories were to have been those of the least liberal mistakes. I like +at any rate to think of our easy overstrainings--the possible flaw in +many of which was not indeed to be put to the proof. That was the case +for the general, and for every particular, impression of Will Temple, +thanks to his early death in battle--at Chancellorsville, 1863; he +having, among the quickened forces of the time, and his father's record +helping him, leaped to a captaincy in the regular Army; but I cling to +the idea that the siftings and sortings of life, had he remained subject +to them, would still have left him the lustre that blinds and subdues. I +even do more, at this hour; I ask myself, while his appearance and my +personal feeling about it live for me again, what possible aftertime +could have kept up the pitch of my sentiment--aftertime either of his +or of mine. Blest beyond others, I think as we look back, the +admirations, even the fondest (and which indeed were not of their nature +fond?) that were not to know to their cost the inevitable test or +strain; they are almost the only ones, of the true high pitch, that, +without broken edges or other tatters to show, fold themselves away +entire and secure, even as rare lengths of precious old stuff, in the +scented chest of our savings. So great misadventure have too often known +at all events certain of those that were to come to trial. The others +are the _residual_, those we must keep when we can, so to be sure at +least of a few, sacrificing as many possible mistakes and misproportions +as need be to pay but for two or three of them. There could be no +mistake about Gus Barker, who threw himself into the fray, that is into +the cavalry saddle, as he might into a match at baseball (football being +then undreamt of), and my last reminiscence of whom is the sight of him, +on a brief leave for a farewell to his Harvard classmates after he had +got his commission, crossing with two or three companions the expanse of +Harvard Square that faced the old Law School, of which I found myself +for that year (1862-63) a singularly alien member. I was afterwards +sharply to regret the accident by which I on that occasion missed speech +of him; but my present vision of his charming latent agility, which any +motion showed, of his bright-coloured wagging head and of the large +gaiety of the young smile that made his handsome teeth shine out, is +after all the years but the more happily uneffaced. The point of all +which connections, however, is that they somehow managed to make in the +parental view no straight links for us with the matter-of-course of +college. There were accidents too by the aid of which they failed of +this the more easily. It comes to me that, for my own part, I thought of +William at the time as having, or rather as so much more than having, +already graduated; the effect of contact with his mind and talk, with +the free play of his spirit and the irrepressible brush of his humour, +couldn't have been greater had he carried off fifty honours. I felt in +him such authority, so perpetually quickened a state of intellect and +character, that the detail or the literal side of the question never so +much as came up for me: I must have made out that to plenty of +graduates, or of the graduating, nothing in the nature of such +appearances attached. I think of our father moreover as no less affected +by a like impression; so extremely, so immensely disposed do I see him +to generalise his eldest son's gifts as by the largest, fondest +synthesis, and not so much proceed upon them in any one direction as +proceed _from_ them, as it were, in all. + +Little as such a view might have lent itself to application, my +brother's searching discovery during the summer of 1861 that his +vocation was not "after all" in the least satisfyingly for Art, took on +as a prompt sequel the recognition that it was quite positively and +before everything for Science, physical Science, strenuous Science in +all its exactitude; with the opportunity again forthcoming to put his +freshness of faith to the test. I had presumed to rejoice before at his +adoption of the studio life, that offering as well possible contacts for +myself; and yet I recall no pang for his tergiversation, there being +nothing he mightn't have done at this or at any other moment that I +shouldn't have felt as inevitable and found in my sense of his previous +age some happy and striking symptom or pledge of. As certain as that he +had been all the while "artistic" did it thus appear that he had been at +the same time quite otherwise inquiring too--addicted to "experiments" +and the consumption of chemicals, the transfusion of mysterious liquids +from glass to glass under exposure to lambent flame, the cultivation of +stained fingers, the establishment and the transport, in our wanderings, +of galvanic batteries, the administration to all he could persuade of +electric shocks, the maintenance of marine animals in splashy aquaria, +the practice of photography in the room I for a while shared with him +at Boulogne, with every stern reality of big cumbrous camera, prolonged +exposure, exposure mostly of myself, darkened development, also +interminable, and ubiquitous brown blot. Then there had been also the +constant, as I fearfully felt it, the finely speculative and boldly +disinterested absorption of curious drugs. No livelier remembrance have +I of our early years together than this inveteracy, often appalling to a +nature so incurious as mine in _that_ direction, of his interest in the +"queer" or the incalculable effects of things. There was apparently for +him no possible effect whatever that mightn't be more or less rejoiced +in as such--all exclusive of its relation to other things than merely +knowing. There recurs to me withal the shamelessness of my own +indifference--at which I also, none the less, I think, wondered a +little; as if by so much as it hadn't been given me to care for visibly +provoked or engineered phenomena, by that same amount was I open to +those of the mysteriously or insidiously aggressive, the ambushed or +suffered sort. Vivid to me in any case is still the sense of how quite +shiningly light, as an activity and an appeal, he had seemed to make +everything he gave himself to; so that at first, until the freshness of +it failed, he flung this iridescent mantle of interest over the then so +grey and scant little scene of the Harvard (the Lawrence) Scientific +School, where in the course of the months I had had a glimpse or two of +him at work. Early in the autumn of 1861 he went up from Newport to +Cambridge to enter that institution; in which thin current rather than +in the ostensibly more ample began to flow his long connection with +Harvard, gathering in time so many affluents. His letters from Cambridge +during the next couple of years, many of them before me now, breathe, I +think, all the experience the conditions could have begotten at the +best; they mark the beginning of those vivacities and varieties of +intellectual and moral reaction which were for the rest of his life to +be the more immeasurably candid and vivid, the more numerous above all, +and the more interesting and amusing, the closer view one had of him. +That of a certainty; yet these familiar pages of youth testify most of +all for me perhaps to the forces of amenity and spontaneity, the happy +working of all relations, in our family life. In such parts of them as I +may cite this will shine sufficiently through--and I shall take for +granted thus the interest of small matters that have perhaps but that +reflected light to show. It is in a letter to myself, of that September, +dated "Drear and Chill Abode," that he appears to have celebrated the +first steps of his initiation. + +Sweet was your letter and grateful to my eyes. I had gone in a +mechanical way to the P.O. not hoping for anything (though "on espère +alors qu'on désespère toujours,") and, finding nothing, was turning +heavily away when a youth modestly tapped me and, holding out an +envelope inscribed in your well-known character, said, "Mr. J., this was +in our box!" 'Twas the young Pascoe, the joy of his mother--but the +graphic account I read in the letter he gave me of the sorrow of my +mother almost made me shed tears on the floor of the P.O. Not that on +reflection I should dream----! for reflection shows me a future in which +she shall regard my vacation visits as "on the whole" rather troublesome +than otherwise; or at least when she shall feel herself as blest in the +trouble I spare her when absent as in the glow of pride and happiness +she feels at the sight of me when present. But she needn't fear I can +ever think of _her_ when absent with such equanimity. I oughtn't to +"joke on such a serious subject," as Bobby would say though; for I have +had several pangs since being here at the thought of all I have left +behind at Newport--especially gushes of feeling about the _place_. I +haven't for one minute had the feeling of being at home here. Something +in my quarters precludes the possibility of it, though what this is I +don't suppose I can describe to you. + +As I write now even, writing itself being a cosy cheerful-looking +amusement, and an argand gas-burner with a neat green shade merrily +singing beside me, I still feel unsettled. I write on a round table in +the middle of the room, with a fearful red and black cloth. Before me I +see another such-covered table of oblong shape against the wall, capped +by a cheap looking-glass and flanked by two windows, curtainless and +bleak, whose shades of linen flout the air as the sportive wind impels +them. To the left are two other such windows, with a horse-hair sofa +between them, and at my back a fifth window and a vast wooden +mantel-piece with nothing to relieve its nakedness but a large cast, +much plumbago'd, of a bust of Franklin. On my right the Bookcase, +imposing and respectable with its empty drawers and with my little array +of printed wisdom covering nearly _one_ of the shelves. I hear the +people breathe as they go past in the street, and the roll and jar of +the horse-cars is terrific. I have accordingly engaged the other room +from Mrs. Pascoe, with the little sleeping-room upstairs. It looks +infinitely more cheerful than this, and if I don't find the grate +sufficient I can easily have a Franklin stove put up. But she says the +grate will make an oven of it.... John Ropes I met the other day at +Harry Quincy's room, and was very much pleased with him. Don't fail to +send on Will Temple's letters to him and to Herbert Mason, which I left +in one of the library's mantelpiece jars, to use the Portuguese idiom. +Storrow Higginson has been very kind to me, making enquiries about +tables etc. We went together this morning to the house of the Curator of +the Gray collection of Engravings, which is solemnly to unfold its +glories to me to-morrow. He is a most serious stately German gentleman, +Mr. Thies by name, fully sensible of the deep vital importance of his +treasures and evidently thinking a visit to them a great affair--to +_me_. Had I known how great, how tremendous and formal, I hardly think I +should have ventured to call. Tom Ward pays me a visit almost every +evening. Poor Tom seems a-cold too. His deafness keeps him from making +acquaintances. Professor Eliot, at the School, is a fine fellow, I +suspect; a man who if he resolves to do a thing won't be prevented. I +find analysis very interesting _so far_! The Library has a +reading-room, where they take all the magazines; so I shan't want for +the Rev. des 2 M. I remain with unalterable sentiments of devotion ever, +my dear H., your Big Brother Bill. + +This record of further impressions closely and copiously followed. + + Your letter this morning was such a godsend that I hasten to + respond a line or two, though I have no business to--for I have a + fearful lesson to-morrow and am going to Boston to-night to hear + Agassiz lecture (12 lectures on "Methods in Nat. Hist."), so that I + will only tell you that I am very well and my spirits just getting + good. Miss Upham's table is much pleasanter than the other. + Professor F. J. Child is a great joker--he's a little flaxen-headed + boy of about 40. There is a nice old lady boarder, another man of + about 50, of aristocratic bearing, who interests me much, and 3 + intelligent students. At the other table was no conversation at + all; the fellows had that American solemnity, called each other + Sir, etc. I cannot tell you, dearest Mother, how your account of + your Sunday dinner and of your feelings thereat brought tears to my + eyes. Give Father my ardent love and cover with kisses the round + fair face of the most kiss-worthy Alice. Then kiss the Aunt till + you get tired, and get all the rest of them to kiss _you_ till you + cry hold enough! + + This morning as I was busy over the 10th page of a letter to Wilky + in he popped and made my labour of no account. I had intended to go + and see him yesterday, but found Edward Emerson and Tom Ward were + going, and so thought he would have too much of a good thing. But + he walked over this morning with, or rather without them, for he + went astray and arrived very hot and dusty. I gave him a bath and + took him to dinner, and he is now gone to see Andrew Robeson and E. + E. His plump corpusculus looks as always. I write in my new parlour + whither I moved yesterday. You have no idea what an improvement it + is on the old affair--worth double the cost, and the little bedroom + under the roof is perfectly delicious, with a charming outlook on + little back yards with trees and pretty old brick walls. The sun is + upon _this_ room from earliest dawn till late in the afternoon--a + capital thing in winter. I like Miss Upham's very much. Dark + "aristocratic" dining-room, with royal cheer. "Fish, roast beef, + veal cutlets, pigeons!" says the splendid, tall, noble-looking, + white-armed, black-eyed Juno of a handmaid as you sit down. And for + dessert a choice of three, _three_, darling Mother, of the most + succulent, unctuous (no, not unctuous, unless you imagine a + celestial unction without the oil) pie-like confections, always 2 + platesful--my eye! She has an admirable chemical, not mechanical, + combination of cake and jam and cream which I recommend to Mother + if she is ever at a loss; though there is no well-stored pantry + like that of good old Kay Street, or if there is it exists not for + miserable me. + + This chemical analysis is so bewildering at first that I am + "muddled and bet" and have to employ almost all my time reading up. + Agassiz is evidently a great favourite with his Boston audience and + feels it himself. But he's an admirable earnest lecturer, clear as + day, and his accent is most fascinating. Jeffries Wyman's lectures + on Comp. Anatomy of Verts. promise to be very good; prosy perhaps a + little and monotonous, but plain and well-arranged and nourris. + Eliot I have not seen much more of; I don't believe he is a _very_ + accomplished chemist, but can't tell yet. We are only about 12 in + the Laboratory, so that we have a very cosy time. I expect to have + a winter of "crowded life." I can be as independent as I please, + and want to live regardless of the good or bad opinion of every + one. I shall have a splendid chance to try, I know, and I know too + that the native hue of resolution has never been of very great + shade in me hitherto. I am sure that that feeling is a right one, + and I mean to live according to it if I can. If I do so I think I + shall turn out all right. + + I stopped this letter before tea, when Wilky the rosy-gilled and + Frank Higginson came in. I now resume it by the light of a taper + and that of the moon. Wilky read H.'s letter and amused me "metch" + by his naive interpretation of Mother's most rational request that + I should "keep a memorandum of all moneys I receive from Father." + He thought it was that she might know exactly what sums her + prodigal philosopher really gives out, and that mistrust of his + generosity caused it. The phrase has a little sound that way, as H. + subtly framed it, I confess! + + The first few days, the first week here, I really didn't know what + to do with myself or how to fill my time. I felt as if turned out + of doors. I then received H.'s and Mother's letters. Never before + did I know what mystic depths of rapture lay concealed within that + familiar word. Never did the same being look so like two different + ones as I going in and out of the P.O. if I bring a letter with me. + Gloomily, with despair written on my leaden brow I stalk the street + along towards the P.O., women, children and students involuntarily + shrinking against the wall as I pass--thus,[4] as if the curse of + Cain were stamped upon my front. But when I come out with a letter + an immense concourse of people generally attends me to my lodging, + attracted by my excited wild gestures and look. + +Christmas being sparely kept in the New England of those days, William +passed that of 1861, as a Cambridge letter of the afternoon indicates, +without opportunity for a seasonable dash to Newport, but with such +compensations, nearer at hand as are here exhibited. Our brother Wilky, +I should premise, had been placed with the youngest of us, Bob, for +companion, at the "co-educational" school then but a short time +previously established by Mr. F. B. Sanborn at Concord, +Massachusetts--and of which there will be more to say. "Tom" Ward, +already mentioned and who, having left the Concord school shortly +before, had just entered Harvard, was quickly to become William's +intimate, approved and trusted friend; the diversion of whose patient +originality, whose intellectual independence, ability and curiosity from +science and free inquiry to hereditary banking--consequent on the +position of the paternal Samuel Gray Ward as the representative for many +years in the United States of the house of Baring Brothers--he from the +first much regretted: the more pertinently doubtless that this companion +was of a family "connected" with ours through an intermarriage, Gus +Barker, as Mrs. S. G. Ward's nephew, being Tom's first cousin as well as +ours, and such links still counting, in that age of comparatively +less developed ramifications, when sympathy and intercourse kept pace as +it was kept between our pairs of parents. + +[Illustration: A leaf from the letter quoted on page 129.] + + I have been in Boston the whole blest morning, toted round by the + Wards, who had as usual asked me to dine with them. I had happily + provided myself with an engagement here for all such emergencies, + but, as is my sportive wont, I befooled Tom with divers answers, + and finally let him believe I would come (having refused several + dazzling chances for the purpose) supposing of course I should see + him here yesterday at Miss Upham's board and disabuse him. But the + young viper went home right after breakfast--so I had to go into + Boston this morning and explain. Wilky had come up from Concord to + dine in said Commonwealth Avenue, and I, as it turned out, found + myself in for following the innocent lamb Lily up and down the town + for two hours, to hold bundles and ring bells for her; Wilky and + Tom having vanished from the scene. Clear sharp cold morning, + thermometer 5 degrees at sunrise, and the streets covered with one + glare of ice. I had thick smooth shoes and went sliding off like an + avalanche every three steps, while she, having india-rubbers and + being a Bostonian, went ahead like a swan. I had among other things + to keep her bundles from harm, to wipe away every three minutes the + trembling jewel with which the cold _would_ with persistent + kindness ornament my coral nose; to keep a hypocritic watchful eye + on her movements lest she fall; to raise my hat gracefully to more + and more of her acquaintances every block; to skate round and round + embracing lamp-posts and door-scrapers by the score to keep from + falling, as well as to avoid serving old lady-promenaders in the + same way; to cut capers 4 feet high at the rate of 20 a second, + every now and then, for the same purpose; to keep from scooting + off down hills and round corners as fast as my able-bodied + companion; often to do all these at once and then fall lickety-bang + like a chandelier, but _when_ so to preserve an expression of + placid beatitude or easy nonchalance despite the raging fiend + within: oh it beggars description! When finally it was over and I + stood alone I shook my companion's dust from my feet and, biting my + beard with rage, sware a mighty oath unto high heaven that I would + never, while reason held her throne in this distracted orb, _never_ + NEVER, by word, look or gesture and this without mental + reservation, acknowledge a "young lady" as a human being. The false + and rotten spawn might die before I would wink to save it. No more + Parties now!--at last I am a Man, etc., etc.! + + My enthusiasm ran very high for a few minutes, but I suddenly saw + that I was a great ass and became sobered instantly, so that on the + whole I am better for the circumstance, being a sadder and a wiser + man. I also went to the Tappans' and gave the children slight + presents; then, coming home to my venal board, behaved very + considerately and paternally to a young lady who sat next to me, + but with a shade of subdued melancholy in my manner which could not + have been noticed at the breakfast-table. Many times and bitterly + to-day have I thought of home and lamented that I should have to be + away at this merry Christmastide from my rare family; wondering, + with Wilky, if they were missing us as we miss them. And now as I + sit in the light of my kerosene, with the fire quietly consuming in + the grate and the twilight on the snow outside and the melancholy + old-fashioned strains of the piano dimly rising from below, I see + in vision those at home just going in to dinner; my aged, silvered + Mother leaning on the arm of her stalwart yet flexible H., merry + and garrulous as ever, my blushing Aunt with her old wild beauty + still hanging about her, my modest Father with his rippling raven + locks, the genial auld Rob and the mysterious Alice, all rise + before me, a glorified throng; but two other forms, one tall, + intellectual, swarthy, with curved nose and eagle eye, the other + having breadth rather than depth, but a goodly morsel too, are + wanting to complete the harmonious whole. Eftsoons they vanish and + I am again alone, _alone_--what pathos in the word! I have two + companions though, most all the time--remorse and despair! T. S. + Perry took their place for a little, and to-day they have not come + back. T. S. seemed to enjoy his visit very much. It was very + pleasant for me to have him; his rustic wonder at the commonest + sights was most ludicrous, and his conversation most amusing and + instructive. + + The place here improves to me as I go on living in it, and if I + study with Agassiz 4 or 5 years there is nothing I should like + better than to have you all with me, regular and comfortable. I + enclose another advertisement of a house--but which would be too + small for us, I believe, though it might be looked at. I had a long + talk with one of A.'s students the other night, and saw for the + first time how a naturalist may feel about his trade exactly as an + artist does about his. For instance Agassiz would rather take + wholly uninstructed people--"for he has to unteach them all they + have learnt." He doesn't let them so much as look into a book for a + long while; what they learn they must learn for themselves and be + _masters_ of it all. The consequence is he makes Naturalists of + them--doesn't merely cram them; and this student (he had been there + 2 years) said he felt ready to go anywhere in the world now with + nothing but his notebook and study out anything quite alone. A. + must be a great teacher. Chemistry comes on tolerably, but not so + fast as I expected. I am pretty slow with my substances, having + done but 12 since Thanksgiving and having 38 more to do before the + end of the term. + +Comment on the abundance, the gaiety and drollery, the generous play of +vision and fancy in all this, would seem so needless as to be almost +officious, were not the commentator constantly, were he not infinitely, +arrested and reminded and solicited; which is at once his advantage and +his embarrassment. Such a letter, at all events, read over with the +general key, touches its contemporary scene and hour into an intensity +of life for him; making indeed the great sign of that life my brother's +signal vivacity and cordiality, his endless spontaneity of mind. Every +thing in it is characteristic of the genius and expressive of the mood, +and not least, of course, the pleasantry of paradox, the evocation of +each familiar image by its vivid opposite. Our mother, _e.g._, was not +at that time, nor for a good while yet, so venerably "silvered"; our +handsome-headed father had lost, occipitally, long before, all pretence +to raven locks, certainly to the effect of their "rippling"; the beauty +of our admirable aunt was as happily alien either to wildness or to the +"hanging" air as it could very well be; the "mystery" of our young +sister consisted all in the candour of her natural bloom, even if at the +same time of her lively intelligence; and H.'s mirth and garrulity +appear to have represented for the writer the veriest ironic translation +of something in that youth, I judge, not a little mildly--though oh _so_ +mildly!--morose or anxiously mute. To the same tune the aquiline in his +own nose heroically derides the slightly relaxed line of that feature; +and our brother Wilky's want of physical "depth" is a glance at a +different proportion. Of a like tinge of pleasantry, I may add, is the +imputation of the provincial gape to our friend T. S. Perry, of Newport +birth and unintermitted breeding, with whom we were to live so much in +the years to come, and who was then on the eve of entering Harvard--his +face already uninterruptedly turned to that love of letters, that +practice of them by dauntless and inordinate, though never at all +vulgarly resonant, absorption which was to constitute in itself the most +disinterested of careers. I had myself felt him from the first an +exemplary, at once, and a discouraging friend; he had let himself loose +in the world of books, pressed and roamed through the most various +literatures and the most voluminous authors, with a stride that, as it +carried him beyond all view, left me dismayed and helpless at the edge +of the forest, where I listened wistfully but unemulously to the far-off +crash from within of his felled timber, the clearing of whole spaces or +periods shelf by shelf or great tree by tree. The brother-in-law of +John La Farge, he had for us further, with that reviving consciousness +of American annals which the War was at once so rudely and so +insidiously to quicken in us, the glamour of his straight descent from +the Commodores Perry of the Lake Erie in the war of 1812, respectively, +and of the portentous penetration of Japan just after the mid-century, +and his longer-drawn but equally direct and so clean and comfortable +affiliation to the great Benjamin Franklin: as these things at least +seemed to me under my habit (too musing and brooding certainly to have +made for light loquacity) of pressing every wind-borne particle of +personal history--once the persons were only other enough from +myself--into the service of what I would fain have called picture or, +less explicitly, less formulatedly, romance. + +These, however, are but too fond insistences, and what mainly bears +pointing out is my brother's already restless reach forth to some new +subject of study. He had but lately addressed himself, not without +confidence, to such an investigation of Chemistry as he might become +conscious of a warrant for, yet the appeal of Agassiz's great authority, +so much in the air of the Cambridge of that time, found him at once +responsive; it opened up a world, the world of sentient life, in the +light of which Chemistry faded. He had not, however, for the moment +done with it; and what I at any rate find most to the point in the pages +before me is the charm of their so witnessing to the geniality and +harmony of our family life, exquisite as I look back on it and reflected +almost as much in any one passage taken at hazard as in any other. He +had apparently, at the date of the following, changed his lodging. + + President Felton's death has been the great event of the week--two + funerals and I don't know how many prayers and sermons. To-day I + thought I would go to University chapel for the sake of variety and + hear Dr. Peabody's final word on him--and a very long and + lugubrious one it was. The prayer was a prolonged moan in which the + death (not in its consequences, but in itself) was treated as a + great calamity, and the whole eulogy was almost ridiculously + overcharged. What was most disagreeable throughout was the wailing + tones, not a bit that of simple pagan grief at the _loss_--which + would have been honest; but a whine consciously put on as from a + sense of duty, and a whine at nothing definite either, only a + purposeless clothing of all his words in tears. The whole style of + the performance was such that I have concluded to have nothing more + to do with funerals till they improve. + + The walking here has been terrible with ice or slush these many + weeks, but over head celestial. No new developments in this house. + The maniac sometimes chills my very marrow by hoarsely whispering + outside the door, "Gulielmo, Gulielmo!" Old Sweetser sits in his + dressing-gown smoking his pipe all day in a little uncomfortable + old _bathroom_ next door to me. He may with truth be called a + queer cuss. The young ladies have that very nasty immodest habit of + hustling themselves out of sight precipitately whenever I appear. I + dined with Mrs. ---- yesterday all alone. She was quite sick, very + hoarse, and _he_ was in the country, so that on the whole it was a + great bore. She is very clumsy in her way of doing things, and her + invitation to me was for the wife of an artist--not artistic! + + I am now studying organic Chemistry. It will probably shock Mother + to hear that I yesterday destroyed a pockethandkerchief--but it was + an old one and I converted it into some sugar which though rather + brown is very good. I believe I forgot to tell you that I am shorn + of my brightest ornament. That solitary hirsute jewel which lent + such a manly and martial aspect to my visage is gone, and the place + thereof is naked. I don't think anyone will know the difference, + and moreover it is not dead, it only sleeps and will some day rise + phoenix-like from its ashes with tenfold its former beauty. When + Father comes will he please bring Ganot's Physique _if H. doesn't + want it_? + +In none of these earlier communications from Cambridge is the element of +affectionate pleasantry more at play than in those addressed to his +sister. + + Charmante jeune fille, I find the Tappans _really_ expected me to + bring you to them and were much disappointed at my failure. Ellen + has grown very fat and big. Mary calls everybody "horrid." Lyly + Barker is with the Wards. I haven't seen her yet, but shall do so + on Saturday, when I am also to dine with the Hunts. I hope your + neuralgia, or whatever you may believe the thing was, has gone and + that you are back at school instead of languishing and lolling + about the house. I send you herewith a portrait of Prof. Eliot, a + very fair likeness, to grace your book withal. Write me whenever + you have the slightest or most fleeting inclination to do so. If + you have only one sentence to say, don't grudge paper and stamps + for it. You don't know how much good you may do me at an + appropriate time by a little easy scratching of your graceful + nimble pen. + +In another apostrophe to the same correspondent, at the same season, his +high spirits throw off the bonds of the vernacular. + + Est-ce que tu songes jamais à moi comme moi je songe à toi?--oh je + crois bien que non! Maintes fois dans la journée l'image d'une + espèce d'ange vêtue de blanc avec de longs boucles noirs qui + encadrent une figure telle que la plupart des mortels ne font que + l'entrevoir dans leur rêves, s'impose à mes sens ravis; créature + longue et fluette qui se dispose à se coucher dans une petite + chambrette verte où le gaz fait un grand jour. Eh, oua, oua, oua! + c'est à faire mourir de douleur. Mais je parie que tout de même pas + une étincelle ne vibre pour moi dans les fibres de ton coeur + endurci. Hélas, oublié de mes parents et de mes semblables, je ne + vois, où que je regarde, qu'un abîme de désespoir, un gouffre noir + et peuplé de démons, qui tôt ou tard va m'engloutir. Tu ne m'écris + jamais sauf pour me soutirer des objets de luxe. La vaste mère me + déteste, il n'y a que le frère qui me reste attaché, et lui par + esprit d'opposition plus que par autre chose. Eh mon Dieu, que + vais-je devenir? En tout cas je vais clore cette lettre, qui s'est + allongée malgré moi. Ton frère, James William. + +Of the same bright complexion is this report, addressed to his parents, +of the change of lodging already noted. + + The presence of the Tweedys has been most agreeable and has + contributed in no small degree to break the shock of removal to + these new rooms, which are not near so cosy as the old; especially + with the smoking of my stove, which went on all the first two days. + That has been stopped, however, and the only trouble is now to get + the fire alight at all. I have generally to start it 3 or 4 times, + and the removal of the material of each failure from the grate is a + fearful business. I have also to descend to the cellar myself to + get my coal, and my "hod," as Ma Sweetser, my land-lady, calls it, + not being very much bigger than a milk-pitcher, doesn't add to the + charm. The coal is apt to drop on the stairs, and I have to pick it + all up. At present the stove fills the room with a nephitic and + pestilential gas, so that I have to keep the window open. I went + last night with the Tweedys to the concert for which they came up, + and with them this morning to hear Wendell Phillips. This Sweetser + family is worthy of Dickens. It consists of a Mr. and Miss S., Mr. + S.'s three gushing girls, a parrot and a maniac. The maniac is very + obstreperous. Her husband left her boarding here 3 months ago and + went to Cuba. When she got mad he was written to, but has sent no + reply, and they are keeping her. For the Aunt's sake I keep my + drawer locked against her at night. Old Sweetser is a riddle I hope + to do justice to at some future time, but can't begin on now. His + sister shakes like an aspen whenever she is spoken to. Oh I forgot + the most important character of all, the black wench who "does" the + room. She is about 20 years old and wears short frocks, but talks + like Alice Robeson and has an antediluvian face about as large as + the top of a flour-barrel. + +I can really keep my hand from nothing, of whatever connection, that +causes his intensity of animation and spontaneity of expression to +revive. On a Sunday evening early in 1862 he had + + just returned from Milton, and, after removing from my person a + beetle, sit down to write you immediately. Ever since 10.30 this + A.M. the beetle s'est promené à l'envi sur ma peau. The first + feeling I had of his becoming attached to it made me jump so as to + scare an old lady opposite me in the car into fits. Finding him too + hard to crush I let him run, and at last got used to him though at + times he tickled me to excruciation. I ache in every limb and every + cranny of my mind from my visit.... They had the usual number of + stories, wonderful and not wonderful, to tell of their friends and + relatives (of Stephen somebody, _e.g._, who had a waggon weighing + several tons run over his chest without even bruising him, and so + on). They are very nice girls indeed all the same. I then went, + near by, to the Forbes's in a state of profuse perspiration, and + saw handsome Mrs. F. and her daughters, and a substitute for + Governor Andrew in the person of his wife; after which I returned + here, being driven back in the car, as I perceived on the front + platform, by our old familiar--familiar indeed!--friend William (I + mean our Irish ex-coachman) whom age doesn't seem to render more + veracious, as he told me several very big stories about himself: + how he smashed a car to pieces the other night, how he first gave + the alarm of the great fire, etc. + + I went to the theatre the other night, and, asking a gentleman to + make room for me, found him to be Bob Temple, who had arrived in + Boston that day. He looks very well and talks in the most + extraordinary way you ever heard about Slavery and the wickedness + of human society, and is apparently very sincere. He sailed for + Europe on Wednesday. I exhorted him to stop over at Newport, but he + wouldn't. There was something quite peculiar about him--he seemed + greatly changed. I can tell you more at home, but wish I might have + seen more of him. I have been the last three nights running to hear + John Wilkes Booth, the "young American Roscius." Rant, rant, rant + of the most fearful kind. The worst parts most applauded, but with + any amount of fire and energy in the passionate parts, in some of + which he really becomes natural.... You don't know what a regular + Sévigné you have in Alice. I blush for my delinquencies toward her, + but bow my head with meek humility, contented to be her debtor all + my life and despairing of ever repaying her the value of her + letters. Mother and Aunt I pine to see, and the honest Jack Tar of + the family, the rough Bob, with his rude untutored ways! + +Traps for remembrance I find set at every turn here, so that I have +either to dodge them or patiently to suffer catching. I try in vain for +instance merely to brush past the image of our kinsman Robert Temple the +younger, who made with his brother Will the eldest pair in that house of +cousins: he waylays, he persuades me too much, and to fail of the few +right words for him would be to leave a deep debt unrepaid--his fitful +hovering presence, repeatedly vivid and repeatedly obscured, so +considerably "counted" for us, pointing the sharpest moral, pointing +fifty morals, and adorning a perpetual tale. He was for years, first on +the nearer and then little by little on the further, the furthest, +horizon, quite the most emphasised of all our wastrels, the figure +bristling most with every irregular accent that we were to find +ourselves in any closeness of relation with. I held him for myself at +least, from far back, a pure gift of free-handed chance to the grateful +imagination, the utmost limit of whose complaint of it could be but for +the difficulty of rendering him the really proper tribute. I regarded +him truly, for a long time, as a possession of the mind, the human image +swung before us with most of the effect of strong and thick and +inimitable colour. If to be orphaned and free of range had affected my +young fancy as the happy, that is the romantic, lot, no member of the +whole cousinship, favoured in that sense as so many of them were, +enjoyed so, by my making out, the highest privilege of the case. +Nothing, I could afterwards easily see, had been less inevitable and of +a greater awkwardness of accident than his being, soon after the death +of his parents, shipped off from Albany, in pursuit of an education, to +an unheard-of school in a remote corner of Scotland; which fact it was, +however, that played for me exactly the bright part of preparing to show +with particular intensity what Europe again, with the opportunity so +given, was going to proceed to. It thus shone out when after the lapse +of several years he recurred to our more competent view that, quite +richly erratic creature as he might appear, and to whatever degree of +wonder and suspense, of amusement and amazement, he might wind us up, +the rich alien influence, full of special queernesses and mysteries in +this special connection, had complacently turned him out for us and had +ever so irretrievably and ineffaceably stamped him. He rose before us, +tall and goodlooking and easy, as a figure of an oddly _civilised_ +perversity; his irreverent challenging humour, playing at once, without +mercy, over American aspects, seemed somehow not less cultivated than +profane--just which note in itself caused the plot beautifully to +thicken; for this was to distinguish and almost embellish him throughout +a long career in which he was to neglect no occasion, however frankly +forbidding, for graceless adventure, that he had the pure derisive, the +loose and mocking mind, yet initiated, educated, almost elegantly +impudent, in other words successfully impertinent, and which expressed +itself, in particular by the pen, with a literary lightness that we used +to find inimitable. He had dangled there, further off and nearer, as a +character, to my attention, in the sense in which "people in books" were +characters, and other people, roundabout us, were somehow not; so that I +fairly thought of him (though this more, doubtless, with the lapse of +time) very much as if we had owed him to Thackeray or Dickens, the +creators of superior life to whom we were at that time always owing +most, rather than to any set of circumstances by which we had in our own +persons felt served; that he was inimitable, inimitably droll, +inimitably wasted, wanton, impossible, or whatever else it might be, +making him thus one with the rounded and represented creature, shining +in the light of art, as distinguished from the vague handful of more or +less susceptible material that had in the common air to pass for a true +concretion. The promise of this had been, to my original vision, in +every wind-borne echo of him, however light; I doubtless put people +"into books" by very much the same turn of the hand with which I took +them out, but it had tinged itself with the finely free that, proceeding +in due course from his school at Fochabers to the University of Aberdeen +(each sound and syllable of this general far cry from Albany had in +itself an incoherence!) he had encountered while there the oddest of all +occasions to embrace the Romish faith. In the same way it ministered to +the vivid, even if baffled, view of him that he appeared then to have +retreated upon the impenetrable stronghold of Nairn, described by him as +a bleak little Scotch watering-place which yet sufficed to his cluster +of predicaments: whence he began to address to his bewildered pair of +Albany guardians and trustees the earlier of that series of incomparably +amusing letters, as we judged them, the arrival of almost any one of +which among us, out of the midst of indocilities at once more and more +horrific and more and more reported with a desperate drollery, was to +constitute an event so supremely beguiling that distressful meanings and +expensive remedies found themselves alike salved to consciousness by the +fact that such compositions could only be, for people of taste, +enjoyable. I think of this hapless kinsman throughout as blest with a +"form" that appealed to the finer fibres of appreciation; so that, +variously misadventurous as he was ever to continue, his genius for +expression again and again just saved him--saved him for bare life, left +in his hand a broken piece of the effective magic wand, never perhaps +waved with anything like that easy grace in an equally compromised +interest. + +It was at any rate as if I had from the first collected and saved up the +echoes--or so at least it seems to me now: echoes of him as all +sarcastically and incorrigibly mutinous, somewhat later on, while in +nominal charge of a despairing _pasteur_ at Neuchâtel--followed by the +intensified sense of him, after I scarce remember quite what interval, +on his appearing at Newport, where his sisters, as I have mentioned, had +been protectively gathered in, during the year, more or less, that +followed our own installation there. Then it was that we had the value +of his being interesting with less trouble taken to that end--in +proportion to the effect achieved--than perhaps ever served such a +cause; it would perhaps scarce even be too much to say that, as the only +trouble he seemed capable of was the trouble of quite positively +declining to interest on any terms, his essential Dickensism, as I have +called it, or his Thackerayan tint if preferred, his comedy-virtue in +fine, which he could neither disown nor, practically speaking, misapply, +was stronger even than his particular sardonic cynicism, strongly as +that was at last to flower. I won't in the least say he dazzled--that +was reserved for his so quite otherwise brilliant, his temporarily +triumphant, younger brother, at whom I have already glanced, who was on +no possible terms with him, and never could have been, so that the +difficulty of their relation glimmers upon me as probably half the good +reason for the original queer despatch of the elder to about the +remotest, the most separating, point in space at which "educational +advantages" could be conceived as awaiting him. I must have had no need +by that time to be dazzled, or even to be charmed, in order more or less +fondly, often indeed doubtless fearfully, to apprehend; what I +apprehended being that here was a creature quite amusedly and +perceptively, quite attentively and, after a fashion, profitably, living +without a single one of the elements of life (of the inward, I mean, +those one would most have missed if deprived of them) that I knew as +most conducive to animation. What could have roused more curiosity than +this, for the time at least, even if there hadn't been associated with +it such a fine redolence, as I then supposed it, of the rich and strange +places and things, as I supposed _them_, that had contributed to making +him over? He had come back made--unless one was already, and too +conveniently or complacently, to call it unmade: _that_ was the point +(and it certainly wasn't Albany that ever would have made him); he had +come back charged, to my vision, with prodigious "English" impressions +and awarenesses, each so thoroughly and easily assimilated that they +might have played their part as convictions and standards had he +pretended to anything that would in that degree have satisfied us. He +never spoke of his "faith," as that might have been the thing we could +have held him to; and he knew what not too gracelessly to speak of when +the sense of the American grotesque in general and the largely-viewed +"family" reducibility to the absurd in particular offered him such free +light pasture. He had the sign of grace that he ever perfectly +considered my father--so far as attitude, distinct from behaviour, went; +but most members of our kinship on that side still clung to this habit +of consideration even when, as was in certain cases but too visible, +they had parted with all sense of any other. I have preserved no happier +truth about my father than that the graceless whom, according to their +own fond term, he, and he alone of all of us, "understood," returned to +him as often and appealed to him as freely as those happier, though +indeed scarce less importunate, in their connection, who found +attraction and reason enough in their understanding _him_. My brother's +impression of this vessel of intimations that evening at the Boston +theatre, and of his "sincerity" and his seeming "greatly changed," +doesn't at all events, I feel, fail in the least to fit into one of +those amplifications upon which my incurable trick of unwillingness +wholly to sacrifice any good value compromised by time tends to +precipitate me with a force that my reader can scarce fear for me more +than I fear it for myself. There was no "extraordinary way" in which our +incalculable kinsman _mightn't_ talk, and that William should have had +for the hour the benefit of his general truth is but a happy note in my +record. It was not always the case that one wished one "might have seen +more of him," but this was only because one had had on any contact the +sense of seeing so much. That produced consequences among which the +desire for more might even be uncannily numbered. John Wilkes Booth, of +the same evening, was of course President Lincoln's assassin-to-be, of +whose crudely extravagant performance of the hero of Schiller's Robbers +I recall my brother's imitative description--I never myself saw him; and +it simplifies his case, I think, for distracted history, that he must +have been quite an abominable actor. I appear meanwhile to have paid +William at Cambridge a visit of which I have quite oddly lost +remembrance--by reason doubtless of its but losing itself in like, +though more prolonged, occasions that were to follow at no great +distance and that await my further reference. The manner of his own +allusion to it more than suffices. + + The radiance of H.'s visit has not faded yet, and I come upon + gleams of it three or four times a day in my farings to and fro, + but it has never a bit diminished the lustre of far-off shining + Newport, all silver and blue, and of this heavenly group + below[5]--all being more or less failures, especially the two + outside ones. The more so as the above-mentioned H. could in no + wise satisfy my craving for knowledge of family and friends--he + didn't seem to have been on speaking terms with anyone for some + time past, and could tell me nothing of what they did, said or + thought, about any given subject. Never did I see a so-much + uninterested creature in the affairs of those about him. He is a + good soul, though, in his way, too; and less fatal than the light + fantastic and ever-sociable Wilky, who has wrought little but + disaster during his stay with me; breaking down my good resolutions + about food, keeping me from all intellectual exercise, working + havoc on my best hat by wearing it while dressing, while in his + nightgown, while washing his face, and all but going to bed with + it. He occupied my comfortable arm-chair all the morning in the + position represented in the fine plate that accompanies this + letter--but one more night though, and he will have gone, and no + thorn shall pierce the side of the serene and hallowed felicity of + expectation in which I shall revel till the time comes for + returning home, home to the hearth of my infancy and budding youth. + As Wilky has submitted to you a résumé of his future history for + the next few years, so will I of mine, hoping it will meet your + approval. Thus: one year Chemistry, then one term at home. Then one + year with Wyman, followed by a medical education. Then five or six + years with Agassiz; after which probably death, death, death from + inflation and plethora of knowledge. This you had better seriously + consider. So farewell till 8.45 some Sunday evening soon. Your + bold, your beautiful, your blossom! + +"I lead, as ever," he meanwhile elsewhere records, "the monotonous life +of the scholar, with few variations." + + We have very general talk at our table, Miss Upham declaiming + against the vulgarity of President Lincoln and complacently telling + of her own ignorance as to the way the wind blows or as to the + political events going on, and saying she thinks it a great waste + of time and of "no practical account" to study natural history. F. + J. Child impresses one as very witty and funny, but leaves it + impossible to remember what he says. I took a walk with the + Divinity student this splendid afternoon. He told me he had been + walking yesterday with one of the Jerseymen and they had discussed + the doctrine of a future state. The Jerseyman thought that if the + easy Unitarian doctrines were to become popular the morals of the + community would be most terribly relaxed. "Why," said the other, + "here you are in the very thick of Unitarianism; look about + you--people are about as good as anywhere." "Yes," replied the + Jerseyman, "I confess to you that that is what has _staggered_ me, + and I don't understand it yet!" + +I stretch over to the next year, 1863, for the sake of the following to +his sister. + + Chérie charmante, I am established in a cosy little room, with a + large recess with a window in it containing bed and washstand, and + separated from the main apartment by a rich green silk curtain and + a large gilt cornice. This gives the whole establishment a splendid + look. I found when I got back here that Miss Upham had raised her + price; so great efforts were made by two of us to form a club. But + too little enthusiasm was shown by any one else, and it fell + through. I then with that fine economical instinct which + distinguishes me resolved to take breakfast and tea, of my own + finding and making, in my room, and only pay Miss Upham for + dinners. Miss U. is now holding forth at Swampscott, so I asked to + see her sister Mrs. Wood and learn the cost of the 7 dinners a + week. She with true motherly instinct said that I should only make + a slop with my self-made meals in my room, and that she would + rather let me keep on for 4.50, seeing it was me. I said she must + first consult Miss Upham. She returned from Swampscott saying that + Miss U. had sworn she would rather pay _me_ a dollar a week than + have me go away. Ablaze with economic passion I cried + "Done!"--trying to make it appear that she had made me a formal + offer to that effect. But she then wouldn't admit it, and after + much recrimination we separated, it being agreed that I should come + for 4.50, _but tell no one_. So mind _you_ don't either. I now lay + my hand on my heart and confidently look to my Mother for that + glance of approbation which she must bestow. Have I not redeemed + any weaknesses of the past? Though part of my conception fails, yet + it was boldly planned and would have been a noble stroke. + + I have been pretty busy this week. I have a filial feeling toward + Wyman already. I work in a vast museum at a table all alone, + surrounded by skeletons of mastodons, crocodiles and the like, with + the walls hung about with monsters and horrors enough to freeze the + blood. But I have no fear, as most of them are tightly bottled up. + Occasionally solemn men and women come in to see the museum, and + sometimes timid little girls (reminding me of thee, my love, only + they are less fashionably dressed), who whisper "Is folks allowed + here?" It pains me to remark, however, that not all the little + girls are of this pleasing type, many being bold-faced jades. + Salter is back here, but morose. One or two new students and Prof. + Goodwin, who is very agreeable. Also William Everett, son of the + great Edward, very intelligent and a capital scholar, studying law. + He took honours at the English Cambridge. I send a photograph of + General Sickles for your and Wilky's amusement. It is a part of a + great anthropomorphological collection which I am going to make. So + take care of it, as well as of all the photographs you will find in + the table-drawer in my room. But isn't he a bully boy? Desecrate + the room as little as possible. If Wilky wants me as an extra nurse + send for me without hesitation. + + + + +VI + + +These returns to that first year or two at Newport contribute meanwhile +to filling out as nothing in the present pages has yet done for me that +vision of our father's unsurpassable patience and independence, in the +interest of the convictions he cherished and the expression of them, as +richly emphatic as it was scantly heeded, to which he daily gave +himself. We took his "writing" infinitely for granted--we had always so +taken it, and the sense of him, each long morning, at his study table +either with bent considering brow or with a half-spent and checked +intensity, a lapse backward in his chair and a musing lift of perhaps +troubled and baffled eyes, seems to me the most constant fact, the most +closely interwoven and underlying, among all our breaks and variations. +He applied himself there with a regularity and a piety as little subject +to sighing abatements or betrayed fears as if he had been working under +pressure for his bread and ours and the question were too urgent for his +daring to doubt. This play of his remarkable genius brought him in fact +throughout the long years no ghost of a reward in the form of pence, and +could proceed to publicity, as it repeatedly did, not only by the +copious and resigned sacrifice of such calculations, but by his meeting +in every single case all the expenses of the process. The untired +impulse to this devotion figured for us, comprehensively and familiarly, +as "Father's Ideas," of the force and truth of which in his own view we +were always so respectfully, even though at times so bewilderedly and +confoundedly persuaded, that we felt there was nothing in his exhibition +of life that they didn't or couldn't account for. They pervaded and +supported his existence, and very considerably our own; but what comes +back to me, to the production of a tenderness and an admiration scarce +to be expressed, is the fact that though we thus easily and naturally +lived with them and indeed, as to their more general effects, the colour +and savour they gave to his talk, breathed them in and enjoyed both +their quickening and their embarrassing presence, to say nothing of +their almost never less than amusing, we were left as free and +unattacked by them as if they had been so many droppings of gold and +silver coin on tables and chimney-pieces, to be "taken" or not according +to our sense and delicacy, that is our felt need and felt honour. The +combination in him of his different vivacities, his living interest in +his philosophy, his living interest in us and his living superiority to +all greed of authority, all overreaching or overemphasising "success", +at least in the heated short run, gave his character a magnanimity by +which it was impossible to us not to profit in all sorts of responsive +and in fact quite luxurious ways. It was a luxury, I to-day see, to have +all the benefit of his intellectual and spiritual, his religious, his +philosophic and his social passion, without ever feeling the pressure of +it to our direct irritation or discomfort. It would perhaps more truly +figure the relation in which he left us to these things to have likened +our opportunities rather to so many scattered glasses of the liquor of +faith, poured-out cups stood about for our either sipping or draining +down or leaving alone, in the measure of our thirst, our curiosity or +our strength of head and heart. If there was much leaving alone in +us--and I freely confess that, so far as the taking any of it all +"straight" went, my lips rarely adventured--this was doubtless because +we drank so largely at the source itself, the personally overflowing and +irrigating. What it then comes to, for my present vision, was that he +treated us most of all on the whole, as he in fact treated everything, +by his saving imagination--which set us, and the more as we were +naturally so inclined, the example of living as much as we might in some +such light of our own. If we had been asked in our younger time for +instance what _were_ our father's ideas, or to give an example of one +of them, I think we should promptly have answered (I should myself have +hastened to do so) that the principal was a devoted attachment to the +writings of Swedenborg; as to whom we were to remember betimes, with +intimate appreciation, that in reply to somebody's plea of not finding +him credible our parent had pronounced him, on the contrary, fairly +"insipid with veracity." We liked that partly, I think, because it +disposed in a manner, that is in favour of our detachment, of the great +Emanuel, but when I remember the part played, so close beside us, by +this latter's copious revelation, I feel almost ashamed for my own +incurious conduct. The part played consisted to a large extent in the +vast, even though incomplete, array of Swedenborg's works, the old faded +covers of which, anciently red, actually apt to be loose, and backed +with labels of impressive, though to my sense somewhat sinister London +imprint, Arcana Coelestia, Heaven and Hell and other such matters--they +all had, as from other days, a sort of black emphasis of dignity--ranged +themselves before us wherever, and however briefly, we disposed +ourselves, forming even for short journeys the base of our father's +travelling library and perhaps at some seasons therewith the accepted +strain on our mother's patience. I recall them as inveterately part of +our very luggage, requiring proportionate receptacles; I recall them as, +in a number considerable even when reduced, part of their proprietor's +own most particular dependence on his leaving home, during our more +agitated years, for those speculative visits to possible better places +(than whatever place of the moment) from which, as I have elsewhere +mentioned, he was apt to return under premature, under passionate +nostalgic, reaction. The Swedenborgs were promptly out again on their +customary shelves or sometimes more improvised perches, and it was +somehow not till we had assured ourselves of this that we felt _that_ +incident closed. + +Nothing could have exceeded at the same time our general sense--unless I +all discreetly again confine myself to the spare record of my own--for +our good fortune in never having been, even when most helpless, dragged +by any approach to a faint jerk over the threshold of the inhabited +temple. It stood there in the centre of our family life, into which its +doors of fine austere bronze opened straight; we passed and repassed +them when we didn't more consciously go round and behind; we took for +granted vague grand things within, but we never paused to peer or +penetrate, and none the less never had the so natural and wistful, +perhaps even the so properly resentful, "Oh I say, do look in a moment +for manners if for nothing else!" called after us as we went. Our +admirable mother sat on the steps at least and caught reverberations of +the inward mystic choir; but there were positive contemporary moments +when I well-nigh became aware, I think, of something graceless, +something not to the credit of my aspiring "intellectual life," or of +whatever small pretensions to seriousness I might have begun to nourish, +in the anything but heroic impunity of my inattention. William, later +on, made up for this not a little, redeeming so, to a large extent, as +he grew older, our filial honour in the matter of a decent sympathy, if +not of a noble curiosity: distinct to me even are certain echoes of +passages between our father and his eldest son that I assisted at, more +or less indirectly and wonderingly, as at intellectual "scenes," +gathering from them portents of my brother's independent range of +speculation, agitations of thought and announcements of difference, +which could but have represented, far beyond anything I should ever have +to show, a gained and to a considerable degree an enjoyed, confessedly +an interested, acquaintance with the paternal philosophic _penetralia_. +That particular impression refers indeed to hours which at the point I +have reached had not yet struck; but I am touched even now, after all +the years, with something exquisite in my half-grasped premonitory +vision of their belonging, these belated discussions that were but the +flowering of the first germs of such _other_, doubtless already such +opposed, perceptions and conclusions, to that order of thin consolations +and broken rewards which long figured as the most and the best of what +was to have been waited for on our companion's part without the escape +of a plaint. Yet I feel I may claim that our awareness of all that was +so serenely dispensed with--to call it missed would have been quite to +falsify the story and reflect meanly on the spirit--never in the least +brutally lapsed from admiration, however unuttered the sentiment itself, +after the fashion of raw youth; it is in fact quite distinct to me that, +had there been danger of this, there came to us from our mother's lips +at intervals long enough to emphasise the final sincerity and beauty a +fairly sacred reminder of that strain of almost solely self-nourished +equanimity, or in other words insuperable gaiety, in her life's comrade, +which she had never seen give way. This was the very gaiety that kept +through the years coming out for us--to the point of inviting free jokes +and other light familiarities from us at its expense. The happiest +household pleasantry invested our legend of our mother's fond habit of +address, "Your father's _ideas_, you know--!" which was always the +signal for our embracing her with the last responsive finality (and, for +the full pleasure of it, in his presence). Nothing indeed so much as his +presence encouraged the licence, as I may truly call it, of the +legend--that is of our treatment _en famille_ of any reference to the +attested public weight of his labours; which, I hasten to add, was much +too esoteric a ground of geniality, a dear old family joke, not to be +kept, for its value, to ourselves. But there comes back to me the +impression of his appearing on occasion quite moved to the exuberance of +cheer--as a form of refreshment he could draw on for a stronger and +brighter spurt, I mean--by such an apology for resonance of reputation +as our harmless, our of course utterly edgeless, profanity represented. +It might have been for him, by a happy stretch, a sign that the world +_did_ know--taking us for the moment, in our selfish young babble, as a +part of the noise of the world. Nothing, at the same time, could alter +the truth of his case, or can at least alter it to me now: he had, +intellectually, convictionally, passionally speaking, a selfless +detachment, a lack of what is called the eye for effect--always I mean +of the elated and interested order--which I can but marvel at in the +light of the rare aptitude of his means to his end, and in that of the +beauty of both, though the stamp was doubtless most vivid, for so +differing, so gropingly "esthetic" a mind as my own, in his unfailingly +personal and admirable style. We knew he had thoroughly his own +"unconventional" form, which, by the unspeakable law of youth, we +managed to feel the distinction of as not platitudinous even while we a +bit sneakingly felt it as quotable, on possible occasions, against our +presence of mind; the great thing was at all events that we couldn't +live with him without the sense that if his books resembled his talk and +his character--as we moreover felt they couldn't help almost violently +doing--they might want for this, that or the other which kept the +conventional true to its type, but could as little fail to flush with +the strong colour, colour so remarkably given and not taken, projected +and not reflected, colour of thought and faith and moral and +expressional atmosphere, as they could leave us without that felt +side-wind of their strong composition which made after all so much of +the air we breathed and was in the last resort the gage of something +perpetually fine going on. + +It is not too much to say, I think, that our religious education, so far +as we had any, consisted wholly in that loose yet enlightening +impression: I say so far as we had any in spite of my very definitely +holding that it would absolutely not have been possible to us, in the +measure of our sensibility, to breathe more the air of that reference to +an order of goodness and power greater than any this world by itself can +show which we understand as the religious spirit. Wondrous to me, as I +consider again, that my father's possession of this spirit, in a degree +that made it more deeply one with his life than I can conceive another +or a different case of its being, should have been unaccompanied with a +single one of the outward or formal, the theological, devotional, +ritual, or even implicitly pietistic signs by which we usually know it. +The fact of course was that his religion was nothing if not a +philosophy, extraordinarily complex and worked out and original, +intensely personal as an exposition, yet not only susceptible of +application, but clamorous for it, to the whole field of consciousness, +nature and society, history, knowledge, all human relations and +questions, every pulse of the process of our destiny. Of this vast and +interesting conception, as striking an expression of the religious +spirit surely as ever was put forth, his eldest son has given an +account[6]--so far as this was possible at once with brevity and with +full comprehension--that I should have been unable even to dream of +aspiring to, and in the masterly clearness and justice of which the +opportunity of the son blends with that of the critic, each character +acting in perfect felicity, after a fashion of which I know elsewhere no +such fine example. It conveys the whole sense of our father's +philosophic passion, which was theologic, by my direct impression of it, +to a degree fairly outdistancing all theologies; representing its +weight, reproducing its utterance, placing it in the eye of the world, +and making for it the strong and single claim it suggests, in a manner +that leaves nothing to be added to the subject. I am not concerned with +the intrinsic meaning of these things here, and should not be even had +they touched me more directly, or more converted me from what I can best +call, to my doubtless scant honour, a total otherness of contemplation, +during the years when my privilege was greatest and my situation for +inquiry and response amplest; but the active, not to say the obvious, +moral of them, in all our younger time, was that a life of the most +richly consequent flowed straight out of them, that in this life, the +most abundantly, and above all naturally, communicated _as_ life that it +was possible to imagine, we had an absolutely equal share, and that in +fine I was to live to go back with wonder and admiration to the quantity +of secreted thought in our daily medium, the quality of intellectual +passion, the force of cogitation and aspiration, as to the explanation +both of a thousand surface incoherences and a thousand felt felicities. +A religion that was so systematically a philosophy, a philosophy that +was so sweepingly a religion, being together, by their necessity, as I +have said, an intensity of relation to the actual, the consciousness so +determined was furnished forth in a way that met by itself the whole +question of the attitude of "worship" for instance; as I have attempted +a little to show that it met, with a beautiful good faith and the +easiest sufficiency, every other when such came up: those of education, +acquisition, material vindication, what is called success generally. In +the beauty of the whole thing, again, I lose myself--by which I mean in +the fact that we were all the while partaking, to our most intimate +benefit, of an influence of direction and enlargement attended with +scarce a single consecrated form and which would have made many of +these, had we been exposed to intrusion from them, absurdly irrelevant. +My father liked in our quite younger period to read us chapters from the +New Testament and the Old, and I hope we liked to listen to them--though +I recall their seeming dreary from their association with school +practice; but that was the sole approach to a challenge of our complete +freedom of inward, not less than our natural ingenuity of outward, +experience. No other explicit address to us in the name of the Divine +could, I see, have been made with any congruity--in face of the fact +that invitations issued in all the vividest social terms, terms of +living appreciation, of spiritual perception, of "human fellowship," to +use the expression that was perhaps oftenest on his lips and his pen +alike, were the very substance of the food supplied in the parental +nest. + +The freedom from pressure that we enjoyed in every direction, all those +immunities and exemptions that had been, in protracted childhood, +positively embarrassing to us, as I have already noted, before the +framework, ecclesiastical and mercantile, squared at us as with +reprobation from other households, where it seemed so to conduce to +their range of resource--these things consorted with our yet being +yearned over or prescribed for, by every implication, after a fashion +that was to make the social organisation of such invidious homes, under +my subsequent observation of life, affect me as so much bleak penury or +domestic desert where these things of the spirit, these genialities of +faith were concerned. Well do I remember, none the less, how I was +troubled all along just by this particular crookedness of our being so +extremely religious without having, as it were, anything in the least +classified or striking to show for it; so that the measure of +other-worldliness pervading our premises was rather a waste, though at +the same time oddly enough a congestion--projecting outwardly as it did +no single one of those usual symptoms of propriety any of which, +gathered at a venture from the general prospect, might by my sense have +served: I shouldn't have been particular, I thought, as to the +selection. Religion was a matter, by this imagination, to be worked off +much more than to be worked in, and I fear my real vague sentiment to +have been but that life would under the common equipment be somehow more +amusing; and this even though, as I don't forget, there was not an item +of the detail of devotional practice that we had been so much as allowed +to divine. I scarce know why I should have wanted anything more amusing, +as most of our coevals would have regarded it, than that we had from as +far back as I could remember indulged in no shade of an approach to +"keeping Sunday"; which is one of the reasons why to speak as if piety +could have borne for us any sense but the tender human, or to speak at +all of devotion, unction, initiation, even of the vaguest, into the +exercises or professions, as among our attributes, would falsify +altogether our mere fortune of a general liberty of living, of making +ourselves as brightly at home as might be, in that "spiritual world" +which we were in the habit of hearing as freely alluded to as we heard +the prospect of dinner or the call of the postman. The oddity of my own +case, as I make it out so far as it involved a confused criticism, was +that my small uneasy mind, bulging and tightening in the wrong, or at +least in unnatural and unexpected, places, like a little jacket ill cut +or ill sewn, attached its gaping view, as I have already more than +enough noted, to things and persons, objects and aspects, frivolities +all, I dare say I was willing to grant, compared with whatever +manifestations of the serious, these being by need, apparently, the +abstract; and that in fine I should have been thankful for a state of +faith, a conviction of the Divine, an interpretation of the +universe--anything one might have made bold to call it--which would have +supplied more features or appearances. Feeling myself "after" persons so +much more than after anything else--to recur to that side of my earliest +and most constant consciousness which might have been judged most +deplorable--I take it that I found the sphere of our more nobly +supposititious habitation too imperceptibly peopled; whereas the +religious life of every other family that could boast of any such (and +what family didn't boast?) affected my fancy as with a social and +material crowdedness. That faculty alone was affected--this I hasten to +add; no directness of experience ever stirred for me; it being the case +in the first place that I scarce remember, as to all our young time, the +crossing of our threshold by any faint shade of an ecclesiastical +presence, or the lightest encounter with any such elsewhere, and equally +of the essence, over and above, that the clerical race, the +pre-eminently restrictive tribe, as I apprehended them, couldn't very +well have agreed less with the general colour of my fondest vision: if +it be not indeed more correct to say that I was reduced to _supposing_ +they couldn't. We knew in truth nothing whatever about them, a fact +that, as I recover it, also flushes for me with its fine +awkwardness--the social scene in general handsomely bristling with them +to the rueful view I sketch, and they yet remaining for us, or at any +rate for myself, such creatures of pure hearsay that when late in my +teens, and in particular after my twentieth year, I began to see them +portrayed by George Eliot and Anthony Trollope the effect was a +disclosure of a new and romantic species. Strange beyond my present +power to account for it this anomaly that amid a civilisation replete +with "ministers"--for we at least knew the word--actively, +competitively, indeed as would often appear quite violently, +ministering, so little sense of a brush against approved examples was +ever to attend me that I had finally to draw my nearest sufficiency of +a true image from pictures of a social order largely alien to our own. +All of which, at the same time, I allow myself to add, didn't mitigate +the simple fact of my felt--my indeed so luxuriously permitted--detachment +of sensibility from everything, everything, that is, in the way of great +relations, as to which our father's emphasis was richest. _There_ was +the dim dissociation, there my comparative poverty, or call it even +frivolity, of instinct: I gaped imaginatively, as it were, to such a +different set of relations. I couldn't have framed stories that would +have succeeded in involving the least of the relations that seemed most +present to _him_; while those most present to myself, that is more +complementary to whatever it was I thought of as humanly most +interesting, attaching, inviting, were the ones his schemes of +importances seemed virtually to do without. Didn't I discern in this +from the first a kind of implied snub to the significance of mine?--so +that, in the blest absence of "pressure" which I just sought here +passingly to celebrate, I could brood to my heart's content on the so +conceivable alternative of a field of exposure crammed with those +objective appearances that my faculty seemed alone fitted to grasp. In +which there was ever the small torment of the fact--though I don't quite +see to-day why it should not have been of a purely pleasant +irritation--that what our parent most overflowed with was just the brave +contradiction or opposition between all his parts, a thing which made +for perfect variety, which he carried ever so easily and brightly, and +which would have put one no less in the wrong had one accused him of +knowing only the abstract (as I was so complacently and invidiously +disposed to name it) than if one had foolishly remarked on his living +and concluding without it. But I have already made clear his great mixed +range--which of course couldn't _not_ have been the sign of a mind +conceiving our very own breathing humanity in its every fibre the +absolute expression of a resident Divinity. No element of character, no +spontaneity of life, but instantly seized his attention and incurred his +greeting and his comment; which things could never possibly have been so +genially alert and expert--as I have, again, before this, +superabundantly recorded--if it had not fairly fed on active observation +and contact. He could answer one with the radiant when one challenged +him with the obscure, just as he could respond with the general when one +pulled at the particular; and I needn't repeat that this made for us, +during all our time, anything but a starved actuality. + +None the less, however, I remember it as savouring of loss to me--which +is my present point--that our so thoroughly informal scene of +susceptibility seemed to result from a positive excess of familiarity, +in his earlier past, with such types of the shepherd and the flock, to +say nothing of such forms of the pasture, as might have met in some +degree my appetite for the illustrational. This was one of the things +that made me often wish, as I remember, that I might have caught him +sooner or younger, less developed, as who should say; the matters that +appeared, however confusedly, to have started his development being by +this measure stranger and livelier than most of those that finally +crowned it, marked with their own colour as many of these doubtless +were. Three or four strongest pages in the fragment of autobiography +gathered by his eldest son into the sheaf of his Literary Remains +describe the state of soul undergone by him in England, in '44, just +previous to the hour at which Mrs. Chichester, a gentle lady of his +acquaintance there, brought to his knowledge, by a wondrous chance, the +possibility that the great Swedenborg, from whom she had drawn much +light, might have something to say to his case; so that under the +impression of his talk with her he posted at once up to London from the +neighbourhood of Windsor, where he was staying, possessed himself of +certain volumes of the writings of the eminent mystic (so-called I +mean, for to my father this description of him was grotesque), and +passed rapidly into that grateful infinitude of recognition and +application which he was to inhabit for the rest of his days. I saw him +move about there after the fashion of the oldest and easiest native, and +this had on some sides its own considerable effect, tinged even on +occasion with romance; yet I felt how the _real_ right thing for me +would have been the hurrying drama of the original rush, the interview +with the admirable Mrs. Chichester, the sweet legend of his and my +mother's charmed impression of whom had lingered with us--I admired her +very name, there seeming none other among us at all like it; and then +the return with the tokens of light, the splendid agitation as the light +deepened, and the laying in of that majestic array of volumes which were +to form afterward the purplest rim of his library's horizon and which I +was thus capable, for my poor part, of finding valuable, in default of +other values, as coloured properties in a fine fifth act. It was all a +play I hadn't "been to," consciously at least--that was the trouble; the +curtain had fallen while I was still tucked in my crib, and I assisted +but on a comparatively flat home scene at the echo of a great success. I +could still have done, for the worst, with a consciousness of Swedenborg +that should have been graced at least with Swedenborgians--aware as I +was of the existence of such enrolled disciples, ornaments of a church +of their own, yet known to us only as persons rather acidly mystified by +the inconvenience, as we even fancied them to feel it, of our father's +frankly independent and disturbingly irregular (all the more for its +being so expressive) connection with their inspirer. In the light or the +dusk of all this it was surely impossible to make out that he professed +any faint shade of that clerical character as to his having incurred +which we were, "in the world," to our bewilderment, not infrequently +questioned. Those of the enrolled order, in the matter of his and their +subject of study, might in their way too have raised to my regard a +fretted vault or opened a long-drawn aisle, but they were never at all, +in the language of a later day, to materialise to me; we neither on a +single occasion sat in their circle, nor did one of them, to the best of +my belief, ever stray, remonstrantly or invitingly, into ours; where +Swedenborg was read not in the least as the Bible scarce more than just +escaped being, but even as Shakespeare or Dickens or Macaulay was +content to be--which was without our arranging or subscribing for it. I +seem to distinguish that if a fugitive or a shy straggler from the +pitched camp did turn up it was under cover of night or of curiosity and +with much panting and putting off of the mantle, much nervous laughter +above all--this safe, however, to become on the shortest order amusement +easy and intimate. That _figured_ something in a slight way--as at least +I suppose I may infer from the faint adumbration I retain; but nothing +none the less much attenuated what I suppose I should have denounced as +the falsity of our position (meaning thereby of mine) had I been +constitutionally at all voluble for such flights. Constructionally we +had all the fun of licence, while the truth seemed really to be that fun +in the religious connection closely depended on bondage. The fun was of +course that I wanted in this line of diversion something of the coarser +strain; which came home to me in especial, to cut the matter short, when +I was present, as I yielded first and last to many an occasion for +being, at my father's reading out to my mother with an appreciation of +that modest grasp of somebody's attention, the brief illusion of +publicity, which has now for me the exquisite grace of the touching, +some series of pages from among his "papers" that were to show her how +he had this time at last done it. No touch of the beautiful or the +sacred in the disinterested life can have been absent from such +scenes--I find every such ideally there; and my memory rejoices above +all in their presentation of our mother at her very perfectest of +soundless and yet absolutely all-saving service and trust. To have +attempted any projection of our father's aspect without an immediate +reference to her sovereign care for him and for all of us as the so +widely open, yet so softly enclosing, lap of all his liberties and all +our securities, all our variety and withal our harmony, the harmony that +was for nine-tenths of it our sense of her gathered life in us, and of +her having no other--to have so proceeded has been but to defer by +instinct and by scruple to the kind of truth and of beauty before which +the direct report breaks down. I may well have stopped short with what +there would be to say, and yet what account of us all can pretend to +have gone the least bit deep without coming to our mother at every +penetration? We simply lived by her, in proportion as we lived +spontaneously, with an equanimity of confidence, an independence of +something that I should now find myself think of as decent compunction +if I didn't try to call it instead morbid delicacy, which left us free +for detachments of thought and flights of mind, experiments, so to +speak, on the assumption of our genius and our intrinsic interest, that +I look back upon as to a luxury of the unworried that is scarce of this +world. This was a support on which my father rested with the absolute +whole of his weight, and it was when I felt her listen with the whole of +her usefulness, which needed no other force, being as it was the whole +of her tenderness and amply sufficing by itself, that I understood most +what it was so to rest and so to act. When in the fulness of the years +she was to die, and he then to give us time, a few months, as with a +beatific depth of design, to marvel at the manner of his acceptance of +the stroke, a shown triumph of his philosophy, he simply one day +consciously ceased, quietly declined to continue, as an offered measure +of his loss of interest. Nothing--he had enabled himself to make +perfectly sure--was in the least worth while without her; this attested, +he passed away or went out, with entire simplicity, promptness and ease, +for the definite reason that his support had failed. His philosophy had +been not his support but his suspension, and he had never, I am sure, +felt so lifted as at that hour, which splendidly crowned his faith. It +showed us more intimately still what, in this world of cleft components, +one human being can yet be for another, and how a form of vital aid may +have operated for years with such perfection as fairly to have made +recognition seem at the time a sort of excess of reaction, an +interference or a pedantry. All which is imaged for me while I see our +mother listen, at her work, to the full music of the "papers." She could +do that by the mere force of her complete availability, and could do it +with a smoothness of surrender that was like an array of all the +perceptions. The only thing that I might well have questioned on these +occasions was the possibility on the part of a selflessness so +consistently and unabatedly active of its having anything ever left +_acutely_ to offer; to abide so unbrokenly in such inaptness for the +personal claim might have seemed to render difficult such a special show +of it as any particular pointedness of hospitality would propose to +represent. I dare say it was our sense of this that so often made us +all, when the explicit or the categoric, the impulse of acclamation, +flowered out in her, find our happiest play of filial humour in just +embracing her for the sound of it; than which I can imagine no more +expressive tribute to our constant depths of indebtedness. She lived in +ourselves so exclusively, with such a want of use for anything in her +consciousness that was not about us and for us, that I think we almost +contested her being separate enough to be proud of us--it was too like +our being proud of ourselves. We were delightedly derisive with her even +about pride in our father--it was the most domestic of our pastimes; for +what really could exceed the tenderness of our fastening on her that she +_was_ he, _was_ each of us, was our pride and our humility, our +possibility of _any_ relation, and the very canvas itself on which we +were floridly embroidered? How can I better express what she seemed to +do for her second son in especial than by saying that even with her +deepest delicacy of attention present I could still feel, while my +father read, why it was that I most of all seemed to wish we might have +been either much less religious or much more so? Was not the reason at +bottom that I so suffered, I might almost have put it, under the +impression of his style, which affected me as somehow too philosophic +for life, and at the same time too living, as I made out, for +thought?--since I must weirdly have opined that by so much as you were +individual, which meant personal, which meant monotonous, which meant +limitedly allusive and verbally repetitive, by so much you were not +literary or, so to speak, _largely_ figurative. My father had terms, +evidently strong, but in which I presumed to feel, with a shade of +irritation, a certain narrowness of exclusion as to images +otherwise--and oh, since it was a question of the pen, so +multitudinously!--entertainable. Variety, variety--_that_ sweet ideal, +_that_ straight contradiction of any dialectic, hummed for me all the +while as a direct, if perverse and most unedified, effect of the +parental concentration, with some of its consequent, though heedless, +dissociations. I heard it, felt it, saw it, both shamefully enjoyed and +shamefully denied it as form, though as form only; and I owed thus +supremely to my mother that I could, in whatever obscure levity, muddle +out some sense of my own preoccupation under the singular softness of +the connection that she kept for me, by the outward graces, with that +other and truly much intenser which I was so little framed to share. + +If meanwhile my father's tone, so far as that went, was to remain the +same, save for a natural growth of assurance, and thereby of amplitude, +all his life, I find it already, and his very voice as we were to know +them, in a letter to R. W. Emerson of 1842, without more specific date, +after the loose fashion of those days, but from 2 Washington Place, New +York, the second house in the row between the University building and +Broadway, as he was next to note to his correspondent in expressing the +hope of a visit from him. (It was the house in which, the following +year, his second son was born.) + + I came home to-night from my lecture a little disposed to think, + from the smart reduction of my audience, that I had about as well + not have prepared my course, especially as I get no tidings of + having interested one of the sort (the religious) for whom they are + wholly designed. When I next see you I want a half-hour's support + from you under this discouragement, and the purpose of this letter + is to secure it. When I am _with_ you I get no help from you--of + the sort you can give me, I feel sure; though you must know what I + want before I listen to you next. Usually the temper you show, of + perfect repose and candour, free from all sickening partisanship + and full of magnanimous tenderness for every creature, makes me + forget my wants in your lavish plenty. But I know you have the same + as I have, deep down in your breast, and it is by these I would + fain know you. I am led, quite without any conscious wilfulness + either, to seek the _laws_ of these appearances that swim round us + in God's great museum, to get hold of some central facts which may + make all other facts properly circumferential and orderly; and you + continually dishearten me by your apparent indifference to such law + and such facts, by the dishonour you seem to cast on our + intelligence as if it were what stands in our way. Now my + conviction is that my intelligence is the necessary digestive + apparatus for my life; that there is nihil in vita--worth anything, + that is--quod non prius in intellectu. Now is it not so in truth + with you? Can you not report your life to me by some intellectual + symbol which my intellect appreciates? Do you not know your + activity? But fudge--I cannot say what I want to say, what aches to + say itself in me, and so I'll hold up till I see you, and try once + more to get some better furtherance by my own effort. Here I am + these thirty-one years in life, ignorant in all outward science, + but having patient habits of meditation which never know disgust or + weariness, and feeling a force of impulsive love toward all + humanity which will not let me rest wholly mute, a force which + grows against all resistance that I can muster against it. What + shall I do? Shall I get me a little nook in the country and + communicate with my _living_ kind--not my talking kind--by life + only; a word perhaps of _that_ communication, a fit word once a + year? Or shall I follow some commoner method--learn science and + bring myself first into man's respect, that I may thus the better + speak to him? I confess this last theory seems rank with + earthliness--to belong to days forever past. + +His appeal to Emerson at this hour was, as he elsewhere then puts it, to +the "invisible" man in the matter, who affected him as somewhere behind +the more or less immediately visible, the beautifully but mystifyingly +audible, the Emerson of honeyed lectures and addresses, suggestive and +inspiring as that one might be, and who might, as we say to-day, have +something, something more at least, for him. "I will tell him that I do +not value his substantive discoveries, whatever they may be, perhaps +half so largely as he values them, but that I chiefly cherish that erect +attitude of mind in him which in God's universe undauntedly seeks the +worthiest tidings of God, and calmly defies every mumbling phantom which +would challenge its freedom. Should his zeal for realities and contempt +of vulgar shows abide the ordeal I have thus contrived for them I shall +gladly await his visit to me. So much at least is what I have been +saying to myself. Now that I have told it to you also you have become a +sort of confidant between me and myself, and so bound to promote harmony +there." The correspondence expands, however, beyond my space for +reporting of it; I but pick out a few passages. + + I am cheered by the coming of Carlyle's new book, which Greeley + announces, and shall hasten off for it as soon as I have + leisure.[7] The title is provokingly enigmatical, but thought + enough there will be in it no doubt, whatever the name; thought + heaped up to topheaviness and inevitable lopsidedness, but more + interesting to me than comes from any other quarter of + Europe--interesting for the man's sake whom it shows. According to + my notion he is the very best interpreter of a spiritual philosophy + that could be devised for _this age_, the age of transition and + conflict; and what renders him so is his natural + birth-and-education-place. Just to think of a Scotchman with a + heart widened to German spiritualities! To have overcome his + educational bigotries far enough to listen to the new ideas, this + by itself was wonderful; and then to give all his native shrewdness + and humour to the service of making them _tell_ to the minds of his + people--what more fortunate thing for the time could there be? You + don't look upon Calvinism as a fact at all; wherein you are to my + mind philosophically infirm--impaired in your universality. I can + see in Carlyle the advantage his familiarity with it gives him over + you with a general audience. What is highest in him is built upon + that lowest. At least so I read; I believe Jonathan Edwards + redivivus in true blue would, after an honest study of the + philosophy that has grown up since his day, make the best possible + reconciler and critic of this philosophy--far better than Schelling + redivivus. + +In the autumn of 1843 the "nook in the country" above alluded to had +become a question renounced, so far at least as the American country +was concerned, and never again afterwards flushed into life. "I think it +probable I shall winter in some mild English climate, Devonshire +perhaps, and go on with my studies as at home. I shall miss the stimulus +of your candid and generous society, and I confess we don't like the +aspect of the journey; but one's destiny puts on many garments as it +goes shaping itself in secret--so let us not cling to any particular +fashion." Very marked, and above all very characteristic of my father, +in this interesting relation, which I may but so imperfectly illustrate, +his constant appeal to his so inspired, yet so uninflamed, so +irreducible and, as it were, inapplicable, friend for intellectual and, +as he would have said, spiritual help of the immediate and adjustable, +the more concretely vital, kind, the kind translatable into terms of the +real, the particular human terms of action and passion. "Oh you man +without a _handle_! Shall one never be able to help himself out of you, +according to his needs, and be dependent only upon your fitful +tippings-up?"--a remarkably felicitous expression, as it strikes me, of +that difficulty often felt by the passionately-living of the earlier +time, as they may be called, to draw down their noble philosopher's +great overhanging heaven of universal and ethereal answers to the plane +of their comparatively terrestrial and personal questions; the note of +the answers and their great anticipatory spirit being somehow that they +seemed to anticipate everything but the unaccommodating individual case. +My father, on his side, bristled with "handles"--there could scarce be a +better general account of him--and tipped himself up for you almost +before you could take hold of one; of which truth, for that matter, this +same letter happens to give, even if just trivially, the hint. "Can I do +anything for you in the way of taking parcels, no matter how large or +expensive?--or for any of your friends? If you see Margaret Fuller ask +her to give me some service to render her abroad, the dear noble woman: +it seems a real hardship to be leaving the country now that I have just +come to talk with her." Emerson, I should add, did offer personally so +solid a handle that my father appears to have taken from him two +introductions to be made use of in London, one to Carlyle and the other +to John Sterling, the result of which shortly afterwards was as vivid +and as deeply appropriated an impression of each eminent character as it +was probably to be given either of them ever to have made. The +impression of Carlyle was recorded but long subsequently, I note, and is +included in William's gathering-in of our father's Literary Remains +(1885); and of the acquaintance with Sterling no reflection remains but +a passage in a letter, under date of Ventnor and of the winter of 1843, +from the latter to his biographer to be; Carlyle having already +mentioned in the Life that "Two American gentlemen, acquaintances also +of mine, had been recommended to him, by Emerson most likely"; and that +"one morning Sterling appeared here with a strenuous proposal that we +should come to Knightsbridge and dine with him and them.... And +accordingly we went," it goes on. "I remember it as one of the saddest +dinners; though Sterling talked copiously, and our friends, Theodore +Parker one of them, were pleasant and distinguished men." My father, +with Theodore Parker his friend and the date fitting, would quite seem +to have been one of the pair were it not that "our conversation was +waste and logical, I forget quite on what, not joyful and harmoniously +effusive." It is _that_ that doesn't fit with any real participation of +his--nothing could well do less so; unless the occasion had but too +closely conformed to the biographer's darkly and richly prophetic view +of it as tragic and ominous, "sad as if one had been dining in a ruin, +in the crypt of a mausoleum"--all this "painfully apparent through the +bright mask (Sterling) had bound himself to wear." The end of his life +was then, to Carlyle's view, in sight; but his own note, in the Isle of +Wight, on "Mr. James, your New-England friend," was genial enough--"I +saw him several times and liked him. They went on the 24th of last month +back to London--or so purposed," he adds, "because there is no pavement +here for him to walk on. I want to know where he is, and thought I +should be able to learn from you. I gave him a note for Mill, who may +perhaps have seen him." + +My main interest in which is, I confess, for the far-off germ of the odd +legend, destined much to grow later on, that--already the nucleus of a +household--we were New England products; which I think my parents could +then have even so much as seemed only to eyes naturally unaware of our +American "sectional" differences. My father, when considerably past his +thirtieth year, if I am not mistaken, had travelled "East," within our +borders, but once in his life--on the occasion of his spending two or +three months in Boston as a very young man; there connecting itself with +this for me a reminiscence so bedimmed at once and so suggestive as now +almost to torment me. It must have been in '67 or '68 that, giving him +my arm, of a slippery Boston day, up or down one of the steep streets +that used to mount, from behind, and as slightly sullen with the effort, +to Beacon Hill, and between which my now relaxed memory rather fails to +discriminate, I was arrested by his pointing out to me opposite us a +house in which he had for a while had rooms, long before and quite in +his early time. I but recall that we were more or less skirting the base +of an ancient town-reservoir, the seat of the water-supply as then +constituted, a monument rugged and dark, massively granitic, perched all +perversely, as it seemed to look, on the precipitous slope, and +which--at least as I see it through the years--struck quite handsomely +the Babylonian note. I at any rate mix up with this frowning object--it +had somehow a sinister presence and suggestion--my companion's mention +there in front of it that he had anciently taken refuge under its shadow +from certain effects of a misunderstanding, if indeed not of a sharp +rupture, for the time, with a highly generous but also on occasion +strongly protesting parent at Albany, a parent displeased with some +course he had taken or had declined to take (there was a tradition among +us that he had been for a period quite definitely "wild"), and relief +from further discussion with whom he had sought, and had more or less +found, on that spot. It was an age in which a flight from Albany to +Boston--there being then no Boston and Albany Railroad--counted as a far +flight; though it wasn't to occur to me either then or afterwards that +the ground of this manoeuvre had been any plotted wildness in the +Puritan air. What was clear at the moment, and what he remarked upon, +was that the street-scene about us showed for all the lapse of time no +scrap of change, and I remember well for myself how my first impression +of Boston gave it to me under certain aspects as more expressive than I +had supposed an American city could be of a seated and rooted social +order, an order not complex but sensibly fixed--gathered in or folded +back to intensity upon itself; and this, again and again, when the +compass of the posture, its narrow field, might almost have made the +fold excruciating. It had given however no sign of excruciation--that +itself had been part of the Puritan stoicism; which perhaps was exactly +why the local look, recognised to the point I speak of by the visitor, +was so contained and yet comparatively so full: full, very nearly, I +originally fancied, after the appraisable fashion of some composed +town-face in one of Balzac's _villes de province_. All of which, I +grant, is much to say for the occasion of that dropped confidence, on +the sloshy hillside, to which I allude--and part of the action of which +was that it had never been dropped before; this circumstance somehow a +peculiar source of interest, an interest I the more regret to have lost +my grasp of as it must have been sharp, or in other words founded, to +account for the long reverberation here noted. I had still--as I was +indeed to keep having through life--the good fortune that elements of +interest easily sprang, to my incurable sense, from any ghost of a drama +at all _presented_; though I of course can't in the least pretend to +generalise on what may or may not have constituted living presentation. +This felicity occurred, I make out, quite incalculably, just as it could +or would; the effect depended on some particular touch of the spring, +which was set in motion the instant the touch happened to be right. My +father's was always right, to my receptive mind; as receptive, that is, +of any scrap of enacted story or evoked picture as it was closed to the +dry or the abstract proposition; so that I blush the deeper at not being +able, in honour of his reference, to make the latter more vividly +flower--I still so feel that I quite thrilled with it and with the +standing background at the moment lighted by it. There were things in +it, and other persons, old actualities, old meanings and furnishings of +the other old Boston, as I by that time couldn't but appraise it; and +the really archaic, the overhung and sombre and secret-keeping street, +"socially" disconnected, socially mysterious--as I like at any rate to +remember it--was there to testify (testify to the ancient time of +tension, expansion, sore meditation or whatever) by its positively +conscious gloom. + +The moral of this, I fear, amounts to little more than that, putting +aside the substance of his anecdote, my father had not set foot in New +England till toward his thirty-fifth year, and my mother was not to do +so till later still; circumstances not in the least preventing the birth +of what I have called the falsifying legend. The allusion to the walking +at Ventnor touches his inability to deal with rural roads and paths, +then rougher things than now; by reason of an accident received in early +youth and which had so lamed him for life that he could circulate to any +convenience but on even surfaces and was indeed mainly reduced to +driving--it had made him for all his earlier time an excellent whip. His +constitution had been happily of the strongest, but as I look back I see +his grave disability, which it took a strong constitution to carry, +mainly in the light of a consistency of patience that we were never to +have heard broken. The two acceptances melt together for me--that of the +limits of his material action, his doing and enjoying, set so narrowly, +and that of his scant allowance of "public recognition," or of the +support and encouragement that spring, and spring so naturally and +rightly, when the relation of effect to cause is close and straight, +from any at all attested and glad understanding of a formula, as we say +nowadays a message, richly and sincerely urged. Too many such +reflections, however, beset me here by the way. My letters jump +meanwhile to the summer of 1849, when I find in another of them, +addressed to Emerson, a passage as characteristic as possible of one of +the writer's liveliest and, as I confess it was ever to seem to me, most +genially perverse idiosyncrasies, his distinctly low opinion of "mere" +literary men. This note his letters in general again and again +strike--not a little to the diversion of those who were to have observed +and remembered his constant charmed subjection, in the matter of +practice, to the masters, even quite the lighter, in the depreciated +group. His sensibility to their spell was in fact so marked that it +became from an early time a household game with us to detect him in +evasive tears over their pages, when these were either real or romantic +enough, and to publish without mercy that he had so been caught. There +was a period in particular during which this pastime enjoyed, indeed +quite revelled in, the form of our dragging to the light, with every +circumstance of derision, the fact of his clandestine and deeply moved +perusal of G. P. R. James, our nominal congener, at that time ceasing to +be prescribed. It was his plea, in the "'fifties," that this romancer +had been his idol in the 'forties and the 'thirties, and that under +renewed, even if but experimental, surrender the associations of youth +flocked back to life--so that _we_, profane about the unduly displaced +master, were deplorably the poorer. He loved the novel in fine, he +followed its constant course in the Revue with a beautiful +inconsequence, and the more it was literature loved it the better, which +was just how he loved, as well, criticism and journalism; the particular +instance, with him, once he was in relation with it, quite sufficiently +taking care of the invidiously-viewed type--as this was indeed viewed +but a _priori_ and at its most general--and making him ever so +cheerfully forget to be consistent. Work was verily cut out for the +particular instance, as against the type, in an air and at a time +favouring so, again and again, and up and down the "literary world," a +dire mediocrity. It was the distillers of _that_ thinness, the "mere" +ones, that must have been present to him when he wrote to Emerson in +1849: "There is nothing I dread so much as literary men, especially +_our_ literary men; catch them out of the range of mere personal gossip +about authors and books and ask them for honest sympathy in your +sentiment, or for an honest repugnancy of it, and you will find the +company of stage-drivers sweeter and more comforting to your soul. In +truth the questions which are beginning to fill the best books, and will +fill the best for a long time to come, are not related to what we have +called literature, and are as well judged--I think better--by those +whom books have at all events not belittled. When a man _lives_, that is +lives enough, he can scarcely write. He cannot read, I apprehend, at +all. All his writing will be algebraicised, put into the form of sonnets +and proverbs, and the community will feel itself insulted to be offered +a big bunch of pages, as though it were stupid and wanted tedious +drilling like a child." When I begin to quote my father, however, I hang +over him perhaps even too historically; for his expression leads me on +and on so by its force and felicity that I scarce know where to stop. +"The fact is that I am afraid I am in a very bad way, for I cannot +heartily engage in any topic in which I shall appear to advantage"--the +question having been, _de part et d'autre_, of possible courses of +lectures for which the appetite of New York and Boston already announced +itself as of the largest. And it still more beguiles me that "my wife +and I are obliged--so numerous has waxed our family--to enlarge our +house in town and get a country house for the summer." Here came in that +earnest dream of the solutional "Europe" with which I have elsewhere +noted that my very youngest sensibility was fed. "These things look +expensive and temporary to us, besides being an additional care; and so, +considering with much pity our four stout boys, who have no play-room +within doors and import shocking bad manners from the street, we gravely +ponder whether it wouldn't be better to go abroad for a few years with +them, allowing them to absorb French and German and get such a sensuous +education as they can't get here." + +In 1850, however, we had still not departed for Europe--as we were not +to do for several years yet; one advantage of which was that my father +remained for the time in intercourse by letter with his English friend +Dr. J. J. Garth Wilkinson, first known during my parents' considerable +stay in London of several years before, 1843-44; and whose admirable +style of expression, in its way as personal and as vivid as Henry +James's own, with an added and doubtless more perceptibly full-blooded +massiveness, is so attested by his earlier writings,[8] to say nothing +of the rich collection of his letters (1845-55) lately before +me--notably by The Human Body and its Connection with Man, dedicated in +1851 to my father--that I wonder at the absence of such a master, in +more than one happy specimen, from the common educational exhibitions of +English prose. Dr. Wilkinson was a friend of Emerson's as well, which +leads the latter's New York correspondent to cite to him in February +1850 a highly characteristic passage from one of the London +communications. + + Carlyle came up here (presumably to Hampstead) on Monday to see + Neuberg, and spoke much of you with very kind recollections. He + remembered your metaphysics also and asked with terrible solicitude + whether they yet persevered. I couldn't absolutely say that they + did not, though I did my best to stammer out something about the + great social movement. He was suffering dreadfully from _malaise_ + and indigestion and gave with his usual force his usual putrid + theory of the universe. All great men were most miserable; the day + on which any man could say he was not miserable, that day he was a + scoundrel; God was a Divine Sorrow; to no moment could he, Carlyle, + ever say Linger, but only Goodbye and never let me see your face + again. And all this interpolated with convulsive laughter, showing + that joy would come into him were it even by the path of hysteria + and disease. To me he is an unprofitable man, and though he gave me + the most kind invitation I have too much respect for my stomach to + go much into his company. Where hope is feeble genius and the human + voice are on the way to die. By the next boat I will endeavour to + send you over my thoughts on his recent pamphlet, the first of a + series of Latter-Day-Tracts. He is very rapidly falling out with + all his present admirers, for which I like them all the better; and + indeed is driving fast toward social views--only his is to be a + compulsory, not an attractive, socialism. + +After quoting which my father comments: "Never was anything more false +than this worship of sorrow by Carlyle; he has picked it up out of past +history and spouts it for mere display, as a virtuoso delights in the +style of his grandfather. It is the merest babble in him, as everyone +who has ever talked an hour with him will acquit him of the least grain +of humility. A man who has once uttered a cry of despair should ever +after clothe himself in sackcloth and ashes." + +The writer was to have meanwhile, before our migration of 1855, a +considerable lecturing activity. A confused, yet perfectly recoverable +recollection, on my own part, of these years, connects itself with our +knowledge that our father engaged in that practice and that he went +forth for the purpose, with my mother always in earnest and confident +even though slightly fluttered attendance, at about the hour of our +upward procession to bed; which fact lent to the proceeding--that is to +_his_--a strange air of unnatural riot, quite as of torch-lighted and +wind-blown dissipation. We went to plays and to ballets, and they had +comparatively speaking no mystery; but at no lecture had we ever been +present, and these put on for my fancy at least a richer light and +shade, very much as if we ourselves had been on the performing side of +the curtain, or the wonder of admiring (in our mother's person) and of +being admired (in our father's) had been rolled for us into a single +glory. This glory moreover was not menaced, but only made more of a +thrill by the prime admirer's anxiety, always displayed at the last, as +to whether they were not starting without the feature of features, the +_corpus delicti_ or manuscript itself; which it was legendary with us +that the admired had been known to drive back for in an abashed flurry +at the moment we were launched in dreams of him as in full, though +mysterious, operation. I can see him now, from the parlour window, at +the door of the carriage and under the gusty street-lamp, produce it +from a coat-tail pocket and shake it, for her ideal comfort, in the +face of his companion. The following, to Emerson, I surmise, is of some +early date in the autumn of '52. + + I give three lectures in Boston at the Masonic Temple; the first + and second on Nov. 5th and 8th respectively. I should be greatly + appalled in some respects, but still charmed, to have you for an + auditor, seeing thus a hundred empty seats obliterated; but, I beg + of you, don't let any engagement suffer by such kindness to me. + Looking over the lectures again they horrify me with their + loud-mouthed imbecility!--but I hope they may fall upon less + hardened ears in some cases. I am sure that the thought which is in + them, or rather seems to me to struggle to be in them, is worthy of + all men's rapturous homage, and I will trust that a glimpse of it + may somehow befall my patient auditory. The fact is that a vital + truth can never be transferred from one mind to another, because + life alone appreciates it. The most one can do for another is to + plant some rude formula of such truths in his memory, leaving his + own spiritual chemistry to set free the germ whenever the demands + of his life exact it. The reason why the gods seem so powerless to + the sensuous understanding, and suffer themselves to be so long + defamed by our crazy theologies, is that they are life, and can + consequently be revealed only to life. But life is simply the + passage of idea into action; and our crazy theologies forbid ideas + to come into action any further than our existing institutions + warrant. Hence man leads a mere limping life, and the poor gods who + are dependent upon his manliness for their true revelation and for + their real knowledge, are doomed to remain forever unknown, and + even denied by such solemn pedants as Mr. Atkinson and Miss + Martineau. However, I shall try to convert _myself_ at least into + an army of Goths and Huns, to overcome and destroy our existing + sanctities, that the supernal splendours may at length become + credible and even visible. Good-bye till we meet in Boston, and + cultivate your goodnature according to my extensive needs. + +I bridge the interval before our migration of 1855 exactly for the sake +of certain further passages addressed to the same correspondent, from +London, in the following year. The letter is a long one and highly +significant of the writer's familiar frankness, but I must keep down my +examples--the first of which glances at his general sense of the men he +mainly met. + + They are all of them depressed or embittered by the public + embarrassments that beset them; deflected, distorted, somehow + despoiled of their rich individual manliness by the necessity of + providing for these imbecile old inheritances of church and state. + Carlyle is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own + grease, only infinitely _more_ unreconciled to the blest Providence + which guides human affairs. He names God frequently and alludes to + the highest things as if they were realities, but all only as for a + picturesque effect, so completely does he seem to regard them as + habitually circumvented and set at naught by the politicians. I + took our friend M. to see him, and he came away greatly distressed + and désillusionné, Carlyle having taken the utmost pains to deny + and descry and deride the idea of his having done the least good to + anybody, and to profess indeed the utmost contempt for everybody + who thought he had, and poor M. being intent on giving him a + plenary assurance of this fact in his own case.... Arthur Helps + seems an amiable kindly little man with friendly offers, but I told + him I had no intention to bore him, and would at most apply to him + when I might want a good hatter or bootmaker. He fancied a + little--at least I thought this was the case--that I was going to + make a book, and might be indiscreet enough to put him in!.... ---- + disappoints me, he is so eaten up with the "spirits" and all that. + His imagination is so vast as to dwarf all the higher faculties, + and his sympathy as narrow as Dr. Cheever's or Brownson's. No + reasonable man, it is true, likes the clergy or the philosophers, + but ----'s dislike of them seems as envenomed as that between rival + tradesmen or rival beauties. One can't endure the nonsense they + talk, to be sure, but when one considers the dear human meaning and + effort struggling at the bottom of it all one can feel still less + any personal separation from the men themselves. ----'s sarcasm is + of the fiercest, and on the whole he is only now at last sowing his + intellectual wild oats--he will grow more genial in good time. This + is it: I think he is but now finding his youth! That which we on + our side of the water find so early and exhaust so prodigally he + has found thus much later--I mean an emancipation from the shackles + of custom; and the kicking up of his heels consequently is + proportionate to his greater maturity of muscle. Mrs. ---- is a + dear little goose of a thing, who fancies the divine providence in + closer league with herself than with others, giving her intimations + of events about to happen and endowing her with peculiar + perspicacity in the intuition of remedies for disease; and ----, + the great brawny fellow, sits by and says never a word in abatement + of this enormous domestic inflation, though the visitor feels + himself crowded by it into the most inconsiderable of corners. A + sweet, loving, innocent woman like Mrs. ---- oughtn't to grow + egotistical in the company of a truly wise man, and this + accordingly is another quarrel I have with ----. In short I am + getting to the time of life when one values one's friends for what + they are more than for what they do. I am just as much impressed as + ever by his enormous power, but the goodness out of which it is + born and the wisdom by which it is nurtured and bred are things I + don't so much see. + +The correspondence grew more interspaced, and with the year 1861 and the +following, when we were at home again, became a matter of the occasional +note. I have before me a series of beautiful examples of Emerson's share +in it--during the earlier time copious enough; but these belong +essentially to another case. I am all but limited, for any further show +of the interesting relation than I have already given, to reproducing a +few lines from Emerson's Diary, passages unpublished at the moment I +write, and the first of them of April 1850. "I have made no note of +these long weary absences at New York and Philadelphia. I am a bad +traveller, and the hotels are mortifications to all sense of well-being +in me. The people who fill them oppress me with their excessive +virility, and would soon become intolerable if it were not for a few +friends who, like women, tempered the acrid mass. Henry James was true +comfort--wise, gentle, polished, with heroic manners and a serenity like +the sun." The hotels of those days may well have been an +ordeal--distinct to me still, from no few childish glimpses of their +bareness of ease and rudeness of _acceuil_; yet that our justly +fastidious friend was not wholly left to their mercy seems signified by +my not less vivid remembrance of his staying with us on occasion in New +York; some occasion, or occasions, I infer, of his coming on to lecture +there. Do I roll several occasions into one, or amplify one beyond +reason?--this last being ever, I allow, the waiting pitfall of a +chronicler too memory-ridden. I "visualise" at any rate the winter +firelight of our back-parlour at dusk and the great Emerson--I knew he +was great, greater than any of our friends--sitting in it between my +parents, before the lamps had been lighted, as a visitor consentingly +housed only could have done, and affecting me the more as an apparition +sinuously and, I held, elegantly slim, benevolently aquiline, and +commanding a tone alien, beautifully alien, to any we heard roundabout, +that he bent this benignity upon me by an invitation to draw nearer to +him, off the hearth-rug, and know myself as never yet, as I was not +indeed to know myself again for years, in touch with the wonder of +Boston. The wonder of Boston was above all just then and there for me +in the sweetness of the voice and the finish of the speech--this latter +through a sort of attenuated emphasis which at the same time made sounds +more important, more interesting in themselves, than by any revelation +yet vouchsafed us. Was not this my first glimmer of a sense that the +human tone _could_, in that independent and original way, be +interesting? and didn't it for a long time keep me going, however +unwittingly, in that faith, carrying me in fact more or less on to my +day of recognising that it took much more than simply not being of New +York to produce the music I had listened to. The point was that, however +that might be, I had had given me there in the firelight an absolutely +abiding measure. If I didn't know from that hour forth quite all it was +to _not_ utter sounds worth mentioning, I make out that I had at least +the opposite knowledge. And all by the operation of those signal +moments--the truth of which I find somehow reflected in the fact of my +afterwards knowing one of our household rooms for the time--it must have +been our only guest-chamber--as "Mr. Emerson's room." The evening +firelight played so long for me upon the door--that is to the length +probably of three days, the length of a child's impression. But I must +not let this carry me beyond the second note of the Diary, this time of +May 1852. "'I do not wish this or that thing my fortune will procure, I +wish the great fortune,' said Henry James, and said it in the noblest +sense." The report has a beauty to me without my quite understanding it; +the union of the two voices in it signifies quite enough. The last very +relevant echo of my father's by itself, in the connection, I hasten now +to find in a communication that must have been of the summer of 1869, +when Dr. Wilkinson paid his only visit to America--this apparently of +the briefest. The letter to Emerson from Cambridge notes that his +appearance there had been delayed. + + He may come to-morrow possibly: if in the morning I will telegraph + you; if in the evening I shall try to keep him over Monday that you + may meet him here at dinner on that day. But I fear this bothersome + Sabbath and its motionless cars may play us a trick. I shall hope + for a generous Monday all the same, and if that hope is baulked + shall owe Sunday a black-eye--and will pay my debt on the first + suitable occasion, I warrant you. What an awkward story (the letter + continues) The Nation to-day tells of Charles Sumner! Charles's + burly voice has always had for me a dreadfully hollow sound, as if + it came from a great copper vat, and I have loved him but with fear + and trembling accordingly. Is he _really_, like all American + politicians, tricky, or is The Nation--so careful about facts + ordinarily--only slanderous?... Carlyle nowadays is a palpable + nuisance. If he holds to his present mouthing ways to the end he + will find no showman là-bas to match him, for I hold Barnum a much + more innocent personage. I shouldn't wonder if Barnum grew + regenerate in some far off day by mere force of his democracy. But + Carlyle's intellectual pride is so stupid that one can hardly + imagine anything able to cope with it. + +The following, in so different a key, is of some seven years earlier +date--apparently '62; but I have let it stand over, for reasons, that it +may figure here as the last of the communications addressed to Emerson +that I shall cite. Written at an hotel, the Tremont House, in Boston, it +marks his having come up from Newport for attendance at some meeting of +a dining-club, highly distinguished in composition, as it still happily +remains, of which he was a member--though but so occasionally present +that this circumstance perhaps explains a little the even more than +usual vivacity of his impression. Not indeed, I may add, that mustered +reasons or apologies were ever much called for in any case of the play +of that really prime note of his spontaneity. + + I go to Concord in the morning, but shall have barely time to see + you there, even if I do as much as that; so that I can't forbear to + say to you now the word I wanted as to my impression of yesterday + about Hawthorne and Ellery Channing. Hawthorne isn't to me a + prepossessing figure, nor apparently at all an _enjoying_ person in + any way: he has all the while the look--or would have to the + unknowing--of a rogue who suddenly finds himself in a company of + detectives. But in spite of his rusticity I felt a sympathy for + him fairly amounting to anguish, and couldn't take my eyes off him + all dinner, nor my rapt attention: as that indecisive little Dr. + Hedge[9] found, I am afraid, to his cost, for I hardly heard a word + of what he kept on saying to me, and resented his maliciously + putting his artificial person between me and the profitable object + of study. (It isn't however that I now feel any ill-will to him--I + could recommend anyone but myself to go and hear him preach. The + thing was that Hawthorne seemed to me to possess human substance + and not to have dissipated it all away like that culturally + debauched ----, or even like good inoffensive comforting + Longfellow.) John Forbes and you kept up the human balance at the + other end of the table, but my region was a desert with H. for its + only oasis. It was so pathetic to see him, contented sprawling + Concord owl that he was and always has been, brought blindfold into + that brilliant daylight and expected to wink and be lively, like + some dapper Tommy Titmouse. I felt him bury his eyes in his plate + and eat with such voracity that no one should dare to speak to him. + My heart broke for him as his attenuated left-hand neighbour kept + putting forth _his_ long antennae to stroke his face and try + whether his eyes were open. It was heavenly to see him persist in + ignoring the spectral smiles--in eating his dinner and doing + nothing but that, and then go home to his Concord den to fall upon + his knees and ask his heavenly Father why it was that an owl + couldn't remain an owl and not be forced into the diversions of a + canary. I have no doubt that all the tenderest angels saw to his + case that night and poured oil into his wounds more soothing than + gentlemen ever know. W. Ellery Channing too seemed so human and + good--sweet as summer and fragrant as pinewoods. He is more + sophisticated than Hawthorne of course, but still he was kin; and I + felt the world richer by two _men_, who had not yet lost themselves + in mere members of society. This is what I suspect--that we are + fast getting so fearful one to another, we "members of society" + that we shall ere long begin to kill one another in self-defence + and give place in that way at last to a more veracious state of + things. The old world is breaking up on all hands: the glimpse of + the everlasting granite I caught in H. and W. E. shows me that + there is stock enough left for fifty better. Let the old impostors + go, bag and baggage, for a very real and substantial one is aching + to come in, in which the churl shall not be exalted to a place of + dignity, in which innocence shall never be tarnished nor trafficked + in, in which every man's freedom shall be respected down to its + feeblest filament as the radiant altar of God. To the angels, says + Swedenborg, death means resurrection to life; by that necessary + rule of inversion which keeps them separate from us and us from + them, and so prevents our being mutual nuisances. Let us then + accept political and all other distraction that chooses to come; + because what is disorder and wrath and contention on the surface is + sure to be the greatest peace at the centre, working its way thus + to a surface that shall never be disorderly. + +But it is in the postscript that the mixture and the transition strike +me as most inevitable. + + Weren't you shocked at ----'s engagement? To think of that prim old + snuffers imposing himself on that pure young flame! What a world, + what a world! But once we get rid of Slavery the new heavens and + new earth will swim into reality. + +No better example could there be, I think, of my father's remarkable and +constant belief, proof against all confusion, in the imminence of a +transformation-scene in human affairs--"spiritually" speaking of course +always--which was to be enacted somehow without gross or vulgar +visibility, or at least violence, as I have said, but was none the less +straining to the front, and all by reason of the world's being, deep +within and at heart, as he conceived, so achingly anxious for it. He had +the happiness--though not so untroubled, all the while, doubtless, as +some of his declarations would appear to represent--of being able to see +his own period and environment as the field of the sensible change, and +thereby as a great historic hour; that is, I at once subjoin, I more or +less _suppose_ he had. His measure of the imminent and immediate, of the +socially and historically visible and sensible was not a thing easy to +answer for, and when treated to any one of the loud vaticinations or +particular revolutionary messages and promises our age was to have so +much abounded in, all his sense of proportion and of the whole, of the +real and the ridiculous, asserted itself with the last emphasis. In that +mixture in him of faith and humour, criticism and conviction, that mark +of a love of his kind which fed on discriminations and was never so +moved to a certain extravagance as by an exhibited, above all by a +cultivated or in the least sententious vagueness in respect to these, +dwelt largely the original charm, the peculiarly social and living +challenge (in that it was so straight and bright a reflection of life) +of his talk and temper. Almost all of my father shines for me at any +rate in the above passages, and in another that follows, with their so +easy glide from discrimination, as I have called it, that is from +analytic play, in the outward sphere, to serenity of synthesis and +confidence and high joy in the inward. It was as if he might have liked +so to see his fellow-humans, fellow-diners, fellow-celebrities or +whatever, in that acuity of individual salience, in order to proceed +thence to some enormous final doubt or dry renouncement--instead of +concluding, on the contrary, and on the same free and familiar note, to +the eminently "worth while" character of life, or its susceptibility to +vast and happy conversions. With which too, more than I can say, have I +the sense here of his so finely contentious or genially perverse impulse +to carry his wares of observation to the market in which they would on +the whole bring least rather than most--where his offering them at all +would produce rather a flurry (there might have been markets in which it +had been known to produce almost a scandal), and where he would in fact +give them away for nothing if thereby he might show that such produce +grew. Never was there more of a case of the direct friendliness to +startling growths--if so they might be held--of the very soil that lies +under our windows. I don't think he liked to scandalise--certainly he +didn't in the least for scandal's sake; but nothing inspired him more to +the act and the pleasure of appreciation for appropriation, as it might +be termed, than the deprecating attitude of others on such ground--that +degree of shyness of appropriation on their part which practically left +appreciation vague. It was true that the appreciation for a human use, +as it might be called--that is for the high optimistic transition--could +here carry the writer far. + + + + +VII + + +I find markedly relevant at this point a letter from Newport in the +autumn of '61 to another correspondent, one of a series several other +examples of which no less successfully appeal to me, even though it +involve my going back a little to place three or four of these latter, +written at Geneva in 1860. Mrs. William Tappan, primarily Caroline +Sturgis of Boston, was for long years and to the end of her life our +very great friend and one of my father's most constant and most +considered interlocutors, both on the ground of his gravity and on that +of his pleasantry. She had spent in Europe with her husband and her two +small daughters very much the same years, from early in the summer of +'55 till late in the autumn of '60, that we had been spending; and like +ourselves, though with less continuity for the time, she had come to +live at Newport, where, with no shadow of contention, but with an +admirable intelligence, of the incurably ironic or mocking order, she +was such a light, free, somewhat intellectually perverse but socially +impulsive presence (always for instance insatiably hospitable) as our +mustered circle could ill have spared. If play of mind, which she +carried to any point of quietly-smiling audacity that might be, had not +already become a noted, in fact I think the very most noted, value among +us, it would have seated itself there in her person with a nervous +animation, a refinement of what might have been called soundable +sincerity, that left mere plump assurance in such directions far in the +lurch. And she was interesting, she became fairly historic, with the +drawing-out of the years, as almost the only survivor of that young band +of the ardent and uplifted who had rallied in the other time to the +"transcendental" standard, the movement for organised candour of +conversation on almost all conceivable or inconceivable things which +appeared, with whatever looseness, to find its prime inspirer in Emerson +and become more familiarly, if a shade less authentically, vocal in +Margaret Fuller. Hungry, ever so cheerfully and confidently hungry, had +been much of the New England, and peculiarly the Boston, of those days; +but with no such outreaching of the well-scoured empty platter, it +probably would have struck one, as by the occasional and quite +individual agitation of it from some ruefully-observed doorstep of the +best society. It was from such a doorstep that Caroline Sturgis had +originally taken her restless flight, just as it was on such another +that, after a course of infinite freedom of inquiry and irony, she in +the later time, with a fortune inherited, an hospitality extended and a +genial gravity of expression confirmed, alighted again, to the no small +re-enrichment of a company of friends who had had meanwhile scarce any +such intellectual adventures as she was to retain, in a delicate and +casual irreverence, the just slightly sharp fragrance or fine asperity +of, but who might cultivate with complacency and in support of the +general claim to comprehensive culture and awareness unafraid the legend +of her vicarious exposure. + +Mr. Frank Sanborn's school, which I have already mentioned and to which +the following alludes, was during the years immediately preceding the +War, as during those of the War itself, the last word of what was then +accounted the undauntedly modern, flourishing as it did under the +patronage of the most "advanced" thought. The "coeducational" idea had +up to that time, if I mistake not, taken on no such confident and +consistent, certainly no such graceful or plausible form; small boys and +big boys, boys from near and boys from far, consorted there and +cohabited, so far as community of board and lodging and of study and +sport went, with little girls and great girls, mainly under the earnest +tutoring and elder-sistering of young women accomplished as scholarly +accomplishment in such cases was then understood, but with Mr. Sanborn +himself of course predominantly active and instructional, and above all +with the further felicity of the participation of the generous Emerson +family by sympathy and interest and the protective spread of the rich +mantle of their presence. The case had been from the first a frank and +high-toned experiment, a step down from the tonic air, as was so +considerably felt, of radical conviction to the firm ground of radical +application, that is of happy demonstration--an admittedly new and +trustful thing, but all the brighter and wiser, all the more nobly and +beautifully workable for that. With but the scantest direct observation +of the attempted demonstration--demonstration, that is, of the excellent +fruit such a grafting might produce--I yet imagine the enacted and +considerably prolonged scene (it lasted a whole decade) to have heaped +perfectly full the measure of what it proposed. The interesting, the +curious, the characteristic thing was just, however, I seem to make +out--I seemed to have made out even at the time--in the almost complete +absence of difficulty. It might almost then be said of the affair that +it hadn't been difficult enough for interest even should one insist on +treating it as sufficiently complicated or composed for picture. The +great War was to leave so many things changed, the country over, so many +elements added, to say nothing of others subtracted, in the American +consciousness at large, that even though the coeducational idea, taking +to itself strength, has during these later years pushed its conquests to +the very verge of demonstration of its inevitable limits, my memory +speaks to me of the Concord school rather as of a supreme artless word +on the part of the old social order than as a charged intimation or +announcement on the part of the new. The later arrangements, more or +less in its likeness and when on a considerable scale, have appeared, to +attentive observation, I think, mere endlessly multiplied notes of the +range of high spirits in the light heart of communities more aware on +the whole of the size and number of their opportunity, of the boundless +spaces, the possible undertakings, the uncritical minds and the absent +standards about them, than of matters to be closely and preparedly +reckoned with. They have been, comparatively speaking, experiments in +the void--the great void that may spread so smilingly between wide +natural borders before complications have begun to grow. The name of the +complication before the fact is very apt to be the discovery--which +latter term was so promptly to figure for the faith that living and +working more intimately together than had up to then been conceived +possible would infinitely improve both the condition and the +performance of the brother and sister sexes. It takes long in new +communities for discoveries to become complications--though +complications become discoveries doubtless often in advance of this; the +large vague area, with its vast marginal ease, over which confidence +could run riot and new kinds of human relation, elatedly proposed, +flourish in the sun, was to shift to different ground the question the +Concord school had played with, during its term of life, on its smaller +stage, under the great New England elms and maples and in the +preoccupied New England air. + +The preoccupation had been in a large measure, it is true, exactly with +such possibilities, such bright fresh answers to old stale riddles, as +Mr. Sanborn and his friends clubbed together to supply; but I can only, +for my argument, recover the sense of my single visit to the scene, +which must have been in the winter of '62-'63, I think, and which put +before me, as I seem now to make out, some suggested fit of +perversity--not desperate, quite harmless rather, and almost frivolously +futile, on the part of a particular little world that had been thrown +back upon itself for very boredom and, after a spell of much admired +talking and other beating of the air, wanted for a change to "do" +something. The question it "played" with I just advisedly said--for what +could my impression have been, personally if indirectly gathered, and +with my admirably communicative younger brother to testify, but that if +as a school, in strict parlance, the thing was scarce more than naught, +as a prolonged pastime it was scarce less than charming and quite filled +up in that direction its ample and original measure? I have to reckon, I +here allow, with the trick of what I used irrepressibly to read into +things in front of which I found myself, for gaping purposes, planted by +some unquestioned outer force: it seemed so prescribed to me, so imposed +on me, to read more, as through some ever-felt claim for roundness of +aspect and intensity of effect in presented matters, whatever they might +be, than the conscience of the particular affair itself was perhaps +developed enough to ask of it. The experience of many of the Concord +pupils during the freshness of the experiment must have represented for +them a free and yet ever so conveniently conditioned taste of the +idyllic--such possibilities of perfect good comradeship between +unsuspected and unalarmed youths and maidens (on a comprehensive ground +that really exposed the business to a light and put it to a test) as +they were never again to see so favoured in every way by circumstance +and, one may quite emphatically say, by atmosphere. It is the atmosphere +that comes back to me as most of all the making of the story, even when +inhaled but by an occasional whiff and from afar--the manner of my own +inhaling. In that air of charmed and cultivated good faith nothing for +which the beautiful might be so presumingly claimed--if only claimed +with a sufficiently brave clean emphasis--wouldn't have _worked_, which +was the great thing; every one must have felt that what was aspired to +did work, and as I catch the many-voiced report of it again (many-voiced +but pretty well suffused with one clear tone, this of inflections +irreproducible now) I seem to listen in convinced admiration, though not +by any means in stirred envy, to the cheerful clatter of its working. My +failure of envy has, however, no mite of historic importance, proving as +it does nothing at all but that if we had, in the family sense, so +distinctly turned our back on Europe, the distinctness was at no point +so marked as in our facing so straight to such a picture, by which I +mean to such an exhibition, as my father's letter throws off. Without +knowledge of the letter at the time I yet measured the situation much as +he did and enjoyed it as he did, because it would have been stupid not +to; but from that to any wishful vision of being in it or of it would +have been a long jump, of which I was unabashedly incapable. To have +broken so personally, so all but catastrophically, with Europe as we +had done affected me as the jump sufficient; we had landed somewhere in +quite another world or at least on the sharp edge of one; and in the +single particular sense could I, as time then went on, feel myself at +all moved, with the helpless, the baffled visionary way of it, to push +further in. What straight solicitation _that_ phase of the American +scene could exert--more coercive to the imagination than any we were +ever again, as Americans, to know--I shall presently try to explain; but +this was an intensely different matter. + + I buried two of my children yesterday--at Concord, Mass., and feel + so heartbroken this morning that I shall need to adopt two more + instantly to supply their place; and lo and behold you and William + present yourselves, or if you decline the honour Ellen and Baby. + Mary and I trotted forth last Wednesday, bearing Wilky and Bob in + our arms to surrender them to the famous Mr. Sanborn. The yellowest + sunshine and an atmosphere of balm were all over the goodly land, + while the maple, the oak and the dogwood showered such splendours + upon the eye as made the Champs Elysées and the Bois appear + parvenus and comical. Mrs. Clark is a graceless enough woman + outwardly, but so tenderly feathered inwardly, so unaffectedly kind + and motherly toward the urchins under her roof, that one was glad + to leave them in that provident nest. She has three or four other + school-boarders, one of them a daughter of John Brown--tall, erect, + long-haired and freckled, as John Brown's daughter has a right to + be. I kissed her (inwardly) between the eyes, and inwardly heard + the martyred Johannes chuckle over the fat inheritance of love and + tenderness he had after all bequeathed to his children in all good + men's minds. An arch little Miss Plumley also lives there, with + eyes full of laughter and a mouth like a bed of lilies bordered + with roses. How it is going to be possible for my two boys to + pursue their studies in the midst of that bewilderment I don't + clearly see. I am only sure of one thing, which is that if I had + had such educational advantages as that in my youth I should + probably have been now far more nearly ripe for this world's + business. We asked to see Miss Waterman, one of the teachers + quartered in the house, in order to say to her how much we should + thank her if she would occasionally put out any too lively spark + she might see fall on the expectant tinder of my poor boys' bosoms; + but Miss W. herself proved of so siliceous a quality on + inspection--with round tender eyes, young, fair and womanly--that I + saw in her only new danger and no promise of safety. My present + conviction is that a general conflagration is inevitable, ending in + the total combustion of all that I hold dear on that spot. Yet I + can't but felicitate our native land that such magnificent + experiments in education go on among us. + + Then we drove to Emerson's and waded up to our knees through a + harvest of apples and pears, which, tired of their mere outward or + carnal growth, had descended to the loving bosom of the lawn, there + or elsewhere to grow inwardly meet for their heavenly rest in the + veins of Ellen the saintly and others; until at last we found the + cordial Pan himself in the midst of his household, breezy with + hospitality and blowing exhilarating trumpets of welcome. Age has + just the least in the world dimmed the lustre we once knew, but an + unmistakable breath of the morning still encircles him, and the + odour of primaeval woods. Pitchpine is not more pagan than he + continues to be, and acorns as little confess the gardener's skill. + Still I insist that he is a voluntary Pan, that it is a condition + of mere wilfulness and insurrection on his part, contingent upon a + mercilessly sound digestion and an uncommon imaginative influx, and + I have no doubt that even he, as the years ripen, will at last + admit Nature to be tributary and not supreme. However this be, we + consumed juicy pears to the diligent music of Pan's pipe, while + Ellen and Edith softly gathered themselves upon two low stools in + the chimney-corner, saying never a word nor looking a look, but + apparently hemming their handkerchiefs; and good Mrs. Stearns, who + sat by the window and seemed to be the village dressmaker, ever and + anon glanced at us over her spectacles as if to say that never + before has she seen this wondrous Pan so glistening with dewdrops. + Then and upon the waves of that friendly music we were duly wafted + to our educational Zion and carefully made over our good and + promising and affectionate boys to the school-master's keeping. Out + into the field beside his house Sanborn incontinently took us to + show how his girls and boys perform together their worship of + Hygeia. It was a glimpse into that new world wherein dwelleth + righteousness and which is full surely fast coming upon our + children and our children's children; and I could hardly keep + myself, as I saw my children's eyes drink in the mingled work and + play of the inspiring scene, from shouting out a joyful Nunc + Dimittis. The short of the story is that we left them and rode home + robbed of our plumage, feeling sore and ugly and only hoping that + they wouldn't die, any of these cold winter days, before the + parental breast could get there to warm them back to life or cheer + them on to a better. + + Mrs. William Hunt has just come in to tell the good news of your + near advent and that she has found the exact house for you; + instigated to that activity by one of your angels, of the Hooper + band, with whom she has been in correspondence. I don't thank angel + Hooper for putting angel Hunt upon that errand, since I should like + to have had the merit of it myself. I suspect the rent is what it + ought to be: if it's not I will lay by something every week for you + toward it, and have no doubt we shall stagger through the cold + weather. + +I gather from the above the very flower of my father's irrepressible +utterance of his constitutional optimism, that optimism fed so little by +any sense of things as they were or are, but rich in its vision of the +facility with which they might become almost at any moment or from one +day to the other totally and splendidly different. A less vague or vain +idealist couldn't, I think, have been encountered; it was given him to +catch in the fact at almost any turn right or left some flagrant +assurance or promise of the state of man transfigured. The Concord +school could be to him for the hour--there were hours and hours!--such a +promise; could even figure in that light, to his amplifying sympathy, in +a degree disproportionate to its genial, but after all limited, after +all not so intensely "inflated," as he would have said, sense of itself. +In which light it is that I recognise, and even to elation, how little, +practically, of the idea of the Revolution in the vulgar or violent +sense was involved in his seeing so many things, in the whole social +order about him, and in the interest of their being more or less +immediately altered, as lamentably, and yet at the same time and under +such a coloured light, as amusingly and illustratively, wrong--wrong, +that is, with a blundering helpless human salience that kept criticism +humorous, kept it, so to speak, sociable and almost "sympathetic" even +when readiest. The case was really of his rather feeling so vast a +rightness close at hand or lurking immediately behind actual +arrangements that a single turn of the inward wheel, one real response +to pressure of the spiritual spring, would bridge the chasms, straighten +the distortions, rectify the relations and, in a word, redeem and vivify +the whole mass--after a far sounder, yet, one seemed to see, also far +subtler, fashion than any that our spasmodic annals had yet shown us. It +was of course the old story that we had only to _be_ with more +intelligence and faith--an immense deal more, certainly--in order to +work off, in the happiest manner, the many-sided ugliness of life; which +was a process that might go on, blessedly, in the quietest of all quiet +ways. _That_ wouldn't be blood and fire and tears, or would be none of +these things stupidly precipitated; it would simply have taken place by +_enjoyed_ communication and contact, enjoyed concussion or convulsion +even--since pangs and agitations, the very agitations of perception +itself, are of the highest privilege of the soul and there is always, +thank goodness, a saving sharpness of play or complexity of consequence +in the intelligence completely alive. The meaning of which remarks for +myself, I must be content to add, is that the optimists of the world, +the constructive idealists, as one has mainly known them, have too often +struck one as overlooking more of the aspects of the real than they +recognise; whereas our indefeasible impression, William's and mine, of +our parent was that he by his very constitution and intimate heritage +recognised many more of those than he overlooked. What was the finest +part of our intercourse with him--that is the most nutritive--but a +positive record of that? Such a matter as that the factitious had +absolutely no hold on him was the truest thing about him, and it was all +the while present to us, I think, as backing up his moral authority and +play of vision that never, for instance, had there been a more numerous +and candid exhibition of all the human susceptibilities than in the nest +of his original nurture. I have spoken of the fashion in which I still +see him, after the years, attentively bent over those much re-written +"papers," that we had, even at our stupidest, this warrant for going in +vague admiration of that they caught the eye, even the most filially +detached, with a final face of wrought clarity, and thereby of beauty, +that there _could_ be no thinking unimportant--and see him also fall +back from the patient posture, again and again, in long fits of remoter +consideration, wondering, pondering sessions into which I think I was +more often than not moved to read, for the fine interest and colour of +it, some story of acute inward difficulty amounting for the time to +discouragement. If one wanted drama _there_ was drama, and of the most +concrete and most immediately offered to one's view and one's suspense; +to the point verily, as might often occur, of making one go roundabout +it on troubled tiptoe even as one would have held one's breath at the +play. + +These opposed glimpses, I say, hang before me as I look back, but really +fuse together in the vivid picture of the fond scribe separated but by a +pane of glass--his particular preference was always directly to face the +window--from the general human condition he was so devoutly concerned +with. He _saw_ it, through the near glass, saw it in such detail and +with a feeling for it that broke down nowhere--that was the great thing; +which truth it confirmed that his very fallings back and long waits and +stays and almost stricken musings witnessed exactly to his intensity, +the intensity that would "come out," after all, and make his passionate +philosophy and the fullest array of the appearances that couldn't be +blinked fit together and harmonise. Detached as I could during all those +years perhaps queerly enough believe myself, it would still have done my +young mind the very greatest violence to have to suppose that any plane +of conclusion for him, however rich and harmonious he might tend to make +conclusion, could be in the nature of a fool's paradise. Small vague +outsider as I was, I couldn't have borne _that_ possibility; and I see, +as I return to the case, how little I really could ever have feared it. +This would have amounted to fearing it on account of his geniality--a +shocking supposition; as if his geniality had been thin and _bête_, +patched up and poor, and not by the straightest connections, nominal and +other, of the very stuff of his genius. No, I feel myself complacently +look back to _my_ never having, even at my small poorest, been so +_bête_, either, as to conceive he might be "wrong," wrong as a +thinker-out, in his own way, of the great mysteries, because of the +interest and amusement and vividness his attesting spirit could fling +over the immediate ground. What he saw _there_ at least could be so +enlightening, so evocatory, could fall in so--which was to the most +inspiring effect within the range of perception of a scant son who was +doubtless, as to the essential, already more than anything else a +novelist _en herbe_. If it didn't sound in a manner patronising I should +say that I saw that my father saw; and that I couldn't but have given my +own case away by not believing, however obscurely, in the virtue of his +consequent and ultimate synthesis. Of course I never dreamed of any such +name for it--I only thought of it as something very great and fine +founded on those forces in him that came home to us and that touched us +all the while. As these were extraordinary forces of sympathy and +generosity, and that yet knew how to be such without falsifying any +minutest measure, the structure raised upon them might well, it would +seem, and even to the uppermost sublime reaches, be as valid as it was +beautiful. If he so endeared himself wasn't it, one asked as time went +on, through his never having sentimentalised or merely meditated away, +so to call it, the least embarrassment of the actual about him, and +having with a passion peculiarly his own kept together his stream of +thought, however transcendent and the stream of life, however humanised? +There was a kind of experiential authority in his basis, as he felt his +basis--there being no human predicament he couldn't by a sympathy more +_like_ direct experience than any I have known enter into; and this +authority, which concluded so to a widening and brightening of the +philosophic--for him the spiritual--sky, made his character, as +intercourse disclosed it, in a high degree fascinating. These things, I +think, however, are so happily illustrated in his letters that they look +out from almost any continuous passage in such a series for instance as +those addressed in the earlier time to Mrs. Tappan. His _tone_, that is, +always so effectually looks out, and the living parts of him so +singularly hung together, that one may fairly say his philosophy _was_ +his tone. To cite a few passages here is at the same time to go back to +a previous year or two--which my examples, I hold, make worth while. He +had been on a visit to Paris toward the winter's end of '60, and had +returned to Geneva, whence he writes early in April. + + So sleepy have I been ever since my return from Paris that I am + utterly unfit to write letters. I was thoroughly poisoned by + tobacco in those horrid railway carriages, and this with want of + sleep knocked me down. I am only half awake still, and will not + engage consequently in any of those profound inquiries which your + remembrance always suggests. + + I am very sorry for you that you live in an excommunicated country, + or next door to it; and I don't wonder at your wanting to get away. + But it is provoking to think that but for your other plan + Switzerland might possess you all for the summer. It is doubtless + in part this disappointment that will unsettle us in our present + moorings and take us probably soon to Germany. What after that I + have no idea, and am always so little wilful about our movements + that I am ready the young ones should settle them. So we may be in + Europe a good while yet, always providing that war keep smooth his + wrinkled front and allow us quiet newspapers. They must fight in + Italy for some time to come, but between England and France is the + main point. If _they_ can hold aloof from tearing each other we + shall manage; otherwise we go home at once, to escape the universal + spatter that must then ensue. + + What is the meaning of all these wars and rumours of wars? No + respectable person ever seems to occupy himself with the question, + but I can't help feeling it more interesting than anything in Homer + or Plato or the gallery of the Vatican. I long daily with + unappeasable longing for a righteous life, such a life as I am sure + is implied in every human possibility, and myriads are bearing me + company. What does this show but that the issue is near out of all + our existing chaos? All our evil is fossil and comes from the mere + persistence of diseased institutions in pretending to rule us when + we ought to be left free to be living spirits of God. There is no + _fresh_ evil in the world. No one now steals or commits murder or + any other offence with the least relish for it, but only to revenge + his poor starved opportunities. The superiority of America in + respect to freedom of thought over Europe comes from this fact that + she has so nearly achieved her deliverance from such tyrannies. All + she now needs to make her right is simply an intelligent + recognition of her spiritual whereabouts. If she had this she would + put her hand to the work splendidly. You and I when we get home + will try to quicken her intelligence in that respect, will do at + any rate _our_ best to put away this pestilent munching of the tree + of knowledge of good and evil, and persuade to the belief of man's + unmixed innocence. + +Which, it will easily be seen, was optimism with a vengeance, and marked +especially in the immediacy, the state of being at hand for him, of a +social redemption. What made this the more signal was its being so +unattended with visions the least Apocalyptic or convulsional; the +better order slipping in amid the worse, and superseding it, so +insidiously, so quietly and, by a fair measure, so easily. It was a +faith and an accompanying philosophy that couldn't be said not to be +together simplifying; and yet nothing was more unmistakable when we saw +them at close range, I repeat, than that they weren't unnourished, +weren't what he himself would, as I hear him, have called the +"flatulent" fruit of sentimentality. + +His correspondent had in a high degree, by her vivacity of expression, +the art of challenging his--as is markedly apparent from a letter the +date of which fails beyond its being of the same stay at Geneva and of +the winter's end. + + If I had really imagined that I had bored you and your husband so + very little while I was in Paris in December I should long since + have repeated the experiment; the more surely that I want so much + to see again my darling nieces and delight myself in the abundance + of their large-eyed belief.... Our Alice is still under + discipline--preparing to fulfil some high destiny or other in the + future by reducing decimal fractions to their lowest possible rate + of subsistence, where they often grow so attenuated under her rapid + little fingers that my poor old eyes can no longer see them at all. + I shall go before long to England, and then perhaps--! But I shan't + promise anything on _her_ behalf. + + You ask me "why I do not brandish my tomahawk and, like Walt + Whitman, raise my barbaric yawp over the roofs of all the houses." + It is because I am not yet a "cosmos" as that gentleman avowedly + is, but only a very dim nebula, doing its modest best, no doubt, to + solidify into cosmical dimensions, but still requiring an "awful + sight" of time and pains and patience on the part of its friends. + You evidently fancy that cosmoses are born to all the faculty they + shall ever have, like ducks: no such thing. There is no respectable + cosmos but what is born to such a vapoury and even gaseous + inheritance as requires long centuries of conflict on its part to + overcome the same and become pronounced or educated in its proper + mineral, vegatable or animal order. Ducks are born perfect; that is + to say they utter the same unmodified unimproved quack on their + dying pillow that they uttered on their natal day; whereas cosmoses + are destined to a life of such surprising change that you may say + their career is an incessant disavowal of their birth, or that + their highest maturation consists in their utter renunciation of + their natural father and mother. You transcendentalists make the + fatal mistake of denying education, of sundering present from past + and future from present. These things are indissolubly one, the + present deriving its consciousness only from the past, and the + future drawing all its distinctive wisdom from our present + experience. The law is the same with the individual as it is with + the race: none of us can dodge the necessity of regeneration, of + disavowing our natural ancestry in order to come forth in our own + divinely-given proportions. The secret of this necessity ought to + reconcile us to it, however onerous the obligation it imposes; for + that secret is nothing more nor less than this, that we cosmoses + have a plenary divine origin and are bound eventually to see that + divinity reproduced in our most familiar and trivial experience, + even down to the length of our shoe-ties. If the Deity were an + immense Duck capable only of emitting an eternal quack we of course + should all have been born webfooted, each as infallible in his way + as the Pope, nor ever have been at the expense and bother of + swimming-schools. But He is a perfect man, incapable of the + slightest quackery, capable only of every honest and modest and + helpful purpose, and these are perfections to which manifestly no + one is born, but only _re_-born. We come to such states not by + learning, only by _unlearning_. No natural edification issues in + spiritual architecture of this splendour, but only a natural + demolition or undoing. I dimly recognise this great truth, and + hence hold more to a present imbecility than to a too eager + efficiency. I feel myself more fit to be knocked about for some + time yet and vastated of my natural vigour than to commence cosmos + and raise the barbaric yawp. Time enough for that when I am fairly + finished. Say what we will, you and I are all the while at school + just now. The genial pedagogue may give you so little of the ferule + as to leave you to doubt whether you really are there; but this + only proves what a wonderful pedagogue it is, and how capable of + adapting himself to everyone. + +His friend in Paris found herself at that time, like many other persons, +much interested in the exercise of automatic writing, of which we have +since so abundantly heard and as to which she had communicated some +striking observations. + + ...Your letter is full of details that interest but don't + fascinate. I haven't a doubt of a single experience you allege, and + do not agree with your friend Count S. (your writing of this name + is obscure) that the world of spirits is not an element in your + writing. I am persuaded now for a long time of the truth of these + phenomena and feel no inclination to dispute or disparage them; but + at the same time I feel to such a degree my own remoteness from + them that I am sure I could never get any personal contact with + them. The state of mind exposing one to influences of this nature, + and which makes them beneficial to it, is a sceptical state; and + this I have never known for a moment. Spiritual existence has + always been more real to me (I was going to say) than natural; and + when accordingly I am asked to believe in the spiritual world + because my senses are getting to reveal it I feel as if the ground + of my conviction were going to be weakened rather than + strengthened. Of course I should have very little respect for + spiritual things which didn't ultimately report themselves to + sense, which didn't indeed subside into things of sense as + logically as a house into its foundations. But what I deny is that + spiritual existence can be directly known on earth--known otherwise + than by correspondence or inversely. The letter of every revelation + must be directly hostile to its spirit, and only inversely + accordant, because the very pretension of revelation is that it's a + descent, an absolute coming down, of truth, a humiliation of it + from its own elevated and habitual plane to a lower one. + + Admit therefore that the facts of "spiritualism" are all true; + admit that persons really deceased have been communicating with you + about the state of Europe, the approaching crisis and the persons + known to us whom you name; in that case I should insist that, to + possess the slightest spiritual interest, their revelation should + be re-translated into the spiritual tongue by correspondences; + because as to any spirit knowing or caring to know those persons, + or being bothered about any crisis of ours, that is to me simply + incredible. Such matters have in each case doubtless some spiritual + or substantial counterpart answering in every particular to its + superficial features; and Wilkinson and Emerson, for instance, with + the others, are of course shadows of some greater or less spiritual + quantities. But I'll be hanged if there's the slightest _sensible_ + accord between the substance and the semblance on either hand. Your + spirits, no doubt, give you the very communications you report to + me; only Wilkinson spiritually interpreted and Emerson spiritually + interpreted mean things so very different from our two friends of + those denominations that if our spiritual eye were for a moment + open to discern the difference I think it highly probable--I'm sure + it is infinitely possible--we should renounce their acquaintance. + + But I have harped on this string long enough; let me change the + tune. Your spirits tell you to repose in what they are doing for + you and, with a pathos to which I am not insensible, say "Rest now, + poor child; your struggles have been great; clasp peace to your + bosom at last." And as a general thing our ears are saluted by + assurances that these communications are all urged by philanthropy + and that everyone so addressing us wants in some way to help and + elevate us. But just this is to my mind the unpleasant side of the + business. I have been so long accustomed to see the most arrant + deviltry transact itself in the name of benevolence that the moment + I hear a profession of good-will from almost any quarter I + instinctively look about for a constable or place my hand within + reach of the bell-rope. My ideal of human intercourse would be a + state of things in which no man will ever stand in need of any + other man's help, but will derive all his satisfaction from the + great social tides which own no individual names. I am sure no man + can be put in a position of dependence upon another without that + other's very soon becoming--if he accepts the duties of the + relation--utterly degraded out of his just human proportions. No + man can play the Deity to his fellow man with impunity--I mean + spiritual impunity of course. For see: if I am at all satisfied + with that relation, if it contents me to be in a position of + generosity toward others, I must be remarkably indifferent at + bottom to the gross social inequality which permits that position, + and instead of resenting the enforced humiliation of my fellow man + to myself, in the interests of humanity, I acquiesce in it for the + sake of the profit it yields to my own self-complacency. I do hope + the reign of benevolence is over; until that event occurs I am sure + the reign of God will be impossible. But I have a shocking bad cold + that racks my head to bursting almost; I can't think to any + purpose. Let me hear soon from you that I have not been + misunderstood. I wouldn't for the world seem wilfully to depreciate + what you set a high value on. No, I really can't help my judgments. + And I always soften them to within an inch of their life as it is. + +The following, no longer from the Hotel de l'Ecu, but from 5 Quai du +Mont Blanc, would indicate that his "Dear Queen Caroline," as he +addresses her, was at no loss to defend her own view of the matters in +discussion between them: in which warm light indeed it is that I was +myself in the after years ever most amusedly to see her. + + Don't scold a fellow so! Exert your royal gifts in exalting only + the lowly and humbling only the proud. Precisely what I like, to + get extricated from metaphysics, is encouragement from a few + persons like yourself, such encouragement as would lie in your + intelligent apprehension and acknowledgment of the great _result_ + of metaphysics, which is a godly and spotless life on earth. If I + could find anyone apt to that doctrine I should not work so hard + metaphysically to convince the world of its truth. And as for being + a metaphysical Jack Horner, the thing is contradictory, as no + metaphysician whose studies are sincere ever felt tempted to + self-complacency or disposed to reckon himself a good boy. Such + exaltations are not for him, but only for the artists and poets, + who dazzle the eyes of mankind and _don't_ recoil from the darkness + they themselves produce--as Dryden says, or Collins. + +Mrs. Tappan, spending the month of June in London, continued to impute +for the time, I infer (I seem to remember a later complete detachment), +a livelier importance to the supernatural authors of her "writing" than +her correspondent was disposed to admit; but almost anything was a +quickener of the correspondent's own rich, that is always so animated, +earnestness. He had to feel an interlocutor's general sympathy, or +recognise a moral relation, even if a disturbed one, for the deep tide +of his conviction to rise outwardly higher; but when that happened the +tide overflowed indeed. + + MY DEAR CAROLINA--Neither North nor South, but an eminently free + State, with no exulting shout of master and no groan of captive to + be heard in all its borders, but only the cheerful hum of happy + husband and children--how do you find London? Here in Geneva we are + so saturate with sunshine that we would fain dive to the depths of + the lake to learn coolness of the little fishes. Still, we don't + envy your two weeks of unbroken rain in dear dismal London. What a + preparation for doing justice to Lenox! You see I know--through + Mary Tweedy, who has a hearty appreciation of her London + privileges. How are A. D. and all the rest of them? _Familiar_ + spirits, are they not, on a short acquaintance?--and how pleasant + an aspect it gives to the middle kingdom to think you shall be sure + to find there such lovers and friends! Only let us keep them at a + proper distance. It doesn't do for us ever to accept another only + at that other's own estimate of himself. If we do we may as well + plunge into Tartarus at once. No human being can afford to commit + his happiness to another's keeping, or, what is the same thing, + forego his own individuality with all that it imports. The first + requisite of our true relationship to each other (spiritually + speaking) is that we be wholly independent of each other: then we + may give ourselves away as much as we please, we shall do neither + them nor ourselves any harm. But until that blessed day comes, by + the advance of a scientific society among men, we shall be utterly + unworthy to love each other or be loved in return. We shall do + nothing but prey upon each other and turn each other's life to + perfect weariness. + + The more of it then just now the better! The more we bite and + devour each other, the more horribly the newspapers abound in all + the evidences of our disgusting disorganisation, the + disorganisation of the old world, the readier will our dull ears be + to listen to the tidings of the new world which is aching to + appear, the world wherein dwelleth righteousness. Don't abuse the + newspapers therefore publicly, but tell everybody of the use they + are destined to promote, and set others upon the look-out. A. D. is + a very good woman, I haven't a doubt, but will fast grow a better + one if she would let herself alone, and me also, and all other mere + persons, while she diligently inquires about the Lord; that is + about that lustrous universal life which God's providence is now + forcing upon men's attention and which will obliterate for ever all + this exaggeration of our personalities. It is very well for lovers + to abase themselves in this way to each other; because love is a + _passion_ of one's nature--that is to say the lover is not + self-possessed, but is lifted for a passing moment to the level of + the Lord's life in the race, and so attuned to higher issues ever + after in his own proper sphere. But these experiences are purely + disciplinary and not final. All passion is a mere inducement to + action, and when at last activity really dawns in us we drop this + faculty of hallucination that we have been under about persons and + see and adore the abounding divinity which is in all persons alike. + Who will then ever be caught in that foolish snare again? I did + nothing but tumble into it from my boyhood up to my marriage; since + which great disillusioning--yes!--I feel that the only lovable + person is one who will never permit himself to be loved. But I have + written on without any intention and have now no time to say what + alone I intended, how charming and kind and long to be remembered + you were all those Paris days. Give my love to honest William and + tell my small nieces that I pine to pluck again the polished + cherries of their cheeks. My wife admires and loves you. + +From which I jump considerably forward, for its (privately) historic +value, to a communication from Newport of the middle of August '63. My +father's two younger sons had, one the previous and one at the beginning +of the current, year obtained commissions in the Volunteer Army; as a +sequel to which my next younger brother, as Adjutant of the Fifty-fourth +Massachusetts, Colonel Robert Shaw's regiment, the first body of +coloured soldiers raised in the North, had received two grave wounds in +that unsuccessful attack on Fort Wagner from which the gallant young +leader of the movement was not to return. + + Wilky had a bad day yesterday and kept me busy or I shouldn't have + delayed answering your inquiries till to-day. He is very severely + wounded both in the ankle and in the side--where he doesn't heal so + fast as the doctor wishes in consequence of the shell having made a + pouch which collects matter and retards nature. They cut it open + yesterday, and to-day he is better, or will be. The wound in the + ankle was made by a cannister ball an inch and a half in diameter, + which lodged eight days in the foot and was finally dislodged by + cutting down through (the foot) and taking it out at the sole. He + is excessively weak, unable to do anything but lie passive, even + to turn himself on his pillow. He will probably have a slow and + tedious recovery--the doctors say of a year at least; but he knows + nothing of this himself and speaks, so far as he does talk, but of + going back in the Fall. If you write please say nothing of this; he + is so distressed at the thought of a long sickness. He is vastly + attached to the negro-soldier cause; believes (I think) that the + world has existed for it; and is sure that enormous results to + civilisation are coming out of it. We heard from Bob this morning + at Morris Island; with his regiment, building earthworks and + mounting guns. Hot, he says, but breezy; also that the shells make + for them every few minutes--while he and his men betake themselves + to the trenches and holes in the earth "like so many land-crabs in + distress." He writes in the highest spirits. Cabot Russell, Wilky's + dearest friend, is, we fear, a prisoner and wounded. We hear + nothing decisive, but the indications point that way. Poor Wilky + cries aloud for his friends gone and missing, and I could hardly + have supposed he might be educated so suddenly up to serious + manhood altogether as he appears to have been. I hear from Frank + Shaw this morning, and they are all well--and admirable. + +This goes beyond the moment I had lately, and doubtless too lingeringly, +reached, as I say; just as I shall here find convenience in borrowing a +few passages from my small handful of letters of the time to follow--to +the extent of its not following by a very long stretch. Such a course +keeps these fragments of record together, as scattering them would +perhaps conduce to some leakage in their characteristic tone, for which +I desire all the fulness it can keep. Impossible moreover not in some +degree to yield on the spot to _any_ brush of the huge procession of +those particular months and years, even though I shall presently take +occasion to speak as I may of my own so inevitably contracted +consciousness of what the brush, with its tremendous possibilities of +violence, could consist of in the given case. I had, under stress, to +content myself with knowing it in a more indirect and muffled fashion +than might easily have been--even should one speak of it but as a matter +of mere vision of the eyes or quickened wonder of the mind or heaviness +of the heart, as a matter in fine of the closer and more inquiring, to +say nothing of the more agitated, approach. All of which, none the less, +was not to prevent the whole quite indescribably intensified +time--intensified through all lapses of occasion and frustrations of +contact--from remaining with me as a more constituted and sustained act +of living, in proportion to my powers and opportunities, than any other +homogeneous stretch of experience that my memory now recovers. The case +had to be in a peculiar degree, alas, that of living inwardly--like so +many of my other cases; in a peculiar degree compared, that is, to the +immense and prolonged outwardness, outwardness naturally at the very +highest pitch, that was the general sign of the situation. To which I +may add that my "alas" just uttered is in the key altogether of my then +current consciousness, and not in the least in that of my present +appreciation of the same--so that I leave it, even while I thus put my +mark against it, as I should restore tenderly to the shelf any odd +rococo object that might have slipped from a reliquary. My appreciation +of what I presume at the risk of any apparent fatuity to call my +"relation to" the War is at present a thing exquisite to me, a thing of +the last refinement of romance, whereas it had to be at the time a sore +and troubled, a mixed and oppressive thing--though I promptly see, on +reflection, how it must frequently have flushed with emotions, with +small scraps of direct perception even, with particular sharpnesses in +the generalised pang of participation, that were all but touched in +themselves as with the full experience. Clear as some object presented +in high relief against the evening sky of the west, at all events, is +the presence for me beside the stretcher on which my young brother was +to lie for so many days before he could be moved, and on which he had +lain during his boat-journey from the South to New York and thence again +to Newport, of lost Cabot Russell's stricken father, who, failing, up +and down the searched field, in respect of his own irrecoverable +boy--then dying, or dead, as afterwards appeared, well within the +enemy's works--had with an admirable charity brought Wilky back to a +waiting home instead, and merged the parental ache in the next nearest +devotion he could find. Vivid to me still is one's almost ashamed sense +of this at the hurried disordered time, and of how it was impossible not +to impute to his grave steady gentleness and judgment a full awareness +of the difference it would have made for him, all the same, to be doing +such things with a still more intimate pity. Unobliterated for me, in +spite of vaguenesses, this quasi-twilight vision of the good bereft man, +bereft, if I rightly recall, of his only son, as he sat erect and +dry-eyed at the guarded feast of our relief; and so much doubtless +partly because of the image that hovers to me across the years of Cabot +Russell himself, my brother's so close comrade--dark-eyed, youthfully +brown, heartily bright, actively handsome, and with the arrested +expression, the indefinable shining stigma, worn, to the regard that +travels back to them, by those of the young figures of the fallen that +memory and fancy, wanting, never ceasing to want, to "do" something for +them, set as upright and clear-faced as may be, each in his sacred +niche. They have each to such a degree, so ranged, the strange property +or privilege--one scarce knows what to call it--of exquisitely, for all +our time, facing us out, quite blandly ignoring us, looking through us +or straight over us at something they partake of together but that we +mayn't pretend to know. We walk thus, I think, rather ruefully before +them--those of us at least who didn't at the time share more happily +their risk. William, during those first critical days, while the +stretcher itself, set down with its load just within the entrance to our +house, mightn't be moved further, preserved our poor lacerated brother's +aspect in a drawing of great and tender truth which I permit myself to +reproduce. It tells for me the double story--I mean both of Wilky's then +condition and of the draughtsman's admirable hand. + +[Illustration: Sketch of G. W. James brought home wounded from the +assault on Fort Wagner] + +But I find waiting my father's last letter of the small group to Mrs. +Tappan. We were by that time, the autumn of 1865, settled in Boston for +a couple of years. + + MY DEAR CARRY--Are you a carry_atid_ that you consider yourself + bound to uphold that Lenox edifice through the cold winter as well + as the hot summer? Why don't you come to town? I can't _write_ what + I want to say. My brain is tired, and I gladly forego all writing + that costs thought or attention. But I have no day forgotten your + question, and am eager always to make a conquest of you; you are so + full both of the upper and the nether might as always greatly to + excite my interest and make me feel how little is accomplished + while you are left not so. I make no prayer to you; I would have no + assistance from your own vows; or the pleasure of my intercourse + with you would be slain. I would rather outrage than conciliate + your sympathies, that I might have all the joy of winning you over + at last. Hate me on my ideal side, the side that menaces you, as + much as you please meanwhile, but keep a warm corner in your regard + for me personally, as I always do for you, until we meet again. + It's a delight to know a person of your sense and depth; even the + _gaudia certaminis_ are more cheering with you than ordinary + agreements with other people. + +On which note I may leave the exchange in question, feeling how equal an +honour it does to the parties. + + + + +VIII + + +I judge best to place together here several passages from my father's +letters belonging to this general period, even though they again carry +me to points beyond my story proper. It is not for the story's sake that +I am moved to gather them, but for their happy illustration, once more, +of something quite else, the human beauty of the writer's spirit and the +fine breadth of his expression. This latter virtue is most striking, +doubtless, when he addresses his women correspondents, of whom there +were many, yet it so pervades for instance various notes, longer and +shorter, to Mrs. James T. Fields, wife of the eminent Boston publisher +and editor, much commended to us as founder and, for a time, chief +conductor of the Atlantic Monthly, our most adopted and enjoyed native +_recueil_ of that series of years. The Atlantic seemed somehow, while +the good season lasted, to live with us, whereas our relation to the two +or three other like organs, homegrown or foreign, of which there could +be any question, and most of all, naturally, to the great French Revue, +was that we lived with _them_. The light of literature, as we then +invoked or at any rate received it, seemed to beat into the delightful +Fields salon from a nearer heaven than upon any other scene, and played +there over a museum of relics and treasures and apparitions (these last +whether reflected and by that time legendary, or directly protrusive and +presented, wearers of the bay) with an intensity, I feel again as I look +back, every resting ray of which was a challenge to dreaming ambition. I +am bound to note, none the less, oddly enough, that my father's +communications with the charming mistress of the scene are more often +than not a bright profession of sad reasons for inability to mingle in +it. He mingled with reluctance in scenes designed and preappointed, and +was, I think, mostly content to feel almost anything near at hand become +a scene for him from the moment he had happened to cast into the arena +(which he preferred without flags or festoons) the golden apple of the +unexpected--in humorous talk, that is, in reaction without preparation, +in sincerity which was itself sociability. It was not nevertheless that +he didn't now and then "accept"--with attenuations. + + ...If therefore you will let Alice and me come to you on Wednesday + evening I shall still rejoice in the benignant fate that befalls my + house--even though my wife, indisposed, "feels reluctantly + constrained to count herself out of the sphere of your + hospitality;" and I will bind myself moreover by solemn vows not + to perplex the happy atmosphere which almost reigns in yours by + risking a syllable of the incongruous polemic your husband wots of. + I will listen devotedly to you and him all the evening if thereby I + may early go home repaired in my own esteem, and not dilapidated, + as has been hitherto too often the case. + +He could resist persuasion even in the insidious form of an expressed +desire that he should read something, "something he was writing," to a +chosen company. + + Your charming note is irresistible at first sight, and I had almost + uttered a profligate Yes!--that is a promise irrespective of a + power to perform; when my good angel arrested me by the stern + inquiry: What have you got to give them? And I could only say in + reply to this intermeddling but blest spirit: Nothing, my dear + friend, absolutely nothing! Whereupon the veracious one said again: + Sit you down immediately therefore and, confessing your literary + indigence to this lovely lady, pray her to postpone the fulfilment + of her desire to some future flood-tide in the little stream of + your inspiration, when you will be ready to serve her. + +The following refers to the question of his attending with my mother at +some session of a Social Club, at which a prepared performance of some +sort was always offered, but of which they had lately found it +convenient to cease to be members. + + I snatch the pen from my wife's hand to enjoy, myself, the + satisfaction of saying to you how good and kind and charming you + always are, and how we never grow tired of recounting the fact + among ourselves here, and yet how we still shall be unable to + accept your hospitality. Why? Simply because we have a due sense of + what becomes us after our late secession, and would not willingly + be seen at two successive meetings, lest the carnal observer should + argue that we had left the Club by the front door of obligation + only to be readmitted at the back door of indulgence: I put it as + Fields would phrase it. To speak of him always reminds me of + various things, so richly endowed is the creature in all good + gifts; but the dominant consideration evoked in my mind by his name + is just his beautiful home and that atmosphere of faultless womanly + worth and dignity which fills it with light and warmth, and makes + it a blessing to one's heart whenever one enters its precincts. + Please felicitate the wretch for me--! + +However earnest these deprecations he could embroider them with a rare +grace. + + My wife--who has just received your kind note in rapid route for + the Dedham Profane Asylum, or something of that sort--begs leave to + say, through me as a willing and sensitive medium, that you are one + of those _arva beata_, renowned in poetry, which, visit them never + so often, one is always glad to _re_visit, which are attractive in + all seasons by their own absolute light and without any Emersonian + pansies and buttercups to make them so. This enthusiastic Dedhamite + says further in effect that while she is duly grateful for your + courteous offer of a seat upon your sofa to hear the conquered + sage, she yet prefers the material banquet you summon us to in your + dining-room, since there we should be out of the mist and able to + discern between nature and cookery, between what eats and what is + eaten, at all events, and feel a thankful mind that we were in + solid comfortable Charles Street, instead of in the vague and wide + weltering galaxy, and should be sure to deem A. and J. (_I_ am sure + of A., and I think my wife feels equally sure of J.), finer + fireflies than ever sparkled in the old empyrean. But alas who + shall control his destiny? Not my wife, whom multitudinous cares + enthrall; nor yet myself, whom a couple of months' enforced + idleness now constrains to a preternatural activity, lest the world + fail of salvation. Please accept then our united apologies and + regrets.... + + _P.S._ Who contrived the comical title for E.'s + lectures?--"Philosophy of the People!" May it not have been a joke + of J. T. F.'s? It would be no less absurd for Emerson himself to + think of philosophising than for the rose to think of botanising. + He is the divinely pompous rose of the philosophic garden, gorgeous + with colour and fragrance; so what a sad look-out for tulip and + violet and lily, and the humbler grasses, if the rose should turn + out philosophic gardener as well. + +There connects itself with a passage in another letter to the same +correspondent a memory of my own that I have always superlatively +cherished and that remains in consequence vivid enough for some light +reflection here. But I first give the passage, which is of date of +November '67. "What a charming impression of Dickens the other night at +the Nortons' dinner! How innocent and honest and sweet he is maugre his +fame! Fields was merely superb on the occasion, but Dickens was +saintly." As a young person of twenty-four I took part, restrictedly yet +exaltedly, in that occasion--and an immense privilege I held it to slip +in at all--from after dinner on; at which stage of the evening I +presented myself, in the company of my excellent friend Arthur Sedgwick, +brother to our hostess and who still lives to testify, for the honour of +introduction to the tremendous guest. How tremendously it had been laid +upon young persons of our generation to feel Dickens, down to the soles +of our shoes, no more modern instance that I might try to muster would +give, I think, the least measure of; I can imagine no actual young +person of my then age, and however like myself, so ineffably agitated, +so mystically moved, in the presence of any exhibited idol of the mind +who should be in that character at all conceivably "like" the author of +Pickwick and of Copperfield. There has been since his extinction no +corresponding case--as to the relation between benefactor and +beneficiary, or debtor and creditor; no other debt in our time has been +piled so high, for those carrying it, as the long, the purely +"Victorian" pressure of that obligation. It was the pressure, the +feeling, that made it--as it made the feeling, and no operation of +feeling on any such ground has within my observation so much as +attempted to emulate it. So that on the evening I speak of at Shady +Hill it was as a slim and shaken vessel of the feeling that one stood +there--of the feeling in the first place diffused, public and universal, +and in the second place all unfathomably, undemonstrably, unassistedly +and, as it were, unrewardedly, proper to one's self as an already +groping and fumbling, already dreaming and yearning dabbler in the +mystery, the creative, that of comedy, tragedy, evocation, +representation, erect and concrete before us there as in a sublimity of +mastership. I saw the master--nothing could be more evident--in the +light of an intense emotion, and I trembled, I remember, in every limb, +while at the same time, by a blest fortune, emotion produced no luminous +blur, but left him shining indeed, only shining with august particulars. +It was to be remarked that those of his dress, which managed to be +splendid even while remaining the general spare uniform of the +diner-out, had the effect of higher refinements, of accents stronger and +better placed, than we had ever in such a connection seen so much as +hinted. But the offered inscrutable mask was the great thing, the +extremely handsome face, the face of symmetry yet of formidable +character, as I at once recognised, and which met my dumb homage with a +straight inscrutability, a merciless _military_ eye, I might have +pronounced it, an automatic hardness, in fine, which at once indicated +to me, and in the most interesting way in the world, a kind of economy +of apprehension. Wonderful was it thus to see, and thrilling inwardly to +note, that since the question was of personal values so great no +faintest fraction of the whole could succeed in _not_ counting for +interest. The confrontation was but of a moment; our introduction, my +companion's and mine, once effected, by an arrest in a doorway, nothing +followed, as it were, or happened (what _might_ have happened it +remained in fact impossible to conceive); but intense though the +positive perception there was an immensity more left to understand--for +the long aftersense, I mean; and one, or the chief, of these later +things was that if our hero neither shook hands nor spoke, only meeting +us by the barest act, so to say, of the trained eye, the penetration of +which, to my sense, revealed again a world, there was a grim beauty, to +one's subsequently panting imagination, in that very truth of his then +so knowing himself (committed to his monstrous "readings" and with the +force required for them ominously ebbing) on the outer edge of his once +magnificent margin. So at any rate I was to like for long to consider of +it; I was to like to let the essential radiance which had nevertheless +reached me measure itself by this accompaniment of the pitying vision. +He couldn't loosely spend for grace what he had to keep for life--which +was the awful nightly, or all but nightly, exhibition: such the economy, +as I have called it, in which I was afterwards to feel sure he had been +locked up--in spite of the appearance, in the passage from my father's +letter, of the opened gates of the hour or two before. These were but a +reason the more, really, for the so exquisitely complicated image which +was to remain with me to this day and which couldn't on any other terms +have made itself nearly so important. For that was the whole sense of +the matter. It hadn't been in the least important that we should have +shaken hands or exchanged platitudes--it had only been supremely so that +one should have had the essence of the hour, the knowledge enriched by +proof that whatever the multifold or absolute reason, no accession to +sensibility from any other at all "similar" source could have compared, +for penetration, to the intimacy of this particular and prodigious +glimpse. It was as if I had carried off my strange treasure just exactly +from under the merciless military eye--placed there on guard of the +secret. All of which I recount for illustration of the force of action, +unless I call it passion, that may reside in a single pulse of time. + +I allow myself not to hang back in gathering several passages from +another series for fear of their crossing in a manner the line of +privacy and giving a distinctness to old intimate things. The +distinctness is in the first place all to the honour of the persons and +the interests thus glimmering through; and I hold, in the second, that +the light touch under which they revive positively adds, by the magic of +memory, a composite fineness. The only thing is that to speak of my +father's correspondent here is to be more or less involved at once in +the vision of her frame and situation, and that to get at all into +relation with "the Nortons," as they were known to us at that period, to +say nothing of all the years to follow, is to find on my hands a much +heavier weight of reference than my scale at this point can carry. The +relation had ripened for us with the settlement of my parents at +Cambridge in the autumn of '66, and might I attempt even a sketch of the +happy fashion in which the University circle consciously accepted, for +its better satisfaction, or in other words just from a sense of what +was, within its range, in the highest degree interesting, the social +predominance of Shady Hill and the master there, and the ladies of the +master's family, I should find myself rich in material. That institution +and its administrators, however, became at once, under whatever recall +of them, a picture of great inclusions and implications; so true is it +of any community, and so true above all of one of the American +communities best to be studied fifty years ago in their homogeneous form +and native essence and identity, that a strong character reinforced by a +great culture, a culture great in the given conditions, obeys an +inevitable law in simply standing out. Charles Eliot Norton stood out, +in the air of the place and time--which for that matter, I think, +changed much as he changed, and couldn't change much beyond his own +range of experiment--with a greater salience, granting his background, I +should say, than I have ever known a human figure stand out with from +any: an effect involved of course in the nature of the background as +well as in that of the figure. He profited at any rate, to a degree that +was a lesson in all the civilities, by the fact that he represented an +ampler and easier, above all a more curious, play of the civil relation +than was to be detected anywhere about, and a play by which that +relation had the charming art of becoming extraordinarily multifold and +various without appearing to lose the note of rarity. It is not of +course through any exhibition of mere multiplicity that the instinct for +relations becomes a great example and bears its best fruit; the weight +of the example and the nature of the benefit depending so much as they +do on the achieved and preserved terms of intercourse. Here it was that +the curiosity, as I have called it, of Shady Hill was justified--so did +its action prove largely humanising. This was all the witchcraft it had +used--that of manners understood with all the extensions at once and all +the particularisations to which it is the privilege of the highest +conception of manners to lend itself. What it all came back to, +naturally, was the fact that, on so happy a ground, the application of +such an ideal and such a genius _could_ find agents expressive and +proportionate, and the least that could be said of the ladies of the +house was that they had in perfection the imagination of their +opportunity. History still at comparatively close range lays to its +lips, I admit, a warning finger--yet how can I help looking it bravely +in the face as I name in common courtesy Jane Norton? She distilled +civility and sympathy and charm, she exhaled humanity and invitation to +friendship, which latter she went through the world leaving at mortal +doors as in effect the revelation of a new amenity altogether--something +to wait, most other matters being meanwhile suspended, for her to come +back on a turn of the genial tide and take up again, according to the +stirred desire, with each beneficiary. All this to the extent, moreover, +I confess, that it takes the whole of one's measure of her rendered +service and her admirable life, cut so much too short--it takes the +full list of her fond acclaimers, the shyest with the clearest, those +who most waited or most followed, not to think almost more of the way +her blest influence went to waste as by its mere uneconomised and +selfless spread than of what would have been called (what was by the +simply-seeing freely enough called) her achieved success. It was given +her at once to shine for the simply-seeing and to abide forever with the +subtly; which latter, so far as they survive, are left again to +recognise how there plays inveterately within the beautiful, if it but +go far enough, the fine strain of the tragic. The household at Shady +Hill was leaving that residence early in the summer of '68 for a long +stay in Europe, and the following is of that moment. + + When I heard the other day that you had been at our house to say + farewell I was glad and also sorry, glad because I couldn't say + before all the world so easily what I wanted to say to you in + parting, and sorry because I longed for another sight of your + beautiful countenance. And then I consoled myself with thinking + that I should write you the next morning and be able to do my + feelings better justice. But when the morning came I saw how you + would, with all your wealth of friends, scarcely value a puny + chirrup from one of my like, and by no means probably expect it, + and so I desisted. And now comes your heavenly letter this moment + to renew my happiness in showing me once more your undimmed + friendly face. How delightful that face has ever been to me since + first I beheld it; how your frank and gracious and healing manners + have shed on my soul a celestial dew whenever I have encountered + you: I despair to tell you in fitting words. You are the largest + and more generous nature I know, and one that remains always, at + the same time, so womanly; and while you leave behind you such a + memory you needn't fear that our affectionate wishes will ever fail + you for a moment. I for my part shall rest in my affection for you + till we meet where to love is to live. + +Shady Hill was meanwhile occupied by other friends, out of the group of +which, especially as reflected in another of my father's letters to Miss +Norton, there rise for me beckoning ghosts; against whose deep appeal to +me to let them lead me on I have absolutely to steel myself--so far, for +the interest of it, I feel that they might take me. + + We dined the other night at Shady Hill, where the Gurneys were + charming and the company excellent; but there was a perpetual + suggestion of the Elysian Fields about the banquet to me, and we + seemed met together to celebrate a memory rather than applaud a + hope. Godkin and his wife were there, and they heartily lent + themselves to discourse of you all. Ever and anon his friendship + gave itself such an emphatic _jerk_ to your address that you might + have heard it on your window-panes if you had not been asleep. As + for her--what a great clot she is of womanly health, beauty and + benignity! That is a most unwonted word to use in such a + connection, but it came of itself, and I won't refuse it, as it + means to express a wealth that seems chaotic--seems so because + apparently not enough exercised or put to specific use. The + Ashburners and Sedgwicks continue your tradition and even ornament + or variegate it with their own original force. I go there of a + Sunday afternoon, whenever possible, to read anew the gospel of + their beautiful life and manners and bring away a text for the good + of my own household. No one disputes the authenticity of that + gospel, and I have no difficulty in spreading its knowledge. + +On which follows, as if inevitably, the tragic note re-echoed; news +having come from Dresden, in March '72, of the death of Mrs. Charles +Norton, still young, delightful, inestimable. + + What a blow we have all had in the deeper blow that has prostrated + you! I despair to tell you how keen and how real a grief is felt + here by all who have heard the desolating news. With my own family + the brooding presence of the calamity is almost as obvious as it is + in the Kirkland Street home, and I have to make a perpetual effort + to reason it down. Reflectively, I confess, I am somewhat surprised + that I could have been so _much_ surprised by an event of this + order. I know very well that death is the secret of life + spiritually, and that this outward image of death which has just + obtruded itself upon our gaze is _only_ an image--is wholly unreal + from a spiritual point of view. I know in short that your lovely + sister lives at present more livingly than she has ever lived + before. And yet my life is so low, habitually, that when I am + called upon to put my knowledge into practice I am as superstitious + as anybody else and grovel instead of soaring. Keep me in your own + sweet and fragrant memory, for nowhere else could I feel myself + more embalmed to my own self-respect. Indeed if anything could + relieve a personal sorrow to me it would be the sense that it was + shared by a being so infinitely tender and true as yourself. + +Of the mass of letters by the same hand that I further turn over too +many are of a domestic strain inconsistent with other application; but a +page here and there emerges clear, with elements of interest and notes +of the characteristic that rather invite than deprecate an emphasis. +From these I briefly glean, not minding that later dates are +involved--no particular hour at that time being far out of touch with +any other, and the value of everything gaining here, as I feel, by my +keeping my examples together. The following, addressed to me in England +early in '69, beautifully illustrates, to my sense, our father's close +participation in any once quite positive case that either one or the +other of his still somewhat undetermined, but none the less interesting +sons--interesting to themselves, to each other and to _him_--might +appear for the time to insist on constituting. William had in '68 been +appointed to an instructorship in Psychology at Harvard. + + He gets on greatly with his teaching; his students--fifty-seven of + them--are elated with their luck in having him, and I feel sure he + will have next year a still larger number attracted by his fame. He + came in the other afternoon while I was sitting alone, and, after + walking the floor in an animated way for a moment, broke out: + "Bless my soul, what a difference between me as I am now and as I + was last spring at this time! Then so hypochondriachal"--he used + that word, though perhaps less in substance than form--"and now + with my mind so cleared up and restored to sanity. It's the + difference between death and life." He had a great effusion. I was + afraid of interfering with it, or possibly checking it, but I + ventured to ask what especially in his opinion had produced the + change. He said several things: the reading of Renouvier + (particularly his vindication of the freedom of the will) and of + Wordsworth, whom he has been feeding on now for a good while; but + more than anything else his having given up the notion that all + mental disorder requires to have a physical basis. This had become + perfectly untrue to him. He saw that the mind does act + irrespectively of material coercion, and could be dealt with + therefore at first hand, and this was health to his bones. It was a + splendid declaration, and though I had known from unerring signs of + the _fact_ of the change I never had been more delighted than by + hearing of it so unreservedly from his own lips. He has been + shaking off his respect for men of mere science as such, and is + even more universal and impartial in his mental judgments than I + have known him before. + +Nothing in such a report could affect me more, at a distance, as indeed +nothing shines for me more sacredly now, than the writer's perfect +perception of what it would richly say to me, even if a little to my +comparative confusion and bewilderment; engaged as I must rightly have +appeared in working out, not to say in tentatively playing with, much +thinner things. I like to remember, as I do, ineffaceably, that my +attention attached itself, intensely and on the spot, to the very +picture, with whatever else, conveyed, which for that matter hangs +before me still: the vision of my brother, agitated by the growth of his +genius, moving in his burst of confidence, his bright earnestness, about +the room I knew, which must have been our admirable parent's study--with +that admirable parent himself almost holding his breath for the charm +and the accepted peace of it, after earlier discussions and reserves; to +say nothing too, if charm was in question, of the fact of rarity and +beauty I must have felt, or in any case at present feel, in the resource +for such an intellectually living and fermenting son of such a +spiritually perceiving and responding sire. What was the whole passage +but a vision of the fine private luxury of each?--with the fine private +luxury of my own almost blurred image of it superadded. Of that same +spring of '69 is another page addressed to myself in Europe. My memory +must at the very time have connected itself with what had remained to me +of our common or certainly of my own inveterate, childish appeal to him, +in early New York days, for repetition, in the winter afternoon +firelight, of his most personal, most remembering and picture-recovering +"story"; that of a visit paid by him about in his nineteenth year, as I +make it out, to his Irish relatives, his father's nephews, nieces and +cousins, with a younger brother or two perhaps, as I set the scene +forth--which it conduced to our liveliest interest to see "Billy +Taylor," the negro servant accompanying him from Albany, altogether rule +from the point of view of effect. The dignity of this apparition indeed, +I must parenthesise, would have yielded in general to the source of a +glamour still more marked--the very air in which the young emissary +would have moved as the son of his father and the representative of an +American connection prodigious surely in its power to dazzle. William +James of Albany was at that time approaching the term of his remarkably +fruitful career, and as I see the fruits of it stated on the morrow of +his death--in the New York Evening Post of December 20th 1832, for +instance, I find myself envying the friendly youth who could bring his +modest Irish kin such a fairytale from over the sea. I attach as I hang +upon the passage a melancholy gaze to the cloud of images of what might +have been for us all that it distractingly throws off. Our grandfather's +energy, exercised in Albany from the great year 1789, appears promptly +to have begun with his arrival there. "Everywhere we see his footsteps, +turn where we may, and these are the results of his informing mind and +his vast wealth. His plans of improvement embraced the entire city, and +there is scarcely a street or a square which does not exhibit some mark +of his hand or some proof of his opulence. With the exception of Mr. +Astor," this delightful report goes on to declare, "no other business +man has acquired so great a fortune in this State. To his enormous +estate of three millions of dollars there are nine surviving heirs. His +enterprises have for the last ten years furnished constant employment +for hundreds of our mechanics and labourers." The enterprises appear, +alas, to have definitely ceased, or to have fallen into less able hands, +with his death--and to the mass of property so handsomely computed the +heirs were, more exactly, not nine but a good dozen. Which fact, +however, reduces but by a little the rich ambiguity of the question that +was to flit before my father's children, as they grew up, with an air of +impenetrability that I remember no attempt on his own part to mitigate. +I doubt, for that matter, whether he could in the least have appeased +our all but haunting wonder as to what had become even in the hands of +twelve heirs, he himself naturally being one, of the admirable three +millions. The various happy and rapid courses of most of the +participants accounted for much, but did they account for the full +beautiful value, and would even the furthest stretch of the charming +legend of his own early taste for the amusements of the town really tell +us what had been the disposition, by such a measure, of _his_ share? Our +dear parent, we were later quite to feel, could have told us very +little, in all probability, under whatever pressure, what had become of +anything. There had been, by our inference, a general history--not on +the whole exhilarating, and pressure for information could never, I +think, have been applied; wherefore the question arrests me only through +the brightly associated presumption that the Irish visit was made, to +its extreme enlivening, in the character of a gilded youth, a youth +gilded an inch thick and shining to effulgence on the scene not +otherwise brilliant. Which image appeals to my filial fidelity--even +though I hasten not to sacrifice the circle evoked, that for which I a +trifle unassuredly figure a small town in county Cavan as forming an +horizon, and which consisted, we used to delight to hear with every +contributive circumstance, of the local lawyer, the doctor and the (let +us hope--for we _did_ hope) principal "merchant," whose conjoined +hospitality appeared, as it was again agreeable to know, to have more +than graced the occasion: the main definite pictorial touches that have +lingered with me being that all the doors always stood open, with the +vistas mostly raking the provision of whiskey on every table, and that +these opportunities were much less tempting (to our narrator) than that +of the quest of gooseberries in the garden with a certain beautiful +Barbara, otherwise anonymous, who was not of the kin but on a visit from +a distance at one of the genial houses. We liked to hear about Barbara, +liked the sound of her still richer rarer surname; which in spite of the +fine Irish harmony it even then struck me as making I have frivolously +forgotten. She had been matchlessly fair and she ate gooseberries with a +charm that was in itself of the nature of a brogue--so that, as I say, +we couldn't have too much of her; yet even her measure dwindled, for our +appetite, beside the almost epic shape of black Billy Taylor carrying +off at every juncture alike the laurel and the bay. He singularly +appealed, it was clear, to the Irish imagination, performing in a manner +never to disappoint it; his young master--in those days, even in the +North, young mastership hadn't too long since lapsed to have lost every +grace of its tradition--had been all cordially acclaimed, but not least, +it appeared, because so histrionically attended: he had been the +ringmaster, as it were, of the American circus, the small circus of +two, but the other had been the inimitable clown. My point is that we +repaired retrospectively to the circus as insatiably as our Irish +cousins had of old attended it in person--even for the interest of which +fact, however, my father's words have led me too far. What here follows, +I must nevertheless add, would carry me on again, for development of +reference, should I weakly allow it. The allusion to my brother Wilky's +vividly independent verbal collocations and commentative flights +re-echoes afresh, for instance, as one of the fond by-words that spoke +most of our whole humorous harmony. Just so might the glance at the next +visitor prompt a further raising of the curtain, save that this is a +portrait to which, for lack of acquaintance with the original, I have +nothing to contribute--beyond repeating again that it was ever the sign +of my father's portraits to supply almost more than anything else +material for a vision of himself. + + Your enjoyment of England reminds me of my feelings on my first + visit there forty years ago nearly, when I landed in Devonshire in + the month of May or June and was so intoxicated with the roads and + lanes and hedges and fields and cottages and castles and inns that + I thought I should fairly expire with delight. You can't expatiate + too much for our entertainment on your impressions, though you make + us want consumedly to go over and follow in your footsteps. Wilky + has been at home now for 2 or 3 days and is very philosophic and + enthusiastic over your letters. I hoped to remember some of his + turns of speech for you, but one chases another out of my memory + and it is now all a blank. I will consult Alice's livelier one + before I close. + + My friend ---- is a tropical phenomenon, a favourite of nature + whatever his fellow man may say of him. His face and person are + handsome rather than otherwise, and it's obvious that he is a very + unsoiled and pure piece of humanity in all _personal_ regards. And + with such a gift of oratory--such a boundless wealth of diction set + off by copious and not ungraceful gesticulation! Here is where he + belongs to the tropics, where nature claims him for her own and + flings him like a cascade in the face of conventional + good-breeding. I can't begin to describe him, he is what I have + never before met. I see that he can't help turning out excessively + tiresome, but he is not at all vulgar. He has a genius for + elocution, that is all; but a real genius and no mistake. In + comparison with Mr. F. L. or Mr. Longfellow or the restrained + Boston style of address generally, he is what the sunflower is to + the snowdrop; but on the whole, if I could kick his shins whenever + I should like to and so reduce him to silence, I prefer him to the + others. + +What mainly commends to me certain other passages of other dates (these +still reaching on a little) is doubtless the fact that I myself show in +them as the object of attention and even in a manner as a claimant for +esthetic aid. This latter active sympathy overflows in a letter of the +spring of '70, which would be open to more elucidation than I have, +alas, space for. Let the sentence with which it begins merely remind me +that Forrest, the American actor, of high renown in his time, and of +several of whose appearances toward the close of his career I keep a +memory uneffaced--the impression as of a deep-toned thunderous organ, a +prodigious instrument pounded by a rank barbarian--had been literally, +from what we gathered, an early comrade of our parent: literally, I say, +because the association could seem to me, at my hours of ease, so +bravely incongruous. By my hours of ease I mean those doubtless too +devoted to that habit of wanton dispersed embroidery for which any scrap +of the human canvas would serve. From one particular peg, I at the same +time allow, the strongest sense of the incongruity depended--my +remembrance, long entertained, of my father's relating how, on an +occasion, which must have been betimes in the morning, of his calling on +the great tragedian, a man of enormous build and strength, the latter, +fresh and dripping from the bath, had entered the room absolutely upside +down, or by the rare gymnastic feat of throwing his heels into the air +and walking, as with strides, on his hands; an extraordinary performance +if kept up for more than a second or two, and the result at any rate of +mere exuberance of muscle and pride and robustious joie de vivre. It had +affected me, the picture, as one of those notes of high colour that the +experience of a young Albany viveur, the like of which I felt I was +never to come in for, alone could strike off; but what was of the finer +profit in it was less the direct illustration of the mighty mountebank +than of its being delightful on the part of a domestic character we so +respected to have had, with everything else a Bohemian past too--since I +couldn't have borne at such moments to hear it argued as not Bohemian. +What did his having dropped in after such a fashion and at a late +breakfast-hour on the glory of the footlights and the idol of the town, +what did it fall in with but the kind of thing one had caught glimpses +and echoes of from the diaries and memoirs, so far as these had been +subject to the passing peep, of the giftedly idle and the fashionably +great, the Byrons, the Bulwers, the Pelhams, the Coningsbys, or even, +for a nearer vividness perhaps, the N. P. Willises?--of all of whom it +was somehow more characteristic than anything else, to the imagination, +that they always began their day in some such fashion. Even if I cite +this as a fair example of one's instinct for making much of a +little--once this little, a chance handful of sand, could show the +twinkle of the objective, or even the reflective, grain of gold--I still +claim value for that instanced felicity, as I felt it, of being able to +yearn, thanks to whatever chance support, over Bohemia, and yet to have +proof in the paternal presence close at hand of how well even the real +frequentation of it, when achieved in romantic youth, might enable a +person at last to turn out. The lesson may now indeed seem to have been +one of those that rather more strictly adorn a tale than point a moral; +but with me, at that period, I think, the moral ever came first and the +tale more brilliantly followed. As for the recital, in such detail, of +the theme of a possible literary effort which the rest of my letter +represents, how could I feel this, when it had reached me, as anything +but a sign of the admirable anxiety with which thought could be taken, +even though "amateurishly," in my professional interest?--since +professional I by that time appeared able to pass for being. And how +above all can it not serve as an exhibition again of the manner in which +all my benevolent backer's inveterate original _malaise_ in face of +betrayed symptoms of the impulse to "narrow down" on the part of his +young found its solution always, or its almost droll simplification, as +soon as the case might reach for him a _personal_ enough, or "social" +enough, as he would have said, relation to its fruits? Then the malaise +might promptly be felt as changed, by a wave of that wand, to the +extremity of active and expatiative confidence. + + Horatio Alger is writing a Life of Edwin Forrest, and I am afraid + will give him a Bowery appreciation. He reports his hero as a very + "fine" talker--in which light I myself don't so much recall him, + though he had a native breadth--as when telling Alger for example + of old Gilbert Stuart's having when in a state of dilapidation + asked him to let him paint his portrait. "I consented," said + Forrest, "and went to his studio. He was an old white lion, so + blind that he had to ask me the colour of my eyes and my hair; but + he threw his brush at the canvas, and every stroke was life." Alger + talks freely about his own late insanity--which he in fact appears + to enjoy as a subject of conversation and in which I believe he has + somewhat interested William, who has talked with him a good deal of + his experience at the Somerville Asylum. Charles Grinnell--though + not à propos of the crazy--has become a great reader and apparently + a considerable understander of my productions; Alger aforesaid + aussi. Everyone hopes that J. G. hasn't caught a Rosamund Vincy in + Miss M. I don't know whether this hope means affection to J. or + disaffection to the young lady. + + I have written to Gail Hamilton to send me your story; but she does + it not as yet. I will renew my invitation to her in a day or two if + necessary. I went to see Osgood lately about his publishing a + selection from your tales. He repeated what he had told you--that + he would give you 15 per cent and do all the advertising, etc., you + paying for the plates; or he would pay everything and give you 10 + per cent on every copy sold after the first thousand. I shall be + glad (in case you would like to publish, and I think it time for + you to do so) to meet the expense of your stereotyping, and if you + will pick out what you would like to be included we shall set to + work at once and have the book ready by next autumn. I have + meanwhile the materials of a story for you which I was telling + William of the other day as a regular Tourgéneff subject, and he + urged me to send it off to you at once--he was so struck with it. + + Matthew Henry W. was a very cultivated and accomplished young man + in Albany at the time I was growing up. He belonged to a highly + respectable family of booksellers and publishers and was himself + bred to the law; but had such a love of literature, and more + especially of the natural sciences, that he never devoted himself + strictly to his profession. He was the intimate friend of my dear + old tutor, Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian, and of other + distinguished men of science; he corresponded with foreign + scientific bodies, and his contributions to science generally were + of so original a cast as to suggest great hopes of his future + eminence. He was a thorough gentleman, of perfect address and + perfect courage--utterly unegotistic, and one's wonder was how he + had ever grown up in Albany or resigned himself to living there. + One day he invested his money, of which he had a certain quantity, + in a scheme much favoured by the president of the bank in which he + deposited, and this adventure proved a fortune. There lived near us + as well a family of the name of K----, your cousin Mary Minturn + Post's stepmother being of its members; and this family reckoned + upon a great social sensation in bringing out their youngest + daughter, Lydia Sibyl, who had never been seen by mortal eye + outside her own immediate circle, save that of a physician who + reported that she was fabulously beautiful. She _was_ the most + beautiful girl I think I ever saw, at a little distance. Well, she + made her sensation and brought Matthew Henry promptly to her feet. + Her family wanted wealth above all things for her; but here was + wealth and something more, very much more, and they smiled upon + his suit. Everything went merrily for a while--M. H. was deeply + intoxicated with his prize. Never was man so enamoured, and never + was beauty better fitted to receive adoration. She was of an + exquisite Grecian outline as to face, with a countenance like the + tender dawn and form and manners ravishingly graceful. But W. was + not content with his adventure--he embarked again and lost almost + all he owned. The girl's father--or her mother rather, being the + ruler of the family and as hard as the nether world at heart--gave + the cue to her daughter and my friend was dismissed. He couldn't + believe his senses, he raved and cursed his fate, but it was + inexorable. What was to be done? With a bitterness of heart + inconceivable he plucked his revenge by marrying at once a stout + and blooming jade who was to Lydia Sibyl as a peony to a violet, + absolutely nothing but flesh and blood. Her he bore upon his arm at + fashionable hours through the streets; her he took to church, + preserving his admirable ease and courtesy to everyone, as if + absolutely nothing had occurred; and her he pretended to take to + his bosom in private, with what a shudder one can imagine. + Everybody stood aghast. He went daily about his affairs, as serene + and unconscious apparently as the moon in the heavens. Soon his + poverty showed itself in certain economies of his attire, which had + always been most recherché. Soon again he broke his leg and went + about on crutches, but neither poverty nor accident had the least + power to ruffle his air of equanimity. He was always superior to + his circumstances, met you exactly as he had always done, impressed + you always as the best-bred man you knew, and left you wondering + what a heart and what a brain lay behind such a fortune. One + morning we all read in the newspaper at breakfast that Mr. M. H. W. + had appealed the day before to the protection of the police + against his wife, who had taken to beating him and whom as a woman + he couldn't deal with by striking back; and the police responded + properly to his appeal. He went about his affairs as usual that day + and every day, never saying a word to any one of his trouble nor + even indirectly asking sympathy, but making you feel that here if + anywhere was a rare kind of manhood, a self-respect so eminent as + to look down with scorn on the refuges open to ordinary human + weakness. This lasted five or six years. He never drank or took to + other vices, and lived a life of such decorum, so far as his own + action was concerned, a life of such interest and science and + literature, as to be the most delightful and unconscious of + companions even when his coat was at the last shabbiness and you + didn't dare to look at him for fear of betraying your own vulgar + misintelligence. Finally Lydia Sibyl died smitten with smallpox and + all her beauty gone to hideousness. He lingered awhile, his + charming manners undismayed still, his eye as undaunted as at the + beginning, and then he suddenly died. I never knew his equal for a + manly force competent to itself in every emergency and seeking none + of the ordinary subterfuges that men so often seek to hide their + imbecility. I think it a good basis.... + +Returning from Europe in June '70, after a stay there of some fifteen +months, I had crossed the sea eastward again two years later, with my +sister and our admirable aunt as companions--leaving them, I may +mention, to return home at the end of six months while I betook myself +to Italy, where I chiefly remained till the autumn of '74. The following +expresses our father's liberality of recognition and constant +tenderness of tone in a manner that no comment need emphasise, but at +one or two of his references I allow myself to glance. I happen to +remember perfectly for instance the appearance of the novel of Madame +Sand's that he so invidiously alludes to in one of the first numbers of +the cherished Revue that reached us after the siege of Paris had been +raised--such a pathetically scant starved pale number, I quite recall, +as expressed the share even of the proud periodical in the late general +and so tragic dearth; with which it comes back to me that I had myself a +bit critically mused on the characteristic queerness, the oddity of the +light thrown on the stricken French consciousness by the prompt +sprouting of _such_ a flower of the native imagination in the chill air +of discipline accepted and after the administration to that +consciousness of a supposedly clarifying dose. But I hadn't gone the +length of my father, who must have taken up the tale in its republished +form, a so slim salmon-coloured volume this time: oh the repeated +arrival, during those years, of the salmon-coloured volumes in their +habit as they lived, a habit reserved, to my extreme appreciation, for +this particular series, and that, enclosing the extraordinarily fresh +fruit of their author's benign maturity, left Tamaris and Valvèdre and +Mademoiselle La Quintinie in no degree ever "discounted" for us as +devotees of the Revue, I make out, by their being but renewals of +acquaintance. The sense of the salmon-coloured distinctive of Madame +Sand was even to come back to me long years after on my hearing Edmond +de Goncourt speak reminiscentially and, I permit myself to note, not at +all reverently, of the _robe de satin fleur-de-pêcher_ that the +illustrious and infatuated lady, whose more peculiar or native tint, as +Blanche Amory used to say, didn't contribute to a harmony, _s'était fait +faire_ in order to fix as much as possible the attention of Gustave +Flaubert at the Dîner Magny; of Gustave Flaubert, who, according to this +most invidious of reporters, disembroiled from each other with too scant +ease his tangle of possibly incurred ridicule from the declared +sentiment of so old a woman, even in a peach-blossom dress, and the +glory reflected on him by his admirer's immense distinction. Which +vision of a complicated past, recovered even as I write--and of a past +indeed contemporary with the early complacencies I attribute to +ourselves--doesn't at all blur its also coming back to me that I was to +have found my parent "hard on" poor Francia in spite of my own +comparative reserves; these being questions and shades that I rejoice to +think of our having had so discussionally, and well at home for the most +part, the social education of. I see that general period as quite +flushed and toned by the salmon-coloured covers; so that a kind of +domestic loyalty would ever operate, as we must have all felt, to make +us take the thick with the thin and not _y regarder_ for a Francia the +more or the less. When I say all indeed I doubtless have in mind +especially my parents and myself, with my sister and our admirable aunt +(in her times of presence) thrown in--to the extent of our subjection to +the charm of such matters in particular as La Famille de Germandre, La +Ville Noire, Nanon and L'Homme de Neige, round which last above all we +sat ranged in united ecstasy; so that I was to wonder through the after +years, and I think perhaps to this day, how it could come that a case of +the "story" strain at its finest and purest, a gush of imaginative force +so free and yet so artfully directed, shouldn't have somehow "stood out" +more in literary history. Perhaps indeed L'Homme de Neige does +essentially stand out in the unwritten parts of that record--which are +content to be mere tacit tender tradition; for all the world as if, +since there are more or less dreadful perpetuated books, by the hundred, +dreadful from whatever baseness or whatever scantness, that for shame, +as it were, we never mention, so one may figure others as closeted in +dimness (than which there is nothing safer) by the very scruple of +respect at its richest. I hover for instance about the closet of L'Homme +de Neige, I stand outside a moment as if listening for a breath from +within; but I don't open the door, you see--which must mean, in all +probability, that I wouldn't for the world inconsiderately finger again +one of the three volumes; _that_ meaning, in its turn, doubtless, that I +have heard the breath I had listened for and that it can only have been +what my argument wants, the breath of life unquenched. Isn't it relevant +to this that when she was not reading Trollope our dear mother was +reading "over" La Famille de Germandre, which, with several of its +companions of the same bland period, confirmed her in the sense that +there was no one like their author for a "love-story"?--a conviction, +however, that when made articulate exposed her to the imputation of a +larger tolerance than she doubtless intended to project; till the matter +was cleared up by our generally embracing her for so sweetly not knowing +about Valentine and Jacques and suchlike, and having only begun at La +Mare au Diable and even thereafter been occasionally obliged to skip. + +So far do I let myself go while, to recur to my letter, Chauncey Wright +sits for me in his customary corner of the deep library sofa and his +strange conflictingly conscious light blue eyes, appealing across the +years from under the splendid arch of his fair head, one of the +handsomest for representation of amplitude of thought that it was +possible to see, seems to say to me with a softness more aimed at the +heart than any alarm or any challenge: "But what then are you going to +do for me?" I find myself simply ache, I fear, as almost the only answer +to this--beyond his figuring for me as the most wasted and doomed, the +biggest at once and the gentlest, of the great intending and unproducing +(in anything like the just degree) bachelors of philosophy, bachelors of +attitude and of life. And as he so sits, loved and befriended and +welcomed, valued and invoked and vainly guarded and infinitely pitied, +till the end couldn't but come, he renews that appeal to the old +kindness left over, as I may say, and which must be more or less known +to all of us, for the good society that was helplessly to miss a right +chronicler, and the names of which, so full at the time of their fine +sense, were yet to be writ in water. Chauncey Wright, of the great +imperfectly-attested mind; Jane Norton, of the train, so markedly, of +the distinguished, the sacrificial, devoted; exquisite Mrs. Gurney, of +the infallible taste, the beautiful hands and the tragic fate; Gurney +himself, for so long Dean of the Faculty at Harvard and trusted judge of +all judgments (this latter pair the subject of my father's glance at +the tenantship of Shady Hill in the Nortons' absence:) they would +delightfully adorn a page and appease a piety that is still athirst if I +hadn't to let them pass. Harshly condemned to let them pass, and looking +wistfully after them as they go, how can I yet not have inconsequently +asked them to turn a moment more before disappearing? + + My heart turns to you this morning, so radiant in the paternal + panoply you wear toward Alice and your aunt, and I would give a + great deal to see you. The enclosed scrap of a letter from William + is sent to show you how vastly improved are his eyes, especially + when you shall have learned that he has written us within the last + four or five days twenty pages of like density to these. He would + fain persuade us to go to Mount Desert; perhaps later we may go to + Quebec, but we are so comfortable together reading Trollope and + talking philosophy that we cheerfully drop the future from our + regard. Mamma is free and active and bracing. She is a domestic + nor'wester, carrying balm and bloom into every nook and corner of + her empire.... She hangs over The Eustace Diamonds while I try + vainly to read George Sand's Francia. I have come across nothing of + that lady's that reflects a baser light on her personal history. + What must a woman have been through to want to grovel at this time + of day in such uncleanness? Don't buy it--I wish I hadn't! The new + North American is out, with a not too interesting article of + Chauncey Wright's on Mivart, a scandalous (in point of taste) essay + of Mr. Stirling on Buckle, full of Scotch conceit, insolence and + "wut;" a very very laboured article by James Lowell on Dante, in + which he determines to exhaust all knowledge; and these are all I + have read. Mr. Stirling of course makes Buckle ridiculous, but he + stamps himself a shabby creature. + +I find the following, addressed to his daughter in August '72, so +beautifully characteristic of our parents' always explicit admonition to +us, in our dependent years, against too abject an impulse to be frugal +in their interests, that I may fairly let it stand as a monument to this +particular aspect of their affection. + + Your and H.'s last letters bring tears of joy to our eyes. It's a + delight above all delights to feel one's children turn out all that + the heart covets in children. Your conviction is not up to the + truth. Our "tender thoughts" of you are so constant that I have + hardly been able to settle to anything since you have been gone. I + can do little else than recount to myself "the tender mercies of + the Lord" to me and my household. Still I am not wholly useless; I + try to write every day, and though I haven't my daughter at hand to + look after my style and occasionally after my ideas, I manage to do + a little. Your conscientious economy is excessively touching, but + it's a little overstrained. You needn't be afraid of putting us to + any embarrassment so long as your expenses don't exceed their + present rate; and you can buy all you want in Paris without + stretching your tether a particle. This is Mamma's message as well + as mine. Charles Atkinson wishes me to say that Monte Genneroso + above Lugano Lake--the P.O. Mendrisio--offers a wondrous climate; + and Mamma thinks--so fearful is she that you will descend into + Italy before the warm weather is over and so compromise your + strength--that you had either better go there awhile first or else + be ready to retreat on it in case you find the summer heat in + Venice impossible. + +Nor does this scrap from a letter to myself at the same season breathe a +spirit less liberal--so far as the sympathy with whatever might pass for +my fondest preoccupations was concerned. These were now quite frankly +recognised as the arduous attempt to learn somehow or other to write. + + I send you The Nation, though there seems nothing in it of your + own, and I think I never fail to recognise you. A notice of Gustave + Droz's Babolain (by T. S. P., I suppose) there is; which book I + read the other day. This fumbling in the cadaver of the old world, + however, only disgusts me when so unrelieved as in this case by any + contrast or any souffle of inspiration such as you get in + Tourguéneff. It's curious to observe how uncertain the author's + step is in this story--how he seems always on the look-out for some + chance to break away. But it has mastered him, he can't lay the + ghost he has conjured. + +To which I should limit myself for the commemoration of that group of +years by the gentle aid of the always vivid excerpt, were it not that I +have before me a considerable cluster of letters addressed by the writer +of the foregoing to Mr. J. Eliot Cabot, most accomplished of Bostonians, +most "cultivated" even among the cultivated, as we used to say, and of +a philosophic acuteness to which my father highly testified, with which +indeed he earnestly contended. The correspondence in question covered, +during the years I include, philosophic ground and none other; but +though no further exhibition of it than this reference may convey is to +my purpose I lay it under contribution to the extent of a passage or two +just for the pleasure of inviting recognition, as I invite it wherever +we meet an instance, of the fashion after which the intensely animated +soul can scarce fail of a harmony and a consistency of expression that +are nothing less than interesting, that in fact become at once +beautiful, in themselves. By which remark I nevertheless do not mean to +limit the significance of the writer's side of his long argument with +Mr. Eliot Cabot, into which I may not pretend to enter, nor the part +that in any such case a rare gift for style must inveterately play. + + I grant then that I am often tempted to conceive, as I read your + letters, that we differ only in your terms being more abstract, + mine more concrete; and yet I really don't think this difference is + exhaustive. If I thought Philosophy capable ever of being reduced + to logical compass or realising itself as science, I should give in + at once. But this is just what I cannot think. Philosophy is the + doctrine exclusively of the infinite in the finite, and deals with + the latter therefore only as a mask, only as _harbouring_ the + former. But if you formulate it scientifically your terms are + necessarily all finite, as furnished by experience, and the + infinite is excluded or at most creeps in as the + indefinite--Hegel's _becoming_ for example. Thus Hegel's dialectic + modulates only in the sphere of his distance. His _being_ is + universal existence, and, as universals have only a logical truth, + being in se is equivalent to Nothing. But Nothing hasn't even a + logical basis. Lithe as human thought is it can't compass the + conception. It is a mere brutum fulmen devised to disguise the + absence of thought or its inanition; and Hegel, if he had been + wise, would have said no-thought instead of no-thing. For no-thing + doesn't express the complete absence of existence. Existence is of + two sorts, real and personal, sensible and conscious, quantitative + and qualitative. The most you are entitled to say therefore when + existence disappears in quantitative, real or sensible, form is + that it has been taken up into purely qualitative, personal or + conscious form; no-thing being the logical equivalent of + all-person. Thus I, who in Hegel's formula presumably extract + existence from being, survive the operation as person, and though I + am most clearly no-thing I am yet not _being_. Indeed I am not even + existence any longer, since by knocking thing out of being I have + forfeited my own reality, and consent henceforth to be pure + personality, _i.e._ phenomenality. And personal or phenomenal + existence is constituted by referring itself to a foreign source, + or, what is the same thing, confessing itself created: so that the + fundamental word of Philosophy, by Hegel's own formula, is + creation; which, however, as I understand him, he denies in any + objective sense of the word. This then is what I complain of in + him--with deference of course to your better knowledge, which, + however, you do not urge as yet in what seems to me a silencing + way--that he makes existence _essential_ to being, so that take + existence away and being becomes nothing. It would not be a whit + less preposterous in me to say that thought is essential to thing, + subject to object, marble to statue, canvas to picture, woman to + wife, mother to child. It is literally putting the cart before the + horse and converting Philosophy to a practical quagmire. Being + implies existence of course just as picture implies canvas, or as + personality implies reality, or as chick implies egg; but it + implies it only to a lower intelligence than itself, an unspiritual + intelligence to wit, which has no direct or inward intuition of + being, and requires to be agitated to discerning it. When I + recognise the spiritual life of Art I never think of marble or + canvas as entering even conditionally into its manifestations. + +But I hold my case for a rare command of manner thus proved, and need go +no further; the more that I have dropped too many of those threads of my +rather niggled tapestry that belong but to the experience of my own +weaving hand and the interplay of which represents thereby a certain +gained authority. I disentangle these again, if the term be not +portentous, though reflecting too, and again with complacency, that +though I thus prize them as involved most in my own consciousness, this +is just because of their attachment somewhere else to other matters and +other lives. + + + + +IX + + +I went up from Newport to Cambridge early in the autumn of '62, and on +one of the oddest errands, I think, that, given the several +circumstances, I could possibly have undertaken. I was nineteen years +old, and it had seemed to me for some time past that some such step as +my entering for instance the Harvard Law School more or less urgently +concerned what I could but try to help myself out by still putting +forward as my indispensable education--I am not sure indeed that the +claim didn't explicitly figure, or at least successfully dangle, as that +of my possibly graceful mere "culture." I had somehow--by which I mean +for reasons quite sufficient--to fall back on the merciful "mere" for +any statement of my pretensions even to myself: so little they seemed to +fit into any scheme of the conventional maximum as compared with those I +saw so variously and strongly asserted about me, especially since the +outbreak of the War. I am not sure whether I yet made bold to say it, +but I should surely be good for nothing, all my days, if not for +projecting into the concrete, by hook or by crook--that is my +imagination shamelessly aiding--some show of (again) mere life. This +impression was not in the least the flag I publicly brandished; in fact +I must have come as near as possible to brandishing none whatever, a +sound instinct always hinting to me, I gather, that the tune for such a +performance was much more after than before--before the perfect place +had been found for the real planting of the standard and the giving of +its folds to the air. No such happy spot had been marked, decidedly, at +that period, to my inquiring eye; in consequence of which the emblazoned +morsel (hoisted sooner or later by all of us, I think, somehow and +somewhere), might have passed for the hour as a light extravagant +bandanna rolled into the tight ball that fits it for hiding in the +pocket. There it considerably stayed, so far as I was concerned; and all +the more easily as I can but have felt how little any particular thing I +might meanwhile "do" would matter--save for some specious appearance in +it. This last, I recognise, had for me a virtue--principally that of +somehow gaining time; though I hasten to add that my approach to the Law +School can scarcely, as a means to this end, in the air of it that comes +back to me, have been in the least deceptive. By which I mean that my +appearance of intentions, qualifications, possibilities, or whatever +else, in the connection, hadn't surely so much as the grace of the +specious. I spoke above of the assumed "indispensability" of some show +of my being further subject to the "education" theory, but this was for +the moment only under failure to ask to whom, or for what, such a +tribute _was_ indispensable. The interest to myself would seem to have +been, as I recover the sense of the time, that of all the +impossibilities of action my proceeding to Cambridge on the very vaguest +grounds that probably ever determined a residence there might pass for +the least flagrant; as I breathe over again at any rate the comparative +confidence in which I so moved I feel it as a confidence in the positive +saving virtue of vagueness. Could I but work that force as an ideal I +felt it must see me through, for the beauty of it in that form was that +it should absolutely superabound. I wouldn't have allowed, either, that +it was vaguer to do nothing; for in the first place just staying at home +when everyone was on the move couldn't in any degree show the right +mark: to be properly and perfectly vague one had to be vague _about_ +something; mere inaction quite lacked the note--it was nothing but +definite and dull. I thought of the Law School experiment, I remember, +in all sorts of conceivable connections, but in the connection of +dulness surely never for an hour. I thought of it under the head of +"life"--by which term at the same time, I blush to confess, I didn't in +the least mean free evening access to Boston in a jangling horse-car, +with whatever extension this might give to the joy of the liberated +senses. I simply meant--well, what was monstrously to happen; which I +shall be better inspired here to deal with as a demonstration made in +its course than as a premonition relatively crude and at the time still +to be verified. Marked in the whole matter, however these things might +be, was that irony of fate under the ugly grin of which I found my +father reply in the most offhand and liberal manner to my remark that +the step in question--my joining, in a sense, my brother at +Cambridge--wouldn't be wholly impracticable. It might have been, from +his large assent to it, a masterstroke of high policy. A certain +inconsequence in this left me wondering why then if the matter was now +so natural it hadn't been to his mind a year before equally simple that +I should go to college, and to _that_ College, after a more showy, even +though I see it would have been at the same time a less presumptuous, +fashion. To have deprecated the "college course" with such emphasis only +so soon afterwards to forswear all emphasis and practically smile, in +mild oblivion, on _any_ Harvard connection I might find it in me to take +up, was to bring it home, I well recall, that the case might originally +have been much better managed. + +All of which would seem to kick up more dust than need quite have hung +about so simple a matter as my setting forth to the Cambridge scene with +no design that I could honourably exhibit. A superficial account of the +matter would have been that my father had a year or two earlier appeared +to think so ill of it as to reduce me, given the "delicacy," the inward, +not then the outward, which I have glanced at, to mild renunciation--mild +I say because I remember in fact, rather to my mystification now, no +great pang of disappointment, no soreness of submission. I didn't want +anything so much as I wanted a certain good (or wanted thus supremely +_to_ want it, if I may say so), with which a conventional going to +college wouldn't have so tremendously much to do as for the giving it up +to break my heart--or an unconventional not-going so tremendously much +either. What I "wanted to want" to be was, all intimately, just +_literary_; a decent respect for the standard hadn't yet made my +approach so straight that there weren't still difficulties that might +seem to meet it, questions it would have to depend on. Passing the +Harvard portal positively failed in fact to strike me as the shorter cut +to literature; the sounds that rose from the scene as I caught them +appeared on the contrary the most detached from any such interest that +had ever reached my ear. Merely to open the door of the big square +closet, the ample American closet, to the like of which Europe had never +treated us, on the shelves and round the walls of which the pink Revues +sat with the air, row upon row, of a choir of breathing angels, was to +take up that particular, that sacred, connection in a way that put the +coarser process to shame. The drop of the Harvard question had of a +truth really meant, as I recover it, a renewed consecration of the rites +of that chapel where the taper always twinkled--which circumstance I +mention as not only qualifying my sense of loss, but as symbolising, +after a queer fashion, the independence, blest vision (to the extent, +that is, of its being a closer compact with the life of the +imagination), that I should thus both luckily come in for and +designingly cultivate: cultivate in other words under the rich cover of +obscurity. I have already noted how the independence was, ever so few +months later, by so quaint a turn, another mere shake of the tree, to +drop into my lap in the form of a great golden apple--a value not a +simple windfall only through the fact that my father's hand had after +all just lightly loosened it. This accession pointed the moral that +there was no difficulty about anything, no intrinsic difficulty; so +that, to re-emphasise the sweet bewilderment, I was to "go" where I +liked in the Harvard direction and do what I liked in the Harvard +relation. Such was the situation as offered me; though as I had to take +it and use it I found in it no little difference. Two things and more +had come up--the biggest of which, and very wondrous as bearing on any +circumstance of mine, as having a grain of weight to spare for it, was +the breaking out of the War. The other, the infinitely small affair in +comparison, was a passage of personal history the most entirely +personal, but between which, as a private catastrophe or difficulty, +bristling with embarrassments, and the great public convulsion that +announced itself in bigger terms each day, I felt from the very first an +association of the closest, yet withal, I fear, almost of the least +clearly expressible. Scarce at all to be stated, to begin with, the +queer fusion or confusion established in my consciousness during the +soft spring of '61 by the firing on Fort Sumter, Mr. Lincoln's instant +first call for volunteers and a physical mishap, already referred to as +having overtaken me at the same dark hour, and the effects of which were +to draw themselves out incalculably and intolerably. Beyond all present +notation the interlaced, undivided way in which what had happened to me, +by a turn of fortune's hand, in twenty odious minutes, kept company of +the most unnatural--I can call it nothing less--with my view of what was +happening, with the question of what might still happen, to everyone +about me, to the country at large: it so made of these marked +disparities a single vast visitation. One had the sense, I mean, of a +huge comprehensive ache, and there were hours at which one could scarce +have told whether it came most from one's own poor organism, still so +young and so meant for better things, but which had suffered particular +wrong, or from the enclosing social body, a body rent with a thousand +wounds and that thus treated one to the honour of a sort of tragic +fellowship. The twenty minutes had sufficed, at all events, to establish +a relation--a relation to everything occurring round me not only for the +next four years but for long afterward--that was at once extraordinarily +intimate and quite awkwardly irrelevant. I must have felt in some +befooled way in presence of a crisis--the smoke of Charleston Bay still +so acrid in the air--at which the likely young should be up and doing +or, as familiarly put, lend a hand much wanted; the willing youths, all +round, were mostly starting to their feet, and to have trumped up a +lameness at such a juncture could be made to pass in no light for +graceful. Jammed into the acute angle between two high fences, where the +rhythmic play of my arms, in tune with that of several other pairs, but +at a dire disadvantage of position, induced a rural, a rusty, a +quasi-extemporised old engine to work and a saving stream to flow, I had +done myself, in face of a shabby conflagration, a horrid even if an +obscure hurt; and what was interesting from the first was my not +doubting in the least its duration--though what seemed equally clear was +that I needn't as a matter of course adopt and appropriate it, so to +speak, or place it for increase of interest on exhibition. The interest +of it, I very presently knew, would certainly be of the greatest, would +even in conditions kept as simple as I might make them become little +less than absorbing. The shortest account of what was to follow for a +long time after is therefore to plead that the interest never did fail. +It was naturally what is called a painful one, but it consistently +declined, as an influence at play, to drop for a single instant. +Circumstances, by a wonderful chance, overwhelmingly favoured it--as an +interest, an inexhaustible, I mean; since I also felt in the whole +enveloping tonic atmosphere a force promoting its growth. Interest, the +interest of life and of death, of our national existence, of the fate of +those, the vastly numerous, whom it closely concerned, the interest of +the extending War, in fine, the hurrying troops, the transfigured scene, +formed a cover for every sort of intensity, made tension itself in fact +contagious--so that almost any tension would do, would serve for one's +share. + +I have here, I allow, not a little to foreshorten--have to skip sundry +particulars, certain of the steps by which I came to think of my +relation to my injury as a _modus vivendi_ workable for the time. These +steps had after the first flush of reaction inevitably _had_ to be +communications of my state, recognitions and admissions; which had the +effect, I hasten to add, of producing sympathies, supports and +reassurances. I gladly took these things, I perfectly remember, at that +value; distinct to me as it still is nevertheless that the indulgence +they conveyed lost part of its balm by involving a degree of +publication. Direfully distinct have remained to me the conditions of a +pilgrimage to Boston made that summer under my father's care for +consultation of a great surgeon, the head of his profession there; whose +opinion and advice--the more that he was a guaranteed friend of my +father's--had seemed the best light to invoke on the less and less +bearable affliction with which I had been for three or four months +seeking to strike some sort of bargain: mainly, up to that time, under +protection of a theory of temporary supine "rest" against which +everything inward and outward tended equally to conspire. Agitated +scraps of rest, snatched, to my consciousness, by the liveliest +violence, were to show for futile almost to the degree in which the +effort of our interview with the high expert was afterwards so to show; +the truth being that this interview settled my sad business, settled it +just in that saddest sense, for ever so long to come. This was so much +the case that, as the mere scene of our main appeal, the house from +which we had after its making dejectedly emerged put forth to me as I +passed it in many a subsequent season an ironic smug symbolism of its +action on my fate. That action had come from the complete failure of our +approached oracle either to warn, to comfort or to command--to do +anything but make quite unassistingly light of the bewilderment exposed +to him. In default of other attention or suggestion he might by a mere +warning as to gravities only too possible, and already well advanced, +have made such a difference; but I have little forgotten how I felt +myself, the warning absent, treated but to a comparative pooh-pooh--an +impression I long looked back to as a sharp parting of the ways, with an +adoption of the wrong one distinctly determined. It was not simply small +comfort, it was only a mystification the more, that the inconvenience of +my state had to reckon with the strange fact of there being nothing to +speak of the matter with me. The graceful course, on the whole ground +again (and where moreover was delicacy, the proposed, the intended, +without grace?) was to behave accordingly, in good set terms, as if the +assurance were true; since the time left no margin at all for one's +gainsaying with the right confidence so high an authority. There were a +hundred ways to behave--in the general sense so freely suggested, I +mean; and I think of the second half of that summer of '62 as my attempt +at selection of the best. The best still remained, under closer +comparisons, very much what it had at first seemed, and there was in +fact this charm in it that to prepare for an ordeal essentially +intellectual, as I surmised, might justly involve, in the public eye, a +season of some retirement. The beauty was--I can fairly see it now, +through the haze of time, even as beauty!--that studious retirement and +preparatory hours did after all supply the supine attitude, did invest +the ruefulness, did deck out the cynicism of lying down book in hand +with a certain fine plausibility. This was at least a negative of +combat, an organised, not a loose and empty one, something definitely +and firmly parallel to action in the tented field; and I well recall, +for that matter, how, when early in the autumn I had in fact become the +queerest of forensic recruits, the bristling horde of my Law School +comrades fairly produced the illusion of a mustered army. The Cambridge +campus was tented field enough for a conscript starting so compromised; +and I can scarce say moreover how easily it let me down that when it +came to the point one had still fine fierce young men, in great numbers, +for company, there being at the worst so many such who hadn't flown to +arms. I was to find my fancy of the merely relative right in any way to +figure, or even on such terms just to exist, I was to find it in due +course quite drop from me as the Cambridge year played itself out, +leaving me all aware that, full though the air might be of stiffer +realities, one had yet a rare handful of one's own to face and deal +with. + +At Cambridge of course, when I got there, I was further to find my +brother on the scene and already at a stage of possession of its +contents that I was resigned in advance never to reach; so thoroughly I +seemed to feel a sort of quickening savoury meal in any cold scrap of +his own experience that he might pass on to my palate. This figure has +definite truth, that is, but for association at the board literally +yielding us nourishment--the happiest as to social composition and +freedom of supply of all the _tables d'hôte_ of those days, a veritable +haunt of conversation ruled by that gently fatuous Miss Upham something +of whose angular grace and antique attitude has lived again for us in +William's letters. I place him, if not at the moment of my to that +extent joining him then at least from a short time afterwards, in +quarters that he occupied for the next two or three years--quiet +cloistered rooms, as they almost appeared to me, in the comparatively +sequestered Divinity Hall of that still virtually rustic age; which, +though mainly affected to the use of post-graduates and others, of a +Unitarian colour, enrolled under Harvard's theological Faculty, offered +chance accommodation, much appreciated for a certain supposedly separate +charm, not to say a finer dignity, by the more maturely studious in +other branches as well. The superstition or aftertaste of Europe had +then neither left me nor hinted that it ever might; yet I recall as a +distinct source of interest, to be desperately dealt with, and dealt +with somehow to my inward advantage, the special force of the +circumstance that I was now for the first time in presence of matters +normally, entirely, consistently American, and that more particularly I +found myself sniff up straight from the sources, such as they +unmistakably were, the sense of that New England which had been to me +till then but a name. This from the first instant was what I most took +in, and quite apart from the question of what one was going to make of +it, of whether one was going, in the simple formula, to like it, and of +what would come, could the impression so triumph, of such monstrous +assimilations. Clear to me in the light thus kindled that my American +consciousness had hitherto been after all and at the best singularly +starved, and that Newport for instance, during the couple of years, had +fed it but with sips of an adulterated strain. Newport, with its +opera-glass turned for ever across the sea--for Newport, or at least +_our_ Newport, even during the War, lived mainly, and quite visibly, by +the opera-glass--was comparatively, and in its degree incurably, +cosmopolite; and though on our first alighting there I had more or less +successfully, as I fancied, invited the local historic sense to vibrate, +it was at present left me to feel myself a poor uninitiated creature. +However, an initiation, at least by the intelligence, into some given +thing--almost anything really given would do--was essentially what I +was, as we nowadays say, after; the fault with my previous data in the +American kind had been that they weren't sufficiently given; so that +here would be Boston and Cambridge giving as with absolute authority. +The War had by itself of course, on the ground I speak of, communicated +something of the quality, or rather of the quantity, otherwise +deficient; only this was for my case, of which alone I speak, an +apprehension without a language or a channel--a revelation as sublime +as one would like to feel it, but spreading abroad as a whole and not, +alas, by any practice of mine, reducible to parts. What I promptly made +out at Cambridge was that "America" would be given, as I have called it, +to a tune altogether fresh, so that to hear this tune wholly played out +might well become on the spot an inspiring privilege. If I indeed, I +should add, said to myself "wholly," this was of course not a little +straining a point; since, putting my initiation, my grasp of the +exhibition, at its conceivable liveliest, far more of the supposed total +was I inevitably to miss than to gather to my use. But I might gather +what I could, and therein was exactly the adventure. To rinse my mouth +of the European aftertaste _in order_ to do justice to whatever of the +native bitter-sweet might offer itself in congruous vessels--such a +brave dash for discovery, and such only, would give a sense to my +posture. With which it was unmistakable that I shouldn't in the least +have painfully to strive; of such a force of impact was each impression +clearly capable that I had much rather to steady myself, at any moment, +where I stood, and quite to a sense of the luxury of the occasion, than +to cultivate inquiry at the aggressive pitch. There was no need for +curiosity--it was met by every object, I seemed to see, so much more +than half way; unless indeed I put it better by saying that as _all_ my +vision partook of that principle the impulse and the object perpetually +melted together. It wasn't for instance by the faintest process of +inquiry that the _maison_ Upham, where I three times daily sat at meat, +had scarce to wait an hour to become as vivid a translation into +American terms of Balzac's Maison Vauquer, in Le Père Goriot, as I could +have desired to deal with. + +It would have been at once uplifting to see in the American terms a vast +improvement on the prime version, had I not been here a bit baffled by +the sense that the correspondence was not quite, after all, of like with +like, and that the main scene of Balzac's action was confessedly and +curiously sordid and even sinister, whereas its equivalent under the +Harvard elms would rank decidedly as what we had _de mieux_, or in other +words of most refined, in the "boarding" line, to show. I must have been +further conscious that what we had de mieux in the social line appeared +quite liable, on occasion, to board wherever it might--the situation in +Balzac's world being on this head as different as possible. No one not +deeply distressed or dismally involved or all but fatally compromised +could have taken the chances of such an establishment at all; so that +any comparison to our own particular advantage had to be, on +reflection, nipped in the bud. There was a generic sameness, none the +less, I might still reason; enough of that at least to show the two +pictures as each in its way interesting--which was all that was +required. The Maison Vauquer, its musty air thick with heavier social +elements, might have been more so, for the Harvard elms overhung no +strange Vautrin, no old Goriot, no young Rastignac; yet the interest of +the Kirkland Street company couldn't, so to speak, help itself either, +any more than I could help taking advantage of it. In one respect +certainly, in the matter of talk as talk, we shone incomparably +brighter; and if it took what we had de mieux to make our so regular +resort a scene essentially of conversation, the point was none the less +that our materials were there. I found the effect of this, very easily, +as American as I liked--liked, that is, to think of it and to make all I +might of it for being; about which in truth all difficulty vanished from +the moment the local colour of the War broke in. So of course this +element did at that season come back to us through every outward +opening, and mean enough by contrast had been the questions amid which +the Vauquer boarders grubbed. Anything even indirectly touched by our +public story, stretching now into volume after volume of the very +biggest print, took on that reflected light of dignity, of importance, +or of mere gross salience, which passion charged with criticism, and +criticism charged with the thousand menaced affections and connections, +the whole of the reaction--charged in short with immediate intimate +life--have a power, in such conditions, to fling as from a waving torch. +The torch flared sufficiently about Miss Upham's board--save that she +herself, ancient spinster, pushed it in dismay from her top of the +table, blew upon it with vain scared sighs, and would have nothing to do +with a matter so disturbing to the right temperature of her _plats_. We +others passed it from hand to hand, so that it couldn't go quite +out--since I must in fairness add that the element of the casual and the +more _generally_ ironic, the play of the studious or the irrepressibly +social intelligence at large, couldn't fail to insist pretty constantly +on its rights. There were quarters as well, I should note, in which the +sense of local colour proceeding at all straight from the source I have +named--reflected, that is, from camp and field--could but very soon run +short; sharply enough do I recall for instance the felt, even if all so +privately felt, limits of _my_ poor stream of contributive remark +(despite my habit, so fondly practised in the connection, of expatiating +_in petto_). My poor stream would have trickled, truly, had it been able +to trickle at all, from the most effective of my few occasions of +"realising," up to that time, as to field and camp; literally as to camp +in fact, since the occasion had consisted of a visit paid, or a +pilgrimage, rather, ever so piously, so tenderly made, one August +afternoon of the summer just ended, to a vast gathering of invalid and +convalescent troops, under canvas and in roughly improvised shanties, at +some point of the Rhode Island shore that figures to my memory, though +with a certain vagueness, as Portsmouth Grove. (American local names +lend themselves strangely little to retention, I find, if one has +happened to deal for long years with almost any group of European +designations--these latter springing, as it has almost always come to +seem, straight from the soil where natural causes were anciently to root +them, each with its rare identity. The bite into interest of the +borrowed, the imposed, the "faked" label, growing but as by a dab of +glue on an article of trade, is inevitably much less sharp.) Vagueness +at best attends, however, the queer experience I glance at; what lives +of it, in the ineffaceable way, being again, by my incurable perversity, +my ambiguous economy, much less a matter of the "facts of the case," as +they should, even though so dead and buried now, revive to help me +through an anecdote, than the prodigiously subjective side of the +experience, thanks to which it still presumes to flush with the grand +air of an adventure. If I had not already so often brazened out my +confession of the far from "showy" in the terms on which impressions +could become indelibly momentous to me I might blush indeed for the thin +tatter dragged in thus as an affair of record. It consisted at the time +simply of an emotion--though the emotion, I should add, appeared to +consist of everything in the whole world that my consciousness could +hold. By _that_ intensity did it hang as bravely as possible together, +and by the title so made good has it handed itself endlessly down. + +Owing to which it is that I don't at all know what troops were in +question, a "mere" couple of Rhode Island regiments (nothing in those +days could be too big to escape the application of the "mere,") or a +congeries of the temporarily incapacitated, the more or less broken, +picked from the veterans--so far as there already were such--of the East +at large and directed upon the Grove as upon a place of stowage and +sanitation. Discriminations of the prosaic order had little to do with +my first and all but sole vision of the American soldier in his +multitude, and above all--for that was markedly the colour of the whole +thing--in his depression, his wasted melancholy almost; an effect that +somehow corresponds for memory, I bethink myself, with the tender +elegiac tone in which Walt Whitman was later on so admirably to +commemorate him. The restrictions I confess to are abject, but both my +sense and my aftersense of the exhibition I here allude to had, thanks +to my situation, to do all the work they could in the way of +representation to me of what was most publicly, most heroically, most +wastefully, tragically, terribly going on. It had so to serve for my +particular nearest approach to a "contact" with the active drama--I mean +of course the collectively and scenically active, since the brush of +interest against the soldier single and salient was an affair of every +day--that were it not for just one other strange spasm of awareness, +scarce relaxed to this hour, I should have been left all but pitifully +void of any scrap of a substitute for the concrete experience. The long +hot July 1st of '63, on which the huge battle of Gettysburg had begun, +could really be--or rather couldn't possibly not be--a scrap of concrete +experience for any group of united persons, New York cousins and all, +who, in a Newport garden, restlessly strolling, sitting, neither daring +quite to move nor quite to rest, quite to go in nor quite to stay out, +actually _listened_ together, in their almost ignobly safe stillness, as +to the boom of far-away guns. This _was_, as it were, the War--the War +palpably in Pennsylvania; not less than my hour of a felt rage of +repining at my doomed absence from the sight of that march of the 54th +Massachusetts out of Boston, "Bob" Shaw at its head and our exalted +Wilky among its officers, of which a great sculptor was, on the spot of +their vividest passing, to set the image aloft forever. Poor other +visitations, comparatively, had had to suffice for me; I could take in +fact for amusing, most of all (since that, thank goodness, was high +gaiety), a couple of impressions of the brief preliminary camp life at +Readville during which we admired the charming composition of the 44th +of the same State, under Colonel Frank Lee, and which fairly made +romantic for me Wilky's quick spring out of mere juvenility and into +such brightly-bristling ranks. He had begun by volunteering in a company +that gave him half the ingenuous youth of the circle within our social +ken for brothers-in-arms, and it was to that pair of Readville +afternoons I must have owed my all so emphasised vision of handsome +young Cabot Russell, who, again to be his closest brother-in-arms in the +54th, irrecoverably lost himself, as we have seen, at Fort Wagner. A dry +desert, one must suppose, the life in which, for memory and appreciation +made one, certain single hours or compressed groups of hours have found +their reason for standing out through everything, for insistently +living on, in the cabinet of intimate reference, the museum, as it were, +of the soul's curiosities--where doubtless at the same time an +exhibition of them to mere other eyes or ears or questioning logical +minds may effect itself in no plain terms. We recognise such occasions +more and more as we go on, and are surely, as a general thing, glad +when, for the interest of memory--which it's such a business to _keep_ +interesting--they constitute something of a cluster. In my queer +cluster, at any rate, that flower of the connection which answers to the +name of Portsmouth Grove still overtops other members of its class, so +that to finger it again for a moment is to make it perceptibly exhale +its very principle of life. This was, for me, at the time, neither more +nor less than that the American soldier in his multitude was the most +attaching and affecting and withal the most amusing figure of romance +conceivable; the great sense of my vision being thus that, as the +afternoon light of the place and time lingered upon him, both to the +seeming enhancement of his quality and of its own, romance of a more +confused kind than I shall now attempt words for attended his every +movement. It was the charmingest, touchingest, dreadfullest thing in the +world that my impression of him should have to be somehow of his +abandonment to a rueful humour, to a stoic reserve which could yet +melt, a relation with him once established, into a rich communicative +confidence; and, in particular, all over the place, of his own scanted +and more or less baffled, though constantly and, as I couldn't not have +it, pathetically, "knowing" devices. + +The great point remained for me at all events that I could afterwards +appear to myself to have done nothing but establish with him a relation, +that I established it, to my imagination, in several cases--and all in +the three or four hours--even to the pitch of the last tenderness of +friendship. I recover that, strolling about with honest and so superior +fellow-citizens, or sitting with them by the improvised couches of their +languid rest, I drew from each his troubled tale, listened to his plaint +on his special hard case--taking form, this, in what seemed to me the +very poetry of the esoteric vernacular--and sealed the beautiful tie, +the responsive sympathy, by an earnest offer, in no instance waved away, +of such pecuniary solace as I might at brief notice draw on my poor +pocket for. Yet again, as I indulge this memory, do I feel that I might +if pushed a little rejoice in having to such an extent coincided with, +not to say perhaps positively anticipated, dear old Walt--even if I +hadn't come armed like him with oranges and peppermints. I ministered +much more summarily, though possibly in proportion to the time and +thanks to my better luck more pecuniarily; but I like to treat myself to +making out that I can scarce have brought to the occasion (in proportion +to the time again and to other elements of the case) less of the +consecrating sentiment than he. I like further to put it in a light +that, ever so curiously, if the good Walt was most inwardly stirred to +his later commemorative accents by his participating in the common +Americanism of his hospital friends, the familiar note and shared sound +of which formed its ground of appeal, I found myself victim to a like +moving force through quite another logic. It was literally, I fear, +because our common Americanism carried with it, to my imagination, such +a disclosed freshness and strangeness, working, as I might say, over +such gulfs of dissociation, that I reached across to _their_, these +hospital friends', side of the matter, even at the risk of an imperilled +consistency. It had for me, the state in question, colour and form, +accent and quality, with scarce less "authority" than if instead of the +rough tracks or worn paths of my casual labyrinth I had trod the glazed +halls of some school of natural history. What holds me now indeed is +that such an institution might have exemplified then almost nothing but +the aspects strictly native to our social and seasonal air; so simply +and easily conceivable to the kindly mind were at that time these +reciprocities, so great the freedom and pleasure of them compared with +the restrictions imposed on directness of sympathy by the awful +admixtures of to-day, those which offer to the would-be participant +among us, on returns from sojourns wherever homogeneity and its entailed +fraternity, its easy contacts, still may be seen to work, the strange +shock of such amenities declined on any terms. Really not possible then, +I think, the perception now accompanying, on American ground, this +shock--the recognition, by any sensibility at all reflective, of the +point where our national theory of absorption, assimilation and +conversion appallingly breaks down; appallingly, that is, for those to +whom the _consecrated_ association, of the sort still at play where +community has not been blighted, strongly speaks. Which remarks may +reinforce the note of my unconsciousness of any difficulty for knowing +in the old, the comparatively brothering, conditions what an American at +least _was_. Absurd thus, no doubt, that the scant experience over which +I perversely linger insists on figuring to me as quite a revel of the +right confidence. + +The revel, though I didn't for the moment yet know it, was to be renewed +for me at Cambridge with less of a romantic intensity perhaps, but more +usefully, so to put it, and more informingly; surrounded as I presently +found myself at the Law School with young types, or rather with young +members of a single type, not one of whom but would have enriched my +imagined hall of congruous specimens. _That_, with the many months of +it, was to be the real disclosure, the larger revelation; that was to be +the fresh picture for a young person reaching the age of twenty in +wellnigh grotesque unawareness of the properties of the atmosphere in +which he but wanted to claim that he had been nourished. Of what I mean +by this I shall in a moment have more to say--after pointing a trifle +more, for our patience, the sense of my dilatation upon Portsmouth +Grove. Perfectly distinct has remained the sail back to Newport by that +evening's steamboat; the mere memory of which indeed--and I recall that +I felt it inordinately long--must have been for me, just above, the +spring of the whole reference. The sail was long, measured by my acute +consciousness of paying physically for my excursion--which hadn't +answered the least little bit for my impaired state. This last +disobliging fact became one, at the same time, with an intensity, indeed +a strange rapture, of reflection, which I may not in the least pretend +to offer as a clear or coherent or logical thing, and of which I can +only say, leaving myself there through the summer twilight, in too scant +rest on a deck stool and against the bulwark, that it somehow crowned +my little adventure of sympathy and wonder with a shining round of +resignation--a realisation, as we nowadays put it, that, measuring +wounds against wounds, or the compromised, the particular taxed +condition, at the least, against all the rest of the debt then so +generally and enormously due, one was no less exaltedly than wastefully +engaged in the common fact of endurance. There are memories in truth too +fine or too peculiar for notation, too intensely individual and +supersubtle--call them what one will; yet which one may thus no more +give up confusedly than one may insist on them vainly. Their kind is +nothing ever to a present purpose unless they are in a manner statable, +but is at the same time ruefully aware of threatened ridicule if they +are overstated. Not that I in the least mind such a menace, however, in +just adding that, soothed as I have called the admirable ache of my +afternoon with that inward interpretation of it, I felt the latter--or +rather doubtless simply the entire affair--absolutely overarched by the +majestic manner in which the distress of our return drew out into the +lucid charm of the night. To which I must further add that the hour +seemed, by some wondrous secret, to know itself marked and charged and +unforgettable--hinting so in its very own terms of cool beauty at +something portentous in it, an exquisite claim then and there for +lasting value and high authority. + + + + +X + + +All of which foregoing makes, I grant, a long parenthesis in my recovery +of the more immediate Cambridge impressions. I have left them awaiting +me, yet I am happy to say not sensibly the worse for it, in their +cluster roundabout Miss Upham and her board of beneficiary images; which +latter start up afresh and with the softest submission to any convenient +neglect--that ineffably touching and confessed dependence of such +apparitions on one's "pleasure," save the mark! for the flicker of +restorative light. The image most vividly restored is doubtless that of +Professor F. J. Child, head of the "English Department" at Harvard and +master of that great modern science of folk-lore to his accomplishment +in which his vast and slowly-published collection of the Ballad +literature of our language is a recognised monument; delightful man, +rounded character, passionate patriot, admirable talker, above all +thorough humanist and humorist. He was the genial autocrat of that +breakfast-table not only, but of our symposia otherwise timed, and as he +comes back to me with the fresh and quite circular countenance of the +time before the personal cares and complications of life had gravely +thickened for him, his aspect _all_ finely circular, with its close +rings of the fairest hair, its golden rims of the largest glasses, its +finished rotundity of figure and attitude, I see that _there_ was the +American spirit--since I was "after" it--of a quality deeply inbred, +beautifully adjusted to all extensions of knowledge and taste and, as +seemed to me, quite sublimely quickened by everything that was at the +time so tremendously in question. That vision of him was never +afterwards to yield to other lights--though these, even had occasion for +them been more frequent with me, couldn't much have interfered with it; +so that what I still most retain of him is the very flush and mobility, +the living expansion and contraction, the bright comedy and almost lunar +eclipse, of his cherubic face according as things appeared to be going +for the country. I was always just across from him, as my brother, +beside whom I took my place, had been, and I remember well how vivid a +clock-face it became to me; I found still, as in my younger time, matter +enough everywhere for gaping, but greatest of all, I think, while that +tense season lasted, was my wonder for the signs and portents, the quips +and cranks, the wreathèd smiles, or otherwise the candid obscurations, +of our prime talker's presented visage. I set, as it were, the small +tick of my own poor watch by it--which private register would thump or +intermit in agreement with these indications. I recover it that, thanks +to the perpetual play of his sympathy and irony, confidence and scorn, +as well as to that of my own less certainly directed sensibility, he +struck me on the bad days, which were then so many, as fairly august, +cherubism and all, for sincerity of association with every light and +shade, every ebb and flow, of our Cause. Where he most shone out, +indeed, so that depression then wasn't a gloom in him but a darting +flame, was in the icy air of the attitude of the nations to us, that of +the couple, the most potent, across the sea, with which we were +especially concerned and which, as during the whole earlier half of the +War and still longer it more and more defined itself, drew from him at +once all the drolleries and all the asperities of his sarcasm. Nothing +more particularly touched me in him, I make out--for it lingers in a +light of its own--than the fashion after which he struck me as a fond +grave guardian, not so much of the memory and the ashes yet awhile, as +of the promise, in all its flower, of the sacrificial young men whom the +University connection had passed through his hands and whom he looked +out for with a tenderness of interest, a nursing pride, that was as +contagious as I could possibly have wished it. I didn't myself know the +young men, save three or four, and could only, at our distance, hold my +tongue and do them homage; never afterwards (as I even then foreknew +would be the case) missing, when I could help it, or failing to pick up, +a single brush, a scattered leaf, of their growing or their riper +legend. Certain of them whom I had neither seen nor, as they fell in +battle, was destined ever to see, have lived for me since just as +communicated images, figures created by his tone about them--which, I +admit, mightn't or needn't have mattered to me for all the years, yet +which couldn't help so doing from the moment the right touch had handed +them over to my restless claim. + +It was not meanwhile for want of other figures that these were gathered +in, for I have again to grant that in those days figures became such for +me on easy terms, and that in particular William had only to let the +light of _his_ attention, his interest, his curiosity, his aversion even +(could he indeed have passingly lived in the helplessness of mere +aversion) visibly rest on them for me entirely to feel that they must +count for as much as might be--so far at least as my perception was +concerned, contact being truly another affair. That was the truth at +that season, if it wasn't always to remain the truth; I felt his +interpretations, his personal allowances, so largely and inveterately +liberal, always impose themselves: it was not till ever so much later, +and then only little by little, that I came to accept the strange +circumstance of my not invariably "liking," in homely parlance, his +people, and his not invariably liking mine. The process represented by +that word was for each of us, I think, a process so involved with other +operations of the spirit, so beautifully complicated and deformed by +them, that our results in this sort doubtless eventually lost themselves +in the labyrinth of our reasons; which latter, eventually--the +labyrinth, I mean--could be a frequent and not other than animated +meeting-place in spite of the play of divergence. The true case, I all +the while plentifully felt, and still more feel now, was that _I_ +diverged and my brother almost never; in the sense, that is, that no man +can well have cared less for the question, or made less of the +consciousness, of dislike--have valued less their developments and +comforts. Even the opposite of that complacency scarce seemed a +recognised, or at least in any degree a cultivated, state with him; his +passion, and that a passion of the intelligence, was justice +unafraid--and this, as it were, almost unformulatedly, altogether +unpedantically: it simply made him utterly not "mind" numberless things +that with most people serve as dim lights, warnings or attractions, in +the grope of appreciation or the adventure of instinct. His luminous +indifference kept his course thus, as I was later to recognise, +extraordinarily straight--to the increase, as I have noted, of my own +poor sense of weakly straggling, unaccompanied as this at the same time +was by the least envy of such a deficiency in what is roughly called +prejudice, and what I, to save my face, in my ups and downs of +sociability or curiosity, could perhaps have found no better term for +than the play of taste as taste. Wonderful, and to me in the last resort +admirable, was William's fine heritage and awareness of that principle +without its yet affecting him on the human, the more largely social, +just the conversable and workable ground--in presence of some other +principle that might do so, whether this validly or but speciously +interfered. The triumph over _dis_taste, in one's relations, one's +exposures, one's judgments, _that_ I could understand as high virtue, +strained heroism, the ideal groaningly applied; but what left me always +impressed, to put it mildly, was the fact that in my brother's case the +incorruptibility of his candour would have had to be explained to him, +and with scant presumption too of his taking it in or having patience +while one spoke. Such an enterprise, I was well aware, would at any rate +have left _me_ a sorry enough figure afterwards. What one would have had +to be, what one could in the least decently be, _except_ candid without +alternative--this, with other like matters, I should have had to be +prepared to set forth; and, more and more addressed as I eventually +found myself to a cultivation of the absolute in taste as taste, to +repeat my expression, I was far from the wish to contend for it as +against any appearance whatever of a better way. Such was part of the +experience, or call it even the discipline, of association with a genius +so marked for the process known as giving the benefit of the doubt--and +giving it (for that was the irritating charm), not in smug charity or +for a pointed moral, but through the very nature of a mind incapable of +the shut door in any direction and of a habit of hospitality so free +that it might again and again have been observed, in contact and +intercourse, to supply weaker and less graced vessels with the very +means of bringing in response, often absolutely in retort. This last of +course was not so much the benefit of the doubt as the displayed +unconsciousness of any doubt, a perpetual aid rendered the doubtful, +especially when incarnate in persons, to be more right or more true, +more clever or more charming or whatever, than mere grudging love of +"form," standing by, could at all see it entitled to become. Anything +like William's unawareness of exertion after having helped the lame dog +of converse over stile after stile I have in no other case met. +Together with which, however, I may not forbear to add, the very +occasional and comparatively small flare in him of some blest perversity +of prejudice that one might enjoy on one's own side the vulgar luxury of +naming as such was a thing which, conformably to that elation, one +reached out for as one might for the white glint of the rare edelweiss +on some high Alpine ledge. + +If these remarks illustrate in their number the inevitable bent of the +remark to multiply within me as an effect of fraternal evocation I +thereby but stick the more to my subject, or in other words to the +much-peopled scene, as I found it; which I should scarce have found +without him. Peopled as it was with _his_ people, which they at first +struck me as markedly being, it led me then to take the company, apart +from F. J. Child, for whatever he all vividly and possessively +pronounced it; I having for a long time but the scantest company of my +own, even at the Law School, where my fellow-disciples could bear the +name for me only as a troop of actors might have done on that further +side of footlights to which I never went round. This last at least with +few exceptions, while there were none to the exquisite rule, as I +positively to-day feel it, of my apprehension of William's cluster as a +concern of his--interesting exactly because of that reference. Any +concern of his was thus a thing already charged with life, _his_ life +over and above its own, if it happened by grace to have any comparable; +which, as I pick out the elements again from the savoury Upham shades, +could indeed be claimed for several of these. I pick out the ardent and +delicate and firm John May, son, as he comes back to me, of a +distinguished Abolitionist of New York State--rare bird; and seen by +that fact in a sort of glamour of picturesque justification, an air +deriving colour from the pre-established gallantry, yet the quiet and +gentlemanly triumph, of his attitude. So at least do I read back into +blurred visions the richest meanings they could have. I pick out for a +not less baffled tribute a particular friend of my brother's and a +comrade of May's, whom I identify on the superficial side but by his +name of Salter and the fact of his studentship in theology; which +pursuit, it comes over me as I write, he must have shared, of homely, +almost of sickly, New England type as he was, with May of the fine +features, the handsome smile, by my resolute recollection, the developed +moustache and short dark pointed beard, the property of vaguely +recalling in fine some old portrait supposedly Spanish (supposedly, and +perhaps to a fantastic tune, by _me_--for I dare say it was by no one +else). Salter had no such references--it even appalled me to have a bit +intelligently to imagine to what origins starved of amenity or colour +his aspect and air, the slope of his shoulders, the mode of growth of +his hair, the relation of his clothes to his person and the relation of +his person to the inevitable needs of intercourse, might refer him; but +there played about him a bright force in the highest and extraordinarily +quick flares of which one felt nothing, while the exhibition lasted, but +his intellectual elegance. He had the distinction of wit--so rare, we +ever feel it to be, when we see it beautifully act; and I remember well +how, as that was indeed for me almost the whole of intellectual +elegance, I fell back on the idea that such an odd assortment of marks +in him was at least picturesque, or much in the Maison Vauquer line: +pinched as I must have been by the question of whether a person of that +type and cut had the "right" to be witty. On what else but the power the +right rested I couldn't doubtless have said; I but recall my sense that +wit was somehow the finest of all social matters and that it seemed +impossible to be less connected with such than this product of New +England at its sparest and dryest; which fact was a sort of bad mark for +the higher civilisation. I was prepared to recognise that you might be +witty and ugly, ugly with the highest finish of ugliness--hadn't the +celebrated Voltaire been one of the scrappiest of men as well as of the +most immortally quoted?--but it cost a wrench to have to take it that +you could shine to admiration out of such a platitude of the mere +"plain." It was William in especial who guaranteed to me Salter's +superior gift, of which in the free commerce of Divinity Hall he had +frequent illustration--so that what I really most apprehended, I think, +was the circumstance of _his_ apprehending: this too with a much finer +intellectual need and competence than mine, after all, and in the course +of debates and discussions, ardent young symposia of the spirit, which +struck me as falling in with all I had ever curiously conceived of those +hours that foster the generous youth of minds preappointed to greatness. +_There_ was the note of the effective quaint on which I could put my +finger: catch a poor student only dreary enough and then light in him +the flame of irony at its intensest, the range of question and the +command of figure at their bravest, and one might, with one's appetite +for character, feed on the bold antithesis. I had only to like for my +brother, and verily almost with pride, his assured experience of any +queer concretion--his experience of abstractions I was to rise to much +more feebly and belatedly, scarce more indeed ever than most +imperfectly--to find the very scene of action, or at least of passion, +enjoyed by these my elders and betters, enriched and toned and +consecrated after the fashion of places referred to in literature and +legend. + +I thus live back of a sudden--for I insist on just yielding to it--into +the odd hours when the poor little old Divinity Hall of the overgrown +present faced me as through the haze of all the past Indian summers it +had opened its brooding study-windows to; when the "avenue" of approach +to it from the outer world was a thing of dignity, a positive vista in a +composition; when the Norton woods, near by, massed themselves in +scarlet and orange, and when to penetrate and mount a stair and knock at +a door and, enjoying response, then sink into a window-bench and inhale +at once the vague golden November and the thick suggestion of the room +where nascent "thought" had again and again piped or wailed, was to +taste as I had never done before the poetry of the prime initiation and +of associated growth. With cards of such pale pasteboard could the +trick, to my vision, play itself--by which I mean that I admire under +this memory the constant "dodges" of an imagination reduced to such +straits for picking up a living. It was as if one's sense of "Europe," +sufficiently sure of itself to risk the strategic retreat, had backed +away on tiptoe just to see how the sense of what was there facing one +would manage without it--manage for luxury, that is, with the mere +indispensable doubtless otherwise provided for. That the sense in +question did manage beautifully, when at last so hard pressed, and that +the plasticity and variety of my vision draw from me now this murmur of +elation, are truths constituting together for me the perhaps even +overloaded moral of my tale. With which I scarce need note that so +elastic a fancy, so perverse a little passion for finding good in +everything--good for what I thought of as history, which was the +consideration of life, while the given thing, whatever it was, had only +to be before me--was inevitably to work a storage of other material for +memory close-packed enough to make such disengagement as I thus attempt +at the end of time almost an act of violence. I couldn't do without the +_scene_, as I have elsewhere had occasion to hint, whether actually or +but possibly peopled (the people always calling for the background and +the background insisting on the people); and thanks to this harmless +extravagance, or thanks in other words to the visionary liberties I +constantly took (so that the plate of sense was at the time I speak of +more overscored and figured for me than sense was in the least +practically required to have it), my path is even now beset to +inconvenience with the personal image unextinct. It presents itself, I +feel, beyond reason, and yet if I turn from it the ease is less, and I +am divided when I further press the spring between compunction at not +pausing before some shade that seems individually and even hopefully to +wait, and the fear of its feeling after all scanted of service should I +name it only to leave it. I name for instance, just to hover a little, +silent Vanderpool, the mutest presence at the Upham board, and quite +with no sense of the invidious in so doing. He was save for myself, by +my remembrance, the only member of the Law School there present; I see +him moreover altogether remarkably, just incorruptibly and exquisitely +dumb, though with a "gentlemanly" presence, a quasi-conservative New +Jersey finish (so delicate those dim discriminations!) that would have +seemed naturally to go with a certain forensic assurance. He looked so +as if he came from "good people"--which was no very common appearance on +the Harvard scene of those days, as indeed it is to a positive degree no +so very common appearance on any scene at any time: it was a note of +aspect which one in any case found one's self, to whatever vague tune, +apt quite to treasure or save up. So it was impossible not to recognise +in our soundless _commensal_ the very finest flower of shyness, the very +richest shade of the deprecating blush, that one had perhaps ever +encountered; one ended in fact by fairly hanging on the question of +whether the perfection of his modesty--for it was all a true welter of +modesty, not a grain of it anything stiffer--would beautifully hold out +or would give way to comparatively brute pressure from some point of our +circle. I longed to bet on him, to see him through without a lapse; and +this in fact was so thoroughly reserved to me that my eventual relief +and homage doubtless account for the blest roundness of my impression. +He had so much "for" him, was tall and fine, equipped and appointed, +born, quite to an effect of ultimately basking, in the light of the Law, +acquainted, one couldn't fail of seeing, with a tradition of manners, +not to mention that of the forensic as aforesaid, and not to name either +the use of "means," equally imputable: how rare accordingly would be the +_quality_, letting even the quantity alone, of his inhibitions, and how +interesting in the event the fact that he was absolutely never to have +deviated! He disappeared without having spoken, and yet why should I now +be noting it if he hadn't nevertheless admirably expressed himself? What +this consisted of was that there was scarce anything he wouldn't have +done for us had it been possible, and I think, in view of the +distinctness with which he still faces me, the tenderness with which he +inspires my muse and the assurance with which I have "gone into" him, +that I can never in all my life since have seen so precious a message +delivered under such difficulties. Admirable, ineffaceable, because so +essentially all _decipherable_, Vanderpool! + +It wasn't either that John Bancroft tossed the ball of talk--which but +for the presence of the supremely retentive agent just commemorated +would have appeared on occasion to remain in his keeping by a +preference, on its own part, not to be outwitted; this more or less at +all times too, but especially during the first weeks of his dawning on +us straight out of Germany and France, flushed with the alarm, as one +might have read it, of having to justify rare opportunities and account +for the time he had inordinately, obscurely, or at least not a little +mysteriously, spent--the implication of every inch of him being that he +had spent it seriously. Odd enough it certainly was that we should have +been appointed to unveil, so far as we might, a _pair_ of such marked +monuments to modesty, marble statues, as they might have been, on either +side of the portal of talk; what I at any rate preserve of my immediate +vision of Bancroft--whose very promptest identity indeed had been his +sonship to the eminent historian of our country and earlier and later +diplomatist--was an opposition, trying to me rather than engaging as its +like had been in the composition of Vanderpool, between what we somehow +wanted from him (or what I at least did) and what we too scantly +gathered. This excellent friend, as he was later on to become, with his +handsome high head, large colourable brow and eyes widely divided--brave +contribution ever to a fine countenance--sat there in a sort of glory of +experience which, had he been capable of anything so akin to a +demonstration, he would have appeared all unsociably to repudiate. It +was bruited of him that, like John La Farge, whose friend he was +admiringly to become--for he too had a Newport connection--he "painted," +that is persisted (which was the wondrous thing!) in painting; and that +this practice had grown upon him in France, where, _en province_, his +brother had entirely taken root and where the whole art-life, as well as +the rural life, of the country had been opened to him; besides its a +little later coming to light that he had romantically practised at +Dusseldorf, where too he had personally known and tremendously liked +George du Maurier, whose first so distinguished appearances as an +illustrator had already engaged our fondest attention--were they most +dawningly in the early Cornhill, or in Punch, or in Once a Week? They +glimmer upon me, darkly and richly, as from the pages of the last named. +Not to be rendered, I may again parenthesise, our little thrilled +awareness, William's and mine, though mine indeed but panting after his, +of such peeping phenomena of the European day as the outbreak of a "new +man" upon our yearning view of the field of letters and of the arts. I +am moved to wonder at how we came by it, shifting all for ourselves, and +with the parental _flair_, so far as the sensibility of home was +concerned, turned but to directions of its own and much less restless on +the whole than ours. More touching to me now than I can say, at all +events, this recapture of the hour at which Du Maurier, consecrated to +much later, to then still far-off intimate affection, became the new man +so significantly as to make a great importance of John Bancroft's news +of him, which already bore, among many marvels, upon the supreme wonder +of his working, as he was all his life bravely to work, under impaired +and gravely menaced eyesight. When I speak, as just above, of what, +through so many veils, "came to light," I should further add, I use a +figure representing a considerable lapse of time and shading off, for +full evocation, into more associations than I can here make place for. +Nothing in this connection came _soon_ to light at least but that +endless amazement might lie in the strange facts of difference between +our companion and his distinguished sire--the latter so supremely, so +quaintly yet so brilliantly, social a figure, I apprehended, when gaped +at, a still more angular, but more polished and pacific Don Quixote, on +the sleekest of Rosinantes, with white-tipped chin protrusive, with high +sharp elbows raised and long straight legs beautifully pointed, all +after the gallantest fashion, against the clear sunset sky of old +Newport cavalcades. Mr. Bancroft the elder, the "great," was a comfort, +that is a fine high identity, a cluster of strong accents, the sort of +thing one's vision followed, in the light of history, if not of mere +misguided fancy, for illustration of conceived type--type, say in this +case, of superior person of the ancient and the more or less alien +public order, the world of affairs transacted at courts and +_chancelleries_, in which renown, one had gathered from the perusal of +memoirs, allowed for much development of detail and much incision of +outline, when not even directly resting on them. As it had been a +positive bliss to me that words and names might prove in extremity +sources of support, so it comes back to me that I had drawn mystic +strength from just obscurely sighing "Metternich!" or "Talleyrand!" as +Mr. Bancroft bounced by me--so far as a pair of widely-opened compasses +might bounce--in the August gloaming. The value of which, for +reflection, moreover, was not in the least in its being that if his son +remained so long pleadingly inscrutable any derived Metternich +suggestion had contributed to keep him so--for quite _there_ was the +curiosity of the case, that among the imputations John appeared most to +repudiate was that of having at any moment breathed the air either of +records or of protocols. If he persisted in painting for years after his +return to America without, as the legend grew, the smallest disclosure +of his work or confession of his progress to human eye or ear, he drew +the rigour of this course wholly from his singleness of nature, in the +aftertime to be so much approved to us. However, I pause before the +aftertime, into the lap of which more than one sort of stored soundness +and sweetness was to fall from him drop by drop. + +I scarce know whether my impulse to lead forth these most shrinking of +my apparitions be more perverse or more natural--mainly feeling, I +confess, however it appear, that the rest of my impression of the +animated Cambridge scene, so far as I could take it in, was anything but +a vision of unasserted forces. It was only I, as now appears to me, who, +ready as yet to assert nothing, hung back, and for reasons even more +appreciable to me to-day than then; wondering, almost regretting as I +do, that I didn't with a still sharper promptness throw up the sponge +for stoppage of the absurd little boxing-match within me between the +ostensible and the real--this I mean because I might afterwards thereby +have winced a couple of times the less in haunting remembrance of +exhibited inaptitude. My condition of having nothing to exhibit was +blessedly one that there was nobody to quarrel with--and I couldn't have +sufficiently let it alone. I didn't in truth, under a misleading light, +reconsider it much; yet I have kept to this hour a black little memory +of my having attempted to argue one afternoon, by way of exercise and +under what seemed to me a perfect glare of publicity, the fierce light +of a "moot-court," some case proposed to me by a fellow-student--who can +only have been one of the most benign of men unless he was darkly the +designingest, and to whom I was at any rate to owe it that I figured my +shame for years much in the image of my having stood forth before an +audience with a fiddle and bow and trusted myself to rub them together +desperately enough (after the fashion of Rousseau in a passage of the +Confessions,) to make some appearance of music. My music, I recall, +before the look on the faces around me, quavered away into mere collapse +and cessation, a void now engulfing memory itself, so that I liken it +all to a merciful fall of the curtain on some actor stricken and +stammering. The sense of the brief glare, as I have called the luckless +exposure, revives even on this hither side of the wide gulf of time; +but I must have outlived every witness--I was so obviously there the +very youngest of all aspirants--and, in truth, save for one or two minor +and merely comparative miscarriages of the sacrificial act before my +false gods, my connection with the temple was to remain as consistently +superficial as could be possible to a relation still restlessly +perceptive through all its profaneness. Perceiving, even with its +accompaniments of noting, wondering, fantasticating, kicked up no glare, +but went on much rather under richest shades or in many-coloured +lights--a _tone_ of opportunity that I look back on as somehow at once +deliciously soothing to myself and favourable to the clearness of each +item of the picture even as the cool grey sky of a landscape is +equalising. That was of course especially when I had let everything +slide--everything but the mere act of rather difficultly living (by +reason of my scant physical ease,) and fallen back again on the hard +sofa of certain ancient rooms in the Winthrop Square, contracted nook, +of a local order now quite abolished, and held to my nose for long and +sustaining sniffs the scented flower of independence. I took my +independence for romantic, or at least for a happy form of yawning +vessel into which romance, even should it perforce consist but of mere +loose observational play, might drop in the shape of ripe fruit from a +shaken tree. Winthrop Square, as I had occasion to note a couple of +years since, is a forgotten name, and the disappearance of my lodging +spares me doubtless a reminder, possibly ironic, of the debility of +those few constructional and pictorial elements that, mustering a +wondrous good-will, I had invited myself to rejoice in as "colonial." +The house was indeed very old, as antiquity in Cambridge went, with +everything in it slanting and gaping and creaking, but with humble +antique "points" and a dignity in its decay; above all with the deep +recess or alcove, a sweet "irregularity" (so could irregularities of +architectural conception then and there count,) thrust forth from its +sitting-room toward what I supposed to be the Brighton hills and +forming, by the aid of a large window and that commanding view, not to +mention the grace of an ancient expansive bureau or secretary-desk (this +such a piece, I now venture to figure, as would to-day be pounced on at +any cunning dealer's,) a veritable bower toward which even so shy a +dreamer as I still then had to take myself for might perhaps hope to woo +the muse. The muse was of course the muse of prose fiction--never for +the briefest hour in my case the presumable, not to say the presuming, +the much-taking-for-granted muse of rhyme, with whom I had never had, +even in thought, the faintest flirtation; and she did, in the event, I +note, yield to the seduction of so appointed a nook--as to which +romantic passage, however, I may not here anticipate. I but lose myself +in the recovered sense of what it richly "meant" to me just to _have_ a +place where I could so handsomely receive her, where I could remark with +complacency that the distant horizon, an horizon long since rudely +obliterated, was not, after all, too humble to be blue, purple, tawny, +changeable in short, everything an horizon should be, and that over the +intervening marshes of the Charles (if I don't go astray in so much +geography) there was all the fine complicated cloud-scenery I could +wish--so extravagantly did I then conceive more or less associational +cloud-scenery, after the fashion, I mean, of that feature of remembered +English and Boulognese water-colours, to promote the atmosphere of +literary composition as the act had begun to glimmer for me. + +Everything, however, meant, as I say, more quite other things than I can +pretend now to treat of. The mere fact of a sudden rupture, as by the +happiest thought, with the "form" of bringing home from the Law-library +sheepskin volumes that might give my table, if not, for sufficiency of +emphasis, my afflicted self, a temporary countenance, heaped up the +measure of my general intention--from the moment I embraced instead of +it the practice of resorting to Gore Hall exclusively for my +reading-matter; a practice in the light of which my general intention +took on the air of absolutely basking. To get somehow, and in spite of +everything, in spite especially of being so much disabled, at life, +_that_ was my brooding purpose, straight out of which the College +library, with its sparse bristle of aspiring granite, stood open to far +more enchanted distances than any represented by the leathery walls, +with never a breach amid their labelled and numbered blocks, that I +might pretend to beat against in the other quarter. Yet, happily enough, +on this basis of general rather than of special culture, I still loosely +rejoiced in being where I was, and by way of proof that it was all right +the swim into my ken of Sainte-Beuve, for whose presence on my table, in +still other literary company, Gore Hall aiding, I succeeded in not at +all blushing, became in the highest degree congruous with regular +attendance at lectures. The forenoon lectures at Dane Hall I never in +all my time missed, that I can recollect, and I look back on it now as +quite prodigious that I should have been so systematically faithful to +them without my understanding the first word of what they were about. +They contrived--or at least my attendance at them did, inimitably--to +be "life;" and as my wondering dips into the vast deep well of the +French critic to whom all my roused response went out brought up that +mystery to me in cupfuls of extraordinary savour, where was the +incongruity of the two rites? That the Causeries du Lundi, wholly fresh +then to my grateful lips, should so have overflowed for me was certainly +no marvel--that prime acquaintance absolutely _having_, by my measure, +to form a really sacred date in the development of any historic or +aesthetic consciousness worth mentioning; but that I could be to the +very end more or less thrilled by simply sitting, all stupid and +sentient, in the thick company of my merely nominal associates and under +the strange ministrations of Dr. Theophilus Parsons, "Governor" Washburn +and Professor Joel Parker, would have appeared to defy explanation only +for those by whom the phenomena of certain kinds of living and working +sensibility are unsuspected. For myself at any rate there was no +anomaly--the anomaly would have been much rather in any prompter +consciousness of a sated perception; I knew why I liked to "go," I knew +even why I could unabashedly keep going in face of the fact that if I +had learned my reason I had learned, and was still to learn, absolutely +nothing else; and that sufficiently supported me through a stretch of +bodily overstrain that I only afterwards allowed myself dejectedly to +measure. The mere sitting at attention for two or three hours--such +attention as I achieved--was paid for by sorry pain; yet it was but +later on that I wondered how I could have found what I "got" an +equivalent for the condition produced. The condition was one of many, +and the others for the most part declared themselves with much of an +equal, though a different, sharpness. It was acute, that is, that one +was so incommoded, but it had broken upon me with force from the first +of my taking my seat--which had the advantage, I acknowledge, of the rim +of the circle, symbolising thereby all the detachment I had been +foredoomed to--that the whole scene was going to be, and again and +again, as "American," and above all as suffused with New England colour, +however one might finally estimate that, as I could possibly have +wished. Such was the effect of one's offering such a plate for +impressions to play on at their will; as well as of one's so failing to +ask in advance what they would matter, so taking for granted that they +would all matter somehow. It would matter somehow for instance that just +a queer dusky half smothered light, as from windows placed too low, or +too many interposing heads, should hang upon our old auditorium--long +since voided of its then use and, with all its accessory chambers, +seated elsewhere afresh and in much greater state; which glimpse of a +scheme of values might well have given the measure of the sort of profit +I was, or rather wasn't, to derive. It doubtless quite ought to have +confounded me that I had come up to _faire mon droit_ by appreciations +predominantly of the local chiaroscuro and other like quantities; but I +remember no alarm--I only remember with what complacency my range of +perception on those general lines was able to spread. + +It mattered, by the same law, no end that Dr. Theophilus Parsons, whose +rich, if slightly quavering, old accents were the first to fall upon my +ear from the chair of instruction beneath a huge hot portrait of Daniel +Webster should at once approve himself a vivid and curiously-composed +person, an _illustrative_ figure, as who should say--exactly with all +the marks one might have wished him, marks of a social order, a general +air, a whole history of things, or in other words of people; since there +was nothing one mightn't, by my sentiment, do with such a subject from +the moment it gave out character. Character thus was all over the place, +as it could scarce fail to be when the general subject, the one gone in +for, had become identical with the persons of all its votaries. Such was +the interest of the source of edification just named, not one ray of +whose merely professed value so much as entered my mind. Governor +Washburn was of a different, but of a no less complete consistency--queer, +ingenuous, more candidly confiding, especially as to his own pleasant +fallibility, than I had ever before known a chaired dispenser of +knowledge, and all after a fashion that endeared him to his young +hearers, whose resounding relish of the frequent tangle of his +apologetic returns upon himself, quite, almost always, to +inextricability, was really affectionate in its freedom. I could +understand and admire that--it seemed to have for me legendary +precedents; whereas of the third of our instructors I mainly recall that +he represented dryness and hardness, prose unrelieved, at their +deadliest--partly perhaps because he was most master of his subject. He +was none the less placeable for these things withal, and what mainly +comes back to me of him is the full sufficiency with which he made me +ask myself how I _could_ for a moment have seen myself really browse in +any field where the marks of the shepherd were such an oblong dome of a +bare cranium, such a fringe of dropping little ringlets toward its base, +and a mouth so meanly retentive, so ignorant of style, as I made out, +above a chin so indifferent to the duty, or at least to the opportunity, +of chins. If I had put it to myself that there was no excuse for the +presence of a young person so affected by the idea of how people looked +on a scene where the issue was altogether what they usefully taught, as +well as intelligently learned and wanted to learn, I feel I should, +after my first flush of confusion, have replied assuredly enough that +just the beauty of the former of these questions was in its being of +equal application everywhere; which was far from the case with the +latter. The question of how people looked, and of how their look counted +for a thousand relations, had risen before me too early and kept me +company too long for me not to have made a fight over it, from the very +shame of appearing at all likely to give it up, had some fleeting +delusion led me to cast a slur upon it. It would do, I was already sure, +half the work of carrying me through life, and where was better proof of +all it would have to give than just in the fact of what it was then and +there doing? It worked for appreciation--not one of the uses of which as +an act of intelligence had, all round, finer connections; and on the +day, in short, when one should cease to live in large measure by one's +eyes (with the imagination of course all the while waiting on this) one +would have taken the longest step towards not living at all. My +companions--however scantly indeed they were to become such--were +subject to my so practising in a degree which represented well-nigh the +whole of my relation with them, small reciprocity for them as there may +have been in it; since vision, and nothing but vision, was from +beginning to end the fruit of my situation among them. There was not one +of them as to whom it didn't matter that he "looked," by my fancy of +him, thus or so; the key to this disposition of the accents being for me +to such an extent that, as I have said, I was with all intensity taking +in New England and that I knew no better _immediate_ way than to take it +in by my senses. What that name really comprehended had been a mystery, +daily growing less, to which everything that fell upon those senses +referred itself, making the innumerable appearances hang together ever +so densely. Theophilus Parsons, with his tone, his unction, his homage +still to some ancient superstition, some standard of manners, reached +back as to a state of provincialism rounded and compact, quite +self-supporting, which gave it serenity and quality, something +comparatively rich and urban; the good ex-Governor, on the other hand, +of whom I think with singular tenderness, opened through every note of +aspect and expression straight into those depths of rusticity which more +and more unmistakably underlay the social order at large and out of +which one felt it to have emerged in any degree but at scattered points. +Where it did emerge, I seemed to see, it held itself as high as +possible, conscious, panting a little, elate with the fact of having +cleared its skirts, saved its life, consolidated its Boston, yet as with +wastes unredeemed, roundabout it, propping up and pushing in--all so +insistently that the light in which one for the most part considered the +scene was strongly coloured by their action. This was one's clue to the +labyrinth, if labyrinth it was to be called--a generalisation into which +everything fitted, first to surprise and then indubitably to relief, +from the moment one had begun to make it. Under its law the Puritan +capital, however visibly disposed to spread and take on new disguises, +affected me as a rural centre even to a point at which I had never known +anything as rural; there being involved with this too much further food +for curiosity and wonder. Boston was in a manner of its own stoutly and +vividly urban, not only a town, but a town of history--so that how did +it manage to be such different things at the same time? That was +doubtless its secret--more and more interesting to study in proportion +as, on closer acquaintance, yet an acquaintance before which the sense +of one's preferred view from outside never gave way, one felt the +equilibrium attained as on the whole an odd fusion and intermixture, of +the chemical sort as it were, and not a matter of elements or aspects +sharply alternating. There was in the exhibition at its best distinctly +a savour--an excellent thing for a community to have, and part of the +savour was, as who should say, the breath of the fields and woods and +waters, though at their domesticated and familiarised stage, or the echo +of a tone which had somehow become that of the most educated of our +societies without ceasing to be that of the village. + +Of so much from the first I felt sure, and this all the more that by my +recollection of New York, even indeed by my recollection of Albany, we +had been aware in those places of no such strain. New York at least had +been whatever disagreeable, not to say whatever agreeable, other thing +one might have declared it--it might even have been vulgar, though that +cheap substitute for an account of anything didn't, I think, in the +connection, then exist for me; but the last reference to its nature +likely to crop up in its social soil was beyond question the flower of +the homely. New England had, by one's impression, cropped up there, but +had done so just _as_ New England, New England unabsorbed and +unreconciled; which was exactly a note in the striated, the piebald or, +more gracefully, cosmopolite local character. I am not sure that the +comparatively--I say comparatively--market-town suggestion of the city +by the Charles came out for me as a positive richness, but it did +essentially contribute to what had become so highly desirable, the +reinforcement of my vision of American life by the idea of variety. I +apparently required of anything I should take to my heart that it should +be, approached at different angles, "like" as many other things as +possible--in accordance with which it made for a various "America" that +Boston should seem really strong, really in not having, for better or +worse, the same irrepressible likenesses as New York. I invoked, I +called down the revelation of, new likenesses by the simple act of +threading the Boston streets, whether by garish day (the afterglow of +the great snowfalls of winter was to turn in particular to a blinding +glare, an unequalled hardness of light,) or under that mantle of night +which draped as with the garb of adventure our long-drawn townward +little rumbles in the interest of the theatre or of Parker's--oh the +sordid, yet never in the least deterrent conditions of transit in that +age of the unabbreviated, the dividing desert and the primitive +horse-car! (The desert is indeed, despite other local developments and +the general theory of the rate at which civilisation spreads and +ugliness wanes, still very much what it was in the last mid-century, but +the act of passage through it has been made to some extent easier.) +Parker's played in the intercourse of Cambridge with Boston a part of a +preponderance that I look back upon, I confess, as the very condition +of the purest felicity we knew--I knew at any rate myself none, whether +of a finer or a grosser strain, that competed with this precious +relation. Competition has thickened since and proportions have +altered--to no small darkening of the air, but the time was surely +happier; a single such _point de repère_ not only sufficed but richly +heaped up the measure. Parker's, on the whole side of the joy of life, +_was_ Boston--speaking as under the thrill of early occasions +recaptured; Boston could be therefore, in the acutest connections, those +of young comradeship and young esthetic experience, heaven save the +mark, fondly prepared or properly crowned, but the enjoyed and shared +repast, literally the American feast, as I then appraised such values; a +basis of native abundance on which everything else rested. The theatre, +resorted to whenever possible, rested indeed doubtless most, though with +its heaviest weight thrown perhaps at a somewhat later time; the theatre +my uncanny appetite for which strikes me as almost abnormal in the light +of what I braved to reach it from the studious suburb, or more +particularly braved to return from it. I touch alas no spring that +doesn't make a hum of memories, and pick them over as I will three or +four of that scenic strain linger on my sense. The extraordinary fact +about these--which plays into my generalisation a little way back--was +that, for all the connection of such occasions with the great interest +of the theatre at large, there was scarce an impression of the stage +wrung from current opportunity that didn't somehow underscore itself +with the special Boston emphasis; and this in spite of the fact that +plays and performers in those days were but a shade less raggedly +itinerant over the land than they are now. The implication of the +provincial in the theatric air, and of the rustic in the provincial, may +have been a matter of the "house" itself, with its twenty kinds of +redolence of barbarism--with the kind determined by the very audience +perhaps indeed plainest; vivid to me at all events is it how I felt even +at the time, in repairing to the Howard Atheneum to admire Miss Maggie +Mitchell and Miss Kate Bateman, that one would have had only to scratch +a little below the surface of the affair to come upon the but +half-buried Puritan curse not so very long before devoted to such +perversities. Wasn't the curse still in the air, and could anything less +than a curse, weighing from far back on the general conscience, have +accounted for one could scarce say what want of self-respect in the +total exhibition?--for that intimation more than anything else perhaps +of the underhand snicker with which one sat so oddly associated. By the +blest law of youth and fancy withal one did admire the actress--the +young need to admire as flatly as one could broke through all crowding +apprehensions. I like to put it down that nothing in the world qualified +my wonder at the rendering by the first of the performers I have named +of the figure of "Fanchon the Cricket" in a piece so entitled, an +artless translation from a German original, if I rightly remember, which +original had been an arrangement for the stage of La Petite Fadette, +George Sand's charming rustic idyll. I like to put it down that Miss +Maggie Mitchell's having for years, as I gathered, twanged that one +string and none other; every night of her theatric life, over the huge +country, before she was revealed to us--just as Mr. Joe Jefferson, with +no word of audible reprehension ever once addressed to him, was to have +twanged his--did nothing to bedim the brightness of our vision or the +apparent freshness of her art, and that above all it seemed a privilege +critically to disengage the delicacy of this art and the rare effect of +the natural in it from the baseness in which it was framed: so golden a +glimmer is shed, as one looks back, from any shaky little torch lighted, +by whatever fond stretch, at the high esthetic flame. Upon these faint +sparks in the night of time would I gently breathe, just to see them +again distinguishably glow, rather than leave their momentary function +uncommemorated. Strange doubtless were some of the things that +represented these momentary functions--strange I mean in proportion to +the fires they lighted. The small bower of the muse in Winthrop Square +was first to know the fluttered descent of the goddess to my appeal for +her aid in the composition of a letter from which the admired Miss +Maggie should gather the full force of my impression. Particularly do I +incline even now to mention that she testified to her having gratefully +gathered it by the despatch to me in return of a little printed copy of +the play, a scant pamphlet of "acting edition" humility, addressed in a +hand which assumed a romantic cast as soon as I had bethought myself of +finding for it a happy precedent in that of Pendennis's Miss +Fotheringay. + +It had been perhaps to the person of this heroine that Pendennis +especially rendered homage, while I, without illusions, or at least +without confusions, was fain to discriminate in favour of the magic of +method, that is of genius, itself; which exactly, more than anything +else could have done (success, as I considered, crowning my +demonstration,) contributed to consecrate to an exquisite use, _the_ +exquisite, my auspicious _réduit_ aforesaid. For an esthetic vibration +to whatever touch had but to be intense enough to tremble on into other +reactions under other blest contacts and commotions. It was by the +operation again of the impulse shaking me up to an expression of what +the elder star of the Howard Atheneum had artistically "meant" to me +that I first sat down beside my view of the Brighton hills to enrol +myself in the bright band of the fondly hoping and fearfully doubting +who count the days after the despatch of manuscripts. I formally +addressed myself under the protection, not to say the inspiration, of +Winthrop Square to the profession of literature, though nothing would +induce me now to name the periodical on whose protracted silence I had +thus begun to hang with my own treasures of reserve to match it. The +bearing of which shy ecstasies--shy of exhibition then, that is, save as +achievements recognised--is on their having thus begun, at any rate, to +supply all the undertone one needed to whatever positive perfunctory +show; the show proceeding as it could, all the while, thanks to much +help from the undertone, which felt called upon at times to be copious. +It is not, I allow, that memory may pretend for me to keep the two +elements of the under and the over always quite distinct--it would have +been a pity all round, in truth, should they have altogether escaped +mixing and fraternising. The positive perfunctory show, at all events, +to repeat my term, hitched itself along from point to point, and could +have no lack of outside support to complain of, I reflect, from the +moment I could make my own every image and incitement--those, as I have +noted, of the supply breaking upon me with my first glimpse of the +Cambridge scene. If I seem to make too much of these it is because I at +the time made still more, more even than my pious record has presumed to +set down. The air of truth doubtless hangs uneasy, as the matter stands, +over so queer a case as my having, by my intimation above, found +appreciability in life at the Law School even under the failure for me +of everything generally drawn upon for it, whether the glee of study, +the ardour of battle or the joy of associated adventure. Not to have +felt earlier sated with the mere mechanic amusement or vain form of +regularity at lectures would strike me to-day as a fact too "rum" for +belief if certain gathered flowers by the way, flowers of perverse +appreciation though they might but be, didn't give out again as I turn +them over their unspeakable freshness. They were perforce gathered (what +makes it still more wondrous) all too languidly; yet they massed +themselves for my sense, through the lapsing months, to the final +semblance of an intimate secret garden. Such was the odd, the almost +overwhelming consequence--or one of these, for they are many--of an +imagination to which literally everything obligingly signified. One of +the actual penalties of this is that so few of such ancient importances +remain definable or presentable. It may in the fulness of time simply +sound _bête_ that, with the crash of greater questions about one, I +should have been positively occupied with such an affair as the degree +and the exact shade to which the blest figures in the School array, each +quite for himself, might settle and fix the weight, the interest, the +function, as it were, of his Americanism. I could scarce have cleared up +even for myself, I dare say, the profit, or more pertinently the charm, +of that extravagance--and the fact was of course that I didn't feel it +as extravagance, but quite as homely thrift, moral, social, esthetic, or +indeed, as I might have been quite ready to say, practical and +professional. It was practical at least in the sense that it probably +more helped to pass the time than all other pursuits together. The real +proof of which would be of course my being able now to string together +for exhibition some of these pearls of differentiation--since it was to +differentiation exactly that I was then, in my innocence, most prompted; +not dreaming of the stiff law by which, on the whole American ground, +division of _type_, in the light of opposition and contrast, was more +and more to break down for me and fail: so that verily the recital of +my mere concomitant efforts to pick it up again and piece its parts +together and make them somehow show and serve would be a record of +clinging courage. I may note at once, however, as a light on the +anomaly, that there hung about _all_ young appearances at that period +something ever so finely derivative and which at this day rather defies +re-expression--the common character or shared function of the precious +clay so largely making up the holocausts of battle; an advantage working +for them circuitously or perhaps ambiguously enough, I grant, but still +placing them more or less under the play of its wing even when the arts +of peace happened for the hour to engage them. They potentially, they +conceivably, they indirectly paid, and nothing was for the most part +more ascertainable of them individually than that, with brothers or +other near relatives in the ranks or in commands, they came, to their +credit, of paying families. All of which again may represent the high +pitch of one's associated sensibility--there having been occasions of +crisis, were they worth recovering, when under its action places, +persons, objects animate or not, glimmered alike but through the grand +idealising, the generalising, blur. At moments of less fine a strain, it +may be added, the sources of interest presented themselves in looser +formation. The young appearances, as I like to continue to call them, +could be pleasingly, or at least robustly homogeneous, and yet, for +livelier appeal to fancy, flower here and there into special cases of +elegant deviation--"sports," of exotic complexion, one enjoyed +denominating these (or would have enjoyed had the happy figure then +flourished) thrown off from the thick stem that was rooted under our +feet. Even these rare exceptions, the few apparitions referring +themselves to other producing conditions than the New England, wrought +by contrast no havoc in the various quantities for which that section +was responsible; it was certainly refreshing--always to the fond +imagination--that there were, for a change, imprints in the stuff of +youth that didn't square with the imprint, virtually _one_ throughout, +imposed by Springfield or Worcester, by Providence or Portland, or +whatever rural wastes might lie between; yet the variations, I none the +less gather as I strive to recall them, beguiled the spirit (talking +always of my own) rather than coerced it, and this even though fitting +into life as one had already more or less known it, fitting in, that is, +with more points of contact and more reciprocation of understanding than +the New England relation seemed able to produce. It could in fact fairly +blind me to the implication of an inferior immediate _portée_ that such +and such a shape of the New York heterogeneity, however simplified by +silliness, or at least by special stupidity (though who was I to note +_that_?) pressed a certain spring of association, waiting as I always +was for such echoes, rather than left it either just soundless or +bunglingly touched. + +It was for example a link with the larger life, as I am afraid I must +have privately called it, that a certain young New Yorker, an outsider +of still more unmistakable hue than I could suppose even myself, came +and went before us with an effect of cultivated detachment that I +admired at the time for its perfect consistency, and that caused him, it +was positively thrilling to note, not in the least to forfeit sympathy, +but to shine in the high light of public favour. The richest reflections +sprang for me from this, some of them inspiring even beyond the promptly +grasped truth, a comparative commonplace, that the variation or +opposition sufficiently embodied, the line of divergence sharply enough +drawn, always achieves some triumph by the fact of its emphasis, by its +putting itself through at any cost, any cost in particular of ridicule. +So much one had often observed; but what really enriched the dear +induction and made our friend's instance thus remain with me was the +part played by the utter blandness itself of his protest, such an +exhibition of the sweet in the imperturbable. This it was that +enshrined him, by my vision, in a popularity than which nothing could +have seemed in advance less indicated, and that makes me wonder to-day +whether he was simply the luckiest of gamblers or just a conscious and +consummate artist. He reappears to me as a finished fop, finished to +possibilities we hadn't then dreamt of, and as taking his stand, or +rather taking all his walks, on _that_, the magician's wand of his +ideally tight umbrella under his arm and the magician's familiar of his +bristling toy-terrier at his heels. He became thus an apparition +entrancing to the mind. His clothes were of a perfection never known nor +divined in that sphere, a revelation, straight and blindingly authentic, +of Savile Row in its prime; his single eyeglass alone, and his inspired, +his infinite use of it as at once a defensive crystal wall and a lucid +window of hospitality, one couldn't say most which, might well have +foredoomed him, by all likelihood, to execration and destruction. He +became none the less, as I recover him, our general pride and joy; his +entrances and exits were acclaimed beyond all others, and it was his +rare privilege to cause the note of derision and the note of affection +to melt together, beyond separation, in vague but virtual homage to the +refreshment of felt type. To see it dawn upon rude breasts (for rude, +comparatively, were the breasts of the typeless, or at the best of the +typed but in one character, throughout the same,) that defiant and +confident difference carried far enough might avert the impulse to slay, +was to muse ever so agreeably on the queer means by which great morals, +picking up a life as they may, can still get themselves pointed. The +"connotation" of the trivial, it was thus attaching to remark, could +perfectly serve when that of the important, roughly speaking, failed for +a grateful _connection_--from the moment some such was massed invitingly +in view. The difficulty with the type about me was that, in its +monotony, beginning and ending with itself, it _had_ no connections and +suggested none; whereas the grace of the salient apparition I have +perhaps too earnestly presented lay in its bridging over our separation +from worlds, from great far-off reservoirs, of a different mixture +altogether, another civility and complexity. Young as I was, I myself +clearly recognised that ground of reference, saw it even to some extent +in the light of experience--so could I stretch any scrap of contact; +kept hold of it by fifty clues, recalls and reminders that dangled for +me mainly out of books and magazines and heard talk, things of picture +and story, things of prose and verse and anecdotal vividness in fine, +and, as I have elsewhere allowed, for the most part hoardedly English +and French. Our "character man" of the priceless monocle and the +trotting terrier was "like" some type in a collection of types--that was +the word for it; and, there being no collection, nor the ghost of one, +roundabout us, was a lone courageous creature in the desert of our bald +reiterations. The charm of which conclusion was exactly, as I have said, +that the common voice did, by every show, bless him for rendered +service, his dropped hint of an ideal containing the germ of other +ideals--and confessed by that fact to more appetites and inward +yearnings than it the least bit consciously counted up. + +Not quite the same service was rendered by G. A. J., who had no ridicule +to brave, and I can speak with confidence but of the connections, rather +confused if they were, opened up to me by his splendid aspect and which +had absolutely nothing in common with the others that hung near. It was +brilliant to a degree that none other had by so much as a single shade +the secret of, and it carried the mooning fancy to a further reach even, +on the whole, than the figure of surprise I have just commemorated; this +last comparatively scant in itself and rich only by what it made us read +into it, and G. A. J. on the other hand intrinsically and actively ample +and making us read wonders, as it were, into whatever it might be that +was, as we used to say, "back of" him. He had such a flush of life and +presence as to make that reference mysteriously and inscrutably +loom--and the fascinating thing about this, as we again would have said, +was that it could strike me as so beguilingly American. That too was +part of the glamour, that its being so could kick up a mystery which one +might have pushed on to explore, whereas our New York friend only kicked +up a certainty (for those properly prepared) and left not exploration, +but mere assured satisfaction, the mark of the case. G. A. J. reached +westward, westward even of New York, and southward at least as far as +Virginia; teeming facts that I discovered, so to speak, by my own +unaided intelligence--so little were they responsibly communicated. +Little was communicated that I recover--it would have had to drop from +too great a personal height; so that the fun, as I may call it, was the +greater for my opening all by myself to perceptions. I was getting +furiously American, in the big sense I invoked, through this felt growth +of an ability to reach out westward, southward, anywhere, everywhere, on +that apprehension of finding myself but patriotically charmed. Thus +there dawned upon me the grand possibility that, charm for charm, the +American, the assumed, the postulated, would, in the particular case of +its really acting, count double; whereas the European paid for being +less precarious by being also less miraculous. It counted single, as one +might say, and only made up for that by counting almost always. It +mightn't be anything like almost always, even at the best, no doubt, +that an American-grown value of aspect would so entirely emerge as G. A. +J.'s seemed to do; but what did this exactly point to unless that the +rarity so implied would be in the nature of the splendid? That at least +was the way the cultivation of patriotism as a resource was the +cultivation of workable aids to the same, however ingenious these. (Just +to glow belligerently with one's country was no resource, but a +primitive instinct breaking through; and besides this resources were +cooling, not heating.) It might have seemed that I might after all +perfectly dispense with friends when simple acquaintances, and rather +feared ones at that, though feared but for excess of lustre, could +kindle in the mind such bonfires of thought, feeding the flame with +gestures and sounds and light accidents of passage so beyond their own +supposing. In spite of all which, however, G. A. J. was marked for a +friend and taken for a kinsman from the day when his blaze of colour +should have sufficiently cleared itself up for me to distinguish the +component shades. + + + + +XI + + +I am fully aware while I go, I should mention, of all that flows from +the principle governing, by my measure, these recoveries and +reflections--even to the effect, hoped for at least, of stringing their +apparently dispersed and disordered parts upon a fine silver thread; +none other than the principle of response to a long-sought occasion, now +gratefully recognised, for making trial of the recording and figuring +act on behalf of some case of the imaginative faculty under cultivation. +The personal history, as it were, of an imagination, a lively one of +course, in a given and favourable case, had always struck me as a task +that a teller of tales might rejoice in, his advance through it +conceivably causing at every step some rich precipitation--unless it be +rather that the play of strong imaginative passion, passion strong +enough to _be_, for its subject or victim, the very interest of life, +constitutes in itself an endless crisis. Fed by every contact and every +apprehension, and feeding in turn every motion and every act, wouldn't +the light in which it might so cause the whole scene of life to unroll +inevitably become as fine a thing as possible to represent? The idea of +some pretext for such an attempt had again and again, naturally, haunted +me; the man of imagination, and of an "awfully good" one, showed, as the +creature of that force or the sport of that fate or the wielder of that +arm, for the hero of a hundred possible fields--if one could but first +"catch" him, after the fashion of the hare in the famous receipt. Who +and what might he prove, when caught, in respect to _other_ signs and +conditions? He might take, it would seem, some finding and launching, +let alone much handling--which itself, however, would be exactly part of +the pleasure. Meanwhile, it no less appeared, there were other subjects +to go on with, and even if one had to wait for him he would still +perhaps come. It happened for me that he _was_ belatedly to come, but +that he was to turn up then in a shape almost too familiar at first for +recognition, the shape of one of those residual substitutes that engage +doubting eyes the day after the fair. He had been with me all the while, +and only too obscurely and intimately--I had not found him in the market +as an exhibited or _offered_ value. I had in a word to draw him forth +from within rather than meet him in the world before me, the more +convenient sphere of the objective, and to make him objective, in short, +had to turn nothing less than myself inside out. What was _I_ thus, +within and essentially, what had I ever been and could I ever be but a +man of imagination at the active pitch?--so that if it was a question of +treating _some_ happy case, any that would give me what, artistically +speaking, I wanted, here on the very spot was one at hand in default of +a better. It wasn't what I should have preferred, yet it was after all +the example I knew best and should feel most at home with--granting +always that objectivity, the prize to be won, shouldn't just be +frightened away by the odd terms of the affair. It is of course for my +reader to say whether or no what I have done _has_ meant defeat; yet +even if this should be his judgment I fall back on the interest, at the +worst, of certain sorts of failure. I shall have brought up from the +deep many things probably not to have been arrived at for the benefit of +these pages without my particular attempt. Sundry of such I seem still +to recognise, and not least just now those involved in that visionary +"assistance" at the drama of the War, from however far off, which had +become a habit for us without ceasing to be a strain. I am sure I +thought more things under that head, with the fine visionary ache, than +I thought in all other connections together; for the simple reason that +one had to _ask_ leave--of one's own spirit--for these last +intermissions, whereas one but took it, with both hands free, for one's +sense of the bigger cause. There was not in that the least complication +of consciousness. I have sufficiently noted how my apprehension of the +bigger cause was at the same time, and this all through, at once +quickened and kept low; to the point that positively my whole +acquaintance of the personal sort even with such a matter as my brother +Wilky's enrolment in the 44th Massachusetts was to reduce itself to but +a single visit to him in camp. + +I recall an afternoon at Readville, near Boston, and the fashion in +which his state of juniority gave way, for me, on the spot, to +immensities of superior difference, immensities that were at the same +time intensities, varieties, supremacies, of the enviable in the +all-difficult and the delightful in the impossible: such a fairy-tale +seemed it, and withal such a flat revolution, that this soft companion +of my childhood should have such romantic chances and should have +mastered, by the mere aid of his native gaiety and sociability, such +mysteries, such engines, such arts. To become first a happy soldier and +then an easy officer was in particular for G. W. J. an exercise of +sociability--and that above all was my extract of the Readville scene, +which most came home to me as a picture, an interplay of bright breezy +air and high shanty-covered levels with blue horizons, and laughing, +welcoming, sunburnt young men, who seemed mainly to bristle, through +their welcome, with Boston genealogies, and who had all alike turned +handsome, only less handsome than their tawny-bearded Colonel, under I +couldn't have said what common grace of clear blue toggery imperfectly +and hitchingly donned in the midst of the camp labours that I gaped at +(by the blessing of heaven I could in default of other adventures still +gape) as at shining revels. I couldn't "do things," I couldn't +indefinitely hang about, though on occasion I did so, as it comes back +to me, verily to desperation; which had to be my dim explanation--dim as +to my ever insisting on it--of so rare a snatch at opportunity for +gapings the liveliest, or in better terms admirations the crudest, that +I could have presumed to encumber the scene with. Scarce credible to me +now, even under recall of my frustrations, that I was able in all this +stretch of time to respond but to a single other summons to admire at +any cost, which I think must have come again from Readville, and the +occasion of which, that of my brother's assumed adjutancy of the so +dramatically, so much more radically recruited 54th involved a view +superficially less harmonious. The whole situation was more wound up and +girded then, the formation of negro regiments affected us as a +tremendous War measure, and I have glanced in another place at the +consequence of it that was at the end of a few months most pointedly to +touch ourselves. That second aspect of the weeks of preparation before +the departure of the regiment can not at all have suggested a frolic, +though at the time I don't remember it as grim, and can only gather +that, as the other impression had been of something quite luminous and +beautiful, so this was vaguely sinister and sad--perhaps simply through +the fact that, though our sympathies, our own as a family's, were, in +the current phrase, all enlisted on behalf of the race that had sat in +bondage, it was impossible for the mustered presence of more specimens +of it, and of stranger, than I had ever seen together, not to make the +young men who were about to lead them appear sacrificed to the general +tragic need in a degree beyond that of their more orthodox appearances. +The air of sacrifice was, however, so to brighten as to confound itself +with that of splendid privilege on the day (May 28th, '63) of the march +of the 54th out of Boston, its fairest of young commanders at its head, +to great reverberations of music, of fluttering banners, launched +benedictions and every public sound; only from that scene, when it took +place, I had to be helplessly absent--just as I see myself in a like +dismal manner deprived of any nearness of view of my still younger +brother's military metamorphosis and contemporary initiation. I vainly +question memory for some such picture of _him_, at this stage of his +adventure, as would have been certain to hang itself, for reasons of +wonder and envy again, in my innermost cabinet. Our differently +compacted and more variously endowed Bob, who had strained much at every +tether, was so eager and ardent that it made for him a positive +authority; but what most recurs to me of his start in the 45th, or of my +baffled vision of it, is the marvel of our not having all just wept, +more than anything else, either for his being so absurdly young or his +being so absurdly strenuous--we might have had our choice of pretexts +and protests. It seemed so short a time since he had been l'ingénieux +petit Robertson of the domestic schoolroom, pairing with our small +sister as I paired with Wilky. We didn't in the least weep, however--we +smiled as over the interest of childhood at its highest bloom, and that +my parents, with their consistent tenderness, should have found their +surrender of their latest born so workable is doubtless a proof that we +were all lifted together as on a wave that might bear us where it would. +Our ingenious Robertson was but seventeen years old, but I suspect his +ingenuity of having, in so good a cause, anticipated his next birthday +by a few months. The 45th was a nine-months regiment, but he got +himself passed out of it, in advance of its discharge, to a lieutenancy +in the 55th U.S.C.T., Colonel A. P. Hallowell (transferred from +lieutenant-colonelcy of the 54th) commanding; though not before he had +been involved in the siege of Charleston, whence the visionary, the +quite Edgar Poeish look, for my entertainment, of the camp-covered +"Folly Island" of his letters. While his regiment was engaged in +Seymour's raid on Florida he suffered a serious sunstroke, with such +consequences that he was recommended for discharge; of which he declined +to avail himself, obtaining instead a position on General Ames's staff +and enjoying thus for six months the relief of being mounted. But he +returned to his regiment in front of Charleston (after service with the +Tenth Army Corps, part of the Army of the James, before Petersburg and +Richmond); and though I have too scant an echo of his letters from that +scene one of the passages that I do recover is of the happiest. "It was +when the line wavered and I saw Gen'l Hartwell's horse on my right rear +up with a shell exploding under him that I rammed my spurs into my own +beast, who, maddened with pain, carried me on through the line, throwing +men down, and over the Rebel works some distance ahead of our troops." +For this action he was breveted captain; and the 55th, later on, was +the first body of troops to enter Charleston and march through its +streets--which term of his experience, as it unfolded, presents him to +my memory as again on staff duty; with Brigadier-Generals Potter, Rufus +Hatch and his old superior and, at my present writing, gallant and vivid +survivor, Alfred Hartwell, who had been his captain and his +lieut.-colonel in the 45th and the 55th respectively.[10] + +I can at all events speak perfectly of my own sense of the uplifting +wave just alluded to during the couple of years that the "boys'" letters +from the field came in to us--with the one abatement of glamour for them +the fact that so much of their substance was in the whole air of life +and their young reports of sharp experience but a minor pipe in the huge +mixed concert always in our ears. Faded and touching pages, these +letters are in some abundance before me now, breathing confidence and +extraordinary cheer--though surviving principally but in Wilky's +admirable hand, of all those I knew at that time the most humiliating +to a feebler yet elder fist; and with their liveliest present action to +recompose for me not by any means so much the scenes and circumstances, +the passages of history concerned, as to make me know again and +reinhabit the places, the hours, the stilled or stirred conditions +through which I took them in. These conditions seem indeed mostly to +have settled for me into the single sense of what I missed, compared to +what the authors of our bulletins gained, in wondrous opportunity of +vision, that is _appreciation of the thing seen_--there being clearly +such a lot of this, and all of it, by my conviction, portentous and +prodigious. The key to which assurance was that I longed to live by my +eyes, in the midst of such far-spreading chances, in greater measure +than I then had help to, and that the measure in which _they_ had it +gloriously overflowed. This capacity in them to deal with such an +affluence of life stood out from every line, and images sprung up about +them at every turn of the story. The story, the general one, of the +great surge of action on which they were so early carried, was to take +still other turns during the years I now speak of, some of these not of +the happiest; but with the same relation to it on my own part too +depressingly prolonged--that of seeing, sharing, envying, applauding, +pitying, all from too far-off, and with the queer sense that, whether or +no they would prove to have had the time of their lives, it seemed that +the only time I should have had would stand or fall by theirs. This was +to be yet more deplorably the case later on--I like to give a twitch to +the curtain of a future reduced to the humility of a past: when, the War +being over and we confronted with all the personal questions it had +showily muffled up only to make them step forth with their sharper +angles well upon us, our father, easily beguiled, acquired by purchase +and for the benefit of his younger sons divers cottonlands in Florida; +which scene of blighted hopes it perhaps was that cast upon me, at its +defiant distance, the most provoking spell. There was provocation, at +those subsequent seasons, in the very place-name of Serenola, beautiful +to ear and eye; unforgettable were to remain the times, while the vain +experiment dragged on for our anxiety and curiosity, and finally to our +great discomfiture, when my still ingenuous young brothers, occupied in +raising and selling crops that refused alike, it seemed, to come and to +go, wafted northward their fluctuating faith, their constant hospitality +and above all, for one of the number at home, their large unconscious +evocations. The mere borrowed, and so brokenly borrowed, impression of +southern fields basking in a light we didn't know, of scented +sub-tropic nights, of a situation suffused with economic and social +drama of the strangest and sharpest, worked in me, I dare say most +deceptively, as a sign of material wasted, my material not being in the +least the crops unproduced or unsold, but the precious store of images +ungathered. However, the vicarious sensation had, as I say, been intense +enough, from point to point, before that; a series of Wilky's letters of +the autumn of '62 and the following winter during operations in North +Carolina intended apparently to clear an approach to Charleston overflow +with the vivacity of his interest in whatever befell, and still more in +whatever promised, and reflect, in this freshness of young assurances +and young delusions, the general public fatuity. The thread of interest +for me here would certainly be much more in an exhibition of some such +artless notes of the period, with their faded marks upon them, than in +that of the spirit of my own poor perusal of them--were it not that +those things shrink after years to the common measure when not +testifying to some rarity of experience and expression. All experience +in the field struck me indeed as then rare, and I wondered at both my +brothers' military mastery of statement, through which played, on the +part of the elder, a whimsicality of "turn," an oddity of verbal +collocation, that we had ever cherished, in the family circle, as the +sign of his address. "The next fight we have, I expect," he writes from +Newberne, N. C., on New Year's Day '63, "will be a pretty big one, but I +am confident that under Foster and our gunboats we will rid the State of +these miserable wretches whom the Divine Providence has created in its +wisdom to make men wish----! Send on then, open yourselves a recruiting +establishment if necessary--all we want is numbers! _They_ are the +greatest help to the individual soldier on the battle-field. If he feels +he has 30,000 men behind him pushing on steadily to back him he is in +much more fighting trim than when away in the rear with 10,000 ahead of +him fighting like madmen. It seems that Halleck told Foster when F. was +in Washington that he scarcely slept for a week after learning that we +were near Goldsboro', having heard previously that a reinforcement of +40,000 Rebels were coming down there to whip us. Long live Foster!" + +"It was so cold this morning," he writes at another and earlier date, +"that Divine service was held in our barracks instead of out-of-doors, +as it generally is, and it was the most impressive that I have ever +heard. The sermon was on profanity, and the chaplain, after making all +the observations and doing by mouth and action as much as he could to +rid the regiment of the curse, sat down, credulous being, thinking he +had settled the question for ever. Colonel Lee then rose and said that +the chaplain the other day accused him--most properly--of profanity and +of its setting a very bad example to the regiment; also that when he +took the command he had felt how very bad the thing would be in its +influence on all around him. He felt that it would be the great conflict +of his life. At this point his head drooped and he lifted his +handkerchief to his face; but he went on in conclusion: 'Now boys, let +us try one and all to vindicate the sublime principles our chaplain has +just so eloquently expressed, and I will do _my_ best. I hope to God I +have wounded no man's feelings by an oath; if I have I humbly beg his +pardon.' Here he finished." How this passage impressed me at the time +signifies little; but I find myself now feel in its illustration of what +could then happen among soldiers of the old Puritan Commonwealth a rich +recall of some story from Cromwellian ranks. Striking the continuity, +and not unworthy of it my brother's further comment. "I leave you to +imagine which of these appeals did most good, the conventional address +of the pastor or the honest manly heart-touching acknowledgment of our +Colonel. That is the man through and through, and I heard myself say +afterwards: 'Let him swear to all eternity if he _is_ that sort of man, +and if profanity makes such, for goodness' sake let us all swear.' This +may be a bad doctrine, but is one that might after all undergo +discussion." From which letter I cull further: "I really begin to think +you've been hard in your judgments of McClellan. You don't know what an +enemy we have to conquer. Every secesh I've seen, and all the rebel +prisoners here, talk of the War with such callous earnestness." A letter +from Newberne of December 2nd contains a "pathetic" record of momentary +faith, the sort so abundant at the time in what was not at all to be +able to happen. Moreover a name rings out of it which it is a kind of +privilege to give again to the air--when one can do so with some +approach to an association signified; so much did Charles Lowell's +virtue and value and death represent at the season soon to come for +those who stood within sight of them, and with such still unextinct +emotion may the few of these who now survive turn to his admirably +inspired kinsman's Harvard Commemoration Ode and find it infinitely and +tenderly suffused with pride. Two gallantest nephews, particularly +radiant to memory, had James Russell Lowell to commemorate. + + I sweep for them a pæan, but they wane + Again and yet again + Into a dirge and die away in pain. + + In these brave ranks I only see the gaps, + Thinking of dear ones whom the dumb turf wraps, + Dark to the triumph which they died to gain. + + Cabot has had news that Mr. Amos Lawrence of Boston is getting up a + cavalry regiment (Wilky writes), and he has sent home to try for a + commission as 2nd lieutenant. Now if we could only _both_ get such + a commission in that regiment you can judge yourself how desirable + it would be. Perkins will probably have one in the Massachusetts + 2nd and our orderly stands a pretty good chance of one in the 44th. + This cavalry colonelcy will probably be for Cabot's cousin, Charles + Lowell. + + There is a report that we start this week for Kinston, and if so we + shall doubtless have a good little fight. We have just received 2 + new Mass. Regiments, the 8th and the 51st. We have absolutely no + time to ourselves; and what time we do have we want much more to + give to lying down than to anything else. But try your best for me + now, and I promise you to do _my_ best wherever I am. + +A homelier truth is in a few lines three weeks later. + + The men as a general thing think war a mean piece of business as + it's carried on in this State; we march 20 or 30 miles and find the + enemy entrenched in rifle-pits or hidden away in some + out-of-the-way place; we send our artillery forward, and after a + brisk skirmish ahead the foe is driven back into the woods, and we + march on for 20 miles more to find the same luck. We were all on + the last march praying for a fight, so that we might halt and throw + off our knapsacks. I don't pretend I am eager to make friends with + bullets, but at Whitehall, after marching some 20 miles, I was on + this account really glad when I heard cannonading ahead and the + column was halted and the fight began. + +The details of this engagement are missing from the letter, but we found +matter of interest in two or three other passages--one in particular +recording a December day's march with 15,000 men, "not including +artillerymen," 70 pieces of artillery and 1100 cavalry; which, "on +account of obstructions on the roads," had achieved by night but +seventeen miles and resulted in a bivouac "in 3 immense cotton-fields, +one about as large as Easton's Pond at Newport." + + We began to see the camp fires of the advance brigade about 4 miles + ahead of us, and I assure you those miles were soon got over. I + think Willy's artistic eye would have enjoyed the sight--it seemed + so as if the world were on fire. When we arrived on the field the + stacks were made, the ranks broken and the men sent after rail + fences, which fortunately abound in this region and are the only + comfort we have at night. A long fire is made, the length of the + stacks, and one rank is placed on one side of it and the other + opposite. I try to make a picture you see, but scratch it out in + despair. The fires made, we sit down and make our coffee in our tin + dippers, and often is one of these pushed over by some careless + wretch who hasn't noticed it on the coals or has been too tired to + look. The coffee and the hard tack consumed we spread our rubber + blankets and sleep as sound as any house in Christendom. At about 5 + the fearful réveillé calls us to our feet, we make more coffee, + drink it in a hurry, sling our knapsacks and spank down the road in + one of Foster's regular old quicksteps. + +Thrilling at our fireside of course were the particulars of the Kinston +engagement, and still more, doubtless, the happy freshness of the +writer. + + At 8 A.M. we were on the road, and had hardly marched 3 miles when + we knew by sounds ahead that the ball had opened. We were ordered + up and deployed in an open field on the right of the road, where we + remained some half an hour. Then we were moved some hundred yards + further, but resumed our former position in another field. Here + Foster came up to the Major, who was directly in the rear of our + company and told him to advance our left wing to support Morrison's + battery, which was about half a mile ahead. He also said he was + pressing the Rebs hard and that they were retiring at every shell + from our side. On we went, the left flank company taking the lead, + and many a bullet and shell whizzed over our heads in that longest + half-mile of my life. We seemed to be nearing the fun, for wounded + men were being carried to the rear and dead ones lay on each side + of us in the woods. We were taken into another field on the left of + the road, and before us were deployed the 23rd Mass., who were + firing in great style. First we were ordered to lie down, and then + in 5 or 10 minutes ordered up again, when we charged down that + field in a manner creditable to any Waterloo legion. I felt as if + this moment was the greatest of my life and as if all the devils of + the Inferno were my benighted system. We halted after having + charged some 60 yards, when what should we see on our left, just + out of the woods and stuck up on a rail, but a flag of truce, + placing under its protecting wing some 50 or 60 poor cowering + wretches who, in their zeal for recognition, not only pulled out + all their pocket handkerchiefs, but in the case of one man spread + out his white shirt-flaps and offered them pacifically to the + winds. The most demonic shouts and yells were raised by the 23rd + ahead of us at this sight, in which the 44th joined; while the + regiments on our right, and that of the road, greeted in the same + frightful manner 200 prisoners they had cut off from retreat by the + bridge. So far I was alive and the thing had lasted perhaps 3 + hours; all the enemy but the 200 just named had got away over the + bridge to Kinston and our cavalry were in hot pursuit. I don't + think Sergeant G. W. has ever known greater glee in all his born + days. At about 3 P.M. we crossed the bridge and got into the town. + All along the road from bridge to town Rebel equipments, guns and + cartridge-boxes lay thick, and within the place dead men and horses + thickened too. We were taken ahead through the town to support the + New York 3rd Artillery beyond, where it was shelling the woods + around and ridding the place for the night of any troublesome + wanderers. The Union pickets posted out ahead that night said the + shrieks of women and children further on in the wood could be heard + perfectly all night long, these unfortunates having taken refuge + there from the threatened town. That night we lived like + fighting-cocks--molasses, pork, butter, cheese and all sorts of + different delicacies being foraged for and houses entered + regardless of the commonest dues of life, and others set on fire to + show Kinston was our own. She belonged to our army, and almost + every man claimed a house. If I had only had your orders beforehand + for trophies I could have satisfied you with anything named, from a + gold watch to an old brickbat. This is the ugly part of war. A too + victorious army soon goes down; but we luckily didn't have time + for big demoralisation, as the next day in the afternoon we found + ourselves some 17 miles away and bivouacking in a single prodigious + cornfield. + +To which I don't resist subjoining another characteristic passage from +the same general scene as a wind-up to that small chapter of history. + + The report has gained ground to-day that we leave to-morrow, and if + so I suppose the next three months will be important ones in the + history of the War. Four ironclads and a great many gunboats are in + Beaufort Harbour; we have at present a force of 50,000 infantry, an + immense artillery and upwards of 800 cavalry. Transports + innumerable are filling up every spare inch of our harbour, and + every man's pity and charity are exercised upon Charleston, Mobile + or Wilmington. We are the only nine-months regiment going, a fact + which to the sensitive is highly gratifying, showing Foster's + evident high opinion of us. The expedition, I imagine, will be + pretty interesting, for we shall have excitement enough without the + fearful marches. To-day is Sunday, and I've been reading Hugo's + account of Waterloo in Les Misérables and preparing my mind for + something of the same sort at Wilmington. God grant the battle may + do as much harm to the Rebels as Waterloo did to the French. If it + does the fight will be worth the dreadful carnage it may involve, + and the experience for the survivors an immense treasure. Men will + fight forever if they are well treated. Give them little marching + and keep the wounded away from them, and they'll do anything. I am + very well and in capital spirits, though now and then rather blue + about home. But only 5 months more and then heaven! General Foster + has just issued an order permitting us to inscribe Goldsboro, + Kinston and Whitehall on our banner. + +On the discharge of the 44th after the term of nine months for which it +had engaged and my brother's return home, he at once sought service +again in the Massachusetts 54th, his connection with which I have +already recorded, as well as his injuries in the assault on Fort Wagner +fruitlessly made by that regiment in the summer of '63. He recovered +with difficulty, but at last sufficiently, from his wounds (with one +effect of which he had for the rest of his short life grievously to +reckon), and made haste to rejoin his regiment in the field--to the +promotion of my gathering a few more notes. From "off Graham's point, +Tillapenny River, Headquarters 2nd Brigade," he writes in December '64. + + We started last night from the riflepits in the front of Deveaux + Neck to cross the Tillapenny and make a reconnaissance on this side + and try and get round the enemy's works. It is now half-past 10 + A.M., and I have been trying to wash some of my mud off. We are all + a sorry crowd of beggars--I don't look as I did the night we left + home. I am much of the time mud from head to foot, and my spirit is + getting muddled also. But I am in excellent condition as regards my + wounds and astonish myself by my powers. I rode some 26 miles + yesterday and walked some 3 in thick mud, but don't feel a bit the + worse for it. We're only waiting here an hour or two to get a + relief of horses, when we shall start again. We shan't have a fight + of any kind to-day, but to-morrow expect to give them a little + trouble at Pocotaligo. Colonel Hallowell commands this + reconnaissance. We have only 4 regiments and a section of artillery + from the 2nd Brigade with us. We heard some fine music from the + Rebel lines yesterday. They have got a stunning band over there. + Prisoners tell us it's a militia band from Georgia. Most all the + troops in our front are militia composed of old men and boys, the + flower of the chivalry being just now engaged with Sherman at + Savannah. We hear very heavy firing in that direction this morning, + and I guess the chivalry is getting the worst of it. The taking of + Fort McAllister the other day was a splendid thing--we got 280 + prisoners and made them go out and pick up the torpedoes round the + fort. Sherman was up at Oguchee and Ossahaw yesterday on another + consultation with Foster. We had called our whole army out the + night before in front of our works to give him three cheers. This + had a marvellous effect upon the Rebs. About 20 men came in the + night into our lines, thinking we had got reinforcements and were + going to advance. Later. A scout has just come in and tells us the + enemy are intrenched about 4 miles off, so that we _shall_ have + to-day a shindy of some kind. Our headquarters are now in a large + house once owned by Judge Graham. The coloured troops are in high + spirits and have done splendidly this campaign. + +The high spirits of the coloured troops appear naturally to have been +shared by their officers--"in the field, Tillapenny River," late at +night on December 23rd, '64. + + We have just received such bully news to comfort us that I can't + help rising from my slumbers to drop you a line. A despatch just + received tells us that Sherman has captured 150 guns, 250,000 dols. + worth of cotton at Savannah, that Forrest is killed and routed by + Rousseau, and that Thomas has walked into Hood and given him the + worst kind of fits. I imagine the poor Rebel outposts in our front + feel pretty blue to-night, for what with that and the thermometer + at about zero I guess the night won't pass without robbing their + army of some of its best and bravest. We suffer a good deal from + the cold, but are now sitting round our camp fire in as good + spirits as men could possibly be. A despatch received early this + evening tells us to look out sharp for Hardee, but this latest news + knocks that to a cocked hat, and we are only just remembering that + that gentleman is round. My foot is bully. + +As regards that impaired member, on which he was ever afterwards +considerably to limp, he opines three days later, on Christmas evening, +that "even in the palmy days of old it never _felt_ better than now." +And he goes on: + + Though Savannah is taken I fear we shan't get much credit for + having helped to take it. Yet night and day we have been at it + hammer and tongs, and as we are away from the main army and + somewhat isolated and cut off our work has been pretty hard. We + have had only 1,200 effective men in our brigade, and out of that + number have had regularly 400 on picket night and day, and the + fatigue and extra guard duty have nearly used them up. Twice we + have been attacked and both times held our own. Twice we attacked + and once have been driven. The only prisoners we have captured on + the whole expedition have been taken by this part of the column, + and on the whole though we didn't march into Savannah I know you + will give us a little credit for having hastened its downfall. + Three prisoners that we took the other night slept at our Hdqrs, + and we had a good long talk with them. We could get out of them + nothing at all that helps from a military point of view, but their + stories about the Confederacy were most hopeless. They were 3 + officers and gentlemen of a crack S.C. cavalry company which has + been used during the War simply to guard this coast, and their + language and state of mind were those of the true Southern + chevalier. They confessed to a great scare on finding themselves + hemmed in by coloured troops, and all agree that the niggers are + the worst enemies they have had to face. On Thursday we turned them + over to the Provost-Marshal at Deveaux Neck, who took them to Gen'l + Hatch. The General had got our despatch announcing we could get + nothing at all out of them, and he came down on them most + ruthlessly and told them to draw lots, as one would have to swing + before night. He told them he had got the affidavit of an escaped + Union prisoner, a man captured at Honey Hill and who had come into + our lines the day previous, to the effect that he had witnessed the + hanging of a negro soldier belonging to the 26th U.S.C.T., and that + he had determined one of them should answer for it. Two seemed very + much moved, but the third, Lee by name (cousin of Gen'l Stephen Lee + of the cavalry), said he knew nothing about it, but if it was so, + so it might be. The other two were taken from each other and Gen'l + Hatch managed to draw a good deal of information from them about + our position, that is the force and nature of the enemy and works + in our front. Lee refused to the last to answer any question + whatever, and they all 3 now await at Hilton Head the issue of the + law. The hanging of the negro seems a perfectly ascertained + fact--he was hung by the 48th Georgia Infty, and the story has + naturally much stirred up our coloured troops. If Hardee should + decide to come down on us I believe he would get the worst of it, + and only hope now that our men won't take a prisoner alive. They + certainly make a great mistake at Washington in not attending to + these little matters, and I am sure the moral effect of an order + from the President announcing that such things have happened, and + that the coloured troops have taken them thoroughly to heart, would + be greater on the Rebels than any physical blow we can deal them. + +When I read again, "in the field before Pocotaligo," toward the middle +of January '65, that "Sherman leaves to-night from Beaufort with Logan's +Corps to cross Beaufort Ferry and come up on our right flank and push on +to Pocotaligo bridge," the stir as from great things rises again for me, +wraps about Sherman's name as with the huge hum that then surrounded it, +and in short makes me give the passage such honour as I may. "We are +waiting anxiously for the sound of his musketry announcing him." I was +never in my life to wait for any such sound, but how at that juncture I +hung about with privileged Wilky! "We all propose at Hdqrs to take our +stores out and ride up to the bank of the river and watch the fight on +the other side. We are praying to be relieved here--our men are dying +for want of clothing; and when we see Morris Island again we shall +utterly rejoice." He writes three days later from headquarters +established in a plantation the name of which, as well as that of the +stream, of whatever magnitude, that they had crossed to reach it, +happens to be marked by an illegibility quite unprecedented in his +splendid script--to the effect of a still intenser evocation (as was +then to be felt at any rate) of all the bignesses involved. "Sherman's +whole army is in our front, and they expect to move on Charleston at any +moment." Sherman's whole army!--it affected me from afar off as a vast +epic vision. The old vibration lives again, but with it also that of the +smaller and nearer, the more intimate notes--such for instance as: "I +shall go up to the 20th Corps to-morrow and try for a sight of Billy +Perkins and Sam Storrow in the 2nd Mass." Into which I somehow read, +under the touch of a ghostly hand no more "weirdly" laid than _that_, +more volumes than I can the least account for or than I have doubtless +any business to. + +My visionary yearning must however, I think, have drawn most to feed on +from the first of a series of missives dated from Headquarters, +Department of the South, Hilton Head S.C., this particular one of the +middle of February. "I write in a great hurry to tell you I have been +placed on General Gillmore's staff as A.D.C. It is just the very thing +for my foot under present circumstances, and I consider myself most +fortunate. I greatly like the General, who is most kind and genial and +very considerate. My duties will be principally the carrying of orders +to Savannah, Morris Island, Fortress Monroe, Combalee(?) Florida, and +the General's correspondence. Charleston is ours," he goes on two days +later: "it surrendered to a negro regiment yesterday at 9 A.M. We have +just come up from Sumter, where we have hoisted the American flag. We +were lying off Bull's Bay yesterday noon waiting for this when the +General saw through his glass the stars and stripes suddenly flown from +the town hall. We immediately steamed up to Sumter and ran up the +colours there. Old Gillmore was in fine feather and I am in consummate +joy." The joy nevertheless, I may add, doesn't prevent the remark after +a couple of days more that "Charleston isn't on the whole such a very +great material victory; in fact the capture of the place is of value +only in that its moral effect tends to strengthen the Union cause." +After which he proceeds: + + Governor Aiken of S.C. came up to Hdqrs to-day to call on the + Gen'l, and they had a long talk. He is a "gradual Emancipationist" + and says the worst of the President's acts was his sweeping + Proclamation. Before that every one in this State was ready to come + back on the gradual system, and would have done so if Lincoln's act + hadn't driven them to madness. This is all fine talk, but there is + nothing in it. They had at least 5 months' warning and could have + in that time perfectly returned within the fold; in fact the strong + Abolitionists of the North were afraid the President had made the + thing but too easy for them and that they would get ahead of us and + themselves emancipate. This poor gentleman is simple crazy and + weakminded. Between Davis and us he _is_ puzzled beyond measure, + and doesn't know what line to take. One thing though troubled him + most, namely the ingratitude of the negro. He can't conceive how + the creatures he has treated with such extraordinary kindness and + taken such care of should all be willing to leave him. He says he + was the first man in the South to introduce religion among the + blacks and that his plantation of 600 of them was a model of + civilisation and peace. Just think of this immense slaveholder + telling me as I drove him home that the coat he had on had been + turned three times and his pantaloons the only ones he possessed. + He stated this so simply and touchingly that I couldn't help + offering him a pair of mine--which he refused, however. There are + some 10,000 people in the town, mostly women and negroes, and it's + tremendously ravaged by our shell, about which they have naturally + lied from beginning to end. + +"Bob has just come down from Charleston," he writes in March--"he has +been commissioned captain in the 103rd U.S.C.T. I am sorry he has left +his regiment, still he seemed bent on doing so and offers all kinds of +reasons for it. He may judge rightly, but I fear he's hasty;" and +indeed this might appear from a glimpse of our younger brother at his +ease given by him in a letter of some days before, written at two +o'clock in the morning and recording a day spent in a somewhat arduously +performed visit to Charleston. "I drove out to the entrenchments to-day +to see B., and found him with Hartwell (R. J.'s colonel) smoking their +long pipes on the verandah of a neat country cottage with a beautiful +garden in front of them and the birds chirping and rambling around. Bob +looks remarkably well and seemed very nice indeed. He speaks very highly +of Hartwell, and the latter the same of him. They seemed settled in +remarkable comfort at Charleston and to be taking life easy after their +180 miles march through South Carolina." He mentions further that his +visit to the captured city, begun the previous day, had been made in +interesting conditions; there is in fact matter for quotation throughout +the letter, the last of the small group from which I shall borrow. He +had, with his general, accompanied a "large Senatorial delegation from +Washington and shown them round the place." He records the delegation's +"delight" in what they saw; how "a large crowd of young ladies" were of +the party, so that the Senatorial presences were "somewhat relieved and +lightened to the members of the staff;" and also that they all went +over to Forts Sumter and Moultrie and the adjacent works. The pleasure +of the whole company in the scene of desolation thus presented is one of +those ingenuous historic strokes that the time-spirit, after a +sufficient interval, permits itself to smile at--and is not the only +such, it may be noted, in the sincere young statement. + + To-morrow they go to Savannah, returning here in the evening, when + there is to be a grand reception for them at Hdqrs. We expect Gen'l + Robert Anderson (the loyalist commandant at Sumter when originally + fired upon) by the next steamer, with Gideon Welles (secretary of + the Navy) and a number of other notables from Washington. Anderson + is going to raise the old flag on Sumter, and of course there will + be a great shindy here--I only wish you were with us to join in it. + I never go to Sumter without the deepest exhilaration--so many + scenes come to my mind. It's the centre of the nest, and for one to + _be_ there is to feel that the whole game is up. These people have + always insisted that there the last gun should be fired. But the + suffering and desolation of this land is the worst feature of the + whole thing. If you could see what they are reduced to you couldn't + help being touched. The best people are in utter penury; they look + like the poorest of the poor and they talk like them also. They are + deeply demoralised, in fact degraded. Charleston is more forsaken + and stricken than I can describe; it reminds me when I go through + the streets of some old doomed city on which the wrath of God has + rested from far back, and if it ever revives will do so simply + through the infinite mercy and charity of the North. But for this + generation at least the inhabitants are done for. Can't H. come + down and pay us a visit of 2 or 3 weeks? I can get him a War Dept. + pass approved by General Gillmore. + +H. knew and well remembers the pang of his inability to accept this +invitation, to the value of which for emphasis of tragic life on the +scene of the great drama the next passage adds a touch. Mrs. William +Young, the lady alluded to, was a friend we had known almost only on the +European stage and amid the bright associations of Paris in particular. +Whom did we suppose he had met on the arrival of a steamer from the +North but this more or less distracted acquaintance of other days?--who +had come down "to try and get her stepmother into our lines and take her +home. She is accompanied by a friend from New York, and expects to +succeed in her undertaking. I hardly think she will, however, as her +mother is 90 miles out of our lines and a very old woman. We have sent a +negro out to give her Mrs. Young's news, but how can this poor old thing +travel such a distance on foot and sleep in the swamp besides? It's an +absurd idea, but I shall do everything in my power to facilitate it." Of +what further befell I gather no account; but I remember how a later time +was to cause me to remark on the manner in which even dire tragedy may +lapse, in the individual life, and leave no trace on the ground it has +ravaged--none at least apparent unless pushingly searched for. The last +thing to infer from appearances, on much subsequent renewal of contact +with Mrs. Young in Paris again, was that this tension of a reach forth +across great war-wasted and swamp-smothered spaces for recovery of an +aged and half-starved pedestrian female relative counted for her as a +chapter of experience: the experience of Paris dressmakers and other +like matters had so revived and supervened. But let me add that I speak +here of mere appearances, and have ever inclined to the more ironic and +more complicating vision of them. It would doubtless have been too +simple for wonder that our elegant friend should have lived, as it were, +under the cloud of reminiscence--and wonder had always somewhere to come +in. + + + + +XII + + +It had been, however, neither at Newport nor at Cambridge--the Cambridge +at least of that single year--that the plot began most to thicken for +me: I figure it as a sudden stride into conditions of a sort to minister +and inspire much more, all round, that we early in 1864 migrated, as a +family, to Boston, and that I now seem to see the scene of our existence +there for a couple of years packed with drama of a finer consistency +than any I had yet tasted. We settled for the interesting time in +Ashburton Place--the "sympathetic" old house we occupied, one of a pair +of tallish brick fronts based, as to its ground floor, upon the dignity +of time-darkened granite, was lately swept away in the interest of I +know not what grander cause; and when I wish to think of such +intercourse as I have enjoyed with the good city at its closest and, as +who should say its kindest, though this comes doubtless but to saying at +its freshest, I live over again the story of that sojourn, a period +bristling, while I recover my sense of it, with an unprecedented number +of simultaneous particulars. To stick, as I can only do, to the point +from which my own young outlook worked, the things going on for me so +tremendously all at once were in the first place the last impressions of +the War, a whole social relation to it crowding upon us there as for +many reasons, all of the best, it couldn't have done elsewhere; and +then, more personally speaking, the prodigious little assurance I found +myself gathering as from one day to another that fortune had in store +some response to my deeply reserved but quite unabashed design of +becoming as "literary" as might be. It was as if, our whole new medium +of existence aiding, I had begun to see much further into the question +of how that end was gained. The vision, quickened by a wealth, a great +mixture, of new appearances, became such a throbbing affair that my +memory of the time from the spring of '64 to the autumn of '66 moves as +through an apartment hung with garlands and lights--where I have but to +breathe for an instant on the flowers again to see them flush with +colour, and but tenderly to snuff the candles to see them twinkle +afresh. Things happened, and happened repeatedly, the mere brush or +side-wind of which was the stir of life; and the fact that I see, when I +consider, how it was mostly the mere side-wind I got, doesn't draw from +the picture a shade of its virtue. I literally, and under whatever felt +restriction of my power to knock about, formed independent +relations--several; and two or three of them, as I then thought, of the +very most momentous. I may not attempt just here to go far into these, +save for the exception of the easiest to treat, which I also, by good +fortune, win back as by no means the least absorbing--the beautiful, the +entrancing presumption that I should have but to write with sufficient +difficulty and sufficient felicity to get once for all (that was the +point) into the incredibility of print. I see before me, in the rich, +the many-hued light of my room that overhung dear Ashburton Place from +our third floor, the very greenbacks, to the total value of twelve +dollars, into which I had changed the cheque representing my first +earned wage. I had earned it, I couldn't but feel, with fabulous +felicity: a circumstance so strangely mixed with the fact that literary +composition of a high order had, at that very table where the greenbacks +were spread out, quite viciously declined, and with the air of its being +also once for all, to "come" on any save its own essential terms, which +it seemed to distinguish in the most invidious manner conceivable from +mine. It was to insist through all my course on this distinction, and +sordid gain thereby never again to seem so easy as in that prime +handling of my fee. Other guerdons, of the same queer, the same often +rather greasy, complexion followed; for what had I done, to the +accompaniment of a thrill the most ineffable, an agitation that, as I +recapture it, affects me as never exceeded in all my life for fineness, +but go one beautiful morning out to Shady Hill at Cambridge and there +drink to the lees the offered cup of editorial sweetness?--none ever +again to be more delicately mixed. I had addressed in trembling hope my +first fond attempt at literary criticism to Charles Eliot Norton, who +had lately, and with the highest, brightest competence, come to the +rescue of the North American Review, submerged in a stale tradition and +gasping for life, and he had not only published it in his very next +number--the interval for me of breathless brevity--but had expressed the +liveliest further hospitality, the gage of which was thus at once his +welcome to me at home. I was to grow fond of regarding as a positive +consecration to letters that half-hour in the long library at Shady +Hill, where the winter sunshine touched serene book-shelves and arrayed +pictures, the whole embrowned composition of objects in my view, with I +knew not what golden light of promise, what assurance of things to come: +there was to be nothing exactly like it later on--the conditions of +perfect rightness for a certain fresh felicity, certain decisive +pressures of the spring, _can_ occur, it would seem, but once. This was +on the other hand the beginning of so many intentions that it mattered +little if the particular occasion was not repeated; for what did I do +again and again, through all the years, but handle in plenty what I +might have called the small change of it? + +I despair, however, as I look back, of rendering the _fusions_ in that +much-mixed little time, every feature of which had something of the +quality and interest of every other, and the more salient, the more +"epoch-making"--I apply with complacency the portentous term--to drape +themselves romantically in the purple folds of the whole. I think it +must have been the sense of the various climaxes, the enjoyed, because +so long postponed, revenges of the War, that lifted the moment in the +largest embrace: the general consciousness was of such big things at +last in sight, the huge national emergence, the widening assurance, +however overdarkened, it is true, by the vast black cost of what General +Grant (no light-handed artist he!) was doing for us. He was at all +events working to an end, and something strange and immense, even like +the light of a new day rising above a definite rim, shot its rays +through the chinks of the immediate, the high-piled screen of sacrifice +behind which he wrought. I fail to seize again, to my wonder, the +particular scene of our acclamation of Lee's surrender, but I feel in +the air the exhalation of our relief, which mingled, near and far, with +the breath of the springtime itself and positively seemed to become +over the land, over the world at large in fact, an element of reviving +Nature. Sensible again are certain other sharpest vibrations then +communicated from the public consciousness: Ashburton Place resounds for +me with a wild cry, rocks as from a convulsed breast, on that early +morning of our news of Lincoln's death by murder; and, in a different +order, but also darkening the early day, there associates itself with my +cherished chamber of application the fact that of a sudden, and while we +were always and as much as ever awaiting him, Hawthorne was dead. What I +have called the fusion strikes me as indeed beyond any rendering when I +think of the peculiar assault on my private consciousness of _that_ +news: I sit once more, half-dressed, late of a summer morning and in a +bedimmed light which is somehow at once that of dear old green American +shutters drawn to against openest windows and that of a moral shadow +projected as with violence--I sit on my belated bed, I say, and yield to +the pang that made me positively and loyally cry. I didn't rise early in +those days of scant ease--I now even ask myself how sometimes I rose at +all; which ungrudged license withal, I thus make out, was not less +blessedly effective in the harmony I glance at than several showier +facts. To tell at all adequately why the pang was fine would +nevertheless too closely involve my going back, as we have learned to +say, on the whole rich interpenetration. I fondly felt it in those days +invaluable that I had during certain last and otherwise rather blank +months at Newport taken in for the first time and at one straight +draught the full sweet sense of our one fine romancer's work--for sweet +it then above all seemed to me; and I remember well how, while the +process day after day drew itself admirably out, I found the actual +exquisite taste of it, the strain of the revelation, justify up to the +notch whatever had been weak in my delay. This prolonged hanging off +from true knowledge had been the more odd, so that I couldn't have +explained it, I felt, through the fact that The Wonder-Book and +Twice-Told Tales had helped to enchant our childhood; the consequence at +any rate seemed happy, since without it, very measurably, the sudden +sense of recognition would have been less uplifting a wave. The joy of +the recognition was to know at the time no lapse--was in fact through +the years never to know one, and this by some rare action of a principle +or a sentiment, I scarce know whether to call it a clinging consistency +or a singular silliness, that placed the Seven Gables, the Blithedale +Romance and the story of Donatello and Miriam (the accepted title of +which I dislike to use, not the "marble" but very particularly the human +Faun being throughout in question) somewhere on a shelf unvisited by +harsh inquiry. The feeling had perhaps at the time been marked by +presumption, by a touch of the fatuity of patronage; yet wasn't +well-nigh the best charm of a relation with the works just named in the +impulse, known from the first, somehow to stand in _between_ them and +harsh inquiry? If I had asked myself what I meant by that term, at which +freedom of appreciation, in fact of intelligence, might have looked +askance, I hope I should have found a sufficient answer in the mere plea +of a sort of _bêtise_ of tenderness. I recall how once, in the air of +Rome at a time ever so long subsequent, a friend and countryman now no +more, who had spent most of his life in Italy and who remains for me, +with his accomplishment, his distinction, his extraordinary play of mind +and his too early and too tragic death, the clearest case of +"cosmopolitan culture" I was to have known, exclaimed with surprise on +my happening to speak as from an ancient fondness for Hawthorne's +treatment of the Roman scene: "Why, can you read _that_ thing, and +_here_?--to me it means nothing at all!" I remember well that under the +breath of this disallowance of any possibility of association, and quite +most of such a one as I had from far back positively cultivated, the +gentle perforated book tumbled before me from its shelf very much as old +Polonius, at the thrust of Hamlet's sword, must have collapsed behind +the pictured arras. Of course I might have picked it up and brushed it +off, but I seem to feel again that I didn't so much as want to, lost as +I could only have been in the sense that the note of harsh inquiry, or +in other words of the very stroke I had anciently wished to avert, +_there_ fell straight upon my ear. It represented everything I had so +early known we must have none of; though there was interest galore at +the same time (as there almost always is in lively oppositions of +sensibility, with the sharpness of each, its special exclusions, well +exhibited), in an "American" measure that could so reject our beautiful +genius and in a Roman, as it were, that could so little see he had done +anything for Rome. H. B. Brewster in truth, literary master of three +tongues at least, was scarce American at all; homely superstitions had +no hold on him; he was French, Italian, above all perhaps German; and +there would have been small use, even had there been any importance, in +my trying to tell him for instance why it had particularly been, in the +gentle time, that I had settled once for all to take our author's case +as simply exquisite and not budge from that taking. Which indeed scarce +bears telling now, with matters of relative (if _but_ of relative!) +urgence on hand--consisting as it mainly did in the fact that his work +was all charged with a _tone_, a full and rare tone of prose, and that +this made for it an extraordinary value in an air in which absolutely +nobody's else was or has shown since any aptitude for being. And the +tone had been, in its beauty--for me at least--ever so appreciably +American; which proved to what a use American matter could be put by an +American hand: a consummation involving, it appeared, the happiest +moral. For the moral was that an American could be an artist, one of the +finest, without "going outside" about it, as I liked to say; quite in +fact as if Hawthorne had become one just by being American _enough_, by +the felicity of how the artist in him missed nothing, suspected nothing, +that the ambient air didn't affect him as containing. Thus he was at +once so clear and so entire--clear without thinness, for he might have +seemed underfed, it was his danger; and entire without heterogeneity, +which might, with less luck and to the discredit of our sufficing +manners, have had to be his help. These remarks, as I say, were those I +couldn't, or at any rate didn't, make to my Roman critic; if only +because I was so held by the other case he offered me--that of a culture +for which, in the dense medium around us, Miriam and Donatello and +their friends hadn't the virtue that shines or pushes through. I tried +to feel that this _constatation_ left me musing--and perhaps in truth it +did; though doubtless if my attachment to the arranger of those images +had involved, to repeat, my not budging, my meditation, whatever it was, +respected that condition. + +It has renewed itself, however, but too much on this spot, and the scene +viewed from Ashburton Place claims at the best more filling in than I +can give it. Any illustration of anything worth illustrating has beauty, +to my vision, largely by its developments; and developments, alas, are +the whole flowering of the plant, while what really meets such attention +as one may hope to beguile is at the best but a plucked and tossed sprig +or two. That my elder brother was during these months away with +Professor Agassiz, a member of the party recruited by that great +naturalist for a prolonged exploration of Brazil, is one of the few +blooms, I see, that I must content myself with detaching--the main sense +of it being for myself, no doubt, that his absence (and he had never +been at anything like such a distance from us,) left me the more +exposed, and thereby the more responsive, to contact with impressions +that had to learn to suffice for me in their uncorrected, when not still +more in their inspiringly emphasised, state. The main sense for William +himself is recorded in a series of letters from him addressed to us at +home and for which, against my hope, these pages succeed in affording no +space--they are to have ampler presentation; but the arrival of which at +irregular intervals for the greater part of a year comes back to me as +perhaps a fuller enrichment of my consciousness than it owed for the +time to any other single source. We all still hung so together that this +replete organ could yet go on helping itself, with whatever awkwardness, +from the conception or projection of others of a like _general_ strain, +such as those of one's brothers might appear; thanks to which constant +hum of borrowed experience, in addition to the quicker play of whatever +could pass as more honestly earned, my stage of life knew no drop of the +curtain. I literally came and went, I had never practised such coming +and going; I went in particular, during summer weeks, and even if +carrying my general difficulty with me, to the White Mountains of New +Hampshire, with some repetition, and again and again back to Newport, on +visits to John La Farge and to the Edmund Tweedys (_their_ house almost +a second summer home to us;) to say nothing of winter attempts, a little +weak, but still more or less achieved, upon New York--which city was +rapidly taking on the capital quality, the large worldly sense that +dear old London and dear old Paris, with other matters in hand for them +as time went on, the time they were "biding" for me, indulgently didn't +grudge it. The matters they had in hand wandered indeed as stray vague +airs across to us--this I think I have noted; but Boston itself could +easily rule, in default even of New York, when to "go," in particular, +was an act of such easy virtue. To go from Ashburton Place was to go +verily round the corner not less than further afield; to go to the +Athenæum, to the Museum, to a certain door of importances, in fact of +immensities, defiant of vulgar notation, in Charles Street, at the +opposite end from Beacon. The fruit of these mixed proceedings I found +abundant at the time, and I think quite inveterately sweet, but to +gather it in again now--by which I mean set it forth as a banquet for +imaginations already provided--would be to presume too far; not least +indeed even on my own cultivated art of exhibition. The fruit of golden +youth is all and always golden--it touches to gold what it gathers; this +was so the essence of the case that in the first place everything was in +some degree an adventure, and in the second any differences of degree +guiding my selection would be imperceptible at this end of time to the +cold eye of criticism. Not least moreover in the third place the very +terms would fail, under whatever ingenuity, for my really justifying so +bland an account of the period at large. Do I speak of it as a thumping +sum but to show it in the small change, the handful of separate copper +and silver coin, the scattered occasions reduced to their individual +cash value, that, spread upon the table as a treasure of reminiscence, +might only excite derision? _Why_ was "staying at Newport" so absurdly, +insistently romantic, romantic out of all proportion, as we say--why +unless I can truly tell in proportion to what it became so? It consisted +often in my "sitting" to John La Farge, within his own precincts and in +the open air of attenuated summer days, and lounging thereby just +passive to the surge of culture that broke upon me in waves the most +desultory and disjointed, it was true, but to an absolute effect of +unceasingly scented spray. Particular hours and old (that is young!) +ineffable reactions come back to me; it's like putting one's ear, +doctor-fashion, to the breast of time--or say as the subtle savage puts +his to the ground--and catching at its start some vibratory hum that has +been going on more or less for the fifty years since. Newport, the +barren isle of our return from Europe, had thus become--and at no such +great expense if the shock of public affairs, everywhere making +interests start to their feet, be counted out of the process--a source +of fifty suggestions to me; which it would have been much less, +however, I hasten to add, if the call of La Farge hadn't worked in with +our other most standing attraction, and this in turn hadn't practically +been part of the positive affluence of certain elements of spectacle. +Why again I should have been able to see the pictorial so freely +suggested, that pictorial which was ever for me the dramatic, the +social, the effectively human aspect, would be doubtless a baffling +inquiry in presence of the queer and dear old phenomena themselves; +those that, taken together, may be described at the best, I suppose, +rather as a much-mixed grope or halting struggle, call it even a +competitive scramble, toward the larger, the ideal elegance, the +traditional forms of good society in possession, than as a presentation +of great noble assurances. + +Spectacle in any case broke out, spectacle accumulated, by our then +measure, many thicknesses deep, flushing in the sovereign light, as one +felt it, of the waning Rhode Island afternoons of August and September +with the most "evolved" material civilisation our American world could +then show; the vividest note of this in those years, unconscious, even +to an artless innocence, of the wider wings still to spread, being the +long daily _corso_ or processional drive (with cavaliers and amazons not +otherwise than conveniently intermixed,) which, with a different +direction for different days, offered doubtless as good an example of +that gregarious exercise at any cost distinguishing "fashionable life" +as was anywhere on the globe to be observed. The price paid for the +sticking together was what emphasised, I mean, the wondrous resolve to +stick, however scant and narrow and unadjusted for processional effect +the various fields of evolution. The variety moreover was short, just as +the incongruities of composition in the yearning array were marked; but +the tender grace of old sunset hours, the happier breadth of old shining +sands under favour of friendly tides, the glitter _quand même_ of +"caparisoned" animals, appointed vehicles and approved charioteers, to +say nothing of the other and more freely exchanged and interrelated +brightnesses then at play (in the softer ease of women, the more +moustachio'd swagger of men, the braver bonhomie of the social aspect at +large), melted together for fond fancy into a tone, a rhythm, a +representational virtue charged, as to the amenities, with authority. +The amenities thus sought their occasion to multiply even to the sound +of far cannonades, and I well remember at once reflecting, in such +maturity as I could muster, that the luckier half of a nation able to +carry a huge war-burden without sacrifice of amusement might well +overcome the fraction that had to feed but on shrinkage and privation; +at the same time that the so sad and handsome face of the most frequent +of our hostesses, Mary Temple the elder as she had been, now the apt +image of a stern priestess of the public altar, was to leave with me for +the years to come the grand expression and tragic irony of its revulsion +from those who, offering us some high entertainment during days of +particular tension, could fiddle, as she scathingly said, while Rome was +burning. Blest again the state of youth which could appreciate that +admirable look and preserve it for illustration of one of the forms of +ancient piety lost to us, and yet at the same time stow away as part of +the poetry of the general drama just the luxury and pride, overhanging +summer seas and projecting into summer nights great shafts of light and +sound, that prompted the noble scorn. The "round of pleasure" all this +with a grand good conscience of course--for it always in the like case +has that, had it at least when arranging performances, dramatic and +musical, at ever so much a ticket, under the advantage of rare amateur +talent, in aid of the great Sanitary Commission that walked in the +footsteps and renewed in various forms the example of Florence +Nightingale; these exhibitions taking place indeed more particularly in +the tributary cities, New York, Philadelphia, Boston (we were then shut +up to those,) but with the shining stars marked for triumphant +appearance announced in advance on the Newport scene and glittering +there as beauties, as élégantes, as vocalists, as heroines of European +legend. Hadn't there broken upon us, under public stress, a refluent +wave from Paris, the mid-Empire Paris of the highest pitch, which was to +raise our social water-mark to a point unprecedented and there +strikingly leave it? We were learning new lessons in every branch--that +was the sense of the so immensely quickened general pace; and though my +examples may seem rather spectral I like to believe this bigger +breathing of the freshness of the future to have been what the +collective rumble and shimmer of the whole business most meant. It +exhaled an artless confidence which yet momently increased; it had no +great sense of a direction, but gratefully took any of which the least +hint was given, gathering up by the way and after the fact whatever +account of itself a vague voice might strike off. There were times when +the account of itself as flooding Lawton's Valley for afternoon tea was +doubtless what it would most comfortably have welcomed--Lawton's Valley, +at a good drive's length from the seaward quarter, being the scene of +villeggiatura of the Boston muse, as it were, and the Boston muse +having in those after all battle-haunted seasons an authority and a +finish of accent beyond any other Tyrtaean strain. The New York and +perhaps still more the Philadelphia of the time fumbled more helplessly, +even if aspiringly, with the Boston evidences in general, I think, than +they were to be reduced to doing later on; and by the happy pretext, +certainly, that these superior signs had then a bravery they were not +perhaps on their own side indefinitely to keep up. + +They rustled, with the other leafage of the umbrageous grove, in the +summer airs that hung over the long tea-tables; afternoon tea was itself +but a new and romantic possibility, with the lesson of it gratefully +learnt at hands that dispensed, with the tea and sugar and in the +charmingest voice perhaps then to be heard among us, a tone of talk that +New York took for exotic and inimitable, yet all the more felt "good," +much better than it might if left _all_ to itself, for thus flocking in +every sort of conveyance to listen to. The Valley was deep, winding and +pastoral--or at least looks so now to my attached vision; the infancy of +a finer self-consciousness seemed cradled there; the inconsequent +vehicles fraternised, the dim, the more dejected, with the burnished and +upstanding; so that I may really perhaps take most for the note of the +hour the first tremor of the sense on the part of fashion that, if it +could, as it already more or less suspected, get its thinking and +reading and writing, almost everything in fact but its arithmetic, a bit +dingily, but just by that sign cleverly, done for it, so occasion seemed +easy, after all, for a nearer view, without responsibility, of the odd +performers of the service. When these last were not literally all +Bostonians they were New Yorkers who might have been mistaken for +such--never indeed by Bostonians themselves, but only by other New +Yorkers, the rich and guileless; so the effect as of a vague tribute to +culture the most authentic (if I speak not too portentously) was left +over for the aftertaste of simple and subtle alike. Those were +comparatively thin seasons, I recognise, in the so ample career of Mrs. +Howe, mistress of the Valley and wife of the eminent, the militant +Phil-Hellene, Dr. S. G. of the honoured name, who reached back to the +Byronic time and had dedicated his own later to still more distinguished +liberating work on behalf of deaf mutes; for if she was thus the most +attuned of interlocutors, most urbane of disputants, most insidious of +wits, even before her gathered fame as Julia Ward and the established +fortune of her elegant Battle-Hymn, she was perhaps to have served the +State scarce better through final organised activities and shining +optimisms and great lucky lyric hits than by having in her vale of +heterogeneous hospitality undermined the blank assurance of her thicker +contingent--after all too but to an _amusing_ vague unrest--and thereby +scattered the first rare seed of new assimilations. I am moved to add +that, by the old terminology, the Avenue might have been figured, in the +connection, as descending into the glen to meet the Point--which, save +for a very small number of the rarest representatives of the latter, it +could meet nowhere else. The difficulty was that of an encounter of +birds and fishes; the two tribes were native to elements as opposed as +air and water, the Avenue essentially nothing if not exalted on wheels +or otherwise expertly mounted, and the Point hopelessly pedestrian and +unequipped with stables, so that the very levels at which they +materially moved were but upper and lower, dreadfully lower, parallels. +And indeed the way to see the Point--which, without playing on the word, +naturally became our highest law--was at the Point, where it appeared to +much higher advantage than in its trudge through the purple haze or +golden dust of supercilious parades. Of the advantage to which it did so +appear, off in its own more languorous climate and on its own ground, we +fairly cultivated a conviction, rejoicing by that aid very much as in +certain old French towns it was possible to distinguish invidiously the +Ville from the Cité. The Point was our _cité_, the primal aboriginal +Newport--which, striking us on a first acquaintance as not other than +dilapidated, might well have been "restored" quite as M. Viollet-le-Duc +was even then restoring Carcassonne; and this all the more because our +elder Newport, the only seat of history, had a dismantled grassy fort or +archaic citadel that dozed over the waterside and that might (though I +do take the vision, at close quarters, for horrible) be smartly waked +up. The waterside, which was that of the inner bay, the ample reach +toward Providence, so much more susceptible of quality than the +extravagant open sea, the "old houses," the old elms, the old Quaker +faces at the small-paned old windows, the appointedness of the scene for +the literary and artistic people, who, by our fond constructive theory, +lodged and boarded with the Quakers, always thrifty these, for the sake +of all the sweetness and quaintness, for the sake above all somehow of +_our_ hungry felicity of view, by which I mean mine and that of a trusty +friend or two, T. S. Perry in especial--those attributes, meeting a +want, as the phrase is, of the decent imagination, made us perhaps +overdramatise the sphere of the clever people, but made them at least +also, when they unmistakably hovered, affect us as truly the finest +touches in the picture. For they were in their way ironic about the +rest, and that was a tremendous lift in face of an Avenue that not only, +as one could see at a glance, had no irony, but hadn't yet risen, the +magazines and the Point aiding, to so much as a suspicion of the effect, +familiar to later generations, with which the word can conversationally +come in. Oh the old clever people, with their difference of shade from +that of the clever old ones--some few of these to have been discerned, +no doubt, as of Avenue position: I read back into their various +presences I know not what queer little functional value the exercise and +privilege of which, uncontested, uncontrasted (save with the absence of +everything but stables) represents a felicity for the individual that is +lost to our age. It could count as functional then, it could count as +felicitous, to have been reabsorbed into Boston, or to propose to absorb +even, for the first time, New York, under cover of the mantle, the old +artistic draped cloak, that had almost in each case trailed round in +Florence, in Rome, in Venice, in conversations with Landor, in pencilled +commemoration, a little niggling possibly but withal so sincere, of the +"haunts" of Dante, in a general claim of having known the Brownings (ah +"the Brownings" of those days!) in a disposition to arrange readings of +these and the most oddly associated other poets about the great bleak +parlours of the hotels. I despair, however, of any really right register +of the art with which the cité ingratiated itself with me in this +character of a vivid missionary Bohemia; I met it of course more than +half way, as I met everything in the faintest degree ingratiating, even +suggesting to it with an art of my own that it should become so--though +in this matter I rather missed, I fear, a happy conversion, as if the +authenticity were there but my sort of personal dash too absent. + +I appear to myself none the less to have had dash for approaches to a +confidence more largely seated; since I recall how, having commenced +critic under Charles Norton's weighty protection, I was to find myself, +on all but the very morrow, invited to the high glory, as I felt it, of +aiding to launch, though on the obscurer side of the enterprise, a +weekly journal which, putting forth its first leaves in the summer of +'65 and under the highest auspices, was soon to enjoy a fortune and +achieve an authority and a dignity of which neither newspaper nor +critical review among us had hitherto so much as hinted the possibility. +The New York Nation had from the first, to the enlivening of several +persons consciously and ruefully astray in our desert, made no secret of +a literary leaning; and indeed its few foremost months shine most for +me in the light of their bestowal of one of the longest and happiest +friendships of my life, a relation with Edwin Lawrence Godkin, the +Nation incarnate as he was to become, which bore fruit of affection for +years after it had ceased to involve the comparatively poorer exercise. +Godkin's paper, Godkin's occasional presence and interesting history and +vivid ability and, above all, admirably aggressive and ironic editorial +humour, of a quality and authority new in the air of a journalism that +had meant for the most part the heavy hand alone, these things, with the +sudden sweet discovery that I might for my own part acceptedly stammer a +style, are so many shades and shifting tints in the positive historic +iridescence that flings itself for my memory, as I have noted, over the +"period" of Ashburton Place. Wherever I dip, again, I pull out a plum +from under the tooth of time--this at least so to my own rapt sense that +had I more space I might pull both freely and at a venture. The +strongest savour of the feast--with the fumes of a feast it comes +back--was, I need scarce once more insist, the very taste of the War as +ending and ended; through which blessing, more and more, the quantity of +military life or at least the images of military experience seemed all +about us, quite paradoxically, to grow greater. This I take to have been +a result, first of the impending, and then of the effective, break-up +of the vast veteran Army, swamping much of the scene as with the flow of +a monster tide and bringing literally home to us, in bronzed, matured +faces and even more in bronzed, matured characters, above all in the +absolutely acquired and stored resource of overwhelming reference, +reference usually of most substance the less it was immediately +explicit, the more in fact it was faded and jaded to indifference, what +was meant by having patiently served. The very smell of having so served +was somehow, at least to my super-sensitive nostril, in the larger and +cooler air, where it might have been an emanation, the most masculine, +the most communicative as to associated far-off things (according to the +nature, ever, of elements vaguely exhaled), from the operation of the +general huge gesture of relief--from worn toggery put off, from old +army-cloth and other fittings at a discount, from swordbelts and +buckles, from a myriad saturated articles now not even lying about but +brushed away with an effect upon the passing breeze and all relegated to +the dim state of some mere theoretic commemorative panoply that was +never in the event to be objectively disposed. The generalisation grew +richly or, as it were, quite adorably familiar, that life was ever so +handsomely reinforced, and manners, not to say manner at large, +refreshed, and personal aspects and types accented, and categories +multiplied (no category, for the dreaming painter of things, could our +scene afford not to grab at on the chance), just by the fact of the +discharge upon society of such an amount of out-of-the-way experience, +as it might roughly be termed--such a quantity and variety of possession +and assimilation of unprecedented history. It had been unprecedented at +least among ourselves, we had had it in our own highly original +conditions--or "they," to be more exact, had had it admirably in theirs; +and I think I was never to know a case in which his having been directly +touched by it, or, in a word, having consistently "soldiered," learnt +all about it and exhausted it, wasn't to count all the while on behalf +of the happy man for one's own individual impression or attention; call +it again, as everything came back to that, one's own need to interpret. +The discharge upon "society" is moreover what I especially mean; it +being the sense of how society in _our_ image of the word was taking it +all in that I was most concerned with; plenty of other images figured of +course for other entertainers of such. The world immediately roundabout +us at any rate bristled with more of the young, or the younger, cases I +speak of, cases of "things seen" and felt, and a delectable difference +in the man thereby made imputable, than I could begin here to name even +had I kept the record. I think I fairly cultivated the perceiving of it +all, so that nothing of it, under some face or other, shouldn't brush my +sense and add to my impression; yet my point is more particularly that +the body social itself was for the time so permeated, in the light I +glance at, that it became to its own consciousness more interesting. As +so many existent parts of it, however unstoried yet, to their minor +credit, various thrilled persons could inhale the interest to their +fullest capacity and feel that they too had been pushed forward--and +were even to find themselves by so much the more pushable yet. + +I resort thus to the lift and the push as the most expressive figures +for that immensely _remonté_ state which coincided for us all with the +great disconcerting irony of the hour, the unforgettable death of +Lincoln. I think of the springtime of '65 as it breathed through Boston +streets--my remembrance of all those days is a matter, strangely enough, +of the out-of-door vision, of one's constantly dropping down from Beacon +Hill, to the brave edge of which we clung, for appreciation of those +premonitory gusts of April that one felt most perhaps where Park Street +Church stood dominant, where the mouth of the Common itself uttered +promises, more signs and portents than one could count, more prodigies +than one could keep apart, and where further strange matters seemed to +charge up out of the lower districts and of the "business world," +generative as never before of news. The streets were restless, the +meeting of the seasons couldn't but be inordinately so, and one's own +poor pulses matched--at the supreme pitch of that fusion, for instance, +which condensed itself to blackness roundabout the dawn of April 15th: I +was fairly to go in shame of its being my birthday. These would have +been the hours of the streets if none others had been--when the huge +general gasp filled them like a great earth-shudder and people's eyes +met people's eyes without the vulgarity of speech. Even this was, all so +strangely, part of the lift and the swell, as tragedy has but to be of a +pure enough strain and a high enough connection to sow with its dark +hand the seed of greater life. The collective sense of what had occurred +was of a sadness too noble not somehow to inspire, and it was truly in +the air that, whatever we had as a nation produced or failed to produce, +we could at least gather round this perfection of a classic woe. True +enough, as we were to see, the immediate harvest of our loss was almost +too ugly to be borne--for nothing more sharply comes back to me than the +tune to which the "esthetic sense," if one glanced but from _that_ high +window (which was after all one of many too), recoiled in dismay from +the sight of Mr. Andrew Johnson perched on the stricken scene. We had +given ourselves a figure-head, and the figure-head sat there in its +habit as it lived, and we were to have it in our eyes for three or four +years and to ask ourselves in horror what monstrous thing we had done. I +speak but of aspects, those aspects which, under a certain turn of them, +may be all but everything; gathered together they become a symbol of +what is behind, and it was open to us to waver at shop-windows exposing +the new photograph, exposing, that is, _the_ photograph, and ask +ourselves what we had been guilty of as a people, when all was said, to +deserve the infliction of that form. It was vain to say that we had +deliberately invoked the "common" in authority and must drink the wine +we had drawn. No countenance, no salience of aspect nor composed symbol, +could superficially have referred itself less than Lincoln's +mould-smashing mask to any mere matter-of-course type of propriety; but +his admirable unrelated head had itself revealed a type--as if by the +very fact that what made in it for roughness of kind looked out only +less than what made in it for splendid final stamp, in other words for +commanding Style. The result thus determined had been precious for +representation, and above all for fine suggestional function, in a +degree that left behind every medal we had ever played at striking; +whereas before the image now substituted representation veiled her head +in silence and the element of the suggested was exactly the direst. +What, however, on the further view, was to be more refreshing than to +find that there were excesses of native habit which truly we couldn't +bear? so that it was for the next two or three years fairly sustaining +to consider that, let the reasons publicly given for the impeachment of +the official in question be any that would serve, the grand inward logic +or mystic law had been that we really couldn't go on offering each other +before the nations the consciousness of such a presence. That was at any +rate the style of reflection to which the humiliating case reduced me; +just this withal now especially working, I feel, into that image of our +generally quickened activity of spirit, our having by the turn of events +more ideas to apply and even to play with, that I have tried to throw +off. Everything I recover, I again risk repeating, fits into the vast +miscellany--the detail of which I may well seem, however, too poorly to +have handled. + +Let it serve then for a scrap of detail that the appearance of William's +further fortune enjoyed thereabouts a grasp of my attention scarce +menaced even by the call on that faculty of such appearances of my own +as I had naturally in some degree also to take for graces of the +banquet. I associate the sense of his being, in a great cause, far away +on the billow with that clearance of the air through the tremendous +draught, from sea to sea, of the Northern triumph, which seemed to make +a good-natured infinitude of room for all the individual interests and +personal lives that might help the pot to bubble--if the expression be +not too mean for the size of our confidence; that the cause on which the +Agassiz expedition to South America embarked _was_ of the greatest being +happily a presumption altogether within my scope. It reawoke the mild +divinatory rage with which I had followed, with so little to show for +it, the military fortune of my younger brothers--feeding the gentle +passion indeed, it must be added, thanks to the letter-writing grace of +which the case had now the benefit, with report and picture of a +vividness greater than any ever to be shed from a like source upon our +waiting circle. Everything of the kind, for me, was company; but I +dwelt, for that matter and as I put it all together, in company so +constant and so enchanting that this amounted to moving, in whatever +direction, with the mass--more and more aware as I was of the "fun" (to +express it grossly) of living by my imagination and thereby finding that +company, in countless different forms, could only swarm about me. +Seeing further into the figurable world _made_ company of persons and +places, objects and subjects alike: it gave them all without exception +chances to be somehow or other interesting, and the imaginative ply of +finding interest once taken (I think I had by that time got much beyond +looking for it), the whole conspiracy of aspects danced round me in a +ring. It formed, by my present vision of it, a shining escort to one's +possibly often hampered or mystified, but never long stayed and +absolutely never wasted, steps; it hung about, after the fashion of +winter evening adumbrations just outside the reach of the lamplight, +while one sat writing, reading, listening, watching--perhaps even again, +incurably, but dawdling and gaping; and most of all doubtless, if it +supplied with colour people and things often by themselves, I dare say, +neutral enough, how it painted thick, how it fairly smothered, any +surface that did it the turn of showing positive and intrinsic life! Ah +the things and the people, the hours and scenes and circumstances, the +_inénarrables_ occasions and relations, that I might still present in +its light if I would, and with the enormous advantage now (for this I +should unblushingly claim), of being able to mark for present irony or +pity or wonder, or just for a better intelligence, or again for the high +humour or extreme strangeness of the thing, the rare indebtedness, +calculated by the long run, in which it could leave particular cases! +This necessity I was under that everything should be interesting--for +fear of the collapse otherwise of one's sustaining intention--would have +confessed doubtless to a closest connection, of all the connections, +with the small inkpot in which I seemed at last definitely destined to +dip to the exclusion of any stream more Pactolean: a modest manner of +saying that difficulty and slowness of composition were clearly by this +time not in the least appointed to blight me, however inveterate they +were likely to prove; that production, such as it was, floundered on in +spite of them; and that, to put it frankly, if I enjoyed as much company +as I have said no small part of it was of my very own earning. The +freshness of first creations--since we are exalted, in art, to these +arrogant expressions--never fails, I take it, to beguile the creator, in +default of any other victim, even to the last extravagance; so that what +happened was that one found all the swarm of one's intentions, one's +projected images, quite "good enough" to mix with the rest of one's +society, setting up with it terms of interpenetration, an admirable +commerce of borrowing and lending, taking and giving, not to say +stealing and keeping. Did it verily _all_, this freshness of felt +contact, of curiosity and wonder, come back perhaps to certain small and +relatively ridiculous achievements of "production" as aforesaid?--ridiculous +causes, I mean, of such prodigious effects. I am divided between the +shame on the one hand of claiming for them, these concocted "short +stories," that they played so great a part, and a downright admiring +tenderness on the other for their holding up their stiff little heads in +such a bustle of life and traffic of affairs. I of course really and +truly cared for them, as we say, more than for aught else +whatever--cared for them with that kind of care, infatuated though it +may seem, that makes it bliss for the fond votary never to so much as +speak of the loved object, makes it a refinement of piety to perform his +rites under cover of a perfect freedom of mind as to everything _but_ +them. These secrets of the imaginative life were in fact more various +than I may dream of trying to tell; they referred to actual concretions +of existence as well as to the supposititious; the joy of life indeed, +drawbacks and all, was just in the constant quick flit of association, +to and fro, and through a hundred open doors, between the two great +chambers (if it be not absurd, or even base, to separate them) of direct +and indirect experience. If it is of the great comprehensive _fusion_ +that I speak as the richest note of all those hours, what could truly +have been more in the sense of it than exactly such a perfect muddle of +pleasure for instance as my having (and, as I seem to remember, at his +positive invitation) addressed the most presuming as yet of my fictional +bids to my distinguished friend of a virtual lifetime, as he was to +become, William Dean Howells, whom I rejoice to name here and who had +shortly before returned from a considerable term of exile in Venice and +was in the act of taking all but complete charge of the Boston +"Atlantic"? The confusion was, to be plain, of more things than can hope +to go into my picture with any effect of keeping distinct there--the +felt felicity, literally, in my performance, the felt ecstasy, the still +greater, in my receipt of Howells's message; and then, naturally, most +of all, the at once to be recorded blest violence in the break upon my +consciousness of his glittering response after perusal. + +There was still more in it all than that, however--which is the point of +my mild demonstration; I associate the passage, to press closer, with a +long summer, from May to November, spent at the then rural retreat of +Swampscott, forty minutes by train northward from Boston, and that scene +of fermentation, in its turn, I invest with unspeakable memories. It was +the summer of '66 and of the campaign of Sadowa across the sea--we had +by that time got sufficiently away from our own campaigns to take some +notice of those of other combatants, on which we bestowed in fact, I +think, the highest competence of attention then anywhere at play; a +sympathetic sense that bore us even over to the Franco-German war four +years later and helped us to know what we meant when we "felt strongly" +about it. No strength of feeling indeed of which the vibration had +remained to us from the other time could have been greater than our +woe-stricken vision of the plight of France under the portent of Sedan; +I had been back to that country and some of its neighbourhoods for some +fifteen months during the previous interval, and I recover again no +share in a great collective pang more vividly than our particular +appalled state, that of a whole company of us, while we gaped out at the +cry of reiterated bulletins from the shade of an August verandah, and +then again from amid boskages of more immediate consolation, during the +Saratoga and the Newport seasons of 1870. I had happened to repair to +Saratoga, of all inconsequent places, on my return from the Paris and +the London of the weeks immediately preceding the war, and though it was +not there that the worst sound of the first crash reached us, I feel +around me still all the air of our dismay--which was, in the queerest +way in the world, that of something so alien mixed, to the increase of +horror, with something so cherished: the great hot glare of vulgarity of +the aligned hotels of the place and period drenching with its crude +light the apparent collapse of everything we had supposed most massive. +Which forward stretch on the part of this chronicle represents, I +recognise, the practice of the discursive well-nigh overmastering its +principle--or would do so, rather, weren't it that the fitful and the +flickering, the extravagant advance and the corrective retreat from it, +the law and the lovely art of foreshortening, have had here throughout +most to serve me. It is under countenance of that law that I still grasp +my capricious clue, making a jump for the moment over two or three years +and brushing aside by the way quite numberless appeals, claims upon +tenderness of memory not less than pleas for charm of interest, against +which I must steel myself, even though I account this rank disloyalty to +each. There is no quarter to which I have inclined in my brief recovery +of the high tide of impression flooding the "period" of Ashburton Place +that might not have drawn me on and on; so that I confess I feel myself +here drag my mantle, right and left, from the clutch of suppliant +hands--voluminous as it may doubtless yet appear in spite of my sense of +its raggedness. Wrapped in tatters it is therefore that, with three or +four of William's letters of '67 and '68 kept before me, I make my +stride, not only for the sake of what I still regard as their admirable +interest, but for the way they bring back again to me everything they +figured at the time, every flame of faith they rekindled, every gage +they held out for the future. Present for me are still others than these +in particular, which I keep over for another introducing, but even the +pages I here preserve overflow with connections--so many that, +extravagant as it may sound, I have to make an effort to breast them. +These are with a hundred matters of our then actual life--little as that +virtue may perhaps show on their face; but above all just with the huge +small fact that the writer was by the blest description "in Europe," and +that this had verily still its way of meaning for me more than aught +else beside. For what sprang in especial from his situation was the +proof, with its positive air, that a like, when all was said, might +become again one's own; that such luck wasn't going to be for evermore +perversely out of the question with us, and that in fine I too was +already in a manner transported by the intimacy with which I partook of +his having been. I shouldn't have overstated it, I think, in saying that +I really preferred such a form of experience (of this particular one) to +the simpler--given most of our current conditions; there was somehow a +greater richness, a larger accession of knowledge, vision, life, +whatever one might have called it, in "having him there," as we said, +and in my individually getting the good of this with the peculiar degree +of ease that reinforced the general quest of a special sufficiency of +that boon to which I was during those years rigidly, and yet on the +whole by no means abjectly, reduced. + +Our parents had in the autumn of '66 settled, virtually for the rest of +their days, at Cambridge, and William had concomitantly with this, that +is from soon after his return from Brazil, entered upon a season of +study at the Harvard Medical School, then keeping its terms in Boston +and under the wide wing of--as one supposed it, or as I at any rate +did--the Massachusetts General Hospital. I have to disengage my mantle +here with a force in which I invite my reader to believe--for I push +through a thicket of memories in which the thousand-fingered branches +arrestingly catch; otherwise I should surrender, and with a passionate +sense of the logic in it, to that long and crowded Swampscott summer at +which its graceless name has already failed to keep me from having +glanced. The place, smothered in a dense prose of prosperity now, may +have been even in those days, by any high measure, a weak enough apology +for an offered breast of Nature: nevertheless it ministered to me as +the only "American country" save the silky Newport fringes with which my +growing imagination, not to mention my specious energy, had met at all +continuous occasion to play--so that I should have but to let myself go +a little, as I say, to sit up to my neck again in the warm depth of its +deposit. Out of this I should lift great handfuls of variety of vision; +it was to have been in its way too a season of coming and going, and +with its main mark, I make out, that it somehow absurdly flowered, first +and last, into some intenser example of every sort of intimation up to +then vouchsafed me, whether by the inward or the outward life. I think +of it thus as a big bouquet of blooms the most mixed--yet from which it +is to the point just here to detach the sole reminiscence, coloured to a +shade I may not reproduce, of a day's excursion to see my brother up at +the Hospital. Had I not now been warned off too many of the prime images +brought, for their confusion, to the final proof, I should almost risk +ever so briefly "evoking" the impression this mere snatch was to leave +with me, the picture as of sublime activities and prodigious +possibilities, of genial communities of consideration and acquisition, +all in a great bright porticoed and gardened setting, that was to hang +itself in my crazy cabinet for as long as the light of the hour might +allow. I put my hand on the piece still--in its now so deeply obscured +corner; though the true point of my reference would seem to be in the +fact that if William studied medicine long enough to qualify and to take +his degree (so as to have become as roundedly "scientific" as possible) +he was yet immediately afterwards, by one of those quick shifts of the +scene with which we were familiar, beginning philosophic study in +Germany and again writing home letters of an interest that could be but +re-emphasised by our having him planted out as a reflector of +impressions where impressions were both strong and as different as +possible from those that more directly beat upon us. I myself could do +well enough with these last, I may parenthesise, so long as none others +were in question; but that complacency shrank just in proportion as we +were reached by the report of difference and of the foreign note, the +report particularly favourable--which was indeed what any and every +report perforce appeared to me. William's, from anywhere, had ever an +authority for me that attended none others; even if this be not the +place for more than a word of light on the apparent disconnection of his +actual course. It comes back to me that the purpose of practising +medicine had at no season been flagrant in him, and he was in fact, his +hospital connection once over, never to practise for a day. He was on +the other hand to remain grateful for his intimate experience of the +laboratory and the clinic, and I was as constantly to feel that the +varieties of his application had been as little wasted for him as those +of my vagueness had really been for me. His months at Dresden and his +winter in Berlin were of a new variety--this last even with that tinge +of the old in it which came from his sharing quarters with T. S. Perry, +who, his four years at Harvard ended and his ensuing grand tour of +Europe, as then comprehensively carried out, performed, was giving the +Universities of Berlin and Paris a highly competent attention. To +whatever else of method may have underlain the apparently lawless strain +of our sequences I should add the action of a sharp lapse of health on +my brother's part which the tension of a year at the dissecting table +seemed to have done much to determine; as well as the fond fact that +Europe was again from that crisis forth to take its place for us as a +standing remedy, a regular mitigation of all suffered, or at least of +all wrong, stress. Of which remarks but a couple of letters addressed to +myself, I have to recognise, form here the occasion; these only, in that +order, have survived the accidents of time, as I the more regret that I +have in my mind's eye still much of the matter of certain others; +notably of one from Paris (on his way further) recounting a pair of +evenings at the theatre, first for the younger Dumas and Les Idées de +Madame Aubray, with Pasca and Delaporte, this latter of an exquisite +truth to him, and then for something of the Palais Royal with _four_ +comedians, as he emphatically noted, who were each, wonderful to say, +"de la force of Warren of the Boston Museum." He spent the summer of '67 +partly in Dresden and partly at Bad-Teplitz in Bohemia, where he had +been recommended the waters; he was to return for these again after a +few months and was also to seek treatment by hydropathy at the +establishment of Divonne, in the French back-country of Lake Leman, +where a drawing sent home in a letter, and which I do my best to +reproduce, very comically represents him as surrounded by the listening +fair. I remember supposing even his Dresden of the empty weeks to +bristle with precious images and every form of local character--this a +little perhaps because of his treating us first of all to a pair of +whimsical crayoned views of certain animated housetops seen from his +window. It is the old names in the old letters, however, that now always +most rewrite themselves to my eyes in colour--shades alas that defy +plain notation, and if the two with which the following begins, and +especially the first of them, only asked me to tell their story I but +turn my back on the whole company of which they are part. + + ...I got last week an excellent letter from Frank Washburn who + writes in such a manly way. But the greatest delight I've had was + the loan of 5 Weekly Transcripts from Dick Derby. It's strange how + quickly one grows away from one's old surroundings. I never should + have believed that in so few months the tone of a Boston paper + would seem so outlandish to me. As it was, I was in one squeal of + amusement, surprise and satisfaction until deep in the night, when + I went to bed tired out with patriotism. The boisterous animal + good-humour, familiarity, reckless energy and self-confidence, + unprincipled optimism, esthetic saplessness and intellectual + imbecility, made a mixture hard to characterise, but totally + different from the tone of things here and, as the Germans would + say, whose "Existenz so völlig dasteht," that there was nothing to + do but to let yourself feel it. The Americans themselves here too + amuse me much; they have such a hungry, restless look and seem so + unhooked somehow from the general framework. The other afternoon as + I was sitting on the Terrace, a gentleman and two young ladies came + and sat down quite near me. I knew them for Americans at a glance, + and the man interested me by his exceedingly American expression: a + reddish moustache and tuft on chin, a powerful nose, a small light + eye, half insolent and _all_ sagacious, and a sort of rowdy air of + superiority that made me proud to claim him as a brother. In a few + minutes I recognised him as General M'Clellan, rather different + from his photographs of the War-time, but still not to be mistaken + (and I afterwards learned he is here). Whatever his faults may be + that of not being "one of us" is not among them. + +This next is the note of a slightly earlier impression. + + The Germans are certainly a most gemüthlich people. The way all the + old women told me how "freundlich" their rooms were--"so freundlich + mobilirt" and so forth--melted my heart. Whenever you tell an + inferior here to do anything (_e.g._ a cabman) he or she replies + "Schön!" or rather "Schehn!" with an accent not quick like a + Frenchman's "Bien!" but so protracted, soothing and reassuring to + you that you feel as if he were adopting you into his family. You + say I've said nothing of the people of this house, but there is + nothing to tell about them. The Doctor is an open-hearted excellent + man as ever was, and wrapped up in his children; Frau Semler is a + sickly, miserly, petty-spirited nonentity. The children are quite + uninteresting, though the younger, Anna or Aennchen, aged five, is + very handsome and fat. The following short colloquy, which I + overheard one day after breakfast a few days since, may serve you + as a piece of local colour. Aennchen drops a book she is carrying + across the room and exclaims "Herr Jesus!" + + Mother: "Ach, das sagen _Kinder_ nicht, Anna!" + + Aennchen (reflectively to herself, sotto voce): "Nicht fur Kinder!" + ... + +What here follows from Divonne--of fourteen months later--is too full +and too various to need contribution or comment. + + You must have envied within the last few weeks my revisiting of the + sacred scenes of our youth, the shores of Leman, the Ecu de Genève, + the sloping Corraterie, etc. My only pang in it all has been caused + by your absence, or rather by the fact of my presence instead of + yours; for I think your abstemious and poetic soul would have got + much more good of the things I've seen than my hardening and + definite-growing nature. I wrote a few words about Nürnberg to + Alice from Montreux. I found that about as pleasant an impression + as any I have had since being abroad--and this because I didn't + expect it. The Americans at Dresden had told me it was quite + uninteresting. I enclose you a few stereographs I got there--I + don't know why, for they are totally irrelevant to the real effect + of the place. This it would take Théophile Gautier to describe, so + I renounce. It was strange to find how little I remembered at + Geneva--I couldn't find the way I used to take up to the Academy, + and the shops and houses of the Rue du Rhône visible from our old + windows left me uncertain whether they were the same or new ones. + Kohler has set up a new hotel on the Quai du Mont-Blanc--you + remember he's the brother of our old Madame Buscarlet there; but I + went for association's sake to the Écu. The dining-room was + differently hung, and the only thing in my whole 24 hours in the + place that stung me, so to speak, with memory, was that kind of + chinese-patterned dessert-service we used to have. So runs the + world away. I didn't try to look up Ritter, Chantre or any of ces + messieurs, but started off here the next morning, where I have now + been a week. + + [Illustration: "The cold water cure at Divonne--excellent for + melancholia."--From a letter of William James (page 447)] + + My impression on gradually coming from a German into a French + atmosphere of things was rather unexpected and not in all respects + happy. I have been in Germany half amused and half impatient with + the slowness of proceeding and the uncouthness of taste and + expression that prevail there so largely in all things, but on + exchanging it for the brightness and shipshapeness of these + quasi-French arrangements of life and for the tart + fire-cracker-like speech of those who make them I found myself + inclined to retreat again on what I had left, and had for a few + days quite a homesickness for the easy, ugly, substantial German + ways. The "'tarnal" smartness in which the railway refreshment + counters, for example, are dressed up, the tight waists and + "tasteful" white caps of the female servants, the everlasting + monsieur and madame, and especially the quickness and snappishness + of enunciation, suggesting such an inward impatience, quite + absurdly gave on my nerves. But I am getting used to it all, and + the French people who sit near me here at table and who repelled me + at first by the apparently cold-blooded artificiality of their + address to each other, now seem less heartless and inhuman. I am + struck more than ever I was with the hopelessness of us English, + and a _fortiori_ the Germans, ever competing with the French in + matters of form or finite taste of any sort. They are sensitive to + things that simply don't exist for us. I notice it here in manners + and speech: how can a people who speak with no tonic accents in + their words _help_ being cleaner and neater in expressing + themselves? On the other hand the limitations of _reach_ in the + French mind strike me more and more; their delight in rallying + round an official standard in all matters, in counting and dating + everything from certain great names, their use and love of + catchwords and current phrases, their sacrifice of independence of + mind for the mere sake of meeting their hearer or reader on common + ground, their metaphysical incapacity not only to deal with + questions but to know what the questions are, stand out plainer and + plainer the more headway I make in German. One wonders where the + "Versöhnung" or conciliation of all these rival national qualities + is going to take place. I imagine we English stand rather between + the French and the Germans both in taste and in spiritual + intuition. In Germany, while unable to avoid respecting that + solidity of the national mind which causes such a mass of permanent + work to be produced there annually, I couldn't help consoling + myself by the thought that whatever, after all, they might _do_, + the Germans were a plebeian crowd and could never _be_ such + gentlemen as we were. I now find myself getting over the French + superiority by an exactly inverse process of thought. The Frenchman + must sneer at us even more than we sneer at the Germans--and which + sneer is final, his at us two, or ours at him, or the Germans' at + us? It seems an insoluble question, which I fortunately haven't got + to settle. + + I've read several novels lately, some of the irrepressible + George's: La Daniella and the Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré. (Was it + thee, by the bye that wrotest the Nation notices on her, on W. + Morris's new poem and on The Spanish Gypsy? They came to me + unmarked, but the thoughts seemed such as you would entertain, and + the style in some places like yours--in others not.) George Sand + babbles her improvisations on so that I never begin to believe a + word of what she says. I've also read The Woman in White, a couple + of Balzac's, etc., and a volume of tales by Mérimée which I will + send you if I can by Frank Washburn. He is a big man; but the + things which have given me most pleasure have been some sketches of + travel by Th. Gautier. What an absolute thing genius is! That this + creature, with no more soul than a healthy poodle-dog, no + philosophy, no morality, no information (for I doubt exceedingly if + his knowledge of architectural terms and suchlike is accurate) + should give one a finer enjoyment than his betters in all these + respects by mere force of good-nature, clear eyesight and felicity + of phrase! His style seems to me perfect, and I should think it + would pay you to study it with love--principally in the most + trivial of these collections of notes of travel. T. S. P. has a + couple of them for you, and another, which I've read here and is + called Caprices et Zigzags, is worth buying. It contains wonderful + French (in the classic sense, I mean, with all those associations) + descriptions of London. I'm not sure if you know Gautier at all + save by the delicious Capitaine Fracasse. But these republished + feuilletons are all of as charming a quality and I should think + would last as long as the language. + + There are 70 or 80 people in this etablissement, no one of whom I + have as yet particularly cottoned up to. It's incredible how even + so slight a barrier as the difference of language with most of + them, and still more as the absence of local and personal + associations, range of gibes and other common ground to stand on, + counts against one's scraping acquaintance. It's disgusting and + humiliating. There is a lovely maiden of _etwa_ 19 sits in sight of + me at the table with whom I am falling deeply in love. She has + never looked at me yet, and I really believe I should be quite + incapable of conversing with her even were I "introduced," from a + sense of the above difficulties and because one doesn't know what + subjects or allusions may be possible with a jeune fille. I suppose + my life for the past year would have furnished you, as the great + American nouvelliste, a good many "motives" and subjects of + observation--especially so in this place. I wish I could pass them + over to you--such as they are you'd profit by them more than I and + gather in a great many more. I should like full well an hour's, or + even longer, interview with you, and with the Parents and the + Sister and the Aunt and all; just so as to start afresh on a clean + basis. Give my love to Wendell Holmes. I've seen ---- ---- several + times; but what a cold-blooded cuss he is! Write me your impression + of T. S. P., who will probably reach you before this letter. If + Frank Washburn ever gets home be friendly to him. He is much aged + by travel and experience, and is a most charming character and + generous mind. + + + + +XIII + + +If I add to the foregoing a few lines more from my brother's hand, these +are of a day separated by long years from that time of our youth of +which I have treated. Addressed after the immense interval to an +admirable friend whom I shall not name here, they yet so vividly +refer--and with something I can only feel as the first authority--to one +of the most prized interests of our youth that, under the need of still +failing to rescue so many of these values from the dark gulf, I find +myself insist the more on a place here, before I close, for that +presence in our early lives as to which my brother's few words say so +much. To have so promptly and earnestly spoken of Mary Temple the +younger in this volume is indeed I think to have offered a gage for my +not simply leaving her there. The opportunity not so to leave her comes +at any rate very preciously into my hands, and I can not better round +off this record than by making the most of it. The letter to which +William alludes is one that my reader will presently recognise. It had +come back to him thus clearly at the far end of time. + + I am deeply thankful to you for sending me this letter, which + revives all sorts of poignant memories and makes her live again in + all her lightness and freedom. Few spirits have been more free than + hers. I find myself wishing so that she could know me as I am now. + As for knowing her as _she_ is now--??!! I find that she means as + much in the way of human character for me now as she ever did, + being unique and with no analogue in all my subsequent experience + of people. Thank you once more for what you have done. + +The testimony so acknowledged was a letter in a copious succession, the +product of little more than one year, January '69 to February '70, +sacredly preserved by the recipient; who was not long after the day of +my brother's acknowledgment to do me the honour of communicating to me +the whole series. He could have done nothing to accord more with the +spirit in which I have tried to gather up something of the sense of our +far-off past, his own as well as that of the rest of us; and no loose +clue that I have been able to recover unaided touches into life anything +like such a tract of the time-smothered consciousness. More charming and +interesting things emerge for me than I can point to in their order--but +they will make, I think, their own appeal. It need only further be +premised that our delightful young cousin had had from some months back +to begin to reckon with the progressive pulmonary weakness of which the +letters tell the sad story. Also, I can scarce help saying, the whole +world of the old New York, that of the earlier dancing years, shimmers +out for me from the least of her allusions. + + I will write you as nice a letter as I can, but would much rather + have a good talk with you. As I can't have the best thing I am + putting up with the second-best, contrary to my pet theory. I feel + as if I were in heaven to-day--all because the day is splendid and + I have been driving about all the morning in a small sleigh in the + fresh air and sunshine, until I found that I had in spite of + myself, for the time being, stopped asking the usual inward + question of why I was born. I am not going to Canada--I know no + better reason for this than because I said I _was_ going. My + brother-in-law makes such a clamour when I propose departure that I + am easily overcome by his kindness and my own want of energy. + Besides, it is great fun to live here; the weather just now is + grand, and I knock about all day in a sleigh, and do nothing but + enjoy it and meditate. Then we are so near town that we often go in + for the day to shop and lunch with some of our numerous friends, + returning with a double relish for the country. We all went in on a + spree the other night and stayed at the Everett House; from which, + as a starting-point we poured ourselves in strong force upon Mrs. + Gracie King's ball--a very grand affair, given for a very pretty + Miss King, at Delmonico's. Our raid consisted of thirteen Emmets + and a moderate supply of Temples, and the ball was a great success. + It was two years since I had been to one and I enjoyed it so much + that I mean very soon to repeat the experiment--at the next + Assembly if possible. The men in society, in New York, this winter, + are principally a lot of feeble-minded boys; but I was fortunate + enough to escape them, as my partner for the German was a man of + thirty-five, the solitary _man_, I believe, in the room. Curiously + enough, I had danced my last German, two years before, in that very + place and with the same person. He is a Mr. Lee, who has spent + nearly all his life abroad; two of his sisters have married German + princes, and from knocking about so much he has become a thorough + cosmopolite. As he is intelligent, with nothing to do but amuse + himself, he is a very agreeable partner, and I mean to dance with + him again as soon as possible. I don't know why I have tried your + patience by writing so about a person you have never seen; unless + it's to show you that I haven't irrevocably given up the world, the + flesh and the devil, but am conscious of a faint charm about them + still when taken in small doses. I agree with you perfectly about + Uncle Henry--I should think he would be very irritating to the + legal mind; he is not at all satisfactory even to mine. Have you + seen much of Willy James lately? That is a rare creature, and one + in whom my intellect, if you will pardon the misapplication of the + word, takes more solid satisfaction than in almost anybody. I + haven't read Browning's new book--I mean to wait till you are by to + explain it to me--which reminds me, along with what you say about + wishing for the spring, that we shall go to North Conway next + summer, and that in that case you may as well make up your mind to + come and see us there. I can't wait longer than that for the + Browning readings. (Which would have been of The Ring and the + Book.) Arthur Sedgwick has sent me Matthew Arnold's photograph, + which Harry had pronounced so disappointing. I don't myself, on the + whole, find it so; on the contrary, after having looked at it much, + I like it--it quite harmonises with my notion of him, and I have + always had an affection for him. You must tell me something that + you are _sure_ is true--I don't care much what it may be, I will + take your word for it. Things get into a muddle with me--how can I + give you "a start on the way of righteousness"? You know that way + better than I do, and the only advice I can give you is not to stop + saying your prayers. I hope God may bless you, and beyond those + things I hardly know what is right, and therefore what to wish you. + Good-bye. + +"North Conway" in the foregoing has almost the force for me of a +wizard's wand; the figures spring up again and move in a harmony that is +not of the fierce present; the sense in particular of the August of '65 +shuts me in to its blest unawarenesses not less than to all that was +then exquisite in its current certainties and felicities; the +fraternising, endlessly conversing group of us gather under the rustling +pines--and I admire, precisely, the arrival, the bright revelation as I +recover it, of the so handsome young man, marked with military +distinction but already, with our light American promptitude, addressed +to that high art of peace in which a greater eminence awaited him, of +whom this most attaching member of the circle was to make four years +later so wise and steady a confidant. Our circle I fondly call it, and +doubtless then called it, because in the light of that description I +could most rejoice in it, and I think of it now as having formed a +little world of easy and happy interchange, of unrestricted and yet all +so instinctively sane and secure association and conversation, with all +its liberties and delicacies, all its mirth and its earnestness +protected and directed so much more from within than from without, that +I ask myself, perhaps too fatuously, whether any such right conditions +for the play of young intelligence and young friendship, the reading of +Matthew Arnold and Browning, the discussion of a hundred human and +personal things, the sense of the splendid American summer drawn out to +its last generosity, survives to this more complicated age. I doubt if +there be circles to-day, and seem rather to distinguish confusedly gangs +and crowds and camps, more propitious, I dare say, to material affluence +and physical riot than anything we knew, but not nearly so appointed for +ingenious and ingenuous talk. I think of our interplay of relation as +attuned to that fruitful freedom of what we took for speculation, what +we didn't recoil from as boundless curiosity--as the consideration of +life, that is, the personal, the moral inquiry and adventure at large, +so far as matter for them had up to then met our view--I think of this +fine quality in our scene with no small confidence in its having been +rare, or to be more exact perhaps, in its having been possible to the +general American felicity and immunity as it couldn't otherwise or +elsewhere have begun to be. Merely to say, as an assurance, that such +relations shone with the light of "innocence" is of itself to breathe on +them wrongly or rudely, is uncouthly to "defend" them--as if the very +air that consciously conceived and produced them didn't all tenderly and +amusedly take care of them. I at any rate figure again, to my customary +positive piety, all the aspects now; that in especial of my young +orphaned cousins as mainly composing the maiden train and seeming as if +they still had but yesterday brushed the morning dew of the dear old +Albany naturalness; that of the venerable, genial, erect great-aunt, +their more immediately active guardian, a model of antique spinsterhood +appointed to cares such as even renewals of wedlock could scarce more +have multiplied for her, and thus, among her many ancient and curious +national references--one was tempted to call them--most impressive by +her striking resemblance to the portraits, the most benignant, of +General Washington. She might have represented the mother, no less +adequately than he represented the father, of their country. I can only +feel, however, that what particularly drew the desired circle sharpest +for me was the contribution to it that I had been able to effect by +introducing the companion of my own pilgrimage, who was in turn to +introduce a little later the great friend of _his_ then expanding +situation, restored with the close of the War to civil pursuits and +already deep in them; the interesting pair possessed after this fashion +of a quantity of common fine experience that glittered as so much +acquired and enjoyed luxury--all of a sort that I had no acquisition +whatever to match. I remember being happy in that I might repeatedly +point our moral, under permission (for we were always pointing morals), +with this brilliant advantage of theirs even if I might with none of my +own; and I of course knew--what was half the beauty--that if we were +just the most delightful loose band conceivable, and immersed in a +regular revel of all the harmonies, it was largely by grace of the three +quite exceptional young men who, thanks in part to the final sublime +coach-drive of other days, had travelled up from Boston with their +preparation to admire inevitably quickened. I was quite willing to offer +myself as exceptional through being able to promote such exceptions and +see them justified to waiting apprehension. There was a dangling fringe, +there were graceful accessories and hovering shades, but, essentially, +we of the true connection made up the drama, or in other words, for the +benefit of my imagination, reduced the fond figment of the Circle to +terms of daily experience. If drama we could indeed feel this as being, +I hasten to add, we owed it most of all to our just having such a +heroine that everything else inevitably came. Mary Temple was +beautifully and indescribably _that_--in the technical or logical as +distinguished from the pompous or romantic sense of the word; wholly +without effort or desire on her part--for never was a girl less +consciously or consentingly or vulgarly dominant--everything that took +place around her took place as if primarily in relation to her and in +her interest: that is in the interest of drawing her out and displaying +her the more. This too without her in the least caring, as I say--in the +deep, the morally nostalgic indifferences that were the most finally +characteristic thing about her--whether such an effect took place or +not; she liked nothing in the world so much as to see others fairly +exhibited; not as they might best please her by being, but as they might +most fully reveal themselves, their stuff and their truth: which was the +only thing that, after any first flutter for the superficial air or +grace in an acquaintance, could in the least fix her attention. She had +beyond any equally young creature I have known a sense for verity of +character and play of life in others, for their acting out of their +force or their weakness, whatever either might be, at no matter what +cost to herself; and it was this instinct that made her care so for +life in general, just as it was her being thereby so engaged in that +tangle that made her, as I have expressed it, ever the heroine of the +scene. Life claimed her and used her and beset her--made her range in +her groping, her naturally immature and unlighted way from end to end of +the scale. No one felt more the charm of the actual--only the actual +comprised for her kinds of reality (those to which her letters perhaps +most of all testify), that she saw treated round her for the most part +either as irrelevant or as unpleasant. She was absolutely afraid of +nothing she might come to by living with enough sincerity and enough +wonder; and I think it is because one was to see her launched on that +adventure in such bedimmed, such almost tragically compromised +conditions that one is caught by her title to the heroic and pathetic +mark. It is always difficult for us after the fact not to see young +things who were soon to be lost to us as already distinguished by their +fate; this particular victim of it at all events might well have made +the near witness ask within himself how her restlessness of spirit, the +finest reckless impatience, was to be assuaged or "met" by the common +lot. One somehow saw it nowhere about us as up to her terrible young +standard of the interesting--even if to say this suggests an air of +tension, a sharpness of importunity, than which nothing could have been +less like her. The charming, irresistible fact was that one had never +seen a creature with such lightness of forms, a lightness all her own, +so inconsequently grave at the core, or an asker of endless questions +with such apparent lapses of care. It is true that as an effect of the +state of health which during the year '69 grew steadily worse the +anxious note and serious mind sound in her less intermittently than by +her former wont. + + This might be headed with that line of a hymn, "Hark, from the + tombs etc.!"--but perhaps it won't prove as bad as that. It looks + pretty doubtful still, but I have a sort of feeling that I shall + come round this one time more; by which I don't mean to brag! The + "it" of which I speak is of course my old enemy hemorrhage, of + which I have had within the last week seven pretty big ones and + several smaller, hardly worth mentioning. I don't know what has + come over me--I can't stop them; but, as I said, I mean to try and + beat them yet. Of course I am in bed, where I shall be + indefinitely--not allowed to speak one word, literally, even in a + whisper. The reason I write this is because I don't think it will + hurt me at all--if I take it easy and stop when I feel tired. It is + a pleasant break in the monotony of gruel and of thinking of the + grave--and then too a few words from somebody who is strong and + active in the good old world (as it seems to me now) would be very + refreshing. But don't tell anyone I have written, because it will + be sure to reach the ears of my dear relatives and will cause them + to sniff the air and flounce! You see I am a good deal of a + baby--in the sense of not wanting the reproaches of my relatives + on this or any other subject.... All the Emmets are so good and + kind that I found, when it came to the point, that there was a good + deal to make life attractive, and that if the choice were given me + I would much rather stay up here on the solid earth, in the air and + sunshine, with an occasional sympathetic glimpse of another + person's soul, than to be put down underground and say good-bye for + ever to humanity, with all its laughter and its sadness. Yet you + mustn't think me now in any _special_ danger of dying, or even in + low spirits, for it isn't so--the doctor tells me I am _not_ in + danger, even if the hemorrhages should keep on. However, "you can't + fool a regular boarder," as Mr. Holmes would say, and I can't see + why there is any reason to think they will heal a week hence, when + I shall be still weaker, if they can't heal now. Still, they _may_ + be going to stop--I haven't had one since yesterday at 4, and now + it's 3; nearly twenty-four hours. I am of a hopeful temperament and + not easily scared, which is in my favour. If this _should_ prove to + be the last letter you get from me, why take it for a good-bye; + I'll keep on the lookout for you in the spirit world, and shall be + glad to see you when you come there, provided it's a better place + than this. Elly is in New York, enjoying herself immensely, and I + haven't let her know how ill I have been, as there were to be + several parties this last week and I was afraid it might spoil her + fun. I didn't mean you to infer from my particularising Willy + James's intellect that the rest of him isn't to my liking--he is + one of the very few people in this world that I love. He has the + largest heart as well as the largest head, and is thoroughly + interesting to me. He is generous and affectionate and full of + sympathy and humanity--though you mustn't tell him I say so, lest + he should think I have been telling you a lie to serve my own + purposes. Good-bye. + +I should have little heart, I confess, for what is essentially the +record of a rapid illness if it were not at the same time the image of +an admirable soul. Surrounded as she was with affection she had yet +greatly to help herself, and nothing is thus more penetrating than the +sense, as one reads, that a method of care would have been followed for +her to-day, and perhaps followed with signal success, that was not in +the healing or nursing range of forty years ago. + + It is a week ago to-day, I think, since I last wrote to you, and I + have only had one more hemorrhage--the day after. I feel pretty + sure they have stopped for the present, and I am sitting up in my + room, as bright as possible. Yesterday when I walked across it I + thought I should never be strong again, but now it's quite + different, and so nice to be out of bed that my spirits go up + absurdly. As soon as I am able I am to be taken to town for another + examination, and then when I know my fate I will do the best I can. + This climate is trying, to be sure, but such as it is I've got to + take my chance in it, as there is no one I care enough for, or who + cares enough for me, to take charge of me to Italy, or to the south + anywhere. I don't believe any climate, however good, would be of + the least use to me with people I don't care for. You may let your + moustache grow down to your toes if you like, and I shall but smile + scornfully at your futile precautions. + +Of the following, in spite of its length, I can bring myself to abate +nothing. + + ....Well, "to make a long story short," as Hannah (her old nurse) + says, I caught a cold, and it went to the weak spot, and I had + another slight attack of hemorrhage; but I took the necessary steps + at once, stayed in bed and didn't speak for six days, and then it + stopped and I felt better than I had at all since I was first taken + ill. But I began to tire so of such constant confinement to my room + that they promised to take me to town as soon as I was well enough, + and perhaps to the Opera. This of course would have been a wild + excitement for me, and I had charming little plans of music by day + and by night, for a week, which I meant to spend with Mrs. + Griswold. Accordingly a cavalcade set out from here on Monday, + consisting of myself escorted by sisters and friends, who were to + see me safely installed in my new quarters and leave me. I arrived, + bundled up, at Mrs. Griswold's, and had begun to consider myself + already quite emancipated from bondage--so that I was discussing + with my brother-in-law the propriety of my going that evening to + hear Faust, this but the beginning of a mad career on which I + proposed to rush headlong--when Dr. Bassett arrived, who is the + medical man that I had meant to consult during my stay + _incidentally_ and between the pauses in the music. The first thing + he said was: "What are you doing here? Go directly back to the + place you came from and don't come up again till the warm weather. + As for music, you mustn't hear of it or even think of it for two + months." This was pleasant, but there was nothing to be done but + obey; which I did a few hours later, with my trunk still unpacked + and my immediate plan of life somewhat limited. + + I say my immediate plan because my permanent found itself by no + means curtailed, but on the contrary expanded and varied in a + manner I had not even dared to hope. This came from what Dr. B. + said subsequently, when he had examined my lungs; that is to say + after he had laid his head affectionately first under one of my + shoulders and then the other, and there kept it solemnly for about + ten minutes, in a way that was irresistibly ludicrous, especially + with Kitty as spectator. His verdict was that my lungs were + _sound_, that he couldn't detect the least evidence of disease, and + that hemorrhage couldn't have come from the lung itself, but from + their membraneous lining, and that of the throat, whatever this may + be. So he gave me to understand that I have as sound a pair of + lungs at present as the next person; in fact from what he said one + would have thought them a pair that a prize-fighter might covet. At + the same time he sent me flying back to the country, with orders + not to get excited, nor to listen to music, nor to speak with + anybody I care for, nor to do anything in short that the + unregenerate nature longs for. This struck my untutored mind as + somewhat inconsistent, and I ventured a gentle remonstrance, which + however was not even listened to, and I was ignominiously thrust + into a car and borne back to Pelham. The problem still bothers me: + either sound lungs are a very dangerous thing to have, or there is + a foul conspiracy on foot to oppress me. Still, I cling to the + consoling thought of my matchless lungs, and this obliterates my + present sufferings. + + Harry came to see me before he sailed for Europe; I'm very glad he + has gone, though I don't expect to see him again for a good many + years. I don't think he will come back for a long time, and I hope + it will do him good and that he will enjoy himself--which he hasn't + done for several years. I haven't read all of Faust, but I think I + know the scenes you call divine--at least I know some that are + exquisite. But why do you speak so disparagingly of King David, + whom I always had a weakness for? Think how charming and lovable a + person he must have been, poet, musician and so much else + combined--with however their attendant imperfections. I don't think + I should have cared to be _Queen_ David exactly. I am possessed + with an overpowering admiration and affection for George Eliot. I + don't know why this has so suddenly come over me, but everything I + look at of hers nowadays makes me take a deeper interest in her. I + should love to see her, and I hope Harry will; I asked him to give + my love to her. But I don't remember ever to have heard _you_ speak + of her. Good-bye. I wish conventionality would invent some other + way of ending a letter than "yours truly"; I am so tired of it, and + as one says it to one's shoemaker it would be rather more + complimentary to one's friends to dispense with it altogether and + just sign one's name without anything, after the manner of Miss + Emerson and other free Boston citizens. But I am a slave to + conventionality, and after all _am_ yours truly.... + +Singularly present has remained to "Harry," as may be imagined, the +rapid visit he paid her at Pelham that February; he was spending a +couple of days in New York, on a quick decision, before taking ship for +England. I was then to make in Europe no such stay as she had +forecast--I was away but for fifteen months; though I can well believe +my appetite must have struck her as open to the boundless, and can +easily be touched again by her generous thought of this as the right +compensatory thing for me. That indeed is what I mainly recall of the +hour I spent with her--so unforgettable none the less in its general +value; our so beautifully agreeing that quite the same course would be +the right thing for _her_ and that it was wholly detestable I should be +voyaging off without her. But the precious question and the bright +aspect of her own still waiting chance made our talk for the time all +gaiety; it was, strangely enough, a laughing hour altogether, coloured +with the vision of the next winter in Rome, where we should romantically +meet: the appearance then being of particular protective friends with +Roman designs, under whose wing she might happily travel. She had at +that moment been for many weeks as ill as will here have been shown; but +such is the priceless good faith of youth that we perfectly kept at bay +together the significance of this. I recall no mortal note--nothing but +the bright extravagance of her envy; and see her again, in the old-time +Pelham parlours, ever so erectly slight and so more than needfully, so +transparently, fair (I fatuously took this for "becoming"), glide as +swiftly, toss her head as characteristically, laugh to as free a +disclosure of the handsome largeish teeth that made her mouth almost the +main fact of her face, as if no corner of the veil of the future had +been lifted. The house was quiet and spacious for the day, after the +manner of all American houses of that age at those hours, and yet spoke +of such a possible muster at need of generous, gregarious, neighbouring, +sympathising Emmets; in spite of which, withal, the impression was to +come back to me as of a child struggling with her ignorance in a sort of +pathless desert of the genial and the casual. Three months before I +returned to America the struggle had ended. I _was_, as happened, soon +to see in London her admiration, and my own, the great George Eliot--a +brief glimpse then, but a very impressive, and wellnigh my main +satisfaction in which was that I should have my cousin to tell of it. I +found the Charles Nortons settled for the time in London, with social +contacts and penetrations, a give and take of hospitality, that I felt +as wondrous and of some elements of which they offered me, in their +great kindness, the benefit; so that I was long to value having owed +them in the springtime of '69 five separate impressions of distinguished +persons, then in the full flush of activity and authority, that affected +my young provincialism as a positive fairytale of privilege. I had a +Sunday afternoon hour with Mrs. Lewes at North Bank, no second visitor +but my gentle introducer, the younger Miss Norton, sharing the +revelation, which had some odd and for myself peculiarly thrilling +accompaniments; and then the opportunity of dining with Mr. Ruskin at +Denmark Hill, an impression of uneffaced intensity and followed by a +like--and yet so unlike--evening of hospitality from William Morris in +the medieval mise-en-scène of Queen Square. This had been preceded by a +luncheon with Charles Darwin, beautifully benignant, sublimely simple, +at Down; a memory to which I find attached our incidental wondrous +walk--Mrs. Charles Norton, the too near term of her earthly span then +smoothly out of sight, being my guide for the happy excursion--across a +private park of great oaks, which I conceive to have been the admirable +Holwood and where I knew my first sense of a matter afterwards, through +fortunate years, to be more fully disclosed: the springtime in such +places, the adored footpath, the first primroses, the stir and scent of +renascence in the watered sunshine and under spreading boughs that were +somehow before aught else the still reach of remembered lines of +Tennyson, ached over in nostalgic years. The rarest hour of all perhaps, +or at least the strangest, strange verily to the pitch of the sinister, +was a vision, provided by the same care, of D. G. Rossetti in the vernal +dusk of Queen's House Chelsea--among his pictures, amid his poetry +itself, his whole haunting "esthetic," and yet above all bristling with +his personality, with his perversity, with anything, as it rather +awfully seemed to me, but his sympathy, though it at the same time left +one oddly desirous of more of him. These impressions heaped up the +measure, goodness knew, of what would serve for Minnie's curiosity--she +was familiarly Minnie to us; the point remaining all along, however, +that, impatient at having overmuch to wait, I rejoiced in possession of +the exact vivid terms in which I should image George Eliot to her. I was +much later on to renew acquaintance with that great lady, but I think I +scarce exceed in saying that with my so interested cousin's death half +the savour of my appreciation had lost itself. Just in those days, that +month of April, the latter had made a weak ineffectual move to +Philadelphia in quest of physical relief--which expressed at the same +time even more one of those reachings out for appeasement of the soul +which were never too publicly indulged in, but by which her power to +interest the true subjects of her attraction was infinitely quickened. +It represented wonderments, I might well indeed have said to myself, +even beyond any inspired by the high muse of North Bank. + + I suppose I ought to have something special to say after having + been suddenly transplanted to a new place and among new people, yet + there isn't much to tell. I came because they all thought at home + that the climate might do me good; I don't feel, however, any + difference in my sensations between this and New York--if I do it's + in favour of New York. I wish it might turn out that an inland + climate isn't after all necessary for me, as I like the other sort + much better and really think I feel stronger in it too. My doctor + told me that Boston would kill me in six months--though he is + possibly mistaken. I am going to try it a little longer here, and + then go back to Pelham, where I'm pretty sure I shall find myself + better again. It may be that the mental atmosphere is more to me + than any other, for I feel homesick here all the while, or at least + what I call so, being away from what is most _like_ home to me, and + what if I were there I should call tired. The chief object I had in + coming was to listen to Phillips Brooks; I have heard him several + times and am not, I think, disappointed. To be sure he didn't say + anything new or startling, but I certainly oughtn't to have + expected that, though I believe I did have a secret hope that he + was going to expound to me the old beliefs with a clearness that + would convince me for ever and banish doubt. I had placed all my + hopes in him as the one man I had heard of who, progressive in all + other ways, had yet been able to keep his faith firm in the things + that most earnest men have left far behind them. Yet in preaching + to his congregation he doesn't, or didn't, touch the real + difficulties at all. He was leading them forward instead of trying + to make it clear to _me_ that I have any good reason for my + feelings. Still, it was something to feel that he has them too, and + isn't afraid to trust them and live for them. I wonder what he + really does believe or think about it all, and whether he knows the + reaction that comes to me about Thursday, after the enthusiasm and + confidence made by his eloquence and earnestness on Sunday. + To-morrow will be Saturday, and I shall be glad when Sunday comes + to wind me up again. I feel sadly run down to-night and as if I + should like to see some honest old pagan and shake him by the hand. + It will seem all right and easy again soon, I know, but is it + always thus? Is there no more of that undoubting faith in the + world that there used to be? But I won't talk any more about it + now, or I shan't sleep; it is getting late and all themes but the + least interesting must be put away. + +"Quaint," as we now say, it at this end of time seems to me that +Phillips Brooks, the great Episcopal light of the period, first in +Philadelphia and then in Boston, and superior character, excellent, even +ardent, thoughtful, genial, practical man, should have appeared to play +before her a light possibly of the clear strain, the rich abundance, the +straight incidence, that she so desired to think attainable. A large, in +fact an enormous, softly massive and sociably active presence, of +capacious attention and comforting suggestion, he was a brave worker +among those who didn't too passionately press their questions and +claims--half the office of such a minister being, no doubt, to abate the +high pitch, and the high pitch being by the same token too much Minnie's +tendency. She was left with it in the smug Philadelphia visibly on her +hands; she had found there after all but a closed door, to which she was +blandly directed, rather than an open, and the sigh of her falling back +with her disappointment seems still to reach one's ears. She found them +too much all round, the stiff blank barriers that, for whatever +thumping, didn't "give;" and in fine I like not too faintly to colour +this image of her as failing, in her avid young sincerity, to draw from +the honest pastor of more satisfied souls any assurance that she could +herself honestly apply. I confess that her particular recorded case, +slender enough in its lonely unrest, suggests to me a force, or at least +a play, of effective criticism more vivid to-day than either of the +several rich monuments, honourably as these survive, to Phillips +Brooks's positive "success." She had no occasion or no chance to find +the delightful harmonising friend in him--which was part of the success +for so many others. But her letter goes on after a couple of days--she +had apparently not sent the previous part, and it brings her back, we +can rejoicingly note, to George Eliot, whose poem, alluded to, must have +been The Spanish Gipsy. This work may indeed much less have counted for +her than the all-engulfing Mill on the Floss, incomparably privileged +production, which shone for young persons of that contemporaneity with a +nobleness that nothing under our actual star begins in like case to +match. These are great recognitions, but how can I slight for them a +mention that has again and again all but broken through in my +pages?--that of Francis Boott and his daughter (she to become later on +Mrs. Frank Duveneck and to yield to the same dismal decree of death +before her time that rested on so many of the friends of our youth). +When I turn in thought to the happiness that our kinswoman was still to +have known in her short life, for all her disaster, Elizabeth Boott, +delightful, devoted and infinitely under the charm, at once hovers for +me; this all the more, I hasten to add, that we too on our side, and not +least Mary Temple herself, were under the charm, and that _that_ charm, +if less immediately pointed, affected all our young collective +sensibility as a wondrous composite thing. There was the charm for +us--if I must not again speak in assurance but for myself--that +"Europe," the irrepressible even as the _ewig Weibliche_ of literary +allusion was irrepressible, had more than anything else to do with; and +then there was the other that, strange to say (strange as I, once more, +found myself feeling it) owed nothing of its authority to anything so +markedly out of the picture. The spell to which I in any case most +piously sacrificed, most cultivated the sense of, was ever of this +second cast--and for the simple reason that the other, serene in its +virtue, fairly insolent in its pride, needed no rites and no care. It +must be allowed that there was nothing composite in any spell +proceeding, whether directly or indirectly, from the great Albany +connection: this form of the agreeable, through whatever appeals, could +certainly not have been more of a piece, as we say--more of a single +superfused complexion, an element or principle that we could in the +usual case ever so easily and pleasantly account for. The case of that +one in the large number of my cousins whom we have seen to be so +incomparably the most interesting was of course anything but the usual; +yet the Albany origin, the woodnote wild, sounded out even amid her +various voices and kept her true, in her way, to something we could only +have called local, or perhaps family, type. Essentially, however, she +had been a free incalculable product, a vivid exception to rules and +precedents; so far as she had at all the value of the "composite" it was +on her own lines altogether--the composition was of things that had lain +nearest to hand. It mattered enormously for such a pair as the Bootts, +intimately associated father and daughter, that what had lain nearest +_their_ hand, or at least that of conspiring nature and fortune in +preparing them for our consumption, had been the things of old Italy, of +the inconceivable Tuscany, that of the but lately expropriated Grand +Dukes in particular, and that when originally alighting among us _en +plein_ Newport they had seemed fairly to reek with a saturation, +esthetic, historic, romantic, that everything roundabout made precious. +I was to apprehend in due course, and not without dismay, that what they +really most reeked with was the delight of finding us ourselves exactly +as we were; they fell so into the wondrous class of inverted romantics, +several other odd flowers of which I was later on to have anxiously to +deal with: we and our large crude scene of barbaric plenty, as it might +have been called, beguiled them to appreciations such as made our +tribute to themselves excite at moments their impatience and strike them +as almost silly. It was _our_ conditions that were picturesque, and I +had to make the best of a time when they themselves appeared to consent +to remain so but by the beautiful gaiety of their preference. This, I +remember well, I found disconcerting, so that my main affectionate +business with them became, under amusement by the way, that of keeping +them true to type. What above all contributed was that they really +couldn't help their case, try as they would to shake off the old +infection; they were of "old world" production through steps it was too +late to retrace; and they were in the practical way and in the course of +the very next years to plead as guilty to this as the highest proper +standard for them could have prescribed. They "went back," and again and +again, with a charming, smiling, pleading inconsequence--any pretext but +the real one, the fact that the prime poison was in their veins, serving +them at need; so that, as the case turned, all my own earlier sense, on +the spot, of Florence and Rome was to mix itself with their delightfully +rueful presence there. I could then perfectly put up with that flame of +passion for Boston and Newport in them which still left so perfect their +adaptability to Italian installations that would have been impossible +save for subtle Italian reasons. + +I speak of course but of the whole original view: time brings strange +revenges and contradictions, and all the later history was to be a +chapter by itself and of the fullest. We had been all alike accessible +in the first instance to the call of those references which played +through their walk and conversation with an effect that their qualifying +ironies and amusing reactions, where such memories were concerned, +couldn't in the least abate; for nothing in fact lent them a happier +colour than just this ability to afford so carelessly to cheapen the +certain treasure of their past. They had enough of that treasure to give +it perpetually away--in our subsequently to be more determined, our +present, sense; in short we had the fondest use for their leavings even +when they themselves hadn't. Mary Temple, with her own fine quality so +far from composite, rejoiced in the perception, however unassisted by +any sort of experience, of what their background had "meant"; she would +have liked to be able to know just that for herself, as I have already +hinted, and I actually find her image most touching perhaps by its so +speaking of what she with a peculiar naturalness dreamed of and missed. +Of clear old English stock on her father's side, her sense for what was +English in life--so we used to simplify--was an intimate part of her, +little chance as it enjoyed for happy verifications. In the Bootts, +despite their still ampler and more recently attested share in that +racial strain, the foreign tradition had exceedingly damped the English, +which didn't however in the least prevent her being caught up by it as +it had stamped itself upon the admirable, the infinitely civilised and +sympathetic, the markedly _produced_ Lizzie. This delightful girl, +educated, cultivated, accomplished, toned above all, as from steeping in +a rich old medium, to a degree of the rarest among her coevals "on our +side," had the further, the supreme grace that she melted into American +opportunities of friendship--and small blame to her, given such as she +then met--with the glee of a sudden scarce believing discoverer. Tuscany +could only swoon away under comparison of its starved sociabilities and +complacent puerilities, the stress of which her previous years had so +known, with the multiplied welcomes and freedoms, the exquisite and easy +fellowships that glorified to her the home scene. Into not the least of +these quick affinities had her prompt acquaintance with Mary Temple +confidently ripened; and with no one in the aftertime, so long as that +too escaped the waiting shears, was I to find it more a blest and +sacred rite, guarded by no stiff approaches, to celebrate my cousin's +memory. That really is my apology for this evocation--which might under +straighter connections have let me in still deeper; since if I have +glanced on another page of the present miscellany at the traps too often +successfully set for my wandering feet my reader will doubtless here +recognise a perfect illustration of our danger and will accuse me of +treating an inch of canvas to an acre of embroidery. Let the poor canvas +figure time and the embroidery figure consciousness--the proportion will +perhaps then not strike us as so wrong. Consciousness accordingly still +grips me to the point of a felt pressure of interest in such a matter as +the recoverable history--history in the esthetic connection at least--of +its insistent dealings with a given case. How in the course of time for +instance was it not insistently to deal, for a purpose of application, +with the fine prime image deposited all unwittingly by the "picturesque" +(as I absolutely required to feel it) Boott situation or Boott _data_? +The direct or vital value of these last, in so many ways, was +experiential, a stored and assimilated thing; but the seed of suggestion +proved after long years to have kept itself apart in order that it +should develop under a particular breath. A not other than lonely and +bereft American, addicted to the arts and endowed for them, housed to +an effect of long expatriation in a massive old Florentine villa with a +treasured and tended little daughter by his side, _that_ was the germ +which for reasons beyond my sounding the case of Frank Boott had been +appointed to plant deep down in my vision of things. So lodged it +waited, but the special instance, as I say, had lodged it, and it lost +no vitality--on the contrary it acquired every patience--by the fact +that little by little each of its connections above ground, so to speak, +was successively cut. Then at last after years it raised its own head +into the air and found its full use for the imagination. An Italianate +bereft American with a little moulded daughter in the setting of a +massive old Tuscan residence was at the end of years exactly what was +required by a situation of my own--conceived in the light of the Novel; +and I _had_ it there, in the authenticated way, with its essential fund +of truth, at once all the more because my admirable old friend had given +it to me and none the less because he had no single note of character or +temper, not a grain of the non-essential, in common with my Gilbert +Osmond. This combination of facts has its shy interest, I think, in the +general imaginative or reproductive connection--testifying as it so +happens to do on that whole question of the "putting of people into +books" as to which any ineptitude of judgment appears always in order. +I probably shouldn't have had the Gilbert Osmonds at all without the +early "form" of the Frank Bootts, but I still more certainly shouldn't +have had them with the _sense_ of my old inspirers. The form had to be +disembarrassed of that sense and to take in a thoroughly other; thanks +to which account of the matter I am left feeling that I scarce know +whether most to admire, for support of one's beautiful business of the +picture of life, the relation of "people" to art or the relation of art +to people. Adorable each time the mystery of which of these factors, as +we say, has the more prevailingly conduced to a given effect--and too +much adored, at any rate, I allow, when carrying me so very far away. I +retrace my steps with this next. + + I have made several attempts lately to write you a letter, but I + have given it up after two or three pages, because I have always + been in a blue state of mind at the time, and have each time + charitably decided before it was too late to spare you. But if I + were to wait until things change to rose-colour I might perhaps + wait till I die, or longer even, in which case your next + communication from me would be a spiritual one. I am going to + Newport in the early part of May to meet the Bootts--Henrietta has + just come back from there delighted with her visit; why, heaven + knows, I suppose, but I don't--except that she is in that blissful + state of babyhood peculiar to herself where everything seems + delightful.... I like George Eliot not through her poem so much, + not nearly so much, as through her prose. The creature interests me + personally, and I feel a desire to know something of her life; how + far her lofty moral sentiments have served her practically--for + instance in her dealings with Lewes. I see that she understands the + character of a _generous_ woman, that is of a woman who believes in + generosity and who must be that or nothing, and who feels keenly, + notwithstanding, how hard it is practically to follow this out, and + how (looking at it from the point of view of comfort as far as this + world goes) it "pays" not at all. We are having weather quite like + summer and rather depressing; I don't feel very well and am always + catching cold--that is I suppose I am, as I have a cough nearly all + the time. As for Phillips Brooks, what you say of him is, no doubt, + all true--he didn't touch the main point when I heard him, at all + events, and that satisfaction you so kindly wish me is, I am + afraid, not to be got from any man. The mystery of this world grows + and grows, and sticks out of every apparently trivial thing, + instead of lessening. I hope this feeling may not be the incipient + stage of insanity. Paul told the truth when he said that now we see + through a glass, _very_ darkly. I hope and trust that the rest may + be equally true, and that some day we shall see face to face. You + say it is easy to drown thought by well-doing, and is it not also + the soundest philosophy (so long of course as one doesn't humbug + oneself); since by simply thinking out a religion who has ever + arrived at anything that did not leave one's heart empty? Do you + ever see Willy James? Good-bye. + +Needless enough surely to declare that such pages were essentially not +love-letters: that they could scarce have been less so seems exactly +part of their noble inevitability, as well as a proof singularly +interesting and charming that confident friendship may obey its force +and insist on its say quite as much as the sentiment we are apt to take, +as to many of its occasions, for the supremely vocal. We have so often +seen this latter beat distressfully about the bush for something still +deficient, something in the line of positive esteem or constructive +respect, whether offered or enjoyed, that an esteem and a respect such +as we here apprehend, explicit enough on either side to dispense with +those superlatives in which graceless reaction has been known +insidiously to lurk, peculiarly refresh and instruct us. The fine +special quietude of the relation thus promoted in a general +consciousness of unrest--and even if it could breed questions too, since +a relation that breeds none at all is not a living one--was of the +highest value to the author of my letters, who had already sufficiently +"lived," in her generous way, to know well enough in how different a +quarter to look for the grand inconclusive. The directness, the ease, +the extent of the high consideration, the felt need of it as a support, +indeed one may almost say as an inspiration, in trouble, and the free +gift of it as a delightful act of intelligence and justice, render the +whole exhibition, to my sense, admirable in its kind. Questions luckily +_could_ haunt it, as I say and as we shall presently see, but only to +illustrate the more all the equilibrium preserved. I confess I can +imagine no tribute to a manly nature from a feminine more final even +than the confidence in "mere" consideration here embodied--the comfort +of the consideration being in the fact that the character with which the +feminine nature was dealing lent it, could it but come, such weight. We +seem to see play through the whole appeal of the younger person to the +somewhat older an invocation of the weight suspended, weight of +judgment, weight of experience and authority, and which may ever so +quietly drop. How kindly in another relation it had been in fact capable +of dropping comes back to me in the mention of my brother Wilky, as to +whom this aspect of his admiring friendship for our young relative's +correspondent, the fruit of their common military service roundabout +Charleston, again comprehensively testifies. That comradeship was a +privilege that Wilky strongly cherished, as well as what one +particularly liked to think for him of his having known--he was to have +known nothing more fortunate. In no less a degree was our elder brother +to come to prize _his_ like share in the association--this being +sufficiently indicated, for that matter, in the note I have quoted from +him. That I have prized my own share in it let my use of this benefit +derived strongly represent. But again for Minnie herself the sadder +admonition is sharp, and I find I know not what lonely pluck in her +relapses shaken off as with the jangle of silver bells, her expert +little efforts to live them down, Newport and other matters aiding and +the general preoccupied good will all vainly at her service. Pitiful in +particular her carrying her trouble experimentally back to the Newport +of the first gladness of her girlhood and of the old bright spectacle. + + I know quite well I don't owe you a letter, and that the custom for + maidens is to mete out strictly letter for letter; but if you don't + mind it I don't, and if you _do_ mind that kind of thing you had + better learn not to at once--if you propose to be a friend of mine; + or else have your feelings from time to time severely shocked. + After which preamble I will say that there is a special reason in + this case, though there might not be in another. + +She mentions having seen a common friend, in great bereavement and +trouble, who has charged her with a message to her correspondent "if you +know of anything to comfort a person when the one they love best dies, +for heaven's sake say it to her--_I_ hadn't a word to say." And she goes +on: + + I wrote to you that I was going to Newport, and I meant to go next + Tuesday, but I had another hemorrhage last night, and it is + impossible to say when I shall be able to leave here. I think I was + feeling ill when I last wrote to you, and ever since have been + coughing and feeling wretchedly, until finally the hemorrhage has + come. If that goes over well I think I shall be better. I am in bed + now, on the old plan of gruel and silence, and I may get off + without any worse attack this time. It is a perfect day, like + summer--my windows are up and the birds sing. It seems quite out of + keeping that I should be in bed. I should be all right if I could + only get rid of coughing. The warm weather will set me up again. I + wonder what you are doing to-day. Probably taking a solitary walk + and meditating--on what? Good-bye. + +But she went to Newport after a few days apparently; whence comes this. + + I believe I was in bed when I last wrote to you, but that attack + didn't prove nearly so bad a one as the previous; I rather bullied + it, and after the fourth hemorrhage it ceased; moreover my cough is + better since I came here. But I am, to tell the truth, a little + homesick--and am afraid I am becoming too much of a baby. Whether + it's from illness or from the natural bent I know not, but there is + no comfort in life away from people who care for you--not an heroic + statement, I am fully aware. I hear that Wilky is at home, and dare + say he will have the kindness to run down and see me while I am + here; at least I hope so. But I am not in the mood for writing + to-day--I am tired and can only bore you if I kept on. It is just a + year since we began to write, and aren't you by this time a little + tired of it? If you are, say so like a man--don't be afraid of me. + Now I am going to lie down before dressing for dinner. Good-bye. + +This passage more than a month later makes me ask myself of which of the +correspondents it strikes me as most characteristic. The gay clearness +of the one looks out--as it always looked out on the least chance +given--at the several apparent screens of the other; each of which is +indeed disconnectedly, independently clear, but tells too small a part +(at least for her pitch of lucidity) of what they together enclose, and +what was _quand même_ of so fine an implication. Delightful at the same +time any page from her that is not one of the huddled milestones of her +rate of decline. + + How can I write to you when I have forgotten all about you?--if one + _can_ forget what one has never known. However, I am not quite sure + whether it isn't knowing you too much rather than too little that + seems to prevent. Do you comprehend the difficulty? Of course you + don't, so I will explain. The trouble is, I think, that to me you + have no distinct personality. I don't feel sure to whom I am + writing when I say to myself that I will write to you. I see + mentally three men, all answering to your name, each liable to read + my letters and yet differing so much from each other that if it is + proper for one of them it's quite unsuitable to the others. Do you + see? If you can once settle for me the question of which gets my + letters I shall know better what to say in them. Is it the man I + used to see (I can't say know) at Conway, who had a beard, I think, + and might have been middle-aged, and who discussed Trollope's + novels with Kitty and Elly? This was doubtless one of the best of + men, but he didn't _interest_ me, I never felt disposed to speak to + him, and used to get so sleepy in his society at about eight + o'clock that I wondered how the other girls could stay awake till + eleven. Is it _that_ person who reads my letters? Or is it the + young man I recently saw at Newport, with a priestly countenance, + calm and critical, with whom I had certainly no fault to find as a + chance companion for three or four days, but whom I should never + have dreamt of writing to or bothering with my affairs one way or + the other, happiness or no happiness, as he would doubtless at once + despise me for my nonsense and wonder at me for my gravity? Does + _he_ get my letters?--or is it finally the being who has from time + to time himself written to me, signing by the same name that the + other gentlemen appropriate? If my correspondent is this last I + know where I stand--and, please heaven, shall stand there some time + longer. Him I won't describe, but he's the only one of the three I + care anything about. My only doubt is because I always address him + at Pemberton Square, and I think him the least likely of the three + to go there much. But good-bye, whichever you are! + +It was not at any rate to be said of her that she didn't live +surrounded, even though she had to go so far afield--very far it may at +moments have appeared to her--for the freedom of talk that was her +greatest need of all. How happily and hilariously surrounded this next, +of the end of the following August, and still more its sequel of the +mid-September, abundantly bring back to me; so in the habit were the +numerous Emmets, it might almost be said, of marrying the numerous young +women of our own then kinship: they at all events formed mainly by +themselves at that time the figures and the action of her immediate +scene. The marriage of her younger sister was as yet but an +engagement--to the brother-in-law of the eldest, already united to +Richard Emmet and with Temple kinship, into the bargain, playing between +the pairs. All of which animation of prospective and past wedding-bells, +with whatever consolidation of pleasant ties, couldn't quench her +ceaseless instinct for the obscurer connections of things or keep +passionate reflections from awaiting her at every turn. This disposition +in her, and the way in which, at the least push, the gate of thought +opened for her to its widest, which was to the prospect of the soul and +the question of interests on _its_ part that wouldn't be ignored, by no +means fails to put to me that she might well have found the +mystifications of life, had she been appointed to enjoy more of them, +much in excess of its contentments. It easily comes up for us over the +relics of those we have seen beaten, this sense that it was not for +nothing they missed the ampler experience, but in no case that I have +known has it come up for me so much. In none other have I so felt the +naturalness of our asking ourselves what such spirits would have done +with their extension and what would have satisfied them; since dire as +their defeat may have been we don't see them, in the ambiguous light of +some of their possibilities, at peace with victory. This may be perhaps +an illusion of our interest in them, a mere part of its ingenuity; and +I allow that if our doubt is excessive it does them a great wrong--which +is another way in which they were not to have been righted. We soothe a +little with it at any rate our sense of the tragic. + + ...The irretrievableness of the step (her sister E.'s marriage) + comes over my mind from time to time in such an overwhelming way + that it's most depressing, and I have to be constantly on my guard + not to let Temple and Elly see it, as it would naturally not please + them. After all, since they are not appalled at what they've done, + and are quite sure of each other, as they evidently are, why should + I worry myself? I am well aware that if all other women felt the + seriousness of the matter to the extent I do, hardly any would + _ever_ marry, and the human race would stop short. So I ought + perhaps to be glad so many people can find and take that "little + ease" that Clough talks about, without consciously giving up the + "highest thing." And may not this majority of people be the truly + wise and my own notions of the subject simply fanatical and + impracticable? I clearly see in how small a minority I am, and that + the other side has, with Bishop Blougram, the best of it from one + point of view; but I can't help that, can I? We must be true to + _ourselves_, mustn't we? though all the rest of humanity be of a + contrary opinion, or else throw discredit upon the wisdom of God, + who made us as we are and not like the next person. Do you remember + my old hobby of the "remote possibility of the best thing" being + better than a clear certainty of the second best? Well, I believe + it more than ever, every day I live. Indeed I don't believe + anything else--but is not that everything? And isn't it exactly + what Christianity means? Wasn't Christ the only man who ever lived + and died _entirely_ for his faith, without a shadow of selfishness? + And isn't that reason enough why we should all turn to Him after + having tried everything else and found it wanting?--turn to Him as + the only pure and _unmixed_ manifestation of God in humanity? And + if I believe this, which I think I do, how utterly inconsistent and + detestable is the life I lead, which, so far from being a loving + and cheerful surrender of itself once for all to God's service, is + at best but a base compromise--a few moments or acts or thoughts + consciously and with difficulty divested of actual selfishness. + Must this always be so? Is it owing to the indissoluble mixture of + the divine and the diabolical in us all, or is it because I myself + am hopelessly frivolous and trifling? Or is it finally that I + really don't _believe_, that I have still a doubt in my mind + whether religion _is_ the one exclusive thing to live for, as + Christ taught us, or whether it will prove to be only _one_ of the + influences, though a great one, which educate the human race and + help it along in that culture which Matthew Arnold thinks the most + desirable thing in the world? In fine is it the meaning and end of + our lives, or only a moral principle bearing a certain part in our + development----? + + Since I wrote this I have been having my tea and sitting on the + piazza looking at the stars and thinking it most unfaithful and + disloyal of me even to speak as I did just now, admitting the + possibility of that faith not being everything which yet at moments + is so divinely true as to light up the whole of life suddenly and + make everything clear. I know the trouble is with _me_ when doubt + and despondency come, but on the other hand I can't altogether + believe it wrong of me to have written as I have, for then what + becomes of my principle of saying what one really thinks and + leaving it to God to take care of his own glory? The truth will + vindicate itself in spite of my voice to the contrary. If you think + I am letting myself go this way without sufficient excuse I won't + do it again; but I can't help it this time, I have nobody else to + speak to about serious things. If by chance I say anything or ask a + question that lies at all near my heart my sisters all tell me I am + "queer" and that they "wouldn't be me for anything"--which is, no + doubt, sensible on their part, but which puts an end to anything + but conversation of the most superficial kind on mine. You know one + gets lonely after a while on such a plan of living, so in sheer + desperation I break out where I perhaps more safely can. + +Such is the magic of old letters on its subtlest occasions that I +reconstitute in every detail, to a vivid probability--even if I may not +again proportionately project the bristling image--our scene of next +mention; drawing for this upon my uneffaced impression of a like one, my +cousin Katharine Temple's bright nuptials, in the same general setting, +very much before, and in addition seeming to see the very muse of +history take a fresh scroll in order to prepare to cover it, in her very +handsomest hand, well before my eyes. Covered is it now for me with that +abounding and interesting life of the generations then to come at the +pair of preliminary flourishes ushering in the record of which I thus +feel myself still assist. + + But a line to-day to tell you that Elly was safely married on + Wednesday. She looked simply beautiful in her wedding garment, and + behaved herself throughout with a composure that was as delightful + as it was surprising. I send you a photograph of myself that I had + taken a few weeks ago. It looks perhaps a trifle melancholy, but I + can't help that--I did the best I could. But I won't write more--it + wouldn't be enlivening. Everything looks grey and blue in the world + nowadays. It will all be bright again in time, I have no doubt; + there is no special reason for it; I think I am simply tired with + knocking about. Yet my week in Newport might have been pleasant + enough if the dentist hadn't taken that occasion to break my bones + for me in a barbarous manner. You are very kind and friendly to + me--you don't know how much happiness your letters give me. You + will be surprised, I dare say, but I shall not, at the last day, + when the accounts are all settled, to find how much this counts in + your favour. Good-bye. + +I find my story so attaching that I prize every step of its course, each +note of which hangs together with all the others. The writer is +expressed to my vision in every word, and the resulting image so worth +preserving. Much of one's service to it is thus a gathering-in of the +ever so faded ashes of the happiness that did come to her after all in +snatches. Everything could well, on occasion, look "grey and blue," as +she says; yet there were stretches, even if of the briefest, when other +things still were present than the active symptoms of her state. The +photograph that she speaks of above is before me as I write and +blessedly helpful to memory--so that I am moved to reproduce it only +till I feel again how the fondness of memory must strike the light for +apprehension. The plan of the journey to California for the advantage of +the climate there was, with other plans taken up and helplessly dropped, +but beguiling for the day, to accompany her almost to the end. + + The Temple-Emmet caravan have advanced as far as Newport and now + propose to retreat again to Pelham without stopping at Boston or + anywhere else. My brother-in-law has business in New York and can't + be away any longer. I haven't been well of late, or I should have + run up to Boston for a day or two to take a sad farewell of all I + love in that city and thereabouts before I cross the Rocky + Mountains. This little trip has been made out for me by my friends; + I have determined to go, and shall probably start with Elly and + Temple in about ten days, possibly not for a fortnight, to spend + the winter in San Francisco. I can't be enthusiastic about it, but + suppose I might as well take all the means I can to get better: a + winter in a warm climate _may_ be good for me. In short I am going, + and now what I want _you_ to do about it is simply to come and see + us before that. Kitty is going to send you a line to add her + voice--perhaps that may bring you. You may never see me again, you + know, and if I were to die so far away you'd be sorry you hadn't + taken leave of me, wouldn't you? + +The idea of California held, and with other pleasant matters really +occupied the scene; out of which moreover insist on shining to me +accessory connections, or connections that then were to be: intensely +distinct for example the figure of Miss Crawford, afterwards Madame von +Rabe, sister of my eminent friend F. Marion of the name and, in her +essence, I think, but by a few shades less entire a figure than +he--which is saying much. The most endowed and accomplished of men Frank +Crawford, so that I have scarcely known another who had more aboundingly +lived and wrought, about whom moreover there was singularly more to be +said, it struck me, than at all found voice at the time he might have +been commemorated. Therefore if the young lady alluded to in my cousin's +anecdote was at all of the same personal style and proportion--well, I +should draw the moral if it didn't represent here too speciously the +mouth of a trap, one of those I have already done penance for; the +effect of my yielding to which would be a shaft sunk so straight down +into matters interesting and admirable and sad and strange that, with +everything that was futurity to the occasion noted in our letter and is +an infinitely mixed and a heavily closed past now, I hurry on without so +much as a glance. + + The present plan is to send me to California in about three weeks + by water, under the care of one of the Emmet boys and Temple's + valet--for nurse; and by the time I get there, early in December, + they will be settled in San Francisco for the winter. The idea of a + twenty-one days' sea-voyage is rather appalling--what do you think + of it? This day is but too heavenly here. I haven't been to + church, but walking by myself, as happy as possible. When one + sleeps well and the sun shines, what happiness to live! I wish you + were here--wouldn't I show you Pelham at high tide, on a day that + is simply intoxicating, with a fresh breeze blown through the red + and yellow leaves and sunshine "on field and hill, in heart and + brain," as Mr. Lowell says. I suppose you remember the pony I + drove, and Punch, the little Scotch terrier that tried so to + insinuate himself into your affections, on the piazza, the morning + you left. The former has been "cutting up," the latter _cut_ up, + since then. You wouldn't believe me when I told you the pony was a + highly nervous creature--but she behaved as one the other day when + I took the Roman Miss Crawford, who has been staying near here, a + ride. She shied at a dog that frightened her, and dragged the cart + into a ditch, and tried to get over a stone wall, waggon and all. I + of course had to hang on to the reins, but I suggested to Miss + Crawford that she should get out, as the cart was pretty steady + while the horse's forefeet were on top of the wall; which she did, + into a mud-puddle, and soiled her pretty striped stockings and + shoes in a horrible way. It ended by the dear little beast's + consenting to get back upon all fours, but I found it very amusing + and have liked her better ever since.... How does Mr. Holmes + persevere about smoking? I pity him if he can't sleep, and wish _I_ + had a vicious habit so that I might give it up. But I must finish + my tale of the quadruped Punch, who was called upon in the dead of + night by five dogs of the neighbourhood and torn to pieces by them. + The coachman heard him crying in the night, and in the morning we + found him--that is to say we gathered him together, his dear little + tail from one place and his head from another etc! So went out a + very sweet little spirit--I wonder where it is now. Don't tell me + he hadn't more of a soul than that Kaufmann, the fat oysterman. + +I find bribes to recognition and recovery quite mercilessly multiply, +and with the effort to brush past them more and more difficult; with the +sense for me at any rate (whatever that may be worth for wisdom or +comfort) of sitting rather queerly safe and alone, though as with a +dangle of legs over the edge of a precipice, on the hither side of great +gulfs of history. But these things, dated toward the end of that +November, speak now in a manner for themselves. + + My passage for California is taken for the 4th of December; Elly + and Temple have written to me to come at once--they are settled in + San Francisco for the winter. My brother-in-law here has been + promised that I shall be made so comfortable I shan't want to tear + myself from the ship when I arrive. The captain is a friend of + Temple's, and also of my uncle Captain Temple, and both of them are + going to arrange so for me that I fully expect the ship to be hung + with banners and flowers when I step on board.... I enjoyed my time + in Boston far more than I had expected--in fact immensely, and + wouldn't have missed it for anything; I feel now as if it had + _necessarily_ had to happen. I don't know how I should have done + the winter, and especially started off for an indefinitely long + absence in the west without the impetus that it gave me in certain + directions--the settling down and shaking up, the dissipating of + certain impressions that I had thought fixed and the strengthening + of others that I hadn't been so sure of: an epoch in short. I dare + say you have had such--in which a good deal of living was done in a + short time, to be turned over and made fruitful in days to come. I + saw Mr. Holmes once, and was very glad of that glimpse, short as it + was. I went home by way of Newport, where I stayed two days--and + where I was surprised to hear of Fred Jones's engagement to Miss + Rawle of Philadelphia. Do you know her? When I got to New York I + went to the Hones' to ask something about Fred and his affairs and + found that Miss Rawle was staying next door with Mrs. Willy Duncan; + so I went in to see her on the spur of the moment, very much as I + had come from the boat, not particularly presentable for a first + call: however, I thought if she had a soul she wouldn't mind + it--and such I found the case.... Lizzie Boott was as sweet and + good to me as ever; I think she is at once the most unselfish and + most unegotistical girl I know--they don't always go together. + +What follows here has, in its order, I think, that it still so testifies +to life--if one doesn't see in it indeed rather perhaps the instinct on +the writer's part, though a scarce conscious one, to wind up the affairs +of her spirit, as it were, and be able to turn over with a sigh of +supreme relief for an end intimately felt as at hand. The moral +fermentation breaking through the bustle of outward questions even at a +time when she might have thrown herself, as one feels, on the great soft +breast of equalising Nature, or taken her chance of not being too wrong, +is a great stroke of truth. No one really could be less "morbid"; yet +she would take no chance--it wasn't in her--of not being right with the +right persons; among whom she so ranked her correspondent. + + My address at San Francisco will be simply Care of C. Temple Emmet, + Esq.; and I am surely off this time unless heaven interposes in a + miraculous way between now and Saturday. I've no great courage + about it, but after all it's much the same to me where I am; life + is always full of interest and mystery and happiness to me, and as + for the voyage, the idea of three weeks of comparative solitude + between sea and sky isn't unattractive.... I know that by my + question [as to why he had written, apparently, that she was, of + her nature, "far off" from him] I am putting an end to that + delightful immunity I have enjoyed so much with you from sickening + introspection, analysis of myself and yourself, that exhausting and + nauseating subjectivity, with which most of my other friends see + fit to deluge me, thereby taking much that is refreshing out of + life. Don't be afraid of "hurting my feelings" by anything you can + say. Our friendship has always been to my mind a one-sided thing, + and if you should tell me you find me in any way unsympathetic or + unsatisfactory it won't disappoint me, and I won't even allow + myself to think I'm sorry. I feel so clearly that God knows best, + and that we ought neither of us surely to wish to distort his + creatures from the uses he made them for, just to serve our own + purposes--that is to get a little more sympathy and comfort. We + must each of us, after all, live out our own lives apart from + everyone else; and yet, this being once understood as a fundamental + truth, there is nobody's sympathy and approval that would encourage + me so much as yours. I mean that if one's heart and motives could + be known by another as God knows them, without disguise or + extenuation, and if it should _then_ prove that on the _whole_ you + didn't think well of me, it would, more than anything else could, + shake my confidence in my own instincts, which must after all + forever be my guide. And yet, as I said before, I am quite prepared + for the worst, and shall listen to it, if necessary, quite humbly. + I am very much inclined to trust your opinion before my own. + + An hour later. _Sold_ again, by all that's wonderful--I had almost + said by all that's damnable, though it isn't exactly that. My + brother Dick has just walked in with a telegram from Temple: "I + shall be back in December--don't send M." A tremendous revulsion of + feeling and a general sigh of relief have taken place on this + announcement, and it's all right, I'm sure, though when I wrote you + an hour ago I thought the same of the other prospect. + +One catches one's breath a little, frankly, at what was to follow the +above within a few days--implying as it does that she had drawn upon +herself some fairly direct statement of her correspondent's reserves of +view as to her human or "intellectual" composition. To have _had_ such +reserves at such an hour, and to have responded to the invitation to +express them--for invitation there had been--is something that our +actual larger light quite helps us to flatter ourselves _we_ shouldn't +have been capable of. But what was of the essence between these +admirable persons was exactly the tone of truth; the larger light was +all to wait for, and the real bearings of the hour were as unapparent as +the interlocutors themselves were at home in clearness, so far as they +might bring that ideal about. And whatever turn their conversation took +is to the honour always of the generous girl's passion for truth. As +this long letter admirably illustrates that, I withdraw from it almost +nothing. The record of the rare commerce would be incomplete without it; +all the more perhaps for the wonder and pain of our seeing the noble and +pathetic young creature have, of all things, in her predicament, to +plead for extenuations, to excuse and justify herself. + + I understood your letter perfectly well--it was better than I + feared it might be, but bad enough. Better because I knew already + all it told me, and had been afraid there might be some new and + horrible development in store for me which I hadn't myself felt; + but bad enough because I find it in itself, new or old, such a + disgusting fact that I am intellectually so unsympathetic. It is a + fault I feel profoundly conscious of, but one that, strange to say, + I have only of late been conscious of _as_ a fault. I dare say I + have always known, in a general way, that I am very unobservant + about things and take very little interest in subjects upon which + my mind doesn't naturally dwell; but it had never occurred to me + before that it is a fault that ought to be corrected. Whether + because I have never been given to studying myself much, but have + just let myself go the way my mind was most inclined to, more + interested in the subject itself than in the fact that it + interested me; or whether because one is averse to set oneself down + as indolent and egotistic I don't know; at all events I have of + late seen the thing in all its unattractiveness, and I wish I could + get over it. Do you think that, now I am fully roused to the fact, + my case is hopeless? Or that if I should try hard for the next + twenty-five years I might succeed in modifying it? I am speaking + now of a want of interest in _all_ the rest of the world; of not + having the desire to investigate subjects, naturally uninteresting + to me, just because they are interesting to some other human being + whom I don't particularly owe anything to except that he _is_ a + human being, and so his thoughts and feelings ought to be respected + by me and sympathised with. Not to do this is, I know, + unphilosophic and selfish, conceited and altogether inhuman. To be + unselfish, to live for other people, to mould our lives as much as + possible on the model of Christ's all-embracing humanity, seems + most clearly to my mind the one thing worth living for; and yet it + is still the hardest thing for me to do, and I think I do it less + than anybody else who feels the necessity of it strongly at all. + + I am glad you still go to an occasional ball--I should rather like + to meet you at one myself; it's a phase of life we have seen so + little of together. I have been feeling so well lately that I don't + know what to make of it. I don't remember ever in my life being in + such good spirits. Not that they are not in general pretty natural + to me when there is the slightest excuse for them, but now + everything seems bright and happy, my life so full of interest, my + time so thoroughly filled and such a delicious calm to have settled + down on my usually restless spirit. Such an enjoyment of the + _present_, such a grateful contentment, is in each new day as I see + it dawn in the east, that I can only be thankful and say to myself: + "Make a note of this--you are happy; don't forget it, nor to be + thankful for this beautiful gift of life." This is Sunday morning, + and I wonder whether you are listening to Phillips Brooks. I + understand how you feel about his preaching--that it is all feeling + and no reason; I found it so myself last winter in Philadelphia: he + was good for those within the pale, but not good to convince + outsiders that they should come in. I am glad, however, that he + preaches in this way--I think his power lies in it; for it seems to + me, after all, that what comfort we get from religion, and what + light we have upon it, come to us through feeling, that is through + trusting our instinct as the voice of God, the Holy Ghost, though + it may at the same time appear to us directly against what our + intellect teaches us. I don't mean by this that we should deny the + conclusions arrived at by our intellect--which on the contrary I + believe we should trust and stand by to the bitter end, whenever + this may be. But let us fearlessly trust our _whole_ nature, + showing our faith in God by being true to ourselves all through, + and not dishonouring Him by ignoring what our heart says because it + is not carried out by our intellect, or by wilfully blunting our + intellectual perception because it happens to run against some + cherished wish of our heart. + + "But," you will say, "how can a man live torn to pieces this way by + these contrary currents?" Well, I know it is hard to keep our faith + _sure_ of a standpoint where these apparent inconsistencies are all + reconciled and the jangle and discord sound the sweetest harmony; + but I do believe there _is_ one, in God, and that we must only try + to have that faith and never mind how great the inconsistency may + seem, nor how perplexing the maze it leads us through. Let us never + give up one element of the problem for the sake of coming to a + comfortable solution of it in this world. I don't blame those eager + minds that are always worrying, studying, investigating, to _find_ + the solution here below; it is a noble work, and let them follow it + out (and without a bit of compromise) to whom God has given the + work. But whether we find it or not I would have them and all of us + feel that it is to _be_ found, if God wills--and through no other + means surely than by our being _true_. Blessed are they who have + not seen and who have yet believed. But I am going out now for a + walk! We have had the most delightful weather this whole week, and + capital sleighing, and I have spent most of my time driving myself + about with that same dear little pony. I went to town yesterday to + a matinée of William Tell; it was delightful and I slept all night + after it too. I am reading German a little every day, and it's + beginning to go pretty well. Good-bye. Don't tire yourself out + between work and dissipation. + +I find myself quite sit up to her, as we have it to-day, while she sits +there without inconvenience, after all that has happened, under the dead +weight of William Tell; the relief of seeing her sublimely capable of +which, with the reprieve from her formidable flight to the Pacific +doubtless not a little contributing, helps to draw down again the +vision, or more exactly the sound, of the old New York and Boston Opera +as our young generation knew and artlessly admired it; admired it, by my +quite broken memories of the early time, in Brignoli the sweet and +vague, in Susini the deep and rich, in Miss Kellogg the native and +charming, in Adelaide Phillipps the universal, to say nothing of other +acclaimed warblers (they appear to me to have warbled then so much more +than since) whom I am afraid of not placing in the right perspective. +They warbled Faust a dozen times, it comes back to me, for once of +anything else; Miss Kellogg and Brignoli heaped up the measure of that +success, and I well remember the great yearning with which I heard my +cousin describe her first enchanted sense of it. The next in date of the +letters before me, of the last day but one of December '69, is mainly an +interesting expression of the part that music plays in her mental +economy--though but tentatively offered to her correspondent, who, she +fears, may not be musical enough to understand her, understand how much +"spiritual truth has been 'borne in' upon me by means of harmony: the +relation of the part to the whole, the absolute value of the individual, +the absolute necessity of uncompromising and unfaltering truth, the +different ways in which we like our likes and our unlikes," things all +that have been so made clearer to her. Of a singular grace in movement +and attitude, a grace of free mobility and activity, as original and +"unconventional" as it was carelessly natural, she never looked more +possessed of her best resources than at the piano in which she +delighted, at which she had ardently worked, and where, slim and +straight, her shoulders and head constantly, sympathetically swaying, +she discoursed with an admirable touch and a long surrender that was +like a profession of the safest relation she could know. Comparatively +safe though it might have been, however, in the better time, she was +allowed now, I gather, but little playing, and she is deep again toward +the end of January '70 in a quite other exposure, the old familiar +exposure to the "demon," as she calls it, "of the Why, Whence, Whither?" +Long as the letter is I feel it a case again for presentation whole; the +last thoughts of her life, as they appear, breathe in it with such +elevation. They seem to give us her last words and impulses, and, with +what follows of the middle of February, constitute the moving climax of +her rich short story. + + There have been times (and they will come again no doubt) when I + could write to you about ordinary things in a way at least not + depressing; but for a good while now I have felt so tired out, + bodily and mentally, that I couldn't conscientiously ask you to + share my mood. The life I live here in the country, and so very + much alone, is capable of being the happiest or the unhappiest of + existences, as it all depends so on oneself and is so very little + interfered with by outside influences. Perhaps I am more than + usually subject to extremes of happiness and of depression, yet I + suppose everyone must have moments, even in the most varied and + distracting life, when the old questioning spirit, the demon of the + Why, Whence, Whither? stalks in like the skeleton at the feast and + takes a seat beside him. I say everyone, but I must except those + rare and happy souls who really believe in Christianity, who no + longer strive after even goodness as it comes from one's own + effort, but take refuge in the mysterious sacrifice of Christ, his + merit sufficing, and in short throw themselves in the orthodox way + on the consoling truth of the Atonement--to me hitherto neither + comprehensible nor desirable. These people, having completely + surrendered self, having lost their lives, as it were in Christ, + must truly have found them, must know the rest that comes from + literally casting their care of doubt and strife and thought upon + the Lord. + + I say hitherto the doctrine of the vicarious suffering of Christ + has been to me not only incomprehensible but also unconsoling; I + didn't want it and didn't understand even intellectually the + feeling of people who do. I don't mean to say that the life and + death of Christ and the example they set for us have not been to me + always the brightest spot in history--for they have; but they have + stood rather as an example that we must try to follow, that we must + by constant and ceaseless effort bring our lives nearer to--but + always, to some extent at least, through ourselves, that is through + ourselves with God's help, got by asking Him for it and by His + giving it to us straight and with no mediation. When I have seen as + time went by my own shortcomings all the more instead of the less + frequent, I have thought: "Well, you don't try hard enough; you are + not really in earnest in thinking that you believe in the Christian + life as the only true one." The more I tried, nevertheless, the + less it seemed like the model life; the best things I did continued + to be the more spontaneous ones; the greatest efforts had the least + success; until finally I couldn't but see that if this was + Christianity it was not the "rest" that Christ had promised his + disciples--it was nothing more than a pagan life with a high ideal, + only an ideal so high that nothing but failure and unhappiness came + from trying to follow it. And one night when I was awake through + all the hours it occurred to me: What if this were the need that + Christianity came to fill up in our hearts? What if, after all, + that old meaningless form of words that had been sounded in my + unheeding ears all my days were suddenly to become invested with + spirit and truth? What if this were the good tidings that have made + so many hearts secure and happy in the most trying situations? For + if morality and virtue were the test of a Christian, certainly + Christ would never have likened the kingdom of heaven to a little + child, in whose heart is no struggle, no conscious battle between + right and wrong, but only unthinking love and trust. + + However it may turn out, whether it shall seem true or untrue to me + finally, I am at least glad to be able to put myself intellectually + into the place of the long line of Christians who have felt the + need and the comfort of this belief. It throws a light upon Uncle + Henry's talk, which has seemed to me hitherto neither reasonable + nor consoling. When I was with him it so far disgusted me that I + fear I showed him plainly that I found it not only highly + unpractical, but ignoble and shirking. I knew all the while that he + disliked what he called my pride and conceit, but felt all the same + that his views didn't touch my case a bit, didn't give me the least + comfort or practical help, and seemed to me wanting in earnestness + and strength. _Now_ I say to myself: What if the good gentleman had + all along really got hold of the higher truth, the purer + spirituality? Verily there are two sides to everything in this + world, and one becomes more charitable the older one grows. + However, if I write at this length it is because I am feeling + to-day too seedy for anything else. I had a hemorrhage a week ago, + which rather took the life out of me; but as it was the only one I + feel I should by this time be coming round again--and probably + might if I hadn't got into a sleepless state which completely + knocks me up. The old consolatory remark, "Patience, neighbour, and + shuffle the cards," ought to impart a little hope to me, I suppose; + but it's a long time since I've had any trumps in my hand, and you + know that with the best luck the game always tired me. Willy James + sometimes tells me to behave like a man and a gentleman if I wish + to outwit fate. What a _real_ person he is! He is to me in nearly + all respects a head and shoulders above other people. How is + Wendell Holmes? Elly is having the gayest winter in Washington and + wants me to go to them there, which I had meant to do before the + return of my last winter's illness. But it's not for me now. + + Later.--I have kept my letter a day or two, thinking I might feel + in tune for writing you a better one and not sending this at all. + But alas I shall have to wait some time before I am like my old + self again, so I may as well let this go. You see I'm not in a + condition, mentally or physically, to take bright and healthy views + of life. But if you really care you may as well see this mood as + another, for heaven only knows when I shall get out of it. Can you + understand the utter weariness of thinking about one thing all the + time, so that when you wake up in the morning consciousness comes + back with a sigh of "Oh yes, here it is again; another day of + doubting and worrying, hoping and fearing has begun." If I don't + get any sleep at all, which is too frequently the case, the strain + is a "leetle" bit too hard, and I am sometimes tempted to take a + drop of "pison" to put me to sleep in earnest. That momentary + vision of redemption from thinking and striving, of a happy rest + this side of eternity, has vanished away again. I can't help it; + peaceful, desirable as it may be, the truth is that practically I + don't believe it. It was such a sudden thing, such an entire change + from anything that had ever come to me before, that it seemed + almost like an inspiration, and I waited, almost expecting it to + continue, to be permanent. But it doesn't stay, and so back swings + the universe to the old place--paganism, naturalism, or whatever + you call the belief whose watchword is "God and our own soul." And + who shall say there is not comfort in it? One at least feels that + here one breathes one's native air, welcoming back the old _human_ + feeling, with its beautiful pride and its striving, its despair, + its mystery and its faith. Write to me and tell me whether, as one + goes on, one must still be tossed about more and more by these + conflicting feelings, or whether they finally settle themselves + quietly one way or the other and take only their proper share at + least of one's life. This day is like summer, but I should enjoy it + more if last night hadn't been quite the most unpleasant I ever + spent. I got so thoroughly tired about two in the morning that I + made up my mind in despair to give the morphine another trial, and + as one dose had no effect took two; the consequence of which is + that I feel as ill to-day as one could desire. I can tell you, sir, + you had better prize the gift of sleep as it deserves while you + have it. If I don't never write to you no more you'll know it's + because I really wish to treat you kindly. But one of these days + you'll get another kind of letter, brim-full perhaps with health + and happiness and thoroughly ashamed of my present self. I had a + long letter yesterday from Harry James at Florence--enjoying Italy + but homesick. Did you see those verses in the North American + translated from the Persian? Good-bye. + +The last of all is full both of realities and illusions, the latter +insistently living through all the distress of the former. And I should +like to say, or to believe, that they remained with her to the end, +which was near. + + Don't be alarmed at my pencil--I am not in bed but only bundled-up + on the piazza by order of the doctor.... I started for New York + feeling a good deal knocked up, but hoping to get better from the + change; I was to stay there over Sunday and see Dr. Metcalfe, who + has a high reputation and was a friend of my father's. I left a + request at his office that he would come to me on Sunday P.M.; but + in the meantime my cousin Mrs. Minturn Post, with whom I was + staying, urged upon me her physician, Dr. Taylor, who came on + Saturday night, just as I was going to bed, and, after sounding my + lungs, told me very dreadful things about them. As his verdict was + worse than Metcalfe's proved I will tell you what he said first. He + began very solemnly: "My dear young lady, your right lung is + diseased; all your hemorrhages have come from there. It must have + been bad for at least a year before they began. You must go to + Europe as soon as possible." This was not cheerful, as I had been + idiot enough to believe some time ago such a different explanation. + But of course I wanted to learn what he absolutely thought, and + told him I wasn't a bit afraid. If there weren't tubercles was I + curable and if there _were_• was I hopeless? I asked him for the + very worst view he had conscientiously to take, but didn't mean + definitely to ask how long I should live, and so was rather + unprepared for his reply of "Two or three years." I didn't however + wish to make him regret his frankness, so I said, "Well, Doctor, + even if my right lung were all gone I should make a stand with my + left," and then, by way of showing how valiant the stand would be, + fainted away. This, I should say, was owing a good deal to my + previous used-up condition from want of sleep. It made him at any + rate hasten to assure me that there was every possibility of my + case being not after all so bad--with which he took his departure; + to my great relief as I didn't think him at all nice. His grammar + was bad, and he made himself generally objectionable. + + The next night dear Dr. Metcalfe came, whom I love for the gentlest + and kindest soul I have ever seen. To start with he's a gentleman, + as well as an excellent physician, and to end with he and my father + were fond of each other at West Point, and he takes a sort of + paternal interest in me. He told me that my right lung is decidedly + weaker than my left, which is quite sound, and that the hemorrhage + has been a good thing for it and kept it from actual disease; and + also that if I can keep up my general health I may get all right + again. He has known a ten times worse case get entirely well. He + urged me not to go to Washington, but decidedly to go to Europe; so + this last is what I am to do with my cousin Mrs. Post if I am not + dead before June. In a fortnight I'm to go back to New York to be + for some time under Metcalfe's care. I feel tired out and hardly + able to stir, but my courage is good, and I don't propose to lose + it if I can help, for I know it all depends on myself whether I get + through or not. That is if I begin to be indifferent to what + happens I shall go down the hill fast. I have fortunately, through + my mother's father, enough Irish blood in me rather to enjoy a good + fight. I feel the greatest longing for summer or spring; I should + like it to be always spring for the rest of my life and to have all + the people I care for always with me! But who _wouldn't_ like it + so? Good-bye. + +To the gallantry and beauty of which there is little surely to add. But +there came a moment, almost immediately after, when all illusion failed; +which it is not good to think of or linger on, and yet not pitiful not +to note. One may have wondered rather doubtingly--and I have expressed +that--what life would have had for her and how her exquisite faculty of +challenge could have "worked in" with what she was likely otherwise to +have encountered or been confined to. None the less did she in fact +cling to consciousness; death, at the last, was dreadful to her; she +would have given anything to live--and the image of this, which was long +to remain with me, appeared so of the essence of tragedy that I was in +the far-off aftertime to seek to lay the ghost by wrapping it, a +particular occasion aiding, in the beauty and dignity of art. The figure +that was to hover as the ghost has at any rate been of an extreme +pertinence, I feel, to my doubtless too loose and confused general +picture, vitiated perhaps by the effort to comprehend more than it +contains. Much as this cherished companion's presence among us had +represented for William and myself--and it is on _his_ behalf I +especially speak--her death made a mark that must stand here for a too +waiting conclusion. We felt it together as the end of our youth. + + +THE END + + * * * * * + +The following typographical errors have been corrected by the etext +transcriber: + +which I left in one of the of the library's mantelpiece=>which I left in +one of the library's mantelpiece + +qui s'est allongée malgré moi. Ton frere, James William.=>qui s'est +allongée malgré moi. Ton frère, James William. + +At about 5 the fearful revéillé calls us>=At about 5 the fearful +réveillé calls us + +quand meme>=quand même + +my own that it should beeome so=>my own that it should become so + +I dont care much what it may be=>I don't care much what it may be + + * * * * * + + + +FOOTNOTES: + +[1] _A Small Boy and Others._ New York, 1913. + +[2] _A Small Boy and Others_, 1913. + +[3] A Small Boy and Others, 1913. + +[4] Expressive drawing alas irreproducible. + +[5] A drawing of figures in evening lamplight. + +[6] Literary Remains of Henry James, Boston, 1885. The portrait +accompanying the volume gave us, alas, but the scantest satisfaction. + +[7] _Past and Present_, 1843. + +[8] "But, Sir, we have yet one more scene to visit together, connected +with all we have previously witnessed: a home scene, Sir Benjamin; and +we must now ascend a mountain of pity high enough to command the dewy +extense of three kingdoms. From thence we have to look down from every +point of our warm hearts with a sight as multifold as the cherubic eyes. +We are to see with equal penetration through the diverse thickness of +castles, mansions, and cottages, through London and through hamlet, at +young wives and at aged mothers, little children, brothers and +sisters--all groups and ties that are; and at affianced maidens, ties +that were to be. There are rents and tears to-day in the general life: +the bulletin of the dead has come, and the groups of sorrow are +constituted. Splendid Paris bends as a Niobe or as a Rachel while the +corse of her much-enduring Hero is borne to the marble Invalides; other +corses go earthward with a shorter procession, helped away by the spades +of ruder but more instant sculptors; the rucked sod of the Alma is their +urn and monument in one; yet every warrior among them is also buried +to-day with swelling greatness of obsequies, if we could see them, in +the everlasting ruby vaults of some human heart. You are touched, Sir +Benjamin, and are justly religious on this summit. Struck down for a +moment from worldliness, we both discourse without an afterthought on +the immortal state; we hope that the brave are already welcomed in the +land of peace; that our laurels they could not stop to take, and our +earned promotion they seem to have missed are clad upon them now by the +God of battles in front of the shining armies of the just. We hope also +that if their voices could now speak to the mourners, the oil of their +sure gladness would heal our faithless sorrow. It is a true strain no +doubt, and yet but of momentary power." War, Cholera, and the Ministry +of Health. An Appeal to Sir Benjamin Hall and the British People. +London, 1854. + +[9] An eminent Unitarian pastor. + +[10] My youngest brother's ingenuity was to know as little rest during +much of his life as his strong faculty of agitation--to the employment +of which it was indeed not least remarkably applied. Many illustrations +of it would be to give, had I more margin; and not one of them anything +less than striking, thanks to the vivacity of his intelligence, the +variety of his gifts and the native ability in which he was himself so +much less interested than was the case with everyone he met, however +casually, that he became, many years before his death in 1910, our one +gentleman of leisure: so far as this condition might consort with the +easiest aptitude for admirable talk, charged with natural life, +perception, humour and colour, that I have perhaps ever known. There +were times when Bob's spoken overflow struck me as the equivalent, for +fine animation, of William's epistolary. The note of the ingenious in +him spent itself as he went, but I find an echo of one of its many +incidents in the passage of verse that I am here moved to rescue from +undue obscurity. It is too "amateurish" and has too many irregular +lines, but images admirably the play of spirit in him which after +ranging through much misadventure could at last drop to an almost +effective grasp of the happiest relation. + + Although I lie so low and still + Here came I by the Master's will; + He smote at last to make me free, + As He was smitten on the tree + And nailèd there. He knew of old + The human heart, and mine is cold; + And I know now that all we gain + Until we come to Him is vain. + Thy hands have never wrought a deed, + Thy heart has never known a need, + That went astray in His great plan + Since far-off days when youth began. + For in that vast and perfect plan + Where time is but an empty span + Our Master waits. He knows our want, + We know not his--till pale and gaunt + With weariness of life we come + And say to Him, What shall I be? + Oh Master, smite, but make me free + Perchance in these far worlds to know + The better thing we sought to be. + + And then upon thy couch lie down + And fold the hands which have not sown; + And as thou liest there alone + Perhaps some breath from seraph blown + As soft as dew upon the rose + Will fall upon thee at life's close. + So thou wilt say, At last, at last! + All pain is love when pain is past! + And to the Master once again: + Oh keep my heart too weak to pray; + I ask no longer questions vain + Of life and love, of loss and gain-- + These for the living are and strong; + I go to Thee, to Thee belong. + Once was I wakened by Thy light, + But years have passed, and now the night + Takes me to Thee. I am content; + So be it in Thy perfect plan + A mansion is where I am sent + To dwell among the innocent. + + + + + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's Notes of a Son and Brother, by Henry James + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER *** + +***** This file should be named 38424-8.txt or 38424-8.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/3/8/4/2/38424/ + +Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was +produced from scanned images of public domain material +from the Google Print project.) + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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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: Notes of a Son and Brother + +Author: Henry James + +Release Date: December 27, 2011 [EBook #38424] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER *** + + + + +Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was +produced from scanned images of public domain material +from the Google Print project.) + + + + + + +</pre> + +<hr class="full" /> + +<p class="figcenter"> +<a href="images/cover_lg.jpg"> +<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="355" height="550" alt="image of the book's cover" title="image of the book's cover" /></a> +</p> + +<p class="c">B<small>Y</small> HENRY JAMES<br /> +———<br /> +<small>A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS<br /> +NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER</small></p> + +<p class="cb"><br /><br /><br />NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER</p> + +<p><a name="front" id="front"></a></p> +<p class="figcenter"> +<img src="images/ill_frontis.jpg" width="352" height="398" alt="Pencil-drawn portrait of William James by himself about +1866" title="" /> +<br /> +<span class="caption">Pencil-drawn portrait of<br /> +William James by himself about +1866</span> +</p> + +<h1> +NOTES OF A<br /> +SON AND BROTHER</h1> + +<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="contents" +style="border:2px dotted gray;padding:2%;max-width:30em;margin:5% auto 5% auto;text-align:center;"> +<tr><td><a href="#ILLUSTRATIONS">Illustrations </a></td></tr> +<tr><td><a href="#I">I, </a> +<a href="#II">II, </a> +<a href="#III">III, </a> +<a href="#IV">IV, </a> +<a href="#V">V, </a> +<a href="#VI">VI, </a> +<a href="#VII">VII, </a> +<a href="#VIII">VIII, </a> +<a href="#IX">IX, </a> +<a href="#X">X, </a> +<a href="#XI">XI, </a> +<a href="#XII">XII, </a> +<a href="#XIII">XIII.</a></td></tr> +<tr><td><a href="#transcriber">Transcriber's note</a></td></tr> +<tr><td><a href="#FOOTNOTES">Footnotes</a></td></tr> +</table> + +<p class="cb"><br /><br />BY<br /> +HENRY JAMES<br /><br /><br /><br /> +<small>ILLUSTRATED</small><br /><br /><br /> +<br /> +NEW YORK<br /> +CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS<br /> +1914</p> + +<p class="c"><br /><br /><br /> +<small>C<small>OPYRIGHT</small>, 1914, B<small>Y</small><br /> +CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS<br /> +——<br /> +Published March, 1914</small></p> + +<h2><a name="ILLUSTRATIONS" id="ILLUSTRATIONS"></a>ILLUSTRATIONS</h2> + +<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="illustrations"> +<tr><td>Pencil-drawn portrait of William James by himself, about 1866</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#front"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td></tr> + +<tr><td colspan="2" align="right"><small>FACING<br /> +PAGE</small> +</td></tr> + +<tr><td>Louis Osborne. Sketch from a letter of William James (<a href="#page_018">page 18</a>) </td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_018">18</a></td></tr> + +<tr><td>Portrait in oils of Miss Katherine Temple, 1861</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_096">96</a></td></tr> + +<tr><td>A leaf from the letter quoted on <a href="#page_129">page 129</a></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_130">130</a></td></tr> + +<tr><td>Sketch of G. W. James brought home wounded from the assault on Fort Wagner</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_244">244</a></td></tr> + +<tr><td>"The cold water cure at Divonne—excellent for melancholia."—From +a letter of William James (<a href="#page_448">page 448</a>)</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_448">448</a></td></tr> +</table> + +<p><a name="page_001" id="page_001"></a></p> + +<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2> + +<p>It may again perhaps betray something of that incorrigible vagueness of +current in our educational drift which I have elsewhere<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> so +unreservedly suffered to reflect itself that, though we had come abroad +in 1855 with an eye to the then supposedly supreme benefits of Swiss +schooling, our most resolute attempt to tap that supply, after twenty +distractions, waited over to the autumn of the fourth year later on, +when we in renewed good faith retraced our steps to Geneva. Our parents +began at that season a long sojourn at the old Hôtel de l'Écu, which now +erects a somewhat diminished head on the edge of the rushing Rhone—its +only rival then was the Hôtel des Bergues opposite, considerably larger +and commanding more or less the view of that profiled crest of +Mont-Blanc which used to be so oddly likened to the head and face of a +singularly supine Napoleon. But on that side the shooting blue flood was +less directly and familiarly under the windows; in our position<a name="page_002" id="page_002"></a> we +lived with it and hung over it, and its beauty, just where we mainly +congregated, was, I fear, my own sole happy impression during several of +those months. It was of a Sunday that we congregated most; my two +younger brothers had, in general, on that day their <i>sortie</i> from the +Pensionnat Maquelin, a couple of miles out of town, where they were then +established, and W. J., following courses at the Academy, in its present +enriched and amplified form the University, mingled, failing livelier +recreation, in the family circle at the hotel. Livelier recreation, +during the hours of completest ease, consisted mostly, as the period +drew itself out, of those <i>courses</i>, along the lake and along the hills, +which offer to student-life in whatever phase, throughout that blest +country, the most romantic of all forms of "a little change"; enjoyed +too in some degree, but much more restrictedly, by myself—this an +effect, as I remember feeling it, of my considerably greater servitude. +I had been placed, separately, at still another Institution, that of M. +Rochette, who carried on an École Préparatoire aux Écoles Spéciales, by +which was meant in particular the Polytechnic School at Zurich, with +whatever other like curricula, always "scientific," might elsewhere be +aimed at; and I had been so disposed of under a flattering misconception +of my aptitudes that leaves me to-day<a name="page_003" id="page_003"></a> even more wonderstruck than at +that immediate season of my distress.</p> + +<p>I so feared and abhorred mathematics that the simplest arithmetical +operation had always found and kept me helpless and blank—the dire +discipline of the years bringing no relief whatever to my state; and +mathematics unmitigated were at the Institution Rochette the air we +breathed, building us up as they most officiously did for those other +grim ordeals and pursuits, those of the mining and the civil engineer, +those of the architectural aspirant and the technician in still other +fields, to which we were supposed to be addressed. Nothing of the sort +was indeed supposed of me—which is in particular my present +mystification; so that my assault of the preliminaries disclosed, feeble +as it strikingly remained, was mere darkness, waste and anguish. I found +myself able to bite, as the phrase was, into no subject there deemed +savoury; it was hard and bitter fruit all and turned to ashes in my +mouth. More extraordinary however than my good parents' +belief—eccentric on their part too, in the light of their usual +practice and disposition, their habit, for the most part, of liking for +us after a gasp or two whatever we seemed to like—was my own failure to +protest with a frankness proportioned to my horror. The stiffer +intellectual discipline, the discipline of physics<a name="page_004" id="page_004"></a> and of algebra, +invoked for the benefit of an understanding undisputedly weak and shy, +had been accepted on my side as a blessing perhaps in disguise. It had +come to me by I know not what perversity that if I couldn't tackle the +smallest problem in mechanics or face without dismay at the blackboard +the simplest geometric challenge I ought somehow in decency to make +myself over, oughtn't really to be so inferior to almost everyone else. +That was the pang, as it was also the marvel—that the meanest minds and +the vulgarest types approached these matters without a sign of +trepidation even when they approached them, at the worst, without +positive appetite. My attempt not therefore to remain abnormal wholly +broke down, however, and when I at last withdrew from the scene it was +not even as a conspicuous, it was only as an obscure, a deeply hushed +failure. I joined William, after what had seemed to me an eternity of +woe, at the Academy, where I followed, for too short a time but with a +comparative recovery of confidence, such literary <i>cours</i> as I might.</p> + +<p>I puzzle it out to-day that my parents had simply said to themselves, in +serious concern, that I read too many novels, or at least read them too +attentively—<i>that</i> was the vice; as also that they had by the contagion +of their good faith got me in a manner to agree with them; since I +could<a name="page_005" id="page_005"></a> almost always enter, to the gain of "horizon" but too often to +the perversion of experience, into any view of my real interests, +so-called, that was presented to me with a dazzling assurance. I didn't +consider certainly that I was so forming my mind, and was doubtless +curious to see whether it mightn't, by a process flourishing in other +applications, get to some extent formed. It wasn't, I think, till I felt +the rapture of that method's arrest that I knew how grotesquely little +it had done for me. And yet I bore it afterwards no malice—resorting +again to that early fatalistic philosophy of which the general sense was +that almost anything, however disagreeable, had been worth while; so +unable was I to claim that it hadn't involved impressions. I positively +felt the impressional harvest rather rich, little as any item of it +might have passed at the time for the sort of thing one exhibits as a +trophy of learning. My small exhibition was all for myself and consisted +on the whole but of a dusty, spotty, ugly picture—I took it for ugly +well-nigh to the pitch of the sinister. Its being a picture at all—and +I clung to that—came from the personal and material facts of the place, +where I was the only scholar of English speech, since my companions, +with a Genevese predominance, were variously polyglot. They wondered, I +couldn't doubt, what I was doing<a name="page_006" id="page_006"></a> among them, and what lost lamb, almost +audibly bleating, I had been charged to figure. Yet I remember no crude +chaff, no very free relation of any one with any one, no high pitch, +still less any low descent, of young pleasantry or irony; our manners +must have been remarkably formed, and our general tone was that of a +man-of-the-world discretion, or at the worst of a certain small +bourgeois circumspection. The dread in the Genevese of having definitely +to "know" strangers and thereby be at costs for any sort of hospitality +to them comes back to me as written clear; not less than their being of +two sorts or societies, sons of the townspeople pure and simple and sons +of the local aristocracy perched in certain of the fine old houses of +the Cité and enjoying a background of sturdily-seated lakeside villas +and deeply umbrageous campagnes. I remember thinking the difference of +type, complexion and general <i>allure</i> between these groups more marked, +to all the senses, than any "social distinction" I had yet encountered. +But the great thing was that I could so simplify our enclosing scene +itself, round it in and make it compose—the dark, the dreary +Institution, squeezed into a tall, dim, stony-faced and stony-hearted +house at the very top of the Cité and directly in the rear of the +Cathedral, portions of the apse of which seem to me to have<a name="page_007" id="page_007"></a> straggled +above or protruded toward it, with other odd extraneous masses than +itself pressing still nearer. This simplification, quite luxuriously for +my young mind, was to mere mean blackness of an old-world sordid order. +I recognised <i>rich</i> blackness in other connections, but this was somehow +of a harsh tradition and a tragic economy; sordid and strong was what I +had from the first felt the place, though urging myself always to rub +off history from its stones, and suffering thus, after a fashion, by the +fact that with history it ought to be interesting and that I ought to +know just how and why it was. For that, I think, was ever both the +burden and the joy—the complication, I mean, of interest, and the +sense, in the midst of the ugly and the melancholy, that queer crooked +silent corners behind cathedrals wrought in their way for one, did +something, while one haunted them, to the imagination and the taste; and +that so, once more, since the generalisation had become a habit with me, +I couldn't, seeing and feeling these things, really believe I had picked +up nothing.</p> + +<p>When I sat in a dusky upper chamber and read "French literature" with +blighted M. Toeppfer, son of a happier sire, as I was sure the charming +writer and caricaturist, in spite of cumbrous cares, must have been; or +when, a couple of times a week and in the same eternal twilight (we +groped<a name="page_008" id="page_008"></a> almost lampless through the winter days, and our glimmering +tapers, when they sparsely appeared, smelt of a past age), I worried out +Virgil and Tite-Live with M. Verchère, or Schiller and Lessing with the +ruddy noisy little professor of German, who sat always, the lesson long, +in a light brown talma, the sides of which he caused violently to flap +for emphasis like agitated wings, I was almost conscious of the breath +of culture as I modestly aspired to culture, and was at any rate safe +for the time from a summons to the blackboard at the hands of awful +little M. Galopin, that dispenser of the paralysing chalk who most +affected me. Extremely diminutive and wearing for the most part a thin +inscrutable smile, the ghost of a tribute to awkwardness happily carried +off, he found in our barren interviews, I believed, a charm to +curiosity, bending afresh each time as over the handful of specimen +dust, unprecedented product at its finest, extracted from the scratched +soil of my intelligence. With M. Toeppfer I was almost happy; with each +of these instructors my hour was unshared, my exploits unwitnessed, by +others; but M. Toeppfer became a friend, shewed himself a <i>causeur</i>, +brightened our lesson with memories of his time in Paris, where, if I am +not mistaken, he had made, with great animation, his baccalauréat, and +whence it was my possibly presumptuous impression he had<a name="page_009" id="page_009"></a> brought back a +state of health, apparently much impaired, which represented contrition +for youthful spirits. He had haunted the parterre of the Théâtre +Français, and when we read Racine his vision of Rachel, whom he had seen +there as often as possible, revived; he was able to say at moments how +she had spoken and moved, and I recall in particular his telling me that +on her entrance as Phèdre, borne down, in her languorous passion, by the +weight of her royal robes—"Que ces vains ornemens, que ces voiles me +pèsent!"—the long lapse of time before she spoke and while she sank +upon a seat filled itself extraordinarily with her visible woe. But +where he most gave me comfort was in bringing home to me that the house +commemorated, immortalised, as we call it, in the first of his father's +Nouvelles Genevoises, La Bibliothèque de mon Oncle, was none other than +the structure facing us where we sat and which so impinged and leaned on +the cathedral walls that he had but to indicate to me certain points +from the window of our room to reconstitute thrillingly the scenery, the +drollery, the whimsical action of the tale. <i>There</i> was a demonstration +I could feel important, votary and victim of the "scene," the scene and +the "atmosphere" only, that I had been formed to be. That I called +interesting lore—called it so at least to myself, though feeling it at +the same<a name="page_010" id="page_010"></a> time of course so little <i>directly</i> producible that I could +perhaps even then have fronted this actually remote circumstance of my +never having produced it till this moment. There abode in me, I may add, +a sense that on any subject that did appeal and that so found me +ready—such subjects being indeed as yet vague, but immensely suggestive +of number—I should have grasped the confident chalk, welcomed the very +biggest piece, not in the least have feared the blackboard. They were +inscribed, alas for me, in no recognised course. I put my hand straight +on another of them, none the less, if not on a whole group of others, in +my ascent, each morning of the spring or the early summer sémestre, of +the admirable old Rue de la Tour de Boël, pronounced Boisl, which, +dusky, steep and tortuous, formed a short cut to that part of the Grand' +Rue in which the Academy was then seated.</p> + +<p>It was a foul and malodorous way—I sniff again, during the tepid weeks, +its warm close air and that near presence of rank cheese which was in +those days almost everywhere, for the nostril, the note of urban +Switzerland; these things blessed me as I passed, for I passed straight +to freedom and away from M. Galopin; they mixed with the benediction of +the exquisite spring and the rapture, constantly renewed, though for too +short a period, of my now substituting literary,<a name="page_011" id="page_011"></a> or in other words +romantic, studies for the pursuits of the Institution Rochette. I viewed +them as literary, these new branches of research, though in truth they +were loose enough and followed on loose terms. My dear parents, as if to +make up to me, characteristically, for my recent absurd strain to no +purpose, allowed me now the happiest freedom, left me to attend such +lectures as I preferred, only desiring that I should attend several a +week, and content—cherished memory that it makes of their forms with +me—that these should involve neither examinations nor reports. The +Academic authorities, good-natured in the extreme and accustomed to the +alien amateur, appear to have been equally content, and I was but too +delighted, on such lines, to attend anything or everything. My whole +impression now, with my self-respect re-established, was of something +exquisite: I was put to the proof about nothing; I deeply enjoyed the +confidence shown in my taste, not to say in my honour, and I sat out +lecture after lecture as I might have sat out drama, alternate tragedy +and comedy, beautifully performed—the professor in each case figuring +the hero, and the undergraduates, much more numerous, though not in +general maturer than those of the Institution, where I had been, to my +perception, every one's junior, partaking in an odd fashion of the +nature at once of troupe and<a name="page_012" id="page_012"></a> spectators. The scientific subjects, in a +large suggestive way, figured tragedy, I seemed to feel, and I pushed +this form to the point of my following, for conscience' sake, though not +with the last regularity, lurid demonstrations, as they affected me, on +anatomy and physiology; these in turn leading to my earnest view, at the +Medical School, of the dissection of a <i>magnifique gendarme</i>—which +ordeal brought me to a stand. It was by the literary and even by the +philosophic <i>leçons</i> that the office of bright comedy was discharged, on +the same liberal lines; at the same time that I blush to remember with +how base a blankness I must have several times listened to H. F. Amiel, +admirable writer, analyst, moralist. His name and the fact of his having +been then a mild grave oracle of the shrine are all that remain with me +(I was fit to be coupled with my cousin Anne King, named in another +place, who, on the same Genevese scene, had had early lessons from the +young Victor Cherbuliez, then with all his music in him, and was to live +to mention to me that he had been for her "like any one else"); the +shrine, not to say the temple itself, shining for me truly, all that +season, with a mere confounding blur of light. Was it an effect of my +intensity of reaction from what I had hated? was it to a great extent +the beguiling beauty of a wonderful Swiss spring, into which all things +else soothingly<a name="page_013" id="page_013"></a> melted, becoming together a harmony without +parts?—whatever the cause, I owed it to some accident only to be +described, I think, as happy, that I moved, those three months, in an +acutely enjoying and yet, as would at present appear, a but scantly +comparing or distinguishing maze of the senses and the fancy. So at +least, to cover this so thin report of my intelligence and my sum of +acquisition and retention, I am reduced to supposing.</p> + +<p>What essentially most operated, I make out, however, was that force of a +renewed sense of William's major activity which always made the +presumption of any degree of importance or success fall, with a sort of +ecstasy of resignation, from my own so minor. Whatever he might happen +to be doing made him so interesting about it, and indeed, with the +quickest concomitance, about everything else, that what I probably most +did, all the while, was but to pick up, and to the effect not a bit of +starving but quite of filling myself, the crumbs of his feast and the +echoes of his life. His life, all this Geneva period, had been more of a +feast than mine, and I recall the sense of this that I had got on the +occasion of my accompanying him, by his invitation, toward the end of +our stay, to a students' celebration or carouse, which was held at such +a distance from the town, at a village or small bourg, up in the<a name="page_014" id="page_014"></a> Vaud +back-country, that we had, after a considerable journey by boat and in +heterogeneous and primitive conveyances, tightly packed, to spend two +nights there. The Genevese section of the Société de Zoffingue, the +great Swiss students' organisation for brotherhood and beer, as it might +summarily be defined, of which my brother had become a member, was to +meet there certain other sections, now vague to me, but predominantly +from the German-speaking Cantons, and, holding a Commerce, to toast +their reunion in brimming bowls. It had been thought the impression +might amuse, might even interest me—for it was not denied that there +were directions, after all, in which I <i>could</i> perhaps take notice; and +this was doubtless what after a fashion happened, though I felt out in +the cold (and all the more that the cold at the moment happened to be +cruel), as the only participant in view not crowned with the charming +white cap of the society, becoming to most young heads, and still less +girt with the parti-coloured ribbon or complementary scarf, which set +off even the shabby—for shabbiness considerably figured. I participated +vaguely but not too excludedly; I suffered from cold, from hunger and +from scant sleeping-space; I found the Bernese and the Bâlois strange +representatives of the joy of life, some of them the finest gothic +grotesques—but the time none the<a name="page_015" id="page_015"></a> less very long; all of which, +however, was in the day's work if I might live, by the imagination, in +William's so adaptive skin. To see that he was adaptive, was initiated, +and to what a happy and fruitful effect, that, I recollect, was my +measure of content; which was filled again to overflowing, as I have +hinted, on my finding him so launched at the Academy after our stretch +of virtual separation, and just fancying, with a freedom of fancy, even +if with a great reserve of expression, how much he might be living and +learning, enjoying and feeling, amid work that was the right work for +him and comrades, consecrated comrades, that at the worst weren't the +wrong. What was not indeed, I always asked myself, the right work for +him, or the right thing of any kind, that he took up or looked at or +played with?—failing, as I did more than ever at the time I speak of, +of the least glimpse of his being below an occasion. Whatever he played +with or worked at entered at once into his intelligence, his talk, his +humour, as with the action of colouring-matter dropped into water or +that of the turning-on of a light within a window. Occasions waited on +him, had always done so, to my view; and there he was, that springtime, +on a level with them all: the effect of which recognition had much, had +more than aught else, to say to the charming silver haze just then<a name="page_016" id="page_016"></a> +wrapped about everything of which I was conscious. He had formed two or +three young friendships that were to continue and to which even the +correspondence of his later years testifies; with which it may have had +something to do that the Swiss <i>jeunesse</i> of the day was, thanks to the +political temperature then prevailing, in a highly inflamed and exalted +state, and particularly sensitive to foreign sympathy, however platonic, +with the national fever. It was the hour at which the French Emperor was +to be paid by Victor Emmanuel the price of the liberation of Lombardy; +the cession of Nice and Savoie were in the air—with the consequence, in +the Genevese breast, of the new immediate neighbourhood thus constituted +for its territory. Small Savoie was to be replaced, close against it, by +enormous and triumphant France, whose power to absorb great mouthfuls +was being so strikingly exhibited. Hence came much hurrying to and fro, +much springing to arms, in the way of exercise, and much flocking to the +standard—"demonstrations," in other words, of the liveliest; one of +which I recall as a huge tented banquet, largely of the white caps, +where I was present under my brother's wing, and, out of a sea of +agitated and vociferous young heads, sprang passionate protests and +toasts and vows and declaimed verses, a storm of local patriotism, +though a flurry happily short-lived.<a name="page_017" id="page_017"></a></p> + +<p>All this was thrilling, but the term of it, by our consecrated custom, +already in view; we were transferred at a bound, for the rest of that +summer of 1860, to the care, respectively, of a pair of kindly +pedagogues at Bonn-am-Rhein; as to which rapid phase I find remembrance +again lively, with a letter or two of William's to reinforce it. Yet I +first pick up as I pass several young lines from Geneva, and would fain +pick up too the drawing that accompanied them—this by reason of the +interest of everything of the sort, without exception, that remains to +us from his hand. He at a given moment, which came quite early, as +completely ceased to ply his pencil as he had in his younger time +earnestly and curiously exercised it; and this constitutes exactly the +interest of his case. No stroke of it that I have recovered but +illustrates his aptitude for drawing, his possible real mastery of the +art that was yet, in the light of other interests, so utterly to drop +from him; and the example is rare of being so finely capable only to +become so indifferent. It was thanks to his later indifference that he +made no point of preserving what he had done—a neglect that, still more +lucklessly, communicated itself to his circle; so that we also let +things go, let them again and again stray into the desert, and that what +might be reproducible is but the handful of scraps that have happened +not to<a name="page_018" id="page_018"></a> perish. "Mother," he writes to his father in absence, "does +nothing but sit and cry for you. She refuses to associate with us and +has one side of the room to herself. She and the Aunt are now in the +Aunt's room. Wilky and Bobby, at home for the day, are at church. It is +a hard grey day. H. is telling a story to Louis Osborne, and I will try +to make a sketch of them. There has been a terrible bise; the two +Cornhill Magazines have come; Mrs. Thomas has been too sick to be at +dinner, and we have seen something of some most extraordinary English +people." Mrs. Thomas, of New York, was a handsome American widow with +handsome children, all from the Avenue Gabriel in Paris, and with the +boys enjoying life, among many little compatriots, at the admired +establishment of M. Haccius, even as our small brothers were doing at +that of M. Maquelin; yet with their destiny of ultimate Europeanisation, +of finally complete absorption into the French system, already rather +written for them—as a like history, for like foredoomed young subjects, +was in those years beginning to be prefigured, through marriages of +daughters and other such beguilements, almost wherever one looked. The +extraordinary English people were perhaps an amiable family of whom I +retain an image as conversing with our parents at the season when the +latter were in their prompt<a name="page_019" id="page_019"></a> flush of admiration for George Eliot's +first novel, Adam Bede, then just given to the world and their copy of +which they had rejoicingly lent to their fellow Anglo-Saxons. I catch +again the echo of their consternation on receiving it back with the +remark that all attempt at an interest in such people, village +carpenters and Methodists, had proved vain—for that style of +Anglo-Saxon; together with that of my own excited wonder about such +other people, those of the style in question, those somehow prodigiously +presented by so rare a delicacy, so proud a taste, and made thus to +irradiate a strange historic light. It <i>referred</i> them, and to a social +order, making life more interesting and more various; even while our +clear democratic air, that of our little family circle, quivered as with +the monstrosity. It might, this note that made us, in the parlance of +to-day, sit up, fairly have opened to me that great and up to then +unsuspected door of the world from which the general collection of +monstrosities, its existence suddenly brought home to us, would +doubtless stretch grandly away. The story I told Louis Osborne has quite +passed from me, but not little Louis himself, an American child of the +most charming and appealing intelligence, marked by some malady that was +more or less permanently to cripple, or was even cruelly to destroy him, +and whom it was a constant joy to aspire to amuse. His mother was +schooling her<a name="page_020" id="page_020"></a> elder son in the company of our own brothers, his father +having established them all at Geneva that he might go for a tour in the +East. Vivid to me still is the glimpse I happened to get one Sunday +betimes of the good Maquelin couple, husband and wife, in deep +mourning—a touch of the highest decency—who had come, with faces a +yard long, to announce to Mrs. Osborne the death of her husband in the +Holy Land, communicated to them, by slow letter, in the first instance. +With little Louis on one's knee one didn't at all envy M. and Madame +Maquelin; and than this small faint phantom of sociable helpless little +listening Louis none more exquisite hovers before me.</p> + +<p class="figcenter"> + +<img src="images/ill_018_sml.png" width="550" height="339" alt="Most eternal love from every one, & from Louis Osborne. + +Louis Osborne. Sketch from a letter of William James (page 18)." title="Louis Osborne. Sketch from a letter of William James (page 18)" /><br /> +<br /> +<span class="caption2">Louis Osborne. Sketch from a letter of William James (<a href="#page_018">page 18</a>).</span> +<br /> +<a href="images/ill_018.png">(view enlarged)</a><br /> +<a href="images/ill_018-u.png">(view upside down)</a> +</p> + +<p>With which mild memories thus stands out for me too the lively +importance, that winter, of the arrival, from the first number, of the +orange-covered earlier Cornhill—the thrill of each composing item of +that first number especially recoverable in its intensity. Is anything +like that thrill possible to-day—for a submerged and blinded and +deafened generation, a generation so smothered in quantity and number +that discrimination, under the gasp, has neither air to breathe nor room +to turn round? Has any like circumstance now conceivably the value, to +the charmed attention, so far as anything worth naming attention, or any +charm for it, is anywhere left, of the fact that Trollope's Framley<a name="page_021" id="page_021"></a> +Parsonage there began?—let alone the still other fact that the +Roundabout Papers did and that Thackeray thus appeared to us to +guarantee personally, intimately, with a present audibility that was as +the accent of good company, the new relation with him and with others of +company not much worse, as they then seemed, that such a medium could +establish. To speak of these things, in truth, however, is to feel the +advantage of being able to live back into the time of the more sovereign +periodical appearances much of a compensation for any reduced prospect +of living forward. For these appearances, these strong time-marks in +such stretches of production as that of Dickens, that of Thackeray, that +of George Eliot, had in the first place simply a genial weight and +force, a direct importance, and in the second a command of the permeable +air and the collective sensibility, with which nothing since has begun +to deserve comparison. They were enrichments of life, they were <i>large</i> +arrivals, these particular renewals of supply—to which, frankly, I am +moved to add, the early Cornhill giving me a pretext, even the frequent +examples of Anthony Trollope's fine middle period, looked at in the +light of old affection and that of his great heavy shovelfuls of +testimony to constituted English matters; a testimony of course looser +and thinner than Balzac's to <i>his</i> range of facts, but charged with +something of the big Balzac<a name="page_022" id="page_022"></a> authority. These various, let alone +numerous, deeper-toned strokes of the great Victorian clock were so many +steps in the march of our age, besides being so many notes, full and +far-reverberating, of our having high company to keep—high, I mean, to +cover all the ground, in the sense of the genial pitch of it. So it was, +I remember too, that our parents spoke of their memory of the successive +surpassing attestations of the contemporary presence of Scott; to which +we might have replied, and doubtless after no great space began to +reply, that our state, and even their later one, allowing for a certain +gap, had nothing to envy any other. I witnessed, for that matter, with +all my senses, young as I was, the never-to-be-equalled degree of +difference made, for what may really be called the world-consciousness +happily exposed to it, by the prolonged "coming-out" of The Newcomes, +yellow number by number, and could take the general civilised +participation in the process for a sort of basking in the light of +distinction. The process repeated itself for some years under other +forms and stimuli, but the merciless change was to come—so that through +whatever bristling mazes we may now pick our way it is not to find them +open into any such vales of Arcady. My claim for our old privilege is +that we did then, with our pace of dignity, proceed from vale to vale.<a name="page_023" id="page_023"></a></p> + +<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2> + +<p>My point at any rate, such as it is, would be that even at the age I had +reached in 1860 something of the happier time still lingered—the time +in which a given product of the press might have a situation and an +aspect, a considerability, so to speak, a circumscription and an <i>aura</i>; +room to breathe and to show in, margin for the casting of its nets. The +occasion at large was doubtless shrinking, one could note—shrinking +like the unlet "house" on a night of grandest opera, but "standing room +only" was not yet everywhere the sign, and the fine deliberate thing +could here and there find its seat. I really indeed might have held it +the golden age of letters still, and of their fond sister leisure, with +that quiet swim into our ken on its appointed day, during our Bonn +summer, of the charming Once a Week of the prime, the prime of George +Meredith and Charles Reade and J. E. Millais and George du Maurier; +which our father, to bridge our separation from him, sent us, from Paris +and elsewhere, in prompt and characteristic relief of our plotted, our +determined strict servitude to German, and to the embrace of the sweet +slim essence of which the<a name="page_024" id="page_024"></a> strain of one's muscles round a circular ton +of advertisement was not a condition attached. I should like to say that +I rioted, all that season, on the supreme German classics <i>and</i> on Evan +Harrington, with Charles Reade's A Good Fight, the assured little +prelude to The Cloister and the Hearth, thrown in; and I should indeed +be ready to say it, were not the expression gross for the really hushed +piety of my attitude during those weeks. It was perhaps not quite till +then that I fully emerged from the black shadow of the École +Préparatoire aux Écoles Spéciales, not quite till we had got off beyond +the blest Rhine at Basle that I ceased to hear and feel all but just +behind me, portentous perhaps of another spring, the cold breath of the +monster. The guttery Bonn-Gasse was during those weeks of the year close +and stale, and the house of our good Herr Doctor Humpert, professor at +the Bonn Gymnasium, in which I shared a room with my brother Wilky, +contracted and dim, as well as fragrant through a range of assaults that +differed only in kind and not at all in number from those of the street +itself; and yet I held the period and the whole situation idyllic—the +slightly odd sense of which was one's being to that extent attuned to +the life of letters and of (oh the great thing!) impressions "gone in +for." To feel a unity, a character and a tone in one's impressions, to +feel<a name="page_025" id="page_025"></a> them related and all harmoniously coloured, that <i>was</i> positively +to face the æsthetic, the creative, even, quite wondrously, the critical +life and almost on the spot to commence author. They had begun, the +impressions—that was what was the matter with them—to scratch quite +audibly at the door of liberation, of extension, of projection; what +they were <i>of</i> one more or less knew, but what they were <i>for</i> was the +question that began to stir, though one was still to be a long time at a +loss directly to answer it.</p> + +<p>There, for the present, was the rub, the dark difficulty at which one +could but secretly stare—secretly because one was somehow ashamed of +its being there and would have quickly removed one's eyes, or tried to +clear them, if caught in the act of watching. Impressions were not +merely all right but were the dearest things in the world; only one +would have gone to the stake rather than in the first place confessed to +some of them, or in the second announced that one really lived by them +and built on them. This failure then to take one's stand in the +connection could but come from the troubled view that they were naught +without a backing, a stout stiff hard-grained underside that would hold +them together and of which the terrible name was simply science, +otherwise learning, and learning exclusively by books, which were at +once the most beautiful and<a name="page_026" id="page_026"></a> the most dreadful things in the world, some +of them right, strikingly, showily right, some of them disgracefully and +almost unmentionably wrong, that is grossly irrelevant, as for instance +a bound volume of Once a Week would be, but remarkable above all for +overwhelming number and in general for defiance of comprehension. It was +true that one had from time to time the rare adventure of one's surprise +at understanding parts of them none the less—understanding more than a +very little, more than much too little; but there was no practical +support to speak of in that, even the most one could ever hope to +understand being a mere drop in the bucket. Never did I quite strike it +off, I think, that impressions might themselves <i>be</i> science—and this +probably because I didn't then know them, when it came to the point, as +anything but life. I knew them but by that collective and +unpractical—many persons would have said that frivolous—name; which +saw me little further. I was under the impression—this in fact the very +liveliest of what might have been called the lot—that life and +knowledge were simply mutual opposites, one inconsistent with the other; +though hovered about, together, at the same time, by the anomaly that +when knowledge impinged upon life, pushed against her, as it were, and +drove her to the wall, it was all right, and such was knowledge's way +and title; whereas<a name="page_027" id="page_027"></a> when life played the like tricks with knowledge +nothing but shame for the ruder, even if lighter, party could accrue. +There was to come to me of course in time the due perception that +neither was of the least use—use to myself—without the other; but +meanwhile, and even for much after, the extreme embarrassment continued: +to whichever of the opposites one gave one's self it was with a sense of +all but basely sacrificing the other. However, the conflict and the +drama involved in the question at large was doubtless what was to make +consciousness—under whichever of the two names one preferred to +entertain it—supremely intense and interesting.</p> + +<p>This then is by way of saying that the idyll, as I have called it, of +the happy juncture I glanced at a moment back came from the fact that I +didn't at all know how much I was living, and meanwhile quite supposed I +was considerably learning. When, rising at some extraordinary hour of +the morning, I went forth through the unawakened town (and the Germans, +at that time, heaven knows, were early afoot too), and made for the open +country and the hill, in particular, of the neighbouring Venusberg, +long, low and bosky, where the dews were still fresh and ancient mummies +of an old cloister, as I remember it, somewhere perched and exposed, I +was doing, to my sense, an attuned thing;<a name="page_028" id="page_028"></a> attuned, that is, to my +coming home to bend double over Schiller's Thirty Years' War in the +strenuous spirit that would keep me at it, or that would vary it with +Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften, till late in the warm afternoon. I found +German prose much tougher than the verse, and thereby more opposed to +"life," as to which I of course couldn't really shake off the sense that +it might be worked as infinitely comprehensive, comprehensive even of +the finest discriminations against it. The felicity, present but +naturally unanalysed, was that the whole thing, our current episode, +<i>was</i> exactly comprehensive of life, presenting it in particular as +characteristically German, and therein freshly vivid—with the great +vividness that, by our parents' vague wish, we were all three after or +out for; in spite of our comparatively restricted use, in those days, of +these verbal graces. Such therefore was the bright unity of our +experience, or at least of my own share in it—this luck that, through +the intensity of my wanting it to, all consciousness, all my own +immediate, <i>tasted</i> German, to the great and delightful quickening of my +imagination. The quickening was of course no such matter as I was to +know nearly ten years later on plunging for the first time over the Alps +into Italy; but, letting alone that I was then so much older, I had +wondered about Italy, to put it<a name="page_029" id="page_029"></a> embracingly, far more than I was +constitutionally capable of wondering about Germany. It was enough for +me at Bonn that I felt no lack of appetite—had for the time all the +illusion of being on the way to something; to something, I mean, with +which the taste of German might somehow <i>directly</i> mix itself. Every +aspect and object round about was a part, at all events, of the actual +mixture; and when on drowsy afternoons, not a little interspaced indeed, +I attempted the articulate perusal of Hermann und Dorothea with our good +Professor, it was like dreaming, to the hum of bees, if not to the +aftertaste of "good old Rhenish," in some homely fruity +eighteenth-century garden.</p> + +<p>The good old Rhenish is no such false note in this reconstitution; I +seem to see the Frau Doctorin and her ancient mildly-scowling sister +Fräulein Stamm, who reminded me of Hepzibah Pyncheon in The House of the +Seven Gables, perpetually wiping green hock-glasses and holding them up +to our meagre light, as well as setting out long-necked bottles, with +rather chalky cakes, in that forward section of our general +eating-and-living-room which formed our precinct of reception and +conversation. The unbroken space was lighted at either end, from street +and court, and its various effects of tempered shade or, frankly +speaking, of rather greasy gloom, amid<a name="page_030" id="page_030"></a> which the light touch of +elegance gleamed but from the polish of the glasses and the sloping +shoulders of their bottle, comes back to me as the view of an intensely +internal interior. I recall how oppressively in that apartment, how +congestedly, as in some cage of which the wires had been papered over, I +felt housed and disconnected; I scarce then, I think, knew what the +matter was, but it could only have been that in all those summer weeks, +to the best of my belief, no window was ever once opened. Still, there +was the scene, the thick, the much-mixed chiaroscuro through which the +two ladies of the family emerged from an exiguous retreat just off the +back end of the place with ample platters of food; the almost +impenetrable dusk of the middle zone, where the four or five of us, +seated with our nutcracker-faced pastor, conveyed the food to our mouths +with a confidence mainly borrowed from the play of his own deep-plunging +knife; and then the forward, the festal extension, the privilege of +occasionally lingering in which, or of returning to it for renewed +refreshment, was a recognition both of our general minding of our +business upstairs—left as we were to thumb our Flügel's Dictionary by +the hour so long as we invoked no other oracle. Our drowsy Doctor +invited no such approach; he smiled upon us as if unseen forefingers of +great force had been inserted for<a name="page_031" id="page_031"></a> the widening of his mouth at the +corners, and I had the sense of his not quite knowing what to make of +our being so very gently barbaric, or rather so informally civilised; he +safely housed and quite rankly fed us, guided us to country walks and to +the swimming-baths by the Rhine-side, introduced us to fruit-gardens +where, on payment of the scantest tribute, we were suffered to consume +off-hand bushels of cherries, plums and pears; suffered us to ascend the +Drachenfels and to partake of coffee at Rolandseck and in other friendly +open-air situations; but flung his gothic shadow as little as possible +over my so passive page at least, and took our rate of acquisition +savingly for granted.</p> + +<p>This, in the optimism of the hour, I have no memory of resenting; the +page, though slow, managed at the same time to be stirring, and I asked +no more of any one or anything but that they should be with all due +gothicism whatever they most easily might. The long vistas of the +beeches and poplars on the other side of the Rhine, after we had crossed +by the funicular ferry, gothically rustled and murmured: I fancied their +saying perpetually "We are German woods, we are German woods—which +makes us very wonderful, do you know? and unlike any others: don't you +feel the spell of the very sound of us and of the beautiful words, 'Old +German woods, old German<a name="page_032" id="page_032"></a> woods,' even if you can't tell why?" I +couldn't altogether tell why, but took everything on trust as mystically +and valuably gothic—valuably because ministering with peculiar +directness, as I gathered, to culture. I was in, or again I was "out," +in my small way, for culture; which seemed quite to come, come from +everywhere at once, with the most absurd conciliatory rush, pitifully +small as would have been any list of the sources I tapped. The beauty +was in truth that everything was a source, giving me, by the charmingest +breach of logic, more than it at all appeared to hold; which was exactly +what had not been the case at the Institution Rochette, where things had +appeared, or at least had pretended, to hold so much more than they +gave. The oddity was that about us now everything—everything but the +murmur of the German woods and the great flow and magic name of the +Rhine—was more ugly than beautiful, tended in fact to say at every +turn: "You shall suffer, yes, indeed you <i>are</i> doing so (stick up for +your right to!) in your sense of form; which however is quite compatible +with culture, is really one of the finest parts of it, and may decidedly +prove to you that you're getting it." I hadn't, in rubbing, with +whatever weakness, against French and, so far as might be, against +France, and in sinking, very sensibly, more and more into them, +particularly<a name="page_033" id="page_033"></a> felt that I was getting it <i>as</i> such; what I was getting +as such was decidedly rather my famous "life," and without so much as +thinking of the degree, with it all, of the valuable and the helpful.</p> + +<p>Life meanwhile I had a good deal of at my side in the person of my +brother Wilky, who, as I have had occasion elsewhere to say, contrived +in those years to live, or to have every appearance of so doing, with an +immediacy that left me far in the lurch. I was always still wondering +how, while he had solved the question simply <i>ambulando</i>, which was for +him but by the merest sociable stroll. This represented to me +success—success of a kind, but such an assured kind—in a degree that +was my despair; and I have never forgotten how, that summer, when the +Herr Doctor did look in, did settle down a little to have the bristling +page out with us, Wilky's share of the hour took on the spot the form of +his turning at once upon our visitor the tables of earnest inquiry. He +delighted, after this tribute of eagerness, to meet the Doctor's +interrogative advance; but the communication so made was of anything and +everything except the fruit of his reading (the act of reading was +inhuman and repugnant to him), and I amazedly noted while I nursed my +small hoard that anything he offered did in the event quite as well: he +could talk with such<a name="page_034" id="page_034"></a> charm, such drollery of candour, such +unexpectedness of figure, about what he had done and what he hadn't—or +talk at least before it, behind it and beside it. We had three or four +house-companions, youths from other places attending the Gymnasium and +committed to our Professor's care, as to whom I could somehow but infer +that they were, each in his personal way, inordinately gothic—which +they had to be to supply to my mind a relation, or a substitute for a +relation, with them; whereas my younger brother, without a scrap of a +view of them, a grain of theory or formula, tumbled straight into their +confidence all round. Our air for <i>him</i> was by just so much life as it +couldn't have dreamed of being culture, and he was so far right that +when the son of the house and its only child, the slim and ardent +Theodor, who figured to me but as a case of such classic sensibility, of +the Lieder or the Werther sort, as might have made, with the toss of a +yellow lock or the gleam of a green blouse, the image for an Uhland or a +Heine stanza, had imparted to him an intention of instant suicide under +some resentment of parental misconception, he had been able to use +dissuasion, or otherwise the instinct of then most freely fraternising, +with a success to which my relish for so romantic a stroke as charmingly +in Theodor's character and setting mightn't at all have<a name="page_035" id="page_035"></a> attained. There +is a small something of each of us in a passage of an ingenuous letter +addressed by him from the midst of these conditions to his parents. I +fondly catch, I confess, at any of these recoverable lights; finding +them at the best too scant for my commemorative purpose.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>Willy got his photograph this morning after three hours' hard work. +From the post-office he was sent to the custom-house, and there was +obliged to sign his name and to go to some neighbouring bookstore +to buy a seal. On returning to the custom-house he was sent back to +the post-office to get some document or other. After obtaining this +article he turned his steps once more to the custom-house, where an +insolent officer told him he must wait an hour. W. informed him +that he would return at the end of the hour, and accordingly for +the third time went to the C.H., and was conducted by the clerk to +a cellar where the packages were kept, and there told to take off +his hat. He obeyed, raging, and then was a fourth time sent to the +P.O.—this time to pay money. Happily he is now in possession of +his property. H. and he took a walk this afternoon to a +fruit-garden, where plums, cherries, gooseberries and currants were +abundant. After half an hour's good work H. left W. finishing +merely the plums—the cherry and gooseberry course to come later. +He was so enchanted that he thought H. a great fool to leave so +soon. How does Paris now strike you? It can't be as nice as Bonn. +You had better write to Bob.</p></div> + +<p>Bob, our youngest brother, had been left at Geneva with excellent M. +Maquelin and was at<a name="page_036" id="page_036"></a> that time <i>en course</i>, over the Alps, with this +gentleman and their young companions; a most desirable, delicious +excursion, which I remember following in envious fancy, as it included a +descent to the Italian Lakes and a push on as far as Genoa. In reference +to which excursion I cull a line or two from a faded scrap of a letter +addressed a little later by this youngest of us to his "Beloved Brother" +William. "This is about our Grande Course. We started at 5 o'clock in +the morning with our faces and hands all nicely washed and our nails +clean. The morning was superb, and as we waited in the court the soft +balmy air of the mountains came in bringing with it the melodious sound +of the rappel for breakfast. This finished we bade adieu, and I could +see the emotions of the kind and ever-watchful Madame Maquelin as a few +silent drops trickled down her fair cheeks. We at last arrived at the +boat, where we met Mr. Peters, a portly gentleman from the city of +Philadelphia, with his two sweet sons, one twelve, the other seven years +old, the eldest coming from Mr. E.'s school with no very good opinion of +the principal—saying he had seen him in a state of tightness several +times during his stay there." Mr. Peters appears to have been something +of a pessimist, for, when at a later stage "it began to rain hard, and +half the road was a foot deep in water, and the cocher had<a name="page_037" id="page_037"></a> stopped +somewhere to get lanterns and had at the same time indulged in certain +potations which didn't make him drive any the straighter," this +gentleman "insinuated that we had all better have been with our +mothers." The letter records at some length the early phases of the +affair, but under the weight of the vision of Italy it rather breaks +down and artlessly simplifies. "Genoa is a most lively town, and there +is a continual swarm of sailors in the street. We visited several +palaces, among others that of Victor Emanuel, which is very fine, and +the fruit is very cheap. We stayed there several days, but at last +started for Turin, where we spent a Sunday—a place I didn't much like, +I suppose because of that reason. We left Turin the next day on foot, +but lost our road and had to come back." I recover even in presence of +these light accents my shade of wonder at this odd chance that made the +least developed of us the subject of what seemed to me even then a +privilege of the highest intensity; and there again keeps it company my +sense, through all the after years, that this early glimpse of the blest +old Italy, almost too early though it appears to have but just missed +being, might have done something towards preparing or enriching for Bob +the one little plot of consciousness in which his deeply troubled life +was to find rest. He was in the event also fondly to aim at painting, +like two<a name="page_038" id="page_038"></a> of his brothers; but whereas they were to fumble with the +lock, in their very differing degree, only in those young years, he was +to keep at it most as he grew older, though always with a perfect +intelligence of the inevitable limits of the relation, the same +intelligence that was so sharp and sad, so extraordinarily free and fine +and detached in fact, as play of mind, play of independent talk and of +pen, for the limits of his relation to many other matters. Singularly +intelligent all round, yet with faculties that had early declined any +consummation of acquaintance with such training as under a different +sort of pressure he might have enjoyed, he had an admirable hand and +eye, and I have known no other such capacity for absorbing or storing up +the minutest truths and shades of landscape fact and giving them out +afterward, in separation from the scene, with full assurance and +felicity. He could do this still better even than he cared to do; I for +my part cared much more that he should than he ever did himself, and +then it was, I dare say, that I made the reflection: "He took in the +picture of Italy, with his firm hard gift, having the chance while +William and I were still, comparatively, small untouched and gaping +barbarians; and it should always be in him to do at some odd fine moment +a certain honour to that." I held to it that that sensibility had played +in him more than by any<a name="page_039" id="page_039"></a> outward measure at the time; which was perhaps +indeed one of the signs within me of the wasteful habit or trick of a +greater feeling for people's potential propriety or felicity or full +expression than they seemed able to have themselves. At all events I was +absolutely never to cease to remember for Bob, through everything—and +there was much and of the most agitated and agitating—that he had been +dipped as a boy into the sacred stream; to some effect which, thanks to +two or three of his most saving and often so amusing sensibilities, the +turbid sea of his life might never quite wash away.</p> + +<p>William had meanwhile come to Bonn with us, but was domiciled with +another tutor, younger and fairer and more of the world, above all more +ventilated and ventilating, Herr Stromberg, whose defect might in fact +have seemed that, with his constant exhibition of the stamp received by +him from the writings of Lord Macaulay, passages of which he could +recite by heart, and the circumstance that his other pupil, William's +comrade for a time, was of unmitigatedly English, that is of +quasi-Byronic association, he didn't quite rise to the full gothic +standard. Otherwise indeed our brother moved on the higher plane of +light and air and ease, and above all of enjoyed society, that we felt +he naturally must. Present to me yet is the thrill of learning from him +that his<a name="page_040" id="page_040"></a> English fellow-pupil was the grandson, if I remember rightly +the degree of descent, of Mary Chaworth, Byron's "first love," and my +sense afterwards, in gaping at young Mr. Musters himself, that this +independently romantic contact would have been more to my own private +purpose at least than the most emphasised gothicism. None the less do I +regain it as a part of my current vision that Frau Stromberg, who was +young and fair, wrote tragedies as well as made pancakes—which were +served to each consumer double, a thick confiture within being the +reason of this luxuriance, and being also a note beyond our experience +in the Bonn-Gasse; and that with the printed five acts of a certain +"Cleopatra" before me, read aloud in the first instance to her young +inmates and by my brother passed on to me, I lost myself in the view of +I scarce knew what old-world Germanic grace, positively, or little +court-city practice of the theatre: these things so lived in the small +thick pamphlet, "grey paper with blunt type" and bristling, to my +discomfiture, with descriptive stage directions, vast dense bracketed +tracts, gothic enough in all conscience, as to which I could already +begin to wonder whether such reinforcements of presentation proved more +for or against the true expressional essence of the matter; for or +against, that is, there being nothing at all so dramatic, so chargeable<a name="page_041" id="page_041"></a> +with meaning and picture, as speech, of whatever sort, made perfect. +Such speculations, I may parenthesise, might well have been fostered, +and doubtless were, by an impression that I find commemorated in a few +lines of a letter of my father's to a friend in America—he having +brought us on to Bonn, introduced us to our respective caretakers and +remained long enough to have had an evening at the theatre, to which we +accompanied him. "We had Ristori to play Mary Stuart for us last +night—which was the vulture counterfeiting Jenny Wren. Every little +while the hoarse exulting voice, the sanguinary beak, the lurid leer of +menace, and the relentless talons looked forth from the feathery mass +and sickened you with disgust. She would do Elizabeth better." I recall +the performance in every feature, as well as my absence of such +reserves, though quite also the point to which I was impressed by the +utterance of them; not that it didn't leave me at the same time free to +feel that the heroine of history represented could scarce have been at +all a dove-like, much less a wren-like person. She had indeed on Madame +Ristori's showing prodigious resources of militant mobility—of what in +fact would be called to-day mobilisation. Several years later on I was +to see the actress play the same part in America; and then, if I am not +mistaken, was to note scarce more<a name="page_042" id="page_042"></a> than one point; the awful effect on +<i>any</i> histrionic case, even on one so guardedly artful as hers, of +having been dragged round the globe and forced home, so far as might be, +to imperfect comprehensions. The big brush had come fairly to daub the +canvas. Let the above, however, serve in particular to lead in as many +examples of my father's singularly striking and personal habit of +expression and weight of thought as these pages may find room for.</p> + +<p>The one difficulty is that to open that general door into the limbo of +old letters, charged with their exquisite ghostly appeal, is almost to +sink into depths of concession. I yield here for instance to the claim +of a page or two from William, just contemporary and addressed to our +parents in Paris—and yield perhaps but for no better reason than that +of the small historic value or recoverable charm that I am moved to find +in its illustrative items. The reference of its later lines is to a +contemporary cousin, young and blooming, by whom I have already ever so +lightly brushed<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> and who figured quite with the grand air on our young +horizon; the only daughter of the brightest of the Albany uncles (by +that time lost and mourned) now on the tour of Europe with a pair of +protective elders for her entrance upon life and at that hour +surrounding<a name="page_043" id="page_043"></a> our parents, her uncle and aunt, with a notably voluminous +rustle of fresh Paris clothes, the far-spreading drapery of the more and +more draped and flounced and "sloped" second Empire. This friendly +frou-frou almost reached our ears, so sociable for us was every sound of +her, in our far-off Rhineland. She was with her stature and shape the +finest possible person to carry clothes, and I thought of her, with a +revival of the old yearning envy, as now quite transcendently orphaned +and bereft, dowered, directed and equipped.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>Your hearts, I know, would have been melted if you had had a view +of us this Sunday morning. I went directly after breakfast for the +boys, and though H. had an "iron stomach-ache," as he called it, we +went off together to that low wooded hill which the Aunt could see +from her window when you were here, and walked about till +dinner-time, H. being all the while in great pain. In one part we +found a platform with a stone bench commanding a view of the whole +valley, and, as we were rather tired, sat down on it, H. and Wilky +each with a Once a Week, while I tried to draw the view in my +pocket-book. We wondered what our beloved parents were doing at +that moment, 11.30, and thought you must all have been in your +salon, Alice at the window with her eyes fixed on her novel, but +eating some rich fruit that Father has just brought in for her from +the Palais Royal, and the lovely Mother and Aunt in armchairs, +their hands crossed in front of them, listening to Father, who +walks up and down talking of the superiority of America to these +countries after all,<a name="page_044" id="page_044"></a> and how much better it is we should have done +with them. We wished, oh we wished we could have been with you to +join in the conversation and partake of the fruit. We got up from +the seat and went on with a heavy sigh, but in a way so fraternal, +presenting such a sweet picture of brotherly unitedness and +affection, that it would have done you good to see us.</p> + +<p>And so it is every day that we meet for our shorter walks and +talks. The German gets on slowly, but I notice a very marked +improvement in talking. I have not kept at it so hard this last +week as before, and I prevent H. from working his eyes out, which +he seems on the whole rather less inclined to do. I am going to +read as much as I can the rest of the time we are here. It seems a +mere process of soaking, requiring no mental effort, but only time +and steady patience. My room is very comfortable now I've got used +to it, and I have a pair of slippers of green plush heavy and +strong enough to last all my life and then be worn by my children. +The photograph of our Zoffingen group has come, which gives me a +moustache big enough for three lifeguardsmen. Tell us something +more about Mary Helen. How long does she expect to stay in Europe, +and who is this Dr. Adams—the man she is engaged to? She directs +me to write to her in his care—so that I wish you would ask her, +as she says she hopes to meet me, whether I shall still address her +as Miss James? Of course it would be painful, but I think I could +do it if Adams weren't there. Let the delicious little grey-eyed +Alice be locked up alone on the day after the receipt of this with +paper and envelopes to write a letter unassisted, uncorrected and +unpunctuated to her loving brothers, who would send her novels and +peaches if they could. What a blessing it is to have such parents, +such a perfect Mother and magnificent Father and dear good Aunt and +splendid little Sister!<a name="page_045" id="page_045"></a></p></div> + +<p>I may mention that Mary Helen was not "engaged" to the gentleman +above-mentioned, and was eventually to marry the late Alfred Grymes, +originally of Louisiana. Also that a letter subsequent to this, +apparently of the first days in September, sounds to his father the +first note of my brother's definite personal preference, as he seemed +lately and increasingly, though not in conditions markedly propitious, +to have become aware of it, for an adoption of the "artistic career." It +was an odd enough circumstance, in respect to the attested blood in our +veins, that no less than three of our father's children, with two of his +grandsons to add to these, and with a collateral addendum representing +seven, in all, of our grandfather's, William James's, descendants in +three generations, should have found the artistic career in general and +the painter's trade in particular irresistibly solicit them.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>I wish you would as you promised set down as clearly as you can on +paper what your idea of the nature of Art <i>is</i>, because I do not, +probably, understand it fully, and should like to have it presented +in a form that I might think over at my leisure. I wish you would +do so as fully as you conveniently can, so that I may ruminate +it—and I won't say more about it till I have heard from you again. +As for what your last letter did contain, what can I do but thank +you for every word of it and assure you that they went to the right +spot. Having such a Father with us, how can we be<a name="page_046" id="page_046"></a> other than in +some measure worthy of him?—if not perhaps as eminently so as the +distance leads his fond heart to imagine. I never value him so much +as when I am away from him. At home I see only his striking +defects, but here he seems all perfection, and I wonder as I write +why I didn't cherish him more when he was beside me. I beg darling +old Mother's forgiveness too for the rude and dastardly way in +which I snub her, and the Aunt for the impatience and violence I +have always shown her. I shall be a perfect sherry-cobbler to both +of them, and to the small Alice too, young as she may be for such +treats.</p> + +<p>I have just got home from dining with the boys and their Humperts; +where I found the Doctor as genial as ever and the two old ladies +perfect characters for Dickens. They have been so shut out from the +world and melting together so long by the kitchen fire that the +minds of both have become fused into one, and then seem to +constitute a sort of two-bodied individual. I never saw anything +more curious than the way they sit mumbling together at the end of +the table, each using simultaneously the same comment if anything +said at our end strikes their ear. H. pegs away pretty stoutly, but +I don't think you need worry about him. He and Wilky appear to get +on in great harmony and enliven themselves occasionally by +brotherly trials of strength, quite good-natured, in their room, +when excess of labour has made them sleepy or heavy. In these +sometimes one, sometimes the other is victorious. They often pay me +a visit here while I am dressing, which of course is highly +convenient—and I have more than once been with <i>them</i> early enough +to be present at Wilky's tumble out of bed and consequent +awakening, with the call on the already-at-work H.: "Why the +mischief didn't you stop me?" Wilky and I walked to Rolandseck +yesterday afternoon, and after a furious<a name="page_047" id="page_047"></a> race back to the station +found ourselves too late for the train by a second. So we took a +boat and rowed down here, which was delightful. We are going to put +H. through a splashing good walk daily. A thousand thanks to the +cherry-lipped, apricot-nosed, double-chinned little Sister for her +strongly dashed-off letter, which inflamed the hearts of her lonely +brothers with an intense longing to smack her celestial cheeks.</p></div> + +<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2> + +<p>I have before me another communication of about the same moment, a +letter addressed to his father in Paris within that month; from which, +in spite of its lively interest as I hold, I cull nothing—and precisely +because of that interest, which prescribes for it a later appearance in +conditions in which it may be given entire. William is from this season +on, to my sense, so livingly and admirably reflected in his letters, +which were happily through much of his career both numerous and highly +characteristic, that I feel them particularly plead, in those cases in +which they most testify to his personal history, for the separate +gathered presentation that happily awaits them. <i>There</i> best may figure +the serious and reasoned reply drawn from him by some assuredly +characteristic enough communication of our parent's own in respect to +his declared preference for a painter's life over any other. Lost is +this original and, in the light of later matters, sufficiently quaint +declaration, and lost the paternal protest answered by my brother from +Bonn and anything <i>but</i> infelicitous, on its side, so far as the truer +apprehension went, under<a name="page_049" id="page_049"></a> the showing of the time to come. The only +thing was that our father had a wonderful way of being essentially right +without being practically or, as it were, vulgarly, determinant, and +that this relegation of his grounds of contention to the sphere of the +non-immediate, the but indirectly urgent, from the point of view of the +thing really to <i>do</i>, couldn't but often cause impatience in young +breasts conscious of gifts or desires or ideals of which the very sign +and warrant, the truth they were known by, was that they were +susceptible of application. It was in no world of close application that +our wondrous parent moved, and his indifference at the first blush to +the manifestation of special and marketable talents and faculties, +restlessly outward purposes of whatever would-be "successful" sort, was +apt to be surpassable only by his delight subsequently taken in our +attested and visible results, the very fruits of application; as to +which the possibility, perhaps even the virtual guarantee, hadn't so +much left him cold in advance as made him adversely and "spiritually" +hot. The sense of that word was the most living thing in the world for +him—to the point that the spiritual simply meant to him the practical +and the successful, so far as he could get into touch with such +denominations, or so far, that is, as he could face them or care for +them <i>a priori</i>. Fortunately,<a name="page_050" id="page_050"></a> as he had observational powers of the +happiest, perceptions—perceptions of character and value, perceptions +of relation and effect, perceptions in short of the whole—turned to the +ground sensibly beneath our feet, as well as a splendid, an +extraordinarily animated and, so far as he himself at least was +concerned, guiding and governing soul, justice and generosity always +eventually played up, the case worked itself happily out, and before we +knew it he had found it quite the rightest of all cases, while we on our +side had had the liveliest, and certainly the most amusing and +civilising, moral or, as he would have insisted, spiritual recreation by +the way.</p> + +<p>My brother challenges him, with a beautiful deference, on the imputed +damage to what might be best in a man by the professional pursuit of +"art"—which he appears to have set forth with characteristic emphasis; +and I take the example for probably one of the rarest in all the so +copious annals of parental opposition to the æsthetic as distinguished +from some other more respectable course. What was marked in our father's +prime uneasiness in presence of any particular form of success we might, +according to our lights as then glimmering, propose to invoke was that +it bravely, or with such inward assurance, dispensed with any suggestion +of an alternative. What we were to do instead was just to <i>be</i> +something, something<a name="page_051" id="page_051"></a> unconnected with specific doing, something free +and uncommitted, something finer in short than being <i>that</i>, whatever it +was, might consist of. The "career of art" has again and again been +deprecated and denounced, on the lips of anxiety or authority, as a +departure from the career of business, of industry and respectability, +the so-called regular life, but it was perhaps never elsewhere to know +dissuasion on the very ground of its failing to uplift the spirit in the +ways it most pretends to. I must in fairness add, however, that if the +uneasiness I here refer to continued, and quite by exception as compared +with the development of other like episodes, during the whole of my +brother's fortunately but little prolonged studio season, it was really +because more alternatives swarmed before our parent's eyes, in the +cause, than he could bring himself to simplify it by naming. He +apprehended ever so deeply and tenderly his eldest son's other +genius—as to which he was to be so justified; though this indeed was +not to alter the fact that when afterwards that subject went in, by a +wondrous reaction, for the pursuit of science, first of chemistry and +then of anatomy and physiology and medicine, with psychology and +philosophy at last piling up the record, the rich <i>malaise</i> at every +turn characteristically betrayed itself, each of these surrenders being, +by the<a name="page_052" id="page_052"></a> measure of them in the parental imagination, so comparatively +narrowing. That was the nearest approach to any plea for some other +application of the spirit—that they <i>were</i> narrowing. When I myself, +later on, began to "write" it was breathed upon me with the finest +bewildering eloquence, with a power of suggestion in truth which I +fairly now count it a gain to have felt play over me, that this too was +narrowing. On the subsequent history of which high paradox no better +comment could occur to me than my find of a passage in a letter long +subsequently addressed to Mr. James T. Fields, then proprietor and +editor of the Atlantic Monthly magazine—a letter under date of May 1868 +and referring clearly to some published remarks on a certain young +writer which did violence to the blessedly quick paternal prejudice.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>I had no sooner left your sanctum yesterday than I was afflicted to +remember how I had profaned it by my unmeasured talk about poor H. +Please forget it utterly. I don't know how it is with better men, +but the parental sentiment is so fiendish a thing with me that if +anyone attempt to slay my young, especially in a clandestine way, +or out of a pious regard (<i>e.g</i>.) to the welfare of the souls +comprised in the diocese of the Atlantic, I can't help devoting him +bag and baggage to the infernal gods. I am not aware of my animus +until I catch, as yesterday, a courteous ear; then the unholy fire +flames forth at such a rate as to leave me no doubt on reflection +where it was originally lighted.</p></div> + +<p>Almost all my dear father is there, making the faded page to-day +inexpressibly touching to me; his passionate tenderness, his infinite +capacity for reaction on reaction, a force in him fruitful in so many +more directions than any high smoothness of <i>parti-pris</i> could be, and +his beautiful fresh individual utterance, always so stamped with the +very whole of him. The few lines make for me, after all the years, a +sort of silver key, so exquisitely fitting, to the treasure of living +intercourse, of a domestic air quickened and infinitely coloured, +comprised in all our younger time. The renewed sense of which, however, +has carried me for the moment too far from the straighter line of my +narrative.</p> + +<p>The author of the young letter of which I have deferred presentation met +in Paris, shortly after that date, the other party to the discussion; +and the impression of the endless day of our journey, my elder and my +younger brothers' and mine, from Bonn to that city, has scarcely faded +from me. The railway service was so little then what it has become that +I even marvel at our having made our connections between our early rise +in the Bonn-Gasse and our midnight tumble into bed at the Hôtel des +Trois Empereurs in the Place du Palais Royal; a still-felt rapture, a +revelation of the Parisian idea of bed after the rude German conception, +our sore discipline for<a name="page_054" id="page_054"></a> so many weeks. I remember Cologne and its +cathedral almost in the bland dawn, and our fresh start thence for +Strasbourg, now clearly recognised, alas, as a start back to America, to +which it had been of a sudden settled that we were, still with a fine +inconsequence, to return. We had seen Cologne cathedral by excursion +from Bonn, but we saw Strasbourg, to my sorrow until a far later +occasion soothed it, only as a mild monster behind bars, that is above +chimneys, housetops and fortifications; a loss not made up to me by +other impressions or particulars, vivid and significant as I found +myself none the less supposing several of these. Those were the +September days in which French society, so far as it was of the Empire +at least, moved more or less in its mass upon Homburg and Baden-Baden; +and we met it in expressive samples, and in advance and retreat, during +our incessant stops, those long-time old stops, unknown to the modern +age, when everyone appeared to alight and walk about with the animation +of prisoners suddenly pardoned, and ask for conveniences, and clamour +for food, and get mixed with the always apparently still dustier people +of opposite trains drawn up for the same purposes. We appeared to be +concerned with none but first-class carriages, as an effect of which our +own was partly occupied, the livelong day, by the <i>gens</i> of<a name="page_055" id="page_055"></a> a noble +French house as to which we thus had frequent revelations—a pair of +footmen and a lady's maid, types of servile impudence taking its ease, +who chattered by the hour for our wonderstruck ears, treating them to +their first echo of the strange underworld, the sustaining vulgarity, of +existences classified as "great." They opened vistas, and I remember how +when, much later, I came to consider the designed picture, first in +Edmond About and then in Alphonse Daudet, of fifty features symptomatic +of the social pace at which the glittering régime hurried to its end, +there came back to me the breath of this sidewind of the frenzied dance +that we had caught during those numerous and so far from edifying hours +in our fine old deep-seated compartment. The impression, I now at any +rate perfectly recover, was one that could feed full enough any optimism +of the appointedly modest condition. It was true that Madame la +Marquise, who was young and good-natured and pretty without beauty, and +unmistakably "great," exhaling from afar, as I encouraged myself to +imagine, the scented air of the Tuileries, came on occasion and looked +in on us and smiled, and even pouted, through her elegant patience; so +that she at least, I recollect, caused to swim before me somehow such a +view of happy privilege at the highest pitch as made me sigh the more<a name="page_056" id="page_056"></a> +sharply, even if the less professedly, for our turning our backs on the +complex order, the European, fresh to me still, in which contrasts +flared and flourished and through which discrimination could +unexhaustedly riot—pointing so many more morals, withal, if that was +the benefit it was supposed to be, than we should find pretexts for "on +the other side." We were to fall as soon as we were at home again to +reading the Revue des Deux Mondes—though doubtless again I should speak +here, with any emphasis, but for myself; my chin, in Europe, had scarce +risen to the level of that publication; but at Newport in Rhode Island, +our next following place of sojourn, I speedily shot up so as quite to +bend down to it: it took its place therewith as the very headspring of +culture, a mainstay in exile, and as opening wide in especial the doors +of that fictive portrayal of a society which put a price, for the +brooding young reader, on cases, on <i>cadres</i>, in the Revue parlance, +already constituted and propitiously lighted. Then it was that the +special tension of the dragged-out day from Cologne to Paris proved, on +the absurdest scale, a preparation, justified itself as a vivid point of +reference: I was to know what the high periodical meant when I +encountered in its <i>études de mœurs</i> the blue-chinned corruptible, +not to say corrupt, <i>larbin</i> and the smart soubrette;<a name="page_057" id="page_057"></a> it was above all +a blessing to feel myself, in the perusal of M. Octave Feuillet, an +education, as I supposed, of the taste, not at a marked disadvantage; +since who but the Petite Comtesse herself had swung her crinoline in and +out of my prospect, or, to put it better, of my preserved past, on one +of my occasions of acutest receptivity?</p> + +<p>The truth was that acute, that quite desperate receptivity set in for +me, under a law of its own—may really be described as having quite +raged for me—from the moment our general face, by the restless parental +decree (born not a little of parental homesickness and reinforced by a +theory of that complaint on our own part, we having somehow in Europe +"no companions," none but mere parents themselves), had been turned +again to the quarter in which there would assuredly be welcomes and +freedoms and unchecked appropriations, not to say also cousins, of both +sexes and of a more and more engaging time of life, cousins kept and +tended and adorned for us in our absence, together with the solicitation +for our favour of possible, though oh so just barely possible, habitats +before which the range of Europe paled; but which, nevertheless, to my +aching fancy, meant premature abdication, sacrifice and, in one dreadful +word, failure. I had had cousins, naturally, in the countries we<a name="page_058" id="page_058"></a> were +quitting, but to a limited degree; yet I think I already knew I had had +companions in as full a measure as any I was still to know—inasmuch as +my imagination made out one, in the complex order and the coloured air, +almost wherever I turned; and, inasmuch as, further, to live by the +imagination was to live almost only in that way, so to foresee the +comparative, not to say the absolute, absence of tonic accent in the +appearances complacently awaiting me, as well as to forecast in these +appearances, at the best, a greater paucity, was really to enjoy a sharp +prevision of dearth. Certain it is that those supreme moments of Paris, +those after-days at the Trois Empereurs, were to flush for me, as they +ebbed, with images and visions; judged by any achieved act of possession +I hadn't assuredly much to give up, but intensity of sentiment, resting +on a good disposition, makes for its own sake the most of opportunity, +and I buried my associations, which had been in a manner till lately my +hopes as well, with all decent dignity and tenderness. These more or +less secret obsequies lent to our further brief delay a quality of +suppressed excitement; the "old-world" hours were numbered too +dreadfully—had shrunk but to a handful: I had waked up to that, as with +a passionate even if private need for gathering in and saving, on the +morrow of our reaching<a name="page_059" id="page_059"></a> our final sticking-place: I had slipped from my +so cushioned sleep, my canopied couch, to hang, from the balcony of our +quatrième, my brothers' and mine, over that Place du Palais Royal and up +against that sculptured and storied façade of the new Louvre which +seemed to me then to represent, in its strength, the capacity and +chiselled rim of some such potent vivifying cup as it might have been +given us, under a happier arrangement, to taste now in its fulness and +with a braver sense for it. Over against us on the great palace wall, as +I make out—if not for that occasion then for some other—were statues +of heroes, Napoleon's young generals, Hoche, Marceau, Desaix or whoever, +such a galaxy as never was or should ever be again for splendid +monumental reference; and what it somehow came to was that here massed +itself the shining second Empire, over which they stood straight aloft +and on guard, like archangels of the sword, and that the whole thing was +a high-pitched wonder and splendour, which we had already, in our small +gaping way, got into a sort of relation with and which would have ever +so much more ever so thrillingly to give us. What it would give us +loomed but vaguely enough out of the great hum and the great toned +perspective, and withal the great noble expense, of which we had +constant reminder; but that we were present at something<a name="page_060" id="page_060"></a> it would be +always after accounted a privilege to have been concerned with, and that +we were perversely and inconsiderately dropping out of it, and for a +reason, so far as there might be a reason, that was scarcely less than +strange—all this loomed large to me as our interval shrank, and I even +ask myself before the memory of it whether I was ever again in the later +and more encompassing and accommodating years to have in those places so +rich a weight of consciousness to carry or so grand a presumption of +joy. The presumption so boldly entertained was, if you please, of what +the whole thing meant. It meant, immensely, the glittering régime, and +that meant in turn, prodigiously, something that would probably never be +meant quite to any such tune again: so much one positively and however +absurdly said to one's self as one stood up on the high balcony to the +great insolence of the Louvre and to all the history, all the glory +again and all the imposed applause, not to say worship, and not to speak +of the implied inferiority, on the part of everything else, that it +represented. And the sense was of course not less while one haunted at +odd hours the arcades and glass galleries of the Palais Royal close at +hand—as if to store up, for all the world, treasures of impression that +might be gnawed, in seasons or places of want, like winter pears or a +squirrel's<a name="page_061" id="page_061"></a> hoard of nuts, and so perhaps keep one alive, as to one's +most vital faculty above-mentioned, till one should somehow or other be +able to scramble back.</p> + +<p>The particular ground for our defection, which I obscurely pronounced +mistaken, was that since William was to embrace the artistic career—and +freedom for this experiment had been after all, as I repeat that it was +always in like cases to be, not in the least grudgingly granted him—our +return to America would place him in prompt and happy relation to +William Hunt, then the most distinguished of our painters as well as one +of the most original and delightful of men, and who had cordially +assured us that he would welcome such a pupil. This was judged among us +at large, other considerations aiding, a sound basis for action; but +never surely had so odd a motive operated for a break with the spell of +Paris. We named the motive generally, I think, and to the credit of our +earnest good faith, with confidence—and I am of course not sure how +often our dear father may not explicatively have mentioned the shy fact +that he himself in any case had gradually ceased to "like" Europe. This +affects me at present as in the highest degree natural: it was to be his +fortune for the rest of his life to find himself, as a worker in his own +field and as to what he held most dear,<a name="page_062" id="page_062"></a> scantly enough heeded, reported +or assimilated even in his own air, no brisk conductor at any time of +his remarkable voice; but in Europe his isolation had been utter—he had +there had the sense of playing his mature and ardent thought over great +dense constituted presences and opaque surfaces that could by their very +nature scarce give back so much as a shudder. No more admirable case of +apostolic energy combined with philosophic patience, of constancy of +conviction and solitary singleness of production unperturbed, can I well +conceive; and I certainly came later on to rejoice in his having had +after a certain date to walk, if there was a preference, rather in the +thin wilderness than in the thick. I dare say that when we returned to +America toward the end of 1860, some five years and a half after our +departure, it may have been with illusions not a few for him about the +nature of the desert, or in other words about the degree of sensibility +of the public, there awaiting him; but the pretext given him by his so +prized and admired eldest son was at the worst, and however eccentric +our action, inspiring: I alone of the family perhaps made bold not to +say quite directly or literally that we went home to learn to paint. +People stared or laughed when we said it, and I disliked their thinking +us so simple—though dreaming too a little perhaps that they<a name="page_063" id="page_063"></a> might have +been struck with our patriotism. This however conveyed but a chill the +more—since we didn't in the least go to our friend, who had been +Couture's and Frère's pupil, who had spent years in France and of whom +it was the common belief that you couldn't for the life of you tell him +from a French painter, because he was patriotic; but because he was +distinguished and accomplished, charming and kind, and above all known +to us and thereby in a manner guaranteed. He looked, as people get to +look under such enjoyed or even suffered exposures, extremely like a +Frenchman, and, what was noteworthy, still more like a sculptor of the +race than a painter; which doubtless had to do with my personally, +though I hope, in present cultivated anxiety, not too officiously, +sighing at all the explanation the whole thing took. I am bound to add +none the less that later on, repatriated and, as to my few contacts, +reassured, I found this amount, the apprehension of which had haunted +me, no great charge; and seem even to make out that for the first six +months of our Newport phase at least we might have passed for strikingly +wise. For here was, beyond doubt, a genial, an admirable master; and +here also—at such a rate did sparse individuals, scattered notches in +the long plain stick, count—was John La Farge. Here moreover—here and +everywhere<a name="page_064" id="page_064"></a> about me, before we could quite turn round—was the War, +with its infinite, its truly quite humiliating correction of my (as I +now can but so far call it) fatuous little confidence that +"appearances," on the native scene, would run short. They were in the +event, taking one thing with another, never to hold out for me as they +held during those four years. Wondrous this force in them as I at +present look back—wondrous I mean in view of that indirectness of its +play which my conditions confined me, with such private, though I must +add, alas, such helplessly unapplied resentment, to knowing it by. If +the force was great the attenuation of its reach was none the less +preappointed and constant; so that the case must have come back again +but to the degree—call it too, frankly, the force—of one's +sensibility, or in other words the blest resource, the supremely +breatheable and thereby nourishing and favouring air of one's +imaginative life. There were of a truth during that time probably more +appearances at one's command in the way of felt aspects, images, +apprehended living relations and impressions of the stress of life, than +during any other season one was to know; only doubtless with more of the +work of their figuring to their utmost, their giving all they could, to +do by one's self and, in the last resort, deep within one's breast. The<a name="page_065" id="page_065"></a> +point to be made just here, in any case, is that if we had not recrossed +the sea, by way, rather, of such an anticlimax, to William Hunt, we +should certainly with brief delay have found ourselves doing it, on the +first alarm of War, for the experience I thus too summarily glance at +and which I don't pretend to speak of as all my own.<a name="page_066" id="page_066"></a></p> + +<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2> + +<p>Newport, with repatriation accepted, would have been on many grounds +inevitable, I think—as it was to remain inevitable for several years, +and this quite apart from William's having to paint; since if I spoke +just now of the sweep of our view, from over the water, of a continent, +or well-nigh, waiting to receive us, the eligibility of its innumerable +sites was a matter much more of our simplified, our almost distressfully +uninvolved and unconnected state than of the inherent virtue of this, +that or the other particular group of local conditions. Our parents had +for us no definite project but to be liberally "good"—in other words so +good that the presumption of our being so would literally operate +anywhere and anyhow, would really amount in itself to a sort of situated +state, a sufficient prime position, and leave other circumstances +comparatively irrelevant. What would infallibly have occurred at the +best, however, was what did punctually happen—its having to be +definitely gathered that, though we might apparently be good, as I say, +almost on any ground, there was but one place in which we should even<a name="page_067" id="page_067"></a> +at a restricted pitch be well: Newport imposed itself at that period to +so remarkable a degree as the one right residence, in all our great +country, for those tainted, under whatever attenuations, with the +quality and the effect of detachment. The effect of detachment was the +fact of the experience of Europe. Detachment might of course have come +from many causes, but it truly came in most cases but from one, though +that a fairly merciless: it came from the experience of Europe, and I +think was on the whole regarded as—what it could only have been in the +sphere of intimacy and secrecy felt to be—without an absolute remedy. +As comparatively remedial Newport none the less figured, and this for +sundry reasons into the detail of which I needn't go. Its rare +distinction and precious attribute was that, being a watering-place, a +refuge from summer heats, it had also, were the measure considerably +stretched, possibilities of hibernation. We could, under stress, brave +there the period from November to June; and it was to be under stress +not to know what else to do. That was the pinch to which Europe reduced +you; insidiously, fatally disconnected, you could but make the best, as +a penalty, of the one marked point of reattachment. The philosophy of +all of which was that to confess to disconnection was to confess by the +same stroke to leisure—which<a name="page_068" id="page_068"></a> involved also an admission, however +rueful at once and deprecatory, of what might still at that time pass in +our unregenerate country for something in the nature of "means." You had +had the means, that is, to <i>become</i>, so awkwardly, detached—for you +might then do that cheaply; but the whole basis of the winter life +there, of that spare semblance of the Brighton life, the Folkestone +life, the Bath or the Cheltenham or the Leamington life, was that your +occupation or avocation should be vague enough; or that you shouldn't in +other words be, like everyone you might know save a dozen or so at the +most, in business. I remember well how when we were all young together +we had, under pressure of the American ideal in that matter, then so +rigid, felt it tasteless and even humiliating that the head of our +little family was <i>not</i> in business, and that even among our relatives +on each side we couldn't so much as name proudly anyone who was—with +the sole exception of our maternal uncle Robertson Walsh, who looked, +ever so benevolently, after our father's "affairs," happily for us. Such +had never been the case with the father of any boy of our acquaintance; +the business in which the boy's father gloriously <i>was</i> stood forth +inveterately as the very first note of our comrade's impressiveness. +<i>We</i> had no note of that sort to produce, and I perfectly<a name="page_069" id="page_069"></a> recover the +effect of my own repeated appeal to our parent for some presentable +account of him that would prove us respectable. Business alone was +respectable—if one meant by it, that is, the calling of a lawyer, a +doctor or a minister (we never spoke of clergymen) as well; I think that +if we had had the Pope among us we should have supposed the Pope in +business, just as I remember my friend Simpson's telling me crushingly, +at one of our New York schools, on my hanging back with the fatal truth +about our credentials, that the author of <i>his</i> being (we spoke no more +of "governors" than we did of "parsons") was in the business of a +stevedore. That struck me as a great card to play—the word was fine and +mysterious; so that "What shall we tell them you <i>are</i>, don't you see?" +could but become on our lips at home a more constant appeal. It seemed +wantonly to be prompted for our father, and indeed greatly to amuse him, +that he should put us off with strange unheard-of attributions, such as +would have made us ridiculous in our special circles; his "Say I'm a +philosopher, say I'm a seeker for truth, say I'm a lover of my kind, say +I'm an author of books if you like; or, best of all, just say I'm a +Student," saw us so very little further. Abject it certainly appeared to +be reduced to the "student" plea; and I must have lacked even the +confidence of my brother<a name="page_070" id="page_070"></a> Bob, who, challenged, in my hearing and the +usual way, was ready not only with the fact that our parent "wrote," but +with the further fact that he had written <i>Lectures and Miscellanies +James</i>. I think that when we settled awhile at Newport there was no one +there who had written but Mr. Henry T. Tuckerman, a genial and graceful +poet of the Artless Age, as it might still be called in spite of Poe and +Hawthorne and Longfellow and Lowell, the most characteristic works of +the first and the two last of whom had already appeared; especially as +those most characteristic of Mr. Tuckerman referred themselves to a past +sufficiently ample to have left that gentleman with a certain deafness +and a glossy wig and a portly presence and the reputation, positively, +of the most practised and desired of diners-out. He was to be recognised +at once as a social value on a scene not under that rubric densely +peopled; he constituted indeed such a note as would help to keep others +of the vague definability in countenance. Clearly indeed it might happen +that an association of vaguenesses would arrive in time, by fondly +cleaving together, at the semblance of a common identity; the nature of +the case then demanding, however, that they should be methodically +vague, take their stand on it and work it for all it was worth. That in +truth was made easy by the fact that<a name="page_071" id="page_071"></a> what I have called our common +disconnectedness positively projected and proclaimed a void; +disconnected from business we could only be connected with the negation +of it, which had as yet no affirmative, no figurative side. This +probably would come; figures, in the void, would one by one spring up; +but what would be thus required for them was that the void should be +ample and, as it were, established. Not to be afraid of it they would +have to feel it clear of everything and everyone they knew in the air +actually peopled.</p> + +<p>William Hunt, for that matter, was already a figure unmmistakable, +superficially speaking unsurpassable, just as John La Farge, already +mentioned, was so soon to prove to be. They were only two indeed, but +they argued the possibility; and so the great thing, as I say, was that, +to stand out, they should have margin and light. We couldn't all be +figures—on a mere margin, the margin of business, and in the light of +the general wonder of our being anything, anything <i>there</i>; but we could +at least understand the situation and cultivate the possibilities, watch +and protect the germs. This consciousness, this aim or ideal, had after +all its own intensity—it burned with a pure flame: there is a special +joy, clearly, in the hopeful conversion of the desert into the garden, +of thinness into thickness, a joy<a name="page_072" id="page_072"></a> to which the conversion of the thick +into the mere dense, of the free into the rank or the close, perhaps +gives no clue. The great need that Newport met was that of a basis of +reconciliation to "America" when the habit, the taking for granted, of +America had been broken or intermitted: it would be hard to say of what +subtle secret or magic the place was possessed toward this end, and by a +common instinct, I think, we didn't attempt to formulate it—we let it +alone, only looking at each other hard, only moving gently, on the brave +hypothesis, only in fine deprecating too rude and impatient, too +precipitate a doubt of the spell that perhaps might work if we waited +and prayed. We did wait and pray, accordingly, scantly-served though the +board we might often have felt we had sat down to, and there was a fair +company of us to do so, friendliest among whom to our particular effort +was my father's excellent friend of many years Edmund Tweedy, already +named in pages preparatory to these and who, with his admirable wife, +presented himself as our main introducer and initiator. He had married, +while we were all young in New York together, a manner of Albany cousin, +Mary Temple the elder, aunt of the younger,<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> and had by this time +"been through" more than anything, more than everything, of<a name="page_073" id="page_073"></a> which there +could be question for ourselves. The pair had on their marriage gone at +once to Europe to live, had put in several years of Italy and yet had at +last, particular reasons operating, returned to their native, that is to +sterner, realities; those as to which it was our general theory, of so +touching a candour as I look back to it, that they offered themselves at +Newport in a muffling mitigating air. The air, material, moral, social, +was in fact clear and clean to a degree that might well have left us but +dazed at the circumjacent blankness; yet as to that I hasten to add too +that the blowing out of our bubble, the planting of our garden, the +correction of our thinness, the discovery, under stress, of such scraps +of colour and conversation, such saving echoes and redeeming references +as might lurk for us in each other, all formed in themselves an active, +and might at last even grow to suggest an absolutely bustling, process.</p> + +<p>I come back with a real tenderness of memory for instance to that +felicity of the personal, the social, the "literary and artistic," +almost really the romantic, identity responding, after a fashion quite +to bring tears to the eyes, in proportion as it might have seemed to +feel by some divine insufflation what it practically could stand for. +What should one call this but the brave triumph of values conscious of +having to be almost<a name="page_074" id="page_074"></a> missionary? There were many such that in "Europe" +hadn't had to be missionary at all; in Europe, as it were, one +hadn't—comparatively—seen, if not the forest for the trees, then the +trees for the forest; whereas on this other great vacuous level every +single stem seemed to enjoy for its distinction quite the totality of +the daylight and to rise into the air with a gladness that was itself a +grace. Of some of the personal importances that acted in that way I +should with easier occasion have more to say—I shall as it is have +something; but there could perhaps be no better sample of the effect of +sharpness with which the forces of culture might emerge than, say, the +fairly golden glow of romance investing the mere act of perusal of the +Revue des Deux Mondes. There was the charm—though I grant of course +that I speak here all for myself, constitutionally and, face to face +<i>with</i> myself, quite shamelessly an inquirer, a hunter, for charm—that +whereas the spell cast had more or less inevitable limits in the world +to which such a quality as the best things of the Revue, such a +performance of the intellectual and expressional engagement as these +suggested, was native and was thereby relative to other generally like +phenomena, so it represented among <i>us</i>, where it had to take upon +itself what I have already alluded to as all the work, far more than its +face<a name="page_075" id="page_075"></a> value. Few of the forces about us reached as yet the level of +representation (even if here and there some might have been felt as +trying for it); and this made all the difference. Anything suggestive or +significant, anything promising or interesting, anything in the least +finely charming above all, immensely counted, claimed tendance and +protection, almost claimed, or at any rate enjoyed, worship; as for that +matter anything finely charming does, quite rightly, anywhere. But our +care, our privilege, on occasion our felt felicity, was to foster every +symptom and breathe encouragement to every success; to hang over the +tenderest shoots that betrayed the principle of growth—or in other +words to read devoutly into everything, and as straight as possible, the +very fullest meaning we might hope it would learn to have. So at least +quite at first—and so again very considerably after the large interval +and grim intermission represented by the War; during which interest and +quality, to say nothing of quantity, at the highest pitch, ceased in any +degree to fail us, and what might be "read into" almost any aspect +without exception paled in the light of what was inevitably read out +from it. It must be added at the same time that with its long duration +the War fell into its place as part of life at large, and that when it +was over various other things still than the love of peace were found to +have grown.<a name="page_076" id="page_076"></a></p> + +<p>Immediately, at any rate, the Albany cousins, or a particular group of +them, began again to be intensely in question for us; coloured in due +course with reflections of the War as their lives, not less than our +own, were to become—and coloured as well too, for all sorts of notation +and appreciation, from irrepressible private founts. Mrs. Edmund Tweedy, +bereft of her own young children, had at the time I speak of opened her +existence, with the amplest hospitality, to her four orphaned nieces, +who were also our father's and among whom the second in age, Mary Temple +the younger, about in her seventeenth year when she thus renewed her +appearance to our view, shone with vividest lustre, an essence that +preserves her still, more than half a century from the date of her +death, in a memory or two where many a relic once sacred has +comparatively yielded to time. Most of those who knew and loved, I was +going to say adored, her have also yielded—which is a reason the more +why thus much of her, faint echo from too far off though it prove, +should be tenderly saved. If I have spoken of the elements and presences +round about us that "counted," Mary Temple was to count, and in more +lives than can now be named, to an extraordinary degree; count as a +young and shining apparition, a creature who owed to the charm of her +every aspect (her aspects were so<a name="page_077" id="page_077"></a> many!) and the originality, vivacity, +audacity, generosity, of her spirit, an indescribable grace and +weight—if one might impute weight to a being so imponderable in common +scales. Whatever other values on our scene might, as I have hinted, +appear to fail, she was one of the first order, in the sense of the +immediacy of the impression she produced, and produced altogether as by +the play of her own light spontaneity and curiosity—not, that is, as +through a sense of such a pressure and such a motive, or through a care +for them, in others. "Natural" to an effect of perfect felicity that we +were never to see surpassed is what I have already praised all the +Albany <i>cousinage</i> of those years for being; but in none of the company +was the note so clear as in this rarest, though at the same tune +symptomatically or ominously palest, flower of the stem; who was natural +at more points and about more things, with a greater range of freedom +and ease and reach of horizon than any of the others dreamed of. They +had that way, delightfully, with the small, after all, and the common +matters—while she had it with those too, but with the great and rare +ones over and above; so that she was to remain for us the very figure +and image of a felt interest in life, an interest as magnanimously +far-spread, or as familiarly and exquisitely fixed, as her splendid +shifting sensibility, moral,<a name="page_078" id="page_078"></a> personal, nervous, and having at once such +noble flights and such touchingly discouraged drops, such graces of +indifference and inconsequence, might at any moment determine. She was +really to remain, for our appreciation, the supreme case of a taste for +life as life, as personal living; of an endlessly active and yet somehow +a careless, an illusionless, a sublimely forewarned curiosity about it: +something that made her, slim and fair and quick, all straightness and +charming tossed head, with long light and yet almost sliding steps and a +large light postponing, renouncing laugh, the very muse or amateur +priestess of rash speculation. To express her in the mere terms of her +restless young mind, one felt from the first, was to place her, by a +perversion of the truth, under the shadow of female "earnestness"—for +which she was much too unliteral and too ironic; so that, superlatively +personal and yet as independent, as "off" into higher spaces, at a +touch, as all the breadth of her sympathy and her courage could send +her, she made it impossible to say whether she was just the most moving +of maidens or a disengaged and dancing flame of thought. No one to come +after her could easily seem to show either a quick inward life or a +brave, or even a bright, outward, either a consistent contempt for +social squalors or a very marked genius for moral reactions. She had in +her brief<a name="page_079" id="page_079"></a> passage the enthusiasm of humanity—more, assuredly, than any +charming girl who ever circled, and would fain have continued to circle, +round a ballroom. This kept her indeed for a time more interested in the +individual, the immediate human, than in the race or the social order at +large; but that, on the other hand, made her ever so restlessly, or +quite inappeasably, "psychologic." The psychology of others, in her +shadow—I mean their general resort to it—could only for a long time +seem weak and flat and dim, above all not at all amusing. She burned +herself out; she died at twenty-four.</p> + +<p>At the risk perhaps of appearing to make my own scant adventure the +pivot of that early Newport phase I find my reference to William Hunt +and his truly fertilising action on our common life much conditioned by +the fact that, since W. J., for the first six months or so after our +return, daily and devotedly haunted his studio, I myself did no less, +for a shorter stretch, under the irresistible contagion. The clearness +of the whole passage for me, the clearest impression, above all, of the +vivid and whimsical master, an inspirer, during a period that began a +little later on, of numberless devotions and loyalties, is what this +fond memory of my permitted contact and endeavour still has to give me. +Pupils at that time didn't flock to his gates—though they<a name="page_080" id="page_080"></a> were to do +so in Boston, during years, later on; an earnest lady or two, Boston +precursors, hovered and flitted, but I remember for the rest (and I +speak of a short period) no thorough-going élèves save John La Farge and +my brother. I remember, for that matter, sitting quite in solitude in +one of the grey cool rooms of the studio, which thus comes back to me as +having several, and thinking that I really might get to copy casts +rather well, and might in particular see myself congratulated on my +sympathetic rendering of the sublime uplifted face of Michael Angelo's +"Captive" in the Louvre. I sat over this effort and a few others for +long quiet hours, and seem to feel myself again aware, just to that +tune, of how happy I ought to be. No one disturbed me; the earnest +workers were elsewhere; I had a chamber of the temple all to myself, +with immortal forms and curves, with shadows beautiful and right, +waiting there on blank-eyed faces for me to prove myself not helpless; +and with two or three of Hunt's own fine things, examples of his work in +France, transporting me at once and defying. I believed them great +productions—thought in especial endless good of the large canvas of the +girl with her back presented while she fills her bucket at the spout in +the wall, against which she leans with a tension of young muscle, a +general expression<a name="page_081" id="page_081"></a> of back, beneath her dress, and with the pressure of +her raised and extended bare arm and flattened hand: this, to my +imagination, could only become the prize of some famous collection, the +light of some museum, for all the odd circumstance that it was company +just then for muddled me and for the queer figures projected by my +crayon. Frankly, intensely—that was the great thing—these were hours +of Art, art definitely named, looking me full in the face and accepting +my stare in return—no longer a tacit implication or a shy subterfuge, +but a flagrant unattenuated aim. I had somehow come into the temple by +the back door, the <i>porte d'honneur</i> opened on another side, and I could +never have believed much at best in the length of my stay; but I was +there, day by day, as much as any one had ever been, and with a sense of +what it "meant" to be there that the most accredited of pupils couldn't +have surpassed; so that the situation to this extent really hummed with +promise. I fail, I confess, to reconstitute the relation borne by my +privilege to that of tuition "in the higher branches," to which it was +quite time I should have mounted, enjoyed at the hands of the Reverend +William C. Leverett, curate to the then "rector," Doctor Mercer, of that +fine old high-spired Trinity Church in which had throbbed, from long +before the Revolution as they used to<a name="page_082" id="page_082"></a> say, the proud episcopal heart of +Newport; and feel indeed that I must pretty well have shaken off, as a +proved absurd predicament, all submission to my dilemma: all submission +of the mind, that is, for if my share of Mr. Leverett's attention was +less stinted than my share of William Hunt's (and neither had much +duration) it failed to give me the impression that anything worth naming +had opened out to me, whereas in the studio I was at the threshold of a +world.</p> + +<p>It became itself indeed on the spot a rounded satisfying world, the +place did; enclosed within the grounds, as we then regarded them, of the +master's house, circled about with numerous trees, as we then counted +them, and representing a more direct exclusion of vulgar sounds, false +notes and harsh reminders than I had ever known. I fail in the least to +make out where the real work of the studio went forward; it took +somewhere else its earnest course, and our separation—mine from the +real workers, my indulged yet ignored state—kept me somehow the safer, +as if I had taken some mild and quite harmless drug through which +external rubs would reach me from a distance, but which left my own +rubbing power, not to say my own smearing or smutching, quite free. Into +the world so beautifully valid the master would occasionally walk, +inquiring as to what I had done or would do, but bearing on<a name="page_083" id="page_083"></a> the +question with an easy lightness, a friendliness of tact, a neglect of +conclusion, which it touches me still to remember. It was impossible to +me at that time not so to admire him that his just being to such an +extent, as from top to toe and in every accent and motion, the living +and communicating Artist, made the issue, with his presence, quite cease +to be of how one got on or fell short, and become instead a mere +self-sacrificing vision of the picturesque itself, the constituted +picturesque or treated "subject," in efficient figure, personal form, +vivid human style. I then felt the man the great mystery could mark with +its stamp, when wishing the mark unmistakable, teach me just in himself +the most and best about any art that I should come to find benignantly +concerned with me, for moments however smilingly scant. William Hunt, +all muscular spareness and brownness and absence of waste, all flagrant +physiognomy, brave bony arch of handsome nose, upwardness of strong +eyebrow and glare, almost, of eyes that both recognised and wondered, +strained eyes that played over questions as if they were objects and +objects as if they were questions, might have stood, to the life, for +Don Quixote, if we could associate with that hero a far-spreading beard +already a little grizzled, a manner and range of gesture and broken form +of discourse that was like a restless reference<a name="page_084" id="page_084"></a> to a palette and that +seemed to take for granted, all about, canvases and models and charming, +amusing things, the "tremendously interesting" in the seen bit or caught +moment, and the general unsayability, in comparison, of anything else. +He never would have perched, it must be added, on Rosinante—he was +fonder of horses even than of the method of Couture, and though with a +shade of resemblance, as all simple and imaginative men have, to the +knight of La Mancha, he least suggested that analogy as he passed in a +spinning buggy, his beard flying, behind a favourite trotter. But what +he perhaps most puts before me to-day is the grim truth of the merciless +manner in which a living and hurrying public educates itself, making and +devouring in a day reputations and values which represent something of +the belief in it that it has had in <i>them</i>, but at the memory of which +we wince, almost to horror, as at the legend of victims who have been +buried alive. Oh the cold grey luminaries hung about in odd corners and +back passages, and that we have known shining and warm! They serve at +the most now as beacons warning any step not to come <i>that</i> way, +whatever it does; the various attested ways it may not with felicity +come growing thus all the while in number.</p> + +<p>John La Farge became at once, in breaking on<a name="page_085" id="page_085"></a> our view, quite the most +interesting person we knew, and for a time remained so; he became a +great many other things beside—a character, above all, if there ever +was one; but he opened up to us, though perhaps to me in particular, who +could absorb all that was given me on those suggestive lines, prospects +and possibilities that made the future flush and swarm. His foreignness, +which seemed great at that time, had gained a sharper accent from a long +stay made in France, where both on his father's and his mother's side he +had relations, and had found, to our hovering envy, all sorts of +charming occasions. He had spent much time in Brittany, among kindred +the most romantically interesting, people and places whose very names, +the De Nanteuils of Saint-Pol-de-Léon, I seem to remember for instance, +cast a spell across comparatively blank Newport sands; he had brought +home with him innumerable water-colour sketches, Breton peasants, +costumes, interiors, bits of villages and landscape; and I supposed him +to have had on such ground the most delightful adventure in the world. +How was one not to suppose it at a time when the best of one's +education, such as that was, had begun to proceed almost altogether by +the aid of the Revue des Deux Mondes, a periodical that supplied to us +then and for several years after (or again I can but speak for myself) +all that was<a name="page_086" id="page_086"></a> finest in the furniture and the fittings of romance? Those +beginnings of Newport were our first contact with New England—a New +England already comparatively subdued and sophisticated, a Samson shorn +of his strength by the shears of the Southern, and more particularly of +the New York, Delilah; the result of which, still speaking for myself, +was a prompt yearning and reaching out, on the part of the spirit, for +some corrective or antidote to whatever it was that might be going, in +the season to come, least charmingly or informingly or inspiringly to +press upon us. I well recall my small anxious foresight as to a +required, an indispensable provision against either assault or dearth, +as if the question might be of standing an indefinite siege; and how a +certain particular capacious closet in a house we were presently to +occupy took on to my fond fancy the likeness at once of a store of +edibles, both substantial and succulent, and of a hoard of ammunition +for the defence of any breach—the Revue accumulating on its shelves at +last in serried rows and really building up beneath us with its slender +firm salmon-coloured blocks an alternative sphere of habitation. There +will be more to say of this, bristling or rather flowering with precious +particulars, if I stray so far; but the point for the moment was that +one would have pushed into that world of the closet, one<a name="page_087" id="page_087"></a> would have +wandered or stumbled about in it quite alone if it hadn't been that La +Farge was somehow always in it with us. That was in those years his +admirable function and touch—that he affected me as knowing his way +there as absolutely no one else did, and even as having risen of a +sudden before us to bear us this quickening company. Nobody else, not +another creature, was free of it to that tune; the whole mid-century New +England—as a rough expression of what the general consciousness most +signified—was utterly out of it; which made, you see, a most unequal +division of our little working, or our totally cogitative, universe into +the wondrous esoteric quarter peopled just by us and our friend and our +common references, and the vast remainder of the public at large, the +public of the innumerably uninitiated even when apparently of the most +associated.</p> + +<p>All of which is but a manner of expressing the intensity, as I felt it, +of our Franco-American, our most completely accomplished friend's +presence among us. Out of the safe rich home of the Revue, which opened +away into the vastness of visions, he practically stepped, and into it, +with all his ease, he mysteriously returned again: he came nearer to +being what might have been meant concretely throughout it all—though +meant most of course in its full-charged stream of fiction—<a name="page_088" id="page_088"></a>than any +other visiting figure. The stream of fiction was so constant an appeal +to the charmed, by which I mean of course the predisposed, mind that it +fairly seemed at moments to overflow its banks and take to its bosom any +recognised, any congruous creature or thing that might happen to be +within reach. La Farge was of the type—the "European," and this gave +him an authority for me that it verily took the length of years to +undermine; so that as the sense of those first of them in especial comes +back to me I find it difficult, even under the appeal to me of the +attempt, to tell how he was to count in my earliest culture. If culture, +as I hold, is a matter of attitude quite as much as of opportunity, and +of the form and substance of the vessel carried to the fountain no less +than of the water-supply itself, there couldn't have been better +conditions for its operating drop by drop. It operates ever much more, I +think, by one's getting whatever there may happen to be out for one's +use than by its conforming to any abstract standard of quantity or +lustre. It may work, as between dispenser and subject, in so +incalculably personal a manner that no chemical analysis shall recover +it, no common estimate of forces or amounts find itself in the least +apply. The case was that La Farge swam into our ingenuous ken as the +figure of figures, and that such an agent, on a<a name="page_089" id="page_089"></a> stage so unpeopled and +before a scene so unpainted, became salient and vivid almost in spite of +itself. The figure was at a premium, and fit for any glass case that its +vivacity should allow to enclose it—wherein it might be surrounded by +wondering, admiring and often quite inevitably misconceiving observers. +It was not that these too weren't agents in their way, agents in some +especial good cause without the furtherance of which we never should +have done at all; but they were by that very fact specialised and +stiffened, committed to their one attitude, the immediately profitable, +and incapable of that play of gesture in which we recognise +representation. A representative, a rounded figure, however, is as to +none of its relations definable or announceable beforehand; we only know +it, for good or for ill, but with something of the throb of elation +always, when we see it, and then it in general sufficiently accounts for +itself. We often for that matter insist on its being a figure, we +positively make it one, in proportion as we seem to need it—or as in +other words we too acutely miss the active virtue of representation. It +takes some extraordinary set of circumstances or time of life, I think, +either to beguile or to hustle us into indifference to some larger felt +extension roundabout us of "the world"—a sphere the confines of which +move on even as<a name="page_090" id="page_090"></a> we ourselves move and which is always there, just +beyond us, to twit us with the more it should have to show if we were a +little more "of" it. Sufficiency shuts us in but till the man of the +world—never prefigured, as I say, only welcomed on the spot—appears; +when we see at once how much we have wanted him. When we fail of that +acknowledgment, that sense as of a tension, an anxiety or an indigence +relieved, it is of course but that the extraordinary set of +circumstances, or above all the extraordinary time of life I speak of, +has indeed intervened.</p> + +<p>It was as a man of the world that, for all his youth, La Farge rose or, +still better, bowed, before us, his inclinations of obeisance, his +considerations of address being such as we had never seen and now almost +publicly celebrated. This was what most immediately and most +iridescently showed, the truth being all the while that the character +took on in him particular values without which it often enough, though +then much more grossly, flourishes. It was by these enrichments of +curiosity, of taste and genius, that he became the personality, as we +nowadays say, that I have noted—the full freshness of all of which was +to play but through his younger time, or at least through our younger +apprehension. He was so "intellectual"—that was the flower; it crowned +his being personally so finished and launched.<a name="page_091" id="page_091"></a> The wealth of his +cultivation, the variety of his initiations, the inveteracy of his +forms, the degree of his <i>empressement</i> (this in itself, I repeat, a +revelation) made him, with those elements of the dandy and the cavalier +to which he struck us as so picturesquely sacrificing, a cluster of +bright promises, a rare original and, though not at all a direct model +for simpler folk, as we then could but feel ourselves, an embodiment of +the gospel of esthetics. Those more resounding forms that our age was to +see this gospel take on were then still to come, but I was to owe them +in the later time not half the thrill that the La Farge of the prime +could set in motion. He was really an artistic, an esthetic nature of +wondrous homogeneity; one was to have known in the future many an +unfolding that went with a larger ease and a shrewder economy, but never +to have seen a subtler mind or a more generously wasteful passion, in +other words a sincerer one, addressed to the problems of the designer +and painter. Of his long later history, full of flights and drops, +advances and retreats, experiment and performance, of the endless +complications of curiosity and perversity, I say nothing here save that +if it was to contradict none of our first impressions it was to qualify +them all by others still more lively; these things belonging quite to +some other record. Yet I may<a name="page_092" id="page_092"></a> just note that they were to represent in +some degree an eclipse of the so essentially harmonious person round +whom a positive grace of legend had originally formed itself. I see him +at this hour again as that bright apparition; see him, jacketed in black +velvet or clad from top to toe in old-time elegances of cool white and +leaning much forward with his protuberant and over-glazed, his doubting +yet all-seizing vision, dandle along the shining Newport sands in +far-away summer sunsets on a charming chestnut mare whose light legs and +fine head and great sweep of tail showed the Arab strain—quite as if +(what would have been characteristic of him) he had borrowed his mount +from the adorable Fromentin, whom we already knew as a painter, but +whose acquaintance as a writer we were of course so promptly to owe him +that when "Dominique" broke upon us out of the Revue as one of the most +exquisite literary events of our time it found us doubly responsive.</p> + +<p>So, at any rate, he was there, and there to stay—intensely among us but +somehow not withal of us; his being a Catholic, and apparently a "real" +one in spite of so many other omnisciences, making perhaps by itself the +greatest difference. He had been through a Catholic college in Maryland, +the name of which, though I am not assured of it now, exhaled a sort of<a name="page_093" id="page_093"></a> +educational elegance; but where and when he had so miraculously laid up +his stores of reading and achieved his universal saturation was what we +longest kept asking ourselves. Many of these depths I couldn't pretend +to sound, but it was immediate and appreciable that he revealed to us +Browning for instance; and this, oddly enough, long after Men and Women +had begun (from our Paris time on, if I remember) to lie upon our +parents' book-table. <i>They</i> had not divined in us as yet an aptitude for +that author; whose appeal indeed John reinforced to our eyes by the +reproduction of a beautiful series of illustrative drawings, two or +three of which he was never to surpass—any more than he was to complete +his highly distinguished plan for the full set, not the least faded of +his hundred dreams. Most of all he revealed to us Balzac; having so much +to tell me of what was within that formidably-plated door, in which he +all expertly and insidiously played the key, that to re-read even after +long years the introductory pages of Eugénie Grandet, breathlessly +seized and earnestly absorbed under his instruction, is to see my +initiator's youthful face, so irregular but so refined, look out at me +between the lines as through blurred prison bars. In Mérimée, after the +same fashion, I meet his expository ghost—hovering to remind me of how +he started me on<a name="page_094" id="page_094"></a> La Vénus d'Ille; so that nothing would do but that I +should translate it, try to render it as lovingly as if it were a +classic and old (both of which things it now indeed is) and send it off +to the New York weekly periodical of that age of crudest categories +which was to do me the honour neither of acknowledging nor printing nor, +clearly, since translations did savingly appear there, in the least +understanding it. These again are mild memories—though not differing in +that respect from most of their associates; yet I cherish them as +ineffaceable dates, sudden milestones, the first distinctly noted, on +the road of so much inward or apprehensive life. Our guest—I call him +our guest because he was so lingeringly, so abidingly and supersedingly +present—began meanwhile to paint, under our eyes, with devotion, with +exquisite perception, and above all as with the implication, a hundred +times beneficent and fertilising, that if one didn't in these +connections consistently take one's stand on supersubtlety of taste one +was a helpless outsider and at the best the basest of vulgarians or +flattest of frauds—a doctrine more salutary at that time in our world +at large than any other that might be sounded. Of all of which ingenuous +intensity and activity I should have been a much scanter witness than +his then close condisciple, my brother, had not his personal kindness, +that<a name="page_095" id="page_095"></a> of the good-natured and amused elder youth to the enslaved, the +yearningly gullible younger, charmed me often into a degree of +participation. Occasions and accidents come back to me under their wash +of that distilled old Newport light as to which we more and more agreed +that it made altogether exceptionally, on our side of the world, for +possibility of the <i>nuance</i>, or in other words for picture and story; +such for example as my felt sense of how unutterably it was the real +thing, the gage of a great future, when I one morning found my +companions of the larger, the serious studio inspired to splendid +performance by the beautiful young manly form of our cousin Gus Barker, +then on a vivid little dash of a visit to us and who, perched on a +pedestal and divested of every garment, was the gayest as well as the +neatest of models. This was my first personal vision of the "life," on a +pedestal and in a pose, that had half gleamed and half gloomed through +the chiaroscuro of our old friend Haydon; and I well recall the crash, +at the sight, of all my inward emulation—so forced was I to recognise +on the spot that I might niggle for months over plaster casts and not +come within miles of any such point of attack. The bravery of my +brother's own in especial dazzled me out of every presumption; since +nothing less than that meant drawing (they were not using<a name="page_096" id="page_096"></a> colour) and +since our genial kinsman's perfect gymnastic figure meant living truth, +I should certainly best testify to the whole mystery by pocketing my +pencil.</p> + +<p>I secured and preserved for long William's finished rendering of the +happy figure—which was to speak for the original, after his gallant +death, in sharper and finer accents perhaps than aught else that +remained of him; and it wanted but another occasion somewhat later on, +that of the sitting to the pair of pupils under Hunt's direction of a +subject presented as a still larger challenge, to feel that I had +irrecoverably renounced. Very handsome were the head and shoulders of +Katherine Temple, the eldest of those Albany cousins then gathered at +Newport under their, and derivatively our, Aunt Mary's wing, who +afterwards was to become Mrs. Richard Emmet—the Temples and the Emmets +being so much addicted to alliances that a still later generation was to +bristle for us with a delightful Emmetry, each member of it a different +blessing; she sat with endless patience, the serenest of models, and W. +J.'s portrait of her in oils survives (as well as La Farge's, dealing +with her in another view) as a really mature, an almost masterly, piece +of painting, having, as has been happily suggested to me, much the air +of a characteristic Manet. Such demonstrations would throw one<a name="page_097" id="page_097"></a> back +on regret, so far as my brother was concerned, if subsequent +counter-demonstrations hadn't had it in them so much to check the train. +For myself at the hour, in any case, the beautiful success with Kitty +Temple did nothing but hurry on the future, just as the sight of the +charming thing to-day, not less than that of La Farge's <i>profil perdu</i>, +or presented ear and neck and gathered braids of hair, quite as charming +and quite as painted, touchingly reanimates the past. I say touchingly +because of the remembered pang of my acceptance of an admonition so +sharply conveyed. Therefore if somewhat later on I could still so fondly +hang about in that air of production—so far at least as it enveloped +our friend, and particularly after his marriage and his setting up of +his house at Newport, vivid proofs alike, as seemed to us all, of his +consummate, his <i>raffiné</i> taste, even if we hadn't yet, I think, that +epithet for this—it was altogether in the form of mere helpless admirer +and inhaler, led captive in part by the dawning perception that the arts +were after all essentially one and that even with canvas and brush +whisked out of my grasp I still needn't feel disinherited. That was the +luxury of the friend and senior with a literary side—that if there were +futilities that he didn't bring home to me he nevertheless opened more +windows than he closed; since he couldn't<a name="page_098" id="page_098"></a> have meant nothing by causing +my eyes to plunge so straight into the square and dense little formal +garden of Mérimée. I might occasionally serve for an abundantly idle +young out-of-doors model—as in fact I frequently did, the best perhaps +of his early exhibitions of a rare colour-sense even now attesting it; +but mightn't it become possible that Mérimée would meanwhile serve for +me? Didn't I already see, as I fumbled with a pen, of what the small +dense formal garden might be inspiringly symbolic? It was above all +wonderful in the La Farge of those years that even as he painted and +painted, very slowly and intently and belatedly—his habit of putting +back the clock and ignoring every time-scheme but his own was matched +only by his view of the constant timeliness of talk, talk as talk, for +which no moment, no suspended step, was too odd or too fleeting—he +remained as referentially and unexhaustedly bookish, he turned his back +by the act as little on our theory of his omniscience as he ceased to +disown his job, whatever it might be, while endlessly burying his +salient and reinforced eyes and his visibly active organ of scent in +some minutest rarity of print, some precious ancientry of binding, +mechanically plucked, by the hazard of a touch, from one of the shelves +of a stored collection that easily passed with us for unapproached.<a name="page_099" id="page_099"></a></p> + +<p class="figcenter"> +<img src="images/ill_096.jpg" width="387" height="499" alt="Portrait in oils of Miss Katherine Temple, 1861." title="" /> +<br /> +<span class="caption2">Portrait in oils of Miss Katherine Temple, 1861.</span> +</p> + +<p>He lost himself on these occasions both by a natural ease and by his +early adoption and application of the principle of the imperturbable, +which promised even from those days to govern his conduct well-nigh to +the exclusion of every other. We were to know surely as time went on no +comparable case of consistency of attitude—no other such prompt grasp +by a nature essentially entire, a settled sovereign self, of the truth +of what would work for it most favourably should it but succeed in never +yielding the first inch of any ground. Immense every ground thus became +by its covering itself from edge to edge with the defence of his +serenity, which, whatever his fathomless private dealings with it, was +never consentingly, I mean publicly, to suffer a grain of abatement. The +artist's serenity, by this conception, was an intellectual and spiritual +capital that must never brook defeat—which it so easily might incur by +a single act of abdication. That was at any rate the case for the +particular artist and the particular nature he felt himself, +armour-proof as they became against the appeal of sacrifice. Sacrifice +was fallibility, and one could only of course be consistent if one +inveterately had hold of the truth. There was no safety or, otherwise, +no inward serenity or even outward—though the outward came +secondly—unless there was no deflection; none into the<a name="page_100" id="page_100"></a> question, that +is, of what might make for the serenity of others, which was their own +affair and which above all seemed not urgent in comparison with the +supreme artistic. It wasn't that the artist hadn't to pay, to pay for +the general stupidity, perversity and perfidy, from the moment he might +have to deal with these things; that was the inevitable suffering, and +it was always there; but it could be more or less borne if one was +systematically, or rather if one was naturally, or even, better still, +preternaturally, in the right; since this meant the larger, the largest +serenity. That account of so fine a case of inward confidence would +indeed during those very first years have sinned somewhat by +anticipation; yet something of the beauty—that is of the unmatched +virtuosity—of the attitude finally achieved did even at the early time +colour the air of intercourse with him for those who had either few +enough or many enough of their own reserves. The second of these +conditions sprang from a due anxiety for one's own interests, more or +less defined in advance and therefore, as might be, more or less +menaced; the other proviso easily went with vagueness—vagueness as to +what things were one's interests, seeing that the exhibited working of +an esthetic and a moral confidence conjoined on that scale and at play +together unhampered would perhaps prove for<a name="page_101" id="page_101"></a> the time an attraction +beyond any other. This reflection must verily, in our relation, have +brought about my own quietus—so far as that mild ecstasy could be +divorced from agitation. I recall at all events less of the agitation +than of the ecstasy; the primary months, certain aspects even of the few +following years, look out at me as from fine accommodations, +acceptances, submissions, emotions, all melted together, that one must +have taken for joys of the mind and gains of the imagination so clear as +to cost one practically nothing. They are what I see, and are all I want +to see, as I look back; there hangs about them a charm of thrilled good +faith, the flush and throb of crowding apprehensions, that has scarce +faded and of which I can only wish to give the whole picture the +benefit. I bottle this imponderable extract of the loitering summers of +youth, when every occasion really seemed to stay to be gathered and +tasted, just for the sake of its faint sweetness.</p> + +<p>Some time since, in Boston, I spent an hour before a commemorative +cluster of La Farge's earlier productions, gathered in on the occasion +of his death, with the effect as of a plummet suddenly dropped into +obscure depths long unstirred, that of a remembered participation, it +didn't seem too much to say, in the far-away difficult business of their +getting themselves born.<a name="page_102" id="page_102"></a> These things, almost all finished studies of +landscape, small and fond celebrations of the modest little Newport +harmonies, the spare felicities and delicacies of a range of aspects +that have ceased to appeal or to "count," called back into life a +hundred memories, laid bare the very footsteps of time, light and +uncertain though so often the imprint. I seemed so to have been there by +the projection of curiosity and sympathy, if not by having literally +looked in, when the greater number of such effects worked themselves +out, that they spoke to me of my own history—through the felt intensity +of my commission, as it were, to speak for my old friend. The terms on +which he was ever ready to draw out for us the interesting hours, terms +of patience as they essentially were for the edified party, lived again +in this record, but with the old supposition of profit, or in other +words the old sense of pleasure, of precious acquisition and intenser +experience, more vivid than anything else. There recurs to me for +instance one of the smallest of adventures, as tiny a thing as could +incur the name and which was of the early stage of our acquaintance, +when he proposed to me that we should drive out to the Glen, some six +miles off, to breakfast, and should afterwards paint—we paint!—in the +bosky open air. It looks at this distance a mythic time, that of felt +inducements to travel so far at such an<a name="page_103" id="page_103"></a> hour and in a backless buggy on +the supposition of rustic fare. But different ages have different +measures, and I quite remember how ours, that morning, at the neat +hostel in the umbrageous valley, overflowed with coffee and +griddle-cakes that were not as other earthly refreshment, and how a +spell of romance rested for several hours on our invocation of the +genius of the scene: of such material, with the help of the attuned +spirit, may great events consent to be composed. My companion, his easel +and canvas, his palette and stool and other accessories happily placed, +settled to his subject, while I, at a respectful distance, settled to +mine and to the preparation of this strange fruit of time, my having +kept the impression as if it really mattered. It did indeed matter, it +was to continue to have done so, and when I ask myself the reason I find +this in something as rare and deep and beautiful as a passage of old +poetry, a scrap of old legend, in the vagueness of rustling murmuring +green and plashing water and woodland voices and images, flitting +hovering possibilities; the most retained of these last of course being +the chance that one's small daub (for I too had my easel and panel and +palette) might incur appreciation by the eye of friendship. This indeed +was the true source of the spell, that it was in the eye of friendship, +friendship full of character and colour, and full<a name="page_104" id="page_104"></a> of amusement of its +own, that I lived on any such occasion, and that I had come forth in the +morning cool and had found our breakfast at the inn a thing of ineffable +savour, and that I now sat and flurriedly and fearfully aspired. Yes, +the interesting ineffectual and exquisite array of the Boston "show" +smote for me most the chord of the prime questions, the admirations and +expectations at first so confident, even that of those refinements of +loyalty out of which the last and highest tribute was to spring; the +consideration, I mean, of whether our extraordinary associate, neither +promptly understood nor inveterately accepted, might not eventually be +judged such a colourist and such a poet that owners of his first +felicities, those very ones over which he was actually bending, and with +a touch so inscrutable, such "tonalities" of his own, would find +themselves envied and rich. I remember positively liking to see most +people stupid about him, and to make them out, I dare say, more +numerously stupid than they really were: this perhaps in some degree as +a bright communication of his own spirit—which discerned from so far +off that of the bitterest-sweet cup it was abundantly to taste; and +partly because the case would after that fashion only have its highest +interest. The highest interest, <a name="page_105" id="page_105"></a>the very highest, it certainly couldn't +fail to have; and the beauty of a final poetic justice, with exquisite +delays, the whole romance of conscious delicacy and heroic patience +intervening, was just what we seemed to see meanwhile stow itself +expectantly away.</p> + +<p>This view of the inevitable fate of distinguished work was thus, on my +part, as it comes before me again, of early development, and I admit +that I should appear to antedate it hadn't I in renewed presence of each +of the particular predestined objects of sacrifice I have glanced at +caught myself in the very act of that invidious apprehension, that +fondest contemporaneity. There were the charming individual things round +the production of which I had so at once elatedly and resignedly +circled; and nothing remained at the end of time but to test the +historic question. <i>Was</i> the quiet chamber of the Boston museum a +constitution of poetic justice long awaited and at last fully +cognisant?—or did the event perhaps fail to give out, after all, the +essence of our far-away forecast? I think that what showed clearest, or +what I, at any rate, most sharply felt, was the very difficulty of +saying; which fact meant of course, I recognise, that the story fell a +little short, alas, of rounding itself off. Poetic justice, when it +comes, I gather, comes ever with a great shining; so that if there is +any doubt about it the source of the doubt is in the very depths of the +case and has been from the first at work there. It literally<a name="page_106" id="page_106"></a> seems to +me, besides, that there was more history and thereby more interest +recoverable as the matter stood than if every answer to every question +about it hadn't had a fine ambiguity. I like ambiguities and detest +great glares; preferring thus for my critical no less than for my +pedestrian progress the cool and the shade to the sun and dust of the +way. There was an exquisite effort of which I had been peculiarly sure; +the large canvas of the view of the Paradise Rocks over against Newport, +but within the island and beyond the "second beach"—such were our thin +designations! On the high style and the grand manner of this thing, even +though a little uneasy before the absence from it of a certain crânerie +of touch, I would have staked every grain of my grounded sensibility—in +spite of which, on second thoughts, I shall let that faded fact, and no +other contention at all, be my last word about it. For the prevailing +force, within the Boston walls, the supreme magic anything was to +distil, just melted into another connection which flung a soft mantle as +over the whole show. It became, from the question of how even a man of +perceptive genius had painted what we then locally regarded as our +scenery, a question of how we ourselves had felt and cherished that +scenery; which latter of these two memories swept for me everything +before it. The scenery we cherished—by which I really mean, I fear, but +four or five of<a name="page_107" id="page_107"></a> us—has now been grossly and utterly sacrificed; in the +sense that its range was all for the pedestrian measure, that to +overwalk it was to love it and to love it to overwalk it, and that no +such relation with it as either of these appears possible or thinkable +to-day. We had, the four or five of us, the instinct—the very finest +this must have been—of its scale and constitution, the adorable wise +economy with which nature had handled it and in the light of which the +whole seaward and insular extension of the comparatively futile town, +untrodden, unsuspected, practically all inviolate, offered a course for +the long afternoon ramble more in harmony with the invocations, or for +that matter the evocations, of youth than we most of us, with +appreciation so rooted, were perhaps ever to know. We knew already, we +knew then, that no such range of airs would ever again be played for us +on but two or three silver strings. They were but two or three—the sea +so often as of the isles of Greece, the mildly but perpetually embayed +promontories of mossy rock and wasted thankless pasture, bathed in a +refinement of radiance and a sweetness of solitude which amounted in +themselves to the highest "finish"; and little more than the feeling, +with all this, or rather with no more than this, that possession, +discrimination, far frequentation, were ours alone, and that a grassy +rocky tide-washed,<a name="page_108" id="page_108"></a> just a bare, though ever so fine-grained, toned and +tinted breast of nature and field of fancy stretched for us to the low +horizon's furthest rim. The vast region—it struck us then as vast—was +practically roadless, but this, far from making it a desert, made it a +kind of boundless empty carpeted saloon. It comes back to me that nobody +in those days walked, nobody but the three or four of us—or indeed I +should say, if pushed, the single pair in particular of whom I was one +and the other Thomas Sargeant Perry, superexcellent and all-reading, +all-engulfing friend of those days and still, sole survivor, of these, I +thus found deeply consecrated that love of the long, again and again of +the very longest possible, walk which was to see me, year after year, +through so many of the twists and past so many of the threatened blocks +of life's road, and which, during the early and American period, was to +make me lone and perverse even in my own sight: so little was it ever +given me then, wherever I scanned the view, to descry a +fellow-pedestrian. The pedestrians came to succumb altogether, at +Newport, to this virtual challenge of their strange agitation—by the +circumstance, that is, of their being offered at last, to importunity, +the vulgar road, under the invasion of which the old rich alternative +miserably dwindled.<a name="page_109" id="page_109"></a></p> + +<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2> + +<p>Nothing meanwhile could have been less logical, yet at the same time +more natural, than that William's interest in the practice of painting +should have suddenly and abruptly ceased; a turn of our affair attended, +however, with no shade of commotion, no repining at proved waste; with +as little of any confessed ruefulness of mistake on one side as of any +elation of wisdom, any resonance of the ready "I told you so" on the +other. The one side would have been, with a different tone about the +matter and a different domestic habit than ours, that of my brother's +awkwardness, accompanying whatever intelligence, of disavowal, and the +other been our father's not unemphatic return to the point that his +doubts, those originally and confidently intimated, had been justified +by the fact. Tempting doubtless in a heavier household air the +opportunity on the latter's part to recall that if he had perfectly +recognised his son's probable progress to a pitch of excellence he had +exactly not granted that an attainment of this pitch was likely in the +least, however uncontested, to satisfy the nature concerned; the +foregone conclusion having all the while been that such a spirit was +competent<a name="page_110" id="page_110"></a> to something larger and less superficially calculable, +something more expressive of its true inwardness. This was not the way +in which things happened among us, for I really think the committed +mistake was ever discriminated against—certainly by the head of the +family—only to the extent of its acquiring, even if but speedily again +to fade, an interest greater than was obtainable by the too obvious +success. I am not sure indeed that the kind of personal history most +appealing to my father would not have been some kind that should fairly +proceed by mistakes, mistakes more human, more associational, less +angular, less hard for others, that is less exemplary for them (since +righteousness, as mostly understood, was in our parent's view, I think, +the cruellest thing in the world) than straight and smug and declared +felicities. The qualification here, I allow, would be in his scant +measure of the difference, after all, for the life of the soul, between +the marked achievement and the marked shortcoming. He had a manner of +his own of appreciating failure, or of not at least piously rejoicing in +displayed moral, intellectual, or even material, economies, which, had +it not been that his humanity, his generosity and, for the most part, +his gaiety, were always, at the worst, consistent, might sometimes have +left us with our small savings, our little exhibitions and +complacencies,<a name="page_111" id="page_111"></a> rather on our hands. As the case stood I find myself +thinking of our life in those years as profiting greatly for animation +and curiosity by the interest he shed for us on the whole side of the +human scene usually held least interesting—the element, the appearance, +of waste which plays there such a part and into which he could read +under provocation so much character and colour and charm, so many +implications of the fine and the worthy, that, since the art of missing +or of failing, or of otherwise going astray, did after all in his hands +escape becoming either a matter of real example or of absolute precept, +enlarged not a little our field and our categories of appreciation and +perception. I recover as I look back on all this the sense as of an +extraordinary young confidence, our common support, in our coming round +together, through the immense lubrication of his expressed thought, +often perhaps extravagantly working and playing, to plenty of +unbewildered rightness, a state of comfort that would always +serve—whether after strange openings into a sphere where nothing +practical mattered, or after even still quainter closings in upon us of +unexpected importances and values. Which means, to my memory, that we +breathed somehow an air in which waste, for us at least, couldn't and +didn't live, so certain were aberrations and discussions, adventures,<a name="page_112" id="page_112"></a> +excursions and alarms of whatever sort, to wind up in a "transformation +scene" or, if the term be not profane, happy harlequinade; a figuration +of each involved issue and item before the footlights of a familiar +idealism, the most socialised and ironised, the most amusedly +generalised, that possibly could be.</p> + +<p>Such an atmosphere was, taking one of its elements with another, +doubtless delightful; yet if it was friendly to the suggested or +imagined thing it promoted among us much less directly, as I have +already hinted, the act of choice—choice as to the "career" for +example, with a view of the usual proceedings thereupon consequent. I +marvel at the manner in which the door appears to have been held or at +least left open to us for experiment, though with a tendency to close, +the oddest yet most inveterately perceptible movement in that sense, +before any very earnest proposition in particular. I have no remembrance +at all of marked prejudices on our father's part, but I recall repeated +cases, in his attitude to our young affairs, of a disparagement +suggested as by stirred memories of his own; the instance most present +to me being his extreme tepidity in the matter of William's, or in fact +of my, going, on our then American basis, to college. I make out in him, +and at the time made out, a great revulsion of spirit from that incurred +experience<a name="page_113" id="page_113"></a> in his own history, a revulsion I think moreover quite +independent of any particular or instrinsic attributes of the seat of +learning involved in it. Union College, Schenectady, New York, the scene +of his personal experiment and the natural resort, in his youth, of +comparatively adjacent Albanians, might easily have offered at that time +no very rare opportunities—few were the American country colleges that +then had such to offer; but when, after years, the question arose for +his sons he saw it in I scarce know what light of associational or +"subjective" dislike. He had the disadvantage—unless indeed it was much +more we who had it—of his having, after many changes and detachments, +ceased to believe in the Schenectady resource, or to revert to it +sentimentally, without his forming on the other hand, with his boys to +place, any fonder presumption or preference. There comes out to me, much +bedimmed but recognisable, the image of a day of extreme youth on which, +during a stay with our grandmother at Albany, we achieved, William and +I, with some confused and heated railway effort, a pious pilgrimage to +the small scholastic city—pious by reason, I clearly remember, of a +lively persuasion on my brother's part that to Union College, at some +indefinite future time, we should both most naturally and delightedly +repair. We invoked, I gather, among<a name="page_114" id="page_114"></a> its scattered shades, fairly vague +to me now, the loyalty that our parent appeared to have dropped by the +way—even though our attitude about it can scarce have been prematurely +contentious; the whole vision is at any rate to-day bathed and blurred +for me in the air of some charmed and beguiled dream, that of the +flushed good faith of an hour of crude castle-building. We were helped +to build, on the spot, by an older friend, much older, as I remember +him, even than my brother, already a member of the college and, as it +seemed, greatly enjoying his life and those "society" badges and +trinkets with which he reappears to me as bristling and twinkling quite +to the extinction of his particular identity. This is lost, like +everything else, in the mere golden haze of the little old-time autumn +adventure. Wondrous to our sensibility may well have been the October +glamour—if October it was, and if it was not it ought to have been!—of +that big brave region of the great State over which the shade of +Fenimore Cooper's Mohawks and Mohicans (if this be not a pleonasm) might +still have been felt to hang. The castle we had built, however, +crumbled—there were plenty of others awaiting erection; these too +successively had their hour, but I needn't at this time stoop to pick up +their pieces. I see moreover vividly enough how it might have been that, +at this<a name="page_115" id="page_115"></a> stage, our parents were left cold by the various appeal, in our +interest, of Columbia, Harvard and Yale. Hard by, at Providence, in the +Newport time, was also "Brown"; but I recover no connection in which +that mystic syllable swept our sky as a name to conjure with. Our +largest licence somehow didn't stray toward Brown. It was to the same +tune not conceivable that we should have been restored for educational +purposes to the swollen city, the New York of our childhood, where we +had then so tumbled in and out of school as to exhaust the measure, or +as at least greatly to deflower the image, of our teachability on that +ground. Yale, off our beat from every point of view, was as little to be +thought of, and there was moreover in our father's imagination no grain +of susceptibility to what might have been, on the general ground, +"socially expected." Even Harvard, clearly—and it was perhaps a trifle +odd—moved him in our interest as little as Schenectady could do; so +that, for authority, the voice of social expectation would have had to +sound with an art or an accent of which it had by no means up to that +time learned roundabout us the trick. This indeed (it comes to saying) +is something that, so far as our parents were concerned, it would never +have learned. They were, from other preoccupations, unaware of any such<a name="page_116" id="page_116"></a> +pressure; and to become aware would, I think, primarily have been for +them to find it out of all proportion to the general pitch of +prescription. We were not at that time, when it came to such claims, in +presence of persuasive, much less of impressive, social forms and +precedents—at least those of us of the liberated mind and the really +more curious culture were not; the more curious culture, only to be +known by the positive taste of it, was nowhere in the air, nowhere +seated or embodied.</p> + +<p>Which reflections, as I perhaps too loosely gather them in, refresh at +any rate my sense of how we in particular of our father's house actually +profited more than we lost, if the more curious culture was in question, +by the degree to which we were afloat and disconnected; since there were +at least luxuries of the spirit in this quite as much as +drawbacks—given a social order (so far as it <i>was</i> an order) that found +its main ideal in a "strict attention to business," that is to buying +and selling over a counter or a desk, and in such an intensity of the +traffic as made, on the part of all involved, for close localisation. To +attend strictly to business was to be invariably <i>there</i>, on a certain +spot in a certain place; just as to be nowhere in particular, to <i>have</i> +to be nowhere, told the queer tale of a lack or of a forfeiture, or +possibly even of a state of<a name="page_117" id="page_117"></a> intrinsic unworthiness. I have already +expressed how few of these elements of the background we ourselves had +ever had either to add to or to subtract from, and how this of itself +did after a fashion "place" us in the small Newport colony of the +despoiled and disillusioned, the mildly, the reminiscentially desperate. +As easy as might be, for the time, I have also noted, was our footing +there; but I have not, for myself, forgotten, or even now outlived, the +particular shade of satisfaction to be taken in one's thus being in New +England without being of it. To have originally been of it, or still to +have had to be, affected me, I recall, as a case I should have +regretted—unless it be more exact to say that I thought of the +condition as a danger after all escaped. Long would it take to tell why +it figured as a danger, and why that impression was during the several +following years much more to gain than to lose intensity. The question +was to fall into the rear indeed, with ever so many such secondary +others, during the War, and for reasons effective enough; but it was +afterwards to know a luxury of emergence—this, I mean, while one still +"cared," in general, as one was sooner or later to stop caring. +Infinitely interesting to recover, in the history of a mind, for those +concerned, these movements of the spirit, these tides and currents of +growth—though under the inconvenience for the historian<a name="page_118" id="page_118"></a> of such +ramifications of research that here at any rate I feel myself warned +off. There appeared to us at Newport the most interesting, much, of the +Albany male cousins, William James Temple—coming, oddly enough, first +from Yale and then from Harvard; so that by contact and example the +practicability of a like experience might have been, and doubtless was, +put well before us. "Will" Temple, as we were in his short life too +scantly to know him, had made so luckless, even if so lively a start +under one alma mater that the appeal to a fresh parentship altogether +appears to have been judged the best remedy for his case: he entered +Harvard jumping, if I mistake not, a couple of years of the +undergraduate curriculum, and my personal memory of these reappearances +is a mere recapture of admiration, of prostration, before him. The +dazzled state, under his striking good looks and his manly charm, was +the common state; so that I disengage from it no presumption of a +particular plea playing in our own domestic air for his temporary +Cambridge setting; he was so much too radiant and gallant and personal, +too much a character and a figure, a splendid importance in himself, to +owe the least glamour to settings; an advantage that might have seemed +rather to be shed on whatever scene by himself in consenting to light it +up. He made all life for the hour a foreground, and one that<a name="page_119" id="page_119"></a> we none of +us would have quitted for a moment while he was there.</p> + +<p>In that form at least I see him, and no revival of those years so puts +to me the interesting question, so often aimlessly returned upon in +later life, of the amount of truth in this or that case of young +confidence in a glory to come—for another than one's self; of the +likelihood of the wonders so flatteringly forecast. Many of our +estimates were monstrous magnifications—though doing us even at that +more good than harm; so that one isn't even sure that the happiest +histories were to have been those of the least liberal mistakes. I like +at any rate to think of our easy overstrainings—the possible flaw in +many of which was not indeed to be put to the proof. That was the case +for the general, and for every particular, impression of Will Temple, +thanks to his early death in battle—at Chancellorsville, 1863; he +having, among the quickened forces of the time, and his father's record +helping him, leaped to a captaincy in the regular Army; but I cling to +the idea that the siftings and sortings of life, had he remained subject +to them, would still have left him the lustre that blinds and subdues. I +even do more, at this hour; I ask myself, while his appearance and my +personal feeling about it live for me again, what possible aftertime +could have kept up the pitch of my<a name="page_120" id="page_120"></a> sentiment—aftertime either of his +or of mine. Blest beyond others, I think as we look back, the +admirations, even the fondest (and which indeed were not of their nature +fond?) that were not to know to their cost the inevitable test or +strain; they are almost the only ones, of the true high pitch, that, +without broken edges or other tatters to show, fold themselves away +entire and secure, even as rare lengths of precious old stuff, in the +scented chest of our savings. So great misadventure have too often known +at all events certain of those that were to come to trial. The others +are the <i>residual</i>, those we must keep when we can, so to be sure at +least of a few, sacrificing as many possible mistakes and misproportions +as need be to pay but for two or three of them. There could be no +mistake about Gus Barker, who threw himself into the fray, that is into +the cavalry saddle, as he might into a match at baseball (football being +then undreamt of), and my last reminiscence of whom is the sight of him, +on a brief leave for a farewell to his Harvard classmates after he had +got his commission, crossing with two or three companions the expanse of +Harvard Square that faced the old Law School, of which I found myself +for that year (1862-63) a singularly alien member. I was afterwards +sharply to regret the accident by which I on that occasion missed speech +of him; but my<a name="page_121" id="page_121"></a> present vision of his charming latent agility, which any +motion showed, of his bright-coloured wagging head and of the large +gaiety of the young smile that made his handsome teeth shine out, is +after all the years but the more happily uneffaced. The point of all +which connections, however, is that they somehow managed to make in the +parental view no straight links for us with the matter-of-course of +college. There were accidents too by the aid of which they failed of +this the more easily. It comes to me that, for my own part, I thought of +William at the time as having, or rather as so much more than having, +already graduated; the effect of contact with his mind and talk, with +the free play of his spirit and the irrepressible brush of his humour, +couldn't have been greater had he carried off fifty honours. I felt in +him such authority, so perpetually quickened a state of intellect and +character, that the detail or the literal side of the question never so +much as came up for me: I must have made out that to plenty of +graduates, or of the graduating, nothing in the nature of such +appearances attached. I think of our father moreover as no less affected +by a like impression; so extremely, so immensely disposed do I see him +to generalise his eldest son's gifts as by the largest, fondest +synthesis, and not so much proceed upon them in any one direction as +proceed <i>from</i> them, as it were, in all.<a name="page_122" id="page_122"></a></p> + +<p>Little as such a view might have lent itself to application, my +brother's searching discovery during the summer of 1861 that his +vocation was not "after all" in the least satisfyingly for Art, took on +as a prompt sequel the recognition that it was quite positively and +before everything for Science, physical Science, strenuous Science in +all its exactitude; with the opportunity again forthcoming to put his +freshness of faith to the test. I had presumed to rejoice before at his +adoption of the studio life, that offering as well possible contacts for +myself; and yet I recall no pang for his tergiversation, there being +nothing he mightn't have done at this or at any other moment that I +shouldn't have felt as inevitable and found in my sense of his previous +age some happy and striking symptom or pledge of. As certain as that he +had been all the while "artistic" did it thus appear that he had been at +the same time quite otherwise inquiring too—addicted to "experiments" +and the consumption of chemicals, the transfusion of mysterious liquids +from glass to glass under exposure to lambent flame, the cultivation of +stained fingers, the establishment and the transport, in our wanderings, +of galvanic batteries, the administration to all he could persuade of +electric shocks, the maintenance of marine animals in splashy aquaria, +the practice of photography in the room I for a while shared<a name="page_123" id="page_123"></a> with him +at Boulogne, with every stern reality of big cumbrous camera, prolonged +exposure, exposure mostly of myself, darkened development, also +interminable, and ubiquitous brown blot. Then there had been also the +constant, as I fearfully felt it, the finely speculative and boldly +disinterested absorption of curious drugs. No livelier remembrance have +I of our early years together than this inveteracy, often appalling to a +nature so incurious as mine in <i>that</i> direction, of his interest in the +"queer" or the incalculable effects of things. There was apparently for +him no possible effect whatever that mightn't be more or less rejoiced +in as such—all exclusive of its relation to other things than merely +knowing. There recurs to me withal the shamelessness of my own +indifference—at which I also, none the less, I think, wondered a +little; as if by so much as it hadn't been given me to care for visibly +provoked or engineered phenomena, by that same amount was I open to +those of the mysteriously or insidiously aggressive, the ambushed or +suffered sort. Vivid to me in any case is still the sense of how quite +shiningly light, as an activity and an appeal, he had seemed to make +everything he gave himself to; so that at first, until the freshness of +it failed, he flung this iridescent mantle of interest over the then so +grey and scant little scene of the Harvard (the<a name="page_124" id="page_124"></a> Lawrence) Scientific +School, where in the course of the months I had had a glimpse or two of +him at work. Early in the autumn of 1861 he went up from Newport to +Cambridge to enter that institution; in which thin current rather than +in the ostensibly more ample began to flow his long connection with +Harvard, gathering in time so many affluents. His letters from Cambridge +during the next couple of years, many of them before me now, breathe, I +think, all the experience the conditions could have begotten at the +best; they mark the beginning of those vivacities and varieties of +intellectual and moral reaction which were for the rest of his life to +be the more immeasurably candid and vivid, the more numerous above all, +and the more interesting and amusing, the closer view one had of him. +That of a certainty; yet these familiar pages of youth testify most of +all for me perhaps to the forces of amenity and spontaneity, the happy +working of all relations, in our family life. In such parts of them as I +may cite this will shine sufficiently through—and I shall take for +granted thus the interest of small matters that have perhaps but that +reflected light to show. It is in a letter to myself, of that September, +dated "Drear and Chill Abode," that he appears to have celebrated the +first steps of his initiation.<a name="page_125" id="page_125"></a></p> + +<p>Sweet was your letter and grateful to my eyes. I had gone in a +mechanical way to the P.O. not hoping for anything (though "on espère +alors qu'on désespère toujours,") and, finding nothing, was turning +heavily away when a youth modestly tapped me and, holding out an +envelope inscribed in your well-known character, said, "Mr. J., this was +in our box!" 'Twas the young Pascoe, the joy of his mother—but the +graphic account I read in the letter he gave me of the sorrow of my +mother almost made me shed tears on the floor of the P.O. Not that on +reflection I should dream——! for reflection shows me a future in which +she shall regard my vacation visits as "on the whole" rather troublesome +than otherwise; or at least when she shall feel herself as blest in the +trouble I spare her when absent as in the glow of pride and happiness +she feels at the sight of me when present. But she needn't fear I can +ever think of <i>her</i> when absent with such equanimity. I oughtn't to +"joke on such a serious subject," as Bobby would say though; for I have +had several pangs since being here at the thought of all I have left +behind at Newport—especially gushes of feeling about the <i>place</i>. I +haven't for one minute had the feeling of being at home here. Something +in my quarters precludes the possibility of it, though what this is I +don't suppose I can describe to you.</p> + +<p>As I write now even, writing itself being a cosy cheerful-looking +amusement, and an argand gas-burner with a neat green shade merrily +singing beside me, I still feel unsettled. I write on a round table in +the middle of the room, with a fearful red and black cloth. Before me I +see another such-covered table of oblong shape against the wall, capped +by a cheap looking-glass and flanked by two windows, curtainless and +bleak, whose shades of linen flout the air as the sportive wind<a name="page_126" id="page_126"></a> impels +them. To the left are two other such windows, with a horse-hair sofa +between them, and at my back a fifth window and a vast wooden +mantel-piece with nothing to relieve its nakedness but a large cast, +much plumbago'd, of a bust of Franklin. On my right the Bookcase, +imposing and respectable with its empty drawers and with my little array +of printed wisdom covering nearly <i>one</i> of the shelves. I hear the +people breathe as they go past in the street, and the roll and jar of +the horse-cars is terrific. I have accordingly engaged the other room +from Mrs. Pascoe, with the little sleeping-room upstairs. It looks +infinitely more cheerful than this, and if I don't find the grate +sufficient I can easily have a Franklin stove put up. But she says the +grate will make an oven of it.... John Ropes I met the other day at +Harry Quincy's room, and was very much pleased with him. Don't fail to +send on Will Temple's letters to him and to Herbert Mason, which I left +in one of the library's mantelpiece jars, to use the Portuguese idiom. +Storrow Higginson has been very kind to me, making enquiries about +tables etc. We went together this morning to the house of the Curator of +the Gray collection of Engravings, which is solemnly to unfold its +glories to me to-morrow. He is a most serious stately German gentleman, +Mr. Thies by name, fully sensible of the deep vital importance of his +treasures and evidently thinking a visit to them a great affair—to +<i>me</i>. Had I known how great, how tremendous and formal, I hardly think I +should have ventured to call. Tom Ward pays me a visit almost every +evening. Poor Tom seems a-cold too. His deafness keeps him from making +acquaintances. Professor Eliot, at the School, is a fine fellow, I +suspect; a man who if he resolves to do a thing won't be prevented. I +find analysis very interesting <i>so far</i>! The Library has a +reading-room,<a name="page_127" id="page_127"></a> where they take all the magazines; so I shan't want for +the Rev. des 2 M. I remain with unalterable sentiments of devotion ever, +my dear H., your Big Brother Bill.</p> + +<p>This record of further impressions closely and copiously followed.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>Your letter this morning was such a godsend that I hasten to +respond a line or two, though I have no business to—for I have a +fearful lesson to-morrow and am going to Boston to-night to hear +Agassiz lecture (12 lectures on "Methods in Nat. Hist."), so that I +will only tell you that I am very well and my spirits just getting +good. Miss Upham's table is much pleasanter than the other. +Professor F. J. Child is a great joker—he's a little flaxen-headed +boy of about 40. There is a nice old lady boarder, another man of +about 50, of aristocratic bearing, who interests me much, and 3 +intelligent students. At the other table was no conversation at +all; the fellows had that American solemnity, called each other +Sir, etc. I cannot tell you, dearest Mother, how your account of +your Sunday dinner and of your feelings thereat brought tears to my +eyes. Give Father my ardent love and cover with kisses the round +fair face of the most kiss-worthy Alice. Then kiss the Aunt till +you get tired, and get all the rest of them to kiss <i>you</i> till you +cry hold enough!</p> + +<p>This morning as I was busy over the 10th page of a letter to Wilky +in he popped and made my labour of no account. I had intended to go +and see him yesterday, but found Edward Emerson and Tom Ward were +going, and so thought he would have too much of a good thing. But +he walked over this morning with, or rather without them, for he +went astray and arrived<a name="page_128" id="page_128"></a> very hot and dusty. I gave him a bath and +took him to dinner, and he is now gone to see Andrew Robeson and E. +E. His plump corpusculus looks as always. I write in my new parlour +whither I moved yesterday. You have no idea what an improvement it +is on the old affair—worth double the cost, and the little bedroom +under the roof is perfectly delicious, with a charming outlook on +little back yards with trees and pretty old brick walls. The sun is +upon <i>this</i> room from earliest dawn till late in the afternoon—a +capital thing in winter. I like Miss Upham's very much. Dark +"aristocratic" dining-room, with royal cheer. "Fish, roast beef, +veal cutlets, pigeons!" says the splendid, tall, noble-looking, +white-armed, black-eyed Juno of a handmaid as you sit down. And for +dessert a choice of three, <i>three</i>, darling Mother, of the most +succulent, unctuous (no, not unctuous, unless you imagine a +celestial unction without the oil) pie-like confections, always 2 +platesful—my eye! She has an admirable chemical, not mechanical, +combination of cake and jam and cream which I recommend to Mother +if she is ever at a loss; though there is no well-stored pantry +like that of good old Kay Street, or if there is it exists not for +miserable me.</p> + +<p>This chemical analysis is so bewildering at first that I am +"muddled and bet" and have to employ almost all my time reading up. +Agassiz is evidently a great favourite with his Boston audience and +feels it himself. But he's an admirable earnest lecturer, clear as +day, and his accent is most fascinating. Jeffries Wyman's lectures +on Comp. Anatomy of Verts. promise to be very good; prosy perhaps a +little and monotonous, but plain and well-arranged and nourris. +Eliot I have not seen much more of; I don't believe he is a <i>very</i> +accomplished chemist, but can't tell yet. We are only about 12 in +the Laboratory, so that we have a very cosy<a name="page_129" id="page_129"></a> time. I expect to have +a winter of "crowded life." I can be as independent as I please, +and want to live regardless of the good or bad opinion of every +one. I shall have a splendid chance to try, I know, and I know too +that the native hue of resolution has never been of very great +shade in me hitherto. I am sure that that feeling is a right one, +and I mean to live according to it if I can. If I do so I think I +shall turn out all right.</p> + +<p>I stopped this letter before tea, when Wilky the rosy-gilled and +Frank Higginson came in. I now resume it by the light of a taper +and that of the moon. Wilky read H.'s letter and amused me "metch" +by his naive interpretation of Mother's most rational request that +I should "keep a memorandum of all moneys I receive from Father." +He thought it was that she might know exactly what sums her +prodigal philosopher really gives out, and that mistrust of his +generosity caused it. The phrase has a little sound that way, as H. +subtly framed it, I confess!</p> + +<p>The first few days, the first week here, I really didn't know what +to do with myself or how to fill my time. I felt as if turned out +of doors. I then received H.'s and Mother's letters. Never before +did I know what mystic depths of rapture lay concealed within that +familiar word. Never did the same being look so like two different +ones as I going in and out of the P.O. if I bring a letter with me. +Gloomily, with despair written on my leaden brow I stalk the street +along towards the P.O., women, children and students involuntarily +shrinking against the wall as I pass—thus,<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> as if the curse of +Cain were stamped upon my front. But when I come out with a letter +an immense concourse of people generally attends me to my lodging, +attracted by my excited wild gestures and look.</p></div> + +<p><a name="page_130" id="page_130"></a></p> + +<p>Christmas being sparely kept in the New England of those days, William +passed that of 1861, as a Cambridge letter of the afternoon indicates, +without opportunity for a seasonable dash to Newport, but with such +compensations, nearer at hand as are here exhibited. Our brother Wilky, +I should premise, had been placed with the youngest of us, Bob, for +companion, at the "co-educational" school then but a short time +previously established by Mr. F. B. Sanborn at Concord, +Massachusetts—and of which there will be more to say. "Tom" Ward, +already mentioned and who, having left the Concord school shortly +before, had just entered Harvard, was quickly to become William's +intimate, approved and trusted friend; the diversion of whose patient +originality, whose intellectual independence, ability and curiosity from +science and free inquiry to hereditary banking—consequent on the +position of the paternal Samuel Gray Ward as the representative for many +years in the United States of the house of Baring Brothers—he from the +first much regretted: the more pertinently doubtless that this companion +was of a family "connected" with ours through an intermarriage, Gus +Barker, as Mrs. S. G. Ward's nephew, being Tom's first cousin as well as +ours, and such links still counting, in that age <a name="page_131" id="page_131"></a>of comparatively +less developed ramifications, when sympathy and intercourse kept pace as +it was kept between our pairs of parents.</p> + +<p class="figcenter"> +<img src="images/ill_130.png" width="481" height="730" alt="A leaf from the letter quoted on page 129." title="" /> +<br /> +<span class="caption2">A leaf from the letter quoted on <a href="#page_129">page 129</a>.</span> +</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>I have been in Boston the whole blest morning, toted round by the +Wards, who had as usual asked me to dine with them. I had happily +provided myself with an engagement here for all such emergencies, +but, as is my sportive wont, I befooled Tom with divers answers, +and finally let him believe I would come (having refused several +dazzling chances for the purpose) supposing of course I should see +him here yesterday at Miss Upham's board and disabuse him. But the +young viper went home right after breakfast—so I had to go into +Boston this morning and explain. Wilky had come up from Concord to +dine in said Commonwealth Avenue, and I, as it turned out, found +myself in for following the innocent lamb Lily up and down the town +for two hours, to hold bundles and ring bells for her; Wilky and +Tom having vanished from the scene. Clear sharp cold morning, +thermometer 5 degrees at sunrise, and the streets covered with one +glare of ice. I had thick smooth shoes and went sliding off like an +avalanche every three steps, while she, having india-rubbers and +being a Bostonian, went ahead like a swan. I had among other things +to keep her bundles from harm, to wipe away every three minutes the +trembling jewel with which the cold <i>would</i> with persistent +kindness ornament my coral nose; to keep a hypocritic watchful eye +on her movements lest she fall; to raise my hat gracefully to more +and more of her acquaintances every block; to skate round and round +embracing lamp-posts and door-scrapers by the score to keep from +falling, as well as to avoid serving old lady-promenaders in the +same way; to cut capers 4 feet high at the rate of 20 a second, +every now and then, for the same purpose; to<a name="page_132" id="page_132"></a> keep from scooting +off down hills and round corners as fast as my able-bodied +companion; often to do all these at once and then fall lickety-bang +like a chandelier, but <i>when</i> so to preserve an expression of +placid beatitude or easy nonchalance despite the raging fiend +within: oh it beggars description! When finally it was over and I +stood alone I shook my companion's dust from my feet and, biting my +beard with rage, sware a mighty oath unto high heaven that I would +never, while reason held her throne in this distracted orb, <i>never</i> +NEVER, by word, look or gesture and this without mental +reservation, acknowledge a "young lady" as a human being. The false +and rotten spawn might die before I would wink to save it. No more +Parties now!—at last I am a Man, etc., etc.!</p> + +<p>My enthusiasm ran very high for a few minutes, but I suddenly saw +that I was a great ass and became sobered instantly, so that on the +whole I am better for the circumstance, being a sadder and a wiser +man. I also went to the Tappans' and gave the children slight +presents; then, coming home to my venal board, behaved very +considerately and paternally to a young lady who sat next to me, +but with a shade of subdued melancholy in my manner which could not +have been noticed at the breakfast-table. Many times and bitterly +to-day have I thought of home and lamented that I should have to be +away at this merry Christmastide from my rare family; wondering, +with Wilky, if they were missing us as we miss them. And now as I +sit in the light of my kerosene, with the fire quietly consuming in +the grate and the twilight on the snow outside and the melancholy +old-fashioned strains of the piano dimly rising from below, I see +in vision those at home just going in to dinner; my aged, silvered +Mother leaning on the arm of her stalwart yet flexible H., merry +and garrulous as ever, my blushing Aunt<a name="page_133" id="page_133"></a> with her old wild beauty +still hanging about her, my modest Father with his rippling raven +locks, the genial auld Rob and the mysterious Alice, all rise +before me, a glorified throng; but two other forms, one tall, +intellectual, swarthy, with curved nose and eagle eye, the other +having breadth rather than depth, but a goodly morsel too, are +wanting to complete the harmonious whole. Eftsoons they vanish and +I am again alone, <i>alone</i>—what pathos in the word! I have two +companions though, most all the time—remorse and despair! T. S. +Perry took their place for a little, and to-day they have not come +back. T. S. seemed to enjoy his visit very much. It was very +pleasant for me to have him; his rustic wonder at the commonest +sights was most ludicrous, and his conversation most amusing and +instructive.</p> + +<p>The place here improves to me as I go on living in it, and if I +study with Agassiz 4 or 5 years there is nothing I should like +better than to have you all with me, regular and comfortable. I +enclose another advertisement of a house—but which would be too +small for us, I believe, though it might be looked at. I had a long +talk with one of A.'s students the other night, and saw for the +first time how a naturalist may feel about his trade exactly as an +artist does about his. For instance Agassiz would rather take +wholly uninstructed people—"for he has to unteach them all they +have learnt." He doesn't let them so much as look into a book for a +long while; what they learn they must learn for themselves and be +<i>masters</i> of it all. The consequence is he makes Naturalists of +them—doesn't merely cram them; and this student (he had been there +2 years) said he felt ready to go anywhere in the world now with +nothing but his notebook and study out anything quite alone. A. +must be a great teacher. Chemistry comes on tolerably, but not so<a name="page_134" id="page_134"></a> +fast as I expected. I am pretty slow with my substances, having +done but 12 since Thanksgiving and having 38 more to do before the +end of the term.</p></div> + +<p>Comment on the abundance, the gaiety and drollery, the generous play of +vision and fancy in all this, would seem so needless as to be almost +officious, were not the commentator constantly, were he not infinitely, +arrested and reminded and solicited; which is at once his advantage and +his embarrassment. Such a letter, at all events, read over with the +general key, touches its contemporary scene and hour into an intensity +of life for him; making indeed the great sign of that life my brother's +signal vivacity and cordiality, his endless spontaneity of mind. Every +thing in it is characteristic of the genius and expressive of the mood, +and not least, of course, the pleasantry of paradox, the evocation of +each familiar image by its vivid opposite. Our mother, <i>e.g.</i>, was not +at that time, nor for a good while yet, so venerably "silvered"; our +handsome-headed father had lost, occipitally, long before, all pretence +to raven locks, certainly to the effect of their "rippling"; the beauty +of our admirable aunt was as happily alien either to wildness or to the +"hanging" air as it could very well be; the "mystery" of our young +sister consisted all in the candour of her natural bloom, even if at the +same time of her lively intelligence; and<a name="page_135" id="page_135"></a> H.'s mirth and garrulity +appear to have represented for the writer the veriest ironic translation +of something in that youth, I judge, not a little mildly—though oh <i>so</i> +mildly!—morose or anxiously mute. To the same tune the aquiline in his +own nose heroically derides the slightly relaxed line of that feature; +and our brother Wilky's want of physical "depth" is a glance at a +different proportion. Of a like tinge of pleasantry, I may add, is the +imputation of the provincial gape to our friend T. S. Perry, of Newport +birth and unintermitted breeding, with whom we were to live so much in +the years to come, and who was then on the eve of entering Harvard—his +face already uninterruptedly turned to that love of letters, that +practice of them by dauntless and inordinate, though never at all +vulgarly resonant, absorption which was to constitute in itself the most +disinterested of careers. I had myself felt him from the first an +exemplary, at once, and a discouraging friend; he had let himself loose +in the world of books, pressed and roamed through the most various +literatures and the most voluminous authors, with a stride that, as it +carried him beyond all view, left me dismayed and helpless at the edge +of the forest, where I listened wistfully but unemulously to the far-off +crash from within of his felled timber, the clearing of whole spaces or +periods shelf by shelf or great<a name="page_136" id="page_136"></a> tree by tree. The brother-in-law of +John La Farge, he had for us further, with that reviving consciousness +of American annals which the War was at once so rudely and so +insidiously to quicken in us, the glamour of his straight descent from +the Commodores Perry of the Lake Erie in the war of 1812, respectively, +and of the portentous penetration of Japan just after the mid-century, +and his longer-drawn but equally direct and so clean and comfortable +affiliation to the great Benjamin Franklin: as these things at least +seemed to me under my habit (too musing and brooding certainly to have +made for light loquacity) of pressing every wind-borne particle of +personal history—once the persons were only other enough from +myself—into the service of what I would fain have called picture or, +less explicitly, less formulatedly, romance.</p> + +<p>These, however, are but too fond insistences, and what mainly bears +pointing out is my brother's already restless reach forth to some new +subject of study. He had but lately addressed himself, not without +confidence, to such an investigation of Chemistry as he might become +conscious of a warrant for, yet the appeal of Agassiz's great authority, +so much in the air of the Cambridge of that time, found him at once +responsive; it opened up a world, the world of sentient life, in the +light of which Chemistry faded.<a name="page_137" id="page_137"></a> He had not, however, for the moment +done with it; and what I at any rate find most to the point in the pages +before me is the charm of their so witnessing to the geniality and +harmony of our family life, exquisite as I look back on it and reflected +almost as much in any one passage taken at hazard as in any other. He +had apparently, at the date of the following, changed his lodging.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>President Felton's death has been the great event of the week—two +funerals and I don't know how many prayers and sermons. To-day I +thought I would go to University chapel for the sake of variety and +hear Dr. Peabody's final word on him—and a very long and +lugubrious one it was. The prayer was a prolonged moan in which the +death (not in its consequences, but in itself) was treated as a +great calamity, and the whole eulogy was almost ridiculously +overcharged. What was most disagreeable throughout was the wailing +tones, not a bit that of simple pagan grief at the <i>loss</i>—which +would have been honest; but a whine consciously put on as from a +sense of duty, and a whine at nothing definite either, only a +purposeless clothing of all his words in tears. The whole style of +the performance was such that I have concluded to have nothing more +to do with funerals till they improve.</p> + +<p>The walking here has been terrible with ice or slush these many +weeks, but over head celestial. No new developments in this house. +The maniac sometimes chills my very marrow by hoarsely whispering +outside the door, "Gulielmo, Gulielmo!" Old Sweetser sits in his +dressing-gown smoking his pipe all day in a little uncomfortable +old <i>bathroom</i> next door to me. He may<a name="page_138" id="page_138"></a> with truth be called a +queer cuss. The young ladies have that very nasty immodest habit of +hustling themselves out of sight precipitately whenever I appear. I +dined with Mrs. —— yesterday all alone. She was quite sick, very +hoarse, and <i>he</i> was in the country, so that on the whole it was a +great bore. She is very clumsy in her way of doing things, and her +invitation to me was for the wife of an artist—not artistic!</p> + +<p>I am now studying organic Chemistry. It will probably shock Mother +to hear that I yesterday destroyed a pockethandkerchief—but it was +an old one and I converted it into some sugar which though rather +brown is very good. I believe I forgot to tell you that I am shorn +of my brightest ornament. That solitary hirsute jewel which lent +such a manly and martial aspect to my visage is gone, and the place +thereof is naked. I don't think anyone will know the difference, +and moreover it is not dead, it only sleeps and will some day rise +phoenix-like from its ashes with tenfold its former beauty. When +Father comes will he please bring Ganot's Physique <i>if H. doesn't +want it</i>?</p></div> + +<p>In none of these earlier communications from Cambridge is the element of +affectionate pleasantry more at play than in those addressed to his +sister.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>Charmante jeune fille, I find the Tappans <i>really</i> expected me to +bring you to them and were much disappointed at my failure. Ellen +has grown very fat and big. Mary calls everybody "horrid." Lyly +Barker is with the Wards. I haven't seen her yet, but shall do so +on Saturday, when I am also to dine with the Hunts. I hope your +neuralgia, or whatever<a name="page_139" id="page_139"></a> you may believe the thing was, has gone and +that you are back at school instead of languishing and lolling +about the house. I send you herewith a portrait of Prof. Eliot, a +very fair likeness, to grace your book withal. Write me whenever +you have the slightest or most fleeting inclination to do so. If +you have only one sentence to say, don't grudge paper and stamps +for it. You don't know how much good you may do me at an +appropriate time by a little easy scratching of your graceful +nimble pen.</p></div> + +<p>In another apostrophe to the same correspondent, at the same season, his +high spirits throw off the bonds of the vernacular.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>Est-ce que tu songes jamais à moi comme moi je songe à toi?—oh je +crois bien que non! Maintes fois dans la journée l'image d'une +espèce d'ange vêtue de blanc avec de longs boucles noirs qui +encadrent une figure telle que la plupart des mortels ne font que +l'entrevoir dans leur rêves, s'impose à mes sens ravis; créature +longue et fluette qui se dispose à se coucher dans une petite +chambrette verte où le gaz fait un grand jour. Eh, oua, oua, oua! +c'est à faire mourir de douleur. Mais je parie que tout de même pas +une étincelle ne vibre pour moi dans les fibres de ton cœur +endurci. Hélas, oublié de mes parents et de mes semblables, je ne +vois, où que je regarde, qu'un abîme de désespoir, un gouffre noir +et peuplé de démons, qui tôt ou tard va m'engloutir. Tu ne m'écris +jamais sauf pour me soutirer des objets de luxe. La vaste mère me +déteste, il n'y a que le frère qui me reste attaché, et lui par +esprit d'opposition plus que par autre chose. Eh mon Dieu, que +vais-je devenir? En tout cas je vais clore cette lettre, qui s'est +allongée malgré moi. Ton frère, James William.</p></div> + +<p>Of the same bright complexion is this report, addressed to his parents, +of the change of lodging already noted.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>The presence of the Tweedys has been most agreeable and has +contributed in no small degree to break the shock of removal to +these new rooms, which are not near so cosy as the old; especially +with the smoking of my stove, which went on all the first two days. +That has been stopped, however, and the only trouble is now to get +the fire alight at all. I have generally to start it 3 or 4 times, +and the removal of the material of each failure from the grate is a +fearful business. I have also to descend to the cellar myself to +get my coal, and my "hod," as Ma Sweetser, my land-lady, calls it, +not being very much bigger than a milk-pitcher, doesn't add to the +charm. The coal is apt to drop on the stairs, and I have to pick it +all up. At present the stove fills the room with a nephitic and +pestilential gas, so that I have to keep the window open. I went +last night with the Tweedys to the concert for which they came up, +and with them this morning to hear Wendell Phillips. This Sweetser +family is worthy of Dickens. It consists of a Mr. and Miss S., Mr. +S.'s three gushing girls, a parrot and a maniac. The maniac is very +obstreperous. Her husband left her boarding here 3 months ago and +went to Cuba. When she got mad he was written to, but has sent no +reply, and they are keeping her. For the Aunt's sake I keep my +drawer locked against her at night. Old Sweetser is a riddle I hope +to do justice to at some future time, but can't begin on now. His +sister shakes like an aspen whenever she is spoken to. Oh I forgot +the most important character of all, the black wench who "does" the +room. She is about 20 years old and<a name="page_141" id="page_141"></a> wears short frocks, but talks +like Alice Robeson and has an antediluvian face about as large as +the top of a flour-barrel.</p></div> + +<p>I can really keep my hand from nothing, of whatever connection, that +causes his intensity of animation and spontaneity of expression to +revive. On a Sunday evening early in 1862 he had</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p class="nind">just returned from Milton, and, after removing from my person a +beetle, sit down to write you immediately. Ever since 10.30 this +A.M. the beetle s'est promené à l'envi sur ma peau. The first +feeling I had of his becoming attached to it made me jump so as to +scare an old lady opposite me in the car into fits. Finding him too +hard to crush I let him run, and at last got used to him though at +times he tickled me to excruciation. I ache in every limb and every +cranny of my mind from my visit.... They had the usual number of +stories, wonderful and not wonderful, to tell of their friends and +relatives (of Stephen somebody, <i>e.g.</i>, who had a waggon weighing +several tons run over his chest without even bruising him, and so +on). They are very nice girls indeed all the same. I then went, +near by, to the Forbes's in a state of profuse perspiration, and +saw handsome Mrs. F. and her daughters, and a substitute for +Governor Andrew in the person of his wife; after which I returned +here, being driven back in the car, as I perceived on the front +platform, by our old familiar—familiar indeed!—friend William (I +mean our Irish ex-coachman) whom age doesn't seem to render more +veracious, as he told me several very big stories about himself: +how he smashed a car to pieces the other night, how he first gave +the alarm of the great fire, etc.<a name="page_142" id="page_142"></a></p> + +<p>I went to the theatre the other night, and, asking a gentleman to +make room for me, found him to be Bob Temple, who had arrived in +Boston that day. He looks very well and talks in the most +extraordinary way you ever heard about Slavery and the wickedness +of human society, and is apparently very sincere. He sailed for +Europe on Wednesday. I exhorted him to stop over at Newport, but he +wouldn't. There was something quite peculiar about him—he seemed +greatly changed. I can tell you more at home, but wish I might have +seen more of him. I have been the last three nights running to hear +John Wilkes Booth, the "young American Roscius." Rant, rant, rant +of the most fearful kind. The worst parts most applauded, but with +any amount of fire and energy in the passionate parts, in some of +which he really becomes natural.... You don't know what a regular +Sévigné you have in Alice. I blush for my delinquencies toward her, +but bow my head with meek humility, contented to be her debtor all +my life and despairing of ever repaying her the value of her +letters. Mother and Aunt I pine to see, and the honest Jack Tar of +the family, the rough Bob, with his rude untutored ways!</p></div> + +<p>Traps for remembrance I find set at every turn here, so that I have +either to dodge them or patiently to suffer catching. I try in vain for +instance merely to brush past the image of our kinsman Robert Temple the +younger, who made with his brother Will the eldest pair in that house of +cousins: he waylays, he persuades me too much, and to fail of the few +right words for him would be to leave a deep debt unrepaid—his<a name="page_143" id="page_143"></a> fitful +hovering presence, repeatedly vivid and repeatedly obscured, so +considerably "counted" for us, pointing the sharpest moral, pointing +fifty morals, and adorning a perpetual tale. He was for years, first on +the nearer and then little by little on the further, the furthest, +horizon, quite the most emphasised of all our wastrels, the figure +bristling most with every irregular accent that we were to find +ourselves in any closeness of relation with. I held him for myself at +least, from far back, a pure gift of free-handed chance to the grateful +imagination, the utmost limit of whose complaint of it could be but for +the difficulty of rendering him the really proper tribute. I regarded +him truly, for a long time, as a possession of the mind, the human image +swung before us with most of the effect of strong and thick and +inimitable colour. If to be orphaned and free of range had affected my +young fancy as the happy, that is the romantic, lot, no member of the +whole cousinship, favoured in that sense as so many of them were, +enjoyed so, by my making out, the highest privilege of the case. +Nothing, I could afterwards easily see, had been less inevitable and of +a greater awkwardness of accident than his being, soon after the death +of his parents, shipped off from Albany, in pursuit of an education, to +an unheard-of school in a remote corner of Scotland; which fact it was,<a name="page_144" id="page_144"></a> +however, that played for me exactly the bright part of preparing to show +with particular intensity what Europe again, with the opportunity so +given, was going to proceed to. It thus shone out when after the lapse +of several years he recurred to our more competent view that, quite +richly erratic creature as he might appear, and to whatever degree of +wonder and suspense, of amusement and amazement, he might wind us up, +the rich alien influence, full of special queernesses and mysteries in +this special connection, had complacently turned him out for us and had +ever so irretrievably and ineffaceably stamped him. He rose before us, +tall and goodlooking and easy, as a figure of an oddly <i>civilised</i> +perversity; his irreverent challenging humour, playing at once, without +mercy, over American aspects, seemed somehow not less cultivated than +profane—just which note in itself caused the plot beautifully to +thicken; for this was to distinguish and almost embellish him throughout +a long career in which he was to neglect no occasion, however frankly +forbidding, for graceless adventure, that he had the pure derisive, the +loose and mocking mind, yet initiated, educated, almost elegantly +impudent, in other words successfully impertinent, and which expressed +itself, in particular by the pen, with a literary lightness that we used +to find inimitable.<a name="page_145" id="page_145"></a> He had dangled there, further off and nearer, as a +character, to my attention, in the sense in which "people in books" were +characters, and other people, roundabout us, were somehow not; so that I +fairly thought of him (though this more, doubtless, with the lapse of +time) very much as if we had owed him to Thackeray or Dickens, the +creators of superior life to whom we were at that time always owing +most, rather than to any set of circumstances by which we had in our own +persons felt served; that he was inimitable, inimitably droll, +inimitably wasted, wanton, impossible, or whatever else it might be, +making him thus one with the rounded and represented creature, shining +in the light of art, as distinguished from the vague handful of more or +less susceptible material that had in the common air to pass for a true +concretion. The promise of this had been, to my original vision, in +every wind-borne echo of him, however light; I doubtless put people +"into books" by very much the same turn of the hand with which I took +them out, but it had tinged itself with the finely free that, proceeding +in due course from his school at Fochabers to the University of Aberdeen +(each sound and syllable of this general far cry from Albany had in +itself an incoherence!) he had encountered while there the oddest of all +occasions to embrace the Romish faith. In<a name="page_146" id="page_146"></a> the same way it ministered to +the vivid, even if baffled, view of him that he appeared then to have +retreated upon the impenetrable stronghold of Nairn, described by him as +a bleak little Scotch watering-place which yet sufficed to his cluster +of predicaments: whence he began to address to his bewildered pair of +Albany guardians and trustees the earlier of that series of incomparably +amusing letters, as we judged them, the arrival of almost any one of +which among us, out of the midst of indocilities at once more and more +horrific and more and more reported with a desperate drollery, was to +constitute an event so supremely beguiling that distressful meanings and +expensive remedies found themselves alike salved to consciousness by the +fact that such compositions could only be, for people of taste, +enjoyable. I think of this hapless kinsman throughout as blest with a +"form" that appealed to the finer fibres of appreciation; so that, +variously misadventurous as he was ever to continue, his genius for +expression again and again just saved him—saved him for bare life, left +in his hand a broken piece of the effective magic wand, never perhaps +waved with anything like that easy grace in an equally compromised +interest.</p> + +<p>It was at any rate as if I had from the first collected and saved up the +echoes—or so at least<a name="page_147" id="page_147"></a> it seems to me now: echoes of him as all +sarcastically and incorrigibly mutinous, somewhat later on, while in +nominal charge of a despairing <i>pasteur</i> at Neuchâtel—followed by the +intensified sense of him, after I scarce remember quite what interval, +on his appearing at Newport, where his sisters, as I have mentioned, had +been protectively gathered in, during the year, more or less, that +followed our own installation there. Then it was that we had the value +of his being interesting with less trouble taken to that end—in +proportion to the effect achieved—than perhaps ever served such a +cause; it would perhaps scarce even be too much to say that, as the only +trouble he seemed capable of was the trouble of quite positively +declining to interest on any terms, his essential Dickensism, as I have +called it, or his Thackerayan tint if preferred, his comedy-virtue in +fine, which he could neither disown nor, practically speaking, misapply, +was stronger even than his particular sardonic cynicism, strongly as +that was at last to flower. I won't in the least say he dazzled—that +was reserved for his so quite otherwise brilliant, his temporarily +triumphant, younger brother, at whom I have already glanced, who was on +no possible terms with him, and never could have been, so that the +difficulty of their relation glimmers upon me as probably half the good +reason for the original queer despatch<a name="page_148" id="page_148"></a> of the elder to about the +remotest, the most separating, point in space at which "educational +advantages" could be conceived as awaiting him. I must have had no need +by that time to be dazzled, or even to be charmed, in order more or less +fondly, often indeed doubtless fearfully, to apprehend; what I +apprehended being that here was a creature quite amusedly and +perceptively, quite attentively and, after a fashion, profitably, living +without a single one of the elements of life (of the inward, I mean, +those one would most have missed if deprived of them) that I knew as +most conducive to animation. What could have roused more curiosity than +this, for the time at least, even if there hadn't been associated with +it such a fine redolence, as I then supposed it, of the rich and strange +places and things, as I supposed <i>them</i>, that had contributed to making +him over? He had come back made—unless one was already, and too +conveniently or complacently, to call it unmade: <i>that</i> was the point +(and it certainly wasn't Albany that ever would have made him); he had +come back charged, to my vision, with prodigious "English" impressions +and awarenesses, each so thoroughly and easily assimilated that they +might have played their part as convictions and standards had he +pretended to anything that would in that degree have satisfied us. He +never<a name="page_149" id="page_149"></a> spoke of his "faith," as that might have been the thing we could +have held him to; and he knew what not too gracelessly to speak of when +the sense of the American grotesque in general and the largely-viewed +"family" reducibility to the absurd in particular offered him such free +light pasture. He had the sign of grace that he ever perfectly +considered my father—so far as attitude, distinct from behaviour, went; +but most members of our kinship on that side still clung to this habit +of consideration even when, as was in certain cases but too visible, +they had parted with all sense of any other. I have preserved no happier +truth about my father than that the graceless whom, according to their +own fond term, he, and he alone of all of us, "understood," returned to +him as often and appealed to him as freely as those happier, though +indeed scarce less importunate, in their connection, who found +attraction and reason enough in their understanding <i>him</i>. My brother's +impression of this vessel of intimations that evening at the Boston +theatre, and of his "sincerity" and his seeming "greatly changed," +doesn't at all events, I feel, fail in the least to fit into one of +those amplifications upon which my incurable trick of unwillingness +wholly to sacrifice any good value compromised by time tends to +precipitate me with a force that my reader can scarce fear for<a name="page_150" id="page_150"></a> me more +than I fear it for myself. There was no "extraordinary way" in which our +incalculable kinsman <i>mightn't</i> talk, and that William should have had +for the hour the benefit of his general truth is but a happy note in my +record. It was not always the case that one wished one "might have seen +more of him," but this was only because one had had on any contact the +sense of seeing so much. That produced consequences among which the +desire for more might even be uncannily numbered. John Wilkes Booth, of +the same evening, was of course President Lincoln's assassin-to-be, of +whose crudely extravagant performance of the hero of Schiller's Robbers +I recall my brother's imitative description—I never myself saw him; and +it simplifies his case, I think, for distracted history, that he must +have been quite an abominable actor. I appear meanwhile to have paid +William at Cambridge a visit of which I have quite oddly lost +remembrance—by reason doubtless of its but losing itself in like, +though more prolonged, occasions that were to follow at no great +distance and that await my further reference. The manner of his own +allusion to it more than suffices.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>The radiance of H.'s visit has not faded yet, and I come upon +gleams of it three or four times a day in my farings to and fro, +but it has never a bit diminished the lustre of far-off shining +Newport, all silver and blue,<a name="page_151" id="page_151"></a> and of this heavenly group +below<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a>—all being more or less failures, especially the two +outside ones. The more so as the above-mentioned H. could in no +wise satisfy my craving for knowledge of family and friends—he +didn't seem to have been on speaking terms with anyone for some +time past, and could tell me nothing of what they did, said or +thought, about any given subject. Never did I see a so-much +uninterested creature in the affairs of those about him. He is a +good soul, though, in his way, too; and less fatal than the light +fantastic and ever-sociable Wilky, who has wrought little but +disaster during his stay with me; breaking down my good resolutions +about food, keeping me from all intellectual exercise, working +havoc on my best hat by wearing it while dressing, while in his +nightgown, while washing his face, and all but going to bed with +it. He occupied my comfortable arm-chair all the morning in the +position represented in the fine plate that accompanies this +letter—but one more night though, and he will have gone, and no +thorn shall pierce the side of the serene and hallowed felicity of +expectation in which I shall revel till the time comes for +returning home, home to the hearth of my infancy and budding youth. +As Wilky has submitted to you a résumé of his future history for +the next few years, so will I of mine, hoping it will meet your +approval. Thus: one year Chemistry, then one term at home. Then one +year with Wyman, followed by a medical education. Then five or six +years with Agassiz; after which probably death, death, death from +inflation and plethora of knowledge. This you had better seriously +consider. So farewell till 8.45 some Sunday evening soon. Your +bold, your beautiful, your blossom!</p></div> + +<p>"I lead, as ever," he meanwhile elsewhere records, "the monotonous life +of the scholar, with few variations."</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>We have very general talk at our table, Miss Upham declaiming +against the vulgarity of President Lincoln and complacently telling +of her own ignorance as to the way the wind blows or as to the +political events going on, and saying she thinks it a great waste +of time and of "no practical account" to study natural history. F. +J. Child impresses one as very witty and funny, but leaves it +impossible to remember what he says. I took a walk with the +Divinity student this splendid afternoon. He told me he had been +walking yesterday with one of the Jerseymen and they had discussed +the doctrine of a future state. The Jerseyman thought that if the +easy Unitarian doctrines were to become popular the morals of the +community would be most terribly relaxed. "Why," said the other, +"here you are in the very thick of Unitarianism; look about +you—people are about as good as anywhere." "Yes," replied the +Jerseyman, "I confess to you that that is what has <i>staggered</i> me, +and I don't understand it yet!"</p></div> + +<p>I stretch over to the next year, 1863, for the sake of the following to +his sister.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>Chérie charmante, I am established in a cosy little room, with a +large recess with a window in it containing bed and washstand, and +separated from the main apartment by a rich green silk curtain and +a large gilt cornice. This gives the whole establishment a splendid +look. I found when I got back here that Miss Upham had raised her +price; so great efforts were made by two of us to form a club. But +too little enthusiasm<a name="page_153" id="page_153"></a> was shown by any one else, and it fell +through. I then with that fine economical instinct which +distinguishes me resolved to take breakfast and tea, of my own +finding and making, in my room, and only pay Miss Upham for +dinners. Miss U. is now holding forth at Swampscott, so I asked to +see her sister Mrs. Wood and learn the cost of the 7 dinners a +week. She with true motherly instinct said that I should only make +a slop with my self-made meals in my room, and that she would +rather let me keep on for 4.50, seeing it was me. I said she must +first consult Miss Upham. She returned from Swampscott saying that +Miss U. had sworn she would rather pay <i>me</i> a dollar a week than +have me go away. Ablaze with economic passion I cried +"Done!"—trying to make it appear that she had made me a formal +offer to that effect. But she then wouldn't admit it, and after +much recrimination we separated, it being agreed that I should come +for 4.50, <i>but tell no one</i>. So mind <i>you</i> don't either. I now lay +my hand on my heart and confidently look to my Mother for that +glance of approbation which she must bestow. Have I not redeemed +any weaknesses of the past? Though part of my conception fails, yet +it was boldly planned and would have been a noble stroke.</p> + +<p>I have been pretty busy this week. I have a filial feeling toward +Wyman already. I work in a vast museum at a table all alone, +surrounded by skeletons of mastodons, crocodiles and the like, with +the walls hung about with monsters and horrors enough to freeze the +blood. But I have no fear, as most of them are tightly bottled up. +Occasionally solemn men and women come in to see the museum, and +sometimes timid little girls (reminding me of thee, my love, only +they are less fashionably dressed), who whisper "Is folks allowed +here?" It pains me to remark, however,<a name="page_154" id="page_154"></a> that not all the little +girls are of this pleasing type, many being bold-faced jades. +Salter is back here, but morose. One or two new students and Prof. +Goodwin, who is very agreeable. Also William Everett, son of the +great Edward, very intelligent and a capital scholar, studying law. +He took honours at the English Cambridge. I send a photograph of +General Sickles for your and Wilky's amusement. It is a part of a +great anthropomorphological collection which I am going to make. So +take care of it, as well as of all the photographs you will find in +the table-drawer in my room. But isn't he a bully boy? Desecrate +the room as little as possible. If Wilky wants me as an extra nurse +send for me without hesitation.</p></div> + +<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2> + +<p>These returns to that first year or two at Newport contribute meanwhile +to filling out as nothing in the present pages has yet done for me that +vision of our father's unsurpassable patience and independence, in the +interest of the convictions he cherished and the expression of them, as +richly emphatic as it was scantly heeded, to which he daily gave +himself. We took his "writing" infinitely for granted—we had always so +taken it, and the sense of him, each long morning, at his study table +either with bent considering brow or with a half-spent and checked +intensity, a lapse backward in his chair and a musing lift of perhaps +troubled and baffled eyes, seems to me the most constant fact, the most +closely interwoven and underlying, among all our breaks and variations. +He applied himself there with a regularity and a piety as little subject +to sighing abatements or betrayed fears as if he had been working under +pressure for his bread and ours and the question were too urgent for his +daring to doubt. This play of his remarkable genius brought him in fact +throughout the long years no ghost of a reward in the form of pence, and +could proceed to publicity, as it repeatedly<a name="page_156" id="page_156"></a> did, not only by the +copious and resigned sacrifice of such calculations, but by his meeting +in every single case all the expenses of the process. The untired +impulse to this devotion figured for us, comprehensively and familiarly, +as "Father's Ideas," of the force and truth of which in his own view we +were always so respectfully, even though at times so bewilderedly and +confoundedly persuaded, that we felt there was nothing in his exhibition +of life that they didn't or couldn't account for. They pervaded and +supported his existence, and very considerably our own; but what comes +back to me, to the production of a tenderness and an admiration scarce +to be expressed, is the fact that though we thus easily and naturally +lived with them and indeed, as to their more general effects, the colour +and savour they gave to his talk, breathed them in and enjoyed both +their quickening and their embarrassing presence, to say nothing of +their almost never less than amusing, we were left as free and +unattacked by them as if they had been so many droppings of gold and +silver coin on tables and chimney-pieces, to be "taken" or not according +to our sense and delicacy, that is our felt need and felt honour. The +combination in him of his different vivacities, his living interest in +his philosophy, his living interest in us and his living superiority to +all greed of authority,<a name="page_157" id="page_157"></a> all overreaching or overemphasising "success", +at least in the heated short run, gave his character a magnanimity by +which it was impossible to us not to profit in all sorts of responsive +and in fact quite luxurious ways. It was a luxury, I to-day see, to have +all the benefit of his intellectual and spiritual, his religious, his +philosophic and his social passion, without ever feeling the pressure of +it to our direct irritation or discomfort. It would perhaps more truly +figure the relation in which he left us to these things to have likened +our opportunities rather to so many scattered glasses of the liquor of +faith, poured-out cups stood about for our either sipping or draining +down or leaving alone, in the measure of our thirst, our curiosity or +our strength of head and heart. If there was much leaving alone in +us—and I freely confess that, so far as the taking any of it all +"straight" went, my lips rarely adventured—this was doubtless because +we drank so largely at the source itself, the personally overflowing and +irrigating. What it then comes to, for my present vision, was that he +treated us most of all on the whole, as he in fact treated everything, +by his saving imagination—which set us, and the more as we were +naturally so inclined, the example of living as much as we might in some +such light of our own. If we had been asked in our younger time for +instance<a name="page_158" id="page_158"></a> what <i>were</i> our father's ideas, or to give an example of one +of them, I think we should promptly have answered (I should myself have +hastened to do so) that the principal was a devoted attachment to the +writings of Swedenborg; as to whom we were to remember betimes, with +intimate appreciation, that in reply to somebody's plea of not finding +him credible our parent had pronounced him, on the contrary, fairly +"insipid with veracity." We liked that partly, I think, because it +disposed in a manner, that is in favour of our detachment, of the great +Emanuel, but when I remember the part played, so close beside us, by +this latter's copious revelation, I feel almost ashamed for my own +incurious conduct. The part played consisted to a large extent in the +vast, even though incomplete, array of Swedenborg's works, the old faded +covers of which, anciently red, actually apt to be loose, and backed +with labels of impressive, though to my sense somewhat sinister London +imprint, Arcana Coelestia, Heaven and Hell and other such matters—they +all had, as from other days, a sort of black emphasis of dignity—ranged +themselves before us wherever, and however briefly, we disposed +ourselves, forming even for short journeys the base of our father's +travelling library and perhaps at some seasons therewith the accepted +strain on our mother's patience.<a name="page_159" id="page_159"></a> I recall them as inveterately part of +our very luggage, requiring proportionate receptacles; I recall them as, +in a number considerable even when reduced, part of their proprietor's +own most particular dependence on his leaving home, during our more +agitated years, for those speculative visits to possible better places +(than whatever place of the moment) from which, as I have elsewhere +mentioned, he was apt to return under premature, under passionate +nostalgic, reaction. The Swedenborgs were promptly out again on their +customary shelves or sometimes more improvised perches, and it was +somehow not till we had assured ourselves of this that we felt <i>that</i> +incident closed.</p> + +<p>Nothing could have exceeded at the same time our general sense—unless I +all discreetly again confine myself to the spare record of my own—for +our good fortune in never having been, even when most helpless, dragged +by any approach to a faint jerk over the threshold of the inhabited +temple. It stood there in the centre of our family life, into which its +doors of fine austere bronze opened straight; we passed and repassed +them when we didn't more consciously go round and behind; we took for +granted vague grand things within, but we never paused to peer or +penetrate, and none the less never had the so natural and wistful, +perhaps even the so properly<a name="page_160" id="page_160"></a> resentful, "Oh I say, do look in a moment +for manners if for nothing else!" called after us as we went. Our +admirable mother sat on the steps at least and caught reverberations of +the inward mystic choir; but there were positive contemporary moments +when I well-nigh became aware, I think, of something graceless, +something not to the credit of my aspiring "intellectual life," or of +whatever small pretensions to seriousness I might have begun to nourish, +in the anything but heroic impunity of my inattention. William, later +on, made up for this not a little, redeeming so, to a large extent, as +he grew older, our filial honour in the matter of a decent sympathy, if +not of a noble curiosity: distinct to me even are certain echoes of +passages between our father and his eldest son that I assisted at, more +or less indirectly and wonderingly, as at intellectual "scenes," +gathering from them portents of my brother's independent range of +speculation, agitations of thought and announcements of difference, +which could but have represented, far beyond anything I should ever have +to show, a gained and to a considerable degree an enjoyed, confessedly +an interested, acquaintance with the paternal philosophic <i>penetralia</i>. +That particular impression refers indeed to hours which at the point I +have reached had not yet struck; but I am touched even now, after all +the years, with<a name="page_161" id="page_161"></a> something exquisite in my half-grasped premonitory +vision of their belonging, these belated discussions that were but the +flowering of the first germs of such <i>other</i>, doubtless already such +opposed, perceptions and conclusions, to that order of thin consolations +and broken rewards which long figured as the most and the best of what +was to have been waited for on our companion's part without the escape +of a plaint. Yet I feel I may claim that our awareness of all that was +so serenely dispensed with—to call it missed would have been quite to +falsify the story and reflect meanly on the spirit—never in the least +brutally lapsed from admiration, however unuttered the sentiment itself, +after the fashion of raw youth; it is in fact quite distinct to me that, +had there been danger of this, there came to us from our mother's lips +at intervals long enough to emphasise the final sincerity and beauty a +fairly sacred reminder of that strain of almost solely self-nourished +equanimity, or in other words insuperable gaiety, in her life's comrade, +which she had never seen give way. This was the very gaiety that kept +through the years coming out for us—to the point of inviting free jokes +and other light familiarities from us at its expense. The happiest +household pleasantry invested our legend of our mother's fond habit of +address, "Your father's <i>ideas</i>, you<a name="page_162" id="page_162"></a> know—!" which was always the +signal for our embracing her with the last responsive finality (and, for +the full pleasure of it, in his presence). Nothing indeed so much as his +presence encouraged the licence, as I may truly call it, of the +legend—that is of our treatment <i>en famille</i> of any reference to the +attested public weight of his labours; which, I hasten to add, was much +too esoteric a ground of geniality, a dear old family joke, not to be +kept, for its value, to ourselves. But there comes back to me the +impression of his appearing on occasion quite moved to the exuberance of +cheer—as a form of refreshment he could draw on for a stronger and +brighter spurt, I mean—by such an apology for resonance of reputation +as our harmless, our of course utterly edgeless, profanity represented. +It might have been for him, by a happy stretch, a sign that the world +<i>did</i> know—taking us for the moment, in our selfish young babble, as a +part of the noise of the world. Nothing, at the same time, could alter +the truth of his case, or can at least alter it to me now: he had, +intellectually, convictionally, passionally speaking, a selfless +detachment, a lack of what is called the eye for effect—always I mean +of the elated and interested order—which I can but marvel at in the +light of the rare aptitude of his means to his end, and in that of the +beauty of both, though the stamp was<a name="page_163" id="page_163"></a> doubtless most vivid, for so +differing, so gropingly "esthetic" a mind as my own, in his unfailingly +personal and admirable style. We knew he had thoroughly his own +"unconventional" form, which, by the unspeakable law of youth, we +managed to feel the distinction of as not platitudinous even while we a +bit sneakingly felt it as quotable, on possible occasions, against our +presence of mind; the great thing was at all events that we couldn't +live with him without the sense that if his books resembled his talk and +his character—as we moreover felt they couldn't help almost violently +doing—they might want for this, that or the other which kept the +conventional true to its type, but could as little fail to flush with +the strong colour, colour so remarkably given and not taken, projected +and not reflected, colour of thought and faith and moral and +expressional atmosphere, as they could leave us without that felt +side-wind of their strong composition which made after all so much of +the air we breathed and was in the last resort the gage of something +perpetually fine going on.</p> + +<p>It is not too much to say, I think, that our religious education, so far +as we had any, consisted wholly in that loose yet enlightening +impression: I say so far as we had any in spite of my very definitely +holding that it would absolutely not have been possible to us, in the<a name="page_164" id="page_164"></a> +measure of our sensibility, to breathe more the air of that reference to +an order of goodness and power greater than any this world by itself can +show which we understand as the religious spirit. Wondrous to me, as I +consider again, that my father's possession of this spirit, in a degree +that made it more deeply one with his life than I can conceive another +or a different case of its being, should have been unaccompanied with a +single one of the outward or formal, the theological, devotional, +ritual, or even implicitly pietistic signs by which we usually know it. +The fact of course was that his religion was nothing if not a +philosophy, extraordinarily complex and worked out and original, +intensely personal as an exposition, yet not only susceptible of +application, but clamorous for it, to the whole field of consciousness, +nature and society, history, knowledge, all human relations and +questions, every pulse of the process of our destiny. Of this vast and +interesting conception, as striking an expression of the religious +spirit surely as ever was put forth, his eldest son has given an +account<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a>—so far as this was possible at once with brevity and with +full comprehension—that I should have been unable even to dream of +aspiring to, and in the masterly clearness and justice of which the<a name="page_165" id="page_165"></a> +opportunity of the son blends with that of the critic, each character +acting in perfect felicity, after a fashion of which I know elsewhere no +such fine example. It conveys the whole sense of our father's +philosophic passion, which was theologic, by my direct impression of it, +to a degree fairly outdistancing all theologies; representing its +weight, reproducing its utterance, placing it in the eye of the world, +and making for it the strong and single claim it suggests, in a manner +that leaves nothing to be added to the subject. I am not concerned with +the intrinsic meaning of these things here, and should not be even had +they touched me more directly, or more converted me from what I can best +call, to my doubtless scant honour, a total otherness of contemplation, +during the years when my privilege was greatest and my situation for +inquiry and response amplest; but the active, not to say the obvious, +moral of them, in all our younger time, was that a life of the most +richly consequent flowed straight out of them, that in this life, the +most abundantly, and above all naturally, communicated <i>as</i> life that it +was possible to imagine, we had an absolutely equal share, and that in +fine I was to live to go back with wonder and admiration to the quantity +of secreted thought in our daily medium, the quality of intellectual +passion, the force of cogitation and aspiration,<a name="page_166" id="page_166"></a> as to the explanation +both of a thousand surface incoherences and a thousand felt felicities. +A religion that was so systematically a philosophy, a philosophy that +was so sweepingly a religion, being together, by their necessity, as I +have said, an intensity of relation to the actual, the consciousness so +determined was furnished forth in a way that met by itself the whole +question of the attitude of "worship" for instance; as I have attempted +a little to show that it met, with a beautiful good faith and the +easiest sufficiency, every other when such came up: those of education, +acquisition, material vindication, what is called success generally. In +the beauty of the whole thing, again, I lose myself—by which I mean in +the fact that we were all the while partaking, to our most intimate +benefit, of an influence of direction and enlargement attended with +scarce a single consecrated form and which would have made many of +these, had we been exposed to intrusion from them, absurdly irrelevant. +My father liked in our quite younger period to read us chapters from the +New Testament and the Old, and I hope we liked to listen to them—though +I recall their seeming dreary from their association with school +practice; but that was the sole approach to a challenge of our complete +freedom of inward, not less than our natural ingenuity of outward, +experience.<a name="page_167" id="page_167"></a> No other explicit address to us in the name of the Divine +could, I see, have been made with any congruity—in face of the fact +that invitations issued in all the vividest social terms, terms of +living appreciation, of spiritual perception, of "human fellowship," to +use the expression that was perhaps oftenest on his lips and his pen +alike, were the very substance of the food supplied in the parental +nest.</p> + +<p>The freedom from pressure that we enjoyed in every direction, all those +immunities and exemptions that had been, in protracted childhood, +positively embarrassing to us, as I have already noted, before the +framework, ecclesiastical and mercantile, squared at us as with +reprobation from other households, where it seemed so to conduce to +their range of resource—these things consorted with our yet being +yearned over or prescribed for, by every implication, after a fashion +that was to make the social organisation of such invidious homes, under +my subsequent observation of life, affect me as so much bleak penury or +domestic desert where these things of the spirit, these genialities of +faith were concerned. Well do I remember, none the less, how I was +troubled all along just by this particular crookedness of our being so +extremely religious without having, as it were, anything in the least +classified or striking to show for it; so that the<a name="page_168" id="page_168"></a> measure of +other-worldliness pervading our premises was rather a waste, though at +the same time oddly enough a congestion—projecting outwardly as it did +no single one of those usual symptoms of propriety any of which, +gathered at a venture from the general prospect, might by my sense have +served: I shouldn't have been particular, I thought, as to the +selection. Religion was a matter, by this imagination, to be worked off +much more than to be worked in, and I fear my real vague sentiment to +have been but that life would under the common equipment be somehow more +amusing; and this even though, as I don't forget, there was not an item +of the detail of devotional practice that we had been so much as allowed +to divine. I scarce know why I should have wanted anything more amusing, +as most of our coevals would have regarded it, than that we had from as +far back as I could remember indulged in no shade of an approach to +"keeping Sunday"; which is one of the reasons why to speak as if piety +could have borne for us any sense but the tender human, or to speak at +all of devotion, unction, initiation, even of the vaguest, into the +exercises or professions, as among our attributes, would falsify +altogether our mere fortune of a general liberty of living, of making +ourselves as brightly at home as might be, in that "spiritual world" +which we<a name="page_169" id="page_169"></a> were in the habit of hearing as freely alluded to as we heard +the prospect of dinner or the call of the postman. The oddity of my own +case, as I make it out so far as it involved a confused criticism, was +that my small uneasy mind, bulging and tightening in the wrong, or at +least in unnatural and unexpected, places, like a little jacket ill cut +or ill sewn, attached its gaping view, as I have already more than +enough noted, to things and persons, objects and aspects, frivolities +all, I dare say I was willing to grant, compared with whatever +manifestations of the serious, these being by need, apparently, the +abstract; and that in fine I should have been thankful for a state of +faith, a conviction of the Divine, an interpretation of the +universe—anything one might have made bold to call it—which would have +supplied more features or appearances. Feeling myself "after" persons so +much more than after anything else—to recur to that side of my earliest +and most constant consciousness which might have been judged most +deplorable—I take it that I found the sphere of our more nobly +supposititious habitation too imperceptibly peopled; whereas the +religious life of every other family that could boast of any such (and +what family didn't boast?) affected my fancy as with a social and +material crowdedness. That faculty alone was affected—this I hasten to +add; no<a name="page_170" id="page_170"></a> directness of experience ever stirred for me; it being the case +in the first place that I scarce remember, as to all our young time, the +crossing of our threshold by any faint shade of an ecclesiastical +presence, or the lightest encounter with any such elsewhere, and equally +of the essence, over and above, that the clerical race, the +pre-eminently restrictive tribe, as I apprehended them, couldn't very +well have agreed less with the general colour of my fondest vision: if +it be not indeed more correct to say that I was reduced to <i>supposing</i> +they couldn't. We knew in truth nothing whatever about them, a fact +that, as I recover it, also flushes for me with its fine +awkwardness—the social scene in general handsomely bristling with them +to the rueful view I sketch, and they yet remaining for us, or at any +rate for myself, such creatures of pure hearsay that when late in my +teens, and in particular after my twentieth year, I began to see them +portrayed by George Eliot and Anthony Trollope the effect was a +disclosure of a new and romantic species. Strange beyond my present +power to account for it this anomaly that amid a civilisation replete +with "ministers"—for we at least knew the word—actively, +competitively, indeed as would often appear quite violently, +ministering, so little sense of a brush against approved examples was +ever to attend me that I had finally to draw my<a name="page_171" id="page_171"></a> nearest sufficiency of +a true image from pictures of a social order largely alien to our own. +All of which, at the same time, I allow myself to add, didn't mitigate +the simple fact of my felt—my indeed so luxuriously +permitted—detachment of sensibility from everything, everything, that +is, in the way of great relations, as to which our father's emphasis was +richest. <i>There</i> was the dim dissociation, there my comparative poverty, +or call it even frivolity, of instinct: I gaped imaginatively, as it +were, to such a different set of relations. I couldn't have framed +stories that would have succeeded in involving the least of the +relations that seemed most present to <i>him</i>; while those most present to +myself, that is more complementary to whatever it was I thought of as +humanly most interesting, attaching, inviting, were the ones his schemes +of importances seemed virtually to do without. Didn't I discern in this +from the first a kind of implied snub to the significance of mine?—so +that, in the blest absence of "pressure" which I just sought here +passingly to celebrate, I could brood to my heart's content on the so +conceivable alternative of a field of exposure crammed with those +objective appearances that my faculty seemed alone fitted to grasp. In +which there was ever the small torment of the fact—though I don't quite +see to-day why it should not have been of a purely<a name="page_172" id="page_172"></a> pleasant +irritation—that what our parent most overflowed with was just the brave +contradiction or opposition between all his parts, a thing which made +for perfect variety, which he carried ever so easily and brightly, and +which would have put one no less in the wrong had one accused him of +knowing only the abstract (as I was so complacently and invidiously +disposed to name it) than if one had foolishly remarked on his living +and concluding without it. But I have already made clear his great mixed +range—which of course couldn't <i>not</i> have been the sign of a mind +conceiving our very own breathing humanity in its every fibre the +absolute expression of a resident Divinity. No element of character, no +spontaneity of life, but instantly seized his attention and incurred his +greeting and his comment; which things could never possibly have been so +genially alert and expert—as I have, again, before this, +superabundantly recorded—if it had not fairly fed on active observation +and contact. He could answer one with the radiant when one challenged +him with the obscure, just as he could respond with the general when one +pulled at the particular; and I needn't repeat that this made for us, +during all our time, anything but a starved actuality.</p> + +<p>None the less, however, I remember it as savouring of loss to me—which +is my present<a name="page_173" id="page_173"></a> point—that our so thoroughly informal scene of +susceptibility seemed to result from a positive excess of familiarity, +in his earlier past, with such types of the shepherd and the flock, to +say nothing of such forms of the pasture, as might have met in some +degree my appetite for the illustrational. This was one of the things +that made me often wish, as I remember, that I might have caught him +sooner or younger, less developed, as who should say; the matters that +appeared, however confusedly, to have started his development being by +this measure stranger and livelier than most of those that finally +crowned it, marked with their own colour as many of these doubtless +were. Three or four strongest pages in the fragment of autobiography +gathered by his eldest son into the sheaf of his Literary Remains +describe the state of soul undergone by him in England, in '44, just +previous to the hour at which Mrs. Chichester, a gentle lady of his +acquaintance there, brought to his knowledge, by a wondrous chance, the +possibility that the great Swedenborg, from whom she had drawn much +light, might have something to say to his case; so that under the +impression of his talk with her he posted at once up to London from the +neighbourhood of Windsor, where he was staying, possessed himself of +certain volumes of the writings of the eminent mystic (so-called I +mean,<a name="page_174" id="page_174"></a> for to my father this description of him was grotesque), and +passed rapidly into that grateful infinitude of recognition and +application which he was to inhabit for the rest of his days. I saw him +move about there after the fashion of the oldest and easiest native, and +this had on some sides its own considerable effect, tinged even on +occasion with romance; yet I felt how the <i>real</i> right thing for me +would have been the hurrying drama of the original rush, the interview +with the admirable Mrs. Chichester, the sweet legend of his and my +mother's charmed impression of whom had lingered with us—I admired her +very name, there seeming none other among us at all like it; and then +the return with the tokens of light, the splendid agitation as the light +deepened, and the laying in of that majestic array of volumes which were +to form afterward the purplest rim of his library's horizon and which I +was thus capable, for my poor part, of finding valuable, in default of +other values, as coloured properties in a fine fifth act. It was all a +play I hadn't "been to," consciously at least—that was the trouble; the +curtain had fallen while I was still tucked in my crib, and I assisted +but on a comparatively flat home scene at the echo of a great success. I +could still have done, for the worst, with a consciousness of Swedenborg +that should have been graced at least with Swedenborgians—<a name="page_175" id="page_175"></a>aware as I +was of the existence of such enrolled disciples, ornaments of a church +of their own, yet known to us only as persons rather acidly mystified by +the inconvenience, as we even fancied them to feel it, of our father's +frankly independent and disturbingly irregular (all the more for its +being so expressive) connection with their inspirer. In the light or the +dusk of all this it was surely impossible to make out that he professed +any faint shade of that clerical character as to his having incurred +which we were, "in the world," to our bewilderment, not infrequently +questioned. Those of the enrolled order, in the matter of his and their +subject of study, might in their way too have raised to my regard a +fretted vault or opened a long-drawn aisle, but they were never at all, +in the language of a later day, to materialise to me; we neither on a +single occasion sat in their circle, nor did one of them, to the best of +my belief, ever stray, remonstrantly or invitingly, into ours; where +Swedenborg was read not in the least as the Bible scarce more than just +escaped being, but even as Shakespeare or Dickens or Macaulay was +content to be—which was without our arranging or subscribing for it. I +seem to distinguish that if a fugitive or a shy straggler from the +pitched camp did turn up it was under cover of night or of curiosity and +with much panting and putting off of the mantle,<a name="page_176" id="page_176"></a> much nervous laughter +above all—this safe, however, to become on the shortest order amusement +easy and intimate. That <i>figured</i> something in a slight way—as at least +I suppose I may infer from the faint adumbration I retain; but nothing +none the less much attenuated what I suppose I should have denounced as +the falsity of our position (meaning thereby of mine) had I been +constitutionally at all voluble for such flights. Constructionally we +had all the fun of licence, while the truth seemed really to be that fun +in the religious connection closely depended on bondage. The fun was of +course that I wanted in this line of diversion something of the coarser +strain; which came home to me in especial, to cut the matter short, when +I was present, as I yielded first and last to many an occasion for +being, at my father's reading out to my mother with an appreciation of +that modest grasp of somebody's attention, the brief illusion of +publicity, which has now for me the exquisite grace of the touching, +some series of pages from among his "papers" that were to show her how +he had this time at last done it. No touch of the beautiful or the +sacred in the disinterested life can have been absent from such +scenes—I find every such ideally there; and my memory rejoices above +all in their presentation of our mother at her very perfectest of +soundless and yet absolutely all-saving<a name="page_177" id="page_177"></a> service and trust. To have +attempted any projection of our father's aspect without an immediate +reference to her sovereign care for him and for all of us as the so +widely open, yet so softly enclosing, lap of all his liberties and all +our securities, all our variety and withal our harmony, the harmony that +was for nine-tenths of it our sense of her gathered life in us, and of +her having no other—to have so proceeded has been but to defer by +instinct and by scruple to the kind of truth and of beauty before which +the direct report breaks down. I may well have stopped short with what +there would be to say, and yet what account of us all can pretend to +have gone the least bit deep without coming to our mother at every +penetration? We simply lived by her, in proportion as we lived +spontaneously, with an equanimity of confidence, an independence of +something that I should now find myself think of as decent compunction +if I didn't try to call it instead morbid delicacy, which left us free +for detachments of thought and flights of mind, experiments, so to +speak, on the assumption of our genius and our intrinsic interest, that +I look back upon as to a luxury of the unworried that is scarce of this +world. This was a support on which my father rested with the absolute +whole of his weight, and it was when I felt her listen with the whole of +her usefulness,<a name="page_178" id="page_178"></a> which needed no other force, being as it was the whole +of her tenderness and amply sufficing by itself, that I understood most +what it was so to rest and so to act. When in the fulness of the years +she was to die, and he then to give us time, a few months, as with a +beatific depth of design, to marvel at the manner of his acceptance of +the stroke, a shown triumph of his philosophy, he simply one day +consciously ceased, quietly declined to continue, as an offered measure +of his loss of interest. Nothing—he had enabled himself to make +perfectly sure—was in the least worth while without her; this attested, +he passed away or went out, with entire simplicity, promptness and ease, +for the definite reason that his support had failed. His philosophy had +been not his support but his suspension, and he had never, I am sure, +felt so lifted as at that hour, which splendidly crowned his faith. It +showed us more intimately still what, in this world of cleft components, +one human being can yet be for another, and how a form of vital aid may +have operated for years with such perfection as fairly to have made +recognition seem at the time a sort of excess of reaction, an +interference or a pedantry. All which is imaged for me while I see our +mother listen, at her work, to the full music of the "papers." She could +do that by the mere force of her complete availability, and<a name="page_179" id="page_179"></a> could do it +with a smoothness of surrender that was like an array of all the +perceptions. The only thing that I might well have questioned on these +occasions was the possibility on the part of a selflessness so +consistently and unabatedly active of its having anything ever left +<i>acutely</i> to offer; to abide so unbrokenly in such inaptness for the +personal claim might have seemed to render difficult such a special show +of it as any particular pointedness of hospitality would propose to +represent. I dare say it was our sense of this that so often made us +all, when the explicit or the categoric, the impulse of acclamation, +flowered out in her, find our happiest play of filial humour in just +embracing her for the sound of it; than which I can imagine no more +expressive tribute to our constant depths of indebtedness. She lived in +ourselves so exclusively, with such a want of use for anything in her +consciousness that was not about us and for us, that I think we almost +contested her being separate enough to be proud of us—it was too like +our being proud of ourselves. We were delightedly derisive with her even +about pride in our father—it was the most domestic of our pastimes; for +what really could exceed the tenderness of our fastening on her that she +<i>was</i> he, <i>was</i> each of us, was our pride and our humility, our +possibility of <i>any</i> relation, and the very canvas itself on which we +were<a name="page_180" id="page_180"></a> floridly embroidered? How can I better express what she seemed to +do for her second son in especial than by saying that even with her +deepest delicacy of attention present I could still feel, while my +father read, why it was that I most of all seemed to wish we might have +been either much less religious or much more so? Was not the reason at +bottom that I so suffered, I might almost have put it, under the +impression of his style, which affected me as somehow too philosophic +for life, and at the same time too living, as I made out, for +thought?—since I must weirdly have opined that by so much as you were +individual, which meant personal, which meant monotonous, which meant +limitedly allusive and verbally repetitive, by so much you were not +literary or, so to speak, <i>largely</i> figurative. My father had terms, +evidently strong, but in which I presumed to feel, with a shade of +irritation, a certain narrowness of exclusion as to images +otherwise—and oh, since it was a question of the pen, so +multitudinously!—entertainable. Variety, variety—<i>that</i> sweet ideal, +<i>that</i> straight contradiction of any dialectic, hummed for me all the +while as a direct, if perverse and most unedified, effect of the +parental concentration, with some of its consequent, though heedless, +dissociations. I heard it, felt it, saw it, both shamefully enjoyed and +shamefully denied it as form, though as form<a name="page_181" id="page_181"></a> only; and I owed thus +supremely to my mother that I could, in whatever obscure levity, muddle +out some sense of my own preoccupation under the singular softness of +the connection that she kept for me, by the outward graces, with that +other and truly much intenser which I was so little framed to share.</p> + +<p>If meanwhile my father's tone, so far as that went, was to remain the +same, save for a natural growth of assurance, and thereby of amplitude, +all his life, I find it already, and his very voice as we were to know +them, in a letter to R. W. Emerson of 1842, without more specific date, +after the loose fashion of those days, but from 2 Washington Place, New +York, the second house in the row between the University building and +Broadway, as he was next to note to his correspondent in expressing the +hope of a visit from him. (It was the house in which, the following +year, his second son was born.)</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>I came home to-night from my lecture a little disposed to think, +from the smart reduction of my audience, that I had about as well +not have prepared my course, especially as I get no tidings of +having interested one of the sort (the religious) for whom they are +wholly designed. When I next see you I want a half-hour's support +from you under this discouragement, and the purpose of this letter +is to secure it. When I am <i>with</i> you I get no help from you—of +the sort you can give me, I feel sure; though you must<a name="page_182" id="page_182"></a> know what I +want before I listen to you next. Usually the temper you show, of +perfect repose and candour, free from all sickening partisanship +and full of magnanimous tenderness for every creature, makes me +forget my wants in your lavish plenty. But I know you have the same +as I have, deep down in your breast, and it is by these I would +fain know you. I am led, quite without any conscious wilfulness +either, to seek the <i>laws</i> of these appearances that swim round us +in God's great museum, to get hold of some central facts which may +make all other facts properly circumferential and orderly; and you +continually dishearten me by your apparent indifference to such law +and such facts, by the dishonour you seem to cast on our +intelligence as if it were what stands in our way. Now my +conviction is that my intelligence is the necessary digestive +apparatus for my life; that there is nihil in vita—worth anything, +that is—quod non prius in intellectu. Now is it not so in truth +with you? Can you not report your life to me by some intellectual +symbol which my intellect appreciates? Do you not know your +activity? But fudge—I cannot say what I want to say, what aches to +say itself in me, and so I'll hold up till I see you, and try once +more to get some better furtherance by my own effort. Here I am +these thirty-one years in life, ignorant in all outward science, +but having patient habits of meditation which never know disgust or +weariness, and feeling a force of impulsive love toward all +humanity which will not let me rest wholly mute, a force which +grows against all resistance that I can muster against it. What +shall I do? Shall I get me a little nook in the country and +communicate with my <i>living</i> kind—not my talking kind—by life +only; a word perhaps of <i>that</i> communication, a fit word once a +year? Or shall I follow some commoner method—learn science and +bring<a name="page_183" id="page_183"></a> myself first into man's respect, that I may thus the better +speak to him? I confess this last theory seems rank with +earthliness—to belong to days forever past.</p></div> + +<p>His appeal to Emerson at this hour was, as he elsewhere then puts it, to +the "invisible" man in the matter, who affected him as somewhere behind +the more or less immediately visible, the beautifully but mystifyingly +audible, the Emerson of honeyed lectures and addresses, suggestive and +inspiring as that one might be, and who might, as we say to-day, have +something, something more at least, for him. "I will tell him that I do +not value his substantive discoveries, whatever they may be, perhaps +half so largely as he values them, but that I chiefly cherish that erect +attitude of mind in him which in God's universe undauntedly seeks the +worthiest tidings of God, and calmly defies every mumbling phantom which +would challenge its freedom. Should his zeal for realities and contempt +of vulgar shows abide the ordeal I have thus contrived for them I shall +gladly await his visit to me. So much at least is what I have been +saying to myself. Now that I have told it to you also you have become a +sort of confidant between me and myself, and so bound to promote harmony +there." The correspondence expands, however, beyond my space for +reporting of it; I but pick out a few passages.<a name="page_184" id="page_184"></a></p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>I am cheered by the coming of Carlyle's new book, which Greeley +announces, and shall hasten off for it as soon as I have +leisure.<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> The title is provokingly enigmatical, but thought +enough there will be in it no doubt, whatever the name; thought +heaped up to topheaviness and inevitable lopsidedness, but more +interesting to me than comes from any other quarter of +Europe—interesting for the man's sake whom it shows. According to +my notion he is the very best interpreter of a spiritual philosophy +that could be devised for <i>this age</i>, the age of transition and +conflict; and what renders him so is his natural +birth-and-education-place. Just to think of a Scotchman with a +heart widened to German spiritualities! To have overcome his +educational bigotries far enough to listen to the new ideas, this +by itself was wonderful; and then to give all his native shrewdness +and humour to the service of making them <i>tell</i> to the minds of his +people—what more fortunate thing for the time could there be? You +don't look upon Calvinism as a fact at all; wherein you are to my +mind philosophically infirm—impaired in your universality. I can +see in Carlyle the advantage his familiarity with it gives him over +you with a general audience. What is highest in him is built upon +that lowest. At least so I read; I believe Jonathan Edwards +redivivus in true blue would, after an honest study of the +philosophy that has grown up since his day, make the best possible +reconciler and critic of this philosophy—far better than Schelling +redivivus.</p></div> + +<p>In the autumn of 1843 the "nook in the country" above alluded to had +become a question renounced, so far at least as the American country<a name="page_185" id="page_185"></a> +was concerned, and never again afterwards flushed into life. "I think it +probable I shall winter in some mild English climate, Devonshire +perhaps, and go on with my studies as at home. I shall miss the stimulus +of your candid and generous society, and I confess we don't like the +aspect of the journey; but one's destiny puts on many garments as it +goes shaping itself in secret—so let us not cling to any particular +fashion." Very marked, and above all very characteristic of my father, +in this interesting relation, which I may but so imperfectly illustrate, +his constant appeal to his so inspired, yet so uninflamed, so +irreducible and, as it were, inapplicable, friend for intellectual and, +as he would have said, spiritual help of the immediate and adjustable, +the more concretely vital, kind, the kind translatable into terms of the +real, the particular human terms of action and passion. "Oh you man +without a <i>handle</i>! Shall one never be able to help himself out of you, +according to his needs, and be dependent only upon your fitful +tippings-up?"—a remarkably felicitous expression, as it strikes me, of +that difficulty often felt by the passionately-living of the earlier +time, as they may be called, to draw down their noble philosopher's +great overhanging heaven of universal and ethereal answers to the plane +of their comparatively terrestrial and personal questions; the note of<a name="page_186" id="page_186"></a> +the answers and their great anticipatory spirit being somehow that they +seemed to anticipate everything but the unaccommodating individual case. +My father, on his side, bristled with "handles"—there could scarce be a +better general account of him—and tipped himself up for you almost +before you could take hold of one; of which truth, for that matter, this +same letter happens to give, even if just trivially, the hint. "Can I do +anything for you in the way of taking parcels, no matter how large or +expensive?—or for any of your friends? If you see Margaret Fuller ask +her to give me some service to render her abroad, the dear noble woman: +it seems a real hardship to be leaving the country now that I have just +come to talk with her." Emerson, I should add, did offer personally so +solid a handle that my father appears to have taken from him two +introductions to be made use of in London, one to Carlyle and the other +to John Sterling, the result of which shortly afterwards was as vivid +and as deeply appropriated an impression of each eminent character as it +was probably to be given either of them ever to have made. The +impression of Carlyle was recorded but long subsequently, I note, and is +included in William's gathering-in of our father's Literary Remains +(1885); and of the acquaintance with Sterling no reflection remains but +a passage in a letter, under date of<a name="page_187" id="page_187"></a> Ventnor and of the winter of 1843, +from the latter to his biographer to be; Carlyle having already +mentioned in the Life that "Two American gentlemen, acquaintances also +of mine, had been recommended to him, by Emerson most likely"; and that +"one morning Sterling appeared here with a strenuous proposal that we +should come to Knightsbridge and dine with him and them.... And +accordingly we went," it goes on. "I remember it as one of the saddest +dinners; though Sterling talked copiously, and our friends, Theodore +Parker one of them, were pleasant and distinguished men." My father, +with Theodore Parker his friend and the date fitting, would quite seem +to have been one of the pair were it not that "our conversation was +waste and logical, I forget quite on what, not joyful and harmoniously +effusive." It is <i>that</i> that doesn't fit with any real participation of +his—nothing could well do less so; unless the occasion had but too +closely conformed to the biographer's darkly and richly prophetic view +of it as tragic and ominous, "sad as if one had been dining in a ruin, +in the crypt of a mausoleum"—all this "painfully apparent through the +bright mask (Sterling) had bound himself to wear." The end of his life +was then, to Carlyle's view, in sight; but his own note, in the Isle of +Wight, on "Mr. James, your New-England<a name="page_188" id="page_188"></a> friend," was genial enough—"I +saw him several times and liked him. They went on the 24th of last month +back to London—or so purposed," he adds, "because there is no pavement +here for him to walk on. I want to know where he is, and thought I +should be able to learn from you. I gave him a note for Mill, who may +perhaps have seen him."</p> + +<p>My main interest in which is, I confess, for the far-off germ of the odd +legend, destined much to grow later on, that—already the nucleus of a +household—we were New England products; which I think my parents could +then have even so much as seemed only to eyes naturally unaware of our +American "sectional" differences. My father, when considerably past his +thirtieth year, if I am not mistaken, had travelled "East," within our +borders, but once in his life—on the occasion of his spending two or +three months in Boston as a very young man; there connecting itself with +this for me a reminiscence so bedimmed at once and so suggestive as now +almost to torment me. It must have been in '67 or '68 that, giving him +my arm, of a slippery Boston day, up or down one of the steep streets +that used to mount, from behind, and as slightly sullen with the effort, +to Beacon Hill, and between which my now relaxed memory rather fails to +discriminate, I was arrested by his pointing out<a name="page_189" id="page_189"></a> to me opposite us a +house in which he had for a while had rooms, long before and quite in +his early time. I but recall that we were more or less skirting the base +of an ancient town-reservoir, the seat of the water-supply as then +constituted, a monument rugged and dark, massively granitic, perched all +perversely, as it seemed to look, on the precipitous slope, and +which—at least as I see it through the years—struck quite handsomely +the Babylonian note. I at any rate mix up with this frowning object—it +had somehow a sinister presence and suggestion—my companion's mention +there in front of it that he had anciently taken refuge under its shadow +from certain effects of a misunderstanding, if indeed not of a sharp +rupture, for the time, with a highly generous but also on occasion +strongly protesting parent at Albany, a parent displeased with some +course he had taken or had declined to take (there was a tradition among +us that he had been for a period quite definitely "wild"), and relief +from further discussion with whom he had sought, and had more or less +found, on that spot. It was an age in which a flight from Albany to +Boston—there being then no Boston and Albany Railroad—counted as a far +flight; though it wasn't to occur to me either then or afterwards that +the ground of this manœuvre had been any plotted wildness in the +Puritan air. What was<a name="page_190" id="page_190"></a> clear at the moment, and what he remarked upon, +was that the street-scene about us showed for all the lapse of time no +scrap of change, and I remember well for myself how my first impression +of Boston gave it to me under certain aspects as more expressive than I +had supposed an American city could be of a seated and rooted social +order, an order not complex but sensibly fixed—gathered in or folded +back to intensity upon itself; and this, again and again, when the +compass of the posture, its narrow field, might almost have made the +fold excruciating. It had given however no sign of excruciation—that +itself had been part of the Puritan stoicism; which perhaps was exactly +why the local look, recognised to the point I speak of by the visitor, +was so contained and yet comparatively so full: full, very nearly, I +originally fancied, after the appraisable fashion of some composed +town-face in one of Balzac's <i>villes de province</i>. All of which, I +grant, is much to say for the occasion of that dropped confidence, on +the sloshy hillside, to which I allude—and part of the action of which +was that it had never been dropped before; this circumstance somehow a +peculiar source of interest, an interest I the more regret to have lost +my grasp of as it must have been sharp, or in other words founded, to +account for the long reverberation here noted. I had still—as I was +indeed to keep having through life—the<a name="page_191" id="page_191"></a> good fortune that elements of +interest easily sprang, to my incurable sense, from any ghost of a drama +at all <i>presented</i>; though I of course can't in the least pretend to +generalise on what may or may not have constituted living presentation. +This felicity occurred, I make out, quite incalculably, just as it could +or would; the effect depended on some particular touch of the spring, +which was set in motion the instant the touch happened to be right. My +father's was always right, to my receptive mind; as receptive, that is, +of any scrap of enacted story or evoked picture as it was closed to the +dry or the abstract proposition; so that I blush the deeper at not being +able, in honour of his reference, to make the latter more vividly +flower—I still so feel that I quite thrilled with it and with the +standing background at the moment lighted by it. There were things in +it, and other persons, old actualities, old meanings and furnishings of +the other old Boston, as I by that time couldn't but appraise it; and +the really archaic, the overhung and sombre and secret-keeping street, +"socially" disconnected, socially mysterious—as I like at any rate to +remember it—was there to testify (testify to the ancient time of +tension, expansion, sore meditation or whatever) by its positively +conscious gloom.</p> + +<p>The moral of this, I fear, amounts to little<a name="page_192" id="page_192"></a> more than that, putting +aside the substance of his anecdote, my father had not set foot in New +England till toward his thirty-fifth year, and my mother was not to do +so till later still; circumstances not in the least preventing the birth +of what I have called the falsifying legend. The allusion to the walking +at Ventnor touches his inability to deal with rural roads and paths, +then rougher things than now; by reason of an accident received in early +youth and which had so lamed him for life that he could circulate to any +convenience but on even surfaces and was indeed mainly reduced to +driving—it had made him for all his earlier time an excellent whip. His +constitution had been happily of the strongest, but as I look back I see +his grave disability, which it took a strong constitution to carry, +mainly in the light of a consistency of patience that we were never to +have heard broken. The two acceptances melt together for me—that of the +limits of his material action, his doing and enjoying, set so narrowly, +and that of his scant allowance of "public recognition," or of the +support and encouragement that spring, and spring so naturally and +rightly, when the relation of effect to cause is close and straight, +from any at all attested and glad understanding of a formula, as we say +nowadays a message, richly and sincerely urged. Too many such +reflections,<a name="page_193" id="page_193"></a> however, beset me here by the way. My letters jump +meanwhile to the summer of 1849, when I find in another of them, +addressed to Emerson, a passage as characteristic as possible of one of +the writer's liveliest and, as I confess it was ever to seem to me, most +genially perverse idiosyncrasies, his distinctly low opinion of "mere" +literary men. This note his letters in general again and again +strike—not a little to the diversion of those who were to have observed +and remembered his constant charmed subjection, in the matter of +practice, to the masters, even quite the lighter, in the depreciated +group. His sensibility to their spell was in fact so marked that it +became from an early time a household game with us to detect him in +evasive tears over their pages, when these were either real or romantic +enough, and to publish without mercy that he had so been caught. There +was a period in particular during which this pastime enjoyed, indeed +quite revelled in, the form of our dragging to the light, with every +circumstance of derision, the fact of his clandestine and deeply moved +perusal of G. P. R. James, our nominal congener, at that time ceasing to +be prescribed. It was his plea, in the "'fifties," that this romancer +had been his idol in the 'forties and the 'thirties, and that under +renewed, even if but experimental, surrender the associations of youth +flocked back<a name="page_194" id="page_194"></a> to life—so that <i>we</i>, profane about the unduly displaced +master, were deplorably the poorer. He loved the novel in fine, he +followed its constant course in the Revue with a beautiful +inconsequence, and the more it was literature loved it the better, which +was just how he loved, as well, criticism and journalism; the particular +instance, with him, once he was in relation with it, quite sufficiently +taking care of the invidiously-viewed type—as this was indeed viewed +but a <i>priori</i> and at its most general—and making him ever so +cheerfully forget to be consistent. Work was verily cut out for the +particular instance, as against the type, in an air and at a time +favouring so, again and again, and up and down the "literary world," a +dire mediocrity. It was the distillers of <i>that</i> thinness, the "mere" +ones, that must have been present to him when he wrote to Emerson in +1849: "There is nothing I dread so much as literary men, especially +<i>our</i> literary men; catch them out of the range of mere personal gossip +about authors and books and ask them for honest sympathy in your +sentiment, or for an honest repugnancy of it, and you will find the +company of stage-drivers sweeter and more comforting to your soul. In +truth the questions which are beginning to fill the best books, and will +fill the best for a long time to come, are not related to what we have +called<a name="page_195" id="page_195"></a> literature, and are as well judged—I think better—by those +whom books have at all events not belittled. When a man <i>lives</i>, that is +lives enough, he can scarcely write. He cannot read, I apprehend, at +all. All his writing will be algebraicised, put into the form of sonnets +and proverbs, and the community will feel itself insulted to be offered +a big bunch of pages, as though it were stupid and wanted tedious +drilling like a child." When I begin to quote my father, however, I hang +over him perhaps even too historically; for his expression leads me on +and on so by its force and felicity that I scarce know where to stop. +"The fact is that I am afraid I am in a very bad way, for I cannot +heartily engage in any topic in which I shall appear to advantage"—the +question having been, <i>de part et d'autre</i>, of possible courses of +lectures for which the appetite of New York and Boston already announced +itself as of the largest. And it still more beguiles me that "my wife +and I are obliged—so numerous has waxed our family—to enlarge our +house in town and get a country house for the summer." Here came in that +earnest dream of the solutional "Europe" with which I have elsewhere +noted that my very youngest sensibility was fed. "These things look +expensive and temporary to us, besides being an additional care; and so, +considering with much pity our four stout boys,<a name="page_196" id="page_196"></a> who have no play-room +within doors and import shocking bad manners from the street, we gravely +ponder whether it wouldn't be better to go abroad for a few years with +them, allowing them to absorb French and German and get such a sensuous +education as they can't get here."</p> + +<p>In 1850, however, we had still not departed for Europe—as we were not +to do for several years yet; one advantage of which was that my father +remained for the time in intercourse by letter with his English friend +Dr. J. J. Garth Wilkinson, first known during my parents' considerable +stay in London of several years before, 1843-44; and whose admirable +style of expression, in its way as personal and as vivid as Henry +James's own, with an added and doubtless more perceptibly full-blooded +massiveness, is so attested by his earlier writings,<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> to say nothing +of the rich collection of his letters (1845-55) lately before +me—notably by The Human Body and its<a name="page_197" id="page_197"></a> Connection with Man, dedicated in +1851 to my father—that I wonder at the absence of such a master, in +more than one happy specimen, from the common educational exhibitions of +English prose. Dr. Wilkinson was a friend of Emerson's as well, which +leads the latter's New York correspondent to cite to him in February +1850 a highly characteristic passage from one of the London +communications.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>Carlyle came up here (presumably to Hampstead) on Monday to see +Neuberg, and spoke much of you with very kind recollections. He +remembered your metaphysics also and asked with terrible solicitude +whether they yet persevered. I couldn't absolutely say that they +did not, though I did my best to stammer out something about the +great social movement. He was suffering dreadfully from <i>malaise</i> +and indigestion and gave with his usual force his usual putrid +theory of the universe. All great men were most miserable; the day +on which any man could say he was not miserable, that day he was a +scoundrel; God was a Divine Sorrow; to no moment could he, Carlyle, +ever say<a name="page_198" id="page_198"></a> Linger, but only Goodbye and never let me see your face +again. And all this interpolated with convulsive laughter, showing +that joy would come into him were it even by the path of hysteria +and disease. To me he is an unprofitable man, and though he gave me +the most kind invitation I have too much respect for my stomach to +go much into his company. Where hope is feeble genius and the human +voice are on the way to die. By the next boat I will endeavour to +send you over my thoughts on his recent pamphlet, the first of a +series of Latter-Day-Tracts. He is very rapidly falling out with +all his present admirers, for which I like them all the better; and +indeed is driving fast toward social views—only his is to be a +compulsory, not an attractive, socialism.</p></div> + +<p>After quoting which my father comments: "Never was anything more false +than this worship of sorrow by Carlyle; he has picked it up out of past +history and spouts it for mere display, as a virtuoso delights in the +style of his grandfather. It is the merest babble in him, as everyone +who has ever talked an hour with him will acquit him of the least grain +of humility. A man who has once uttered a cry of despair should ever +after clothe himself in sackcloth and ashes."</p> + +<p>The writer was to have meanwhile, before our migration of 1855, a +considerable lecturing activity. A confused, yet perfectly recoverable +recollection, on my own part, of these years, connects itself with our +knowledge that our<a name="page_199" id="page_199"></a> father engaged in that practice and that he went +forth for the purpose, with my mother always in earnest and confident +even though slightly fluttered attendance, at about the hour of our +upward procession to bed; which fact lent to the proceeding—that is to +<i>his</i>—a strange air of unnatural riot, quite as of torch-lighted and +wind-blown dissipation. We went to plays and to ballets, and they had +comparatively speaking no mystery; but at no lecture had we ever been +present, and these put on for my fancy at least a richer light and +shade, very much as if we ourselves had been on the performing side of +the curtain, or the wonder of admiring (in our mother's person) and of +being admired (in our father's) had been rolled for us into a single +glory. This glory moreover was not menaced, but only made more of a +thrill by the prime admirer's anxiety, always displayed at the last, as +to whether they were not starting without the feature of features, the +<i>corpus delicti</i> or manuscript itself; which it was legendary with us +that the admired had been known to drive back for in an abashed flurry +at the moment we were launched in dreams of him as in full, though +mysterious, operation. I can see him now, from the parlour window, at +the door of the carriage and under the gusty street-lamp, produce it +from a coat-tail pocket and shake it, for her ideal<a name="page_200" id="page_200"></a> comfort, in the +face of his companion. The following, to Emerson, I surmise, is of some +early date in the autumn of '52.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>I give three lectures in Boston at the Masonic Temple; the first +and second on Nov. 5th and 8th respectively. I should be greatly +appalled in some respects, but still charmed, to have you for an +auditor, seeing thus a hundred empty seats obliterated; but, I beg +of you, don't let any engagement suffer by such kindness to me. +Looking over the lectures again they horrify me with their +loud-mouthed imbecility!—but I hope they may fall upon less +hardened ears in some cases. I am sure that the thought which is in +them, or rather seems to me to struggle to be in them, is worthy of +all men's rapturous homage, and I will trust that a glimpse of it +may somehow befall my patient auditory. The fact is that a vital +truth can never be transferred from one mind to another, because +life alone appreciates it. The most one can do for another is to +plant some rude formula of such truths in his memory, leaving his +own spiritual chemistry to set free the germ whenever the demands +of his life exact it. The reason why the gods seem so powerless to +the sensuous understanding, and suffer themselves to be so long +defamed by our crazy theologies, is that they are life, and can +consequently be revealed only to life. But life is simply the +passage of idea into action; and our crazy theologies forbid ideas +to come into action any further than our existing institutions +warrant. Hence man leads a mere limping life, and the poor gods who +are dependent upon his manliness for their true revelation and for +their real knowledge, are doomed to remain forever unknown, and +even denied by such solemn pedants as Mr. Atkinson<a name="page_201" id="page_201"></a> and Miss +Martineau. However, I shall try to convert <i>myself</i> at least into +an army of Goths and Huns, to overcome and destroy our existing +sanctities, that the supernal splendours may at length become +credible and even visible. Good-bye till we meet in Boston, and +cultivate your goodnature according to my extensive needs.</p></div> + +<p>I bridge the interval before our migration of 1855 exactly for the sake +of certain further passages addressed to the same correspondent, from +London, in the following year. The letter is a long one and highly +significant of the writer's familiar frankness, but I must keep down my +examples—the first of which glances at his general sense of the men he +mainly met.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>They are all of them depressed or embittered by the public +embarrassments that beset them; deflected, distorted, somehow +despoiled of their rich individual manliness by the necessity of +providing for these imbecile old inheritances of church and state. +Carlyle is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own +grease, only infinitely <i>more</i> unreconciled to the blest Providence +which guides human affairs. He names God frequently and alludes to +the highest things as if they were realities, but all only as for a +picturesque effect, so completely does he seem to regard them as +habitually circumvented and set at naught by the politicians. I +took our friend M. to see him, and he came away greatly distressed +and désillusionné, Carlyle having taken the utmost pains to deny +and descry and deride the idea of his having done the least good to +anybody, and to profess indeed<a name="page_202" id="page_202"></a> the utmost contempt for everybody +who thought he had, and poor M. being intent on giving him a +plenary assurance of this fact in his own case.... Arthur Helps +seems an amiable kindly little man with friendly offers, but I told +him I had no intention to bore him, and would at most apply to him +when I might want a good hatter or bootmaker. He fancied a +little—at least I thought this was the case—that I was going to +make a book, and might be indiscreet enough to put him in!.... —— +disappoints me, he is so eaten up with the "spirits" and all that. +His imagination is so vast as to dwarf all the higher faculties, +and his sympathy as narrow as Dr. Cheever's or Brownson's. No +reasonable man, it is true, likes the clergy or the philosophers, +but ——'s dislike of them seems as envenomed as that between rival +tradesmen or rival beauties. One can't endure the nonsense they +talk, to be sure, but when one considers the dear human meaning and +effort struggling at the bottom of it all one can feel still less +any personal separation from the men themselves. ——'s sarcasm is +of the fiercest, and on the whole he is only now at last sowing his +intellectual wild oats—he will grow more genial in good time. This +is it: I think he is but now finding his youth! That which we on +our side of the water find so early and exhaust so prodigally he +has found thus much later—I mean an emancipation from the shackles +of custom; and the kicking up of his heels consequently is +proportionate to his greater maturity of muscle. Mrs. —— is a +dear little goose of a thing, who fancies the divine providence in +closer league with herself than with others, giving her intimations +of events about to happen and endowing her with peculiar +perspicacity in the intuition of remedies for disease; and ——, +the great brawny fellow, sits by and says never a word in abatement +of this enormous domestic<a name="page_203" id="page_203"></a> inflation, though the visitor feels +himself crowded by it into the most inconsiderable of corners. A +sweet, loving, innocent woman like Mrs. —— oughtn't to grow +egotistical in the company of a truly wise man, and this +accordingly is another quarrel I have with ——. In short I am +getting to the time of life when one values one's friends for what +they are more than for what they do. I am just as much impressed as +ever by his enormous power, but the goodness out of which it is +born and the wisdom by which it is nurtured and bred are things I +don't so much see.</p></div> + +<p>The correspondence grew more interspaced, and with the year 1861 and the +following, when we were at home again, became a matter of the occasional +note. I have before me a series of beautiful examples of Emerson's share +in it—during the earlier time copious enough; but these belong +essentially to another case. I am all but limited, for any further show +of the interesting relation than I have already given, to reproducing a +few lines from Emerson's Diary, passages unpublished at the moment I +write, and the first of them of April 1850. "I have made no note of +these long weary absences at New York and Philadelphia. I am a bad +traveller, and the hotels are mortifications to all sense of well-being +in me. The people who fill them oppress me with their excessive +virility, and would soon become intolerable if it were not for a few +friends who, like women, tempered the<a name="page_204" id="page_204"></a> acrid mass. Henry James was true +comfort—wise, gentle, polished, with heroic manners and a serenity like +the sun." The hotels of those days may well have been an +ordeal—distinct to me still, from no few childish glimpses of their +bareness of ease and rudeness of <i>acceuil</i>; yet that our justly +fastidious friend was not wholly left to their mercy seems signified by +my not less vivid remembrance of his staying with us on occasion in New +York; some occasion, or occasions, I infer, of his coming on to lecture +there. Do I roll several occasions into one, or amplify one beyond +reason?—this last being ever, I allow, the waiting pitfall of a +chronicler too memory-ridden. I "visualise" at any rate the winter +firelight of our back-parlour at dusk and the great Emerson—I knew he +was great, greater than any of our friends—sitting in it between my +parents, before the lamps had been lighted, as a visitor consentingly +housed only could have done, and affecting me the more as an apparition +sinuously and, I held, elegantly slim, benevolently aquiline, and +commanding a tone alien, beautifully alien, to any we heard roundabout, +that he bent this benignity upon me by an invitation to draw nearer to +him, off the hearth-rug, and know myself as never yet, as I was not +indeed to know myself again for years, in touch with the wonder of +Boston. The wonder of Boston was above<a name="page_205" id="page_205"></a> all just then and there for me +in the sweetness of the voice and the finish of the speech—this latter +through a sort of attenuated emphasis which at the same time made sounds +more important, more interesting in themselves, than by any revelation +yet vouchsafed us. Was not this my first glimmer of a sense that the +human tone <i>could</i>, in that independent and original way, be +interesting? and didn't it for a long time keep me going, however +unwittingly, in that faith, carrying me in fact more or less on to my +day of recognising that it took much more than simply not being of New +York to produce the music I had listened to. The point was that, however +that might be, I had had given me there in the firelight an absolutely +abiding measure. If I didn't know from that hour forth quite all it was +to <i>not</i> utter sounds worth mentioning, I make out that I had at least +the opposite knowledge. And all by the operation of those signal +moments—the truth of which I find somehow reflected in the fact of my +afterwards knowing one of our household rooms for the time—it must have +been our only guest-chamber—as "Mr. Emerson's room." The evening +firelight played so long for me upon the door—that is to the length +probably of three days, the length of a child's impression. But I must +not let this carry me beyond the second note of the Diary,<a name="page_206" id="page_206"></a> this time of +May 1852. "'I do not wish this or that thing my fortune will procure, I +wish the great fortune,' said Henry James, and said it in the noblest +sense." The report has a beauty to me without my quite understanding it; +the union of the two voices in it signifies quite enough. The last very +relevant echo of my father's by itself, in the connection, I hasten now +to find in a communication that must have been of the summer of 1869, +when Dr. Wilkinson paid his only visit to America—this apparently of +the briefest. The letter to Emerson from Cambridge notes that his +appearance there had been delayed.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>He may come to-morrow possibly: if in the morning I will telegraph +you; if in the evening I shall try to keep him over Monday that you +may meet him here at dinner on that day. But I fear this bothersome +Sabbath and its motionless cars may play us a trick. I shall hope +for a generous Monday all the same, and if that hope is baulked +shall owe Sunday a black-eye—and will pay my debt on the first +suitable occasion, I warrant you. What an awkward story (the letter +continues) The Nation to-day tells of Charles Sumner! Charles's +burly voice has always had for me a dreadfully hollow sound, as if +it came from a great copper vat, and I have loved him but with fear +and trembling accordingly. Is he <i>really</i>, like all American +politicians, tricky, or is The Nation—so careful about facts +ordinarily—only slanderous?... Carlyle nowadays is a palpable +nuisance. If he holds to his present mouthing ways to the end he +will find no showman là-bas to match him, for I hold Barnum a much +more<a name="page_207" id="page_207"></a> innocent personage. I shouldn't wonder if Barnum grew +regenerate in some far off day by mere force of his democracy. But +Carlyle's intellectual pride is so stupid that one can hardly +imagine anything able to cope with it.</p></div> + +<p>The following, in so different a key, is of some seven years earlier +date—apparently '62; but I have let it stand over, for reasons, that it +may figure here as the last of the communications addressed to Emerson +that I shall cite. Written at an hotel, the Tremont House, in Boston, it +marks his having come up from Newport for attendance at some meeting of +a dining-club, highly distinguished in composition, as it still happily +remains, of which he was a member—though but so occasionally present +that this circumstance perhaps explains a little the even more than +usual vivacity of his impression. Not indeed, I may add, that mustered +reasons or apologies were ever much called for in any case of the play +of that really prime note of his spontaneity.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>I go to Concord in the morning, but shall have barely time to see +you there, even if I do as much as that; so that I can't forbear to +say to you now the word I wanted as to my impression of yesterday +about Hawthorne and Ellery Channing. Hawthorne isn't to me a +prepossessing figure, nor apparently at all an <i>enjoying</i> person in +any way: he has all the while the look—or would have to the +unknowing—of a rogue who suddenly finds himself in a company of +detectives.<a name="page_208" id="page_208"></a> But in spite of his rusticity I felt a sympathy for +him fairly amounting to anguish, and couldn't take my eyes off him +all dinner, nor my rapt attention: as that indecisive little Dr. +Hedge<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> found, I am afraid, to his cost, for I hardly heard a word +of what he kept on saying to me, and resented his maliciously +putting his artificial person between me and the profitable object +of study. (It isn't however that I now feel any ill-will to him—I +could recommend anyone but myself to go and hear him preach. The +thing was that Hawthorne seemed to me to possess human substance +and not to have dissipated it all away like that culturally +debauched ——, or even like good inoffensive comforting +Longfellow.) John Forbes and you kept up the human balance at the +other end of the table, but my region was a desert with H. for its +only oasis. It was so pathetic to see him, contented sprawling +Concord owl that he was and always has been, brought blindfold into +that brilliant daylight and expected to wink and be lively, like +some dapper Tommy Titmouse. I felt him bury his eyes in his plate +and eat with such voracity that no one should dare to speak to him. +My heart broke for him as his attenuated left-hand neighbour kept +putting forth <i>his</i> long antennae to stroke his face and try +whether his eyes were open. It was heavenly to see him persist in +ignoring the spectral smiles—in eating his dinner and doing +nothing but that, and then go home to his Concord den to fall upon +his knees and ask his heavenly Father why it was that an owl +couldn't remain an owl and not be forced into the diversions of a +canary. I have no doubt that all the tenderest angels saw to his +case that night and poured oil into his wounds more soothing than +gentlemen ever know. W. Ellery Channing too seemed so human and +good—sweet<a name="page_209" id="page_209"></a> as summer and fragrant as pinewoods. He is more +sophisticated than Hawthorne of course, but still he was kin; and I +felt the world richer by two <i>men</i>, who had not yet lost themselves +in mere members of society. This is what I suspect—that we are +fast getting so fearful one to another, we "members of society" +that we shall ere long begin to kill one another in self-defence +and give place in that way at last to a more veracious state of +things. The old world is breaking up on all hands: the glimpse of +the everlasting granite I caught in H. and W. E. shows me that +there is stock enough left for fifty better. Let the old impostors +go, bag and baggage, for a very real and substantial one is aching +to come in, in which the churl shall not be exalted to a place of +dignity, in which innocence shall never be tarnished nor trafficked +in, in which every man's freedom shall be respected down to its +feeblest filament as the radiant altar of God. To the angels, says +Swedenborg, death means resurrection to life; by that necessary +rule of inversion which keeps them separate from us and us from +them, and so prevents our being mutual nuisances. Let us then +accept political and all other distraction that chooses to come; +because what is disorder and wrath and contention on the surface is +sure to be the greatest peace at the centre, working its way thus +to a surface that shall never be disorderly.</p></div> + +<p>But it is in the postscript that the mixture and the transition strike +me as most inevitable.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>Weren't you shocked at ——'s engagement? To think of that prim old +snuffers imposing himself on that pure young flame! What a world, +what a world! But once we get rid of Slavery the new heavens and +new earth will swim into reality.</p></div> + +<p>No better example could there be, I think, of my father's remarkable and +constant belief, proof against all confusion, in the imminence of a +transformation-scene in human affairs—"spiritually" speaking of course +always—which was to be enacted somehow without gross or vulgar +visibility, or at least violence, as I have said, but was none the less +straining to the front, and all by reason of the world's being, deep +within and at heart, as he conceived, so achingly anxious for it. He had +the happiness—though not so untroubled, all the while, doubtless, as +some of his declarations would appear to represent—of being able to see +his own period and environment as the field of the sensible change, and +thereby as a great historic hour; that is, I at once subjoin, I more or +less <i>suppose</i> he had. His measure of the imminent and immediate, of the +socially and historically visible and sensible was not a thing easy to +answer for, and when treated to any one of the loud vaticinations or +particular revolutionary messages and promises our age was to have so +much abounded in, all his sense of proportion and of the whole, of the +real and the ridiculous, asserted itself with the last emphasis. In that +mixture in him of faith and humour, criticism and conviction, that mark +of a love of his kind which fed on discriminations and was never so +moved to a certain extravagance as by an<a name="page_211" id="page_211"></a> exhibited, above all by a +cultivated or in the least sententious vagueness in respect to these, +dwelt largely the original charm, the peculiarly social and living +challenge (in that it was so straight and bright a reflection of life) +of his talk and temper. Almost all of my father shines for me at any +rate in the above passages, and in another that follows, with their so +easy glide from discrimination, as I have called it, that is from +analytic play, in the outward sphere, to serenity of synthesis and +confidence and high joy in the inward. It was as if he might have liked +so to see his fellow-humans, fellow-diners, fellow-celebrities or +whatever, in that acuity of individual salience, in order to proceed +thence to some enormous final doubt or dry renouncement—instead of +concluding, on the contrary, and on the same free and familiar note, to +the eminently "worth while" character of life, or its susceptibility to +vast and happy conversions. With which too, more than I can say, have I +the sense here of his so finely contentious or genially perverse impulse +to carry his wares of observation to the market in which they would on +the whole bring least rather than most—where his offering them at all +would produce rather a flurry (there might have been markets in which it +had been known to produce almost a scandal), and where he would in fact +give them away for nothing if<a name="page_212" id="page_212"></a> thereby he might show that such produce +grew. Never was there more of a case of the direct friendliness to +startling growths—if so they might be held—of the very soil that lies +under our windows. I don't think he liked to scandalise—certainly he +didn't in the least for scandal's sake; but nothing inspired him more to +the act and the pleasure of appreciation for appropriation, as it might +be termed, than the deprecating attitude of others on such ground—that +degree of shyness of appropriation on their part which practically left +appreciation vague. It was true that the appreciation for a human use, +as it might be called—that is for the high optimistic transition—could +here carry the writer far.<a name="page_213" id="page_213"></a></p> + +<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII</h2> + +<p>I find markedly relevant at this point a letter from Newport in the +autumn of '61 to another correspondent, one of a series several other +examples of which no less successfully appeal to me, even though it +involve my going back a little to place three or four of these latter, +written at Geneva in 1860. Mrs. William Tappan, primarily Caroline +Sturgis of Boston, was for long years and to the end of her life our +very great friend and one of my father's most constant and most +considered interlocutors, both on the ground of his gravity and on that +of his pleasantry. She had spent in Europe with her husband and her two +small daughters very much the same years, from early in the summer of +'55 till late in the autumn of '60, that we had been spending; and like +ourselves, though with less continuity for the time, she had come to +live at Newport, where, with no shadow of contention, but with an +admirable intelligence, of the incurably ironic or mocking order, she +was such a light, free, somewhat intellectually perverse but socially +impulsive presence (always for instance insatiably hospitable) as our +mustered circle could ill have spared. If play of mind, which she +carried to<a name="page_214" id="page_214"></a> any point of quietly-smiling audacity that might be, had not +already become a noted, in fact I think the very most noted, value among +us, it would have seated itself there in her person with a nervous +animation, a refinement of what might have been called soundable +sincerity, that left mere plump assurance in such directions far in the +lurch. And she was interesting, she became fairly historic, with the +drawing-out of the years, as almost the only survivor of that young band +of the ardent and uplifted who had rallied in the other time to the +"transcendental" standard, the movement for organised candour of +conversation on almost all conceivable or inconceivable things which +appeared, with whatever looseness, to find its prime inspirer in Emerson +and become more familiarly, if a shade less authentically, vocal in +Margaret Fuller. Hungry, ever so cheerfully and confidently hungry, had +been much of the New England, and peculiarly the Boston, of those days; +but with no such outreaching of the well-scoured empty platter, it +probably would have struck one, as by the occasional and quite +individual agitation of it from some ruefully-observed doorstep of the +best society. It was from such a doorstep that Caroline Sturgis had +originally taken her restless flight, just as it was on such another +that, after a course of infinite freedom of inquiry and irony, she in +the later<a name="page_215" id="page_215"></a> time, with a fortune inherited, an hospitality extended and a +genial gravity of expression confirmed, alighted again, to the no small +re-enrichment of a company of friends who had had meanwhile scarce any +such intellectual adventures as she was to retain, in a delicate and +casual irreverence, the just slightly sharp fragrance or fine asperity +of, but who might cultivate with complacency and in support of the +general claim to comprehensive culture and awareness unafraid the legend +of her vicarious exposure.</p> + +<p>Mr. Frank Sanborn's school, which I have already mentioned and to which +the following alludes, was during the years immediately preceding the +War, as during those of the War itself, the last word of what was then +accounted the undauntedly modern, flourishing as it did under the +patronage of the most "advanced" thought. The "coeducational" idea had +up to that time, if I mistake not, taken on no such confident and +consistent, certainly no such graceful or plausible form; small boys and +big boys, boys from near and boys from far, consorted there and +cohabited, so far as community of board and lodging and of study and +sport went, with little girls and great girls, mainly under the earnest +tutoring and elder-sistering of young women accomplished as scholarly +accomplishment in such cases was then<a name="page_216" id="page_216"></a> understood, but with Mr. Sanborn +himself of course predominantly active and instructional, and above all +with the further felicity of the participation of the generous Emerson +family by sympathy and interest and the protective spread of the rich +mantle of their presence. The case had been from the first a frank and +high-toned experiment, a step down from the tonic air, as was so +considerably felt, of radical conviction to the firm ground of radical +application, that is of happy demonstration—an admittedly new and +trustful thing, but all the brighter and wiser, all the more nobly and +beautifully workable for that. With but the scantest direct observation +of the attempted demonstration—demonstration, that is, of the excellent +fruit such a grafting might produce—I yet imagine the enacted and +considerably prolonged scene (it lasted a whole decade) to have heaped +perfectly full the measure of what it proposed. The interesting, the +curious, the characteristic thing was just, however, I seem to make +out—I seemed to have made out even at the time—in the almost complete +absence of difficulty. It might almost then be said of the affair that +it hadn't been difficult enough for interest even should one insist on +treating it as sufficiently complicated or composed for picture. The +great War was to leave so many things changed, the country over, so many +elements<a name="page_217" id="page_217"></a> added, to say nothing of others subtracted, in the American +consciousness at large, that even though the coeducational idea, taking +to itself strength, has during these later years pushed its conquests to +the very verge of demonstration of its inevitable limits, my memory +speaks to me of the Concord school rather as of a supreme artless word +on the part of the old social order than as a charged intimation or +announcement on the part of the new. The later arrangements, more or +less in its likeness and when on a considerable scale, have appeared, to +attentive observation, I think, mere endlessly multiplied notes of the +range of high spirits in the light heart of communities more aware on +the whole of the size and number of their opportunity, of the boundless +spaces, the possible undertakings, the uncritical minds and the absent +standards about them, than of matters to be closely and preparedly +reckoned with. They have been, comparatively speaking, experiments in +the void—the great void that may spread so smilingly between wide +natural borders before complications have begun to grow. The name of the +complication before the fact is very apt to be the discovery—which +latter term was so promptly to figure for the faith that living and +working more intimately together than had up to then been conceived +possible would infinitely improve both the condition<a name="page_218" id="page_218"></a> and the +performance of the brother and sister sexes. It takes long in new +communities for discoveries to become complications—though +complications become discoveries doubtless often in advance of this; the +large vague area, with its vast marginal ease, over which confidence +could run riot and new kinds of human relation, elatedly proposed, +flourish in the sun, was to shift to different ground the question the +Concord school had played with, during its term of life, on its smaller +stage, under the great New England elms and maples and in the +preoccupied New England air.</p> + +<p>The preoccupation had been in a large measure, it is true, exactly with +such possibilities, such bright fresh answers to old stale riddles, as +Mr. Sanborn and his friends clubbed together to supply; but I can only, +for my argument, recover the sense of my single visit to the scene, +which must have been in the winter of '62-'63, I think, and which put +before me, as I seem now to make out, some suggested fit of +perversity—not desperate, quite harmless rather, and almost frivolously +futile, on the part of a particular little world that had been thrown +back upon itself for very boredom and, after a spell of much admired +talking and other beating of the air, wanted for a change to "do" +something. The question it "played" with I just advisedly said—for what +could my<a name="page_219" id="page_219"></a> impression have been, personally if indirectly gathered, and +with my admirably communicative younger brother to testify, but that if +as a school, in strict parlance, the thing was scarce more than naught, +as a prolonged pastime it was scarce less than charming and quite filled +up in that direction its ample and original measure? I have to reckon, I +here allow, with the trick of what I used irrepressibly to read into +things in front of which I found myself, for gaping purposes, planted by +some unquestioned outer force: it seemed so prescribed to me, so imposed +on me, to read more, as through some ever-felt claim for roundness of +aspect and intensity of effect in presented matters, whatever they might +be, than the conscience of the particular affair itself was perhaps +developed enough to ask of it. The experience of many of the Concord +pupils during the freshness of the experiment must have represented for +them a free and yet ever so conveniently conditioned taste of the +idyllic—such possibilities of perfect good comradeship between +unsuspected and unalarmed youths and maidens (on a comprehensive ground +that really exposed the business to a light and put it to a test) as +they were never again to see so favoured in every way by circumstance +and, one may quite emphatically say, by atmosphere. It is the atmosphere +that comes back to me as most<a name="page_220" id="page_220"></a> of all the making of the story, even when +inhaled but by an occasional whiff and from afar—the manner of my own +inhaling. In that air of charmed and cultivated good faith nothing for +which the beautiful might be so presumingly claimed—if only claimed +with a sufficiently brave clean emphasis—wouldn't have <i>worked</i>, which +was the great thing; every one must have felt that what was aspired to +did work, and as I catch the many-voiced report of it again (many-voiced +but pretty well suffused with one clear tone, this of inflections +irreproducible now) I seem to listen in convinced admiration, though not +by any means in stirred envy, to the cheerful clatter of its working. My +failure of envy has, however, no mite of historic importance, proving as +it does nothing at all but that if we had, in the family sense, so +distinctly turned our back on Europe, the distinctness was at no point +so marked as in our facing so straight to such a picture, by which I +mean to such an exhibition, as my father's letter throws off. Without +knowledge of the letter at the time I yet measured the situation much as +he did and enjoyed it as he did, because it would have been stupid not +to; but from that to any wishful vision of being in it or of it would +have been a long jump, of which I was unabashedly incapable. To have +broken so personally, so all but catastrophically, with<a name="page_221" id="page_221"></a> Europe as we +had done affected me as the jump sufficient; we had landed somewhere in +quite another world or at least on the sharp edge of one; and in the +single particular sense could I, as time then went on, feel myself at +all moved, with the helpless, the baffled visionary way of it, to push +further in. What straight solicitation <i>that</i> phase of the American +scene could exert—more coercive to the imagination than any we were +ever again, as Americans, to know—I shall presently try to explain; but +this was an intensely different matter.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>I buried two of my children yesterday—at Concord, Mass., and feel +so heartbroken this morning that I shall need to adopt two more +instantly to supply their place; and lo and behold you and William +present yourselves, or if you decline the honour Ellen and Baby. +Mary and I trotted forth last Wednesday, bearing Wilky and Bob in +our arms to surrender them to the famous Mr. Sanborn. The yellowest +sunshine and an atmosphere of balm were all over the goodly land, +while the maple, the oak and the dogwood showered such splendours +upon the eye as made the Champs Elysées and the Bois appear +parvenus and comical. Mrs. Clark is a graceless enough woman +outwardly, but so tenderly feathered inwardly, so unaffectedly kind +and motherly toward the urchins under her roof, that one was glad +to leave them in that provident nest. She has three or four other +school-boarders, one of them a daughter of John Brown—tall, erect, +long-haired and freckled, as John Brown's daughter has a right to +be. I kissed her (inwardly)<a name="page_222" id="page_222"></a> between the eyes, and inwardly heard +the martyred Johannes chuckle over the fat inheritance of love and +tenderness he had after all bequeathed to his children in all good +men's minds. An arch little Miss Plumley also lives there, with +eyes full of laughter and a mouth like a bed of lilies bordered +with roses. How it is going to be possible for my two boys to +pursue their studies in the midst of that bewilderment I don't +clearly see. I am only sure of one thing, which is that if I had +had such educational advantages as that in my youth I should +probably have been now far more nearly ripe for this world's +business. We asked to see Miss Waterman, one of the teachers +quartered in the house, in order to say to her how much we should +thank her if she would occasionally put out any too lively spark +she might see fall on the expectant tinder of my poor boys' bosoms; +but Miss W. herself proved of so siliceous a quality on +inspection—with round tender eyes, young, fair and womanly—that I +saw in her only new danger and no promise of safety. My present +conviction is that a general conflagration is inevitable, ending in +the total combustion of all that I hold dear on that spot. Yet I +can't but felicitate our native land that such magnificent +experiments in education go on among us.</p> + +<p>Then we drove to Emerson's and waded up to our knees through a +harvest of apples and pears, which, tired of their mere outward or +carnal growth, had descended to the loving bosom of the lawn, there +or elsewhere to grow inwardly meet for their heavenly rest in the +veins of Ellen the saintly and others; until at last we found the +cordial Pan himself in the midst of his household, breezy with +hospitality and blowing exhilarating trumpets of welcome. Age has +just the least in the world dimmed the lustre we once knew, but an +unmistakable breath of the morning still encircles him, and the +odour of primaeval woods. Pitchpine is<a name="page_223" id="page_223"></a> not more pagan than he +continues to be, and acorns as little confess the gardener's skill. +Still I insist that he is a voluntary Pan, that it is a condition +of mere wilfulness and insurrection on his part, contingent upon a +mercilessly sound digestion and an uncommon imaginative influx, and +I have no doubt that even he, as the years ripen, will at last +admit Nature to be tributary and not supreme. However this be, we +consumed juicy pears to the diligent music of Pan's pipe, while +Ellen and Edith softly gathered themselves upon two low stools in +the chimney-corner, saying never a word nor looking a look, but +apparently hemming their handkerchiefs; and good Mrs. Stearns, who +sat by the window and seemed to be the village dressmaker, ever and +anon glanced at us over her spectacles as if to say that never +before has she seen this wondrous Pan so glistening with dewdrops. +Then and upon the waves of that friendly music we were duly wafted +to our educational Zion and carefully made over our good and +promising and affectionate boys to the school-master's keeping. Out +into the field beside his house Sanborn incontinently took us to +show how his girls and boys perform together their worship of +Hygeia. It was a glimpse into that new world wherein dwelleth +righteousness and which is full surely fast coming upon our +children and our children's children; and I could hardly keep +myself, as I saw my children's eyes drink in the mingled work and +play of the inspiring scene, from shouting out a joyful Nunc +Dimittis. The short of the story is that we left them and rode home +robbed of our plumage, feeling sore and ugly and only hoping that +they wouldn't die, any of these cold winter days, before the +parental breast could get there to warm them back to life or cheer +them on to a better.</p> + +<p>Mrs. William Hunt has just come in to tell the good<a name="page_224" id="page_224"></a> news of your +near advent and that she has found the exact house for you; +instigated to that activity by one of your angels, of the Hooper +band, with whom she has been in correspondence. I don't thank angel +Hooper for putting angel Hunt upon that errand, since I should like +to have had the merit of it myself. I suspect the rent is what it +ought to be: if it's not I will lay by something every week for you +toward it, and have no doubt we shall stagger through the cold +weather.</p></div> + +<p>I gather from the above the very flower of my father's irrepressible +utterance of his constitutional optimism, that optimism fed so little by +any sense of things as they were or are, but rich in its vision of the +facility with which they might become almost at any moment or from one +day to the other totally and splendidly different. A less vague or vain +idealist couldn't, I think, have been encountered; it was given him to +catch in the fact at almost any turn right or left some flagrant +assurance or promise of the state of man transfigured. The Concord +school could be to him for the hour—there were hours and hours!—such a +promise; could even figure in that light, to his amplifying sympathy, in +a degree disproportionate to its genial, but after all limited, after +all not so intensely "inflated," as he would have said, sense of itself. +In which light it is that I recognise, and even to elation, how little, +practically, of the idea of the Revolution<a name="page_225" id="page_225"></a> in the vulgar or violent +sense was involved in his seeing so many things, in the whole social +order about him, and in the interest of their being more or less +immediately altered, as lamentably, and yet at the same time and under +such a coloured light, as amusingly and illustratively, wrong—wrong, +that is, with a blundering helpless human salience that kept criticism +humorous, kept it, so to speak, sociable and almost "sympathetic" even +when readiest. The case was really of his rather feeling so vast a +rightness close at hand or lurking immediately behind actual +arrangements that a single turn of the inward wheel, one real response +to pressure of the spiritual spring, would bridge the chasms, straighten +the distortions, rectify the relations and, in a word, redeem and vivify +the whole mass—after a far sounder, yet, one seemed to see, also far +subtler, fashion than any that our spasmodic annals had yet shown us. It +was of course the old story that we had only to <i>be</i> with more +intelligence and faith—an immense deal more, certainly—in order to +work off, in the happiest manner, the many-sided ugliness of life; which +was a process that might go on, blessedly, in the quietest of all quiet +ways. <i>That</i> wouldn't be blood and fire and tears, or would be none of +these things stupidly precipitated; it would simply have taken place by +<i>enjoyed</i> communication<a name="page_226" id="page_226"></a> and contact, enjoyed concussion or convulsion +even—since pangs and agitations, the very agitations of perception +itself, are of the highest privilege of the soul and there is always, +thank goodness, a saving sharpness of play or complexity of consequence +in the intelligence completely alive. The meaning of which remarks for +myself, I must be content to add, is that the optimists of the world, +the constructive idealists, as one has mainly known them, have too often +struck one as overlooking more of the aspects of the real than they +recognise; whereas our indefeasible impression, William's and mine, of +our parent was that he by his very constitution and intimate heritage +recognised many more of those than he overlooked. What was the finest +part of our intercourse with him—that is the most nutritive—but a +positive record of that? Such a matter as that the factitious had +absolutely no hold on him was the truest thing about him, and it was all +the while present to us, I think, as backing up his moral authority and +play of vision that never, for instance, had there been a more numerous +and candid exhibition of all the human susceptibilities than in the nest +of his original nurture. I have spoken of the fashion in which I still +see him, after the years, attentively bent over those much re-written +"papers," that we had, even at our stupidest, this warrant for<a name="page_227" id="page_227"></a> going in +vague admiration of that they caught the eye, even the most filially +detached, with a final face of wrought clarity, and thereby of beauty, +that there <i>could</i> be no thinking unimportant—and see him also fall +back from the patient posture, again and again, in long fits of remoter +consideration, wondering, pondering sessions into which I think I was +more often than not moved to read, for the fine interest and colour of +it, some story of acute inward difficulty amounting for the time to +discouragement. If one wanted drama <i>there</i> was drama, and of the most +concrete and most immediately offered to one's view and one's suspense; +to the point verily, as might often occur, of making one go roundabout +it on troubled tiptoe even as one would have held one's breath at the +play.</p> + +<p>These opposed glimpses, I say, hang before me as I look back, but really +fuse together in the vivid picture of the fond scribe separated but by a +pane of glass—his particular preference was always directly to face the +window—from the general human condition he was so devoutly concerned +with. He <i>saw</i> it, through the near glass, saw it in such detail and +with a feeling for it that broke down nowhere—that was the great thing; +which truth it confirmed that his very fallings back and long waits and +stays and almost stricken musings witnessed exactly to his intensity,<a name="page_228" id="page_228"></a> +the intensity that would "come out," after all, and make his passionate +philosophy and the fullest array of the appearances that couldn't be +blinked fit together and harmonise. Detached as I could during all those +years perhaps queerly enough believe myself, it would still have done my +young mind the very greatest violence to have to suppose that any plane +of conclusion for him, however rich and harmonious he might tend to make +conclusion, could be in the nature of a fool's paradise. Small vague +outsider as I was, I couldn't have borne <i>that</i> possibility; and I see, +as I return to the case, how little I really could ever have feared it. +This would have amounted to fearing it on account of his geniality—a +shocking supposition; as if his geniality had been thin and <i>bête</i>, +patched up and poor, and not by the straightest connections, nominal and +other, of the very stuff of his genius. No, I feel myself complacently +look back to <i>my</i> never having, even at my small poorest, been so +<i>bête</i>, either, as to conceive he might be "wrong," wrong as a +thinker-out, in his own way, of the great mysteries, because of the +interest and amusement and vividness his attesting spirit could fling +over the immediate ground. What he saw <i>there</i> at least could be so +enlightening, so evocatory, could fall in so—which was to the most +inspiring effect within the range of perception of a scant son who<a name="page_229" id="page_229"></a> was +doubtless, as to the essential, already more than anything else a +novelist <i>en herbe</i>. If it didn't sound in a manner patronising I should +say that I saw that my father saw; and that I couldn't but have given my +own case away by not believing, however obscurely, in the virtue of his +consequent and ultimate synthesis. Of course I never dreamed of any such +name for it—I only thought of it as something very great and fine +founded on those forces in him that came home to us and that touched us +all the while. As these were extraordinary forces of sympathy and +generosity, and that yet knew how to be such without falsifying any +minutest measure, the structure raised upon them might well, it would +seem, and even to the uppermost sublime reaches, be as valid as it was +beautiful. If he so endeared himself wasn't it, one asked as time went +on, through his never having sentimentalised or merely meditated away, +so to call it, the least embarrassment of the actual about him, and +having with a passion peculiarly his own kept together his stream of +thought, however transcendent and the stream of life, however humanised? +There was a kind of experiential authority in his basis, as he felt his +basis—there being no human predicament he couldn't by a sympathy more +<i>like</i> direct experience than any I have known enter into; and this +authority,<a name="page_230" id="page_230"></a> which concluded so to a widening and brightening of the +philosophic—for him the spiritual—sky, made his character, as +intercourse disclosed it, in a high degree fascinating. These things, I +think, however, are so happily illustrated in his letters that they look +out from almost any continuous passage in such a series for instance as +those addressed in the earlier time to Mrs. Tappan. His <i>tone</i>, that is, +always so effectually looks out, and the living parts of him so +singularly hung together, that one may fairly say his philosophy <i>was</i> +his tone. To cite a few passages here is at the same time to go back to +a previous year or two—which my examples, I hold, make worth while. He +had been on a visit to Paris toward the winter's end of '60, and had +returned to Geneva, whence he writes early in April.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>So sleepy have I been ever since my return from Paris that I am +utterly unfit to write letters. I was thoroughly poisoned by +tobacco in those horrid railway carriages, and this with want of +sleep knocked me down. I am only half awake still, and will not +engage consequently in any of those profound inquiries which your +remembrance always suggests.</p> + +<p>I am very sorry for you that you live in an excommunicated country, +or next door to it; and I don't wonder at your wanting to get away. +But it is provoking to think that but for your other plan +Switzerland might possess you all for the summer. It is doubtless +in part this disappointment that will unsettle us in our present +moorings and take us probably <a name="page_231" id="page_231"></a>soon to Germany. What after that I +have no idea, and am always so little wilful about our movements +that I am ready the young ones should settle them. So we may be in +Europe a good while yet, always providing that war keep smooth his +wrinkled front and allow us quiet newspapers. They must fight in +Italy for some time to come, but between England and France is the +main point. If <i>they</i> can hold aloof from tearing each other we +shall manage; otherwise we go home at once, to escape the universal +spatter that must then ensue.</p> + +<p>What is the meaning of all these wars and rumours of wars? No +respectable person ever seems to occupy himself with the question, +but I can't help feeling it more interesting than anything in Homer +or Plato or the gallery of the Vatican. I long daily with +unappeasable longing for a righteous life, such a life as I am sure +is implied in every human possibility, and myriads are bearing me +company. What does this show but that the issue is near out of all +our existing chaos? All our evil is fossil and comes from the mere +persistence of diseased institutions in pretending to rule us when +we ought to be left free to be living spirits of God. There is no +<i>fresh</i> evil in the world. No one now steals or commits murder or +any other offence with the least relish for it, but only to revenge +his poor starved opportunities. The superiority of America in +respect to freedom of thought over Europe comes from this fact that +she has so nearly achieved her deliverance from such tyrannies. All +she now needs to make her right is simply an intelligent +recognition of her spiritual whereabouts. If she had this she would +put her hand to the work splendidly. You and I when we get home +will try to quicken her intelligence in that respect, will do at +any rate <i>our</i> best to put away this pestilent munching of the tree +of knowledge<a name="page_232" id="page_232"></a> of good and evil, and persuade to the belief of man's +unmixed innocence.</p></div> + +<p>Which, it will easily be seen, was optimism with a vengeance, and marked +especially in the immediacy, the state of being at hand for him, of a +social redemption. What made this the more signal was its being so +unattended with visions the least Apocalyptic or convulsional; the +better order slipping in amid the worse, and superseding it, so +insidiously, so quietly and, by a fair measure, so easily. It was a +faith and an accompanying philosophy that couldn't be said not to be +together simplifying; and yet nothing was more unmistakable when we saw +them at close range, I repeat, than that they weren't unnourished, +weren't what he himself would, as I hear him, have called the +"flatulent" fruit of sentimentality.</p> + +<p>His correspondent had in a high degree, by her vivacity of expression, +the art of challenging his—as is markedly apparent from a letter the +date of which fails beyond its being of the same stay at Geneva and of +the winter's end.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>If I had really imagined that I had bored you and your husband so +very little while I was in Paris in December I should long since +have repeated the experiment; the more surely that I want so much +to see again my darling nieces and delight myself in the abundance +of their large-eyed belief.... Our Alice<a name="page_233" id="page_233"></a> is still under +discipline—preparing to fulfil some high destiny or other in the +future by reducing decimal fractions to their lowest possible rate +of subsistence, where they often grow so attenuated under her rapid +little fingers that my poor old eyes can no longer see them at all. +I shall go before long to England, and then perhaps—! But I shan't +promise anything on <i>her</i> behalf.</p> + +<p>You ask me "why I do not brandish my tomahawk and, like Walt +Whitman, raise my barbaric yawp over the roofs of all the houses." +It is because I am not yet a "cosmos" as that gentleman avowedly +is, but only a very dim nebula, doing its modest best, no doubt, to +solidify into cosmical dimensions, but still requiring an "awful +sight" of time and pains and patience on the part of its friends. +You evidently fancy that cosmoses are born to all the faculty they +shall ever have, like ducks: no such thing. There is no respectable +cosmos but what is born to such a vapoury and even gaseous +inheritance as requires long centuries of conflict on its part to +overcome the same and become pronounced or educated in its proper +mineral, vegatable or animal order. Ducks are born perfect; that is +to say they utter the same unmodified unimproved quack on their +dying pillow that they uttered on their natal day; whereas cosmoses +are destined to a life of such surprising change that you may say +their career is an incessant disavowal of their birth, or that +their highest maturation consists in their utter renunciation of +their natural father and mother. You transcendentalists make the +fatal mistake of denying education, of sundering present from past +and future from present. These things are indissolubly one, the +present deriving its consciousness only from the past, and the +future drawing all its distinctive wisdom from our present +experience. The law is the same with<a name="page_234" id="page_234"></a> the individual as it is with +the race: none of us can dodge the necessity of regeneration, of +disavowing our natural ancestry in order to come forth in our own +divinely-given proportions. The secret of this necessity ought to +reconcile us to it, however onerous the obligation it imposes; for +that secret is nothing more nor less than this, that we cosmoses +have a plenary divine origin and are bound eventually to see that +divinity reproduced in our most familiar and trivial experience, +even down to the length of our shoe-ties. If the Deity were an +immense Duck capable only of emitting an eternal quack we of course +should all have been born webfooted, each as infallible in his way +as the Pope, nor ever have been at the expense and bother of +swimming-schools. But He is a perfect man, incapable of the +slightest quackery, capable only of every honest and modest and +helpful purpose, and these are perfections to which manifestly no +one is born, but only <i>re</i>-born. We come to such states not by +learning, only by <i>unlearning</i>. No natural edification issues in +spiritual architecture of this splendour, but only a natural +demolition or undoing. I dimly recognise this great truth, and +hence hold more to a present imbecility than to a too eager +efficiency. I feel myself more fit to be knocked about for some +time yet and vastated of my natural vigour than to commence cosmos +and raise the barbaric yawp. Time enough for that when I am fairly +finished. Say what we will, you and I are all the while at school +just now. The genial pedagogue may give you so little of the ferule +as to leave you to doubt whether you really are there; but this +only proves what a wonderful pedagogue it is, and how capable of +adapting himself to everyone.</p></div> + +<p>His friend in Paris found herself at that time, like many other persons, +much interested in the<a name="page_235" id="page_235"></a> exercise of automatic writing, of which we have +since so abundantly heard and as to which she had communicated some +striking observations.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>...Your letter is full of details that interest but don't +fascinate. I haven't a doubt of a single experience you allege, and +do not agree with your friend Count S. (your writing of this name +is obscure) that the world of spirits is not an element in your +writing. I am persuaded now for a long time of the truth of these +phenomena and feel no inclination to dispute or disparage them; but +at the same time I feel to such a degree my own remoteness from +them that I am sure I could never get any personal contact with +them. The state of mind exposing one to influences of this nature, +and which makes them beneficial to it, is a sceptical state; and +this I have never known for a moment. Spiritual existence has +always been more real to me (I was going to say) than natural; and +when accordingly I am asked to believe in the spiritual world +because my senses are getting to reveal it I feel as if the ground +of my conviction were going to be weakened rather than +strengthened. Of course I should have very little respect for +spiritual things which didn't ultimately report themselves to +sense, which didn't indeed subside into things of sense as +logically as a house into its foundations. But what I deny is that +spiritual existence can be directly known on earth—known otherwise +than by correspondence or inversely. The letter of every revelation +must be directly hostile to its spirit, and only inversely +accordant, because the very pretension of revelation is that it's a +descent, an absolute coming down, of truth, a humiliation of it +from its own elevated and habitual plane to a lower one.<a name="page_236" id="page_236"></a></p> + +<p>Admit therefore that the facts of "spiritualism" are all true; +admit that persons really deceased have been communicating with you +about the state of Europe, the approaching crisis and the persons +known to us whom you name; in that case I should insist that, to +possess the slightest spiritual interest, their revelation should +be re-translated into the spiritual tongue by correspondences; +because as to any spirit knowing or caring to know those persons, +or being bothered about any crisis of ours, that is to me simply +incredible. Such matters have in each case doubtless some spiritual +or substantial counterpart answering in every particular to its +superficial features; and Wilkinson and Emerson, for instance, with +the others, are of course shadows of some greater or less spiritual +quantities. But I'll be hanged if there's the slightest <i>sensible</i> +accord between the substance and the semblance on either hand. Your +spirits, no doubt, give you the very communications you report to +me; only Wilkinson spiritually interpreted and Emerson spiritually +interpreted mean things so very different from our two friends of +those denominations that if our spiritual eye were for a moment +open to discern the difference I think it highly probable—I'm sure +it is infinitely possible—we should renounce their acquaintance.</p> + +<p>But I have harped on this string long enough; let me change the +tune. Your spirits tell you to repose in what they are doing for +you and, with a pathos to which I am not insensible, say "Rest now, +poor child; your struggles have been great; clasp peace to your +bosom at last." And as a general thing our ears are saluted by +assurances that these communications are all urged by philanthropy +and that everyone so addressing us wants in some way to help and +elevate us. But just this is to my mind the unpleasant side<a name="page_237" id="page_237"></a> of the +business. I have been so long accustomed to see the most arrant +deviltry transact itself in the name of benevolence that the moment +I hear a profession of good-will from almost any quarter I +instinctively look about for a constable or place my hand within +reach of the bell-rope. My ideal of human intercourse would be a +state of things in which no man will ever stand in need of any +other man's help, but will derive all his satisfaction from the +great social tides which own no individual names. I am sure no man +can be put in a position of dependence upon another without that +other's very soon becoming—if he accepts the duties of the +relation—utterly degraded out of his just human proportions. No +man can play the Deity to his fellow man with impunity—I mean +spiritual impunity of course. For see: if I am at all satisfied +with that relation, if it contents me to be in a position of +generosity toward others, I must be remarkably indifferent at +bottom to the gross social inequality which permits that position, +and instead of resenting the enforced humiliation of my fellow man +to myself, in the interests of humanity, I acquiesce in it for the +sake of the profit it yields to my own self-complacency. I do hope +the reign of benevolence is over; until that event occurs I am sure +the reign of God will be impossible. But I have a shocking bad cold +that racks my head to bursting almost; I can't think to any +purpose. Let me hear soon from you that I have not been +misunderstood. I wouldn't for the world seem wilfully to depreciate +what you set a high value on. No, I really can't help my judgments. +And I always soften them to within an inch of their life as it is.</p></div> + +<p>The following, no longer from the Hotel de l'Ecu, but from 5 Quai du +Mont Blanc, would<a name="page_238" id="page_238"></a> indicate that his "Dear Queen Caroline," as he +addresses her, was at no loss to defend her own view of the matters in +discussion between them: in which warm light indeed it is that I was +myself in the after years ever most amusedly to see her.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>Don't scold a fellow so! Exert your royal gifts in exalting only +the lowly and humbling only the proud. Precisely what I like, to +get extricated from metaphysics, is encouragement from a few +persons like yourself, such encouragement as would lie in your +intelligent apprehension and acknowledgment of the great <i>result</i> +of metaphysics, which is a godly and spotless life on earth. If I +could find anyone apt to that doctrine I should not work so hard +metaphysically to convince the world of its truth. And as for being +a metaphysical Jack Horner, the thing is contradictory, as no +metaphysician whose studies are sincere ever felt tempted to +self-complacency or disposed to reckon himself a good boy. Such +exaltations are not for him, but only for the artists and poets, +who dazzle the eyes of mankind and <i>don't</i> recoil from the darkness +they themselves produce—as Dryden says, or Collins.</p></div> + +<p>Mrs. Tappan, spending the month of June in London, continued to impute +for the time, I infer (I seem to remember a later complete detachment), +a livelier importance to the supernatural authors of her "writing" than +her correspondent was disposed to admit; but almost anything was a +quickener of the correspondent's own rich, that is always so animated, +earnestness. He had to feel an interlocutor's general sympathy,<a name="page_239" id="page_239"></a> or +recognise a moral relation, even if a disturbed one, for the deep tide +of his conviction to rise outwardly higher; but when that happened the +tide overflowed indeed.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>M<small>Y DEAR</small> C<small>AROLINA</small>—Neither North nor South, but an eminently free +State, with no exulting shout of master and no groan of captive to +be heard in all its borders, but only the cheerful hum of happy +husband and children—how do you find London? Here in Geneva we are +so saturate with sunshine that we would fain dive to the depths of +the lake to learn coolness of the little fishes. Still, we don't +envy your two weeks of unbroken rain in dear dismal London. What a +preparation for doing justice to Lenox! You see I know—through +Mary Tweedy, who has a hearty appreciation of her London +privileges. How are A. D. and all the rest of them? <i>Familiar</i> +spirits, are they not, on a short acquaintance?—and how pleasant +an aspect it gives to the middle kingdom to think you shall be sure +to find there such lovers and friends! Only let us keep them at a +proper distance. It doesn't do for us ever to accept another only +at that other's own estimate of himself. If we do we may as well +plunge into Tartarus at once. No human being can afford to commit +his happiness to another's keeping, or, what is the same thing, +forego his own individuality with all that it imports. The first +requisite of our true relationship to each other (spiritually +speaking) is that we be wholly independent of each other: then we +may give ourselves away as much as we please, we shall do neither +them nor ourselves any harm. But until that blessed day comes, by +the advance of a scientific society among men, we shall be utterly +unworthy to love each other or be loved in<a name="page_240" id="page_240"></a> return. We shall do +nothing but prey upon each other and turn each other's life to +perfect weariness.</p> + +<p>The more of it then just now the better! The more we bite and +devour each other, the more horribly the newspapers abound in all +the evidences of our disgusting disorganisation, the +disorganisation of the old world, the readier will our dull ears be +to listen to the tidings of the new world which is aching to +appear, the world wherein dwelleth righteousness. Don't abuse the +newspapers therefore publicly, but tell everybody of the use they +are destined to promote, and set others upon the look-out. A. D. is +a very good woman, I haven't a doubt, but will fast grow a better +one if she would let herself alone, and me also, and all other mere +persons, while she diligently inquires about the Lord; that is +about that lustrous universal life which God's providence is now +forcing upon men's attention and which will obliterate for ever all +this exaggeration of our personalities. It is very well for lovers +to abase themselves in this way to each other; because love is a +<i>passion</i> of one's nature—that is to say the lover is not +self-possessed, but is lifted for a passing moment to the level of +the Lord's life in the race, and so attuned to higher issues ever +after in his own proper sphere. But these experiences are purely +disciplinary and not final. All passion is a mere inducement to +action, and when at last activity really dawns in us we drop this +faculty of hallucination that we have been under about persons and +see and adore the abounding divinity which is in all persons alike. +Who will then ever be caught in that foolish snare again? I did +nothing but tumble into it from my boyhood up to my marriage; since +which great disillusioning—yes!—I feel that the only lovable +person is one who will never permit himself to be loved. But I have +written on without any intention and have<a name="page_241" id="page_241"></a> now no time to say what +alone I intended, how charming and kind and long to be remembered +you were all those Paris days. Give my love to honest William and +tell my small nieces that I pine to pluck again the polished +cherries of their cheeks. My wife admires and loves you.</p></div> + +<p>From which I jump considerably forward, for its (privately) historic +value, to a communication from Newport of the middle of August '63. My +father's two younger sons had, one the previous and one at the beginning +of the current, year obtained commissions in the Volunteer Army; as a +sequel to which my next younger brother, as Adjutant of the Fifty-fourth +Massachusetts, Colonel Robert Shaw's regiment, the first body of +coloured soldiers raised in the North, had received two grave wounds in +that unsuccessful attack on Fort Wagner from which the gallant young +leader of the movement was not to return.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>Wilky had a bad day yesterday and kept me busy or I shouldn't have +delayed answering your inquiries till to-day. He is very severely +wounded both in the ankle and in the side—where he doesn't heal so +fast as the doctor wishes in consequence of the shell having made a +pouch which collects matter and retards nature. They cut it open +yesterday, and to-day he is better, or will be. The wound in the +ankle was made by a cannister ball an inch and a half in diameter, +which lodged eight days in the foot and was finally dislodged by +cutting down through (the foot) and taking it out at the sole. He +is excessively weak, unable to do anything<a name="page_242" id="page_242"></a> but lie passive, even +to turn himself on his pillow. He will probably have a slow and +tedious recovery—the doctors say of a year at least; but he knows +nothing of this himself and speaks, so far as he does talk, but of +going back in the Fall. If you write please say nothing of this; he +is so distressed at the thought of a long sickness. He is vastly +attached to the negro-soldier cause; believes (I think) that the +world has existed for it; and is sure that enormous results to +civilisation are coming out of it. We heard from Bob this morning +at Morris Island; with his regiment, building earthworks and +mounting guns. Hot, he says, but breezy; also that the shells make +for them every few minutes—while he and his men betake themselves +to the trenches and holes in the earth "like so many land-crabs in +distress." He writes in the highest spirits. Cabot Russell, Wilky's +dearest friend, is, we fear, a prisoner and wounded. We hear +nothing decisive, but the indications point that way. Poor Wilky +cries aloud for his friends gone and missing, and I could hardly +have supposed he might be educated so suddenly up to serious +manhood altogether as he appears to have been. I hear from Frank +Shaw this morning, and they are all well—and admirable.</p></div> + +<p>This goes beyond the moment I had lately, and doubtless too lingeringly, +reached, as I say; just as I shall here find convenience in borrowing a +few passages from my small handful of letters of the time to follow—to +the extent of its not following by a very long stretch. Such a course +keeps these fragments of record together, as scattering them would +perhaps conduce to some<a name="page_243" id="page_243"></a> leakage in their characteristic tone, for which +I desire all the fulness it can keep. Impossible moreover not in some +degree to yield on the spot to <i>any</i> brush of the huge procession of +those particular months and years, even though I shall presently take +occasion to speak as I may of my own so inevitably contracted +consciousness of what the brush, with its tremendous possibilities of +violence, could consist of in the given case. I had, under stress, to +content myself with knowing it in a more indirect and muffled fashion +than might easily have been—even should one speak of it but as a matter +of mere vision of the eyes or quickened wonder of the mind or heaviness +of the heart, as a matter in fine of the closer and more inquiring, to +say nothing of the more agitated, approach. All of which, none the less, +was not to prevent the whole quite indescribably intensified +time—intensified through all lapses of occasion and frustrations of +contact—from remaining with me as a more constituted and sustained act +of living, in proportion to my powers and opportunities, than any other +homogeneous stretch of experience that my memory now recovers. The case +had to be in a peculiar degree, alas, that of living inwardly—like so +many of my other cases; in a peculiar degree compared, that is, to the +immense and prolonged outwardness, outwardness naturally at the very<a name="page_244" id="page_244"></a> +highest pitch, that was the general sign of the situation. To which I +may add that my "alas" just uttered is in the key altogether of my then +current consciousness, and not in the least in that of my present +appreciation of the same—so that I leave it, even while I thus put my +mark against it, as I should restore tenderly to the shelf any odd +rococo object that might have slipped from a reliquary. My appreciation +of what I presume at the risk of any apparent fatuity to call my +"relation to" the War is at present a thing exquisite to me, a thing of +the last refinement of romance, whereas it had to be at the time a sore +and troubled, a mixed and oppressive thing—though I promptly see, on +reflection, how it must frequently have flushed with emotions, with +small scraps of direct perception even, with particular sharpnesses in +the generalised pang of participation, that were all but touched in +themselves as with the full experience. Clear as some object presented +in high relief against the evening sky of the west, at all events, is +the presence for me beside the stretcher on which my young brother was +to lie for so many days before he could be moved, and on which he had +lain during his boat-journey from the South to New York and thence again +to Newport, of lost Cabot Russell's stricken father, who, failing, up +and down the searched field, in respect of his own<a name="page_245" id="page_245"></a> irrecoverable +boy—then dying, or dead, as afterwards appeared, well within the +enemy's works—had with an admirable charity brought Wilky back to a +waiting home instead, and merged the parental ache in the next nearest +devotion he could find. Vivid to me still is one's almost ashamed sense +of this at the hurried disordered time, and of how it was impossible not +to impute to his grave steady gentleness and judgment a full awareness +of the difference it would have made for him, all the same, to be doing +such things with a still more intimate pity. Unobliterated for me, in +spite of vaguenesses, this quasi-twilight vision of the good bereft man, +bereft, if I rightly recall, of his only son, as he sat erect and +dry-eyed at the guarded feast of our relief; and so much doubtless +partly because of the image that hovers to me across the years of Cabot +Russell himself, my brother's so close comrade—dark-eyed, youthfully +brown, heartily bright, actively handsome, and with the arrested +expression, the indefinable shining stigma, worn, to the regard that +travels back to them, by those of the young figures of the fallen that +memory and fancy, wanting, never ceasing to want, to "do" something for +them, set as upright and clear-faced as may be, each in his sacred +niche. They have each to such a degree, so ranged, the strange property +or privilege—one scarce knows<a name="page_246" id="page_246"></a> what to call it—of exquisitely, for all +our time, facing us out, quite blandly ignoring us, looking through us +or straight over us at something they partake of together but that we +mayn't pretend to know. We walk thus, I think, rather ruefully before +them—those of us at least who didn't at the time share more happily +their risk. William, during those first critical days, while the +stretcher itself, set down with its load just within the entrance to our +house, mightn't be moved further, preserved our poor lacerated brother's +aspect in a drawing of great and tender truth which I permit myself to +reproduce. It tells for me the double story—I mean both of Wilky's then +condition and of the draughtsman's admirable hand.</p> + +<p class="figcenter"> +<img src="images/ill_244.jpg" width="496" height="302" alt="Sketch of G. W. James brought home wounded from the assault on Fort Wagner" title="" /> +<br /> +<span class="caption">Sketch of G. W. James brought home wounded from the assault on Fort Wagner</span> +</p> + +<p>But I find waiting my father's last letter of the small group to Mrs. +Tappan. We were by that time, the autumn of 1865, settled in Boston for +a couple of years.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>M<small>Y DEAR</small> C<small>ARRY</small>—Are you a carry<i>atid</i> that you consider yourself +bound to uphold that Lenox edifice through the cold winter as well +as the hot summer? Why don't you come to town? I can't <i>write</i> what +I want to say. My brain is tired, and I gladly forego all writing +that costs thought or attention. But I have no day forgotten your +question, and am eager always to make a conquest of you; you are so +full both of the upper and the nether might as always greatly to +excite my interest and make me feel how<a name="page_247" id="page_247"></a> little is accomplished +while you are left not so. I make no prayer to you; I would have no +assistance from your own vows; or the pleasure of my intercourse +with you would be slain. I would rather outrage than conciliate +your sympathies, that I might have all the joy of winning you over +at last. Hate me on my ideal side, the side that menaces you, as +much as you please meanwhile, but keep a warm corner in your regard +for me personally, as I always do for you, until we meet again. +It's a delight to know a person of your sense and depth; even the +<i>gaudia certaminis</i> are more cheering with you than ordinary +agreements with other people.</p></div> + +<p>On which note I may leave the exchange in question, feeling how equal an +honour it does to the parties.<a name="page_248" id="page_248"></a></p> + +<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII</h2> + +<p>I judge best to place together here several passages from my father's +letters belonging to this general period, even though they again carry +me to points beyond my story proper. It is not for the story's sake that +I am moved to gather them, but for their happy illustration, once more, +of something quite else, the human beauty of the writer's spirit and the +fine breadth of his expression. This latter virtue is most striking, +doubtless, when he addresses his women correspondents, of whom there +were many, yet it so pervades for instance various notes, longer and +shorter, to Mrs. James T. Fields, wife of the eminent Boston publisher +and editor, much commended to us as founder and, for a time, chief +conductor of the Atlantic Monthly, our most adopted and enjoyed native +<i>recueil</i> of that series of years. The Atlantic seemed somehow, while +the good season lasted, to live with us, whereas our relation to the two +or three other like organs, homegrown or foreign, of which there could +be any question, and most of all, naturally, to the great French Revue, +was that we lived with <i>them</i>. The light of literature, as we then +invoked or at any rate received it, seemed to beat into the<a name="page_249" id="page_249"></a> delightful +Fields salon from a nearer heaven than upon any other scene, and played +there over a museum of relics and treasures and apparitions (these last +whether reflected and by that time legendary, or directly protrusive and +presented, wearers of the bay) with an intensity, I feel again as I look +back, every resting ray of which was a challenge to dreaming ambition. I +am bound to note, none the less, oddly enough, that my father's +communications with the charming mistress of the scene are more often +than not a bright profession of sad reasons for inability to mingle in +it. He mingled with reluctance in scenes designed and preappointed, and +was, I think, mostly content to feel almost anything near at hand become +a scene for him from the moment he had happened to cast into the arena +(which he preferred without flags or festoons) the golden apple of the +unexpected—in humorous talk, that is, in reaction without preparation, +in sincerity which was itself sociability. It was not nevertheless that +he didn't now and then "accept"—with attenuations.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>...If therefore you will let Alice and me come to you on Wednesday +evening I shall still rejoice in the benignant fate that befalls my +house—even though my wife, indisposed, "feels reluctantly +constrained to count herself out of the sphere of your +hospitality;" and I will bind myself moreover by solemn vows not<a name="page_250" id="page_250"></a> +to perplex the happy atmosphere which almost reigns in yours by +risking a syllable of the incongruous polemic your husband wots of. +I will listen devotedly to you and him all the evening if thereby I +may early go home repaired in my own esteem, and not dilapidated, +as has been hitherto too often the case.</p></div> + +<p>He could resist persuasion even in the insidious form of an expressed +desire that he should read something, "something he was writing," to a +chosen company.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>Your charming note is irresistible at first sight, and I had almost +uttered a profligate Yes!—that is a promise irrespective of a +power to perform; when my good angel arrested me by the stern +inquiry: What have you got to give them? And I could only say in +reply to this intermeddling but blest spirit: Nothing, my dear +friend, absolutely nothing! Whereupon the veracious one said again: +Sit you down immediately therefore and, confessing your literary +indigence to this lovely lady, pray her to postpone the fulfilment +of her desire to some future flood-tide in the little stream of +your inspiration, when you will be ready to serve her.</p></div> + +<p>The following refers to the question of his attending with my mother at +some session of a Social Club, at which a prepared performance of some +sort was always offered, but of which they had lately found it +convenient to cease to be members.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>I snatch the pen from my wife's hand to enjoy, myself, the +satisfaction of saying to you how good and<a name="page_251" id="page_251"></a> kind and charming you +always are, and how we never grow tired of recounting the fact +among ourselves here, and yet how we still shall be unable to +accept your hospitality. Why? Simply because we have a due sense of +what becomes us after our late secession, and would not willingly +be seen at two successive meetings, lest the carnal observer should +argue that we had left the Club by the front door of obligation +only to be readmitted at the back door of indulgence: I put it as +Fields would phrase it. To speak of him always reminds me of +various things, so richly endowed is the creature in all good +gifts; but the dominant consideration evoked in my mind by his name +is just his beautiful home and that atmosphere of faultless womanly +worth and dignity which fills it with light and warmth, and makes +it a blessing to one's heart whenever one enters its precincts. +Please felicitate the wretch for me—!</p></div> + +<p>However earnest these deprecations he could embroider them with a rare +grace.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>My wife—who has just received your kind note in rapid route for +the Dedham Profane Asylum, or something of that sort—begs leave to +say, through me as a willing and sensitive medium, that you are one +of those <i>arva beata</i>, renowned in poetry, which, visit them never +so often, one is always glad to <i>re</i>visit, which are attractive in +all seasons by their own absolute light and without any Emersonian +pansies and buttercups to make them so. This enthusiastic Dedhamite +says further in effect that while she is duly grateful for your +courteous offer of a seat upon your sofa to hear the conquered +sage, she yet prefers the material banquet you summon us to in your +dining-room, since there we should be out of the mist and able to +discern between<a name="page_252" id="page_252"></a> nature and cookery, between what eats and what is +eaten, at all events, and feel a thankful mind that we were in +solid comfortable Charles Street, instead of in the vague and wide +weltering galaxy, and should be sure to deem A. and J. (<i>I</i> am sure +of A., and I think my wife feels equally sure of J.), finer +fireflies than ever sparkled in the old empyrean. But alas who +shall control his destiny? Not my wife, whom multitudinous cares +enthrall; nor yet myself, whom a couple of months' enforced +idleness now constrains to a preternatural activity, lest the world +fail of salvation. Please accept then our united apologies and +regrets....</p> + +<p><i>P.S.</i> Who contrived the comical title for E.'s +lectures?—"Philosophy of the People!" May it not have been a joke +of J. T. F.'s? It would be no less absurd for Emerson himself to +think of philosophising than for the rose to think of botanising. +He is the divinely pompous rose of the philosophic garden, gorgeous +with colour and fragrance; so what a sad look-out for tulip and +violet and lily, and the humbler grasses, if the rose should turn +out philosophic gardener as well.</p></div> + +<p>There connects itself with a passage in another letter to the same +correspondent a memory of my own that I have always superlatively +cherished and that remains in consequence vivid enough for some light +reflection here. But I first give the passage, which is of date of +November '67. "What a charming impression of Dickens the other night at +the Nortons' dinner! How innocent and honest and sweet he is maugre his +fame! Fields was merely superb on the occasion, but<a name="page_253" id="page_253"></a> Dickens was +saintly." As a young person of twenty-four I took part, restrictedly yet +exaltedly, in that occasion—and an immense privilege I held it to slip +in at all—from after dinner on; at which stage of the evening I +presented myself, in the company of my excellent friend Arthur Sedgwick, +brother to our hostess and who still lives to testify, for the honour of +introduction to the tremendous guest. How tremendously it had been laid +upon young persons of our generation to feel Dickens, down to the soles +of our shoes, no more modern instance that I might try to muster would +give, I think, the least measure of; I can imagine no actual young +person of my then age, and however like myself, so ineffably agitated, +so mystically moved, in the presence of any exhibited idol of the mind +who should be in that character at all conceivably "like" the author of +Pickwick and of Copperfield. There has been since his extinction no +corresponding case—as to the relation between benefactor and +beneficiary, or debtor and creditor; no other debt in our time has been +piled so high, for those carrying it, as the long, the purely +"Victorian" pressure of that obligation. It was the pressure, the +feeling, that made it—as it made the feeling, and no operation of +feeling on any such ground has within my observation so much as +attempted to emulate it. So that<a name="page_254" id="page_254"></a> on the evening I speak of at Shady +Hill it was as a slim and shaken vessel of the feeling that one stood +there—of the feeling in the first place diffused, public and universal, +and in the second place all unfathomably, undemonstrably, unassistedly +and, as it were, unrewardedly, proper to one's self as an already +groping and fumbling, already dreaming and yearning dabbler in the +mystery, the creative, that of comedy, tragedy, evocation, +representation, erect and concrete before us there as in a sublimity of +mastership. I saw the master—nothing could be more evident—in the +light of an intense emotion, and I trembled, I remember, in every limb, +while at the same time, by a blest fortune, emotion produced no luminous +blur, but left him shining indeed, only shining with august particulars. +It was to be remarked that those of his dress, which managed to be +splendid even while remaining the general spare uniform of the +diner-out, had the effect of higher refinements, of accents stronger and +better placed, than we had ever in such a connection seen so much as +hinted. But the offered inscrutable mask was the great thing, the +extremely handsome face, the face of symmetry yet of formidable +character, as I at once recognised, and which met my dumb homage with a +straight inscrutability, a merciless <i>military</i> eye, I might have +pronounced it, an automatic<a name="page_255" id="page_255"></a> hardness, in fine, which at once indicated +to me, and in the most interesting way in the world, a kind of economy +of apprehension. Wonderful was it thus to see, and thrilling inwardly to +note, that since the question was of personal values so great no +faintest fraction of the whole could succeed in <i>not</i> counting for +interest. The confrontation was but of a moment; our introduction, my +companion's and mine, once effected, by an arrest in a doorway, nothing +followed, as it were, or happened (what <i>might</i> have happened it +remained in fact impossible to conceive); but intense though the +positive perception there was an immensity more left to understand—for +the long aftersense, I mean; and one, or the chief, of these later +things was that if our hero neither shook hands nor spoke, only meeting +us by the barest act, so to say, of the trained eye, the penetration of +which, to my sense, revealed again a world, there was a grim beauty, to +one's subsequently panting imagination, in that very truth of his then +so knowing himself (committed to his monstrous "readings" and with the +force required for them ominously ebbing) on the outer edge of his once +magnificent margin. So at any rate I was to like for long to consider of +it; I was to like to let the essential radiance which had nevertheless +reached me measure itself by this accompaniment of the pitying vision. +He<a name="page_256" id="page_256"></a> couldn't loosely spend for grace what he had to keep for life—which +was the awful nightly, or all but nightly, exhibition: such the economy, +as I have called it, in which I was afterwards to feel sure he had been +locked up—in spite of the appearance, in the passage from my father's +letter, of the opened gates of the hour or two before. These were but a +reason the more, really, for the so exquisitely complicated image which +was to remain with me to this day and which couldn't on any other terms +have made itself nearly so important. For that was the whole sense of +the matter. It hadn't been in the least important that we should have +shaken hands or exchanged platitudes—it had only been supremely so that +one should have had the essence of the hour, the knowledge enriched by +proof that whatever the multifold or absolute reason, no accession to +sensibility from any other at all "similar" source could have compared, +for penetration, to the intimacy of this particular and prodigious +glimpse. It was as if I had carried off my strange treasure just exactly +from under the merciless military eye—placed there on guard of the +secret. All of which I recount for illustration of the force of action, +unless I call it passion, that may reside in a single pulse of time.</p> + +<p>I allow myself not to hang back in gathering<a name="page_257" id="page_257"></a> several passages from +another series for fear of their crossing in a manner the line of +privacy and giving a distinctness to old intimate things. The +distinctness is in the first place all to the honour of the persons and +the interests thus glimmering through; and I hold, in the second, that +the light touch under which they revive positively adds, by the magic of +memory, a composite fineness. The only thing is that to speak of my +father's correspondent here is to be more or less involved at once in +the vision of her frame and situation, and that to get at all into +relation with "the Nortons," as they were known to us at that period, to +say nothing of all the years to follow, is to find on my hands a much +heavier weight of reference than my scale at this point can carry. The +relation had ripened for us with the settlement of my parents at +Cambridge in the autumn of '66, and might I attempt even a sketch of the +happy fashion in which the University circle consciously accepted, for +its better satisfaction, or in other words just from a sense of what +was, within its range, in the highest degree interesting, the social +predominance of Shady Hill and the master there, and the ladies of the +master's family, I should find myself rich in material. That institution +and its administrators, however, became at once, under whatever recall +of them, a picture of great inclusions<a name="page_258" id="page_258"></a> and implications; so true is it +of any community, and so true above all of one of the American +communities best to be studied fifty years ago in their homogeneous form +and native essence and identity, that a strong character reinforced by a +great culture, a culture great in the given conditions, obeys an +inevitable law in simply standing out. Charles Eliot Norton stood out, +in the air of the place and time—which for that matter, I think, +changed much as he changed, and couldn't change much beyond his own +range of experiment—with a greater salience, granting his background, I +should say, than I have ever known a human figure stand out with from +any: an effect involved of course in the nature of the background as +well as in that of the figure. He profited at any rate, to a degree that +was a lesson in all the civilities, by the fact that he represented an +ampler and easier, above all a more curious, play of the civil relation +than was to be detected anywhere about, and a play by which that +relation had the charming art of becoming extraordinarily multifold and +various without appearing to lose the note of rarity. It is not of +course through any exhibition of mere multiplicity that the instinct for +relations becomes a great example and bears its best fruit; the weight +of the example and the nature of the benefit depending so much as they +do on the achieved and preserved terms<a name="page_259" id="page_259"></a> of intercourse. Here it was that +the curiosity, as I have called it, of Shady Hill was justified—so did +its action prove largely humanising. This was all the witchcraft it had +used—that of manners understood with all the extensions at once and all +the particularisations to which it is the privilege of the highest +conception of manners to lend itself. What it all came back to, +naturally, was the fact that, on so happy a ground, the application of +such an ideal and such a genius <i>could</i> find agents expressive and +proportionate, and the least that could be said of the ladies of the +house was that they had in perfection the imagination of their +opportunity. History still at comparatively close range lays to its +lips, I admit, a warning finger—yet how can I help looking it bravely +in the face as I name in common courtesy Jane Norton? She distilled +civility and sympathy and charm, she exhaled humanity and invitation to +friendship, which latter she went through the world leaving at mortal +doors as in effect the revelation of a new amenity altogether—something +to wait, most other matters being meanwhile suspended, for her to come +back on a turn of the genial tide and take up again, according to the +stirred desire, with each beneficiary. All this to the extent, moreover, +I confess, that it takes the whole of one's measure of her rendered +service and her admirable<a name="page_260" id="page_260"></a> life, cut so much too short—it takes the +full list of her fond acclaimers, the shyest with the clearest, those +who most waited or most followed, not to think almost more of the way +her blest influence went to waste as by its mere uneconomised and +selfless spread than of what would have been called (what was by the +simply-seeing freely enough called) her achieved success. It was given +her at once to shine for the simply-seeing and to abide forever with the +subtly; which latter, so far as they survive, are left again to +recognise how there plays inveterately within the beautiful, if it but +go far enough, the fine strain of the tragic. The household at Shady +Hill was leaving that residence early in the summer of '68 for a long +stay in Europe, and the following is of that moment.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>When I heard the other day that you had been at our house to say +farewell I was glad and also sorry, glad because I couldn't say +before all the world so easily what I wanted to say to you in +parting, and sorry because I longed for another sight of your +beautiful countenance. And then I consoled myself with thinking +that I should write you the next morning and be able to do my +feelings better justice. But when the morning came I saw how you +would, with all your wealth of friends, scarcely value a puny +chirrup from one of my like, and by no means probably expect it, +and so I desisted. And now comes your heavenly letter this moment +to renew my happiness in showing me once more your undimmed +friendly<a name="page_261" id="page_261"></a> face. How delightful that face has ever been to me since +first I beheld it; how your frank and gracious and healing manners +have shed on my soul a celestial dew whenever I have encountered +you: I despair to tell you in fitting words. You are the largest +and more generous nature I know, and one that remains always, at +the same time, so womanly; and while you leave behind you such a +memory you needn't fear that our affectionate wishes will ever fail +you for a moment. I for my part shall rest in my affection for you +till we meet where to love is to live.</p></div> + +<p>Shady Hill was meanwhile occupied by other friends, out of the group of +which, especially as reflected in another of my father's letters to Miss +Norton, there rise for me beckoning ghosts; against whose deep appeal to +me to let them lead me on I have absolutely to steel myself—so far, for +the interest of it, I feel that they might take me.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>We dined the other night at Shady Hill, where the Gurneys were +charming and the company excellent; but there was a perpetual +suggestion of the Elysian Fields about the banquet to me, and we +seemed met together to celebrate a memory rather than applaud a +hope. Godkin and his wife were there, and they heartily lent +themselves to discourse of you all. Ever and anon his friendship +gave itself such an emphatic <i>jerk</i> to your address that you might +have heard it on your window-panes if you had not been asleep. As +for her—what a great clot she is of womanly health, beauty and +benignity! That is a most unwonted word to use in such a +connection, but it came of itself,<a name="page_262" id="page_262"></a> and I won't refuse it, as it +means to express a wealth that seems chaotic—seems so because +apparently not enough exercised or put to specific use. The +Ashburners and Sedgwicks continue your tradition and even ornament +or variegate it with their own original force. I go there of a +Sunday afternoon, whenever possible, to read anew the gospel of +their beautiful life and manners and bring away a text for the good +of my own household. No one disputes the authenticity of that +gospel, and I have no difficulty in spreading its knowledge.</p></div> + +<p>On which follows, as if inevitably, the tragic note re-echoed; news +having come from Dresden, in March '72, of the death of Mrs. Charles +Norton, still young, delightful, inestimable.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>What a blow we have all had in the deeper blow that has prostrated +you! I despair to tell you how keen and how real a grief is felt +here by all who have heard the desolating news. With my own family +the brooding presence of the calamity is almost as obvious as it is +in the Kirkland Street home, and I have to make a perpetual effort +to reason it down. Reflectively, I confess, I am somewhat surprised +that I could have been so <i>much</i> surprised by an event of this +order. I know very well that death is the secret of life +spiritually, and that this outward image of death which has just +obtruded itself upon our gaze is <i>only</i> an image—is wholly unreal +from a spiritual point of view. I know in short that your lovely +sister lives at present more livingly than she has ever lived +before. And yet my life is so low, habitually, that when I am +called upon to put my knowledge into practice I am as superstitious +as anybody else and grovel instead of<a name="page_263" id="page_263"></a> soaring. Keep me in your own +sweet and fragrant memory, for nowhere else could I feel myself +more embalmed to my own self-respect. Indeed if anything could +relieve a personal sorrow to me it would be the sense that it was +shared by a being so infinitely tender and true as yourself.</p></div> + +<p>Of the mass of letters by the same hand that I further turn over too +many are of a domestic strain inconsistent with other application; but a +page here and there emerges clear, with elements of interest and notes +of the characteristic that rather invite than deprecate an emphasis. +From these I briefly glean, not minding that later dates are +involved—no particular hour at that time being far out of touch with +any other, and the value of everything gaining here, as I feel, by my +keeping my examples together. The following, addressed to me in England +early in '69, beautifully illustrates, to my sense, our father's close +participation in any once quite positive case that either one or the +other of his still somewhat undetermined, but none the less interesting +sons—interesting to themselves, to each other and to <i>him</i>—might +appear for the time to insist on constituting. William had in '68 been +appointed to an instructorship in Psychology at Harvard.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>He gets on greatly with his teaching; his students—fifty-seven of +them—are elated with their luck in<a name="page_264" id="page_264"></a> having him, and I feel sure he +will have next year a still larger number attracted by his fame. He +came in the other afternoon while I was sitting alone, and, after +walking the floor in an animated way for a moment, broke out: +"Bless my soul, what a difference between me as I am now and as I +was last spring at this time! Then so hypochondriachal"—he used +that word, though perhaps less in substance than form—"and now +with my mind so cleared up and restored to sanity. It's the +difference between death and life." He had a great effusion. I was +afraid of interfering with it, or possibly checking it, but I +ventured to ask what especially in his opinion had produced the +change. He said several things: the reading of Renouvier +(particularly his vindication of the freedom of the will) and of +Wordsworth, whom he has been feeding on now for a good while; but +more than anything else his having given up the notion that all +mental disorder requires to have a physical basis. This had become +perfectly untrue to him. He saw that the mind does act +irrespectively of material coercion, and could be dealt with +therefore at first hand, and this was health to his bones. It was a +splendid declaration, and though I had known from unerring signs of +the <i>fact</i> of the change I never had been more delighted than by +hearing of it so unreservedly from his own lips. He has been +shaking off his respect for men of mere science as such, and is +even more universal and impartial in his mental judgments than I +have known him before.</p></div> + +<p>Nothing in such a report could affect me more, at a distance, as indeed +nothing shines for me more sacredly now, than the writer's perfect +perception of what it would richly say to me,<a name="page_265" id="page_265"></a> even if a little to my +comparative confusion and bewilderment; engaged as I must rightly have +appeared in working out, not to say in tentatively playing with, much +thinner things. I like to remember, as I do, ineffaceably, that my +attention attached itself, intensely and on the spot, to the very +picture, with whatever else, conveyed, which for that matter hangs +before me still: the vision of my brother, agitated by the growth of his +genius, moving in his burst of confidence, his bright earnestness, about +the room I knew, which must have been our admirable parent's study—with +that admirable parent himself almost holding his breath for the charm +and the accepted peace of it, after earlier discussions and reserves; to +say nothing too, if charm was in question, of the fact of rarity and +beauty I must have felt, or in any case at present feel, in the resource +for such an intellectually living and fermenting son of such a +spiritually perceiving and responding sire. What was the whole passage +but a vision of the fine private luxury of each?—with the fine private +luxury of my own almost blurred image of it superadded. Of that same +spring of '69 is another page addressed to myself in Europe. My memory +must at the very time have connected itself with what had remained to me +of our common or certainly of my own inveterate, childish appeal to him, +in early New York days, for<a name="page_266" id="page_266"></a> repetition, in the winter afternoon +firelight, of his most personal, most remembering and picture-recovering +"story"; that of a visit paid by him about in his nineteenth year, as I +make it out, to his Irish relatives, his father's nephews, nieces and +cousins, with a younger brother or two perhaps, as I set the scene +forth—which it conduced to our liveliest interest to see "Billy +Taylor," the negro servant accompanying him from Albany, altogether rule +from the point of view of effect. The dignity of this apparition indeed, +I must parenthesise, would have yielded in general to the source of a +glamour still more marked—the very air in which the young emissary +would have moved as the son of his father and the representative of an +American connection prodigious surely in its power to dazzle. William +James of Albany was at that time approaching the term of his remarkably +fruitful career, and as I see the fruits of it stated on the morrow of +his death—in the New York Evening Post of December 20th 1832, for +instance, I find myself envying the friendly youth who could bring his +modest Irish kin such a fairytale from over the sea. I attach as I hang +upon the passage a melancholy gaze to the cloud of images of what might +have been for us all that it distractingly throws off. Our grandfather's +energy, exercised in Albany from the great year 1789, appears promptly +to<a name="page_267" id="page_267"></a> have begun with his arrival there. "Everywhere we see his footsteps, +turn where we may, and these are the results of his informing mind and +his vast wealth. His plans of improvement embraced the entire city, and +there is scarcely a street or a square which does not exhibit some mark +of his hand or some proof of his opulence. With the exception of Mr. +Astor," this delightful report goes on to declare, "no other business +man has acquired so great a fortune in this State. To his enormous +estate of three millions of dollars there are nine surviving heirs. His +enterprises have for the last ten years furnished constant employment +for hundreds of our mechanics and labourers." The enterprises appear, +alas, to have definitely ceased, or to have fallen into less able hands, +with his death—and to the mass of property so handsomely computed the +heirs were, more exactly, not nine but a good dozen. Which fact, +however, reduces but by a little the rich ambiguity of the question that +was to flit before my father's children, as they grew up, with an air of +impenetrability that I remember no attempt on his own part to mitigate. +I doubt, for that matter, whether he could in the least have appeased +our all but haunting wonder as to what had become even in the hands of +twelve heirs, he himself naturally being one, of the admirable three +millions. The various happy<a name="page_268" id="page_268"></a> and rapid courses of most of the +participants accounted for much, but did they account for the full +beautiful value, and would even the furthest stretch of the charming +legend of his own early taste for the amusements of the town really tell +us what had been the disposition, by such a measure, of <i>his</i> share? Our +dear parent, we were later quite to feel, could have told us very +little, in all probability, under whatever pressure, what had become of +anything. There had been, by our inference, a general history—not on +the whole exhilarating, and pressure for information could never, I +think, have been applied; wherefore the question arrests me only through +the brightly associated presumption that the Irish visit was made, to +its extreme enlivening, in the character of a gilded youth, a youth +gilded an inch thick and shining to effulgence on the scene not +otherwise brilliant. Which image appeals to my filial fidelity—even +though I hasten not to sacrifice the circle evoked, that for which I a +trifle unassuredly figure a small town in county Cavan as forming an +horizon, and which consisted, we used to delight to hear with every +contributive circumstance, of the local lawyer, the doctor and the (let +us hope—for we <i>did</i> hope) principal "merchant," whose conjoined +hospitality appeared, as it was again agreeable to know, to have more +than graced the occasion:<a name="page_269" id="page_269"></a> the main definite pictorial touches that have +lingered with me being that all the doors always stood open, with the +vistas mostly raking the provision of whiskey on every table, and that +these opportunities were much less tempting (to our narrator) than that +of the quest of gooseberries in the garden with a certain beautiful +Barbara, otherwise anonymous, who was not of the kin but on a visit from +a distance at one of the genial houses. We liked to hear about Barbara, +liked the sound of her still richer rarer surname; which in spite of the +fine Irish harmony it even then struck me as making I have frivolously +forgotten. She had been matchlessly fair and she ate gooseberries with a +charm that was in itself of the nature of a brogue—so that, as I say, +we couldn't have too much of her; yet even her measure dwindled, for our +appetite, beside the almost epic shape of black Billy Taylor carrying +off at every juncture alike the laurel and the bay. He singularly +appealed, it was clear, to the Irish imagination, performing in a manner +never to disappoint it; his young master—in those days, even in the +North, young mastership hadn't too long since lapsed to have lost every +grace of its tradition—had been all cordially acclaimed, but not least, +it appeared, because so histrionically attended: he had been the +ringmaster, as it were, of the American circus,<a name="page_270" id="page_270"></a> the small circus of +two, but the other had been the inimitable clown. My point is that we +repaired retrospectively to the circus as insatiably as our Irish +cousins had of old attended it in person—even for the interest of which +fact, however, my father's words have led me too far. What here follows, +I must nevertheless add, would carry me on again, for development of +reference, should I weakly allow it. The allusion to my brother Wilky's +vividly independent verbal collocations and commentative flights +re-echoes afresh, for instance, as one of the fond by-words that spoke +most of our whole humorous harmony. Just so might the glance at the next +visitor prompt a further raising of the curtain, save that this is a +portrait to which, for lack of acquaintance with the original, I have +nothing to contribute—beyond repeating again that it was ever the sign +of my father's portraits to supply almost more than anything else +material for a vision of himself.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>Your enjoyment of England reminds me of my feelings on my first +visit there forty years ago nearly, when I landed in Devonshire in +the month of May or June and was so intoxicated with the roads and +lanes and hedges and fields and cottages and castles and inns that +I thought I should fairly expire with delight. You can't expatiate +too much for our entertainment on your impressions, though you make +us want consumedly to go over and follow in your footsteps. Wilky +has been at home now for 2 or 3 days and is<a name="page_271" id="page_271"></a> very philosophic and +enthusiastic over your letters. I hoped to remember some of his +turns of speech for you, but one chases another out of my memory +and it is now all a blank. I will consult Alice's livelier one +before I close.</p> + +<p>My friend —— is a tropical phenomenon, a favourite of nature +whatever his fellow man may say of him. His face and person are +handsome rather than otherwise, and it's obvious that he is a very +unsoiled and pure piece of humanity in all <i>personal</i> regards. And +with such a gift of oratory—such a boundless wealth of diction set +off by copious and not ungraceful gesticulation! Here is where he +belongs to the tropics, where nature claims him for her own and +flings him like a cascade in the face of conventional +good-breeding. I can't begin to describe him, he is what I have +never before met. I see that he can't help turning out excessively +tiresome, but he is not at all vulgar. He has a genius for +elocution, that is all; but a real genius and no mistake. In +comparison with Mr. F. L. or Mr. Longfellow or the restrained +Boston style of address generally, he is what the sunflower is to +the snowdrop; but on the whole, if I could kick his shins whenever +I should like to and so reduce him to silence, I prefer him to the +others.</p></div> + +<p>What mainly commends to me certain other passages of other dates (these +still reaching on a little) is doubtless the fact that I myself show in +them as the object of attention and even in a manner as a claimant for +esthetic aid. This latter active sympathy overflows in a letter of the +spring of '70, which would be open to more elucidation than I have, +alas, space for. Let<a name="page_272" id="page_272"></a> the sentence with which it begins merely remind me +that Forrest, the American actor, of high renown in his time, and of +several of whose appearances toward the close of his career I keep a +memory uneffaced—the impression as of a deep-toned thunderous organ, a +prodigious instrument pounded by a rank barbarian—had been literally, +from what we gathered, an early comrade of our parent: literally, I say, +because the association could seem to me, at my hours of ease, so +bravely incongruous. By my hours of ease I mean those doubtless too +devoted to that habit of wanton dispersed embroidery for which any scrap +of the human canvas would serve. From one particular peg, I at the same +time allow, the strongest sense of the incongruity depended—my +remembrance, long entertained, of my father's relating how, on an +occasion, which must have been betimes in the morning, of his calling on +the great tragedian, a man of enormous build and strength, the latter, +fresh and dripping from the bath, had entered the room absolutely upside +down, or by the rare gymnastic feat of throwing his heels into the air +and walking, as with strides, on his hands; an extraordinary performance +if kept up for more than a second or two, and the result at any rate of +mere exuberance of muscle and pride and robustious joie de vivre. It had +affected me, the picture, as one of those<a name="page_273" id="page_273"></a> notes of high colour that the +experience of a young Albany viveur, the like of which I felt I was +never to come in for, alone could strike off; but what was of the finer +profit in it was less the direct illustration of the mighty mountebank +than of its being delightful on the part of a domestic character we so +respected to have had, with everything else a Bohemian past too—since I +couldn't have borne at such moments to hear it argued as not Bohemian. +What did his having dropped in after such a fashion and at a late +breakfast-hour on the glory of the footlights and the idol of the town, +what did it fall in with but the kind of thing one had caught glimpses +and echoes of from the diaries and memoirs, so far as these had been +subject to the passing peep, of the giftedly idle and the fashionably +great, the Byrons, the Bulwers, the Pelhams, the Coningsbys, or even, +for a nearer vividness perhaps, the N. P. Willises?—of all of whom it +was somehow more characteristic than anything else, to the imagination, +that they always began their day in some such fashion. Even if I cite +this as a fair example of one's instinct for making much of a +little—once this little, a chance handful of sand, could show the +twinkle of the objective, or even the reflective, grain of gold—I still +claim value for that instanced felicity, as I felt it, of being able to +yearn, thanks to whatever chance<a name="page_274" id="page_274"></a> support, over Bohemia, and yet to have +proof in the paternal presence close at hand of how well even the real +frequentation of it, when achieved in romantic youth, might enable a +person at last to turn out. The lesson may now indeed seem to have been +one of those that rather more strictly adorn a tale than point a moral; +but with me, at that period, I think, the moral ever came first and the +tale more brilliantly followed. As for the recital, in such detail, of +the theme of a possible literary effort which the rest of my letter +represents, how could I feel this, when it had reached me, as anything +but a sign of the admirable anxiety with which thought could be taken, +even though "amateurishly," in my professional interest?—since +professional I by that time appeared able to pass for being. And how +above all can it not serve as an exhibition again of the manner in which +all my benevolent backer's inveterate original <i>malaise</i> in face of +betrayed symptoms of the impulse to "narrow down" on the part of his +young found its solution always, or its almost droll simplification, as +soon as the case might reach for him a <i>personal</i> enough, or "social" +enough, as he would have said, relation to its fruits? Then the malaise +might promptly be felt as changed, by a wave of that wand, to the +extremity of active and expatiative confidence.<a name="page_275" id="page_275"></a></p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>Horatio Alger is writing a Life of Edwin Forrest, and I am afraid +will give him a Bowery appreciation. He reports his hero as a very +"fine" talker—in which light I myself don't so much recall him, +though he had a native breadth—as when telling Alger for example +of old Gilbert Stuart's having when in a state of dilapidation +asked him to let him paint his portrait. "I consented," said +Forrest, "and went to his studio. He was an old white lion, so +blind that he had to ask me the colour of my eyes and my hair; but +he threw his brush at the canvas, and every stroke was life." Alger +talks freely about his own late insanity—which he in fact appears +to enjoy as a subject of conversation and in which I believe he has +somewhat interested William, who has talked with him a good deal of +his experience at the Somerville Asylum. Charles Grinnell—though +not à propos of the crazy—has become a great reader and apparently +a considerable understander of my productions; Alger aforesaid +aussi. Everyone hopes that J. G. hasn't caught a Rosamund Vincy in +Miss M. I don't know whether this hope means affection to J. or +disaffection to the young lady.</p> + +<p>I have written to Gail Hamilton to send me your story; but she does +it not as yet. I will renew my invitation to her in a day or two if +necessary. I went to see Osgood lately about his publishing a +selection from your tales. He repeated what he had told you—that +he would give you 15 per cent and do all the advertising, etc., you +paying for the plates; or he would pay everything and give you 10 +per cent on every copy sold after the first thousand. I shall be +glad (in case you would like to publish, and I think it time for +you to do so) to meet the expense of your stereotyping, and if you +will pick out what you would like to be included we shall set to +work at once and have the book ready by next autumn. I have +meanwhile<a name="page_276" id="page_276"></a> the materials of a story for you which I was telling +William of the other day as a regular Tourgéneff subject, and he +urged me to send it off to you at once—he was so struck with it.</p> + +<p>Matthew Henry W. was a very cultivated and accomplished young man +in Albany at the time I was growing up. He belonged to a highly +respectable family of booksellers and publishers and was himself +bred to the law; but had such a love of literature, and more +especially of the natural sciences, that he never devoted himself +strictly to his profession. He was the intimate friend of my dear +old tutor, Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian, and of other +distinguished men of science; he corresponded with foreign +scientific bodies, and his contributions to science generally were +of so original a cast as to suggest great hopes of his future +eminence. He was a thorough gentleman, of perfect address and +perfect courage—utterly unegotistic, and one's wonder was how he +had ever grown up in Albany or resigned himself to living there. +One day he invested his money, of which he had a certain quantity, +in a scheme much favoured by the president of the bank in which he +deposited, and this adventure proved a fortune. There lived near us +as well a family of the name of K——, your cousin Mary Minturn +Post's stepmother being of its members; and this family reckoned +upon a great social sensation in bringing out their youngest +daughter, Lydia Sibyl, who had never been seen by mortal eye +outside her own immediate circle, save that of a physician who +reported that she was fabulously beautiful. She <i>was</i> the most +beautiful girl I think I ever saw, at a little distance. Well, she +made her sensation and brought Matthew Henry promptly to her feet. +Her family wanted wealth above all things for her; but here was +wealth and something more, very much more, and they smiled<a name="page_277" id="page_277"></a> upon +his suit. Everything went merrily for a while—M. H. was deeply +intoxicated with his prize. Never was man so enamoured, and never +was beauty better fitted to receive adoration. She was of an +exquisite Grecian outline as to face, with a countenance like the +tender dawn and form and manners ravishingly graceful. But W. was +not content with his adventure—he embarked again and lost almost +all he owned. The girl's father—or her mother rather, being the +ruler of the family and as hard as the nether world at heart—gave +the cue to her daughter and my friend was dismissed. He couldn't +believe his senses, he raved and cursed his fate, but it was +inexorable. What was to be done? With a bitterness of heart +inconceivable he plucked his revenge by marrying at once a stout +and blooming jade who was to Lydia Sibyl as a peony to a violet, +absolutely nothing but flesh and blood. Her he bore upon his arm at +fashionable hours through the streets; her he took to church, +preserving his admirable ease and courtesy to everyone, as if +absolutely nothing had occurred; and her he pretended to take to +his bosom in private, with what a shudder one can imagine. +Everybody stood aghast. He went daily about his affairs, as serene +and unconscious apparently as the moon in the heavens. Soon his +poverty showed itself in certain economies of his attire, which had +always been most recherché. Soon again he broke his leg and went +about on crutches, but neither poverty nor accident had the least +power to ruffle his air of equanimity. He was always superior to +his circumstances, met you exactly as he had always done, impressed +you always as the best-bred man you knew, and left you wondering +what a heart and what a brain lay behind such a fortune. One +morning we all read in the newspaper at breakfast that Mr. M. H. W. +had appealed the day before to the protection of the<a name="page_278" id="page_278"></a> police +against his wife, who had taken to beating him and whom as a woman +he couldn't deal with by striking back; and the police responded +properly to his appeal. He went about his affairs as usual that day +and every day, never saying a word to any one of his trouble nor +even indirectly asking sympathy, but making you feel that here if +anywhere was a rare kind of manhood, a self-respect so eminent as +to look down with scorn on the refuges open to ordinary human +weakness. This lasted five or six years. He never drank or took to +other vices, and lived a life of such decorum, so far as his own +action was concerned, a life of such interest and science and +literature, as to be the most delightful and unconscious of +companions even when his coat was at the last shabbiness and you +didn't dare to look at him for fear of betraying your own vulgar +misintelligence. Finally Lydia Sibyl died smitten with smallpox and +all her beauty gone to hideousness. He lingered awhile, his +charming manners undismayed still, his eye as undaunted as at the +beginning, and then he suddenly died. I never knew his equal for a +manly force competent to itself in every emergency and seeking none +of the ordinary subterfuges that men so often seek to hide their +imbecility. I think it a good basis....</p></div> + +<p>Returning from Europe in June '70, after a stay there of some fifteen +months, I had crossed the sea eastward again two years later, with my +sister and our admirable aunt as companions—leaving them, I may +mention, to return home at the end of six months while I betook myself +to Italy, where I chiefly remained till the autumn of '74. The following +expresses our father's<a name="page_279" id="page_279"></a> liberality of recognition and constant +tenderness of tone in a manner that no comment need emphasise, but at +one or two of his references I allow myself to glance. I happen to +remember perfectly for instance the appearance of the novel of Madame +Sand's that he so invidiously alludes to in one of the first numbers of +the cherished Revue that reached us after the siege of Paris had been +raised—such a pathetically scant starved pale number, I quite recall, +as expressed the share even of the proud periodical in the late general +and so tragic dearth; with which it comes back to me that I had myself a +bit critically mused on the characteristic queerness, the oddity of the +light thrown on the stricken French consciousness by the prompt +sprouting of <i>such</i> a flower of the native imagination in the chill air +of discipline accepted and after the administration to that +consciousness of a supposedly clarifying dose. But I hadn't gone the +length of my father, who must have taken up the tale in its republished +form, a so slim salmon-coloured volume this time: oh the repeated +arrival, during those years, of the salmon-coloured volumes in their +habit as they lived, a habit reserved, to my extreme appreciation, for +this particular series, and that, enclosing the extraordinarily fresh +fruit of their author's benign maturity, left Tamaris and Valvèdre and +Mademoiselle La<a name="page_280" id="page_280"></a> Quintinie in no degree ever "discounted" for us as +devotees of the Revue, I make out, by their being but renewals of +acquaintance. The sense of the salmon-coloured distinctive of Madame +Sand was even to come back to me long years after on my hearing Edmond +de Goncourt speak reminiscentially and, I permit myself to note, not at +all reverently, of the <i>robe de satin fleur-de-pêcher</i> that the +illustrious and infatuated lady, whose more peculiar or native tint, as +Blanche Amory used to say, didn't contribute to a harmony, <i>s'était fait +faire</i> in order to fix as much as possible the attention of Gustave +Flaubert at the Dîner Magny; of Gustave Flaubert, who, according to this +most invidious of reporters, disembroiled from each other with too scant +ease his tangle of possibly incurred ridicule from the declared +sentiment of so old a woman, even in a peach-blossom dress, and the +glory reflected on him by his admirer's immense distinction. Which +vision of a complicated past, recovered even as I write—and of a past +indeed contemporary with the early complacencies I attribute to +ourselves—doesn't at all blur its also coming back to me that I was to +have found my parent "hard on" poor Francia in spite of my own +comparative reserves; these being questions and shades that I rejoice to +think of our having had so discussionally, and well at home for the most +part, the social education<a name="page_281" id="page_281"></a> of. I see that general period as quite +flushed and toned by the salmon-coloured covers; so that a kind of +domestic loyalty would ever operate, as we must have all felt, to make +us take the thick with the thin and not <i>y regarder</i> for a Francia the +more or the less. When I say all indeed I doubtless have in mind +especially my parents and myself, with my sister and our admirable aunt +(in her times of presence) thrown in—to the extent of our subjection to +the charm of such matters in particular as La Famille de Germandre, La +Ville Noire, Nanon and L'Homme de Neige, round which last above all we +sat ranged in united ecstasy; so that I was to wonder through the after +years, and I think perhaps to this day, how it could come that a case of +the "story" strain at its finest and purest, a gush of imaginative force +so free and yet so artfully directed, shouldn't have somehow "stood out" +more in literary history. Perhaps indeed L'Homme de Neige does +essentially stand out in the unwritten parts of that record—which are +content to be mere tacit tender tradition; for all the world as if, +since there are more or less dreadful perpetuated books, by the hundred, +dreadful from whatever baseness or whatever scantness, that for shame, +as it were, we never mention, so one may figure others as closeted in +dimness (than which there is nothing safer) by<a name="page_282" id="page_282"></a> the very scruple of +respect at its richest. I hover for instance about the closet of L'Homme +de Neige, I stand outside a moment as if listening for a breath from +within; but I don't open the door, you see—which must mean, in all +probability, that I wouldn't for the world inconsiderately finger again +one of the three volumes; <i>that</i> meaning, in its turn, doubtless, that I +have heard the breath I had listened for and that it can only have been +what my argument wants, the breath of life unquenched. Isn't it relevant +to this that when she was not reading Trollope our dear mother was +reading "over" La Famille de Germandre, which, with several of its +companions of the same bland period, confirmed her in the sense that +there was no one like their author for a "love-story"?—a conviction, +however, that when made articulate exposed her to the imputation of a +larger tolerance than she doubtless intended to project; till the matter +was cleared up by our generally embracing her for so sweetly not knowing +about Valentine and Jacques and suchlike, and having only begun at La +Mare au Diable and even thereafter been occasionally obliged to skip.</p> + +<p>So far do I let myself go while, to recur to my letter, Chauncey Wright +sits for me in his customary corner of the deep library sofa and his +strange conflictingly conscious light blue eyes, appealing<a name="page_283" id="page_283"></a> across the +years from under the splendid arch of his fair head, one of the +handsomest for representation of amplitude of thought that it was +possible to see, seems to say to me with a softness more aimed at the +heart than any alarm or any challenge: "But what then are you going to +do for me?" I find myself simply ache, I fear, as almost the only answer +to this—beyond his figuring for me as the most wasted and doomed, the +biggest at once and the gentlest, of the great intending and unproducing +(in anything like the just degree) bachelors of philosophy, bachelors of +attitude and of life. And as he so sits, loved and befriended and +welcomed, valued and invoked and vainly guarded and infinitely pitied, +till the end couldn't but come, he renews that appeal to the old +kindness left over, as I may say, and which must be more or less known +to all of us, for the good society that was helplessly to miss a right +chronicler, and the names of which, so full at the time of their fine +sense, were yet to be writ in water. Chauncey Wright, of the great +imperfectly-attested mind; Jane Norton, of the train, so markedly, of +the distinguished, the sacrificial, devoted; exquisite Mrs. Gurney, of +the infallible taste, the beautiful hands and the tragic fate; Gurney +himself, for so long Dean of the Faculty at Harvard and trusted judge of +all judgments (this latter pair the subject of my<a name="page_284" id="page_284"></a> father's glance at +the tenantship of Shady Hill in the Nortons' absence:) they would +delightfully adorn a page and appease a piety that is still athirst if I +hadn't to let them pass. Harshly condemned to let them pass, and looking +wistfully after them as they go, how can I yet not have inconsequently +asked them to turn a moment more before disappearing?</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>My heart turns to you this morning, so radiant in the paternal +panoply you wear toward Alice and your aunt, and I would give a +great deal to see you. The enclosed scrap of a letter from William +is sent to show you how vastly improved are his eyes, especially +when you shall have learned that he has written us within the last +four or five days twenty pages of like density to these. He would +fain persuade us to go to Mount Desert; perhaps later we may go to +Quebec, but we are so comfortable together reading Trollope and +talking philosophy that we cheerfully drop the future from our +regard. Mamma is free and active and bracing. She is a domestic +nor'wester, carrying balm and bloom into every nook and corner of +her empire.... She hangs over The Eustace Diamonds while I try +vainly to read George Sand's Francia. I have come across nothing of +that lady's that reflects a baser light on her personal history. +What must a woman have been through to want to grovel at this time +of day in such uncleanness? Don't buy it—I wish I hadn't! The new +North American is out, with a not too interesting article of +Chauncey Wright's on Mivart, a scandalous (in point of taste) essay +of Mr. Stirling on Buckle, full of Scotch conceit, insolence and +"wut;" a very very laboured article by James Lowell on Dante, in +which he determines<a name="page_285" id="page_285"></a> to exhaust all knowledge; and these are all I +have read. Mr. Stirling of course makes Buckle ridiculous, but he +stamps himself a shabby creature.</p></div> + +<p>I find the following, addressed to his daughter in August '72, so +beautifully characteristic of our parents' always explicit admonition to +us, in our dependent years, against too abject an impulse to be frugal +in their interests, that I may fairly let it stand as a monument to this +particular aspect of their affection.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>Your and H.'s last letters bring tears of joy to our eyes. It's a +delight above all delights to feel one's children turn out all that +the heart covets in children. Your conviction is not up to the +truth. Our "tender thoughts" of you are so constant that I have +hardly been able to settle to anything since you have been gone. I +can do little else than recount to myself "the tender mercies of +the Lord" to me and my household. Still I am not wholly useless; I +try to write every day, and though I haven't my daughter at hand to +look after my style and occasionally after my ideas, I manage to do +a little. Your conscientious economy is excessively touching, but +it's a little overstrained. You needn't be afraid of putting us to +any embarrassment so long as your expenses don't exceed their +present rate; and you can buy all you want in Paris without +stretching your tether a particle. This is Mamma's message as well +as mine. Charles Atkinson wishes me to say that Monte Genneroso +above Lugano Lake—the P.O. Mendrisio—offers a wondrous climate; +and Mamma thinks—so fearful is she that you will descend into +Italy before the warm weather is over<a name="page_286" id="page_286"></a> and so compromise your +strength—that you had either better go there awhile first or else +be ready to retreat on it in case you find the summer heat in +Venice impossible.</p></div> + +<p>Nor does this scrap from a letter to myself at the same season breathe a +spirit less liberal—so far as the sympathy with whatever might pass for +my fondest preoccupations was concerned. These were now quite frankly +recognised as the arduous attempt to learn somehow or other to write.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>I send you The Nation, though there seems nothing in it of your +own, and I think I never fail to recognise you. A notice of Gustave +Droz's Babolain (by T. S. P., I suppose) there is; which book I +read the other day. This fumbling in the cadaver of the old world, +however, only disgusts me when so unrelieved as in this case by any +contrast or any souffle of inspiration such as you get in +Tourguéneff. It's curious to observe how uncertain the author's +step is in this story—how he seems always on the look-out for some +chance to break away. But it has mastered him, he can't lay the +ghost he has conjured.</p></div> + +<p>To which I should limit myself for the commemoration of that group of +years by the gentle aid of the always vivid excerpt, were it not that I +have before me a considerable cluster of letters addressed by the writer +of the foregoing to Mr. J. Eliot Cabot, most accomplished of Bostonians, +most "cultivated" even among the cultivated,<a name="page_287" id="page_287"></a> as we used to say, and of +a philosophic acuteness to which my father highly testified, with which +indeed he earnestly contended. The correspondence in question covered, +during the years I include, philosophic ground and none other; but +though no further exhibition of it than this reference may convey is to +my purpose I lay it under contribution to the extent of a passage or two +just for the pleasure of inviting recognition, as I invite it wherever +we meet an instance, of the fashion after which the intensely animated +soul can scarce fail of a harmony and a consistency of expression that +are nothing less than interesting, that in fact become at once +beautiful, in themselves. By which remark I nevertheless do not mean to +limit the significance of the writer's side of his long argument with +Mr. Eliot Cabot, into which I may not pretend to enter, nor the part +that in any such case a rare gift for style must inveterately play.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>I grant then that I am often tempted to conceive, as I read your +letters, that we differ only in your terms being more abstract, +mine more concrete; and yet I really don't think this difference is +exhaustive. If I thought Philosophy capable ever of being reduced +to logical compass or realising itself as science, I should give in +at once. But this is just what I cannot think. Philosophy is the +doctrine exclusively of the infinite in the finite, and deals with +the latter therefore only as a mask, only as <i>harbouring</i> the +former. But if you<a name="page_288" id="page_288"></a> formulate it scientifically your terms are +necessarily all finite, as furnished by experience, and the +infinite is excluded or at most creeps in as the +indefinite—Hegel's <i>becoming</i> for example. Thus Hegel's dialectic +modulates only in the sphere of his distance. His <i>being</i> is +universal existence, and, as universals have only a logical truth, +being in se is equivalent to Nothing. But Nothing hasn't even a +logical basis. Lithe as human thought is it can't compass the +conception. It is a mere brutum fulmen devised to disguise the +absence of thought or its inanition; and Hegel, if he had been +wise, would have said no-thought instead of no-thing. For no-thing +doesn't express the complete absence of existence. Existence is of +two sorts, real and personal, sensible and conscious, quantitative +and qualitative. The most you are entitled to say therefore when +existence disappears in quantitative, real or sensible, form is +that it has been taken up into purely qualitative, personal or +conscious form; no-thing being the logical equivalent of +all-person. Thus I, who in Hegel's formula presumably extract +existence from being, survive the operation as person, and though I +am most clearly no-thing I am yet not <i>being</i>. Indeed I am not even +existence any longer, since by knocking thing out of being I have +forfeited my own reality, and consent henceforth to be pure +personality, <i>i.e.</i> phenomenality. And personal or phenomenal +existence is constituted by referring itself to a foreign source, +or, what is the same thing, confessing itself created: so that the +fundamental word of Philosophy, by Hegel's own formula, is +creation; which, however, as I understand him, he denies in any +objective sense of the word. This then is what I complain of in +him—with deference of course to your better knowledge, which, +however, you do not urge as yet in what seems to me a silencing +way—that he makes existence <i>essential</i> to<a name="page_289" id="page_289"></a> being, so that take +existence away and being becomes nothing. It would not be a whit +less preposterous in me to say that thought is essential to thing, +subject to object, marble to statue, canvas to picture, woman to +wife, mother to child. It is literally putting the cart before the +horse and converting Philosophy to a practical quagmire. Being +implies existence of course just as picture implies canvas, or as +personality implies reality, or as chick implies egg; but it +implies it only to a lower intelligence than itself, an unspiritual +intelligence to wit, which has no direct or inward intuition of +being, and requires to be agitated to discerning it. When I +recognise the spiritual life of Art I never think of marble or +canvas as entering even conditionally into its manifestations.</p></div> + +<p>But I hold my case for a rare command of manner thus proved, and need go +no further; the more that I have dropped too many of those threads of my +rather niggled tapestry that belong but to the experience of my own +weaving hand and the interplay of which represents thereby a certain +gained authority. I disentangle these again, if the term be not +portentous, though reflecting too, and again with complacency, that +though I thus prize them as involved most in my own consciousness, this +is just because of their attachment somewhere else to other matters and +other lives.<a name="page_290" id="page_290"></a></p> + +<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>IX</h2> + +<p>I went up from Newport to Cambridge early in the autumn of '62, and on +one of the oddest errands, I think, that, given the several +circumstances, I could possibly have undertaken. I was nineteen years +old, and it had seemed to me for some time past that some such step as +my entering for instance the Harvard Law School more or less urgently +concerned what I could but try to help myself out by still putting +forward as my indispensable education—I am not sure indeed that the +claim didn't explicitly figure, or at least successfully dangle, as that +of my possibly graceful mere "culture." I had somehow—by which I mean +for reasons quite sufficient—to fall back on the merciful "mere" for +any statement of my pretensions even to myself: so little they seemed to +fit into any scheme of the conventional maximum as compared with those I +saw so variously and strongly asserted about me, especially since the +outbreak of the War. I am not sure whether I yet made bold to say it, +but I should surely be good for nothing, all my days, if not for +projecting into the concrete, by hook<a name="page_291" id="page_291"></a> or by crook—that is my +imagination shamelessly aiding—some show of (again) mere life. This +impression was not in the least the flag I publicly brandished; in fact +I must have come as near as possible to brandishing none whatever, a +sound instinct always hinting to me, I gather, that the tune for such a +performance was much more after than before—before the perfect place +had been found for the real planting of the standard and the giving of +its folds to the air. No such happy spot had been marked, decidedly, at +that period, to my inquiring eye; in consequence of which the emblazoned +morsel (hoisted sooner or later by all of us, I think, somehow and +somewhere), might have passed for the hour as a light extravagant +bandanna rolled into the tight ball that fits it for hiding in the +pocket. There it considerably stayed, so far as I was concerned; and all +the more easily as I can but have felt how little any particular thing I +might meanwhile "do" would matter—save for some specious appearance in +it. This last, I recognise, had for me a virtue—principally that of +somehow gaining time; though I hasten to add that my approach to the Law +School can scarcely, as a means to this end, in the air of it that comes +back to me, have been in the least deceptive. By which I mean that my +appearance of intentions, qualifications, possibilities, or whatever +else, in the connection,<a name="page_292" id="page_292"></a> hadn't surely so much as the grace of the +specious. I spoke above of the assumed "indispensability" of some show +of my being further subject to the "education" theory, but this was for +the moment only under failure to ask to whom, or for what, such a +tribute <i>was</i> indispensable. The interest to myself would seem to have +been, as I recover the sense of the time, that of all the +impossibilities of action my proceeding to Cambridge on the very vaguest +grounds that probably ever determined a residence there might pass for +the least flagrant; as I breathe over again at any rate the comparative +confidence in which I so moved I feel it as a confidence in the positive +saving virtue of vagueness. Could I but work that force as an ideal I +felt it must see me through, for the beauty of it in that form was that +it should absolutely superabound. I wouldn't have allowed, either, that +it was vaguer to do nothing; for in the first place just staying at home +when everyone was on the move couldn't in any degree show the right +mark: to be properly and perfectly vague one had to be vague <i>about</i> +something; mere inaction quite lacked the note—it was nothing but +definite and dull. I thought of the Law School experiment, I remember, +in all sorts of conceivable connections, but in the connection of +dulness surely never for an hour. I thought<a name="page_293" id="page_293"></a> of it under the head of +"life"—by which term at the same time, I blush to confess, I didn't in +the least mean free evening access to Boston in a jangling horse-car, +with whatever extension this might give to the joy of the liberated +senses. I simply meant—well, what was monstrously to happen; which I +shall be better inspired here to deal with as a demonstration made in +its course than as a premonition relatively crude and at the time still +to be verified. Marked in the whole matter, however these things might +be, was that irony of fate under the ugly grin of which I found my +father reply in the most offhand and liberal manner to my remark that +the step in question—my joining, in a sense, my brother at +Cambridge—wouldn't be wholly impracticable. It might have been, from +his large assent to it, a masterstroke of high policy. A certain +inconsequence in this left me wondering why then if the matter was now +so natural it hadn't been to his mind a year before equally simple that +I should go to college, and to <i>that</i> College, after a more showy, even +though I see it would have been at the same time a less presumptuous, +fashion. To have deprecated the "college course" with such emphasis only +so soon afterwards to forswear all emphasis and practically smile, in +mild oblivion, on <i>any</i> Harvard connection I might find it in me to take +up, was to bring it home, I well recall,<a name="page_294" id="page_294"></a> that the case might originally +have been much better managed.</p> + +<p>All of which would seem to kick up more dust than need quite have hung +about so simple a matter as my setting forth to the Cambridge scene with +no design that I could honourably exhibit. A superficial account of the +matter would have been that my father had a year or two earlier appeared +to think so ill of it as to reduce me, given the "delicacy," the inward, +not then the outward, which I have glanced at, to mild +renunciation—mild I say because I remember in fact, rather to my +mystification now, no great pang of disappointment, no soreness of +submission. I didn't want anything so much as I wanted a certain good +(or wanted thus supremely <i>to</i> want it, if I may say so), with which a +conventional going to college wouldn't have so tremendously much to do +as for the giving it up to break my heart—or an unconventional +not-going so tremendously much either. What I "wanted to want" to be +was, all intimately, just <i>literary</i>; a decent respect for the standard +hadn't yet made my approach so straight that there weren't still +difficulties that might seem to meet it, questions it would have to +depend on. Passing the Harvard portal positively failed in fact to +strike me as the shorter cut to literature; the sounds that rose from +the scene as I caught<a name="page_295" id="page_295"></a> them appeared on the contrary the most detached +from any such interest that had ever reached my ear. Merely to open the +door of the big square closet, the ample American closet, to the like of +which Europe had never treated us, on the shelves and round the walls of +which the pink Revues sat with the air, row upon row, of a choir of +breathing angels, was to take up that particular, that sacred, +connection in a way that put the coarser process to shame. The drop of +the Harvard question had of a truth really meant, as I recover it, a +renewed consecration of the rites of that chapel where the taper always +twinkled—which circumstance I mention as not only qualifying my sense +of loss, but as symbolising, after a queer fashion, the independence, +blest vision (to the extent, that is, of its being a closer compact with +the life of the imagination), that I should thus both luckily come in +for and designingly cultivate: cultivate in other words under the rich +cover of obscurity. I have already noted how the independence was, ever +so few months later, by so quaint a turn, another mere shake of the +tree, to drop into my lap in the form of a great golden apple—a value +not a simple windfall only through the fact that my father's hand had +after all just lightly loosened it. This accession pointed the moral +that there was no difficulty about anything, no intrinsic difficulty;<a name="page_296" id="page_296"></a> +so that, to re-emphasise the sweet bewilderment, I was to "go" where I +liked in the Harvard direction and do what I liked in the Harvard +relation. Such was the situation as offered me; though as I had to take +it and use it I found in it no little difference. Two things and more +had come up—the biggest of which, and very wondrous as bearing on any +circumstance of mine, as having a grain of weight to spare for it, was +the breaking out of the War. The other, the infinitely small affair in +comparison, was a passage of personal history the most entirely +personal, but between which, as a private catastrophe or difficulty, +bristling with embarrassments, and the great public convulsion that +announced itself in bigger terms each day, I felt from the very first an +association of the closest, yet withal, I fear, almost of the least +clearly expressible. Scarce at all to be stated, to begin with, the +queer fusion or confusion established in my consciousness during the +soft spring of '61 by the firing on Fort Sumter, Mr. Lincoln's instant +first call for volunteers and a physical mishap, already referred to as +having overtaken me at the same dark hour, and the effects of which were +to draw themselves out incalculably and intolerably. Beyond all present +notation the interlaced, undivided way in which what had happened to me, +by a turn of fortune's hand, in<a name="page_297" id="page_297"></a> twenty odious minutes, kept company of +the most unnatural—I can call it nothing less—with my view of what was +happening, with the question of what might still happen, to everyone +about me, to the country at large: it so made of these marked +disparities a single vast visitation. One had the sense, I mean, of a +huge comprehensive ache, and there were hours at which one could scarce +have told whether it came most from one's own poor organism, still so +young and so meant for better things, but which had suffered particular +wrong, or from the enclosing social body, a body rent with a thousand +wounds and that thus treated one to the honour of a sort of tragic +fellowship. The twenty minutes had sufficed, at all events, to establish +a relation—a relation to everything occurring round me not only for the +next four years but for long afterward—that was at once extraordinarily +intimate and quite awkwardly irrelevant. I must have felt in some +befooled way in presence of a crisis—the smoke of Charleston Bay still +so acrid in the air—at which the likely young should be up and doing +or, as familiarly put, lend a hand much wanted; the willing youths, all +round, were mostly starting to their feet, and to have trumped up a +lameness at such a juncture could be made to pass in no light for +graceful. Jammed into the acute angle between two high fences, where the +rhythmic play<a name="page_298" id="page_298"></a> of my arms, in tune with that of several other pairs, but +at a dire disadvantage of position, induced a rural, a rusty, a +quasi-extemporised old engine to work and a saving stream to flow, I had +done myself, in face of a shabby conflagration, a horrid even if an +obscure hurt; and what was interesting from the first was my not +doubting in the least its duration—though what seemed equally clear was +that I needn't as a matter of course adopt and appropriate it, so to +speak, or place it for increase of interest on exhibition. The interest +of it, I very presently knew, would certainly be of the greatest, would +even in conditions kept as simple as I might make them become little +less than absorbing. The shortest account of what was to follow for a +long time after is therefore to plead that the interest never did fail. +It was naturally what is called a painful one, but it consistently +declined, as an influence at play, to drop for a single instant. +Circumstances, by a wonderful chance, overwhelmingly favoured it—as an +interest, an inexhaustible, I mean; since I also felt in the whole +enveloping tonic atmosphere a force promoting its growth. Interest, the +interest of life and of death, of our national existence, of the fate of +those, the vastly numerous, whom it closely concerned, the interest of +the extending War, in fine, the hurrying troops, the transfigured scene, +formed a cover for every<a name="page_299" id="page_299"></a> sort of intensity, made tension itself in fact +contagious—so that almost any tension would do, would serve for one's +share.</p> + +<p>I have here, I allow, not a little to foreshorten—have to skip sundry +particulars, certain of the steps by which I came to think of my +relation to my injury as a <i>modus vivendi</i> workable for the time. These +steps had after the first flush of reaction inevitably <i>had</i> to be +communications of my state, recognitions and admissions; which had the +effect, I hasten to add, of producing sympathies, supports and +reassurances. I gladly took these things, I perfectly remember, at that +value; distinct to me as it still is nevertheless that the indulgence +they conveyed lost part of its balm by involving a degree of +publication. Direfully distinct have remained to me the conditions of a +pilgrimage to Boston made that summer under my father's care for +consultation of a great surgeon, the head of his profession there; whose +opinion and advice—the more that he was a guaranteed friend of my +father's—had seemed the best light to invoke on the less and less +bearable affliction with which I had been for three or four months +seeking to strike some sort of bargain: mainly, up to that time, under +protection of a theory of temporary supine "rest" against which +everything inward and outward tended equally to conspire. Agitated<a name="page_300" id="page_300"></a> +scraps of rest, snatched, to my consciousness, by the liveliest +violence, were to show for futile almost to the degree in which the +effort of our interview with the high expert was afterwards so to show; +the truth being that this interview settled my sad business, settled it +just in that saddest sense, for ever so long to come. This was so much +the case that, as the mere scene of our main appeal, the house from +which we had after its making dejectedly emerged put forth to me as I +passed it in many a subsequent season an ironic smug symbolism of its +action on my fate. That action had come from the complete failure of our +approached oracle either to warn, to comfort or to command—to do +anything but make quite unassistingly light of the bewilderment exposed +to him. In default of other attention or suggestion he might by a mere +warning as to gravities only too possible, and already well advanced, +have made such a difference; but I have little forgotten how I felt +myself, the warning absent, treated but to a comparative pooh-pooh—an +impression I long looked back to as a sharp parting of the ways, with an +adoption of the wrong one distinctly determined. It was not simply small +comfort, it was only a mystification the more, that the inconvenience of +my state had to reckon with the strange fact of there being nothing to +speak<a name="page_301" id="page_301"></a> of the matter with me. The graceful course, on the whole ground +again (and where moreover was delicacy, the proposed, the intended, +without grace?) was to behave accordingly, in good set terms, as if the +assurance were true; since the time left no margin at all for one's +gainsaying with the right confidence so high an authority. There were a +hundred ways to behave—in the general sense so freely suggested, I +mean; and I think of the second half of that summer of '62 as my attempt +at selection of the best. The best still remained, under closer +comparisons, very much what it had at first seemed, and there was in +fact this charm in it that to prepare for an ordeal essentially +intellectual, as I surmised, might justly involve, in the public eye, a +season of some retirement. The beauty was—I can fairly see it now, +through the haze of time, even as beauty!—that studious retirement and +preparatory hours did after all supply the supine attitude, did invest +the ruefulness, did deck out the cynicism of lying down book in hand +with a certain fine plausibility. This was at least a negative of +combat, an organised, not a loose and empty one, something definitely +and firmly parallel to action in the tented field; and I well recall, +for that matter, how, when early in the autumn I had in fact become the +queerest of forensic recruits, the bristling horde of my Law<a name="page_302" id="page_302"></a> School +comrades fairly produced the illusion of a mustered army. The Cambridge +campus was tented field enough for a conscript starting so compromised; +and I can scarce say moreover how easily it let me down that when it +came to the point one had still fine fierce young men, in great numbers, +for company, there being at the worst so many such who hadn't flown to +arms. I was to find my fancy of the merely relative right in any way to +figure, or even on such terms just to exist, I was to find it in due +course quite drop from me as the Cambridge year played itself out, +leaving me all aware that, full though the air might be of stiffer +realities, one had yet a rare handful of one's own to face and deal +with.</p> + +<p>At Cambridge of course, when I got there, I was further to find my +brother on the scene and already at a stage of possession of its +contents that I was resigned in advance never to reach; so thoroughly I +seemed to feel a sort of quickening savoury meal in any cold scrap of +his own experience that he might pass on to my palate. This figure has +definite truth, that is, but for association at the board literally +yielding us nourishment—the happiest as to social composition and +freedom of supply of all the <i>tables d'hôte</i> of those days, a veritable +haunt of conversation ruled by that gently fatuous Miss Upham something +of whose angular grace and antique attitude has<a name="page_303" id="page_303"></a> lived again for us in +William's letters. I place him, if not at the moment of my to that +extent joining him then at least from a short time afterwards, in +quarters that he occupied for the next two or three years—quiet +cloistered rooms, as they almost appeared to me, in the comparatively +sequestered Divinity Hall of that still virtually rustic age; which, +though mainly affected to the use of post-graduates and others, of a +Unitarian colour, enrolled under Harvard's theological Faculty, offered +chance accommodation, much appreciated for a certain supposedly separate +charm, not to say a finer dignity, by the more maturely studious in +other branches as well. The superstition or aftertaste of Europe had +then neither left me nor hinted that it ever might; yet I recall as a +distinct source of interest, to be desperately dealt with, and dealt +with somehow to my inward advantage, the special force of the +circumstance that I was now for the first time in presence of matters +normally, entirely, consistently American, and that more particularly I +found myself sniff up straight from the sources, such as they +unmistakably were, the sense of that New England which had been to me +till then but a name. This from the first instant was what I most took +in, and quite apart from the question of what one was going to make of +it, of whether one was going, in the simple formula,<a name="page_304" id="page_304"></a> to like it, and of +what would come, could the impression so triumph, of such monstrous +assimilations. Clear to me in the light thus kindled that my American +consciousness had hitherto been after all and at the best singularly +starved, and that Newport for instance, during the couple of years, had +fed it but with sips of an adulterated strain. Newport, with its +opera-glass turned for ever across the sea—for Newport, or at least +<i>our</i> Newport, even during the War, lived mainly, and quite visibly, by +the opera-glass—was comparatively, and in its degree incurably, +cosmopolite; and though on our first alighting there I had more or less +successfully, as I fancied, invited the local historic sense to vibrate, +it was at present left me to feel myself a poor uninitiated creature. +However, an initiation, at least by the intelligence, into some given +thing—almost anything really given would do—was essentially what I +was, as we nowadays say, after; the fault with my previous data in the +American kind had been that they weren't sufficiently given; so that +here would be Boston and Cambridge giving as with absolute authority. +The War had by itself of course, on the ground I speak of, communicated +something of the quality, or rather of the quantity, otherwise +deficient; only this was for my case, of which alone I speak, an +apprehension without a language<a name="page_305" id="page_305"></a> or a channel—a revelation as sublime +as one would like to feel it, but spreading abroad as a whole and not, +alas, by any practice of mine, reducible to parts. What I promptly made +out at Cambridge was that "America" would be given, as I have called it, +to a tune altogether fresh, so that to hear this tune wholly played out +might well become on the spot an inspiring privilege. If I indeed, I +should add, said to myself "wholly," this was of course not a little +straining a point; since, putting my initiation, my grasp of the +exhibition, at its conceivable liveliest, far more of the supposed total +was I inevitably to miss than to gather to my use. But I might gather +what I could, and therein was exactly the adventure. To rinse my mouth +of the European aftertaste <i>in order</i> to do justice to whatever of the +native bitter-sweet might offer itself in congruous vessels—such a +brave dash for discovery, and such only, would give a sense to my +posture. With which it was unmistakable that I shouldn't in the least +have painfully to strive; of such a force of impact was each impression +clearly capable that I had much rather to steady myself, at any moment, +where I stood, and quite to a sense of the luxury of the occasion, than +to cultivate inquiry at the aggressive pitch. There was no need for +curiosity—it was met by every object, I seemed to see,<a name="page_306" id="page_306"></a> so much more +than half way; unless indeed I put it better by saying that as <i>all</i> my +vision partook of that principle the impulse and the object perpetually +melted together. It wasn't for instance by the faintest process of +inquiry that the <i>maison</i> Upham, where I three times daily sat at meat, +had scarce to wait an hour to become as vivid a translation into +American terms of Balzac's Maison Vauquer, in Le Père Goriot, as I could +have desired to deal with.</p> + +<p>It would have been at once uplifting to see in the American terms a vast +improvement on the prime version, had I not been here a bit baffled by +the sense that the correspondence was not quite, after all, of like with +like, and that the main scene of Balzac's action was confessedly and +curiously sordid and even sinister, whereas its equivalent under the +Harvard elms would rank decidedly as what we had <i>de mieux</i>, or in other +words of most refined, in the "boarding" line, to show. I must have been +further conscious that what we had de mieux in the social line appeared +quite liable, on occasion, to board wherever it might—the situation in +Balzac's world being on this head as different as possible. No one not +deeply distressed or dismally involved or all but fatally compromised +could have taken the chances of such an establishment at all; so that +any comparison to our own particular<a name="page_307" id="page_307"></a> advantage had to be, on +reflection, nipped in the bud. There was a generic sameness, none the +less, I might still reason; enough of that at least to show the two +pictures as each in its way interesting—which was all that was +required. The Maison Vauquer, its musty air thick with heavier social +elements, might have been more so, for the Harvard elms overhung no +strange Vautrin, no old Goriot, no young Rastignac; yet the interest of +the Kirkland Street company couldn't, so to speak, help itself either, +any more than I could help taking advantage of it. In one respect +certainly, in the matter of talk as talk, we shone incomparably +brighter; and if it took what we had de mieux to make our so regular +resort a scene essentially of conversation, the point was none the less +that our materials were there. I found the effect of this, very easily, +as American as I liked—liked, that is, to think of it and to make all I +might of it for being; about which in truth all difficulty vanished from +the moment the local colour of the War broke in. So of course this +element did at that season come back to us through every outward +opening, and mean enough by contrast had been the questions amid which +the Vauquer boarders grubbed. Anything even indirectly touched by our +public story, stretching now into volume after volume of the very +biggest print, took on that reflected<a name="page_308" id="page_308"></a> light of dignity, of importance, +or of mere gross salience, which passion charged with criticism, and +criticism charged with the thousand menaced affections and connections, +the whole of the reaction—charged in short with immediate intimate +life—have a power, in such conditions, to fling as from a waving torch. +The torch flared sufficiently about Miss Upham's board—save that she +herself, ancient spinster, pushed it in dismay from her top of the +table, blew upon it with vain scared sighs, and would have nothing to do +with a matter so disturbing to the right temperature of her <i>plats</i>. We +others passed it from hand to hand, so that it couldn't go quite +out—since I must in fairness add that the element of the casual and the +more <i>generally</i> ironic, the play of the studious or the irrepressibly +social intelligence at large, couldn't fail to insist pretty constantly +on its rights. There were quarters as well, I should note, in which the +sense of local colour proceeding at all straight from the source I have +named—reflected, that is, from camp and field—could but very soon run +short; sharply enough do I recall for instance the felt, even if all so +privately felt, limits of <i>my</i> poor stream of contributive remark +(despite my habit, so fondly practised in the connection, of expatiating +<i>in petto</i>). My poor stream would have trickled, truly, had it been able +to trickle at all, from the<a name="page_309" id="page_309"></a> most effective of my few occasions of +"realising," up to that time, as to field and camp; literally as to camp +in fact, since the occasion had consisted of a visit paid, or a +pilgrimage, rather, ever so piously, so tenderly made, one August +afternoon of the summer just ended, to a vast gathering of invalid and +convalescent troops, under canvas and in roughly improvised shanties, at +some point of the Rhode Island shore that figures to my memory, though +with a certain vagueness, as Portsmouth Grove. (American local names +lend themselves strangely little to retention, I find, if one has +happened to deal for long years with almost any group of European +designations—these latter springing, as it has almost always come to +seem, straight from the soil where natural causes were anciently to root +them, each with its rare identity. The bite into interest of the +borrowed, the imposed, the "faked" label, growing but as by a dab of +glue on an article of trade, is inevitably much less sharp.) Vagueness +at best attends, however, the queer experience I glance at; what lives +of it, in the ineffaceable way, being again, by my incurable perversity, +my ambiguous economy, much less a matter of the "facts of the case," as +they should, even though so dead and buried now, revive to help me +through an anecdote, than the prodigiously subjective side of the +experience, thanks to<a name="page_310" id="page_310"></a> which it still presumes to flush with the grand +air of an adventure. If I had not already so often brazened out my +confession of the far from "showy" in the terms on which impressions +could become indelibly momentous to me I might blush indeed for the thin +tatter dragged in thus as an affair of record. It consisted at the time +simply of an emotion—though the emotion, I should add, appeared to +consist of everything in the whole world that my consciousness could +hold. By <i>that</i> intensity did it hang as bravely as possible together, +and by the title so made good has it handed itself endlessly down.</p> + +<p>Owing to which it is that I don't at all know what troops were in +question, a "mere" couple of Rhode Island regiments (nothing in those +days could be too big to escape the application of the "mere,") or a +congeries of the temporarily incapacitated, the more or less broken, +picked from the veterans—so far as there already were such—of the East +at large and directed upon the Grove as upon a place of stowage and +sanitation. Discriminations of the prosaic order had little to do with +my first and all but sole vision of the American soldier in his +multitude, and above all—for that was markedly the colour of the whole +thing—in his depression, his wasted melancholy almost; an effect that +somehow corresponds for memory, I bethink myself, with<a name="page_311" id="page_311"></a> the tender +elegiac tone in which Walt Whitman was later on so admirably to +commemorate him. The restrictions I confess to are abject, but both my +sense and my aftersense of the exhibition I here allude to had, thanks +to my situation, to do all the work they could in the way of +representation to me of what was most publicly, most heroically, most +wastefully, tragically, terribly going on. It had so to serve for my +particular nearest approach to a "contact" with the active drama—I mean +of course the collectively and scenically active, since the brush of +interest against the soldier single and salient was an affair of every +day—that were it not for just one other strange spasm of awareness, +scarce relaxed to this hour, I should have been left all but pitifully +void of any scrap of a substitute for the concrete experience. The long +hot July 1st of '63, on which the huge battle of Gettysburg had begun, +could really be—or rather couldn't possibly not be—a scrap of concrete +experience for any group of united persons, New York cousins and all, +who, in a Newport garden, restlessly strolling, sitting, neither daring +quite to move nor quite to rest, quite to go in nor quite to stay out, +actually <i>listened</i> together, in their almost ignobly safe stillness, as +to the boom of far-away guns. This <i>was</i>, as it were, the War—the War +palpably in Pennsylvania; not less than my<a name="page_312" id="page_312"></a> hour of a felt rage of +repining at my doomed absence from the sight of that march of the 54th +Massachusetts out of Boston, "Bob" Shaw at its head and our exalted +Wilky among its officers, of which a great sculptor was, on the spot of +their vividest passing, to set the image aloft forever. Poor other +visitations, comparatively, had had to suffice for me; I could take in +fact for amusing, most of all (since that, thank goodness, was high +gaiety), a couple of impressions of the brief preliminary camp life at +Readville during which we admired the charming composition of the 44th +of the same State, under Colonel Frank Lee, and which fairly made +romantic for me Wilky's quick spring out of mere juvenility and into +such brightly-bristling ranks. He had begun by volunteering in a company +that gave him half the ingenuous youth of the circle within our social +ken for brothers-in-arms, and it was to that pair of Readville +afternoons I must have owed my all so emphasised vision of handsome +young Cabot Russell, who, again to be his closest brother-in-arms in the +54th, irrecoverably lost himself, as we have seen, at Fort Wagner. A dry +desert, one must suppose, the life in which, for memory and appreciation +made one, certain single hours or compressed groups of hours have found +their reason for standing out through everything, for insistently<a name="page_313" id="page_313"></a> +living on, in the cabinet of intimate reference, the museum, as it were, +of the soul's curiosities—where doubtless at the same time an +exhibition of them to mere other eyes or ears or questioning logical +minds may effect itself in no plain terms. We recognise such occasions +more and more as we go on, and are surely, as a general thing, glad +when, for the interest of memory—which it's such a business to <i>keep</i> +interesting—they constitute something of a cluster. In my queer +cluster, at any rate, that flower of the connection which answers to the +name of Portsmouth Grove still overtops other members of its class, so +that to finger it again for a moment is to make it perceptibly exhale +its very principle of life. This was, for me, at the time, neither more +nor less than that the American soldier in his multitude was the most +attaching and affecting and withal the most amusing figure of romance +conceivable; the great sense of my vision being thus that, as the +afternoon light of the place and time lingered upon him, both to the +seeming enhancement of his quality and of its own, romance of a more +confused kind than I shall now attempt words for attended his every +movement. It was the charmingest, touchingest, dreadfullest thing in the +world that my impression of him should have to be somehow of his +abandonment to a rueful humour, to a stoic reserve which<a name="page_314" id="page_314"></a> could yet +melt, a relation with him once established, into a rich communicative +confidence; and, in particular, all over the place, of his own scanted +and more or less baffled, though constantly and, as I couldn't not have +it, pathetically, "knowing" devices.</p> + +<p>The great point remained for me at all events that I could afterwards +appear to myself to have done nothing but establish with him a relation, +that I established it, to my imagination, in several cases—and all in +the three or four hours—even to the pitch of the last tenderness of +friendship. I recover that, strolling about with honest and so superior +fellow-citizens, or sitting with them by the improvised couches of their +languid rest, I drew from each his troubled tale, listened to his plaint +on his special hard case—taking form, this, in what seemed to me the +very poetry of the esoteric vernacular—and sealed the beautiful tie, +the responsive sympathy, by an earnest offer, in no instance waved away, +of such pecuniary solace as I might at brief notice draw on my poor +pocket for. Yet again, as I indulge this memory, do I feel that I might +if pushed a little rejoice in having to such an extent coincided with, +not to say perhaps positively anticipated, dear old Walt—even if I +hadn't come armed like him with oranges and peppermints. I ministered +much more summarily, though possibly<a name="page_315" id="page_315"></a> in proportion to the time and +thanks to my better luck more pecuniarily; but I like to treat myself to +making out that I can scarce have brought to the occasion (in proportion +to the time again and to other elements of the case) less of the +consecrating sentiment than he. I like further to put it in a light +that, ever so curiously, if the good Walt was most inwardly stirred to +his later commemorative accents by his participating in the common +Americanism of his hospital friends, the familiar note and shared sound +of which formed its ground of appeal, I found myself victim to a like +moving force through quite another logic. It was literally, I fear, +because our common Americanism carried with it, to my imagination, such +a disclosed freshness and strangeness, working, as I might say, over +such gulfs of dissociation, that I reached across to <i>their</i>, these +hospital friends', side of the matter, even at the risk of an imperilled +consistency. It had for me, the state in question, colour and form, +accent and quality, with scarce less "authority" than if instead of the +rough tracks or worn paths of my casual labyrinth I had trod the glazed +halls of some school of natural history. What holds me now indeed is +that such an institution might have exemplified then almost nothing but +the aspects strictly native to our social and seasonal air; so simply +and easily<a name="page_316" id="page_316"></a> conceivable to the kindly mind were at that time these +reciprocities, so great the freedom and pleasure of them compared with +the restrictions imposed on directness of sympathy by the awful +admixtures of to-day, those which offer to the would-be participant +among us, on returns from sojourns wherever homogeneity and its entailed +fraternity, its easy contacts, still may be seen to work, the strange +shock of such amenities declined on any terms. Really not possible then, +I think, the perception now accompanying, on American ground, this +shock—the recognition, by any sensibility at all reflective, of the +point where our national theory of absorption, assimilation and +conversion appallingly breaks down; appallingly, that is, for those to +whom the <i>consecrated</i> association, of the sort still at play where +community has not been blighted, strongly speaks. Which remarks may +reinforce the note of my unconsciousness of any difficulty for knowing +in the old, the comparatively brothering, conditions what an American at +least <i>was</i>. Absurd thus, no doubt, that the scant experience over which +I perversely linger insists on figuring to me as quite a revel of the +right confidence.</p> + +<p>The revel, though I didn't for the moment yet know it, was to be renewed +for me at Cambridge with less of a romantic intensity perhaps, but more +usefully, so to put it, and more informingly;<a name="page_317" id="page_317"></a> surrounded as I presently +found myself at the Law School with young types, or rather with young +members of a single type, not one of whom but would have enriched my +imagined hall of congruous specimens. <i>That</i>, with the many months of +it, was to be the real disclosure, the larger revelation; that was to be +the fresh picture for a young person reaching the age of twenty in +wellnigh grotesque unawareness of the properties of the atmosphere in +which he but wanted to claim that he had been nourished. Of what I mean +by this I shall in a moment have more to say—after pointing a trifle +more, for our patience, the sense of my dilatation upon Portsmouth +Grove. Perfectly distinct has remained the sail back to Newport by that +evening's steamboat; the mere memory of which indeed—and I recall that +I felt it inordinately long—must have been for me, just above, the +spring of the whole reference. The sail was long, measured by my acute +consciousness of paying physically for my excursion—which hadn't +answered the least little bit for my impaired state. This last +disobliging fact became one, at the same time, with an intensity, indeed +a strange rapture, of reflection, which I may not in the least pretend +to offer as a clear or coherent or logical thing, and of which I can +only say, leaving myself there through the summer twilight, in too scant +rest<a name="page_318" id="page_318"></a> on a deck stool and against the bulwark, that it somehow crowned +my little adventure of sympathy and wonder with a shining round of +resignation—a realisation, as we nowadays put it, that, measuring +wounds against wounds, or the compromised, the particular taxed +condition, at the least, against all the rest of the debt then so +generally and enormously due, one was no less exaltedly than wastefully +engaged in the common fact of endurance. There are memories in truth too +fine or too peculiar for notation, too intensely individual and +supersubtle—call them what one will; yet which one may thus no more +give up confusedly than one may insist on them vainly. Their kind is +nothing ever to a present purpose unless they are in a manner statable, +but is at the same time ruefully aware of threatened ridicule if they +are overstated. Not that I in the least mind such a menace, however, in +just adding that, soothed as I have called the admirable ache of my +afternoon with that inward interpretation of it, I felt the latter—or +rather doubtless simply the entire affair—absolutely overarched by the +majestic manner in which the distress of our return drew out into the +lucid charm of the night. To which I must further add that the hour +seemed, by some wondrous secret, to know itself marked and charged and +unforgettable—hinting so in its<a name="page_319" id="page_319"></a> very own terms of cool beauty at +something portentous in it, an exquisite claim then and there for +lasting value and high authority.<a name="page_320" id="page_320"></a></p> + +<h2><a name="X" id="X"></a>X</h2> + +<p>All of which foregoing makes, I grant, a long parenthesis in my recovery +of the more immediate Cambridge impressions. I have left them awaiting +me, yet I am happy to say not sensibly the worse for it, in their +cluster roundabout Miss Upham and her board of beneficiary images; which +latter start up afresh and with the softest submission to any convenient +neglect—that ineffably touching and confessed dependence of such +apparitions on one's "pleasure," save the mark! for the flicker of +restorative light. The image most vividly restored is doubtless that of +Professor F. J. Child, head of the "English Department" at Harvard and +master of that great modern science of folk-lore to his accomplishment +in which his vast and slowly-published collection of the Ballad +literature of our language is a recognised monument; delightful man, +rounded character, passionate patriot, admirable talker, above all +thorough humanist and humorist. He was the genial autocrat of that +breakfast-table not only, but of our symposia otherwise timed, and as he +comes back to me with the fresh and quite circular countenance of the +time before the personal cares and complications of life had<a name="page_321" id="page_321"></a> gravely +thickened for him, his aspect <i>all</i> finely circular, with its close +rings of the fairest hair, its golden rims of the largest glasses, its +finished rotundity of figure and attitude, I see that <i>there</i> was the +American spirit—since I was "after" it—of a quality deeply inbred, +beautifully adjusted to all extensions of knowledge and taste and, as +seemed to me, quite sublimely quickened by everything that was at the +time so tremendously in question. That vision of him was never +afterwards to yield to other lights—though these, even had occasion for +them been more frequent with me, couldn't much have interfered with it; +so that what I still most retain of him is the very flush and mobility, +the living expansion and contraction, the bright comedy and almost lunar +eclipse, of his cherubic face according as things appeared to be going +for the country. I was always just across from him, as my brother, +beside whom I took my place, had been, and I remember well how vivid a +clock-face it became to me; I found still, as in my younger time, matter +enough everywhere for gaping, but greatest of all, I think, while that +tense season lasted, was my wonder for the signs and portents, the quips +and cranks, the wreathèd smiles, or otherwise the candid obscurations, +of our prime talker's presented visage. I set, as it were, the small +tick of my own poor watch by it—which private<a name="page_322" id="page_322"></a> register would thump or +intermit in agreement with these indications. I recover it that, thanks +to the perpetual play of his sympathy and irony, confidence and scorn, +as well as to that of my own less certainly directed sensibility, he +struck me on the bad days, which were then so many, as fairly august, +cherubism and all, for sincerity of association with every light and +shade, every ebb and flow, of our Cause. Where he most shone out, +indeed, so that depression then wasn't a gloom in him but a darting +flame, was in the icy air of the attitude of the nations to us, that of +the couple, the most potent, across the sea, with which we were +especially concerned and which, as during the whole earlier half of the +War and still longer it more and more defined itself, drew from him at +once all the drolleries and all the asperities of his sarcasm. Nothing +more particularly touched me in him, I make out—for it lingers in a +light of its own—than the fashion after which he struck me as a fond +grave guardian, not so much of the memory and the ashes yet awhile, as +of the promise, in all its flower, of the sacrificial young men whom the +University connection had passed through his hands and whom he looked +out for with a tenderness of interest, a nursing pride, that was as +contagious as I could possibly have wished it. I didn't myself know the +young men, save three<a name="page_323" id="page_323"></a> or four, and could only, at our distance, hold my +tongue and do them homage; never afterwards (as I even then foreknew +would be the case) missing, when I could help it, or failing to pick up, +a single brush, a scattered leaf, of their growing or their riper +legend. Certain of them whom I had neither seen nor, as they fell in +battle, was destined ever to see, have lived for me since just as +communicated images, figures created by his tone about them—which, I +admit, mightn't or needn't have mattered to me for all the years, yet +which couldn't help so doing from the moment the right touch had handed +them over to my restless claim.</p> + +<p>It was not meanwhile for want of other figures that these were gathered +in, for I have again to grant that in those days figures became such for +me on easy terms, and that in particular William had only to let the +light of <i>his</i> attention, his interest, his curiosity, his aversion even +(could he indeed have passingly lived in the helplessness of mere +aversion) visibly rest on them for me entirely to feel that they must +count for as much as might be—so far at least as my perception was +concerned, contact being truly another affair. That was the truth at +that season, if it wasn't always to remain the truth; I felt his +interpretations, his personal allowances, so largely and inveterately +liberal, always impose themselves: it<a name="page_324" id="page_324"></a> was not till ever so much later, +and then only little by little, that I came to accept the strange +circumstance of my not invariably "liking," in homely parlance, his +people, and his not invariably liking mine. The process represented by +that word was for each of us, I think, a process so involved with other +operations of the spirit, so beautifully complicated and deformed by +them, that our results in this sort doubtless eventually lost themselves +in the labyrinth of our reasons; which latter, eventually—the +labyrinth, I mean—could be a frequent and not other than animated +meeting-place in spite of the play of divergence. The true case, I all +the while plentifully felt, and still more feel now, was that <i>I</i> +diverged and my brother almost never; in the sense, that is, that no man +can well have cared less for the question, or made less of the +consciousness, of dislike—have valued less their developments and +comforts. Even the opposite of that complacency scarce seemed a +recognised, or at least in any degree a cultivated, state with him; his +passion, and that a passion of the intelligence, was justice +unafraid—and this, as it were, almost unformulatedly, altogether +unpedantically: it simply made him utterly not "mind" numberless things +that with most people serve as dim lights, warnings or attractions, in +the grope of appreciation or the adventure of instinct. His luminous +indifference<a name="page_325" id="page_325"></a> kept his course thus, as I was later to recognise, +extraordinarily straight—to the increase, as I have noted, of my own +poor sense of weakly straggling, unaccompanied as this at the same time +was by the least envy of such a deficiency in what is roughly called +prejudice, and what I, to save my face, in my ups and downs of +sociability or curiosity, could perhaps have found no better term for +than the play of taste as taste. Wonderful, and to me in the last resort +admirable, was William's fine heritage and awareness of that principle +without its yet affecting him on the human, the more largely social, +just the conversable and workable ground—in presence of some other +principle that might do so, whether this validly or but speciously +interfered. The triumph over <i>dis</i>taste, in one's relations, one's +exposures, one's judgments, <i>that</i> I could understand as high virtue, +strained heroism, the ideal groaningly applied; but what left me always +impressed, to put it mildly, was the fact that in my brother's case the +incorruptibility of his candour would have had to be explained to him, +and with scant presumption too of his taking it in or having patience +while one spoke. Such an enterprise, I was well aware, would at any rate +have left <i>me</i> a sorry enough figure afterwards. What one would have had +to be, what one could in the least decently be, <i>except</i><a name="page_326" id="page_326"></a> candid without +alternative—this, with other like matters, I should have had to be +prepared to set forth; and, more and more addressed as I eventually +found myself to a cultivation of the absolute in taste as taste, to +repeat my expression, I was far from the wish to contend for it as +against any appearance whatever of a better way. Such was part of the +experience, or call it even the discipline, of association with a genius +so marked for the process known as giving the benefit of the doubt—and +giving it (for that was the irritating charm), not in smug charity or +for a pointed moral, but through the very nature of a mind incapable of +the shut door in any direction and of a habit of hospitality so free +that it might again and again have been observed, in contact and +intercourse, to supply weaker and less graced vessels with the very +means of bringing in response, often absolutely in retort. This last of +course was not so much the benefit of the doubt as the displayed +unconsciousness of any doubt, a perpetual aid rendered the doubtful, +especially when incarnate in persons, to be more right or more true, +more clever or more charming or whatever, than mere grudging love of +"form," standing by, could at all see it entitled to become. Anything +like William's unawareness of exertion after having helped the lame dog +of converse over stile after stile I have in no other case met.<a name="page_327" id="page_327"></a> +Together with which, however, I may not forbear to add, the very +occasional and comparatively small flare in him of some blest perversity +of prejudice that one might enjoy on one's own side the vulgar luxury of +naming as such was a thing which, conformably to that elation, one +reached out for as one might for the white glint of the rare edelweiss +on some high Alpine ledge.</p> + +<p>If these remarks illustrate in their number the inevitable bent of the +remark to multiply within me as an effect of fraternal evocation I +thereby but stick the more to my subject, or in other words to the +much-peopled scene, as I found it; which I should scarce have found +without him. Peopled as it was with <i>his</i> people, which they at first +struck me as markedly being, it led me then to take the company, apart +from F. J. Child, for whatever he all vividly and possessively +pronounced it; I having for a long time but the scantest company of my +own, even at the Law School, where my fellow-disciples could bear the +name for me only as a troop of actors might have done on that further +side of footlights to which I never went round. This last at least with +few exceptions, while there were none to the exquisite rule, as I +positively to-day feel it, of my apprehension of William's cluster as a +concern of his—interesting exactly because of that reference. Any +concern of his was thus<a name="page_328" id="page_328"></a> a thing already charged with life, <i>his</i> life +over and above its own, if it happened by grace to have any comparable; +which, as I pick out the elements again from the savoury Upham shades, +could indeed be claimed for several of these. I pick out the ardent and +delicate and firm John May, son, as he comes back to me, of a +distinguished Abolitionist of New York State—rare bird; and seen by +that fact in a sort of glamour of picturesque justification, an air +deriving colour from the pre-established gallantry, yet the quiet and +gentlemanly triumph, of his attitude. So at least do I read back into +blurred visions the richest meanings they could have. I pick out for a +not less baffled tribute a particular friend of my brother's and a +comrade of May's, whom I identify on the superficial side but by his +name of Salter and the fact of his studentship in theology; which +pursuit, it comes over me as I write, he must have shared, of homely, +almost of sickly, New England type as he was, with May of the fine +features, the handsome smile, by my resolute recollection, the developed +moustache and short dark pointed beard, the property of vaguely +recalling in fine some old portrait supposedly Spanish (supposedly, and +perhaps to a fantastic tune, by <i>me</i>—for I dare say it was by no one +else). Salter had no such references—it even appalled me to have a bit +intelligently to imagine<a name="page_329" id="page_329"></a> to what origins starved of amenity or colour +his aspect and air, the slope of his shoulders, the mode of growth of +his hair, the relation of his clothes to his person and the relation of +his person to the inevitable needs of intercourse, might refer him; but +there played about him a bright force in the highest and extraordinarily +quick flares of which one felt nothing, while the exhibition lasted, but +his intellectual elegance. He had the distinction of wit—so rare, we +ever feel it to be, when we see it beautifully act; and I remember well +how, as that was indeed for me almost the whole of intellectual +elegance, I fell back on the idea that such an odd assortment of marks +in him was at least picturesque, or much in the Maison Vauquer line: +pinched as I must have been by the question of whether a person of that +type and cut had the "right" to be witty. On what else but the power the +right rested I couldn't doubtless have said; I but recall my sense that +wit was somehow the finest of all social matters and that it seemed +impossible to be less connected with such than this product of New +England at its sparest and dryest; which fact was a sort of bad mark for +the higher civilisation. I was prepared to recognise that you might be +witty and ugly, ugly with the highest finish of ugliness—hadn't the +celebrated Voltaire been one of the scrappiest of men as well as of<a name="page_330" id="page_330"></a> the +most immortally quoted?—but it cost a wrench to have to take it that +you could shine to admiration out of such a platitude of the mere +"plain." It was William in especial who guaranteed to me Salter's +superior gift, of which in the free commerce of Divinity Hall he had +frequent illustration—so that what I really most apprehended, I think, +was the circumstance of <i>his</i> apprehending: this too with a much finer +intellectual need and competence than mine, after all, and in the course +of debates and discussions, ardent young symposia of the spirit, which +struck me as falling in with all I had ever curiously conceived of those +hours that foster the generous youth of minds preappointed to greatness. +<i>There</i> was the note of the effective quaint on which I could put my +finger: catch a poor student only dreary enough and then light in him +the flame of irony at its intensest, the range of question and the +command of figure at their bravest, and one might, with one's appetite +for character, feed on the bold antithesis. I had only to like for my +brother, and verily almost with pride, his assured experience of any +queer concretion—his experience of abstractions I was to rise to much +more feebly and belatedly, scarce more indeed ever than most +imperfectly—to find the very scene of action, or at least of passion, +enjoyed by these my elders and betters, enriched<a name="page_331" id="page_331"></a> and toned and +consecrated after the fashion of places referred to in literature and +legend.</p> + +<p>I thus live back of a sudden—for I insist on just yielding to it—into +the odd hours when the poor little old Divinity Hall of the overgrown +present faced me as through the haze of all the past Indian summers it +had opened its brooding study-windows to; when the "avenue" of approach +to it from the outer world was a thing of dignity, a positive vista in a +composition; when the Norton woods, near by, massed themselves in +scarlet and orange, and when to penetrate and mount a stair and knock at +a door and, enjoying response, then sink into a window-bench and inhale +at once the vague golden November and the thick suggestion of the room +where nascent "thought" had again and again piped or wailed, was to +taste as I had never done before the poetry of the prime initiation and +of associated growth. With cards of such pale pasteboard could the +trick, to my vision, play itself—by which I mean that I admire under +this memory the constant "dodges" of an imagination reduced to such +straits for picking up a living. It was as if one's sense of "Europe," +sufficiently sure of itself to risk the strategic retreat, had backed +away on tiptoe just to see how the sense of what was there facing one +would manage without it—manage for luxury, that is, with the mere +indispensable<a name="page_332" id="page_332"></a> doubtless otherwise provided for. That the sense in +question did manage beautifully, when at last so hard pressed, and that +the plasticity and variety of my vision draw from me now this murmur of +elation, are truths constituting together for me the perhaps even +overloaded moral of my tale. With which I scarce need note that so +elastic a fancy, so perverse a little passion for finding good in +everything—good for what I thought of as history, which was the +consideration of life, while the given thing, whatever it was, had only +to be before me—was inevitably to work a storage of other material for +memory close-packed enough to make such disengagement as I thus attempt +at the end of time almost an act of violence. I couldn't do without the +<i>scene</i>, as I have elsewhere had occasion to hint, whether actually or +but possibly peopled (the people always calling for the background and +the background insisting on the people); and thanks to this harmless +extravagance, or thanks in other words to the visionary liberties I +constantly took (so that the plate of sense was at the time I speak of +more overscored and figured for me than sense was in the least +practically required to have it), my path is even now beset to +inconvenience with the personal image unextinct. It presents itself, I +feel, beyond reason, and yet if I turn from it the ease is less,<a name="page_333" id="page_333"></a> and I +am divided when I further press the spring between compunction at not +pausing before some shade that seems individually and even hopefully to +wait, and the fear of its feeling after all scanted of service should I +name it only to leave it. I name for instance, just to hover a little, +silent Vanderpool, the mutest presence at the Upham board, and quite +with no sense of the invidious in so doing. He was save for myself, by +my remembrance, the only member of the Law School there present; I see +him moreover altogether remarkably, just incorruptibly and exquisitely +dumb, though with a "gentlemanly" presence, a quasi-conservative New +Jersey finish (so delicate those dim discriminations!) that would have +seemed naturally to go with a certain forensic assurance. He looked so +as if he came from "good people"—which was no very common appearance on +the Harvard scene of those days, as indeed it is to a positive degree no +so very common appearance on any scene at any time: it was a note of +aspect which one in any case found one's self, to whatever vague tune, +apt quite to treasure or save up. So it was impossible not to recognise +in our soundless <i>commensal</i> the very finest flower of shyness, the very +richest shade of the deprecating blush, that one had perhaps ever +encountered; one ended in fact by fairly hanging on the question of +whether the<a name="page_334" id="page_334"></a> perfection of his modesty—for it was all a true welter of +modesty, not a grain of it anything stiffer—would beautifully hold out +or would give way to comparatively brute pressure from some point of our +circle. I longed to bet on him, to see him through without a lapse; and +this in fact was so thoroughly reserved to me that my eventual relief +and homage doubtless account for the blest roundness of my impression. +He had so much "for" him, was tall and fine, equipped and appointed, +born, quite to an effect of ultimately basking, in the light of the Law, +acquainted, one couldn't fail of seeing, with a tradition of manners, +not to mention that of the forensic as aforesaid, and not to name either +the use of "means," equally imputable: how rare accordingly would be the +<i>quality</i>, letting even the quantity alone, of his inhibitions, and how +interesting in the event the fact that he was absolutely never to have +deviated! He disappeared without having spoken, and yet why should I now +be noting it if he hadn't nevertheless admirably expressed himself? What +this consisted of was that there was scarce anything he wouldn't have +done for us had it been possible, and I think, in view of the +distinctness with which he still faces me, the tenderness with which he +inspires my muse and the assurance with which I have "gone into" him, +that I can never<a name="page_335" id="page_335"></a> in all my life since have seen so precious a message +delivered under such difficulties. Admirable, ineffaceable, because so +essentially all <i>decipherable</i>, Vanderpool!</p> + +<p>It wasn't either that John Bancroft tossed the ball of talk—which but +for the presence of the supremely retentive agent just commemorated +would have appeared on occasion to remain in his keeping by a +preference, on its own part, not to be outwitted; this more or less at +all times too, but especially during the first weeks of his dawning on +us straight out of Germany and France, flushed with the alarm, as one +might have read it, of having to justify rare opportunities and account +for the time he had inordinately, obscurely, or at least not a little +mysteriously, spent—the implication of every inch of him being that he +had spent it seriously. Odd enough it certainly was that we should have +been appointed to unveil, so far as we might, a <i>pair</i> of such marked +monuments to modesty, marble statues, as they might have been, on either +side of the portal of talk; what I at any rate preserve of my immediate +vision of Bancroft—whose very promptest identity indeed had been his +sonship to the eminent historian of our country and earlier and later +diplomatist—was an opposition, trying to me rather than engaging as its +like had been in the composition of Vanderpool,<a name="page_336" id="page_336"></a> between what we somehow +wanted from him (or what I at least did) and what we too scantly +gathered. This excellent friend, as he was later on to become, with his +handsome high head, large colourable brow and eyes widely divided—brave +contribution ever to a fine countenance—sat there in a sort of glory of +experience which, had he been capable of anything so akin to a +demonstration, he would have appeared all unsociably to repudiate. It +was bruited of him that, like John La Farge, whose friend he was +admiringly to become—for he too had a Newport connection—he "painted," +that is persisted (which was the wondrous thing!) in painting; and that +this practice had grown upon him in France, where, <i>en province</i>, his +brother had entirely taken root and where the whole art-life, as well as +the rural life, of the country had been opened to him; besides its a +little later coming to light that he had romantically practised at +Dusseldorf, where too he had personally known and tremendously liked +George du Maurier, whose first so distinguished appearances as an +illustrator had already engaged our fondest attention—were they most +dawningly in the early Cornhill, or in Punch, or in Once a Week? They +glimmer upon me, darkly and richly, as from the pages of the last named. +Not to be rendered, I may again parenthesise, our little thrilled<a name="page_337" id="page_337"></a> +awareness, William's and mine, though mine indeed but panting after his, +of such peeping phenomena of the European day as the outbreak of a "new +man" upon our yearning view of the field of letters and of the arts. I +am moved to wonder at how we came by it, shifting all for ourselves, and +with the parental <i>flair</i>, so far as the sensibility of home was +concerned, turned but to directions of its own and much less restless on +the whole than ours. More touching to me now than I can say, at all +events, this recapture of the hour at which Du Maurier, consecrated to +much later, to then still far-off intimate affection, became the new man +so significantly as to make a great importance of John Bancroft's news +of him, which already bore, among many marvels, upon the supreme wonder +of his working, as he was all his life bravely to work, under impaired +and gravely menaced eyesight. When I speak, as just above, of what, +through so many veils, "came to light," I should further add, I use a +figure representing a considerable lapse of time and shading off, for +full evocation, into more associations than I can here make place for. +Nothing in this connection came <i>soon</i> to light at least but that +endless amazement might lie in the strange facts of difference between +our companion and his distinguished sire—the latter so supremely, so +quaintly yet so brilliantly, social a<a name="page_338" id="page_338"></a> figure, I apprehended, when gaped +at, a still more angular, but more polished and pacific Don Quixote, on +the sleekest of Rosinantes, with white-tipped chin protrusive, with high +sharp elbows raised and long straight legs beautifully pointed, all +after the gallantest fashion, against the clear sunset sky of old +Newport cavalcades. Mr. Bancroft the elder, the "great," was a comfort, +that is a fine high identity, a cluster of strong accents, the sort of +thing one's vision followed, in the light of history, if not of mere +misguided fancy, for illustration of conceived type—type, say in this +case, of superior person of the ancient and the more or less alien +public order, the world of affairs transacted at courts and +<i>chancelleries</i>, in which renown, one had gathered from the perusal of +memoirs, allowed for much development of detail and much incision of +outline, when not even directly resting on them. As it had been a +positive bliss to me that words and names might prove in extremity +sources of support, so it comes back to me that I had drawn mystic +strength from just obscurely sighing "Metternich!" or "Talleyrand!" as +Mr. Bancroft bounced by me—so far as a pair of widely-opened compasses +might bounce—in the August gloaming. The value of which, for +reflection, moreover, was not in the least in its being that if his son +remained so long pleadingly inscrutable<a name="page_339" id="page_339"></a> any derived Metternich +suggestion had contributed to keep him so—for quite <i>there</i> was the +curiosity of the case, that among the imputations John appeared most to +repudiate was that of having at any moment breathed the air either of +records or of protocols. If he persisted in painting for years after his +return to America without, as the legend grew, the smallest disclosure +of his work or confession of his progress to human eye or ear, he drew +the rigour of this course wholly from his singleness of nature, in the +aftertime to be so much approved to us. However, I pause before the +aftertime, into the lap of which more than one sort of stored soundness +and sweetness was to fall from him drop by drop.</p> + +<p>I scarce know whether my impulse to lead forth these most shrinking of +my apparitions be more perverse or more natural—mainly feeling, I +confess, however it appear, that the rest of my impression of the +animated Cambridge scene, so far as I could take it in, was anything but +a vision of unasserted forces. It was only I, as now appears to me, who, +ready as yet to assert nothing, hung back, and for reasons even more +appreciable to me to-day than then; wondering, almost regretting as I +do, that I didn't with a still sharper promptness throw up the sponge +for stoppage of the absurd little boxing-match within<a name="page_340" id="page_340"></a> me between the +ostensible and the real—this I mean because I might afterwards thereby +have winced a couple of times the less in haunting remembrance of +exhibited inaptitude. My condition of having nothing to exhibit was +blessedly one that there was nobody to quarrel with—and I couldn't have +sufficiently let it alone. I didn't in truth, under a misleading light, +reconsider it much; yet I have kept to this hour a black little memory +of my having attempted to argue one afternoon, by way of exercise and +under what seemed to me a perfect glare of publicity, the fierce light +of a "moot-court," some case proposed to me by a fellow-student—who can +only have been one of the most benign of men unless he was darkly the +designingest, and to whom I was at any rate to owe it that I figured my +shame for years much in the image of my having stood forth before an +audience with a fiddle and bow and trusted myself to rub them together +desperately enough (after the fashion of Rousseau in a passage of the +Confessions,) to make some appearance of music. My music, I recall, +before the look on the faces around me, quavered away into mere collapse +and cessation, a void now engulfing memory itself, so that I liken it +all to a merciful fall of the curtain on some actor stricken and +stammering. The sense of the brief glare, as I have called the luckless +exposure, revives<a name="page_341" id="page_341"></a> even on this hither side of the wide gulf of time; +but I must have outlived every witness—I was so obviously there the +very youngest of all aspirants—and, in truth, save for one or two minor +and merely comparative miscarriages of the sacrificial act before my +false gods, my connection with the temple was to remain as consistently +superficial as could be possible to a relation still restlessly +perceptive through all its profaneness. Perceiving, even with its +accompaniments of noting, wondering, fantasticating, kicked up no glare, +but went on much rather under richest shades or in many-coloured +lights—a <i>tone</i> of opportunity that I look back on as somehow at once +deliciously soothing to myself and favourable to the clearness of each +item of the picture even as the cool grey sky of a landscape is +equalising. That was of course especially when I had let everything +slide—everything but the mere act of rather difficultly living (by +reason of my scant physical ease,) and fallen back again on the hard +sofa of certain ancient rooms in the Winthrop Square, contracted nook, +of a local order now quite abolished, and held to my nose for long and +sustaining sniffs the scented flower of independence. I took my +independence for romantic, or at least for a happy form of yawning +vessel into which romance, even should it perforce consist but of mere +loose observational<a name="page_342" id="page_342"></a> play, might drop in the shape of ripe fruit from a +shaken tree. Winthrop Square, as I had occasion to note a couple of +years since, is a forgotten name, and the disappearance of my lodging +spares me doubtless a reminder, possibly ironic, of the debility of +those few constructional and pictorial elements that, mustering a +wondrous good-will, I had invited myself to rejoice in as "colonial." +The house was indeed very old, as antiquity in Cambridge went, with +everything in it slanting and gaping and creaking, but with humble +antique "points" and a dignity in its decay; above all with the deep +recess or alcove, a sweet "irregularity" (so could irregularities of +architectural conception then and there count,) thrust forth from its +sitting-room toward what I supposed to be the Brighton hills and +forming, by the aid of a large window and that commanding view, not to +mention the grace of an ancient expansive bureau or secretary-desk (this +such a piece, I now venture to figure, as would to-day be pounced on at +any cunning dealer's,) a veritable bower toward which even so shy a +dreamer as I still then had to take myself for might perhaps hope to woo +the muse. The muse was of course the muse of prose fiction—never for +the briefest hour in my case the presumable, not to say the presuming, +the much-taking-for-granted muse of rhyme, with whom I had never had, +even in<a name="page_343" id="page_343"></a> thought, the faintest flirtation; and she did, in the event, I +note, yield to the seduction of so appointed a nook—as to which +romantic passage, however, I may not here anticipate. I but lose myself +in the recovered sense of what it richly "meant" to me just to <i>have</i> a +place where I could so handsomely receive her, where I could remark with +complacency that the distant horizon, an horizon long since rudely +obliterated, was not, after all, too humble to be blue, purple, tawny, +changeable in short, everything an horizon should be, and that over the +intervening marshes of the Charles (if I don't go astray in so much +geography) there was all the fine complicated cloud-scenery I could +wish—so extravagantly did I then conceive more or less associational +cloud-scenery, after the fashion, I mean, of that feature of remembered +English and Boulognese water-colours, to promote the atmosphere of +literary composition as the act had begun to glimmer for me.</p> + +<p>Everything, however, meant, as I say, more quite other things than I can +pretend now to treat of. The mere fact of a sudden rupture, as by the +happiest thought, with the "form" of bringing home from the Law-library +sheepskin volumes that might give my table, if not, for sufficiency of +emphasis, my afflicted self, a temporary countenance, heaped up the +measure of<a name="page_344" id="page_344"></a> my general intention—from the moment I embraced instead of +it the practice of resorting to Gore Hall exclusively for my +reading-matter; a practice in the light of which my general intention +took on the air of absolutely basking. To get somehow, and in spite of +everything, in spite especially of being so much disabled, at life, +<i>that</i> was my brooding purpose, straight out of which the College +library, with its sparse bristle of aspiring granite, stood open to far +more enchanted distances than any represented by the leathery walls, +with never a breach amid their labelled and numbered blocks, that I +might pretend to beat against in the other quarter. Yet, happily enough, +on this basis of general rather than of special culture, I still loosely +rejoiced in being where I was, and by way of proof that it was all right +the swim into my ken of Sainte-Beuve, for whose presence on my table, in +still other literary company, Gore Hall aiding, I succeeded in not at +all blushing, became in the highest degree congruous with regular +attendance at lectures. The forenoon lectures at Dane Hall I never in +all my time missed, that I can recollect, and I look back on it now as +quite prodigious that I should have been so systematically faithful to +them without my understanding the first word of what they were about. +They contrived—or at least my attendance at them did, inimitably—<a name="page_345" id="page_345"></a>to +be "life;" and as my wondering dips into the vast deep well of the +French critic to whom all my roused response went out brought up that +mystery to me in cupfuls of extraordinary savour, where was the +incongruity of the two rites? That the Causeries du Lundi, wholly fresh +then to my grateful lips, should so have overflowed for me was certainly +no marvel—that prime acquaintance absolutely <i>having</i>, by my measure, +to form a really sacred date in the development of any historic or +aesthetic consciousness worth mentioning; but that I could be to the +very end more or less thrilled by simply sitting, all stupid and +sentient, in the thick company of my merely nominal associates and under +the strange ministrations of Dr. Theophilus Parsons, "Governor" Washburn +and Professor Joel Parker, would have appeared to defy explanation only +for those by whom the phenomena of certain kinds of living and working +sensibility are unsuspected. For myself at any rate there was no +anomaly—the anomaly would have been much rather in any prompter +consciousness of a sated perception; I knew why I liked to "go," I knew +even why I could unabashedly keep going in face of the fact that if I +had learned my reason I had learned, and was still to learn, absolutely +nothing else; and that sufficiently supported me through a stretch of +bodily overstrain that I only afterwards<a name="page_346" id="page_346"></a> allowed myself dejectedly to +measure. The mere sitting at attention for two or three hours—such +attention as I achieved—was paid for by sorry pain; yet it was but +later on that I wondered how I could have found what I "got" an +equivalent for the condition produced. The condition was one of many, +and the others for the most part declared themselves with much of an +equal, though a different, sharpness. It was acute, that is, that one +was so incommoded, but it had broken upon me with force from the first +of my taking my seat—which had the advantage, I acknowledge, of the rim +of the circle, symbolising thereby all the detachment I had been +foredoomed to—that the whole scene was going to be, and again and +again, as "American," and above all as suffused with New England colour, +however one might finally estimate that, as I could possibly have +wished. Such was the effect of one's offering such a plate for +impressions to play on at their will; as well as of one's so failing to +ask in advance what they would matter, so taking for granted that they +would all matter somehow. It would matter somehow for instance that just +a queer dusky half smothered light, as from windows placed too low, or +too many interposing heads, should hang upon our old auditorium—long +since voided of its then use and, with all its accessory chambers, +seated elsewhere afresh<a name="page_347" id="page_347"></a> and in much greater state; which glimpse of a +scheme of values might well have given the measure of the sort of profit +I was, or rather wasn't, to derive. It doubtless quite ought to have +confounded me that I had come up to <i>faire mon droit</i> by appreciations +predominantly of the local chiaroscuro and other like quantities; but I +remember no alarm—I only remember with what complacency my range of +perception on those general lines was able to spread.</p> + +<p>It mattered, by the same law, no end that Dr. Theophilus Parsons, whose +rich, if slightly quavering, old accents were the first to fall upon my +ear from the chair of instruction beneath a huge hot portrait of Daniel +Webster should at once approve himself a vivid and curiously-composed +person, an <i>illustrative</i> figure, as who should say—exactly with all +the marks one might have wished him, marks of a social order, a general +air, a whole history of things, or in other words of people; since there +was nothing one mightn't, by my sentiment, do with such a subject from +the moment it gave out character. Character thus was all over the place, +as it could scarce fail to be when the general subject, the one gone in +for, had become identical with the persons of all its votaries. Such was +the interest of the source of edification just named, not one ray of +whose merely professed value so much as entered my<a name="page_348" id="page_348"></a> mind. Governor +Washburn was of a different, but of a no less complete +consistency—queer, ingenuous, more candidly confiding, especially as to +his own pleasant fallibility, than I had ever before known a chaired +dispenser of knowledge, and all after a fashion that endeared him to his +young hearers, whose resounding relish of the frequent tangle of his +apologetic returns upon himself, quite, almost always, to +inextricability, was really affectionate in its freedom. I could +understand and admire that—it seemed to have for me legendary +precedents; whereas of the third of our instructors I mainly recall that +he represented dryness and hardness, prose unrelieved, at their +deadliest—partly perhaps because he was most master of his subject. He +was none the less placeable for these things withal, and what mainly +comes back to me of him is the full sufficiency with which he made me +ask myself how I <i>could</i> for a moment have seen myself really browse in +any field where the marks of the shepherd were such an oblong dome of a +bare cranium, such a fringe of dropping little ringlets toward its base, +and a mouth so meanly retentive, so ignorant of style, as I made out, +above a chin so indifferent to the duty, or at least to the opportunity, +of chins. If I had put it to myself that there was no excuse for the +presence of a young person so affected by the idea of how people<a name="page_349" id="page_349"></a> looked +on a scene where the issue was altogether what they usefully taught, as +well as intelligently learned and wanted to learn, I feel I should, +after my first flush of confusion, have replied assuredly enough that +just the beauty of the former of these questions was in its being of +equal application everywhere; which was far from the case with the +latter. The question of how people looked, and of how their look counted +for a thousand relations, had risen before me too early and kept me +company too long for me not to have made a fight over it, from the very +shame of appearing at all likely to give it up, had some fleeting +delusion led me to cast a slur upon it. It would do, I was already sure, +half the work of carrying me through life, and where was better proof of +all it would have to give than just in the fact of what it was then and +there doing? It worked for appreciation—not one of the uses of which as +an act of intelligence had, all round, finer connections; and on the +day, in short, when one should cease to live in large measure by one's +eyes (with the imagination of course all the while waiting on this) one +would have taken the longest step towards not living at all. My +companions—however scantly indeed they were to become such—were +subject to my so practising in a degree which represented well-nigh the +whole of my relation with them, small reciprocity for<a name="page_350" id="page_350"></a> them as there may +have been in it; since vision, and nothing but vision, was from +beginning to end the fruit of my situation among them. There was not one +of them as to whom it didn't matter that he "looked," by my fancy of +him, thus or so; the key to this disposition of the accents being for me +to such an extent that, as I have said, I was with all intensity taking +in New England and that I knew no better <i>immediate</i> way than to take it +in by my senses. What that name really comprehended had been a mystery, +daily growing less, to which everything that fell upon those senses +referred itself, making the innumerable appearances hang together ever +so densely. Theophilus Parsons, with his tone, his unction, his homage +still to some ancient superstition, some standard of manners, reached +back as to a state of provincialism rounded and compact, quite +self-supporting, which gave it serenity and quality, something +comparatively rich and urban; the good ex-Governor, on the other hand, +of whom I think with singular tenderness, opened through every note of +aspect and expression straight into those depths of rusticity which more +and more unmistakably underlay the social order at large and out of +which one felt it to have emerged in any degree but at scattered points. +Where it did emerge, I seemed to see, it held itself as high as +possible, conscious, panting a little, elate with<a name="page_351" id="page_351"></a> the fact of having +cleared its skirts, saved its life, consolidated its Boston, yet as with +wastes unredeemed, roundabout it, propping up and pushing in—all so +insistently that the light in which one for the most part considered the +scene was strongly coloured by their action. This was one's clue to the +labyrinth, if labyrinth it was to be called—a generalisation into which +everything fitted, first to surprise and then indubitably to relief, +from the moment one had begun to make it. Under its law the Puritan +capital, however visibly disposed to spread and take on new disguises, +affected me as a rural centre even to a point at which I had never known +anything as rural; there being involved with this too much further food +for curiosity and wonder. Boston was in a manner of its own stoutly and +vividly urban, not only a town, but a town of history—so that how did +it manage to be such different things at the same time? That was +doubtless its secret—more and more interesting to study in proportion +as, on closer acquaintance, yet an acquaintance before which the sense +of one's preferred view from outside never gave way, one felt the +equilibrium attained as on the whole an odd fusion and intermixture, of +the chemical sort as it were, and not a matter of elements or aspects +sharply alternating. There was in the exhibition at its best distinctly +a savour<a name="page_352" id="page_352"></a>—an excellent thing for a community to have, and part of the +savour was, as who should say, the breath of the fields and woods and +waters, though at their domesticated and familiarised stage, or the echo +of a tone which had somehow become that of the most educated of our +societies without ceasing to be that of the village.</p> + +<p>Of so much from the first I felt sure, and this all the more that by my +recollection of New York, even indeed by my recollection of Albany, we +had been aware in those places of no such strain. New York at least had +been whatever disagreeable, not to say whatever agreeable, other thing +one might have declared it—it might even have been vulgar, though that +cheap substitute for an account of anything didn't, I think, in the +connection, then exist for me; but the last reference to its nature +likely to crop up in its social soil was beyond question the flower of +the homely. New England had, by one's impression, cropped up there, but +had done so just <i>as</i> New England, New England unabsorbed and +unreconciled; which was exactly a note in the striated, the piebald or, +more gracefully, cosmopolite local character. I am not sure that the +comparatively—I say comparatively—market-town suggestion of the city +by the Charles came out for me as a positive richness, but it did +essentially contribute to what had become so highly desirable,<a name="page_353" id="page_353"></a> the +reinforcement of my vision of American life by the idea of variety. I +apparently required of anything I should take to my heart that it should +be, approached at different angles, "like" as many other things as +possible—in accordance with which it made for a various "America" that +Boston should seem really strong, really in not having, for better or +worse, the same irrepressible likenesses as New York. I invoked, I +called down the revelation of, new likenesses by the simple act of +threading the Boston streets, whether by garish day (the afterglow of +the great snowfalls of winter was to turn in particular to a blinding +glare, an unequalled hardness of light,) or under that mantle of night +which draped as with the garb of adventure our long-drawn townward +little rumbles in the interest of the theatre or of Parker's—oh the +sordid, yet never in the least deterrent conditions of transit in that +age of the unabbreviated, the dividing desert and the primitive +horse-car! (The desert is indeed, despite other local developments and +the general theory of the rate at which civilisation spreads and +ugliness wanes, still very much what it was in the last mid-century, but +the act of passage through it has been made to some extent easier.) +Parker's played in the intercourse of Cambridge with Boston a part of a +preponderance that I<a name="page_354" id="page_354"></a> look back upon, I confess, as the very condition +of the purest felicity we knew—I knew at any rate myself none, whether +of a finer or a grosser strain, that competed with this precious +relation. Competition has thickened since and proportions have +altered—to no small darkening of the air, but the time was surely +happier; a single such <i>point de repère</i> not only sufficed but richly +heaped up the measure. Parker's, on the whole side of the joy of life, +<i>was</i> Boston—speaking as under the thrill of early occasions +recaptured; Boston could be therefore, in the acutest connections, those +of young comradeship and young esthetic experience, heaven save the +mark, fondly prepared or properly crowned, but the enjoyed and shared +repast, literally the American feast, as I then appraised such values; a +basis of native abundance on which everything else rested. The theatre, +resorted to whenever possible, rested indeed doubtless most, though with +its heaviest weight thrown perhaps at a somewhat later time; the theatre +my uncanny appetite for which strikes me as almost abnormal in the light +of what I braved to reach it from the studious suburb, or more +particularly braved to return from it. I touch alas no spring that +doesn't make a hum of memories, and pick them over as I will three or +four of that scenic strain linger on my sense. The extraordinary fact +about these—which plays into<a name="page_355" id="page_355"></a> my generalisation a little way back—was +that, for all the connection of such occasions with the great interest +of the theatre at large, there was scarce an impression of the stage +wrung from current opportunity that didn't somehow underscore itself +with the special Boston emphasis; and this in spite of the fact that +plays and performers in those days were but a shade less raggedly +itinerant over the land than they are now. The implication of the +provincial in the theatric air, and of the rustic in the provincial, may +have been a matter of the "house" itself, with its twenty kinds of +redolence of barbarism—with the kind determined by the very audience +perhaps indeed plainest; vivid to me at all events is it how I felt even +at the time, in repairing to the Howard Atheneum to admire Miss Maggie +Mitchell and Miss Kate Bateman, that one would have had only to scratch +a little below the surface of the affair to come upon the but +half-buried Puritan curse not so very long before devoted to such +perversities. Wasn't the curse still in the air, and could anything less +than a curse, weighing from far back on the general conscience, have +accounted for one could scarce say what want of self-respect in the +total exhibition?—for that intimation more than anything else perhaps +of the underhand snicker with which one sat so oddly associated. By the +blest law of<a name="page_356" id="page_356"></a> youth and fancy withal one did admire the actress—the +young need to admire as flatly as one could broke through all crowding +apprehensions. I like to put it down that nothing in the world qualified +my wonder at the rendering by the first of the performers I have named +of the figure of "Fanchon the Cricket" in a piece so entitled, an +artless translation from a German original, if I rightly remember, which +original had been an arrangement for the stage of La Petite Fadette, +George Sand's charming rustic idyll. I like to put it down that Miss +Maggie Mitchell's having for years, as I gathered, twanged that one +string and none other; every night of her theatric life, over the huge +country, before she was revealed to us—just as Mr. Joe Jefferson, with +no word of audible reprehension ever once addressed to him, was to have +twanged his—did nothing to bedim the brightness of our vision or the +apparent freshness of her art, and that above all it seemed a privilege +critically to disengage the delicacy of this art and the rare effect of +the natural in it from the baseness in which it was framed: so golden a +glimmer is shed, as one looks back, from any shaky little torch lighted, +by whatever fond stretch, at the high esthetic flame. Upon these faint +sparks in the night of time would I gently breathe, just to see them +again distinguishably glow, rather than<a name="page_357" id="page_357"></a> leave their momentary function +uncommemorated. Strange doubtless were some of the things that +represented these momentary functions—strange I mean in proportion to +the fires they lighted. The small bower of the muse in Winthrop Square +was first to know the fluttered descent of the goddess to my appeal for +her aid in the composition of a letter from which the admired Miss +Maggie should gather the full force of my impression. Particularly do I +incline even now to mention that she testified to her having gratefully +gathered it by the despatch to me in return of a little printed copy of +the play, a scant pamphlet of "acting edition" humility, addressed in a +hand which assumed a romantic cast as soon as I had bethought myself of +finding for it a happy precedent in that of Pendennis's Miss +Fotheringay.</p> + +<p>It had been perhaps to the person of this heroine that Pendennis +especially rendered homage, while I, without illusions, or at least +without confusions, was fain to discriminate in favour of the magic of +method, that is of genius, itself; which exactly, more than anything +else could have done (success, as I considered, crowning my +demonstration,) contributed to consecrate to an exquisite use, <i>the</i> +exquisite, my auspicious <i>réduit</i> aforesaid. For an esthetic vibration +to whatever touch had but to be intense enough to tremble<a name="page_358" id="page_358"></a> on into other +reactions under other blest contacts and commotions. It was by the +operation again of the impulse shaking me up to an expression of what +the elder star of the Howard Atheneum had artistically "meant" to me +that I first sat down beside my view of the Brighton hills to enrol +myself in the bright band of the fondly hoping and fearfully doubting +who count the days after the despatch of manuscripts. I formally +addressed myself under the protection, not to say the inspiration, of +Winthrop Square to the profession of literature, though nothing would +induce me now to name the periodical on whose protracted silence I had +thus begun to hang with my own treasures of reserve to match it. The +bearing of which shy ecstasies—shy of exhibition then, that is, save as +achievements recognised—is on their having thus begun, at any rate, to +supply all the undertone one needed to whatever positive perfunctory +show; the show proceeding as it could, all the while, thanks to much +help from the undertone, which felt called upon at times to be copious. +It is not, I allow, that memory may pretend for me to keep the two +elements of the under and the over always quite distinct—it would have +been a pity all round, in truth, should they have altogether escaped +mixing and fraternising. The positive perfunctory show, at all events, +to repeat my term, hitched itself<a name="page_359" id="page_359"></a> along from point to point, and could +have no lack of outside support to complain of, I reflect, from the +moment I could make my own every image and incitement—those, as I have +noted, of the supply breaking upon me with my first glimpse of the +Cambridge scene. If I seem to make too much of these it is because I at +the time made still more, more even than my pious record has presumed to +set down. The air of truth doubtless hangs uneasy, as the matter stands, +over so queer a case as my having, by my intimation above, found +appreciability in life at the Law School even under the failure for me +of everything generally drawn upon for it, whether the glee of study, +the ardour of battle or the joy of associated adventure. Not to have +felt earlier sated with the mere mechanic amusement or vain form of +regularity at lectures would strike me to-day as a fact too "rum" for +belief if certain gathered flowers by the way, flowers of perverse +appreciation though they might but be, didn't give out again as I turn +them over their unspeakable freshness. They were perforce gathered (what +makes it still more wondrous) all too languidly; yet they massed +themselves for my sense, through the lapsing months, to the final +semblance of an intimate secret garden. Such was the odd, the almost +overwhelming consequence—or one of these, for they are many<a name="page_360" id="page_360"></a>—of an +imagination to which literally everything obligingly signified. One of +the actual penalties of this is that so few of such ancient importances +remain definable or presentable. It may in the fulness of time simply +sound <i>bête</i> that, with the crash of greater questions about one, I +should have been positively occupied with such an affair as the degree +and the exact shade to which the blest figures in the School array, each +quite for himself, might settle and fix the weight, the interest, the +function, as it were, of his Americanism. I could scarce have cleared up +even for myself, I dare say, the profit, or more pertinently the charm, +of that extravagance—and the fact was of course that I didn't feel it +as extravagance, but quite as homely thrift, moral, social, esthetic, or +indeed, as I might have been quite ready to say, practical and +professional. It was practical at least in the sense that it probably +more helped to pass the time than all other pursuits together. The real +proof of which would be of course my being able now to string together +for exhibition some of these pearls of differentiation—since it was to +differentiation exactly that I was then, in my innocence, most prompted; +not dreaming of the stiff law by which, on the whole American ground, +division of <i>type</i>, in the light of opposition and contrast, was more +and more to break down for me and fail: so that verily the recital of +my<a name="page_361" id="page_361"></a> mere concomitant efforts to pick it up again and piece its parts +together and make them somehow show and serve would be a record of +clinging courage. I may note at once, however, as a light on the +anomaly, that there hung about <i>all</i> young appearances at that period +something ever so finely derivative and which at this day rather defies +re-expression—the common character or shared function of the precious +clay so largely making up the holocausts of battle; an advantage working +for them circuitously or perhaps ambiguously enough, I grant, but still +placing them more or less under the play of its wing even when the arts +of peace happened for the hour to engage them. They potentially, they +conceivably, they indirectly paid, and nothing was for the most part +more ascertainable of them individually than that, with brothers or +other near relatives in the ranks or in commands, they came, to their +credit, of paying families. All of which again may represent the high +pitch of one's associated sensibility—there having been occasions of +crisis, were they worth recovering, when under its action places, +persons, objects animate or not, glimmered alike but through the grand +idealising, the generalising, blur. At moments of less fine a strain, it +may be added, the sources of interest presented themselves in looser +formation. The young appearances, as I like to continue to call<a name="page_362" id="page_362"></a> them, +could be pleasingly, or at least robustly homogeneous, and yet, for +livelier appeal to fancy, flower here and there into special cases of +elegant deviation—"sports," of exotic complexion, one enjoyed +denominating these (or would have enjoyed had the happy figure then +flourished) thrown off from the thick stem that was rooted under our +feet. Even these rare exceptions, the few apparitions referring +themselves to other producing conditions than the New England, wrought +by contrast no havoc in the various quantities for which that section +was responsible; it was certainly refreshing—always to the fond +imagination—that there were, for a change, imprints in the stuff of +youth that didn't square with the imprint, virtually <i>one</i> throughout, +imposed by Springfield or Worcester, by Providence or Portland, or +whatever rural wastes might lie between; yet the variations, I none the +less gather as I strive to recall them, beguiled the spirit (talking +always of my own) rather than coerced it, and this even though fitting +into life as one had already more or less known it, fitting in, that is, +with more points of contact and more reciprocation of understanding than +the New England relation seemed able to produce. It could in fact fairly +blind me to the implication of an inferior immediate <i>portée</i> that such +and such a shape of the New York heterogeneity,<a name="page_363" id="page_363"></a> however simplified by +silliness, or at least by special stupidity (though who was I to note +<i>that</i>?) pressed a certain spring of association, waiting as I always +was for such echoes, rather than left it either just soundless or +bunglingly touched.</p> + +<p>It was for example a link with the larger life, as I am afraid I must +have privately called it, that a certain young New Yorker, an outsider +of still more unmistakable hue than I could suppose even myself, came +and went before us with an effect of cultivated detachment that I +admired at the time for its perfect consistency, and that caused him, it +was positively thrilling to note, not in the least to forfeit sympathy, +but to shine in the high light of public favour. The richest reflections +sprang for me from this, some of them inspiring even beyond the promptly +grasped truth, a comparative commonplace, that the variation or +opposition sufficiently embodied, the line of divergence sharply enough +drawn, always achieves some triumph by the fact of its emphasis, by its +putting itself through at any cost, any cost in particular of ridicule. +So much one had often observed; but what really enriched the dear +induction and made our friend's instance thus remain with me was the +part played by the utter blandness itself of his protest, such an +exhibition of the sweet in the imperturbable.<a name="page_364" id="page_364"></a> This it was that +enshrined him, by my vision, in a popularity than which nothing could +have seemed in advance less indicated, and that makes me wonder to-day +whether he was simply the luckiest of gamblers or just a conscious and +consummate artist. He reappears to me as a finished fop, finished to +possibilities we hadn't then dreamt of, and as taking his stand, or +rather taking all his walks, on <i>that</i>, the magician's wand of his +ideally tight umbrella under his arm and the magician's familiar of his +bristling toy-terrier at his heels. He became thus an apparition +entrancing to the mind. His clothes were of a perfection never known nor +divined in that sphere, a revelation, straight and blindingly authentic, +of Savile Row in its prime; his single eyeglass alone, and his inspired, +his infinite use of it as at once a defensive crystal wall and a lucid +window of hospitality, one couldn't say most which, might well have +foredoomed him, by all likelihood, to execration and destruction. He +became none the less, as I recover him, our general pride and joy; his +entrances and exits were acclaimed beyond all others, and it was his +rare privilege to cause the note of derision and the note of affection +to melt together, beyond separation, in vague but virtual homage to the +refreshment of felt type. To see it dawn upon rude breasts (for rude, +comparatively, were the breasts of the<a name="page_365" id="page_365"></a> typeless, or at the best of the +typed but in one character, throughout the same,) that defiant and +confident difference carried far enough might avert the impulse to slay, +was to muse ever so agreeably on the queer means by which great morals, +picking up a life as they may, can still get themselves pointed. The +"connotation" of the trivial, it was thus attaching to remark, could +perfectly serve when that of the important, roughly speaking, failed for +a grateful <i>connection</i>—from the moment some such was massed invitingly +in view. The difficulty with the type about me was that, in its +monotony, beginning and ending with itself, it <i>had</i> no connections and +suggested none; whereas the grace of the salient apparition I have +perhaps too earnestly presented lay in its bridging over our separation +from worlds, from great far-off reservoirs, of a different mixture +altogether, another civility and complexity. Young as I was, I myself +clearly recognised that ground of reference, saw it even to some extent +in the light of experience—so could I stretch any scrap of contact; +kept hold of it by fifty clues, recalls and reminders that dangled for +me mainly out of books and magazines and heard talk, things of picture +and story, things of prose and verse and anecdotal vividness in fine, +and, as I have elsewhere allowed, for the most part hoardedly English +and French. Our<a name="page_366" id="page_366"></a> "character man" of the priceless monocle and the +trotting terrier was "like" some type in a collection of types—that was +the word for it; and, there being no collection, nor the ghost of one, +roundabout us, was a lone courageous creature in the desert of our bald +reiterations. The charm of which conclusion was exactly, as I have said, +that the common voice did, by every show, bless him for rendered +service, his dropped hint of an ideal containing the germ of other +ideals—and confessed by that fact to more appetites and inward +yearnings than it the least bit consciously counted up.</p> + +<p>Not quite the same service was rendered by G. A. J., who had no ridicule +to brave, and I can speak with confidence but of the connections, rather +confused if they were, opened up to me by his splendid aspect and which +had absolutely nothing in common with the others that hung near. It was +brilliant to a degree that none other had by so much as a single shade +the secret of, and it carried the mooning fancy to a further reach even, +on the whole, than the figure of surprise I have just commemorated; this +last comparatively scant in itself and rich only by what it made us read +into it, and G. A. J. on the other hand intrinsically and actively ample +and making us read wonders, as it were, into whatever it might be that +was, as we used to say, "back<a name="page_367" id="page_367"></a> of" him. He had such a flush of life and +presence as to make that reference mysteriously and inscrutably +loom—and the fascinating thing about this, as we again would have said, +was that it could strike me as so beguilingly American. That too was +part of the glamour, that its being so could kick up a mystery which one +might have pushed on to explore, whereas our New York friend only kicked +up a certainty (for those properly prepared) and left not exploration, +but mere assured satisfaction, the mark of the case. G. A. J. reached +westward, westward even of New York, and southward at least as far as +Virginia; teeming facts that I discovered, so to speak, by my own +unaided intelligence—so little were they responsibly communicated. +Little was communicated that I recover—it would have had to drop from +too great a personal height; so that the fun, as I may call it, was the +greater for my opening all by myself to perceptions. I was getting +furiously American, in the big sense I invoked, through this felt growth +of an ability to reach out westward, southward, anywhere, everywhere, on +that apprehension of finding myself but patriotically charmed. Thus +there dawned upon me the grand possibility that, charm for charm, the +American, the assumed, the postulated, would, in the particular case of +its really acting, count double; whereas the European<a name="page_368" id="page_368"></a> paid for being +less precarious by being also less miraculous. It counted single, as one +might say, and only made up for that by counting almost always. It +mightn't be anything like almost always, even at the best, no doubt, +that an American-grown value of aspect would so entirely emerge as G. A. +J.'s seemed to do; but what did this exactly point to unless that the +rarity so implied would be in the nature of the splendid? That at least +was the way the cultivation of patriotism as a resource was the +cultivation of workable aids to the same, however ingenious these. (Just +to glow belligerently with one's country was no resource, but a +primitive instinct breaking through; and besides this resources were +cooling, not heating.) It might have seemed that I might after all +perfectly dispense with friends when simple acquaintances, and rather +feared ones at that, though feared but for excess of lustre, could +kindle in the mind such bonfires of thought, feeding the flame with +gestures and sounds and light accidents of passage so beyond their own +supposing. In spite of all which, however, G. A. J. was marked for a +friend and taken for a kinsman from the day when his blaze of colour +should have sufficiently cleared itself up for me to distinguish the +component shades.<a name="page_369" id="page_369"></a></p> + +<h2><a name="XI" id="XI"></a>XI</h2> + +<p>I am fully aware while I go, I should mention, of all that flows from +the principle governing, by my measure, these recoveries and +reflections—even to the effect, hoped for at least, of stringing their +apparently dispersed and disordered parts upon a fine silver thread; +none other than the principle of response to a long-sought occasion, now +gratefully recognised, for making trial of the recording and figuring +act on behalf of some case of the imaginative faculty under cultivation. +The personal history, as it were, of an imagination, a lively one of +course, in a given and favourable case, had always struck me as a task +that a teller of tales might rejoice in, his advance through it +conceivably causing at every step some rich precipitation—unless it be +rather that the play of strong imaginative passion, passion strong +enough to <i>be</i>, for its subject or victim, the very interest of life, +constitutes in itself an endless crisis. Fed by every contact and every +apprehension, and feeding in turn every motion and every act, wouldn't +the light in which it might so cause the whole scene of life to unroll +inevitably become as fine a thing as possible to<a name="page_370" id="page_370"></a> represent? The idea of +some pretext for such an attempt had again and again, naturally, haunted +me; the man of imagination, and of an "awfully good" one, showed, as the +creature of that force or the sport of that fate or the wielder of that +arm, for the hero of a hundred possible fields—if one could but first +"catch" him, after the fashion of the hare in the famous receipt. Who +and what might he prove, when caught, in respect to <i>other</i> signs and +conditions? He might take, it would seem, some finding and launching, +let alone much handling—which itself, however, would be exactly part of +the pleasure. Meanwhile, it no less appeared, there were other subjects +to go on with, and even if one had to wait for him he would still +perhaps come. It happened for me that he <i>was</i> belatedly to come, but +that he was to turn up then in a shape almost too familiar at first for +recognition, the shape of one of those residual substitutes that engage +doubting eyes the day after the fair. He had been with me all the while, +and only too obscurely and intimately—I had not found him in the market +as an exhibited or <i>offered</i> value. I had in a word to draw him forth +from within rather than meet him in the world before me, the more +convenient sphere of the objective, and to make him objective, in short, +had to turn nothing less than myself inside out. What was <i>I</i> thus,<a name="page_371" id="page_371"></a> +within and essentially, what had I ever been and could I ever be but a +man of imagination at the active pitch?—so that if it was a question of +treating <i>some</i> happy case, any that would give me what, artistically +speaking, I wanted, here on the very spot was one at hand in default of +a better. It wasn't what I should have preferred, yet it was after all +the example I knew best and should feel most at home with—granting +always that objectivity, the prize to be won, shouldn't just be +frightened away by the odd terms of the affair. It is of course for my +reader to say whether or no what I have done <i>has</i> meant defeat; yet +even if this should be his judgment I fall back on the interest, at the +worst, of certain sorts of failure. I shall have brought up from the +deep many things probably not to have been arrived at for the benefit of +these pages without my particular attempt. Sundry of such I seem still +to recognise, and not least just now those involved in that visionary +"assistance" at the drama of the War, from however far off, which had +become a habit for us without ceasing to be a strain. I am sure I +thought more things under that head, with the fine visionary ache, than +I thought in all other connections together; for the simple reason that +one had to <i>ask</i> leave—of one's own spirit—for these last +intermissions, whereas one but took it, with both hands free,<a name="page_372" id="page_372"></a> for one's +sense of the bigger cause. There was not in that the least complication +of consciousness. I have sufficiently noted how my apprehension of the +bigger cause was at the same time, and this all through, at once +quickened and kept low; to the point that positively my whole +acquaintance of the personal sort even with such a matter as my brother +Wilky's enrolment in the 44th Massachusetts was to reduce itself to but +a single visit to him in camp.</p> + +<p>I recall an afternoon at Readville, near Boston, and the fashion in +which his state of juniority gave way, for me, on the spot, to +immensities of superior difference, immensities that were at the same +time intensities, varieties, supremacies, of the enviable in the +all-difficult and the delightful in the impossible: such a fairy-tale +seemed it, and withal such a flat revolution, that this soft companion +of my childhood should have such romantic chances and should have +mastered, by the mere aid of his native gaiety and sociability, such +mysteries, such engines, such arts. To become first a happy soldier and +then an easy officer was in particular for G. W. J. an exercise of +sociability—and that above all was my extract of the Readville scene, +which most came home to me as a picture, an interplay of bright breezy +air and high shanty-covered levels with blue horizons, and laughing, +welcoming, sunburnt young<a name="page_373" id="page_373"></a> men, who seemed mainly to bristle, through +their welcome, with Boston genealogies, and who had all alike turned +handsome, only less handsome than their tawny-bearded Colonel, under I +couldn't have said what common grace of clear blue toggery imperfectly +and hitchingly donned in the midst of the camp labours that I gaped at +(by the blessing of heaven I could in default of other adventures still +gape) as at shining revels. I couldn't "do things," I couldn't +indefinitely hang about, though on occasion I did so, as it comes back +to me, verily to desperation; which had to be my dim explanation—dim as +to my ever insisting on it—of so rare a snatch at opportunity for +gapings the liveliest, or in better terms admirations the crudest, that +I could have presumed to encumber the scene with. Scarce credible to me +now, even under recall of my frustrations, that I was able in all this +stretch of time to respond but to a single other summons to admire at +any cost, which I think must have come again from Readville, and the +occasion of which, that of my brother's assumed adjutancy of the so +dramatically, so much more radically recruited 54th involved a view +superficially less harmonious. The whole situation was more wound up and +girded then, the formation of negro regiments affected us as a +tremendous War measure, and I have glanced in another place at<a name="page_374" id="page_374"></a> the +consequence of it that was at the end of a few months most pointedly to +touch ourselves. That second aspect of the weeks of preparation before +the departure of the regiment can not at all have suggested a frolic, +though at the time I don't remember it as grim, and can only gather +that, as the other impression had been of something quite luminous and +beautiful, so this was vaguely sinister and sad—perhaps simply through +the fact that, though our sympathies, our own as a family's, were, in +the current phrase, all enlisted on behalf of the race that had sat in +bondage, it was impossible for the mustered presence of more specimens +of it, and of stranger, than I had ever seen together, not to make the +young men who were about to lead them appear sacrificed to the general +tragic need in a degree beyond that of their more orthodox appearances. +The air of sacrifice was, however, so to brighten as to confound itself +with that of splendid privilege on the day (May 28th, '63) of the march +of the 54th out of Boston, its fairest of young commanders at its head, +to great reverberations of music, of fluttering banners, launched +benedictions and every public sound; only from that scene, when it took +place, I had to be helplessly absent—just as I see myself in a like +dismal manner deprived of any nearness of view of my still younger +brother's military metamorphosis<a name="page_375" id="page_375"></a> and contemporary initiation. I vainly +question memory for some such picture of <i>him</i>, at this stage of his +adventure, as would have been certain to hang itself, for reasons of +wonder and envy again, in my innermost cabinet. Our differently +compacted and more variously endowed Bob, who had strained much at every +tether, was so eager and ardent that it made for him a positive +authority; but what most recurs to me of his start in the 45th, or of my +baffled vision of it, is the marvel of our not having all just wept, +more than anything else, either for his being so absurdly young or his +being so absurdly strenuous—we might have had our choice of pretexts +and protests. It seemed so short a time since he had been l'ingénieux +petit Robertson of the domestic schoolroom, pairing with our small +sister as I paired with Wilky. We didn't in the least weep, however—we +smiled as over the interest of childhood at its highest bloom, and that +my parents, with their consistent tenderness, should have found their +surrender of their latest born so workable is doubtless a proof that we +were all lifted together as on a wave that might bear us where it would. +Our ingenious Robertson was but seventeen years old, but I suspect his +ingenuity of having, in so good a cause, anticipated his next birthday +by a few months. The 45th was a nine-months regiment,<a name="page_376" id="page_376"></a> but he got +himself passed out of it, in advance of its discharge, to a lieutenancy +in the 55th U.S.C.T., Colonel A. P. Hallowell (transferred from +lieutenant-colonelcy of the 54th) commanding; though not before he had +been involved in the siege of Charleston, whence the visionary, the +quite Edgar Poeish look, for my entertainment, of the camp-covered +"Folly Island" of his letters. While his regiment was engaged in +Seymour's raid on Florida he suffered a serious sunstroke, with such +consequences that he was recommended for discharge; of which he declined +to avail himself, obtaining instead a position on General Ames's staff +and enjoying thus for six months the relief of being mounted. But he +returned to his regiment in front of Charleston (after service with the +Tenth Army Corps, part of the Army of the James, before Petersburg and +Richmond); and though I have too scant an echo of his letters from that +scene one of the passages that I do recover is of the happiest. "It was +when the line wavered and I saw Gen'l Hartwell's horse on my right rear +up with a shell exploding under him that I rammed my spurs into my own +beast, who, maddened with pain, carried me on through the line, throwing +men down, and over the Rebel works some distance ahead of our troops." +For this action he was breveted captain; and the 55th, later on,<a name="page_377" id="page_377"></a> was +the first body of troops to enter Charleston and march through its +streets—which term of his experience, as it unfolded, presents him to +my memory as again on staff duty; with Brigadier-Generals Potter, Rufus +Hatch and his old superior and, at my present writing, gallant and vivid +survivor, Alfred Hartwell, who had been his captain and his +lieut.-colonel in the 45th and the 55th respectively.<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a><a name="page_378" id="page_378"></a></p> + +<p>I can at all events speak perfectly of my own sense of the uplifting +wave just alluded to during the couple of years that the "boys'" letters +from the field came in to us—with the one abatement of glamour for them +the fact that so much of their substance was in the whole air of life +and their young reports of sharp experience but a minor pipe in the huge +mixed concert always in our ears. Faded and touching pages, these +letters are in some abundance before me now, breathing confidence and +extraordinary cheer—though surviving principally but in Wilky's +admirable<a name="page_379" id="page_379"></a> hand, of all those I knew at that time the most humiliating +to a feebler yet elder fist; and with their liveliest present action to +recompose for me not by any means so much the scenes and circumstances, +the passages of history concerned, as to make me know again and +reinhabit the places, the hours, the stilled or stirred conditions +through which I took them in. These conditions seem indeed mostly to +have settled for me into the single sense of what I missed, compared to +what the authors of our bulletins gained, in wondrous opportunity of +vision, that is <i>appreciation of the thing seen</i>—there being clearly +such a lot of this, and all of it, by my conviction, portentous and +prodigious. The key to which assurance was that I longed to live by my +eyes, in the midst of such far-spreading chances, in greater measure +than I then had help to, and that the measure in which <i>they</i> had it +gloriously overflowed. This capacity in them to deal with such an +affluence of life stood out from every line, and images sprung up about +them at every turn of the story. The story, the general one, of the +great surge of action on which they were so early carried, was to take +still other turns during the years I now speak of, some of these not of +the happiest; but with the same relation to it on my own part too +depressingly prolonged—that of seeing, sharing, envying, applauding,<a name="page_380" id="page_380"></a> +pitying, all from too far-off, and with the queer sense that, whether or +no they would prove to have had the time of their lives, it seemed that +the only time I should have had would stand or fall by theirs. This was +to be yet more deplorably the case later on—I like to give a twitch to +the curtain of a future reduced to the humility of a past: when, the War +being over and we confronted with all the personal questions it had +showily muffled up only to make them step forth with their sharper +angles well upon us, our father, easily beguiled, acquired by purchase +and for the benefit of his younger sons divers cottonlands in Florida; +which scene of blighted hopes it perhaps was that cast upon me, at its +defiant distance, the most provoking spell. There was provocation, at +those subsequent seasons, in the very place-name of Serenola, beautiful +to ear and eye; unforgettable were to remain the times, while the vain +experiment dragged on for our anxiety and curiosity, and finally to our +great discomfiture, when my still ingenuous young brothers, occupied in +raising and selling crops that refused alike, it seemed, to come and to +go, wafted northward their fluctuating faith, their constant hospitality +and above all, for one of the number at home, their large unconscious +evocations. The mere borrowed, and so brokenly borrowed, impression of +southern fields basking<a name="page_381" id="page_381"></a> in a light we didn't know, of scented +sub-tropic nights, of a situation suffused with economic and social +drama of the strangest and sharpest, worked in me, I dare say most +deceptively, as a sign of material wasted, my material not being in the +least the crops unproduced or unsold, but the precious store of images +ungathered. However, the vicarious sensation had, as I say, been intense +enough, from point to point, before that; a series of Wilky's letters of +the autumn of '62 and the following winter during operations in North +Carolina intended apparently to clear an approach to Charleston overflow +with the vivacity of his interest in whatever befell, and still more in +whatever promised, and reflect, in this freshness of young assurances +and young delusions, the general public fatuity. The thread of interest +for me here would certainly be much more in an exhibition of some such +artless notes of the period, with their faded marks upon them, than in +that of the spirit of my own poor perusal of them—were it not that +those things shrink after years to the common measure when not +testifying to some rarity of experience and expression. All experience +in the field struck me indeed as then rare, and I wondered at both my +brothers' military mastery of statement, through which played, on the +part of the elder, a whimsicality of "turn," an oddity of verbal +collocation, that<a name="page_382" id="page_382"></a> we had ever cherished, in the family circle, as the +sign of his address. "The next fight we have, I expect," he writes from +Newberne, N. C., on New Year's Day '63, "will be a pretty big one, but I +am confident that under Foster and our gunboats we will rid the State of +these miserable wretches whom the Divine Providence has created in its +wisdom to make men wish——! Send on then, open yourselves a recruiting +establishment if necessary—all we want is numbers! <i>They</i> are the +greatest help to the individual soldier on the battle-field. If he feels +he has 30,000 men behind him pushing on steadily to back him he is in +much more fighting trim than when away in the rear with 10,000 ahead of +him fighting like madmen. It seems that Halleck told Foster when F. was +in Washington that he scarcely slept for a week after learning that we +were near Goldsboro', having heard previously that a reinforcement of +40,000 Rebels were coming down there to whip us. Long live Foster!"</p> + +<p>"It was so cold this morning," he writes at another and earlier date, +"that Divine service was held in our barracks instead of out-of-doors, +as it generally is, and it was the most impressive that I have ever +heard. The sermon was on profanity, and the chaplain, after making all +the observations and doing by mouth and action as much as he could to +rid the regiment of the<a name="page_383" id="page_383"></a> curse, sat down, credulous being, thinking he +had settled the question for ever. Colonel Lee then rose and said that +the chaplain the other day accused him—most properly—of profanity and +of its setting a very bad example to the regiment; also that when he +took the command he had felt how very bad the thing would be in its +influence on all around him. He felt that it would be the great conflict +of his life. At this point his head drooped and he lifted his +handkerchief to his face; but he went on in conclusion: 'Now boys, let +us try one and all to vindicate the sublime principles our chaplain has +just so eloquently expressed, and I will do <i>my</i> best. I hope to God I +have wounded no man's feelings by an oath; if I have I humbly beg his +pardon.' Here he finished." How this passage impressed me at the time +signifies little; but I find myself now feel in its illustration of what +could then happen among soldiers of the old Puritan Commonwealth a rich +recall of some story from Cromwellian ranks. Striking the continuity, +and not unworthy of it my brother's further comment. "I leave you to +imagine which of these appeals did most good, the conventional address +of the pastor or the honest manly heart-touching acknowledgment of our +Colonel. That is the man through and through, and I heard myself say +afterwards: 'Let him swear to all eternity if<a name="page_384" id="page_384"></a> he <i>is</i> that sort of man, +and if profanity makes such, for goodness' sake let us all swear.' This +may be a bad doctrine, but is one that might after all undergo +discussion." From which letter I cull further: "I really begin to think +you've been hard in your judgments of McClellan. You don't know what an +enemy we have to conquer. Every secesh I've seen, and all the rebel +prisoners here, talk of the War with such callous earnestness." A letter +from Newberne of December 2nd contains a "pathetic" record of momentary +faith, the sort so abundant at the time in what was not at all to be +able to happen. Moreover a name rings out of it which it is a kind of +privilege to give again to the air—when one can do so with some +approach to an association signified; so much did Charles Lowell's +virtue and value and death represent at the season soon to come for +those who stood within sight of them, and with such still unextinct +emotion may the few of these who now survive turn to his admirably +inspired kinsman's Harvard Commemoration Ode and find it infinitely and +tenderly suffused with pride. Two gallantest nephews, particularly +radiant to memory, had James Russell Lowell to commemorate.</p> + +<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poetry"> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">I sweep for them a pæan, but they wane</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 2em;">Again and yet again</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Into a dirge and die away in pain.<a name="page_385" id="page_385"></a></span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"> </td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">In these brave ranks I only see the gaps,</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Thinking of dear ones whom the dumb turf wraps,</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Dark to the triumph which they died to gain.</span></td></tr> +</table> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>Cabot has had news that Mr. Amos Lawrence of Boston is getting up a +cavalry regiment (Wilky writes), and he has sent home to try for a +commission as 2nd lieutenant. Now if we could only <i>both</i> get such +a commission in that regiment you can judge yourself how desirable +it would be. Perkins will probably have one in the Massachusetts +2nd and our orderly stands a pretty good chance of one in the 44th. +This cavalry colonelcy will probably be for Cabot's cousin, Charles +Lowell.</p> + +<p>There is a report that we start this week for Kinston, and if so we +shall doubtless have a good little fight. We have just received 2 +new Mass. Regiments, the 8th and the 51st. We have absolutely no +time to ourselves; and what time we do have we want much more to +give to lying down than to anything else. But try your best for me +now, and I promise you to do <i>my</i> best wherever I am.</p></div> + +<p>A homelier truth is in a few lines three weeks later.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>The men as a general thing think war a mean piece of business as +it's carried on in this State; we march 20 or 30 miles and find the +enemy entrenched in rifle-pits or hidden away in some +out-of-the-way place; we send our artillery forward, and after a +brisk skirmish ahead the foe is driven back into the woods, and we +march on for 20 miles more to find the same luck. We were all on +the last march praying for a fight, so that we might halt and throw +off our knapsacks. I don't pretend I am eager to make friends with +bullets,<a name="page_386" id="page_386"></a> but at Whitehall, after marching some 20 miles, I was on +this account really glad when I heard cannonading ahead and the +column was halted and the fight began.</p></div> + +<p>The details of this engagement are missing from the letter, but we found +matter of interest in two or three other passages—one in particular +recording a December day's march with 15,000 men, "not including +artillerymen," 70 pieces of artillery and 1100 cavalry; which, "on +account of obstructions on the roads," had achieved by night but +seventeen miles and resulted in a bivouac "in 3 immense cotton-fields, +one about as large as Easton's Pond at Newport."</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>We began to see the camp fires of the advance brigade about 4 miles +ahead of us, and I assure you those miles were soon got over. I +think Willy's artistic eye would have enjoyed the sight—it seemed +so as if the world were on fire. When we arrived on the field the +stacks were made, the ranks broken and the men sent after rail +fences, which fortunately abound in this region and are the only +comfort we have at night. A long fire is made, the length of the +stacks, and one rank is placed on one side of it and the other +opposite. I try to make a picture you see, but scratch it out in +despair. The fires made, we sit down and make our coffee in our tin +dippers, and often is one of these pushed over by some careless +wretch who hasn't noticed it on the coals or has been too tired to +look. The coffee and the hard tack consumed we spread our rubber +blankets and sleep as sound as any house in Christendom. At about 5 +the fearful réveillé calls us<a name="page_387" id="page_387"></a> to our feet, we make more coffee, +drink it in a hurry, sling our knapsacks and spank down the road in +one of Foster's regular old quicksteps.</p></div> + +<p>Thrilling at our fireside of course were the particulars of the Kinston +engagement, and still more, doubtless, the happy freshness of the +writer.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>At 8 <small>A.M.</small> we were on the road, and had hardly marched 3 miles when +we knew by sounds ahead that the ball had opened. We were ordered +up and deployed in an open field on the right of the road, where we +remained some half an hour. Then we were moved some hundred yards +further, but resumed our former position in another field. Here +Foster came up to the Major, who was directly in the rear of our +company and told him to advance our left wing to support Morrison's +battery, which was about half a mile ahead. He also said he was +pressing the Rebs hard and that they were retiring at every shell +from our side. On we went, the left flank company taking the lead, +and many a bullet and shell whizzed over our heads in that longest +half-mile of my life. We seemed to be nearing the fun, for wounded +men were being carried to the rear and dead ones lay on each side +of us in the woods. We were taken into another field on the left of +the road, and before us were deployed the 23rd Mass., who were +firing in great style. First we were ordered to lie down, and then +in 5 or 10 minutes ordered up again, when we charged down that +field in a manner creditable to any Waterloo legion. I felt as if +this moment was the greatest of my life and as if all the devils of +the Inferno were my benighted system. We halted after having +charged some 60 yards, when what should we see on our left, just +out of the woods and stuck up on a rail, but a flag of truce, +placing under its<a name="page_388" id="page_388"></a> protecting wing some 50 or 60 poor cowering +wretches who, in their zeal for recognition, not only pulled out +all their pocket handkerchiefs, but in the case of one man spread +out his white shirt-flaps and offered them pacifically to the +winds. The most demonic shouts and yells were raised by the 23rd +ahead of us at this sight, in which the 44th joined; while the +regiments on our right, and that of the road, greeted in the same +frightful manner 200 prisoners they had cut off from retreat by the +bridge. So far I was alive and the thing had lasted perhaps 3 +hours; all the enemy but the 200 just named had got away over the +bridge to Kinston and our cavalry were in hot pursuit. I don't +think Sergeant G. W. has ever known greater glee in all his born +days. At about 3 <small>P.M.</small> we crossed the bridge and got into the town. +All along the road from bridge to town Rebel equipments, guns and +cartridge-boxes lay thick, and within the place dead men and horses +thickened too. We were taken ahead through the town to support the +New York 3rd Artillery beyond, where it was shelling the woods +around and ridding the place for the night of any troublesome +wanderers. The Union pickets posted out ahead that night said the +shrieks of women and children further on in the wood could be heard +perfectly all night long, these unfortunates having taken refuge +there from the threatened town. That night we lived like +fighting-cocks—molasses, pork, butter, cheese and all sorts of +different delicacies being foraged for and houses entered +regardless of the commonest dues of life, and others set on fire to +show Kinston was our own. She belonged to our army, and almost +every man claimed a house. If I had only had your orders beforehand +for trophies I could have satisfied you with anything named, from a +gold watch to an old brickbat. This is the ugly part of war. A too +victorious army soon<a name="page_389" id="page_389"></a> goes down; but we luckily didn't have time +for big demoralisation, as the next day in the afternoon we found +ourselves some 17 miles away and bivouacking in a single prodigious +cornfield.</p></div> + +<p>To which I don't resist subjoining another characteristic passage from +the same general scene as a wind-up to that small chapter of history.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>The report has gained ground to-day that we leave to-morrow, and if +so I suppose the next three months will be important ones in the +history of the War. Four ironclads and a great many gunboats are in +Beaufort Harbour; we have at present a force of 50,000 infantry, an +immense artillery and upwards of 800 cavalry. Transports +innumerable are filling up every spare inch of our harbour, and +every man's pity and charity are exercised upon Charleston, Mobile +or Wilmington. We are the only nine-months regiment going, a fact +which to the sensitive is highly gratifying, showing Foster's +evident high opinion of us. The expedition, I imagine, will be +pretty interesting, for we shall have excitement enough without the +fearful marches. To-day is Sunday, and I've been reading Hugo's +account of Waterloo in Les Misérables and preparing my mind for +something of the same sort at Wilmington. God grant the battle may +do as much harm to the Rebels as Waterloo did to the French. If it +does the fight will be worth the dreadful carnage it may involve, +and the experience for the survivors an immense treasure. Men will +fight forever if they are well treated. Give them little marching +and keep the wounded away from them, and they'll do anything. I am +very well and in capital spirits, though now and<a name="page_390" id="page_390"></a> then rather blue +about home. But only 5 months more and then heaven! General Foster +has just issued an order permitting us to inscribe Goldsboro, +Kinston and Whitehall on our banner.</p></div> + +<p>On the discharge of the 44th after the term of nine months for which it +had engaged and my brother's return home, he at once sought service +again in the Massachusetts 54th, his connection with which I have +already recorded, as well as his injuries in the assault on Fort Wagner +fruitlessly made by that regiment in the summer of '63. He recovered +with difficulty, but at last sufficiently, from his wounds (with one +effect of which he had for the rest of his short life grievously to +reckon), and made haste to rejoin his regiment in the field—to the +promotion of my gathering a few more notes. From "off Graham's point, +Tillapenny River, Headquarters 2nd Brigade," he writes in December '64.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>We started last night from the riflepits in the front of Deveaux +Neck to cross the Tillapenny and make a reconnaissance on this side +and try and get round the enemy's works. It is now half-past 10 +<small>A.M.</small>, and I have been trying to wash some of my mud off. We are all +a sorry crowd of beggars—I don't look as I did the night we left +home. I am much of the time mud from head to foot, and my spirit is +getting muddled also. But I am in excellent condition as regards my +wounds and astonish myself by my powers. I rode some 26 miles +yesterday and walked some 3 in thick mud, but don't feel a bit the +worse for it. We're<a name="page_391" id="page_391"></a> only waiting here an hour or two to get a +relief of horses, when we shall start again. We shan't have a fight +of any kind to-day, but to-morrow expect to give them a little +trouble at Pocotaligo. Colonel Hallowell commands this +reconnaissance. We have only 4 regiments and a section of artillery +from the 2nd Brigade with us. We heard some fine music from the +Rebel lines yesterday. They have got a stunning band over there. +Prisoners tell us it's a militia band from Georgia. Most all the +troops in our front are militia composed of old men and boys, the +flower of the chivalry being just now engaged with Sherman at +Savannah. We hear very heavy firing in that direction this morning, +and I guess the chivalry is getting the worst of it. The taking of +Fort McAllister the other day was a splendid thing—we got 280 +prisoners and made them go out and pick up the torpedoes round the +fort. Sherman was up at Oguchee and Ossahaw yesterday on another +consultation with Foster. We had called our whole army out the +night before in front of our works to give him three cheers. This +had a marvellous effect upon the Rebs. About 20 men came in the +night into our lines, thinking we had got reinforcements and were +going to advance. Later. A scout has just come in and tells us the +enemy are intrenched about 4 miles off, so that we <i>shall</i> have +to-day a shindy of some kind. Our headquarters are now in a large +house once owned by Judge Graham. The coloured troops are in high +spirits and have done splendidly this campaign.</p></div> + +<p>The high spirits of the coloured troops appear naturally to have been +shared by their officers—"in the field, Tillapenny River," late at +night on December 23rd, '64.<a name="page_392" id="page_392"></a></p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>We have just received such bully news to comfort us that I can't +help rising from my slumbers to drop you a line. A despatch just +received tells us that Sherman has captured 150 guns, 250,000 dols. +worth of cotton at Savannah, that Forrest is killed and routed by +Rousseau, and that Thomas has walked into Hood and given him the +worst kind of fits. I imagine the poor Rebel outposts in our front +feel pretty blue to-night, for what with that and the thermometer +at about zero I guess the night won't pass without robbing their +army of some of its best and bravest. We suffer a good deal from +the cold, but are now sitting round our camp fire in as good +spirits as men could possibly be. A despatch received early this +evening tells us to look out sharp for Hardee, but this latest news +knocks that to a cocked hat, and we are only just remembering that +that gentleman is round. My foot is bully.</p></div> + +<p>As regards that impaired member, on which he was ever afterwards +considerably to limp, he opines three days later, on Christmas evening, +that "even in the palmy days of old it never <i>felt</i> better than now." +And he goes on:</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>Though Savannah is taken I fear we shan't get much credit for +having helped to take it. Yet night and day we have been at it +hammer and tongs, and as we are away from the main army and +somewhat isolated and cut off our work has been pretty hard. We +have had only 1,200 effective men in our brigade, and out of that +number have had regularly 400 on picket night and day, and the +fatigue and extra guard duty have nearly used them up. Twice we +have been attacked and both times held our own. Twice we attacked<a name="page_393" id="page_393"></a> +and once have been driven. The only prisoners we have captured on +the whole expedition have been taken by this part of the column, +and on the whole though we didn't march into Savannah I know you +will give us a little credit for having hastened its downfall. +Three prisoners that we took the other night slept at our Hdqrs, +and we had a good long talk with them. We could get out of them +nothing at all that helps from a military point of view, but their +stories about the Confederacy were most hopeless. They were 3 +officers and gentlemen of a crack S.C. cavalry company which has +been used during the War simply to guard this coast, and their +language and state of mind were those of the true Southern +chevalier. They confessed to a great scare on finding themselves +hemmed in by coloured troops, and all agree that the niggers are +the worst enemies they have had to face. On Thursday we turned them +over to the Provost-Marshal at Deveaux Neck, who took them to Gen'l +Hatch. The General had got our despatch announcing we could get +nothing at all out of them, and he came down on them most +ruthlessly and told them to draw lots, as one would have to swing +before night. He told them he had got the affidavit of an escaped +Union prisoner, a man captured at Honey Hill and who had come into +our lines the day previous, to the effect that he had witnessed the +hanging of a negro soldier belonging to the 26th U.S.C.T., and that +he had determined one of them should answer for it. Two seemed very +much moved, but the third, Lee by name (cousin of Gen'l Stephen Lee +of the cavalry), said he knew nothing about it, but if it was so, +so it might be. The other two were taken from each other and Gen'l +Hatch managed to draw a good deal of information from them about +our position, that is the force and nature of the enemy and works +in our front.<a name="page_394" id="page_394"></a> Lee refused to the last to answer any question +whatever, and they all 3 now await at Hilton Head the issue of the +law. The hanging of the negro seems a perfectly ascertained +fact—he was hung by the 48th Georgia Infty, and the story has +naturally much stirred up our coloured troops. If Hardee should +decide to come down on us I believe he would get the worst of it, +and only hope now that our men won't take a prisoner alive. They +certainly make a great mistake at Washington in not attending to +these little matters, and I am sure the moral effect of an order +from the President announcing that such things have happened, and +that the coloured troops have taken them thoroughly to heart, would +be greater on the Rebels than any physical blow we can deal them.</p></div> + +<p>When I read again, "in the field before Pocotaligo," toward the middle +of January '65, that "Sherman leaves to-night from Beaufort with Logan's +Corps to cross Beaufort Ferry and come up on our right flank and push on +to Pocotaligo bridge," the stir as from great things rises again for me, +wraps about Sherman's name as with the huge hum that then surrounded it, +and in short makes me give the passage such honour as I may. "We are +waiting anxiously for the sound of his musketry announcing him." I was +never in my life to wait for any such sound, but how at that juncture I +hung about with privileged Wilky! "We all propose at Hdqrs to take our +stores out and ride up to the bank of the river and watch the fight on +the other side. We are<a name="page_395" id="page_395"></a> praying to be relieved here—our men are dying +for want of clothing; and when we see Morris Island again we shall +utterly rejoice." He writes three days later from headquarters +established in a plantation the name of which, as well as that of the +stream, of whatever magnitude, that they had crossed to reach it, +happens to be marked by an illegibility quite unprecedented in his +splendid script—to the effect of a still intenser evocation (as was +then to be felt at any rate) of all the bignesses involved. "Sherman's +whole army is in our front, and they expect to move on Charleston at any +moment." Sherman's whole army!—it affected me from afar off as a vast +epic vision. The old vibration lives again, but with it also that of the +smaller and nearer, the more intimate notes—such for instance as: "I +shall go up to the 20th Corps to-morrow and try for a sight of Billy +Perkins and Sam Storrow in the 2nd Mass." Into which I somehow read, +under the touch of a ghostly hand no more "weirdly" laid than <i>that</i>, +more volumes than I can the least account for or than I have doubtless +any business to.</p> + +<p>My visionary yearning must however, I think, have drawn most to feed on +from the first of a series of missives dated from Headquarters, +Department of the South, Hilton Head S.C., this particular one of the +middle of February. "I<a name="page_396" id="page_396"></a> write in a great hurry to tell you I have been +placed on General Gillmore's staff as A.D.C. It is just the very thing +for my foot under present circumstances, and I consider myself most +fortunate. I greatly like the General, who is most kind and genial and +very considerate. My duties will be principally the carrying of orders +to Savannah, Morris Island, Fortress Monroe, Combalee(?) Florida, and +the General's correspondence. Charleston is ours," he goes on two days +later: "it surrendered to a negro regiment yesterday at 9 <small>A.M.</small> We have +just come up from Sumter, where we have hoisted the American flag. We +were lying off Bull's Bay yesterday noon waiting for this when the +General saw through his glass the stars and stripes suddenly flown from +the town hall. We immediately steamed up to Sumter and ran up the +colours there. Old Gillmore was in fine feather and I am in consummate +joy." The joy nevertheless, I may add, doesn't prevent the remark after +a couple of days more that "Charleston isn't on the whole such a very +great material victory; in fact the capture of the place is of value +only in that its moral effect tends to strengthen the Union cause." +After which he proceeds:</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>Governor Aiken of S.C. came up to Hdqrs to-day to call on the +Gen'l, and they had a long talk. He is a "gradual Emancipationist" +and says the worst of the<a name="page_397" id="page_397"></a> President's acts was his sweeping +Proclamation. Before that every one in this State was ready to come +back on the gradual system, and would have done so if Lincoln's act +hadn't driven them to madness. This is all fine talk, but there is +nothing in it. They had at least 5 months' warning and could have +in that time perfectly returned within the fold; in fact the strong +Abolitionists of the North were afraid the President had made the +thing but too easy for them and that they would get ahead of us and +themselves emancipate. This poor gentleman is simple crazy and +weakminded. Between Davis and us he <i>is</i> puzzled beyond measure, +and doesn't know what line to take. One thing though troubled him +most, namely the ingratitude of the negro. He can't conceive how +the creatures he has treated with such extraordinary kindness and +taken such care of should all be willing to leave him. He says he +was the first man in the South to introduce religion among the +blacks and that his plantation of 600 of them was a model of +civilisation and peace. Just think of this immense slaveholder +telling me as I drove him home that the coat he had on had been +turned three times and his pantaloons the only ones he possessed. +He stated this so simply and touchingly that I couldn't help +offering him a pair of mine—which he refused, however. There are +some 10,000 people in the town, mostly women and negroes, and it's +tremendously ravaged by our shell, about which they have naturally +lied from beginning to end.</p></div> + +<p>"Bob has just come down from Charleston," he writes in March—"he has +been commissioned captain in the 103rd U.S.C.T. I am sorry he has left +his regiment, still he seemed bent on doing so and offers all kinds of +reasons for it.<a name="page_398" id="page_398"></a> He may judge rightly, but I fear he's hasty;" and +indeed this might appear from a glimpse of our younger brother at his +ease given by him in a letter of some days before, written at two +o'clock in the morning and recording a day spent in a somewhat arduously +performed visit to Charleston. "I drove out to the entrenchments to-day +to see B., and found him with Hartwell (R. J.'s colonel) smoking their +long pipes on the verandah of a neat country cottage with a beautiful +garden in front of them and the birds chirping and rambling around. Bob +looks remarkably well and seemed very nice indeed. He speaks very highly +of Hartwell, and the latter the same of him. They seemed settled in +remarkable comfort at Charleston and to be taking life easy after their +180 miles march through South Carolina." He mentions further that his +visit to the captured city, begun the previous day, had been made in +interesting conditions; there is in fact matter for quotation throughout +the letter, the last of the small group from which I shall borrow. He +had, with his general, accompanied a "large Senatorial delegation from +Washington and shown them round the place." He records the delegation's +"delight" in what they saw; how "a large crowd of young ladies" were of +the party, so that the Senatorial presences were "somewhat relieved and +lightened to the<a name="page_399" id="page_399"></a> members of the staff;" and also that they all went +over to Forts Sumter and Moultrie and the adjacent works. The pleasure +of the whole company in the scene of desolation thus presented is one of +those ingenuous historic strokes that the time-spirit, after a +sufficient interval, permits itself to smile at—and is not the only +such, it may be noted, in the sincere young statement.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>To-morrow they go to Savannah, returning here in the evening, when +there is to be a grand reception for them at Hdqrs. We expect Gen'l +Robert Anderson (the loyalist commandant at Sumter when originally +fired upon) by the next steamer, with Gideon Welles (secretary of +the Navy) and a number of other notables from Washington. Anderson +is going to raise the old flag on Sumter, and of course there will +be a great shindy here—I only wish you were with us to join in it. +I never go to Sumter without the deepest exhilaration—so many +scenes come to my mind. It's the centre of the nest, and for one to +<i>be</i> there is to feel that the whole game is up. These people have +always insisted that there the last gun should be fired. But the +suffering and desolation of this land is the worst feature of the +whole thing. If you could see what they are reduced to you couldn't +help being touched. The best people are in utter penury; they look +like the poorest of the poor and they talk like them also. They are +deeply demoralised, in fact degraded. Charleston is more forsaken +and stricken than I can describe; it reminds me when I go through +the streets of some old doomed city on which the wrath of God has +rested from far back, and if it ever revives will do so simply +through the infinite mercy<a name="page_400" id="page_400"></a> and charity of the North. But for this +generation at least the inhabitants are done for. Can't H. come +down and pay us a visit of 2 or 3 weeks? I can get him a War Dept. +pass approved by General Gillmore.</p></div> + +<p>H. knew and well remembers the pang of his inability to accept this +invitation, to the value of which for emphasis of tragic life on the +scene of the great drama the next passage adds a touch. Mrs. William +Young, the lady alluded to, was a friend we had known almost only on the +European stage and amid the bright associations of Paris in particular. +Whom did we suppose he had met on the arrival of a steamer from the +North but this more or less distracted acquaintance of other days?—who +had come down "to try and get her stepmother into our lines and take her +home. She is accompanied by a friend from New York, and expects to +succeed in her undertaking. I hardly think she will, however, as her +mother is 90 miles out of our lines and a very old woman. We have sent a +negro out to give her Mrs. Young's news, but how can this poor old thing +travel such a distance on foot and sleep in the swamp besides? It's an +absurd idea, but I shall do everything in my power to facilitate it." Of +what further befell I gather no account; but I remember how a later time +was to cause me to remark on the manner in which even dire tragedy may +lapse, in the individual life, and leave<a name="page_401" id="page_401"></a> no trace on the ground it has +ravaged—none at least apparent unless pushingly searched for. The last +thing to infer from appearances, on much subsequent renewal of contact +with Mrs. Young in Paris again, was that this tension of a reach forth +across great war-wasted and swamp-smothered spaces for recovery of an +aged and half-starved pedestrian female relative counted for her as a +chapter of experience: the experience of Paris dressmakers and other +like matters had so revived and supervened. But let me add that I speak +here of mere appearances, and have ever inclined to the more ironic and +more complicating vision of them. It would doubtless have been too +simple for wonder that our elegant friend should have lived, as it were, +under the cloud of reminiscence—and wonder had always somewhere to come +in.<a name="page_402" id="page_402"></a></p> + +<h2><a name="XII" id="XII"></a>XII</h2> + +<p>It had been, however, neither at Newport nor at Cambridge—the Cambridge +at least of that single year—that the plot began most to thicken for +me: I figure it as a sudden stride into conditions of a sort to minister +and inspire much more, all round, that we early in 1864 migrated, as a +family, to Boston, and that I now seem to see the scene of our existence +there for a couple of years packed with drama of a finer consistency +than any I had yet tasted. We settled for the interesting time in +Ashburton Place—the "sympathetic" old house we occupied, one of a pair +of tallish brick fronts based, as to its ground floor, upon the dignity +of time-darkened granite, was lately swept away in the interest of I +know not what grander cause; and when I wish to think of such +intercourse as I have enjoyed with the good city at its closest and, as +who should say its kindest, though this comes doubtless but to saying at +its freshest, I live over again the story of that sojourn, a period +bristling, while I recover my sense of it, with an unprecedented number +of simultaneous particulars. To stick, as I can only do, to the point +from which my<a name="page_403" id="page_403"></a> own young outlook worked, the things going on for me so +tremendously all at once were in the first place the last impressions of +the War, a whole social relation to it crowding upon us there as for +many reasons, all of the best, it couldn't have done elsewhere; and +then, more personally speaking, the prodigious little assurance I found +myself gathering as from one day to another that fortune had in store +some response to my deeply reserved but quite unabashed design of +becoming as "literary" as might be. It was as if, our whole new medium +of existence aiding, I had begun to see much further into the question +of how that end was gained. The vision, quickened by a wealth, a great +mixture, of new appearances, became such a throbbing affair that my +memory of the time from the spring of '64 to the autumn of '66 moves as +through an apartment hung with garlands and lights—where I have but to +breathe for an instant on the flowers again to see them flush with +colour, and but tenderly to snuff the candles to see them twinkle +afresh. Things happened, and happened repeatedly, the mere brush or +side-wind of which was the stir of life; and the fact that I see, when I +consider, how it was mostly the mere side-wind I got, doesn't draw from +the picture a shade of its virtue. I literally, and under whatever felt +restriction of my power to knock about, formed independent +relations—<a name="page_404" id="page_404"></a>several; and two or three of them, as I then thought, of the +very most momentous. I may not attempt just here to go far into these, +save for the exception of the easiest to treat, which I also, by good +fortune, win back as by no means the least absorbing—the beautiful, the +entrancing presumption that I should have but to write with sufficient +difficulty and sufficient felicity to get once for all (that was the +point) into the incredibility of print. I see before me, in the rich, +the many-hued light of my room that overhung dear Ashburton Place from +our third floor, the very greenbacks, to the total value of twelve +dollars, into which I had changed the cheque representing my first +earned wage. I had earned it, I couldn't but feel, with fabulous +felicity: a circumstance so strangely mixed with the fact that literary +composition of a high order had, at that very table where the greenbacks +were spread out, quite viciously declined, and with the air of its being +also once for all, to "come" on any save its own essential terms, which +it seemed to distinguish in the most invidious manner conceivable from +mine. It was to insist through all my course on this distinction, and +sordid gain thereby never again to seem so easy as in that prime +handling of my fee. Other guerdons, of the same queer, the same often +rather greasy, complexion followed; for what had I done, to<a name="page_405" id="page_405"></a> the +accompaniment of a thrill the most ineffable, an agitation that, as I +recapture it, affects me as never exceeded in all my life for fineness, +but go one beautiful morning out to Shady Hill at Cambridge and there +drink to the lees the offered cup of editorial sweetness?—none ever +again to be more delicately mixed. I had addressed in trembling hope my +first fond attempt at literary criticism to Charles Eliot Norton, who +had lately, and with the highest, brightest competence, come to the +rescue of the North American Review, submerged in a stale tradition and +gasping for life, and he had not only published it in his very next +number—the interval for me of breathless brevity—but had expressed the +liveliest further hospitality, the gage of which was thus at once his +welcome to me at home. I was to grow fond of regarding as a positive +consecration to letters that half-hour in the long library at Shady +Hill, where the winter sunshine touched serene book-shelves and arrayed +pictures, the whole embrowned composition of objects in my view, with I +knew not what golden light of promise, what assurance of things to come: +there was to be nothing exactly like it later on—the conditions of +perfect rightness for a certain fresh felicity, certain decisive +pressures of the spring, <i>can</i> occur, it would seem, but once. This was +on the other hand the beginning of so many intentions that it<a name="page_406" id="page_406"></a> mattered +little if the particular occasion was not repeated; for what did I do +again and again, through all the years, but handle in plenty what I +might have called the small change of it?</p> + +<p>I despair, however, as I look back, of rendering the <i>fusions</i> in that +much-mixed little time, every feature of which had something of the +quality and interest of every other, and the more salient, the more +"epoch-making"—I apply with complacency the portentous term—to drape +themselves romantically in the purple folds of the whole. I think it +must have been the sense of the various climaxes, the enjoyed, because +so long postponed, revenges of the War, that lifted the moment in the +largest embrace: the general consciousness was of such big things at +last in sight, the huge national emergence, the widening assurance, +however overdarkened, it is true, by the vast black cost of what General +Grant (no light-handed artist he!) was doing for us. He was at all +events working to an end, and something strange and immense, even like +the light of a new day rising above a definite rim, shot its rays +through the chinks of the immediate, the high-piled screen of sacrifice +behind which he wrought. I fail to seize again, to my wonder, the +particular scene of our acclamation of Lee's surrender, but I feel in +the air the exhalation of our relief, which mingled, near and far, with +the<a name="page_407" id="page_407"></a> breath of the springtime itself and positively seemed to become +over the land, over the world at large in fact, an element of reviving +Nature. Sensible again are certain other sharpest vibrations then +communicated from the public consciousness: Ashburton Place resounds for +me with a wild cry, rocks as from a convulsed breast, on that early +morning of our news of Lincoln's death by murder; and, in a different +order, but also darkening the early day, there associates itself with my +cherished chamber of application the fact that of a sudden, and while we +were always and as much as ever awaiting him, Hawthorne was dead. What I +have called the fusion strikes me as indeed beyond any rendering when I +think of the peculiar assault on my private consciousness of <i>that</i> +news: I sit once more, half-dressed, late of a summer morning and in a +bedimmed light which is somehow at once that of dear old green American +shutters drawn to against openest windows and that of a moral shadow +projected as with violence—I sit on my belated bed, I say, and yield to +the pang that made me positively and loyally cry. I didn't rise early in +those days of scant ease—I now even ask myself how sometimes I rose at +all; which ungrudged license withal, I thus make out, was not less +blessedly effective in the harmony I glance at than several showier +facts. To tell at<a name="page_408" id="page_408"></a> all adequately why the pang was fine would +nevertheless too closely involve my going back, as we have learned to +say, on the whole rich interpenetration. I fondly felt it in those days +invaluable that I had during certain last and otherwise rather blank +months at Newport taken in for the first time and at one straight +draught the full sweet sense of our one fine romancer's work—for sweet +it then above all seemed to me; and I remember well how, while the +process day after day drew itself admirably out, I found the actual +exquisite taste of it, the strain of the revelation, justify up to the +notch whatever had been weak in my delay. This prolonged hanging off +from true knowledge had been the more odd, so that I couldn't have +explained it, I felt, through the fact that The Wonder-Book and +Twice-Told Tales had helped to enchant our childhood; the consequence at +any rate seemed happy, since without it, very measurably, the sudden +sense of recognition would have been less uplifting a wave. The joy of +the recognition was to know at the time no lapse—was in fact through +the years never to know one, and this by some rare action of a principle +or a sentiment, I scarce know whether to call it a clinging consistency +or a singular silliness, that placed the Seven Gables, the Blithedale +Romance and the story of Donatello and Miriam (the accepted<a name="page_409" id="page_409"></a> title of +which I dislike to use, not the "marble" but very particularly the human +Faun being throughout in question) somewhere on a shelf unvisited by +harsh inquiry. The feeling had perhaps at the time been marked by +presumption, by a touch of the fatuity of patronage; yet wasn't +well-nigh the best charm of a relation with the works just named in the +impulse, known from the first, somehow to stand in <i>between</i> them and +harsh inquiry? If I had asked myself what I meant by that term, at which +freedom of appreciation, in fact of intelligence, might have looked +askance, I hope I should have found a sufficient answer in the mere plea +of a sort of <i>bêtise</i> of tenderness. I recall how once, in the air of +Rome at a time ever so long subsequent, a friend and countryman now no +more, who had spent most of his life in Italy and who remains for me, +with his accomplishment, his distinction, his extraordinary play of mind +and his too early and too tragic death, the clearest case of +"cosmopolitan culture" I was to have known, exclaimed with surprise on +my happening to speak as from an ancient fondness for Hawthorne's +treatment of the Roman scene: "Why, can you read <i>that</i> thing, and +<i>here</i>?—to me it means nothing at all!" I remember well that under the +breath of this disallowance of any possibility of association, and quite +most of such a one as I had from<a name="page_410" id="page_410"></a> far back positively cultivated, the +gentle perforated book tumbled before me from its shelf very much as old +Polonius, at the thrust of Hamlet's sword, must have collapsed behind +the pictured arras. Of course I might have picked it up and brushed it +off, but I seem to feel again that I didn't so much as want to, lost as +I could only have been in the sense that the note of harsh inquiry, or +in other words of the very stroke I had anciently wished to avert, +<i>there</i> fell straight upon my ear. It represented everything I had so +early known we must have none of; though there was interest galore at +the same time (as there almost always is in lively oppositions of +sensibility, with the sharpness of each, its special exclusions, well +exhibited), in an "American" measure that could so reject our beautiful +genius and in a Roman, as it were, that could so little see he had done +anything for Rome. H. B. Brewster in truth, literary master of three +tongues at least, was scarce American at all; homely superstitions had +no hold on him; he was French, Italian, above all perhaps German; and +there would have been small use, even had there been any importance, in +my trying to tell him for instance why it had particularly been, in the +gentle time, that I had settled once for all to take our author's case +as simply exquisite and not budge from that taking. Which indeed<a name="page_411" id="page_411"></a> scarce +bears telling now, with matters of relative (if <i>but</i> of relative!) +urgence on hand—consisting as it mainly did in the fact that his work +was all charged with a <i>tone</i>, a full and rare tone of prose, and that +this made for it an extraordinary value in an air in which absolutely +nobody's else was or has shown since any aptitude for being. And the +tone had been, in its beauty—for me at least—ever so appreciably +American; which proved to what a use American matter could be put by an +American hand: a consummation involving, it appeared, the happiest +moral. For the moral was that an American could be an artist, one of the +finest, without "going outside" about it, as I liked to say; quite in +fact as if Hawthorne had become one just by being American <i>enough</i>, by +the felicity of how the artist in him missed nothing, suspected nothing, +that the ambient air didn't affect him as containing. Thus he was at +once so clear and so entire—clear without thinness, for he might have +seemed underfed, it was his danger; and entire without heterogeneity, +which might, with less luck and to the discredit of our sufficing +manners, have had to be his help. These remarks, as I say, were those I +couldn't, or at any rate didn't, make to my Roman critic; if only +because I was so held by the other case he offered me—that of a culture +for which, in the dense medium around us, Miriam and Donatello<a name="page_412" id="page_412"></a> and +their friends hadn't the virtue that shines or pushes through. I tried +to feel that this <i>constatation</i> left me musing—and perhaps in truth it +did; though doubtless if my attachment to the arranger of those images +had involved, to repeat, my not budging, my meditation, whatever it was, +respected that condition.</p> + +<p>It has renewed itself, however, but too much on this spot, and the scene +viewed from Ashburton Place claims at the best more filling in than I +can give it. Any illustration of anything worth illustrating has beauty, +to my vision, largely by its developments; and developments, alas, are +the whole flowering of the plant, while what really meets such attention +as one may hope to beguile is at the best but a plucked and tossed sprig +or two. That my elder brother was during these months away with +Professor Agassiz, a member of the party recruited by that great +naturalist for a prolonged exploration of Brazil, is one of the few +blooms, I see, that I must content myself with detaching—the main sense +of it being for myself, no doubt, that his absence (and he had never +been at anything like such a distance from us,) left me the more +exposed, and thereby the more responsive, to contact with impressions +that had to learn to suffice for me in their uncorrected, when not still +more in their inspiringly emphasised, state. The main sense<a name="page_413" id="page_413"></a> for William +himself is recorded in a series of letters from him addressed to us at +home and for which, against my hope, these pages succeed in affording no +space—they are to have ampler presentation; but the arrival of which at +irregular intervals for the greater part of a year comes back to me as +perhaps a fuller enrichment of my consciousness than it owed for the +time to any other single source. We all still hung so together that this +replete organ could yet go on helping itself, with whatever awkwardness, +from the conception or projection of others of a like <i>general</i> strain, +such as those of one's brothers might appear; thanks to which constant +hum of borrowed experience, in addition to the quicker play of whatever +could pass as more honestly earned, my stage of life knew no drop of the +curtain. I literally came and went, I had never practised such coming +and going; I went in particular, during summer weeks, and even if +carrying my general difficulty with me, to the White Mountains of New +Hampshire, with some repetition, and again and again back to Newport, on +visits to John La Farge and to the Edmund Tweedys (<i>their</i> house almost +a second summer home to us;) to say nothing of winter attempts, a little +weak, but still more or less achieved, upon New York—which city was +rapidly taking on the capital quality, the large worldly sense that +dear<a name="page_414" id="page_414"></a> old London and dear old Paris, with other matters in hand for them +as time went on, the time they were "biding" for me, indulgently didn't +grudge it. The matters they had in hand wandered indeed as stray vague +airs across to us—this I think I have noted; but Boston itself could +easily rule, in default even of New York, when to "go," in particular, +was an act of such easy virtue. To go from Ashburton Place was to go +verily round the corner not less than further afield; to go to the +Athenæum, to the Museum, to a certain door of importances, in fact of +immensities, defiant of vulgar notation, in Charles Street, at the +opposite end from Beacon. The fruit of these mixed proceedings I found +abundant at the time, and I think quite inveterately sweet, but to +gather it in again now—by which I mean set it forth as a banquet for +imaginations already provided—would be to presume too far; not least +indeed even on my own cultivated art of exhibition. The fruit of golden +youth is all and always golden—it touches to gold what it gathers; this +was so the essence of the case that in the first place everything was in +some degree an adventure, and in the second any differences of degree +guiding my selection would be imperceptible at this end of time to the +cold eye of criticism. Not least moreover in the third place the very +terms would fail, under whatever ingenuity,<a name="page_415" id="page_415"></a> for my really justifying so +bland an account of the period at large. Do I speak of it as a thumping +sum but to show it in the small change, the handful of separate copper +and silver coin, the scattered occasions reduced to their individual +cash value, that, spread upon the table as a treasure of reminiscence, +might only excite derision? <i>Why</i> was "staying at Newport" so absurdly, +insistently romantic, romantic out of all proportion, as we say—why +unless I can truly tell in proportion to what it became so? It consisted +often in my "sitting" to John La Farge, within his own precincts and in +the open air of attenuated summer days, and lounging thereby just +passive to the surge of culture that broke upon me in waves the most +desultory and disjointed, it was true, but to an absolute effect of +unceasingly scented spray. Particular hours and old (that is young!) +ineffable reactions come back to me; it's like putting one's ear, +doctor-fashion, to the breast of time—or say as the subtle savage puts +his to the ground—and catching at its start some vibratory hum that has +been going on more or less for the fifty years since. Newport, the +barren isle of our return from Europe, had thus become—and at no such +great expense if the shock of public affairs, everywhere making +interests start to their feet, be counted out of the process—a source +of fifty suggestions<a name="page_416" id="page_416"></a> to me; which it would have been much less, +however, I hasten to add, if the call of La Farge hadn't worked in with +our other most standing attraction, and this in turn hadn't practically +been part of the positive affluence of certain elements of spectacle. +Why again I should have been able to see the pictorial so freely +suggested, that pictorial which was ever for me the dramatic, the +social, the effectively human aspect, would be doubtless a baffling +inquiry in presence of the queer and dear old phenomena themselves; +those that, taken together, may be described at the best, I suppose, +rather as a much-mixed grope or halting struggle, call it even a +competitive scramble, toward the larger, the ideal elegance, the +traditional forms of good society in possession, than as a presentation +of great noble assurances.</p> + +<p>Spectacle in any case broke out, spectacle accumulated, by our then +measure, many thicknesses deep, flushing in the sovereign light, as one +felt it, of the waning Rhode Island afternoons of August and September +with the most "evolved" material civilisation our American world could +then show; the vividest note of this in those years, unconscious, even +to an artless innocence, of the wider wings still to spread, being the +long daily <i>corso</i> or processional drive (with cavaliers and amazons not +otherwise than conveniently<a name="page_417" id="page_417"></a> intermixed,) which, with a different +direction for different days, offered doubtless as good an example of +that gregarious exercise at any cost distinguishing "fashionable life" +as was anywhere on the globe to be observed. The price paid for the +sticking together was what emphasised, I mean, the wondrous resolve to +stick, however scant and narrow and unadjusted for processional effect +the various fields of evolution. The variety moreover was short, just as +the incongruities of composition in the yearning array were marked; but +the tender grace of old sunset hours, the happier breadth of old shining +sands under favour of friendly tides, the glitter <i>quand même</i> of +"caparisoned" animals, appointed vehicles and approved charioteers, to +say nothing of the other and more freely exchanged and interrelated +brightnesses then at play (in the softer ease of women, the more +moustachio'd swagger of men, the braver bonhomie of the social aspect at +large), melted together for fond fancy into a tone, a rhythm, a +representational virtue charged, as to the amenities, with authority. +The amenities thus sought their occasion to multiply even to the sound +of far cannonades, and I well remember at once reflecting, in such +maturity as I could muster, that the luckier half of a nation able to +carry a huge war-burden without sacrifice of amusement might well +overcome<a name="page_418" id="page_418"></a> the fraction that had to feed but on shrinkage and privation; +at the same time that the so sad and handsome face of the most frequent +of our hostesses, Mary Temple the elder as she had been, now the apt +image of a stern priestess of the public altar, was to leave with me for +the years to come the grand expression and tragic irony of its revulsion +from those who, offering us some high entertainment during days of +particular tension, could fiddle, as she scathingly said, while Rome was +burning. Blest again the state of youth which could appreciate that +admirable look and preserve it for illustration of one of the forms of +ancient piety lost to us, and yet at the same time stow away as part of +the poetry of the general drama just the luxury and pride, overhanging +summer seas and projecting into summer nights great shafts of light and +sound, that prompted the noble scorn. The "round of pleasure" all this +with a grand good conscience of course—for it always in the like case +has that, had it at least when arranging performances, dramatic and +musical, at ever so much a ticket, under the advantage of rare amateur +talent, in aid of the great Sanitary Commission that walked in the +footsteps and renewed in various forms the example of Florence +Nightingale; these exhibitions taking place indeed more particularly in +the tributary cities,<a name="page_419" id="page_419"></a> New York, Philadelphia, Boston (we were then shut +up to those,) but with the shining stars marked for triumphant +appearance announced in advance on the Newport scene and glittering +there as beauties, as élégantes, as vocalists, as heroines of European +legend. Hadn't there broken upon us, under public stress, a refluent +wave from Paris, the mid-Empire Paris of the highest pitch, which was to +raise our social water-mark to a point unprecedented and there +strikingly leave it? We were learning new lessons in every branch—that +was the sense of the so immensely quickened general pace; and though my +examples may seem rather spectral I like to believe this bigger +breathing of the freshness of the future to have been what the +collective rumble and shimmer of the whole business most meant. It +exhaled an artless confidence which yet momently increased; it had no +great sense of a direction, but gratefully took any of which the least +hint was given, gathering up by the way and after the fact whatever +account of itself a vague voice might strike off. There were times when +the account of itself as flooding Lawton's Valley for afternoon tea was +doubtless what it would most comfortably have welcomed—Lawton's Valley, +at a good drive's length from the seaward quarter, being the scene of +villeggiatura of the Boston muse, as<a name="page_420" id="page_420"></a> it were, and the Boston muse +having in those after all battle-haunted seasons an authority and a +finish of accent beyond any other Tyrtaean strain. The New York and +perhaps still more the Philadelphia of the time fumbled more helplessly, +even if aspiringly, with the Boston evidences in general, I think, than +they were to be reduced to doing later on; and by the happy pretext, +certainly, that these superior signs had then a bravery they were not +perhaps on their own side indefinitely to keep up.</p> + +<p>They rustled, with the other leafage of the umbrageous grove, in the +summer airs that hung over the long tea-tables; afternoon tea was itself +but a new and romantic possibility, with the lesson of it gratefully +learnt at hands that dispensed, with the tea and sugar and in the +charmingest voice perhaps then to be heard among us, a tone of talk that +New York took for exotic and inimitable, yet all the more felt "good," +much better than it might if left <i>all</i> to itself, for thus flocking in +every sort of conveyance to listen to. The Valley was deep, winding and +pastoral—or at least looks so now to my attached vision; the infancy of +a finer self-consciousness seemed cradled there; the inconsequent +vehicles fraternised, the dim, the more dejected, with the burnished and +upstanding; so that I may really perhaps take most for the<a name="page_421" id="page_421"></a> note of the +hour the first tremor of the sense on the part of fashion that, if it +could, as it already more or less suspected, get its thinking and +reading and writing, almost everything in fact but its arithmetic, a bit +dingily, but just by that sign cleverly, done for it, so occasion seemed +easy, after all, for a nearer view, without responsibility, of the odd +performers of the service. When these last were not literally all +Bostonians they were New Yorkers who might have been mistaken for +such—never indeed by Bostonians themselves, but only by other New +Yorkers, the rich and guileless; so the effect as of a vague tribute to +culture the most authentic (if I speak not too portentously) was left +over for the aftertaste of simple and subtle alike. Those were +comparatively thin seasons, I recognise, in the so ample career of Mrs. +Howe, mistress of the Valley and wife of the eminent, the militant +Phil-Hellene, Dr. S. G. of the honoured name, who reached back to the +Byronic time and had dedicated his own later to still more distinguished +liberating work on behalf of deaf mutes; for if she was thus the most +attuned of interlocutors, most urbane of disputants, most insidious of +wits, even before her gathered fame as Julia Ward and the established +fortune of her elegant Battle-Hymn, she was perhaps to have served the +State scarce better through final organised<a name="page_422" id="page_422"></a> activities and shining +optimisms and great lucky lyric hits than by having in her vale of +heterogeneous hospitality undermined the blank assurance of her thicker +contingent—after all too but to an <i>amusing</i> vague unrest—and thereby +scattered the first rare seed of new assimilations. I am moved to add +that, by the old terminology, the Avenue might have been figured, in the +connection, as descending into the glen to meet the Point—which, save +for a very small number of the rarest representatives of the latter, it +could meet nowhere else. The difficulty was that of an encounter of +birds and fishes; the two tribes were native to elements as opposed as +air and water, the Avenue essentially nothing if not exalted on wheels +or otherwise expertly mounted, and the Point hopelessly pedestrian and +unequipped with stables, so that the very levels at which they +materially moved were but upper and lower, dreadfully lower, parallels. +And indeed the way to see the Point—which, without playing on the word, +naturally became our highest law—was at the Point, where it appeared to +much higher advantage than in its trudge through the purple haze or +golden dust of supercilious parades. Of the advantage to which it did so +appear, off in its own more languorous climate and on its own ground, we +fairly cultivated a conviction, rejoicing by that aid very<a name="page_423" id="page_423"></a> much as in +certain old French towns it was possible to distinguish invidiously the +Ville from the Cité. The Point was our <i>cité</i>, the primal aboriginal +Newport—which, striking us on a first acquaintance as not other than +dilapidated, might well have been "restored" quite as M. Viollet-le-Duc +was even then restoring Carcassonne; and this all the more because our +elder Newport, the only seat of history, had a dismantled grassy fort or +archaic citadel that dozed over the waterside and that might (though I +do take the vision, at close quarters, for horrible) be smartly waked +up. The waterside, which was that of the inner bay, the ample reach +toward Providence, so much more susceptible of quality than the +extravagant open sea, the "old houses," the old elms, the old Quaker +faces at the small-paned old windows, the appointedness of the scene for +the literary and artistic people, who, by our fond constructive theory, +lodged and boarded with the Quakers, always thrifty these, for the sake +of all the sweetness and quaintness, for the sake above all somehow of +<i>our</i> hungry felicity of view, by which I mean mine and that of a trusty +friend or two, T. S. Perry in especial—those attributes, meeting a +want, as the phrase is, of the decent imagination, made us perhaps +overdramatise the sphere of the clever people, but made them at least +also, when<a name="page_424" id="page_424"></a> they unmistakably hovered, affect us as truly the finest +touches in the picture. For they were in their way ironic about the +rest, and that was a tremendous lift in face of an Avenue that not only, +as one could see at a glance, had no irony, but hadn't yet risen, the +magazines and the Point aiding, to so much as a suspicion of the effect, +familiar to later generations, with which the word can conversationally +come in. Oh the old clever people, with their difference of shade from +that of the clever old ones—some few of these to have been discerned, +no doubt, as of Avenue position: I read back into their various +presences I know not what queer little functional value the exercise and +privilege of which, uncontested, uncontrasted (save with the absence of +everything but stables) represents a felicity for the individual that is +lost to our age. It could count as functional then, it could count as +felicitous, to have been reabsorbed into Boston, or to propose to absorb +even, for the first time, New York, under cover of the mantle, the old +artistic draped cloak, that had almost in each case trailed round in +Florence, in Rome, in Venice, in conversations with Landor, in pencilled +commemoration, a little niggling possibly but withal so sincere, of the +"haunts" of Dante, in a general claim of having known the Brownings (ah +"the Brownings" of those days!) in a disposition to arrange readings of<a name="page_425" id="page_425"></a> +these and the most oddly associated other poets about the great bleak +parlours of the hotels. I despair, however, of any really right register +of the art with which the cité ingratiated itself with me in this +character of a vivid missionary Bohemia; I met it of course more than +half way, as I met everything in the faintest degree ingratiating, even +suggesting to it with an art of my own that it should become so—though +in this matter I rather missed, I fear, a happy conversion, as if the +authenticity were there but my sort of personal dash too absent.</p> + +<p>I appear to myself none the less to have had dash for approaches to a +confidence more largely seated; since I recall how, having commenced +critic under Charles Norton's weighty protection, I was to find myself, +on all but the very morrow, invited to the high glory, as I felt it, of +aiding to launch, though on the obscurer side of the enterprise, a +weekly journal which, putting forth its first leaves in the summer of +'65 and under the highest auspices, was soon to enjoy a fortune and +achieve an authority and a dignity of which neither newspaper nor +critical review among us had hitherto so much as hinted the possibility. +The New York Nation had from the first, to the enlivening of several +persons consciously and ruefully astray in our desert, made no secret of +a literary leaning; and indeed its few foremost<a name="page_426" id="page_426"></a> months shine most for +me in the light of their bestowal of one of the longest and happiest +friendships of my life, a relation with Edwin Lawrence Godkin, the +Nation incarnate as he was to become, which bore fruit of affection for +years after it had ceased to involve the comparatively poorer exercise. +Godkin's paper, Godkin's occasional presence and interesting history and +vivid ability and, above all, admirably aggressive and ironic editorial +humour, of a quality and authority new in the air of a journalism that +had meant for the most part the heavy hand alone, these things, with the +sudden sweet discovery that I might for my own part acceptedly stammer a +style, are so many shades and shifting tints in the positive historic +iridescence that flings itself for my memory, as I have noted, over the +"period" of Ashburton Place. Wherever I dip, again, I pull out a plum +from under the tooth of time—this at least so to my own rapt sense that +had I more space I might pull both freely and at a venture. The +strongest savour of the feast—with the fumes of a feast it comes +back—was, I need scarce once more insist, the very taste of the War as +ending and ended; through which blessing, more and more, the quantity of +military life or at least the images of military experience seemed all +about us, quite paradoxically, to grow greater. This I take to have been +a result, first<a name="page_427" id="page_427"></a> of the impending, and then of the effective, break-up +of the vast veteran Army, swamping much of the scene as with the flow of +a monster tide and bringing literally home to us, in bronzed, matured +faces and even more in bronzed, matured characters, above all in the +absolutely acquired and stored resource of overwhelming reference, +reference usually of most substance the less it was immediately +explicit, the more in fact it was faded and jaded to indifference, what +was meant by having patiently served. The very smell of having so served +was somehow, at least to my super-sensitive nostril, in the larger and +cooler air, where it might have been an emanation, the most masculine, +the most communicative as to associated far-off things (according to the +nature, ever, of elements vaguely exhaled), from the operation of the +general huge gesture of relief—from worn toggery put off, from old +army-cloth and other fittings at a discount, from swordbelts and +buckles, from a myriad saturated articles now not even lying about but +brushed away with an effect upon the passing breeze and all relegated to +the dim state of some mere theoretic commemorative panoply that was +never in the event to be objectively disposed. The generalisation grew +richly or, as it were, quite adorably familiar, that life was ever so +handsomely reinforced, and manners, not to say manner at<a name="page_428" id="page_428"></a> large, +refreshed, and personal aspects and types accented, and categories +multiplied (no category, for the dreaming painter of things, could our +scene afford not to grab at on the chance), just by the fact of the +discharge upon society of such an amount of out-of-the-way experience, +as it might roughly be termed—such a quantity and variety of possession +and assimilation of unprecedented history. It had been unprecedented at +least among ourselves, we had had it in our own highly original +conditions—or "they," to be more exact, had had it admirably in theirs; +and I think I was never to know a case in which his having been directly +touched by it, or, in a word, having consistently "soldiered," learnt +all about it and exhausted it, wasn't to count all the while on behalf +of the happy man for one's own individual impression or attention; call +it again, as everything came back to that, one's own need to interpret. +The discharge upon "society" is moreover what I especially mean; it +being the sense of how society in <i>our</i> image of the word was taking it +all in that I was most concerned with; plenty of other images figured of +course for other entertainers of such. The world immediately roundabout +us at any rate bristled with more of the young, or the younger, cases I +speak of, cases of "things seen" and felt, and a delectable difference +in the man thereby<a name="page_429" id="page_429"></a> made imputable, than I could begin here to name even +had I kept the record. I think I fairly cultivated the perceiving of it +all, so that nothing of it, under some face or other, shouldn't brush my +sense and add to my impression; yet my point is more particularly that +the body social itself was for the time so permeated, in the light I +glance at, that it became to its own consciousness more interesting. As +so many existent parts of it, however unstoried yet, to their minor +credit, various thrilled persons could inhale the interest to their +fullest capacity and feel that they too had been pushed forward—and +were even to find themselves by so much the more pushable yet.</p> + +<p>I resort thus to the lift and the push as the most expressive figures +for that immensely <i>remonté</i> state which coincided for us all with the +great disconcerting irony of the hour, the unforgettable death of +Lincoln. I think of the springtime of '65 as it breathed through Boston +streets—my remembrance of all those days is a matter, strangely enough, +of the out-of-door vision, of one's constantly dropping down from Beacon +Hill, to the brave edge of which we clung, for appreciation of those +premonitory gusts of April that one felt most perhaps where Park Street +Church stood dominant, where the mouth of the Common itself uttered +promises, more signs and<a name="page_430" id="page_430"></a> portents than one could count, more prodigies +than one could keep apart, and where further strange matters seemed to +charge up out of the lower districts and of the "business world," +generative as never before of news. The streets were restless, the +meeting of the seasons couldn't but be inordinately so, and one's own +poor pulses matched—at the supreme pitch of that fusion, for instance, +which condensed itself to blackness roundabout the dawn of April 15th: I +was fairly to go in shame of its being my birthday. These would have +been the hours of the streets if none others had been—when the huge +general gasp filled them like a great earth-shudder and people's eyes +met people's eyes without the vulgarity of speech. Even this was, all so +strangely, part of the lift and the swell, as tragedy has but to be of a +pure enough strain and a high enough connection to sow with its dark +hand the seed of greater life. The collective sense of what had occurred +was of a sadness too noble not somehow to inspire, and it was truly in +the air that, whatever we had as a nation produced or failed to produce, +we could at least gather round this perfection of a classic woe. True +enough, as we were to see, the immediate harvest of our loss was almost +too ugly to be borne—for nothing more sharply comes back to me than the +tune to which the "esthetic sense," if one glanced but<a name="page_431" id="page_431"></a> from <i>that</i> high +window (which was after all one of many too), recoiled in dismay from +the sight of Mr. Andrew Johnson perched on the stricken scene. We had +given ourselves a figure-head, and the figure-head sat there in its +habit as it lived, and we were to have it in our eyes for three or four +years and to ask ourselves in horror what monstrous thing we had done. I +speak but of aspects, those aspects which, under a certain turn of them, +may be all but everything; gathered together they become a symbol of +what is behind, and it was open to us to waver at shop-windows exposing +the new photograph, exposing, that is, <i>the</i> photograph, and ask +ourselves what we had been guilty of as a people, when all was said, to +deserve the infliction of that form. It was vain to say that we had +deliberately invoked the "common" in authority and must drink the wine +we had drawn. No countenance, no salience of aspect nor composed symbol, +could superficially have referred itself less than Lincoln's +mould-smashing mask to any mere matter-of-course type of propriety; but +his admirable unrelated head had itself revealed a type—as if by the +very fact that what made in it for roughness of kind looked out only +less than what made in it for splendid final stamp, in other words for +commanding Style. The result thus determined had been precious for +representation, and above<a name="page_432" id="page_432"></a> all for fine suggestional function, in a +degree that left behind every medal we had ever played at striking; +whereas before the image now substituted representation veiled her head +in silence and the element of the suggested was exactly the direst. +What, however, on the further view, was to be more refreshing than to +find that there were excesses of native habit which truly we couldn't +bear? so that it was for the next two or three years fairly sustaining +to consider that, let the reasons publicly given for the impeachment of +the official in question be any that would serve, the grand inward logic +or mystic law had been that we really couldn't go on offering each other +before the nations the consciousness of such a presence. That was at any +rate the style of reflection to which the humiliating case reduced me; +just this withal now especially working, I feel, into that image of our +generally quickened activity of spirit, our having by the turn of events +more ideas to apply and even to play with, that I have tried to throw +off. Everything I recover, I again risk repeating, fits into the vast +miscellany—the detail of which I may well seem, however, too poorly to +have handled.</p> + +<p>Let it serve then for a scrap of detail that the appearance of William's +further fortune enjoyed thereabouts a grasp of my attention scarce +menaced even by the call on that faculty of such<a name="page_433" id="page_433"></a> appearances of my own +as I had naturally in some degree also to take for graces of the +banquet. I associate the sense of his being, in a great cause, far away +on the billow with that clearance of the air through the tremendous +draught, from sea to sea, of the Northern triumph, which seemed to make +a good-natured infinitude of room for all the individual interests and +personal lives that might help the pot to bubble—if the expression be +not too mean for the size of our confidence; that the cause on which the +Agassiz expedition to South America embarked <i>was</i> of the greatest being +happily a presumption altogether within my scope. It reawoke the mild +divinatory rage with which I had followed, with so little to show for +it, the military fortune of my younger brothers—feeding the gentle +passion indeed, it must be added, thanks to the letter-writing grace of +which the case had now the benefit, with report and picture of a +vividness greater than any ever to be shed from a like source upon our +waiting circle. Everything of the kind, for me, was company; but I +dwelt, for that matter and as I put it all together, in company so +constant and so enchanting that this amounted to moving, in whatever +direction, with the mass—more and more aware as I was of the "fun" (to +express it grossly) of living by my imagination and thereby finding that +company, in countless different<a name="page_434" id="page_434"></a> forms, could only swarm about me. +Seeing further into the figurable world <i>made</i> company of persons and +places, objects and subjects alike: it gave them all without exception +chances to be somehow or other interesting, and the imaginative ply of +finding interest once taken (I think I had by that time got much beyond +looking for it), the whole conspiracy of aspects danced round me in a +ring. It formed, by my present vision of it, a shining escort to one's +possibly often hampered or mystified, but never long stayed and +absolutely never wasted, steps; it hung about, after the fashion of +winter evening adumbrations just outside the reach of the lamplight, +while one sat writing, reading, listening, watching—perhaps even again, +incurably, but dawdling and gaping; and most of all doubtless, if it +supplied with colour people and things often by themselves, I dare say, +neutral enough, how it painted thick, how it fairly smothered, any +surface that did it the turn of showing positive and intrinsic life! Ah +the things and the people, the hours and scenes and circumstances, the +<i>inénarrables</i> occasions and relations, that I might still present in +its light if I would, and with the enormous advantage now (for this I +should unblushingly claim), of being able to mark for present irony or +pity or wonder, or just for a better intelligence, or again for the high +humour<a name="page_435" id="page_435"></a> or extreme strangeness of the thing, the rare indebtedness, +calculated by the long run, in which it could leave particular cases! +This necessity I was under that everything should be interesting—for +fear of the collapse otherwise of one's sustaining intention—would have +confessed doubtless to a closest connection, of all the connections, +with the small inkpot in which I seemed at last definitely destined to +dip to the exclusion of any stream more Pactolean: a modest manner of +saying that difficulty and slowness of composition were clearly by this +time not in the least appointed to blight me, however inveterate they +were likely to prove; that production, such as it was, floundered on in +spite of them; and that, to put it frankly, if I enjoyed as much company +as I have said no small part of it was of my very own earning. The +freshness of first creations—since we are exalted, in art, to these +arrogant expressions—never fails, I take it, to beguile the creator, in +default of any other victim, even to the last extravagance; so that what +happened was that one found all the swarm of one's intentions, one's +projected images, quite "good enough" to mix with the rest of one's +society, setting up with it terms of interpenetration, an admirable +commerce of borrowing and lending, taking and giving, not to say +stealing and keeping. Did it<a name="page_436" id="page_436"></a> verily <i>all</i>, this freshness of felt +contact, of curiosity and wonder, come back perhaps to certain small and +relatively ridiculous achievements of "production" as +aforesaid?—ridiculous causes, I mean, of such prodigious effects. I am +divided between the shame on the one hand of claiming for them, these +concocted "short stories," that they played so great a part, and a +downright admiring tenderness on the other for their holding up their +stiff little heads in such a bustle of life and traffic of affairs. I of +course really and truly cared for them, as we say, more than for aught +else whatever—cared for them with that kind of care, infatuated though +it may seem, that makes it bliss for the fond votary never to so much as +speak of the loved object, makes it a refinement of piety to perform his +rites under cover of a perfect freedom of mind as to everything <i>but</i> +them. These secrets of the imaginative life were in fact more various +than I may dream of trying to tell; they referred to actual concretions +of existence as well as to the supposititious; the joy of life indeed, +drawbacks and all, was just in the constant quick flit of association, +to and fro, and through a hundred open doors, between the two great +chambers (if it be not absurd, or even base, to separate them) of direct +and indirect experience. If it is of the great comprehensive <i>fusion</i> +that I speak as the richest<a name="page_437" id="page_437"></a> note of all those hours, what could truly +have been more in the sense of it than exactly such a perfect muddle of +pleasure for instance as my having (and, as I seem to remember, at his +positive invitation) addressed the most presuming as yet of my fictional +bids to my distinguished friend of a virtual lifetime, as he was to +become, William Dean Howells, whom I rejoice to name here and who had +shortly before returned from a considerable term of exile in Venice and +was in the act of taking all but complete charge of the Boston +"Atlantic"? The confusion was, to be plain, of more things than can hope +to go into my picture with any effect of keeping distinct there—the +felt felicity, literally, in my performance, the felt ecstasy, the still +greater, in my receipt of Howells's message; and then, naturally, most +of all, the at once to be recorded blest violence in the break upon my +consciousness of his glittering response after perusal.</p> + +<p>There was still more in it all than that, however—which is the point of +my mild demonstration; I associate the passage, to press closer, with a +long summer, from May to November, spent at the then rural retreat of +Swampscott, forty minutes by train northward from Boston, and that scene +of fermentation, in its turn, I invest with unspeakable memories. It was +the summer of '66 and of the campaign of Sadowa across the<a name="page_438" id="page_438"></a> sea—we had +by that time got sufficiently away from our own campaigns to take some +notice of those of other combatants, on which we bestowed in fact, I +think, the highest competence of attention then anywhere at play; a +sympathetic sense that bore us even over to the Franco-German war four +years later and helped us to know what we meant when we "felt strongly" +about it. No strength of feeling indeed of which the vibration had +remained to us from the other time could have been greater than our +woe-stricken vision of the plight of France under the portent of Sedan; +I had been back to that country and some of its neighbourhoods for some +fifteen months during the previous interval, and I recover again no +share in a great collective pang more vividly than our particular +appalled state, that of a whole company of us, while we gaped out at the +cry of reiterated bulletins from the shade of an August verandah, and +then again from amid boskages of more immediate consolation, during the +Saratoga and the Newport seasons of 1870. I had happened to repair to +Saratoga, of all inconsequent places, on my return from the Paris and +the London of the weeks immediately preceding the war, and though it was +not there that the worst sound of the first crash reached us, I feel +around me still all the air of our dismay—which was, in the queerest +way in the world,<a name="page_439" id="page_439"></a> that of something so alien mixed, to the increase of +horror, with something so cherished: the great hot glare of vulgarity of +the aligned hotels of the place and period drenching with its crude +light the apparent collapse of everything we had supposed most massive. +Which forward stretch on the part of this chronicle represents, I +recognise, the practice of the discursive well-nigh overmastering its +principle—or would do so, rather, weren't it that the fitful and the +flickering, the extravagant advance and the corrective retreat from it, +the law and the lovely art of foreshortening, have had here throughout +most to serve me. It is under countenance of that law that I still grasp +my capricious clue, making a jump for the moment over two or three years +and brushing aside by the way quite numberless appeals, claims upon +tenderness of memory not less than pleas for charm of interest, against +which I must steel myself, even though I account this rank disloyalty to +each. There is no quarter to which I have inclined in my brief recovery +of the high tide of impression flooding the "period" of Ashburton Place +that might not have drawn me on and on; so that I confess I feel myself +here drag my mantle, right and left, from the clutch of suppliant +hands—voluminous as it may doubtless yet appear in spite of my sense of +its raggedness. Wrapped in tatters it is therefore<a name="page_440" id="page_440"></a> that, with three or +four of William's letters of '67 and '68 kept before me, I make my +stride, not only for the sake of what I still regard as their admirable +interest, but for the way they bring back again to me everything they +figured at the time, every flame of faith they rekindled, every gage +they held out for the future. Present for me are still others than these +in particular, which I keep over for another introducing, but even the +pages I here preserve overflow with connections—so many that, +extravagant as it may sound, I have to make an effort to breast them. +These are with a hundred matters of our then actual life—little as that +virtue may perhaps show on their face; but above all just with the huge +small fact that the writer was by the blest description "in Europe," and +that this had verily still its way of meaning for me more than aught +else beside. For what sprang in especial from his situation was the +proof, with its positive air, that a like, when all was said, might +become again one's own; that such luck wasn't going to be for evermore +perversely out of the question with us, and that in fine I too was +already in a manner transported by the intimacy with which I partook of +his having been. I shouldn't have overstated it, I think, in saying that +I really preferred such a form of experience (of this particular one) to +the simpler—given most of<a name="page_441" id="page_441"></a> our current conditions; there was somehow a +greater richness, a larger accession of knowledge, vision, life, +whatever one might have called it, in "having him there," as we said, +and in my individually getting the good of this with the peculiar degree +of ease that reinforced the general quest of a special sufficiency of +that boon to which I was during those years rigidly, and yet on the +whole by no means abjectly, reduced.</p> + +<p>Our parents had in the autumn of '66 settled, virtually for the rest of +their days, at Cambridge, and William had concomitantly with this, that +is from soon after his return from Brazil, entered upon a season of +study at the Harvard Medical School, then keeping its terms in Boston +and under the wide wing of—as one supposed it, or as I at any rate +did—the Massachusetts General Hospital. I have to disengage my mantle +here with a force in which I invite my reader to believe—for I push +through a thicket of memories in which the thousand-fingered branches +arrestingly catch; otherwise I should surrender, and with a passionate +sense of the logic in it, to that long and crowded Swampscott summer at +which its graceless name has already failed to keep me from having +glanced. The place, smothered in a dense prose of prosperity now, may +have been even in those days, by any high measure, a weak enough apology +for an offered breast of Nature:<a name="page_442" id="page_442"></a> nevertheless it ministered to me as +the only "American country" save the silky Newport fringes with which my +growing imagination, not to mention my specious energy, had met at all +continuous occasion to play—so that I should have but to let myself go +a little, as I say, to sit up to my neck again in the warm depth of its +deposit. Out of this I should lift great handfuls of variety of vision; +it was to have been in its way too a season of coming and going, and +with its main mark, I make out, that it somehow absurdly flowered, first +and last, into some intenser example of every sort of intimation up to +then vouchsafed me, whether by the inward or the outward life. I think +of it thus as a big bouquet of blooms the most mixed—yet from which it +is to the point just here to detach the sole reminiscence, coloured to a +shade I may not reproduce, of a day's excursion to see my brother up at +the Hospital. Had I not now been warned off too many of the prime images +brought, for their confusion, to the final proof, I should almost risk +ever so briefly "evoking" the impression this mere snatch was to leave +with me, the picture as of sublime activities and prodigious +possibilities, of genial communities of consideration and acquisition, +all in a great bright porticoed and gardened setting, that was to hang +itself in my crazy cabinet for as long as the light of the<a name="page_443" id="page_443"></a> hour might +allow. I put my hand on the piece still—in its now so deeply obscured +corner; though the true point of my reference would seem to be in the +fact that if William studied medicine long enough to qualify and to take +his degree (so as to have become as roundedly "scientific" as possible) +he was yet immediately afterwards, by one of those quick shifts of the +scene with which we were familiar, beginning philosophic study in +Germany and again writing home letters of an interest that could be but +re-emphasised by our having him planted out as a reflector of +impressions where impressions were both strong and as different as +possible from those that more directly beat upon us. I myself could do +well enough with these last, I may parenthesise, so long as none others +were in question; but that complacency shrank just in proportion as we +were reached by the report of difference and of the foreign note, the +report particularly favourable—which was indeed what any and every +report perforce appeared to me. William's, from anywhere, had ever an +authority for me that attended none others; even if this be not the +place for more than a word of light on the apparent disconnection of his +actual course. It comes back to me that the purpose of practising +medicine had at no season been flagrant in him, and he was in fact, his +hospital connection once<a name="page_444" id="page_444"></a> over, never to practise for a day. He was on +the other hand to remain grateful for his intimate experience of the +laboratory and the clinic, and I was as constantly to feel that the +varieties of his application had been as little wasted for him as those +of my vagueness had really been for me. His months at Dresden and his +winter in Berlin were of a new variety—this last even with that tinge +of the old in it which came from his sharing quarters with T. S. Perry, +who, his four years at Harvard ended and his ensuing grand tour of +Europe, as then comprehensively carried out, performed, was giving the +Universities of Berlin and Paris a highly competent attention. To +whatever else of method may have underlain the apparently lawless strain +of our sequences I should add the action of a sharp lapse of health on +my brother's part which the tension of a year at the dissecting table +seemed to have done much to determine; as well as the fond fact that +Europe was again from that crisis forth to take its place for us as a +standing remedy, a regular mitigation of all suffered, or at least of +all wrong, stress. Of which remarks but a couple of letters addressed to +myself, I have to recognise, form here the occasion; these only, in that +order, have survived the accidents of time, as I the more regret that I +have in my mind's eye still much of the matter of certain others; +notably of one<a name="page_445" id="page_445"></a> from Paris (on his way further) recounting a pair of +evenings at the theatre, first for the younger Dumas and Les Idées de +Madame Aubray, with Pasca and Delaporte, this latter of an exquisite +truth to him, and then for something of the Palais Royal with <i>four</i> +comedians, as he emphatically noted, who were each, wonderful to say, +"de la force of Warren of the Boston Museum." He spent the summer of '67 +partly in Dresden and partly at Bad-Teplitz in Bohemia, where he had +been recommended the waters; he was to return for these again after a +few months and was also to seek treatment by hydropathy at the +establishment of Divonne, in the French back-country of Lake Leman, +where a drawing sent home in a letter, and which I do my best to +reproduce, very comically represents him as surrounded by the listening +fair. I remember supposing even his Dresden of the empty weeks to +bristle with precious images and every form of local character—this a +little perhaps because of his treating us first of all to a pair of +whimsical crayoned views of certain animated housetops seen from his +window. It is the old names in the old letters, however, that now always +most rewrite themselves to my eyes in colour—shades alas that defy +plain notation, and if the two with which the following begins, and +especially the first of them, only asked me to tell their story I<a name="page_446" id="page_446"></a> but +turn my back on the whole company of which they are part.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>...I got last week an excellent letter from Frank Washburn who +writes in such a manly way. But the greatest delight I've had was +the loan of 5 Weekly Transcripts from Dick Derby. It's strange how +quickly one grows away from one's old surroundings. I never should +have believed that in so few months the tone of a Boston paper +would seem so outlandish to me. As it was, I was in one squeal of +amusement, surprise and satisfaction until deep in the night, when +I went to bed tired out with patriotism. The boisterous animal +good-humour, familiarity, reckless energy and self-confidence, +unprincipled optimism, esthetic saplessness and intellectual +imbecility, made a mixture hard to characterise, but totally +different from the tone of things here and, as the Germans would +say, whose "Existenz so völlig dasteht," that there was nothing to +do but to let yourself feel it. The Americans themselves here too +amuse me much; they have such a hungry, restless look and seem so +unhooked somehow from the general framework. The other afternoon as +I was sitting on the Terrace, a gentleman and two young ladies came +and sat down quite near me. I knew them for Americans at a glance, +and the man interested me by his exceedingly American expression: a +reddish moustache and tuft on chin, a powerful nose, a small light +eye, half insolent and <i>all</i> sagacious, and a sort of rowdy air of +superiority that made me proud to claim him as a brother. In a few +minutes I recognised him as General M'Clellan, rather different +from his photographs of the War-time, but still not to be mistaken +(and I afterwards learned he is here). Whatever his faults may be +that of not being "one of us" is not among them.</p></div> + +<p><a name="page_447" id="page_447"></a></p> + +<p>This next is the note of a slightly earlier impression.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>The Germans are certainly a most gemüthlich people. The way all the +old women told me how "freundlich" their rooms were—"so freundlich +mobilirt" and so forth—melted my heart. Whenever you tell an +inferior here to do anything (<i>e.g.</i> a cabman) he or she replies +"Schön!" or rather "Schehn!" with an accent not quick like a +Frenchman's "Bien!" but so protracted, soothing and reassuring to +you that you feel as if he were adopting you into his family. You +say I've said nothing of the people of this house, but there is +nothing to tell about them. The Doctor is an open-hearted excellent +man as ever was, and wrapped up in his children; Frau Semler is a +sickly, miserly, petty-spirited nonentity. The children are quite +uninteresting, though the younger, Anna or Aennchen, aged five, is +very handsome and fat. The following short colloquy, which I +overheard one day after breakfast a few days since, may serve you +as a piece of local colour. Aennchen drops a book she is carrying +across the room and exclaims "Herr Jesus!"</p> + +<p>Mother: "Ach, das sagen <i>Kinder</i> nicht, Anna!"</p> + +<p>Aennchen (reflectively to herself, sotto voce): "Nicht fur Kinder!" +...</p></div> + +<p>What here follows from Divonne—of fourteen months later—is too full +and too various to need contribution or comment.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>You must have envied within the last few weeks my revisiting of the +sacred scenes of our youth, the shores of Leman, the Ecu de Genève, +the sloping Corraterie, etc. My only pang in it all has been caused +by your<a name="page_448" id="page_448"></a> absence, or rather by the fact of my presence instead of +yours; for I think your abstemious and poetic soul would have got +much more good of the things I've seen than my hardening and +definite-growing nature. I wrote a few words about Nürnberg to +Alice from Montreux. I found that about as pleasant an impression +as any I have had since being abroad—and this because I didn't +expect it. The Americans at Dresden had told me it was quite +uninteresting. I enclose you a few stereographs I got there—I +don't know why, for they are totally irrelevant to the real effect +of the place. This it would take Théophile Gautier to describe, so +I renounce. It was strange to find how little I remembered at +Geneva—I couldn't find the way I used to take up to the Academy, +and the shops and houses of the Rue du Rhône visible from our old +windows left me uncertain whether they were the same or new ones. +Kohler has set up a new hotel on the Quai du Mont-Blanc—you +remember he's the brother of our old Madame Buscarlet there; but I +went for association's sake to the Écu. The dining-room was +differently hung, and the only thing in my whole 24 hours in the +place that stung me, so to speak, with memory, was that kind of +chinese-patterned dessert-service we used to have. So runs the +world away. I didn't try to look up Ritter, Chantre or any of ces +messieurs, but started off here the next morning, where I have now +been a week.</p> + +<p class="figcenter"> +<a href="images/ill_448.png"> +<img src="images/ill_448_sml.png" width="550" height="335" alt=""The cold water cure at Divonne—excellent for +melancholia."—From a letter of William James (page 447)" title=""The cold water cure at Divonne—excellent for +melancholia."—From a letter of William James (page 447)" /></a> +<br /> +<span class="caption2">"The cold water cure at Divonne—excellent for +melancholia."—From a letter of William James (<a href="#page_447">page 447</a>)</span> +</p> + +<p>My impression on gradually coming from a German into a French +atmosphere of things was rather unexpected and not in all respects +happy. I have been in Germany half amused and half impatient with +the slowness of proceeding and the uncouthness of taste and +expression that prevail there so largely in all things, but on +exchanging it for the brightness and shipshapeness of these +quasi-French arrangements of<a name="page_449" id="page_449"></a> life and for the tart +fire-cracker-like speech of those who make them I found myself +inclined to retreat again on what I had left, and had for a few +days quite a homesickness for the easy, ugly, substantial German +ways. The "'tarnal" smartness in which the railway refreshment +counters, for example, are dressed up, the tight waists and +"tasteful" white caps of the female servants, the everlasting +monsieur and madame, and especially the quickness and snappishness +of enunciation, suggesting such an inward impatience, quite +absurdly gave on my nerves. But I am getting used to it all, and +the French people who sit near me here at table and who repelled me +at first by the apparently cold-blooded artificiality of their +address to each other, now seem less heartless and inhuman. I am +struck more than ever I was with the hopelessness of us English, +and a <i>fortiori</i> the Germans, ever competing with the French in +matters of form or finite taste of any sort. They are sensitive to +things that simply don't exist for us. I notice it here in manners +and speech: how can a people who speak with no tonic accents in +their words <i>help</i> being cleaner and neater in expressing +themselves? On the other hand the limitations of <i>reach</i> in the +French mind strike me more and more; their delight in rallying +round an official standard in all matters, in counting and dating +everything from certain great names, their use and love of +catchwords and current phrases, their sacrifice of independence of +mind for the mere sake of meeting their hearer or reader on common +ground, their metaphysical incapacity not only to deal with +questions but to know what the questions are, stand out plainer and +plainer the more headway I make in German. One wonders where the +"Versöhnung" or conciliation of all these rival national qualities +is going to take place. I imagine we English stand rather between<a name="page_450" id="page_450"></a> +the French and the Germans both in taste and in spiritual +intuition. In Germany, while unable to avoid respecting that +solidity of the national mind which causes such a mass of permanent +work to be produced there annually, I couldn't help consoling +myself by the thought that whatever, after all, they might <i>do</i>, +the Germans were a plebeian crowd and could never <i>be</i> such +gentlemen as we were. I now find myself getting over the French +superiority by an exactly inverse process of thought. The Frenchman +must sneer at us even more than we sneer at the Germans—and which +sneer is final, his at us two, or ours at him, or the Germans' at +us? It seems an insoluble question, which I fortunately haven't got +to settle.</p> + +<p>I've read several novels lately, some of the irrepressible +George's: La Daniella and the Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré. (Was it +thee, by the bye that wrotest the Nation notices on her, on W. +Morris's new poem and on The Spanish Gypsy? They came to me +unmarked, but the thoughts seemed such as you would entertain, and +the style in some places like yours—in others not.) George Sand +babbles her improvisations on so that I never begin to believe a +word of what she says. I've also read The Woman in White, a couple +of Balzac's, etc., and a volume of tales by Mérimée which I will +send you if I can by Frank Washburn. He is a big man; but the +things which have given me most pleasure have been some sketches of +travel by Th. Gautier. What an absolute thing genius is! That this +creature, with no more soul than a healthy poodle-dog, no +philosophy, no morality, no information (for I doubt exceedingly if +his knowledge of architectural terms and suchlike is accurate) +should give one a finer enjoyment than his betters in all these +respects by mere force of good-nature,<a name="page_451" id="page_451"></a> clear eyesight and felicity +of phrase! His style seems to me perfect, and I should think it +would pay you to study it with love—principally in the most +trivial of these collections of notes of travel. T. S. P. has a +couple of them for you, and another, which I've read here and is +called Caprices et Zigzags, is worth buying. It contains wonderful +French (in the classic sense, I mean, with all those associations) +descriptions of London. I'm not sure if you know Gautier at all +save by the delicious Capitaine Fracasse. But these republished +feuilletons are all of as charming a quality and I should think +would last as long as the language.</p> + +<p>There are 70 or 80 people in this etablissement, no one of whom I +have as yet particularly cottoned up to. It's incredible how even +so slight a barrier as the difference of language with most of +them, and still more as the absence of local and personal +associations, range of gibes and other common ground to stand on, +counts against one's scraping acquaintance. It's disgusting and +humiliating. There is a lovely maiden of <i>etwa</i> 19 sits in sight of +me at the table with whom I am falling deeply in love. She has +never looked at me yet, and I really believe I should be quite +incapable of conversing with her even were I "introduced," from a +sense of the above difficulties and because one doesn't know what +subjects or allusions may be possible with a jeune fille. I suppose +my life for the past year would have furnished you, as the great +American nouvelliste, a good many "motives" and subjects of +observation—especially so in this place. I wish I could pass them +over to you—such as they are you'd profit by them more than I and +gather in a great many more. I should like full well an hour's, or +even longer, interview with you, and with the Parents and the +Sister and the Aunt and all; just so<a name="page_452" id="page_452"></a> as to start afresh on a clean +basis. Give my love to Wendell Holmes. I've seen —— —— several +times; but what a cold-blooded cuss he is! Write me your impression +of T. S. P., who will probably reach you before this letter. If +Frank Washburn ever gets home be friendly to him. He is much aged +by travel and experience, and is a most charming character and +generous mind.</p></div> + +<h2><a name="XIII" id="XIII"></a>XIII</h2> + +<p>If I add to the foregoing a few lines more from my brother's hand, these +are of a day separated by long years from that time of our youth of +which I have treated. Addressed after the immense interval to an +admirable friend whom I shall not name here, they yet so vividly +refer—and with something I can only feel as the first authority—to one +of the most prized interests of our youth that, under the need of still +failing to rescue so many of these values from the dark gulf, I find +myself insist the more on a place here, before I close, for that +presence in our early lives as to which my brother's few words say so +much. To have so promptly and earnestly spoken of Mary Temple the +younger in this volume is indeed I think to have offered a gage for my +not simply leaving her there. The opportunity not so to leave her comes +at any rate very preciously into my hands, and I can not better round +off this record than by making the most of it. The letter to which +William alludes is one that my reader will presently recognise. It had +come back to him thus clearly at the far end of time.<a name="page_454" id="page_454"></a></p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>I am deeply thankful to you for sending me this letter, which +revives all sorts of poignant memories and makes her live again in +all her lightness and freedom. Few spirits have been more free than +hers. I find myself wishing so that she could know me as I am now. +As for knowing her as <i>she</i> is now—??!! I find that she means as +much in the way of human character for me now as she ever did, +being unique and with no analogue in all my subsequent experience +of people. Thank you once more for what you have done.</p></div> + +<p>The testimony so acknowledged was a letter in a copious succession, the +product of little more than one year, January '69 to February '70, +sacredly preserved by the recipient; who was not long after the day of +my brother's acknowledgment to do me the honour of communicating to me +the whole series. He could have done nothing to accord more with the +spirit in which I have tried to gather up something of the sense of our +far-off past, his own as well as that of the rest of us; and no loose +clue that I have been able to recover unaided touches into life anything +like such a tract of the time-smothered consciousness. More charming and +interesting things emerge for me than I can point to in their order—but +they will make, I think, their own appeal. It need only further be +premised that our delightful young cousin had had from some months back +to begin to reckon with the progressive pulmonary weakness of which the +letters tell the<a name="page_455" id="page_455"></a> sad story. Also, I can scarce help saying, the whole +world of the old New York, that of the earlier dancing years, shimmers +out for me from the least of her allusions.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>I will write you as nice a letter as I can, but would much rather +have a good talk with you. As I can't have the best thing I am +putting up with the second-best, contrary to my pet theory. I feel +as if I were in heaven to-day—all because the day is splendid and +I have been driving about all the morning in a small sleigh in the +fresh air and sunshine, until I found that I had in spite of +myself, for the time being, stopped asking the usual inward +question of why I was born. I am not going to Canada—I know no +better reason for this than because I said I <i>was</i> going. My +brother-in-law makes such a clamour when I propose departure that I +am easily overcome by his kindness and my own want of energy. +Besides, it is great fun to live here; the weather just now is +grand, and I knock about all day in a sleigh, and do nothing but +enjoy it and meditate. Then we are so near town that we often go in +for the day to shop and lunch with some of our numerous friends, +returning with a double relish for the country. We all went in on a +spree the other night and stayed at the Everett House; from which, +as a starting-point we poured ourselves in strong force upon Mrs. +Gracie King's ball—a very grand affair, given for a very pretty +Miss King, at Delmonico's. Our raid consisted of thirteen Emmets +and a moderate supply of Temples, and the ball was a great success. +It was two years since I had been to one and I enjoyed it so much +that I mean very soon to repeat the experiment—at the next +Assembly if possible. The men in society, in New York, this winter, +are principally<a name="page_456" id="page_456"></a> a lot of feeble-minded boys; but I was fortunate +enough to escape them, as my partner for the German was a man of +thirty-five, the solitary <i>man</i>, I believe, in the room. Curiously +enough, I had danced my last German, two years before, in that very +place and with the same person. He is a Mr. Lee, who has spent +nearly all his life abroad; two of his sisters have married German +princes, and from knocking about so much he has become a thorough +cosmopolite. As he is intelligent, with nothing to do but amuse +himself, he is a very agreeable partner, and I mean to dance with +him again as soon as possible. I don't know why I have tried your +patience by writing so about a person you have never seen; unless +it's to show you that I haven't irrevocably given up the world, the +flesh and the devil, but am conscious of a faint charm about them +still when taken in small doses. I agree with you perfectly about +Uncle Henry—I should think he would be very irritating to the +legal mind; he is not at all satisfactory even to mine. Have you +seen much of Willy James lately? That is a rare creature, and one +in whom my intellect, if you will pardon the misapplication of the +word, takes more solid satisfaction than in almost anybody. I +haven't read Browning's new book—I mean to wait till you are by to +explain it to me—which reminds me, along with what you say about +wishing for the spring, that we shall go to North Conway next +summer, and that in that case you may as well make up your mind to +come and see us there. I can't wait longer than that for the +Browning readings. (Which would have been of The Ring and the +Book.) Arthur Sedgwick has sent me Matthew Arnold's photograph, +which Harry had pronounced so disappointing. I don't myself, on the +whole, find it so; on the contrary, after having looked at it much, +I like it—it quite harmonises with<a name="page_457" id="page_457"></a> my notion of him, and I have +always had an affection for him. You must tell me something that +you are <i>sure</i> is true—I don't care much what it may be, I will +take your word for it. Things get into a muddle with me—how can I +give you "a start on the way of righteousness"? You know that way +better than I do, and the only advice I can give you is not to stop +saying your prayers. I hope God may bless you, and beyond those +things I hardly know what is right, and therefore what to wish you. +Good-bye.</p></div> + +<p>"North Conway" in the foregoing has almost the force for me of a +wizard's wand; the figures spring up again and move in a harmony that is +not of the fierce present; the sense in particular of the August of '65 +shuts me in to its blest unawarenesses not less than to all that was +then exquisite in its current certainties and felicities; the +fraternising, endlessly conversing group of us gather under the rustling +pines—and I admire, precisely, the arrival, the bright revelation as I +recover it, of the so handsome young man, marked with military +distinction but already, with our light American promptitude, addressed +to that high art of peace in which a greater eminence awaited him, of +whom this most attaching member of the circle was to make four years +later so wise and steady a confidant. Our circle I fondly call it, and +doubtless then called it, because in the light of that description I +could most rejoice in it, and I think of it now as having<a name="page_458" id="page_458"></a> formed a +little world of easy and happy interchange, of unrestricted and yet all +so instinctively sane and secure association and conversation, with all +its liberties and delicacies, all its mirth and its earnestness +protected and directed so much more from within than from without, that +I ask myself, perhaps too fatuously, whether any such right conditions +for the play of young intelligence and young friendship, the reading of +Matthew Arnold and Browning, the discussion of a hundred human and +personal things, the sense of the splendid American summer drawn out to +its last generosity, survives to this more complicated age. I doubt if +there be circles to-day, and seem rather to distinguish confusedly gangs +and crowds and camps, more propitious, I dare say, to material affluence +and physical riot than anything we knew, but not nearly so appointed for +ingenious and ingenuous talk. I think of our interplay of relation as +attuned to that fruitful freedom of what we took for speculation, what +we didn't recoil from as boundless curiosity—as the consideration of +life, that is, the personal, the moral inquiry and adventure at large, +so far as matter for them had up to then met our view—I think of this +fine quality in our scene with no small confidence in its having been +rare, or to be more exact perhaps, in its having been possible to the +general American felicity and immunity<a name="page_459" id="page_459"></a> as it couldn't otherwise or +elsewhere have begun to be. Merely to say, as an assurance, that such +relations shone with the light of "innocence" is of itself to breathe on +them wrongly or rudely, is uncouthly to "defend" them—as if the very +air that consciously conceived and produced them didn't all tenderly and +amusedly take care of them. I at any rate figure again, to my customary +positive piety, all the aspects now; that in especial of my young +orphaned cousins as mainly composing the maiden train and seeming as if +they still had but yesterday brushed the morning dew of the dear old +Albany naturalness; that of the venerable, genial, erect great-aunt, +their more immediately active guardian, a model of antique spinsterhood +appointed to cares such as even renewals of wedlock could scarce more +have multiplied for her, and thus, among her many ancient and curious +national references—one was tempted to call them—most impressive by +her striking resemblance to the portraits, the most benignant, of +General Washington. She might have represented the mother, no less +adequately than he represented the father, of their country. I can only +feel, however, that what particularly drew the desired circle sharpest +for me was the contribution to it that I had been able to effect by +introducing the companion of my own pilgrimage, who was in turn to +introduce<a name="page_460" id="page_460"></a> a little later the great friend of <i>his</i> then expanding +situation, restored with the close of the War to civil pursuits and +already deep in them; the interesting pair possessed after this fashion +of a quantity of common fine experience that glittered as so much +acquired and enjoyed luxury—all of a sort that I had no acquisition +whatever to match. I remember being happy in that I might repeatedly +point our moral, under permission (for we were always pointing morals), +with this brilliant advantage of theirs even if I might with none of my +own; and I of course knew—what was half the beauty—that if we were +just the most delightful loose band conceivable, and immersed in a +regular revel of all the harmonies, it was largely by grace of the three +quite exceptional young men who, thanks in part to the final sublime +coach-drive of other days, had travelled up from Boston with their +preparation to admire inevitably quickened. I was quite willing to offer +myself as exceptional through being able to promote such exceptions and +see them justified to waiting apprehension. There was a dangling fringe, +there were graceful accessories and hovering shades, but, essentially, +we of the true connection made up the drama, or in other words, for the +benefit of my imagination, reduced the fond figment of the Circle to +terms of daily experience. If drama we could indeed<a name="page_461" id="page_461"></a> feel this as being, +I hasten to add, we owed it most of all to our just having such a +heroine that everything else inevitably came. Mary Temple was +beautifully and indescribably <i>that</i>—in the technical or logical as +distinguished from the pompous or romantic sense of the word; wholly +without effort or desire on her part—for never was a girl less +consciously or consentingly or vulgarly dominant—everything that took +place around her took place as if primarily in relation to her and in +her interest: that is in the interest of drawing her out and displaying +her the more. This too without her in the least caring, as I say—in the +deep, the morally nostalgic indifferences that were the most finally +characteristic thing about her—whether such an effect took place or +not; she liked nothing in the world so much as to see others fairly +exhibited; not as they might best please her by being, but as they might +most fully reveal themselves, their stuff and their truth: which was the +only thing that, after any first flutter for the superficial air or +grace in an acquaintance, could in the least fix her attention. She had +beyond any equally young creature I have known a sense for verity of +character and play of life in others, for their acting out of their +force or their weakness, whatever either might be, at no matter what +cost to herself; and it was this instinct that made her care so for +life<a name="page_462" id="page_462"></a> in general, just as it was her being thereby so engaged in that +tangle that made her, as I have expressed it, ever the heroine of the +scene. Life claimed her and used her and beset her—made her range in +her groping, her naturally immature and unlighted way from end to end of +the scale. No one felt more the charm of the actual—only the actual +comprised for her kinds of reality (those to which her letters perhaps +most of all testify), that she saw treated round her for the most part +either as irrelevant or as unpleasant. She was absolutely afraid of +nothing she might come to by living with enough sincerity and enough +wonder; and I think it is because one was to see her launched on that +adventure in such bedimmed, such almost tragically compromised +conditions that one is caught by her title to the heroic and pathetic +mark. It is always difficult for us after the fact not to see young +things who were soon to be lost to us as already distinguished by their +fate; this particular victim of it at all events might well have made +the near witness ask within himself how her restlessness of spirit, the +finest reckless impatience, was to be assuaged or "met" by the common +lot. One somehow saw it nowhere about us as up to her terrible young +standard of the interesting—even if to say this suggests an air of +tension, a sharpness of importunity, than which nothing<a name="page_463" id="page_463"></a> could have been +less like her. The charming, irresistible fact was that one had never +seen a creature with such lightness of forms, a lightness all her own, +so inconsequently grave at the core, or an asker of endless questions +with such apparent lapses of care. It is true that as an effect of the +state of health which during the year '69 grew steadily worse the +anxious note and serious mind sound in her less intermittently than by +her former wont.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>This might be headed with that line of a hymn, "Hark, from the +tombs etc.!"—but perhaps it won't prove as bad as that. It looks +pretty doubtful still, but I have a sort of feeling that I shall +come round this one time more; by which I don't mean to brag! The +"it" of which I speak is of course my old enemy hemorrhage, of +which I have had within the last week seven pretty big ones and +several smaller, hardly worth mentioning. I don't know what has +come over me—I can't stop them; but, as I said, I mean to try and +beat them yet. Of course I am in bed, where I shall be +indefinitely—not allowed to speak one word, literally, even in a +whisper. The reason I write this is because I don't think it will +hurt me at all—if I take it easy and stop when I feel tired. It is +a pleasant break in the monotony of gruel and of thinking of the +grave—and then too a few words from somebody who is strong and +active in the good old world (as it seems to me now) would be very +refreshing. But don't tell anyone I have written, because it will +be sure to reach the ears of my dear relatives and will cause them +to sniff the air and flounce! You see I am a good deal of a +baby—in the sense of not wanting<a name="page_464" id="page_464"></a> the reproaches of my relatives +on this or any other subject.... All the Emmets are so good and +kind that I found, when it came to the point, that there was a good +deal to make life attractive, and that if the choice were given me +I would much rather stay up here on the solid earth, in the air and +sunshine, with an occasional sympathetic glimpse of another +person's soul, than to be put down underground and say good-bye for +ever to humanity, with all its laughter and its sadness. Yet you +mustn't think me now in any <i>special</i> danger of dying, or even in +low spirits, for it isn't so—the doctor tells me I am <i>not</i> in +danger, even if the hemorrhages should keep on. However, "you can't +fool a regular boarder," as Mr. Holmes would say, and I can't see +why there is any reason to think they will heal a week hence, when +I shall be still weaker, if they can't heal now. Still, they <i>may</i> +be going to stop—I haven't had one since yesterday at 4, and now +it's 3; nearly twenty-four hours. I am of a hopeful temperament and +not easily scared, which is in my favour. If this <i>should</i> prove to +be the last letter you get from me, why take it for a good-bye; +I'll keep on the lookout for you in the spirit world, and shall be +glad to see you when you come there, provided it's a better place +than this. Elly is in New York, enjoying herself immensely, and I +haven't let her know how ill I have been, as there were to be +several parties this last week and I was afraid it might spoil her +fun. I didn't mean you to infer from my particularising Willy +James's intellect that the rest of him isn't to my liking—he is +one of the very few people in this world that I love. He has the +largest heart as well as the largest head, and is thoroughly +interesting to me. He is generous and affectionate and full of +sympathy and humanity—though you mustn't tell him I say so, lest +he should think I have been telling you a lie to serve my own +purposes. Good-bye.</p></div> + +<p>I should have little heart, I confess, for what is essentially the +record of a rapid illness if it were not at the same time the image of +an admirable soul. Surrounded as she was with affection she had yet +greatly to help herself, and nothing is thus more penetrating than the +sense, as one reads, that a method of care would have been followed for +her to-day, and perhaps followed with signal success, that was not in +the healing or nursing range of forty years ago.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>It is a week ago to-day, I think, since I last wrote to you, and I +have only had one more hemorrhage—the day after. I feel pretty +sure they have stopped for the present, and I am sitting up in my +room, as bright as possible. Yesterday when I walked across it I +thought I should never be strong again, but now it's quite +different, and so nice to be out of bed that my spirits go up +absurdly. As soon as I am able I am to be taken to town for another +examination, and then when I know my fate I will do the best I can. +This climate is trying, to be sure, but such as it is I've got to +take my chance in it, as there is no one I care enough for, or who +cares enough for me, to take charge of me to Italy, or to the south +anywhere. I don't believe any climate, however good, would be of +the least use to me with people I don't care for. You may let your +moustache grow down to your toes if you like, and I shall but smile +scornfully at your futile precautions.</p></div> + +<p>Of the following, in spite of its length, I can bring myself to abate +nothing.<a name="page_466" id="page_466"></a></p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>....Well, "to make a long story short," as Hannah (her old nurse) +says, I caught a cold, and it went to the weak spot, and I had +another slight attack of hemorrhage; but I took the necessary steps +at once, stayed in bed and didn't speak for six days, and then it +stopped and I felt better than I had at all since I was first taken +ill. But I began to tire so of such constant confinement to my room +that they promised to take me to town as soon as I was well enough, +and perhaps to the Opera. This of course would have been a wild +excitement for me, and I had charming little plans of music by day +and by night, for a week, which I meant to spend with Mrs. +Griswold. Accordingly a cavalcade set out from here on Monday, +consisting of myself escorted by sisters and friends, who were to +see me safely installed in my new quarters and leave me. I arrived, +bundled up, at Mrs. Griswold's, and had begun to consider myself +already quite emancipated from bondage—so that I was discussing +with my brother-in-law the propriety of my going that evening to +hear Faust, this but the beginning of a mad career on which I +proposed to rush headlong—when Dr. Bassett arrived, who is the +medical man that I had meant to consult during my stay +<i>incidentally</i> and between the pauses in the music. The first thing +he said was: "What are you doing here? Go directly back to the +place you came from and don't come up again till the warm weather. +As for music, you mustn't hear of it or even think of it for two +months." This was pleasant, but there was nothing to be done but +obey; which I did a few hours later, with my trunk still unpacked +and my immediate plan of life somewhat limited.</p> + +<p>I say my immediate plan because my permanent found itself by no +means curtailed, but on the contrary expanded and varied in a +manner I had not even dared<a name="page_467" id="page_467"></a> to hope. This came from what Dr. B. +said subsequently, when he had examined my lungs; that is to say +after he had laid his head affectionately first under one of my +shoulders and then the other, and there kept it solemnly for about +ten minutes, in a way that was irresistibly ludicrous, especially +with Kitty as spectator. His verdict was that my lungs were +<i>sound</i>, that he couldn't detect the least evidence of disease, and +that hemorrhage couldn't have come from the lung itself, but from +their membraneous lining, and that of the throat, whatever this may +be. So he gave me to understand that I have as sound a pair of +lungs at present as the next person; in fact from what he said one +would have thought them a pair that a prize-fighter might covet. At +the same time he sent me flying back to the country, with orders +not to get excited, nor to listen to music, nor to speak with +anybody I care for, nor to do anything in short that the +unregenerate nature longs for. This struck my untutored mind as +somewhat inconsistent, and I ventured a gentle remonstrance, which +however was not even listened to, and I was ignominiously thrust +into a car and borne back to Pelham. The problem still bothers me: +either sound lungs are a very dangerous thing to have, or there is +a foul conspiracy on foot to oppress me. Still, I cling to the +consoling thought of my matchless lungs, and this obliterates my +present sufferings.</p> + +<p>Harry came to see me before he sailed for Europe; I'm very glad he +has gone, though I don't expect to see him again for a good many +years. I don't think he will come back for a long time, and I hope +it will do him good and that he will enjoy himself—which he hasn't +done for several years. I haven't read all of Faust, but I think I +know the scenes you call divine—at least I know some that are +exquisite. But why do you speak so disparagingly of King David, +whom I<a name="page_468" id="page_468"></a> always had a weakness for? Think how charming and lovable a +person he must have been, poet, musician and so much else +combined—with however their attendant imperfections. I don't think +I should have cared to be <i>Queen</i> David exactly. I am possessed +with an overpowering admiration and affection for George Eliot. I +don't know why this has so suddenly come over me, but everything I +look at of hers nowadays makes me take a deeper interest in her. I +should love to see her, and I hope Harry will; I asked him to give +my love to her. But I don't remember ever to have heard <i>you</i> speak +of her. Good-bye. I wish conventionality would invent some other +way of ending a letter than "yours truly"; I am so tired of it, and +as one says it to one's shoemaker it would be rather more +complimentary to one's friends to dispense with it altogether and +just sign one's name without anything, after the manner of Miss +Emerson and other free Boston citizens. But I am a slave to +conventionality, and after all <i>am</i> yours truly....</p></div> + +<p>Singularly present has remained to "Harry," as may be imagined, the +rapid visit he paid her at Pelham that February; he was spending a +couple of days in New York, on a quick decision, before taking ship for +England. I was then to make in Europe no such stay as she had +forecast—I was away but for fifteen months; though I can well believe +my appetite must have struck her as open to the boundless, and can +easily be touched again by her generous thought of this as the right +compensatory thing for me. That indeed is what I mainly recall of the +hour I spent<a name="page_469" id="page_469"></a> with her—so unforgettable none the less in its general +value; our so beautifully agreeing that quite the same course would be +the right thing for <i>her</i> and that it was wholly detestable I should be +voyaging off without her. But the precious question and the bright +aspect of her own still waiting chance made our talk for the time all +gaiety; it was, strangely enough, a laughing hour altogether, coloured +with the vision of the next winter in Rome, where we should romantically +meet: the appearance then being of particular protective friends with +Roman designs, under whose wing she might happily travel. She had at +that moment been for many weeks as ill as will here have been shown; but +such is the priceless good faith of youth that we perfectly kept at bay +together the significance of this. I recall no mortal note—nothing but +the bright extravagance of her envy; and see her again, in the old-time +Pelham parlours, ever so erectly slight and so more than needfully, so +transparently, fair (I fatuously took this for "becoming"), glide as +swiftly, toss her head as characteristically, laugh to as free a +disclosure of the handsome largeish teeth that made her mouth almost the +main fact of her face, as if no corner of the veil of the future had +been lifted. The house was quiet and spacious for the day, after the +manner of all American houses of that age at those hours, and<a name="page_470" id="page_470"></a> yet spoke +of such a possible muster at need of generous, gregarious, neighbouring, +sympathising Emmets; in spite of which, withal, the impression was to +come back to me as of a child struggling with her ignorance in a sort of +pathless desert of the genial and the casual. Three months before I +returned to America the struggle had ended. I <i>was</i>, as happened, soon +to see in London her admiration, and my own, the great George Eliot—a +brief glimpse then, but a very impressive, and wellnigh my main +satisfaction in which was that I should have my cousin to tell of it. I +found the Charles Nortons settled for the time in London, with social +contacts and penetrations, a give and take of hospitality, that I felt +as wondrous and of some elements of which they offered me, in their +great kindness, the benefit; so that I was long to value having owed +them in the springtime of '69 five separate impressions of distinguished +persons, then in the full flush of activity and authority, that affected +my young provincialism as a positive fairytale of privilege. I had a +Sunday afternoon hour with Mrs. Lewes at North Bank, no second visitor +but my gentle introducer, the younger Miss Norton, sharing the +revelation, which had some odd and for myself peculiarly thrilling +accompaniments; and then the opportunity of dining with Mr. Ruskin at +Denmark Hill, an impression of uneffaced intensity<a name="page_471" id="page_471"></a> and followed by a +like—and yet so unlike—evening of hospitality from William Morris in +the medieval mise-en-scène of Queen Square. This had been preceded by a +luncheon with Charles Darwin, beautifully benignant, sublimely simple, +at Down; a memory to which I find attached our incidental wondrous +walk—Mrs. Charles Norton, the too near term of her earthly span then +smoothly out of sight, being my guide for the happy excursion—across a +private park of great oaks, which I conceive to have been the admirable +Holwood and where I knew my first sense of a matter afterwards, through +fortunate years, to be more fully disclosed: the springtime in such +places, the adored footpath, the first primroses, the stir and scent of +renascence in the watered sunshine and under spreading boughs that were +somehow before aught else the still reach of remembered lines of +Tennyson, ached over in nostalgic years. The rarest hour of all perhaps, +or at least the strangest, strange verily to the pitch of the sinister, +was a vision, provided by the same care, of D. G. Rossetti in the vernal +dusk of Queen's House Chelsea—among his pictures, amid his poetry +itself, his whole haunting "esthetic," and yet above all bristling with +his personality, with his perversity, with anything, as it rather +awfully seemed to me, but his sympathy, though it at the same time left +one oddly desirous of more<a name="page_472" id="page_472"></a> of him. These impressions heaped up the +measure, goodness knew, of what would serve for Minnie's curiosity—she +was familiarly Minnie to us; the point remaining all along, however, +that, impatient at having overmuch to wait, I rejoiced in possession of +the exact vivid terms in which I should image George Eliot to her. I was +much later on to renew acquaintance with that great lady, but I think I +scarce exceed in saying that with my so interested cousin's death half +the savour of my appreciation had lost itself. Just in those days, that +month of April, the latter had made a weak ineffectual move to +Philadelphia in quest of physical relief—which expressed at the same +time even more one of those reachings out for appeasement of the soul +which were never too publicly indulged in, but by which her power to +interest the true subjects of her attraction was infinitely quickened. +It represented wonderments, I might well indeed have said to myself, +even beyond any inspired by the high muse of North Bank.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>I suppose I ought to have something special to say after having +been suddenly transplanted to a new place and among new people, yet +there isn't much to tell. I came because they all thought at home +that the climate might do me good; I don't feel, however, any +difference in my sensations between this and New York—if I do it's +in favour of New York. I wish it might turn out that an inland +climate isn't after all necessary for me, as I like the other sort +much better<a name="page_473" id="page_473"></a> and really think I feel stronger in it too. My doctor +told me that Boston would kill me in six months—though he is +possibly mistaken. I am going to try it a little longer here, and +then go back to Pelham, where I'm pretty sure I shall find myself +better again. It may be that the mental atmosphere is more to me +than any other, for I feel homesick here all the while, or at least +what I call so, being away from what is most <i>like</i> home to me, and +what if I were there I should call tired. The chief object I had in +coming was to listen to Phillips Brooks; I have heard him several +times and am not, I think, disappointed. To be sure he didn't say +anything new or startling, but I certainly oughtn't to have +expected that, though I believe I did have a secret hope that he +was going to expound to me the old beliefs with a clearness that +would convince me for ever and banish doubt. I had placed all my +hopes in him as the one man I had heard of who, progressive in all +other ways, had yet been able to keep his faith firm in the things +that most earnest men have left far behind them. Yet in preaching +to his congregation he doesn't, or didn't, touch the real +difficulties at all. He was leading them forward instead of trying +to make it clear to <i>me</i> that I have any good reason for my +feelings. Still, it was something to feel that he has them too, and +isn't afraid to trust them and live for them. I wonder what he +really does believe or think about it all, and whether he knows the +reaction that comes to me about Thursday, after the enthusiasm and +confidence made by his eloquence and earnestness on Sunday. +To-morrow will be Saturday, and I shall be glad when Sunday comes +to wind me up again. I feel sadly run down to-night and as if I +should like to see some honest old pagan and shake him by the hand. +It will seem all right and easy again soon, I know, but is it +always thus? Is there<a name="page_474" id="page_474"></a> no more of that undoubting faith in the +world that there used to be? But I won't talk any more about it +now, or I shan't sleep; it is getting late and all themes but the +least interesting must be put away.</p></div> + +<p>"Quaint," as we now say, it at this end of time seems to me that +Phillips Brooks, the great Episcopal light of the period, first in +Philadelphia and then in Boston, and superior character, excellent, even +ardent, thoughtful, genial, practical man, should have appeared to play +before her a light possibly of the clear strain, the rich abundance, the +straight incidence, that she so desired to think attainable. A large, in +fact an enormous, softly massive and sociably active presence, of +capacious attention and comforting suggestion, he was a brave worker +among those who didn't too passionately press their questions and +claims—half the office of such a minister being, no doubt, to abate the +high pitch, and the high pitch being by the same token too much Minnie's +tendency. She was left with it in the smug Philadelphia visibly on her +hands; she had found there after all but a closed door, to which she was +blandly directed, rather than an open, and the sigh of her falling back +with her disappointment seems still to reach one's ears. She found them +too much all round, the stiff blank barriers that, for whatever +thumping, didn't "give;" and in fine I like not too faintly to colour +this image of her as<a name="page_475" id="page_475"></a> failing, in her avid young sincerity, to draw from +the honest pastor of more satisfied souls any assurance that she could +herself honestly apply. I confess that her particular recorded case, +slender enough in its lonely unrest, suggests to me a force, or at least +a play, of effective criticism more vivid to-day than either of the +several rich monuments, honourably as these survive, to Phillips +Brooks's positive "success." She had no occasion or no chance to find +the delightful harmonising friend in him—which was part of the success +for so many others. But her letter goes on after a couple of days—she +had apparently not sent the previous part, and it brings her back, we +can rejoicingly note, to George Eliot, whose poem, alluded to, must have +been The Spanish Gipsy. This work may indeed much less have counted for +her than the all-engulfing Mill on the Floss, incomparably privileged +production, which shone for young persons of that contemporaneity with a +nobleness that nothing under our actual star begins in like case to +match. These are great recognitions, but how can I slight for them a +mention that has again and again all but broken through in my +pages?—that of Francis Boott and his daughter (she to become later on +Mrs. Frank Duveneck and to yield to the same dismal decree of death +before her time that rested on so many of the friends of our youth). +When I turn in thought to the happiness that our<a name="page_476" id="page_476"></a> kinswoman was still to +have known in her short life, for all her disaster, Elizabeth Boott, +delightful, devoted and infinitely under the charm, at once hovers for +me; this all the more, I hasten to add, that we too on our side, and not +least Mary Temple herself, were under the charm, and that <i>that</i> charm, +if less immediately pointed, affected all our young collective +sensibility as a wondrous composite thing. There was the charm for +us—if I must not again speak in assurance but for myself—that +"Europe," the irrepressible even as the <i>ewig Weibliche</i> of literary +allusion was irrepressible, had more than anything else to do with; and +then there was the other that, strange to say (strange as I, once more, +found myself feeling it) owed nothing of its authority to anything so +markedly out of the picture. The spell to which I in any case most +piously sacrificed, most cultivated the sense of, was ever of this +second cast—and for the simple reason that the other, serene in its +virtue, fairly insolent in its pride, needed no rites and no care. It +must be allowed that there was nothing composite in any spell +proceeding, whether directly or indirectly, from the great Albany +connection: this form of the agreeable, through whatever appeals, could +certainly not have been more of a piece, as we say—more of a single +superfused complexion, an element or principle that we could<a name="page_477" id="page_477"></a> in the +usual case ever so easily and pleasantly account for. The case of that +one in the large number of my cousins whom we have seen to be so +incomparably the most interesting was of course anything but the usual; +yet the Albany origin, the woodnote wild, sounded out even amid her +various voices and kept her true, in her way, to something we could only +have called local, or perhaps family, type. Essentially, however, she +had been a free incalculable product, a vivid exception to rules and +precedents; so far as she had at all the value of the "composite" it was +on her own lines altogether—the composition was of things that had lain +nearest to hand. It mattered enormously for such a pair as the Bootts, +intimately associated father and daughter, that what had lain nearest +<i>their</i> hand, or at least that of conspiring nature and fortune in +preparing them for our consumption, had been the things of old Italy, of +the inconceivable Tuscany, that of the but lately expropriated Grand +Dukes in particular, and that when originally alighting among us <i>en +plein</i> Newport they had seemed fairly to reek with a saturation, +esthetic, historic, romantic, that everything roundabout made precious. +I was to apprehend in due course, and not without dismay, that what they +really most reeked with was the delight of finding us ourselves exactly +as we were; they fell so into the wondrous class of<a name="page_478" id="page_478"></a> inverted romantics, +several other odd flowers of which I was later on to have anxiously to +deal with: we and our large crude scene of barbaric plenty, as it might +have been called, beguiled them to appreciations such as made our +tribute to themselves excite at moments their impatience and strike them +as almost silly. It was <i>our</i> conditions that were picturesque, and I +had to make the best of a time when they themselves appeared to consent +to remain so but by the beautiful gaiety of their preference. This, I +remember well, I found disconcerting, so that my main affectionate +business with them became, under amusement by the way, that of keeping +them true to type. What above all contributed was that they really +couldn't help their case, try as they would to shake off the old +infection; they were of "old world" production through steps it was too +late to retrace; and they were in the practical way and in the course of +the very next years to plead as guilty to this as the highest proper +standard for them could have prescribed. They "went back," and again and +again, with a charming, smiling, pleading inconsequence—any pretext but +the real one, the fact that the prime poison was in their veins, serving +them at need; so that, as the case turned, all my own earlier sense, on +the spot, of Florence and Rome was to mix itself with their delightfully +rueful presence<a name="page_479" id="page_479"></a> there. I could then perfectly put up with that flame of +passion for Boston and Newport in them which still left so perfect their +adaptability to Italian installations that would have been impossible +save for subtle Italian reasons.</p> + +<p>I speak of course but of the whole original view: time brings strange +revenges and contradictions, and all the later history was to be a +chapter by itself and of the fullest. We had been all alike accessible +in the first instance to the call of those references which played +through their walk and conversation with an effect that their qualifying +ironies and amusing reactions, where such memories were concerned, +couldn't in the least abate; for nothing in fact lent them a happier +colour than just this ability to afford so carelessly to cheapen the +certain treasure of their past. They had enough of that treasure to give +it perpetually away—in our subsequently to be more determined, our +present, sense; in short we had the fondest use for their leavings even +when they themselves hadn't. Mary Temple, with her own fine quality so +far from composite, rejoiced in the perception, however unassisted by +any sort of experience, of what their background had "meant"; she would +have liked to be able to know just that for herself, as I have already +hinted, and I actually find her image most touching perhaps by its so +speaking of what she with a<a name="page_480" id="page_480"></a> peculiar naturalness dreamed of and missed. +Of clear old English stock on her father's side, her sense for what was +English in life—so we used to simplify—was an intimate part of her, +little chance as it enjoyed for happy verifications. In the Bootts, +despite their still ampler and more recently attested share in that +racial strain, the foreign tradition had exceedingly damped the English, +which didn't however in the least prevent her being caught up by it as +it had stamped itself upon the admirable, the infinitely civilised and +sympathetic, the markedly <i>produced</i> Lizzie. This delightful girl, +educated, cultivated, accomplished, toned above all, as from steeping in +a rich old medium, to a degree of the rarest among her coevals "on our +side," had the further, the supreme grace that she melted into American +opportunities of friendship—and small blame to her, given such as she +then met—with the glee of a sudden scarce believing discoverer. Tuscany +could only swoon away under comparison of its starved sociabilities and +complacent puerilities, the stress of which her previous years had so +known, with the multiplied welcomes and freedoms, the exquisite and easy +fellowships that glorified to her the home scene. Into not the least of +these quick affinities had her prompt acquaintance with Mary Temple +confidently ripened; and with no one in the aftertime, so long as that +too escaped the waiting<a name="page_481" id="page_481"></a> shears, was I to find it more a blest and +sacred rite, guarded by no stiff approaches, to celebrate my cousin's +memory. That really is my apology for this evocation—which might under +straighter connections have let me in still deeper; since if I have +glanced on another page of the present miscellany at the traps too often +successfully set for my wandering feet my reader will doubtless here +recognise a perfect illustration of our danger and will accuse me of +treating an inch of canvas to an acre of embroidery. Let the poor canvas +figure time and the embroidery figure consciousness—the proportion will +perhaps then not strike us as so wrong. Consciousness accordingly still +grips me to the point of a felt pressure of interest in such a matter as +the recoverable history—history in the esthetic connection at least—of +its insistent dealings with a given case. How in the course of time for +instance was it not insistently to deal, for a purpose of application, +with the fine prime image deposited all unwittingly by the "picturesque" +(as I absolutely required to feel it) Boott situation or Boott <i>data</i>? +The direct or vital value of these last, in so many ways, was +experiential, a stored and assimilated thing; but the seed of suggestion +proved after long years to have kept itself apart in order that it +should develop under a particular breath. A not other than lonely and +bereft American, addicted to the arts and<a name="page_482" id="page_482"></a> endowed for them, housed to +an effect of long expatriation in a massive old Florentine villa with a +treasured and tended little daughter by his side, <i>that</i> was the germ +which for reasons beyond my sounding the case of Frank Boott had been +appointed to plant deep down in my vision of things. So lodged it +waited, but the special instance, as I say, had lodged it, and it lost +no vitality—on the contrary it acquired every patience—by the fact +that little by little each of its connections above ground, so to speak, +was successively cut. Then at last after years it raised its own head +into the air and found its full use for the imagination. An Italianate +bereft American with a little moulded daughter in the setting of a +massive old Tuscan residence was at the end of years exactly what was +required by a situation of my own—conceived in the light of the Novel; +and I <i>had</i> it there, in the authenticated way, with its essential fund +of truth, at once all the more because my admirable old friend had given +it to me and none the less because he had no single note of character or +temper, not a grain of the non-essential, in common with my Gilbert +Osmond. This combination of facts has its shy interest, I think, in the +general imaginative or reproductive connection—testifying as it so +happens to do on that whole question of the "putting of people into +books" as to which<a name="page_483" id="page_483"></a> any ineptitude of judgment appears always in order. +I probably shouldn't have had the Gilbert Osmonds at all without the +early "form" of the Frank Bootts, but I still more certainly shouldn't +have had them with the <i>sense</i> of my old inspirers. The form had to be +disembarrassed of that sense and to take in a thoroughly other; thanks +to which account of the matter I am left feeling that I scarce know +whether most to admire, for support of one's beautiful business of the +picture of life, the relation of "people" to art or the relation of art +to people. Adorable each time the mystery of which of these factors, as +we say, has the more prevailingly conduced to a given effect—and too +much adored, at any rate, I allow, when carrying me so very far away. I +retrace my steps with this next.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>I have made several attempts lately to write you a letter, but I +have given it up after two or three pages, because I have always +been in a blue state of mind at the time, and have each time +charitably decided before it was too late to spare you. But if I +were to wait until things change to rose-colour I might perhaps +wait till I die, or longer even, in which case your next +communication from me would be a spiritual one. I am going to +Newport in the early part of May to meet the Bootts—Henrietta has +just come back from there delighted with her visit; why, heaven +knows, I suppose, but I don't—except that she is in that blissful +state of babyhood peculiar to herself where everything seems +delightful.... I like George Eliot not<a name="page_484" id="page_484"></a> through her poem so much, +not nearly so much, as through her prose. The creature interests me +personally, and I feel a desire to know something of her life; how +far her lofty moral sentiments have served her practically—for +instance in her dealings with Lewes. I see that she understands the +character of a <i>generous</i> woman, that is of a woman who believes in +generosity and who must be that or nothing, and who feels keenly, +notwithstanding, how hard it is practically to follow this out, and +how (looking at it from the point of view of comfort as far as this +world goes) it "pays" not at all. We are having weather quite like +summer and rather depressing; I don't feel very well and am always +catching cold—that is I suppose I am, as I have a cough nearly all +the time. As for Phillips Brooks, what you say of him is, no doubt, +all true—he didn't touch the main point when I heard him, at all +events, and that satisfaction you so kindly wish me is, I am +afraid, not to be got from any man. The mystery of this world grows +and grows, and sticks out of every apparently trivial thing, +instead of lessening. I hope this feeling may not be the incipient +stage of insanity. Paul told the truth when he said that now we see +through a glass, <i>very</i> darkly. I hope and trust that the rest may +be equally true, and that some day we shall see face to face. You +say it is easy to drown thought by well-doing, and is it not also +the soundest philosophy (so long of course as one doesn't humbug +oneself); since by simply thinking out a religion who has ever +arrived at anything that did not leave one's heart empty? Do you +ever see Willy James? Good-bye.</p></div> + +<p>Needless enough surely to declare that such pages were essentially not +love-letters: that they could scarce have been less so seems exactly +part<a name="page_485" id="page_485"></a> of their noble inevitability, as well as a proof singularly +interesting and charming that confident friendship may obey its force +and insist on its say quite as much as the sentiment we are apt to take, +as to many of its occasions, for the supremely vocal. We have so often +seen this latter beat distressfully about the bush for something still +deficient, something in the line of positive esteem or constructive +respect, whether offered or enjoyed, that an esteem and a respect such +as we here apprehend, explicit enough on either side to dispense with +those superlatives in which graceless reaction has been known +insidiously to lurk, peculiarly refresh and instruct us. The fine +special quietude of the relation thus promoted in a general +consciousness of unrest—and even if it could breed questions too, since +a relation that breeds none at all is not a living one—was of the +highest value to the author of my letters, who had already sufficiently +"lived," in her generous way, to know well enough in how different a +quarter to look for the grand inconclusive. The directness, the ease, +the extent of the high consideration, the felt need of it as a support, +indeed one may almost say as an inspiration, in trouble, and the free +gift of it as a delightful act of intelligence and justice, render the +whole exhibition, to my sense, admirable in its kind. Questions luckily +<i>could</i> haunt it, as I say and as we shall presently see, but only to<a name="page_486" id="page_486"></a> +illustrate the more all the equilibrium preserved. I confess I can +imagine no tribute to a manly nature from a feminine more final even +than the confidence in "mere" consideration here embodied—the comfort +of the consideration being in the fact that the character with which the +feminine nature was dealing lent it, could it but come, such weight. We +seem to see play through the whole appeal of the younger person to the +somewhat older an invocation of the weight suspended, weight of +judgment, weight of experience and authority, and which may ever so +quietly drop. How kindly in another relation it had been in fact capable +of dropping comes back to me in the mention of my brother Wilky, as to +whom this aspect of his admiring friendship for our young relative's +correspondent, the fruit of their common military service roundabout +Charleston, again comprehensively testifies. That comradeship was a +privilege that Wilky strongly cherished, as well as what one +particularly liked to think for him of his having known—he was to have +known nothing more fortunate. In no less a degree was our elder brother +to come to prize <i>his</i> like share in the association—this being +sufficiently indicated, for that matter, in the note I have quoted from +him. That I have prized my own share in it let my use of this benefit +derived strongly represent. But again for Minnie herself the sadder +admonition<a name="page_487" id="page_487"></a> is sharp, and I find I know not what lonely pluck in her +relapses shaken off as with the jangle of silver bells, her expert +little efforts to live them down, Newport and other matters aiding and +the general preoccupied good will all vainly at her service. Pitiful in +particular her carrying her trouble experimentally back to the Newport +of the first gladness of her girlhood and of the old bright spectacle.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>I know quite well I don't owe you a letter, and that the custom for +maidens is to mete out strictly letter for letter; but if you don't +mind it I don't, and if you <i>do</i> mind that kind of thing you had +better learn not to at once—if you propose to be a friend of mine; +or else have your feelings from time to time severely shocked. +After which preamble I will say that there is a special reason in +this case, though there might not be in another.</p></div> + +<p>She mentions having seen a common friend, in great bereavement and +trouble, who has charged her with a message to her correspondent "if you +know of anything to comfort a person when the one they love best dies, +for heaven's sake say it to her—<i>I</i> hadn't a word to say." And she goes +on:</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>I wrote to you that I was going to Newport, and I meant to go next +Tuesday, but I had another hemorrhage last night, and it is +impossible to say when I shall be able to leave here. I think I was +feeling ill when I last wrote to you, and ever since have been +coughing and feeling wretchedly, until finally the<a name="page_488" id="page_488"></a> hemorrhage has +come. If that goes over well I think I shall be better. I am in bed +now, on the old plan of gruel and silence, and I may get off +without any worse attack this time. It is a perfect day, like +summer—my windows are up and the birds sing. It seems quite out of +keeping that I should be in bed. I should be all right if I could +only get rid of coughing. The warm weather will set me up again. I +wonder what you are doing to-day. Probably taking a solitary walk +and meditating—on what? Good-bye.</p></div> + +<p>But she went to Newport after a few days apparently; whence comes this.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>I believe I was in bed when I last wrote to you, but that attack +didn't prove nearly so bad a one as the previous; I rather bullied +it, and after the fourth hemorrhage it ceased; moreover my cough is +better since I came here. But I am, to tell the truth, a little +homesick—and am afraid I am becoming too much of a baby. Whether +it's from illness or from the natural bent I know not, but there is +no comfort in life away from people who care for you—not an heroic +statement, I am fully aware. I hear that Wilky is at home, and dare +say he will have the kindness to run down and see me while I am +here; at least I hope so. But I am not in the mood for writing +to-day—I am tired and can only bore you if I kept on. It is just a +year since we began to write, and aren't you by this time a little +tired of it? If you are, say so like a man—don't be afraid of me. +Now I am going to lie down before dressing for dinner. Good-bye.</p></div> + +<p>This passage more than a month later makes me ask myself of which of the +correspondents it<a name="page_489" id="page_489"></a> strikes me as most characteristic. The gay clearness +of the one looks out—as it always looked out on the least chance +given—at the several apparent screens of the other; each of which is +indeed disconnectedly, independently clear, but tells too small a part +(at least for her pitch of lucidity) of what they together enclose, and +what was <i>quand même</i> of so fine an implication. Delightful at the same +time any page from her that is not one of the huddled milestones of her +rate of decline.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>How can I write to you when I have forgotten all about you?—if one +<i>can</i> forget what one has never known. However, I am not quite sure +whether it isn't knowing you too much rather than too little that +seems to prevent. Do you comprehend the difficulty? Of course you +don't, so I will explain. The trouble is, I think, that to me you +have no distinct personality. I don't feel sure to whom I am +writing when I say to myself that I will write to you. I see +mentally three men, all answering to your name, each liable to read +my letters and yet differing so much from each other that if it is +proper for one of them it's quite unsuitable to the others. Do you +see? If you can once settle for me the question of which gets my +letters I shall know better what to say in them. Is it the man I +used to see (I can't say know) at Conway, who had a beard, I think, +and might have been middle-aged, and who discussed Trollope's +novels with Kitty and Elly? This was doubtless one of the best of +men, but he didn't <i>interest</i> me, I never felt disposed to speak to +him, and used to get so sleepy in his society at about eight +o'clock that I wondered how the other girls could stay awake till +eleven. Is it <i>that</i> person<a name="page_490" id="page_490"></a> who reads my letters? Or is it the +young man I recently saw at Newport, with a priestly countenance, +calm and critical, with whom I had certainly no fault to find as a +chance companion for three or four days, but whom I should never +have dreamt of writing to or bothering with my affairs one way or +the other, happiness or no happiness, as he would doubtless at once +despise me for my nonsense and wonder at me for my gravity? Does +<i>he</i> get my letters?—or is it finally the being who has from time +to time himself written to me, signing by the same name that the +other gentlemen appropriate? If my correspondent is this last I +know where I stand—and, please heaven, shall stand there some time +longer. Him I won't describe, but he's the only one of the three I +care anything about. My only doubt is because I always address him +at Pemberton Square, and I think him the least likely of the three +to go there much. But good-bye, whichever you are!</p></div> + +<p>It was not at any rate to be said of her that she didn't live +surrounded, even though she had to go so far afield—very far it may at +moments have appeared to her—for the freedom of talk that was her +greatest need of all. How happily and hilariously surrounded this next, +of the end of the following August, and still more its sequel of the +mid-September, abundantly bring back to me; so in the habit were the +numerous Emmets, it might almost be said, of marrying the numerous young +women of our own then kinship: they at all events formed mainly by +themselves at that time the figures and the action of her immediate<a name="page_491" id="page_491"></a> +scene. The marriage of her younger sister was as yet but an +engagement—to the brother-in-law of the eldest, already united to +Richard Emmet and with Temple kinship, into the bargain, playing between +the pairs. All of which animation of prospective and past wedding-bells, +with whatever consolidation of pleasant ties, couldn't quench her +ceaseless instinct for the obscurer connections of things or keep +passionate reflections from awaiting her at every turn. This disposition +in her, and the way in which, at the least push, the gate of thought +opened for her to its widest, which was to the prospect of the soul and +the question of interests on <i>its</i> part that wouldn't be ignored, by no +means fails to put to me that she might well have found the +mystifications of life, had she been appointed to enjoy more of them, +much in excess of its contentments. It easily comes up for us over the +relics of those we have seen beaten, this sense that it was not for +nothing they missed the ampler experience, but in no case that I have +known has it come up for me so much. In none other have I so felt the +naturalness of our asking ourselves what such spirits would have done +with their extension and what would have satisfied them; since dire as +their defeat may have been we don't see them, in the ambiguous light of +some of their possibilities, at peace with victory. This may be perhaps +an illusion of our interest in them,<a name="page_492" id="page_492"></a> a mere part of its ingenuity; and +I allow that if our doubt is excessive it does them a great wrong—which +is another way in which they were not to have been righted. We soothe a +little with it at any rate our sense of the tragic.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>...The irretrievableness of the step (her sister E.'s marriage) +comes over my mind from time to time in such an overwhelming way +that it's most depressing, and I have to be constantly on my guard +not to let Temple and Elly see it, as it would naturally not please +them. After all, since they are not appalled at what they've done, +and are quite sure of each other, as they evidently are, why should +I worry myself? I am well aware that if all other women felt the +seriousness of the matter to the extent I do, hardly any would +<i>ever</i> marry, and the human race would stop short. So I ought +perhaps to be glad so many people can find and take that "little +ease" that Clough talks about, without consciously giving up the +"highest thing." And may not this majority of people be the truly +wise and my own notions of the subject simply fanatical and +impracticable? I clearly see in how small a minority I am, and that +the other side has, with Bishop Blougram, the best of it from one +point of view; but I can't help that, can I? We must be true to +<i>ourselves</i>, mustn't we? though all the rest of humanity be of a +contrary opinion, or else throw discredit upon the wisdom of God, +who made us as we are and not like the next person. Do you remember +my old hobby of the "remote possibility of the best thing" being +better than a clear certainty of the second best? Well, I believe +it more than ever, every day I live. Indeed I don't believe +anything else—but is not that everything? And isn't it exactly +what Christianity means?<a name="page_493" id="page_493"></a> Wasn't Christ the only man who ever lived +and died <i>entirely</i> for his faith, without a shadow of selfishness? +And isn't that reason enough why we should all turn to Him after +having tried everything else and found it wanting?—turn to Him as +the only pure and <i>unmixed</i> manifestation of God in humanity? And +if I believe this, which I think I do, how utterly inconsistent and +detestable is the life I lead, which, so far from being a loving +and cheerful surrender of itself once for all to God's service, is +at best but a base compromise—a few moments or acts or thoughts +consciously and with difficulty divested of actual selfishness. +Must this always be so? Is it owing to the indissoluble mixture of +the divine and the diabolical in us all, or is it because I myself +am hopelessly frivolous and trifling? Or is it finally that I +really don't <i>believe</i>, that I have still a doubt in my mind +whether religion <i>is</i> the one exclusive thing to live for, as +Christ taught us, or whether it will prove to be only <i>one</i> of the +influences, though a great one, which educate the human race and +help it along in that culture which Matthew Arnold thinks the most +desirable thing in the world? In fine is it the meaning and end of +our lives, or only a moral principle bearing a certain part in our +development——?</p> + +<p>Since I wrote this I have been having my tea and sitting on the +piazza looking at the stars and thinking it most unfaithful and +disloyal of me even to speak as I did just now, admitting the +possibility of that faith not being everything which yet at moments +is so divinely true as to light up the whole of life suddenly and +make everything clear. I know the trouble is with <i>me</i> when doubt +and despondency come, but on the other hand I can't altogether +believe it wrong of me to have written as I have, for then what +becomes of my principle of saying what one really thinks and +leaving it to God to take care of his own glory? The<a name="page_494" id="page_494"></a> truth will +vindicate itself in spite of my voice to the contrary. If you think +I am letting myself go this way without sufficient excuse I won't +do it again; but I can't help it this time, I have nobody else to +speak to about serious things. If by chance I say anything or ask a +question that lies at all near my heart my sisters all tell me I am +"queer" and that they "wouldn't be me for anything"—which is, no +doubt, sensible on their part, but which puts an end to anything +but conversation of the most superficial kind on mine. You know one +gets lonely after a while on such a plan of living, so in sheer +desperation I break out where I perhaps more safely can.</p></div> + +<p>Such is the magic of old letters on its subtlest occasions that I +reconstitute in every detail, to a vivid probability—even if I may not +again proportionately project the bristling image—our scene of next +mention; drawing for this upon my uneffaced impression of a like one, my +cousin Katharine Temple's bright nuptials, in the same general setting, +very much before, and in addition seeming to see the very muse of +history take a fresh scroll in order to prepare to cover it, in her very +handsomest hand, well before my eyes. Covered is it now for me with that +abounding and interesting life of the generations then to come at the +pair of preliminary flourishes ushering in the record of which I thus +feel myself still assist.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>But a line to-day to tell you that Elly was safely married on +Wednesday. She looked simply beautiful<a name="page_495" id="page_495"></a> in her wedding garment, and +behaved herself throughout with a composure that was as delightful +as it was surprising. I send you a photograph of myself that I had +taken a few weeks ago. It looks perhaps a trifle melancholy, but I +can't help that—I did the best I could. But I won't write more—it +wouldn't be enlivening. Everything looks grey and blue in the world +nowadays. It will all be bright again in time, I have no doubt; +there is no special reason for it; I think I am simply tired with +knocking about. Yet my week in Newport might have been pleasant +enough if the dentist hadn't taken that occasion to break my bones +for me in a barbarous manner. You are very kind and friendly to +me—you don't know how much happiness your letters give me. You +will be surprised, I dare say, but I shall not, at the last day, +when the accounts are all settled, to find how much this counts in +your favour. Good-bye.</p></div> + +<p>I find my story so attaching that I prize every step of its course, each +note of which hangs together with all the others. The writer is +expressed to my vision in every word, and the resulting image so worth +preserving. Much of one's service to it is thus a gathering-in of the +ever so faded ashes of the happiness that did come to her after all in +snatches. Everything could well, on occasion, look "grey and blue," as +she says; yet there were stretches, even if of the briefest, when other +things still were present than the active symptoms of her state. The +photograph that she speaks of above is before me as I write and +blessedly helpful to memory—so that I am moved to reproduce it<a name="page_496" id="page_496"></a> only +till I feel again how the fondness of memory must strike the light for +apprehension. The plan of the journey to California for the advantage of +the climate there was, with other plans taken up and helplessly dropped, +but beguiling for the day, to accompany her almost to the end.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>The Temple-Emmet caravan have advanced as far as Newport and now +propose to retreat again to Pelham without stopping at Boston or +anywhere else. My brother-in-law has business in New York and can't +be away any longer. I haven't been well of late, or I should have +run up to Boston for a day or two to take a sad farewell of all I +love in that city and thereabouts before I cross the Rocky +Mountains. This little trip has been made out for me by my friends; +I have determined to go, and shall probably start with Elly and +Temple in about ten days, possibly not for a fortnight, to spend +the winter in San Francisco. I can't be enthusiastic about it, but +suppose I might as well take all the means I can to get better: a +winter in a warm climate <i>may</i> be good for me. In short I am going, +and now what I want <i>you</i> to do about it is simply to come and see +us before that. Kitty is going to send you a line to add her +voice—perhaps that may bring you. You may never see me again, you +know, and if I were to die so far away you'd be sorry you hadn't +taken leave of me, wouldn't you?</p></div> + +<p>The idea of California held, and with other pleasant matters really +occupied the scene; out of which moreover insist on shining to me +accessory connections, or connections that then were to be: intensely +distinct for example the figure<a name="page_497" id="page_497"></a> of Miss Crawford, afterwards Madame von +Rabe, sister of my eminent friend F. Marion of the name and, in her +essence, I think, but by a few shades less entire a figure than +he—which is saying much. The most endowed and accomplished of men Frank +Crawford, so that I have scarcely known another who had more aboundingly +lived and wrought, about whom moreover there was singularly more to be +said, it struck me, than at all found voice at the time he might have +been commemorated. Therefore if the young lady alluded to in my cousin's +anecdote was at all of the same personal style and proportion—well, I +should draw the moral if it didn't represent here too speciously the +mouth of a trap, one of those I have already done penance for; the +effect of my yielding to which would be a shaft sunk so straight down +into matters interesting and admirable and sad and strange that, with +everything that was futurity to the occasion noted in our letter and is +an infinitely mixed and a heavily closed past now, I hurry on without so +much as a glance.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>The present plan is to send me to California in about three weeks +by water, under the care of one of the Emmet boys and Temple's +valet—for nurse; and by the time I get there, early in December, +they will be settled in San Francisco for the winter. The idea of a +twenty-one days' sea-voyage is rather appalling—what do you think +of it? This day is but too heavenly<a name="page_498" id="page_498"></a> here. I haven't been to +church, but walking by myself, as happy as possible. When one +sleeps well and the sun shines, what happiness to live! I wish you +were here—wouldn't I show you Pelham at high tide, on a day that +is simply intoxicating, with a fresh breeze blown through the red +and yellow leaves and sunshine "on field and hill, in heart and +brain," as Mr. Lowell says. I suppose you remember the pony I +drove, and Punch, the little Scotch terrier that tried so to +insinuate himself into your affections, on the piazza, the morning +you left. The former has been "cutting up," the latter <i>cut</i> up, +since then. You wouldn't believe me when I told you the pony was a +highly nervous creature—but she behaved as one the other day when +I took the Roman Miss Crawford, who has been staying near here, a +ride. She shied at a dog that frightened her, and dragged the cart +into a ditch, and tried to get over a stone wall, waggon and all. I +of course had to hang on to the reins, but I suggested to Miss +Crawford that she should get out, as the cart was pretty steady +while the horse's forefeet were on top of the wall; which she did, +into a mud-puddle, and soiled her pretty striped stockings and +shoes in a horrible way. It ended by the dear little beast's +consenting to get back upon all fours, but I found it very amusing +and have liked her better ever since.... How does Mr. Holmes +persevere about smoking? I pity him if he can't sleep, and wish <i>I</i> +had a vicious habit so that I might give it up. But I must finish +my tale of the quadruped Punch, who was called upon in the dead of +night by five dogs of the neighbourhood and torn to pieces by them. +The coachman heard him crying in the night, and in the morning we +found him—that is to say we gathered him together, his dear little +tail from one place and his head from another etc! So went out a +very sweet little spirit—I wonder where<a name="page_499" id="page_499"></a> it is now. Don't tell me +he hadn't more of a soul than that Kaufmann, the fat oysterman.</p></div> + +<p>I find bribes to recognition and recovery quite mercilessly multiply, +and with the effort to brush past them more and more difficult; with the +sense for me at any rate (whatever that may be worth for wisdom or +comfort) of sitting rather queerly safe and alone, though as with a +dangle of legs over the edge of a precipice, on the hither side of great +gulfs of history. But these things, dated toward the end of that +November, speak now in a manner for themselves.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>My passage for California is taken for the 4th of December; Elly +and Temple have written to me to come at once—they are settled in +San Francisco for the winter. My brother-in-law here has been +promised that I shall be made so comfortable I shan't want to tear +myself from the ship when I arrive. The captain is a friend of +Temple's, and also of my uncle Captain Temple, and both of them are +going to arrange so for me that I fully expect the ship to be hung +with banners and flowers when I step on board.... I enjoyed my time +in Boston far more than I had expected—in fact immensely, and +wouldn't have missed it for anything; I feel now as if it had +<i>necessarily</i> had to happen. I don't know how I should have done +the winter, and especially started off for an indefinitely long +absence in the west without the impetus that it gave me in certain +directions—the settling down and shaking up, the dissipating of +certain impressions that I had thought fixed and the strengthening +of others that I hadn't been so sure of: an epoch in short.<a name="page_500" id="page_500"></a> I dare +say you have had such—in which a good deal of living was done in a +short time, to be turned over and made fruitful in days to come. I +saw Mr. Holmes once, and was very glad of that glimpse, short as it +was. I went home by way of Newport, where I stayed two days—and +where I was surprised to hear of Fred Jones's engagement to Miss +Rawle of Philadelphia. Do you know her? When I got to New York I +went to the Hones' to ask something about Fred and his affairs and +found that Miss Rawle was staying next door with Mrs. Willy Duncan; +so I went in to see her on the spur of the moment, very much as I +had come from the boat, not particularly presentable for a first +call: however, I thought if she had a soul she wouldn't mind +it—and such I found the case.... Lizzie Boott was as sweet and +good to me as ever; I think she is at once the most unselfish and +most unegotistical girl I know—they don't always go together.</p></div> + +<p>What follows here has, in its order, I think, that it still so testifies +to life—if one doesn't see in it indeed rather perhaps the instinct on +the writer's part, though a scarce conscious one, to wind up the affairs +of her spirit, as it were, and be able to turn over with a sigh of +supreme relief for an end intimately felt as at hand. The moral +fermentation breaking through the bustle of outward questions even at a +time when she might have thrown herself, as one feels, on the great soft +breast of equalising Nature, or taken her chance of not being too wrong, +is a great stroke of truth. No one really could be less "morbid"; yet +she would take no chance—it wasn't in her—of not<a name="page_501" id="page_501"></a> being right with the +right persons; among whom she so ranked her correspondent.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>My address at San Francisco will be simply Care of C. Temple Emmet, +Esq.; and I am surely off this time unless heaven interposes in a +miraculous way between now and Saturday. I've no great courage +about it, but after all it's much the same to me where I am; life +is always full of interest and mystery and happiness to me, and as +for the voyage, the idea of three weeks of comparative solitude +between sea and sky isn't unattractive.... I know that by my +question [as to why he had written, apparently, that she was, of +her nature, "far off" from him] I am putting an end to that +delightful immunity I have enjoyed so much with you from sickening +introspection, analysis of myself and yourself, that exhausting and +nauseating subjectivity, with which most of my other friends see +fit to deluge me, thereby taking much that is refreshing out of +life. Don't be afraid of "hurting my feelings" by anything you can +say. Our friendship has always been to my mind a one-sided thing, +and if you should tell me you find me in any way unsympathetic or +unsatisfactory it won't disappoint me, and I won't even allow +myself to think I'm sorry. I feel so clearly that God knows best, +and that we ought neither of us surely to wish to distort his +creatures from the uses he made them for, just to serve our own +purposes—that is to get a little more sympathy and comfort. We +must each of us, after all, live out our own lives apart from +everyone else; and yet, this being once understood as a fundamental +truth, there is nobody's sympathy and approval that would encourage +me so much as yours. I mean that if one's heart and motives could +be known by another as God knows them, without disguise or +extenuation, and if it should<a name="page_502" id="page_502"></a> <i>then</i> prove that on the <i>whole</i> you +didn't think well of me, it would, more than anything else could, +shake my confidence in my own instincts, which must after all +forever be my guide. And yet, as I said before, I am quite prepared +for the worst, and shall listen to it, if necessary, quite humbly. +I am very much inclined to trust your opinion before my own.</p> + +<p>An hour later. <i>Sold</i> again, by all that's wonderful—I had almost +said by all that's damnable, though it isn't exactly that. My +brother Dick has just walked in with a telegram from Temple: "I +shall be back in December—don't send M." A tremendous revulsion of +feeling and a general sigh of relief have taken place on this +announcement, and it's all right, I'm sure, though when I wrote you +an hour ago I thought the same of the other prospect.</p></div> + +<p>One catches one's breath a little, frankly, at what was to follow the +above within a few days—implying as it does that she had drawn upon +herself some fairly direct statement of her correspondent's reserves of +view as to her human or "intellectual" composition. To have <i>had</i> such +reserves at such an hour, and to have responded to the invitation to +express them—for invitation there had been—is something that our +actual larger light quite helps us to flatter ourselves <i>we</i> shouldn't +have been capable of. But what was of the essence between these +admirable persons was exactly the tone of truth; the larger light was +all to wait for, and the real bearings of the hour were as unapparent as +the interlocutors<a name="page_503" id="page_503"></a> themselves were at home in clearness, so far as they +might bring that ideal about. And whatever turn their conversation took +is to the honour always of the generous girl's passion for truth. As +this long letter admirably illustrates that, I withdraw from it almost +nothing. The record of the rare commerce would be incomplete without it; +all the more perhaps for the wonder and pain of our seeing the noble and +pathetic young creature have, of all things, in her predicament, to +plead for extenuations, to excuse and justify herself.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>I understood your letter perfectly well—it was better than I +feared it might be, but bad enough. Better because I knew already +all it told me, and had been afraid there might be some new and +horrible development in store for me which I hadn't myself felt; +but bad enough because I find it in itself, new or old, such a +disgusting fact that I am intellectually so unsympathetic. It is a +fault I feel profoundly conscious of, but one that, strange to say, +I have only of late been conscious of <i>as</i> a fault. I dare say I +have always known, in a general way, that I am very unobservant +about things and take very little interest in subjects upon which +my mind doesn't naturally dwell; but it had never occurred to me +before that it is a fault that ought to be corrected. Whether +because I have never been given to studying myself much, but have +just let myself go the way my mind was most inclined to, more +interested in the subject itself than in the fact that it +interested me; or whether because one is averse to set oneself down +as indolent<a name="page_504" id="page_504"></a> and egotistic I don't know; at all events I have of +late seen the thing in all its unattractiveness, and I wish I could +get over it. Do you think that, now I am fully roused to the fact, +my case is hopeless? Or that if I should try hard for the next +twenty-five years I might succeed in modifying it? I am speaking +now of a want of interest in <i>all</i> the rest of the world; of not +having the desire to investigate subjects, naturally uninteresting +to me, just because they are interesting to some other human being +whom I don't particularly owe anything to except that he <i>is</i> a +human being, and so his thoughts and feelings ought to be respected +by me and sympathised with. Not to do this is, I know, +unphilosophic and selfish, conceited and altogether inhuman. To be +unselfish, to live for other people, to mould our lives as much as +possible on the model of Christ's all-embracing humanity, seems +most clearly to my mind the one thing worth living for; and yet it +is still the hardest thing for me to do, and I think I do it less +than anybody else who feels the necessity of it strongly at all.</p> + +<p>I am glad you still go to an occasional ball—I should rather like +to meet you at one myself; it's a phase of life we have seen so +little of together. I have been feeling so well lately that I don't +know what to make of it. I don't remember ever in my life being in +such good spirits. Not that they are not in general pretty natural +to me when there is the slightest excuse for them, but now +everything seems bright and happy, my life so full of interest, my +time so thoroughly filled and such a delicious calm to have settled +down on my usually restless spirit. Such an enjoyment of the +<i>present</i>, such a grateful contentment, is in each new day as I see +it dawn in the east, that I can only be thankful and say to myself: +"Make a note of this—you are happy; don't forget it, nor to be +thankful<a name="page_505" id="page_505"></a> for this beautiful gift of life." This is Sunday morning, +and I wonder whether you are listening to Phillips Brooks. I +understand how you feel about his preaching—that it is all feeling +and no reason; I found it so myself last winter in Philadelphia: he +was good for those within the pale, but not good to convince +outsiders that they should come in. I am glad, however, that he +preaches in this way—I think his power lies in it; for it seems to +me, after all, that what comfort we get from religion, and what +light we have upon it, come to us through feeling, that is through +trusting our instinct as the voice of God, the Holy Ghost, though +it may at the same time appear to us directly against what our +intellect teaches us. I don't mean by this that we should deny the +conclusions arrived at by our intellect—which on the contrary I +believe we should trust and stand by to the bitter end, whenever +this may be. But let us fearlessly trust our <i>whole</i> nature, +showing our faith in God by being true to ourselves all through, +and not dishonouring Him by ignoring what our heart says because it +is not carried out by our intellect, or by wilfully blunting our +intellectual perception because it happens to run against some +cherished wish of our heart.</p> + +<p>"But," you will say, "how can a man live torn to pieces this way by +these contrary currents?" Well, I know it is hard to keep our faith +<i>sure</i> of a standpoint where these apparent inconsistencies are all +reconciled and the jangle and discord sound the sweetest harmony; +but I do believe there <i>is</i> one, in God, and that we must only try +to have that faith and never mind how great the inconsistency may +seem, nor how perplexing the maze it leads us through. Let us never +give up one element of the problem for the sake of coming to a +comfortable solution of it in this world. I don't blame those eager +minds that are always worrying,<a name="page_506" id="page_506"></a> studying, investigating, to <i>find</i> +the solution here below; it is a noble work, and let them follow it +out (and without a bit of compromise) to whom God has given the +work. But whether we find it or not I would have them and all of us +feel that it is to <i>be</i> found, if God wills—and through no other +means surely than by our being <i>true</i>. Blessed are they who have +not seen and who have yet believed. But I am going out now for a +walk! We have had the most delightful weather this whole week, and +capital sleighing, and I have spent most of my time driving myself +about with that same dear little pony. I went to town yesterday to +a matinée of William Tell; it was delightful and I slept all night +after it too. I am reading German a little every day, and it's +beginning to go pretty well. Good-bye. Don't tire yourself out +between work and dissipation.</p></div> + +<p>I find myself quite sit up to her, as we have it to-day, while she sits +there without inconvenience, after all that has happened, under the dead +weight of William Tell; the relief of seeing her sublimely capable of +which, with the reprieve from her formidable flight to the Pacific +doubtless not a little contributing, helps to draw down again the +vision, or more exactly the sound, of the old New York and Boston Opera +as our young generation knew and artlessly admired it; admired it, by my +quite broken memories of the early time, in Brignoli the sweet and +vague, in Susini the deep and rich, in Miss Kellogg the native and +charming, in Adelaide Phillipps the universal, to say nothing of other +acclaimed warblers (they appear to me<a name="page_507" id="page_507"></a> to have warbled then so much more +than since) whom I am afraid of not placing in the right perspective. +They warbled Faust a dozen times, it comes back to me, for once of +anything else; Miss Kellogg and Brignoli heaped up the measure of that +success, and I well remember the great yearning with which I heard my +cousin describe her first enchanted sense of it. The next in date of the +letters before me, of the last day but one of December '69, is mainly an +interesting expression of the part that music plays in her mental +economy—though but tentatively offered to her correspondent, who, she +fears, may not be musical enough to understand her, understand how much +"spiritual truth has been 'borne in' upon me by means of harmony: the +relation of the part to the whole, the absolute value of the individual, +the absolute necessity of uncompromising and unfaltering truth, the +different ways in which we like our likes and our unlikes," things all +that have been so made clearer to her. Of a singular grace in movement +and attitude, a grace of free mobility and activity, as original and +"unconventional" as it was carelessly natural, she never looked more +possessed of her best resources than at the piano in which she +delighted, at which she had ardently worked, and where, slim and +straight, her shoulders and head constantly, sympathetically swaying, +she discoursed with an admirable<a name="page_508" id="page_508"></a> touch and a long surrender that was +like a profession of the safest relation she could know. Comparatively +safe though it might have been, however, in the better time, she was +allowed now, I gather, but little playing, and she is deep again toward +the end of January '70 in a quite other exposure, the old familiar +exposure to the "demon," as she calls it, "of the Why, Whence, Whither?" +Long as the letter is I feel it a case again for presentation whole; the +last thoughts of her life, as they appear, breathe in it with such +elevation. They seem to give us her last words and impulses, and, with +what follows of the middle of February, constitute the moving climax of +her rich short story.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>There have been times (and they will come again no doubt) when I +could write to you about ordinary things in a way at least not +depressing; but for a good while now I have felt so tired out, +bodily and mentally, that I couldn't conscientiously ask you to +share my mood. The life I live here in the country, and so very +much alone, is capable of being the happiest or the unhappiest of +existences, as it all depends so on oneself and is so very little +interfered with by outside influences. Perhaps I am more than +usually subject to extremes of happiness and of depression, yet I +suppose everyone must have moments, even in the most varied and +distracting life, when the old questioning spirit, the demon of the +Why, Whence, Whither? stalks in like the skeleton at the feast and +takes a seat beside him. I say everyone, but I must except those +rare and happy souls who really believe in Christianity, who<a name="page_509" id="page_509"></a> no +longer strive after even goodness as it comes from one's own +effort, but take refuge in the mysterious sacrifice of Christ, his +merit sufficing, and in short throw themselves in the orthodox way +on the consoling truth of the Atonement—to me hitherto neither +comprehensible nor desirable. These people, having completely +surrendered self, having lost their lives, as it were in Christ, +must truly have found them, must know the rest that comes from +literally casting their care of doubt and strife and thought upon +the Lord.</p> + +<p>I say hitherto the doctrine of the vicarious suffering of Christ +has been to me not only incomprehensible but also unconsoling; I +didn't want it and didn't understand even intellectually the +feeling of people who do. I don't mean to say that the life and +death of Christ and the example they set for us have not been to me +always the brightest spot in history—for they have; but they have +stood rather as an example that we must try to follow, that we must +by constant and ceaseless effort bring our lives nearer to—but +always, to some extent at least, through ourselves, that is through +ourselves with God's help, got by asking Him for it and by His +giving it to us straight and with no mediation. When I have seen as +time went by my own shortcomings all the more instead of the less +frequent, I have thought: "Well, you don't try hard enough; you are +not really in earnest in thinking that you believe in the Christian +life as the only true one." The more I tried, nevertheless, the +less it seemed like the model life; the best things I did continued +to be the more spontaneous ones; the greatest efforts had the least +success; until finally I couldn't but see that if this was +Christianity it was not the "rest" that Christ had promised his +disciples—it was nothing more than a pagan life with a high ideal, +only an ideal so high that nothing but failure and unhappiness came +from trying to follow it. And one night when I was awake<a name="page_510" id="page_510"></a> through +all the hours it occurred to me: What if this were the need that +Christianity came to fill up in our hearts? What if, after all, +that old meaningless form of words that had been sounded in my +unheeding ears all my days were suddenly to become invested with +spirit and truth? What if this were the good tidings that have made +so many hearts secure and happy in the most trying situations? For +if morality and virtue were the test of a Christian, certainly +Christ would never have likened the kingdom of heaven to a little +child, in whose heart is no struggle, no conscious battle between +right and wrong, but only unthinking love and trust.</p> + +<p>However it may turn out, whether it shall seem true or untrue to me +finally, I am at least glad to be able to put myself intellectually +into the place of the long line of Christians who have felt the +need and the comfort of this belief. It throws a light upon Uncle +Henry's talk, which has seemed to me hitherto neither reasonable +nor consoling. When I was with him it so far disgusted me that I +fear I showed him plainly that I found it not only highly +unpractical, but ignoble and shirking. I knew all the while that he +disliked what he called my pride and conceit, but felt all the same +that his views didn't touch my case a bit, didn't give me the least +comfort or practical help, and seemed to me wanting in earnestness +and strength. <i>Now</i> I say to myself: What if the good gentleman had +all along really got hold of the higher truth, the purer +spirituality? Verily there are two sides to everything in this +world, and one becomes more charitable the older one grows. +However, if I write at this length it is because I am feeling +to-day too seedy for anything else. I had a hemorrhage a week ago, +which rather took the life out of me; but as it was the only one I +feel I should by this time be coming round again—and probably +might if I hadn't got into a sleepless state<a name="page_511" id="page_511"></a> which completely +knocks me up. The old consolatory remark, "Patience, neighbour, and +shuffle the cards," ought to impart a little hope to me, I suppose; +but it's a long time since I've had any trumps in my hand, and you +know that with the best luck the game always tired me. Willy James +sometimes tells me to behave like a man and a gentleman if I wish +to outwit fate. What a <i>real</i> person he is! He is to me in nearly +all respects a head and shoulders above other people. How is +Wendell Holmes? Elly is having the gayest winter in Washington and +wants me to go to them there, which I had meant to do before the +return of my last winter's illness. But it's not for me now.</p> + +<p>Later.—I have kept my letter a day or two, thinking I might feel +in tune for writing you a better one and not sending this at all. +But alas I shall have to wait some time before I am like my old +self again, so I may as well let this go. You see I'm not in a +condition, mentally or physically, to take bright and healthy views +of life. But if you really care you may as well see this mood as +another, for heaven only knows when I shall get out of it. Can you +understand the utter weariness of thinking about one thing all the +time, so that when you wake up in the morning consciousness comes +back with a sigh of "Oh yes, here it is again; another day of +doubting and worrying, hoping and fearing has begun." If I don't +get any sleep at all, which is too frequently the case, the strain +is a "leetle" bit too hard, and I am sometimes tempted to take a +drop of "pison" to put me to sleep in earnest. That momentary +vision of redemption from thinking and striving, of a happy rest +this side of eternity, has vanished away again. I can't help it; +peaceful, desirable as it may be, the truth is that practically I +don't believe it. It was such a sudden thing, such an entire change +from anything that had ever come to me before, that it seemed +almost like an inspiration, and I<a name="page_512" id="page_512"></a> waited, almost expecting it to +continue, to be permanent. But it doesn't stay, and so back swings +the universe to the old place—paganism, naturalism, or whatever +you call the belief whose watchword is "God and our own soul." And +who shall say there is not comfort in it? One at least feels that +here one breathes one's native air, welcoming back the old <i>human</i> +feeling, with its beautiful pride and its striving, its despair, +its mystery and its faith. Write to me and tell me whether, as one +goes on, one must still be tossed about more and more by these +conflicting feelings, or whether they finally settle themselves +quietly one way or the other and take only their proper share at +least of one's life. This day is like summer, but I should enjoy it +more if last night hadn't been quite the most unpleasant I ever +spent. I got so thoroughly tired about two in the morning that I +made up my mind in despair to give the morphine another trial, and +as one dose had no effect took two; the consequence of which is +that I feel as ill to-day as one could desire. I can tell you, sir, +you had better prize the gift of sleep as it deserves while you +have it. If I don't never write to you no more you'll know it's +because I really wish to treat you kindly. But one of these days +you'll get another kind of letter, brim-full perhaps with health +and happiness and thoroughly ashamed of my present self. I had a +long letter yesterday from Harry James at Florence—enjoying Italy +but homesick. Did you see those verses in the North American +translated from the Persian? Good-bye.</p></div> + +<p>The last of all is full both of realities and illusions, the latter +insistently living through all the distress of the former. And I should +like to say, or to believe, that they remained with her to the end, +which was near.<a name="page_513" id="page_513"></a></p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>Don't be alarmed at my pencil—I am not in bed but only bundled-up +on the piazza by order of the doctor.... I started for New York +feeling a good deal knocked up, but hoping to get better from the +change; I was to stay there over Sunday and see Dr. Metcalfe, who +has a high reputation and was a friend of my father's. I left a +request at his office that he would come to me on Sunday <small>P.M.</small>; but +in the meantime my cousin Mrs. Minturn Post, with whom I was +staying, urged upon me her physician, Dr. Taylor, who came on +Saturday night, just as I was going to bed, and, after sounding my +lungs, told me very dreadful things about them. As his verdict was +worse than Metcalfe's proved I will tell you what he said first. He +began very solemnly: "My dear young lady, your right lung is +diseased; all your hemorrhages have come from there. It must have +been bad for at least a year before they began. You must go to +Europe as soon as possible." This was not cheerful, as I had been +idiot enough to believe some time ago such a different explanation. +But of course I wanted to learn what he absolutely thought, and +told him I wasn't a bit afraid. If there weren't tubercles was I +curable and if there <i>were</i>• was I hopeless? I asked him for the +very worst view he had conscientiously to take, but didn't mean +definitely to ask how long I should live, and so was rather +unprepared for his reply of "Two or three years." I didn't however +wish to make him regret his frankness, so I said, "Well, Doctor, +even if my right lung were all gone I should make a stand with my +left," and then, by way of showing how valiant the stand would be, +fainted away. This, I should say, was owing a good deal to my +previous used-up condition from want of sleep. It made him at any +rate hasten to assure me that there was every possibility of my +case being not after all so bad—with which he took his departure; +to my<a name="page_514" id="page_514"></a> great relief as I didn't think him at all nice. His grammar +was bad, and he made himself generally objectionable.</p> + +<p>The next night dear Dr. Metcalfe came, whom I love for the gentlest +and kindest soul I have ever seen. To start with he's a gentleman, +as well as an excellent physician, and to end with he and my father +were fond of each other at West Point, and he takes a sort of +paternal interest in me. He told me that my right lung is decidedly +weaker than my left, which is quite sound, and that the hemorrhage +has been a good thing for it and kept it from actual disease; and +also that if I can keep up my general health I may get all right +again. He has known a ten times worse case get entirely well. He +urged me not to go to Washington, but decidedly to go to Europe; so +this last is what I am to do with my cousin Mrs. Post if I am not +dead before June. In a fortnight I'm to go back to New York to be +for some time under Metcalfe's care. I feel tired out and hardly +able to stir, but my courage is good, and I don't propose to lose +it if I can help, for I know it all depends on myself whether I get +through or not. That is if I begin to be indifferent to what +happens I shall go down the hill fast. I have fortunately, through +my mother's father, enough Irish blood in me rather to enjoy a good +fight. I feel the greatest longing for summer or spring; I should +like it to be always spring for the rest of my life and to have all +the people I care for always with me! But who <i>wouldn't</i> like it +so? Good-bye.</p></div> + +<p>To the gallantry and beauty of which there is little surely to add. But +there came a moment, almost immediately after, when all illusion failed; +which it is not good to think of or linger on, and<a name="page_515" id="page_515"></a> yet not pitiful not +to note. One may have wondered rather doubtingly—and I have expressed +that—what life would have had for her and how her exquisite faculty of +challenge could have "worked in" with what she was likely otherwise to +have encountered or been confined to. None the less did she in fact +cling to consciousness; death, at the last, was dreadful to her; she +would have given anything to live—and the image of this, which was long +to remain with me, appeared so of the essence of tragedy that I was in +the far-off aftertime to seek to lay the ghost by wrapping it, a +particular occasion aiding, in the beauty and dignity of art. The figure +that was to hover as the ghost has at any rate been of an extreme +pertinence, I feel, to my doubtless too loose and confused general +picture, vitiated perhaps by the effort to comprehend more than it +contains. Much as this cherished companion's presence among us had +represented for William and myself—and it is on <i>his</i> behalf I +especially speak—her death made a mark that must stand here for a too +waiting conclusion. We felt it together as the end of our youth.</p> + +<p class="c"><br /><br /><br /><br />THE END</p> + +<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="" +style="border:2px dotted gray;margin:5% auto 5% auto;padding:2%;"> +<tr><th align="center">The following typographical errors have been corrected by the etext <a name="transcriber" id="transcriber"></a>transcriber:</th></tr> +<tr><td align="left">which I left in one of the of the library's mantelpiece=>which I left in one of the library's mantelpiece</td></tr> +<tr><td align="left">qui s'est allongée malgré moi. Ton frere, James William.=>qui s'est allongée malgré moi. Ton frère, James William.</td></tr> +<tr><td align="left">At about 5 the fearful revéillé calls us>=At about 5 the fearful réveillé calls us</td></tr> +<tr><td align="left">quand meme>=quand même</td></tr> +<tr><td align="left">my own that it should beeome so=>my own that it should become so</td></tr> +<tr><td align="left">I dont care much what it may be=>I don't care much what it may be</td></tr> +</table> + +<div class="footnotes"><p class="cb"><a name="FOOTNOTES" id="FOOTNOTES"></a>FOOTNOTES:</p> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> <i>A Small Boy and Others.</i> New York, 1913.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> <i>A Small Boy and Others</i>, 1913.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> A Small Boy and Others, 1913.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Expressive drawing alas irreproducible.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> A drawing of figures in evening lamplight.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> Literary Remains of Henry James, Boston, 1885. The portrait +accompanying the volume gave us, alas, but the scantest satisfaction.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> <i>Past and Present</i>, 1843.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> "But, Sir, we have yet one more scene to visit together, +connected with all we have previously witnessed: a home scene, Sir +Benjamin; and we must now ascend a mountain of pity high enough to +command the dewy extense of three kingdoms. From thence we have to look +down from every point of our warm hearts with a sight as multifold as +the cherubic eyes. We are to see with equal penetration through the +diverse thickness of castles, mansions, and cottages, through London and +through hamlet, at young wives and at aged mothers, little children, +brothers and sisters—all groups and ties that are; and at affianced +maidens, ties that were to be. There are rents and tears to-day in the +general life: the bulletin of the dead has come, and the groups of +sorrow are constituted. Splendid Paris bends as a Niobe or as a Rachel +while the corse of her much-enduring Hero is borne to the marble +Invalides; other corses go earthward with a shorter procession, helped +away by the spades of ruder but more instant sculptors; the rucked sod +of the Alma is their urn and monument in one; yet every warrior among +them is also buried to-day with swelling greatness of obsequies, if we +could see them, in the everlasting ruby vaults of some human heart. You +are touched, Sir Benjamin, and are justly religious on this summit. +Struck down for a moment from worldliness, we both discourse without an +afterthought on the immortal state; we hope that the brave are already +welcomed in the land of peace; that our laurels they could not stop to +take, and our earned promotion they seem to have missed are clad upon +them now by the God of battles in front of the shining armies of the +just. We hope also that if their voices could now speak to the mourners, +the oil of their sure gladness would heal our faithless sorrow. It is a +true strain no doubt, and yet but of momentary power." War, Cholera, and +the Ministry of Health. An Appeal to Sir Benjamin Hall and the British +People. London, 1854.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> An eminent Unitarian pastor.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> My youngest brother's ingenuity was to know as little rest +during much of his life as his strong faculty of agitation—to the +employment of which it was indeed not least remarkably applied. Many +illustrations of it would be to give, had I more margin; and not one of +them anything less than striking, thanks to the vivacity of his +intelligence, the variety of his gifts and the native ability in which +he was himself so much less interested than was the case with everyone +he met, however casually, that he became, many years before his death in +1910, our one gentleman of leisure: so far as this condition might +consort with the easiest aptitude for admirable talk, charged with +natural life, perception, humour and colour, that I have perhaps ever +known. There were times when Bob's spoken overflow struck me as the +equivalent, for fine animation, of William's epistolary. The note of the +ingenious in him spent itself as he went, but I find an echo of one of +its many incidents in the passage of verse that I am here moved to +rescue from undue obscurity. It is too "amateurish" and has too many +irregular lines, but images admirably the play of spirit in him which +after ranging through much misadventure could at last drop to an almost +effective grasp of the happiest relation. +</p> + +<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poetry"> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Although I lie so low and still</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Here came I by the Master's will;</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">He smote at last to make me free,</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">As He was smitten on the tree</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">And nailèd there. He knew of old</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">The human heart, and mine is cold;</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">And I know now that all we gain</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Until we come to Him is vain.</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Thy hands have never wrought a deed,</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Thy heart has never known a need,</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">That went astray in His great plan</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Since far-off days when youth began.</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">For in that vast and perfect plan</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Where time is but an empty span</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Our Master waits. He knows our want,</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">We know not his—till pale and gaunt</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">With weariness of life we come</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">And say to Him, What shall I be?</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Oh Master, smite, but make me free</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Perchance in these far worlds to know</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">The better thing we sought to be.</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"> </td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">And then upon thy couch lie down</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">And fold the hands which have not sown;</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">And as thou liest there alone</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Perhaps some breath from seraph blown</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">As soft as dew upon the rose</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Will fall upon thee at life's close.</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">So thou wilt say, At last, at last!</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">All pain is love when pain is past!</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">And to the Master once again:</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Oh keep my heart too weak to pray;</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">I ask no longer questions vain</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Of life and love, of loss and gain—</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">These for the living are and strong;</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">I go to Thee, to Thee belong.</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Once was I wakened by Thy light,</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">But years have passed, and now the night</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">Takes me to Thee. I am content;</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">So be it in Thy perfect plan</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">A mansion is where I am sent</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 0em;">To dwell among the innocent.</span></td></tr> +</table></div> + +</div> +<hr class="full" /> + + + + + + + +<pre> + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's Notes of a Son and Brother, by Henry James + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER *** + +***** This file should be named 38424-h.htm or 38424-h.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/3/8/4/2/38424/ + +Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was +produced from scanned images of public domain material +from the Google Print project.) + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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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: Notes of a Son and Brother + +Author: Henry James + +Release Date: December 27, 2011 [EBook #38424] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER *** + + + + +Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was +produced from scanned images of public domain material +from the Google Print project.) + + + + + + + + +BY HENRY JAMES + +A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS + +NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER + + + + +NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER + +[Illustration: _Pencil-drawn portrait of William James by himself about +1866_] + + + + +NOTES OF A +SON AND BROTHER + +BY + +HENRY JAMES + +ILLUSTRATED + +NEW YORK + +CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS + +1914 + +COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY +CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS + +Published March, 1914 + + + + +ILLUSTRATIONS + + +Pencil-drawn portrait of William James by himself, about +1866 _Frontispiece_ + +FACING +PAGE + +Louis Osborne. Sketch from a letter of William James +(page 18) 18 + +Portrait in oils of Miss Katherine Temple, 1861 96 + +A leaf from the letter quoted on page 129 130 + +Sketch of G. W. James brought home wounded from the assault +on Fort Wagner 244 + +"The cold water cure at Divonne--excellent for melancholia."--From +a letter of William James (page 447) 448 + + + + +I + + +It may again perhaps betray something of that incorrigible vagueness of +current in our educational drift which I have elsewhere[1] so +unreservedly suffered to reflect itself that, though we had come abroad +in 1855 with an eye to the then supposedly supreme benefits of Swiss +schooling, our most resolute attempt to tap that supply, after twenty +distractions, waited over to the autumn of the fourth year later on, +when we in renewed good faith retraced our steps to Geneva. Our parents +began at that season a long sojourn at the old Hotel de l'Ecu, which now +erects a somewhat diminished head on the edge of the rushing Rhone--its +only rival then was the Hotel des Bergues opposite, considerably larger +and commanding more or less the view of that profiled crest of +Mont-Blanc which used to be so oddly likened to the head and face of a +singularly supine Napoleon. But on that side the shooting blue flood was +less directly and familiarly under the windows; in our position we +lived with it and hung over it, and its beauty, just where we mainly +congregated, was, I fear, my own sole happy impression during several of +those months. It was of a Sunday that we congregated most; my two +younger brothers had, in general, on that day their _sortie_ from the +Pensionnat Maquelin, a couple of miles out of town, where they were then +established, and W. J., following courses at the Academy, in its present +enriched and amplified form the University, mingled, failing livelier +recreation, in the family circle at the hotel. Livelier recreation, +during the hours of completest ease, consisted mostly, as the period +drew itself out, of those _courses_, along the lake and along the hills, +which offer to student-life in whatever phase, throughout that blest +country, the most romantic of all forms of "a little change"; enjoyed +too in some degree, but much more restrictedly, by myself--this an +effect, as I remember feeling it, of my considerably greater servitude. +I had been placed, separately, at still another Institution, that of M. +Rochette, who carried on an Ecole Preparatoire aux Ecoles Speciales, by +which was meant in particular the Polytechnic School at Zurich, with +whatever other like curricula, always "scientific," might elsewhere be +aimed at; and I had been so disposed of under a flattering misconception +of my aptitudes that leaves me to-day even more wonderstruck than at +that immediate season of my distress. + +I so feared and abhorred mathematics that the simplest arithmetical +operation had always found and kept me helpless and blank--the dire +discipline of the years bringing no relief whatever to my state; and +mathematics unmitigated were at the Institution Rochette the air we +breathed, building us up as they most officiously did for those other +grim ordeals and pursuits, those of the mining and the civil engineer, +those of the architectural aspirant and the technician in still other +fields, to which we were supposed to be addressed. Nothing of the sort +was indeed supposed of me--which is in particular my present +mystification; so that my assault of the preliminaries disclosed, feeble +as it strikingly remained, was mere darkness, waste and anguish. I found +myself able to bite, as the phrase was, into no subject there deemed +savoury; it was hard and bitter fruit all and turned to ashes in my +mouth. More extraordinary however than my good parents' +belief--eccentric on their part too, in the light of their usual +practice and disposition, their habit, for the most part, of liking for +us after a gasp or two whatever we seemed to like--was my own failure to +protest with a frankness proportioned to my horror. The stiffer +intellectual discipline, the discipline of physics and of algebra, +invoked for the benefit of an understanding undisputedly weak and shy, +had been accepted on my side as a blessing perhaps in disguise. It had +come to me by I know not what perversity that if I couldn't tackle the +smallest problem in mechanics or face without dismay at the blackboard +the simplest geometric challenge I ought somehow in decency to make +myself over, oughtn't really to be so inferior to almost everyone else. +That was the pang, as it was also the marvel--that the meanest minds and +the vulgarest types approached these matters without a sign of +trepidation even when they approached them, at the worst, without +positive appetite. My attempt not therefore to remain abnormal wholly +broke down, however, and when I at last withdrew from the scene it was +not even as a conspicuous, it was only as an obscure, a deeply hushed +failure. I joined William, after what had seemed to me an eternity of +woe, at the Academy, where I followed, for too short a time but with a +comparative recovery of confidence, such literary _cours_ as I might. + +I puzzle it out to-day that my parents had simply said to themselves, in +serious concern, that I read too many novels, or at least read them too +attentively--_that_ was the vice; as also that they had by the contagion +of their good faith got me in a manner to agree with them; since I +could almost always enter, to the gain of "horizon" but too often to +the perversion of experience, into any view of my real interests, +so-called, that was presented to me with a dazzling assurance. I didn't +consider certainly that I was so forming my mind, and was doubtless +curious to see whether it mightn't, by a process flourishing in other +applications, get to some extent formed. It wasn't, I think, till I felt +the rapture of that method's arrest that I knew how grotesquely little +it had done for me. And yet I bore it afterwards no malice--resorting +again to that early fatalistic philosophy of which the general sense was +that almost anything, however disagreeable, had been worth while; so +unable was I to claim that it hadn't involved impressions. I positively +felt the impressional harvest rather rich, little as any item of it +might have passed at the time for the sort of thing one exhibits as a +trophy of learning. My small exhibition was all for myself and consisted +on the whole but of a dusty, spotty, ugly picture--I took it for ugly +well-nigh to the pitch of the sinister. Its being a picture at all--and +I clung to that--came from the personal and material facts of the place, +where I was the only scholar of English speech, since my companions, +with a Genevese predominance, were variously polyglot. They wondered, I +couldn't doubt, what I was doing among them, and what lost lamb, almost +audibly bleating, I had been charged to figure. Yet I remember no crude +chaff, no very free relation of any one with any one, no high pitch, +still less any low descent, of young pleasantry or irony; our manners +must have been remarkably formed, and our general tone was that of a +man-of-the-world discretion, or at the worst of a certain small +bourgeois circumspection. The dread in the Genevese of having definitely +to "know" strangers and thereby be at costs for any sort of hospitality +to them comes back to me as written clear; not less than their being of +two sorts or societies, sons of the townspeople pure and simple and sons +of the local aristocracy perched in certain of the fine old houses of +the Cite and enjoying a background of sturdily-seated lakeside villas +and deeply umbrageous campagnes. I remember thinking the difference of +type, complexion and general _allure_ between these groups more marked, +to all the senses, than any "social distinction" I had yet encountered. +But the great thing was that I could so simplify our enclosing scene +itself, round it in and make it compose--the dark, the dreary +Institution, squeezed into a tall, dim, stony-faced and stony-hearted +house at the very top of the Cite and directly in the rear of the +Cathedral, portions of the apse of which seem to me to have straggled +above or protruded toward it, with other odd extraneous masses than +itself pressing still nearer. This simplification, quite luxuriously for +my young mind, was to mere mean blackness of an old-world sordid order. +I recognised _rich_ blackness in other connections, but this was somehow +of a harsh tradition and a tragic economy; sordid and strong was what I +had from the first felt the place, though urging myself always to rub +off history from its stones, and suffering thus, after a fashion, by the +fact that with history it ought to be interesting and that I ought to +know just how and why it was. For that, I think, was ever both the +burden and the joy--the complication, I mean, of interest, and the +sense, in the midst of the ugly and the melancholy, that queer crooked +silent corners behind cathedrals wrought in their way for one, did +something, while one haunted them, to the imagination and the taste; and +that so, once more, since the generalisation had become a habit with me, +I couldn't, seeing and feeling these things, really believe I had picked +up nothing. + +When I sat in a dusky upper chamber and read "French literature" with +blighted M. Toeppfer, son of a happier sire, as I was sure the charming +writer and caricaturist, in spite of cumbrous cares, must have been; or +when, a couple of times a week and in the same eternal twilight (we +groped almost lampless through the winter days, and our glimmering +tapers, when they sparsely appeared, smelt of a past age), I worried out +Virgil and Tite-Live with M. Verchere, or Schiller and Lessing with the +ruddy noisy little professor of German, who sat always, the lesson long, +in a light brown talma, the sides of which he caused violently to flap +for emphasis like agitated wings, I was almost conscious of the breath +of culture as I modestly aspired to culture, and was at any rate safe +for the time from a summons to the blackboard at the hands of awful +little M. Galopin, that dispenser of the paralysing chalk who most +affected me. Extremely diminutive and wearing for the most part a thin +inscrutable smile, the ghost of a tribute to awkwardness happily carried +off, he found in our barren interviews, I believed, a charm to +curiosity, bending afresh each time as over the handful of specimen +dust, unprecedented product at its finest, extracted from the scratched +soil of my intelligence. With M. Toeppfer I was almost happy; with each +of these instructors my hour was unshared, my exploits unwitnessed, by +others; but M. Toeppfer became a friend, shewed himself a _causeur_, +brightened our lesson with memories of his time in Paris, where, if I am +not mistaken, he had made, with great animation, his baccalaureat, and +whence it was my possibly presumptuous impression he had brought back a +state of health, apparently much impaired, which represented contrition +for youthful spirits. He had haunted the parterre of the Theatre +Francais, and when we read Racine his vision of Rachel, whom he had seen +there as often as possible, revived; he was able to say at moments how +she had spoken and moved, and I recall in particular his telling me that +on her entrance as Phedre, borne down, in her languorous passion, by the +weight of her royal robes--"Que ces vains ornemens, que ces voiles me +pesent!"--the long lapse of time before she spoke and while she sank +upon a seat filled itself extraordinarily with her visible woe. But +where he most gave me comfort was in bringing home to me that the house +commemorated, immortalised, as we call it, in the first of his father's +Nouvelles Genevoises, La Bibliotheque de mon Oncle, was none other than +the structure facing us where we sat and which so impinged and leaned on +the cathedral walls that he had but to indicate to me certain points +from the window of our room to reconstitute thrillingly the scenery, the +drollery, the whimsical action of the tale. _There_ was a demonstration +I could feel important, votary and victim of the "scene," the scene and +the "atmosphere" only, that I had been formed to be. That I called +interesting lore--called it so at least to myself, though feeling it at +the same time of course so little _directly_ producible that I could +perhaps even then have fronted this actually remote circumstance of my +never having produced it till this moment. There abode in me, I may add, +a sense that on any subject that did appeal and that so found me +ready--such subjects being indeed as yet vague, but immensely suggestive +of number--I should have grasped the confident chalk, welcomed the very +biggest piece, not in the least have feared the blackboard. They were +inscribed, alas for me, in no recognised course. I put my hand straight +on another of them, none the less, if not on a whole group of others, in +my ascent, each morning of the spring or the early summer semestre, of +the admirable old Rue de la Tour de Boel, pronounced Boisl, which, +dusky, steep and tortuous, formed a short cut to that part of the Grand' +Rue in which the Academy was then seated. + +It was a foul and malodorous way--I sniff again, during the tepid weeks, +its warm close air and that near presence of rank cheese which was in +those days almost everywhere, for the nostril, the note of urban +Switzerland; these things blessed me as I passed, for I passed straight +to freedom and away from M. Galopin; they mixed with the benediction of +the exquisite spring and the rapture, constantly renewed, though for too +short a period, of my now substituting literary, or in other words +romantic, studies for the pursuits of the Institution Rochette. I viewed +them as literary, these new branches of research, though in truth they +were loose enough and followed on loose terms. My dear parents, as if to +make up to me, characteristically, for my recent absurd strain to no +purpose, allowed me now the happiest freedom, left me to attend such +lectures as I preferred, only desiring that I should attend several a +week, and content--cherished memory that it makes of their forms with +me--that these should involve neither examinations nor reports. The +Academic authorities, good-natured in the extreme and accustomed to the +alien amateur, appear to have been equally content, and I was but too +delighted, on such lines, to attend anything or everything. My whole +impression now, with my self-respect re-established, was of something +exquisite: I was put to the proof about nothing; I deeply enjoyed the +confidence shown in my taste, not to say in my honour, and I sat out +lecture after lecture as I might have sat out drama, alternate tragedy +and comedy, beautifully performed--the professor in each case figuring +the hero, and the undergraduates, much more numerous, though not in +general maturer than those of the Institution, where I had been, to my +perception, every one's junior, partaking in an odd fashion of the +nature at once of troupe and spectators. The scientific subjects, in a +large suggestive way, figured tragedy, I seemed to feel, and I pushed +this form to the point of my following, for conscience' sake, though not +with the last regularity, lurid demonstrations, as they affected me, on +anatomy and physiology; these in turn leading to my earnest view, at the +Medical School, of the dissection of a _magnifique gendarme_--which +ordeal brought me to a stand. It was by the literary and even by the +philosophic _lecons_ that the office of bright comedy was discharged, on +the same liberal lines; at the same time that I blush to remember with +how base a blankness I must have several times listened to H. F. Amiel, +admirable writer, analyst, moralist. His name and the fact of his having +been then a mild grave oracle of the shrine are all that remain with me +(I was fit to be coupled with my cousin Anne King, named in another +place, who, on the same Genevese scene, had had early lessons from the +young Victor Cherbuliez, then with all his music in him, and was to live +to mention to me that he had been for her "like any one else"); the +shrine, not to say the temple itself, shining for me truly, all that +season, with a mere confounding blur of light. Was it an effect of my +intensity of reaction from what I had hated? was it to a great extent +the beguiling beauty of a wonderful Swiss spring, into which all things +else soothingly melted, becoming together a harmony without +parts?--whatever the cause, I owed it to some accident only to be +described, I think, as happy, that I moved, those three months, in an +acutely enjoying and yet, as would at present appear, a but scantly +comparing or distinguishing maze of the senses and the fancy. So at +least, to cover this so thin report of my intelligence and my sum of +acquisition and retention, I am reduced to supposing. + +What essentially most operated, I make out, however, was that force of a +renewed sense of William's major activity which always made the +presumption of any degree of importance or success fall, with a sort of +ecstasy of resignation, from my own so minor. Whatever he might happen +to be doing made him so interesting about it, and indeed, with the +quickest concomitance, about everything else, that what I probably most +did, all the while, was but to pick up, and to the effect not a bit of +starving but quite of filling myself, the crumbs of his feast and the +echoes of his life. His life, all this Geneva period, had been more of a +feast than mine, and I recall the sense of this that I had got on the +occasion of my accompanying him, by his invitation, toward the end of +our stay, to a students' celebration or carouse, which was held at such +a distance from the town, at a village or small bourg, up in the Vaud +back-country, that we had, after a considerable journey by boat and in +heterogeneous and primitive conveyances, tightly packed, to spend two +nights there. The Genevese section of the Societe de Zoffingue, the +great Swiss students' organisation for brotherhood and beer, as it might +summarily be defined, of which my brother had become a member, was to +meet there certain other sections, now vague to me, but predominantly +from the German-speaking Cantons, and, holding a Commerce, to toast +their reunion in brimming bowls. It had been thought the impression +might amuse, might even interest me--for it was not denied that there +were directions, after all, in which I _could_ perhaps take notice; and +this was doubtless what after a fashion happened, though I felt out in +the cold (and all the more that the cold at the moment happened to be +cruel), as the only participant in view not crowned with the charming +white cap of the society, becoming to most young heads, and still less +girt with the parti-coloured ribbon or complementary scarf, which set +off even the shabby--for shabbiness considerably figured. I participated +vaguely but not too excludedly; I suffered from cold, from hunger and +from scant sleeping-space; I found the Bernese and the Balois strange +representatives of the joy of life, some of them the finest gothic +grotesques--but the time none the less very long; all of which, +however, was in the day's work if I might live, by the imagination, in +William's so adaptive skin. To see that he was adaptive, was initiated, +and to what a happy and fruitful effect, that, I recollect, was my +measure of content; which was filled again to overflowing, as I have +hinted, on my finding him so launched at the Academy after our stretch +of virtual separation, and just fancying, with a freedom of fancy, even +if with a great reserve of expression, how much he might be living and +learning, enjoying and feeling, amid work that was the right work for +him and comrades, consecrated comrades, that at the worst weren't the +wrong. What was not indeed, I always asked myself, the right work for +him, or the right thing of any kind, that he took up or looked at or +played with?--failing, as I did more than ever at the time I speak of, +of the least glimpse of his being below an occasion. Whatever he played +with or worked at entered at once into his intelligence, his talk, his +humour, as with the action of colouring-matter dropped into water or +that of the turning-on of a light within a window. Occasions waited on +him, had always done so, to my view; and there he was, that springtime, +on a level with them all: the effect of which recognition had much, had +more than aught else, to say to the charming silver haze just then +wrapped about everything of which I was conscious. He had formed two or +three young friendships that were to continue and to which even the +correspondence of his later years testifies; with which it may have had +something to do that the Swiss _jeunesse_ of the day was, thanks to the +political temperature then prevailing, in a highly inflamed and exalted +state, and particularly sensitive to foreign sympathy, however platonic, +with the national fever. It was the hour at which the French Emperor was +to be paid by Victor Emmanuel the price of the liberation of Lombardy; +the cession of Nice and Savoie were in the air--with the consequence, in +the Genevese breast, of the new immediate neighbourhood thus constituted +for its territory. Small Savoie was to be replaced, close against it, by +enormous and triumphant France, whose power to absorb great mouthfuls +was being so strikingly exhibited. Hence came much hurrying to and fro, +much springing to arms, in the way of exercise, and much flocking to the +standard--"demonstrations," in other words, of the liveliest; one of +which I recall as a huge tented banquet, largely of the white caps, +where I was present under my brother's wing, and, out of a sea of +agitated and vociferous young heads, sprang passionate protests and +toasts and vows and declaimed verses, a storm of local patriotism, +though a flurry happily short-lived. + +All this was thrilling, but the term of it, by our consecrated custom, +already in view; we were transferred at a bound, for the rest of that +summer of 1860, to the care, respectively, of a pair of kindly +pedagogues at Bonn-am-Rhein; as to which rapid phase I find remembrance +again lively, with a letter or two of William's to reinforce it. Yet I +first pick up as I pass several young lines from Geneva, and would fain +pick up too the drawing that accompanied them--this by reason of the +interest of everything of the sort, without exception, that remains to +us from his hand. He at a given moment, which came quite early, as +completely ceased to ply his pencil as he had in his younger time +earnestly and curiously exercised it; and this constitutes exactly the +interest of his case. No stroke of it that I have recovered but +illustrates his aptitude for drawing, his possible real mastery of the +art that was yet, in the light of other interests, so utterly to drop +from him; and the example is rare of being so finely capable only to +become so indifferent. It was thanks to his later indifference that he +made no point of preserving what he had done--a neglect that, still more +lucklessly, communicated itself to his circle; so that we also let +things go, let them again and again stray into the desert, and that what +might be reproducible is but the handful of scraps that have happened +not to perish. "Mother," he writes to his father in absence, "does +nothing but sit and cry for you. She refuses to associate with us and +has one side of the room to herself. She and the Aunt are now in the +Aunt's room. Wilky and Bobby, at home for the day, are at church. It is +a hard grey day. H. is telling a story to Louis Osborne, and I will try +to make a sketch of them. There has been a terrible bise; the two +Cornhill Magazines have come; Mrs. Thomas has been too sick to be at +dinner, and we have seen something of some most extraordinary English +people." Mrs. Thomas, of New York, was a handsome American widow with +handsome children, all from the Avenue Gabriel in Paris, and with the +boys enjoying life, among many little compatriots, at the admired +establishment of M. Haccius, even as our small brothers were doing at +that of M. Maquelin; yet with their destiny of ultimate Europeanisation, +of finally complete absorption into the French system, already rather +written for them--as a like history, for like foredoomed young subjects, +was in those years beginning to be prefigured, through marriages of +daughters and other such beguilements, almost wherever one looked. The +extraordinary English people were perhaps an amiable family of whom I +retain an image as conversing with our parents at the season when the +latter were in their prompt flush of admiration for George Eliot's +first novel, Adam Bede, then just given to the world and their copy of +which they had rejoicingly lent to their fellow Anglo-Saxons. I catch +again the echo of their consternation on receiving it back with the +remark that all attempt at an interest in such people, village +carpenters and Methodists, had proved vain--for that style of +Anglo-Saxon; together with that of my own excited wonder about such +other people, those of the style in question, those somehow prodigiously +presented by so rare a delicacy, so proud a taste, and made thus to +irradiate a strange historic light. It _referred_ them, and to a social +order, making life more interesting and more various; even while our +clear democratic air, that of our little family circle, quivered as with +the monstrosity. It might, this note that made us, in the parlance of +to-day, sit up, fairly have opened to me that great and up to then +unsuspected door of the world from which the general collection of +monstrosities, its existence suddenly brought home to us, would +doubtless stretch grandly away. The story I told Louis Osborne has quite +passed from me, but not little Louis himself, an American child of the +most charming and appealing intelligence, marked by some malady that was +more or less permanently to cripple, or was even cruelly to destroy him, +and whom it was a constant joy to aspire to amuse. His mother was +schooling her elder son in the company of our own brothers, his father +having established them all at Geneva that he might go for a tour in the +East. Vivid to me still is the glimpse I happened to get one Sunday +betimes of the good Maquelin couple, husband and wife, in deep +mourning--a touch of the highest decency--who had come, with faces a +yard long, to announce to Mrs. Osborne the death of her husband in the +Holy Land, communicated to them, by slow letter, in the first instance. +With little Louis on one's knee one didn't at all envy M. and Madame +Maquelin; and than this small faint phantom of sociable helpless little +listening Louis none more exquisite hovers before me. + +[Illustration: Most eternal love from every one, & from Louis Osborne. + +Louis Osborne. Sketch from a letter of William James (page 18).] + +With which mild memories thus stands out for me too the lively +importance, that winter, of the arrival, from the first number, of the +orange-covered earlier Cornhill--the thrill of each composing item of +that first number especially recoverable in its intensity. Is anything +like that thrill possible to-day--for a submerged and blinded and +deafened generation, a generation so smothered in quantity and number +that discrimination, under the gasp, has neither air to breathe nor room +to turn round? Has any like circumstance now conceivably the value, to +the charmed attention, so far as anything worth naming attention, or any +charm for it, is anywhere left, of the fact that Trollope's Framley +Parsonage there began?--let alone the still other fact that the +Roundabout Papers did and that Thackeray thus appeared to us to +guarantee personally, intimately, with a present audibility that was as +the accent of good company, the new relation with him and with others of +company not much worse, as they then seemed, that such a medium could +establish. To speak of these things, in truth, however, is to feel the +advantage of being able to live back into the time of the more sovereign +periodical appearances much of a compensation for any reduced prospect +of living forward. For these appearances, these strong time-marks in +such stretches of production as that of Dickens, that of Thackeray, that +of George Eliot, had in the first place simply a genial weight and +force, a direct importance, and in the second a command of the permeable +air and the collective sensibility, with which nothing since has begun +to deserve comparison. They were enrichments of life, they were _large_ +arrivals, these particular renewals of supply--to which, frankly, I am +moved to add, the early Cornhill giving me a pretext, even the frequent +examples of Anthony Trollope's fine middle period, looked at in the +light of old affection and that of his great heavy shovelfuls of +testimony to constituted English matters; a testimony of course looser +and thinner than Balzac's to _his_ range of facts, but charged with +something of the big Balzac authority. These various, let alone +numerous, deeper-toned strokes of the great Victorian clock were so many +steps in the march of our age, besides being so many notes, full and +far-reverberating, of our having high company to keep--high, I mean, to +cover all the ground, in the sense of the genial pitch of it. So it was, +I remember too, that our parents spoke of their memory of the successive +surpassing attestations of the contemporary presence of Scott; to which +we might have replied, and doubtless after no great space began to +reply, that our state, and even their later one, allowing for a certain +gap, had nothing to envy any other. I witnessed, for that matter, with +all my senses, young as I was, the never-to-be-equalled degree of +difference made, for what may really be called the world-consciousness +happily exposed to it, by the prolonged "coming-out" of The Newcomes, +yellow number by number, and could take the general civilised +participation in the process for a sort of basking in the light of +distinction. The process repeated itself for some years under other +forms and stimuli, but the merciless change was to come--so that through +whatever bristling mazes we may now pick our way it is not to find them +open into any such vales of Arcady. My claim for our old privilege is +that we did then, with our pace of dignity, proceed from vale to vale. + + + + +II + + +My point at any rate, such as it is, would be that even at the age I had +reached in 1860 something of the happier time still lingered--the time +in which a given product of the press might have a situation and an +aspect, a considerability, so to speak, a circumscription and an _aura_; +room to breathe and to show in, margin for the casting of its nets. The +occasion at large was doubtless shrinking, one could note--shrinking +like the unlet "house" on a night of grandest opera, but "standing room +only" was not yet everywhere the sign, and the fine deliberate thing +could here and there find its seat. I really indeed might have held it +the golden age of letters still, and of their fond sister leisure, with +that quiet swim into our ken on its appointed day, during our Bonn +summer, of the charming Once a Week of the prime, the prime of George +Meredith and Charles Reade and J. E. Millais and George du Maurier; +which our father, to bridge our separation from him, sent us, from Paris +and elsewhere, in prompt and characteristic relief of our plotted, our +determined strict servitude to German, and to the embrace of the sweet +slim essence of which the strain of one's muscles round a circular ton +of advertisement was not a condition attached. I should like to say that +I rioted, all that season, on the supreme German classics _and_ on Evan +Harrington, with Charles Reade's A Good Fight, the assured little +prelude to The Cloister and the Hearth, thrown in; and I should indeed +be ready to say it, were not the expression gross for the really hushed +piety of my attitude during those weeks. It was perhaps not quite till +then that I fully emerged from the black shadow of the Ecole +Preparatoire aux Ecoles Speciales, not quite till we had got off beyond +the blest Rhine at Basle that I ceased to hear and feel all but just +behind me, portentous perhaps of another spring, the cold breath of the +monster. The guttery Bonn-Gasse was during those weeks of the year close +and stale, and the house of our good Herr Doctor Humpert, professor at +the Bonn Gymnasium, in which I shared a room with my brother Wilky, +contracted and dim, as well as fragrant through a range of assaults that +differed only in kind and not at all in number from those of the street +itself; and yet I held the period and the whole situation idyllic--the +slightly odd sense of which was one's being to that extent attuned to +the life of letters and of (oh the great thing!) impressions "gone in +for." To feel a unity, a character and a tone in one's impressions, to +feel them related and all harmoniously coloured, that _was_ positively +to face the aesthetic, the creative, even, quite wondrously, the critical +life and almost on the spot to commence author. They had begun, the +impressions--that was what was the matter with them--to scratch quite +audibly at the door of liberation, of extension, of projection; what +they were _of_ one more or less knew, but what they were _for_ was the +question that began to stir, though one was still to be a long time at a +loss directly to answer it. + +There, for the present, was the rub, the dark difficulty at which one +could but secretly stare--secretly because one was somehow ashamed of +its being there and would have quickly removed one's eyes, or tried to +clear them, if caught in the act of watching. Impressions were not +merely all right but were the dearest things in the world; only one +would have gone to the stake rather than in the first place confessed to +some of them, or in the second announced that one really lived by them +and built on them. This failure then to take one's stand in the +connection could but come from the troubled view that they were naught +without a backing, a stout stiff hard-grained underside that would hold +them together and of which the terrible name was simply science, +otherwise learning, and learning exclusively by books, which were at +once the most beautiful and the most dreadful things in the world, some +of them right, strikingly, showily right, some of them disgracefully and +almost unmentionably wrong, that is grossly irrelevant, as for instance +a bound volume of Once a Week would be, but remarkable above all for +overwhelming number and in general for defiance of comprehension. It was +true that one had from time to time the rare adventure of one's surprise +at understanding parts of them none the less--understanding more than a +very little, more than much too little; but there was no practical +support to speak of in that, even the most one could ever hope to +understand being a mere drop in the bucket. Never did I quite strike it +off, I think, that impressions might themselves _be_ science--and this +probably because I didn't then know them, when it came to the point, as +anything but life. I knew them but by that collective and +unpractical--many persons would have said that frivolous--name; which +saw me little further. I was under the impression--this in fact the very +liveliest of what might have been called the lot--that life and +knowledge were simply mutual opposites, one inconsistent with the other; +though hovered about, together, at the same time, by the anomaly that +when knowledge impinged upon life, pushed against her, as it were, and +drove her to the wall, it was all right, and such was knowledge's way +and title; whereas when life played the like tricks with knowledge +nothing but shame for the ruder, even if lighter, party could accrue. +There was to come to me of course in time the due perception that +neither was of the least use--use to myself--without the other; but +meanwhile, and even for much after, the extreme embarrassment continued: +to whichever of the opposites one gave one's self it was with a sense of +all but basely sacrificing the other. However, the conflict and the +drama involved in the question at large was doubtless what was to make +consciousness--under whichever of the two names one preferred to +entertain it--supremely intense and interesting. + +This then is by way of saying that the idyll, as I have called it, of +the happy juncture I glanced at a moment back came from the fact that I +didn't at all know how much I was living, and meanwhile quite supposed I +was considerably learning. When, rising at some extraordinary hour of +the morning, I went forth through the unawakened town (and the Germans, +at that time, heaven knows, were early afoot too), and made for the open +country and the hill, in particular, of the neighbouring Venusberg, +long, low and bosky, where the dews were still fresh and ancient mummies +of an old cloister, as I remember it, somewhere perched and exposed, I +was doing, to my sense, an attuned thing; attuned, that is, to my +coming home to bend double over Schiller's Thirty Years' War in the +strenuous spirit that would keep me at it, or that would vary it with +Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften, till late in the warm afternoon. I found +German prose much tougher than the verse, and thereby more opposed to +"life," as to which I of course couldn't really shake off the sense that +it might be worked as infinitely comprehensive, comprehensive even of +the finest discriminations against it. The felicity, present but +naturally unanalysed, was that the whole thing, our current episode, +_was_ exactly comprehensive of life, presenting it in particular as +characteristically German, and therein freshly vivid--with the great +vividness that, by our parents' vague wish, we were all three after or +out for; in spite of our comparatively restricted use, in those days, of +these verbal graces. Such therefore was the bright unity of our +experience, or at least of my own share in it--this luck that, through +the intensity of my wanting it to, all consciousness, all my own +immediate, _tasted_ German, to the great and delightful quickening of my +imagination. The quickening was of course no such matter as I was to +know nearly ten years later on plunging for the first time over the Alps +into Italy; but, letting alone that I was then so much older, I had +wondered about Italy, to put it embracingly, far more than I was +constitutionally capable of wondering about Germany. It was enough for +me at Bonn that I felt no lack of appetite--had for the time all the +illusion of being on the way to something; to something, I mean, with +which the taste of German might somehow _directly_ mix itself. Every +aspect and object round about was a part, at all events, of the actual +mixture; and when on drowsy afternoons, not a little interspaced indeed, +I attempted the articulate perusal of Hermann und Dorothea with our good +Professor, it was like dreaming, to the hum of bees, if not to the +aftertaste of "good old Rhenish," in some homely fruity +eighteenth-century garden. + +The good old Rhenish is no such false note in this reconstitution; I +seem to see the Frau Doctorin and her ancient mildly-scowling sister +Fraeulein Stamm, who reminded me of Hepzibah Pyncheon in The House of the +Seven Gables, perpetually wiping green hock-glasses and holding them up +to our meagre light, as well as setting out long-necked bottles, with +rather chalky cakes, in that forward section of our general +eating-and-living-room which formed our precinct of reception and +conversation. The unbroken space was lighted at either end, from street +and court, and its various effects of tempered shade or, frankly +speaking, of rather greasy gloom, amid which the light touch of +elegance gleamed but from the polish of the glasses and the sloping +shoulders of their bottle, comes back to me as the view of an intensely +internal interior. I recall how oppressively in that apartment, how +congestedly, as in some cage of which the wires had been papered over, I +felt housed and disconnected; I scarce then, I think, knew what the +matter was, but it could only have been that in all those summer weeks, +to the best of my belief, no window was ever once opened. Still, there +was the scene, the thick, the much-mixed chiaroscuro through which the +two ladies of the family emerged from an exiguous retreat just off the +back end of the place with ample platters of food; the almost +impenetrable dusk of the middle zone, where the four or five of us, +seated with our nutcracker-faced pastor, conveyed the food to our mouths +with a confidence mainly borrowed from the play of his own deep-plunging +knife; and then the forward, the festal extension, the privilege of +occasionally lingering in which, or of returning to it for renewed +refreshment, was a recognition both of our general minding of our +business upstairs--left as we were to thumb our Fluegel's Dictionary by +the hour so long as we invoked no other oracle. Our drowsy Doctor +invited no such approach; he smiled upon us as if unseen forefingers of +great force had been inserted for the widening of his mouth at the +corners, and I had the sense of his not quite knowing what to make of +our being so very gently barbaric, or rather so informally civilised; he +safely housed and quite rankly fed us, guided us to country walks and to +the swimming-baths by the Rhine-side, introduced us to fruit-gardens +where, on payment of the scantest tribute, we were suffered to consume +off-hand bushels of cherries, plums and pears; suffered us to ascend the +Drachenfels and to partake of coffee at Rolandseck and in other friendly +open-air situations; but flung his gothic shadow as little as possible +over my so passive page at least, and took our rate of acquisition +savingly for granted. + +This, in the optimism of the hour, I have no memory of resenting; the +page, though slow, managed at the same time to be stirring, and I asked +no more of any one or anything but that they should be with all due +gothicism whatever they most easily might. The long vistas of the +beeches and poplars on the other side of the Rhine, after we had crossed +by the funicular ferry, gothically rustled and murmured: I fancied their +saying perpetually "We are German woods, we are German woods--which +makes us very wonderful, do you know? and unlike any others: don't you +feel the spell of the very sound of us and of the beautiful words, 'Old +German woods, old German woods,' even if you can't tell why?" I +couldn't altogether tell why, but took everything on trust as mystically +and valuably gothic--valuably because ministering with peculiar +directness, as I gathered, to culture. I was in, or again I was "out," +in my small way, for culture; which seemed quite to come, come from +everywhere at once, with the most absurd conciliatory rush, pitifully +small as would have been any list of the sources I tapped. The beauty +was in truth that everything was a source, giving me, by the charmingest +breach of logic, more than it at all appeared to hold; which was exactly +what had not been the case at the Institution Rochette, where things had +appeared, or at least had pretended, to hold so much more than they +gave. The oddity was that about us now everything--everything but the +murmur of the German woods and the great flow and magic name of the +Rhine--was more ugly than beautiful, tended in fact to say at every +turn: "You shall suffer, yes, indeed you _are_ doing so (stick up for +your right to!) in your sense of form; which however is quite compatible +with culture, is really one of the finest parts of it, and may decidedly +prove to you that you're getting it." I hadn't, in rubbing, with +whatever weakness, against French and, so far as might be, against +France, and in sinking, very sensibly, more and more into them, +particularly felt that I was getting it _as_ such; what I was getting +as such was decidedly rather my famous "life," and without so much as +thinking of the degree, with it all, of the valuable and the helpful. + +Life meanwhile I had a good deal of at my side in the person of my +brother Wilky, who, as I have had occasion elsewhere to say, contrived +in those years to live, or to have every appearance of so doing, with an +immediacy that left me far in the lurch. I was always still wondering +how, while he had solved the question simply _ambulando_, which was for +him but by the merest sociable stroll. This represented to me +success--success of a kind, but such an assured kind--in a degree that +was my despair; and I have never forgotten how, that summer, when the +Herr Doctor did look in, did settle down a little to have the bristling +page out with us, Wilky's share of the hour took on the spot the form of +his turning at once upon our visitor the tables of earnest inquiry. He +delighted, after this tribute of eagerness, to meet the Doctor's +interrogative advance; but the communication so made was of anything and +everything except the fruit of his reading (the act of reading was +inhuman and repugnant to him), and I amazedly noted while I nursed my +small hoard that anything he offered did in the event quite as well: he +could talk with such charm, such drollery of candour, such +unexpectedness of figure, about what he had done and what he hadn't--or +talk at least before it, behind it and beside it. We had three or four +house-companions, youths from other places attending the Gymnasium and +committed to our Professor's care, as to whom I could somehow but infer +that they were, each in his personal way, inordinately gothic--which +they had to be to supply to my mind a relation, or a substitute for a +relation, with them; whereas my younger brother, without a scrap of a +view of them, a grain of theory or formula, tumbled straight into their +confidence all round. Our air for _him_ was by just so much life as it +couldn't have dreamed of being culture, and he was so far right that +when the son of the house and its only child, the slim and ardent +Theodor, who figured to me but as a case of such classic sensibility, of +the Lieder or the Werther sort, as might have made, with the toss of a +yellow lock or the gleam of a green blouse, the image for an Uhland or a +Heine stanza, had imparted to him an intention of instant suicide under +some resentment of parental misconception, he had been able to use +dissuasion, or otherwise the instinct of then most freely fraternising, +with a success to which my relish for so romantic a stroke as charmingly +in Theodor's character and setting mightn't at all have attained. There +is a small something of each of us in a passage of an ingenuous letter +addressed by him from the midst of these conditions to his parents. I +fondly catch, I confess, at any of these recoverable lights; finding +them at the best too scant for my commemorative purpose. + + Willy got his photograph this morning after three hours' hard work. + From the post-office he was sent to the custom-house, and there was + obliged to sign his name and to go to some neighbouring bookstore + to buy a seal. On returning to the custom-house he was sent back to + the post-office to get some document or other. After obtaining this + article he turned his steps once more to the custom-house, where an + insolent officer told him he must wait an hour. W. informed him + that he would return at the end of the hour, and accordingly for + the third time went to the C.H., and was conducted by the clerk to + a cellar where the packages were kept, and there told to take off + his hat. He obeyed, raging, and then was a fourth time sent to the + P.O.--this time to pay money. Happily he is now in possession of + his property. H. and he took a walk this afternoon to a + fruit-garden, where plums, cherries, gooseberries and currants were + abundant. After half an hour's good work H. left W. finishing + merely the plums--the cherry and gooseberry course to come later. + He was so enchanted that he thought H. a great fool to leave so + soon. How does Paris now strike you? It can't be as nice as Bonn. + You had better write to Bob. + +Bob, our youngest brother, had been left at Geneva with excellent M. +Maquelin and was at that time _en course_, over the Alps, with this +gentleman and their young companions; a most desirable, delicious +excursion, which I remember following in envious fancy, as it included a +descent to the Italian Lakes and a push on as far as Genoa. In reference +to which excursion I cull a line or two from a faded scrap of a letter +addressed a little later by this youngest of us to his "Beloved Brother" +William. "This is about our Grande Course. We started at 5 o'clock in +the morning with our faces and hands all nicely washed and our nails +clean. The morning was superb, and as we waited in the court the soft +balmy air of the mountains came in bringing with it the melodious sound +of the rappel for breakfast. This finished we bade adieu, and I could +see the emotions of the kind and ever-watchful Madame Maquelin as a few +silent drops trickled down her fair cheeks. We at last arrived at the +boat, where we met Mr. Peters, a portly gentleman from the city of +Philadelphia, with his two sweet sons, one twelve, the other seven years +old, the eldest coming from Mr. E.'s school with no very good opinion of +the principal--saying he had seen him in a state of tightness several +times during his stay there." Mr. Peters appears to have been something +of a pessimist, for, when at a later stage "it began to rain hard, and +half the road was a foot deep in water, and the cocher had stopped +somewhere to get lanterns and had at the same time indulged in certain +potations which didn't make him drive any the straighter," this +gentleman "insinuated that we had all better have been with our +mothers." The letter records at some length the early phases of the +affair, but under the weight of the vision of Italy it rather breaks +down and artlessly simplifies. "Genoa is a most lively town, and there +is a continual swarm of sailors in the street. We visited several +palaces, among others that of Victor Emanuel, which is very fine, and +the fruit is very cheap. We stayed there several days, but at last +started for Turin, where we spent a Sunday--a place I didn't much like, +I suppose because of that reason. We left Turin the next day on foot, +but lost our road and had to come back." I recover even in presence of +these light accents my shade of wonder at this odd chance that made the +least developed of us the subject of what seemed to me even then a +privilege of the highest intensity; and there again keeps it company my +sense, through all the after years, that this early glimpse of the blest +old Italy, almost too early though it appears to have but just missed +being, might have done something towards preparing or enriching for Bob +the one little plot of consciousness in which his deeply troubled life +was to find rest. He was in the event also fondly to aim at painting, +like two of his brothers; but whereas they were to fumble with the +lock, in their very differing degree, only in those young years, he was +to keep at it most as he grew older, though always with a perfect +intelligence of the inevitable limits of the relation, the same +intelligence that was so sharp and sad, so extraordinarily free and fine +and detached in fact, as play of mind, play of independent talk and of +pen, for the limits of his relation to many other matters. Singularly +intelligent all round, yet with faculties that had early declined any +consummation of acquaintance with such training as under a different +sort of pressure he might have enjoyed, he had an admirable hand and +eye, and I have known no other such capacity for absorbing or storing up +the minutest truths and shades of landscape fact and giving them out +afterward, in separation from the scene, with full assurance and +felicity. He could do this still better even than he cared to do; I for +my part cared much more that he should than he ever did himself, and +then it was, I dare say, that I made the reflection: "He took in the +picture of Italy, with his firm hard gift, having the chance while +William and I were still, comparatively, small untouched and gaping +barbarians; and it should always be in him to do at some odd fine moment +a certain honour to that." I held to it that that sensibility had played +in him more than by any outward measure at the time; which was perhaps +indeed one of the signs within me of the wasteful habit or trick of a +greater feeling for people's potential propriety or felicity or full +expression than they seemed able to have themselves. At all events I was +absolutely never to cease to remember for Bob, through everything--and +there was much and of the most agitated and agitating--that he had been +dipped as a boy into the sacred stream; to some effect which, thanks to +two or three of his most saving and often so amusing sensibilities, the +turbid sea of his life might never quite wash away. + +William had meanwhile come to Bonn with us, but was domiciled with +another tutor, younger and fairer and more of the world, above all more +ventilated and ventilating, Herr Stromberg, whose defect might in fact +have seemed that, with his constant exhibition of the stamp received by +him from the writings of Lord Macaulay, passages of which he could +recite by heart, and the circumstance that his other pupil, William's +comrade for a time, was of unmitigatedly English, that is of +quasi-Byronic association, he didn't quite rise to the full gothic +standard. Otherwise indeed our brother moved on the higher plane of +light and air and ease, and above all of enjoyed society, that we felt +he naturally must. Present to me yet is the thrill of learning from him +that his English fellow-pupil was the grandson, if I remember rightly +the degree of descent, of Mary Chaworth, Byron's "first love," and my +sense afterwards, in gaping at young Mr. Musters himself, that this +independently romantic contact would have been more to my own private +purpose at least than the most emphasised gothicism. None the less do I +regain it as a part of my current vision that Frau Stromberg, who was +young and fair, wrote tragedies as well as made pancakes--which were +served to each consumer double, a thick confiture within being the +reason of this luxuriance, and being also a note beyond our experience +in the Bonn-Gasse; and that with the printed five acts of a certain +"Cleopatra" before me, read aloud in the first instance to her young +inmates and by my brother passed on to me, I lost myself in the view of +I scarce knew what old-world Germanic grace, positively, or little +court-city practice of the theatre: these things so lived in the small +thick pamphlet, "grey paper with blunt type" and bristling, to my +discomfiture, with descriptive stage directions, vast dense bracketed +tracts, gothic enough in all conscience, as to which I could already +begin to wonder whether such reinforcements of presentation proved more +for or against the true expressional essence of the matter; for or +against, that is, there being nothing at all so dramatic, so chargeable +with meaning and picture, as speech, of whatever sort, made perfect. +Such speculations, I may parenthesise, might well have been fostered, +and doubtless were, by an impression that I find commemorated in a few +lines of a letter of my father's to a friend in America--he having +brought us on to Bonn, introduced us to our respective caretakers and +remained long enough to have had an evening at the theatre, to which we +accompanied him. "We had Ristori to play Mary Stuart for us last +night--which was the vulture counterfeiting Jenny Wren. Every little +while the hoarse exulting voice, the sanguinary beak, the lurid leer of +menace, and the relentless talons looked forth from the feathery mass +and sickened you with disgust. She would do Elizabeth better." I recall +the performance in every feature, as well as my absence of such +reserves, though quite also the point to which I was impressed by the +utterance of them; not that it didn't leave me at the same time free to +feel that the heroine of history represented could scarce have been at +all a dove-like, much less a wren-like person. She had indeed on Madame +Ristori's showing prodigious resources of militant mobility--of what in +fact would be called to-day mobilisation. Several years later on I was +to see the actress play the same part in America; and then, if I am not +mistaken, was to note scarce more than one point; the awful effect on +_any_ histrionic case, even on one so guardedly artful as hers, of +having been dragged round the globe and forced home, so far as might be, +to imperfect comprehensions. The big brush had come fairly to daub the +canvas. Let the above, however, serve in particular to lead in as many +examples of my father's singularly striking and personal habit of +expression and weight of thought as these pages may find room for. + +The one difficulty is that to open that general door into the limbo of +old letters, charged with their exquisite ghostly appeal, is almost to +sink into depths of concession. I yield here for instance to the claim +of a page or two from William, just contemporary and addressed to our +parents in Paris--and yield perhaps but for no better reason than that +of the small historic value or recoverable charm that I am moved to find +in its illustrative items. The reference of its later lines is to a +contemporary cousin, young and blooming, by whom I have already ever so +lightly brushed[2] and who figured quite with the grand air on our young +horizon; the only daughter of the brightest of the Albany uncles (by +that time lost and mourned) now on the tour of Europe with a pair of +protective elders for her entrance upon life and at that hour +surrounding our parents, her uncle and aunt, with a notably voluminous +rustle of fresh Paris clothes, the far-spreading drapery of the more and +more draped and flounced and "sloped" second Empire. This friendly +frou-frou almost reached our ears, so sociable for us was every sound of +her, in our far-off Rhineland. She was with her stature and shape the +finest possible person to carry clothes, and I thought of her, with a +revival of the old yearning envy, as now quite transcendently orphaned +and bereft, dowered, directed and equipped. + + Your hearts, I know, would have been melted if you had had a view + of us this Sunday morning. I went directly after breakfast for the + boys, and though H. had an "iron stomach-ache," as he called it, we + went off together to that low wooded hill which the Aunt could see + from her window when you were here, and walked about till + dinner-time, H. being all the while in great pain. In one part we + found a platform with a stone bench commanding a view of the whole + valley, and, as we were rather tired, sat down on it, H. and Wilky + each with a Once a Week, while I tried to draw the view in my + pocket-book. We wondered what our beloved parents were doing at + that moment, 11.30, and thought you must all have been in your + salon, Alice at the window with her eyes fixed on her novel, but + eating some rich fruit that Father has just brought in for her from + the Palais Royal, and the lovely Mother and Aunt in armchairs, + their hands crossed in front of them, listening to Father, who + walks up and down talking of the superiority of America to these + countries after all, and how much better it is we should have done + with them. We wished, oh we wished we could have been with you to + join in the conversation and partake of the fruit. We got up from + the seat and went on with a heavy sigh, but in a way so fraternal, + presenting such a sweet picture of brotherly unitedness and + affection, that it would have done you good to see us. + + And so it is every day that we meet for our shorter walks and + talks. The German gets on slowly, but I notice a very marked + improvement in talking. I have not kept at it so hard this last + week as before, and I prevent H. from working his eyes out, which + he seems on the whole rather less inclined to do. I am going to + read as much as I can the rest of the time we are here. It seems a + mere process of soaking, requiring no mental effort, but only time + and steady patience. My room is very comfortable now I've got used + to it, and I have a pair of slippers of green plush heavy and + strong enough to last all my life and then be worn by my children. + The photograph of our Zoffingen group has come, which gives me a + moustache big enough for three lifeguardsmen. Tell us something + more about Mary Helen. How long does she expect to stay in Europe, + and who is this Dr. Adams--the man she is engaged to? She directs + me to write to her in his care--so that I wish you would ask her, + as she says she hopes to meet me, whether I shall still address her + as Miss James? Of course it would be painful, but I think I could + do it if Adams weren't there. Let the delicious little grey-eyed + Alice be locked up alone on the day after the receipt of this with + paper and envelopes to write a letter unassisted, uncorrected and + unpunctuated to her loving brothers, who would send her novels and + peaches if they could. What a blessing it is to have such parents, + such a perfect Mother and magnificent Father and dear good Aunt and + splendid little Sister! + +I may mention that Mary Helen was not "engaged" to the gentleman +above-mentioned, and was eventually to marry the late Alfred Grymes, +originally of Louisiana. Also that a letter subsequent to this, +apparently of the first days in September, sounds to his father the +first note of my brother's definite personal preference, as he seemed +lately and increasingly, though not in conditions markedly propitious, +to have become aware of it, for an adoption of the "artistic career." It +was an odd enough circumstance, in respect to the attested blood in our +veins, that no less than three of our father's children, with two of his +grandsons to add to these, and with a collateral addendum representing +seven, in all, of our grandfather's, William James's, descendants in +three generations, should have found the artistic career in general and +the painter's trade in particular irresistibly solicit them. + + I wish you would as you promised set down as clearly as you can on + paper what your idea of the nature of Art _is_, because I do not, + probably, understand it fully, and should like to have it presented + in a form that I might think over at my leisure. I wish you would + do so as fully as you conveniently can, so that I may ruminate + it--and I won't say more about it till I have heard from you again. + As for what your last letter did contain, what can I do but thank + you for every word of it and assure you that they went to the right + spot. Having such a Father with us, how can we be other than in + some measure worthy of him?--if not perhaps as eminently so as the + distance leads his fond heart to imagine. I never value him so much + as when I am away from him. At home I see only his striking + defects, but here he seems all perfection, and I wonder as I write + why I didn't cherish him more when he was beside me. I beg darling + old Mother's forgiveness too for the rude and dastardly way in + which I snub her, and the Aunt for the impatience and violence I + have always shown her. I shall be a perfect sherry-cobbler to both + of them, and to the small Alice too, young as she may be for such + treats. + + I have just got home from dining with the boys and their Humperts; + where I found the Doctor as genial as ever and the two old ladies + perfect characters for Dickens. They have been so shut out from the + world and melting together so long by the kitchen fire that the + minds of both have become fused into one, and then seem to + constitute a sort of two-bodied individual. I never saw anything + more curious than the way they sit mumbling together at the end of + the table, each using simultaneously the same comment if anything + said at our end strikes their ear. H. pegs away pretty stoutly, but + I don't think you need worry about him. He and Wilky appear to get + on in great harmony and enliven themselves occasionally by + brotherly trials of strength, quite good-natured, in their room, + when excess of labour has made them sleepy or heavy. In these + sometimes one, sometimes the other is victorious. They often pay me + a visit here while I am dressing, which of course is highly + convenient--and I have more than once been with _them_ early enough + to be present at Wilky's tumble out of bed and consequent + awakening, with the call on the already-at-work H.: "Why the + mischief didn't you stop me?" Wilky and I walked to Rolandseck + yesterday afternoon, and after a furious race back to the station + found ourselves too late for the train by a second. So we took a + boat and rowed down here, which was delightful. We are going to put + H. through a splashing good walk daily. A thousand thanks to the + cherry-lipped, apricot-nosed, double-chinned little Sister for her + strongly dashed-off letter, which inflamed the hearts of her lonely + brothers with an intense longing to smack her celestial cheeks. + + + + +III + + +I have before me another communication of about the same moment, a +letter addressed to his father in Paris within that month; from which, +in spite of its lively interest as I hold, I cull nothing--and precisely +because of that interest, which prescribes for it a later appearance in +conditions in which it may be given entire. William is from this season +on, to my sense, so livingly and admirably reflected in his letters, +which were happily through much of his career both numerous and highly +characteristic, that I feel them particularly plead, in those cases in +which they most testify to his personal history, for the separate +gathered presentation that happily awaits them. _There_ best may figure +the serious and reasoned reply drawn from him by some assuredly +characteristic enough communication of our parent's own in respect to +his declared preference for a painter's life over any other. Lost is +this original and, in the light of later matters, sufficiently quaint +declaration, and lost the paternal protest answered by my brother from +Bonn and anything _but_ infelicitous, on its side, so far as the truer +apprehension went, under the showing of the time to come. The only +thing was that our father had a wonderful way of being essentially right +without being practically or, as it were, vulgarly, determinant, and +that this relegation of his grounds of contention to the sphere of the +non-immediate, the but indirectly urgent, from the point of view of the +thing really to _do_, couldn't but often cause impatience in young +breasts conscious of gifts or desires or ideals of which the very sign +and warrant, the truth they were known by, was that they were +susceptible of application. It was in no world of close application that +our wondrous parent moved, and his indifference at the first blush to +the manifestation of special and marketable talents and faculties, +restlessly outward purposes of whatever would-be "successful" sort, was +apt to be surpassable only by his delight subsequently taken in our +attested and visible results, the very fruits of application; as to +which the possibility, perhaps even the virtual guarantee, hadn't so +much left him cold in advance as made him adversely and "spiritually" +hot. The sense of that word was the most living thing in the world for +him--to the point that the spiritual simply meant to him the practical +and the successful, so far as he could get into touch with such +denominations, or so far, that is, as he could face them or care for +them _a priori_. Fortunately, as he had observational powers of the +happiest, perceptions--perceptions of character and value, perceptions +of relation and effect, perceptions in short of the whole--turned to the +ground sensibly beneath our feet, as well as a splendid, an +extraordinarily animated and, so far as he himself at least was +concerned, guiding and governing soul, justice and generosity always +eventually played up, the case worked itself happily out, and before we +knew it he had found it quite the rightest of all cases, while we on our +side had had the liveliest, and certainly the most amusing and +civilising, moral or, as he would have insisted, spiritual recreation by +the way. + +My brother challenges him, with a beautiful deference, on the imputed +damage to what might be best in a man by the professional pursuit of +"art"--which he appears to have set forth with characteristic emphasis; +and I take the example for probably one of the rarest in all the so +copious annals of parental opposition to the aesthetic as distinguished +from some other more respectable course. What was marked in our father's +prime uneasiness in presence of any particular form of success we might, +according to our lights as then glimmering, propose to invoke was that +it bravely, or with such inward assurance, dispensed with any suggestion +of an alternative. What we were to do instead was just to _be_ +something, something unconnected with specific doing, something free +and uncommitted, something finer in short than being _that_, whatever it +was, might consist of. The "career of art" has again and again been +deprecated and denounced, on the lips of anxiety or authority, as a +departure from the career of business, of industry and respectability, +the so-called regular life, but it was perhaps never elsewhere to know +dissuasion on the very ground of its failing to uplift the spirit in the +ways it most pretends to. I must in fairness add, however, that if the +uneasiness I here refer to continued, and quite by exception as compared +with the development of other like episodes, during the whole of my +brother's fortunately but little prolonged studio season, it was really +because more alternatives swarmed before our parent's eyes, in the +cause, than he could bring himself to simplify it by naming. He +apprehended ever so deeply and tenderly his eldest son's other +genius--as to which he was to be so justified; though this indeed was +not to alter the fact that when afterwards that subject went in, by a +wondrous reaction, for the pursuit of science, first of chemistry and +then of anatomy and physiology and medicine, with psychology and +philosophy at last piling up the record, the rich _malaise_ at every +turn characteristically betrayed itself, each of these surrenders being, +by the measure of them in the parental imagination, so comparatively +narrowing. That was the nearest approach to any plea for some other +application of the spirit--that they _were_ narrowing. When I myself, +later on, began to "write" it was breathed upon me with the finest +bewildering eloquence, with a power of suggestion in truth which I +fairly now count it a gain to have felt play over me, that this too was +narrowing. On the subsequent history of which high paradox no better +comment could occur to me than my find of a passage in a letter long +subsequently addressed to Mr. James T. Fields, then proprietor and +editor of the Atlantic Monthly magazine--a letter under date of May 1868 +and referring clearly to some published remarks on a certain young +writer which did violence to the blessedly quick paternal prejudice. + + I had no sooner left your sanctum yesterday than I was afflicted to + remember how I had profaned it by my unmeasured talk about poor H. + Please forget it utterly. I don't know how it is with better men, + but the parental sentiment is so fiendish a thing with me that if + anyone attempt to slay my young, especially in a clandestine way, + or out of a pious regard (_e.g_.) to the welfare of the souls + comprised in the diocese of the Atlantic, I can't help devoting him + bag and baggage to the infernal gods. I am not aware of my animus + until I catch, as yesterday, a courteous ear; then the unholy fire + flames forth at such a rate as to leave me no doubt on reflection + where it was originally lighted. + +Almost all my dear father is there, making the faded page to-day +inexpressibly touching to me; his passionate tenderness, his infinite +capacity for reaction on reaction, a force in him fruitful in so many +more directions than any high smoothness of _parti-pris_ could be, and +his beautiful fresh individual utterance, always so stamped with the +very whole of him. The few lines make for me, after all the years, a +sort of silver key, so exquisitely fitting, to the treasure of living +intercourse, of a domestic air quickened and infinitely coloured, +comprised in all our younger time. The renewed sense of which, however, +has carried me for the moment too far from the straighter line of my +narrative. + +The author of the young letter of which I have deferred presentation met +in Paris, shortly after that date, the other party to the discussion; +and the impression of the endless day of our journey, my elder and my +younger brothers' and mine, from Bonn to that city, has scarcely faded +from me. The railway service was so little then what it has become that +I even marvel at our having made our connections between our early rise +in the Bonn-Gasse and our midnight tumble into bed at the Hotel des +Trois Empereurs in the Place du Palais Royal; a still-felt rapture, a +revelation of the Parisian idea of bed after the rude German conception, +our sore discipline for so many weeks. I remember Cologne and its +cathedral almost in the bland dawn, and our fresh start thence for +Strasbourg, now clearly recognised, alas, as a start back to America, to +which it had been of a sudden settled that we were, still with a fine +inconsequence, to return. We had seen Cologne cathedral by excursion +from Bonn, but we saw Strasbourg, to my sorrow until a far later +occasion soothed it, only as a mild monster behind bars, that is above +chimneys, housetops and fortifications; a loss not made up to me by +other impressions or particulars, vivid and significant as I found +myself none the less supposing several of these. Those were the +September days in which French society, so far as it was of the Empire +at least, moved more or less in its mass upon Homburg and Baden-Baden; +and we met it in expressive samples, and in advance and retreat, during +our incessant stops, those long-time old stops, unknown to the modern +age, when everyone appeared to alight and walk about with the animation +of prisoners suddenly pardoned, and ask for conveniences, and clamour +for food, and get mixed with the always apparently still dustier people +of opposite trains drawn up for the same purposes. We appeared to be +concerned with none but first-class carriages, as an effect of which our +own was partly occupied, the livelong day, by the _gens_ of a noble +French house as to which we thus had frequent revelations--a pair of +footmen and a lady's maid, types of servile impudence taking its ease, +who chattered by the hour for our wonderstruck ears, treating them to +their first echo of the strange underworld, the sustaining vulgarity, of +existences classified as "great." They opened vistas, and I remember how +when, much later, I came to consider the designed picture, first in +Edmond About and then in Alphonse Daudet, of fifty features symptomatic +of the social pace at which the glittering regime hurried to its end, +there came back to me the breath of this sidewind of the frenzied dance +that we had caught during those numerous and so far from edifying hours +in our fine old deep-seated compartment. The impression, I now at any +rate perfectly recover, was one that could feed full enough any optimism +of the appointedly modest condition. It was true that Madame la +Marquise, who was young and good-natured and pretty without beauty, and +unmistakably "great," exhaling from afar, as I encouraged myself to +imagine, the scented air of the Tuileries, came on occasion and looked +in on us and smiled, and even pouted, through her elegant patience; so +that she at least, I recollect, caused to swim before me somehow such a +view of happy privilege at the highest pitch as made me sigh the more +sharply, even if the less professedly, for our turning our backs on the +complex order, the European, fresh to me still, in which contrasts +flared and flourished and through which discrimination could +unexhaustedly riot--pointing so many more morals, withal, if that was +the benefit it was supposed to be, than we should find pretexts for "on +the other side." We were to fall as soon as we were at home again to +reading the Revue des Deux Mondes--though doubtless again I should speak +here, with any emphasis, but for myself; my chin, in Europe, had scarce +risen to the level of that publication; but at Newport in Rhode Island, +our next following place of sojourn, I speedily shot up so as quite to +bend down to it: it took its place therewith as the very headspring of +culture, a mainstay in exile, and as opening wide in especial the doors +of that fictive portrayal of a society which put a price, for the +brooding young reader, on cases, on _cadres_, in the Revue parlance, +already constituted and propitiously lighted. Then it was that the +special tension of the dragged-out day from Cologne to Paris proved, on +the absurdest scale, a preparation, justified itself as a vivid point of +reference: I was to know what the high periodical meant when I +encountered in its _etudes de moeurs_ the blue-chinned corruptible, +not to say corrupt, _larbin_ and the smart soubrette; it was above all +a blessing to feel myself, in the perusal of M. Octave Feuillet, an +education, as I supposed, of the taste, not at a marked disadvantage; +since who but the Petite Comtesse herself had swung her crinoline in and +out of my prospect, or, to put it better, of my preserved past, on one +of my occasions of acutest receptivity? + +The truth was that acute, that quite desperate receptivity set in for +me, under a law of its own--may really be described as having quite +raged for me--from the moment our general face, by the restless parental +decree (born not a little of parental homesickness and reinforced by a +theory of that complaint on our own part, we having somehow in Europe +"no companions," none but mere parents themselves), had been turned +again to the quarter in which there would assuredly be welcomes and +freedoms and unchecked appropriations, not to say also cousins, of both +sexes and of a more and more engaging time of life, cousins kept and +tended and adorned for us in our absence, together with the solicitation +for our favour of possible, though oh so just barely possible, habitats +before which the range of Europe paled; but which, nevertheless, to my +aching fancy, meant premature abdication, sacrifice and, in one dreadful +word, failure. I had had cousins, naturally, in the countries we were +quitting, but to a limited degree; yet I think I already knew I had had +companions in as full a measure as any I was still to know--inasmuch as +my imagination made out one, in the complex order and the coloured air, +almost wherever I turned; and, inasmuch as, further, to live by the +imagination was to live almost only in that way, so to foresee the +comparative, not to say the absolute, absence of tonic accent in the +appearances complacently awaiting me, as well as to forecast in these +appearances, at the best, a greater paucity, was really to enjoy a sharp +prevision of dearth. Certain it is that those supreme moments of Paris, +those after-days at the Trois Empereurs, were to flush for me, as they +ebbed, with images and visions; judged by any achieved act of possession +I hadn't assuredly much to give up, but intensity of sentiment, resting +on a good disposition, makes for its own sake the most of opportunity, +and I buried my associations, which had been in a manner till lately my +hopes as well, with all decent dignity and tenderness. These more or +less secret obsequies lent to our further brief delay a quality of +suppressed excitement; the "old-world" hours were numbered too +dreadfully--had shrunk but to a handful: I had waked up to that, as with +a passionate even if private need for gathering in and saving, on the +morrow of our reaching our final sticking-place: I had slipped from my +so cushioned sleep, my canopied couch, to hang, from the balcony of our +quatrieme, my brothers' and mine, over that Place du Palais Royal and up +against that sculptured and storied facade of the new Louvre which +seemed to me then to represent, in its strength, the capacity and +chiselled rim of some such potent vivifying cup as it might have been +given us, under a happier arrangement, to taste now in its fulness and +with a braver sense for it. Over against us on the great palace wall, as +I make out--if not for that occasion then for some other--were statues +of heroes, Napoleon's young generals, Hoche, Marceau, Desaix or whoever, +such a galaxy as never was or should ever be again for splendid +monumental reference; and what it somehow came to was that here massed +itself the shining second Empire, over which they stood straight aloft +and on guard, like archangels of the sword, and that the whole thing was +a high-pitched wonder and splendour, which we had already, in our small +gaping way, got into a sort of relation with and which would have ever +so much more ever so thrillingly to give us. What it would give us +loomed but vaguely enough out of the great hum and the great toned +perspective, and withal the great noble expense, of which we had +constant reminder; but that we were present at something it would be +always after accounted a privilege to have been concerned with, and that +we were perversely and inconsiderately dropping out of it, and for a +reason, so far as there might be a reason, that was scarcely less than +strange--all this loomed large to me as our interval shrank, and I even +ask myself before the memory of it whether I was ever again in the later +and more encompassing and accommodating years to have in those places so +rich a weight of consciousness to carry or so grand a presumption of +joy. The presumption so boldly entertained was, if you please, of what +the whole thing meant. It meant, immensely, the glittering regime, and +that meant in turn, prodigiously, something that would probably never be +meant quite to any such tune again: so much one positively and however +absurdly said to one's self as one stood up on the high balcony to the +great insolence of the Louvre and to all the history, all the glory +again and all the imposed applause, not to say worship, and not to speak +of the implied inferiority, on the part of everything else, that it +represented. And the sense was of course not less while one haunted at +odd hours the arcades and glass galleries of the Palais Royal close at +hand--as if to store up, for all the world, treasures of impression that +might be gnawed, in seasons or places of want, like winter pears or a +squirrel's hoard of nuts, and so perhaps keep one alive, as to one's +most vital faculty above-mentioned, till one should somehow or other be +able to scramble back. + +The particular ground for our defection, which I obscurely pronounced +mistaken, was that since William was to embrace the artistic career--and +freedom for this experiment had been after all, as I repeat that it was +always in like cases to be, not in the least grudgingly granted him--our +return to America would place him in prompt and happy relation to +William Hunt, then the most distinguished of our painters as well as one +of the most original and delightful of men, and who had cordially +assured us that he would welcome such a pupil. This was judged among us +at large, other considerations aiding, a sound basis for action; but +never surely had so odd a motive operated for a break with the spell of +Paris. We named the motive generally, I think, and to the credit of our +earnest good faith, with confidence--and I am of course not sure how +often our dear father may not explicatively have mentioned the shy fact +that he himself in any case had gradually ceased to "like" Europe. This +affects me at present as in the highest degree natural: it was to be his +fortune for the rest of his life to find himself, as a worker in his own +field and as to what he held most dear, scantly enough heeded, reported +or assimilated even in his own air, no brisk conductor at any time of +his remarkable voice; but in Europe his isolation had been utter--he had +there had the sense of playing his mature and ardent thought over great +dense constituted presences and opaque surfaces that could by their very +nature scarce give back so much as a shudder. No more admirable case of +apostolic energy combined with philosophic patience, of constancy of +conviction and solitary singleness of production unperturbed, can I well +conceive; and I certainly came later on to rejoice in his having had +after a certain date to walk, if there was a preference, rather in the +thin wilderness than in the thick. I dare say that when we returned to +America toward the end of 1860, some five years and a half after our +departure, it may have been with illusions not a few for him about the +nature of the desert, or in other words about the degree of sensibility +of the public, there awaiting him; but the pretext given him by his so +prized and admired eldest son was at the worst, and however eccentric +our action, inspiring: I alone of the family perhaps made bold not to +say quite directly or literally that we went home to learn to paint. +People stared or laughed when we said it, and I disliked their thinking +us so simple--though dreaming too a little perhaps that they might have +been struck with our patriotism. This however conveyed but a chill the +more--since we didn't in the least go to our friend, who had been +Couture's and Frere's pupil, who had spent years in France and of whom +it was the common belief that you couldn't for the life of you tell him +from a French painter, because he was patriotic; but because he was +distinguished and accomplished, charming and kind, and above all known +to us and thereby in a manner guaranteed. He looked, as people get to +look under such enjoyed or even suffered exposures, extremely like a +Frenchman, and, what was noteworthy, still more like a sculptor of the +race than a painter; which doubtless had to do with my personally, +though I hope, in present cultivated anxiety, not too officiously, +sighing at all the explanation the whole thing took. I am bound to add +none the less that later on, repatriated and, as to my few contacts, +reassured, I found this amount, the apprehension of which had haunted +me, no great charge; and seem even to make out that for the first six +months of our Newport phase at least we might have passed for strikingly +wise. For here was, beyond doubt, a genial, an admirable master; and +here also--at such a rate did sparse individuals, scattered notches in +the long plain stick, count--was John La Farge. Here moreover--here and +everywhere about me, before we could quite turn round--was the War, +with its infinite, its truly quite humiliating correction of my (as I +now can but so far call it) fatuous little confidence that +"appearances," on the native scene, would run short. They were in the +event, taking one thing with another, never to hold out for me as they +held during those four years. Wondrous this force in them as I at +present look back--wondrous I mean in view of that indirectness of its +play which my conditions confined me, with such private, though I must +add, alas, such helplessly unapplied resentment, to knowing it by. If +the force was great the attenuation of its reach was none the less +preappointed and constant; so that the case must have come back again +but to the degree--call it too, frankly, the force--of one's +sensibility, or in other words the blest resource, the supremely +breatheable and thereby nourishing and favouring air of one's +imaginative life. There were of a truth during that time probably more +appearances at one's command in the way of felt aspects, images, +apprehended living relations and impressions of the stress of life, than +during any other season one was to know; only doubtless with more of the +work of their figuring to their utmost, their giving all they could, to +do by one's self and, in the last resort, deep within one's breast. The +point to be made just here, in any case, is that if we had not recrossed +the sea, by way, rather, of such an anticlimax, to William Hunt, we +should certainly with brief delay have found ourselves doing it, on the +first alarm of War, for the experience I thus too summarily glance at +and which I don't pretend to speak of as all my own. + + + + +IV + + +Newport, with repatriation accepted, would have been on many grounds +inevitable, I think--as it was to remain inevitable for several years, +and this quite apart from William's having to paint; since if I spoke +just now of the sweep of our view, from over the water, of a continent, +or well-nigh, waiting to receive us, the eligibility of its innumerable +sites was a matter much more of our simplified, our almost distressfully +uninvolved and unconnected state than of the inherent virtue of this, +that or the other particular group of local conditions. Our parents had +for us no definite project but to be liberally "good"--in other words so +good that the presumption of our being so would literally operate +anywhere and anyhow, would really amount in itself to a sort of situated +state, a sufficient prime position, and leave other circumstances +comparatively irrelevant. What would infallibly have occurred at the +best, however, was what did punctually happen--its having to be +definitely gathered that, though we might apparently be good, as I say, +almost on any ground, there was but one place in which we should even +at a restricted pitch be well: Newport imposed itself at that period to +so remarkable a degree as the one right residence, in all our great +country, for those tainted, under whatever attenuations, with the +quality and the effect of detachment. The effect of detachment was the +fact of the experience of Europe. Detachment might of course have come +from many causes, but it truly came in most cases but from one, though +that a fairly merciless: it came from the experience of Europe, and I +think was on the whole regarded as--what it could only have been in the +sphere of intimacy and secrecy felt to be--without an absolute remedy. +As comparatively remedial Newport none the less figured, and this for +sundry reasons into the detail of which I needn't go. Its rare +distinction and precious attribute was that, being a watering-place, a +refuge from summer heats, it had also, were the measure considerably +stretched, possibilities of hibernation. We could, under stress, brave +there the period from November to June; and it was to be under stress +not to know what else to do. That was the pinch to which Europe reduced +you; insidiously, fatally disconnected, you could but make the best, as +a penalty, of the one marked point of reattachment. The philosophy of +all of which was that to confess to disconnection was to confess by the +same stroke to leisure--which involved also an admission, however +rueful at once and deprecatory, of what might still at that time pass in +our unregenerate country for something in the nature of "means." You had +had the means, that is, to _become_, so awkwardly, detached--for you +might then do that cheaply; but the whole basis of the winter life +there, of that spare semblance of the Brighton life, the Folkestone +life, the Bath or the Cheltenham or the Leamington life, was that your +occupation or avocation should be vague enough; or that you shouldn't in +other words be, like everyone you might know save a dozen or so at the +most, in business. I remember well how when we were all young together +we had, under pressure of the American ideal in that matter, then so +rigid, felt it tasteless and even humiliating that the head of our +little family was _not_ in business, and that even among our relatives +on each side we couldn't so much as name proudly anyone who was--with +the sole exception of our maternal uncle Robertson Walsh, who looked, +ever so benevolently, after our father's "affairs," happily for us. Such +had never been the case with the father of any boy of our acquaintance; +the business in which the boy's father gloriously _was_ stood forth +inveterately as the very first note of our comrade's impressiveness. +_We_ had no note of that sort to produce, and I perfectly recover the +effect of my own repeated appeal to our parent for some presentable +account of him that would prove us respectable. Business alone was +respectable--if one meant by it, that is, the calling of a lawyer, a +doctor or a minister (we never spoke of clergymen) as well; I think that +if we had had the Pope among us we should have supposed the Pope in +business, just as I remember my friend Simpson's telling me crushingly, +at one of our New York schools, on my hanging back with the fatal truth +about our credentials, that the author of _his_ being (we spoke no more +of "governors" than we did of "parsons") was in the business of a +stevedore. That struck me as a great card to play--the word was fine and +mysterious; so that "What shall we tell them you _are_, don't you see?" +could but become on our lips at home a more constant appeal. It seemed +wantonly to be prompted for our father, and indeed greatly to amuse him, +that he should put us off with strange unheard-of attributions, such as +would have made us ridiculous in our special circles; his "Say I'm a +philosopher, say I'm a seeker for truth, say I'm a lover of my kind, say +I'm an author of books if you like; or, best of all, just say I'm a +Student," saw us so very little further. Abject it certainly appeared to +be reduced to the "student" plea; and I must have lacked even the +confidence of my brother Bob, who, challenged, in my hearing and the +usual way, was ready not only with the fact that our parent "wrote," but +with the further fact that he had written _Lectures and Miscellanies +James_. I think that when we settled awhile at Newport there was no one +there who had written but Mr. Henry T. Tuckerman, a genial and graceful +poet of the Artless Age, as it might still be called in spite of Poe and +Hawthorne and Longfellow and Lowell, the most characteristic works of +the first and the two last of whom had already appeared; especially as +those most characteristic of Mr. Tuckerman referred themselves to a past +sufficiently ample to have left that gentleman with a certain deafness +and a glossy wig and a portly presence and the reputation, positively, +of the most practised and desired of diners-out. He was to be recognised +at once as a social value on a scene not under that rubric densely +peopled; he constituted indeed such a note as would help to keep others +of the vague definability in countenance. Clearly indeed it might happen +that an association of vaguenesses would arrive in time, by fondly +cleaving together, at the semblance of a common identity; the nature of +the case then demanding, however, that they should be methodically +vague, take their stand on it and work it for all it was worth. That in +truth was made easy by the fact that what I have called our common +disconnectedness positively projected and proclaimed a void; +disconnected from business we could only be connected with the negation +of it, which had as yet no affirmative, no figurative side. This +probably would come; figures, in the void, would one by one spring up; +but what would be thus required for them was that the void should be +ample and, as it were, established. Not to be afraid of it they would +have to feel it clear of everything and everyone they knew in the air +actually peopled. + +William Hunt, for that matter, was already a figure unmmistakable, +superficially speaking unsurpassable, just as John La Farge, already +mentioned, was so soon to prove to be. They were only two indeed, but +they argued the possibility; and so the great thing, as I say, was that, +to stand out, they should have margin and light. We couldn't all be +figures--on a mere margin, the margin of business, and in the light of +the general wonder of our being anything, anything _there_; but we could +at least understand the situation and cultivate the possibilities, watch +and protect the germs. This consciousness, this aim or ideal, had after +all its own intensity--it burned with a pure flame: there is a special +joy, clearly, in the hopeful conversion of the desert into the garden, +of thinness into thickness, a joy to which the conversion of the thick +into the mere dense, of the free into the rank or the close, perhaps +gives no clue. The great need that Newport met was that of a basis of +reconciliation to "America" when the habit, the taking for granted, of +America had been broken or intermitted: it would be hard to say of what +subtle secret or magic the place was possessed toward this end, and by a +common instinct, I think, we didn't attempt to formulate it--we let it +alone, only looking at each other hard, only moving gently, on the brave +hypothesis, only in fine deprecating too rude and impatient, too +precipitate a doubt of the spell that perhaps might work if we waited +and prayed. We did wait and pray, accordingly, scantly-served though the +board we might often have felt we had sat down to, and there was a fair +company of us to do so, friendliest among whom to our particular effort +was my father's excellent friend of many years Edmund Tweedy, already +named in pages preparatory to these and who, with his admirable wife, +presented himself as our main introducer and initiator. He had married, +while we were all young in New York together, a manner of Albany cousin, +Mary Temple the elder, aunt of the younger,[3] and had by this time +"been through" more than anything, more than everything, of which there +could be question for ourselves. The pair had on their marriage gone at +once to Europe to live, had put in several years of Italy and yet had at +last, particular reasons operating, returned to their native, that is to +sterner, realities; those as to which it was our general theory, of so +touching a candour as I look back to it, that they offered themselves at +Newport in a muffling mitigating air. The air, material, moral, social, +was in fact clear and clean to a degree that might well have left us but +dazed at the circumjacent blankness; yet as to that I hasten to add too +that the blowing out of our bubble, the planting of our garden, the +correction of our thinness, the discovery, under stress, of such scraps +of colour and conversation, such saving echoes and redeeming references +as might lurk for us in each other, all formed in themselves an active, +and might at last even grow to suggest an absolutely bustling, process. + +I come back with a real tenderness of memory for instance to that +felicity of the personal, the social, the "literary and artistic," +almost really the romantic, identity responding, after a fashion quite +to bring tears to the eyes, in proportion as it might have seemed to +feel by some divine insufflation what it practically could stand for. +What should one call this but the brave triumph of values conscious of +having to be almost missionary? There were many such that in "Europe" +hadn't had to be missionary at all; in Europe, as it were, one +hadn't--comparatively--seen, if not the forest for the trees, then the +trees for the forest; whereas on this other great vacuous level every +single stem seemed to enjoy for its distinction quite the totality of +the daylight and to rise into the air with a gladness that was itself a +grace. Of some of the personal importances that acted in that way I +should with easier occasion have more to say--I shall as it is have +something; but there could perhaps be no better sample of the effect of +sharpness with which the forces of culture might emerge than, say, the +fairly golden glow of romance investing the mere act of perusal of the +Revue des Deux Mondes. There was the charm--though I grant of course +that I speak here all for myself, constitutionally and, face to face +_with_ myself, quite shamelessly an inquirer, a hunter, for charm--that +whereas the spell cast had more or less inevitable limits in the world +to which such a quality as the best things of the Revue, such a +performance of the intellectual and expressional engagement as these +suggested, was native and was thereby relative to other generally like +phenomena, so it represented among _us_, where it had to take upon +itself what I have already alluded to as all the work, far more than its +face value. Few of the forces about us reached as yet the level of +representation (even if here and there some might have been felt as +trying for it); and this made all the difference. Anything suggestive or +significant, anything promising or interesting, anything in the least +finely charming above all, immensely counted, claimed tendance and +protection, almost claimed, or at any rate enjoyed, worship; as for that +matter anything finely charming does, quite rightly, anywhere. But our +care, our privilege, on occasion our felt felicity, was to foster every +symptom and breathe encouragement to every success; to hang over the +tenderest shoots that betrayed the principle of growth--or in other +words to read devoutly into everything, and as straight as possible, the +very fullest meaning we might hope it would learn to have. So at least +quite at first--and so again very considerably after the large interval +and grim intermission represented by the War; during which interest and +quality, to say nothing of quantity, at the highest pitch, ceased in any +degree to fail us, and what might be "read into" almost any aspect +without exception paled in the light of what was inevitably read out +from it. It must be added at the same time that with its long duration +the War fell into its place as part of life at large, and that when it +was over various other things still than the love of peace were found to +have grown. + +Immediately, at any rate, the Albany cousins, or a particular group of +them, began again to be intensely in question for us; coloured in due +course with reflections of the War as their lives, not less than our +own, were to become--and coloured as well too, for all sorts of notation +and appreciation, from irrepressible private founts. Mrs. Edmund Tweedy, +bereft of her own young children, had at the time I speak of opened her +existence, with the amplest hospitality, to her four orphaned nieces, +who were also our father's and among whom the second in age, Mary Temple +the younger, about in her seventeenth year when she thus renewed her +appearance to our view, shone with vividest lustre, an essence that +preserves her still, more than half a century from the date of her +death, in a memory or two where many a relic once sacred has +comparatively yielded to time. Most of those who knew and loved, I was +going to say adored, her have also yielded--which is a reason the more +why thus much of her, faint echo from too far off though it prove, +should be tenderly saved. If I have spoken of the elements and presences +round about us that "counted," Mary Temple was to count, and in more +lives than can now be named, to an extraordinary degree; count as a +young and shining apparition, a creature who owed to the charm of her +every aspect (her aspects were so many!) and the originality, vivacity, +audacity, generosity, of her spirit, an indescribable grace and +weight--if one might impute weight to a being so imponderable in common +scales. Whatever other values on our scene might, as I have hinted, +appear to fail, she was one of the first order, in the sense of the +immediacy of the impression she produced, and produced altogether as by +the play of her own light spontaneity and curiosity--not, that is, as +through a sense of such a pressure and such a motive, or through a care +for them, in others. "Natural" to an effect of perfect felicity that we +were never to see surpassed is what I have already praised all the +Albany _cousinage_ of those years for being; but in none of the company +was the note so clear as in this rarest, though at the same tune +symptomatically or ominously palest, flower of the stem; who was natural +at more points and about more things, with a greater range of freedom +and ease and reach of horizon than any of the others dreamed of. They +had that way, delightfully, with the small, after all, and the common +matters--while she had it with those too, but with the great and rare +ones over and above; so that she was to remain for us the very figure +and image of a felt interest in life, an interest as magnanimously +far-spread, or as familiarly and exquisitely fixed, as her splendid +shifting sensibility, moral, personal, nervous, and having at once such +noble flights and such touchingly discouraged drops, such graces of +indifference and inconsequence, might at any moment determine. She was +really to remain, for our appreciation, the supreme case of a taste for +life as life, as personal living; of an endlessly active and yet somehow +a careless, an illusionless, a sublimely forewarned curiosity about it: +something that made her, slim and fair and quick, all straightness and +charming tossed head, with long light and yet almost sliding steps and a +large light postponing, renouncing laugh, the very muse or amateur +priestess of rash speculation. To express her in the mere terms of her +restless young mind, one felt from the first, was to place her, by a +perversion of the truth, under the shadow of female "earnestness"--for +which she was much too unliteral and too ironic; so that, superlatively +personal and yet as independent, as "off" into higher spaces, at a +touch, as all the breadth of her sympathy and her courage could send +her, she made it impossible to say whether she was just the most moving +of maidens or a disengaged and dancing flame of thought. No one to come +after her could easily seem to show either a quick inward life or a +brave, or even a bright, outward, either a consistent contempt for +social squalors or a very marked genius for moral reactions. She had in +her brief passage the enthusiasm of humanity--more, assuredly, than any +charming girl who ever circled, and would fain have continued to circle, +round a ballroom. This kept her indeed for a time more interested in the +individual, the immediate human, than in the race or the social order at +large; but that, on the other hand, made her ever so restlessly, or +quite inappeasably, "psychologic." The psychology of others, in her +shadow--I mean their general resort to it--could only for a long time +seem weak and flat and dim, above all not at all amusing. She burned +herself out; she died at twenty-four. + +At the risk perhaps of appearing to make my own scant adventure the +pivot of that early Newport phase I find my reference to William Hunt +and his truly fertilising action on our common life much conditioned by +the fact that, since W. J., for the first six months or so after our +return, daily and devotedly haunted his studio, I myself did no less, +for a shorter stretch, under the irresistible contagion. The clearness +of the whole passage for me, the clearest impression, above all, of the +vivid and whimsical master, an inspirer, during a period that began a +little later on, of numberless devotions and loyalties, is what this +fond memory of my permitted contact and endeavour still has to give me. +Pupils at that time didn't flock to his gates--though they were to do +so in Boston, during years, later on; an earnest lady or two, Boston +precursors, hovered and flitted, but I remember for the rest (and I +speak of a short period) no thorough-going eleves save John La Farge and +my brother. I remember, for that matter, sitting quite in solitude in +one of the grey cool rooms of the studio, which thus comes back to me as +having several, and thinking that I really might get to copy casts +rather well, and might in particular see myself congratulated on my +sympathetic rendering of the sublime uplifted face of Michael Angelo's +"Captive" in the Louvre. I sat over this effort and a few others for +long quiet hours, and seem to feel myself again aware, just to that +tune, of how happy I ought to be. No one disturbed me; the earnest +workers were elsewhere; I had a chamber of the temple all to myself, +with immortal forms and curves, with shadows beautiful and right, +waiting there on blank-eyed faces for me to prove myself not helpless; +and with two or three of Hunt's own fine things, examples of his work in +France, transporting me at once and defying. I believed them great +productions--thought in especial endless good of the large canvas of the +girl with her back presented while she fills her bucket at the spout in +the wall, against which she leans with a tension of young muscle, a +general expression of back, beneath her dress, and with the pressure of +her raised and extended bare arm and flattened hand: this, to my +imagination, could only become the prize of some famous collection, the +light of some museum, for all the odd circumstance that it was company +just then for muddled me and for the queer figures projected by my +crayon. Frankly, intensely--that was the great thing--these were hours +of Art, art definitely named, looking me full in the face and accepting +my stare in return--no longer a tacit implication or a shy subterfuge, +but a flagrant unattenuated aim. I had somehow come into the temple by +the back door, the _porte d'honneur_ opened on another side, and I could +never have believed much at best in the length of my stay; but I was +there, day by day, as much as any one had ever been, and with a sense of +what it "meant" to be there that the most accredited of pupils couldn't +have surpassed; so that the situation to this extent really hummed with +promise. I fail, I confess, to reconstitute the relation borne by my +privilege to that of tuition "in the higher branches," to which it was +quite time I should have mounted, enjoyed at the hands of the Reverend +William C. Leverett, curate to the then "rector," Doctor Mercer, of that +fine old high-spired Trinity Church in which had throbbed, from long +before the Revolution as they used to say, the proud episcopal heart of +Newport; and feel indeed that I must pretty well have shaken off, as a +proved absurd predicament, all submission to my dilemma: all submission +of the mind, that is, for if my share of Mr. Leverett's attention was +less stinted than my share of William Hunt's (and neither had much +duration) it failed to give me the impression that anything worth naming +had opened out to me, whereas in the studio I was at the threshold of a +world. + +It became itself indeed on the spot a rounded satisfying world, the +place did; enclosed within the grounds, as we then regarded them, of the +master's house, circled about with numerous trees, as we then counted +them, and representing a more direct exclusion of vulgar sounds, false +notes and harsh reminders than I had ever known. I fail in the least to +make out where the real work of the studio went forward; it took +somewhere else its earnest course, and our separation--mine from the +real workers, my indulged yet ignored state--kept me somehow the safer, +as if I had taken some mild and quite harmless drug through which +external rubs would reach me from a distance, but which left my own +rubbing power, not to say my own smearing or smutching, quite free. Into +the world so beautifully valid the master would occasionally walk, +inquiring as to what I had done or would do, but bearing on the +question with an easy lightness, a friendliness of tact, a neglect of +conclusion, which it touches me still to remember. It was impossible to +me at that time not so to admire him that his just being to such an +extent, as from top to toe and in every accent and motion, the living +and communicating Artist, made the issue, with his presence, quite cease +to be of how one got on or fell short, and become instead a mere +self-sacrificing vision of the picturesque itself, the constituted +picturesque or treated "subject," in efficient figure, personal form, +vivid human style. I then felt the man the great mystery could mark with +its stamp, when wishing the mark unmistakable, teach me just in himself +the most and best about any art that I should come to find benignantly +concerned with me, for moments however smilingly scant. William Hunt, +all muscular spareness and brownness and absence of waste, all flagrant +physiognomy, brave bony arch of handsome nose, upwardness of strong +eyebrow and glare, almost, of eyes that both recognised and wondered, +strained eyes that played over questions as if they were objects and +objects as if they were questions, might have stood, to the life, for +Don Quixote, if we could associate with that hero a far-spreading beard +already a little grizzled, a manner and range of gesture and broken form +of discourse that was like a restless reference to a palette and that +seemed to take for granted, all about, canvases and models and charming, +amusing things, the "tremendously interesting" in the seen bit or caught +moment, and the general unsayability, in comparison, of anything else. +He never would have perched, it must be added, on Rosinante--he was +fonder of horses even than of the method of Couture, and though with a +shade of resemblance, as all simple and imaginative men have, to the +knight of La Mancha, he least suggested that analogy as he passed in a +spinning buggy, his beard flying, behind a favourite trotter. But what +he perhaps most puts before me to-day is the grim truth of the merciless +manner in which a living and hurrying public educates itself, making and +devouring in a day reputations and values which represent something of +the belief in it that it has had in _them_, but at the memory of which +we wince, almost to horror, as at the legend of victims who have been +buried alive. Oh the cold grey luminaries hung about in odd corners and +back passages, and that we have known shining and warm! They serve at +the most now as beacons warning any step not to come _that_ way, +whatever it does; the various attested ways it may not with felicity +come growing thus all the while in number. + +John La Farge became at once, in breaking on our view, quite the most +interesting person we knew, and for a time remained so; he became a +great many other things beside--a character, above all, if there ever +was one; but he opened up to us, though perhaps to me in particular, who +could absorb all that was given me on those suggestive lines, prospects +and possibilities that made the future flush and swarm. His foreignness, +which seemed great at that time, had gained a sharper accent from a long +stay made in France, where both on his father's and his mother's side he +had relations, and had found, to our hovering envy, all sorts of +charming occasions. He had spent much time in Brittany, among kindred +the most romantically interesting, people and places whose very names, +the De Nanteuils of Saint-Pol-de-Leon, I seem to remember for instance, +cast a spell across comparatively blank Newport sands; he had brought +home with him innumerable water-colour sketches, Breton peasants, +costumes, interiors, bits of villages and landscape; and I supposed him +to have had on such ground the most delightful adventure in the world. +How was one not to suppose it at a time when the best of one's +education, such as that was, had begun to proceed almost altogether by +the aid of the Revue des Deux Mondes, a periodical that supplied to us +then and for several years after (or again I can but speak for myself) +all that was finest in the furniture and the fittings of romance? Those +beginnings of Newport were our first contact with New England--a New +England already comparatively subdued and sophisticated, a Samson shorn +of his strength by the shears of the Southern, and more particularly of +the New York, Delilah; the result of which, still speaking for myself, +was a prompt yearning and reaching out, on the part of the spirit, for +some corrective or antidote to whatever it was that might be going, in +the season to come, least charmingly or informingly or inspiringly to +press upon us. I well recall my small anxious foresight as to a +required, an indispensable provision against either assault or dearth, +as if the question might be of standing an indefinite siege; and how a +certain particular capacious closet in a house we were presently to +occupy took on to my fond fancy the likeness at once of a store of +edibles, both substantial and succulent, and of a hoard of ammunition +for the defence of any breach--the Revue accumulating on its shelves at +last in serried rows and really building up beneath us with its slender +firm salmon-coloured blocks an alternative sphere of habitation. There +will be more to say of this, bristling or rather flowering with precious +particulars, if I stray so far; but the point for the moment was that +one would have pushed into that world of the closet, one would have +wandered or stumbled about in it quite alone if it hadn't been that La +Farge was somehow always in it with us. That was in those years his +admirable function and touch--that he affected me as knowing his way +there as absolutely no one else did, and even as having risen of a +sudden before us to bear us this quickening company. Nobody else, not +another creature, was free of it to that tune; the whole mid-century New +England--as a rough expression of what the general consciousness most +signified--was utterly out of it; which made, you see, a most unequal +division of our little working, or our totally cogitative, universe into +the wondrous esoteric quarter peopled just by us and our friend and our +common references, and the vast remainder of the public at large, the +public of the innumerably uninitiated even when apparently of the most +associated. + +All of which is but a manner of expressing the intensity, as I felt it, +of our Franco-American, our most completely accomplished friend's +presence among us. Out of the safe rich home of the Revue, which opened +away into the vastness of visions, he practically stepped, and into it, +with all his ease, he mysteriously returned again: he came nearer to +being what might have been meant concretely throughout it all--though +meant most of course in its full-charged stream of fiction--than any +other visiting figure. The stream of fiction was so constant an appeal +to the charmed, by which I mean of course the predisposed, mind that it +fairly seemed at moments to overflow its banks and take to its bosom any +recognised, any congruous creature or thing that might happen to be +within reach. La Farge was of the type--the "European," and this gave +him an authority for me that it verily took the length of years to +undermine; so that as the sense of those first of them in especial comes +back to me I find it difficult, even under the appeal to me of the +attempt, to tell how he was to count in my earliest culture. If culture, +as I hold, is a matter of attitude quite as much as of opportunity, and +of the form and substance of the vessel carried to the fountain no less +than of the water-supply itself, there couldn't have been better +conditions for its operating drop by drop. It operates ever much more, I +think, by one's getting whatever there may happen to be out for one's +use than by its conforming to any abstract standard of quantity or +lustre. It may work, as between dispenser and subject, in so +incalculably personal a manner that no chemical analysis shall recover +it, no common estimate of forces or amounts find itself in the least +apply. The case was that La Farge swam into our ingenuous ken as the +figure of figures, and that such an agent, on a stage so unpeopled and +before a scene so unpainted, became salient and vivid almost in spite of +itself. The figure was at a premium, and fit for any glass case that its +vivacity should allow to enclose it--wherein it might be surrounded by +wondering, admiring and often quite inevitably misconceiving observers. +It was not that these too weren't agents in their way, agents in some +especial good cause without the furtherance of which we never should +have done at all; but they were by that very fact specialised and +stiffened, committed to their one attitude, the immediately profitable, +and incapable of that play of gesture in which we recognise +representation. A representative, a rounded figure, however, is as to +none of its relations definable or announceable beforehand; we only know +it, for good or for ill, but with something of the throb of elation +always, when we see it, and then it in general sufficiently accounts for +itself. We often for that matter insist on its being a figure, we +positively make it one, in proportion as we seem to need it--or as in +other words we too acutely miss the active virtue of representation. It +takes some extraordinary set of circumstances or time of life, I think, +either to beguile or to hustle us into indifference to some larger felt +extension roundabout us of "the world"--a sphere the confines of which +move on even as we ourselves move and which is always there, just +beyond us, to twit us with the more it should have to show if we were a +little more "of" it. Sufficiency shuts us in but till the man of the +world--never prefigured, as I say, only welcomed on the spot--appears; +when we see at once how much we have wanted him. When we fail of that +acknowledgment, that sense as of a tension, an anxiety or an indigence +relieved, it is of course but that the extraordinary set of +circumstances, or above all the extraordinary time of life I speak of, +has indeed intervened. + +It was as a man of the world that, for all his youth, La Farge rose or, +still better, bowed, before us, his inclinations of obeisance, his +considerations of address being such as we had never seen and now almost +publicly celebrated. This was what most immediately and most +iridescently showed, the truth being all the while that the character +took on in him particular values without which it often enough, though +then much more grossly, flourishes. It was by these enrichments of +curiosity, of taste and genius, that he became the personality, as we +nowadays say, that I have noted--the full freshness of all of which was +to play but through his younger time, or at least through our younger +apprehension. He was so "intellectual"--that was the flower; it crowned +his being personally so finished and launched. The wealth of his +cultivation, the variety of his initiations, the inveteracy of his +forms, the degree of his _empressement_ (this in itself, I repeat, a +revelation) made him, with those elements of the dandy and the cavalier +to which he struck us as so picturesquely sacrificing, a cluster of +bright promises, a rare original and, though not at all a direct model +for simpler folk, as we then could but feel ourselves, an embodiment of +the gospel of esthetics. Those more resounding forms that our age was to +see this gospel take on were then still to come, but I was to owe them +in the later time not half the thrill that the La Farge of the prime +could set in motion. He was really an artistic, an esthetic nature of +wondrous homogeneity; one was to have known in the future many an +unfolding that went with a larger ease and a shrewder economy, but never +to have seen a subtler mind or a more generously wasteful passion, in +other words a sincerer one, addressed to the problems of the designer +and painter. Of his long later history, full of flights and drops, +advances and retreats, experiment and performance, of the endless +complications of curiosity and perversity, I say nothing here save that +if it was to contradict none of our first impressions it was to qualify +them all by others still more lively; these things belonging quite to +some other record. Yet I may just note that they were to represent in +some degree an eclipse of the so essentially harmonious person round +whom a positive grace of legend had originally formed itself. I see him +at this hour again as that bright apparition; see him, jacketed in black +velvet or clad from top to toe in old-time elegances of cool white and +leaning much forward with his protuberant and over-glazed, his doubting +yet all-seizing vision, dandle along the shining Newport sands in +far-away summer sunsets on a charming chestnut mare whose light legs and +fine head and great sweep of tail showed the Arab strain--quite as if +(what would have been characteristic of him) he had borrowed his mount +from the adorable Fromentin, whom we already knew as a painter, but +whose acquaintance as a writer we were of course so promptly to owe him +that when "Dominique" broke upon us out of the Revue as one of the most +exquisite literary events of our time it found us doubly responsive. + +So, at any rate, he was there, and there to stay--intensely among us but +somehow not withal of us; his being a Catholic, and apparently a "real" +one in spite of so many other omnisciences, making perhaps by itself the +greatest difference. He had been through a Catholic college in Maryland, +the name of which, though I am not assured of it now, exhaled a sort of +educational elegance; but where and when he had so miraculously laid up +his stores of reading and achieved his universal saturation was what we +longest kept asking ourselves. Many of these depths I couldn't pretend +to sound, but it was immediate and appreciable that he revealed to us +Browning for instance; and this, oddly enough, long after Men and Women +had begun (from our Paris time on, if I remember) to lie upon our +parents' book-table. _They_ had not divined in us as yet an aptitude for +that author; whose appeal indeed John reinforced to our eyes by the +reproduction of a beautiful series of illustrative drawings, two or +three of which he was never to surpass--any more than he was to complete +his highly distinguished plan for the full set, not the least faded of +his hundred dreams. Most of all he revealed to us Balzac; having so much +to tell me of what was within that formidably-plated door, in which he +all expertly and insidiously played the key, that to re-read even after +long years the introductory pages of Eugenie Grandet, breathlessly +seized and earnestly absorbed under his instruction, is to see my +initiator's youthful face, so irregular but so refined, look out at me +between the lines as through blurred prison bars. In Merimee, after the +same fashion, I meet his expository ghost--hovering to remind me of how +he started me on La Venus d'Ille; so that nothing would do but that I +should translate it, try to render it as lovingly as if it were a +classic and old (both of which things it now indeed is) and send it off +to the New York weekly periodical of that age of crudest categories +which was to do me the honour neither of acknowledging nor printing nor, +clearly, since translations did savingly appear there, in the least +understanding it. These again are mild memories--though not differing in +that respect from most of their associates; yet I cherish them as +ineffaceable dates, sudden milestones, the first distinctly noted, on +the road of so much inward or apprehensive life. Our guest--I call him +our guest because he was so lingeringly, so abidingly and supersedingly +present--began meanwhile to paint, under our eyes, with devotion, with +exquisite perception, and above all as with the implication, a hundred +times beneficent and fertilising, that if one didn't in these +connections consistently take one's stand on supersubtlety of taste one +was a helpless outsider and at the best the basest of vulgarians or +flattest of frauds--a doctrine more salutary at that time in our world +at large than any other that might be sounded. Of all of which ingenuous +intensity and activity I should have been a much scanter witness than +his then close condisciple, my brother, had not his personal kindness, +that of the good-natured and amused elder youth to the enslaved, the +yearningly gullible younger, charmed me often into a degree of +participation. Occasions and accidents come back to me under their wash +of that distilled old Newport light as to which we more and more agreed +that it made altogether exceptionally, on our side of the world, for +possibility of the _nuance_, or in other words for picture and story; +such for example as my felt sense of how unutterably it was the real +thing, the gage of a great future, when I one morning found my +companions of the larger, the serious studio inspired to splendid +performance by the beautiful young manly form of our cousin Gus Barker, +then on a vivid little dash of a visit to us and who, perched on a +pedestal and divested of every garment, was the gayest as well as the +neatest of models. This was my first personal vision of the "life," on a +pedestal and in a pose, that had half gleamed and half gloomed through +the chiaroscuro of our old friend Haydon; and I well recall the crash, +at the sight, of all my inward emulation--so forced was I to recognise +on the spot that I might niggle for months over plaster casts and not +come within miles of any such point of attack. The bravery of my +brother's own in especial dazzled me out of every presumption; since +nothing less than that meant drawing (they were not using colour) and +since our genial kinsman's perfect gymnastic figure meant living truth, +I should certainly best testify to the whole mystery by pocketing my +pencil. + +I secured and preserved for long William's finished rendering of the +happy figure--which was to speak for the original, after his gallant +death, in sharper and finer accents perhaps than aught else that +remained of him; and it wanted but another occasion somewhat later on, +that of the sitting to the pair of pupils under Hunt's direction of a +subject presented as a still larger challenge, to feel that I had +irrecoverably renounced. Very handsome were the head and shoulders of +Katherine Temple, the eldest of those Albany cousins then gathered at +Newport under their, and derivatively our, Aunt Mary's wing, who +afterwards was to become Mrs. Richard Emmet--the Temples and the Emmets +being so much addicted to alliances that a still later generation was to +bristle for us with a delightful Emmetry, each member of it a different +blessing; she sat with endless patience, the serenest of models, and W. +J.'s portrait of her in oils survives (as well as La Farge's, dealing +with her in another view) as a really mature, an almost masterly, piece +of painting, having, as has been happily suggested to me, much the air +of a characteristic Manet. Such demonstrations would throw one back +on regret, so far as my brother was concerned, if subsequent +counter-demonstrations hadn't had it in them so much to check the train. +For myself at the hour, in any case, the beautiful success with Kitty +Temple did nothing but hurry on the future, just as the sight of the +charming thing to-day, not less than that of La Farge's _profil perdu_, +or presented ear and neck and gathered braids of hair, quite as charming +and quite as painted, touchingly reanimates the past. I say touchingly +because of the remembered pang of my acceptance of an admonition so +sharply conveyed. Therefore if somewhat later on I could still so fondly +hang about in that air of production--so far at least as it enveloped +our friend, and particularly after his marriage and his setting up of +his house at Newport, vivid proofs alike, as seemed to us all, of his +consummate, his _raffine_ taste, even if we hadn't yet, I think, that +epithet for this--it was altogether in the form of mere helpless admirer +and inhaler, led captive in part by the dawning perception that the arts +were after all essentially one and that even with canvas and brush +whisked out of my grasp I still needn't feel disinherited. That was the +luxury of the friend and senior with a literary side--that if there were +futilities that he didn't bring home to me he nevertheless opened more +windows than he closed; since he couldn't have meant nothing by causing +my eyes to plunge so straight into the square and dense little formal +garden of Merimee. I might occasionally serve for an abundantly idle +young out-of-doors model--as in fact I frequently did, the best perhaps +of his early exhibitions of a rare colour-sense even now attesting it; +but mightn't it become possible that Merimee would meanwhile serve for +me? Didn't I already see, as I fumbled with a pen, of what the small +dense formal garden might be inspiringly symbolic? It was above all +wonderful in the La Farge of those years that even as he painted and +painted, very slowly and intently and belatedly--his habit of putting +back the clock and ignoring every time-scheme but his own was matched +only by his view of the constant timeliness of talk, talk as talk, for +which no moment, no suspended step, was too odd or too fleeting--he +remained as referentially and unexhaustedly bookish, he turned his back +by the act as little on our theory of his omniscience as he ceased to +disown his job, whatever it might be, while endlessly burying his +salient and reinforced eyes and his visibly active organ of scent in +some minutest rarity of print, some precious ancientry of binding, +mechanically plucked, by the hazard of a touch, from one of the shelves +of a stored collection that easily passed with us for unapproached. + +[Illustration: Portrait in oils of Miss Katherine Temple, 1861.] + +He lost himself on these occasions both by a natural ease and by his +early adoption and application of the principle of the imperturbable, +which promised even from those days to govern his conduct well-nigh to +the exclusion of every other. We were to know surely as time went on no +comparable case of consistency of attitude--no other such prompt grasp +by a nature essentially entire, a settled sovereign self, of the truth +of what would work for it most favourably should it but succeed in never +yielding the first inch of any ground. Immense every ground thus became +by its covering itself from edge to edge with the defence of his +serenity, which, whatever his fathomless private dealings with it, was +never consentingly, I mean publicly, to suffer a grain of abatement. The +artist's serenity, by this conception, was an intellectual and spiritual +capital that must never brook defeat--which it so easily might incur by +a single act of abdication. That was at any rate the case for the +particular artist and the particular nature he felt himself, +armour-proof as they became against the appeal of sacrifice. Sacrifice +was fallibility, and one could only of course be consistent if one +inveterately had hold of the truth. There was no safety or, otherwise, +no inward serenity or even outward--though the outward came +secondly--unless there was no deflection; none into the question, that +is, of what might make for the serenity of others, which was their own +affair and which above all seemed not urgent in comparison with the +supreme artistic. It wasn't that the artist hadn't to pay, to pay for +the general stupidity, perversity and perfidy, from the moment he might +have to deal with these things; that was the inevitable suffering, and +it was always there; but it could be more or less borne if one was +systematically, or rather if one was naturally, or even, better still, +preternaturally, in the right; since this meant the larger, the largest +serenity. That account of so fine a case of inward confidence would +indeed during those very first years have sinned somewhat by +anticipation; yet something of the beauty--that is of the unmatched +virtuosity--of the attitude finally achieved did even at the early time +colour the air of intercourse with him for those who had either few +enough or many enough of their own reserves. The second of these +conditions sprang from a due anxiety for one's own interests, more or +less defined in advance and therefore, as might be, more or less +menaced; the other proviso easily went with vagueness--vagueness as to +what things were one's interests, seeing that the exhibited working of +an esthetic and a moral confidence conjoined on that scale and at play +together unhampered would perhaps prove for the time an attraction +beyond any other. This reflection must verily, in our relation, have +brought about my own quietus--so far as that mild ecstasy could be +divorced from agitation. I recall at all events less of the agitation +than of the ecstasy; the primary months, certain aspects even of the few +following years, look out at me as from fine accommodations, +acceptances, submissions, emotions, all melted together, that one must +have taken for joys of the mind and gains of the imagination so clear as +to cost one practically nothing. They are what I see, and are all I want +to see, as I look back; there hangs about them a charm of thrilled good +faith, the flush and throb of crowding apprehensions, that has scarce +faded and of which I can only wish to give the whole picture the +benefit. I bottle this imponderable extract of the loitering summers of +youth, when every occasion really seemed to stay to be gathered and +tasted, just for the sake of its faint sweetness. + +Some time since, in Boston, I spent an hour before a commemorative +cluster of La Farge's earlier productions, gathered in on the occasion +of his death, with the effect as of a plummet suddenly dropped into +obscure depths long unstirred, that of a remembered participation, it +didn't seem too much to say, in the far-away difficult business of their +getting themselves born. These things, almost all finished studies of +landscape, small and fond celebrations of the modest little Newport +harmonies, the spare felicities and delicacies of a range of aspects +that have ceased to appeal or to "count," called back into life a +hundred memories, laid bare the very footsteps of time, light and +uncertain though so often the imprint. I seemed so to have been there by +the projection of curiosity and sympathy, if not by having literally +looked in, when the greater number of such effects worked themselves +out, that they spoke to me of my own history--through the felt intensity +of my commission, as it were, to speak for my old friend. The terms on +which he was ever ready to draw out for us the interesting hours, terms +of patience as they essentially were for the edified party, lived again +in this record, but with the old supposition of profit, or in other +words the old sense of pleasure, of precious acquisition and intenser +experience, more vivid than anything else. There recurs to me for +instance one of the smallest of adventures, as tiny a thing as could +incur the name and which was of the early stage of our acquaintance, +when he proposed to me that we should drive out to the Glen, some six +miles off, to breakfast, and should afterwards paint--we paint!--in the +bosky open air. It looks at this distance a mythic time, that of felt +inducements to travel so far at such an hour and in a backless buggy on +the supposition of rustic fare. But different ages have different +measures, and I quite remember how ours, that morning, at the neat +hostel in the umbrageous valley, overflowed with coffee and +griddle-cakes that were not as other earthly refreshment, and how a +spell of romance rested for several hours on our invocation of the +genius of the scene: of such material, with the help of the attuned +spirit, may great events consent to be composed. My companion, his easel +and canvas, his palette and stool and other accessories happily placed, +settled to his subject, while I, at a respectful distance, settled to +mine and to the preparation of this strange fruit of time, my having +kept the impression as if it really mattered. It did indeed matter, it +was to continue to have done so, and when I ask myself the reason I find +this in something as rare and deep and beautiful as a passage of old +poetry, a scrap of old legend, in the vagueness of rustling murmuring +green and plashing water and woodland voices and images, flitting +hovering possibilities; the most retained of these last of course being +the chance that one's small daub (for I too had my easel and panel and +palette) might incur appreciation by the eye of friendship. This indeed +was the true source of the spell, that it was in the eye of friendship, +friendship full of character and colour, and full of amusement of its +own, that I lived on any such occasion, and that I had come forth in the +morning cool and had found our breakfast at the inn a thing of ineffable +savour, and that I now sat and flurriedly and fearfully aspired. Yes, +the interesting ineffectual and exquisite array of the Boston "show" +smote for me most the chord of the prime questions, the admirations and +expectations at first so confident, even that of those refinements of +loyalty out of which the last and highest tribute was to spring; the +consideration, I mean, of whether our extraordinary associate, neither +promptly understood nor inveterately accepted, might not eventually be +judged such a colourist and such a poet that owners of his first +felicities, those very ones over which he was actually bending, and with +a touch so inscrutable, such "tonalities" of his own, would find +themselves envied and rich. I remember positively liking to see most +people stupid about him, and to make them out, I dare say, more +numerously stupid than they really were: this perhaps in some degree as +a bright communication of his own spirit--which discerned from so far +off that of the bitterest-sweet cup it was abundantly to taste; and +partly because the case would after that fashion only have its highest +interest. The highest interest, the very highest, it certainly couldn't +fail to have; and the beauty of a final poetic justice, with exquisite +delays, the whole romance of conscious delicacy and heroic patience +intervening, was just what we seemed to see meanwhile stow itself +expectantly away. + +This view of the inevitable fate of distinguished work was thus, on my +part, as it comes before me again, of early development, and I admit +that I should appear to antedate it hadn't I in renewed presence of each +of the particular predestined objects of sacrifice I have glanced at +caught myself in the very act of that invidious apprehension, that +fondest contemporaneity. There were the charming individual things round +the production of which I had so at once elatedly and resignedly +circled; and nothing remained at the end of time but to test the +historic question. _Was_ the quiet chamber of the Boston museum a +constitution of poetic justice long awaited and at last fully +cognisant?--or did the event perhaps fail to give out, after all, the +essence of our far-away forecast? I think that what showed clearest, or +what I, at any rate, most sharply felt, was the very difficulty of +saying; which fact meant of course, I recognise, that the story fell a +little short, alas, of rounding itself off. Poetic justice, when it +comes, I gather, comes ever with a great shining; so that if there is +any doubt about it the source of the doubt is in the very depths of the +case and has been from the first at work there. It literally seems to +me, besides, that there was more history and thereby more interest +recoverable as the matter stood than if every answer to every question +about it hadn't had a fine ambiguity. I like ambiguities and detest +great glares; preferring thus for my critical no less than for my +pedestrian progress the cool and the shade to the sun and dust of the +way. There was an exquisite effort of which I had been peculiarly sure; +the large canvas of the view of the Paradise Rocks over against Newport, +but within the island and beyond the "second beach"--such were our thin +designations! On the high style and the grand manner of this thing, even +though a little uneasy before the absence from it of a certain cranerie +of touch, I would have staked every grain of my grounded sensibility--in +spite of which, on second thoughts, I shall let that faded fact, and no +other contention at all, be my last word about it. For the prevailing +force, within the Boston walls, the supreme magic anything was to +distil, just melted into another connection which flung a soft mantle as +over the whole show. It became, from the question of how even a man of +perceptive genius had painted what we then locally regarded as our +scenery, a question of how we ourselves had felt and cherished that +scenery; which latter of these two memories swept for me everything +before it. The scenery we cherished--by which I really mean, I fear, but +four or five of us--has now been grossly and utterly sacrificed; in the +sense that its range was all for the pedestrian measure, that to +overwalk it was to love it and to love it to overwalk it, and that no +such relation with it as either of these appears possible or thinkable +to-day. We had, the four or five of us, the instinct--the very finest +this must have been--of its scale and constitution, the adorable wise +economy with which nature had handled it and in the light of which the +whole seaward and insular extension of the comparatively futile town, +untrodden, unsuspected, practically all inviolate, offered a course for +the long afternoon ramble more in harmony with the invocations, or for +that matter the evocations, of youth than we most of us, with +appreciation so rooted, were perhaps ever to know. We knew already, we +knew then, that no such range of airs would ever again be played for us +on but two or three silver strings. They were but two or three--the sea +so often as of the isles of Greece, the mildly but perpetually embayed +promontories of mossy rock and wasted thankless pasture, bathed in a +refinement of radiance and a sweetness of solitude which amounted in +themselves to the highest "finish"; and little more than the feeling, +with all this, or rather with no more than this, that possession, +discrimination, far frequentation, were ours alone, and that a grassy +rocky tide-washed, just a bare, though ever so fine-grained, toned and +tinted breast of nature and field of fancy stretched for us to the low +horizon's furthest rim. The vast region--it struck us then as vast--was +practically roadless, but this, far from making it a desert, made it a +kind of boundless empty carpeted saloon. It comes back to me that nobody +in those days walked, nobody but the three or four of us--or indeed I +should say, if pushed, the single pair in particular of whom I was one +and the other Thomas Sargeant Perry, superexcellent and all-reading, +all-engulfing friend of those days and still, sole survivor, of these, I +thus found deeply consecrated that love of the long, again and again of +the very longest possible, walk which was to see me, year after year, +through so many of the twists and past so many of the threatened blocks +of life's road, and which, during the early and American period, was to +make me lone and perverse even in my own sight: so little was it ever +given me then, wherever I scanned the view, to descry a +fellow-pedestrian. The pedestrians came to succumb altogether, at +Newport, to this virtual challenge of their strange agitation--by the +circumstance, that is, of their being offered at last, to importunity, +the vulgar road, under the invasion of which the old rich alternative +miserably dwindled. + + + + +V + + +Nothing meanwhile could have been less logical, yet at the same time +more natural, than that William's interest in the practice of painting +should have suddenly and abruptly ceased; a turn of our affair attended, +however, with no shade of commotion, no repining at proved waste; with +as little of any confessed ruefulness of mistake on one side as of any +elation of wisdom, any resonance of the ready "I told you so" on the +other. The one side would have been, with a different tone about the +matter and a different domestic habit than ours, that of my brother's +awkwardness, accompanying whatever intelligence, of disavowal, and the +other been our father's not unemphatic return to the point that his +doubts, those originally and confidently intimated, had been justified +by the fact. Tempting doubtless in a heavier household air the +opportunity on the latter's part to recall that if he had perfectly +recognised his son's probable progress to a pitch of excellence he had +exactly not granted that an attainment of this pitch was likely in the +least, however uncontested, to satisfy the nature concerned; the +foregone conclusion having all the while been that such a spirit was +competent to something larger and less superficially calculable, +something more expressive of its true inwardness. This was not the way +in which things happened among us, for I really think the committed +mistake was ever discriminated against--certainly by the head of the +family--only to the extent of its acquiring, even if but speedily again +to fade, an interest greater than was obtainable by the too obvious +success. I am not sure indeed that the kind of personal history most +appealing to my father would not have been some kind that should fairly +proceed by mistakes, mistakes more human, more associational, less +angular, less hard for others, that is less exemplary for them (since +righteousness, as mostly understood, was in our parent's view, I think, +the cruellest thing in the world) than straight and smug and declared +felicities. The qualification here, I allow, would be in his scant +measure of the difference, after all, for the life of the soul, between +the marked achievement and the marked shortcoming. He had a manner of +his own of appreciating failure, or of not at least piously rejoicing in +displayed moral, intellectual, or even material, economies, which, had +it not been that his humanity, his generosity and, for the most part, +his gaiety, were always, at the worst, consistent, might sometimes have +left us with our small savings, our little exhibitions and +complacencies, rather on our hands. As the case stood I find myself +thinking of our life in those years as profiting greatly for animation +and curiosity by the interest he shed for us on the whole side of the +human scene usually held least interesting--the element, the appearance, +of waste which plays there such a part and into which he could read +under provocation so much character and colour and charm, so many +implications of the fine and the worthy, that, since the art of missing +or of failing, or of otherwise going astray, did after all in his hands +escape becoming either a matter of real example or of absolute precept, +enlarged not a little our field and our categories of appreciation and +perception. I recover as I look back on all this the sense as of an +extraordinary young confidence, our common support, in our coming round +together, through the immense lubrication of his expressed thought, +often perhaps extravagantly working and playing, to plenty of +unbewildered rightness, a state of comfort that would always +serve--whether after strange openings into a sphere where nothing +practical mattered, or after even still quainter closings in upon us of +unexpected importances and values. Which means, to my memory, that we +breathed somehow an air in which waste, for us at least, couldn't and +didn't live, so certain were aberrations and discussions, adventures, +excursions and alarms of whatever sort, to wind up in a "transformation +scene" or, if the term be not profane, happy harlequinade; a figuration +of each involved issue and item before the footlights of a familiar +idealism, the most socialised and ironised, the most amusedly +generalised, that possibly could be. + +Such an atmosphere was, taking one of its elements with another, +doubtless delightful; yet if it was friendly to the suggested or +imagined thing it promoted among us much less directly, as I have +already hinted, the act of choice--choice as to the "career" for +example, with a view of the usual proceedings thereupon consequent. I +marvel at the manner in which the door appears to have been held or at +least left open to us for experiment, though with a tendency to close, +the oddest yet most inveterately perceptible movement in that sense, +before any very earnest proposition in particular. I have no remembrance +at all of marked prejudices on our father's part, but I recall repeated +cases, in his attitude to our young affairs, of a disparagement +suggested as by stirred memories of his own; the instance most present +to me being his extreme tepidity in the matter of William's, or in fact +of my, going, on our then American basis, to college. I make out in him, +and at the time made out, a great revulsion of spirit from that incurred +experience in his own history, a revulsion I think moreover quite +independent of any particular or instrinsic attributes of the seat of +learning involved in it. Union College, Schenectady, New York, the scene +of his personal experiment and the natural resort, in his youth, of +comparatively adjacent Albanians, might easily have offered at that time +no very rare opportunities--few were the American country colleges that +then had such to offer; but when, after years, the question arose for +his sons he saw it in I scarce know what light of associational or +"subjective" dislike. He had the disadvantage--unless indeed it was much +more we who had it--of his having, after many changes and detachments, +ceased to believe in the Schenectady resource, or to revert to it +sentimentally, without his forming on the other hand, with his boys to +place, any fonder presumption or preference. There comes out to me, much +bedimmed but recognisable, the image of a day of extreme youth on which, +during a stay with our grandmother at Albany, we achieved, William and +I, with some confused and heated railway effort, a pious pilgrimage to +the small scholastic city--pious by reason, I clearly remember, of a +lively persuasion on my brother's part that to Union College, at some +indefinite future time, we should both most naturally and delightedly +repair. We invoked, I gather, among its scattered shades, fairly vague +to me now, the loyalty that our parent appeared to have dropped by the +way--even though our attitude about it can scarce have been prematurely +contentious; the whole vision is at any rate to-day bathed and blurred +for me in the air of some charmed and beguiled dream, that of the +flushed good faith of an hour of crude castle-building. We were helped +to build, on the spot, by an older friend, much older, as I remember +him, even than my brother, already a member of the college and, as it +seemed, greatly enjoying his life and those "society" badges and +trinkets with which he reappears to me as bristling and twinkling quite +to the extinction of his particular identity. This is lost, like +everything else, in the mere golden haze of the little old-time autumn +adventure. Wondrous to our sensibility may well have been the October +glamour--if October it was, and if it was not it ought to have been!--of +that big brave region of the great State over which the shade of +Fenimore Cooper's Mohawks and Mohicans (if this be not a pleonasm) might +still have been felt to hang. The castle we had built, however, +crumbled--there were plenty of others awaiting erection; these too +successively had their hour, but I needn't at this time stoop to pick up +their pieces. I see moreover vividly enough how it might have been that, +at this stage, our parents were left cold by the various appeal, in our +interest, of Columbia, Harvard and Yale. Hard by, at Providence, in the +Newport time, was also "Brown"; but I recover no connection in which +that mystic syllable swept our sky as a name to conjure with. Our +largest licence somehow didn't stray toward Brown. It was to the same +tune not conceivable that we should have been restored for educational +purposes to the swollen city, the New York of our childhood, where we +had then so tumbled in and out of school as to exhaust the measure, or +as at least greatly to deflower the image, of our teachability on that +ground. Yale, off our beat from every point of view, was as little to be +thought of, and there was moreover in our father's imagination no grain +of susceptibility to what might have been, on the general ground, +"socially expected." Even Harvard, clearly--and it was perhaps a trifle +odd--moved him in our interest as little as Schenectady could do; so +that, for authority, the voice of social expectation would have had to +sound with an art or an accent of which it had by no means up to that +time learned roundabout us the trick. This indeed (it comes to saying) +is something that, so far as our parents were concerned, it would never +have learned. They were, from other preoccupations, unaware of any such +pressure; and to become aware would, I think, primarily have been for +them to find it out of all proportion to the general pitch of +prescription. We were not at that time, when it came to such claims, in +presence of persuasive, much less of impressive, social forms and +precedents--at least those of us of the liberated mind and the really +more curious culture were not; the more curious culture, only to be +known by the positive taste of it, was nowhere in the air, nowhere +seated or embodied. + +Which reflections, as I perhaps too loosely gather them in, refresh at +any rate my sense of how we in particular of our father's house actually +profited more than we lost, if the more curious culture was in question, +by the degree to which we were afloat and disconnected; since there were +at least luxuries of the spirit in this quite as much as +drawbacks--given a social order (so far as it _was_ an order) that found +its main ideal in a "strict attention to business," that is to buying +and selling over a counter or a desk, and in such an intensity of the +traffic as made, on the part of all involved, for close localisation. To +attend strictly to business was to be invariably _there_, on a certain +spot in a certain place; just as to be nowhere in particular, to _have_ +to be nowhere, told the queer tale of a lack or of a forfeiture, or +possibly even of a state of intrinsic unworthiness. I have already +expressed how few of these elements of the background we ourselves had +ever had either to add to or to subtract from, and how this of itself +did after a fashion "place" us in the small Newport colony of the +despoiled and disillusioned, the mildly, the reminiscentially desperate. +As easy as might be, for the time, I have also noted, was our footing +there; but I have not, for myself, forgotten, or even now outlived, the +particular shade of satisfaction to be taken in one's thus being in New +England without being of it. To have originally been of it, or still to +have had to be, affected me, I recall, as a case I should have +regretted--unless it be more exact to say that I thought of the +condition as a danger after all escaped. Long would it take to tell why +it figured as a danger, and why that impression was during the several +following years much more to gain than to lose intensity. The question +was to fall into the rear indeed, with ever so many such secondary +others, during the War, and for reasons effective enough; but it was +afterwards to know a luxury of emergence--this, I mean, while one still +"cared," in general, as one was sooner or later to stop caring. +Infinitely interesting to recover, in the history of a mind, for those +concerned, these movements of the spirit, these tides and currents of +growth--though under the inconvenience for the historian of such +ramifications of research that here at any rate I feel myself warned +off. There appeared to us at Newport the most interesting, much, of the +Albany male cousins, William James Temple--coming, oddly enough, first +from Yale and then from Harvard; so that by contact and example the +practicability of a like experience might have been, and doubtless was, +put well before us. "Will" Temple, as we were in his short life too +scantly to know him, had made so luckless, even if so lively a start +under one alma mater that the appeal to a fresh parentship altogether +appears to have been judged the best remedy for his case: he entered +Harvard jumping, if I mistake not, a couple of years of the +undergraduate curriculum, and my personal memory of these reappearances +is a mere recapture of admiration, of prostration, before him. The +dazzled state, under his striking good looks and his manly charm, was +the common state; so that I disengage from it no presumption of a +particular plea playing in our own domestic air for his temporary +Cambridge setting; he was so much too radiant and gallant and personal, +too much a character and a figure, a splendid importance in himself, to +owe the least glamour to settings; an advantage that might have seemed +rather to be shed on whatever scene by himself in consenting to light it +up. He made all life for the hour a foreground, and one that we none of +us would have quitted for a moment while he was there. + +In that form at least I see him, and no revival of those years so puts +to me the interesting question, so often aimlessly returned upon in +later life, of the amount of truth in this or that case of young +confidence in a glory to come--for another than one's self; of the +likelihood of the wonders so flatteringly forecast. Many of our +estimates were monstrous magnifications--though doing us even at that +more good than harm; so that one isn't even sure that the happiest +histories were to have been those of the least liberal mistakes. I like +at any rate to think of our easy overstrainings--the possible flaw in +many of which was not indeed to be put to the proof. That was the case +for the general, and for every particular, impression of Will Temple, +thanks to his early death in battle--at Chancellorsville, 1863; he +having, among the quickened forces of the time, and his father's record +helping him, leaped to a captaincy in the regular Army; but I cling to +the idea that the siftings and sortings of life, had he remained subject +to them, would still have left him the lustre that blinds and subdues. I +even do more, at this hour; I ask myself, while his appearance and my +personal feeling about it live for me again, what possible aftertime +could have kept up the pitch of my sentiment--aftertime either of his +or of mine. Blest beyond others, I think as we look back, the +admirations, even the fondest (and which indeed were not of their nature +fond?) that were not to know to their cost the inevitable test or +strain; they are almost the only ones, of the true high pitch, that, +without broken edges or other tatters to show, fold themselves away +entire and secure, even as rare lengths of precious old stuff, in the +scented chest of our savings. So great misadventure have too often known +at all events certain of those that were to come to trial. The others +are the _residual_, those we must keep when we can, so to be sure at +least of a few, sacrificing as many possible mistakes and misproportions +as need be to pay but for two or three of them. There could be no +mistake about Gus Barker, who threw himself into the fray, that is into +the cavalry saddle, as he might into a match at baseball (football being +then undreamt of), and my last reminiscence of whom is the sight of him, +on a brief leave for a farewell to his Harvard classmates after he had +got his commission, crossing with two or three companions the expanse of +Harvard Square that faced the old Law School, of which I found myself +for that year (1862-63) a singularly alien member. I was afterwards +sharply to regret the accident by which I on that occasion missed speech +of him; but my present vision of his charming latent agility, which any +motion showed, of his bright-coloured wagging head and of the large +gaiety of the young smile that made his handsome teeth shine out, is +after all the years but the more happily uneffaced. The point of all +which connections, however, is that they somehow managed to make in the +parental view no straight links for us with the matter-of-course of +college. There were accidents too by the aid of which they failed of +this the more easily. It comes to me that, for my own part, I thought of +William at the time as having, or rather as so much more than having, +already graduated; the effect of contact with his mind and talk, with +the free play of his spirit and the irrepressible brush of his humour, +couldn't have been greater had he carried off fifty honours. I felt in +him such authority, so perpetually quickened a state of intellect and +character, that the detail or the literal side of the question never so +much as came up for me: I must have made out that to plenty of +graduates, or of the graduating, nothing in the nature of such +appearances attached. I think of our father moreover as no less affected +by a like impression; so extremely, so immensely disposed do I see him +to generalise his eldest son's gifts as by the largest, fondest +synthesis, and not so much proceed upon them in any one direction as +proceed _from_ them, as it were, in all. + +Little as such a view might have lent itself to application, my +brother's searching discovery during the summer of 1861 that his +vocation was not "after all" in the least satisfyingly for Art, took on +as a prompt sequel the recognition that it was quite positively and +before everything for Science, physical Science, strenuous Science in +all its exactitude; with the opportunity again forthcoming to put his +freshness of faith to the test. I had presumed to rejoice before at his +adoption of the studio life, that offering as well possible contacts for +myself; and yet I recall no pang for his tergiversation, there being +nothing he mightn't have done at this or at any other moment that I +shouldn't have felt as inevitable and found in my sense of his previous +age some happy and striking symptom or pledge of. As certain as that he +had been all the while "artistic" did it thus appear that he had been at +the same time quite otherwise inquiring too--addicted to "experiments" +and the consumption of chemicals, the transfusion of mysterious liquids +from glass to glass under exposure to lambent flame, the cultivation of +stained fingers, the establishment and the transport, in our wanderings, +of galvanic batteries, the administration to all he could persuade of +electric shocks, the maintenance of marine animals in splashy aquaria, +the practice of photography in the room I for a while shared with him +at Boulogne, with every stern reality of big cumbrous camera, prolonged +exposure, exposure mostly of myself, darkened development, also +interminable, and ubiquitous brown blot. Then there had been also the +constant, as I fearfully felt it, the finely speculative and boldly +disinterested absorption of curious drugs. No livelier remembrance have +I of our early years together than this inveteracy, often appalling to a +nature so incurious as mine in _that_ direction, of his interest in the +"queer" or the incalculable effects of things. There was apparently for +him no possible effect whatever that mightn't be more or less rejoiced +in as such--all exclusive of its relation to other things than merely +knowing. There recurs to me withal the shamelessness of my own +indifference--at which I also, none the less, I think, wondered a +little; as if by so much as it hadn't been given me to care for visibly +provoked or engineered phenomena, by that same amount was I open to +those of the mysteriously or insidiously aggressive, the ambushed or +suffered sort. Vivid to me in any case is still the sense of how quite +shiningly light, as an activity and an appeal, he had seemed to make +everything he gave himself to; so that at first, until the freshness of +it failed, he flung this iridescent mantle of interest over the then so +grey and scant little scene of the Harvard (the Lawrence) Scientific +School, where in the course of the months I had had a glimpse or two of +him at work. Early in the autumn of 1861 he went up from Newport to +Cambridge to enter that institution; in which thin current rather than +in the ostensibly more ample began to flow his long connection with +Harvard, gathering in time so many affluents. His letters from Cambridge +during the next couple of years, many of them before me now, breathe, I +think, all the experience the conditions could have begotten at the +best; they mark the beginning of those vivacities and varieties of +intellectual and moral reaction which were for the rest of his life to +be the more immeasurably candid and vivid, the more numerous above all, +and the more interesting and amusing, the closer view one had of him. +That of a certainty; yet these familiar pages of youth testify most of +all for me perhaps to the forces of amenity and spontaneity, the happy +working of all relations, in our family life. In such parts of them as I +may cite this will shine sufficiently through--and I shall take for +granted thus the interest of small matters that have perhaps but that +reflected light to show. It is in a letter to myself, of that September, +dated "Drear and Chill Abode," that he appears to have celebrated the +first steps of his initiation. + +Sweet was your letter and grateful to my eyes. I had gone in a +mechanical way to the P.O. not hoping for anything (though "on espere +alors qu'on desespere toujours,") and, finding nothing, was turning +heavily away when a youth modestly tapped me and, holding out an +envelope inscribed in your well-known character, said, "Mr. J., this was +in our box!" 'Twas the young Pascoe, the joy of his mother--but the +graphic account I read in the letter he gave me of the sorrow of my +mother almost made me shed tears on the floor of the P.O. Not that on +reflection I should dream----! for reflection shows me a future in which +she shall regard my vacation visits as "on the whole" rather troublesome +than otherwise; or at least when she shall feel herself as blest in the +trouble I spare her when absent as in the glow of pride and happiness +she feels at the sight of me when present. But she needn't fear I can +ever think of _her_ when absent with such equanimity. I oughtn't to +"joke on such a serious subject," as Bobby would say though; for I have +had several pangs since being here at the thought of all I have left +behind at Newport--especially gushes of feeling about the _place_. I +haven't for one minute had the feeling of being at home here. Something +in my quarters precludes the possibility of it, though what this is I +don't suppose I can describe to you. + +As I write now even, writing itself being a cosy cheerful-looking +amusement, and an argand gas-burner with a neat green shade merrily +singing beside me, I still feel unsettled. I write on a round table in +the middle of the room, with a fearful red and black cloth. Before me I +see another such-covered table of oblong shape against the wall, capped +by a cheap looking-glass and flanked by two windows, curtainless and +bleak, whose shades of linen flout the air as the sportive wind impels +them. To the left are two other such windows, with a horse-hair sofa +between them, and at my back a fifth window and a vast wooden +mantel-piece with nothing to relieve its nakedness but a large cast, +much plumbago'd, of a bust of Franklin. On my right the Bookcase, +imposing and respectable with its empty drawers and with my little array +of printed wisdom covering nearly _one_ of the shelves. I hear the +people breathe as they go past in the street, and the roll and jar of +the horse-cars is terrific. I have accordingly engaged the other room +from Mrs. Pascoe, with the little sleeping-room upstairs. It looks +infinitely more cheerful than this, and if I don't find the grate +sufficient I can easily have a Franklin stove put up. But she says the +grate will make an oven of it.... John Ropes I met the other day at +Harry Quincy's room, and was very much pleased with him. Don't fail to +send on Will Temple's letters to him and to Herbert Mason, which I left +in one of the library's mantelpiece jars, to use the Portuguese idiom. +Storrow Higginson has been very kind to me, making enquiries about +tables etc. We went together this morning to the house of the Curator of +the Gray collection of Engravings, which is solemnly to unfold its +glories to me to-morrow. He is a most serious stately German gentleman, +Mr. Thies by name, fully sensible of the deep vital importance of his +treasures and evidently thinking a visit to them a great affair--to +_me_. Had I known how great, how tremendous and formal, I hardly think I +should have ventured to call. Tom Ward pays me a visit almost every +evening. Poor Tom seems a-cold too. His deafness keeps him from making +acquaintances. Professor Eliot, at the School, is a fine fellow, I +suspect; a man who if he resolves to do a thing won't be prevented. I +find analysis very interesting _so far_! The Library has a +reading-room, where they take all the magazines; so I shan't want for +the Rev. des 2 M. I remain with unalterable sentiments of devotion ever, +my dear H., your Big Brother Bill. + +This record of further impressions closely and copiously followed. + + Your letter this morning was such a godsend that I hasten to + respond a line or two, though I have no business to--for I have a + fearful lesson to-morrow and am going to Boston to-night to hear + Agassiz lecture (12 lectures on "Methods in Nat. Hist."), so that I + will only tell you that I am very well and my spirits just getting + good. Miss Upham's table is much pleasanter than the other. + Professor F. J. Child is a great joker--he's a little flaxen-headed + boy of about 40. There is a nice old lady boarder, another man of + about 50, of aristocratic bearing, who interests me much, and 3 + intelligent students. At the other table was no conversation at + all; the fellows had that American solemnity, called each other + Sir, etc. I cannot tell you, dearest Mother, how your account of + your Sunday dinner and of your feelings thereat brought tears to my + eyes. Give Father my ardent love and cover with kisses the round + fair face of the most kiss-worthy Alice. Then kiss the Aunt till + you get tired, and get all the rest of them to kiss _you_ till you + cry hold enough! + + This morning as I was busy over the 10th page of a letter to Wilky + in he popped and made my labour of no account. I had intended to go + and see him yesterday, but found Edward Emerson and Tom Ward were + going, and so thought he would have too much of a good thing. But + he walked over this morning with, or rather without them, for he + went astray and arrived very hot and dusty. I gave him a bath and + took him to dinner, and he is now gone to see Andrew Robeson and E. + E. His plump corpusculus looks as always. I write in my new parlour + whither I moved yesterday. You have no idea what an improvement it + is on the old affair--worth double the cost, and the little bedroom + under the roof is perfectly delicious, with a charming outlook on + little back yards with trees and pretty old brick walls. The sun is + upon _this_ room from earliest dawn till late in the afternoon--a + capital thing in winter. I like Miss Upham's very much. Dark + "aristocratic" dining-room, with royal cheer. "Fish, roast beef, + veal cutlets, pigeons!" says the splendid, tall, noble-looking, + white-armed, black-eyed Juno of a handmaid as you sit down. And for + dessert a choice of three, _three_, darling Mother, of the most + succulent, unctuous (no, not unctuous, unless you imagine a + celestial unction without the oil) pie-like confections, always 2 + platesful--my eye! She has an admirable chemical, not mechanical, + combination of cake and jam and cream which I recommend to Mother + if she is ever at a loss; though there is no well-stored pantry + like that of good old Kay Street, or if there is it exists not for + miserable me. + + This chemical analysis is so bewildering at first that I am + "muddled and bet" and have to employ almost all my time reading up. + Agassiz is evidently a great favourite with his Boston audience and + feels it himself. But he's an admirable earnest lecturer, clear as + day, and his accent is most fascinating. Jeffries Wyman's lectures + on Comp. Anatomy of Verts. promise to be very good; prosy perhaps a + little and monotonous, but plain and well-arranged and nourris. + Eliot I have not seen much more of; I don't believe he is a _very_ + accomplished chemist, but can't tell yet. We are only about 12 in + the Laboratory, so that we have a very cosy time. I expect to have + a winter of "crowded life." I can be as independent as I please, + and want to live regardless of the good or bad opinion of every + one. I shall have a splendid chance to try, I know, and I know too + that the native hue of resolution has never been of very great + shade in me hitherto. I am sure that that feeling is a right one, + and I mean to live according to it if I can. If I do so I think I + shall turn out all right. + + I stopped this letter before tea, when Wilky the rosy-gilled and + Frank Higginson came in. I now resume it by the light of a taper + and that of the moon. Wilky read H.'s letter and amused me "metch" + by his naive interpretation of Mother's most rational request that + I should "keep a memorandum of all moneys I receive from Father." + He thought it was that she might know exactly what sums her + prodigal philosopher really gives out, and that mistrust of his + generosity caused it. The phrase has a little sound that way, as H. + subtly framed it, I confess! + + The first few days, the first week here, I really didn't know what + to do with myself or how to fill my time. I felt as if turned out + of doors. I then received H.'s and Mother's letters. Never before + did I know what mystic depths of rapture lay concealed within that + familiar word. Never did the same being look so like two different + ones as I going in and out of the P.O. if I bring a letter with me. + Gloomily, with despair written on my leaden brow I stalk the street + along towards the P.O., women, children and students involuntarily + shrinking against the wall as I pass--thus,[4] as if the curse of + Cain were stamped upon my front. But when I come out with a letter + an immense concourse of people generally attends me to my lodging, + attracted by my excited wild gestures and look. + +Christmas being sparely kept in the New England of those days, William +passed that of 1861, as a Cambridge letter of the afternoon indicates, +without opportunity for a seasonable dash to Newport, but with such +compensations, nearer at hand as are here exhibited. Our brother Wilky, +I should premise, had been placed with the youngest of us, Bob, for +companion, at the "co-educational" school then but a short time +previously established by Mr. F. B. Sanborn at Concord, +Massachusetts--and of which there will be more to say. "Tom" Ward, +already mentioned and who, having left the Concord school shortly +before, had just entered Harvard, was quickly to become William's +intimate, approved and trusted friend; the diversion of whose patient +originality, whose intellectual independence, ability and curiosity from +science and free inquiry to hereditary banking--consequent on the +position of the paternal Samuel Gray Ward as the representative for many +years in the United States of the house of Baring Brothers--he from the +first much regretted: the more pertinently doubtless that this companion +was of a family "connected" with ours through an intermarriage, Gus +Barker, as Mrs. S. G. Ward's nephew, being Tom's first cousin as well as +ours, and such links still counting, in that age of comparatively +less developed ramifications, when sympathy and intercourse kept pace as +it was kept between our pairs of parents. + +[Illustration: A leaf from the letter quoted on page 129.] + + I have been in Boston the whole blest morning, toted round by the + Wards, who had as usual asked me to dine with them. I had happily + provided myself with an engagement here for all such emergencies, + but, as is my sportive wont, I befooled Tom with divers answers, + and finally let him believe I would come (having refused several + dazzling chances for the purpose) supposing of course I should see + him here yesterday at Miss Upham's board and disabuse him. But the + young viper went home right after breakfast--so I had to go into + Boston this morning and explain. Wilky had come up from Concord to + dine in said Commonwealth Avenue, and I, as it turned out, found + myself in for following the innocent lamb Lily up and down the town + for two hours, to hold bundles and ring bells for her; Wilky and + Tom having vanished from the scene. Clear sharp cold morning, + thermometer 5 degrees at sunrise, and the streets covered with one + glare of ice. I had thick smooth shoes and went sliding off like an + avalanche every three steps, while she, having india-rubbers and + being a Bostonian, went ahead like a swan. I had among other things + to keep her bundles from harm, to wipe away every three minutes the + trembling jewel with which the cold _would_ with persistent + kindness ornament my coral nose; to keep a hypocritic watchful eye + on her movements lest she fall; to raise my hat gracefully to more + and more of her acquaintances every block; to skate round and round + embracing lamp-posts and door-scrapers by the score to keep from + falling, as well as to avoid serving old lady-promenaders in the + same way; to cut capers 4 feet high at the rate of 20 a second, + every now and then, for the same purpose; to keep from scooting + off down hills and round corners as fast as my able-bodied + companion; often to do all these at once and then fall lickety-bang + like a chandelier, but _when_ so to preserve an expression of + placid beatitude or easy nonchalance despite the raging fiend + within: oh it beggars description! When finally it was over and I + stood alone I shook my companion's dust from my feet and, biting my + beard with rage, sware a mighty oath unto high heaven that I would + never, while reason held her throne in this distracted orb, _never_ + NEVER, by word, look or gesture and this without mental + reservation, acknowledge a "young lady" as a human being. The false + and rotten spawn might die before I would wink to save it. No more + Parties now!--at last I am a Man, etc., etc.! + + My enthusiasm ran very high for a few minutes, but I suddenly saw + that I was a great ass and became sobered instantly, so that on the + whole I am better for the circumstance, being a sadder and a wiser + man. I also went to the Tappans' and gave the children slight + presents; then, coming home to my venal board, behaved very + considerately and paternally to a young lady who sat next to me, + but with a shade of subdued melancholy in my manner which could not + have been noticed at the breakfast-table. Many times and bitterly + to-day have I thought of home and lamented that I should have to be + away at this merry Christmastide from my rare family; wondering, + with Wilky, if they were missing us as we miss them. And now as I + sit in the light of my kerosene, with the fire quietly consuming in + the grate and the twilight on the snow outside and the melancholy + old-fashioned strains of the piano dimly rising from below, I see + in vision those at home just going in to dinner; my aged, silvered + Mother leaning on the arm of her stalwart yet flexible H., merry + and garrulous as ever, my blushing Aunt with her old wild beauty + still hanging about her, my modest Father with his rippling raven + locks, the genial auld Rob and the mysterious Alice, all rise + before me, a glorified throng; but two other forms, one tall, + intellectual, swarthy, with curved nose and eagle eye, the other + having breadth rather than depth, but a goodly morsel too, are + wanting to complete the harmonious whole. Eftsoons they vanish and + I am again alone, _alone_--what pathos in the word! I have two + companions though, most all the time--remorse and despair! T. S. + Perry took their place for a little, and to-day they have not come + back. T. S. seemed to enjoy his visit very much. It was very + pleasant for me to have him; his rustic wonder at the commonest + sights was most ludicrous, and his conversation most amusing and + instructive. + + The place here improves to me as I go on living in it, and if I + study with Agassiz 4 or 5 years there is nothing I should like + better than to have you all with me, regular and comfortable. I + enclose another advertisement of a house--but which would be too + small for us, I believe, though it might be looked at. I had a long + talk with one of A.'s students the other night, and saw for the + first time how a naturalist may feel about his trade exactly as an + artist does about his. For instance Agassiz would rather take + wholly uninstructed people--"for he has to unteach them all they + have learnt." He doesn't let them so much as look into a book for a + long while; what they learn they must learn for themselves and be + _masters_ of it all. The consequence is he makes Naturalists of + them--doesn't merely cram them; and this student (he had been there + 2 years) said he felt ready to go anywhere in the world now with + nothing but his notebook and study out anything quite alone. A. + must be a great teacher. Chemistry comes on tolerably, but not so + fast as I expected. I am pretty slow with my substances, having + done but 12 since Thanksgiving and having 38 more to do before the + end of the term. + +Comment on the abundance, the gaiety and drollery, the generous play of +vision and fancy in all this, would seem so needless as to be almost +officious, were not the commentator constantly, were he not infinitely, +arrested and reminded and solicited; which is at once his advantage and +his embarrassment. Such a letter, at all events, read over with the +general key, touches its contemporary scene and hour into an intensity +of life for him; making indeed the great sign of that life my brother's +signal vivacity and cordiality, his endless spontaneity of mind. Every +thing in it is characteristic of the genius and expressive of the mood, +and not least, of course, the pleasantry of paradox, the evocation of +each familiar image by its vivid opposite. Our mother, _e.g._, was not +at that time, nor for a good while yet, so venerably "silvered"; our +handsome-headed father had lost, occipitally, long before, all pretence +to raven locks, certainly to the effect of their "rippling"; the beauty +of our admirable aunt was as happily alien either to wildness or to the +"hanging" air as it could very well be; the "mystery" of our young +sister consisted all in the candour of her natural bloom, even if at the +same time of her lively intelligence; and H.'s mirth and garrulity +appear to have represented for the writer the veriest ironic translation +of something in that youth, I judge, not a little mildly--though oh _so_ +mildly!--morose or anxiously mute. To the same tune the aquiline in his +own nose heroically derides the slightly relaxed line of that feature; +and our brother Wilky's want of physical "depth" is a glance at a +different proportion. Of a like tinge of pleasantry, I may add, is the +imputation of the provincial gape to our friend T. S. Perry, of Newport +birth and unintermitted breeding, with whom we were to live so much in +the years to come, and who was then on the eve of entering Harvard--his +face already uninterruptedly turned to that love of letters, that +practice of them by dauntless and inordinate, though never at all +vulgarly resonant, absorption which was to constitute in itself the most +disinterested of careers. I had myself felt him from the first an +exemplary, at once, and a discouraging friend; he had let himself loose +in the world of books, pressed and roamed through the most various +literatures and the most voluminous authors, with a stride that, as it +carried him beyond all view, left me dismayed and helpless at the edge +of the forest, where I listened wistfully but unemulously to the far-off +crash from within of his felled timber, the clearing of whole spaces or +periods shelf by shelf or great tree by tree. The brother-in-law of +John La Farge, he had for us further, with that reviving consciousness +of American annals which the War was at once so rudely and so +insidiously to quicken in us, the glamour of his straight descent from +the Commodores Perry of the Lake Erie in the war of 1812, respectively, +and of the portentous penetration of Japan just after the mid-century, +and his longer-drawn but equally direct and so clean and comfortable +affiliation to the great Benjamin Franklin: as these things at least +seemed to me under my habit (too musing and brooding certainly to have +made for light loquacity) of pressing every wind-borne particle of +personal history--once the persons were only other enough from +myself--into the service of what I would fain have called picture or, +less explicitly, less formulatedly, romance. + +These, however, are but too fond insistences, and what mainly bears +pointing out is my brother's already restless reach forth to some new +subject of study. He had but lately addressed himself, not without +confidence, to such an investigation of Chemistry as he might become +conscious of a warrant for, yet the appeal of Agassiz's great authority, +so much in the air of the Cambridge of that time, found him at once +responsive; it opened up a world, the world of sentient life, in the +light of which Chemistry faded. He had not, however, for the moment +done with it; and what I at any rate find most to the point in the pages +before me is the charm of their so witnessing to the geniality and +harmony of our family life, exquisite as I look back on it and reflected +almost as much in any one passage taken at hazard as in any other. He +had apparently, at the date of the following, changed his lodging. + + President Felton's death has been the great event of the week--two + funerals and I don't know how many prayers and sermons. To-day I + thought I would go to University chapel for the sake of variety and + hear Dr. Peabody's final word on him--and a very long and + lugubrious one it was. The prayer was a prolonged moan in which the + death (not in its consequences, but in itself) was treated as a + great calamity, and the whole eulogy was almost ridiculously + overcharged. What was most disagreeable throughout was the wailing + tones, not a bit that of simple pagan grief at the _loss_--which + would have been honest; but a whine consciously put on as from a + sense of duty, and a whine at nothing definite either, only a + purposeless clothing of all his words in tears. The whole style of + the performance was such that I have concluded to have nothing more + to do with funerals till they improve. + + The walking here has been terrible with ice or slush these many + weeks, but over head celestial. No new developments in this house. + The maniac sometimes chills my very marrow by hoarsely whispering + outside the door, "Gulielmo, Gulielmo!" Old Sweetser sits in his + dressing-gown smoking his pipe all day in a little uncomfortable + old _bathroom_ next door to me. He may with truth be called a + queer cuss. The young ladies have that very nasty immodest habit of + hustling themselves out of sight precipitately whenever I appear. I + dined with Mrs. ---- yesterday all alone. She was quite sick, very + hoarse, and _he_ was in the country, so that on the whole it was a + great bore. She is very clumsy in her way of doing things, and her + invitation to me was for the wife of an artist--not artistic! + + I am now studying organic Chemistry. It will probably shock Mother + to hear that I yesterday destroyed a pockethandkerchief--but it was + an old one and I converted it into some sugar which though rather + brown is very good. I believe I forgot to tell you that I am shorn + of my brightest ornament. That solitary hirsute jewel which lent + such a manly and martial aspect to my visage is gone, and the place + thereof is naked. I don't think anyone will know the difference, + and moreover it is not dead, it only sleeps and will some day rise + phoenix-like from its ashes with tenfold its former beauty. When + Father comes will he please bring Ganot's Physique _if H. doesn't + want it_? + +In none of these earlier communications from Cambridge is the element of +affectionate pleasantry more at play than in those addressed to his +sister. + + Charmante jeune fille, I find the Tappans _really_ expected me to + bring you to them and were much disappointed at my failure. Ellen + has grown very fat and big. Mary calls everybody "horrid." Lyly + Barker is with the Wards. I haven't seen her yet, but shall do so + on Saturday, when I am also to dine with the Hunts. I hope your + neuralgia, or whatever you may believe the thing was, has gone and + that you are back at school instead of languishing and lolling + about the house. I send you herewith a portrait of Prof. Eliot, a + very fair likeness, to grace your book withal. Write me whenever + you have the slightest or most fleeting inclination to do so. If + you have only one sentence to say, don't grudge paper and stamps + for it. You don't know how much good you may do me at an + appropriate time by a little easy scratching of your graceful + nimble pen. + +In another apostrophe to the same correspondent, at the same season, his +high spirits throw off the bonds of the vernacular. + + Est-ce que tu songes jamais a moi comme moi je songe a toi?--oh je + crois bien que non! Maintes fois dans la journee l'image d'une + espece d'ange vetue de blanc avec de longs boucles noirs qui + encadrent une figure telle que la plupart des mortels ne font que + l'entrevoir dans leur reves, s'impose a mes sens ravis; creature + longue et fluette qui se dispose a se coucher dans une petite + chambrette verte ou le gaz fait un grand jour. Eh, oua, oua, oua! + c'est a faire mourir de douleur. Mais je parie que tout de meme pas + une etincelle ne vibre pour moi dans les fibres de ton coeur + endurci. Helas, oublie de mes parents et de mes semblables, je ne + vois, ou que je regarde, qu'un abime de desespoir, un gouffre noir + et peuple de demons, qui tot ou tard va m'engloutir. Tu ne m'ecris + jamais sauf pour me soutirer des objets de luxe. La vaste mere me + deteste, il n'y a que le frere qui me reste attache, et lui par + esprit d'opposition plus que par autre chose. Eh mon Dieu, que + vais-je devenir? En tout cas je vais clore cette lettre, qui s'est + allongee malgre moi. Ton frere, James William. + +Of the same bright complexion is this report, addressed to his parents, +of the change of lodging already noted. + + The presence of the Tweedys has been most agreeable and has + contributed in no small degree to break the shock of removal to + these new rooms, which are not near so cosy as the old; especially + with the smoking of my stove, which went on all the first two days. + That has been stopped, however, and the only trouble is now to get + the fire alight at all. I have generally to start it 3 or 4 times, + and the removal of the material of each failure from the grate is a + fearful business. I have also to descend to the cellar myself to + get my coal, and my "hod," as Ma Sweetser, my land-lady, calls it, + not being very much bigger than a milk-pitcher, doesn't add to the + charm. The coal is apt to drop on the stairs, and I have to pick it + all up. At present the stove fills the room with a nephitic and + pestilential gas, so that I have to keep the window open. I went + last night with the Tweedys to the concert for which they came up, + and with them this morning to hear Wendell Phillips. This Sweetser + family is worthy of Dickens. It consists of a Mr. and Miss S., Mr. + S.'s three gushing girls, a parrot and a maniac. The maniac is very + obstreperous. Her husband left her boarding here 3 months ago and + went to Cuba. When she got mad he was written to, but has sent no + reply, and they are keeping her. For the Aunt's sake I keep my + drawer locked against her at night. Old Sweetser is a riddle I hope + to do justice to at some future time, but can't begin on now. His + sister shakes like an aspen whenever she is spoken to. Oh I forgot + the most important character of all, the black wench who "does" the + room. She is about 20 years old and wears short frocks, but talks + like Alice Robeson and has an antediluvian face about as large as + the top of a flour-barrel. + +I can really keep my hand from nothing, of whatever connection, that +causes his intensity of animation and spontaneity of expression to +revive. On a Sunday evening early in 1862 he had + + just returned from Milton, and, after removing from my person a + beetle, sit down to write you immediately. Ever since 10.30 this + A.M. the beetle s'est promene a l'envi sur ma peau. The first + feeling I had of his becoming attached to it made me jump so as to + scare an old lady opposite me in the car into fits. Finding him too + hard to crush I let him run, and at last got used to him though at + times he tickled me to excruciation. I ache in every limb and every + cranny of my mind from my visit.... They had the usual number of + stories, wonderful and not wonderful, to tell of their friends and + relatives (of Stephen somebody, _e.g._, who had a waggon weighing + several tons run over his chest without even bruising him, and so + on). They are very nice girls indeed all the same. I then went, + near by, to the Forbes's in a state of profuse perspiration, and + saw handsome Mrs. F. and her daughters, and a substitute for + Governor Andrew in the person of his wife; after which I returned + here, being driven back in the car, as I perceived on the front + platform, by our old familiar--familiar indeed!--friend William (I + mean our Irish ex-coachman) whom age doesn't seem to render more + veracious, as he told me several very big stories about himself: + how he smashed a car to pieces the other night, how he first gave + the alarm of the great fire, etc. + + I went to the theatre the other night, and, asking a gentleman to + make room for me, found him to be Bob Temple, who had arrived in + Boston that day. He looks very well and talks in the most + extraordinary way you ever heard about Slavery and the wickedness + of human society, and is apparently very sincere. He sailed for + Europe on Wednesday. I exhorted him to stop over at Newport, but he + wouldn't. There was something quite peculiar about him--he seemed + greatly changed. I can tell you more at home, but wish I might have + seen more of him. I have been the last three nights running to hear + John Wilkes Booth, the "young American Roscius." Rant, rant, rant + of the most fearful kind. The worst parts most applauded, but with + any amount of fire and energy in the passionate parts, in some of + which he really becomes natural.... You don't know what a regular + Sevigne you have in Alice. I blush for my delinquencies toward her, + but bow my head with meek humility, contented to be her debtor all + my life and despairing of ever repaying her the value of her + letters. Mother and Aunt I pine to see, and the honest Jack Tar of + the family, the rough Bob, with his rude untutored ways! + +Traps for remembrance I find set at every turn here, so that I have +either to dodge them or patiently to suffer catching. I try in vain for +instance merely to brush past the image of our kinsman Robert Temple the +younger, who made with his brother Will the eldest pair in that house of +cousins: he waylays, he persuades me too much, and to fail of the few +right words for him would be to leave a deep debt unrepaid--his fitful +hovering presence, repeatedly vivid and repeatedly obscured, so +considerably "counted" for us, pointing the sharpest moral, pointing +fifty morals, and adorning a perpetual tale. He was for years, first on +the nearer and then little by little on the further, the furthest, +horizon, quite the most emphasised of all our wastrels, the figure +bristling most with every irregular accent that we were to find +ourselves in any closeness of relation with. I held him for myself at +least, from far back, a pure gift of free-handed chance to the grateful +imagination, the utmost limit of whose complaint of it could be but for +the difficulty of rendering him the really proper tribute. I regarded +him truly, for a long time, as a possession of the mind, the human image +swung before us with most of the effect of strong and thick and +inimitable colour. If to be orphaned and free of range had affected my +young fancy as the happy, that is the romantic, lot, no member of the +whole cousinship, favoured in that sense as so many of them were, +enjoyed so, by my making out, the highest privilege of the case. +Nothing, I could afterwards easily see, had been less inevitable and of +a greater awkwardness of accident than his being, soon after the death +of his parents, shipped off from Albany, in pursuit of an education, to +an unheard-of school in a remote corner of Scotland; which fact it was, +however, that played for me exactly the bright part of preparing to show +with particular intensity what Europe again, with the opportunity so +given, was going to proceed to. It thus shone out when after the lapse +of several years he recurred to our more competent view that, quite +richly erratic creature as he might appear, and to whatever degree of +wonder and suspense, of amusement and amazement, he might wind us up, +the rich alien influence, full of special queernesses and mysteries in +this special connection, had complacently turned him out for us and had +ever so irretrievably and ineffaceably stamped him. He rose before us, +tall and goodlooking and easy, as a figure of an oddly _civilised_ +perversity; his irreverent challenging humour, playing at once, without +mercy, over American aspects, seemed somehow not less cultivated than +profane--just which note in itself caused the plot beautifully to +thicken; for this was to distinguish and almost embellish him throughout +a long career in which he was to neglect no occasion, however frankly +forbidding, for graceless adventure, that he had the pure derisive, the +loose and mocking mind, yet initiated, educated, almost elegantly +impudent, in other words successfully impertinent, and which expressed +itself, in particular by the pen, with a literary lightness that we used +to find inimitable. He had dangled there, further off and nearer, as a +character, to my attention, in the sense in which "people in books" were +characters, and other people, roundabout us, were somehow not; so that I +fairly thought of him (though this more, doubtless, with the lapse of +time) very much as if we had owed him to Thackeray or Dickens, the +creators of superior life to whom we were at that time always owing +most, rather than to any set of circumstances by which we had in our own +persons felt served; that he was inimitable, inimitably droll, +inimitably wasted, wanton, impossible, or whatever else it might be, +making him thus one with the rounded and represented creature, shining +in the light of art, as distinguished from the vague handful of more or +less susceptible material that had in the common air to pass for a true +concretion. The promise of this had been, to my original vision, in +every wind-borne echo of him, however light; I doubtless put people +"into books" by very much the same turn of the hand with which I took +them out, but it had tinged itself with the finely free that, proceeding +in due course from his school at Fochabers to the University of Aberdeen +(each sound and syllable of this general far cry from Albany had in +itself an incoherence!) he had encountered while there the oddest of all +occasions to embrace the Romish faith. In the same way it ministered to +the vivid, even if baffled, view of him that he appeared then to have +retreated upon the impenetrable stronghold of Nairn, described by him as +a bleak little Scotch watering-place which yet sufficed to his cluster +of predicaments: whence he began to address to his bewildered pair of +Albany guardians and trustees the earlier of that series of incomparably +amusing letters, as we judged them, the arrival of almost any one of +which among us, out of the midst of indocilities at once more and more +horrific and more and more reported with a desperate drollery, was to +constitute an event so supremely beguiling that distressful meanings and +expensive remedies found themselves alike salved to consciousness by the +fact that such compositions could only be, for people of taste, +enjoyable. I think of this hapless kinsman throughout as blest with a +"form" that appealed to the finer fibres of appreciation; so that, +variously misadventurous as he was ever to continue, his genius for +expression again and again just saved him--saved him for bare life, left +in his hand a broken piece of the effective magic wand, never perhaps +waved with anything like that easy grace in an equally compromised +interest. + +It was at any rate as if I had from the first collected and saved up the +echoes--or so at least it seems to me now: echoes of him as all +sarcastically and incorrigibly mutinous, somewhat later on, while in +nominal charge of a despairing _pasteur_ at Neuchatel--followed by the +intensified sense of him, after I scarce remember quite what interval, +on his appearing at Newport, where his sisters, as I have mentioned, had +been protectively gathered in, during the year, more or less, that +followed our own installation there. Then it was that we had the value +of his being interesting with less trouble taken to that end--in +proportion to the effect achieved--than perhaps ever served such a +cause; it would perhaps scarce even be too much to say that, as the only +trouble he seemed capable of was the trouble of quite positively +declining to interest on any terms, his essential Dickensism, as I have +called it, or his Thackerayan tint if preferred, his comedy-virtue in +fine, which he could neither disown nor, practically speaking, misapply, +was stronger even than his particular sardonic cynicism, strongly as +that was at last to flower. I won't in the least say he dazzled--that +was reserved for his so quite otherwise brilliant, his temporarily +triumphant, younger brother, at whom I have already glanced, who was on +no possible terms with him, and never could have been, so that the +difficulty of their relation glimmers upon me as probably half the good +reason for the original queer despatch of the elder to about the +remotest, the most separating, point in space at which "educational +advantages" could be conceived as awaiting him. I must have had no need +by that time to be dazzled, or even to be charmed, in order more or less +fondly, often indeed doubtless fearfully, to apprehend; what I +apprehended being that here was a creature quite amusedly and +perceptively, quite attentively and, after a fashion, profitably, living +without a single one of the elements of life (of the inward, I mean, +those one would most have missed if deprived of them) that I knew as +most conducive to animation. What could have roused more curiosity than +this, for the time at least, even if there hadn't been associated with +it such a fine redolence, as I then supposed it, of the rich and strange +places and things, as I supposed _them_, that had contributed to making +him over? He had come back made--unless one was already, and too +conveniently or complacently, to call it unmade: _that_ was the point +(and it certainly wasn't Albany that ever would have made him); he had +come back charged, to my vision, with prodigious "English" impressions +and awarenesses, each so thoroughly and easily assimilated that they +might have played their part as convictions and standards had he +pretended to anything that would in that degree have satisfied us. He +never spoke of his "faith," as that might have been the thing we could +have held him to; and he knew what not too gracelessly to speak of when +the sense of the American grotesque in general and the largely-viewed +"family" reducibility to the absurd in particular offered him such free +light pasture. He had the sign of grace that he ever perfectly +considered my father--so far as attitude, distinct from behaviour, went; +but most members of our kinship on that side still clung to this habit +of consideration even when, as was in certain cases but too visible, +they had parted with all sense of any other. I have preserved no happier +truth about my father than that the graceless whom, according to their +own fond term, he, and he alone of all of us, "understood," returned to +him as often and appealed to him as freely as those happier, though +indeed scarce less importunate, in their connection, who found +attraction and reason enough in their understanding _him_. My brother's +impression of this vessel of intimations that evening at the Boston +theatre, and of his "sincerity" and his seeming "greatly changed," +doesn't at all events, I feel, fail in the least to fit into one of +those amplifications upon which my incurable trick of unwillingness +wholly to sacrifice any good value compromised by time tends to +precipitate me with a force that my reader can scarce fear for me more +than I fear it for myself. There was no "extraordinary way" in which our +incalculable kinsman _mightn't_ talk, and that William should have had +for the hour the benefit of his general truth is but a happy note in my +record. It was not always the case that one wished one "might have seen +more of him," but this was only because one had had on any contact the +sense of seeing so much. That produced consequences among which the +desire for more might even be uncannily numbered. John Wilkes Booth, of +the same evening, was of course President Lincoln's assassin-to-be, of +whose crudely extravagant performance of the hero of Schiller's Robbers +I recall my brother's imitative description--I never myself saw him; and +it simplifies his case, I think, for distracted history, that he must +have been quite an abominable actor. I appear meanwhile to have paid +William at Cambridge a visit of which I have quite oddly lost +remembrance--by reason doubtless of its but losing itself in like, +though more prolonged, occasions that were to follow at no great +distance and that await my further reference. The manner of his own +allusion to it more than suffices. + + The radiance of H.'s visit has not faded yet, and I come upon + gleams of it three or four times a day in my farings to and fro, + but it has never a bit diminished the lustre of far-off shining + Newport, all silver and blue, and of this heavenly group + below[5]--all being more or less failures, especially the two + outside ones. The more so as the above-mentioned H. could in no + wise satisfy my craving for knowledge of family and friends--he + didn't seem to have been on speaking terms with anyone for some + time past, and could tell me nothing of what they did, said or + thought, about any given subject. Never did I see a so-much + uninterested creature in the affairs of those about him. He is a + good soul, though, in his way, too; and less fatal than the light + fantastic and ever-sociable Wilky, who has wrought little but + disaster during his stay with me; breaking down my good resolutions + about food, keeping me from all intellectual exercise, working + havoc on my best hat by wearing it while dressing, while in his + nightgown, while washing his face, and all but going to bed with + it. He occupied my comfortable arm-chair all the morning in the + position represented in the fine plate that accompanies this + letter--but one more night though, and he will have gone, and no + thorn shall pierce the side of the serene and hallowed felicity of + expectation in which I shall revel till the time comes for + returning home, home to the hearth of my infancy and budding youth. + As Wilky has submitted to you a resume of his future history for + the next few years, so will I of mine, hoping it will meet your + approval. Thus: one year Chemistry, then one term at home. Then one + year with Wyman, followed by a medical education. Then five or six + years with Agassiz; after which probably death, death, death from + inflation and plethora of knowledge. This you had better seriously + consider. So farewell till 8.45 some Sunday evening soon. Your + bold, your beautiful, your blossom! + +"I lead, as ever," he meanwhile elsewhere records, "the monotonous life +of the scholar, with few variations." + + We have very general talk at our table, Miss Upham declaiming + against the vulgarity of President Lincoln and complacently telling + of her own ignorance as to the way the wind blows or as to the + political events going on, and saying she thinks it a great waste + of time and of "no practical account" to study natural history. F. + J. Child impresses one as very witty and funny, but leaves it + impossible to remember what he says. I took a walk with the + Divinity student this splendid afternoon. He told me he had been + walking yesterday with one of the Jerseymen and they had discussed + the doctrine of a future state. The Jerseyman thought that if the + easy Unitarian doctrines were to become popular the morals of the + community would be most terribly relaxed. "Why," said the other, + "here you are in the very thick of Unitarianism; look about + you--people are about as good as anywhere." "Yes," replied the + Jerseyman, "I confess to you that that is what has _staggered_ me, + and I don't understand it yet!" + +I stretch over to the next year, 1863, for the sake of the following to +his sister. + + Cherie charmante, I am established in a cosy little room, with a + large recess with a window in it containing bed and washstand, and + separated from the main apartment by a rich green silk curtain and + a large gilt cornice. This gives the whole establishment a splendid + look. I found when I got back here that Miss Upham had raised her + price; so great efforts were made by two of us to form a club. But + too little enthusiasm was shown by any one else, and it fell + through. I then with that fine economical instinct which + distinguishes me resolved to take breakfast and tea, of my own + finding and making, in my room, and only pay Miss Upham for + dinners. Miss U. is now holding forth at Swampscott, so I asked to + see her sister Mrs. Wood and learn the cost of the 7 dinners a + week. She with true motherly instinct said that I should only make + a slop with my self-made meals in my room, and that she would + rather let me keep on for 4.50, seeing it was me. I said she must + first consult Miss Upham. She returned from Swampscott saying that + Miss U. had sworn she would rather pay _me_ a dollar a week than + have me go away. Ablaze with economic passion I cried + "Done!"--trying to make it appear that she had made me a formal + offer to that effect. But she then wouldn't admit it, and after + much recrimination we separated, it being agreed that I should come + for 4.50, _but tell no one_. So mind _you_ don't either. I now lay + my hand on my heart and confidently look to my Mother for that + glance of approbation which she must bestow. Have I not redeemed + any weaknesses of the past? Though part of my conception fails, yet + it was boldly planned and would have been a noble stroke. + + I have been pretty busy this week. I have a filial feeling toward + Wyman already. I work in a vast museum at a table all alone, + surrounded by skeletons of mastodons, crocodiles and the like, with + the walls hung about with monsters and horrors enough to freeze the + blood. But I have no fear, as most of them are tightly bottled up. + Occasionally solemn men and women come in to see the museum, and + sometimes timid little girls (reminding me of thee, my love, only + they are less fashionably dressed), who whisper "Is folks allowed + here?" It pains me to remark, however, that not all the little + girls are of this pleasing type, many being bold-faced jades. + Salter is back here, but morose. One or two new students and Prof. + Goodwin, who is very agreeable. Also William Everett, son of the + great Edward, very intelligent and a capital scholar, studying law. + He took honours at the English Cambridge. I send a photograph of + General Sickles for your and Wilky's amusement. It is a part of a + great anthropomorphological collection which I am going to make. So + take care of it, as well as of all the photographs you will find in + the table-drawer in my room. But isn't he a bully boy? Desecrate + the room as little as possible. If Wilky wants me as an extra nurse + send for me without hesitation. + + + + +VI + + +These returns to that first year or two at Newport contribute meanwhile +to filling out as nothing in the present pages has yet done for me that +vision of our father's unsurpassable patience and independence, in the +interest of the convictions he cherished and the expression of them, as +richly emphatic as it was scantly heeded, to which he daily gave +himself. We took his "writing" infinitely for granted--we had always so +taken it, and the sense of him, each long morning, at his study table +either with bent considering brow or with a half-spent and checked +intensity, a lapse backward in his chair and a musing lift of perhaps +troubled and baffled eyes, seems to me the most constant fact, the most +closely interwoven and underlying, among all our breaks and variations. +He applied himself there with a regularity and a piety as little subject +to sighing abatements or betrayed fears as if he had been working under +pressure for his bread and ours and the question were too urgent for his +daring to doubt. This play of his remarkable genius brought him in fact +throughout the long years no ghost of a reward in the form of pence, and +could proceed to publicity, as it repeatedly did, not only by the +copious and resigned sacrifice of such calculations, but by his meeting +in every single case all the expenses of the process. The untired +impulse to this devotion figured for us, comprehensively and familiarly, +as "Father's Ideas," of the force and truth of which in his own view we +were always so respectfully, even though at times so bewilderedly and +confoundedly persuaded, that we felt there was nothing in his exhibition +of life that they didn't or couldn't account for. They pervaded and +supported his existence, and very considerably our own; but what comes +back to me, to the production of a tenderness and an admiration scarce +to be expressed, is the fact that though we thus easily and naturally +lived with them and indeed, as to their more general effects, the colour +and savour they gave to his talk, breathed them in and enjoyed both +their quickening and their embarrassing presence, to say nothing of +their almost never less than amusing, we were left as free and +unattacked by them as if they had been so many droppings of gold and +silver coin on tables and chimney-pieces, to be "taken" or not according +to our sense and delicacy, that is our felt need and felt honour. The +combination in him of his different vivacities, his living interest in +his philosophy, his living interest in us and his living superiority to +all greed of authority, all overreaching or overemphasising "success", +at least in the heated short run, gave his character a magnanimity by +which it was impossible to us not to profit in all sorts of responsive +and in fact quite luxurious ways. It was a luxury, I to-day see, to have +all the benefit of his intellectual and spiritual, his religious, his +philosophic and his social passion, without ever feeling the pressure of +it to our direct irritation or discomfort. It would perhaps more truly +figure the relation in which he left us to these things to have likened +our opportunities rather to so many scattered glasses of the liquor of +faith, poured-out cups stood about for our either sipping or draining +down or leaving alone, in the measure of our thirst, our curiosity or +our strength of head and heart. If there was much leaving alone in +us--and I freely confess that, so far as the taking any of it all +"straight" went, my lips rarely adventured--this was doubtless because +we drank so largely at the source itself, the personally overflowing and +irrigating. What it then comes to, for my present vision, was that he +treated us most of all on the whole, as he in fact treated everything, +by his saving imagination--which set us, and the more as we were +naturally so inclined, the example of living as much as we might in some +such light of our own. If we had been asked in our younger time for +instance what _were_ our father's ideas, or to give an example of one +of them, I think we should promptly have answered (I should myself have +hastened to do so) that the principal was a devoted attachment to the +writings of Swedenborg; as to whom we were to remember betimes, with +intimate appreciation, that in reply to somebody's plea of not finding +him credible our parent had pronounced him, on the contrary, fairly +"insipid with veracity." We liked that partly, I think, because it +disposed in a manner, that is in favour of our detachment, of the great +Emanuel, but when I remember the part played, so close beside us, by +this latter's copious revelation, I feel almost ashamed for my own +incurious conduct. The part played consisted to a large extent in the +vast, even though incomplete, array of Swedenborg's works, the old faded +covers of which, anciently red, actually apt to be loose, and backed +with labels of impressive, though to my sense somewhat sinister London +imprint, Arcana Coelestia, Heaven and Hell and other such matters--they +all had, as from other days, a sort of black emphasis of dignity--ranged +themselves before us wherever, and however briefly, we disposed +ourselves, forming even for short journeys the base of our father's +travelling library and perhaps at some seasons therewith the accepted +strain on our mother's patience. I recall them as inveterately part of +our very luggage, requiring proportionate receptacles; I recall them as, +in a number considerable even when reduced, part of their proprietor's +own most particular dependence on his leaving home, during our more +agitated years, for those speculative visits to possible better places +(than whatever place of the moment) from which, as I have elsewhere +mentioned, he was apt to return under premature, under passionate +nostalgic, reaction. The Swedenborgs were promptly out again on their +customary shelves or sometimes more improvised perches, and it was +somehow not till we had assured ourselves of this that we felt _that_ +incident closed. + +Nothing could have exceeded at the same time our general sense--unless I +all discreetly again confine myself to the spare record of my own--for +our good fortune in never having been, even when most helpless, dragged +by any approach to a faint jerk over the threshold of the inhabited +temple. It stood there in the centre of our family life, into which its +doors of fine austere bronze opened straight; we passed and repassed +them when we didn't more consciously go round and behind; we took for +granted vague grand things within, but we never paused to peer or +penetrate, and none the less never had the so natural and wistful, +perhaps even the so properly resentful, "Oh I say, do look in a moment +for manners if for nothing else!" called after us as we went. Our +admirable mother sat on the steps at least and caught reverberations of +the inward mystic choir; but there were positive contemporary moments +when I well-nigh became aware, I think, of something graceless, +something not to the credit of my aspiring "intellectual life," or of +whatever small pretensions to seriousness I might have begun to nourish, +in the anything but heroic impunity of my inattention. William, later +on, made up for this not a little, redeeming so, to a large extent, as +he grew older, our filial honour in the matter of a decent sympathy, if +not of a noble curiosity: distinct to me even are certain echoes of +passages between our father and his eldest son that I assisted at, more +or less indirectly and wonderingly, as at intellectual "scenes," +gathering from them portents of my brother's independent range of +speculation, agitations of thought and announcements of difference, +which could but have represented, far beyond anything I should ever have +to show, a gained and to a considerable degree an enjoyed, confessedly +an interested, acquaintance with the paternal philosophic _penetralia_. +That particular impression refers indeed to hours which at the point I +have reached had not yet struck; but I am touched even now, after all +the years, with something exquisite in my half-grasped premonitory +vision of their belonging, these belated discussions that were but the +flowering of the first germs of such _other_, doubtless already such +opposed, perceptions and conclusions, to that order of thin consolations +and broken rewards which long figured as the most and the best of what +was to have been waited for on our companion's part without the escape +of a plaint. Yet I feel I may claim that our awareness of all that was +so serenely dispensed with--to call it missed would have been quite to +falsify the story and reflect meanly on the spirit--never in the least +brutally lapsed from admiration, however unuttered the sentiment itself, +after the fashion of raw youth; it is in fact quite distinct to me that, +had there been danger of this, there came to us from our mother's lips +at intervals long enough to emphasise the final sincerity and beauty a +fairly sacred reminder of that strain of almost solely self-nourished +equanimity, or in other words insuperable gaiety, in her life's comrade, +which she had never seen give way. This was the very gaiety that kept +through the years coming out for us--to the point of inviting free jokes +and other light familiarities from us at its expense. The happiest +household pleasantry invested our legend of our mother's fond habit of +address, "Your father's _ideas_, you know--!" which was always the +signal for our embracing her with the last responsive finality (and, for +the full pleasure of it, in his presence). Nothing indeed so much as his +presence encouraged the licence, as I may truly call it, of the +legend--that is of our treatment _en famille_ of any reference to the +attested public weight of his labours; which, I hasten to add, was much +too esoteric a ground of geniality, a dear old family joke, not to be +kept, for its value, to ourselves. But there comes back to me the +impression of his appearing on occasion quite moved to the exuberance of +cheer--as a form of refreshment he could draw on for a stronger and +brighter spurt, I mean--by such an apology for resonance of reputation +as our harmless, our of course utterly edgeless, profanity represented. +It might have been for him, by a happy stretch, a sign that the world +_did_ know--taking us for the moment, in our selfish young babble, as a +part of the noise of the world. Nothing, at the same time, could alter +the truth of his case, or can at least alter it to me now: he had, +intellectually, convictionally, passionally speaking, a selfless +detachment, a lack of what is called the eye for effect--always I mean +of the elated and interested order--which I can but marvel at in the +light of the rare aptitude of his means to his end, and in that of the +beauty of both, though the stamp was doubtless most vivid, for so +differing, so gropingly "esthetic" a mind as my own, in his unfailingly +personal and admirable style. We knew he had thoroughly his own +"unconventional" form, which, by the unspeakable law of youth, we +managed to feel the distinction of as not platitudinous even while we a +bit sneakingly felt it as quotable, on possible occasions, against our +presence of mind; the great thing was at all events that we couldn't +live with him without the sense that if his books resembled his talk and +his character--as we moreover felt they couldn't help almost violently +doing--they might want for this, that or the other which kept the +conventional true to its type, but could as little fail to flush with +the strong colour, colour so remarkably given and not taken, projected +and not reflected, colour of thought and faith and moral and +expressional atmosphere, as they could leave us without that felt +side-wind of their strong composition which made after all so much of +the air we breathed and was in the last resort the gage of something +perpetually fine going on. + +It is not too much to say, I think, that our religious education, so far +as we had any, consisted wholly in that loose yet enlightening +impression: I say so far as we had any in spite of my very definitely +holding that it would absolutely not have been possible to us, in the +measure of our sensibility, to breathe more the air of that reference to +an order of goodness and power greater than any this world by itself can +show which we understand as the religious spirit. Wondrous to me, as I +consider again, that my father's possession of this spirit, in a degree +that made it more deeply one with his life than I can conceive another +or a different case of its being, should have been unaccompanied with a +single one of the outward or formal, the theological, devotional, +ritual, or even implicitly pietistic signs by which we usually know it. +The fact of course was that his religion was nothing if not a +philosophy, extraordinarily complex and worked out and original, +intensely personal as an exposition, yet not only susceptible of +application, but clamorous for it, to the whole field of consciousness, +nature and society, history, knowledge, all human relations and +questions, every pulse of the process of our destiny. Of this vast and +interesting conception, as striking an expression of the religious +spirit surely as ever was put forth, his eldest son has given an +account[6]--so far as this was possible at once with brevity and with +full comprehension--that I should have been unable even to dream of +aspiring to, and in the masterly clearness and justice of which the +opportunity of the son blends with that of the critic, each character +acting in perfect felicity, after a fashion of which I know elsewhere no +such fine example. It conveys the whole sense of our father's +philosophic passion, which was theologic, by my direct impression of it, +to a degree fairly outdistancing all theologies; representing its +weight, reproducing its utterance, placing it in the eye of the world, +and making for it the strong and single claim it suggests, in a manner +that leaves nothing to be added to the subject. I am not concerned with +the intrinsic meaning of these things here, and should not be even had +they touched me more directly, or more converted me from what I can best +call, to my doubtless scant honour, a total otherness of contemplation, +during the years when my privilege was greatest and my situation for +inquiry and response amplest; but the active, not to say the obvious, +moral of them, in all our younger time, was that a life of the most +richly consequent flowed straight out of them, that in this life, the +most abundantly, and above all naturally, communicated _as_ life that it +was possible to imagine, we had an absolutely equal share, and that in +fine I was to live to go back with wonder and admiration to the quantity +of secreted thought in our daily medium, the quality of intellectual +passion, the force of cogitation and aspiration, as to the explanation +both of a thousand surface incoherences and a thousand felt felicities. +A religion that was so systematically a philosophy, a philosophy that +was so sweepingly a religion, being together, by their necessity, as I +have said, an intensity of relation to the actual, the consciousness so +determined was furnished forth in a way that met by itself the whole +question of the attitude of "worship" for instance; as I have attempted +a little to show that it met, with a beautiful good faith and the +easiest sufficiency, every other when such came up: those of education, +acquisition, material vindication, what is called success generally. In +the beauty of the whole thing, again, I lose myself--by which I mean in +the fact that we were all the while partaking, to our most intimate +benefit, of an influence of direction and enlargement attended with +scarce a single consecrated form and which would have made many of +these, had we been exposed to intrusion from them, absurdly irrelevant. +My father liked in our quite younger period to read us chapters from the +New Testament and the Old, and I hope we liked to listen to them--though +I recall their seeming dreary from their association with school +practice; but that was the sole approach to a challenge of our complete +freedom of inward, not less than our natural ingenuity of outward, +experience. No other explicit address to us in the name of the Divine +could, I see, have been made with any congruity--in face of the fact +that invitations issued in all the vividest social terms, terms of +living appreciation, of spiritual perception, of "human fellowship," to +use the expression that was perhaps oftenest on his lips and his pen +alike, were the very substance of the food supplied in the parental +nest. + +The freedom from pressure that we enjoyed in every direction, all those +immunities and exemptions that had been, in protracted childhood, +positively embarrassing to us, as I have already noted, before the +framework, ecclesiastical and mercantile, squared at us as with +reprobation from other households, where it seemed so to conduce to +their range of resource--these things consorted with our yet being +yearned over or prescribed for, by every implication, after a fashion +that was to make the social organisation of such invidious homes, under +my subsequent observation of life, affect me as so much bleak penury or +domestic desert where these things of the spirit, these genialities of +faith were concerned. Well do I remember, none the less, how I was +troubled all along just by this particular crookedness of our being so +extremely religious without having, as it were, anything in the least +classified or striking to show for it; so that the measure of +other-worldliness pervading our premises was rather a waste, though at +the same time oddly enough a congestion--projecting outwardly as it did +no single one of those usual symptoms of propriety any of which, +gathered at a venture from the general prospect, might by my sense have +served: I shouldn't have been particular, I thought, as to the +selection. Religion was a matter, by this imagination, to be worked off +much more than to be worked in, and I fear my real vague sentiment to +have been but that life would under the common equipment be somehow more +amusing; and this even though, as I don't forget, there was not an item +of the detail of devotional practice that we had been so much as allowed +to divine. I scarce know why I should have wanted anything more amusing, +as most of our coevals would have regarded it, than that we had from as +far back as I could remember indulged in no shade of an approach to +"keeping Sunday"; which is one of the reasons why to speak as if piety +could have borne for us any sense but the tender human, or to speak at +all of devotion, unction, initiation, even of the vaguest, into the +exercises or professions, as among our attributes, would falsify +altogether our mere fortune of a general liberty of living, of making +ourselves as brightly at home as might be, in that "spiritual world" +which we were in the habit of hearing as freely alluded to as we heard +the prospect of dinner or the call of the postman. The oddity of my own +case, as I make it out so far as it involved a confused criticism, was +that my small uneasy mind, bulging and tightening in the wrong, or at +least in unnatural and unexpected, places, like a little jacket ill cut +or ill sewn, attached its gaping view, as I have already more than +enough noted, to things and persons, objects and aspects, frivolities +all, I dare say I was willing to grant, compared with whatever +manifestations of the serious, these being by need, apparently, the +abstract; and that in fine I should have been thankful for a state of +faith, a conviction of the Divine, an interpretation of the +universe--anything one might have made bold to call it--which would have +supplied more features or appearances. Feeling myself "after" persons so +much more than after anything else--to recur to that side of my earliest +and most constant consciousness which might have been judged most +deplorable--I take it that I found the sphere of our more nobly +supposititious habitation too imperceptibly peopled; whereas the +religious life of every other family that could boast of any such (and +what family didn't boast?) affected my fancy as with a social and +material crowdedness. That faculty alone was affected--this I hasten to +add; no directness of experience ever stirred for me; it being the case +in the first place that I scarce remember, as to all our young time, the +crossing of our threshold by any faint shade of an ecclesiastical +presence, or the lightest encounter with any such elsewhere, and equally +of the essence, over and above, that the clerical race, the +pre-eminently restrictive tribe, as I apprehended them, couldn't very +well have agreed less with the general colour of my fondest vision: if +it be not indeed more correct to say that I was reduced to _supposing_ +they couldn't. We knew in truth nothing whatever about them, a fact +that, as I recover it, also flushes for me with its fine +awkwardness--the social scene in general handsomely bristling with them +to the rueful view I sketch, and they yet remaining for us, or at any +rate for myself, such creatures of pure hearsay that when late in my +teens, and in particular after my twentieth year, I began to see them +portrayed by George Eliot and Anthony Trollope the effect was a +disclosure of a new and romantic species. Strange beyond my present +power to account for it this anomaly that amid a civilisation replete +with "ministers"--for we at least knew the word--actively, +competitively, indeed as would often appear quite violently, +ministering, so little sense of a brush against approved examples was +ever to attend me that I had finally to draw my nearest sufficiency of +a true image from pictures of a social order largely alien to our own. +All of which, at the same time, I allow myself to add, didn't mitigate +the simple fact of my felt--my indeed so luxuriously permitted--detachment +of sensibility from everything, everything, that is, in the way of great +relations, as to which our father's emphasis was richest. _There_ was +the dim dissociation, there my comparative poverty, or call it even +frivolity, of instinct: I gaped imaginatively, as it were, to such a +different set of relations. I couldn't have framed stories that would +have succeeded in involving the least of the relations that seemed most +present to _him_; while those most present to myself, that is more +complementary to whatever it was I thought of as humanly most +interesting, attaching, inviting, were the ones his schemes of +importances seemed virtually to do without. Didn't I discern in this +from the first a kind of implied snub to the significance of mine?--so +that, in the blest absence of "pressure" which I just sought here +passingly to celebrate, I could brood to my heart's content on the so +conceivable alternative of a field of exposure crammed with those +objective appearances that my faculty seemed alone fitted to grasp. In +which there was ever the small torment of the fact--though I don't quite +see to-day why it should not have been of a purely pleasant +irritation--that what our parent most overflowed with was just the brave +contradiction or opposition between all his parts, a thing which made +for perfect variety, which he carried ever so easily and brightly, and +which would have put one no less in the wrong had one accused him of +knowing only the abstract (as I was so complacently and invidiously +disposed to name it) than if one had foolishly remarked on his living +and concluding without it. But I have already made clear his great mixed +range--which of course couldn't _not_ have been the sign of a mind +conceiving our very own breathing humanity in its every fibre the +absolute expression of a resident Divinity. No element of character, no +spontaneity of life, but instantly seized his attention and incurred his +greeting and his comment; which things could never possibly have been so +genially alert and expert--as I have, again, before this, +superabundantly recorded--if it had not fairly fed on active observation +and contact. He could answer one with the radiant when one challenged +him with the obscure, just as he could respond with the general when one +pulled at the particular; and I needn't repeat that this made for us, +during all our time, anything but a starved actuality. + +None the less, however, I remember it as savouring of loss to me--which +is my present point--that our so thoroughly informal scene of +susceptibility seemed to result from a positive excess of familiarity, +in his earlier past, with such types of the shepherd and the flock, to +say nothing of such forms of the pasture, as might have met in some +degree my appetite for the illustrational. This was one of the things +that made me often wish, as I remember, that I might have caught him +sooner or younger, less developed, as who should say; the matters that +appeared, however confusedly, to have started his development being by +this measure stranger and livelier than most of those that finally +crowned it, marked with their own colour as many of these doubtless +were. Three or four strongest pages in the fragment of autobiography +gathered by his eldest son into the sheaf of his Literary Remains +describe the state of soul undergone by him in England, in '44, just +previous to the hour at which Mrs. Chichester, a gentle lady of his +acquaintance there, brought to his knowledge, by a wondrous chance, the +possibility that the great Swedenborg, from whom she had drawn much +light, might have something to say to his case; so that under the +impression of his talk with her he posted at once up to London from the +neighbourhood of Windsor, where he was staying, possessed himself of +certain volumes of the writings of the eminent mystic (so-called I +mean, for to my father this description of him was grotesque), and +passed rapidly into that grateful infinitude of recognition and +application which he was to inhabit for the rest of his days. I saw him +move about there after the fashion of the oldest and easiest native, and +this had on some sides its own considerable effect, tinged even on +occasion with romance; yet I felt how the _real_ right thing for me +would have been the hurrying drama of the original rush, the interview +with the admirable Mrs. Chichester, the sweet legend of his and my +mother's charmed impression of whom had lingered with us--I admired her +very name, there seeming none other among us at all like it; and then +the return with the tokens of light, the splendid agitation as the light +deepened, and the laying in of that majestic array of volumes which were +to form afterward the purplest rim of his library's horizon and which I +was thus capable, for my poor part, of finding valuable, in default of +other values, as coloured properties in a fine fifth act. It was all a +play I hadn't "been to," consciously at least--that was the trouble; the +curtain had fallen while I was still tucked in my crib, and I assisted +but on a comparatively flat home scene at the echo of a great success. I +could still have done, for the worst, with a consciousness of Swedenborg +that should have been graced at least with Swedenborgians--aware as I +was of the existence of such enrolled disciples, ornaments of a church +of their own, yet known to us only as persons rather acidly mystified by +the inconvenience, as we even fancied them to feel it, of our father's +frankly independent and disturbingly irregular (all the more for its +being so expressive) connection with their inspirer. In the light or the +dusk of all this it was surely impossible to make out that he professed +any faint shade of that clerical character as to his having incurred +which we were, "in the world," to our bewilderment, not infrequently +questioned. Those of the enrolled order, in the matter of his and their +subject of study, might in their way too have raised to my regard a +fretted vault or opened a long-drawn aisle, but they were never at all, +in the language of a later day, to materialise to me; we neither on a +single occasion sat in their circle, nor did one of them, to the best of +my belief, ever stray, remonstrantly or invitingly, into ours; where +Swedenborg was read not in the least as the Bible scarce more than just +escaped being, but even as Shakespeare or Dickens or Macaulay was +content to be--which was without our arranging or subscribing for it. I +seem to distinguish that if a fugitive or a shy straggler from the +pitched camp did turn up it was under cover of night or of curiosity and +with much panting and putting off of the mantle, much nervous laughter +above all--this safe, however, to become on the shortest order amusement +easy and intimate. That _figured_ something in a slight way--as at least +I suppose I may infer from the faint adumbration I retain; but nothing +none the less much attenuated what I suppose I should have denounced as +the falsity of our position (meaning thereby of mine) had I been +constitutionally at all voluble for such flights. Constructionally we +had all the fun of licence, while the truth seemed really to be that fun +in the religious connection closely depended on bondage. The fun was of +course that I wanted in this line of diversion something of the coarser +strain; which came home to me in especial, to cut the matter short, when +I was present, as I yielded first and last to many an occasion for +being, at my father's reading out to my mother with an appreciation of +that modest grasp of somebody's attention, the brief illusion of +publicity, which has now for me the exquisite grace of the touching, +some series of pages from among his "papers" that were to show her how +he had this time at last done it. No touch of the beautiful or the +sacred in the disinterested life can have been absent from such +scenes--I find every such ideally there; and my memory rejoices above +all in their presentation of our mother at her very perfectest of +soundless and yet absolutely all-saving service and trust. To have +attempted any projection of our father's aspect without an immediate +reference to her sovereign care for him and for all of us as the so +widely open, yet so softly enclosing, lap of all his liberties and all +our securities, all our variety and withal our harmony, the harmony that +was for nine-tenths of it our sense of her gathered life in us, and of +her having no other--to have so proceeded has been but to defer by +instinct and by scruple to the kind of truth and of beauty before which +the direct report breaks down. I may well have stopped short with what +there would be to say, and yet what account of us all can pretend to +have gone the least bit deep without coming to our mother at every +penetration? We simply lived by her, in proportion as we lived +spontaneously, with an equanimity of confidence, an independence of +something that I should now find myself think of as decent compunction +if I didn't try to call it instead morbid delicacy, which left us free +for detachments of thought and flights of mind, experiments, so to +speak, on the assumption of our genius and our intrinsic interest, that +I look back upon as to a luxury of the unworried that is scarce of this +world. This was a support on which my father rested with the absolute +whole of his weight, and it was when I felt her listen with the whole of +her usefulness, which needed no other force, being as it was the whole +of her tenderness and amply sufficing by itself, that I understood most +what it was so to rest and so to act. When in the fulness of the years +she was to die, and he then to give us time, a few months, as with a +beatific depth of design, to marvel at the manner of his acceptance of +the stroke, a shown triumph of his philosophy, he simply one day +consciously ceased, quietly declined to continue, as an offered measure +of his loss of interest. Nothing--he had enabled himself to make +perfectly sure--was in the least worth while without her; this attested, +he passed away or went out, with entire simplicity, promptness and ease, +for the definite reason that his support had failed. His philosophy had +been not his support but his suspension, and he had never, I am sure, +felt so lifted as at that hour, which splendidly crowned his faith. It +showed us more intimately still what, in this world of cleft components, +one human being can yet be for another, and how a form of vital aid may +have operated for years with such perfection as fairly to have made +recognition seem at the time a sort of excess of reaction, an +interference or a pedantry. All which is imaged for me while I see our +mother listen, at her work, to the full music of the "papers." She could +do that by the mere force of her complete availability, and could do it +with a smoothness of surrender that was like an array of all the +perceptions. The only thing that I might well have questioned on these +occasions was the possibility on the part of a selflessness so +consistently and unabatedly active of its having anything ever left +_acutely_ to offer; to abide so unbrokenly in such inaptness for the +personal claim might have seemed to render difficult such a special show +of it as any particular pointedness of hospitality would propose to +represent. I dare say it was our sense of this that so often made us +all, when the explicit or the categoric, the impulse of acclamation, +flowered out in her, find our happiest play of filial humour in just +embracing her for the sound of it; than which I can imagine no more +expressive tribute to our constant depths of indebtedness. She lived in +ourselves so exclusively, with such a want of use for anything in her +consciousness that was not about us and for us, that I think we almost +contested her being separate enough to be proud of us--it was too like +our being proud of ourselves. We were delightedly derisive with her even +about pride in our father--it was the most domestic of our pastimes; for +what really could exceed the tenderness of our fastening on her that she +_was_ he, _was_ each of us, was our pride and our humility, our +possibility of _any_ relation, and the very canvas itself on which we +were floridly embroidered? How can I better express what she seemed to +do for her second son in especial than by saying that even with her +deepest delicacy of attention present I could still feel, while my +father read, why it was that I most of all seemed to wish we might have +been either much less religious or much more so? Was not the reason at +bottom that I so suffered, I might almost have put it, under the +impression of his style, which affected me as somehow too philosophic +for life, and at the same time too living, as I made out, for +thought?--since I must weirdly have opined that by so much as you were +individual, which meant personal, which meant monotonous, which meant +limitedly allusive and verbally repetitive, by so much you were not +literary or, so to speak, _largely_ figurative. My father had terms, +evidently strong, but in which I presumed to feel, with a shade of +irritation, a certain narrowness of exclusion as to images +otherwise--and oh, since it was a question of the pen, so +multitudinously!--entertainable. Variety, variety--_that_ sweet ideal, +_that_ straight contradiction of any dialectic, hummed for me all the +while as a direct, if perverse and most unedified, effect of the +parental concentration, with some of its consequent, though heedless, +dissociations. I heard it, felt it, saw it, both shamefully enjoyed and +shamefully denied it as form, though as form only; and I owed thus +supremely to my mother that I could, in whatever obscure levity, muddle +out some sense of my own preoccupation under the singular softness of +the connection that she kept for me, by the outward graces, with that +other and truly much intenser which I was so little framed to share. + +If meanwhile my father's tone, so far as that went, was to remain the +same, save for a natural growth of assurance, and thereby of amplitude, +all his life, I find it already, and his very voice as we were to know +them, in a letter to R. W. Emerson of 1842, without more specific date, +after the loose fashion of those days, but from 2 Washington Place, New +York, the second house in the row between the University building and +Broadway, as he was next to note to his correspondent in expressing the +hope of a visit from him. (It was the house in which, the following +year, his second son was born.) + + I came home to-night from my lecture a little disposed to think, + from the smart reduction of my audience, that I had about as well + not have prepared my course, especially as I get no tidings of + having interested one of the sort (the religious) for whom they are + wholly designed. When I next see you I want a half-hour's support + from you under this discouragement, and the purpose of this letter + is to secure it. When I am _with_ you I get no help from you--of + the sort you can give me, I feel sure; though you must know what I + want before I listen to you next. Usually the temper you show, of + perfect repose and candour, free from all sickening partisanship + and full of magnanimous tenderness for every creature, makes me + forget my wants in your lavish plenty. But I know you have the same + as I have, deep down in your breast, and it is by these I would + fain know you. I am led, quite without any conscious wilfulness + either, to seek the _laws_ of these appearances that swim round us + in God's great museum, to get hold of some central facts which may + make all other facts properly circumferential and orderly; and you + continually dishearten me by your apparent indifference to such law + and such facts, by the dishonour you seem to cast on our + intelligence as if it were what stands in our way. Now my + conviction is that my intelligence is the necessary digestive + apparatus for my life; that there is nihil in vita--worth anything, + that is--quod non prius in intellectu. Now is it not so in truth + with you? Can you not report your life to me by some intellectual + symbol which my intellect appreciates? Do you not know your + activity? But fudge--I cannot say what I want to say, what aches to + say itself in me, and so I'll hold up till I see you, and try once + more to get some better furtherance by my own effort. Here I am + these thirty-one years in life, ignorant in all outward science, + but having patient habits of meditation which never know disgust or + weariness, and feeling a force of impulsive love toward all + humanity which will not let me rest wholly mute, a force which + grows against all resistance that I can muster against it. What + shall I do? Shall I get me a little nook in the country and + communicate with my _living_ kind--not my talking kind--by life + only; a word perhaps of _that_ communication, a fit word once a + year? Or shall I follow some commoner method--learn science and + bring myself first into man's respect, that I may thus the better + speak to him? I confess this last theory seems rank with + earthliness--to belong to days forever past. + +His appeal to Emerson at this hour was, as he elsewhere then puts it, to +the "invisible" man in the matter, who affected him as somewhere behind +the more or less immediately visible, the beautifully but mystifyingly +audible, the Emerson of honeyed lectures and addresses, suggestive and +inspiring as that one might be, and who might, as we say to-day, have +something, something more at least, for him. "I will tell him that I do +not value his substantive discoveries, whatever they may be, perhaps +half so largely as he values them, but that I chiefly cherish that erect +attitude of mind in him which in God's universe undauntedly seeks the +worthiest tidings of God, and calmly defies every mumbling phantom which +would challenge its freedom. Should his zeal for realities and contempt +of vulgar shows abide the ordeal I have thus contrived for them I shall +gladly await his visit to me. So much at least is what I have been +saying to myself. Now that I have told it to you also you have become a +sort of confidant between me and myself, and so bound to promote harmony +there." The correspondence expands, however, beyond my space for +reporting of it; I but pick out a few passages. + + I am cheered by the coming of Carlyle's new book, which Greeley + announces, and shall hasten off for it as soon as I have + leisure.[7] The title is provokingly enigmatical, but thought + enough there will be in it no doubt, whatever the name; thought + heaped up to topheaviness and inevitable lopsidedness, but more + interesting to me than comes from any other quarter of + Europe--interesting for the man's sake whom it shows. According to + my notion he is the very best interpreter of a spiritual philosophy + that could be devised for _this age_, the age of transition and + conflict; and what renders him so is his natural + birth-and-education-place. Just to think of a Scotchman with a + heart widened to German spiritualities! To have overcome his + educational bigotries far enough to listen to the new ideas, this + by itself was wonderful; and then to give all his native shrewdness + and humour to the service of making them _tell_ to the minds of his + people--what more fortunate thing for the time could there be? You + don't look upon Calvinism as a fact at all; wherein you are to my + mind philosophically infirm--impaired in your universality. I can + see in Carlyle the advantage his familiarity with it gives him over + you with a general audience. What is highest in him is built upon + that lowest. At least so I read; I believe Jonathan Edwards + redivivus in true blue would, after an honest study of the + philosophy that has grown up since his day, make the best possible + reconciler and critic of this philosophy--far better than Schelling + redivivus. + +In the autumn of 1843 the "nook in the country" above alluded to had +become a question renounced, so far at least as the American country +was concerned, and never again afterwards flushed into life. "I think it +probable I shall winter in some mild English climate, Devonshire +perhaps, and go on with my studies as at home. I shall miss the stimulus +of your candid and generous society, and I confess we don't like the +aspect of the journey; but one's destiny puts on many garments as it +goes shaping itself in secret--so let us not cling to any particular +fashion." Very marked, and above all very characteristic of my father, +in this interesting relation, which I may but so imperfectly illustrate, +his constant appeal to his so inspired, yet so uninflamed, so +irreducible and, as it were, inapplicable, friend for intellectual and, +as he would have said, spiritual help of the immediate and adjustable, +the more concretely vital, kind, the kind translatable into terms of the +real, the particular human terms of action and passion. "Oh you man +without a _handle_! Shall one never be able to help himself out of you, +according to his needs, and be dependent only upon your fitful +tippings-up?"--a remarkably felicitous expression, as it strikes me, of +that difficulty often felt by the passionately-living of the earlier +time, as they may be called, to draw down their noble philosopher's +great overhanging heaven of universal and ethereal answers to the plane +of their comparatively terrestrial and personal questions; the note of +the answers and their great anticipatory spirit being somehow that they +seemed to anticipate everything but the unaccommodating individual case. +My father, on his side, bristled with "handles"--there could scarce be a +better general account of him--and tipped himself up for you almost +before you could take hold of one; of which truth, for that matter, this +same letter happens to give, even if just trivially, the hint. "Can I do +anything for you in the way of taking parcels, no matter how large or +expensive?--or for any of your friends? If you see Margaret Fuller ask +her to give me some service to render her abroad, the dear noble woman: +it seems a real hardship to be leaving the country now that I have just +come to talk with her." Emerson, I should add, did offer personally so +solid a handle that my father appears to have taken from him two +introductions to be made use of in London, one to Carlyle and the other +to John Sterling, the result of which shortly afterwards was as vivid +and as deeply appropriated an impression of each eminent character as it +was probably to be given either of them ever to have made. The +impression of Carlyle was recorded but long subsequently, I note, and is +included in William's gathering-in of our father's Literary Remains +(1885); and of the acquaintance with Sterling no reflection remains but +a passage in a letter, under date of Ventnor and of the winter of 1843, +from the latter to his biographer to be; Carlyle having already +mentioned in the Life that "Two American gentlemen, acquaintances also +of mine, had been recommended to him, by Emerson most likely"; and that +"one morning Sterling appeared here with a strenuous proposal that we +should come to Knightsbridge and dine with him and them.... And +accordingly we went," it goes on. "I remember it as one of the saddest +dinners; though Sterling talked copiously, and our friends, Theodore +Parker one of them, were pleasant and distinguished men." My father, +with Theodore Parker his friend and the date fitting, would quite seem +to have been one of the pair were it not that "our conversation was +waste and logical, I forget quite on what, not joyful and harmoniously +effusive." It is _that_ that doesn't fit with any real participation of +his--nothing could well do less so; unless the occasion had but too +closely conformed to the biographer's darkly and richly prophetic view +of it as tragic and ominous, "sad as if one had been dining in a ruin, +in the crypt of a mausoleum"--all this "painfully apparent through the +bright mask (Sterling) had bound himself to wear." The end of his life +was then, to Carlyle's view, in sight; but his own note, in the Isle of +Wight, on "Mr. James, your New-England friend," was genial enough--"I +saw him several times and liked him. They went on the 24th of last month +back to London--or so purposed," he adds, "because there is no pavement +here for him to walk on. I want to know where he is, and thought I +should be able to learn from you. I gave him a note for Mill, who may +perhaps have seen him." + +My main interest in which is, I confess, for the far-off germ of the odd +legend, destined much to grow later on, that--already the nucleus of a +household--we were New England products; which I think my parents could +then have even so much as seemed only to eyes naturally unaware of our +American "sectional" differences. My father, when considerably past his +thirtieth year, if I am not mistaken, had travelled "East," within our +borders, but once in his life--on the occasion of his spending two or +three months in Boston as a very young man; there connecting itself with +this for me a reminiscence so bedimmed at once and so suggestive as now +almost to torment me. It must have been in '67 or '68 that, giving him +my arm, of a slippery Boston day, up or down one of the steep streets +that used to mount, from behind, and as slightly sullen with the effort, +to Beacon Hill, and between which my now relaxed memory rather fails to +discriminate, I was arrested by his pointing out to me opposite us a +house in which he had for a while had rooms, long before and quite in +his early time. I but recall that we were more or less skirting the base +of an ancient town-reservoir, the seat of the water-supply as then +constituted, a monument rugged and dark, massively granitic, perched all +perversely, as it seemed to look, on the precipitous slope, and +which--at least as I see it through the years--struck quite handsomely +the Babylonian note. I at any rate mix up with this frowning object--it +had somehow a sinister presence and suggestion--my companion's mention +there in front of it that he had anciently taken refuge under its shadow +from certain effects of a misunderstanding, if indeed not of a sharp +rupture, for the time, with a highly generous but also on occasion +strongly protesting parent at Albany, a parent displeased with some +course he had taken or had declined to take (there was a tradition among +us that he had been for a period quite definitely "wild"), and relief +from further discussion with whom he had sought, and had more or less +found, on that spot. It was an age in which a flight from Albany to +Boston--there being then no Boston and Albany Railroad--counted as a far +flight; though it wasn't to occur to me either then or afterwards that +the ground of this manoeuvre had been any plotted wildness in the +Puritan air. What was clear at the moment, and what he remarked upon, +was that the street-scene about us showed for all the lapse of time no +scrap of change, and I remember well for myself how my first impression +of Boston gave it to me under certain aspects as more expressive than I +had supposed an American city could be of a seated and rooted social +order, an order not complex but sensibly fixed--gathered in or folded +back to intensity upon itself; and this, again and again, when the +compass of the posture, its narrow field, might almost have made the +fold excruciating. It had given however no sign of excruciation--that +itself had been part of the Puritan stoicism; which perhaps was exactly +why the local look, recognised to the point I speak of by the visitor, +was so contained and yet comparatively so full: full, very nearly, I +originally fancied, after the appraisable fashion of some composed +town-face in one of Balzac's _villes de province_. All of which, I +grant, is much to say for the occasion of that dropped confidence, on +the sloshy hillside, to which I allude--and part of the action of which +was that it had never been dropped before; this circumstance somehow a +peculiar source of interest, an interest I the more regret to have lost +my grasp of as it must have been sharp, or in other words founded, to +account for the long reverberation here noted. I had still--as I was +indeed to keep having through life--the good fortune that elements of +interest easily sprang, to my incurable sense, from any ghost of a drama +at all _presented_; though I of course can't in the least pretend to +generalise on what may or may not have constituted living presentation. +This felicity occurred, I make out, quite incalculably, just as it could +or would; the effect depended on some particular touch of the spring, +which was set in motion the instant the touch happened to be right. My +father's was always right, to my receptive mind; as receptive, that is, +of any scrap of enacted story or evoked picture as it was closed to the +dry or the abstract proposition; so that I blush the deeper at not being +able, in honour of his reference, to make the latter more vividly +flower--I still so feel that I quite thrilled with it and with the +standing background at the moment lighted by it. There were things in +it, and other persons, old actualities, old meanings and furnishings of +the other old Boston, as I by that time couldn't but appraise it; and +the really archaic, the overhung and sombre and secret-keeping street, +"socially" disconnected, socially mysterious--as I like at any rate to +remember it--was there to testify (testify to the ancient time of +tension, expansion, sore meditation or whatever) by its positively +conscious gloom. + +The moral of this, I fear, amounts to little more than that, putting +aside the substance of his anecdote, my father had not set foot in New +England till toward his thirty-fifth year, and my mother was not to do +so till later still; circumstances not in the least preventing the birth +of what I have called the falsifying legend. The allusion to the walking +at Ventnor touches his inability to deal with rural roads and paths, +then rougher things than now; by reason of an accident received in early +youth and which had so lamed him for life that he could circulate to any +convenience but on even surfaces and was indeed mainly reduced to +driving--it had made him for all his earlier time an excellent whip. His +constitution had been happily of the strongest, but as I look back I see +his grave disability, which it took a strong constitution to carry, +mainly in the light of a consistency of patience that we were never to +have heard broken. The two acceptances melt together for me--that of the +limits of his material action, his doing and enjoying, set so narrowly, +and that of his scant allowance of "public recognition," or of the +support and encouragement that spring, and spring so naturally and +rightly, when the relation of effect to cause is close and straight, +from any at all attested and glad understanding of a formula, as we say +nowadays a message, richly and sincerely urged. Too many such +reflections, however, beset me here by the way. My letters jump +meanwhile to the summer of 1849, when I find in another of them, +addressed to Emerson, a passage as characteristic as possible of one of +the writer's liveliest and, as I confess it was ever to seem to me, most +genially perverse idiosyncrasies, his distinctly low opinion of "mere" +literary men. This note his letters in general again and again +strike--not a little to the diversion of those who were to have observed +and remembered his constant charmed subjection, in the matter of +practice, to the masters, even quite the lighter, in the depreciated +group. His sensibility to their spell was in fact so marked that it +became from an early time a household game with us to detect him in +evasive tears over their pages, when these were either real or romantic +enough, and to publish without mercy that he had so been caught. There +was a period in particular during which this pastime enjoyed, indeed +quite revelled in, the form of our dragging to the light, with every +circumstance of derision, the fact of his clandestine and deeply moved +perusal of G. P. R. James, our nominal congener, at that time ceasing to +be prescribed. It was his plea, in the "'fifties," that this romancer +had been his idol in the 'forties and the 'thirties, and that under +renewed, even if but experimental, surrender the associations of youth +flocked back to life--so that _we_, profane about the unduly displaced +master, were deplorably the poorer. He loved the novel in fine, he +followed its constant course in the Revue with a beautiful +inconsequence, and the more it was literature loved it the better, which +was just how he loved, as well, criticism and journalism; the particular +instance, with him, once he was in relation with it, quite sufficiently +taking care of the invidiously-viewed type--as this was indeed viewed +but a _priori_ and at its most general--and making him ever so +cheerfully forget to be consistent. Work was verily cut out for the +particular instance, as against the type, in an air and at a time +favouring so, again and again, and up and down the "literary world," a +dire mediocrity. It was the distillers of _that_ thinness, the "mere" +ones, that must have been present to him when he wrote to Emerson in +1849: "There is nothing I dread so much as literary men, especially +_our_ literary men; catch them out of the range of mere personal gossip +about authors and books and ask them for honest sympathy in your +sentiment, or for an honest repugnancy of it, and you will find the +company of stage-drivers sweeter and more comforting to your soul. In +truth the questions which are beginning to fill the best books, and will +fill the best for a long time to come, are not related to what we have +called literature, and are as well judged--I think better--by those +whom books have at all events not belittled. When a man _lives_, that is +lives enough, he can scarcely write. He cannot read, I apprehend, at +all. All his writing will be algebraicised, put into the form of sonnets +and proverbs, and the community will feel itself insulted to be offered +a big bunch of pages, as though it were stupid and wanted tedious +drilling like a child." When I begin to quote my father, however, I hang +over him perhaps even too historically; for his expression leads me on +and on so by its force and felicity that I scarce know where to stop. +"The fact is that I am afraid I am in a very bad way, for I cannot +heartily engage in any topic in which I shall appear to advantage"--the +question having been, _de part et d'autre_, of possible courses of +lectures for which the appetite of New York and Boston already announced +itself as of the largest. And it still more beguiles me that "my wife +and I are obliged--so numerous has waxed our family--to enlarge our +house in town and get a country house for the summer." Here came in that +earnest dream of the solutional "Europe" with which I have elsewhere +noted that my very youngest sensibility was fed. "These things look +expensive and temporary to us, besides being an additional care; and so, +considering with much pity our four stout boys, who have no play-room +within doors and import shocking bad manners from the street, we gravely +ponder whether it wouldn't be better to go abroad for a few years with +them, allowing them to absorb French and German and get such a sensuous +education as they can't get here." + +In 1850, however, we had still not departed for Europe--as we were not +to do for several years yet; one advantage of which was that my father +remained for the time in intercourse by letter with his English friend +Dr. J. J. Garth Wilkinson, first known during my parents' considerable +stay in London of several years before, 1843-44; and whose admirable +style of expression, in its way as personal and as vivid as Henry +James's own, with an added and doubtless more perceptibly full-blooded +massiveness, is so attested by his earlier writings,[8] to say nothing +of the rich collection of his letters (1845-55) lately before +me--notably by The Human Body and its Connection with Man, dedicated in +1851 to my father--that I wonder at the absence of such a master, in +more than one happy specimen, from the common educational exhibitions of +English prose. Dr. Wilkinson was a friend of Emerson's as well, which +leads the latter's New York correspondent to cite to him in February +1850 a highly characteristic passage from one of the London +communications. + + Carlyle came up here (presumably to Hampstead) on Monday to see + Neuberg, and spoke much of you with very kind recollections. He + remembered your metaphysics also and asked with terrible solicitude + whether they yet persevered. I couldn't absolutely say that they + did not, though I did my best to stammer out something about the + great social movement. He was suffering dreadfully from _malaise_ + and indigestion and gave with his usual force his usual putrid + theory of the universe. All great men were most miserable; the day + on which any man could say he was not miserable, that day he was a + scoundrel; God was a Divine Sorrow; to no moment could he, Carlyle, + ever say Linger, but only Goodbye and never let me see your face + again. And all this interpolated with convulsive laughter, showing + that joy would come into him were it even by the path of hysteria + and disease. To me he is an unprofitable man, and though he gave me + the most kind invitation I have too much respect for my stomach to + go much into his company. Where hope is feeble genius and the human + voice are on the way to die. By the next boat I will endeavour to + send you over my thoughts on his recent pamphlet, the first of a + series of Latter-Day-Tracts. He is very rapidly falling out with + all his present admirers, for which I like them all the better; and + indeed is driving fast toward social views--only his is to be a + compulsory, not an attractive, socialism. + +After quoting which my father comments: "Never was anything more false +than this worship of sorrow by Carlyle; he has picked it up out of past +history and spouts it for mere display, as a virtuoso delights in the +style of his grandfather. It is the merest babble in him, as everyone +who has ever talked an hour with him will acquit him of the least grain +of humility. A man who has once uttered a cry of despair should ever +after clothe himself in sackcloth and ashes." + +The writer was to have meanwhile, before our migration of 1855, a +considerable lecturing activity. A confused, yet perfectly recoverable +recollection, on my own part, of these years, connects itself with our +knowledge that our father engaged in that practice and that he went +forth for the purpose, with my mother always in earnest and confident +even though slightly fluttered attendance, at about the hour of our +upward procession to bed; which fact lent to the proceeding--that is to +_his_--a strange air of unnatural riot, quite as of torch-lighted and +wind-blown dissipation. We went to plays and to ballets, and they had +comparatively speaking no mystery; but at no lecture had we ever been +present, and these put on for my fancy at least a richer light and +shade, very much as if we ourselves had been on the performing side of +the curtain, or the wonder of admiring (in our mother's person) and of +being admired (in our father's) had been rolled for us into a single +glory. This glory moreover was not menaced, but only made more of a +thrill by the prime admirer's anxiety, always displayed at the last, as +to whether they were not starting without the feature of features, the +_corpus delicti_ or manuscript itself; which it was legendary with us +that the admired had been known to drive back for in an abashed flurry +at the moment we were launched in dreams of him as in full, though +mysterious, operation. I can see him now, from the parlour window, at +the door of the carriage and under the gusty street-lamp, produce it +from a coat-tail pocket and shake it, for her ideal comfort, in the +face of his companion. The following, to Emerson, I surmise, is of some +early date in the autumn of '52. + + I give three lectures in Boston at the Masonic Temple; the first + and second on Nov. 5th and 8th respectively. I should be greatly + appalled in some respects, but still charmed, to have you for an + auditor, seeing thus a hundred empty seats obliterated; but, I beg + of you, don't let any engagement suffer by such kindness to me. + Looking over the lectures again they horrify me with their + loud-mouthed imbecility!--but I hope they may fall upon less + hardened ears in some cases. I am sure that the thought which is in + them, or rather seems to me to struggle to be in them, is worthy of + all men's rapturous homage, and I will trust that a glimpse of it + may somehow befall my patient auditory. The fact is that a vital + truth can never be transferred from one mind to another, because + life alone appreciates it. The most one can do for another is to + plant some rude formula of such truths in his memory, leaving his + own spiritual chemistry to set free the germ whenever the demands + of his life exact it. The reason why the gods seem so powerless to + the sensuous understanding, and suffer themselves to be so long + defamed by our crazy theologies, is that they are life, and can + consequently be revealed only to life. But life is simply the + passage of idea into action; and our crazy theologies forbid ideas + to come into action any further than our existing institutions + warrant. Hence man leads a mere limping life, and the poor gods who + are dependent upon his manliness for their true revelation and for + their real knowledge, are doomed to remain forever unknown, and + even denied by such solemn pedants as Mr. Atkinson and Miss + Martineau. However, I shall try to convert _myself_ at least into + an army of Goths and Huns, to overcome and destroy our existing + sanctities, that the supernal splendours may at length become + credible and even visible. Good-bye till we meet in Boston, and + cultivate your goodnature according to my extensive needs. + +I bridge the interval before our migration of 1855 exactly for the sake +of certain further passages addressed to the same correspondent, from +London, in the following year. The letter is a long one and highly +significant of the writer's familiar frankness, but I must keep down my +examples--the first of which glances at his general sense of the men he +mainly met. + + They are all of them depressed or embittered by the public + embarrassments that beset them; deflected, distorted, somehow + despoiled of their rich individual manliness by the necessity of + providing for these imbecile old inheritances of church and state. + Carlyle is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own + grease, only infinitely _more_ unreconciled to the blest Providence + which guides human affairs. He names God frequently and alludes to + the highest things as if they were realities, but all only as for a + picturesque effect, so completely does he seem to regard them as + habitually circumvented and set at naught by the politicians. I + took our friend M. to see him, and he came away greatly distressed + and desillusionne, Carlyle having taken the utmost pains to deny + and descry and deride the idea of his having done the least good to + anybody, and to profess indeed the utmost contempt for everybody + who thought he had, and poor M. being intent on giving him a + plenary assurance of this fact in his own case.... Arthur Helps + seems an amiable kindly little man with friendly offers, but I told + him I had no intention to bore him, and would at most apply to him + when I might want a good hatter or bootmaker. He fancied a + little--at least I thought this was the case--that I was going to + make a book, and might be indiscreet enough to put him in!.... ---- + disappoints me, he is so eaten up with the "spirits" and all that. + His imagination is so vast as to dwarf all the higher faculties, + and his sympathy as narrow as Dr. Cheever's or Brownson's. No + reasonable man, it is true, likes the clergy or the philosophers, + but ----'s dislike of them seems as envenomed as that between rival + tradesmen or rival beauties. One can't endure the nonsense they + talk, to be sure, but when one considers the dear human meaning and + effort struggling at the bottom of it all one can feel still less + any personal separation from the men themselves. ----'s sarcasm is + of the fiercest, and on the whole he is only now at last sowing his + intellectual wild oats--he will grow more genial in good time. This + is it: I think he is but now finding his youth! That which we on + our side of the water find so early and exhaust so prodigally he + has found thus much later--I mean an emancipation from the shackles + of custom; and the kicking up of his heels consequently is + proportionate to his greater maturity of muscle. Mrs. ---- is a + dear little goose of a thing, who fancies the divine providence in + closer league with herself than with others, giving her intimations + of events about to happen and endowing her with peculiar + perspicacity in the intuition of remedies for disease; and ----, + the great brawny fellow, sits by and says never a word in abatement + of this enormous domestic inflation, though the visitor feels + himself crowded by it into the most inconsiderable of corners. A + sweet, loving, innocent woman like Mrs. ---- oughtn't to grow + egotistical in the company of a truly wise man, and this + accordingly is another quarrel I have with ----. In short I am + getting to the time of life when one values one's friends for what + they are more than for what they do. I am just as much impressed as + ever by his enormous power, but the goodness out of which it is + born and the wisdom by which it is nurtured and bred are things I + don't so much see. + +The correspondence grew more interspaced, and with the year 1861 and the +following, when we were at home again, became a matter of the occasional +note. I have before me a series of beautiful examples of Emerson's share +in it--during the earlier time copious enough; but these belong +essentially to another case. I am all but limited, for any further show +of the interesting relation than I have already given, to reproducing a +few lines from Emerson's Diary, passages unpublished at the moment I +write, and the first of them of April 1850. "I have made no note of +these long weary absences at New York and Philadelphia. I am a bad +traveller, and the hotels are mortifications to all sense of well-being +in me. The people who fill them oppress me with their excessive +virility, and would soon become intolerable if it were not for a few +friends who, like women, tempered the acrid mass. Henry James was true +comfort--wise, gentle, polished, with heroic manners and a serenity like +the sun." The hotels of those days may well have been an +ordeal--distinct to me still, from no few childish glimpses of their +bareness of ease and rudeness of _acceuil_; yet that our justly +fastidious friend was not wholly left to their mercy seems signified by +my not less vivid remembrance of his staying with us on occasion in New +York; some occasion, or occasions, I infer, of his coming on to lecture +there. Do I roll several occasions into one, or amplify one beyond +reason?--this last being ever, I allow, the waiting pitfall of a +chronicler too memory-ridden. I "visualise" at any rate the winter +firelight of our back-parlour at dusk and the great Emerson--I knew he +was great, greater than any of our friends--sitting in it between my +parents, before the lamps had been lighted, as a visitor consentingly +housed only could have done, and affecting me the more as an apparition +sinuously and, I held, elegantly slim, benevolently aquiline, and +commanding a tone alien, beautifully alien, to any we heard roundabout, +that he bent this benignity upon me by an invitation to draw nearer to +him, off the hearth-rug, and know myself as never yet, as I was not +indeed to know myself again for years, in touch with the wonder of +Boston. The wonder of Boston was above all just then and there for me +in the sweetness of the voice and the finish of the speech--this latter +through a sort of attenuated emphasis which at the same time made sounds +more important, more interesting in themselves, than by any revelation +yet vouchsafed us. Was not this my first glimmer of a sense that the +human tone _could_, in that independent and original way, be +interesting? and didn't it for a long time keep me going, however +unwittingly, in that faith, carrying me in fact more or less on to my +day of recognising that it took much more than simply not being of New +York to produce the music I had listened to. The point was that, however +that might be, I had had given me there in the firelight an absolutely +abiding measure. If I didn't know from that hour forth quite all it was +to _not_ utter sounds worth mentioning, I make out that I had at least +the opposite knowledge. And all by the operation of those signal +moments--the truth of which I find somehow reflected in the fact of my +afterwards knowing one of our household rooms for the time--it must have +been our only guest-chamber--as "Mr. Emerson's room." The evening +firelight played so long for me upon the door--that is to the length +probably of three days, the length of a child's impression. But I must +not let this carry me beyond the second note of the Diary, this time of +May 1852. "'I do not wish this or that thing my fortune will procure, I +wish the great fortune,' said Henry James, and said it in the noblest +sense." The report has a beauty to me without my quite understanding it; +the union of the two voices in it signifies quite enough. The last very +relevant echo of my father's by itself, in the connection, I hasten now +to find in a communication that must have been of the summer of 1869, +when Dr. Wilkinson paid his only visit to America--this apparently of +the briefest. The letter to Emerson from Cambridge notes that his +appearance there had been delayed. + + He may come to-morrow possibly: if in the morning I will telegraph + you; if in the evening I shall try to keep him over Monday that you + may meet him here at dinner on that day. But I fear this bothersome + Sabbath and its motionless cars may play us a trick. I shall hope + for a generous Monday all the same, and if that hope is baulked + shall owe Sunday a black-eye--and will pay my debt on the first + suitable occasion, I warrant you. What an awkward story (the letter + continues) The Nation to-day tells of Charles Sumner! Charles's + burly voice has always had for me a dreadfully hollow sound, as if + it came from a great copper vat, and I have loved him but with fear + and trembling accordingly. Is he _really_, like all American + politicians, tricky, or is The Nation--so careful about facts + ordinarily--only slanderous?... Carlyle nowadays is a palpable + nuisance. If he holds to his present mouthing ways to the end he + will find no showman la-bas to match him, for I hold Barnum a much + more innocent personage. I shouldn't wonder if Barnum grew + regenerate in some far off day by mere force of his democracy. But + Carlyle's intellectual pride is so stupid that one can hardly + imagine anything able to cope with it. + +The following, in so different a key, is of some seven years earlier +date--apparently '62; but I have let it stand over, for reasons, that it +may figure here as the last of the communications addressed to Emerson +that I shall cite. Written at an hotel, the Tremont House, in Boston, it +marks his having come up from Newport for attendance at some meeting of +a dining-club, highly distinguished in composition, as it still happily +remains, of which he was a member--though but so occasionally present +that this circumstance perhaps explains a little the even more than +usual vivacity of his impression. Not indeed, I may add, that mustered +reasons or apologies were ever much called for in any case of the play +of that really prime note of his spontaneity. + + I go to Concord in the morning, but shall have barely time to see + you there, even if I do as much as that; so that I can't forbear to + say to you now the word I wanted as to my impression of yesterday + about Hawthorne and Ellery Channing. Hawthorne isn't to me a + prepossessing figure, nor apparently at all an _enjoying_ person in + any way: he has all the while the look--or would have to the + unknowing--of a rogue who suddenly finds himself in a company of + detectives. But in spite of his rusticity I felt a sympathy for + him fairly amounting to anguish, and couldn't take my eyes off him + all dinner, nor my rapt attention: as that indecisive little Dr. + Hedge[9] found, I am afraid, to his cost, for I hardly heard a word + of what he kept on saying to me, and resented his maliciously + putting his artificial person between me and the profitable object + of study. (It isn't however that I now feel any ill-will to him--I + could recommend anyone but myself to go and hear him preach. The + thing was that Hawthorne seemed to me to possess human substance + and not to have dissipated it all away like that culturally + debauched ----, or even like good inoffensive comforting + Longfellow.) John Forbes and you kept up the human balance at the + other end of the table, but my region was a desert with H. for its + only oasis. It was so pathetic to see him, contented sprawling + Concord owl that he was and always has been, brought blindfold into + that brilliant daylight and expected to wink and be lively, like + some dapper Tommy Titmouse. I felt him bury his eyes in his plate + and eat with such voracity that no one should dare to speak to him. + My heart broke for him as his attenuated left-hand neighbour kept + putting forth _his_ long antennae to stroke his face and try + whether his eyes were open. It was heavenly to see him persist in + ignoring the spectral smiles--in eating his dinner and doing + nothing but that, and then go home to his Concord den to fall upon + his knees and ask his heavenly Father why it was that an owl + couldn't remain an owl and not be forced into the diversions of a + canary. I have no doubt that all the tenderest angels saw to his + case that night and poured oil into his wounds more soothing than + gentlemen ever know. W. Ellery Channing too seemed so human and + good--sweet as summer and fragrant as pinewoods. He is more + sophisticated than Hawthorne of course, but still he was kin; and I + felt the world richer by two _men_, who had not yet lost themselves + in mere members of society. This is what I suspect--that we are + fast getting so fearful one to another, we "members of society" + that we shall ere long begin to kill one another in self-defence + and give place in that way at last to a more veracious state of + things. The old world is breaking up on all hands: the glimpse of + the everlasting granite I caught in H. and W. E. shows me that + there is stock enough left for fifty better. Let the old impostors + go, bag and baggage, for a very real and substantial one is aching + to come in, in which the churl shall not be exalted to a place of + dignity, in which innocence shall never be tarnished nor trafficked + in, in which every man's freedom shall be respected down to its + feeblest filament as the radiant altar of God. To the angels, says + Swedenborg, death means resurrection to life; by that necessary + rule of inversion which keeps them separate from us and us from + them, and so prevents our being mutual nuisances. Let us then + accept political and all other distraction that chooses to come; + because what is disorder and wrath and contention on the surface is + sure to be the greatest peace at the centre, working its way thus + to a surface that shall never be disorderly. + +But it is in the postscript that the mixture and the transition strike +me as most inevitable. + + Weren't you shocked at ----'s engagement? To think of that prim old + snuffers imposing himself on that pure young flame! What a world, + what a world! But once we get rid of Slavery the new heavens and + new earth will swim into reality. + +No better example could there be, I think, of my father's remarkable and +constant belief, proof against all confusion, in the imminence of a +transformation-scene in human affairs--"spiritually" speaking of course +always--which was to be enacted somehow without gross or vulgar +visibility, or at least violence, as I have said, but was none the less +straining to the front, and all by reason of the world's being, deep +within and at heart, as he conceived, so achingly anxious for it. He had +the happiness--though not so untroubled, all the while, doubtless, as +some of his declarations would appear to represent--of being able to see +his own period and environment as the field of the sensible change, and +thereby as a great historic hour; that is, I at once subjoin, I more or +less _suppose_ he had. His measure of the imminent and immediate, of the +socially and historically visible and sensible was not a thing easy to +answer for, and when treated to any one of the loud vaticinations or +particular revolutionary messages and promises our age was to have so +much abounded in, all his sense of proportion and of the whole, of the +real and the ridiculous, asserted itself with the last emphasis. In that +mixture in him of faith and humour, criticism and conviction, that mark +of a love of his kind which fed on discriminations and was never so +moved to a certain extravagance as by an exhibited, above all by a +cultivated or in the least sententious vagueness in respect to these, +dwelt largely the original charm, the peculiarly social and living +challenge (in that it was so straight and bright a reflection of life) +of his talk and temper. Almost all of my father shines for me at any +rate in the above passages, and in another that follows, with their so +easy glide from discrimination, as I have called it, that is from +analytic play, in the outward sphere, to serenity of synthesis and +confidence and high joy in the inward. It was as if he might have liked +so to see his fellow-humans, fellow-diners, fellow-celebrities or +whatever, in that acuity of individual salience, in order to proceed +thence to some enormous final doubt or dry renouncement--instead of +concluding, on the contrary, and on the same free and familiar note, to +the eminently "worth while" character of life, or its susceptibility to +vast and happy conversions. With which too, more than I can say, have I +the sense here of his so finely contentious or genially perverse impulse +to carry his wares of observation to the market in which they would on +the whole bring least rather than most--where his offering them at all +would produce rather a flurry (there might have been markets in which it +had been known to produce almost a scandal), and where he would in fact +give them away for nothing if thereby he might show that such produce +grew. Never was there more of a case of the direct friendliness to +startling growths--if so they might be held--of the very soil that lies +under our windows. I don't think he liked to scandalise--certainly he +didn't in the least for scandal's sake; but nothing inspired him more to +the act and the pleasure of appreciation for appropriation, as it might +be termed, than the deprecating attitude of others on such ground--that +degree of shyness of appropriation on their part which practically left +appreciation vague. It was true that the appreciation for a human use, +as it might be called--that is for the high optimistic transition--could +here carry the writer far. + + + + +VII + + +I find markedly relevant at this point a letter from Newport in the +autumn of '61 to another correspondent, one of a series several other +examples of which no less successfully appeal to me, even though it +involve my going back a little to place three or four of these latter, +written at Geneva in 1860. Mrs. William Tappan, primarily Caroline +Sturgis of Boston, was for long years and to the end of her life our +very great friend and one of my father's most constant and most +considered interlocutors, both on the ground of his gravity and on that +of his pleasantry. She had spent in Europe with her husband and her two +small daughters very much the same years, from early in the summer of +'55 till late in the autumn of '60, that we had been spending; and like +ourselves, though with less continuity for the time, she had come to +live at Newport, where, with no shadow of contention, but with an +admirable intelligence, of the incurably ironic or mocking order, she +was such a light, free, somewhat intellectually perverse but socially +impulsive presence (always for instance insatiably hospitable) as our +mustered circle could ill have spared. If play of mind, which she +carried to any point of quietly-smiling audacity that might be, had not +already become a noted, in fact I think the very most noted, value among +us, it would have seated itself there in her person with a nervous +animation, a refinement of what might have been called soundable +sincerity, that left mere plump assurance in such directions far in the +lurch. And she was interesting, she became fairly historic, with the +drawing-out of the years, as almost the only survivor of that young band +of the ardent and uplifted who had rallied in the other time to the +"transcendental" standard, the movement for organised candour of +conversation on almost all conceivable or inconceivable things which +appeared, with whatever looseness, to find its prime inspirer in Emerson +and become more familiarly, if a shade less authentically, vocal in +Margaret Fuller. Hungry, ever so cheerfully and confidently hungry, had +been much of the New England, and peculiarly the Boston, of those days; +but with no such outreaching of the well-scoured empty platter, it +probably would have struck one, as by the occasional and quite +individual agitation of it from some ruefully-observed doorstep of the +best society. It was from such a doorstep that Caroline Sturgis had +originally taken her restless flight, just as it was on such another +that, after a course of infinite freedom of inquiry and irony, she in +the later time, with a fortune inherited, an hospitality extended and a +genial gravity of expression confirmed, alighted again, to the no small +re-enrichment of a company of friends who had had meanwhile scarce any +such intellectual adventures as she was to retain, in a delicate and +casual irreverence, the just slightly sharp fragrance or fine asperity +of, but who might cultivate with complacency and in support of the +general claim to comprehensive culture and awareness unafraid the legend +of her vicarious exposure. + +Mr. Frank Sanborn's school, which I have already mentioned and to which +the following alludes, was during the years immediately preceding the +War, as during those of the War itself, the last word of what was then +accounted the undauntedly modern, flourishing as it did under the +patronage of the most "advanced" thought. The "coeducational" idea had +up to that time, if I mistake not, taken on no such confident and +consistent, certainly no such graceful or plausible form; small boys and +big boys, boys from near and boys from far, consorted there and +cohabited, so far as community of board and lodging and of study and +sport went, with little girls and great girls, mainly under the earnest +tutoring and elder-sistering of young women accomplished as scholarly +accomplishment in such cases was then understood, but with Mr. Sanborn +himself of course predominantly active and instructional, and above all +with the further felicity of the participation of the generous Emerson +family by sympathy and interest and the protective spread of the rich +mantle of their presence. The case had been from the first a frank and +high-toned experiment, a step down from the tonic air, as was so +considerably felt, of radical conviction to the firm ground of radical +application, that is of happy demonstration--an admittedly new and +trustful thing, but all the brighter and wiser, all the more nobly and +beautifully workable for that. With but the scantest direct observation +of the attempted demonstration--demonstration, that is, of the excellent +fruit such a grafting might produce--I yet imagine the enacted and +considerably prolonged scene (it lasted a whole decade) to have heaped +perfectly full the measure of what it proposed. The interesting, the +curious, the characteristic thing was just, however, I seem to make +out--I seemed to have made out even at the time--in the almost complete +absence of difficulty. It might almost then be said of the affair that +it hadn't been difficult enough for interest even should one insist on +treating it as sufficiently complicated or composed for picture. The +great War was to leave so many things changed, the country over, so many +elements added, to say nothing of others subtracted, in the American +consciousness at large, that even though the coeducational idea, taking +to itself strength, has during these later years pushed its conquests to +the very verge of demonstration of its inevitable limits, my memory +speaks to me of the Concord school rather as of a supreme artless word +on the part of the old social order than as a charged intimation or +announcement on the part of the new. The later arrangements, more or +less in its likeness and when on a considerable scale, have appeared, to +attentive observation, I think, mere endlessly multiplied notes of the +range of high spirits in the light heart of communities more aware on +the whole of the size and number of their opportunity, of the boundless +spaces, the possible undertakings, the uncritical minds and the absent +standards about them, than of matters to be closely and preparedly +reckoned with. They have been, comparatively speaking, experiments in +the void--the great void that may spread so smilingly between wide +natural borders before complications have begun to grow. The name of the +complication before the fact is very apt to be the discovery--which +latter term was so promptly to figure for the faith that living and +working more intimately together than had up to then been conceived +possible would infinitely improve both the condition and the +performance of the brother and sister sexes. It takes long in new +communities for discoveries to become complications--though +complications become discoveries doubtless often in advance of this; the +large vague area, with its vast marginal ease, over which confidence +could run riot and new kinds of human relation, elatedly proposed, +flourish in the sun, was to shift to different ground the question the +Concord school had played with, during its term of life, on its smaller +stage, under the great New England elms and maples and in the +preoccupied New England air. + +The preoccupation had been in a large measure, it is true, exactly with +such possibilities, such bright fresh answers to old stale riddles, as +Mr. Sanborn and his friends clubbed together to supply; but I can only, +for my argument, recover the sense of my single visit to the scene, +which must have been in the winter of '62-'63, I think, and which put +before me, as I seem now to make out, some suggested fit of +perversity--not desperate, quite harmless rather, and almost frivolously +futile, on the part of a particular little world that had been thrown +back upon itself for very boredom and, after a spell of much admired +talking and other beating of the air, wanted for a change to "do" +something. The question it "played" with I just advisedly said--for what +could my impression have been, personally if indirectly gathered, and +with my admirably communicative younger brother to testify, but that if +as a school, in strict parlance, the thing was scarce more than naught, +as a prolonged pastime it was scarce less than charming and quite filled +up in that direction its ample and original measure? I have to reckon, I +here allow, with the trick of what I used irrepressibly to read into +things in front of which I found myself, for gaping purposes, planted by +some unquestioned outer force: it seemed so prescribed to me, so imposed +on me, to read more, as through some ever-felt claim for roundness of +aspect and intensity of effect in presented matters, whatever they might +be, than the conscience of the particular affair itself was perhaps +developed enough to ask of it. The experience of many of the Concord +pupils during the freshness of the experiment must have represented for +them a free and yet ever so conveniently conditioned taste of the +idyllic--such possibilities of perfect good comradeship between +unsuspected and unalarmed youths and maidens (on a comprehensive ground +that really exposed the business to a light and put it to a test) as +they were never again to see so favoured in every way by circumstance +and, one may quite emphatically say, by atmosphere. It is the atmosphere +that comes back to me as most of all the making of the story, even when +inhaled but by an occasional whiff and from afar--the manner of my own +inhaling. In that air of charmed and cultivated good faith nothing for +which the beautiful might be so presumingly claimed--if only claimed +with a sufficiently brave clean emphasis--wouldn't have _worked_, which +was the great thing; every one must have felt that what was aspired to +did work, and as I catch the many-voiced report of it again (many-voiced +but pretty well suffused with one clear tone, this of inflections +irreproducible now) I seem to listen in convinced admiration, though not +by any means in stirred envy, to the cheerful clatter of its working. My +failure of envy has, however, no mite of historic importance, proving as +it does nothing at all but that if we had, in the family sense, so +distinctly turned our back on Europe, the distinctness was at no point +so marked as in our facing so straight to such a picture, by which I +mean to such an exhibition, as my father's letter throws off. Without +knowledge of the letter at the time I yet measured the situation much as +he did and enjoyed it as he did, because it would have been stupid not +to; but from that to any wishful vision of being in it or of it would +have been a long jump, of which I was unabashedly incapable. To have +broken so personally, so all but catastrophically, with Europe as we +had done affected me as the jump sufficient; we had landed somewhere in +quite another world or at least on the sharp edge of one; and in the +single particular sense could I, as time then went on, feel myself at +all moved, with the helpless, the baffled visionary way of it, to push +further in. What straight solicitation _that_ phase of the American +scene could exert--more coercive to the imagination than any we were +ever again, as Americans, to know--I shall presently try to explain; but +this was an intensely different matter. + + I buried two of my children yesterday--at Concord, Mass., and feel + so heartbroken this morning that I shall need to adopt two more + instantly to supply their place; and lo and behold you and William + present yourselves, or if you decline the honour Ellen and Baby. + Mary and I trotted forth last Wednesday, bearing Wilky and Bob in + our arms to surrender them to the famous Mr. Sanborn. The yellowest + sunshine and an atmosphere of balm were all over the goodly land, + while the maple, the oak and the dogwood showered such splendours + upon the eye as made the Champs Elysees and the Bois appear + parvenus and comical. Mrs. Clark is a graceless enough woman + outwardly, but so tenderly feathered inwardly, so unaffectedly kind + and motherly toward the urchins under her roof, that one was glad + to leave them in that provident nest. She has three or four other + school-boarders, one of them a daughter of John Brown--tall, erect, + long-haired and freckled, as John Brown's daughter has a right to + be. I kissed her (inwardly) between the eyes, and inwardly heard + the martyred Johannes chuckle over the fat inheritance of love and + tenderness he had after all bequeathed to his children in all good + men's minds. An arch little Miss Plumley also lives there, with + eyes full of laughter and a mouth like a bed of lilies bordered + with roses. How it is going to be possible for my two boys to + pursue their studies in the midst of that bewilderment I don't + clearly see. I am only sure of one thing, which is that if I had + had such educational advantages as that in my youth I should + probably have been now far more nearly ripe for this world's + business. We asked to see Miss Waterman, one of the teachers + quartered in the house, in order to say to her how much we should + thank her if she would occasionally put out any too lively spark + she might see fall on the expectant tinder of my poor boys' bosoms; + but Miss W. herself proved of so siliceous a quality on + inspection--with round tender eyes, young, fair and womanly--that I + saw in her only new danger and no promise of safety. My present + conviction is that a general conflagration is inevitable, ending in + the total combustion of all that I hold dear on that spot. Yet I + can't but felicitate our native land that such magnificent + experiments in education go on among us. + + Then we drove to Emerson's and waded up to our knees through a + harvest of apples and pears, which, tired of their mere outward or + carnal growth, had descended to the loving bosom of the lawn, there + or elsewhere to grow inwardly meet for their heavenly rest in the + veins of Ellen the saintly and others; until at last we found the + cordial Pan himself in the midst of his household, breezy with + hospitality and blowing exhilarating trumpets of welcome. Age has + just the least in the world dimmed the lustre we once knew, but an + unmistakable breath of the morning still encircles him, and the + odour of primaeval woods. Pitchpine is not more pagan than he + continues to be, and acorns as little confess the gardener's skill. + Still I insist that he is a voluntary Pan, that it is a condition + of mere wilfulness and insurrection on his part, contingent upon a + mercilessly sound digestion and an uncommon imaginative influx, and + I have no doubt that even he, as the years ripen, will at last + admit Nature to be tributary and not supreme. However this be, we + consumed juicy pears to the diligent music of Pan's pipe, while + Ellen and Edith softly gathered themselves upon two low stools in + the chimney-corner, saying never a word nor looking a look, but + apparently hemming their handkerchiefs; and good Mrs. Stearns, who + sat by the window and seemed to be the village dressmaker, ever and + anon glanced at us over her spectacles as if to say that never + before has she seen this wondrous Pan so glistening with dewdrops. + Then and upon the waves of that friendly music we were duly wafted + to our educational Zion and carefully made over our good and + promising and affectionate boys to the school-master's keeping. Out + into the field beside his house Sanborn incontinently took us to + show how his girls and boys perform together their worship of + Hygeia. It was a glimpse into that new world wherein dwelleth + righteousness and which is full surely fast coming upon our + children and our children's children; and I could hardly keep + myself, as I saw my children's eyes drink in the mingled work and + play of the inspiring scene, from shouting out a joyful Nunc + Dimittis. The short of the story is that we left them and rode home + robbed of our plumage, feeling sore and ugly and only hoping that + they wouldn't die, any of these cold winter days, before the + parental breast could get there to warm them back to life or cheer + them on to a better. + + Mrs. William Hunt has just come in to tell the good news of your + near advent and that she has found the exact house for you; + instigated to that activity by one of your angels, of the Hooper + band, with whom she has been in correspondence. I don't thank angel + Hooper for putting angel Hunt upon that errand, since I should like + to have had the merit of it myself. I suspect the rent is what it + ought to be: if it's not I will lay by something every week for you + toward it, and have no doubt we shall stagger through the cold + weather. + +I gather from the above the very flower of my father's irrepressible +utterance of his constitutional optimism, that optimism fed so little by +any sense of things as they were or are, but rich in its vision of the +facility with which they might become almost at any moment or from one +day to the other totally and splendidly different. A less vague or vain +idealist couldn't, I think, have been encountered; it was given him to +catch in the fact at almost any turn right or left some flagrant +assurance or promise of the state of man transfigured. The Concord +school could be to him for the hour--there were hours and hours!--such a +promise; could even figure in that light, to his amplifying sympathy, in +a degree disproportionate to its genial, but after all limited, after +all not so intensely "inflated," as he would have said, sense of itself. +In which light it is that I recognise, and even to elation, how little, +practically, of the idea of the Revolution in the vulgar or violent +sense was involved in his seeing so many things, in the whole social +order about him, and in the interest of their being more or less +immediately altered, as lamentably, and yet at the same time and under +such a coloured light, as amusingly and illustratively, wrong--wrong, +that is, with a blundering helpless human salience that kept criticism +humorous, kept it, so to speak, sociable and almost "sympathetic" even +when readiest. The case was really of his rather feeling so vast a +rightness close at hand or lurking immediately behind actual +arrangements that a single turn of the inward wheel, one real response +to pressure of the spiritual spring, would bridge the chasms, straighten +the distortions, rectify the relations and, in a word, redeem and vivify +the whole mass--after a far sounder, yet, one seemed to see, also far +subtler, fashion than any that our spasmodic annals had yet shown us. It +was of course the old story that we had only to _be_ with more +intelligence and faith--an immense deal more, certainly--in order to +work off, in the happiest manner, the many-sided ugliness of life; which +was a process that might go on, blessedly, in the quietest of all quiet +ways. _That_ wouldn't be blood and fire and tears, or would be none of +these things stupidly precipitated; it would simply have taken place by +_enjoyed_ communication and contact, enjoyed concussion or convulsion +even--since pangs and agitations, the very agitations of perception +itself, are of the highest privilege of the soul and there is always, +thank goodness, a saving sharpness of play or complexity of consequence +in the intelligence completely alive. The meaning of which remarks for +myself, I must be content to add, is that the optimists of the world, +the constructive idealists, as one has mainly known them, have too often +struck one as overlooking more of the aspects of the real than they +recognise; whereas our indefeasible impression, William's and mine, of +our parent was that he by his very constitution and intimate heritage +recognised many more of those than he overlooked. What was the finest +part of our intercourse with him--that is the most nutritive--but a +positive record of that? Such a matter as that the factitious had +absolutely no hold on him was the truest thing about him, and it was all +the while present to us, I think, as backing up his moral authority and +play of vision that never, for instance, had there been a more numerous +and candid exhibition of all the human susceptibilities than in the nest +of his original nurture. I have spoken of the fashion in which I still +see him, after the years, attentively bent over those much re-written +"papers," that we had, even at our stupidest, this warrant for going in +vague admiration of that they caught the eye, even the most filially +detached, with a final face of wrought clarity, and thereby of beauty, +that there _could_ be no thinking unimportant--and see him also fall +back from the patient posture, again and again, in long fits of remoter +consideration, wondering, pondering sessions into which I think I was +more often than not moved to read, for the fine interest and colour of +it, some story of acute inward difficulty amounting for the time to +discouragement. If one wanted drama _there_ was drama, and of the most +concrete and most immediately offered to one's view and one's suspense; +to the point verily, as might often occur, of making one go roundabout +it on troubled tiptoe even as one would have held one's breath at the +play. + +These opposed glimpses, I say, hang before me as I look back, but really +fuse together in the vivid picture of the fond scribe separated but by a +pane of glass--his particular preference was always directly to face the +window--from the general human condition he was so devoutly concerned +with. He _saw_ it, through the near glass, saw it in such detail and +with a feeling for it that broke down nowhere--that was the great thing; +which truth it confirmed that his very fallings back and long waits and +stays and almost stricken musings witnessed exactly to his intensity, +the intensity that would "come out," after all, and make his passionate +philosophy and the fullest array of the appearances that couldn't be +blinked fit together and harmonise. Detached as I could during all those +years perhaps queerly enough believe myself, it would still have done my +young mind the very greatest violence to have to suppose that any plane +of conclusion for him, however rich and harmonious he might tend to make +conclusion, could be in the nature of a fool's paradise. Small vague +outsider as I was, I couldn't have borne _that_ possibility; and I see, +as I return to the case, how little I really could ever have feared it. +This would have amounted to fearing it on account of his geniality--a +shocking supposition; as if his geniality had been thin and _bete_, +patched up and poor, and not by the straightest connections, nominal and +other, of the very stuff of his genius. No, I feel myself complacently +look back to _my_ never having, even at my small poorest, been so +_bete_, either, as to conceive he might be "wrong," wrong as a +thinker-out, in his own way, of the great mysteries, because of the +interest and amusement and vividness his attesting spirit could fling +over the immediate ground. What he saw _there_ at least could be so +enlightening, so evocatory, could fall in so--which was to the most +inspiring effect within the range of perception of a scant son who was +doubtless, as to the essential, already more than anything else a +novelist _en herbe_. If it didn't sound in a manner patronising I should +say that I saw that my father saw; and that I couldn't but have given my +own case away by not believing, however obscurely, in the virtue of his +consequent and ultimate synthesis. Of course I never dreamed of any such +name for it--I only thought of it as something very great and fine +founded on those forces in him that came home to us and that touched us +all the while. As these were extraordinary forces of sympathy and +generosity, and that yet knew how to be such without falsifying any +minutest measure, the structure raised upon them might well, it would +seem, and even to the uppermost sublime reaches, be as valid as it was +beautiful. If he so endeared himself wasn't it, one asked as time went +on, through his never having sentimentalised or merely meditated away, +so to call it, the least embarrassment of the actual about him, and +having with a passion peculiarly his own kept together his stream of +thought, however transcendent and the stream of life, however humanised? +There was a kind of experiential authority in his basis, as he felt his +basis--there being no human predicament he couldn't by a sympathy more +_like_ direct experience than any I have known enter into; and this +authority, which concluded so to a widening and brightening of the +philosophic--for him the spiritual--sky, made his character, as +intercourse disclosed it, in a high degree fascinating. These things, I +think, however, are so happily illustrated in his letters that they look +out from almost any continuous passage in such a series for instance as +those addressed in the earlier time to Mrs. Tappan. His _tone_, that is, +always so effectually looks out, and the living parts of him so +singularly hung together, that one may fairly say his philosophy _was_ +his tone. To cite a few passages here is at the same time to go back to +a previous year or two--which my examples, I hold, make worth while. He +had been on a visit to Paris toward the winter's end of '60, and had +returned to Geneva, whence he writes early in April. + + So sleepy have I been ever since my return from Paris that I am + utterly unfit to write letters. I was thoroughly poisoned by + tobacco in those horrid railway carriages, and this with want of + sleep knocked me down. I am only half awake still, and will not + engage consequently in any of those profound inquiries which your + remembrance always suggests. + + I am very sorry for you that you live in an excommunicated country, + or next door to it; and I don't wonder at your wanting to get away. + But it is provoking to think that but for your other plan + Switzerland might possess you all for the summer. It is doubtless + in part this disappointment that will unsettle us in our present + moorings and take us probably soon to Germany. What after that I + have no idea, and am always so little wilful about our movements + that I am ready the young ones should settle them. So we may be in + Europe a good while yet, always providing that war keep smooth his + wrinkled front and allow us quiet newspapers. They must fight in + Italy for some time to come, but between England and France is the + main point. If _they_ can hold aloof from tearing each other we + shall manage; otherwise we go home at once, to escape the universal + spatter that must then ensue. + + What is the meaning of all these wars and rumours of wars? No + respectable person ever seems to occupy himself with the question, + but I can't help feeling it more interesting than anything in Homer + or Plato or the gallery of the Vatican. I long daily with + unappeasable longing for a righteous life, such a life as I am sure + is implied in every human possibility, and myriads are bearing me + company. What does this show but that the issue is near out of all + our existing chaos? All our evil is fossil and comes from the mere + persistence of diseased institutions in pretending to rule us when + we ought to be left free to be living spirits of God. There is no + _fresh_ evil in the world. No one now steals or commits murder or + any other offence with the least relish for it, but only to revenge + his poor starved opportunities. The superiority of America in + respect to freedom of thought over Europe comes from this fact that + she has so nearly achieved her deliverance from such tyrannies. All + she now needs to make her right is simply an intelligent + recognition of her spiritual whereabouts. If she had this she would + put her hand to the work splendidly. You and I when we get home + will try to quicken her intelligence in that respect, will do at + any rate _our_ best to put away this pestilent munching of the tree + of knowledge of good and evil, and persuade to the belief of man's + unmixed innocence. + +Which, it will easily be seen, was optimism with a vengeance, and marked +especially in the immediacy, the state of being at hand for him, of a +social redemption. What made this the more signal was its being so +unattended with visions the least Apocalyptic or convulsional; the +better order slipping in amid the worse, and superseding it, so +insidiously, so quietly and, by a fair measure, so easily. It was a +faith and an accompanying philosophy that couldn't be said not to be +together simplifying; and yet nothing was more unmistakable when we saw +them at close range, I repeat, than that they weren't unnourished, +weren't what he himself would, as I hear him, have called the +"flatulent" fruit of sentimentality. + +His correspondent had in a high degree, by her vivacity of expression, +the art of challenging his--as is markedly apparent from a letter the +date of which fails beyond its being of the same stay at Geneva and of +the winter's end. + + If I had really imagined that I had bored you and your husband so + very little while I was in Paris in December I should long since + have repeated the experiment; the more surely that I want so much + to see again my darling nieces and delight myself in the abundance + of their large-eyed belief.... Our Alice is still under + discipline--preparing to fulfil some high destiny or other in the + future by reducing decimal fractions to their lowest possible rate + of subsistence, where they often grow so attenuated under her rapid + little fingers that my poor old eyes can no longer see them at all. + I shall go before long to England, and then perhaps--! But I shan't + promise anything on _her_ behalf. + + You ask me "why I do not brandish my tomahawk and, like Walt + Whitman, raise my barbaric yawp over the roofs of all the houses." + It is because I am not yet a "cosmos" as that gentleman avowedly + is, but only a very dim nebula, doing its modest best, no doubt, to + solidify into cosmical dimensions, but still requiring an "awful + sight" of time and pains and patience on the part of its friends. + You evidently fancy that cosmoses are born to all the faculty they + shall ever have, like ducks: no such thing. There is no respectable + cosmos but what is born to such a vapoury and even gaseous + inheritance as requires long centuries of conflict on its part to + overcome the same and become pronounced or educated in its proper + mineral, vegatable or animal order. Ducks are born perfect; that is + to say they utter the same unmodified unimproved quack on their + dying pillow that they uttered on their natal day; whereas cosmoses + are destined to a life of such surprising change that you may say + their career is an incessant disavowal of their birth, or that + their highest maturation consists in their utter renunciation of + their natural father and mother. You transcendentalists make the + fatal mistake of denying education, of sundering present from past + and future from present. These things are indissolubly one, the + present deriving its consciousness only from the past, and the + future drawing all its distinctive wisdom from our present + experience. The law is the same with the individual as it is with + the race: none of us can dodge the necessity of regeneration, of + disavowing our natural ancestry in order to come forth in our own + divinely-given proportions. The secret of this necessity ought to + reconcile us to it, however onerous the obligation it imposes; for + that secret is nothing more nor less than this, that we cosmoses + have a plenary divine origin and are bound eventually to see that + divinity reproduced in our most familiar and trivial experience, + even down to the length of our shoe-ties. If the Deity were an + immense Duck capable only of emitting an eternal quack we of course + should all have been born webfooted, each as infallible in his way + as the Pope, nor ever have been at the expense and bother of + swimming-schools. But He is a perfect man, incapable of the + slightest quackery, capable only of every honest and modest and + helpful purpose, and these are perfections to which manifestly no + one is born, but only _re_-born. We come to such states not by + learning, only by _unlearning_. No natural edification issues in + spiritual architecture of this splendour, but only a natural + demolition or undoing. I dimly recognise this great truth, and + hence hold more to a present imbecility than to a too eager + efficiency. I feel myself more fit to be knocked about for some + time yet and vastated of my natural vigour than to commence cosmos + and raise the barbaric yawp. Time enough for that when I am fairly + finished. Say what we will, you and I are all the while at school + just now. The genial pedagogue may give you so little of the ferule + as to leave you to doubt whether you really are there; but this + only proves what a wonderful pedagogue it is, and how capable of + adapting himself to everyone. + +His friend in Paris found herself at that time, like many other persons, +much interested in the exercise of automatic writing, of which we have +since so abundantly heard and as to which she had communicated some +striking observations. + + ...Your letter is full of details that interest but don't + fascinate. I haven't a doubt of a single experience you allege, and + do not agree with your friend Count S. (your writing of this name + is obscure) that the world of spirits is not an element in your + writing. I am persuaded now for a long time of the truth of these + phenomena and feel no inclination to dispute or disparage them; but + at the same time I feel to such a degree my own remoteness from + them that I am sure I could never get any personal contact with + them. The state of mind exposing one to influences of this nature, + and which makes them beneficial to it, is a sceptical state; and + this I have never known for a moment. Spiritual existence has + always been more real to me (I was going to say) than natural; and + when accordingly I am asked to believe in the spiritual world + because my senses are getting to reveal it I feel as if the ground + of my conviction were going to be weakened rather than + strengthened. Of course I should have very little respect for + spiritual things which didn't ultimately report themselves to + sense, which didn't indeed subside into things of sense as + logically as a house into its foundations. But what I deny is that + spiritual existence can be directly known on earth--known otherwise + than by correspondence or inversely. The letter of every revelation + must be directly hostile to its spirit, and only inversely + accordant, because the very pretension of revelation is that it's a + descent, an absolute coming down, of truth, a humiliation of it + from its own elevated and habitual plane to a lower one. + + Admit therefore that the facts of "spiritualism" are all true; + admit that persons really deceased have been communicating with you + about the state of Europe, the approaching crisis and the persons + known to us whom you name; in that case I should insist that, to + possess the slightest spiritual interest, their revelation should + be re-translated into the spiritual tongue by correspondences; + because as to any spirit knowing or caring to know those persons, + or being bothered about any crisis of ours, that is to me simply + incredible. Such matters have in each case doubtless some spiritual + or substantial counterpart answering in every particular to its + superficial features; and Wilkinson and Emerson, for instance, with + the others, are of course shadows of some greater or less spiritual + quantities. But I'll be hanged if there's the slightest _sensible_ + accord between the substance and the semblance on either hand. Your + spirits, no doubt, give you the very communications you report to + me; only Wilkinson spiritually interpreted and Emerson spiritually + interpreted mean things so very different from our two friends of + those denominations that if our spiritual eye were for a moment + open to discern the difference I think it highly probable--I'm sure + it is infinitely possible--we should renounce their acquaintance. + + But I have harped on this string long enough; let me change the + tune. Your spirits tell you to repose in what they are doing for + you and, with a pathos to which I am not insensible, say "Rest now, + poor child; your struggles have been great; clasp peace to your + bosom at last." And as a general thing our ears are saluted by + assurances that these communications are all urged by philanthropy + and that everyone so addressing us wants in some way to help and + elevate us. But just this is to my mind the unpleasant side of the + business. I have been so long accustomed to see the most arrant + deviltry transact itself in the name of benevolence that the moment + I hear a profession of good-will from almost any quarter I + instinctively look about for a constable or place my hand within + reach of the bell-rope. My ideal of human intercourse would be a + state of things in which no man will ever stand in need of any + other man's help, but will derive all his satisfaction from the + great social tides which own no individual names. I am sure no man + can be put in a position of dependence upon another without that + other's very soon becoming--if he accepts the duties of the + relation--utterly degraded out of his just human proportions. No + man can play the Deity to his fellow man with impunity--I mean + spiritual impunity of course. For see: if I am at all satisfied + with that relation, if it contents me to be in a position of + generosity toward others, I must be remarkably indifferent at + bottom to the gross social inequality which permits that position, + and instead of resenting the enforced humiliation of my fellow man + to myself, in the interests of humanity, I acquiesce in it for the + sake of the profit it yields to my own self-complacency. I do hope + the reign of benevolence is over; until that event occurs I am sure + the reign of God will be impossible. But I have a shocking bad cold + that racks my head to bursting almost; I can't think to any + purpose. Let me hear soon from you that I have not been + misunderstood. I wouldn't for the world seem wilfully to depreciate + what you set a high value on. No, I really can't help my judgments. + And I always soften them to within an inch of their life as it is. + +The following, no longer from the Hotel de l'Ecu, but from 5 Quai du +Mont Blanc, would indicate that his "Dear Queen Caroline," as he +addresses her, was at no loss to defend her own view of the matters in +discussion between them: in which warm light indeed it is that I was +myself in the after years ever most amusedly to see her. + + Don't scold a fellow so! Exert your royal gifts in exalting only + the lowly and humbling only the proud. Precisely what I like, to + get extricated from metaphysics, is encouragement from a few + persons like yourself, such encouragement as would lie in your + intelligent apprehension and acknowledgment of the great _result_ + of metaphysics, which is a godly and spotless life on earth. If I + could find anyone apt to that doctrine I should not work so hard + metaphysically to convince the world of its truth. And as for being + a metaphysical Jack Horner, the thing is contradictory, as no + metaphysician whose studies are sincere ever felt tempted to + self-complacency or disposed to reckon himself a good boy. Such + exaltations are not for him, but only for the artists and poets, + who dazzle the eyes of mankind and _don't_ recoil from the darkness + they themselves produce--as Dryden says, or Collins. + +Mrs. Tappan, spending the month of June in London, continued to impute +for the time, I infer (I seem to remember a later complete detachment), +a livelier importance to the supernatural authors of her "writing" than +her correspondent was disposed to admit; but almost anything was a +quickener of the correspondent's own rich, that is always so animated, +earnestness. He had to feel an interlocutor's general sympathy, or +recognise a moral relation, even if a disturbed one, for the deep tide +of his conviction to rise outwardly higher; but when that happened the +tide overflowed indeed. + + MY DEAR CAROLINA--Neither North nor South, but an eminently free + State, with no exulting shout of master and no groan of captive to + be heard in all its borders, but only the cheerful hum of happy + husband and children--how do you find London? Here in Geneva we are + so saturate with sunshine that we would fain dive to the depths of + the lake to learn coolness of the little fishes. Still, we don't + envy your two weeks of unbroken rain in dear dismal London. What a + preparation for doing justice to Lenox! You see I know--through + Mary Tweedy, who has a hearty appreciation of her London + privileges. How are A. D. and all the rest of them? _Familiar_ + spirits, are they not, on a short acquaintance?--and how pleasant + an aspect it gives to the middle kingdom to think you shall be sure + to find there such lovers and friends! Only let us keep them at a + proper distance. It doesn't do for us ever to accept another only + at that other's own estimate of himself. If we do we may as well + plunge into Tartarus at once. No human being can afford to commit + his happiness to another's keeping, or, what is the same thing, + forego his own individuality with all that it imports. The first + requisite of our true relationship to each other (spiritually + speaking) is that we be wholly independent of each other: then we + may give ourselves away as much as we please, we shall do neither + them nor ourselves any harm. But until that blessed day comes, by + the advance of a scientific society among men, we shall be utterly + unworthy to love each other or be loved in return. We shall do + nothing but prey upon each other and turn each other's life to + perfect weariness. + + The more of it then just now the better! The more we bite and + devour each other, the more horribly the newspapers abound in all + the evidences of our disgusting disorganisation, the + disorganisation of the old world, the readier will our dull ears be + to listen to the tidings of the new world which is aching to + appear, the world wherein dwelleth righteousness. Don't abuse the + newspapers therefore publicly, but tell everybody of the use they + are destined to promote, and set others upon the look-out. A. D. is + a very good woman, I haven't a doubt, but will fast grow a better + one if she would let herself alone, and me also, and all other mere + persons, while she diligently inquires about the Lord; that is + about that lustrous universal life which God's providence is now + forcing upon men's attention and which will obliterate for ever all + this exaggeration of our personalities. It is very well for lovers + to abase themselves in this way to each other; because love is a + _passion_ of one's nature--that is to say the lover is not + self-possessed, but is lifted for a passing moment to the level of + the Lord's life in the race, and so attuned to higher issues ever + after in his own proper sphere. But these experiences are purely + disciplinary and not final. All passion is a mere inducement to + action, and when at last activity really dawns in us we drop this + faculty of hallucination that we have been under about persons and + see and adore the abounding divinity which is in all persons alike. + Who will then ever be caught in that foolish snare again? I did + nothing but tumble into it from my boyhood up to my marriage; since + which great disillusioning--yes!--I feel that the only lovable + person is one who will never permit himself to be loved. But I have + written on without any intention and have now no time to say what + alone I intended, how charming and kind and long to be remembered + you were all those Paris days. Give my love to honest William and + tell my small nieces that I pine to pluck again the polished + cherries of their cheeks. My wife admires and loves you. + +From which I jump considerably forward, for its (privately) historic +value, to a communication from Newport of the middle of August '63. My +father's two younger sons had, one the previous and one at the beginning +of the current, year obtained commissions in the Volunteer Army; as a +sequel to which my next younger brother, as Adjutant of the Fifty-fourth +Massachusetts, Colonel Robert Shaw's regiment, the first body of +coloured soldiers raised in the North, had received two grave wounds in +that unsuccessful attack on Fort Wagner from which the gallant young +leader of the movement was not to return. + + Wilky had a bad day yesterday and kept me busy or I shouldn't have + delayed answering your inquiries till to-day. He is very severely + wounded both in the ankle and in the side--where he doesn't heal so + fast as the doctor wishes in consequence of the shell having made a + pouch which collects matter and retards nature. They cut it open + yesterday, and to-day he is better, or will be. The wound in the + ankle was made by a cannister ball an inch and a half in diameter, + which lodged eight days in the foot and was finally dislodged by + cutting down through (the foot) and taking it out at the sole. He + is excessively weak, unable to do anything but lie passive, even + to turn himself on his pillow. He will probably have a slow and + tedious recovery--the doctors say of a year at least; but he knows + nothing of this himself and speaks, so far as he does talk, but of + going back in the Fall. If you write please say nothing of this; he + is so distressed at the thought of a long sickness. He is vastly + attached to the negro-soldier cause; believes (I think) that the + world has existed for it; and is sure that enormous results to + civilisation are coming out of it. We heard from Bob this morning + at Morris Island; with his regiment, building earthworks and + mounting guns. Hot, he says, but breezy; also that the shells make + for them every few minutes--while he and his men betake themselves + to the trenches and holes in the earth "like so many land-crabs in + distress." He writes in the highest spirits. Cabot Russell, Wilky's + dearest friend, is, we fear, a prisoner and wounded. We hear + nothing decisive, but the indications point that way. Poor Wilky + cries aloud for his friends gone and missing, and I could hardly + have supposed he might be educated so suddenly up to serious + manhood altogether as he appears to have been. I hear from Frank + Shaw this morning, and they are all well--and admirable. + +This goes beyond the moment I had lately, and doubtless too lingeringly, +reached, as I say; just as I shall here find convenience in borrowing a +few passages from my small handful of letters of the time to follow--to +the extent of its not following by a very long stretch. Such a course +keeps these fragments of record together, as scattering them would +perhaps conduce to some leakage in their characteristic tone, for which +I desire all the fulness it can keep. Impossible moreover not in some +degree to yield on the spot to _any_ brush of the huge procession of +those particular months and years, even though I shall presently take +occasion to speak as I may of my own so inevitably contracted +consciousness of what the brush, with its tremendous possibilities of +violence, could consist of in the given case. I had, under stress, to +content myself with knowing it in a more indirect and muffled fashion +than might easily have been--even should one speak of it but as a matter +of mere vision of the eyes or quickened wonder of the mind or heaviness +of the heart, as a matter in fine of the closer and more inquiring, to +say nothing of the more agitated, approach. All of which, none the less, +was not to prevent the whole quite indescribably intensified +time--intensified through all lapses of occasion and frustrations of +contact--from remaining with me as a more constituted and sustained act +of living, in proportion to my powers and opportunities, than any other +homogeneous stretch of experience that my memory now recovers. The case +had to be in a peculiar degree, alas, that of living inwardly--like so +many of my other cases; in a peculiar degree compared, that is, to the +immense and prolonged outwardness, outwardness naturally at the very +highest pitch, that was the general sign of the situation. To which I +may add that my "alas" just uttered is in the key altogether of my then +current consciousness, and not in the least in that of my present +appreciation of the same--so that I leave it, even while I thus put my +mark against it, as I should restore tenderly to the shelf any odd +rococo object that might have slipped from a reliquary. My appreciation +of what I presume at the risk of any apparent fatuity to call my +"relation to" the War is at present a thing exquisite to me, a thing of +the last refinement of romance, whereas it had to be at the time a sore +and troubled, a mixed and oppressive thing--though I promptly see, on +reflection, how it must frequently have flushed with emotions, with +small scraps of direct perception even, with particular sharpnesses in +the generalised pang of participation, that were all but touched in +themselves as with the full experience. Clear as some object presented +in high relief against the evening sky of the west, at all events, is +the presence for me beside the stretcher on which my young brother was +to lie for so many days before he could be moved, and on which he had +lain during his boat-journey from the South to New York and thence again +to Newport, of lost Cabot Russell's stricken father, who, failing, up +and down the searched field, in respect of his own irrecoverable +boy--then dying, or dead, as afterwards appeared, well within the +enemy's works--had with an admirable charity brought Wilky back to a +waiting home instead, and merged the parental ache in the next nearest +devotion he could find. Vivid to me still is one's almost ashamed sense +of this at the hurried disordered time, and of how it was impossible not +to impute to his grave steady gentleness and judgment a full awareness +of the difference it would have made for him, all the same, to be doing +such things with a still more intimate pity. Unobliterated for me, in +spite of vaguenesses, this quasi-twilight vision of the good bereft man, +bereft, if I rightly recall, of his only son, as he sat erect and +dry-eyed at the guarded feast of our relief; and so much doubtless +partly because of the image that hovers to me across the years of Cabot +Russell himself, my brother's so close comrade--dark-eyed, youthfully +brown, heartily bright, actively handsome, and with the arrested +expression, the indefinable shining stigma, worn, to the regard that +travels back to them, by those of the young figures of the fallen that +memory and fancy, wanting, never ceasing to want, to "do" something for +them, set as upright and clear-faced as may be, each in his sacred +niche. They have each to such a degree, so ranged, the strange property +or privilege--one scarce knows what to call it--of exquisitely, for all +our time, facing us out, quite blandly ignoring us, looking through us +or straight over us at something they partake of together but that we +mayn't pretend to know. We walk thus, I think, rather ruefully before +them--those of us at least who didn't at the time share more happily +their risk. William, during those first critical days, while the +stretcher itself, set down with its load just within the entrance to our +house, mightn't be moved further, preserved our poor lacerated brother's +aspect in a drawing of great and tender truth which I permit myself to +reproduce. It tells for me the double story--I mean both of Wilky's then +condition and of the draughtsman's admirable hand. + +[Illustration: Sketch of G. W. James brought home wounded from the +assault on Fort Wagner] + +But I find waiting my father's last letter of the small group to Mrs. +Tappan. We were by that time, the autumn of 1865, settled in Boston for +a couple of years. + + MY DEAR CARRY--Are you a carry_atid_ that you consider yourself + bound to uphold that Lenox edifice through the cold winter as well + as the hot summer? Why don't you come to town? I can't _write_ what + I want to say. My brain is tired, and I gladly forego all writing + that costs thought or attention. But I have no day forgotten your + question, and am eager always to make a conquest of you; you are so + full both of the upper and the nether might as always greatly to + excite my interest and make me feel how little is accomplished + while you are left not so. I make no prayer to you; I would have no + assistance from your own vows; or the pleasure of my intercourse + with you would be slain. I would rather outrage than conciliate + your sympathies, that I might have all the joy of winning you over + at last. Hate me on my ideal side, the side that menaces you, as + much as you please meanwhile, but keep a warm corner in your regard + for me personally, as I always do for you, until we meet again. + It's a delight to know a person of your sense and depth; even the + _gaudia certaminis_ are more cheering with you than ordinary + agreements with other people. + +On which note I may leave the exchange in question, feeling how equal an +honour it does to the parties. + + + + +VIII + + +I judge best to place together here several passages from my father's +letters belonging to this general period, even though they again carry +me to points beyond my story proper. It is not for the story's sake that +I am moved to gather them, but for their happy illustration, once more, +of something quite else, the human beauty of the writer's spirit and the +fine breadth of his expression. This latter virtue is most striking, +doubtless, when he addresses his women correspondents, of whom there +were many, yet it so pervades for instance various notes, longer and +shorter, to Mrs. James T. Fields, wife of the eminent Boston publisher +and editor, much commended to us as founder and, for a time, chief +conductor of the Atlantic Monthly, our most adopted and enjoyed native +_recueil_ of that series of years. The Atlantic seemed somehow, while +the good season lasted, to live with us, whereas our relation to the two +or three other like organs, homegrown or foreign, of which there could +be any question, and most of all, naturally, to the great French Revue, +was that we lived with _them_. The light of literature, as we then +invoked or at any rate received it, seemed to beat into the delightful +Fields salon from a nearer heaven than upon any other scene, and played +there over a museum of relics and treasures and apparitions (these last +whether reflected and by that time legendary, or directly protrusive and +presented, wearers of the bay) with an intensity, I feel again as I look +back, every resting ray of which was a challenge to dreaming ambition. I +am bound to note, none the less, oddly enough, that my father's +communications with the charming mistress of the scene are more often +than not a bright profession of sad reasons for inability to mingle in +it. He mingled with reluctance in scenes designed and preappointed, and +was, I think, mostly content to feel almost anything near at hand become +a scene for him from the moment he had happened to cast into the arena +(which he preferred without flags or festoons) the golden apple of the +unexpected--in humorous talk, that is, in reaction without preparation, +in sincerity which was itself sociability. It was not nevertheless that +he didn't now and then "accept"--with attenuations. + + ...If therefore you will let Alice and me come to you on Wednesday + evening I shall still rejoice in the benignant fate that befalls my + house--even though my wife, indisposed, "feels reluctantly + constrained to count herself out of the sphere of your + hospitality;" and I will bind myself moreover by solemn vows not + to perplex the happy atmosphere which almost reigns in yours by + risking a syllable of the incongruous polemic your husband wots of. + I will listen devotedly to you and him all the evening if thereby I + may early go home repaired in my own esteem, and not dilapidated, + as has been hitherto too often the case. + +He could resist persuasion even in the insidious form of an expressed +desire that he should read something, "something he was writing," to a +chosen company. + + Your charming note is irresistible at first sight, and I had almost + uttered a profligate Yes!--that is a promise irrespective of a + power to perform; when my good angel arrested me by the stern + inquiry: What have you got to give them? And I could only say in + reply to this intermeddling but blest spirit: Nothing, my dear + friend, absolutely nothing! Whereupon the veracious one said again: + Sit you down immediately therefore and, confessing your literary + indigence to this lovely lady, pray her to postpone the fulfilment + of her desire to some future flood-tide in the little stream of + your inspiration, when you will be ready to serve her. + +The following refers to the question of his attending with my mother at +some session of a Social Club, at which a prepared performance of some +sort was always offered, but of which they had lately found it +convenient to cease to be members. + + I snatch the pen from my wife's hand to enjoy, myself, the + satisfaction of saying to you how good and kind and charming you + always are, and how we never grow tired of recounting the fact + among ourselves here, and yet how we still shall be unable to + accept your hospitality. Why? Simply because we have a due sense of + what becomes us after our late secession, and would not willingly + be seen at two successive meetings, lest the carnal observer should + argue that we had left the Club by the front door of obligation + only to be readmitted at the back door of indulgence: I put it as + Fields would phrase it. To speak of him always reminds me of + various things, so richly endowed is the creature in all good + gifts; but the dominant consideration evoked in my mind by his name + is just his beautiful home and that atmosphere of faultless womanly + worth and dignity which fills it with light and warmth, and makes + it a blessing to one's heart whenever one enters its precincts. + Please felicitate the wretch for me--! + +However earnest these deprecations he could embroider them with a rare +grace. + + My wife--who has just received your kind note in rapid route for + the Dedham Profane Asylum, or something of that sort--begs leave to + say, through me as a willing and sensitive medium, that you are one + of those _arva beata_, renowned in poetry, which, visit them never + so often, one is always glad to _re_visit, which are attractive in + all seasons by their own absolute light and without any Emersonian + pansies and buttercups to make them so. This enthusiastic Dedhamite + says further in effect that while she is duly grateful for your + courteous offer of a seat upon your sofa to hear the conquered + sage, she yet prefers the material banquet you summon us to in your + dining-room, since there we should be out of the mist and able to + discern between nature and cookery, between what eats and what is + eaten, at all events, and feel a thankful mind that we were in + solid comfortable Charles Street, instead of in the vague and wide + weltering galaxy, and should be sure to deem A. and J. (_I_ am sure + of A., and I think my wife feels equally sure of J.), finer + fireflies than ever sparkled in the old empyrean. But alas who + shall control his destiny? Not my wife, whom multitudinous cares + enthrall; nor yet myself, whom a couple of months' enforced + idleness now constrains to a preternatural activity, lest the world + fail of salvation. Please accept then our united apologies and + regrets.... + + _P.S._ Who contrived the comical title for E.'s + lectures?--"Philosophy of the People!" May it not have been a joke + of J. T. F.'s? It would be no less absurd for Emerson himself to + think of philosophising than for the rose to think of botanising. + He is the divinely pompous rose of the philosophic garden, gorgeous + with colour and fragrance; so what a sad look-out for tulip and + violet and lily, and the humbler grasses, if the rose should turn + out philosophic gardener as well. + +There connects itself with a passage in another letter to the same +correspondent a memory of my own that I have always superlatively +cherished and that remains in consequence vivid enough for some light +reflection here. But I first give the passage, which is of date of +November '67. "What a charming impression of Dickens the other night at +the Nortons' dinner! How innocent and honest and sweet he is maugre his +fame! Fields was merely superb on the occasion, but Dickens was +saintly." As a young person of twenty-four I took part, restrictedly yet +exaltedly, in that occasion--and an immense privilege I held it to slip +in at all--from after dinner on; at which stage of the evening I +presented myself, in the company of my excellent friend Arthur Sedgwick, +brother to our hostess and who still lives to testify, for the honour of +introduction to the tremendous guest. How tremendously it had been laid +upon young persons of our generation to feel Dickens, down to the soles +of our shoes, no more modern instance that I might try to muster would +give, I think, the least measure of; I can imagine no actual young +person of my then age, and however like myself, so ineffably agitated, +so mystically moved, in the presence of any exhibited idol of the mind +who should be in that character at all conceivably "like" the author of +Pickwick and of Copperfield. There has been since his extinction no +corresponding case--as to the relation between benefactor and +beneficiary, or debtor and creditor; no other debt in our time has been +piled so high, for those carrying it, as the long, the purely +"Victorian" pressure of that obligation. It was the pressure, the +feeling, that made it--as it made the feeling, and no operation of +feeling on any such ground has within my observation so much as +attempted to emulate it. So that on the evening I speak of at Shady +Hill it was as a slim and shaken vessel of the feeling that one stood +there--of the feeling in the first place diffused, public and universal, +and in the second place all unfathomably, undemonstrably, unassistedly +and, as it were, unrewardedly, proper to one's self as an already +groping and fumbling, already dreaming and yearning dabbler in the +mystery, the creative, that of comedy, tragedy, evocation, +representation, erect and concrete before us there as in a sublimity of +mastership. I saw the master--nothing could be more evident--in the +light of an intense emotion, and I trembled, I remember, in every limb, +while at the same time, by a blest fortune, emotion produced no luminous +blur, but left him shining indeed, only shining with august particulars. +It was to be remarked that those of his dress, which managed to be +splendid even while remaining the general spare uniform of the +diner-out, had the effect of higher refinements, of accents stronger and +better placed, than we had ever in such a connection seen so much as +hinted. But the offered inscrutable mask was the great thing, the +extremely handsome face, the face of symmetry yet of formidable +character, as I at once recognised, and which met my dumb homage with a +straight inscrutability, a merciless _military_ eye, I might have +pronounced it, an automatic hardness, in fine, which at once indicated +to me, and in the most interesting way in the world, a kind of economy +of apprehension. Wonderful was it thus to see, and thrilling inwardly to +note, that since the question was of personal values so great no +faintest fraction of the whole could succeed in _not_ counting for +interest. The confrontation was but of a moment; our introduction, my +companion's and mine, once effected, by an arrest in a doorway, nothing +followed, as it were, or happened (what _might_ have happened it +remained in fact impossible to conceive); but intense though the +positive perception there was an immensity more left to understand--for +the long aftersense, I mean; and one, or the chief, of these later +things was that if our hero neither shook hands nor spoke, only meeting +us by the barest act, so to say, of the trained eye, the penetration of +which, to my sense, revealed again a world, there was a grim beauty, to +one's subsequently panting imagination, in that very truth of his then +so knowing himself (committed to his monstrous "readings" and with the +force required for them ominously ebbing) on the outer edge of his once +magnificent margin. So at any rate I was to like for long to consider of +it; I was to like to let the essential radiance which had nevertheless +reached me measure itself by this accompaniment of the pitying vision. +He couldn't loosely spend for grace what he had to keep for life--which +was the awful nightly, or all but nightly, exhibition: such the economy, +as I have called it, in which I was afterwards to feel sure he had been +locked up--in spite of the appearance, in the passage from my father's +letter, of the opened gates of the hour or two before. These were but a +reason the more, really, for the so exquisitely complicated image which +was to remain with me to this day and which couldn't on any other terms +have made itself nearly so important. For that was the whole sense of +the matter. It hadn't been in the least important that we should have +shaken hands or exchanged platitudes--it had only been supremely so that +one should have had the essence of the hour, the knowledge enriched by +proof that whatever the multifold or absolute reason, no accession to +sensibility from any other at all "similar" source could have compared, +for penetration, to the intimacy of this particular and prodigious +glimpse. It was as if I had carried off my strange treasure just exactly +from under the merciless military eye--placed there on guard of the +secret. All of which I recount for illustration of the force of action, +unless I call it passion, that may reside in a single pulse of time. + +I allow myself not to hang back in gathering several passages from +another series for fear of their crossing in a manner the line of +privacy and giving a distinctness to old intimate things. The +distinctness is in the first place all to the honour of the persons and +the interests thus glimmering through; and I hold, in the second, that +the light touch under which they revive positively adds, by the magic of +memory, a composite fineness. The only thing is that to speak of my +father's correspondent here is to be more or less involved at once in +the vision of her frame and situation, and that to get at all into +relation with "the Nortons," as they were known to us at that period, to +say nothing of all the years to follow, is to find on my hands a much +heavier weight of reference than my scale at this point can carry. The +relation had ripened for us with the settlement of my parents at +Cambridge in the autumn of '66, and might I attempt even a sketch of the +happy fashion in which the University circle consciously accepted, for +its better satisfaction, or in other words just from a sense of what +was, within its range, in the highest degree interesting, the social +predominance of Shady Hill and the master there, and the ladies of the +master's family, I should find myself rich in material. That institution +and its administrators, however, became at once, under whatever recall +of them, a picture of great inclusions and implications; so true is it +of any community, and so true above all of one of the American +communities best to be studied fifty years ago in their homogeneous form +and native essence and identity, that a strong character reinforced by a +great culture, a culture great in the given conditions, obeys an +inevitable law in simply standing out. Charles Eliot Norton stood out, +in the air of the place and time--which for that matter, I think, +changed much as he changed, and couldn't change much beyond his own +range of experiment--with a greater salience, granting his background, I +should say, than I have ever known a human figure stand out with from +any: an effect involved of course in the nature of the background as +well as in that of the figure. He profited at any rate, to a degree that +was a lesson in all the civilities, by the fact that he represented an +ampler and easier, above all a more curious, play of the civil relation +than was to be detected anywhere about, and a play by which that +relation had the charming art of becoming extraordinarily multifold and +various without appearing to lose the note of rarity. It is not of +course through any exhibition of mere multiplicity that the instinct for +relations becomes a great example and bears its best fruit; the weight +of the example and the nature of the benefit depending so much as they +do on the achieved and preserved terms of intercourse. Here it was that +the curiosity, as I have called it, of Shady Hill was justified--so did +its action prove largely humanising. This was all the witchcraft it had +used--that of manners understood with all the extensions at once and all +the particularisations to which it is the privilege of the highest +conception of manners to lend itself. What it all came back to, +naturally, was the fact that, on so happy a ground, the application of +such an ideal and such a genius _could_ find agents expressive and +proportionate, and the least that could be said of the ladies of the +house was that they had in perfection the imagination of their +opportunity. History still at comparatively close range lays to its +lips, I admit, a warning finger--yet how can I help looking it bravely +in the face as I name in common courtesy Jane Norton? She distilled +civility and sympathy and charm, she exhaled humanity and invitation to +friendship, which latter she went through the world leaving at mortal +doors as in effect the revelation of a new amenity altogether--something +to wait, most other matters being meanwhile suspended, for her to come +back on a turn of the genial tide and take up again, according to the +stirred desire, with each beneficiary. All this to the extent, moreover, +I confess, that it takes the whole of one's measure of her rendered +service and her admirable life, cut so much too short--it takes the +full list of her fond acclaimers, the shyest with the clearest, those +who most waited or most followed, not to think almost more of the way +her blest influence went to waste as by its mere uneconomised and +selfless spread than of what would have been called (what was by the +simply-seeing freely enough called) her achieved success. It was given +her at once to shine for the simply-seeing and to abide forever with the +subtly; which latter, so far as they survive, are left again to +recognise how there plays inveterately within the beautiful, if it but +go far enough, the fine strain of the tragic. The household at Shady +Hill was leaving that residence early in the summer of '68 for a long +stay in Europe, and the following is of that moment. + + When I heard the other day that you had been at our house to say + farewell I was glad and also sorry, glad because I couldn't say + before all the world so easily what I wanted to say to you in + parting, and sorry because I longed for another sight of your + beautiful countenance. And then I consoled myself with thinking + that I should write you the next morning and be able to do my + feelings better justice. But when the morning came I saw how you + would, with all your wealth of friends, scarcely value a puny + chirrup from one of my like, and by no means probably expect it, + and so I desisted. And now comes your heavenly letter this moment + to renew my happiness in showing me once more your undimmed + friendly face. How delightful that face has ever been to me since + first I beheld it; how your frank and gracious and healing manners + have shed on my soul a celestial dew whenever I have encountered + you: I despair to tell you in fitting words. You are the largest + and more generous nature I know, and one that remains always, at + the same time, so womanly; and while you leave behind you such a + memory you needn't fear that our affectionate wishes will ever fail + you for a moment. I for my part shall rest in my affection for you + till we meet where to love is to live. + +Shady Hill was meanwhile occupied by other friends, out of the group of +which, especially as reflected in another of my father's letters to Miss +Norton, there rise for me beckoning ghosts; against whose deep appeal to +me to let them lead me on I have absolutely to steel myself--so far, for +the interest of it, I feel that they might take me. + + We dined the other night at Shady Hill, where the Gurneys were + charming and the company excellent; but there was a perpetual + suggestion of the Elysian Fields about the banquet to me, and we + seemed met together to celebrate a memory rather than applaud a + hope. Godkin and his wife were there, and they heartily lent + themselves to discourse of you all. Ever and anon his friendship + gave itself such an emphatic _jerk_ to your address that you might + have heard it on your window-panes if you had not been asleep. As + for her--what a great clot she is of womanly health, beauty and + benignity! That is a most unwonted word to use in such a + connection, but it came of itself, and I won't refuse it, as it + means to express a wealth that seems chaotic--seems so because + apparently not enough exercised or put to specific use. The + Ashburners and Sedgwicks continue your tradition and even ornament + or variegate it with their own original force. I go there of a + Sunday afternoon, whenever possible, to read anew the gospel of + their beautiful life and manners and bring away a text for the good + of my own household. No one disputes the authenticity of that + gospel, and I have no difficulty in spreading its knowledge. + +On which follows, as if inevitably, the tragic note re-echoed; news +having come from Dresden, in March '72, of the death of Mrs. Charles +Norton, still young, delightful, inestimable. + + What a blow we have all had in the deeper blow that has prostrated + you! I despair to tell you how keen and how real a grief is felt + here by all who have heard the desolating news. With my own family + the brooding presence of the calamity is almost as obvious as it is + in the Kirkland Street home, and I have to make a perpetual effort + to reason it down. Reflectively, I confess, I am somewhat surprised + that I could have been so _much_ surprised by an event of this + order. I know very well that death is the secret of life + spiritually, and that this outward image of death which has just + obtruded itself upon our gaze is _only_ an image--is wholly unreal + from a spiritual point of view. I know in short that your lovely + sister lives at present more livingly than she has ever lived + before. And yet my life is so low, habitually, that when I am + called upon to put my knowledge into practice I am as superstitious + as anybody else and grovel instead of soaring. Keep me in your own + sweet and fragrant memory, for nowhere else could I feel myself + more embalmed to my own self-respect. Indeed if anything could + relieve a personal sorrow to me it would be the sense that it was + shared by a being so infinitely tender and true as yourself. + +Of the mass of letters by the same hand that I further turn over too +many are of a domestic strain inconsistent with other application; but a +page here and there emerges clear, with elements of interest and notes +of the characteristic that rather invite than deprecate an emphasis. +From these I briefly glean, not minding that later dates are +involved--no particular hour at that time being far out of touch with +any other, and the value of everything gaining here, as I feel, by my +keeping my examples together. The following, addressed to me in England +early in '69, beautifully illustrates, to my sense, our father's close +participation in any once quite positive case that either one or the +other of his still somewhat undetermined, but none the less interesting +sons--interesting to themselves, to each other and to _him_--might +appear for the time to insist on constituting. William had in '68 been +appointed to an instructorship in Psychology at Harvard. + + He gets on greatly with his teaching; his students--fifty-seven of + them--are elated with their luck in having him, and I feel sure he + will have next year a still larger number attracted by his fame. He + came in the other afternoon while I was sitting alone, and, after + walking the floor in an animated way for a moment, broke out: + "Bless my soul, what a difference between me as I am now and as I + was last spring at this time! Then so hypochondriachal"--he used + that word, though perhaps less in substance than form--"and now + with my mind so cleared up and restored to sanity. It's the + difference between death and life." He had a great effusion. I was + afraid of interfering with it, or possibly checking it, but I + ventured to ask what especially in his opinion had produced the + change. He said several things: the reading of Renouvier + (particularly his vindication of the freedom of the will) and of + Wordsworth, whom he has been feeding on now for a good while; but + more than anything else his having given up the notion that all + mental disorder requires to have a physical basis. This had become + perfectly untrue to him. He saw that the mind does act + irrespectively of material coercion, and could be dealt with + therefore at first hand, and this was health to his bones. It was a + splendid declaration, and though I had known from unerring signs of + the _fact_ of the change I never had been more delighted than by + hearing of it so unreservedly from his own lips. He has been + shaking off his respect for men of mere science as such, and is + even more universal and impartial in his mental judgments than I + have known him before. + +Nothing in such a report could affect me more, at a distance, as indeed +nothing shines for me more sacredly now, than the writer's perfect +perception of what it would richly say to me, even if a little to my +comparative confusion and bewilderment; engaged as I must rightly have +appeared in working out, not to say in tentatively playing with, much +thinner things. I like to remember, as I do, ineffaceably, that my +attention attached itself, intensely and on the spot, to the very +picture, with whatever else, conveyed, which for that matter hangs +before me still: the vision of my brother, agitated by the growth of his +genius, moving in his burst of confidence, his bright earnestness, about +the room I knew, which must have been our admirable parent's study--with +that admirable parent himself almost holding his breath for the charm +and the accepted peace of it, after earlier discussions and reserves; to +say nothing too, if charm was in question, of the fact of rarity and +beauty I must have felt, or in any case at present feel, in the resource +for such an intellectually living and fermenting son of such a +spiritually perceiving and responding sire. What was the whole passage +but a vision of the fine private luxury of each?--with the fine private +luxury of my own almost blurred image of it superadded. Of that same +spring of '69 is another page addressed to myself in Europe. My memory +must at the very time have connected itself with what had remained to me +of our common or certainly of my own inveterate, childish appeal to him, +in early New York days, for repetition, in the winter afternoon +firelight, of his most personal, most remembering and picture-recovering +"story"; that of a visit paid by him about in his nineteenth year, as I +make it out, to his Irish relatives, his father's nephews, nieces and +cousins, with a younger brother or two perhaps, as I set the scene +forth--which it conduced to our liveliest interest to see "Billy +Taylor," the negro servant accompanying him from Albany, altogether rule +from the point of view of effect. The dignity of this apparition indeed, +I must parenthesise, would have yielded in general to the source of a +glamour still more marked--the very air in which the young emissary +would have moved as the son of his father and the representative of an +American connection prodigious surely in its power to dazzle. William +James of Albany was at that time approaching the term of his remarkably +fruitful career, and as I see the fruits of it stated on the morrow of +his death--in the New York Evening Post of December 20th 1832, for +instance, I find myself envying the friendly youth who could bring his +modest Irish kin such a fairytale from over the sea. I attach as I hang +upon the passage a melancholy gaze to the cloud of images of what might +have been for us all that it distractingly throws off. Our grandfather's +energy, exercised in Albany from the great year 1789, appears promptly +to have begun with his arrival there. "Everywhere we see his footsteps, +turn where we may, and these are the results of his informing mind and +his vast wealth. His plans of improvement embraced the entire city, and +there is scarcely a street or a square which does not exhibit some mark +of his hand or some proof of his opulence. With the exception of Mr. +Astor," this delightful report goes on to declare, "no other business +man has acquired so great a fortune in this State. To his enormous +estate of three millions of dollars there are nine surviving heirs. His +enterprises have for the last ten years furnished constant employment +for hundreds of our mechanics and labourers." The enterprises appear, +alas, to have definitely ceased, or to have fallen into less able hands, +with his death--and to the mass of property so handsomely computed the +heirs were, more exactly, not nine but a good dozen. Which fact, +however, reduces but by a little the rich ambiguity of the question that +was to flit before my father's children, as they grew up, with an air of +impenetrability that I remember no attempt on his own part to mitigate. +I doubt, for that matter, whether he could in the least have appeased +our all but haunting wonder as to what had become even in the hands of +twelve heirs, he himself naturally being one, of the admirable three +millions. The various happy and rapid courses of most of the +participants accounted for much, but did they account for the full +beautiful value, and would even the furthest stretch of the charming +legend of his own early taste for the amusements of the town really tell +us what had been the disposition, by such a measure, of _his_ share? Our +dear parent, we were later quite to feel, could have told us very +little, in all probability, under whatever pressure, what had become of +anything. There had been, by our inference, a general history--not on +the whole exhilarating, and pressure for information could never, I +think, have been applied; wherefore the question arrests me only through +the brightly associated presumption that the Irish visit was made, to +its extreme enlivening, in the character of a gilded youth, a youth +gilded an inch thick and shining to effulgence on the scene not +otherwise brilliant. Which image appeals to my filial fidelity--even +though I hasten not to sacrifice the circle evoked, that for which I a +trifle unassuredly figure a small town in county Cavan as forming an +horizon, and which consisted, we used to delight to hear with every +contributive circumstance, of the local lawyer, the doctor and the (let +us hope--for we _did_ hope) principal "merchant," whose conjoined +hospitality appeared, as it was again agreeable to know, to have more +than graced the occasion: the main definite pictorial touches that have +lingered with me being that all the doors always stood open, with the +vistas mostly raking the provision of whiskey on every table, and that +these opportunities were much less tempting (to our narrator) than that +of the quest of gooseberries in the garden with a certain beautiful +Barbara, otherwise anonymous, who was not of the kin but on a visit from +a distance at one of the genial houses. We liked to hear about Barbara, +liked the sound of her still richer rarer surname; which in spite of the +fine Irish harmony it even then struck me as making I have frivolously +forgotten. She had been matchlessly fair and she ate gooseberries with a +charm that was in itself of the nature of a brogue--so that, as I say, +we couldn't have too much of her; yet even her measure dwindled, for our +appetite, beside the almost epic shape of black Billy Taylor carrying +off at every juncture alike the laurel and the bay. He singularly +appealed, it was clear, to the Irish imagination, performing in a manner +never to disappoint it; his young master--in those days, even in the +North, young mastership hadn't too long since lapsed to have lost every +grace of its tradition--had been all cordially acclaimed, but not least, +it appeared, because so histrionically attended: he had been the +ringmaster, as it were, of the American circus, the small circus of +two, but the other had been the inimitable clown. My point is that we +repaired retrospectively to the circus as insatiably as our Irish +cousins had of old attended it in person--even for the interest of which +fact, however, my father's words have led me too far. What here follows, +I must nevertheless add, would carry me on again, for development of +reference, should I weakly allow it. The allusion to my brother Wilky's +vividly independent verbal collocations and commentative flights +re-echoes afresh, for instance, as one of the fond by-words that spoke +most of our whole humorous harmony. Just so might the glance at the next +visitor prompt a further raising of the curtain, save that this is a +portrait to which, for lack of acquaintance with the original, I have +nothing to contribute--beyond repeating again that it was ever the sign +of my father's portraits to supply almost more than anything else +material for a vision of himself. + + Your enjoyment of England reminds me of my feelings on my first + visit there forty years ago nearly, when I landed in Devonshire in + the month of May or June and was so intoxicated with the roads and + lanes and hedges and fields and cottages and castles and inns that + I thought I should fairly expire with delight. You can't expatiate + too much for our entertainment on your impressions, though you make + us want consumedly to go over and follow in your footsteps. Wilky + has been at home now for 2 or 3 days and is very philosophic and + enthusiastic over your letters. I hoped to remember some of his + turns of speech for you, but one chases another out of my memory + and it is now all a blank. I will consult Alice's livelier one + before I close. + + My friend ---- is a tropical phenomenon, a favourite of nature + whatever his fellow man may say of him. His face and person are + handsome rather than otherwise, and it's obvious that he is a very + unsoiled and pure piece of humanity in all _personal_ regards. And + with such a gift of oratory--such a boundless wealth of diction set + off by copious and not ungraceful gesticulation! Here is where he + belongs to the tropics, where nature claims him for her own and + flings him like a cascade in the face of conventional + good-breeding. I can't begin to describe him, he is what I have + never before met. I see that he can't help turning out excessively + tiresome, but he is not at all vulgar. He has a genius for + elocution, that is all; but a real genius and no mistake. In + comparison with Mr. F. L. or Mr. Longfellow or the restrained + Boston style of address generally, he is what the sunflower is to + the snowdrop; but on the whole, if I could kick his shins whenever + I should like to and so reduce him to silence, I prefer him to the + others. + +What mainly commends to me certain other passages of other dates (these +still reaching on a little) is doubtless the fact that I myself show in +them as the object of attention and even in a manner as a claimant for +esthetic aid. This latter active sympathy overflows in a letter of the +spring of '70, which would be open to more elucidation than I have, +alas, space for. Let the sentence with which it begins merely remind me +that Forrest, the American actor, of high renown in his time, and of +several of whose appearances toward the close of his career I keep a +memory uneffaced--the impression as of a deep-toned thunderous organ, a +prodigious instrument pounded by a rank barbarian--had been literally, +from what we gathered, an early comrade of our parent: literally, I say, +because the association could seem to me, at my hours of ease, so +bravely incongruous. By my hours of ease I mean those doubtless too +devoted to that habit of wanton dispersed embroidery for which any scrap +of the human canvas would serve. From one particular peg, I at the same +time allow, the strongest sense of the incongruity depended--my +remembrance, long entertained, of my father's relating how, on an +occasion, which must have been betimes in the morning, of his calling on +the great tragedian, a man of enormous build and strength, the latter, +fresh and dripping from the bath, had entered the room absolutely upside +down, or by the rare gymnastic feat of throwing his heels into the air +and walking, as with strides, on his hands; an extraordinary performance +if kept up for more than a second or two, and the result at any rate of +mere exuberance of muscle and pride and robustious joie de vivre. It had +affected me, the picture, as one of those notes of high colour that the +experience of a young Albany viveur, the like of which I felt I was +never to come in for, alone could strike off; but what was of the finer +profit in it was less the direct illustration of the mighty mountebank +than of its being delightful on the part of a domestic character we so +respected to have had, with everything else a Bohemian past too--since I +couldn't have borne at such moments to hear it argued as not Bohemian. +What did his having dropped in after such a fashion and at a late +breakfast-hour on the glory of the footlights and the idol of the town, +what did it fall in with but the kind of thing one had caught glimpses +and echoes of from the diaries and memoirs, so far as these had been +subject to the passing peep, of the giftedly idle and the fashionably +great, the Byrons, the Bulwers, the Pelhams, the Coningsbys, or even, +for a nearer vividness perhaps, the N. P. Willises?--of all of whom it +was somehow more characteristic than anything else, to the imagination, +that they always began their day in some such fashion. Even if I cite +this as a fair example of one's instinct for making much of a +little--once this little, a chance handful of sand, could show the +twinkle of the objective, or even the reflective, grain of gold--I still +claim value for that instanced felicity, as I felt it, of being able to +yearn, thanks to whatever chance support, over Bohemia, and yet to have +proof in the paternal presence close at hand of how well even the real +frequentation of it, when achieved in romantic youth, might enable a +person at last to turn out. The lesson may now indeed seem to have been +one of those that rather more strictly adorn a tale than point a moral; +but with me, at that period, I think, the moral ever came first and the +tale more brilliantly followed. As for the recital, in such detail, of +the theme of a possible literary effort which the rest of my letter +represents, how could I feel this, when it had reached me, as anything +but a sign of the admirable anxiety with which thought could be taken, +even though "amateurishly," in my professional interest?--since +professional I by that time appeared able to pass for being. And how +above all can it not serve as an exhibition again of the manner in which +all my benevolent backer's inveterate original _malaise_ in face of +betrayed symptoms of the impulse to "narrow down" on the part of his +young found its solution always, or its almost droll simplification, as +soon as the case might reach for him a _personal_ enough, or "social" +enough, as he would have said, relation to its fruits? Then the malaise +might promptly be felt as changed, by a wave of that wand, to the +extremity of active and expatiative confidence. + + Horatio Alger is writing a Life of Edwin Forrest, and I am afraid + will give him a Bowery appreciation. He reports his hero as a very + "fine" talker--in which light I myself don't so much recall him, + though he had a native breadth--as when telling Alger for example + of old Gilbert Stuart's having when in a state of dilapidation + asked him to let him paint his portrait. "I consented," said + Forrest, "and went to his studio. He was an old white lion, so + blind that he had to ask me the colour of my eyes and my hair; but + he threw his brush at the canvas, and every stroke was life." Alger + talks freely about his own late insanity--which he in fact appears + to enjoy as a subject of conversation and in which I believe he has + somewhat interested William, who has talked with him a good deal of + his experience at the Somerville Asylum. Charles Grinnell--though + not a propos of the crazy--has become a great reader and apparently + a considerable understander of my productions; Alger aforesaid + aussi. Everyone hopes that J. G. hasn't caught a Rosamund Vincy in + Miss M. I don't know whether this hope means affection to J. or + disaffection to the young lady. + + I have written to Gail Hamilton to send me your story; but she does + it not as yet. I will renew my invitation to her in a day or two if + necessary. I went to see Osgood lately about his publishing a + selection from your tales. He repeated what he had told you--that + he would give you 15 per cent and do all the advertising, etc., you + paying for the plates; or he would pay everything and give you 10 + per cent on every copy sold after the first thousand. I shall be + glad (in case you would like to publish, and I think it time for + you to do so) to meet the expense of your stereotyping, and if you + will pick out what you would like to be included we shall set to + work at once and have the book ready by next autumn. I have + meanwhile the materials of a story for you which I was telling + William of the other day as a regular Tourgeneff subject, and he + urged me to send it off to you at once--he was so struck with it. + + Matthew Henry W. was a very cultivated and accomplished young man + in Albany at the time I was growing up. He belonged to a highly + respectable family of booksellers and publishers and was himself + bred to the law; but had such a love of literature, and more + especially of the natural sciences, that he never devoted himself + strictly to his profession. He was the intimate friend of my dear + old tutor, Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian, and of other + distinguished men of science; he corresponded with foreign + scientific bodies, and his contributions to science generally were + of so original a cast as to suggest great hopes of his future + eminence. He was a thorough gentleman, of perfect address and + perfect courage--utterly unegotistic, and one's wonder was how he + had ever grown up in Albany or resigned himself to living there. + One day he invested his money, of which he had a certain quantity, + in a scheme much favoured by the president of the bank in which he + deposited, and this adventure proved a fortune. There lived near us + as well a family of the name of K----, your cousin Mary Minturn + Post's stepmother being of its members; and this family reckoned + upon a great social sensation in bringing out their youngest + daughter, Lydia Sibyl, who had never been seen by mortal eye + outside her own immediate circle, save that of a physician who + reported that she was fabulously beautiful. She _was_ the most + beautiful girl I think I ever saw, at a little distance. Well, she + made her sensation and brought Matthew Henry promptly to her feet. + Her family wanted wealth above all things for her; but here was + wealth and something more, very much more, and they smiled upon + his suit. Everything went merrily for a while--M. H. was deeply + intoxicated with his prize. Never was man so enamoured, and never + was beauty better fitted to receive adoration. She was of an + exquisite Grecian outline as to face, with a countenance like the + tender dawn and form and manners ravishingly graceful. But W. was + not content with his adventure--he embarked again and lost almost + all he owned. The girl's father--or her mother rather, being the + ruler of the family and as hard as the nether world at heart--gave + the cue to her daughter and my friend was dismissed. He couldn't + believe his senses, he raved and cursed his fate, but it was + inexorable. What was to be done? With a bitterness of heart + inconceivable he plucked his revenge by marrying at once a stout + and blooming jade who was to Lydia Sibyl as a peony to a violet, + absolutely nothing but flesh and blood. Her he bore upon his arm at + fashionable hours through the streets; her he took to church, + preserving his admirable ease and courtesy to everyone, as if + absolutely nothing had occurred; and her he pretended to take to + his bosom in private, with what a shudder one can imagine. + Everybody stood aghast. He went daily about his affairs, as serene + and unconscious apparently as the moon in the heavens. Soon his + poverty showed itself in certain economies of his attire, which had + always been most recherche. Soon again he broke his leg and went + about on crutches, but neither poverty nor accident had the least + power to ruffle his air of equanimity. He was always superior to + his circumstances, met you exactly as he had always done, impressed + you always as the best-bred man you knew, and left you wondering + what a heart and what a brain lay behind such a fortune. One + morning we all read in the newspaper at breakfast that Mr. M. H. W. + had appealed the day before to the protection of the police + against his wife, who had taken to beating him and whom as a woman + he couldn't deal with by striking back; and the police responded + properly to his appeal. He went about his affairs as usual that day + and every day, never saying a word to any one of his trouble nor + even indirectly asking sympathy, but making you feel that here if + anywhere was a rare kind of manhood, a self-respect so eminent as + to look down with scorn on the refuges open to ordinary human + weakness. This lasted five or six years. He never drank or took to + other vices, and lived a life of such decorum, so far as his own + action was concerned, a life of such interest and science and + literature, as to be the most delightful and unconscious of + companions even when his coat was at the last shabbiness and you + didn't dare to look at him for fear of betraying your own vulgar + misintelligence. Finally Lydia Sibyl died smitten with smallpox and + all her beauty gone to hideousness. He lingered awhile, his + charming manners undismayed still, his eye as undaunted as at the + beginning, and then he suddenly died. I never knew his equal for a + manly force competent to itself in every emergency and seeking none + of the ordinary subterfuges that men so often seek to hide their + imbecility. I think it a good basis.... + +Returning from Europe in June '70, after a stay there of some fifteen +months, I had crossed the sea eastward again two years later, with my +sister and our admirable aunt as companions--leaving them, I may +mention, to return home at the end of six months while I betook myself +to Italy, where I chiefly remained till the autumn of '74. The following +expresses our father's liberality of recognition and constant +tenderness of tone in a manner that no comment need emphasise, but at +one or two of his references I allow myself to glance. I happen to +remember perfectly for instance the appearance of the novel of Madame +Sand's that he so invidiously alludes to in one of the first numbers of +the cherished Revue that reached us after the siege of Paris had been +raised--such a pathetically scant starved pale number, I quite recall, +as expressed the share even of the proud periodical in the late general +and so tragic dearth; with which it comes back to me that I had myself a +bit critically mused on the characteristic queerness, the oddity of the +light thrown on the stricken French consciousness by the prompt +sprouting of _such_ a flower of the native imagination in the chill air +of discipline accepted and after the administration to that +consciousness of a supposedly clarifying dose. But I hadn't gone the +length of my father, who must have taken up the tale in its republished +form, a so slim salmon-coloured volume this time: oh the repeated +arrival, during those years, of the salmon-coloured volumes in their +habit as they lived, a habit reserved, to my extreme appreciation, for +this particular series, and that, enclosing the extraordinarily fresh +fruit of their author's benign maturity, left Tamaris and Valvedre and +Mademoiselle La Quintinie in no degree ever "discounted" for us as +devotees of the Revue, I make out, by their being but renewals of +acquaintance. The sense of the salmon-coloured distinctive of Madame +Sand was even to come back to me long years after on my hearing Edmond +de Goncourt speak reminiscentially and, I permit myself to note, not at +all reverently, of the _robe de satin fleur-de-pecher_ that the +illustrious and infatuated lady, whose more peculiar or native tint, as +Blanche Amory used to say, didn't contribute to a harmony, _s'etait fait +faire_ in order to fix as much as possible the attention of Gustave +Flaubert at the Diner Magny; of Gustave Flaubert, who, according to this +most invidious of reporters, disembroiled from each other with too scant +ease his tangle of possibly incurred ridicule from the declared +sentiment of so old a woman, even in a peach-blossom dress, and the +glory reflected on him by his admirer's immense distinction. Which +vision of a complicated past, recovered even as I write--and of a past +indeed contemporary with the early complacencies I attribute to +ourselves--doesn't at all blur its also coming back to me that I was to +have found my parent "hard on" poor Francia in spite of my own +comparative reserves; these being questions and shades that I rejoice to +think of our having had so discussionally, and well at home for the most +part, the social education of. I see that general period as quite +flushed and toned by the salmon-coloured covers; so that a kind of +domestic loyalty would ever operate, as we must have all felt, to make +us take the thick with the thin and not _y regarder_ for a Francia the +more or the less. When I say all indeed I doubtless have in mind +especially my parents and myself, with my sister and our admirable aunt +(in her times of presence) thrown in--to the extent of our subjection to +the charm of such matters in particular as La Famille de Germandre, La +Ville Noire, Nanon and L'Homme de Neige, round which last above all we +sat ranged in united ecstasy; so that I was to wonder through the after +years, and I think perhaps to this day, how it could come that a case of +the "story" strain at its finest and purest, a gush of imaginative force +so free and yet so artfully directed, shouldn't have somehow "stood out" +more in literary history. Perhaps indeed L'Homme de Neige does +essentially stand out in the unwritten parts of that record--which are +content to be mere tacit tender tradition; for all the world as if, +since there are more or less dreadful perpetuated books, by the hundred, +dreadful from whatever baseness or whatever scantness, that for shame, +as it were, we never mention, so one may figure others as closeted in +dimness (than which there is nothing safer) by the very scruple of +respect at its richest. I hover for instance about the closet of L'Homme +de Neige, I stand outside a moment as if listening for a breath from +within; but I don't open the door, you see--which must mean, in all +probability, that I wouldn't for the world inconsiderately finger again +one of the three volumes; _that_ meaning, in its turn, doubtless, that I +have heard the breath I had listened for and that it can only have been +what my argument wants, the breath of life unquenched. Isn't it relevant +to this that when she was not reading Trollope our dear mother was +reading "over" La Famille de Germandre, which, with several of its +companions of the same bland period, confirmed her in the sense that +there was no one like their author for a "love-story"?--a conviction, +however, that when made articulate exposed her to the imputation of a +larger tolerance than she doubtless intended to project; till the matter +was cleared up by our generally embracing her for so sweetly not knowing +about Valentine and Jacques and suchlike, and having only begun at La +Mare au Diable and even thereafter been occasionally obliged to skip. + +So far do I let myself go while, to recur to my letter, Chauncey Wright +sits for me in his customary corner of the deep library sofa and his +strange conflictingly conscious light blue eyes, appealing across the +years from under the splendid arch of his fair head, one of the +handsomest for representation of amplitude of thought that it was +possible to see, seems to say to me with a softness more aimed at the +heart than any alarm or any challenge: "But what then are you going to +do for me?" I find myself simply ache, I fear, as almost the only answer +to this--beyond his figuring for me as the most wasted and doomed, the +biggest at once and the gentlest, of the great intending and unproducing +(in anything like the just degree) bachelors of philosophy, bachelors of +attitude and of life. And as he so sits, loved and befriended and +welcomed, valued and invoked and vainly guarded and infinitely pitied, +till the end couldn't but come, he renews that appeal to the old +kindness left over, as I may say, and which must be more or less known +to all of us, for the good society that was helplessly to miss a right +chronicler, and the names of which, so full at the time of their fine +sense, were yet to be writ in water. Chauncey Wright, of the great +imperfectly-attested mind; Jane Norton, of the train, so markedly, of +the distinguished, the sacrificial, devoted; exquisite Mrs. Gurney, of +the infallible taste, the beautiful hands and the tragic fate; Gurney +himself, for so long Dean of the Faculty at Harvard and trusted judge of +all judgments (this latter pair the subject of my father's glance at +the tenantship of Shady Hill in the Nortons' absence:) they would +delightfully adorn a page and appease a piety that is still athirst if I +hadn't to let them pass. Harshly condemned to let them pass, and looking +wistfully after them as they go, how can I yet not have inconsequently +asked them to turn a moment more before disappearing? + + My heart turns to you this morning, so radiant in the paternal + panoply you wear toward Alice and your aunt, and I would give a + great deal to see you. The enclosed scrap of a letter from William + is sent to show you how vastly improved are his eyes, especially + when you shall have learned that he has written us within the last + four or five days twenty pages of like density to these. He would + fain persuade us to go to Mount Desert; perhaps later we may go to + Quebec, but we are so comfortable together reading Trollope and + talking philosophy that we cheerfully drop the future from our + regard. Mamma is free and active and bracing. She is a domestic + nor'wester, carrying balm and bloom into every nook and corner of + her empire.... She hangs over The Eustace Diamonds while I try + vainly to read George Sand's Francia. I have come across nothing of + that lady's that reflects a baser light on her personal history. + What must a woman have been through to want to grovel at this time + of day in such uncleanness? Don't buy it--I wish I hadn't! The new + North American is out, with a not too interesting article of + Chauncey Wright's on Mivart, a scandalous (in point of taste) essay + of Mr. Stirling on Buckle, full of Scotch conceit, insolence and + "wut;" a very very laboured article by James Lowell on Dante, in + which he determines to exhaust all knowledge; and these are all I + have read. Mr. Stirling of course makes Buckle ridiculous, but he + stamps himself a shabby creature. + +I find the following, addressed to his daughter in August '72, so +beautifully characteristic of our parents' always explicit admonition to +us, in our dependent years, against too abject an impulse to be frugal +in their interests, that I may fairly let it stand as a monument to this +particular aspect of their affection. + + Your and H.'s last letters bring tears of joy to our eyes. It's a + delight above all delights to feel one's children turn out all that + the heart covets in children. Your conviction is not up to the + truth. Our "tender thoughts" of you are so constant that I have + hardly been able to settle to anything since you have been gone. I + can do little else than recount to myself "the tender mercies of + the Lord" to me and my household. Still I am not wholly useless; I + try to write every day, and though I haven't my daughter at hand to + look after my style and occasionally after my ideas, I manage to do + a little. Your conscientious economy is excessively touching, but + it's a little overstrained. You needn't be afraid of putting us to + any embarrassment so long as your expenses don't exceed their + present rate; and you can buy all you want in Paris without + stretching your tether a particle. This is Mamma's message as well + as mine. Charles Atkinson wishes me to say that Monte Genneroso + above Lugano Lake--the P.O. Mendrisio--offers a wondrous climate; + and Mamma thinks--so fearful is she that you will descend into + Italy before the warm weather is over and so compromise your + strength--that you had either better go there awhile first or else + be ready to retreat on it in case you find the summer heat in + Venice impossible. + +Nor does this scrap from a letter to myself at the same season breathe a +spirit less liberal--so far as the sympathy with whatever might pass for +my fondest preoccupations was concerned. These were now quite frankly +recognised as the arduous attempt to learn somehow or other to write. + + I send you The Nation, though there seems nothing in it of your + own, and I think I never fail to recognise you. A notice of Gustave + Droz's Babolain (by T. S. P., I suppose) there is; which book I + read the other day. This fumbling in the cadaver of the old world, + however, only disgusts me when so unrelieved as in this case by any + contrast or any souffle of inspiration such as you get in + Tourgueneff. It's curious to observe how uncertain the author's + step is in this story--how he seems always on the look-out for some + chance to break away. But it has mastered him, he can't lay the + ghost he has conjured. + +To which I should limit myself for the commemoration of that group of +years by the gentle aid of the always vivid excerpt, were it not that I +have before me a considerable cluster of letters addressed by the writer +of the foregoing to Mr. J. Eliot Cabot, most accomplished of Bostonians, +most "cultivated" even among the cultivated, as we used to say, and of +a philosophic acuteness to which my father highly testified, with which +indeed he earnestly contended. The correspondence in question covered, +during the years I include, philosophic ground and none other; but +though no further exhibition of it than this reference may convey is to +my purpose I lay it under contribution to the extent of a passage or two +just for the pleasure of inviting recognition, as I invite it wherever +we meet an instance, of the fashion after which the intensely animated +soul can scarce fail of a harmony and a consistency of expression that +are nothing less than interesting, that in fact become at once +beautiful, in themselves. By which remark I nevertheless do not mean to +limit the significance of the writer's side of his long argument with +Mr. Eliot Cabot, into which I may not pretend to enter, nor the part +that in any such case a rare gift for style must inveterately play. + + I grant then that I am often tempted to conceive, as I read your + letters, that we differ only in your terms being more abstract, + mine more concrete; and yet I really don't think this difference is + exhaustive. If I thought Philosophy capable ever of being reduced + to logical compass or realising itself as science, I should give in + at once. But this is just what I cannot think. Philosophy is the + doctrine exclusively of the infinite in the finite, and deals with + the latter therefore only as a mask, only as _harbouring_ the + former. But if you formulate it scientifically your terms are + necessarily all finite, as furnished by experience, and the + infinite is excluded or at most creeps in as the + indefinite--Hegel's _becoming_ for example. Thus Hegel's dialectic + modulates only in the sphere of his distance. His _being_ is + universal existence, and, as universals have only a logical truth, + being in se is equivalent to Nothing. But Nothing hasn't even a + logical basis. Lithe as human thought is it can't compass the + conception. It is a mere brutum fulmen devised to disguise the + absence of thought or its inanition; and Hegel, if he had been + wise, would have said no-thought instead of no-thing. For no-thing + doesn't express the complete absence of existence. Existence is of + two sorts, real and personal, sensible and conscious, quantitative + and qualitative. The most you are entitled to say therefore when + existence disappears in quantitative, real or sensible, form is + that it has been taken up into purely qualitative, personal or + conscious form; no-thing being the logical equivalent of + all-person. Thus I, who in Hegel's formula presumably extract + existence from being, survive the operation as person, and though I + am most clearly no-thing I am yet not _being_. Indeed I am not even + existence any longer, since by knocking thing out of being I have + forfeited my own reality, and consent henceforth to be pure + personality, _i.e._ phenomenality. And personal or phenomenal + existence is constituted by referring itself to a foreign source, + or, what is the same thing, confessing itself created: so that the + fundamental word of Philosophy, by Hegel's own formula, is + creation; which, however, as I understand him, he denies in any + objective sense of the word. This then is what I complain of in + him--with deference of course to your better knowledge, which, + however, you do not urge as yet in what seems to me a silencing + way--that he makes existence _essential_ to being, so that take + existence away and being becomes nothing. It would not be a whit + less preposterous in me to say that thought is essential to thing, + subject to object, marble to statue, canvas to picture, woman to + wife, mother to child. It is literally putting the cart before the + horse and converting Philosophy to a practical quagmire. Being + implies existence of course just as picture implies canvas, or as + personality implies reality, or as chick implies egg; but it + implies it only to a lower intelligence than itself, an unspiritual + intelligence to wit, which has no direct or inward intuition of + being, and requires to be agitated to discerning it. When I + recognise the spiritual life of Art I never think of marble or + canvas as entering even conditionally into its manifestations. + +But I hold my case for a rare command of manner thus proved, and need go +no further; the more that I have dropped too many of those threads of my +rather niggled tapestry that belong but to the experience of my own +weaving hand and the interplay of which represents thereby a certain +gained authority. I disentangle these again, if the term be not +portentous, though reflecting too, and again with complacency, that +though I thus prize them as involved most in my own consciousness, this +is just because of their attachment somewhere else to other matters and +other lives. + + + + +IX + + +I went up from Newport to Cambridge early in the autumn of '62, and on +one of the oddest errands, I think, that, given the several +circumstances, I could possibly have undertaken. I was nineteen years +old, and it had seemed to me for some time past that some such step as +my entering for instance the Harvard Law School more or less urgently +concerned what I could but try to help myself out by still putting +forward as my indispensable education--I am not sure indeed that the +claim didn't explicitly figure, or at least successfully dangle, as that +of my possibly graceful mere "culture." I had somehow--by which I mean +for reasons quite sufficient--to fall back on the merciful "mere" for +any statement of my pretensions even to myself: so little they seemed to +fit into any scheme of the conventional maximum as compared with those I +saw so variously and strongly asserted about me, especially since the +outbreak of the War. I am not sure whether I yet made bold to say it, +but I should surely be good for nothing, all my days, if not for +projecting into the concrete, by hook or by crook--that is my +imagination shamelessly aiding--some show of (again) mere life. This +impression was not in the least the flag I publicly brandished; in fact +I must have come as near as possible to brandishing none whatever, a +sound instinct always hinting to me, I gather, that the tune for such a +performance was much more after than before--before the perfect place +had been found for the real planting of the standard and the giving of +its folds to the air. No such happy spot had been marked, decidedly, at +that period, to my inquiring eye; in consequence of which the emblazoned +morsel (hoisted sooner or later by all of us, I think, somehow and +somewhere), might have passed for the hour as a light extravagant +bandanna rolled into the tight ball that fits it for hiding in the +pocket. There it considerably stayed, so far as I was concerned; and all +the more easily as I can but have felt how little any particular thing I +might meanwhile "do" would matter--save for some specious appearance in +it. This last, I recognise, had for me a virtue--principally that of +somehow gaining time; though I hasten to add that my approach to the Law +School can scarcely, as a means to this end, in the air of it that comes +back to me, have been in the least deceptive. By which I mean that my +appearance of intentions, qualifications, possibilities, or whatever +else, in the connection, hadn't surely so much as the grace of the +specious. I spoke above of the assumed "indispensability" of some show +of my being further subject to the "education" theory, but this was for +the moment only under failure to ask to whom, or for what, such a +tribute _was_ indispensable. The interest to myself would seem to have +been, as I recover the sense of the time, that of all the +impossibilities of action my proceeding to Cambridge on the very vaguest +grounds that probably ever determined a residence there might pass for +the least flagrant; as I breathe over again at any rate the comparative +confidence in which I so moved I feel it as a confidence in the positive +saving virtue of vagueness. Could I but work that force as an ideal I +felt it must see me through, for the beauty of it in that form was that +it should absolutely superabound. I wouldn't have allowed, either, that +it was vaguer to do nothing; for in the first place just staying at home +when everyone was on the move couldn't in any degree show the right +mark: to be properly and perfectly vague one had to be vague _about_ +something; mere inaction quite lacked the note--it was nothing but +definite and dull. I thought of the Law School experiment, I remember, +in all sorts of conceivable connections, but in the connection of +dulness surely never for an hour. I thought of it under the head of +"life"--by which term at the same time, I blush to confess, I didn't in +the least mean free evening access to Boston in a jangling horse-car, +with whatever extension this might give to the joy of the liberated +senses. I simply meant--well, what was monstrously to happen; which I +shall be better inspired here to deal with as a demonstration made in +its course than as a premonition relatively crude and at the time still +to be verified. Marked in the whole matter, however these things might +be, was that irony of fate under the ugly grin of which I found my +father reply in the most offhand and liberal manner to my remark that +the step in question--my joining, in a sense, my brother at +Cambridge--wouldn't be wholly impracticable. It might have been, from +his large assent to it, a masterstroke of high policy. A certain +inconsequence in this left me wondering why then if the matter was now +so natural it hadn't been to his mind a year before equally simple that +I should go to college, and to _that_ College, after a more showy, even +though I see it would have been at the same time a less presumptuous, +fashion. To have deprecated the "college course" with such emphasis only +so soon afterwards to forswear all emphasis and practically smile, in +mild oblivion, on _any_ Harvard connection I might find it in me to take +up, was to bring it home, I well recall, that the case might originally +have been much better managed. + +All of which would seem to kick up more dust than need quite have hung +about so simple a matter as my setting forth to the Cambridge scene with +no design that I could honourably exhibit. A superficial account of the +matter would have been that my father had a year or two earlier appeared +to think so ill of it as to reduce me, given the "delicacy," the inward, +not then the outward, which I have glanced at, to mild renunciation--mild +I say because I remember in fact, rather to my mystification now, no +great pang of disappointment, no soreness of submission. I didn't want +anything so much as I wanted a certain good (or wanted thus supremely +_to_ want it, if I may say so), with which a conventional going to +college wouldn't have so tremendously much to do as for the giving it up +to break my heart--or an unconventional not-going so tremendously much +either. What I "wanted to want" to be was, all intimately, just +_literary_; a decent respect for the standard hadn't yet made my +approach so straight that there weren't still difficulties that might +seem to meet it, questions it would have to depend on. Passing the +Harvard portal positively failed in fact to strike me as the shorter cut +to literature; the sounds that rose from the scene as I caught them +appeared on the contrary the most detached from any such interest that +had ever reached my ear. Merely to open the door of the big square +closet, the ample American closet, to the like of which Europe had never +treated us, on the shelves and round the walls of which the pink Revues +sat with the air, row upon row, of a choir of breathing angels, was to +take up that particular, that sacred, connection in a way that put the +coarser process to shame. The drop of the Harvard question had of a +truth really meant, as I recover it, a renewed consecration of the rites +of that chapel where the taper always twinkled--which circumstance I +mention as not only qualifying my sense of loss, but as symbolising, +after a queer fashion, the independence, blest vision (to the extent, +that is, of its being a closer compact with the life of the +imagination), that I should thus both luckily come in for and +designingly cultivate: cultivate in other words under the rich cover of +obscurity. I have already noted how the independence was, ever so few +months later, by so quaint a turn, another mere shake of the tree, to +drop into my lap in the form of a great golden apple--a value not a +simple windfall only through the fact that my father's hand had after +all just lightly loosened it. This accession pointed the moral that +there was no difficulty about anything, no intrinsic difficulty; so +that, to re-emphasise the sweet bewilderment, I was to "go" where I +liked in the Harvard direction and do what I liked in the Harvard +relation. Such was the situation as offered me; though as I had to take +it and use it I found in it no little difference. Two things and more +had come up--the biggest of which, and very wondrous as bearing on any +circumstance of mine, as having a grain of weight to spare for it, was +the breaking out of the War. The other, the infinitely small affair in +comparison, was a passage of personal history the most entirely +personal, but between which, as a private catastrophe or difficulty, +bristling with embarrassments, and the great public convulsion that +announced itself in bigger terms each day, I felt from the very first an +association of the closest, yet withal, I fear, almost of the least +clearly expressible. Scarce at all to be stated, to begin with, the +queer fusion or confusion established in my consciousness during the +soft spring of '61 by the firing on Fort Sumter, Mr. Lincoln's instant +first call for volunteers and a physical mishap, already referred to as +having overtaken me at the same dark hour, and the effects of which were +to draw themselves out incalculably and intolerably. Beyond all present +notation the interlaced, undivided way in which what had happened to me, +by a turn of fortune's hand, in twenty odious minutes, kept company of +the most unnatural--I can call it nothing less--with my view of what was +happening, with the question of what might still happen, to everyone +about me, to the country at large: it so made of these marked +disparities a single vast visitation. One had the sense, I mean, of a +huge comprehensive ache, and there were hours at which one could scarce +have told whether it came most from one's own poor organism, still so +young and so meant for better things, but which had suffered particular +wrong, or from the enclosing social body, a body rent with a thousand +wounds and that thus treated one to the honour of a sort of tragic +fellowship. The twenty minutes had sufficed, at all events, to establish +a relation--a relation to everything occurring round me not only for the +next four years but for long afterward--that was at once extraordinarily +intimate and quite awkwardly irrelevant. I must have felt in some +befooled way in presence of a crisis--the smoke of Charleston Bay still +so acrid in the air--at which the likely young should be up and doing +or, as familiarly put, lend a hand much wanted; the willing youths, all +round, were mostly starting to their feet, and to have trumped up a +lameness at such a juncture could be made to pass in no light for +graceful. Jammed into the acute angle between two high fences, where the +rhythmic play of my arms, in tune with that of several other pairs, but +at a dire disadvantage of position, induced a rural, a rusty, a +quasi-extemporised old engine to work and a saving stream to flow, I had +done myself, in face of a shabby conflagration, a horrid even if an +obscure hurt; and what was interesting from the first was my not +doubting in the least its duration--though what seemed equally clear was +that I needn't as a matter of course adopt and appropriate it, so to +speak, or place it for increase of interest on exhibition. The interest +of it, I very presently knew, would certainly be of the greatest, would +even in conditions kept as simple as I might make them become little +less than absorbing. The shortest account of what was to follow for a +long time after is therefore to plead that the interest never did fail. +It was naturally what is called a painful one, but it consistently +declined, as an influence at play, to drop for a single instant. +Circumstances, by a wonderful chance, overwhelmingly favoured it--as an +interest, an inexhaustible, I mean; since I also felt in the whole +enveloping tonic atmosphere a force promoting its growth. Interest, the +interest of life and of death, of our national existence, of the fate of +those, the vastly numerous, whom it closely concerned, the interest of +the extending War, in fine, the hurrying troops, the transfigured scene, +formed a cover for every sort of intensity, made tension itself in fact +contagious--so that almost any tension would do, would serve for one's +share. + +I have here, I allow, not a little to foreshorten--have to skip sundry +particulars, certain of the steps by which I came to think of my +relation to my injury as a _modus vivendi_ workable for the time. These +steps had after the first flush of reaction inevitably _had_ to be +communications of my state, recognitions and admissions; which had the +effect, I hasten to add, of producing sympathies, supports and +reassurances. I gladly took these things, I perfectly remember, at that +value; distinct to me as it still is nevertheless that the indulgence +they conveyed lost part of its balm by involving a degree of +publication. Direfully distinct have remained to me the conditions of a +pilgrimage to Boston made that summer under my father's care for +consultation of a great surgeon, the head of his profession there; whose +opinion and advice--the more that he was a guaranteed friend of my +father's--had seemed the best light to invoke on the less and less +bearable affliction with which I had been for three or four months +seeking to strike some sort of bargain: mainly, up to that time, under +protection of a theory of temporary supine "rest" against which +everything inward and outward tended equally to conspire. Agitated +scraps of rest, snatched, to my consciousness, by the liveliest +violence, were to show for futile almost to the degree in which the +effort of our interview with the high expert was afterwards so to show; +the truth being that this interview settled my sad business, settled it +just in that saddest sense, for ever so long to come. This was so much +the case that, as the mere scene of our main appeal, the house from +which we had after its making dejectedly emerged put forth to me as I +passed it in many a subsequent season an ironic smug symbolism of its +action on my fate. That action had come from the complete failure of our +approached oracle either to warn, to comfort or to command--to do +anything but make quite unassistingly light of the bewilderment exposed +to him. In default of other attention or suggestion he might by a mere +warning as to gravities only too possible, and already well advanced, +have made such a difference; but I have little forgotten how I felt +myself, the warning absent, treated but to a comparative pooh-pooh--an +impression I long looked back to as a sharp parting of the ways, with an +adoption of the wrong one distinctly determined. It was not simply small +comfort, it was only a mystification the more, that the inconvenience of +my state had to reckon with the strange fact of there being nothing to +speak of the matter with me. The graceful course, on the whole ground +again (and where moreover was delicacy, the proposed, the intended, +without grace?) was to behave accordingly, in good set terms, as if the +assurance were true; since the time left no margin at all for one's +gainsaying with the right confidence so high an authority. There were a +hundred ways to behave--in the general sense so freely suggested, I +mean; and I think of the second half of that summer of '62 as my attempt +at selection of the best. The best still remained, under closer +comparisons, very much what it had at first seemed, and there was in +fact this charm in it that to prepare for an ordeal essentially +intellectual, as I surmised, might justly involve, in the public eye, a +season of some retirement. The beauty was--I can fairly see it now, +through the haze of time, even as beauty!--that studious retirement and +preparatory hours did after all supply the supine attitude, did invest +the ruefulness, did deck out the cynicism of lying down book in hand +with a certain fine plausibility. This was at least a negative of +combat, an organised, not a loose and empty one, something definitely +and firmly parallel to action in the tented field; and I well recall, +for that matter, how, when early in the autumn I had in fact become the +queerest of forensic recruits, the bristling horde of my Law School +comrades fairly produced the illusion of a mustered army. The Cambridge +campus was tented field enough for a conscript starting so compromised; +and I can scarce say moreover how easily it let me down that when it +came to the point one had still fine fierce young men, in great numbers, +for company, there being at the worst so many such who hadn't flown to +arms. I was to find my fancy of the merely relative right in any way to +figure, or even on such terms just to exist, I was to find it in due +course quite drop from me as the Cambridge year played itself out, +leaving me all aware that, full though the air might be of stiffer +realities, one had yet a rare handful of one's own to face and deal +with. + +At Cambridge of course, when I got there, I was further to find my +brother on the scene and already at a stage of possession of its +contents that I was resigned in advance never to reach; so thoroughly I +seemed to feel a sort of quickening savoury meal in any cold scrap of +his own experience that he might pass on to my palate. This figure has +definite truth, that is, but for association at the board literally +yielding us nourishment--the happiest as to social composition and +freedom of supply of all the _tables d'hote_ of those days, a veritable +haunt of conversation ruled by that gently fatuous Miss Upham something +of whose angular grace and antique attitude has lived again for us in +William's letters. I place him, if not at the moment of my to that +extent joining him then at least from a short time afterwards, in +quarters that he occupied for the next two or three years--quiet +cloistered rooms, as they almost appeared to me, in the comparatively +sequestered Divinity Hall of that still virtually rustic age; which, +though mainly affected to the use of post-graduates and others, of a +Unitarian colour, enrolled under Harvard's theological Faculty, offered +chance accommodation, much appreciated for a certain supposedly separate +charm, not to say a finer dignity, by the more maturely studious in +other branches as well. The superstition or aftertaste of Europe had +then neither left me nor hinted that it ever might; yet I recall as a +distinct source of interest, to be desperately dealt with, and dealt +with somehow to my inward advantage, the special force of the +circumstance that I was now for the first time in presence of matters +normally, entirely, consistently American, and that more particularly I +found myself sniff up straight from the sources, such as they +unmistakably were, the sense of that New England which had been to me +till then but a name. This from the first instant was what I most took +in, and quite apart from the question of what one was going to make of +it, of whether one was going, in the simple formula, to like it, and of +what would come, could the impression so triumph, of such monstrous +assimilations. Clear to me in the light thus kindled that my American +consciousness had hitherto been after all and at the best singularly +starved, and that Newport for instance, during the couple of years, had +fed it but with sips of an adulterated strain. Newport, with its +opera-glass turned for ever across the sea--for Newport, or at least +_our_ Newport, even during the War, lived mainly, and quite visibly, by +the opera-glass--was comparatively, and in its degree incurably, +cosmopolite; and though on our first alighting there I had more or less +successfully, as I fancied, invited the local historic sense to vibrate, +it was at present left me to feel myself a poor uninitiated creature. +However, an initiation, at least by the intelligence, into some given +thing--almost anything really given would do--was essentially what I +was, as we nowadays say, after; the fault with my previous data in the +American kind had been that they weren't sufficiently given; so that +here would be Boston and Cambridge giving as with absolute authority. +The War had by itself of course, on the ground I speak of, communicated +something of the quality, or rather of the quantity, otherwise +deficient; only this was for my case, of which alone I speak, an +apprehension without a language or a channel--a revelation as sublime +as one would like to feel it, but spreading abroad as a whole and not, +alas, by any practice of mine, reducible to parts. What I promptly made +out at Cambridge was that "America" would be given, as I have called it, +to a tune altogether fresh, so that to hear this tune wholly played out +might well become on the spot an inspiring privilege. If I indeed, I +should add, said to myself "wholly," this was of course not a little +straining a point; since, putting my initiation, my grasp of the +exhibition, at its conceivable liveliest, far more of the supposed total +was I inevitably to miss than to gather to my use. But I might gather +what I could, and therein was exactly the adventure. To rinse my mouth +of the European aftertaste _in order_ to do justice to whatever of the +native bitter-sweet might offer itself in congruous vessels--such a +brave dash for discovery, and such only, would give a sense to my +posture. With which it was unmistakable that I shouldn't in the least +have painfully to strive; of such a force of impact was each impression +clearly capable that I had much rather to steady myself, at any moment, +where I stood, and quite to a sense of the luxury of the occasion, than +to cultivate inquiry at the aggressive pitch. There was no need for +curiosity--it was met by every object, I seemed to see, so much more +than half way; unless indeed I put it better by saying that as _all_ my +vision partook of that principle the impulse and the object perpetually +melted together. It wasn't for instance by the faintest process of +inquiry that the _maison_ Upham, where I three times daily sat at meat, +had scarce to wait an hour to become as vivid a translation into +American terms of Balzac's Maison Vauquer, in Le Pere Goriot, as I could +have desired to deal with. + +It would have been at once uplifting to see in the American terms a vast +improvement on the prime version, had I not been here a bit baffled by +the sense that the correspondence was not quite, after all, of like with +like, and that the main scene of Balzac's action was confessedly and +curiously sordid and even sinister, whereas its equivalent under the +Harvard elms would rank decidedly as what we had _de mieux_, or in other +words of most refined, in the "boarding" line, to show. I must have been +further conscious that what we had de mieux in the social line appeared +quite liable, on occasion, to board wherever it might--the situation in +Balzac's world being on this head as different as possible. No one not +deeply distressed or dismally involved or all but fatally compromised +could have taken the chances of such an establishment at all; so that +any comparison to our own particular advantage had to be, on +reflection, nipped in the bud. There was a generic sameness, none the +less, I might still reason; enough of that at least to show the two +pictures as each in its way interesting--which was all that was +required. The Maison Vauquer, its musty air thick with heavier social +elements, might have been more so, for the Harvard elms overhung no +strange Vautrin, no old Goriot, no young Rastignac; yet the interest of +the Kirkland Street company couldn't, so to speak, help itself either, +any more than I could help taking advantage of it. In one respect +certainly, in the matter of talk as talk, we shone incomparably +brighter; and if it took what we had de mieux to make our so regular +resort a scene essentially of conversation, the point was none the less +that our materials were there. I found the effect of this, very easily, +as American as I liked--liked, that is, to think of it and to make all I +might of it for being; about which in truth all difficulty vanished from +the moment the local colour of the War broke in. So of course this +element did at that season come back to us through every outward +opening, and mean enough by contrast had been the questions amid which +the Vauquer boarders grubbed. Anything even indirectly touched by our +public story, stretching now into volume after volume of the very +biggest print, took on that reflected light of dignity, of importance, +or of mere gross salience, which passion charged with criticism, and +criticism charged with the thousand menaced affections and connections, +the whole of the reaction--charged in short with immediate intimate +life--have a power, in such conditions, to fling as from a waving torch. +The torch flared sufficiently about Miss Upham's board--save that she +herself, ancient spinster, pushed it in dismay from her top of the +table, blew upon it with vain scared sighs, and would have nothing to do +with a matter so disturbing to the right temperature of her _plats_. We +others passed it from hand to hand, so that it couldn't go quite +out--since I must in fairness add that the element of the casual and the +more _generally_ ironic, the play of the studious or the irrepressibly +social intelligence at large, couldn't fail to insist pretty constantly +on its rights. There were quarters as well, I should note, in which the +sense of local colour proceeding at all straight from the source I have +named--reflected, that is, from camp and field--could but very soon run +short; sharply enough do I recall for instance the felt, even if all so +privately felt, limits of _my_ poor stream of contributive remark +(despite my habit, so fondly practised in the connection, of expatiating +_in petto_). My poor stream would have trickled, truly, had it been able +to trickle at all, from the most effective of my few occasions of +"realising," up to that time, as to field and camp; literally as to camp +in fact, since the occasion had consisted of a visit paid, or a +pilgrimage, rather, ever so piously, so tenderly made, one August +afternoon of the summer just ended, to a vast gathering of invalid and +convalescent troops, under canvas and in roughly improvised shanties, at +some point of the Rhode Island shore that figures to my memory, though +with a certain vagueness, as Portsmouth Grove. (American local names +lend themselves strangely little to retention, I find, if one has +happened to deal for long years with almost any group of European +designations--these latter springing, as it has almost always come to +seem, straight from the soil where natural causes were anciently to root +them, each with its rare identity. The bite into interest of the +borrowed, the imposed, the "faked" label, growing but as by a dab of +glue on an article of trade, is inevitably much less sharp.) Vagueness +at best attends, however, the queer experience I glance at; what lives +of it, in the ineffaceable way, being again, by my incurable perversity, +my ambiguous economy, much less a matter of the "facts of the case," as +they should, even though so dead and buried now, revive to help me +through an anecdote, than the prodigiously subjective side of the +experience, thanks to which it still presumes to flush with the grand +air of an adventure. If I had not already so often brazened out my +confession of the far from "showy" in the terms on which impressions +could become indelibly momentous to me I might blush indeed for the thin +tatter dragged in thus as an affair of record. It consisted at the time +simply of an emotion--though the emotion, I should add, appeared to +consist of everything in the whole world that my consciousness could +hold. By _that_ intensity did it hang as bravely as possible together, +and by the title so made good has it handed itself endlessly down. + +Owing to which it is that I don't at all know what troops were in +question, a "mere" couple of Rhode Island regiments (nothing in those +days could be too big to escape the application of the "mere,") or a +congeries of the temporarily incapacitated, the more or less broken, +picked from the veterans--so far as there already were such--of the East +at large and directed upon the Grove as upon a place of stowage and +sanitation. Discriminations of the prosaic order had little to do with +my first and all but sole vision of the American soldier in his +multitude, and above all--for that was markedly the colour of the whole +thing--in his depression, his wasted melancholy almost; an effect that +somehow corresponds for memory, I bethink myself, with the tender +elegiac tone in which Walt Whitman was later on so admirably to +commemorate him. The restrictions I confess to are abject, but both my +sense and my aftersense of the exhibition I here allude to had, thanks +to my situation, to do all the work they could in the way of +representation to me of what was most publicly, most heroically, most +wastefully, tragically, terribly going on. It had so to serve for my +particular nearest approach to a "contact" with the active drama--I mean +of course the collectively and scenically active, since the brush of +interest against the soldier single and salient was an affair of every +day--that were it not for just one other strange spasm of awareness, +scarce relaxed to this hour, I should have been left all but pitifully +void of any scrap of a substitute for the concrete experience. The long +hot July 1st of '63, on which the huge battle of Gettysburg had begun, +could really be--or rather couldn't possibly not be--a scrap of concrete +experience for any group of united persons, New York cousins and all, +who, in a Newport garden, restlessly strolling, sitting, neither daring +quite to move nor quite to rest, quite to go in nor quite to stay out, +actually _listened_ together, in their almost ignobly safe stillness, as +to the boom of far-away guns. This _was_, as it were, the War--the War +palpably in Pennsylvania; not less than my hour of a felt rage of +repining at my doomed absence from the sight of that march of the 54th +Massachusetts out of Boston, "Bob" Shaw at its head and our exalted +Wilky among its officers, of which a great sculptor was, on the spot of +their vividest passing, to set the image aloft forever. Poor other +visitations, comparatively, had had to suffice for me; I could take in +fact for amusing, most of all (since that, thank goodness, was high +gaiety), a couple of impressions of the brief preliminary camp life at +Readville during which we admired the charming composition of the 44th +of the same State, under Colonel Frank Lee, and which fairly made +romantic for me Wilky's quick spring out of mere juvenility and into +such brightly-bristling ranks. He had begun by volunteering in a company +that gave him half the ingenuous youth of the circle within our social +ken for brothers-in-arms, and it was to that pair of Readville +afternoons I must have owed my all so emphasised vision of handsome +young Cabot Russell, who, again to be his closest brother-in-arms in the +54th, irrecoverably lost himself, as we have seen, at Fort Wagner. A dry +desert, one must suppose, the life in which, for memory and appreciation +made one, certain single hours or compressed groups of hours have found +their reason for standing out through everything, for insistently +living on, in the cabinet of intimate reference, the museum, as it were, +of the soul's curiosities--where doubtless at the same time an +exhibition of them to mere other eyes or ears or questioning logical +minds may effect itself in no plain terms. We recognise such occasions +more and more as we go on, and are surely, as a general thing, glad +when, for the interest of memory--which it's such a business to _keep_ +interesting--they constitute something of a cluster. In my queer +cluster, at any rate, that flower of the connection which answers to the +name of Portsmouth Grove still overtops other members of its class, so +that to finger it again for a moment is to make it perceptibly exhale +its very principle of life. This was, for me, at the time, neither more +nor less than that the American soldier in his multitude was the most +attaching and affecting and withal the most amusing figure of romance +conceivable; the great sense of my vision being thus that, as the +afternoon light of the place and time lingered upon him, both to the +seeming enhancement of his quality and of its own, romance of a more +confused kind than I shall now attempt words for attended his every +movement. It was the charmingest, touchingest, dreadfullest thing in the +world that my impression of him should have to be somehow of his +abandonment to a rueful humour, to a stoic reserve which could yet +melt, a relation with him once established, into a rich communicative +confidence; and, in particular, all over the place, of his own scanted +and more or less baffled, though constantly and, as I couldn't not have +it, pathetically, "knowing" devices. + +The great point remained for me at all events that I could afterwards +appear to myself to have done nothing but establish with him a relation, +that I established it, to my imagination, in several cases--and all in +the three or four hours--even to the pitch of the last tenderness of +friendship. I recover that, strolling about with honest and so superior +fellow-citizens, or sitting with them by the improvised couches of their +languid rest, I drew from each his troubled tale, listened to his plaint +on his special hard case--taking form, this, in what seemed to me the +very poetry of the esoteric vernacular--and sealed the beautiful tie, +the responsive sympathy, by an earnest offer, in no instance waved away, +of such pecuniary solace as I might at brief notice draw on my poor +pocket for. Yet again, as I indulge this memory, do I feel that I might +if pushed a little rejoice in having to such an extent coincided with, +not to say perhaps positively anticipated, dear old Walt--even if I +hadn't come armed like him with oranges and peppermints. I ministered +much more summarily, though possibly in proportion to the time and +thanks to my better luck more pecuniarily; but I like to treat myself to +making out that I can scarce have brought to the occasion (in proportion +to the time again and to other elements of the case) less of the +consecrating sentiment than he. I like further to put it in a light +that, ever so curiously, if the good Walt was most inwardly stirred to +his later commemorative accents by his participating in the common +Americanism of his hospital friends, the familiar note and shared sound +of which formed its ground of appeal, I found myself victim to a like +moving force through quite another logic. It was literally, I fear, +because our common Americanism carried with it, to my imagination, such +a disclosed freshness and strangeness, working, as I might say, over +such gulfs of dissociation, that I reached across to _their_, these +hospital friends', side of the matter, even at the risk of an imperilled +consistency. It had for me, the state in question, colour and form, +accent and quality, with scarce less "authority" than if instead of the +rough tracks or worn paths of my casual labyrinth I had trod the glazed +halls of some school of natural history. What holds me now indeed is +that such an institution might have exemplified then almost nothing but +the aspects strictly native to our social and seasonal air; so simply +and easily conceivable to the kindly mind were at that time these +reciprocities, so great the freedom and pleasure of them compared with +the restrictions imposed on directness of sympathy by the awful +admixtures of to-day, those which offer to the would-be participant +among us, on returns from sojourns wherever homogeneity and its entailed +fraternity, its easy contacts, still may be seen to work, the strange +shock of such amenities declined on any terms. Really not possible then, +I think, the perception now accompanying, on American ground, this +shock--the recognition, by any sensibility at all reflective, of the +point where our national theory of absorption, assimilation and +conversion appallingly breaks down; appallingly, that is, for those to +whom the _consecrated_ association, of the sort still at play where +community has not been blighted, strongly speaks. Which remarks may +reinforce the note of my unconsciousness of any difficulty for knowing +in the old, the comparatively brothering, conditions what an American at +least _was_. Absurd thus, no doubt, that the scant experience over which +I perversely linger insists on figuring to me as quite a revel of the +right confidence. + +The revel, though I didn't for the moment yet know it, was to be renewed +for me at Cambridge with less of a romantic intensity perhaps, but more +usefully, so to put it, and more informingly; surrounded as I presently +found myself at the Law School with young types, or rather with young +members of a single type, not one of whom but would have enriched my +imagined hall of congruous specimens. _That_, with the many months of +it, was to be the real disclosure, the larger revelation; that was to be +the fresh picture for a young person reaching the age of twenty in +wellnigh grotesque unawareness of the properties of the atmosphere in +which he but wanted to claim that he had been nourished. Of what I mean +by this I shall in a moment have more to say--after pointing a trifle +more, for our patience, the sense of my dilatation upon Portsmouth +Grove. Perfectly distinct has remained the sail back to Newport by that +evening's steamboat; the mere memory of which indeed--and I recall that +I felt it inordinately long--must have been for me, just above, the +spring of the whole reference. The sail was long, measured by my acute +consciousness of paying physically for my excursion--which hadn't +answered the least little bit for my impaired state. This last +disobliging fact became one, at the same time, with an intensity, indeed +a strange rapture, of reflection, which I may not in the least pretend +to offer as a clear or coherent or logical thing, and of which I can +only say, leaving myself there through the summer twilight, in too scant +rest on a deck stool and against the bulwark, that it somehow crowned +my little adventure of sympathy and wonder with a shining round of +resignation--a realisation, as we nowadays put it, that, measuring +wounds against wounds, or the compromised, the particular taxed +condition, at the least, against all the rest of the debt then so +generally and enormously due, one was no less exaltedly than wastefully +engaged in the common fact of endurance. There are memories in truth too +fine or too peculiar for notation, too intensely individual and +supersubtle--call them what one will; yet which one may thus no more +give up confusedly than one may insist on them vainly. Their kind is +nothing ever to a present purpose unless they are in a manner statable, +but is at the same time ruefully aware of threatened ridicule if they +are overstated. Not that I in the least mind such a menace, however, in +just adding that, soothed as I have called the admirable ache of my +afternoon with that inward interpretation of it, I felt the latter--or +rather doubtless simply the entire affair--absolutely overarched by the +majestic manner in which the distress of our return drew out into the +lucid charm of the night. To which I must further add that the hour +seemed, by some wondrous secret, to know itself marked and charged and +unforgettable--hinting so in its very own terms of cool beauty at +something portentous in it, an exquisite claim then and there for +lasting value and high authority. + + + + +X + + +All of which foregoing makes, I grant, a long parenthesis in my recovery +of the more immediate Cambridge impressions. I have left them awaiting +me, yet I am happy to say not sensibly the worse for it, in their +cluster roundabout Miss Upham and her board of beneficiary images; which +latter start up afresh and with the softest submission to any convenient +neglect--that ineffably touching and confessed dependence of such +apparitions on one's "pleasure," save the mark! for the flicker of +restorative light. The image most vividly restored is doubtless that of +Professor F. J. Child, head of the "English Department" at Harvard and +master of that great modern science of folk-lore to his accomplishment +in which his vast and slowly-published collection of the Ballad +literature of our language is a recognised monument; delightful man, +rounded character, passionate patriot, admirable talker, above all +thorough humanist and humorist. He was the genial autocrat of that +breakfast-table not only, but of our symposia otherwise timed, and as he +comes back to me with the fresh and quite circular countenance of the +time before the personal cares and complications of life had gravely +thickened for him, his aspect _all_ finely circular, with its close +rings of the fairest hair, its golden rims of the largest glasses, its +finished rotundity of figure and attitude, I see that _there_ was the +American spirit--since I was "after" it--of a quality deeply inbred, +beautifully adjusted to all extensions of knowledge and taste and, as +seemed to me, quite sublimely quickened by everything that was at the +time so tremendously in question. That vision of him was never +afterwards to yield to other lights--though these, even had occasion for +them been more frequent with me, couldn't much have interfered with it; +so that what I still most retain of him is the very flush and mobility, +the living expansion and contraction, the bright comedy and almost lunar +eclipse, of his cherubic face according as things appeared to be going +for the country. I was always just across from him, as my brother, +beside whom I took my place, had been, and I remember well how vivid a +clock-face it became to me; I found still, as in my younger time, matter +enough everywhere for gaping, but greatest of all, I think, while that +tense season lasted, was my wonder for the signs and portents, the quips +and cranks, the wreathed smiles, or otherwise the candid obscurations, +of our prime talker's presented visage. I set, as it were, the small +tick of my own poor watch by it--which private register would thump or +intermit in agreement with these indications. I recover it that, thanks +to the perpetual play of his sympathy and irony, confidence and scorn, +as well as to that of my own less certainly directed sensibility, he +struck me on the bad days, which were then so many, as fairly august, +cherubism and all, for sincerity of association with every light and +shade, every ebb and flow, of our Cause. Where he most shone out, +indeed, so that depression then wasn't a gloom in him but a darting +flame, was in the icy air of the attitude of the nations to us, that of +the couple, the most potent, across the sea, with which we were +especially concerned and which, as during the whole earlier half of the +War and still longer it more and more defined itself, drew from him at +once all the drolleries and all the asperities of his sarcasm. Nothing +more particularly touched me in him, I make out--for it lingers in a +light of its own--than the fashion after which he struck me as a fond +grave guardian, not so much of the memory and the ashes yet awhile, as +of the promise, in all its flower, of the sacrificial young men whom the +University connection had passed through his hands and whom he looked +out for with a tenderness of interest, a nursing pride, that was as +contagious as I could possibly have wished it. I didn't myself know the +young men, save three or four, and could only, at our distance, hold my +tongue and do them homage; never afterwards (as I even then foreknew +would be the case) missing, when I could help it, or failing to pick up, +a single brush, a scattered leaf, of their growing or their riper +legend. Certain of them whom I had neither seen nor, as they fell in +battle, was destined ever to see, have lived for me since just as +communicated images, figures created by his tone about them--which, I +admit, mightn't or needn't have mattered to me for all the years, yet +which couldn't help so doing from the moment the right touch had handed +them over to my restless claim. + +It was not meanwhile for want of other figures that these were gathered +in, for I have again to grant that in those days figures became such for +me on easy terms, and that in particular William had only to let the +light of _his_ attention, his interest, his curiosity, his aversion even +(could he indeed have passingly lived in the helplessness of mere +aversion) visibly rest on them for me entirely to feel that they must +count for as much as might be--so far at least as my perception was +concerned, contact being truly another affair. That was the truth at +that season, if it wasn't always to remain the truth; I felt his +interpretations, his personal allowances, so largely and inveterately +liberal, always impose themselves: it was not till ever so much later, +and then only little by little, that I came to accept the strange +circumstance of my not invariably "liking," in homely parlance, his +people, and his not invariably liking mine. The process represented by +that word was for each of us, I think, a process so involved with other +operations of the spirit, so beautifully complicated and deformed by +them, that our results in this sort doubtless eventually lost themselves +in the labyrinth of our reasons; which latter, eventually--the +labyrinth, I mean--could be a frequent and not other than animated +meeting-place in spite of the play of divergence. The true case, I all +the while plentifully felt, and still more feel now, was that _I_ +diverged and my brother almost never; in the sense, that is, that no man +can well have cared less for the question, or made less of the +consciousness, of dislike--have valued less their developments and +comforts. Even the opposite of that complacency scarce seemed a +recognised, or at least in any degree a cultivated, state with him; his +passion, and that a passion of the intelligence, was justice +unafraid--and this, as it were, almost unformulatedly, altogether +unpedantically: it simply made him utterly not "mind" numberless things +that with most people serve as dim lights, warnings or attractions, in +the grope of appreciation or the adventure of instinct. His luminous +indifference kept his course thus, as I was later to recognise, +extraordinarily straight--to the increase, as I have noted, of my own +poor sense of weakly straggling, unaccompanied as this at the same time +was by the least envy of such a deficiency in what is roughly called +prejudice, and what I, to save my face, in my ups and downs of +sociability or curiosity, could perhaps have found no better term for +than the play of taste as taste. Wonderful, and to me in the last resort +admirable, was William's fine heritage and awareness of that principle +without its yet affecting him on the human, the more largely social, +just the conversable and workable ground--in presence of some other +principle that might do so, whether this validly or but speciously +interfered. The triumph over _dis_taste, in one's relations, one's +exposures, one's judgments, _that_ I could understand as high virtue, +strained heroism, the ideal groaningly applied; but what left me always +impressed, to put it mildly, was the fact that in my brother's case the +incorruptibility of his candour would have had to be explained to him, +and with scant presumption too of his taking it in or having patience +while one spoke. Such an enterprise, I was well aware, would at any rate +have left _me_ a sorry enough figure afterwards. What one would have had +to be, what one could in the least decently be, _except_ candid without +alternative--this, with other like matters, I should have had to be +prepared to set forth; and, more and more addressed as I eventually +found myself to a cultivation of the absolute in taste as taste, to +repeat my expression, I was far from the wish to contend for it as +against any appearance whatever of a better way. Such was part of the +experience, or call it even the discipline, of association with a genius +so marked for the process known as giving the benefit of the doubt--and +giving it (for that was the irritating charm), not in smug charity or +for a pointed moral, but through the very nature of a mind incapable of +the shut door in any direction and of a habit of hospitality so free +that it might again and again have been observed, in contact and +intercourse, to supply weaker and less graced vessels with the very +means of bringing in response, often absolutely in retort. This last of +course was not so much the benefit of the doubt as the displayed +unconsciousness of any doubt, a perpetual aid rendered the doubtful, +especially when incarnate in persons, to be more right or more true, +more clever or more charming or whatever, than mere grudging love of +"form," standing by, could at all see it entitled to become. Anything +like William's unawareness of exertion after having helped the lame dog +of converse over stile after stile I have in no other case met. +Together with which, however, I may not forbear to add, the very +occasional and comparatively small flare in him of some blest perversity +of prejudice that one might enjoy on one's own side the vulgar luxury of +naming as such was a thing which, conformably to that elation, one +reached out for as one might for the white glint of the rare edelweiss +on some high Alpine ledge. + +If these remarks illustrate in their number the inevitable bent of the +remark to multiply within me as an effect of fraternal evocation I +thereby but stick the more to my subject, or in other words to the +much-peopled scene, as I found it; which I should scarce have found +without him. Peopled as it was with _his_ people, which they at first +struck me as markedly being, it led me then to take the company, apart +from F. J. Child, for whatever he all vividly and possessively +pronounced it; I having for a long time but the scantest company of my +own, even at the Law School, where my fellow-disciples could bear the +name for me only as a troop of actors might have done on that further +side of footlights to which I never went round. This last at least with +few exceptions, while there were none to the exquisite rule, as I +positively to-day feel it, of my apprehension of William's cluster as a +concern of his--interesting exactly because of that reference. Any +concern of his was thus a thing already charged with life, _his_ life +over and above its own, if it happened by grace to have any comparable; +which, as I pick out the elements again from the savoury Upham shades, +could indeed be claimed for several of these. I pick out the ardent and +delicate and firm John May, son, as he comes back to me, of a +distinguished Abolitionist of New York State--rare bird; and seen by +that fact in a sort of glamour of picturesque justification, an air +deriving colour from the pre-established gallantry, yet the quiet and +gentlemanly triumph, of his attitude. So at least do I read back into +blurred visions the richest meanings they could have. I pick out for a +not less baffled tribute a particular friend of my brother's and a +comrade of May's, whom I identify on the superficial side but by his +name of Salter and the fact of his studentship in theology; which +pursuit, it comes over me as I write, he must have shared, of homely, +almost of sickly, New England type as he was, with May of the fine +features, the handsome smile, by my resolute recollection, the developed +moustache and short dark pointed beard, the property of vaguely +recalling in fine some old portrait supposedly Spanish (supposedly, and +perhaps to a fantastic tune, by _me_--for I dare say it was by no one +else). Salter had no such references--it even appalled me to have a bit +intelligently to imagine to what origins starved of amenity or colour +his aspect and air, the slope of his shoulders, the mode of growth of +his hair, the relation of his clothes to his person and the relation of +his person to the inevitable needs of intercourse, might refer him; but +there played about him a bright force in the highest and extraordinarily +quick flares of which one felt nothing, while the exhibition lasted, but +his intellectual elegance. He had the distinction of wit--so rare, we +ever feel it to be, when we see it beautifully act; and I remember well +how, as that was indeed for me almost the whole of intellectual +elegance, I fell back on the idea that such an odd assortment of marks +in him was at least picturesque, or much in the Maison Vauquer line: +pinched as I must have been by the question of whether a person of that +type and cut had the "right" to be witty. On what else but the power the +right rested I couldn't doubtless have said; I but recall my sense that +wit was somehow the finest of all social matters and that it seemed +impossible to be less connected with such than this product of New +England at its sparest and dryest; which fact was a sort of bad mark for +the higher civilisation. I was prepared to recognise that you might be +witty and ugly, ugly with the highest finish of ugliness--hadn't the +celebrated Voltaire been one of the scrappiest of men as well as of the +most immortally quoted?--but it cost a wrench to have to take it that +you could shine to admiration out of such a platitude of the mere +"plain." It was William in especial who guaranteed to me Salter's +superior gift, of which in the free commerce of Divinity Hall he had +frequent illustration--so that what I really most apprehended, I think, +was the circumstance of _his_ apprehending: this too with a much finer +intellectual need and competence than mine, after all, and in the course +of debates and discussions, ardent young symposia of the spirit, which +struck me as falling in with all I had ever curiously conceived of those +hours that foster the generous youth of minds preappointed to greatness. +_There_ was the note of the effective quaint on which I could put my +finger: catch a poor student only dreary enough and then light in him +the flame of irony at its intensest, the range of question and the +command of figure at their bravest, and one might, with one's appetite +for character, feed on the bold antithesis. I had only to like for my +brother, and verily almost with pride, his assured experience of any +queer concretion--his experience of abstractions I was to rise to much +more feebly and belatedly, scarce more indeed ever than most +imperfectly--to find the very scene of action, or at least of passion, +enjoyed by these my elders and betters, enriched and toned and +consecrated after the fashion of places referred to in literature and +legend. + +I thus live back of a sudden--for I insist on just yielding to it--into +the odd hours when the poor little old Divinity Hall of the overgrown +present faced me as through the haze of all the past Indian summers it +had opened its brooding study-windows to; when the "avenue" of approach +to it from the outer world was a thing of dignity, a positive vista in a +composition; when the Norton woods, near by, massed themselves in +scarlet and orange, and when to penetrate and mount a stair and knock at +a door and, enjoying response, then sink into a window-bench and inhale +at once the vague golden November and the thick suggestion of the room +where nascent "thought" had again and again piped or wailed, was to +taste as I had never done before the poetry of the prime initiation and +of associated growth. With cards of such pale pasteboard could the +trick, to my vision, play itself--by which I mean that I admire under +this memory the constant "dodges" of an imagination reduced to such +straits for picking up a living. It was as if one's sense of "Europe," +sufficiently sure of itself to risk the strategic retreat, had backed +away on tiptoe just to see how the sense of what was there facing one +would manage without it--manage for luxury, that is, with the mere +indispensable doubtless otherwise provided for. That the sense in +question did manage beautifully, when at last so hard pressed, and that +the plasticity and variety of my vision draw from me now this murmur of +elation, are truths constituting together for me the perhaps even +overloaded moral of my tale. With which I scarce need note that so +elastic a fancy, so perverse a little passion for finding good in +everything--good for what I thought of as history, which was the +consideration of life, while the given thing, whatever it was, had only +to be before me--was inevitably to work a storage of other material for +memory close-packed enough to make such disengagement as I thus attempt +at the end of time almost an act of violence. I couldn't do without the +_scene_, as I have elsewhere had occasion to hint, whether actually or +but possibly peopled (the people always calling for the background and +the background insisting on the people); and thanks to this harmless +extravagance, or thanks in other words to the visionary liberties I +constantly took (so that the plate of sense was at the time I speak of +more overscored and figured for me than sense was in the least +practically required to have it), my path is even now beset to +inconvenience with the personal image unextinct. It presents itself, I +feel, beyond reason, and yet if I turn from it the ease is less, and I +am divided when I further press the spring between compunction at not +pausing before some shade that seems individually and even hopefully to +wait, and the fear of its feeling after all scanted of service should I +name it only to leave it. I name for instance, just to hover a little, +silent Vanderpool, the mutest presence at the Upham board, and quite +with no sense of the invidious in so doing. He was save for myself, by +my remembrance, the only member of the Law School there present; I see +him moreover altogether remarkably, just incorruptibly and exquisitely +dumb, though with a "gentlemanly" presence, a quasi-conservative New +Jersey finish (so delicate those dim discriminations!) that would have +seemed naturally to go with a certain forensic assurance. He looked so +as if he came from "good people"--which was no very common appearance on +the Harvard scene of those days, as indeed it is to a positive degree no +so very common appearance on any scene at any time: it was a note of +aspect which one in any case found one's self, to whatever vague tune, +apt quite to treasure or save up. So it was impossible not to recognise +in our soundless _commensal_ the very finest flower of shyness, the very +richest shade of the deprecating blush, that one had perhaps ever +encountered; one ended in fact by fairly hanging on the question of +whether the perfection of his modesty--for it was all a true welter of +modesty, not a grain of it anything stiffer--would beautifully hold out +or would give way to comparatively brute pressure from some point of our +circle. I longed to bet on him, to see him through without a lapse; and +this in fact was so thoroughly reserved to me that my eventual relief +and homage doubtless account for the blest roundness of my impression. +He had so much "for" him, was tall and fine, equipped and appointed, +born, quite to an effect of ultimately basking, in the light of the Law, +acquainted, one couldn't fail of seeing, with a tradition of manners, +not to mention that of the forensic as aforesaid, and not to name either +the use of "means," equally imputable: how rare accordingly would be the +_quality_, letting even the quantity alone, of his inhibitions, and how +interesting in the event the fact that he was absolutely never to have +deviated! He disappeared without having spoken, and yet why should I now +be noting it if he hadn't nevertheless admirably expressed himself? What +this consisted of was that there was scarce anything he wouldn't have +done for us had it been possible, and I think, in view of the +distinctness with which he still faces me, the tenderness with which he +inspires my muse and the assurance with which I have "gone into" him, +that I can never in all my life since have seen so precious a message +delivered under such difficulties. Admirable, ineffaceable, because so +essentially all _decipherable_, Vanderpool! + +It wasn't either that John Bancroft tossed the ball of talk--which but +for the presence of the supremely retentive agent just commemorated +would have appeared on occasion to remain in his keeping by a +preference, on its own part, not to be outwitted; this more or less at +all times too, but especially during the first weeks of his dawning on +us straight out of Germany and France, flushed with the alarm, as one +might have read it, of having to justify rare opportunities and account +for the time he had inordinately, obscurely, or at least not a little +mysteriously, spent--the implication of every inch of him being that he +had spent it seriously. Odd enough it certainly was that we should have +been appointed to unveil, so far as we might, a _pair_ of such marked +monuments to modesty, marble statues, as they might have been, on either +side of the portal of talk; what I at any rate preserve of my immediate +vision of Bancroft--whose very promptest identity indeed had been his +sonship to the eminent historian of our country and earlier and later +diplomatist--was an opposition, trying to me rather than engaging as its +like had been in the composition of Vanderpool, between what we somehow +wanted from him (or what I at least did) and what we too scantly +gathered. This excellent friend, as he was later on to become, with his +handsome high head, large colourable brow and eyes widely divided--brave +contribution ever to a fine countenance--sat there in a sort of glory of +experience which, had he been capable of anything so akin to a +demonstration, he would have appeared all unsociably to repudiate. It +was bruited of him that, like John La Farge, whose friend he was +admiringly to become--for he too had a Newport connection--he "painted," +that is persisted (which was the wondrous thing!) in painting; and that +this practice had grown upon him in France, where, _en province_, his +brother had entirely taken root and where the whole art-life, as well as +the rural life, of the country had been opened to him; besides its a +little later coming to light that he had romantically practised at +Dusseldorf, where too he had personally known and tremendously liked +George du Maurier, whose first so distinguished appearances as an +illustrator had already engaged our fondest attention--were they most +dawningly in the early Cornhill, or in Punch, or in Once a Week? They +glimmer upon me, darkly and richly, as from the pages of the last named. +Not to be rendered, I may again parenthesise, our little thrilled +awareness, William's and mine, though mine indeed but panting after his, +of such peeping phenomena of the European day as the outbreak of a "new +man" upon our yearning view of the field of letters and of the arts. I +am moved to wonder at how we came by it, shifting all for ourselves, and +with the parental _flair_, so far as the sensibility of home was +concerned, turned but to directions of its own and much less restless on +the whole than ours. More touching to me now than I can say, at all +events, this recapture of the hour at which Du Maurier, consecrated to +much later, to then still far-off intimate affection, became the new man +so significantly as to make a great importance of John Bancroft's news +of him, which already bore, among many marvels, upon the supreme wonder +of his working, as he was all his life bravely to work, under impaired +and gravely menaced eyesight. When I speak, as just above, of what, +through so many veils, "came to light," I should further add, I use a +figure representing a considerable lapse of time and shading off, for +full evocation, into more associations than I can here make place for. +Nothing in this connection came _soon_ to light at least but that +endless amazement might lie in the strange facts of difference between +our companion and his distinguished sire--the latter so supremely, so +quaintly yet so brilliantly, social a figure, I apprehended, when gaped +at, a still more angular, but more polished and pacific Don Quixote, on +the sleekest of Rosinantes, with white-tipped chin protrusive, with high +sharp elbows raised and long straight legs beautifully pointed, all +after the gallantest fashion, against the clear sunset sky of old +Newport cavalcades. Mr. Bancroft the elder, the "great," was a comfort, +that is a fine high identity, a cluster of strong accents, the sort of +thing one's vision followed, in the light of history, if not of mere +misguided fancy, for illustration of conceived type--type, say in this +case, of superior person of the ancient and the more or less alien +public order, the world of affairs transacted at courts and +_chancelleries_, in which renown, one had gathered from the perusal of +memoirs, allowed for much development of detail and much incision of +outline, when not even directly resting on them. As it had been a +positive bliss to me that words and names might prove in extremity +sources of support, so it comes back to me that I had drawn mystic +strength from just obscurely sighing "Metternich!" or "Talleyrand!" as +Mr. Bancroft bounced by me--so far as a pair of widely-opened compasses +might bounce--in the August gloaming. The value of which, for +reflection, moreover, was not in the least in its being that if his son +remained so long pleadingly inscrutable any derived Metternich +suggestion had contributed to keep him so--for quite _there_ was the +curiosity of the case, that among the imputations John appeared most to +repudiate was that of having at any moment breathed the air either of +records or of protocols. If he persisted in painting for years after his +return to America without, as the legend grew, the smallest disclosure +of his work or confession of his progress to human eye or ear, he drew +the rigour of this course wholly from his singleness of nature, in the +aftertime to be so much approved to us. However, I pause before the +aftertime, into the lap of which more than one sort of stored soundness +and sweetness was to fall from him drop by drop. + +I scarce know whether my impulse to lead forth these most shrinking of +my apparitions be more perverse or more natural--mainly feeling, I +confess, however it appear, that the rest of my impression of the +animated Cambridge scene, so far as I could take it in, was anything but +a vision of unasserted forces. It was only I, as now appears to me, who, +ready as yet to assert nothing, hung back, and for reasons even more +appreciable to me to-day than then; wondering, almost regretting as I +do, that I didn't with a still sharper promptness throw up the sponge +for stoppage of the absurd little boxing-match within me between the +ostensible and the real--this I mean because I might afterwards thereby +have winced a couple of times the less in haunting remembrance of +exhibited inaptitude. My condition of having nothing to exhibit was +blessedly one that there was nobody to quarrel with--and I couldn't have +sufficiently let it alone. I didn't in truth, under a misleading light, +reconsider it much; yet I have kept to this hour a black little memory +of my having attempted to argue one afternoon, by way of exercise and +under what seemed to me a perfect glare of publicity, the fierce light +of a "moot-court," some case proposed to me by a fellow-student--who can +only have been one of the most benign of men unless he was darkly the +designingest, and to whom I was at any rate to owe it that I figured my +shame for years much in the image of my having stood forth before an +audience with a fiddle and bow and trusted myself to rub them together +desperately enough (after the fashion of Rousseau in a passage of the +Confessions,) to make some appearance of music. My music, I recall, +before the look on the faces around me, quavered away into mere collapse +and cessation, a void now engulfing memory itself, so that I liken it +all to a merciful fall of the curtain on some actor stricken and +stammering. The sense of the brief glare, as I have called the luckless +exposure, revives even on this hither side of the wide gulf of time; +but I must have outlived every witness--I was so obviously there the +very youngest of all aspirants--and, in truth, save for one or two minor +and merely comparative miscarriages of the sacrificial act before my +false gods, my connection with the temple was to remain as consistently +superficial as could be possible to a relation still restlessly +perceptive through all its profaneness. Perceiving, even with its +accompaniments of noting, wondering, fantasticating, kicked up no glare, +but went on much rather under richest shades or in many-coloured +lights--a _tone_ of opportunity that I look back on as somehow at once +deliciously soothing to myself and favourable to the clearness of each +item of the picture even as the cool grey sky of a landscape is +equalising. That was of course especially when I had let everything +slide--everything but the mere act of rather difficultly living (by +reason of my scant physical ease,) and fallen back again on the hard +sofa of certain ancient rooms in the Winthrop Square, contracted nook, +of a local order now quite abolished, and held to my nose for long and +sustaining sniffs the scented flower of independence. I took my +independence for romantic, or at least for a happy form of yawning +vessel into which romance, even should it perforce consist but of mere +loose observational play, might drop in the shape of ripe fruit from a +shaken tree. Winthrop Square, as I had occasion to note a couple of +years since, is a forgotten name, and the disappearance of my lodging +spares me doubtless a reminder, possibly ironic, of the debility of +those few constructional and pictorial elements that, mustering a +wondrous good-will, I had invited myself to rejoice in as "colonial." +The house was indeed very old, as antiquity in Cambridge went, with +everything in it slanting and gaping and creaking, but with humble +antique "points" and a dignity in its decay; above all with the deep +recess or alcove, a sweet "irregularity" (so could irregularities of +architectural conception then and there count,) thrust forth from its +sitting-room toward what I supposed to be the Brighton hills and +forming, by the aid of a large window and that commanding view, not to +mention the grace of an ancient expansive bureau or secretary-desk (this +such a piece, I now venture to figure, as would to-day be pounced on at +any cunning dealer's,) a veritable bower toward which even so shy a +dreamer as I still then had to take myself for might perhaps hope to woo +the muse. The muse was of course the muse of prose fiction--never for +the briefest hour in my case the presumable, not to say the presuming, +the much-taking-for-granted muse of rhyme, with whom I had never had, +even in thought, the faintest flirtation; and she did, in the event, I +note, yield to the seduction of so appointed a nook--as to which +romantic passage, however, I may not here anticipate. I but lose myself +in the recovered sense of what it richly "meant" to me just to _have_ a +place where I could so handsomely receive her, where I could remark with +complacency that the distant horizon, an horizon long since rudely +obliterated, was not, after all, too humble to be blue, purple, tawny, +changeable in short, everything an horizon should be, and that over the +intervening marshes of the Charles (if I don't go astray in so much +geography) there was all the fine complicated cloud-scenery I could +wish--so extravagantly did I then conceive more or less associational +cloud-scenery, after the fashion, I mean, of that feature of remembered +English and Boulognese water-colours, to promote the atmosphere of +literary composition as the act had begun to glimmer for me. + +Everything, however, meant, as I say, more quite other things than I can +pretend now to treat of. The mere fact of a sudden rupture, as by the +happiest thought, with the "form" of bringing home from the Law-library +sheepskin volumes that might give my table, if not, for sufficiency of +emphasis, my afflicted self, a temporary countenance, heaped up the +measure of my general intention--from the moment I embraced instead of +it the practice of resorting to Gore Hall exclusively for my +reading-matter; a practice in the light of which my general intention +took on the air of absolutely basking. To get somehow, and in spite of +everything, in spite especially of being so much disabled, at life, +_that_ was my brooding purpose, straight out of which the College +library, with its sparse bristle of aspiring granite, stood open to far +more enchanted distances than any represented by the leathery walls, +with never a breach amid their labelled and numbered blocks, that I +might pretend to beat against in the other quarter. Yet, happily enough, +on this basis of general rather than of special culture, I still loosely +rejoiced in being where I was, and by way of proof that it was all right +the swim into my ken of Sainte-Beuve, for whose presence on my table, in +still other literary company, Gore Hall aiding, I succeeded in not at +all blushing, became in the highest degree congruous with regular +attendance at lectures. The forenoon lectures at Dane Hall I never in +all my time missed, that I can recollect, and I look back on it now as +quite prodigious that I should have been so systematically faithful to +them without my understanding the first word of what they were about. +They contrived--or at least my attendance at them did, inimitably--to +be "life;" and as my wondering dips into the vast deep well of the +French critic to whom all my roused response went out brought up that +mystery to me in cupfuls of extraordinary savour, where was the +incongruity of the two rites? That the Causeries du Lundi, wholly fresh +then to my grateful lips, should so have overflowed for me was certainly +no marvel--that prime acquaintance absolutely _having_, by my measure, +to form a really sacred date in the development of any historic or +aesthetic consciousness worth mentioning; but that I could be to the +very end more or less thrilled by simply sitting, all stupid and +sentient, in the thick company of my merely nominal associates and under +the strange ministrations of Dr. Theophilus Parsons, "Governor" Washburn +and Professor Joel Parker, would have appeared to defy explanation only +for those by whom the phenomena of certain kinds of living and working +sensibility are unsuspected. For myself at any rate there was no +anomaly--the anomaly would have been much rather in any prompter +consciousness of a sated perception; I knew why I liked to "go," I knew +even why I could unabashedly keep going in face of the fact that if I +had learned my reason I had learned, and was still to learn, absolutely +nothing else; and that sufficiently supported me through a stretch of +bodily overstrain that I only afterwards allowed myself dejectedly to +measure. The mere sitting at attention for two or three hours--such +attention as I achieved--was paid for by sorry pain; yet it was but +later on that I wondered how I could have found what I "got" an +equivalent for the condition produced. The condition was one of many, +and the others for the most part declared themselves with much of an +equal, though a different, sharpness. It was acute, that is, that one +was so incommoded, but it had broken upon me with force from the first +of my taking my seat--which had the advantage, I acknowledge, of the rim +of the circle, symbolising thereby all the detachment I had been +foredoomed to--that the whole scene was going to be, and again and +again, as "American," and above all as suffused with New England colour, +however one might finally estimate that, as I could possibly have +wished. Such was the effect of one's offering such a plate for +impressions to play on at their will; as well as of one's so failing to +ask in advance what they would matter, so taking for granted that they +would all matter somehow. It would matter somehow for instance that just +a queer dusky half smothered light, as from windows placed too low, or +too many interposing heads, should hang upon our old auditorium--long +since voided of its then use and, with all its accessory chambers, +seated elsewhere afresh and in much greater state; which glimpse of a +scheme of values might well have given the measure of the sort of profit +I was, or rather wasn't, to derive. It doubtless quite ought to have +confounded me that I had come up to _faire mon droit_ by appreciations +predominantly of the local chiaroscuro and other like quantities; but I +remember no alarm--I only remember with what complacency my range of +perception on those general lines was able to spread. + +It mattered, by the same law, no end that Dr. Theophilus Parsons, whose +rich, if slightly quavering, old accents were the first to fall upon my +ear from the chair of instruction beneath a huge hot portrait of Daniel +Webster should at once approve himself a vivid and curiously-composed +person, an _illustrative_ figure, as who should say--exactly with all +the marks one might have wished him, marks of a social order, a general +air, a whole history of things, or in other words of people; since there +was nothing one mightn't, by my sentiment, do with such a subject from +the moment it gave out character. Character thus was all over the place, +as it could scarce fail to be when the general subject, the one gone in +for, had become identical with the persons of all its votaries. Such was +the interest of the source of edification just named, not one ray of +whose merely professed value so much as entered my mind. Governor +Washburn was of a different, but of a no less complete consistency--queer, +ingenuous, more candidly confiding, especially as to his own pleasant +fallibility, than I had ever before known a chaired dispenser of +knowledge, and all after a fashion that endeared him to his young +hearers, whose resounding relish of the frequent tangle of his +apologetic returns upon himself, quite, almost always, to +inextricability, was really affectionate in its freedom. I could +understand and admire that--it seemed to have for me legendary +precedents; whereas of the third of our instructors I mainly recall that +he represented dryness and hardness, prose unrelieved, at their +deadliest--partly perhaps because he was most master of his subject. He +was none the less placeable for these things withal, and what mainly +comes back to me of him is the full sufficiency with which he made me +ask myself how I _could_ for a moment have seen myself really browse in +any field where the marks of the shepherd were such an oblong dome of a +bare cranium, such a fringe of dropping little ringlets toward its base, +and a mouth so meanly retentive, so ignorant of style, as I made out, +above a chin so indifferent to the duty, or at least to the opportunity, +of chins. If I had put it to myself that there was no excuse for the +presence of a young person so affected by the idea of how people looked +on a scene where the issue was altogether what they usefully taught, as +well as intelligently learned and wanted to learn, I feel I should, +after my first flush of confusion, have replied assuredly enough that +just the beauty of the former of these questions was in its being of +equal application everywhere; which was far from the case with the +latter. The question of how people looked, and of how their look counted +for a thousand relations, had risen before me too early and kept me +company too long for me not to have made a fight over it, from the very +shame of appearing at all likely to give it up, had some fleeting +delusion led me to cast a slur upon it. It would do, I was already sure, +half the work of carrying me through life, and where was better proof of +all it would have to give than just in the fact of what it was then and +there doing? It worked for appreciation--not one of the uses of which as +an act of intelligence had, all round, finer connections; and on the +day, in short, when one should cease to live in large measure by one's +eyes (with the imagination of course all the while waiting on this) one +would have taken the longest step towards not living at all. My +companions--however scantly indeed they were to become such--were +subject to my so practising in a degree which represented well-nigh the +whole of my relation with them, small reciprocity for them as there may +have been in it; since vision, and nothing but vision, was from +beginning to end the fruit of my situation among them. There was not one +of them as to whom it didn't matter that he "looked," by my fancy of +him, thus or so; the key to this disposition of the accents being for me +to such an extent that, as I have said, I was with all intensity taking +in New England and that I knew no better _immediate_ way than to take it +in by my senses. What that name really comprehended had been a mystery, +daily growing less, to which everything that fell upon those senses +referred itself, making the innumerable appearances hang together ever +so densely. Theophilus Parsons, with his tone, his unction, his homage +still to some ancient superstition, some standard of manners, reached +back as to a state of provincialism rounded and compact, quite +self-supporting, which gave it serenity and quality, something +comparatively rich and urban; the good ex-Governor, on the other hand, +of whom I think with singular tenderness, opened through every note of +aspect and expression straight into those depths of rusticity which more +and more unmistakably underlay the social order at large and out of +which one felt it to have emerged in any degree but at scattered points. +Where it did emerge, I seemed to see, it held itself as high as +possible, conscious, panting a little, elate with the fact of having +cleared its skirts, saved its life, consolidated its Boston, yet as with +wastes unredeemed, roundabout it, propping up and pushing in--all so +insistently that the light in which one for the most part considered the +scene was strongly coloured by their action. This was one's clue to the +labyrinth, if labyrinth it was to be called--a generalisation into which +everything fitted, first to surprise and then indubitably to relief, +from the moment one had begun to make it. Under its law the Puritan +capital, however visibly disposed to spread and take on new disguises, +affected me as a rural centre even to a point at which I had never known +anything as rural; there being involved with this too much further food +for curiosity and wonder. Boston was in a manner of its own stoutly and +vividly urban, not only a town, but a town of history--so that how did +it manage to be such different things at the same time? That was +doubtless its secret--more and more interesting to study in proportion +as, on closer acquaintance, yet an acquaintance before which the sense +of one's preferred view from outside never gave way, one felt the +equilibrium attained as on the whole an odd fusion and intermixture, of +the chemical sort as it were, and not a matter of elements or aspects +sharply alternating. There was in the exhibition at its best distinctly +a savour--an excellent thing for a community to have, and part of the +savour was, as who should say, the breath of the fields and woods and +waters, though at their domesticated and familiarised stage, or the echo +of a tone which had somehow become that of the most educated of our +societies without ceasing to be that of the village. + +Of so much from the first I felt sure, and this all the more that by my +recollection of New York, even indeed by my recollection of Albany, we +had been aware in those places of no such strain. New York at least had +been whatever disagreeable, not to say whatever agreeable, other thing +one might have declared it--it might even have been vulgar, though that +cheap substitute for an account of anything didn't, I think, in the +connection, then exist for me; but the last reference to its nature +likely to crop up in its social soil was beyond question the flower of +the homely. New England had, by one's impression, cropped up there, but +had done so just _as_ New England, New England unabsorbed and +unreconciled; which was exactly a note in the striated, the piebald or, +more gracefully, cosmopolite local character. I am not sure that the +comparatively--I say comparatively--market-town suggestion of the city +by the Charles came out for me as a positive richness, but it did +essentially contribute to what had become so highly desirable, the +reinforcement of my vision of American life by the idea of variety. I +apparently required of anything I should take to my heart that it should +be, approached at different angles, "like" as many other things as +possible--in accordance with which it made for a various "America" that +Boston should seem really strong, really in not having, for better or +worse, the same irrepressible likenesses as New York. I invoked, I +called down the revelation of, new likenesses by the simple act of +threading the Boston streets, whether by garish day (the afterglow of +the great snowfalls of winter was to turn in particular to a blinding +glare, an unequalled hardness of light,) or under that mantle of night +which draped as with the garb of adventure our long-drawn townward +little rumbles in the interest of the theatre or of Parker's--oh the +sordid, yet never in the least deterrent conditions of transit in that +age of the unabbreviated, the dividing desert and the primitive +horse-car! (The desert is indeed, despite other local developments and +the general theory of the rate at which civilisation spreads and +ugliness wanes, still very much what it was in the last mid-century, but +the act of passage through it has been made to some extent easier.) +Parker's played in the intercourse of Cambridge with Boston a part of a +preponderance that I look back upon, I confess, as the very condition +of the purest felicity we knew--I knew at any rate myself none, whether +of a finer or a grosser strain, that competed with this precious +relation. Competition has thickened since and proportions have +altered--to no small darkening of the air, but the time was surely +happier; a single such _point de repere_ not only sufficed but richly +heaped up the measure. Parker's, on the whole side of the joy of life, +_was_ Boston--speaking as under the thrill of early occasions +recaptured; Boston could be therefore, in the acutest connections, those +of young comradeship and young esthetic experience, heaven save the +mark, fondly prepared or properly crowned, but the enjoyed and shared +repast, literally the American feast, as I then appraised such values; a +basis of native abundance on which everything else rested. The theatre, +resorted to whenever possible, rested indeed doubtless most, though with +its heaviest weight thrown perhaps at a somewhat later time; the theatre +my uncanny appetite for which strikes me as almost abnormal in the light +of what I braved to reach it from the studious suburb, or more +particularly braved to return from it. I touch alas no spring that +doesn't make a hum of memories, and pick them over as I will three or +four of that scenic strain linger on my sense. The extraordinary fact +about these--which plays into my generalisation a little way back--was +that, for all the connection of such occasions with the great interest +of the theatre at large, there was scarce an impression of the stage +wrung from current opportunity that didn't somehow underscore itself +with the special Boston emphasis; and this in spite of the fact that +plays and performers in those days were but a shade less raggedly +itinerant over the land than they are now. The implication of the +provincial in the theatric air, and of the rustic in the provincial, may +have been a matter of the "house" itself, with its twenty kinds of +redolence of barbarism--with the kind determined by the very audience +perhaps indeed plainest; vivid to me at all events is it how I felt even +at the time, in repairing to the Howard Atheneum to admire Miss Maggie +Mitchell and Miss Kate Bateman, that one would have had only to scratch +a little below the surface of the affair to come upon the but +half-buried Puritan curse not so very long before devoted to such +perversities. Wasn't the curse still in the air, and could anything less +than a curse, weighing from far back on the general conscience, have +accounted for one could scarce say what want of self-respect in the +total exhibition?--for that intimation more than anything else perhaps +of the underhand snicker with which one sat so oddly associated. By the +blest law of youth and fancy withal one did admire the actress--the +young need to admire as flatly as one could broke through all crowding +apprehensions. I like to put it down that nothing in the world qualified +my wonder at the rendering by the first of the performers I have named +of the figure of "Fanchon the Cricket" in a piece so entitled, an +artless translation from a German original, if I rightly remember, which +original had been an arrangement for the stage of La Petite Fadette, +George Sand's charming rustic idyll. I like to put it down that Miss +Maggie Mitchell's having for years, as I gathered, twanged that one +string and none other; every night of her theatric life, over the huge +country, before she was revealed to us--just as Mr. Joe Jefferson, with +no word of audible reprehension ever once addressed to him, was to have +twanged his--did nothing to bedim the brightness of our vision or the +apparent freshness of her art, and that above all it seemed a privilege +critically to disengage the delicacy of this art and the rare effect of +the natural in it from the baseness in which it was framed: so golden a +glimmer is shed, as one looks back, from any shaky little torch lighted, +by whatever fond stretch, at the high esthetic flame. Upon these faint +sparks in the night of time would I gently breathe, just to see them +again distinguishably glow, rather than leave their momentary function +uncommemorated. Strange doubtless were some of the things that +represented these momentary functions--strange I mean in proportion to +the fires they lighted. The small bower of the muse in Winthrop Square +was first to know the fluttered descent of the goddess to my appeal for +her aid in the composition of a letter from which the admired Miss +Maggie should gather the full force of my impression. Particularly do I +incline even now to mention that she testified to her having gratefully +gathered it by the despatch to me in return of a little printed copy of +the play, a scant pamphlet of "acting edition" humility, addressed in a +hand which assumed a romantic cast as soon as I had bethought myself of +finding for it a happy precedent in that of Pendennis's Miss +Fotheringay. + +It had been perhaps to the person of this heroine that Pendennis +especially rendered homage, while I, without illusions, or at least +without confusions, was fain to discriminate in favour of the magic of +method, that is of genius, itself; which exactly, more than anything +else could have done (success, as I considered, crowning my +demonstration,) contributed to consecrate to an exquisite use, _the_ +exquisite, my auspicious _reduit_ aforesaid. For an esthetic vibration +to whatever touch had but to be intense enough to tremble on into other +reactions under other blest contacts and commotions. It was by the +operation again of the impulse shaking me up to an expression of what +the elder star of the Howard Atheneum had artistically "meant" to me +that I first sat down beside my view of the Brighton hills to enrol +myself in the bright band of the fondly hoping and fearfully doubting +who count the days after the despatch of manuscripts. I formally +addressed myself under the protection, not to say the inspiration, of +Winthrop Square to the profession of literature, though nothing would +induce me now to name the periodical on whose protracted silence I had +thus begun to hang with my own treasures of reserve to match it. The +bearing of which shy ecstasies--shy of exhibition then, that is, save as +achievements recognised--is on their having thus begun, at any rate, to +supply all the undertone one needed to whatever positive perfunctory +show; the show proceeding as it could, all the while, thanks to much +help from the undertone, which felt called upon at times to be copious. +It is not, I allow, that memory may pretend for me to keep the two +elements of the under and the over always quite distinct--it would have +been a pity all round, in truth, should they have altogether escaped +mixing and fraternising. The positive perfunctory show, at all events, +to repeat my term, hitched itself along from point to point, and could +have no lack of outside support to complain of, I reflect, from the +moment I could make my own every image and incitement--those, as I have +noted, of the supply breaking upon me with my first glimpse of the +Cambridge scene. If I seem to make too much of these it is because I at +the time made still more, more even than my pious record has presumed to +set down. The air of truth doubtless hangs uneasy, as the matter stands, +over so queer a case as my having, by my intimation above, found +appreciability in life at the Law School even under the failure for me +of everything generally drawn upon for it, whether the glee of study, +the ardour of battle or the joy of associated adventure. Not to have +felt earlier sated with the mere mechanic amusement or vain form of +regularity at lectures would strike me to-day as a fact too "rum" for +belief if certain gathered flowers by the way, flowers of perverse +appreciation though they might but be, didn't give out again as I turn +them over their unspeakable freshness. They were perforce gathered (what +makes it still more wondrous) all too languidly; yet they massed +themselves for my sense, through the lapsing months, to the final +semblance of an intimate secret garden. Such was the odd, the almost +overwhelming consequence--or one of these, for they are many--of an +imagination to which literally everything obligingly signified. One of +the actual penalties of this is that so few of such ancient importances +remain definable or presentable. It may in the fulness of time simply +sound _bete_ that, with the crash of greater questions about one, I +should have been positively occupied with such an affair as the degree +and the exact shade to which the blest figures in the School array, each +quite for himself, might settle and fix the weight, the interest, the +function, as it were, of his Americanism. I could scarce have cleared up +even for myself, I dare say, the profit, or more pertinently the charm, +of that extravagance--and the fact was of course that I didn't feel it +as extravagance, but quite as homely thrift, moral, social, esthetic, or +indeed, as I might have been quite ready to say, practical and +professional. It was practical at least in the sense that it probably +more helped to pass the time than all other pursuits together. The real +proof of which would be of course my being able now to string together +for exhibition some of these pearls of differentiation--since it was to +differentiation exactly that I was then, in my innocence, most prompted; +not dreaming of the stiff law by which, on the whole American ground, +division of _type_, in the light of opposition and contrast, was more +and more to break down for me and fail: so that verily the recital of +my mere concomitant efforts to pick it up again and piece its parts +together and make them somehow show and serve would be a record of +clinging courage. I may note at once, however, as a light on the +anomaly, that there hung about _all_ young appearances at that period +something ever so finely derivative and which at this day rather defies +re-expression--the common character or shared function of the precious +clay so largely making up the holocausts of battle; an advantage working +for them circuitously or perhaps ambiguously enough, I grant, but still +placing them more or less under the play of its wing even when the arts +of peace happened for the hour to engage them. They potentially, they +conceivably, they indirectly paid, and nothing was for the most part +more ascertainable of them individually than that, with brothers or +other near relatives in the ranks or in commands, they came, to their +credit, of paying families. All of which again may represent the high +pitch of one's associated sensibility--there having been occasions of +crisis, were they worth recovering, when under its action places, +persons, objects animate or not, glimmered alike but through the grand +idealising, the generalising, blur. At moments of less fine a strain, it +may be added, the sources of interest presented themselves in looser +formation. The young appearances, as I like to continue to call them, +could be pleasingly, or at least robustly homogeneous, and yet, for +livelier appeal to fancy, flower here and there into special cases of +elegant deviation--"sports," of exotic complexion, one enjoyed +denominating these (or would have enjoyed had the happy figure then +flourished) thrown off from the thick stem that was rooted under our +feet. Even these rare exceptions, the few apparitions referring +themselves to other producing conditions than the New England, wrought +by contrast no havoc in the various quantities for which that section +was responsible; it was certainly refreshing--always to the fond +imagination--that there were, for a change, imprints in the stuff of +youth that didn't square with the imprint, virtually _one_ throughout, +imposed by Springfield or Worcester, by Providence or Portland, or +whatever rural wastes might lie between; yet the variations, I none the +less gather as I strive to recall them, beguiled the spirit (talking +always of my own) rather than coerced it, and this even though fitting +into life as one had already more or less known it, fitting in, that is, +with more points of contact and more reciprocation of understanding than +the New England relation seemed able to produce. It could in fact fairly +blind me to the implication of an inferior immediate _portee_ that such +and such a shape of the New York heterogeneity, however simplified by +silliness, or at least by special stupidity (though who was I to note +_that_?) pressed a certain spring of association, waiting as I always +was for such echoes, rather than left it either just soundless or +bunglingly touched. + +It was for example a link with the larger life, as I am afraid I must +have privately called it, that a certain young New Yorker, an outsider +of still more unmistakable hue than I could suppose even myself, came +and went before us with an effect of cultivated detachment that I +admired at the time for its perfect consistency, and that caused him, it +was positively thrilling to note, not in the least to forfeit sympathy, +but to shine in the high light of public favour. The richest reflections +sprang for me from this, some of them inspiring even beyond the promptly +grasped truth, a comparative commonplace, that the variation or +opposition sufficiently embodied, the line of divergence sharply enough +drawn, always achieves some triumph by the fact of its emphasis, by its +putting itself through at any cost, any cost in particular of ridicule. +So much one had often observed; but what really enriched the dear +induction and made our friend's instance thus remain with me was the +part played by the utter blandness itself of his protest, such an +exhibition of the sweet in the imperturbable. This it was that +enshrined him, by my vision, in a popularity than which nothing could +have seemed in advance less indicated, and that makes me wonder to-day +whether he was simply the luckiest of gamblers or just a conscious and +consummate artist. He reappears to me as a finished fop, finished to +possibilities we hadn't then dreamt of, and as taking his stand, or +rather taking all his walks, on _that_, the magician's wand of his +ideally tight umbrella under his arm and the magician's familiar of his +bristling toy-terrier at his heels. He became thus an apparition +entrancing to the mind. His clothes were of a perfection never known nor +divined in that sphere, a revelation, straight and blindingly authentic, +of Savile Row in its prime; his single eyeglass alone, and his inspired, +his infinite use of it as at once a defensive crystal wall and a lucid +window of hospitality, one couldn't say most which, might well have +foredoomed him, by all likelihood, to execration and destruction. He +became none the less, as I recover him, our general pride and joy; his +entrances and exits were acclaimed beyond all others, and it was his +rare privilege to cause the note of derision and the note of affection +to melt together, beyond separation, in vague but virtual homage to the +refreshment of felt type. To see it dawn upon rude breasts (for rude, +comparatively, were the breasts of the typeless, or at the best of the +typed but in one character, throughout the same,) that defiant and +confident difference carried far enough might avert the impulse to slay, +was to muse ever so agreeably on the queer means by which great morals, +picking up a life as they may, can still get themselves pointed. The +"connotation" of the trivial, it was thus attaching to remark, could +perfectly serve when that of the important, roughly speaking, failed for +a grateful _connection_--from the moment some such was massed invitingly +in view. The difficulty with the type about me was that, in its +monotony, beginning and ending with itself, it _had_ no connections and +suggested none; whereas the grace of the salient apparition I have +perhaps too earnestly presented lay in its bridging over our separation +from worlds, from great far-off reservoirs, of a different mixture +altogether, another civility and complexity. Young as I was, I myself +clearly recognised that ground of reference, saw it even to some extent +in the light of experience--so could I stretch any scrap of contact; +kept hold of it by fifty clues, recalls and reminders that dangled for +me mainly out of books and magazines and heard talk, things of picture +and story, things of prose and verse and anecdotal vividness in fine, +and, as I have elsewhere allowed, for the most part hoardedly English +and French. Our "character man" of the priceless monocle and the +trotting terrier was "like" some type in a collection of types--that was +the word for it; and, there being no collection, nor the ghost of one, +roundabout us, was a lone courageous creature in the desert of our bald +reiterations. The charm of which conclusion was exactly, as I have said, +that the common voice did, by every show, bless him for rendered +service, his dropped hint of an ideal containing the germ of other +ideals--and confessed by that fact to more appetites and inward +yearnings than it the least bit consciously counted up. + +Not quite the same service was rendered by G. A. J., who had no ridicule +to brave, and I can speak with confidence but of the connections, rather +confused if they were, opened up to me by his splendid aspect and which +had absolutely nothing in common with the others that hung near. It was +brilliant to a degree that none other had by so much as a single shade +the secret of, and it carried the mooning fancy to a further reach even, +on the whole, than the figure of surprise I have just commemorated; this +last comparatively scant in itself and rich only by what it made us read +into it, and G. A. J. on the other hand intrinsically and actively ample +and making us read wonders, as it were, into whatever it might be that +was, as we used to say, "back of" him. He had such a flush of life and +presence as to make that reference mysteriously and inscrutably +loom--and the fascinating thing about this, as we again would have said, +was that it could strike me as so beguilingly American. That too was +part of the glamour, that its being so could kick up a mystery which one +might have pushed on to explore, whereas our New York friend only kicked +up a certainty (for those properly prepared) and left not exploration, +but mere assured satisfaction, the mark of the case. G. A. J. reached +westward, westward even of New York, and southward at least as far as +Virginia; teeming facts that I discovered, so to speak, by my own +unaided intelligence--so little were they responsibly communicated. +Little was communicated that I recover--it would have had to drop from +too great a personal height; so that the fun, as I may call it, was the +greater for my opening all by myself to perceptions. I was getting +furiously American, in the big sense I invoked, through this felt growth +of an ability to reach out westward, southward, anywhere, everywhere, on +that apprehension of finding myself but patriotically charmed. Thus +there dawned upon me the grand possibility that, charm for charm, the +American, the assumed, the postulated, would, in the particular case of +its really acting, count double; whereas the European paid for being +less precarious by being also less miraculous. It counted single, as one +might say, and only made up for that by counting almost always. It +mightn't be anything like almost always, even at the best, no doubt, +that an American-grown value of aspect would so entirely emerge as G. A. +J.'s seemed to do; but what did this exactly point to unless that the +rarity so implied would be in the nature of the splendid? That at least +was the way the cultivation of patriotism as a resource was the +cultivation of workable aids to the same, however ingenious these. (Just +to glow belligerently with one's country was no resource, but a +primitive instinct breaking through; and besides this resources were +cooling, not heating.) It might have seemed that I might after all +perfectly dispense with friends when simple acquaintances, and rather +feared ones at that, though feared but for excess of lustre, could +kindle in the mind such bonfires of thought, feeding the flame with +gestures and sounds and light accidents of passage so beyond their own +supposing. In spite of all which, however, G. A. J. was marked for a +friend and taken for a kinsman from the day when his blaze of colour +should have sufficiently cleared itself up for me to distinguish the +component shades. + + + + +XI + + +I am fully aware while I go, I should mention, of all that flows from +the principle governing, by my measure, these recoveries and +reflections--even to the effect, hoped for at least, of stringing their +apparently dispersed and disordered parts upon a fine silver thread; +none other than the principle of response to a long-sought occasion, now +gratefully recognised, for making trial of the recording and figuring +act on behalf of some case of the imaginative faculty under cultivation. +The personal history, as it were, of an imagination, a lively one of +course, in a given and favourable case, had always struck me as a task +that a teller of tales might rejoice in, his advance through it +conceivably causing at every step some rich precipitation--unless it be +rather that the play of strong imaginative passion, passion strong +enough to _be_, for its subject or victim, the very interest of life, +constitutes in itself an endless crisis. Fed by every contact and every +apprehension, and feeding in turn every motion and every act, wouldn't +the light in which it might so cause the whole scene of life to unroll +inevitably become as fine a thing as possible to represent? The idea of +some pretext for such an attempt had again and again, naturally, haunted +me; the man of imagination, and of an "awfully good" one, showed, as the +creature of that force or the sport of that fate or the wielder of that +arm, for the hero of a hundred possible fields--if one could but first +"catch" him, after the fashion of the hare in the famous receipt. Who +and what might he prove, when caught, in respect to _other_ signs and +conditions? He might take, it would seem, some finding and launching, +let alone much handling--which itself, however, would be exactly part of +the pleasure. Meanwhile, it no less appeared, there were other subjects +to go on with, and even if one had to wait for him he would still +perhaps come. It happened for me that he _was_ belatedly to come, but +that he was to turn up then in a shape almost too familiar at first for +recognition, the shape of one of those residual substitutes that engage +doubting eyes the day after the fair. He had been with me all the while, +and only too obscurely and intimately--I had not found him in the market +as an exhibited or _offered_ value. I had in a word to draw him forth +from within rather than meet him in the world before me, the more +convenient sphere of the objective, and to make him objective, in short, +had to turn nothing less than myself inside out. What was _I_ thus, +within and essentially, what had I ever been and could I ever be but a +man of imagination at the active pitch?--so that if it was a question of +treating _some_ happy case, any that would give me what, artistically +speaking, I wanted, here on the very spot was one at hand in default of +a better. It wasn't what I should have preferred, yet it was after all +the example I knew best and should feel most at home with--granting +always that objectivity, the prize to be won, shouldn't just be +frightened away by the odd terms of the affair. It is of course for my +reader to say whether or no what I have done _has_ meant defeat; yet +even if this should be his judgment I fall back on the interest, at the +worst, of certain sorts of failure. I shall have brought up from the +deep many things probably not to have been arrived at for the benefit of +these pages without my particular attempt. Sundry of such I seem still +to recognise, and not least just now those involved in that visionary +"assistance" at the drama of the War, from however far off, which had +become a habit for us without ceasing to be a strain. I am sure I +thought more things under that head, with the fine visionary ache, than +I thought in all other connections together; for the simple reason that +one had to _ask_ leave--of one's own spirit--for these last +intermissions, whereas one but took it, with both hands free, for one's +sense of the bigger cause. There was not in that the least complication +of consciousness. I have sufficiently noted how my apprehension of the +bigger cause was at the same time, and this all through, at once +quickened and kept low; to the point that positively my whole +acquaintance of the personal sort even with such a matter as my brother +Wilky's enrolment in the 44th Massachusetts was to reduce itself to but +a single visit to him in camp. + +I recall an afternoon at Readville, near Boston, and the fashion in +which his state of juniority gave way, for me, on the spot, to +immensities of superior difference, immensities that were at the same +time intensities, varieties, supremacies, of the enviable in the +all-difficult and the delightful in the impossible: such a fairy-tale +seemed it, and withal such a flat revolution, that this soft companion +of my childhood should have such romantic chances and should have +mastered, by the mere aid of his native gaiety and sociability, such +mysteries, such engines, such arts. To become first a happy soldier and +then an easy officer was in particular for G. W. J. an exercise of +sociability--and that above all was my extract of the Readville scene, +which most came home to me as a picture, an interplay of bright breezy +air and high shanty-covered levels with blue horizons, and laughing, +welcoming, sunburnt young men, who seemed mainly to bristle, through +their welcome, with Boston genealogies, and who had all alike turned +handsome, only less handsome than their tawny-bearded Colonel, under I +couldn't have said what common grace of clear blue toggery imperfectly +and hitchingly donned in the midst of the camp labours that I gaped at +(by the blessing of heaven I could in default of other adventures still +gape) as at shining revels. I couldn't "do things," I couldn't +indefinitely hang about, though on occasion I did so, as it comes back +to me, verily to desperation; which had to be my dim explanation--dim as +to my ever insisting on it--of so rare a snatch at opportunity for +gapings the liveliest, or in better terms admirations the crudest, that +I could have presumed to encumber the scene with. Scarce credible to me +now, even under recall of my frustrations, that I was able in all this +stretch of time to respond but to a single other summons to admire at +any cost, which I think must have come again from Readville, and the +occasion of which, that of my brother's assumed adjutancy of the so +dramatically, so much more radically recruited 54th involved a view +superficially less harmonious. The whole situation was more wound up and +girded then, the formation of negro regiments affected us as a +tremendous War measure, and I have glanced in another place at the +consequence of it that was at the end of a few months most pointedly to +touch ourselves. That second aspect of the weeks of preparation before +the departure of the regiment can not at all have suggested a frolic, +though at the time I don't remember it as grim, and can only gather +that, as the other impression had been of something quite luminous and +beautiful, so this was vaguely sinister and sad--perhaps simply through +the fact that, though our sympathies, our own as a family's, were, in +the current phrase, all enlisted on behalf of the race that had sat in +bondage, it was impossible for the mustered presence of more specimens +of it, and of stranger, than I had ever seen together, not to make the +young men who were about to lead them appear sacrificed to the general +tragic need in a degree beyond that of their more orthodox appearances. +The air of sacrifice was, however, so to brighten as to confound itself +with that of splendid privilege on the day (May 28th, '63) of the march +of the 54th out of Boston, its fairest of young commanders at its head, +to great reverberations of music, of fluttering banners, launched +benedictions and every public sound; only from that scene, when it took +place, I had to be helplessly absent--just as I see myself in a like +dismal manner deprived of any nearness of view of my still younger +brother's military metamorphosis and contemporary initiation. I vainly +question memory for some such picture of _him_, at this stage of his +adventure, as would have been certain to hang itself, for reasons of +wonder and envy again, in my innermost cabinet. Our differently +compacted and more variously endowed Bob, who had strained much at every +tether, was so eager and ardent that it made for him a positive +authority; but what most recurs to me of his start in the 45th, or of my +baffled vision of it, is the marvel of our not having all just wept, +more than anything else, either for his being so absurdly young or his +being so absurdly strenuous--we might have had our choice of pretexts +and protests. It seemed so short a time since he had been l'ingenieux +petit Robertson of the domestic schoolroom, pairing with our small +sister as I paired with Wilky. We didn't in the least weep, however--we +smiled as over the interest of childhood at its highest bloom, and that +my parents, with their consistent tenderness, should have found their +surrender of their latest born so workable is doubtless a proof that we +were all lifted together as on a wave that might bear us where it would. +Our ingenious Robertson was but seventeen years old, but I suspect his +ingenuity of having, in so good a cause, anticipated his next birthday +by a few months. The 45th was a nine-months regiment, but he got +himself passed out of it, in advance of its discharge, to a lieutenancy +in the 55th U.S.C.T., Colonel A. P. Hallowell (transferred from +lieutenant-colonelcy of the 54th) commanding; though not before he had +been involved in the siege of Charleston, whence the visionary, the +quite Edgar Poeish look, for my entertainment, of the camp-covered +"Folly Island" of his letters. While his regiment was engaged in +Seymour's raid on Florida he suffered a serious sunstroke, with such +consequences that he was recommended for discharge; of which he declined +to avail himself, obtaining instead a position on General Ames's staff +and enjoying thus for six months the relief of being mounted. But he +returned to his regiment in front of Charleston (after service with the +Tenth Army Corps, part of the Army of the James, before Petersburg and +Richmond); and though I have too scant an echo of his letters from that +scene one of the passages that I do recover is of the happiest. "It was +when the line wavered and I saw Gen'l Hartwell's horse on my right rear +up with a shell exploding under him that I rammed my spurs into my own +beast, who, maddened with pain, carried me on through the line, throwing +men down, and over the Rebel works some distance ahead of our troops." +For this action he was breveted captain; and the 55th, later on, was +the first body of troops to enter Charleston and march through its +streets--which term of his experience, as it unfolded, presents him to +my memory as again on staff duty; with Brigadier-Generals Potter, Rufus +Hatch and his old superior and, at my present writing, gallant and vivid +survivor, Alfred Hartwell, who had been his captain and his +lieut.-colonel in the 45th and the 55th respectively.[10] + +I can at all events speak perfectly of my own sense of the uplifting +wave just alluded to during the couple of years that the "boys'" letters +from the field came in to us--with the one abatement of glamour for them +the fact that so much of their substance was in the whole air of life +and their young reports of sharp experience but a minor pipe in the huge +mixed concert always in our ears. Faded and touching pages, these +letters are in some abundance before me now, breathing confidence and +extraordinary cheer--though surviving principally but in Wilky's +admirable hand, of all those I knew at that time the most humiliating +to a feebler yet elder fist; and with their liveliest present action to +recompose for me not by any means so much the scenes and circumstances, +the passages of history concerned, as to make me know again and +reinhabit the places, the hours, the stilled or stirred conditions +through which I took them in. These conditions seem indeed mostly to +have settled for me into the single sense of what I missed, compared to +what the authors of our bulletins gained, in wondrous opportunity of +vision, that is _appreciation of the thing seen_--there being clearly +such a lot of this, and all of it, by my conviction, portentous and +prodigious. The key to which assurance was that I longed to live by my +eyes, in the midst of such far-spreading chances, in greater measure +than I then had help to, and that the measure in which _they_ had it +gloriously overflowed. This capacity in them to deal with such an +affluence of life stood out from every line, and images sprung up about +them at every turn of the story. The story, the general one, of the +great surge of action on which they were so early carried, was to take +still other turns during the years I now speak of, some of these not of +the happiest; but with the same relation to it on my own part too +depressingly prolonged--that of seeing, sharing, envying, applauding, +pitying, all from too far-off, and with the queer sense that, whether or +no they would prove to have had the time of their lives, it seemed that +the only time I should have had would stand or fall by theirs. This was +to be yet more deplorably the case later on--I like to give a twitch to +the curtain of a future reduced to the humility of a past: when, the War +being over and we confronted with all the personal questions it had +showily muffled up only to make them step forth with their sharper +angles well upon us, our father, easily beguiled, acquired by purchase +and for the benefit of his younger sons divers cottonlands in Florida; +which scene of blighted hopes it perhaps was that cast upon me, at its +defiant distance, the most provoking spell. There was provocation, at +those subsequent seasons, in the very place-name of Serenola, beautiful +to ear and eye; unforgettable were to remain the times, while the vain +experiment dragged on for our anxiety and curiosity, and finally to our +great discomfiture, when my still ingenuous young brothers, occupied in +raising and selling crops that refused alike, it seemed, to come and to +go, wafted northward their fluctuating faith, their constant hospitality +and above all, for one of the number at home, their large unconscious +evocations. The mere borrowed, and so brokenly borrowed, impression of +southern fields basking in a light we didn't know, of scented +sub-tropic nights, of a situation suffused with economic and social +drama of the strangest and sharpest, worked in me, I dare say most +deceptively, as a sign of material wasted, my material not being in the +least the crops unproduced or unsold, but the precious store of images +ungathered. However, the vicarious sensation had, as I say, been intense +enough, from point to point, before that; a series of Wilky's letters of +the autumn of '62 and the following winter during operations in North +Carolina intended apparently to clear an approach to Charleston overflow +with the vivacity of his interest in whatever befell, and still more in +whatever promised, and reflect, in this freshness of young assurances +and young delusions, the general public fatuity. The thread of interest +for me here would certainly be much more in an exhibition of some such +artless notes of the period, with their faded marks upon them, than in +that of the spirit of my own poor perusal of them--were it not that +those things shrink after years to the common measure when not +testifying to some rarity of experience and expression. All experience +in the field struck me indeed as then rare, and I wondered at both my +brothers' military mastery of statement, through which played, on the +part of the elder, a whimsicality of "turn," an oddity of verbal +collocation, that we had ever cherished, in the family circle, as the +sign of his address. "The next fight we have, I expect," he writes from +Newberne, N. C., on New Year's Day '63, "will be a pretty big one, but I +am confident that under Foster and our gunboats we will rid the State of +these miserable wretches whom the Divine Providence has created in its +wisdom to make men wish----! Send on then, open yourselves a recruiting +establishment if necessary--all we want is numbers! _They_ are the +greatest help to the individual soldier on the battle-field. If he feels +he has 30,000 men behind him pushing on steadily to back him he is in +much more fighting trim than when away in the rear with 10,000 ahead of +him fighting like madmen. It seems that Halleck told Foster when F. was +in Washington that he scarcely slept for a week after learning that we +were near Goldsboro', having heard previously that a reinforcement of +40,000 Rebels were coming down there to whip us. Long live Foster!" + +"It was so cold this morning," he writes at another and earlier date, +"that Divine service was held in our barracks instead of out-of-doors, +as it generally is, and it was the most impressive that I have ever +heard. The sermon was on profanity, and the chaplain, after making all +the observations and doing by mouth and action as much as he could to +rid the regiment of the curse, sat down, credulous being, thinking he +had settled the question for ever. Colonel Lee then rose and said that +the chaplain the other day accused him--most properly--of profanity and +of its setting a very bad example to the regiment; also that when he +took the command he had felt how very bad the thing would be in its +influence on all around him. He felt that it would be the great conflict +of his life. At this point his head drooped and he lifted his +handkerchief to his face; but he went on in conclusion: 'Now boys, let +us try one and all to vindicate the sublime principles our chaplain has +just so eloquently expressed, and I will do _my_ best. I hope to God I +have wounded no man's feelings by an oath; if I have I humbly beg his +pardon.' Here he finished." How this passage impressed me at the time +signifies little; but I find myself now feel in its illustration of what +could then happen among soldiers of the old Puritan Commonwealth a rich +recall of some story from Cromwellian ranks. Striking the continuity, +and not unworthy of it my brother's further comment. "I leave you to +imagine which of these appeals did most good, the conventional address +of the pastor or the honest manly heart-touching acknowledgment of our +Colonel. That is the man through and through, and I heard myself say +afterwards: 'Let him swear to all eternity if he _is_ that sort of man, +and if profanity makes such, for goodness' sake let us all swear.' This +may be a bad doctrine, but is one that might after all undergo +discussion." From which letter I cull further: "I really begin to think +you've been hard in your judgments of McClellan. You don't know what an +enemy we have to conquer. Every secesh I've seen, and all the rebel +prisoners here, talk of the War with such callous earnestness." A letter +from Newberne of December 2nd contains a "pathetic" record of momentary +faith, the sort so abundant at the time in what was not at all to be +able to happen. Moreover a name rings out of it which it is a kind of +privilege to give again to the air--when one can do so with some +approach to an association signified; so much did Charles Lowell's +virtue and value and death represent at the season soon to come for +those who stood within sight of them, and with such still unextinct +emotion may the few of these who now survive turn to his admirably +inspired kinsman's Harvard Commemoration Ode and find it infinitely and +tenderly suffused with pride. Two gallantest nephews, particularly +radiant to memory, had James Russell Lowell to commemorate. + + I sweep for them a paean, but they wane + Again and yet again + Into a dirge and die away in pain. + + In these brave ranks I only see the gaps, + Thinking of dear ones whom the dumb turf wraps, + Dark to the triumph which they died to gain. + + Cabot has had news that Mr. Amos Lawrence of Boston is getting up a + cavalry regiment (Wilky writes), and he has sent home to try for a + commission as 2nd lieutenant. Now if we could only _both_ get such + a commission in that regiment you can judge yourself how desirable + it would be. Perkins will probably have one in the Massachusetts + 2nd and our orderly stands a pretty good chance of one in the 44th. + This cavalry colonelcy will probably be for Cabot's cousin, Charles + Lowell. + + There is a report that we start this week for Kinston, and if so we + shall doubtless have a good little fight. We have just received 2 + new Mass. Regiments, the 8th and the 51st. We have absolutely no + time to ourselves; and what time we do have we want much more to + give to lying down than to anything else. But try your best for me + now, and I promise you to do _my_ best wherever I am. + +A homelier truth is in a few lines three weeks later. + + The men as a general thing think war a mean piece of business as + it's carried on in this State; we march 20 or 30 miles and find the + enemy entrenched in rifle-pits or hidden away in some + out-of-the-way place; we send our artillery forward, and after a + brisk skirmish ahead the foe is driven back into the woods, and we + march on for 20 miles more to find the same luck. We were all on + the last march praying for a fight, so that we might halt and throw + off our knapsacks. I don't pretend I am eager to make friends with + bullets, but at Whitehall, after marching some 20 miles, I was on + this account really glad when I heard cannonading ahead and the + column was halted and the fight began. + +The details of this engagement are missing from the letter, but we found +matter of interest in two or three other passages--one in particular +recording a December day's march with 15,000 men, "not including +artillerymen," 70 pieces of artillery and 1100 cavalry; which, "on +account of obstructions on the roads," had achieved by night but +seventeen miles and resulted in a bivouac "in 3 immense cotton-fields, +one about as large as Easton's Pond at Newport." + + We began to see the camp fires of the advance brigade about 4 miles + ahead of us, and I assure you those miles were soon got over. I + think Willy's artistic eye would have enjoyed the sight--it seemed + so as if the world were on fire. When we arrived on the field the + stacks were made, the ranks broken and the men sent after rail + fences, which fortunately abound in this region and are the only + comfort we have at night. A long fire is made, the length of the + stacks, and one rank is placed on one side of it and the other + opposite. I try to make a picture you see, but scratch it out in + despair. The fires made, we sit down and make our coffee in our tin + dippers, and often is one of these pushed over by some careless + wretch who hasn't noticed it on the coals or has been too tired to + look. The coffee and the hard tack consumed we spread our rubber + blankets and sleep as sound as any house in Christendom. At about 5 + the fearful reveille calls us to our feet, we make more coffee, + drink it in a hurry, sling our knapsacks and spank down the road in + one of Foster's regular old quicksteps. + +Thrilling at our fireside of course were the particulars of the Kinston +engagement, and still more, doubtless, the happy freshness of the +writer. + + At 8 A.M. we were on the road, and had hardly marched 3 miles when + we knew by sounds ahead that the ball had opened. We were ordered + up and deployed in an open field on the right of the road, where we + remained some half an hour. Then we were moved some hundred yards + further, but resumed our former position in another field. Here + Foster came up to the Major, who was directly in the rear of our + company and told him to advance our left wing to support Morrison's + battery, which was about half a mile ahead. He also said he was + pressing the Rebs hard and that they were retiring at every shell + from our side. On we went, the left flank company taking the lead, + and many a bullet and shell whizzed over our heads in that longest + half-mile of my life. We seemed to be nearing the fun, for wounded + men were being carried to the rear and dead ones lay on each side + of us in the woods. We were taken into another field on the left of + the road, and before us were deployed the 23rd Mass., who were + firing in great style. First we were ordered to lie down, and then + in 5 or 10 minutes ordered up again, when we charged down that + field in a manner creditable to any Waterloo legion. I felt as if + this moment was the greatest of my life and as if all the devils of + the Inferno were my benighted system. We halted after having + charged some 60 yards, when what should we see on our left, just + out of the woods and stuck up on a rail, but a flag of truce, + placing under its protecting wing some 50 or 60 poor cowering + wretches who, in their zeal for recognition, not only pulled out + all their pocket handkerchiefs, but in the case of one man spread + out his white shirt-flaps and offered them pacifically to the + winds. The most demonic shouts and yells were raised by the 23rd + ahead of us at this sight, in which the 44th joined; while the + regiments on our right, and that of the road, greeted in the same + frightful manner 200 prisoners they had cut off from retreat by the + bridge. So far I was alive and the thing had lasted perhaps 3 + hours; all the enemy but the 200 just named had got away over the + bridge to Kinston and our cavalry were in hot pursuit. I don't + think Sergeant G. W. has ever known greater glee in all his born + days. At about 3 P.M. we crossed the bridge and got into the town. + All along the road from bridge to town Rebel equipments, guns and + cartridge-boxes lay thick, and within the place dead men and horses + thickened too. We were taken ahead through the town to support the + New York 3rd Artillery beyond, where it was shelling the woods + around and ridding the place for the night of any troublesome + wanderers. The Union pickets posted out ahead that night said the + shrieks of women and children further on in the wood could be heard + perfectly all night long, these unfortunates having taken refuge + there from the threatened town. That night we lived like + fighting-cocks--molasses, pork, butter, cheese and all sorts of + different delicacies being foraged for and houses entered + regardless of the commonest dues of life, and others set on fire to + show Kinston was our own. She belonged to our army, and almost + every man claimed a house. If I had only had your orders beforehand + for trophies I could have satisfied you with anything named, from a + gold watch to an old brickbat. This is the ugly part of war. A too + victorious army soon goes down; but we luckily didn't have time + for big demoralisation, as the next day in the afternoon we found + ourselves some 17 miles away and bivouacking in a single prodigious + cornfield. + +To which I don't resist subjoining another characteristic passage from +the same general scene as a wind-up to that small chapter of history. + + The report has gained ground to-day that we leave to-morrow, and if + so I suppose the next three months will be important ones in the + history of the War. Four ironclads and a great many gunboats are in + Beaufort Harbour; we have at present a force of 50,000 infantry, an + immense artillery and upwards of 800 cavalry. Transports + innumerable are filling up every spare inch of our harbour, and + every man's pity and charity are exercised upon Charleston, Mobile + or Wilmington. We are the only nine-months regiment going, a fact + which to the sensitive is highly gratifying, showing Foster's + evident high opinion of us. The expedition, I imagine, will be + pretty interesting, for we shall have excitement enough without the + fearful marches. To-day is Sunday, and I've been reading Hugo's + account of Waterloo in Les Miserables and preparing my mind for + something of the same sort at Wilmington. God grant the battle may + do as much harm to the Rebels as Waterloo did to the French. If it + does the fight will be worth the dreadful carnage it may involve, + and the experience for the survivors an immense treasure. Men will + fight forever if they are well treated. Give them little marching + and keep the wounded away from them, and they'll do anything. I am + very well and in capital spirits, though now and then rather blue + about home. But only 5 months more and then heaven! General Foster + has just issued an order permitting us to inscribe Goldsboro, + Kinston and Whitehall on our banner. + +On the discharge of the 44th after the term of nine months for which it +had engaged and my brother's return home, he at once sought service +again in the Massachusetts 54th, his connection with which I have +already recorded, as well as his injuries in the assault on Fort Wagner +fruitlessly made by that regiment in the summer of '63. He recovered +with difficulty, but at last sufficiently, from his wounds (with one +effect of which he had for the rest of his short life grievously to +reckon), and made haste to rejoin his regiment in the field--to the +promotion of my gathering a few more notes. From "off Graham's point, +Tillapenny River, Headquarters 2nd Brigade," he writes in December '64. + + We started last night from the riflepits in the front of Deveaux + Neck to cross the Tillapenny and make a reconnaissance on this side + and try and get round the enemy's works. It is now half-past 10 + A.M., and I have been trying to wash some of my mud off. We are all + a sorry crowd of beggars--I don't look as I did the night we left + home. I am much of the time mud from head to foot, and my spirit is + getting muddled also. But I am in excellent condition as regards my + wounds and astonish myself by my powers. I rode some 26 miles + yesterday and walked some 3 in thick mud, but don't feel a bit the + worse for it. We're only waiting here an hour or two to get a + relief of horses, when we shall start again. We shan't have a fight + of any kind to-day, but to-morrow expect to give them a little + trouble at Pocotaligo. Colonel Hallowell commands this + reconnaissance. We have only 4 regiments and a section of artillery + from the 2nd Brigade with us. We heard some fine music from the + Rebel lines yesterday. They have got a stunning band over there. + Prisoners tell us it's a militia band from Georgia. Most all the + troops in our front are militia composed of old men and boys, the + flower of the chivalry being just now engaged with Sherman at + Savannah. We hear very heavy firing in that direction this morning, + and I guess the chivalry is getting the worst of it. The taking of + Fort McAllister the other day was a splendid thing--we got 280 + prisoners and made them go out and pick up the torpedoes round the + fort. Sherman was up at Oguchee and Ossahaw yesterday on another + consultation with Foster. We had called our whole army out the + night before in front of our works to give him three cheers. This + had a marvellous effect upon the Rebs. About 20 men came in the + night into our lines, thinking we had got reinforcements and were + going to advance. Later. A scout has just come in and tells us the + enemy are intrenched about 4 miles off, so that we _shall_ have + to-day a shindy of some kind. Our headquarters are now in a large + house once owned by Judge Graham. The coloured troops are in high + spirits and have done splendidly this campaign. + +The high spirits of the coloured troops appear naturally to have been +shared by their officers--"in the field, Tillapenny River," late at +night on December 23rd, '64. + + We have just received such bully news to comfort us that I can't + help rising from my slumbers to drop you a line. A despatch just + received tells us that Sherman has captured 150 guns, 250,000 dols. + worth of cotton at Savannah, that Forrest is killed and routed by + Rousseau, and that Thomas has walked into Hood and given him the + worst kind of fits. I imagine the poor Rebel outposts in our front + feel pretty blue to-night, for what with that and the thermometer + at about zero I guess the night won't pass without robbing their + army of some of its best and bravest. We suffer a good deal from + the cold, but are now sitting round our camp fire in as good + spirits as men could possibly be. A despatch received early this + evening tells us to look out sharp for Hardee, but this latest news + knocks that to a cocked hat, and we are only just remembering that + that gentleman is round. My foot is bully. + +As regards that impaired member, on which he was ever afterwards +considerably to limp, he opines three days later, on Christmas evening, +that "even in the palmy days of old it never _felt_ better than now." +And he goes on: + + Though Savannah is taken I fear we shan't get much credit for + having helped to take it. Yet night and day we have been at it + hammer and tongs, and as we are away from the main army and + somewhat isolated and cut off our work has been pretty hard. We + have had only 1,200 effective men in our brigade, and out of that + number have had regularly 400 on picket night and day, and the + fatigue and extra guard duty have nearly used them up. Twice we + have been attacked and both times held our own. Twice we attacked + and once have been driven. The only prisoners we have captured on + the whole expedition have been taken by this part of the column, + and on the whole though we didn't march into Savannah I know you + will give us a little credit for having hastened its downfall. + Three prisoners that we took the other night slept at our Hdqrs, + and we had a good long talk with them. We could get out of them + nothing at all that helps from a military point of view, but their + stories about the Confederacy were most hopeless. They were 3 + officers and gentlemen of a crack S.C. cavalry company which has + been used during the War simply to guard this coast, and their + language and state of mind were those of the true Southern + chevalier. They confessed to a great scare on finding themselves + hemmed in by coloured troops, and all agree that the niggers are + the worst enemies they have had to face. On Thursday we turned them + over to the Provost-Marshal at Deveaux Neck, who took them to Gen'l + Hatch. The General had got our despatch announcing we could get + nothing at all out of them, and he came down on them most + ruthlessly and told them to draw lots, as one would have to swing + before night. He told them he had got the affidavit of an escaped + Union prisoner, a man captured at Honey Hill and who had come into + our lines the day previous, to the effect that he had witnessed the + hanging of a negro soldier belonging to the 26th U.S.C.T., and that + he had determined one of them should answer for it. Two seemed very + much moved, but the third, Lee by name (cousin of Gen'l Stephen Lee + of the cavalry), said he knew nothing about it, but if it was so, + so it might be. The other two were taken from each other and Gen'l + Hatch managed to draw a good deal of information from them about + our position, that is the force and nature of the enemy and works + in our front. Lee refused to the last to answer any question + whatever, and they all 3 now await at Hilton Head the issue of the + law. The hanging of the negro seems a perfectly ascertained + fact--he was hung by the 48th Georgia Infty, and the story has + naturally much stirred up our coloured troops. If Hardee should + decide to come down on us I believe he would get the worst of it, + and only hope now that our men won't take a prisoner alive. They + certainly make a great mistake at Washington in not attending to + these little matters, and I am sure the moral effect of an order + from the President announcing that such things have happened, and + that the coloured troops have taken them thoroughly to heart, would + be greater on the Rebels than any physical blow we can deal them. + +When I read again, "in the field before Pocotaligo," toward the middle +of January '65, that "Sherman leaves to-night from Beaufort with Logan's +Corps to cross Beaufort Ferry and come up on our right flank and push on +to Pocotaligo bridge," the stir as from great things rises again for me, +wraps about Sherman's name as with the huge hum that then surrounded it, +and in short makes me give the passage such honour as I may. "We are +waiting anxiously for the sound of his musketry announcing him." I was +never in my life to wait for any such sound, but how at that juncture I +hung about with privileged Wilky! "We all propose at Hdqrs to take our +stores out and ride up to the bank of the river and watch the fight on +the other side. We are praying to be relieved here--our men are dying +for want of clothing; and when we see Morris Island again we shall +utterly rejoice." He writes three days later from headquarters +established in a plantation the name of which, as well as that of the +stream, of whatever magnitude, that they had crossed to reach it, +happens to be marked by an illegibility quite unprecedented in his +splendid script--to the effect of a still intenser evocation (as was +then to be felt at any rate) of all the bignesses involved. "Sherman's +whole army is in our front, and they expect to move on Charleston at any +moment." Sherman's whole army!--it affected me from afar off as a vast +epic vision. The old vibration lives again, but with it also that of the +smaller and nearer, the more intimate notes--such for instance as: "I +shall go up to the 20th Corps to-morrow and try for a sight of Billy +Perkins and Sam Storrow in the 2nd Mass." Into which I somehow read, +under the touch of a ghostly hand no more "weirdly" laid than _that_, +more volumes than I can the least account for or than I have doubtless +any business to. + +My visionary yearning must however, I think, have drawn most to feed on +from the first of a series of missives dated from Headquarters, +Department of the South, Hilton Head S.C., this particular one of the +middle of February. "I write in a great hurry to tell you I have been +placed on General Gillmore's staff as A.D.C. It is just the very thing +for my foot under present circumstances, and I consider myself most +fortunate. I greatly like the General, who is most kind and genial and +very considerate. My duties will be principally the carrying of orders +to Savannah, Morris Island, Fortress Monroe, Combalee(?) Florida, and +the General's correspondence. Charleston is ours," he goes on two days +later: "it surrendered to a negro regiment yesterday at 9 A.M. We have +just come up from Sumter, where we have hoisted the American flag. We +were lying off Bull's Bay yesterday noon waiting for this when the +General saw through his glass the stars and stripes suddenly flown from +the town hall. We immediately steamed up to Sumter and ran up the +colours there. Old Gillmore was in fine feather and I am in consummate +joy." The joy nevertheless, I may add, doesn't prevent the remark after +a couple of days more that "Charleston isn't on the whole such a very +great material victory; in fact the capture of the place is of value +only in that its moral effect tends to strengthen the Union cause." +After which he proceeds: + + Governor Aiken of S.C. came up to Hdqrs to-day to call on the + Gen'l, and they had a long talk. He is a "gradual Emancipationist" + and says the worst of the President's acts was his sweeping + Proclamation. Before that every one in this State was ready to come + back on the gradual system, and would have done so if Lincoln's act + hadn't driven them to madness. This is all fine talk, but there is + nothing in it. They had at least 5 months' warning and could have + in that time perfectly returned within the fold; in fact the strong + Abolitionists of the North were afraid the President had made the + thing but too easy for them and that they would get ahead of us and + themselves emancipate. This poor gentleman is simple crazy and + weakminded. Between Davis and us he _is_ puzzled beyond measure, + and doesn't know what line to take. One thing though troubled him + most, namely the ingratitude of the negro. He can't conceive how + the creatures he has treated with such extraordinary kindness and + taken such care of should all be willing to leave him. He says he + was the first man in the South to introduce religion among the + blacks and that his plantation of 600 of them was a model of + civilisation and peace. Just think of this immense slaveholder + telling me as I drove him home that the coat he had on had been + turned three times and his pantaloons the only ones he possessed. + He stated this so simply and touchingly that I couldn't help + offering him a pair of mine--which he refused, however. There are + some 10,000 people in the town, mostly women and negroes, and it's + tremendously ravaged by our shell, about which they have naturally + lied from beginning to end. + +"Bob has just come down from Charleston," he writes in March--"he has +been commissioned captain in the 103rd U.S.C.T. I am sorry he has left +his regiment, still he seemed bent on doing so and offers all kinds of +reasons for it. He may judge rightly, but I fear he's hasty;" and +indeed this might appear from a glimpse of our younger brother at his +ease given by him in a letter of some days before, written at two +o'clock in the morning and recording a day spent in a somewhat arduously +performed visit to Charleston. "I drove out to the entrenchments to-day +to see B., and found him with Hartwell (R. J.'s colonel) smoking their +long pipes on the verandah of a neat country cottage with a beautiful +garden in front of them and the birds chirping and rambling around. Bob +looks remarkably well and seemed very nice indeed. He speaks very highly +of Hartwell, and the latter the same of him. They seemed settled in +remarkable comfort at Charleston and to be taking life easy after their +180 miles march through South Carolina." He mentions further that his +visit to the captured city, begun the previous day, had been made in +interesting conditions; there is in fact matter for quotation throughout +the letter, the last of the small group from which I shall borrow. He +had, with his general, accompanied a "large Senatorial delegation from +Washington and shown them round the place." He records the delegation's +"delight" in what they saw; how "a large crowd of young ladies" were of +the party, so that the Senatorial presences were "somewhat relieved and +lightened to the members of the staff;" and also that they all went +over to Forts Sumter and Moultrie and the adjacent works. The pleasure +of the whole company in the scene of desolation thus presented is one of +those ingenuous historic strokes that the time-spirit, after a +sufficient interval, permits itself to smile at--and is not the only +such, it may be noted, in the sincere young statement. + + To-morrow they go to Savannah, returning here in the evening, when + there is to be a grand reception for them at Hdqrs. We expect Gen'l + Robert Anderson (the loyalist commandant at Sumter when originally + fired upon) by the next steamer, with Gideon Welles (secretary of + the Navy) and a number of other notables from Washington. Anderson + is going to raise the old flag on Sumter, and of course there will + be a great shindy here--I only wish you were with us to join in it. + I never go to Sumter without the deepest exhilaration--so many + scenes come to my mind. It's the centre of the nest, and for one to + _be_ there is to feel that the whole game is up. These people have + always insisted that there the last gun should be fired. But the + suffering and desolation of this land is the worst feature of the + whole thing. If you could see what they are reduced to you couldn't + help being touched. The best people are in utter penury; they look + like the poorest of the poor and they talk like them also. They are + deeply demoralised, in fact degraded. Charleston is more forsaken + and stricken than I can describe; it reminds me when I go through + the streets of some old doomed city on which the wrath of God has + rested from far back, and if it ever revives will do so simply + through the infinite mercy and charity of the North. But for this + generation at least the inhabitants are done for. Can't H. come + down and pay us a visit of 2 or 3 weeks? I can get him a War Dept. + pass approved by General Gillmore. + +H. knew and well remembers the pang of his inability to accept this +invitation, to the value of which for emphasis of tragic life on the +scene of the great drama the next passage adds a touch. Mrs. William +Young, the lady alluded to, was a friend we had known almost only on the +European stage and amid the bright associations of Paris in particular. +Whom did we suppose he had met on the arrival of a steamer from the +North but this more or less distracted acquaintance of other days?--who +had come down "to try and get her stepmother into our lines and take her +home. She is accompanied by a friend from New York, and expects to +succeed in her undertaking. I hardly think she will, however, as her +mother is 90 miles out of our lines and a very old woman. We have sent a +negro out to give her Mrs. Young's news, but how can this poor old thing +travel such a distance on foot and sleep in the swamp besides? It's an +absurd idea, but I shall do everything in my power to facilitate it." Of +what further befell I gather no account; but I remember how a later time +was to cause me to remark on the manner in which even dire tragedy may +lapse, in the individual life, and leave no trace on the ground it has +ravaged--none at least apparent unless pushingly searched for. The last +thing to infer from appearances, on much subsequent renewal of contact +with Mrs. Young in Paris again, was that this tension of a reach forth +across great war-wasted and swamp-smothered spaces for recovery of an +aged and half-starved pedestrian female relative counted for her as a +chapter of experience: the experience of Paris dressmakers and other +like matters had so revived and supervened. But let me add that I speak +here of mere appearances, and have ever inclined to the more ironic and +more complicating vision of them. It would doubtless have been too +simple for wonder that our elegant friend should have lived, as it were, +under the cloud of reminiscence--and wonder had always somewhere to come +in. + + + + +XII + + +It had been, however, neither at Newport nor at Cambridge--the Cambridge +at least of that single year--that the plot began most to thicken for +me: I figure it as a sudden stride into conditions of a sort to minister +and inspire much more, all round, that we early in 1864 migrated, as a +family, to Boston, and that I now seem to see the scene of our existence +there for a couple of years packed with drama of a finer consistency +than any I had yet tasted. We settled for the interesting time in +Ashburton Place--the "sympathetic" old house we occupied, one of a pair +of tallish brick fronts based, as to its ground floor, upon the dignity +of time-darkened granite, was lately swept away in the interest of I +know not what grander cause; and when I wish to think of such +intercourse as I have enjoyed with the good city at its closest and, as +who should say its kindest, though this comes doubtless but to saying at +its freshest, I live over again the story of that sojourn, a period +bristling, while I recover my sense of it, with an unprecedented number +of simultaneous particulars. To stick, as I can only do, to the point +from which my own young outlook worked, the things going on for me so +tremendously all at once were in the first place the last impressions of +the War, a whole social relation to it crowding upon us there as for +many reasons, all of the best, it couldn't have done elsewhere; and +then, more personally speaking, the prodigious little assurance I found +myself gathering as from one day to another that fortune had in store +some response to my deeply reserved but quite unabashed design of +becoming as "literary" as might be. It was as if, our whole new medium +of existence aiding, I had begun to see much further into the question +of how that end was gained. The vision, quickened by a wealth, a great +mixture, of new appearances, became such a throbbing affair that my +memory of the time from the spring of '64 to the autumn of '66 moves as +through an apartment hung with garlands and lights--where I have but to +breathe for an instant on the flowers again to see them flush with +colour, and but tenderly to snuff the candles to see them twinkle +afresh. Things happened, and happened repeatedly, the mere brush or +side-wind of which was the stir of life; and the fact that I see, when I +consider, how it was mostly the mere side-wind I got, doesn't draw from +the picture a shade of its virtue. I literally, and under whatever felt +restriction of my power to knock about, formed independent +relations--several; and two or three of them, as I then thought, of the +very most momentous. I may not attempt just here to go far into these, +save for the exception of the easiest to treat, which I also, by good +fortune, win back as by no means the least absorbing--the beautiful, the +entrancing presumption that I should have but to write with sufficient +difficulty and sufficient felicity to get once for all (that was the +point) into the incredibility of print. I see before me, in the rich, +the many-hued light of my room that overhung dear Ashburton Place from +our third floor, the very greenbacks, to the total value of twelve +dollars, into which I had changed the cheque representing my first +earned wage. I had earned it, I couldn't but feel, with fabulous +felicity: a circumstance so strangely mixed with the fact that literary +composition of a high order had, at that very table where the greenbacks +were spread out, quite viciously declined, and with the air of its being +also once for all, to "come" on any save its own essential terms, which +it seemed to distinguish in the most invidious manner conceivable from +mine. It was to insist through all my course on this distinction, and +sordid gain thereby never again to seem so easy as in that prime +handling of my fee. Other guerdons, of the same queer, the same often +rather greasy, complexion followed; for what had I done, to the +accompaniment of a thrill the most ineffable, an agitation that, as I +recapture it, affects me as never exceeded in all my life for fineness, +but go one beautiful morning out to Shady Hill at Cambridge and there +drink to the lees the offered cup of editorial sweetness?--none ever +again to be more delicately mixed. I had addressed in trembling hope my +first fond attempt at literary criticism to Charles Eliot Norton, who +had lately, and with the highest, brightest competence, come to the +rescue of the North American Review, submerged in a stale tradition and +gasping for life, and he had not only published it in his very next +number--the interval for me of breathless brevity--but had expressed the +liveliest further hospitality, the gage of which was thus at once his +welcome to me at home. I was to grow fond of regarding as a positive +consecration to letters that half-hour in the long library at Shady +Hill, where the winter sunshine touched serene book-shelves and arrayed +pictures, the whole embrowned composition of objects in my view, with I +knew not what golden light of promise, what assurance of things to come: +there was to be nothing exactly like it later on--the conditions of +perfect rightness for a certain fresh felicity, certain decisive +pressures of the spring, _can_ occur, it would seem, but once. This was +on the other hand the beginning of so many intentions that it mattered +little if the particular occasion was not repeated; for what did I do +again and again, through all the years, but handle in plenty what I +might have called the small change of it? + +I despair, however, as I look back, of rendering the _fusions_ in that +much-mixed little time, every feature of which had something of the +quality and interest of every other, and the more salient, the more +"epoch-making"--I apply with complacency the portentous term--to drape +themselves romantically in the purple folds of the whole. I think it +must have been the sense of the various climaxes, the enjoyed, because +so long postponed, revenges of the War, that lifted the moment in the +largest embrace: the general consciousness was of such big things at +last in sight, the huge national emergence, the widening assurance, +however overdarkened, it is true, by the vast black cost of what General +Grant (no light-handed artist he!) was doing for us. He was at all +events working to an end, and something strange and immense, even like +the light of a new day rising above a definite rim, shot its rays +through the chinks of the immediate, the high-piled screen of sacrifice +behind which he wrought. I fail to seize again, to my wonder, the +particular scene of our acclamation of Lee's surrender, but I feel in +the air the exhalation of our relief, which mingled, near and far, with +the breath of the springtime itself and positively seemed to become +over the land, over the world at large in fact, an element of reviving +Nature. Sensible again are certain other sharpest vibrations then +communicated from the public consciousness: Ashburton Place resounds for +me with a wild cry, rocks as from a convulsed breast, on that early +morning of our news of Lincoln's death by murder; and, in a different +order, but also darkening the early day, there associates itself with my +cherished chamber of application the fact that of a sudden, and while we +were always and as much as ever awaiting him, Hawthorne was dead. What I +have called the fusion strikes me as indeed beyond any rendering when I +think of the peculiar assault on my private consciousness of _that_ +news: I sit once more, half-dressed, late of a summer morning and in a +bedimmed light which is somehow at once that of dear old green American +shutters drawn to against openest windows and that of a moral shadow +projected as with violence--I sit on my belated bed, I say, and yield to +the pang that made me positively and loyally cry. I didn't rise early in +those days of scant ease--I now even ask myself how sometimes I rose at +all; which ungrudged license withal, I thus make out, was not less +blessedly effective in the harmony I glance at than several showier +facts. To tell at all adequately why the pang was fine would +nevertheless too closely involve my going back, as we have learned to +say, on the whole rich interpenetration. I fondly felt it in those days +invaluable that I had during certain last and otherwise rather blank +months at Newport taken in for the first time and at one straight +draught the full sweet sense of our one fine romancer's work--for sweet +it then above all seemed to me; and I remember well how, while the +process day after day drew itself admirably out, I found the actual +exquisite taste of it, the strain of the revelation, justify up to the +notch whatever had been weak in my delay. This prolonged hanging off +from true knowledge had been the more odd, so that I couldn't have +explained it, I felt, through the fact that The Wonder-Book and +Twice-Told Tales had helped to enchant our childhood; the consequence at +any rate seemed happy, since without it, very measurably, the sudden +sense of recognition would have been less uplifting a wave. The joy of +the recognition was to know at the time no lapse--was in fact through +the years never to know one, and this by some rare action of a principle +or a sentiment, I scarce know whether to call it a clinging consistency +or a singular silliness, that placed the Seven Gables, the Blithedale +Romance and the story of Donatello and Miriam (the accepted title of +which I dislike to use, not the "marble" but very particularly the human +Faun being throughout in question) somewhere on a shelf unvisited by +harsh inquiry. The feeling had perhaps at the time been marked by +presumption, by a touch of the fatuity of patronage; yet wasn't +well-nigh the best charm of a relation with the works just named in the +impulse, known from the first, somehow to stand in _between_ them and +harsh inquiry? If I had asked myself what I meant by that term, at which +freedom of appreciation, in fact of intelligence, might have looked +askance, I hope I should have found a sufficient answer in the mere plea +of a sort of _betise_ of tenderness. I recall how once, in the air of +Rome at a time ever so long subsequent, a friend and countryman now no +more, who had spent most of his life in Italy and who remains for me, +with his accomplishment, his distinction, his extraordinary play of mind +and his too early and too tragic death, the clearest case of +"cosmopolitan culture" I was to have known, exclaimed with surprise on +my happening to speak as from an ancient fondness for Hawthorne's +treatment of the Roman scene: "Why, can you read _that_ thing, and +_here_?--to me it means nothing at all!" I remember well that under the +breath of this disallowance of any possibility of association, and quite +most of such a one as I had from far back positively cultivated, the +gentle perforated book tumbled before me from its shelf very much as old +Polonius, at the thrust of Hamlet's sword, must have collapsed behind +the pictured arras. Of course I might have picked it up and brushed it +off, but I seem to feel again that I didn't so much as want to, lost as +I could only have been in the sense that the note of harsh inquiry, or +in other words of the very stroke I had anciently wished to avert, +_there_ fell straight upon my ear. It represented everything I had so +early known we must have none of; though there was interest galore at +the same time (as there almost always is in lively oppositions of +sensibility, with the sharpness of each, its special exclusions, well +exhibited), in an "American" measure that could so reject our beautiful +genius and in a Roman, as it were, that could so little see he had done +anything for Rome. H. B. Brewster in truth, literary master of three +tongues at least, was scarce American at all; homely superstitions had +no hold on him; he was French, Italian, above all perhaps German; and +there would have been small use, even had there been any importance, in +my trying to tell him for instance why it had particularly been, in the +gentle time, that I had settled once for all to take our author's case +as simply exquisite and not budge from that taking. Which indeed scarce +bears telling now, with matters of relative (if _but_ of relative!) +urgence on hand--consisting as it mainly did in the fact that his work +was all charged with a _tone_, a full and rare tone of prose, and that +this made for it an extraordinary value in an air in which absolutely +nobody's else was or has shown since any aptitude for being. And the +tone had been, in its beauty--for me at least--ever so appreciably +American; which proved to what a use American matter could be put by an +American hand: a consummation involving, it appeared, the happiest +moral. For the moral was that an American could be an artist, one of the +finest, without "going outside" about it, as I liked to say; quite in +fact as if Hawthorne had become one just by being American _enough_, by +the felicity of how the artist in him missed nothing, suspected nothing, +that the ambient air didn't affect him as containing. Thus he was at +once so clear and so entire--clear without thinness, for he might have +seemed underfed, it was his danger; and entire without heterogeneity, +which might, with less luck and to the discredit of our sufficing +manners, have had to be his help. These remarks, as I say, were those I +couldn't, or at any rate didn't, make to my Roman critic; if only +because I was so held by the other case he offered me--that of a culture +for which, in the dense medium around us, Miriam and Donatello and +their friends hadn't the virtue that shines or pushes through. I tried +to feel that this _constatation_ left me musing--and perhaps in truth it +did; though doubtless if my attachment to the arranger of those images +had involved, to repeat, my not budging, my meditation, whatever it was, +respected that condition. + +It has renewed itself, however, but too much on this spot, and the scene +viewed from Ashburton Place claims at the best more filling in than I +can give it. Any illustration of anything worth illustrating has beauty, +to my vision, largely by its developments; and developments, alas, are +the whole flowering of the plant, while what really meets such attention +as one may hope to beguile is at the best but a plucked and tossed sprig +or two. That my elder brother was during these months away with +Professor Agassiz, a member of the party recruited by that great +naturalist for a prolonged exploration of Brazil, is one of the few +blooms, I see, that I must content myself with detaching--the main sense +of it being for myself, no doubt, that his absence (and he had never +been at anything like such a distance from us,) left me the more +exposed, and thereby the more responsive, to contact with impressions +that had to learn to suffice for me in their uncorrected, when not still +more in their inspiringly emphasised, state. The main sense for William +himself is recorded in a series of letters from him addressed to us at +home and for which, against my hope, these pages succeed in affording no +space--they are to have ampler presentation; but the arrival of which at +irregular intervals for the greater part of a year comes back to me as +perhaps a fuller enrichment of my consciousness than it owed for the +time to any other single source. We all still hung so together that this +replete organ could yet go on helping itself, with whatever awkwardness, +from the conception or projection of others of a like _general_ strain, +such as those of one's brothers might appear; thanks to which constant +hum of borrowed experience, in addition to the quicker play of whatever +could pass as more honestly earned, my stage of life knew no drop of the +curtain. I literally came and went, I had never practised such coming +and going; I went in particular, during summer weeks, and even if +carrying my general difficulty with me, to the White Mountains of New +Hampshire, with some repetition, and again and again back to Newport, on +visits to John La Farge and to the Edmund Tweedys (_their_ house almost +a second summer home to us;) to say nothing of winter attempts, a little +weak, but still more or less achieved, upon New York--which city was +rapidly taking on the capital quality, the large worldly sense that +dear old London and dear old Paris, with other matters in hand for them +as time went on, the time they were "biding" for me, indulgently didn't +grudge it. The matters they had in hand wandered indeed as stray vague +airs across to us--this I think I have noted; but Boston itself could +easily rule, in default even of New York, when to "go," in particular, +was an act of such easy virtue. To go from Ashburton Place was to go +verily round the corner not less than further afield; to go to the +Athenaeum, to the Museum, to a certain door of importances, in fact of +immensities, defiant of vulgar notation, in Charles Street, at the +opposite end from Beacon. The fruit of these mixed proceedings I found +abundant at the time, and I think quite inveterately sweet, but to +gather it in again now--by which I mean set it forth as a banquet for +imaginations already provided--would be to presume too far; not least +indeed even on my own cultivated art of exhibition. The fruit of golden +youth is all and always golden--it touches to gold what it gathers; this +was so the essence of the case that in the first place everything was in +some degree an adventure, and in the second any differences of degree +guiding my selection would be imperceptible at this end of time to the +cold eye of criticism. Not least moreover in the third place the very +terms would fail, under whatever ingenuity, for my really justifying so +bland an account of the period at large. Do I speak of it as a thumping +sum but to show it in the small change, the handful of separate copper +and silver coin, the scattered occasions reduced to their individual +cash value, that, spread upon the table as a treasure of reminiscence, +might only excite derision? _Why_ was "staying at Newport" so absurdly, +insistently romantic, romantic out of all proportion, as we say--why +unless I can truly tell in proportion to what it became so? It consisted +often in my "sitting" to John La Farge, within his own precincts and in +the open air of attenuated summer days, and lounging thereby just +passive to the surge of culture that broke upon me in waves the most +desultory and disjointed, it was true, but to an absolute effect of +unceasingly scented spray. Particular hours and old (that is young!) +ineffable reactions come back to me; it's like putting one's ear, +doctor-fashion, to the breast of time--or say as the subtle savage puts +his to the ground--and catching at its start some vibratory hum that has +been going on more or less for the fifty years since. Newport, the +barren isle of our return from Europe, had thus become--and at no such +great expense if the shock of public affairs, everywhere making +interests start to their feet, be counted out of the process--a source +of fifty suggestions to me; which it would have been much less, +however, I hasten to add, if the call of La Farge hadn't worked in with +our other most standing attraction, and this in turn hadn't practically +been part of the positive affluence of certain elements of spectacle. +Why again I should have been able to see the pictorial so freely +suggested, that pictorial which was ever for me the dramatic, the +social, the effectively human aspect, would be doubtless a baffling +inquiry in presence of the queer and dear old phenomena themselves; +those that, taken together, may be described at the best, I suppose, +rather as a much-mixed grope or halting struggle, call it even a +competitive scramble, toward the larger, the ideal elegance, the +traditional forms of good society in possession, than as a presentation +of great noble assurances. + +Spectacle in any case broke out, spectacle accumulated, by our then +measure, many thicknesses deep, flushing in the sovereign light, as one +felt it, of the waning Rhode Island afternoons of August and September +with the most "evolved" material civilisation our American world could +then show; the vividest note of this in those years, unconscious, even +to an artless innocence, of the wider wings still to spread, being the +long daily _corso_ or processional drive (with cavaliers and amazons not +otherwise than conveniently intermixed,) which, with a different +direction for different days, offered doubtless as good an example of +that gregarious exercise at any cost distinguishing "fashionable life" +as was anywhere on the globe to be observed. The price paid for the +sticking together was what emphasised, I mean, the wondrous resolve to +stick, however scant and narrow and unadjusted for processional effect +the various fields of evolution. The variety moreover was short, just as +the incongruities of composition in the yearning array were marked; but +the tender grace of old sunset hours, the happier breadth of old shining +sands under favour of friendly tides, the glitter _quand meme_ of +"caparisoned" animals, appointed vehicles and approved charioteers, to +say nothing of the other and more freely exchanged and interrelated +brightnesses then at play (in the softer ease of women, the more +moustachio'd swagger of men, the braver bonhomie of the social aspect at +large), melted together for fond fancy into a tone, a rhythm, a +representational virtue charged, as to the amenities, with authority. +The amenities thus sought their occasion to multiply even to the sound +of far cannonades, and I well remember at once reflecting, in such +maturity as I could muster, that the luckier half of a nation able to +carry a huge war-burden without sacrifice of amusement might well +overcome the fraction that had to feed but on shrinkage and privation; +at the same time that the so sad and handsome face of the most frequent +of our hostesses, Mary Temple the elder as she had been, now the apt +image of a stern priestess of the public altar, was to leave with me for +the years to come the grand expression and tragic irony of its revulsion +from those who, offering us some high entertainment during days of +particular tension, could fiddle, as she scathingly said, while Rome was +burning. Blest again the state of youth which could appreciate that +admirable look and preserve it for illustration of one of the forms of +ancient piety lost to us, and yet at the same time stow away as part of +the poetry of the general drama just the luxury and pride, overhanging +summer seas and projecting into summer nights great shafts of light and +sound, that prompted the noble scorn. The "round of pleasure" all this +with a grand good conscience of course--for it always in the like case +has that, had it at least when arranging performances, dramatic and +musical, at ever so much a ticket, under the advantage of rare amateur +talent, in aid of the great Sanitary Commission that walked in the +footsteps and renewed in various forms the example of Florence +Nightingale; these exhibitions taking place indeed more particularly in +the tributary cities, New York, Philadelphia, Boston (we were then shut +up to those,) but with the shining stars marked for triumphant +appearance announced in advance on the Newport scene and glittering +there as beauties, as elegantes, as vocalists, as heroines of European +legend. Hadn't there broken upon us, under public stress, a refluent +wave from Paris, the mid-Empire Paris of the highest pitch, which was to +raise our social water-mark to a point unprecedented and there +strikingly leave it? We were learning new lessons in every branch--that +was the sense of the so immensely quickened general pace; and though my +examples may seem rather spectral I like to believe this bigger +breathing of the freshness of the future to have been what the +collective rumble and shimmer of the whole business most meant. It +exhaled an artless confidence which yet momently increased; it had no +great sense of a direction, but gratefully took any of which the least +hint was given, gathering up by the way and after the fact whatever +account of itself a vague voice might strike off. There were times when +the account of itself as flooding Lawton's Valley for afternoon tea was +doubtless what it would most comfortably have welcomed--Lawton's Valley, +at a good drive's length from the seaward quarter, being the scene of +villeggiatura of the Boston muse, as it were, and the Boston muse +having in those after all battle-haunted seasons an authority and a +finish of accent beyond any other Tyrtaean strain. The New York and +perhaps still more the Philadelphia of the time fumbled more helplessly, +even if aspiringly, with the Boston evidences in general, I think, than +they were to be reduced to doing later on; and by the happy pretext, +certainly, that these superior signs had then a bravery they were not +perhaps on their own side indefinitely to keep up. + +They rustled, with the other leafage of the umbrageous grove, in the +summer airs that hung over the long tea-tables; afternoon tea was itself +but a new and romantic possibility, with the lesson of it gratefully +learnt at hands that dispensed, with the tea and sugar and in the +charmingest voice perhaps then to be heard among us, a tone of talk that +New York took for exotic and inimitable, yet all the more felt "good," +much better than it might if left _all_ to itself, for thus flocking in +every sort of conveyance to listen to. The Valley was deep, winding and +pastoral--or at least looks so now to my attached vision; the infancy of +a finer self-consciousness seemed cradled there; the inconsequent +vehicles fraternised, the dim, the more dejected, with the burnished and +upstanding; so that I may really perhaps take most for the note of the +hour the first tremor of the sense on the part of fashion that, if it +could, as it already more or less suspected, get its thinking and +reading and writing, almost everything in fact but its arithmetic, a bit +dingily, but just by that sign cleverly, done for it, so occasion seemed +easy, after all, for a nearer view, without responsibility, of the odd +performers of the service. When these last were not literally all +Bostonians they were New Yorkers who might have been mistaken for +such--never indeed by Bostonians themselves, but only by other New +Yorkers, the rich and guileless; so the effect as of a vague tribute to +culture the most authentic (if I speak not too portentously) was left +over for the aftertaste of simple and subtle alike. Those were +comparatively thin seasons, I recognise, in the so ample career of Mrs. +Howe, mistress of the Valley and wife of the eminent, the militant +Phil-Hellene, Dr. S. G. of the honoured name, who reached back to the +Byronic time and had dedicated his own later to still more distinguished +liberating work on behalf of deaf mutes; for if she was thus the most +attuned of interlocutors, most urbane of disputants, most insidious of +wits, even before her gathered fame as Julia Ward and the established +fortune of her elegant Battle-Hymn, she was perhaps to have served the +State scarce better through final organised activities and shining +optimisms and great lucky lyric hits than by having in her vale of +heterogeneous hospitality undermined the blank assurance of her thicker +contingent--after all too but to an _amusing_ vague unrest--and thereby +scattered the first rare seed of new assimilations. I am moved to add +that, by the old terminology, the Avenue might have been figured, in the +connection, as descending into the glen to meet the Point--which, save +for a very small number of the rarest representatives of the latter, it +could meet nowhere else. The difficulty was that of an encounter of +birds and fishes; the two tribes were native to elements as opposed as +air and water, the Avenue essentially nothing if not exalted on wheels +or otherwise expertly mounted, and the Point hopelessly pedestrian and +unequipped with stables, so that the very levels at which they +materially moved were but upper and lower, dreadfully lower, parallels. +And indeed the way to see the Point--which, without playing on the word, +naturally became our highest law--was at the Point, where it appeared to +much higher advantage than in its trudge through the purple haze or +golden dust of supercilious parades. Of the advantage to which it did so +appear, off in its own more languorous climate and on its own ground, we +fairly cultivated a conviction, rejoicing by that aid very much as in +certain old French towns it was possible to distinguish invidiously the +Ville from the Cite. The Point was our _cite_, the primal aboriginal +Newport--which, striking us on a first acquaintance as not other than +dilapidated, might well have been "restored" quite as M. Viollet-le-Duc +was even then restoring Carcassonne; and this all the more because our +elder Newport, the only seat of history, had a dismantled grassy fort or +archaic citadel that dozed over the waterside and that might (though I +do take the vision, at close quarters, for horrible) be smartly waked +up. The waterside, which was that of the inner bay, the ample reach +toward Providence, so much more susceptible of quality than the +extravagant open sea, the "old houses," the old elms, the old Quaker +faces at the small-paned old windows, the appointedness of the scene for +the literary and artistic people, who, by our fond constructive theory, +lodged and boarded with the Quakers, always thrifty these, for the sake +of all the sweetness and quaintness, for the sake above all somehow of +_our_ hungry felicity of view, by which I mean mine and that of a trusty +friend or two, T. S. Perry in especial--those attributes, meeting a +want, as the phrase is, of the decent imagination, made us perhaps +overdramatise the sphere of the clever people, but made them at least +also, when they unmistakably hovered, affect us as truly the finest +touches in the picture. For they were in their way ironic about the +rest, and that was a tremendous lift in face of an Avenue that not only, +as one could see at a glance, had no irony, but hadn't yet risen, the +magazines and the Point aiding, to so much as a suspicion of the effect, +familiar to later generations, with which the word can conversationally +come in. Oh the old clever people, with their difference of shade from +that of the clever old ones--some few of these to have been discerned, +no doubt, as of Avenue position: I read back into their various +presences I know not what queer little functional value the exercise and +privilege of which, uncontested, uncontrasted (save with the absence of +everything but stables) represents a felicity for the individual that is +lost to our age. It could count as functional then, it could count as +felicitous, to have been reabsorbed into Boston, or to propose to absorb +even, for the first time, New York, under cover of the mantle, the old +artistic draped cloak, that had almost in each case trailed round in +Florence, in Rome, in Venice, in conversations with Landor, in pencilled +commemoration, a little niggling possibly but withal so sincere, of the +"haunts" of Dante, in a general claim of having known the Brownings (ah +"the Brownings" of those days!) in a disposition to arrange readings of +these and the most oddly associated other poets about the great bleak +parlours of the hotels. I despair, however, of any really right register +of the art with which the cite ingratiated itself with me in this +character of a vivid missionary Bohemia; I met it of course more than +half way, as I met everything in the faintest degree ingratiating, even +suggesting to it with an art of my own that it should become so--though +in this matter I rather missed, I fear, a happy conversion, as if the +authenticity were there but my sort of personal dash too absent. + +I appear to myself none the less to have had dash for approaches to a +confidence more largely seated; since I recall how, having commenced +critic under Charles Norton's weighty protection, I was to find myself, +on all but the very morrow, invited to the high glory, as I felt it, of +aiding to launch, though on the obscurer side of the enterprise, a +weekly journal which, putting forth its first leaves in the summer of +'65 and under the highest auspices, was soon to enjoy a fortune and +achieve an authority and a dignity of which neither newspaper nor +critical review among us had hitherto so much as hinted the possibility. +The New York Nation had from the first, to the enlivening of several +persons consciously and ruefully astray in our desert, made no secret of +a literary leaning; and indeed its few foremost months shine most for +me in the light of their bestowal of one of the longest and happiest +friendships of my life, a relation with Edwin Lawrence Godkin, the +Nation incarnate as he was to become, which bore fruit of affection for +years after it had ceased to involve the comparatively poorer exercise. +Godkin's paper, Godkin's occasional presence and interesting history and +vivid ability and, above all, admirably aggressive and ironic editorial +humour, of a quality and authority new in the air of a journalism that +had meant for the most part the heavy hand alone, these things, with the +sudden sweet discovery that I might for my own part acceptedly stammer a +style, are so many shades and shifting tints in the positive historic +iridescence that flings itself for my memory, as I have noted, over the +"period" of Ashburton Place. Wherever I dip, again, I pull out a plum +from under the tooth of time--this at least so to my own rapt sense that +had I more space I might pull both freely and at a venture. The +strongest savour of the feast--with the fumes of a feast it comes +back--was, I need scarce once more insist, the very taste of the War as +ending and ended; through which blessing, more and more, the quantity of +military life or at least the images of military experience seemed all +about us, quite paradoxically, to grow greater. This I take to have been +a result, first of the impending, and then of the effective, break-up +of the vast veteran Army, swamping much of the scene as with the flow of +a monster tide and bringing literally home to us, in bronzed, matured +faces and even more in bronzed, matured characters, above all in the +absolutely acquired and stored resource of overwhelming reference, +reference usually of most substance the less it was immediately +explicit, the more in fact it was faded and jaded to indifference, what +was meant by having patiently served. The very smell of having so served +was somehow, at least to my super-sensitive nostril, in the larger and +cooler air, where it might have been an emanation, the most masculine, +the most communicative as to associated far-off things (according to the +nature, ever, of elements vaguely exhaled), from the operation of the +general huge gesture of relief--from worn toggery put off, from old +army-cloth and other fittings at a discount, from swordbelts and +buckles, from a myriad saturated articles now not even lying about but +brushed away with an effect upon the passing breeze and all relegated to +the dim state of some mere theoretic commemorative panoply that was +never in the event to be objectively disposed. The generalisation grew +richly or, as it were, quite adorably familiar, that life was ever so +handsomely reinforced, and manners, not to say manner at large, +refreshed, and personal aspects and types accented, and categories +multiplied (no category, for the dreaming painter of things, could our +scene afford not to grab at on the chance), just by the fact of the +discharge upon society of such an amount of out-of-the-way experience, +as it might roughly be termed--such a quantity and variety of possession +and assimilation of unprecedented history. It had been unprecedented at +least among ourselves, we had had it in our own highly original +conditions--or "they," to be more exact, had had it admirably in theirs; +and I think I was never to know a case in which his having been directly +touched by it, or, in a word, having consistently "soldiered," learnt +all about it and exhausted it, wasn't to count all the while on behalf +of the happy man for one's own individual impression or attention; call +it again, as everything came back to that, one's own need to interpret. +The discharge upon "society" is moreover what I especially mean; it +being the sense of how society in _our_ image of the word was taking it +all in that I was most concerned with; plenty of other images figured of +course for other entertainers of such. The world immediately roundabout +us at any rate bristled with more of the young, or the younger, cases I +speak of, cases of "things seen" and felt, and a delectable difference +in the man thereby made imputable, than I could begin here to name even +had I kept the record. I think I fairly cultivated the perceiving of it +all, so that nothing of it, under some face or other, shouldn't brush my +sense and add to my impression; yet my point is more particularly that +the body social itself was for the time so permeated, in the light I +glance at, that it became to its own consciousness more interesting. As +so many existent parts of it, however unstoried yet, to their minor +credit, various thrilled persons could inhale the interest to their +fullest capacity and feel that they too had been pushed forward--and +were even to find themselves by so much the more pushable yet. + +I resort thus to the lift and the push as the most expressive figures +for that immensely _remonte_ state which coincided for us all with the +great disconcerting irony of the hour, the unforgettable death of +Lincoln. I think of the springtime of '65 as it breathed through Boston +streets--my remembrance of all those days is a matter, strangely enough, +of the out-of-door vision, of one's constantly dropping down from Beacon +Hill, to the brave edge of which we clung, for appreciation of those +premonitory gusts of April that one felt most perhaps where Park Street +Church stood dominant, where the mouth of the Common itself uttered +promises, more signs and portents than one could count, more prodigies +than one could keep apart, and where further strange matters seemed to +charge up out of the lower districts and of the "business world," +generative as never before of news. The streets were restless, the +meeting of the seasons couldn't but be inordinately so, and one's own +poor pulses matched--at the supreme pitch of that fusion, for instance, +which condensed itself to blackness roundabout the dawn of April 15th: I +was fairly to go in shame of its being my birthday. These would have +been the hours of the streets if none others had been--when the huge +general gasp filled them like a great earth-shudder and people's eyes +met people's eyes without the vulgarity of speech. Even this was, all so +strangely, part of the lift and the swell, as tragedy has but to be of a +pure enough strain and a high enough connection to sow with its dark +hand the seed of greater life. The collective sense of what had occurred +was of a sadness too noble not somehow to inspire, and it was truly in +the air that, whatever we had as a nation produced or failed to produce, +we could at least gather round this perfection of a classic woe. True +enough, as we were to see, the immediate harvest of our loss was almost +too ugly to be borne--for nothing more sharply comes back to me than the +tune to which the "esthetic sense," if one glanced but from _that_ high +window (which was after all one of many too), recoiled in dismay from +the sight of Mr. Andrew Johnson perched on the stricken scene. We had +given ourselves a figure-head, and the figure-head sat there in its +habit as it lived, and we were to have it in our eyes for three or four +years and to ask ourselves in horror what monstrous thing we had done. I +speak but of aspects, those aspects which, under a certain turn of them, +may be all but everything; gathered together they become a symbol of +what is behind, and it was open to us to waver at shop-windows exposing +the new photograph, exposing, that is, _the_ photograph, and ask +ourselves what we had been guilty of as a people, when all was said, to +deserve the infliction of that form. It was vain to say that we had +deliberately invoked the "common" in authority and must drink the wine +we had drawn. No countenance, no salience of aspect nor composed symbol, +could superficially have referred itself less than Lincoln's +mould-smashing mask to any mere matter-of-course type of propriety; but +his admirable unrelated head had itself revealed a type--as if by the +very fact that what made in it for roughness of kind looked out only +less than what made in it for splendid final stamp, in other words for +commanding Style. The result thus determined had been precious for +representation, and above all for fine suggestional function, in a +degree that left behind every medal we had ever played at striking; +whereas before the image now substituted representation veiled her head +in silence and the element of the suggested was exactly the direst. +What, however, on the further view, was to be more refreshing than to +find that there were excesses of native habit which truly we couldn't +bear? so that it was for the next two or three years fairly sustaining +to consider that, let the reasons publicly given for the impeachment of +the official in question be any that would serve, the grand inward logic +or mystic law had been that we really couldn't go on offering each other +before the nations the consciousness of such a presence. That was at any +rate the style of reflection to which the humiliating case reduced me; +just this withal now especially working, I feel, into that image of our +generally quickened activity of spirit, our having by the turn of events +more ideas to apply and even to play with, that I have tried to throw +off. Everything I recover, I again risk repeating, fits into the vast +miscellany--the detail of which I may well seem, however, too poorly to +have handled. + +Let it serve then for a scrap of detail that the appearance of William's +further fortune enjoyed thereabouts a grasp of my attention scarce +menaced even by the call on that faculty of such appearances of my own +as I had naturally in some degree also to take for graces of the +banquet. I associate the sense of his being, in a great cause, far away +on the billow with that clearance of the air through the tremendous +draught, from sea to sea, of the Northern triumph, which seemed to make +a good-natured infinitude of room for all the individual interests and +personal lives that might help the pot to bubble--if the expression be +not too mean for the size of our confidence; that the cause on which the +Agassiz expedition to South America embarked _was_ of the greatest being +happily a presumption altogether within my scope. It reawoke the mild +divinatory rage with which I had followed, with so little to show for +it, the military fortune of my younger brothers--feeding the gentle +passion indeed, it must be added, thanks to the letter-writing grace of +which the case had now the benefit, with report and picture of a +vividness greater than any ever to be shed from a like source upon our +waiting circle. Everything of the kind, for me, was company; but I +dwelt, for that matter and as I put it all together, in company so +constant and so enchanting that this amounted to moving, in whatever +direction, with the mass--more and more aware as I was of the "fun" (to +express it grossly) of living by my imagination and thereby finding that +company, in countless different forms, could only swarm about me. +Seeing further into the figurable world _made_ company of persons and +places, objects and subjects alike: it gave them all without exception +chances to be somehow or other interesting, and the imaginative ply of +finding interest once taken (I think I had by that time got much beyond +looking for it), the whole conspiracy of aspects danced round me in a +ring. It formed, by my present vision of it, a shining escort to one's +possibly often hampered or mystified, but never long stayed and +absolutely never wasted, steps; it hung about, after the fashion of +winter evening adumbrations just outside the reach of the lamplight, +while one sat writing, reading, listening, watching--perhaps even again, +incurably, but dawdling and gaping; and most of all doubtless, if it +supplied with colour people and things often by themselves, I dare say, +neutral enough, how it painted thick, how it fairly smothered, any +surface that did it the turn of showing positive and intrinsic life! Ah +the things and the people, the hours and scenes and circumstances, the +_inenarrables_ occasions and relations, that I might still present in +its light if I would, and with the enormous advantage now (for this I +should unblushingly claim), of being able to mark for present irony or +pity or wonder, or just for a better intelligence, or again for the high +humour or extreme strangeness of the thing, the rare indebtedness, +calculated by the long run, in which it could leave particular cases! +This necessity I was under that everything should be interesting--for +fear of the collapse otherwise of one's sustaining intention--would have +confessed doubtless to a closest connection, of all the connections, +with the small inkpot in which I seemed at last definitely destined to +dip to the exclusion of any stream more Pactolean: a modest manner of +saying that difficulty and slowness of composition were clearly by this +time not in the least appointed to blight me, however inveterate they +were likely to prove; that production, such as it was, floundered on in +spite of them; and that, to put it frankly, if I enjoyed as much company +as I have said no small part of it was of my very own earning. The +freshness of first creations--since we are exalted, in art, to these +arrogant expressions--never fails, I take it, to beguile the creator, in +default of any other victim, even to the last extravagance; so that what +happened was that one found all the swarm of one's intentions, one's +projected images, quite "good enough" to mix with the rest of one's +society, setting up with it terms of interpenetration, an admirable +commerce of borrowing and lending, taking and giving, not to say +stealing and keeping. Did it verily _all_, this freshness of felt +contact, of curiosity and wonder, come back perhaps to certain small and +relatively ridiculous achievements of "production" as aforesaid?--ridiculous +causes, I mean, of such prodigious effects. I am divided between the +shame on the one hand of claiming for them, these concocted "short +stories," that they played so great a part, and a downright admiring +tenderness on the other for their holding up their stiff little heads in +such a bustle of life and traffic of affairs. I of course really and +truly cared for them, as we say, more than for aught else +whatever--cared for them with that kind of care, infatuated though it +may seem, that makes it bliss for the fond votary never to so much as +speak of the loved object, makes it a refinement of piety to perform his +rites under cover of a perfect freedom of mind as to everything _but_ +them. These secrets of the imaginative life were in fact more various +than I may dream of trying to tell; they referred to actual concretions +of existence as well as to the supposititious; the joy of life indeed, +drawbacks and all, was just in the constant quick flit of association, +to and fro, and through a hundred open doors, between the two great +chambers (if it be not absurd, or even base, to separate them) of direct +and indirect experience. If it is of the great comprehensive _fusion_ +that I speak as the richest note of all those hours, what could truly +have been more in the sense of it than exactly such a perfect muddle of +pleasure for instance as my having (and, as I seem to remember, at his +positive invitation) addressed the most presuming as yet of my fictional +bids to my distinguished friend of a virtual lifetime, as he was to +become, William Dean Howells, whom I rejoice to name here and who had +shortly before returned from a considerable term of exile in Venice and +was in the act of taking all but complete charge of the Boston +"Atlantic"? The confusion was, to be plain, of more things than can hope +to go into my picture with any effect of keeping distinct there--the +felt felicity, literally, in my performance, the felt ecstasy, the still +greater, in my receipt of Howells's message; and then, naturally, most +of all, the at once to be recorded blest violence in the break upon my +consciousness of his glittering response after perusal. + +There was still more in it all than that, however--which is the point of +my mild demonstration; I associate the passage, to press closer, with a +long summer, from May to November, spent at the then rural retreat of +Swampscott, forty minutes by train northward from Boston, and that scene +of fermentation, in its turn, I invest with unspeakable memories. It was +the summer of '66 and of the campaign of Sadowa across the sea--we had +by that time got sufficiently away from our own campaigns to take some +notice of those of other combatants, on which we bestowed in fact, I +think, the highest competence of attention then anywhere at play; a +sympathetic sense that bore us even over to the Franco-German war four +years later and helped us to know what we meant when we "felt strongly" +about it. No strength of feeling indeed of which the vibration had +remained to us from the other time could have been greater than our +woe-stricken vision of the plight of France under the portent of Sedan; +I had been back to that country and some of its neighbourhoods for some +fifteen months during the previous interval, and I recover again no +share in a great collective pang more vividly than our particular +appalled state, that of a whole company of us, while we gaped out at the +cry of reiterated bulletins from the shade of an August verandah, and +then again from amid boskages of more immediate consolation, during the +Saratoga and the Newport seasons of 1870. I had happened to repair to +Saratoga, of all inconsequent places, on my return from the Paris and +the London of the weeks immediately preceding the war, and though it was +not there that the worst sound of the first crash reached us, I feel +around me still all the air of our dismay--which was, in the queerest +way in the world, that of something so alien mixed, to the increase of +horror, with something so cherished: the great hot glare of vulgarity of +the aligned hotels of the place and period drenching with its crude +light the apparent collapse of everything we had supposed most massive. +Which forward stretch on the part of this chronicle represents, I +recognise, the practice of the discursive well-nigh overmastering its +principle--or would do so, rather, weren't it that the fitful and the +flickering, the extravagant advance and the corrective retreat from it, +the law and the lovely art of foreshortening, have had here throughout +most to serve me. It is under countenance of that law that I still grasp +my capricious clue, making a jump for the moment over two or three years +and brushing aside by the way quite numberless appeals, claims upon +tenderness of memory not less than pleas for charm of interest, against +which I must steel myself, even though I account this rank disloyalty to +each. There is no quarter to which I have inclined in my brief recovery +of the high tide of impression flooding the "period" of Ashburton Place +that might not have drawn me on and on; so that I confess I feel myself +here drag my mantle, right and left, from the clutch of suppliant +hands--voluminous as it may doubtless yet appear in spite of my sense of +its raggedness. Wrapped in tatters it is therefore that, with three or +four of William's letters of '67 and '68 kept before me, I make my +stride, not only for the sake of what I still regard as their admirable +interest, but for the way they bring back again to me everything they +figured at the time, every flame of faith they rekindled, every gage +they held out for the future. Present for me are still others than these +in particular, which I keep over for another introducing, but even the +pages I here preserve overflow with connections--so many that, +extravagant as it may sound, I have to make an effort to breast them. +These are with a hundred matters of our then actual life--little as that +virtue may perhaps show on their face; but above all just with the huge +small fact that the writer was by the blest description "in Europe," and +that this had verily still its way of meaning for me more than aught +else beside. For what sprang in especial from his situation was the +proof, with its positive air, that a like, when all was said, might +become again one's own; that such luck wasn't going to be for evermore +perversely out of the question with us, and that in fine I too was +already in a manner transported by the intimacy with which I partook of +his having been. I shouldn't have overstated it, I think, in saying that +I really preferred such a form of experience (of this particular one) to +the simpler--given most of our current conditions; there was somehow a +greater richness, a larger accession of knowledge, vision, life, +whatever one might have called it, in "having him there," as we said, +and in my individually getting the good of this with the peculiar degree +of ease that reinforced the general quest of a special sufficiency of +that boon to which I was during those years rigidly, and yet on the +whole by no means abjectly, reduced. + +Our parents had in the autumn of '66 settled, virtually for the rest of +their days, at Cambridge, and William had concomitantly with this, that +is from soon after his return from Brazil, entered upon a season of +study at the Harvard Medical School, then keeping its terms in Boston +and under the wide wing of--as one supposed it, or as I at any rate +did--the Massachusetts General Hospital. I have to disengage my mantle +here with a force in which I invite my reader to believe--for I push +through a thicket of memories in which the thousand-fingered branches +arrestingly catch; otherwise I should surrender, and with a passionate +sense of the logic in it, to that long and crowded Swampscott summer at +which its graceless name has already failed to keep me from having +glanced. The place, smothered in a dense prose of prosperity now, may +have been even in those days, by any high measure, a weak enough apology +for an offered breast of Nature: nevertheless it ministered to me as +the only "American country" save the silky Newport fringes with which my +growing imagination, not to mention my specious energy, had met at all +continuous occasion to play--so that I should have but to let myself go +a little, as I say, to sit up to my neck again in the warm depth of its +deposit. Out of this I should lift great handfuls of variety of vision; +it was to have been in its way too a season of coming and going, and +with its main mark, I make out, that it somehow absurdly flowered, first +and last, into some intenser example of every sort of intimation up to +then vouchsafed me, whether by the inward or the outward life. I think +of it thus as a big bouquet of blooms the most mixed--yet from which it +is to the point just here to detach the sole reminiscence, coloured to a +shade I may not reproduce, of a day's excursion to see my brother up at +the Hospital. Had I not now been warned off too many of the prime images +brought, for their confusion, to the final proof, I should almost risk +ever so briefly "evoking" the impression this mere snatch was to leave +with me, the picture as of sublime activities and prodigious +possibilities, of genial communities of consideration and acquisition, +all in a great bright porticoed and gardened setting, that was to hang +itself in my crazy cabinet for as long as the light of the hour might +allow. I put my hand on the piece still--in its now so deeply obscured +corner; though the true point of my reference would seem to be in the +fact that if William studied medicine long enough to qualify and to take +his degree (so as to have become as roundedly "scientific" as possible) +he was yet immediately afterwards, by one of those quick shifts of the +scene with which we were familiar, beginning philosophic study in +Germany and again writing home letters of an interest that could be but +re-emphasised by our having him planted out as a reflector of +impressions where impressions were both strong and as different as +possible from those that more directly beat upon us. I myself could do +well enough with these last, I may parenthesise, so long as none others +were in question; but that complacency shrank just in proportion as we +were reached by the report of difference and of the foreign note, the +report particularly favourable--which was indeed what any and every +report perforce appeared to me. William's, from anywhere, had ever an +authority for me that attended none others; even if this be not the +place for more than a word of light on the apparent disconnection of his +actual course. It comes back to me that the purpose of practising +medicine had at no season been flagrant in him, and he was in fact, his +hospital connection once over, never to practise for a day. He was on +the other hand to remain grateful for his intimate experience of the +laboratory and the clinic, and I was as constantly to feel that the +varieties of his application had been as little wasted for him as those +of my vagueness had really been for me. His months at Dresden and his +winter in Berlin were of a new variety--this last even with that tinge +of the old in it which came from his sharing quarters with T. S. Perry, +who, his four years at Harvard ended and his ensuing grand tour of +Europe, as then comprehensively carried out, performed, was giving the +Universities of Berlin and Paris a highly competent attention. To +whatever else of method may have underlain the apparently lawless strain +of our sequences I should add the action of a sharp lapse of health on +my brother's part which the tension of a year at the dissecting table +seemed to have done much to determine; as well as the fond fact that +Europe was again from that crisis forth to take its place for us as a +standing remedy, a regular mitigation of all suffered, or at least of +all wrong, stress. Of which remarks but a couple of letters addressed to +myself, I have to recognise, form here the occasion; these only, in that +order, have survived the accidents of time, as I the more regret that I +have in my mind's eye still much of the matter of certain others; +notably of one from Paris (on his way further) recounting a pair of +evenings at the theatre, first for the younger Dumas and Les Idees de +Madame Aubray, with Pasca and Delaporte, this latter of an exquisite +truth to him, and then for something of the Palais Royal with _four_ +comedians, as he emphatically noted, who were each, wonderful to say, +"de la force of Warren of the Boston Museum." He spent the summer of '67 +partly in Dresden and partly at Bad-Teplitz in Bohemia, where he had +been recommended the waters; he was to return for these again after a +few months and was also to seek treatment by hydropathy at the +establishment of Divonne, in the French back-country of Lake Leman, +where a drawing sent home in a letter, and which I do my best to +reproduce, very comically represents him as surrounded by the listening +fair. I remember supposing even his Dresden of the empty weeks to +bristle with precious images and every form of local character--this a +little perhaps because of his treating us first of all to a pair of +whimsical crayoned views of certain animated housetops seen from his +window. It is the old names in the old letters, however, that now always +most rewrite themselves to my eyes in colour--shades alas that defy +plain notation, and if the two with which the following begins, and +especially the first of them, only asked me to tell their story I but +turn my back on the whole company of which they are part. + + ...I got last week an excellent letter from Frank Washburn who + writes in such a manly way. But the greatest delight I've had was + the loan of 5 Weekly Transcripts from Dick Derby. It's strange how + quickly one grows away from one's old surroundings. I never should + have believed that in so few months the tone of a Boston paper + would seem so outlandish to me. As it was, I was in one squeal of + amusement, surprise and satisfaction until deep in the night, when + I went to bed tired out with patriotism. The boisterous animal + good-humour, familiarity, reckless energy and self-confidence, + unprincipled optimism, esthetic saplessness and intellectual + imbecility, made a mixture hard to characterise, but totally + different from the tone of things here and, as the Germans would + say, whose "Existenz so voellig dasteht," that there was nothing to + do but to let yourself feel it. The Americans themselves here too + amuse me much; they have such a hungry, restless look and seem so + unhooked somehow from the general framework. The other afternoon as + I was sitting on the Terrace, a gentleman and two young ladies came + and sat down quite near me. I knew them for Americans at a glance, + and the man interested me by his exceedingly American expression: a + reddish moustache and tuft on chin, a powerful nose, a small light + eye, half insolent and _all_ sagacious, and a sort of rowdy air of + superiority that made me proud to claim him as a brother. In a few + minutes I recognised him as General M'Clellan, rather different + from his photographs of the War-time, but still not to be mistaken + (and I afterwards learned he is here). Whatever his faults may be + that of not being "one of us" is not among them. + +This next is the note of a slightly earlier impression. + + The Germans are certainly a most gemuethlich people. The way all the + old women told me how "freundlich" their rooms were--"so freundlich + mobilirt" and so forth--melted my heart. Whenever you tell an + inferior here to do anything (_e.g._ a cabman) he or she replies + "Schoen!" or rather "Schehn!" with an accent not quick like a + Frenchman's "Bien!" but so protracted, soothing and reassuring to + you that you feel as if he were adopting you into his family. You + say I've said nothing of the people of this house, but there is + nothing to tell about them. The Doctor is an open-hearted excellent + man as ever was, and wrapped up in his children; Frau Semler is a + sickly, miserly, petty-spirited nonentity. The children are quite + uninteresting, though the younger, Anna or Aennchen, aged five, is + very handsome and fat. The following short colloquy, which I + overheard one day after breakfast a few days since, may serve you + as a piece of local colour. Aennchen drops a book she is carrying + across the room and exclaims "Herr Jesus!" + + Mother: "Ach, das sagen _Kinder_ nicht, Anna!" + + Aennchen (reflectively to herself, sotto voce): "Nicht fur Kinder!" + ... + +What here follows from Divonne--of fourteen months later--is too full +and too various to need contribution or comment. + + You must have envied within the last few weeks my revisiting of the + sacred scenes of our youth, the shores of Leman, the Ecu de Geneve, + the sloping Corraterie, etc. My only pang in it all has been caused + by your absence, or rather by the fact of my presence instead of + yours; for I think your abstemious and poetic soul would have got + much more good of the things I've seen than my hardening and + definite-growing nature. I wrote a few words about Nuernberg to + Alice from Montreux. I found that about as pleasant an impression + as any I have had since being abroad--and this because I didn't + expect it. The Americans at Dresden had told me it was quite + uninteresting. I enclose you a few stereographs I got there--I + don't know why, for they are totally irrelevant to the real effect + of the place. This it would take Theophile Gautier to describe, so + I renounce. It was strange to find how little I remembered at + Geneva--I couldn't find the way I used to take up to the Academy, + and the shops and houses of the Rue du Rhone visible from our old + windows left me uncertain whether they were the same or new ones. + Kohler has set up a new hotel on the Quai du Mont-Blanc--you + remember he's the brother of our old Madame Buscarlet there; but I + went for association's sake to the Ecu. The dining-room was + differently hung, and the only thing in my whole 24 hours in the + place that stung me, so to speak, with memory, was that kind of + chinese-patterned dessert-service we used to have. So runs the + world away. I didn't try to look up Ritter, Chantre or any of ces + messieurs, but started off here the next morning, where I have now + been a week. + + [Illustration: "The cold water cure at Divonne--excellent for + melancholia."--From a letter of William James (page 447)] + + My impression on gradually coming from a German into a French + atmosphere of things was rather unexpected and not in all respects + happy. I have been in Germany half amused and half impatient with + the slowness of proceeding and the uncouthness of taste and + expression that prevail there so largely in all things, but on + exchanging it for the brightness and shipshapeness of these + quasi-French arrangements of life and for the tart + fire-cracker-like speech of those who make them I found myself + inclined to retreat again on what I had left, and had for a few + days quite a homesickness for the easy, ugly, substantial German + ways. The "'tarnal" smartness in which the railway refreshment + counters, for example, are dressed up, the tight waists and + "tasteful" white caps of the female servants, the everlasting + monsieur and madame, and especially the quickness and snappishness + of enunciation, suggesting such an inward impatience, quite + absurdly gave on my nerves. But I am getting used to it all, and + the French people who sit near me here at table and who repelled me + at first by the apparently cold-blooded artificiality of their + address to each other, now seem less heartless and inhuman. I am + struck more than ever I was with the hopelessness of us English, + and a _fortiori_ the Germans, ever competing with the French in + matters of form or finite taste of any sort. They are sensitive to + things that simply don't exist for us. I notice it here in manners + and speech: how can a people who speak with no tonic accents in + their words _help_ being cleaner and neater in expressing + themselves? On the other hand the limitations of _reach_ in the + French mind strike me more and more; their delight in rallying + round an official standard in all matters, in counting and dating + everything from certain great names, their use and love of + catchwords and current phrases, their sacrifice of independence of + mind for the mere sake of meeting their hearer or reader on common + ground, their metaphysical incapacity not only to deal with + questions but to know what the questions are, stand out plainer and + plainer the more headway I make in German. One wonders where the + "Versoehnung" or conciliation of all these rival national qualities + is going to take place. I imagine we English stand rather between + the French and the Germans both in taste and in spiritual + intuition. In Germany, while unable to avoid respecting that + solidity of the national mind which causes such a mass of permanent + work to be produced there annually, I couldn't help consoling + myself by the thought that whatever, after all, they might _do_, + the Germans were a plebeian crowd and could never _be_ such + gentlemen as we were. I now find myself getting over the French + superiority by an exactly inverse process of thought. The Frenchman + must sneer at us even more than we sneer at the Germans--and which + sneer is final, his at us two, or ours at him, or the Germans' at + us? It seems an insoluble question, which I fortunately haven't got + to settle. + + I've read several novels lately, some of the irrepressible + George's: La Daniella and the Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Dore. (Was it + thee, by the bye that wrotest the Nation notices on her, on W. + Morris's new poem and on The Spanish Gypsy? They came to me + unmarked, but the thoughts seemed such as you would entertain, and + the style in some places like yours--in others not.) George Sand + babbles her improvisations on so that I never begin to believe a + word of what she says. I've also read The Woman in White, a couple + of Balzac's, etc., and a volume of tales by Merimee which I will + send you if I can by Frank Washburn. He is a big man; but the + things which have given me most pleasure have been some sketches of + travel by Th. Gautier. What an absolute thing genius is! That this + creature, with no more soul than a healthy poodle-dog, no + philosophy, no morality, no information (for I doubt exceedingly if + his knowledge of architectural terms and suchlike is accurate) + should give one a finer enjoyment than his betters in all these + respects by mere force of good-nature, clear eyesight and felicity + of phrase! His style seems to me perfect, and I should think it + would pay you to study it with love--principally in the most + trivial of these collections of notes of travel. T. S. P. has a + couple of them for you, and another, which I've read here and is + called Caprices et Zigzags, is worth buying. It contains wonderful + French (in the classic sense, I mean, with all those associations) + descriptions of London. I'm not sure if you know Gautier at all + save by the delicious Capitaine Fracasse. But these republished + feuilletons are all of as charming a quality and I should think + would last as long as the language. + + There are 70 or 80 people in this etablissement, no one of whom I + have as yet particularly cottoned up to. It's incredible how even + so slight a barrier as the difference of language with most of + them, and still more as the absence of local and personal + associations, range of gibes and other common ground to stand on, + counts against one's scraping acquaintance. It's disgusting and + humiliating. There is a lovely maiden of _etwa_ 19 sits in sight of + me at the table with whom I am falling deeply in love. She has + never looked at me yet, and I really believe I should be quite + incapable of conversing with her even were I "introduced," from a + sense of the above difficulties and because one doesn't know what + subjects or allusions may be possible with a jeune fille. I suppose + my life for the past year would have furnished you, as the great + American nouvelliste, a good many "motives" and subjects of + observation--especially so in this place. I wish I could pass them + over to you--such as they are you'd profit by them more than I and + gather in a great many more. I should like full well an hour's, or + even longer, interview with you, and with the Parents and the + Sister and the Aunt and all; just so as to start afresh on a clean + basis. Give my love to Wendell Holmes. I've seen ---- ---- several + times; but what a cold-blooded cuss he is! Write me your impression + of T. S. P., who will probably reach you before this letter. If + Frank Washburn ever gets home be friendly to him. He is much aged + by travel and experience, and is a most charming character and + generous mind. + + + + +XIII + + +If I add to the foregoing a few lines more from my brother's hand, these +are of a day separated by long years from that time of our youth of +which I have treated. Addressed after the immense interval to an +admirable friend whom I shall not name here, they yet so vividly +refer--and with something I can only feel as the first authority--to one +of the most prized interests of our youth that, under the need of still +failing to rescue so many of these values from the dark gulf, I find +myself insist the more on a place here, before I close, for that +presence in our early lives as to which my brother's few words say so +much. To have so promptly and earnestly spoken of Mary Temple the +younger in this volume is indeed I think to have offered a gage for my +not simply leaving her there. The opportunity not so to leave her comes +at any rate very preciously into my hands, and I can not better round +off this record than by making the most of it. The letter to which +William alludes is one that my reader will presently recognise. It had +come back to him thus clearly at the far end of time. + + I am deeply thankful to you for sending me this letter, which + revives all sorts of poignant memories and makes her live again in + all her lightness and freedom. Few spirits have been more free than + hers. I find myself wishing so that she could know me as I am now. + As for knowing her as _she_ is now--??!! I find that she means as + much in the way of human character for me now as she ever did, + being unique and with no analogue in all my subsequent experience + of people. Thank you once more for what you have done. + +The testimony so acknowledged was a letter in a copious succession, the +product of little more than one year, January '69 to February '70, +sacredly preserved by the recipient; who was not long after the day of +my brother's acknowledgment to do me the honour of communicating to me +the whole series. He could have done nothing to accord more with the +spirit in which I have tried to gather up something of the sense of our +far-off past, his own as well as that of the rest of us; and no loose +clue that I have been able to recover unaided touches into life anything +like such a tract of the time-smothered consciousness. More charming and +interesting things emerge for me than I can point to in their order--but +they will make, I think, their own appeal. It need only further be +premised that our delightful young cousin had had from some months back +to begin to reckon with the progressive pulmonary weakness of which the +letters tell the sad story. Also, I can scarce help saying, the whole +world of the old New York, that of the earlier dancing years, shimmers +out for me from the least of her allusions. + + I will write you as nice a letter as I can, but would much rather + have a good talk with you. As I can't have the best thing I am + putting up with the second-best, contrary to my pet theory. I feel + as if I were in heaven to-day--all because the day is splendid and + I have been driving about all the morning in a small sleigh in the + fresh air and sunshine, until I found that I had in spite of + myself, for the time being, stopped asking the usual inward + question of why I was born. I am not going to Canada--I know no + better reason for this than because I said I _was_ going. My + brother-in-law makes such a clamour when I propose departure that I + am easily overcome by his kindness and my own want of energy. + Besides, it is great fun to live here; the weather just now is + grand, and I knock about all day in a sleigh, and do nothing but + enjoy it and meditate. Then we are so near town that we often go in + for the day to shop and lunch with some of our numerous friends, + returning with a double relish for the country. We all went in on a + spree the other night and stayed at the Everett House; from which, + as a starting-point we poured ourselves in strong force upon Mrs. + Gracie King's ball--a very grand affair, given for a very pretty + Miss King, at Delmonico's. Our raid consisted of thirteen Emmets + and a moderate supply of Temples, and the ball was a great success. + It was two years since I had been to one and I enjoyed it so much + that I mean very soon to repeat the experiment--at the next + Assembly if possible. The men in society, in New York, this winter, + are principally a lot of feeble-minded boys; but I was fortunate + enough to escape them, as my partner for the German was a man of + thirty-five, the solitary _man_, I believe, in the room. Curiously + enough, I had danced my last German, two years before, in that very + place and with the same person. He is a Mr. Lee, who has spent + nearly all his life abroad; two of his sisters have married German + princes, and from knocking about so much he has become a thorough + cosmopolite. As he is intelligent, with nothing to do but amuse + himself, he is a very agreeable partner, and I mean to dance with + him again as soon as possible. I don't know why I have tried your + patience by writing so about a person you have never seen; unless + it's to show you that I haven't irrevocably given up the world, the + flesh and the devil, but am conscious of a faint charm about them + still when taken in small doses. I agree with you perfectly about + Uncle Henry--I should think he would be very irritating to the + legal mind; he is not at all satisfactory even to mine. Have you + seen much of Willy James lately? That is a rare creature, and one + in whom my intellect, if you will pardon the misapplication of the + word, takes more solid satisfaction than in almost anybody. I + haven't read Browning's new book--I mean to wait till you are by to + explain it to me--which reminds me, along with what you say about + wishing for the spring, that we shall go to North Conway next + summer, and that in that case you may as well make up your mind to + come and see us there. I can't wait longer than that for the + Browning readings. (Which would have been of The Ring and the + Book.) Arthur Sedgwick has sent me Matthew Arnold's photograph, + which Harry had pronounced so disappointing. I don't myself, on the + whole, find it so; on the contrary, after having looked at it much, + I like it--it quite harmonises with my notion of him, and I have + always had an affection for him. You must tell me something that + you are _sure_ is true--I don't care much what it may be, I will + take your word for it. Things get into a muddle with me--how can I + give you "a start on the way of righteousness"? You know that way + better than I do, and the only advice I can give you is not to stop + saying your prayers. I hope God may bless you, and beyond those + things I hardly know what is right, and therefore what to wish you. + Good-bye. + +"North Conway" in the foregoing has almost the force for me of a +wizard's wand; the figures spring up again and move in a harmony that is +not of the fierce present; the sense in particular of the August of '65 +shuts me in to its blest unawarenesses not less than to all that was +then exquisite in its current certainties and felicities; the +fraternising, endlessly conversing group of us gather under the rustling +pines--and I admire, precisely, the arrival, the bright revelation as I +recover it, of the so handsome young man, marked with military +distinction but already, with our light American promptitude, addressed +to that high art of peace in which a greater eminence awaited him, of +whom this most attaching member of the circle was to make four years +later so wise and steady a confidant. Our circle I fondly call it, and +doubtless then called it, because in the light of that description I +could most rejoice in it, and I think of it now as having formed a +little world of easy and happy interchange, of unrestricted and yet all +so instinctively sane and secure association and conversation, with all +its liberties and delicacies, all its mirth and its earnestness +protected and directed so much more from within than from without, that +I ask myself, perhaps too fatuously, whether any such right conditions +for the play of young intelligence and young friendship, the reading of +Matthew Arnold and Browning, the discussion of a hundred human and +personal things, the sense of the splendid American summer drawn out to +its last generosity, survives to this more complicated age. I doubt if +there be circles to-day, and seem rather to distinguish confusedly gangs +and crowds and camps, more propitious, I dare say, to material affluence +and physical riot than anything we knew, but not nearly so appointed for +ingenious and ingenuous talk. I think of our interplay of relation as +attuned to that fruitful freedom of what we took for speculation, what +we didn't recoil from as boundless curiosity--as the consideration of +life, that is, the personal, the moral inquiry and adventure at large, +so far as matter for them had up to then met our view--I think of this +fine quality in our scene with no small confidence in its having been +rare, or to be more exact perhaps, in its having been possible to the +general American felicity and immunity as it couldn't otherwise or +elsewhere have begun to be. Merely to say, as an assurance, that such +relations shone with the light of "innocence" is of itself to breathe on +them wrongly or rudely, is uncouthly to "defend" them--as if the very +air that consciously conceived and produced them didn't all tenderly and +amusedly take care of them. I at any rate figure again, to my customary +positive piety, all the aspects now; that in especial of my young +orphaned cousins as mainly composing the maiden train and seeming as if +they still had but yesterday brushed the morning dew of the dear old +Albany naturalness; that of the venerable, genial, erect great-aunt, +their more immediately active guardian, a model of antique spinsterhood +appointed to cares such as even renewals of wedlock could scarce more +have multiplied for her, and thus, among her many ancient and curious +national references--one was tempted to call them--most impressive by +her striking resemblance to the portraits, the most benignant, of +General Washington. She might have represented the mother, no less +adequately than he represented the father, of their country. I can only +feel, however, that what particularly drew the desired circle sharpest +for me was the contribution to it that I had been able to effect by +introducing the companion of my own pilgrimage, who was in turn to +introduce a little later the great friend of _his_ then expanding +situation, restored with the close of the War to civil pursuits and +already deep in them; the interesting pair possessed after this fashion +of a quantity of common fine experience that glittered as so much +acquired and enjoyed luxury--all of a sort that I had no acquisition +whatever to match. I remember being happy in that I might repeatedly +point our moral, under permission (for we were always pointing morals), +with this brilliant advantage of theirs even if I might with none of my +own; and I of course knew--what was half the beauty--that if we were +just the most delightful loose band conceivable, and immersed in a +regular revel of all the harmonies, it was largely by grace of the three +quite exceptional young men who, thanks in part to the final sublime +coach-drive of other days, had travelled up from Boston with their +preparation to admire inevitably quickened. I was quite willing to offer +myself as exceptional through being able to promote such exceptions and +see them justified to waiting apprehension. There was a dangling fringe, +there were graceful accessories and hovering shades, but, essentially, +we of the true connection made up the drama, or in other words, for the +benefit of my imagination, reduced the fond figment of the Circle to +terms of daily experience. If drama we could indeed feel this as being, +I hasten to add, we owed it most of all to our just having such a +heroine that everything else inevitably came. Mary Temple was +beautifully and indescribably _that_--in the technical or logical as +distinguished from the pompous or romantic sense of the word; wholly +without effort or desire on her part--for never was a girl less +consciously or consentingly or vulgarly dominant--everything that took +place around her took place as if primarily in relation to her and in +her interest: that is in the interest of drawing her out and displaying +her the more. This too without her in the least caring, as I say--in the +deep, the morally nostalgic indifferences that were the most finally +characteristic thing about her--whether such an effect took place or +not; she liked nothing in the world so much as to see others fairly +exhibited; not as they might best please her by being, but as they might +most fully reveal themselves, their stuff and their truth: which was the +only thing that, after any first flutter for the superficial air or +grace in an acquaintance, could in the least fix her attention. She had +beyond any equally young creature I have known a sense for verity of +character and play of life in others, for their acting out of their +force or their weakness, whatever either might be, at no matter what +cost to herself; and it was this instinct that made her care so for +life in general, just as it was her being thereby so engaged in that +tangle that made her, as I have expressed it, ever the heroine of the +scene. Life claimed her and used her and beset her--made her range in +her groping, her naturally immature and unlighted way from end to end of +the scale. No one felt more the charm of the actual--only the actual +comprised for her kinds of reality (those to which her letters perhaps +most of all testify), that she saw treated round her for the most part +either as irrelevant or as unpleasant. She was absolutely afraid of +nothing she might come to by living with enough sincerity and enough +wonder; and I think it is because one was to see her launched on that +adventure in such bedimmed, such almost tragically compromised +conditions that one is caught by her title to the heroic and pathetic +mark. It is always difficult for us after the fact not to see young +things who were soon to be lost to us as already distinguished by their +fate; this particular victim of it at all events might well have made +the near witness ask within himself how her restlessness of spirit, the +finest reckless impatience, was to be assuaged or "met" by the common +lot. One somehow saw it nowhere about us as up to her terrible young +standard of the interesting--even if to say this suggests an air of +tension, a sharpness of importunity, than which nothing could have been +less like her. The charming, irresistible fact was that one had never +seen a creature with such lightness of forms, a lightness all her own, +so inconsequently grave at the core, or an asker of endless questions +with such apparent lapses of care. It is true that as an effect of the +state of health which during the year '69 grew steadily worse the +anxious note and serious mind sound in her less intermittently than by +her former wont. + + This might be headed with that line of a hymn, "Hark, from the + tombs etc.!"--but perhaps it won't prove as bad as that. It looks + pretty doubtful still, but I have a sort of feeling that I shall + come round this one time more; by which I don't mean to brag! The + "it" of which I speak is of course my old enemy hemorrhage, of + which I have had within the last week seven pretty big ones and + several smaller, hardly worth mentioning. I don't know what has + come over me--I can't stop them; but, as I said, I mean to try and + beat them yet. Of course I am in bed, where I shall be + indefinitely--not allowed to speak one word, literally, even in a + whisper. The reason I write this is because I don't think it will + hurt me at all--if I take it easy and stop when I feel tired. It is + a pleasant break in the monotony of gruel and of thinking of the + grave--and then too a few words from somebody who is strong and + active in the good old world (as it seems to me now) would be very + refreshing. But don't tell anyone I have written, because it will + be sure to reach the ears of my dear relatives and will cause them + to sniff the air and flounce! You see I am a good deal of a + baby--in the sense of not wanting the reproaches of my relatives + on this or any other subject.... All the Emmets are so good and + kind that I found, when it came to the point, that there was a good + deal to make life attractive, and that if the choice were given me + I would much rather stay up here on the solid earth, in the air and + sunshine, with an occasional sympathetic glimpse of another + person's soul, than to be put down underground and say good-bye for + ever to humanity, with all its laughter and its sadness. Yet you + mustn't think me now in any _special_ danger of dying, or even in + low spirits, for it isn't so--the doctor tells me I am _not_ in + danger, even if the hemorrhages should keep on. However, "you can't + fool a regular boarder," as Mr. Holmes would say, and I can't see + why there is any reason to think they will heal a week hence, when + I shall be still weaker, if they can't heal now. Still, they _may_ + be going to stop--I haven't had one since yesterday at 4, and now + it's 3; nearly twenty-four hours. I am of a hopeful temperament and + not easily scared, which is in my favour. If this _should_ prove to + be the last letter you get from me, why take it for a good-bye; + I'll keep on the lookout for you in the spirit world, and shall be + glad to see you when you come there, provided it's a better place + than this. Elly is in New York, enjoying herself immensely, and I + haven't let her know how ill I have been, as there were to be + several parties this last week and I was afraid it might spoil her + fun. I didn't mean you to infer from my particularising Willy + James's intellect that the rest of him isn't to my liking--he is + one of the very few people in this world that I love. He has the + largest heart as well as the largest head, and is thoroughly + interesting to me. He is generous and affectionate and full of + sympathy and humanity--though you mustn't tell him I say so, lest + he should think I have been telling you a lie to serve my own + purposes. Good-bye. + +I should have little heart, I confess, for what is essentially the +record of a rapid illness if it were not at the same time the image of +an admirable soul. Surrounded as she was with affection she had yet +greatly to help herself, and nothing is thus more penetrating than the +sense, as one reads, that a method of care would have been followed for +her to-day, and perhaps followed with signal success, that was not in +the healing or nursing range of forty years ago. + + It is a week ago to-day, I think, since I last wrote to you, and I + have only had one more hemorrhage--the day after. I feel pretty + sure they have stopped for the present, and I am sitting up in my + room, as bright as possible. Yesterday when I walked across it I + thought I should never be strong again, but now it's quite + different, and so nice to be out of bed that my spirits go up + absurdly. As soon as I am able I am to be taken to town for another + examination, and then when I know my fate I will do the best I can. + This climate is trying, to be sure, but such as it is I've got to + take my chance in it, as there is no one I care enough for, or who + cares enough for me, to take charge of me to Italy, or to the south + anywhere. I don't believe any climate, however good, would be of + the least use to me with people I don't care for. You may let your + moustache grow down to your toes if you like, and I shall but smile + scornfully at your futile precautions. + +Of the following, in spite of its length, I can bring myself to abate +nothing. + + ....Well, "to make a long story short," as Hannah (her old nurse) + says, I caught a cold, and it went to the weak spot, and I had + another slight attack of hemorrhage; but I took the necessary steps + at once, stayed in bed and didn't speak for six days, and then it + stopped and I felt better than I had at all since I was first taken + ill. But I began to tire so of such constant confinement to my room + that they promised to take me to town as soon as I was well enough, + and perhaps to the Opera. This of course would have been a wild + excitement for me, and I had charming little plans of music by day + and by night, for a week, which I meant to spend with Mrs. + Griswold. Accordingly a cavalcade set out from here on Monday, + consisting of myself escorted by sisters and friends, who were to + see me safely installed in my new quarters and leave me. I arrived, + bundled up, at Mrs. Griswold's, and had begun to consider myself + already quite emancipated from bondage--so that I was discussing + with my brother-in-law the propriety of my going that evening to + hear Faust, this but the beginning of a mad career on which I + proposed to rush headlong--when Dr. Bassett arrived, who is the + medical man that I had meant to consult during my stay + _incidentally_ and between the pauses in the music. The first thing + he said was: "What are you doing here? Go directly back to the + place you came from and don't come up again till the warm weather. + As for music, you mustn't hear of it or even think of it for two + months." This was pleasant, but there was nothing to be done but + obey; which I did a few hours later, with my trunk still unpacked + and my immediate plan of life somewhat limited. + + I say my immediate plan because my permanent found itself by no + means curtailed, but on the contrary expanded and varied in a + manner I had not even dared to hope. This came from what Dr. B. + said subsequently, when he had examined my lungs; that is to say + after he had laid his head affectionately first under one of my + shoulders and then the other, and there kept it solemnly for about + ten minutes, in a way that was irresistibly ludicrous, especially + with Kitty as spectator. His verdict was that my lungs were + _sound_, that he couldn't detect the least evidence of disease, and + that hemorrhage couldn't have come from the lung itself, but from + their membraneous lining, and that of the throat, whatever this may + be. So he gave me to understand that I have as sound a pair of + lungs at present as the next person; in fact from what he said one + would have thought them a pair that a prize-fighter might covet. At + the same time he sent me flying back to the country, with orders + not to get excited, nor to listen to music, nor to speak with + anybody I care for, nor to do anything in short that the + unregenerate nature longs for. This struck my untutored mind as + somewhat inconsistent, and I ventured a gentle remonstrance, which + however was not even listened to, and I was ignominiously thrust + into a car and borne back to Pelham. The problem still bothers me: + either sound lungs are a very dangerous thing to have, or there is + a foul conspiracy on foot to oppress me. Still, I cling to the + consoling thought of my matchless lungs, and this obliterates my + present sufferings. + + Harry came to see me before he sailed for Europe; I'm very glad he + has gone, though I don't expect to see him again for a good many + years. I don't think he will come back for a long time, and I hope + it will do him good and that he will enjoy himself--which he hasn't + done for several years. I haven't read all of Faust, but I think I + know the scenes you call divine--at least I know some that are + exquisite. But why do you speak so disparagingly of King David, + whom I always had a weakness for? Think how charming and lovable a + person he must have been, poet, musician and so much else + combined--with however their attendant imperfections. I don't think + I should have cared to be _Queen_ David exactly. I am possessed + with an overpowering admiration and affection for George Eliot. I + don't know why this has so suddenly come over me, but everything I + look at of hers nowadays makes me take a deeper interest in her. I + should love to see her, and I hope Harry will; I asked him to give + my love to her. But I don't remember ever to have heard _you_ speak + of her. Good-bye. I wish conventionality would invent some other + way of ending a letter than "yours truly"; I am so tired of it, and + as one says it to one's shoemaker it would be rather more + complimentary to one's friends to dispense with it altogether and + just sign one's name without anything, after the manner of Miss + Emerson and other free Boston citizens. But I am a slave to + conventionality, and after all _am_ yours truly.... + +Singularly present has remained to "Harry," as may be imagined, the +rapid visit he paid her at Pelham that February; he was spending a +couple of days in New York, on a quick decision, before taking ship for +England. I was then to make in Europe no such stay as she had +forecast--I was away but for fifteen months; though I can well believe +my appetite must have struck her as open to the boundless, and can +easily be touched again by her generous thought of this as the right +compensatory thing for me. That indeed is what I mainly recall of the +hour I spent with her--so unforgettable none the less in its general +value; our so beautifully agreeing that quite the same course would be +the right thing for _her_ and that it was wholly detestable I should be +voyaging off without her. But the precious question and the bright +aspect of her own still waiting chance made our talk for the time all +gaiety; it was, strangely enough, a laughing hour altogether, coloured +with the vision of the next winter in Rome, where we should romantically +meet: the appearance then being of particular protective friends with +Roman designs, under whose wing she might happily travel. She had at +that moment been for many weeks as ill as will here have been shown; but +such is the priceless good faith of youth that we perfectly kept at bay +together the significance of this. I recall no mortal note--nothing but +the bright extravagance of her envy; and see her again, in the old-time +Pelham parlours, ever so erectly slight and so more than needfully, so +transparently, fair (I fatuously took this for "becoming"), glide as +swiftly, toss her head as characteristically, laugh to as free a +disclosure of the handsome largeish teeth that made her mouth almost the +main fact of her face, as if no corner of the veil of the future had +been lifted. The house was quiet and spacious for the day, after the +manner of all American houses of that age at those hours, and yet spoke +of such a possible muster at need of generous, gregarious, neighbouring, +sympathising Emmets; in spite of which, withal, the impression was to +come back to me as of a child struggling with her ignorance in a sort of +pathless desert of the genial and the casual. Three months before I +returned to America the struggle had ended. I _was_, as happened, soon +to see in London her admiration, and my own, the great George Eliot--a +brief glimpse then, but a very impressive, and wellnigh my main +satisfaction in which was that I should have my cousin to tell of it. I +found the Charles Nortons settled for the time in London, with social +contacts and penetrations, a give and take of hospitality, that I felt +as wondrous and of some elements of which they offered me, in their +great kindness, the benefit; so that I was long to value having owed +them in the springtime of '69 five separate impressions of distinguished +persons, then in the full flush of activity and authority, that affected +my young provincialism as a positive fairytale of privilege. I had a +Sunday afternoon hour with Mrs. Lewes at North Bank, no second visitor +but my gentle introducer, the younger Miss Norton, sharing the +revelation, which had some odd and for myself peculiarly thrilling +accompaniments; and then the opportunity of dining with Mr. Ruskin at +Denmark Hill, an impression of uneffaced intensity and followed by a +like--and yet so unlike--evening of hospitality from William Morris in +the medieval mise-en-scene of Queen Square. This had been preceded by a +luncheon with Charles Darwin, beautifully benignant, sublimely simple, +at Down; a memory to which I find attached our incidental wondrous +walk--Mrs. Charles Norton, the too near term of her earthly span then +smoothly out of sight, being my guide for the happy excursion--across a +private park of great oaks, which I conceive to have been the admirable +Holwood and where I knew my first sense of a matter afterwards, through +fortunate years, to be more fully disclosed: the springtime in such +places, the adored footpath, the first primroses, the stir and scent of +renascence in the watered sunshine and under spreading boughs that were +somehow before aught else the still reach of remembered lines of +Tennyson, ached over in nostalgic years. The rarest hour of all perhaps, +or at least the strangest, strange verily to the pitch of the sinister, +was a vision, provided by the same care, of D. G. Rossetti in the vernal +dusk of Queen's House Chelsea--among his pictures, amid his poetry +itself, his whole haunting "esthetic," and yet above all bristling with +his personality, with his perversity, with anything, as it rather +awfully seemed to me, but his sympathy, though it at the same time left +one oddly desirous of more of him. These impressions heaped up the +measure, goodness knew, of what would serve for Minnie's curiosity--she +was familiarly Minnie to us; the point remaining all along, however, +that, impatient at having overmuch to wait, I rejoiced in possession of +the exact vivid terms in which I should image George Eliot to her. I was +much later on to renew acquaintance with that great lady, but I think I +scarce exceed in saying that with my so interested cousin's death half +the savour of my appreciation had lost itself. Just in those days, that +month of April, the latter had made a weak ineffectual move to +Philadelphia in quest of physical relief--which expressed at the same +time even more one of those reachings out for appeasement of the soul +which were never too publicly indulged in, but by which her power to +interest the true subjects of her attraction was infinitely quickened. +It represented wonderments, I might well indeed have said to myself, +even beyond any inspired by the high muse of North Bank. + + I suppose I ought to have something special to say after having + been suddenly transplanted to a new place and among new people, yet + there isn't much to tell. I came because they all thought at home + that the climate might do me good; I don't feel, however, any + difference in my sensations between this and New York--if I do it's + in favour of New York. I wish it might turn out that an inland + climate isn't after all necessary for me, as I like the other sort + much better and really think I feel stronger in it too. My doctor + told me that Boston would kill me in six months--though he is + possibly mistaken. I am going to try it a little longer here, and + then go back to Pelham, where I'm pretty sure I shall find myself + better again. It may be that the mental atmosphere is more to me + than any other, for I feel homesick here all the while, or at least + what I call so, being away from what is most _like_ home to me, and + what if I were there I should call tired. The chief object I had in + coming was to listen to Phillips Brooks; I have heard him several + times and am not, I think, disappointed. To be sure he didn't say + anything new or startling, but I certainly oughtn't to have + expected that, though I believe I did have a secret hope that he + was going to expound to me the old beliefs with a clearness that + would convince me for ever and banish doubt. I had placed all my + hopes in him as the one man I had heard of who, progressive in all + other ways, had yet been able to keep his faith firm in the things + that most earnest men have left far behind them. Yet in preaching + to his congregation he doesn't, or didn't, touch the real + difficulties at all. He was leading them forward instead of trying + to make it clear to _me_ that I have any good reason for my + feelings. Still, it was something to feel that he has them too, and + isn't afraid to trust them and live for them. I wonder what he + really does believe or think about it all, and whether he knows the + reaction that comes to me about Thursday, after the enthusiasm and + confidence made by his eloquence and earnestness on Sunday. + To-morrow will be Saturday, and I shall be glad when Sunday comes + to wind me up again. I feel sadly run down to-night and as if I + should like to see some honest old pagan and shake him by the hand. + It will seem all right and easy again soon, I know, but is it + always thus? Is there no more of that undoubting faith in the + world that there used to be? But I won't talk any more about it + now, or I shan't sleep; it is getting late and all themes but the + least interesting must be put away. + +"Quaint," as we now say, it at this end of time seems to me that +Phillips Brooks, the great Episcopal light of the period, first in +Philadelphia and then in Boston, and superior character, excellent, even +ardent, thoughtful, genial, practical man, should have appeared to play +before her a light possibly of the clear strain, the rich abundance, the +straight incidence, that she so desired to think attainable. A large, in +fact an enormous, softly massive and sociably active presence, of +capacious attention and comforting suggestion, he was a brave worker +among those who didn't too passionately press their questions and +claims--half the office of such a minister being, no doubt, to abate the +high pitch, and the high pitch being by the same token too much Minnie's +tendency. She was left with it in the smug Philadelphia visibly on her +hands; she had found there after all but a closed door, to which she was +blandly directed, rather than an open, and the sigh of her falling back +with her disappointment seems still to reach one's ears. She found them +too much all round, the stiff blank barriers that, for whatever +thumping, didn't "give;" and in fine I like not too faintly to colour +this image of her as failing, in her avid young sincerity, to draw from +the honest pastor of more satisfied souls any assurance that she could +herself honestly apply. I confess that her particular recorded case, +slender enough in its lonely unrest, suggests to me a force, or at least +a play, of effective criticism more vivid to-day than either of the +several rich monuments, honourably as these survive, to Phillips +Brooks's positive "success." She had no occasion or no chance to find +the delightful harmonising friend in him--which was part of the success +for so many others. But her letter goes on after a couple of days--she +had apparently not sent the previous part, and it brings her back, we +can rejoicingly note, to George Eliot, whose poem, alluded to, must have +been The Spanish Gipsy. This work may indeed much less have counted for +her than the all-engulfing Mill on the Floss, incomparably privileged +production, which shone for young persons of that contemporaneity with a +nobleness that nothing under our actual star begins in like case to +match. These are great recognitions, but how can I slight for them a +mention that has again and again all but broken through in my +pages?--that of Francis Boott and his daughter (she to become later on +Mrs. Frank Duveneck and to yield to the same dismal decree of death +before her time that rested on so many of the friends of our youth). +When I turn in thought to the happiness that our kinswoman was still to +have known in her short life, for all her disaster, Elizabeth Boott, +delightful, devoted and infinitely under the charm, at once hovers for +me; this all the more, I hasten to add, that we too on our side, and not +least Mary Temple herself, were under the charm, and that _that_ charm, +if less immediately pointed, affected all our young collective +sensibility as a wondrous composite thing. There was the charm for +us--if I must not again speak in assurance but for myself--that +"Europe," the irrepressible even as the _ewig Weibliche_ of literary +allusion was irrepressible, had more than anything else to do with; and +then there was the other that, strange to say (strange as I, once more, +found myself feeling it) owed nothing of its authority to anything so +markedly out of the picture. The spell to which I in any case most +piously sacrificed, most cultivated the sense of, was ever of this +second cast--and for the simple reason that the other, serene in its +virtue, fairly insolent in its pride, needed no rites and no care. It +must be allowed that there was nothing composite in any spell +proceeding, whether directly or indirectly, from the great Albany +connection: this form of the agreeable, through whatever appeals, could +certainly not have been more of a piece, as we say--more of a single +superfused complexion, an element or principle that we could in the +usual case ever so easily and pleasantly account for. The case of that +one in the large number of my cousins whom we have seen to be so +incomparably the most interesting was of course anything but the usual; +yet the Albany origin, the woodnote wild, sounded out even amid her +various voices and kept her true, in her way, to something we could only +have called local, or perhaps family, type. Essentially, however, she +had been a free incalculable product, a vivid exception to rules and +precedents; so far as she had at all the value of the "composite" it was +on her own lines altogether--the composition was of things that had lain +nearest to hand. It mattered enormously for such a pair as the Bootts, +intimately associated father and daughter, that what had lain nearest +_their_ hand, or at least that of conspiring nature and fortune in +preparing them for our consumption, had been the things of old Italy, of +the inconceivable Tuscany, that of the but lately expropriated Grand +Dukes in particular, and that when originally alighting among us _en +plein_ Newport they had seemed fairly to reek with a saturation, +esthetic, historic, romantic, that everything roundabout made precious. +I was to apprehend in due course, and not without dismay, that what they +really most reeked with was the delight of finding us ourselves exactly +as we were; they fell so into the wondrous class of inverted romantics, +several other odd flowers of which I was later on to have anxiously to +deal with: we and our large crude scene of barbaric plenty, as it might +have been called, beguiled them to appreciations such as made our +tribute to themselves excite at moments their impatience and strike them +as almost silly. It was _our_ conditions that were picturesque, and I +had to make the best of a time when they themselves appeared to consent +to remain so but by the beautiful gaiety of their preference. This, I +remember well, I found disconcerting, so that my main affectionate +business with them became, under amusement by the way, that of keeping +them true to type. What above all contributed was that they really +couldn't help their case, try as they would to shake off the old +infection; they were of "old world" production through steps it was too +late to retrace; and they were in the practical way and in the course of +the very next years to plead as guilty to this as the highest proper +standard for them could have prescribed. They "went back," and again and +again, with a charming, smiling, pleading inconsequence--any pretext but +the real one, the fact that the prime poison was in their veins, serving +them at need; so that, as the case turned, all my own earlier sense, on +the spot, of Florence and Rome was to mix itself with their delightfully +rueful presence there. I could then perfectly put up with that flame of +passion for Boston and Newport in them which still left so perfect their +adaptability to Italian installations that would have been impossible +save for subtle Italian reasons. + +I speak of course but of the whole original view: time brings strange +revenges and contradictions, and all the later history was to be a +chapter by itself and of the fullest. We had been all alike accessible +in the first instance to the call of those references which played +through their walk and conversation with an effect that their qualifying +ironies and amusing reactions, where such memories were concerned, +couldn't in the least abate; for nothing in fact lent them a happier +colour than just this ability to afford so carelessly to cheapen the +certain treasure of their past. They had enough of that treasure to give +it perpetually away--in our subsequently to be more determined, our +present, sense; in short we had the fondest use for their leavings even +when they themselves hadn't. Mary Temple, with her own fine quality so +far from composite, rejoiced in the perception, however unassisted by +any sort of experience, of what their background had "meant"; she would +have liked to be able to know just that for herself, as I have already +hinted, and I actually find her image most touching perhaps by its so +speaking of what she with a peculiar naturalness dreamed of and missed. +Of clear old English stock on her father's side, her sense for what was +English in life--so we used to simplify--was an intimate part of her, +little chance as it enjoyed for happy verifications. In the Bootts, +despite their still ampler and more recently attested share in that +racial strain, the foreign tradition had exceedingly damped the English, +which didn't however in the least prevent her being caught up by it as +it had stamped itself upon the admirable, the infinitely civilised and +sympathetic, the markedly _produced_ Lizzie. This delightful girl, +educated, cultivated, accomplished, toned above all, as from steeping in +a rich old medium, to a degree of the rarest among her coevals "on our +side," had the further, the supreme grace that she melted into American +opportunities of friendship--and small blame to her, given such as she +then met--with the glee of a sudden scarce believing discoverer. Tuscany +could only swoon away under comparison of its starved sociabilities and +complacent puerilities, the stress of which her previous years had so +known, with the multiplied welcomes and freedoms, the exquisite and easy +fellowships that glorified to her the home scene. Into not the least of +these quick affinities had her prompt acquaintance with Mary Temple +confidently ripened; and with no one in the aftertime, so long as that +too escaped the waiting shears, was I to find it more a blest and +sacred rite, guarded by no stiff approaches, to celebrate my cousin's +memory. That really is my apology for this evocation--which might under +straighter connections have let me in still deeper; since if I have +glanced on another page of the present miscellany at the traps too often +successfully set for my wandering feet my reader will doubtless here +recognise a perfect illustration of our danger and will accuse me of +treating an inch of canvas to an acre of embroidery. Let the poor canvas +figure time and the embroidery figure consciousness--the proportion will +perhaps then not strike us as so wrong. Consciousness accordingly still +grips me to the point of a felt pressure of interest in such a matter as +the recoverable history--history in the esthetic connection at least--of +its insistent dealings with a given case. How in the course of time for +instance was it not insistently to deal, for a purpose of application, +with the fine prime image deposited all unwittingly by the "picturesque" +(as I absolutely required to feel it) Boott situation or Boott _data_? +The direct or vital value of these last, in so many ways, was +experiential, a stored and assimilated thing; but the seed of suggestion +proved after long years to have kept itself apart in order that it +should develop under a particular breath. A not other than lonely and +bereft American, addicted to the arts and endowed for them, housed to +an effect of long expatriation in a massive old Florentine villa with a +treasured and tended little daughter by his side, _that_ was the germ +which for reasons beyond my sounding the case of Frank Boott had been +appointed to plant deep down in my vision of things. So lodged it +waited, but the special instance, as I say, had lodged it, and it lost +no vitality--on the contrary it acquired every patience--by the fact +that little by little each of its connections above ground, so to speak, +was successively cut. Then at last after years it raised its own head +into the air and found its full use for the imagination. An Italianate +bereft American with a little moulded daughter in the setting of a +massive old Tuscan residence was at the end of years exactly what was +required by a situation of my own--conceived in the light of the Novel; +and I _had_ it there, in the authenticated way, with its essential fund +of truth, at once all the more because my admirable old friend had given +it to me and none the less because he had no single note of character or +temper, not a grain of the non-essential, in common with my Gilbert +Osmond. This combination of facts has its shy interest, I think, in the +general imaginative or reproductive connection--testifying as it so +happens to do on that whole question of the "putting of people into +books" as to which any ineptitude of judgment appears always in order. +I probably shouldn't have had the Gilbert Osmonds at all without the +early "form" of the Frank Bootts, but I still more certainly shouldn't +have had them with the _sense_ of my old inspirers. The form had to be +disembarrassed of that sense and to take in a thoroughly other; thanks +to which account of the matter I am left feeling that I scarce know +whether most to admire, for support of one's beautiful business of the +picture of life, the relation of "people" to art or the relation of art +to people. Adorable each time the mystery of which of these factors, as +we say, has the more prevailingly conduced to a given effect--and too +much adored, at any rate, I allow, when carrying me so very far away. I +retrace my steps with this next. + + I have made several attempts lately to write you a letter, but I + have given it up after two or three pages, because I have always + been in a blue state of mind at the time, and have each time + charitably decided before it was too late to spare you. But if I + were to wait until things change to rose-colour I might perhaps + wait till I die, or longer even, in which case your next + communication from me would be a spiritual one. I am going to + Newport in the early part of May to meet the Bootts--Henrietta has + just come back from there delighted with her visit; why, heaven + knows, I suppose, but I don't--except that she is in that blissful + state of babyhood peculiar to herself where everything seems + delightful.... I like George Eliot not through her poem so much, + not nearly so much, as through her prose. The creature interests me + personally, and I feel a desire to know something of her life; how + far her lofty moral sentiments have served her practically--for + instance in her dealings with Lewes. I see that she understands the + character of a _generous_ woman, that is of a woman who believes in + generosity and who must be that or nothing, and who feels keenly, + notwithstanding, how hard it is practically to follow this out, and + how (looking at it from the point of view of comfort as far as this + world goes) it "pays" not at all. We are having weather quite like + summer and rather depressing; I don't feel very well and am always + catching cold--that is I suppose I am, as I have a cough nearly all + the time. As for Phillips Brooks, what you say of him is, no doubt, + all true--he didn't touch the main point when I heard him, at all + events, and that satisfaction you so kindly wish me is, I am + afraid, not to be got from any man. The mystery of this world grows + and grows, and sticks out of every apparently trivial thing, + instead of lessening. I hope this feeling may not be the incipient + stage of insanity. Paul told the truth when he said that now we see + through a glass, _very_ darkly. I hope and trust that the rest may + be equally true, and that some day we shall see face to face. You + say it is easy to drown thought by well-doing, and is it not also + the soundest philosophy (so long of course as one doesn't humbug + oneself); since by simply thinking out a religion who has ever + arrived at anything that did not leave one's heart empty? Do you + ever see Willy James? Good-bye. + +Needless enough surely to declare that such pages were essentially not +love-letters: that they could scarce have been less so seems exactly +part of their noble inevitability, as well as a proof singularly +interesting and charming that confident friendship may obey its force +and insist on its say quite as much as the sentiment we are apt to take, +as to many of its occasions, for the supremely vocal. We have so often +seen this latter beat distressfully about the bush for something still +deficient, something in the line of positive esteem or constructive +respect, whether offered or enjoyed, that an esteem and a respect such +as we here apprehend, explicit enough on either side to dispense with +those superlatives in which graceless reaction has been known +insidiously to lurk, peculiarly refresh and instruct us. The fine +special quietude of the relation thus promoted in a general +consciousness of unrest--and even if it could breed questions too, since +a relation that breeds none at all is not a living one--was of the +highest value to the author of my letters, who had already sufficiently +"lived," in her generous way, to know well enough in how different a +quarter to look for the grand inconclusive. The directness, the ease, +the extent of the high consideration, the felt need of it as a support, +indeed one may almost say as an inspiration, in trouble, and the free +gift of it as a delightful act of intelligence and justice, render the +whole exhibition, to my sense, admirable in its kind. Questions luckily +_could_ haunt it, as I say and as we shall presently see, but only to +illustrate the more all the equilibrium preserved. I confess I can +imagine no tribute to a manly nature from a feminine more final even +than the confidence in "mere" consideration here embodied--the comfort +of the consideration being in the fact that the character with which the +feminine nature was dealing lent it, could it but come, such weight. We +seem to see play through the whole appeal of the younger person to the +somewhat older an invocation of the weight suspended, weight of +judgment, weight of experience and authority, and which may ever so +quietly drop. How kindly in another relation it had been in fact capable +of dropping comes back to me in the mention of my brother Wilky, as to +whom this aspect of his admiring friendship for our young relative's +correspondent, the fruit of their common military service roundabout +Charleston, again comprehensively testifies. That comradeship was a +privilege that Wilky strongly cherished, as well as what one +particularly liked to think for him of his having known--he was to have +known nothing more fortunate. In no less a degree was our elder brother +to come to prize _his_ like share in the association--this being +sufficiently indicated, for that matter, in the note I have quoted from +him. That I have prized my own share in it let my use of this benefit +derived strongly represent. But again for Minnie herself the sadder +admonition is sharp, and I find I know not what lonely pluck in her +relapses shaken off as with the jangle of silver bells, her expert +little efforts to live them down, Newport and other matters aiding and +the general preoccupied good will all vainly at her service. Pitiful in +particular her carrying her trouble experimentally back to the Newport +of the first gladness of her girlhood and of the old bright spectacle. + + I know quite well I don't owe you a letter, and that the custom for + maidens is to mete out strictly letter for letter; but if you don't + mind it I don't, and if you _do_ mind that kind of thing you had + better learn not to at once--if you propose to be a friend of mine; + or else have your feelings from time to time severely shocked. + After which preamble I will say that there is a special reason in + this case, though there might not be in another. + +She mentions having seen a common friend, in great bereavement and +trouble, who has charged her with a message to her correspondent "if you +know of anything to comfort a person when the one they love best dies, +for heaven's sake say it to her--_I_ hadn't a word to say." And she goes +on: + + I wrote to you that I was going to Newport, and I meant to go next + Tuesday, but I had another hemorrhage last night, and it is + impossible to say when I shall be able to leave here. I think I was + feeling ill when I last wrote to you, and ever since have been + coughing and feeling wretchedly, until finally the hemorrhage has + come. If that goes over well I think I shall be better. I am in bed + now, on the old plan of gruel and silence, and I may get off + without any worse attack this time. It is a perfect day, like + summer--my windows are up and the birds sing. It seems quite out of + keeping that I should be in bed. I should be all right if I could + only get rid of coughing. The warm weather will set me up again. I + wonder what you are doing to-day. Probably taking a solitary walk + and meditating--on what? Good-bye. + +But she went to Newport after a few days apparently; whence comes this. + + I believe I was in bed when I last wrote to you, but that attack + didn't prove nearly so bad a one as the previous; I rather bullied + it, and after the fourth hemorrhage it ceased; moreover my cough is + better since I came here. But I am, to tell the truth, a little + homesick--and am afraid I am becoming too much of a baby. Whether + it's from illness or from the natural bent I know not, but there is + no comfort in life away from people who care for you--not an heroic + statement, I am fully aware. I hear that Wilky is at home, and dare + say he will have the kindness to run down and see me while I am + here; at least I hope so. But I am not in the mood for writing + to-day--I am tired and can only bore you if I kept on. It is just a + year since we began to write, and aren't you by this time a little + tired of it? If you are, say so like a man--don't be afraid of me. + Now I am going to lie down before dressing for dinner. Good-bye. + +This passage more than a month later makes me ask myself of which of the +correspondents it strikes me as most characteristic. The gay clearness +of the one looks out--as it always looked out on the least chance +given--at the several apparent screens of the other; each of which is +indeed disconnectedly, independently clear, but tells too small a part +(at least for her pitch of lucidity) of what they together enclose, and +what was _quand meme_ of so fine an implication. Delightful at the same +time any page from her that is not one of the huddled milestones of her +rate of decline. + + How can I write to you when I have forgotten all about you?--if one + _can_ forget what one has never known. However, I am not quite sure + whether it isn't knowing you too much rather than too little that + seems to prevent. Do you comprehend the difficulty? Of course you + don't, so I will explain. The trouble is, I think, that to me you + have no distinct personality. I don't feel sure to whom I am + writing when I say to myself that I will write to you. I see + mentally three men, all answering to your name, each liable to read + my letters and yet differing so much from each other that if it is + proper for one of them it's quite unsuitable to the others. Do you + see? If you can once settle for me the question of which gets my + letters I shall know better what to say in them. Is it the man I + used to see (I can't say know) at Conway, who had a beard, I think, + and might have been middle-aged, and who discussed Trollope's + novels with Kitty and Elly? This was doubtless one of the best of + men, but he didn't _interest_ me, I never felt disposed to speak to + him, and used to get so sleepy in his society at about eight + o'clock that I wondered how the other girls could stay awake till + eleven. Is it _that_ person who reads my letters? Or is it the + young man I recently saw at Newport, with a priestly countenance, + calm and critical, with whom I had certainly no fault to find as a + chance companion for three or four days, but whom I should never + have dreamt of writing to or bothering with my affairs one way or + the other, happiness or no happiness, as he would doubtless at once + despise me for my nonsense and wonder at me for my gravity? Does + _he_ get my letters?--or is it finally the being who has from time + to time himself written to me, signing by the same name that the + other gentlemen appropriate? If my correspondent is this last I + know where I stand--and, please heaven, shall stand there some time + longer. Him I won't describe, but he's the only one of the three I + care anything about. My only doubt is because I always address him + at Pemberton Square, and I think him the least likely of the three + to go there much. But good-bye, whichever you are! + +It was not at any rate to be said of her that she didn't live +surrounded, even though she had to go so far afield--very far it may at +moments have appeared to her--for the freedom of talk that was her +greatest need of all. How happily and hilariously surrounded this next, +of the end of the following August, and still more its sequel of the +mid-September, abundantly bring back to me; so in the habit were the +numerous Emmets, it might almost be said, of marrying the numerous young +women of our own then kinship: they at all events formed mainly by +themselves at that time the figures and the action of her immediate +scene. The marriage of her younger sister was as yet but an +engagement--to the brother-in-law of the eldest, already united to +Richard Emmet and with Temple kinship, into the bargain, playing between +the pairs. All of which animation of prospective and past wedding-bells, +with whatever consolidation of pleasant ties, couldn't quench her +ceaseless instinct for the obscurer connections of things or keep +passionate reflections from awaiting her at every turn. This disposition +in her, and the way in which, at the least push, the gate of thought +opened for her to its widest, which was to the prospect of the soul and +the question of interests on _its_ part that wouldn't be ignored, by no +means fails to put to me that she might well have found the +mystifications of life, had she been appointed to enjoy more of them, +much in excess of its contentments. It easily comes up for us over the +relics of those we have seen beaten, this sense that it was not for +nothing they missed the ampler experience, but in no case that I have +known has it come up for me so much. In none other have I so felt the +naturalness of our asking ourselves what such spirits would have done +with their extension and what would have satisfied them; since dire as +their defeat may have been we don't see them, in the ambiguous light of +some of their possibilities, at peace with victory. This may be perhaps +an illusion of our interest in them, a mere part of its ingenuity; and +I allow that if our doubt is excessive it does them a great wrong--which +is another way in which they were not to have been righted. We soothe a +little with it at any rate our sense of the tragic. + + ...The irretrievableness of the step (her sister E.'s marriage) + comes over my mind from time to time in such an overwhelming way + that it's most depressing, and I have to be constantly on my guard + not to let Temple and Elly see it, as it would naturally not please + them. After all, since they are not appalled at what they've done, + and are quite sure of each other, as they evidently are, why should + I worry myself? I am well aware that if all other women felt the + seriousness of the matter to the extent I do, hardly any would + _ever_ marry, and the human race would stop short. So I ought + perhaps to be glad so many people can find and take that "little + ease" that Clough talks about, without consciously giving up the + "highest thing." And may not this majority of people be the truly + wise and my own notions of the subject simply fanatical and + impracticable? I clearly see in how small a minority I am, and that + the other side has, with Bishop Blougram, the best of it from one + point of view; but I can't help that, can I? We must be true to + _ourselves_, mustn't we? though all the rest of humanity be of a + contrary opinion, or else throw discredit upon the wisdom of God, + who made us as we are and not like the next person. Do you remember + my old hobby of the "remote possibility of the best thing" being + better than a clear certainty of the second best? Well, I believe + it more than ever, every day I live. Indeed I don't believe + anything else--but is not that everything? And isn't it exactly + what Christianity means? Wasn't Christ the only man who ever lived + and died _entirely_ for his faith, without a shadow of selfishness? + And isn't that reason enough why we should all turn to Him after + having tried everything else and found it wanting?--turn to Him as + the only pure and _unmixed_ manifestation of God in humanity? And + if I believe this, which I think I do, how utterly inconsistent and + detestable is the life I lead, which, so far from being a loving + and cheerful surrender of itself once for all to God's service, is + at best but a base compromise--a few moments or acts or thoughts + consciously and with difficulty divested of actual selfishness. + Must this always be so? Is it owing to the indissoluble mixture of + the divine and the diabolical in us all, or is it because I myself + am hopelessly frivolous and trifling? Or is it finally that I + really don't _believe_, that I have still a doubt in my mind + whether religion _is_ the one exclusive thing to live for, as + Christ taught us, or whether it will prove to be only _one_ of the + influences, though a great one, which educate the human race and + help it along in that culture which Matthew Arnold thinks the most + desirable thing in the world? In fine is it the meaning and end of + our lives, or only a moral principle bearing a certain part in our + development----? + + Since I wrote this I have been having my tea and sitting on the + piazza looking at the stars and thinking it most unfaithful and + disloyal of me even to speak as I did just now, admitting the + possibility of that faith not being everything which yet at moments + is so divinely true as to light up the whole of life suddenly and + make everything clear. I know the trouble is with _me_ when doubt + and despondency come, but on the other hand I can't altogether + believe it wrong of me to have written as I have, for then what + becomes of my principle of saying what one really thinks and + leaving it to God to take care of his own glory? The truth will + vindicate itself in spite of my voice to the contrary. If you think + I am letting myself go this way without sufficient excuse I won't + do it again; but I can't help it this time, I have nobody else to + speak to about serious things. If by chance I say anything or ask a + question that lies at all near my heart my sisters all tell me I am + "queer" and that they "wouldn't be me for anything"--which is, no + doubt, sensible on their part, but which puts an end to anything + but conversation of the most superficial kind on mine. You know one + gets lonely after a while on such a plan of living, so in sheer + desperation I break out where I perhaps more safely can. + +Such is the magic of old letters on its subtlest occasions that I +reconstitute in every detail, to a vivid probability--even if I may not +again proportionately project the bristling image--our scene of next +mention; drawing for this upon my uneffaced impression of a like one, my +cousin Katharine Temple's bright nuptials, in the same general setting, +very much before, and in addition seeming to see the very muse of +history take a fresh scroll in order to prepare to cover it, in her very +handsomest hand, well before my eyes. Covered is it now for me with that +abounding and interesting life of the generations then to come at the +pair of preliminary flourishes ushering in the record of which I thus +feel myself still assist. + + But a line to-day to tell you that Elly was safely married on + Wednesday. She looked simply beautiful in her wedding garment, and + behaved herself throughout with a composure that was as delightful + as it was surprising. I send you a photograph of myself that I had + taken a few weeks ago. It looks perhaps a trifle melancholy, but I + can't help that--I did the best I could. But I won't write more--it + wouldn't be enlivening. Everything looks grey and blue in the world + nowadays. It will all be bright again in time, I have no doubt; + there is no special reason for it; I think I am simply tired with + knocking about. Yet my week in Newport might have been pleasant + enough if the dentist hadn't taken that occasion to break my bones + for me in a barbarous manner. You are very kind and friendly to + me--you don't know how much happiness your letters give me. You + will be surprised, I dare say, but I shall not, at the last day, + when the accounts are all settled, to find how much this counts in + your favour. Good-bye. + +I find my story so attaching that I prize every step of its course, each +note of which hangs together with all the others. The writer is +expressed to my vision in every word, and the resulting image so worth +preserving. Much of one's service to it is thus a gathering-in of the +ever so faded ashes of the happiness that did come to her after all in +snatches. Everything could well, on occasion, look "grey and blue," as +she says; yet there were stretches, even if of the briefest, when other +things still were present than the active symptoms of her state. The +photograph that she speaks of above is before me as I write and +blessedly helpful to memory--so that I am moved to reproduce it only +till I feel again how the fondness of memory must strike the light for +apprehension. The plan of the journey to California for the advantage of +the climate there was, with other plans taken up and helplessly dropped, +but beguiling for the day, to accompany her almost to the end. + + The Temple-Emmet caravan have advanced as far as Newport and now + propose to retreat again to Pelham without stopping at Boston or + anywhere else. My brother-in-law has business in New York and can't + be away any longer. I haven't been well of late, or I should have + run up to Boston for a day or two to take a sad farewell of all I + love in that city and thereabouts before I cross the Rocky + Mountains. This little trip has been made out for me by my friends; + I have determined to go, and shall probably start with Elly and + Temple in about ten days, possibly not for a fortnight, to spend + the winter in San Francisco. I can't be enthusiastic about it, but + suppose I might as well take all the means I can to get better: a + winter in a warm climate _may_ be good for me. In short I am going, + and now what I want _you_ to do about it is simply to come and see + us before that. Kitty is going to send you a line to add her + voice--perhaps that may bring you. You may never see me again, you + know, and if I were to die so far away you'd be sorry you hadn't + taken leave of me, wouldn't you? + +The idea of California held, and with other pleasant matters really +occupied the scene; out of which moreover insist on shining to me +accessory connections, or connections that then were to be: intensely +distinct for example the figure of Miss Crawford, afterwards Madame von +Rabe, sister of my eminent friend F. Marion of the name and, in her +essence, I think, but by a few shades less entire a figure than +he--which is saying much. The most endowed and accomplished of men Frank +Crawford, so that I have scarcely known another who had more aboundingly +lived and wrought, about whom moreover there was singularly more to be +said, it struck me, than at all found voice at the time he might have +been commemorated. Therefore if the young lady alluded to in my cousin's +anecdote was at all of the same personal style and proportion--well, I +should draw the moral if it didn't represent here too speciously the +mouth of a trap, one of those I have already done penance for; the +effect of my yielding to which would be a shaft sunk so straight down +into matters interesting and admirable and sad and strange that, with +everything that was futurity to the occasion noted in our letter and is +an infinitely mixed and a heavily closed past now, I hurry on without so +much as a glance. + + The present plan is to send me to California in about three weeks + by water, under the care of one of the Emmet boys and Temple's + valet--for nurse; and by the time I get there, early in December, + they will be settled in San Francisco for the winter. The idea of a + twenty-one days' sea-voyage is rather appalling--what do you think + of it? This day is but too heavenly here. I haven't been to + church, but walking by myself, as happy as possible. When one + sleeps well and the sun shines, what happiness to live! I wish you + were here--wouldn't I show you Pelham at high tide, on a day that + is simply intoxicating, with a fresh breeze blown through the red + and yellow leaves and sunshine "on field and hill, in heart and + brain," as Mr. Lowell says. I suppose you remember the pony I + drove, and Punch, the little Scotch terrier that tried so to + insinuate himself into your affections, on the piazza, the morning + you left. The former has been "cutting up," the latter _cut_ up, + since then. You wouldn't believe me when I told you the pony was a + highly nervous creature--but she behaved as one the other day when + I took the Roman Miss Crawford, who has been staying near here, a + ride. She shied at a dog that frightened her, and dragged the cart + into a ditch, and tried to get over a stone wall, waggon and all. I + of course had to hang on to the reins, but I suggested to Miss + Crawford that she should get out, as the cart was pretty steady + while the horse's forefeet were on top of the wall; which she did, + into a mud-puddle, and soiled her pretty striped stockings and + shoes in a horrible way. It ended by the dear little beast's + consenting to get back upon all fours, but I found it very amusing + and have liked her better ever since.... How does Mr. Holmes + persevere about smoking? I pity him if he can't sleep, and wish _I_ + had a vicious habit so that I might give it up. But I must finish + my tale of the quadruped Punch, who was called upon in the dead of + night by five dogs of the neighbourhood and torn to pieces by them. + The coachman heard him crying in the night, and in the morning we + found him--that is to say we gathered him together, his dear little + tail from one place and his head from another etc! So went out a + very sweet little spirit--I wonder where it is now. Don't tell me + he hadn't more of a soul than that Kaufmann, the fat oysterman. + +I find bribes to recognition and recovery quite mercilessly multiply, +and with the effort to brush past them more and more difficult; with the +sense for me at any rate (whatever that may be worth for wisdom or +comfort) of sitting rather queerly safe and alone, though as with a +dangle of legs over the edge of a precipice, on the hither side of great +gulfs of history. But these things, dated toward the end of that +November, speak now in a manner for themselves. + + My passage for California is taken for the 4th of December; Elly + and Temple have written to me to come at once--they are settled in + San Francisco for the winter. My brother-in-law here has been + promised that I shall be made so comfortable I shan't want to tear + myself from the ship when I arrive. The captain is a friend of + Temple's, and also of my uncle Captain Temple, and both of them are + going to arrange so for me that I fully expect the ship to be hung + with banners and flowers when I step on board.... I enjoyed my time + in Boston far more than I had expected--in fact immensely, and + wouldn't have missed it for anything; I feel now as if it had + _necessarily_ had to happen. I don't know how I should have done + the winter, and especially started off for an indefinitely long + absence in the west without the impetus that it gave me in certain + directions--the settling down and shaking up, the dissipating of + certain impressions that I had thought fixed and the strengthening + of others that I hadn't been so sure of: an epoch in short. I dare + say you have had such--in which a good deal of living was done in a + short time, to be turned over and made fruitful in days to come. I + saw Mr. Holmes once, and was very glad of that glimpse, short as it + was. I went home by way of Newport, where I stayed two days--and + where I was surprised to hear of Fred Jones's engagement to Miss + Rawle of Philadelphia. Do you know her? When I got to New York I + went to the Hones' to ask something about Fred and his affairs and + found that Miss Rawle was staying next door with Mrs. Willy Duncan; + so I went in to see her on the spur of the moment, very much as I + had come from the boat, not particularly presentable for a first + call: however, I thought if she had a soul she wouldn't mind + it--and such I found the case.... Lizzie Boott was as sweet and + good to me as ever; I think she is at once the most unselfish and + most unegotistical girl I know--they don't always go together. + +What follows here has, in its order, I think, that it still so testifies +to life--if one doesn't see in it indeed rather perhaps the instinct on +the writer's part, though a scarce conscious one, to wind up the affairs +of her spirit, as it were, and be able to turn over with a sigh of +supreme relief for an end intimately felt as at hand. The moral +fermentation breaking through the bustle of outward questions even at a +time when she might have thrown herself, as one feels, on the great soft +breast of equalising Nature, or taken her chance of not being too wrong, +is a great stroke of truth. No one really could be less "morbid"; yet +she would take no chance--it wasn't in her--of not being right with the +right persons; among whom she so ranked her correspondent. + + My address at San Francisco will be simply Care of C. Temple Emmet, + Esq.; and I am surely off this time unless heaven interposes in a + miraculous way between now and Saturday. I've no great courage + about it, but after all it's much the same to me where I am; life + is always full of interest and mystery and happiness to me, and as + for the voyage, the idea of three weeks of comparative solitude + between sea and sky isn't unattractive.... I know that by my + question [as to why he had written, apparently, that she was, of + her nature, "far off" from him] I am putting an end to that + delightful immunity I have enjoyed so much with you from sickening + introspection, analysis of myself and yourself, that exhausting and + nauseating subjectivity, with which most of my other friends see + fit to deluge me, thereby taking much that is refreshing out of + life. Don't be afraid of "hurting my feelings" by anything you can + say. Our friendship has always been to my mind a one-sided thing, + and if you should tell me you find me in any way unsympathetic or + unsatisfactory it won't disappoint me, and I won't even allow + myself to think I'm sorry. I feel so clearly that God knows best, + and that we ought neither of us surely to wish to distort his + creatures from the uses he made them for, just to serve our own + purposes--that is to get a little more sympathy and comfort. We + must each of us, after all, live out our own lives apart from + everyone else; and yet, this being once understood as a fundamental + truth, there is nobody's sympathy and approval that would encourage + me so much as yours. I mean that if one's heart and motives could + be known by another as God knows them, without disguise or + extenuation, and if it should _then_ prove that on the _whole_ you + didn't think well of me, it would, more than anything else could, + shake my confidence in my own instincts, which must after all + forever be my guide. And yet, as I said before, I am quite prepared + for the worst, and shall listen to it, if necessary, quite humbly. + I am very much inclined to trust your opinion before my own. + + An hour later. _Sold_ again, by all that's wonderful--I had almost + said by all that's damnable, though it isn't exactly that. My + brother Dick has just walked in with a telegram from Temple: "I + shall be back in December--don't send M." A tremendous revulsion of + feeling and a general sigh of relief have taken place on this + announcement, and it's all right, I'm sure, though when I wrote you + an hour ago I thought the same of the other prospect. + +One catches one's breath a little, frankly, at what was to follow the +above within a few days--implying as it does that she had drawn upon +herself some fairly direct statement of her correspondent's reserves of +view as to her human or "intellectual" composition. To have _had_ such +reserves at such an hour, and to have responded to the invitation to +express them--for invitation there had been--is something that our +actual larger light quite helps us to flatter ourselves _we_ shouldn't +have been capable of. But what was of the essence between these +admirable persons was exactly the tone of truth; the larger light was +all to wait for, and the real bearings of the hour were as unapparent as +the interlocutors themselves were at home in clearness, so far as they +might bring that ideal about. And whatever turn their conversation took +is to the honour always of the generous girl's passion for truth. As +this long letter admirably illustrates that, I withdraw from it almost +nothing. The record of the rare commerce would be incomplete without it; +all the more perhaps for the wonder and pain of our seeing the noble and +pathetic young creature have, of all things, in her predicament, to +plead for extenuations, to excuse and justify herself. + + I understood your letter perfectly well--it was better than I + feared it might be, but bad enough. Better because I knew already + all it told me, and had been afraid there might be some new and + horrible development in store for me which I hadn't myself felt; + but bad enough because I find it in itself, new or old, such a + disgusting fact that I am intellectually so unsympathetic. It is a + fault I feel profoundly conscious of, but one that, strange to say, + I have only of late been conscious of _as_ a fault. I dare say I + have always known, in a general way, that I am very unobservant + about things and take very little interest in subjects upon which + my mind doesn't naturally dwell; but it had never occurred to me + before that it is a fault that ought to be corrected. Whether + because I have never been given to studying myself much, but have + just let myself go the way my mind was most inclined to, more + interested in the subject itself than in the fact that it + interested me; or whether because one is averse to set oneself down + as indolent and egotistic I don't know; at all events I have of + late seen the thing in all its unattractiveness, and I wish I could + get over it. Do you think that, now I am fully roused to the fact, + my case is hopeless? Or that if I should try hard for the next + twenty-five years I might succeed in modifying it? I am speaking + now of a want of interest in _all_ the rest of the world; of not + having the desire to investigate subjects, naturally uninteresting + to me, just because they are interesting to some other human being + whom I don't particularly owe anything to except that he _is_ a + human being, and so his thoughts and feelings ought to be respected + by me and sympathised with. Not to do this is, I know, + unphilosophic and selfish, conceited and altogether inhuman. To be + unselfish, to live for other people, to mould our lives as much as + possible on the model of Christ's all-embracing humanity, seems + most clearly to my mind the one thing worth living for; and yet it + is still the hardest thing for me to do, and I think I do it less + than anybody else who feels the necessity of it strongly at all. + + I am glad you still go to an occasional ball--I should rather like + to meet you at one myself; it's a phase of life we have seen so + little of together. I have been feeling so well lately that I don't + know what to make of it. I don't remember ever in my life being in + such good spirits. Not that they are not in general pretty natural + to me when there is the slightest excuse for them, but now + everything seems bright and happy, my life so full of interest, my + time so thoroughly filled and such a delicious calm to have settled + down on my usually restless spirit. Such an enjoyment of the + _present_, such a grateful contentment, is in each new day as I see + it dawn in the east, that I can only be thankful and say to myself: + "Make a note of this--you are happy; don't forget it, nor to be + thankful for this beautiful gift of life." This is Sunday morning, + and I wonder whether you are listening to Phillips Brooks. I + understand how you feel about his preaching--that it is all feeling + and no reason; I found it so myself last winter in Philadelphia: he + was good for those within the pale, but not good to convince + outsiders that they should come in. I am glad, however, that he + preaches in this way--I think his power lies in it; for it seems to + me, after all, that what comfort we get from religion, and what + light we have upon it, come to us through feeling, that is through + trusting our instinct as the voice of God, the Holy Ghost, though + it may at the same time appear to us directly against what our + intellect teaches us. I don't mean by this that we should deny the + conclusions arrived at by our intellect--which on the contrary I + believe we should trust and stand by to the bitter end, whenever + this may be. But let us fearlessly trust our _whole_ nature, + showing our faith in God by being true to ourselves all through, + and not dishonouring Him by ignoring what our heart says because it + is not carried out by our intellect, or by wilfully blunting our + intellectual perception because it happens to run against some + cherished wish of our heart. + + "But," you will say, "how can a man live torn to pieces this way by + these contrary currents?" Well, I know it is hard to keep our faith + _sure_ of a standpoint where these apparent inconsistencies are all + reconciled and the jangle and discord sound the sweetest harmony; + but I do believe there _is_ one, in God, and that we must only try + to have that faith and never mind how great the inconsistency may + seem, nor how perplexing the maze it leads us through. Let us never + give up one element of the problem for the sake of coming to a + comfortable solution of it in this world. I don't blame those eager + minds that are always worrying, studying, investigating, to _find_ + the solution here below; it is a noble work, and let them follow it + out (and without a bit of compromise) to whom God has given the + work. But whether we find it or not I would have them and all of us + feel that it is to _be_ found, if God wills--and through no other + means surely than by our being _true_. Blessed are they who have + not seen and who have yet believed. But I am going out now for a + walk! We have had the most delightful weather this whole week, and + capital sleighing, and I have spent most of my time driving myself + about with that same dear little pony. I went to town yesterday to + a matinee of William Tell; it was delightful and I slept all night + after it too. I am reading German a little every day, and it's + beginning to go pretty well. Good-bye. Don't tire yourself out + between work and dissipation. + +I find myself quite sit up to her, as we have it to-day, while she sits +there without inconvenience, after all that has happened, under the dead +weight of William Tell; the relief of seeing her sublimely capable of +which, with the reprieve from her formidable flight to the Pacific +doubtless not a little contributing, helps to draw down again the +vision, or more exactly the sound, of the old New York and Boston Opera +as our young generation knew and artlessly admired it; admired it, by my +quite broken memories of the early time, in Brignoli the sweet and +vague, in Susini the deep and rich, in Miss Kellogg the native and +charming, in Adelaide Phillipps the universal, to say nothing of other +acclaimed warblers (they appear to me to have warbled then so much more +than since) whom I am afraid of not placing in the right perspective. +They warbled Faust a dozen times, it comes back to me, for once of +anything else; Miss Kellogg and Brignoli heaped up the measure of that +success, and I well remember the great yearning with which I heard my +cousin describe her first enchanted sense of it. The next in date of the +letters before me, of the last day but one of December '69, is mainly an +interesting expression of the part that music plays in her mental +economy--though but tentatively offered to her correspondent, who, she +fears, may not be musical enough to understand her, understand how much +"spiritual truth has been 'borne in' upon me by means of harmony: the +relation of the part to the whole, the absolute value of the individual, +the absolute necessity of uncompromising and unfaltering truth, the +different ways in which we like our likes and our unlikes," things all +that have been so made clearer to her. Of a singular grace in movement +and attitude, a grace of free mobility and activity, as original and +"unconventional" as it was carelessly natural, she never looked more +possessed of her best resources than at the piano in which she +delighted, at which she had ardently worked, and where, slim and +straight, her shoulders and head constantly, sympathetically swaying, +she discoursed with an admirable touch and a long surrender that was +like a profession of the safest relation she could know. Comparatively +safe though it might have been, however, in the better time, she was +allowed now, I gather, but little playing, and she is deep again toward +the end of January '70 in a quite other exposure, the old familiar +exposure to the "demon," as she calls it, "of the Why, Whence, Whither?" +Long as the letter is I feel it a case again for presentation whole; the +last thoughts of her life, as they appear, breathe in it with such +elevation. They seem to give us her last words and impulses, and, with +what follows of the middle of February, constitute the moving climax of +her rich short story. + + There have been times (and they will come again no doubt) when I + could write to you about ordinary things in a way at least not + depressing; but for a good while now I have felt so tired out, + bodily and mentally, that I couldn't conscientiously ask you to + share my mood. The life I live here in the country, and so very + much alone, is capable of being the happiest or the unhappiest of + existences, as it all depends so on oneself and is so very little + interfered with by outside influences. Perhaps I am more than + usually subject to extremes of happiness and of depression, yet I + suppose everyone must have moments, even in the most varied and + distracting life, when the old questioning spirit, the demon of the + Why, Whence, Whither? stalks in like the skeleton at the feast and + takes a seat beside him. I say everyone, but I must except those + rare and happy souls who really believe in Christianity, who no + longer strive after even goodness as it comes from one's own + effort, but take refuge in the mysterious sacrifice of Christ, his + merit sufficing, and in short throw themselves in the orthodox way + on the consoling truth of the Atonement--to me hitherto neither + comprehensible nor desirable. These people, having completely + surrendered self, having lost their lives, as it were in Christ, + must truly have found them, must know the rest that comes from + literally casting their care of doubt and strife and thought upon + the Lord. + + I say hitherto the doctrine of the vicarious suffering of Christ + has been to me not only incomprehensible but also unconsoling; I + didn't want it and didn't understand even intellectually the + feeling of people who do. I don't mean to say that the life and + death of Christ and the example they set for us have not been to me + always the brightest spot in history--for they have; but they have + stood rather as an example that we must try to follow, that we must + by constant and ceaseless effort bring our lives nearer to--but + always, to some extent at least, through ourselves, that is through + ourselves with God's help, got by asking Him for it and by His + giving it to us straight and with no mediation. When I have seen as + time went by my own shortcomings all the more instead of the less + frequent, I have thought: "Well, you don't try hard enough; you are + not really in earnest in thinking that you believe in the Christian + life as the only true one." The more I tried, nevertheless, the + less it seemed like the model life; the best things I did continued + to be the more spontaneous ones; the greatest efforts had the least + success; until finally I couldn't but see that if this was + Christianity it was not the "rest" that Christ had promised his + disciples--it was nothing more than a pagan life with a high ideal, + only an ideal so high that nothing but failure and unhappiness came + from trying to follow it. And one night when I was awake through + all the hours it occurred to me: What if this were the need that + Christianity came to fill up in our hearts? What if, after all, + that old meaningless form of words that had been sounded in my + unheeding ears all my days were suddenly to become invested with + spirit and truth? What if this were the good tidings that have made + so many hearts secure and happy in the most trying situations? For + if morality and virtue were the test of a Christian, certainly + Christ would never have likened the kingdom of heaven to a little + child, in whose heart is no struggle, no conscious battle between + right and wrong, but only unthinking love and trust. + + However it may turn out, whether it shall seem true or untrue to me + finally, I am at least glad to be able to put myself intellectually + into the place of the long line of Christians who have felt the + need and the comfort of this belief. It throws a light upon Uncle + Henry's talk, which has seemed to me hitherto neither reasonable + nor consoling. When I was with him it so far disgusted me that I + fear I showed him plainly that I found it not only highly + unpractical, but ignoble and shirking. I knew all the while that he + disliked what he called my pride and conceit, but felt all the same + that his views didn't touch my case a bit, didn't give me the least + comfort or practical help, and seemed to me wanting in earnestness + and strength. _Now_ I say to myself: What if the good gentleman had + all along really got hold of the higher truth, the purer + spirituality? Verily there are two sides to everything in this + world, and one becomes more charitable the older one grows. + However, if I write at this length it is because I am feeling + to-day too seedy for anything else. I had a hemorrhage a week ago, + which rather took the life out of me; but as it was the only one I + feel I should by this time be coming round again--and probably + might if I hadn't got into a sleepless state which completely + knocks me up. The old consolatory remark, "Patience, neighbour, and + shuffle the cards," ought to impart a little hope to me, I suppose; + but it's a long time since I've had any trumps in my hand, and you + know that with the best luck the game always tired me. Willy James + sometimes tells me to behave like a man and a gentleman if I wish + to outwit fate. What a _real_ person he is! He is to me in nearly + all respects a head and shoulders above other people. How is + Wendell Holmes? Elly is having the gayest winter in Washington and + wants me to go to them there, which I had meant to do before the + return of my last winter's illness. But it's not for me now. + + Later.--I have kept my letter a day or two, thinking I might feel + in tune for writing you a better one and not sending this at all. + But alas I shall have to wait some time before I am like my old + self again, so I may as well let this go. You see I'm not in a + condition, mentally or physically, to take bright and healthy views + of life. But if you really care you may as well see this mood as + another, for heaven only knows when I shall get out of it. Can you + understand the utter weariness of thinking about one thing all the + time, so that when you wake up in the morning consciousness comes + back with a sigh of "Oh yes, here it is again; another day of + doubting and worrying, hoping and fearing has begun." If I don't + get any sleep at all, which is too frequently the case, the strain + is a "leetle" bit too hard, and I am sometimes tempted to take a + drop of "pison" to put me to sleep in earnest. That momentary + vision of redemption from thinking and striving, of a happy rest + this side of eternity, has vanished away again. I can't help it; + peaceful, desirable as it may be, the truth is that practically I + don't believe it. It was such a sudden thing, such an entire change + from anything that had ever come to me before, that it seemed + almost like an inspiration, and I waited, almost expecting it to + continue, to be permanent. But it doesn't stay, and so back swings + the universe to the old place--paganism, naturalism, or whatever + you call the belief whose watchword is "God and our own soul." And + who shall say there is not comfort in it? One at least feels that + here one breathes one's native air, welcoming back the old _human_ + feeling, with its beautiful pride and its striving, its despair, + its mystery and its faith. Write to me and tell me whether, as one + goes on, one must still be tossed about more and more by these + conflicting feelings, or whether they finally settle themselves + quietly one way or the other and take only their proper share at + least of one's life. This day is like summer, but I should enjoy it + more if last night hadn't been quite the most unpleasant I ever + spent. I got so thoroughly tired about two in the morning that I + made up my mind in despair to give the morphine another trial, and + as one dose had no effect took two; the consequence of which is + that I feel as ill to-day as one could desire. I can tell you, sir, + you had better prize the gift of sleep as it deserves while you + have it. If I don't never write to you no more you'll know it's + because I really wish to treat you kindly. But one of these days + you'll get another kind of letter, brim-full perhaps with health + and happiness and thoroughly ashamed of my present self. I had a + long letter yesterday from Harry James at Florence--enjoying Italy + but homesick. Did you see those verses in the North American + translated from the Persian? Good-bye. + +The last of all is full both of realities and illusions, the latter +insistently living through all the distress of the former. And I should +like to say, or to believe, that they remained with her to the end, +which was near. + + Don't be alarmed at my pencil--I am not in bed but only bundled-up + on the piazza by order of the doctor.... I started for New York + feeling a good deal knocked up, but hoping to get better from the + change; I was to stay there over Sunday and see Dr. Metcalfe, who + has a high reputation and was a friend of my father's. I left a + request at his office that he would come to me on Sunday P.M.; but + in the meantime my cousin Mrs. Minturn Post, with whom I was + staying, urged upon me her physician, Dr. Taylor, who came on + Saturday night, just as I was going to bed, and, after sounding my + lungs, told me very dreadful things about them. As his verdict was + worse than Metcalfe's proved I will tell you what he said first. He + began very solemnly: "My dear young lady, your right lung is + diseased; all your hemorrhages have come from there. It must have + been bad for at least a year before they began. You must go to + Europe as soon as possible." This was not cheerful, as I had been + idiot enough to believe some time ago such a different explanation. + But of course I wanted to learn what he absolutely thought, and + told him I wasn't a bit afraid. If there weren't tubercles was I + curable and if there _were_• was I hopeless? I asked him for the + very worst view he had conscientiously to take, but didn't mean + definitely to ask how long I should live, and so was rather + unprepared for his reply of "Two or three years." I didn't however + wish to make him regret his frankness, so I said, "Well, Doctor, + even if my right lung were all gone I should make a stand with my + left," and then, by way of showing how valiant the stand would be, + fainted away. This, I should say, was owing a good deal to my + previous used-up condition from want of sleep. It made him at any + rate hasten to assure me that there was every possibility of my + case being not after all so bad--with which he took his departure; + to my great relief as I didn't think him at all nice. His grammar + was bad, and he made himself generally objectionable. + + The next night dear Dr. Metcalfe came, whom I love for the gentlest + and kindest soul I have ever seen. To start with he's a gentleman, + as well as an excellent physician, and to end with he and my father + were fond of each other at West Point, and he takes a sort of + paternal interest in me. He told me that my right lung is decidedly + weaker than my left, which is quite sound, and that the hemorrhage + has been a good thing for it and kept it from actual disease; and + also that if I can keep up my general health I may get all right + again. He has known a ten times worse case get entirely well. He + urged me not to go to Washington, but decidedly to go to Europe; so + this last is what I am to do with my cousin Mrs. Post if I am not + dead before June. In a fortnight I'm to go back to New York to be + for some time under Metcalfe's care. I feel tired out and hardly + able to stir, but my courage is good, and I don't propose to lose + it if I can help, for I know it all depends on myself whether I get + through or not. That is if I begin to be indifferent to what + happens I shall go down the hill fast. I have fortunately, through + my mother's father, enough Irish blood in me rather to enjoy a good + fight. I feel the greatest longing for summer or spring; I should + like it to be always spring for the rest of my life and to have all + the people I care for always with me! But who _wouldn't_ like it + so? Good-bye. + +To the gallantry and beauty of which there is little surely to add. But +there came a moment, almost immediately after, when all illusion failed; +which it is not good to think of or linger on, and yet not pitiful not +to note. One may have wondered rather doubtingly--and I have expressed +that--what life would have had for her and how her exquisite faculty of +challenge could have "worked in" with what she was likely otherwise to +have encountered or been confined to. None the less did she in fact +cling to consciousness; death, at the last, was dreadful to her; she +would have given anything to live--and the image of this, which was long +to remain with me, appeared so of the essence of tragedy that I was in +the far-off aftertime to seek to lay the ghost by wrapping it, a +particular occasion aiding, in the beauty and dignity of art. The figure +that was to hover as the ghost has at any rate been of an extreme +pertinence, I feel, to my doubtless too loose and confused general +picture, vitiated perhaps by the effort to comprehend more than it +contains. Much as this cherished companion's presence among us had +represented for William and myself--and it is on _his_ behalf I +especially speak--her death made a mark that must stand here for a too +waiting conclusion. We felt it together as the end of our youth. + + +THE END + + * * * * * + +The following typographical errors have been corrected by the etext +transcriber: + +which I left in one of the of the library's mantelpiece=>which I left in +one of the library's mantelpiece + +qui s'est allongee malgre moi. Ton frere, James William.=>qui s'est +allongee malgre moi. Ton frere, James William. + +At about 5 the fearful reveille calls us>=At about 5 the fearful +reveille calls us + +quand meme>=quand meme + +my own that it should beeome so=>my own that it should become so + +I dont care much what it may be=>I don't care much what it may be + + * * * * * + + + +FOOTNOTES: + +[1] _A Small Boy and Others._ New York, 1913. + +[2] _A Small Boy and Others_, 1913. + +[3] A Small Boy and Others, 1913. + +[4] Expressive drawing alas irreproducible. + +[5] A drawing of figures in evening lamplight. + +[6] Literary Remains of Henry James, Boston, 1885. The portrait +accompanying the volume gave us, alas, but the scantest satisfaction. + +[7] _Past and Present_, 1843. + +[8] "But, Sir, we have yet one more scene to visit together, connected +with all we have previously witnessed: a home scene, Sir Benjamin; and +we must now ascend a mountain of pity high enough to command the dewy +extense of three kingdoms. From thence we have to look down from every +point of our warm hearts with a sight as multifold as the cherubic eyes. +We are to see with equal penetration through the diverse thickness of +castles, mansions, and cottages, through London and through hamlet, at +young wives and at aged mothers, little children, brothers and +sisters--all groups and ties that are; and at affianced maidens, ties +that were to be. There are rents and tears to-day in the general life: +the bulletin of the dead has come, and the groups of sorrow are +constituted. Splendid Paris bends as a Niobe or as a Rachel while the +corse of her much-enduring Hero is borne to the marble Invalides; other +corses go earthward with a shorter procession, helped away by the spades +of ruder but more instant sculptors; the rucked sod of the Alma is their +urn and monument in one; yet every warrior among them is also buried +to-day with swelling greatness of obsequies, if we could see them, in +the everlasting ruby vaults of some human heart. You are touched, Sir +Benjamin, and are justly religious on this summit. Struck down for a +moment from worldliness, we both discourse without an afterthought on +the immortal state; we hope that the brave are already welcomed in the +land of peace; that our laurels they could not stop to take, and our +earned promotion they seem to have missed are clad upon them now by the +God of battles in front of the shining armies of the just. We hope also +that if their voices could now speak to the mourners, the oil of their +sure gladness would heal our faithless sorrow. It is a true strain no +doubt, and yet but of momentary power." War, Cholera, and the Ministry +of Health. An Appeal to Sir Benjamin Hall and the British People. +London, 1854. + +[9] An eminent Unitarian pastor. + +[10] My youngest brother's ingenuity was to know as little rest during +much of his life as his strong faculty of agitation--to the employment +of which it was indeed not least remarkably applied. Many illustrations +of it would be to give, had I more margin; and not one of them anything +less than striking, thanks to the vivacity of his intelligence, the +variety of his gifts and the native ability in which he was himself so +much less interested than was the case with everyone he met, however +casually, that he became, many years before his death in 1910, our one +gentleman of leisure: so far as this condition might consort with the +easiest aptitude for admirable talk, charged with natural life, +perception, humour and colour, that I have perhaps ever known. There +were times when Bob's spoken overflow struck me as the equivalent, for +fine animation, of William's epistolary. The note of the ingenious in +him spent itself as he went, but I find an echo of one of its many +incidents in the passage of verse that I am here moved to rescue from +undue obscurity. It is too "amateurish" and has too many irregular +lines, but images admirably the play of spirit in him which after +ranging through much misadventure could at last drop to an almost +effective grasp of the happiest relation. + + Although I lie so low and still + Here came I by the Master's will; + He smote at last to make me free, + As He was smitten on the tree + And nailed there. He knew of old + The human heart, and mine is cold; + And I know now that all we gain + Until we come to Him is vain. + Thy hands have never wrought a deed, + Thy heart has never known a need, + That went astray in His great plan + Since far-off days when youth began. + For in that vast and perfect plan + Where time is but an empty span + Our Master waits. He knows our want, + We know not his--till pale and gaunt + With weariness of life we come + And say to Him, What shall I be? + Oh Master, smite, but make me free + Perchance in these far worlds to know + The better thing we sought to be. + + And then upon thy couch lie down + And fold the hands which have not sown; + And as thou liest there alone + Perhaps some breath from seraph blown + As soft as dew upon the rose + Will fall upon thee at life's close. + So thou wilt say, At last, at last! + All pain is love when pain is past! + And to the Master once again: + Oh keep my heart too weak to pray; + I ask no longer questions vain + Of life and love, of loss and gain-- + These for the living are and strong; + I go to Thee, to Thee belong. + Once was I wakened by Thy light, + But years have passed, and now the night + Takes me to Thee. I am content; + So be it in Thy perfect plan + A mansion is where I am sent + To dwell among the innocent. + + + + + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's Notes of a Son and Brother, by Henry James + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER *** + +***** This file should be named 38424.txt or 38424.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/3/8/4/2/38424/ + +Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was +produced from scanned images of public domain material +from the Google Print project.) + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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