A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS

[Illustration: Henry James and his FatherFrom a daguerreotype taken in 1854]

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A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS

BY

HENRY JAMES

NEW YORKCHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS1913

COPYRIGHT, 1913, BYCHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Published March, 1913

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A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS

I

In the attempt to place together some particulars of the early life ofWilliam James and present him in his setting, his immediate native anddomestic air, so that any future gathered memorials of him might becomethe more intelligible and interesting, I found one of the consequencesof my interrogation of the past assert itself a good deal at the expenseof some of the others. For it was to memory in the first place that mymain appeal for particulars had to be made; I had been too near awitness of my brother's beginnings of life, and too close a participant, by affection, admiration and sympathy, in whatever touched and movedhim, not to feel myself in possession even of a greater quantity ofsignificant truth, a larger handful of the fine substance of history, than I could hope to express or apply. To recover anything like the fulltreasure of scattered, wasted circumstance was at the same time to liveover the spent experience itself, so deep and rich and rare, withwhatever sadder and sorer intensities, even with whatever poorer andthinner passages, after the manner of every one's experience; and theeffect of this in turn was to find discrimination among the parts of mysubject again and again difficult--so inseparably and beautifully theyseemed to hang together and the comprehensive case to decline mutilationor refuse to be treated otherwise than handsomely. This meant thataspects began to multiply and images to swarm, so far at least as theyshowed, to appreciation, as true terms and happy values; and that Imight positively and exceedingly rejoice in my relation to most of them, using it for all that, as the phrase is, it should be worth. To knock atthe door of the past was in a word to see it open to me quite wide--tosee the world within begin to "compose" with a grace of its own roundthe primary figure, see it people itself vividly and insistently. Suchthen is the circle of my commemoration and so much these free andcopious notes a labour of love and loyalty. We were, to my sense, theblest group of us, such a company of characters and such a picture ofdifferences, and withal so fused and united and interlocked, that eachof us, to that fond fancy, pleads for preservation, and that in respectto what I speak of myself as possessing I think I shall be ashamed, asof a cold impiety, to find any element altogether negligible. To which Imay add perhaps that I struggle under the drawback, innate and inbred, of seeing the whole content of memory and affection in each enacted andrecovered moment, as who should say, in the vivid image and the veryscene; the light of the only terms in which life has treated me toexperience. And I cherish the moment and evoke the image and repaint thescene; though meanwhile indeed scarce able to convey how prevailinglyand almost exclusively, during years and years, the field was animatedand the adventure conditioned for me by my brother's nearness and thatplay of genius in him of which I had never had a doubt from the first. 

The "first" then--since I retrace our steps to the start, for thepleasure, strangely mixed though it be, of feeling our small feet plantthemselves afresh and artlessly stumble forward again--the first beganlong ago, far off, and yet glimmers at me there as out of a thin goldenhaze, with all the charm, for imagination and memory, of pressingpursuit rewarded, of distinctness in the dimness, of the flush of lifein the grey, of the wonder of consciousness in everything; everythinghaving naturally been all the while but the abject little matter ofcourse. Partly doubtless as the effect of a life, now getting to be atolerably long one, spent in the older world, I see the world of ourchildhood as very young indeed, young with its own juvenility as well aswith ours; as if it wore the few and light garments and had gathered inbut the scant properties and breakable toys of the tenderest age, orwere at the most a very unformed young person, even a boisteroushobbledehoy. It exhaled at any rate a simple freshness, and I catch itspure breath, at our infantile Albany, as the very air of long summerafternoons--occasions tasting of ample leisure, still bookless, yetbeginning to be bedless, or cribless; tasting of accessible gardenpeaches in a liberal backward territory that was still almost part of acountry town; tasting of many-sized uncles, aunts, cousins, of strangelegendary domestics, inveterately but archaically Irish, and whosefamiliar remarks and "criticism of life" were handed down, as well as ofdim family ramifications and local allusions--mystificationsalways--that flowered into anecdote as into small hard plums; tastingabove all of a big much-shaded savoury house in which a softly-sighingwidowed grandmother, Catherine Barber by birth, whose attitude was aresigned consciousness of complications and accretions, dispensed anhospitality seemingly as joyless as it was certainly boundless. What she_liked_, dear gentle lady of many cares and anxieties, was the "fictionof the day, " the novels, at that time promptly pirated, of Mrs. Trollopeand Mrs. Gore, of Mrs. Marsh, Mrs. Hubback and the Misses Kavanagh andAguilar, whose very names are forgotten now, but which used to driveher away to quiet corners whence her figure comes back to me bentforward on a table with the book held out at a distance and a tallsingle candle placed, apparently not at all to her discomfort, in thatage of sparer and braver habits, straight between the page and her eyes. There is a very animated allusion to one or two of her aspects in thefragment of a "spiritual autobiography, " the reminiscences of aso-called Stephen Dewhurst printed by W. J. (1885) in The LiteraryRemains of Henry James; a reference which has the interest of being verynearly as characteristic of my father himself (which his references inalmost any connection were wont to be) as of the person or the occasionevoked. I had reached my sixteenth year when she died, and as my onlyremembered grandparent she touches the chord of attachment to aparticular vibration. She represented for us in our generation the onlyEnglish blood--that of both her own parents--flowing in our veins; Iconfess that out of that association, for reasons and reasons, I feelher image most beneficently bend. We were, as to three parts, of twoother stocks; and I recall how from far back I reflected--for I see Imust have been always reflecting--that, mixed as such a mixture, ourScotch with our Irish, might be, it had had still a grace to borrow fromthe third infusion or dimension. If I could freely have chosen moreoverit was precisely from my father's mother that, fond votary of the finestfaith in the vivifying and characterising force of mothers, I shouldhave wished to borrow it; even while conscious that Catherine Barber'sown people had drawn breath in American air for at least two generationsbefore her. Our father's father, William James, an Irishman and aProtestant born (of county Cavan) had come to America, a very young manand then sole of his family, shortly after the Revolutionary War; myfather, the second son of the third of the marriages to which thecountry of his adoption was liberally to help him, had been born inAlbany in 1811. Our maternal greatgrandfather on the father's side, HughWalsh, had reached our shores from a like Irish home, Killyleagh, countyDown, somewhat earlier, in 1764, he being then nineteen; he had settledat Newburgh-on-the-Hudson, half way to Albany, where some of hisdescendants till lately lingered. Our maternal greatgrandfather on themother's side--that is our mother's mother's father, Alexander Robertsonof Polmont near Edinburgh--had likewise crossed the sea in themid-century and prospered in New York very much as Hugh Walsh wasprospering and William James was still more markedly to prosper, furtherup the Hudson; as unanimous and fortunate beholders of the course ofwhich admirable stream I like to think of them. I find AlexanderRobertson inscribed in a wee New York directory of the close of thecentury as Merchant; and our childhood in that city was passed, as tosome of its aspects, in a sense of the afterglow, reduced andcircumscribed, it is true, but by no means wholly inanimate, of hisshining solidity. 

The sweet taste of Albany probably lurked most in its being our admiredantithesis to New York; it was holiday, whereas New York was home; atleast that presently came to be the relation, for to my very very firstfleeting vision, I apprehend, Albany itself must have been the sceneexhibited. Our parents had gone there for a year or two to be near ourgrandmother on their return from their first (that is our mother'sfirst) visit to Europe, which had quite immediately followed my birth, which appears to have lasted some year and a half, and of which I shallhave another word to say. The Albany experiment would have been thentheir first founded housekeeping, since I make them out to have betakenthemselves for the winter following their marriage to the ancient AstorHouse--not indeed at that time ancient, but the great and appointedmodern hotel of New York, the only one of such pretensions, and whichsomehow continued to project its massive image, that of a great squareblock of granite with vast dark warm interiors, across some of the laterand more sensitive stages of my infancy. Clearly--or I should perhapsrather say dimly--recourse to that hospitality was again occasionallyhad by our parents; who had originally had it to such a happy end thaton January 9th, 1842, my elder brother had come into the world there. Itremained a tradition with him that our father's friend from an earlytime, R. W. Emerson, then happening to be in New York and under thatconvenient roof, was proudly and pressingly "taken upstairs" to admireand give his blessing to the lately-born babe who was to become thesecond American William James. The blessing was to be renewed, I maymention, in the sense that among the impressions of the next early yearsI easily distinguish that of the great and urbane Emerson's occasionalpresence in Fourteenth Street, a centre of many images, where theparental tent was before long to pitch itself and rest awhile. I aminterested for the moment, however, in identifying the scene of our veryfirst perceptions--of my very own at least, which I can here best speakfor. 

One of these, and probably the promptest in order, was that of mybrother's occupying a place in the world to which I couldn't at allaspire--to any approach to which in truth I seem to myself everconscious of having signally forfeited a title. It glimmers back to methat I quite definitely and resignedly thought of him as in the mostexemplary manner already beforehand with me, already seated at his taskwhen the attempt to drag me crying and kicking to the first hour of myeducation failed on the threshold of the Dutch House in Albany after thefashion I have glanced at in a collection of other pages than these(just as I remember to have once borrowed a hint from our grandmother's"interior" in a work of imagination). That failure of my powers or thatindifference to them, my retreat shrieking from the Dutch House, was toleave him once for all already there an embodied demonstration of thepossible--already wherever it might be that there was a question of myarriving, when arriving at all, belatedly and ruefully; as if he hadgained such an advance of me in his sixteen months' experience of theworld before mine began that I never for all the time of childhood andyouth in the least caught up with him or overtook him. He was alwaysround the corner and out of sight, coming back into view but at hishours of extremest ease. We were never in the same schoolroom, in thesame game, scarce even in step together or in the same phase at the sametime; when our phases overlapped, that is, it was only for a moment--hewas clean out before I had got well in. How far he had really at anymoment dashed forward it is not for me now to attempt to say; whatcomes to me is that I at least hung inveterately and woefully back, andthat this relation alike to our interests and to each other seemedproper and preappointed. I lose myself in wonder at the loose ways, thestrange process of waste, through which nature and fortune may deal onoccasion with those whose faculty for application is all and only intheir imagination and their sensibility. There may be during thosebewildered and brooding years so little for them to "show" that I likenthe individual dunce--as he so often must appear--to some commercialtraveller who has lost the key to his packed case of samples and can butpass for a fool while other exhibitions go forward. 

I achieve withal a dim remembrance of my final submission, though it isthe faintest ghost of an impression and consists but of the bright blurof a dame's schoolroom, a mere medium for small piping shuffling soundand suffered heat, as well as for the wistfulness produced by"glimmering squares" that were fitfully screened, though not to anyrevival of cheer, by a huge swaying, yet dominant object. This dominantobject, the shepherdess of the flock, was Miss Bayou or Bayhoo--Irecover but the alien sound of her name, which memory caresses onlybecause she may have been of like race with her temple of learning, which faced my grandmother's house in North Pearl Street and reallyjustified its exotic claim by its yellow archaic gable-end: I think ofthe same as of brick baked in the land of dykes and making a series ofsmall steps from the base of the gable to the point. These images aresubject, I confess, to a soft confusion--which is somehow consecrated, none the less, and out of which, with its shade of contributory truth, some sort of scene insists on glancing. The very flush of the unevenbricks of the pavement lives in it, the very smell of the streetcobbles, the imputed grace of the arching umbrage--I see it all as fromunder trees; the form of Steuben Street, which crossed our view, assteep even to the very essence of adventure, with a summit, and stillmore with a nethermost and riskiest incline, very far away. There livesin it the aspect of the other house--the other and much smaller than mygrandmother's, conveniently near it and within sight; which waspinkish-red picked out with white, whereas my grandmother's wasgreyish-brown and very grave, and which must have stood back a littlefrom the street, as I seem even now to swing, or at least to perch, on arelaxed gate of approach that was conceived to work by an iron chainweighted with a big ball; all under a spreading tree again and with thehigh, oh so high white stone steps (mustn't they have been marble?) andfan-lighted door of the pinkish-red front behind me. I lose myself inravishment before the marble and the pink. There were other housestoo--one of them the occasion of the first "paid" visit that struggleswith my twilight of social consciousness; a call with my father, conveying me presumably for fond exhibition (since if my powers were notexhibitional my appearance and my long fair curls, of which I distinctlyremember the lachrymose sacrifice, suppositiously were), on one of ouraunts, the youngest of his three sisters, lately married and who, predestined to an early death, hovers there for me, softly spectral, inlong light "front" ringlets, the fashion of the time and the capitalsign of all our paternal aunts seemingly; with the rememberedenhancement of her living in Elk Street, the name itself vaguelyportentous, as through beasts of the forest not yet wholly exorcised, and more or less under the high brow of that Capitol which, as aloftsomewhere and beneath the thickest shades of all, loomed, familiar yetimpressive, at the end of almost any Albany vista of reference. I haveseen other capitols since, but the whole majesty of the matter must havebeen then distilled into my mind--even though the connection wasindirect and the concrete image, that of the primitive structure, longsince pretentiously and insecurely superseded--so that, later on, theimpression was to find itself, as the phrase is, discounted. Had it notmoreover been reinforced at the time, for that particular Capitolinehour, by the fact that our uncle, our aunt's husband, was a son of Mr. Martin Van Buren, and that _he_ was the President? This at least led theimagination on--or leads in any case my present imagination of that one;ministering to what I have called the soft confusion. 

The confusion clears, however, though the softness remains, when, ceasing to press too far backward, I meet the ampler light of consciousand educated little returns to the place; for the education of New York, enjoyed up to my twelfth year, failed to blight its romantic appeal. Theimages I really distinguish flush through the maturer medium, but withthe sense of them only the more wondrous. The other house, the house ofmy parents' limited early sojourn, becomes that of those of our cousins, numerous at that time, who pre-eminently figured for us; the variousbrood presided over by my father's second sister, Catherine James, whohad married at a very early age Captain Robert Temple, U. S. A. Both theseparents were to die young, and their children, six in number, the twoeldest boys, were very markedly to people our preliminary scene; thisbeing true in particular of three of them, the sharply differingbrothers and the second sister, Mary Temple, radiant and rare, extinguished in her first youth, but after having made an impression onmany persons, and on ourselves not least, which was to become in theharmonious circle, for all time, matter of sacred legend and reference, of associated piety. Those and others with them were the numerousdawnings on which in many cases the deepening and final darknesses wereso soon to follow: our father's family was to offer such a chronicle ofearly deaths, arrested careers, broken promises, orphaned children. Itsounds cold-blooded, but part of the charm of our grandmother's housefor us--or I should perhaps but speak for myself--was in its being somuch and so sociably a nurseried and playroomed orphanage. The childrenof her lost daughters and daughters-in-law overflowed there, mainly asgirls; on whom the surviving sons-in-law and sons occasionally and mosttrustingly looked in. Parentally bereft cousins were somehow morethrilling than parentally provided ones; and most thrilling when, in theodd fashion of that time, they were sent to school in New York as apreliminary to their being sent to school in Europe. They spent scrapsof holidays with us in Fourteenth Street, and I think my first childishconception of the enviable lot, formed amid these associations, was tobe so little fathered or mothered, so little sunk in the short range, that the romance of life seemed to lie in some constant improvisation, by vague overhovering authorities, of new situations and horizons. Wewere intensely domesticated, yet for the very reason perhaps that wefelt our young bonds easy; and they were so easy compared to other smallplights of which we had stray glimpses that my first assured conceptionof true richness was that we should be sent separately off among cold oreven cruel aliens in order to be there thrillingly homesick. Homesickness was a luxury I remember craving from the tenderest age--aluxury of which I was unnaturally, or at least prosaically, deprived. Our motherless cousin Augustus Barker came up from Albany to theInstitution Charlier--unless it was, as I suspect, a still earlierspecimen, with a name that fades from me, of that type of Frenchestablishment for boys which then and for years after so incongruouslyflourished in New York; and though he professed a complete satisfactionwith pleasures tasted in our innocent society I felt that he was engagedin a brave and strenuous adventure while we but hugged the comparativelysafe shore. 

II

We were day-boys, William and I, at dispensaries of learning the numberand succession of which to-day excite my wonder; we couldn't havechanged oftener, it strikes me as I look back, if our presence had beeninveterately objected to, and yet I enjoy an inward certainty that, mybrother being vividly bright and I quite blankly innocuous, thisreproach was never brought home to our house. It was an humiliation tome at first, small boys though we were, that our instructors kept beinginstructresses and thereby a grave reflection both on our attainmentsand our spirit. A bevy of these educative ladies passes before me, Istill possess their names; as for instance that of Mrs. Daly and that ofMiss Rogers (previously of the "Chelsea Female Institute, " though at themoment of Sixth Avenue this latter), whose benches indeed my brotherdidn't haunt, but who handled us literally with gloves--I still see theelegant objects as Miss Rogers beat time with a long black ferule tosome species of droning chant or chorus in which we spent most of ourhours; just as I see her very tall and straight and spare, in a lightblue dress, her firm face framed in long black glossy ringlets and thestamp of the Chelsea Female Institute all over her. Mrs. Daly, clearlythe immediate successor to the nebulous Miss Bayou, remains quitesubstantial--perhaps because the sphere of her small influence hassucceeded in not passing away, up to this present writing; so that incertain notes on New York published a few years since I was moved torefer to it with emotion as one of the small red houses on the southside of Waverley Place that really carry the imagination back to avanished social order. They carry mine to a stout red-faced lady withgrey hair and a large apron, the latter convenience somehow suggesting, as she stood about with a resolute air, that she viewed her littlepupils as so many small slices cut from the loaf of life and on whichshe was to dab the butter of arithmetic and spelling, accompanied by wayof jam with a light application of the practice of prize-giving. Irecall an occasion indeed, I must in justice mention, when the jamreally was thick--my only memory of a schoolfeast, strange to say, throughout our young annals: something uncanny in the air of theschoolroom at the unwonted evening or late afternoon hour, and tablesthat seemed to me prodigiously long and on which the edibles were chunkyand sticky. The stout red-faced lady must have been Irish, as the nameshe bore imported--or do I think so but from the indescribably Irishlook of her revisited house? It refers itself at any rate to a New Yorkage in which a little more or a little less of the colour was scarcenotable in the general flush. 

Of pure unimported strain, however, were Miss Sedgwick and Mrs. Wright(Lavinia D. ), the next figures in the procession--the procession thatwas to wind up indeed with two foreign recruits, small brown snappyMademoiselle Delavigne, who plied us with the French tongue at home andwho had been introduced to us as the niece--or could it have been thegrandniece?--of the celebrated Casimir, and a large Russian lady in anextraordinarily short cape (I like to recall the fashion of short capes)of the same stuff as her dress, and Merovingian sidebraids that seemedto require the royal crown of Frédégonde or Brunéhaut to complete theireffect. This final and aggravational representative of the compromisingsex looms to my mind's eye, I should add, but as the creature of anhour, in spite of her having been domiciled with us; whereas I think ofMademoiselle Delavigne as flitting in and out on quick, fine, more orless cloth-shod feet of exemplary neatness, the flat-soled feet of LouisPhilippe and of the female figures in those volumes of Gavarni thenactual, then contemporaneous, which were kept in a piece of furniturethat stood between the front-parlour windows in Fourteenth Street, together with a set of Béranger enriched by steel engravings to thestrange imagery of which I so wonderingly responded that all other artof illustration, ever since, has been for me comparatively weak andcold. These volumes and the tall entrancing folios of Nash'slithographed Mansions of England in the Olden Time formed a storelending itself particularly to distribution on the drawingroom carpet, with concomitant pressure to the same surface of the small student'sstomach and relieving agitation of his backward heels. I make out thatit had decidedly been given to Mlle. Delavigne to represent to my firstperception personal France; she was, besides not being at all pink orshy, oval and fluent and mistress somehow of the step--the step oflevity that involved a whisk of her short skirts; there she was, to thelife, on the page of Gavarni, attesting its reality, and there again didthat page in return (I speak not of course of the unplumbed depths ofthe appended text) attest her own felicity. I was later on to feel--thatis I was to learn--how many impressions and appearances, how large asense of things, her type and tone prefigured. The evanescence of thelarge Russian lady, whom I think of as rather rank, I can't express itotherwise, may have been owing to some question of the purity of heraccent in French; it was one of her attributes and her grounds of appealto us that she had come straight from Siberia, and it is distinct to methat the purity was challenged by a friend of the house, andwithout--pathetically enough!--provoking the only answer, the plea thatthe missing Atticism would have been wasted on young barbarians. TheSiberian note, on our inmate's part, may perhaps have been the least ofher incongruities; she was above all too big for a little job, toweredover us doubtless too heroically; and her proportions hover but to losethemselves--with the successors to her function awaiting us a littlelonger. 

Meanwhile, to revert an instant, if the depressed consciousness of ourstill more or less quailing, educationally, beneath the female eye--andthere was as well the deeper depth, there was the degrading fact, thatwith us literally consorted and contended Girls, that we sat and strove, even though we drew the line at playing with them and at knowing them, when not of the swarming cousinship, at home--if that felt awkwardnessdidn't exactly coincide with the ironic effect of "Gussy's" appearances, his emergence from rich mystery and his return to it, our state was butcomparatively the braver: he always had so much more to tell us than wecould possibly have to tell him. On reflection I see that the mostcompletely rueful period couldn't after all greatly have prolongeditself; since the female eye last bent on us would have been that ofLavinia D. Wright, to our connection with whom a small odd reminiscenceattaches a date. A little schoolmate displayed to me with pride, whilethe connection lasted, a beautiful coloured, a positively iridescent andgilded card representing the first of all the "great exhibitions" of ourage, the London Crystal Palace of 1851--his father having lately goneout to it and sent him the dazzling memento. In 1851 I was eight yearsold and my brother scarce more than nine; in addition to which it isdistinct to me in the first place that we were never faithful long, orfor more than one winter, to the same studious scene, and in the secondthat among our instructors Mrs. Lavinia had no successor of her own sexunless I count Mrs. Vredenburg, of New Brighton, where we spent thesummer of 1854, when I had reached the age of eleven and found myselfbewildered by recognition of the part that "attendance at school" was someanly to play in the hitherto unclouded long vacation. This was true atleast for myself and my next younger brother, Wilky, who, under thepresumption now dawning of his "community of pursuits" with my own, wasfrom that moment, off and on, for a few years, my extremely easyyokefellow and playfellow. On William, charged with learning--I thoughtof him inveterately from our younger time as charged with learning--nosuch trick was played; he rested or roamed, that summer, on hisaccumulations; a fact which, as I was sure I saw these more and morerichly accumulate, didn't in the least make me wonder. It comes back tome in truth that I had been prepared for anything by his having said tome toward the end of our time at Lavinia D's and with characteristicauthority--his enjoyment of it coming from my character, I mean, quiteas much as from his own--that that lady was a very able woman, as shownby the Experiments upstairs. He was upstairs of course, and I was down, and I scarce even knew what Experiments were, beyond their indeedrequiring capability. The region of their performance was William'snatural sphere, though I recall that I had a sense of peeping into it toa thrilled effect on seeing our instructress illustrate the proper wayto extinguish a candle. She firmly pressed the flame between her thumband her two forefingers, and, on my remarking that I didn't see how shecould do it, promptly replied that I of course couldn't do it myself (as_he_ could) because I should be afraid. 

That reflection on my courage awakes another echo of the same scantseason--since the test involved must have been that of our taking ourway home through Fourth Avenue from some point up town, and Mrs. Wright's situation in East Twenty-first Street was such a point. TheHudson River Railroad was then in course of construction, or was beingmade to traverse the upper reaches of the city, through that part ofwhich raged, to my young sense, a riot of explosion and a great shoutingand waving of red flags when the gunpowder introduced into the rockysoil was about to take effect. It was our theory that our passage there, in the early afternoon, was beset with danger, and our impression thatwe saw fragments of rock hurtle through the air and smite to the earthanother and yet another of the persons engaged or exposed. The point ofhonour, among several of us, was of course nobly to defy the danger, andI feel again the emotion with which I both hoped and feared that the redflags, lurid signals descried from afar, would enable or compel us torenew the feat. That I didn't for myself inveterately renew it I seem toinfer from the memory of other perambulations of the period--as to whichI am divided between their still present freshness and my sense ofperhaps making too much of these tiny particles of history. My strongerrule, however, I confess, and the one by which I must here consistentlybe guided, is that, from the moment it is a question of projecting apicture, no particle that counts for memory or is appreciable to thespirit _can_ be too tiny, and that experience, in the name of which onespeaks, is all compact of them and shining with them. There was at anyrate another way home, with other appeals, which consisted of gettingstraight along westward to Broadway, a sphere of a different order offascination and bristling, as I seem to recall, with more vivid aspects, greater curiosities and wonderments. _The_ curiosity was of course thecountry-place, as I supposed it to be, on the northeast corner ofEighteenth Street, if I am not mistaken; a big brown house in "grounds"peopled with animal life, which, little as its site may appear to knowit to-day, lingered on into considerably later years. I have but toclose my eyes in order to open them inwardly again, while I lean againstthe tall brown iron rails and peer through, to a romantic view ofbrowsing and pecking and parading creatures, not numerous, but all ofdistinguished appearance: two or three elegant little cows of refinedform and colour, two or three nibbling fawns and a larger company, aboveall, of peacocks and guineafowl, with, doubtless--though as to this I amvague--some of the commoner ornaments of the barnyard. I recognise thatthe scene as I evoke it fails of grandeur; but it none the less had forme the note of greatness--all of which but shows of course what a verytown-bred small person I was, and was to remain. 

I see myself moreover as somehow always alone in these and like New York_flâneries_ and contemplations, and feel how the sense of my being so, being at any rate master of my short steps, such as they were, throughall the beguiling streets, was probably the very savour of each of mychance feasts. Which stirs in me at the same time some wonder at theliberty of range and opportunity of adventure allowed to my tender age;though the puzzle may very well drop, after all, as I ruefully reflectthat I couldn't have been judged at home reckless or adventurous. What Ilook back to as my infant license can only have had for its ground sometimely conviction on the part of my elders that the only form of riot orrevel ever known to me would be that of the visiting mind. Wasn't Imyself for that matter even at that time all acutely and yet resignedly, even quite fatalistically, aware of what to think of this? I at any ratewatch the small boy dawdle and gape again. I smell the cold dusty paintand iron as the rails of the Eighteenth Street corner rub hiscontemplative nose, and, feeling him foredoomed, withhold from him nograin of my sympathy. He is a convenient little image or warning of allthat was to be for him, and he might well have been even happier than hewas. For there was the very pattern and measure of all he was to demand:just to _be_ somewhere--almost anywhere would do--and somehow receive animpression or an accession, feel a relation or a vibration. He was to gowithout many things, ever so many--as all persons do in whomcontemplation takes so much the place of action; but everywhere, in theyears that came soon after, and that in fact continued long, in thestreets of great towns, in New York still for some time, and then for awhile in London, in Paris, in Geneva, wherever it might be, he was toenjoy more than anything the so far from showy practice of wondering anddawdling and gaping: he was really, I think, much to profit by it. Whatit at all appreciably gave him--that is gave him in producibleform--would be difficult to state; but it seems to him, as he even nowthus indulges himself, an education like another: feeling, as he hascome to do more and more, that no education avails for the intelligencethat doesn't stir in it some subjective passion, and that on the otherhand almost anything that does so act is largely educative, howeversmall a figure the process might make in a scheme of training. Strangeindeed, furthermore, are some of the things that _have_ stirred asubjective passion--stirred it, I mean, in young persons predisposed toa more or less fine inspired application. 

III

But I positively dawdle and gape here--I catch myself in the act; sothat I take up the thread of fond reflection that guides me through thatmystification of the summer school, which I referred to a little wayback, at the time when the Summer School as known in America to-day wasso deep in the bosom of the future. The seat of acquisition I speak ofmust have been contiguous to the house we occupied--I recall it as mostintimately and objectionably near--and carried on in the interest ofthose parents from New York who, in villeggiatura under the queerconditions of those days, with the many modern mitigations of thegregarious lot still unrevealed and the many refinements on theindividual one still undeveloped, welcomed almost any influence thatmight help at all to form their children to civility. Yet I rememberthat particular influence as more noisy and drowsy and dusty thananything else--as to which it must have partaken strongly of the generalnature of New Brighton; a neighbourhood that no apt agency whatever hadup to that time concerned itself to fashion, and that was indeed toremain shabbily shapeless for years; since I recall almost as dire animpression of it received in the summer of 1875. I seem more or less tohave begun life, for that matter, with impressions of New Brighton;there comes back to me another, considerably more infantile than that of1854, so infantile indeed that I wonder at its having stuck--that of aplace called the Pavilion, which must have been an hotel sheltering usfor July and August, and the form of which to childish retrospect, unprejudiced by later experience, was that of a great Greek templeshining over blue waters in the splendour of a white colonnade and agreat yellow pediment. The elegant image remained, though imprinted in achild so small as to be easily portable by a stout nurse, I remember, and not less easily duckable; I gasp again, and was long to gasp, withthe sense of salt immersion received at her strong hands. Wonderfulaltogether in fact, I find as I write, the quantity, the intensity ofpicture recoverable from even the blankest and tenderest state of thelittle canvas. 

I connect somehow with the Pavilion period a visit paid with myfather--who decidedly must have liked to take me about, I feel so richin that general reminiscence--to a family whom we reached in what struckme as a quite lovely embowered place, on a very hot day, and among whomluxuries and eccentricities flourished together. They were numerous, themembers of this family, they were beautiful, they partook of theirmeals, or were at the moment partaking of one, out of doors, and thethen pre-eminent figure in the group was a very big Newfoundland dog onwhose back I was put to ride. That must have been my first vision of theliberal life--though I further ask myself what my age could possiblyhave been when my weight was so fantastically far from hinting at laterdevelopments. But the romance of the hour was particularly in what Ihave called the eccentric note, the fact that the children, myentertainers, riveted my gaze to stockingless and shoeless legs andfeet, conveying somehow at the same time that they were not poor anddestitute but rich and provided--just as I took their garden-feast for asign of overflowing food--and that their state as of children of naturewas a refinement of freedom and grace. They were to become great andbeautiful, the household of that glimmering vision, they were to figurehistorically, heroically, and serve great public ends; but always, to myremembering eyes and fond fancy, they were to move through life as withthe bare white feet of that original preferred fairness and wildness. This is rank embroidery, but the old surface itself insists onspreading--it waits at least with an air of its own. The rest issilence; I can--extraordinary encumbrance even for the most doating ofparents on a morning call--but have returned with my father to "ourhotel"; since I feel that I must not only to this but to a still furtherextent face the historic truth that we were for considerable periods, during our earliest time, nothing less than hotel children. Between thefar-off and the later phases at New Brighton stretched a series ofsummers that had seen us all regularly installed for a couple of monthsat an establishment passing in the view of that simpler age for a vastcaravansery--the Hamilton House, on the south Long Island shore, socalled from its nearness to the Fort of that name, which had FortLafayette, the Bastille of the Civil War, out in the channel before itand which probably cast a stronger spell upon the spirit of ourchildhood, William's and mine at least, than any scene presented to usup to our reaching our teens. 

I find that I draw from the singularly unobliterated memory of theparticulars of all that experience the power quite to glory in ourshame; of so entrancing an interest did I feel it at the time to _be_ anhotel child, and so little would I have exchanged my lot with that ofany small person more privately bred. We were private enough in allconscience, I think I must have felt, the rest of the year; and at whatage mustn't I quite have succumbed to the charm of the world seen in alarger way? For there, incomparably, was the chance to dawdle and gape;there were human appearances in endless variety and on theexhibition-stage of a piazza that my gape measured almost as by miles;it was even as if I had become positively conscious that the socialscene so peopled would pretty well always say more to me than anythingelse. What it did say I of course but scantly understood; but I none theless knew it spoke, and I listened to its voice, I seem to recall, verymuch as "young Edwin, " in Dr. Beattie's poem, listened to the roar oftempests and torrents from the nobler eminence of beetling crags and inexposure to still deeper abysses. I cling for the moment, however, tothe small story of our Vredenburg summer, as we were for long afterwardsinvidiously to brand it; the more that it so plays its part inillustration, under the light of a later and happier age, of the growth, when not rather of the arrest, of manners and customs roundabout ourbirthplace. I think we had never been so much as during these particularmonths disinherited of the general and public amenities that reinforcefor the young private precept and example--disinherited in favour ofdust and glare and mosquitoes and pigs and shanties and rumshops, of nowalks and scarce more drives, of a repeated no less than of a strongemphasis on the more sordid sides of the Irish aspect in things. Therewas a castellated residence on the hill above us--very high I remembersupposing the hill and very stately the structure; it had towers andviews and pretensions and belonged to a Colonel, whom we thought veryhandsome and very costumed, (as if befrogged and high-booted, which hecouldn't have been at all, only _ought_ to have been, would evencertainly have been at a higher pitch of social effect, ) and whose sonand heir, also very handsome and known familiarly and endearingly asChick, had a velvet coat and a pony and I think spurs, all luxuries wewere without, and was cousin to boys, the De Coppets, whom we had cometo know at our school of the previous winter and who somehow--doubtlesspartly as guests of the opulent Chick--hovered again about the field ofidleness. 

The De Coppets, particularly in the person of the first-born Louis, hadbeen a value to us, or at any rate to me--for though I was, in commonwith my elders then, unacquainted with the application of that word as Iuse it here, what was my incipient sense of persons and things, whatwere my first stirred observant and imaginative reactions, discriminations and categories, but a vague groping for it? The DeCoppets (again as more especially and most impressively interpreted bythe subtle Louis) enjoyed the pre-eminence of being European; they haddropped during the scholastic term of 1853-4 straight from the lake ofGeneva into the very bosom of Mr. Richard Pulling Jenks's select resortfor young gentlemen, then situated in Broadway below Fourth Street; andhad lately been present at an historic pageant--whether or nocelebrating the annals of the town of Coppet I know not--in whichrepresentatives of their family had figured in armour and on horsebackas the Barons (to our comprehension) de Coup or Cou. Their father wasthus of the Canton de Vaud--only their mother had been native amongourselves and sister to the Colonel of the castellations. But what wasthe most vivid mark of the brothers, and vividest on the part of thesupersubtle Louis, was his French treatment of certain of our nativelocal names, Ohio and Iowa for instance, which he rendered, as to theirseparate vowels, with a daintiness and a delicacy invidious andimperturbable, so that he might have been Chateaubriand declaiming LesNatchez at Madame Récamier's--O-ee-oh and Ee-o-wah; a proceeding in him, a violence offered to his serried circle of little staring and glaringNew Yorkers supplied with the usual allowance of fists and boot-toes, which, as it was clearly conscious, I recollect thinking unsurpassed forcool calm courage. Those _were_ the right names--which we owed wholly tothe French explorers and Jesuit Fathers; so much the worse for us if wevulgarly didn't know it. I lose myself in admiration of the consistency, the superiority, the sublimity, of the not at all game-playing, yet inhis own way so singularly sporting, Louis. He was naturally andincorruptibly French--as, so oddly, I have known other persons of bothsexes to be whose English was naturally and incorruptibly American; theappearance being thus that the possession of indigenous English aloneforms the adequate barrier and the assured racial ground. (Oh the queerreversions observed on the part of Latinized compatriots in the courseof a long life--the remarkable drops from the quite current French orItalian to the comparatively improvised native idiom, with the resultingeffect of the foreign tongue used as a domestic and the domestic, thatis the original American, used as a foreign tongue, or without inheritedconfidence!)

Louis De Coppet, though theoretically American and domiciled, was_naturally_ French, and so pressed further home to me that "sense ofEurope" to which I feel that my very earliest consciousness waked--aperversity that will doubtless appear to ask for all the justification Ican supply and some of which I shall presently attempt to give. Heopened vistas, and I count ever as precious anyone, everyone, whobetimes does that for the small straining vision; performing this officenever so much, doubtless, as when, during that summer, he invited me tocollaborate with him in the production of a romance which _il se fitfort_ to get printed, to get published, when success, or in other wordscompletion, should crown our effort. Our effort, alas, failed of thecrown, in spite of sundry solemn and mysterious meetings--so muchdevoted, I seem to remember, to the publishing question that others morefundamental dreadfully languished; leaving me convinced, however, thatmy friend would have got our fiction published if he could only have gotit written. I think of my participation in this vain dream as of thevery first gage of visiting approval offered to the exercise of agift--though quite unable to conceive my companion's ground forsuspecting a gift of which I must at that time quite have failed toexhibit a single in the least "phenomenal" symptom. It had none the lessby his overtures been handsomely _imputed_ to me; that was in a manner abeginning--a small start, yet not wholly unattended with bravery. LouisDe Coppet, I must add, brought to light later on, so far as I know, nocompositions of his own; we met him long after in Switzerland andeventually heard of his having married a young Russian lady and settledat Nice. If I drop on his memory this apology for a bay-leaf it is fromthe fact of his having given the earliest, or at least the mostpersonal, tap to that pointed prefigurement of the manners of "Europe, "which, inserted wedge-like, if not to say peg-like, into my youngallegiance, was to split the tender organ into such unequal halves. Histhe toy hammer that drove in the very point of the golden nail. 

It was as if there had been a mild magic in that breath, however scant, of another world; but when I ask myself what element of the pleasing orthe agreeable may have glimmered through the then general, the outer andenveloping conditions, I recover many more of the connections in whichforms and civilities lapsed beyond repair than of those in which theystruggled at all successfully. It is for some record of the question oftaste, of the consciousness of an æsthetic appeal, as reflected in formsand aspects, that I shall like best to testify; as the promise and thedevelopment of these things on our earlier American scene are the moreinteresting to trace for their doubtless demanding a degree of the finerattention. The plain and happy profusions and advances and successes, asone looks back, reflect themselves at every turn; the quick beats ofmaterial increase and multiplication, with plenty of people to tell ofthem and throw up their caps for them; but the edifying matters torecapture would be the adventures of the "higher criticism" so far asthere was any--and so far too as it might bear on the real quality andvirtue of things; the state of manners, the terms of intercourse, thecare for excellence, the sense of appearances, the intellectual reactiongenerally. However, any breasting of those deep waters must be but inthe form for me of an occasional dip. It meanwhile fairly overtakes andarrests me here as a contributive truth that our general medium of lifein the situation I speak of was such as to make a large defensiveverandah, which seems to have very stoutly and completely surrounded us, play more or less the part of a raft of rescue in too high a tide--toohigh a tide there beneath us, as I recover it, of the ugly and thegraceless. My particular perspective may magnify a little wildly--whenit doesn't even more weirdly diminish; but I read into the great hoodedand guarded resource in question an evidential force: as if it mustreally have played for us, so far as its narrowness and its exposurepermitted, the part of a buffer-state against the wilderness immediatelynear, that of the empty, the unlovely and the mean. Interposing a littleease, didn't it interpose almost all the ease we knew?--so that whenamiable friends, arriving from New York by the boat, came to see us, there was no rural view for them but that of our great shame, a view ofthe pigs and the shanties and the loose planks and scattered refuse andrude public ways; never even a field-path for a gentle walk or a gardennook in afternoon shade. I recall my prompt distaste, a strangeprecocity of criticism, for so much aridity--since of what lost Arcadia, at that age, had I really had the least glimpse?

Our scant margin must have affected me more nobly, I should in justiceadd, when old Mrs. L. Passed or hovered, for she sometimes causticallyjoined the circle and sometimes, during the highest temperatures, whichwere very high that summer, but flitted across it in a single flowinggarment, as we amazedly conceived; one of the signs of that grandimpertinence, I supposed, which belonged to "dowagers"--dowagers whowere recognised characters and free speakers, doing and saying what theyliked. This ancient lady was lodged in some outlying tract of themany-roomed house, which in more than one quarter stretched away intomystery; but the piazza, to which she had access, was unbroken, andwhenever she strayed from her own territory she swam afresh into ours. Idefinitely remember that, having heard and perhaps read of dowagers, who, as I was aware, had scarce been provided for in our social scheme, I said to myself at first sight of our emphatic neighbour, a personclearly used to exceptional deference, "This must be a perfectspecimen;" which was somehow very wonderful. The absolute first sight, however, had preceded the New Brighton summer, and it makes me losemyself in a queer dim vision, all the obscurities attendant on my havingbeen present, as a very small boy indeed, at an evening entertainmentwhere Mrs. L. Figured in an attire that is still vivid to me: a bluesatin gown, a long black lace shawl and a head-dress consisting inequally striking parts of a brown wig, a plume of some sort waving overit and a band or fillet, whether of some precious metal or not I forget, keeping it in place by the aid of a precious stone which adorned thecentre of her brow. Such was my first view of the _féronnière_ of ourgrandmothers, when not of our greatgrandmothers. I see its wearer atthis day bend that burdened brow upon me in a manner sufficiently awful, while her knuckly white gloves toyed with a large fan and a vinaigretteattached to her thumb by a chain; and as she was known to us afterwardsfor a friend of my Albany grandmother's it may have been as a tribute tothis tie that she allowed me momentarily to engage her attention. _Then_it predominantly must have been that I knew her for a dowager--thoughthis was a light in which I had never considered my grandmother herself;but what I have quite lost the clue to is the question of myextraordinary footing in such an assembly, the occasion of a dance of myelders, youthful elders but young married people, into which, really, mymother, as a participant, must have introduced me. 

IV

It took place in the house of our cousins Robert and Kitty Emmet theelder--for we were to have two cousin Kittys of that ilk and yet anotherconsanguineous Robert at least; the latter name being naturally, amongthem all, of a pious, indeed of a glorious, tradition, and three of myfather's nieces marrying three Emmet brothers, the first of these theRobert aforesaid. Catherine James, daughter of my uncle Augustus, histhen quite recent and, as I remember her, animated and attractive bride, whose fair hair framed her pointed smile in full and far-drooping"front" curls, I easily evoke as my first apprehended image of the freeand happy young woman of fashion, a sign of the wondrous fact thatladies might live for pleasure, pleasure always, pleasure alone. She wasdistinguished for nothing whatever so much as for an insatiable love ofthe dance; that passion in which I think of the "good, " the best, NewYork society of the time as having capered and champagned itself away. Her younger sister Gertrude, afterwards married to James--or moreinveterately Jim--Pendleton, of Virginia, followed close upon her heels, literally speaking, and though emulating her in other respects too, wasto last, through many troubles, much longer (looking extraordinarily thewhile like the younger portraits of Queen Victoria) and to have muchhospitality, showing it, and showing everything, in a singularly naturalway, for a considerable collection of young hobbledehoy kinsmen. But Iam solicited a moment longer by the queer little issues involved--as ifa social light would somehow stream from them--in my having been taken, a mere mite of observation, to Kitty Emmet's "grown-up" assembly. Was itthat my mother really felt that to the scrap that I was other scrapswould perhaps strangely adhere, to the extent thus of something todistinguish me by, nothing else probably having as yet declareditself--such a scrap for instance as the fine germ of this actualferment of memory and play of fancy, a retroactive vision almost intenseof the faded hour and a fond surrender to the questions with which itbristles? All the female relatives on my father's side who reappear tome in these evocations strike me as having been intensely and admirably, but at the same time almost indescribably, _natural_; which factconnects itself for the brooding painter and fond analyst with fiftyother matters and impressions, his vision of a whole social order--ifthe American scene might indeed have been said at that time to bepositively ordered. Wasn't the fact that the dancing passion was so outof proportion to any social resource just one of the signs of thenatural?--and for that matter in both sexes alike of the artlesskindred. It was shining to us that Jim Pendleton had a yacht--though Iwas not smuggled aboard it; there the line was drawn--but the deck musthave been more used for the "German" than for other manoeuvres, oftendoubtless under the lead of our cousin Robert, the eldest of the manylight irresponsibles to whom my father was uncle: distinct to me stillbeing the image of that phenomenally lean and nimble choreographic hero, "Bob" James to us always, who, almost ghost-fashion, led the cotillionon from generation to generation, his skull-like smile, with its accentfrom the stiff points of his long moustache and the brightly holloworbits of his eyes, helping to make of him an immemorial elegantskeleton. 

It is at all events to the sound of fiddles and the popping of corksthat I see even young brides, as well as young grooms, originally soformed to please and to prosper as our hosts of the restless littleoccasion I have glanced at, vanish untimely, become mysterious andlegendary, with such unfathomed silences and significant headshakesreplacing the earlier concert; so that I feel how one's impression of somuch foredoomed youthful levity received constant and quite thrillingincrease. It was of course an impression then obscurely gathered, butinto which one was later on to read strange pages--to some of which Imay find myself moved to revert. Mere mite of observation though I havedubbed myself, I won't pretend to have deciphered any of them amid thebacchanal sounds that, on the evening so suggestively spent, floated outinto the region of Washington Place. It is round that general centrethat my richest memories of the "gay" little life in general cluster--asif it had been, for the circle in which I seem justified in pretendingto have "moved, " of the finer essence of "town"; covering as it did thestretch of Broadway down to Canal Street, with, closer at hand, the NewYork Hotel, which figured somehow inordinately in our family annals (thetwo newer ones, the glory of their brief and discredited, their floutedand demolished age, the brown Metropolitan and the white St. Nicholas, were much further down) and rising northward to the Ultima Thule ofTwenty-third Street, only second then in the supposedly ample scheme ofthe regular ninth "wide" street. I can't indeed have moved much on thatnight of revelations and yet of enigmas over which I still hangfascinated; I must have kept intensely still in my corner, all wonderingand all fearing--fearing notice most; and in a definite way I butremember the formidable interest of my so convincing dowager (to harkback for a second to _her_) and the fact that a great smooth white clothwas spread across the denuded room, converted thus into a field offrolic the prospect of which much excited my curiosity. I but recoverthe preparations, however, without recovering the performance; Mrs. L. And I must have been the only persons not shaking a foot, and prematureunconsciousness clearly in my case supervened. Out of it peeps again theriddle, the so quaint _trait de moeurs_, of my infant participation. But I set that down as representative and interesting, and have donewith it. 

The manners of the time had obviously a _bonhomie_ of theirown--certainly so on our particularly indulgent and humane little field;as to which general proposition the later applications andtransformations of the bonhomie would be interesting to trace. It haslingered and fermented and earned other names, but I seem on the trackof its prime evidence with that note of the sovereign ease of all theyoung persons with whom we grew up. In the after-time, as our view tookin, with new climes and new scenes, other examples of the class, thesewere always to affect us as more formed and finished, more tutored andgovernessed, warned and armed at more points for, and doubtless oftenagainst, the social relation; so that this prepared state on their part, and which at first appeared but a preparation for shyness or silence orwhatever other ideal of the unconversable, came to be for us the normal, since it was the relative and not the positive, still less thesuperlative, state. No charming creatures of the growing girl sort wereever to be natural in the degree of these nearer and remoter ornamentsof our family circle in youth; when after intervals and absences theimpression was renewed we saw how right we had been about it, and I feelas if we had watched it for years under the apprehension and the visionof some inevitable change, wondering with an affectionate interest whateffect the general improvement in manners might, perhaps allunfortunately, have upon it. I make out as I look back that it wasreally to succumb at no point to this complication, that it was to keepits really quite inimitable freshness to the end, or, in other words, when it had been the first free growth of the old conditions, was topass away but with the passing of those themselves for whom it had beenthe sole possible expression. For it was as of an altogether specialshade and sort that the New York young naturalness of our prime wastouchingly to linger with us--so that to myself, at present, with onlythe gentle ghosts of the so numerous exemplars of it before me, itbecomes the very stuff of the soft cerements in which their general mildmortality is laid away. We used to have in the after-time, amid freshrecognitions and reminders, the kindest "old New York" identificationsfor it. The special shade of its identity was thus that it was notconscious--really not conscious of anything in the world; or wasconscious of so few possibilities at least, and these so immediate andso a matter of course, that it came almost to the same thing. That wasthe testimony that the slight subjects in question strike me as havingborne to their surrounding medium--the fact that their unconsciousnesscould be so preserved. They played about in it so happily and serenelyand sociably, as unembarrassed and loquacious as they were unadmonishedand uninformed--only aware at the most that a good many people withintheir horizon were "dissipated"; as in point of fact, alas, a good many_were_. What it was to be dissipated--that, however, was but in the mostlimited degree a feature of their vision; they would have held, underpressure, that it consisted more than anything else in getting tipsy. 

Infinitely queer and quaint, almost incongruously droll, the sensesomehow begotten in ourselves, as very young persons, of our beingsurrounded by a slightly remote, yet dimly rich, outer and quite kindredcircle of the tipsy. I remember how, once, as a very small boy, aftermeeting in the hall a most amiable and irreproachable gentleman, allbut closely consanguineous, who had come to call on my mother, Ianticipated his further entrance by slipping in to report to that parentthat I thought _he_ must be tipsy. And I was to recall perfectlyafterwards the impression I so made on her--in which the generalproposition that the gentlemen of a certain group or connection might onoccasion be best described by the term I had used sought to destroy theparticular presumption that our visitor wouldn't, by his ordinarymeasure, show himself for one of those. He didn't, to all appearance, for I was afterwards disappointed at the lapse of lurid evidence: thatmemory remained with me, as well as a considerable subsequent wonder atmy having leaped to so baseless a view. The truth was indeed that we hadtoo, in the most innocent way in the world, our sense of "dissipation"as an abounding element in family histories; a sense fed quite directlyby our fondness for making our father--I can at any rate testify for theurgency of my own appeal to him--tell us stories of the world of hisyouth. He regaled us with no scandals, yet it somehow rarely failed tocome out that each contemporary on his younger scene, each hero of eachthrilling adventure, had, in spite of brilliant promise and romanticcharm, ended badly, as badly as possible. This became our gapinggeneralisation--it gaped even under the moral that the anecdote wasalways, and so familiarly, humanly and vividly, designed to convey:everyone in the little old Albany of the Dutch houses and the steepstreets and the recurrent family names--Townsends, Clintons, VanRensselaers, Pruyns: I pick them up again at hazard, and alluninvidiously, out of reverberations long since still--everyone withoutexception had at last taken a turn as far as possible from edifying. Andwhat they had most in common, the hovering presences, the fitfulapparitions that, speaking for myself, so engaged my imagination, wasjust the fine old Albany drama--in the light of which a ring of mysteryas to their lives (mainly carried on at the New York Hotel aforesaid)surrounded them, and their charm, inveterate, as I believed, shone outas through vaguely-apprehended storm-clouds. Their charm was in variousmarks of which I shall have more to say--for as I breathe all thishushed air again even the more broken things give out touching humanvalues and faint sweet scents of character, flushes of old beauty andgood-will. 

The grim little generalisation remained, none the less, and I may speakof it--since I speak of everything--as still standing: the strikingevidence that scarce aught but disaster _could_, in that so unformed andunseasoned society, overtake young men who were in the least exposed. Not to have been immediately launched in business of a rigorous sortwas to _be_ exposed--in the absence I mean of some fairly abnormalpredisposition to virtue; since it was a world so simply constitutedthat whatever wasn't business, or exactly an office or a "store, " placesin which people sat close and made money, was just simply pleasure, sought, and sought only, in places in which people got tipsy. There wasclearly no mean, least of all the golden one, for it was just the ready, even when the moderate, possession of gold that determined, that hurriedon, disaster. There were whole sets and groups, there were"sympathetic, " though too susceptible, races, that seemed scarce torecognise or to find possible any practical application of moneyed, thatis of transmitted, ease, however limited, but to go more or less rapidlyto the bad with it--which meant even then going as often as possible toParis. The bright and empty air was as void of "careers" for a choice asof cathedral towers for a sketcher, and I passed my younger time, tillwithin a year or two of the Civil War, with an absolute vagueness ofimpression as to how the political life of the country was carried on. The field was strictly covered, to my young eyes, I make out, by threeclasses, the busy, the tipsy, and Daniel Webster. This last great manmust have represented for us a class in himself; as if to be "political"was just to _be_ Daniel Webster in his proper person and with room leftover for nobody else. That he should have filled the sky of public lifefrom pole to pole, even to a childish consciousness not formed in NewEngland and for which that strenuous section was but a name in thegeography-book, is probably indeed a sign of how large, in the generalair, he comparatively loomed. The public scene was otherwise a blank toour young vision, I discern, till, later on, in Paris, I saw--for atthat unimproved period we of the unfledged didn't suppose ourselves to"meet"--Charles Sumner; with whose name indeed there further connectsitself the image of a thrilled hour in the same city some months before:the gathering of a group of indignant persons on the terrace of a smallold-world _hôtel_ or pavilion looking out on the Avenue des ChampsElysées, slightly above the Rond-Point and just opposite theantediluvian Jardin d'Hiver (who remembers the Jardin d'Hiver, whoremembers the ancient lodges of the _octroi_, the pair of them facingeach other at the Barrière de l'Étoile?) and among them a passionatelady in tears over the news, fresh that morning, of the assault onSumner by the South Carolina ruffian of the House. The wounded Senator, injured in health, had come to Europe later on to recuperate, and heoffered me my first view, to the best of my belief, not only of a"statesman, " but of any person whomsoever concerned in political life. Idistinguish in the earlier twilight of Fourteenth Street my father'sreturn to us one November day--we knew he had been out to vote--with thenews that General Winfield Scott, his and the then "Whig" candidate, hadbeen defeated for the Presidency; just as I rescue from the same limbomy afterwards proud little impression of having "met" that high-piledhero of the Mexican War, whom the Civil War was so soon and with solittle ceremony to extinguish, literally met him, at my father's side, in Fifth Avenue, where he had just emerged from a cross-street. I remainvague as to what had then happened and scarce suppose I was, at the ageprobably of eight or nine, "presented"; but we must have been for somemoments face to face while from under the vast amplitude of a dark bluemilitary cloak with a big velvet collar and loosened silver clasp, whichspread about him like a symbol of the tented field, he greeted myparent--so clear is my sense of the time it took me to gape _all_ theway up to where he towered aloft. 

V

The not very glorious smoke of the Mexican War, I note for anothertouch, had been in the air when I was a still smaller boy, and I have anassociation with it that hovers between the definite and the dim, avision of our uncle (Captain as he then was) Robert Temple, U. S. A. , inregimentals, either on his way to the scene of action or on the returnfrom it. I see him as a person half asleep sees some large object acrossthe room and against the window-light--even if to the effect of my nowasking myself why, so far from the scene of action, he was in panoply ofwar. I seem to see him cock-hatted and feathered too--an odd vision ofdancing superior plumes which doesn't fit if he was only a captain. However, I cultivate the wavering shade merely for its value as myearliest glimpse of any circumstance of the public order--unless indeedanother, the reminiscence to which I owe to-day my sharpest sense ofpersonal antiquity, had already given me the historic thrill. The sceneof this latter stir of consciousness is, for memory, an apartment in oneof the three Fifth Avenue houses that were not long afterward swallowedup in the present Brevoort Hotel, and consists of the admiredappearance of my uncles "Gus" and John James to announce to my fatherthat the Revolution had triumphed in Paris and Louis Philippe had fledto England. These last words, the flight of the king, linger on my earat this hour even as they fell there; we had somehow waked early to aperception of Paris, and a vibration of my very most infantinesensibility under its sky had by the same stroke got itself preservedfor subsequent wondering reference. I had been there for a short time inthe second year of my life, and I was to communicate to my parents lateron that as a baby in long clothes, seated opposite to them in a carriageand on the lap of another person, I had been impressed with the view, framed by the clear window of the vehicle as we passed, of a greatstately square surrounded with high-roofed houses and having in itscentre a tall and glorious column. I had naturally caused them tomarvel, but I had also, under cross-questioning, forced them to comparenotes, as it were, and reconstitute the miracle. They knew what myobservation of monumental squares had been--and alas hadn't; neither NewYork nor Albany could have offered me the splendid perspective, and, forthat matter, neither could London, which moreover I had known at ayounger age still. Conveyed along the Rue St. -Honoré while I waggled mysmall feet, as I definitely remember doing, under my flowing robe, I hadcrossed the Rue de Castiglione and taken in, for all my time, theadmirable aspect of the Place and the Colonne Vendôme. I don't nowpretend to measure the extent to which my interest in the events of1848--I was five years old--was quickened by that _souvenir_, atradition further reinforced, I should add, by the fact that somerelative or other, some member of our circle, was always either "there"("there" being of course generally Europe, but particularly andpointedly Paris) or going there or coming back from there: I at any raterevert to the sound of the rich words on my uncles' lips as to mypositive initiation into History. It was as if I had been ready for themand could catch on; I had heard of kings presumably, and also offleeing: but that kings had sometimes to flee was a new and strikingimage, to which the apparent consternation of my elders added dramaticforce. So much, in any case, for what I may claim--perhaps too idly--onbehalf of my backward reach. 

It has carried me far from my rather evident proposition that if we sawthe "natural" so happily embodied about us--and in female maturity, orcomparative maturity, scarce less than in female adolescence--this wasbecause the artificial, or in other words the complicated, was solittle there to threaten it. The complicated, as we were later on todefine it, was but another name for those more massed and violentassaults upon the social sense that we were to recognise subsequently bytheir effects--observing thus that a sense more subtly social had sobeen created, and that it quite differed from that often almost completeinward blankness, in respect to any circumjacent, any constituted, orderto the exhibition of which our earlier air and our family scene hadinimitably treated us. We came more or less to see that our youngcontemporaries of another world, the trained and admonished, thedisciplined and governessed, or in a word the formed, relativelyspeaking, had been made aware of many things of which those at homehadn't been; yet we were also to note--so far as we may be conceived asso precociously "noting, " though we were certainly incorrigibleobservers--that, the awareness in question remaining at the bestimperfect, our little friends as distinguished from our companions ofthe cousinship, greater and less, advanced and presumed but to flounderand recede, elated at once and abashed and on the whole but _feebly_sophisticated. The cousinship, on the other hand, all unalarmed andunsuspecting and unembarrassed, lived by pure serenity, sociability andloquacity; the oddest fact about its members being withal that it didn'tmake them bores, I seem to feel as I look back, or at least not worsebores than sundry specimens of the other growth. There can surely neverhave been anything like their good faith and, generally speaking, theiramiability. I should have but to let myself go a little to wish to citeexamples--save that in doing so I should lose sight of my point; whichis to recall again that whether we were all amiable or not (and, frankly, I claim it in a high degree for most of us) the scene on whichwe so freely bloomed does strike me, when I reckon up, asextraordinarily unfurnished. How came it then that for the most part sosimple we yet weren't more inane? This was doubtless by reason of thequantity of our inward life--ours of our father's house in especial Imean--which made an excellent, in some cases almost an incomparable, _fond_ for a thicker civility to mix with when growing experience shouldbegin to take that in. It was also quaint, among us, I may be reminded, to have _begun_ with the inward life; but we began, after the manner ofall men, as we could, and I hold that if it comes to that we might havebegun much worse. 

I was in my seventeenth year when the raid and the capture of JohnBrown, of Harper's Ferry fame, enjoyed its sharp reverberation among us, though we were then on the other side of the world; and I count this asthe very first reminder that reached me of our living, on our side, ina political order: I had perfectly taken in from the pages of "Punch, "which contributed in the highest degree to our education, that thepeoples on the other side so lived. As there was no American "Punch, "and to this time has been none, to give small boys the sense and theimagination of living with their public administrators, Daniel Websterand Charles Sumner had never become, for my fancy, members of a class, aclass which numbered in England, by John Leech's showing, so many othermembers still than Lords Brougham, Palmerston and John Russell. The warof Secession, soon arriving, was to cause the field to bristle withfeatures and the sense of the State, in our generation, infinitely toquicken; but that alarm came upon the country like a thief at night, andwe might all have been living in a land in which there seemed at leastnothing save a comparatively small amount of quite private property tosteal. Even private property in other than the most modest amountsscarce figured for our particular selves; which doubtless came partlyfrom the fact that amid all the Albany issue there was ease, with thehabit of ease, thanks to our grandfather's fine old ability--he haddecently provided for so large a generation; but our consciousness waspositively disfurnished, as that of young Americans went, of theactualities of "business" in a world of business. As to that we allformed together quite a monstrous exception; business in a world ofbusiness was the thing we most agreed (differ as we might on minorissues) in knowing nothing about. We touched it and it touched usneither directly nor otherwise, and I think our fond detachment, not tosay our helpless ignorance and on occasion (since I can speak for onefine instance) our settled density of understanding, made us anunexampled and probably, for the ironic "smart" gods of the Americanheaven, a lamentable case. Of course even the office and the "store"leave much of the provision for an approximately complete scheme ofmanners to be accounted for; still there must have been vast numbers ofpeople about us for whom, under the usages, the assault on theimagination from without was much stronger and the filling-in of thegeneral picture much richer. It was exactly by the lack of thatfilling-in that we--we more especially who lived at near view of myfather's admirable example--had been thrown so upon the inward life. Noone could ever have taken to it, even in the face of discouragement, more kindly and naturally than he; but the situation had at least thatcharm that, in default of so many kinds of the outward, people had theirchoice of as many kinds of the inward as they would, and might practisethose kinds with whatever consistency, intensity and brilliancy. Of ourfather's perfect gift for practising _his_ kind I shall have more tosay; but I meanwhile glance yet again at those felicities of destitutionwhich kept us, collectively, so genially interested in almost nothingbut each other and which come over me now as one of the famous blessingsin disguise. 

There were "artists" in the prospect--didn't Mr. Tom Hicks and Mr. PaulDuggan and Mr. C. P. Cranch and Mr. Felix Darley, this last worthy of awider reputation, capable perhaps even of a finer development, than heattained, more or less haunt our friendly fireside, and give us also thesense of others, landscapist Cropseys and Coles and Kensetts, andbust-producing Iveses and Powerses and Moziers, hovering in an outercircle? There were authors not less, some of them vague and female andin this case, as a rule, glossily ringletted and monumentallybreastpinned, but mostly frequent and familiar, after the manner ofGeorge Curtis and Parke Godwin and George Ripley and Charles Dana and N. P. Willis and, for brighter lights or those that in our then comparativeobscurity almost deceived the morn, Mr. Bryant, Washington Irving and E. A. Poe--the last-named of whom I cite not so much because he waspersonally present (the extremity of personal absence had just overtakenhim) as by reason of that predominant lustre in him which our smallopening minds themselves already recognised and which makes me wonderto-day at the legend of the native neglect of him. Was he not even atthat time on all lips, had not my brother, promptly master of thesubject, beckoned on my lagging mind with a recital of The Gold-Bug andThe Pit and the Pendulum?--both of which, however, I was soon enough toread for myself, adding to them The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Were wenot also forever mounting on little platforms at our infant schools to"speak" The Raven and Lenore and the verses in which we phrased theheroine as Annabellee?--falling thus into the trap the poet had sorecklessly laid for us, as he had laid one for our interminable droning, not less, in the other pieces I have named. So far from misprizing ourill-starred magician we acclaimed him surely at every turn; he lay uponour tables and resounded in our mouths, while we communed to satiety, even for boyish appetites, over the thrill of his choicest pages. Don'tI just recognise the ghost of a dim memory of a children's Christmasparty at the house of Fourteenth Street neighbours--they come back to meas "the Beans": who and what and whence and whither the kindlyBeans?--where I admired over the chimney piece the full-length portraitof a lady seated on the ground in a Turkish dress, with hair flowingloose from a cap which was not as the caps of ladies known to me, and Ithink with a tambourine, who was somehow identified to my enquiringmind as the wife of the painter of the piece, Mr. Osgood, and the soministering friend of the unhappy Mr. Poe. There she throned in honour, like Queen Constance on the "huge firm earth"--all for _that_ and hertambourine; and surely we could none of us have done more for theconnection. 

Washington Irving I "met, " with infant promptitude, very much as I hadmet General Scott; only this time it was on a steamboat that Iapprehended the great man; my father, under whose ever-patientprotection I then was--during the summer afternoon's sail from New Yorkto Fort Hamilton--having named him to me, for this long preservation, before they greeted and talked, and having a fact of still more momentto mention, with the greatest concern, afterwards: Mr. Irving had givenhim the news of the shipwreck of Margaret Fuller in those very waters(Fire Island at least was but just without our big Bay) during the greatAugust storm that had within the day or two passed over us. Theunfortunate lady was essentially of the Boston connection; but she musthave been, and probably through Emerson, a friend of my parents--mustn'tshe have held "conversations, " in the finest exotic Bostonese, in NewYork, Emerson himself lecturing there to admiration?--since the more Isqueeze the sponge of memory the more its stored secretions flow, toremind me here again that, being with those elders late one evening atan exhibition of pictures, possibly that of the National Academy, thenconfined to scant quarters, I was shown a small full-length portrait ofMiss Fuller, seated as now appears to me and wrapped in a long whiteshawl, the failure of which to do justice to its original my companionsdenounced with some emphasis. Was this work from the hand of Mr. TomHicks aforesaid, or was that artist concerned only with the life-sized, the enormous (as I took it to be) the full-length, the violentlyprotruded accessories in which come back to me with my infant sense ofthe wonder and the beauty of them, as expressed above all in the imageof a very long and lovely lady, the new bride of the artist, standing ata window before a row of plants or bulbs in tall coloured glasses. Thelight of the window playing over the figure and the "treatment" of itsglass and of the flower-pots and the other furniture, passed, by myimpression, for the sign of the master hand; and _was_ it all brave andcharming, or was it only very hard and stiff, quite ugly and helpless? Iput these questions as to a vanished world and by way of pressing backinto it only the more clingingly and tenderly--wholly regardless inother words of whether the answers to them at all matter. They matterdoubtless but for fond evocation, and if one tries to evoke one mustneglect none of the arts, one must do it with all the forms. Why I_should_ so like to do it is another matter--and what "outsideinterest" I may suppose myself to create perhaps still another: Ifatuously proceed at any rate, I make so far as I can the small warmdusky homogeneous New York world of the mid-century close about us. 

VI

I see a small and compact and ingenuous society, screened in somehowconveniently from north and west, but open wide to the east andcomparatively to the south and, though perpetually moving up Broadway, none the less constantly and delightfully walking down it. Broadway wasthe feature and the artery, the joy and the adventure of one'schildhood, and it stretched, and prodigiously, from Union Square toBarnum's great American Museum by the City Hall--or only went further onthe Saturday mornings (absurdly and deplorably frequent alas) when wewere swept off by a loving aunt, our mother's only sister, then muchdomesticated with us and to whom the ruthless care had assigned itselffrom the first, to Wall Street and the torture chamber of Dr. Parkhurst, our tremendously respectable dentist, who was so old and so empurpledand so polite, in his stock and dress-coat and dark and glossy wig, thathe had been our mother's and our aunt's haunting fear in _their_ youthas well, since, in their quiet Warren Street, not far off, they were, dreadful to think, comparatively under his thumb. He extremelyresembles, to my mind's eye, certain figures in Phiz's illustrations toDickens, and it was clear to us through our long ordeal that our eldersmust, by some mistaken law of compensation, some refinement of thevindictive, be making us "pay" for what they in like helplessness hadsuffered from him: as if _we_ had done them any harm! Our analysis wasmuddled, yet in a manner relieving, and for us too there werecompensations, which we grudged indeed to allow, but which I couldeasily, even if shyly, have named. One of these was Godey's Lady's Book, a sallow pile of which (it shows to me for sallow in the warmer and lessstony light of the Wall Street of those days and through the smell ofancient anodynes) lay on Joey Bagstock's table for our beguilement whilewe waited: I was to encounter in Phiz's Dombey and Son that design forour tormentor's type. There is no doubt whatever that I succumbed to thespell of Godey, who, unlike the present essences, was an anodyne beforethe fact as well as after; since I remember poring, in his pages, overtales of fashionable life in Philadelphia while awaiting my turn in thechair, not less than doing so when my turn was over and to the music ofmy brother's groans. This must have been at the hours when we were leftdiscreetly to our own fortitude, through our aunt's availing herself ofthe relative proximity to go and shop at Stewart's and then come backfor us; the ladies' great shop, vast, marmorean, plate-glassy andnotoriously fatal to the female nerve (we ourselves had wearily trailedthrough it, hanging on the skirts, very literally, of indecision) whichbravely waylaid custom on the Broadway corner of Chambers Street. Wasn'tpart of the charm of life--since I assume that there _was_ such acharm--in its being then (I allude to life itself) so much moredown-towny, on the supposition at least that our young gravitation inthat sense for most of the larger joys consorted with something of thegeneral habit? The joy that had to be fished out, like Truth, from thevery bottom of the well was attendance at Trinity Church, still in thatage supereminent, pointedly absolute, the finest feature of thesouthward scene; to the privilege of which the elder Albany cousins wereapt to be treated when they came on to stay with us; an indulgencemaking their enjoyment of our city as down-towny as possible too, for Iseem otherwise to see them but as returning with the familiar Stewartheadache from the prolonged strain of selection. 

The great reward dispensed to us for our sessions in the house ofpain--as to which it became our subsequent theory that we had beenregularly dragged there on alternate Saturdays--was our being carried onthe return to the house of delight, or to one of them, for there werespecifically two, where we partook of ice-cream, deemed sovereign forsore mouths, deemed sovereign in fact, all through our infancy, foreverything. Two great establishments for the service of it graced theprospect, one Thompson's and the other Taylor's, the former, I perfectlyrecall, grave and immemorial, the latter upstart but dazzling, andhaving together the effect that whichever we went to we wondered if wehadn't better have gone to the other--with that capacity of childhoodfor making the most of its adventures after a fashion that may look solike making the least. It is in our father's company indeed that, as Ipress the responsive spring, I see the bedizened saucers heaped up forour fond consumption (they bore the Taylor-title painted in blue andgilded, with the Christian name, as parentally pointed out to us, perverted to "Jhon" for John, whereas the Thompson-name scorned suchvulgar and above all such misspelt appeals;) whence I infer that stillother occasions for that experience waited on us--as almost any wouldserve, and a paternal presence so associated with them was not in theleast conceivable in the Wall Street _repaire_. That presence is in factnot associated for me, to any effect of distinctness, with the least ofour suffered shocks or penalties--though partly doubtless because ouracquaintance with such was of the most limited; a conclusion I form evenwhile judging it to have been on the whole sufficient for our virtue. This sounds perhaps as if we had borne ourselves as prodigies orprigs--which was as far as possible from being the case; we were bred inhorror of _conscious_ propriety, of what my father was fond of calling"flagrant" morality; what I myself at any rate read back into our rareeducational ease, for the memory of some sides of which I was ever to bethankful, is, besides the _general_ humanisation of our apprehendedworld and our "social" tone, the unmistakeable appearance that my fatherwas again and again accompanied in public by his small second son: somany young impressions come back to me as gathered at his side and inhis personal haunts. Not that he mustn't have offered his firstborn atleast equal opportunities; but I make out that he seldom led us forth, such as we were, together, and my brother must have had in _his_ turnmany a mild adventure of which the secret--I like to put it so--perishedwith him. He was to remember, as I perceived later on, many things thatI didn't, impressions I sometimes wished, as with a retracing jealousy, or at least envy, that I might also have fallen direct heir to; but heprofessed amazement, and even occasionally impatience, at my reach ofreminiscence--liking as he did to brush away old moral scraps in favourof new rather than to hoard and so complacently exhibit them. If in myway I collected the new as well I yet cherished the old; the ragbag ofmemory hung on its nail in my closet, though I learnt with time tocontrol the habit of bringing it forth. And I say that with a due senseof my doubtless now appearing to empty it into these pages. 

I keep picking out at hazard those passages of our earliest age thathelp to reconstruct for me even by tiny touches the experience of ourparents, any shade of which seems somehow to signify. I cherish, to theextent of here reproducing, an old daguerreotype all the circumstancesof the taking of which I intensely recall--though as I was lately turnedtwelve when I figured for it the feat of memory is perhaps notremarkable. It documents for me in so welcome and so definite a mannermy father's cultivation of my company. It documents at the same time theabsurdest little legend of my small boyhood--the romantic tradition ofthe value of being taken up from wherever we were staying to the queerempty dusty smelly New York of midsummer: I apply that last term becausewe always arrived by boat and I have still in my nostril the sense ofthe _abords_ of the hot town, the rank and rubbishy waterside quarters, where big loose cobbles, for the least of all the base items, laywrenched from their sockets of pungent black mud and where the dependentstreets managed by a law of their own to be all corners and the cornersto be all groceries; groceries indeed largely of the "green" order, sofar as greenness could persist in the torrid air, and that bristled, inglorious defiance of traffic, with the overflow of their wares andimplements. Carts and barrows and boxes and baskets, sprawling orstacked, familiarly elbowed in its course the bumping hack (thecomprehensive "carriage" of other days, the only vehicle of hire thenknown to us) while the situation was accepted by the loose citizen inthe garb of a freeman save for the brass star on his breast--and the NewYork garb of the period was, as I remember it, an immense attestation ofliberty. Why the throb of romance should have beat time for me to suchvisions I can scarce explain, or can explain only by the fact that thesqualor was a squalor wonderfully mixed and seasoned, and that I shouldwrong the whole impression if I didn't figure it first and foremost asthat of some vast succulent cornucopia. What did the stacked boxes andbaskets of our youth represent but the boundless fruitage of that morebucolic age of the American world, and what was after all of so strongan assault as the rankness of such a harvest? Where is that fruitagenow, where in particular are the peaches _d'antan_? where the mounds ofIsabella grapes and Seckel pears in the sticky sweetness of which ourchildhood seems to have been steeped? It was surely, save perhaps fororanges, a more informally and familiarly fruit-eating time, and bushelsof peaches in particular, peaches big and peaches small, peaches whiteand peaches yellow, played a part in life from which they have somehowbeen deposed; every garden, almost every bush and the very boys' pocketsgrew them; they were "cut up" and eaten with cream at every meal;domestically "brandied" they figured, the rest of the year, scarce lessfreely--if they were rather a "party dish" it was because they made theparty whenever they appeared, and when ice-cream was added, or they wereadded _to_ it, they formed the highest revel we knew. Above all thepublic heaps of them, the high-piled receptacles at every turn, touchedthe street as with a sort of southern plenty; the note of the rejectedand scattered fragments, the memory of the slippery skins and rinds andkernels with which the old dislocated flags were bestrown, is itselfendeared to me and contributes a further pictorial grace. We ateeverything in those days by the bushel and the barrel, as from storesthat were infinite; we handled watermelons as freely as cocoanuts, andthe amount of stomach-ache involved was negligible in the generalEden-like consciousness. 

The glow of this consciousness even in so small an organism was part ofthe charm of these retreats offered me cityward upon our base ofprovisions; a part of the rest of which, I disengage, was in my fondperception of that almost eccentrically home-loving habit in my fatherwhich furnished us with half the household humour of ourchildhood--besides furnishing _him_ with any quantity of extravagantpicture of his so prompt pangs of anguish in absence for celebration ofhis precipitate returns. It was traditional for us later on, andespecially on the European scene, that for him to leave us in pursuit ofsome advantage or convenience, some improvement of our condition, someenlargement of our view, was for him breathlessly to reappear, after theshortest possible interval, with no account at all to give of thebenefit aimed at, but instead of this a moving representation, a farricher recital, of his spiritual adventures at the horrid inhuman innsand amid the hard alien races which had stayed his advance. He reacted, he rebounded, in favour of his fireside, from whatever briefexplorations or curiosities; these passionate spontaneities were thepulse of his life and quite some of the principal events of ours; and, as he was nothing if not expressive, whatever happened to him for inwardintensity happened abundantly to us for pity and terror, as it were, aswell as for an ease and a quality of amusement among ourselves that wasreally always to fail us among others. Comparatively late in life, afterhis death, I had occasion to visit, in lieu of my brother, then inEurope, an American city in which he had had, since his own father'sdeath, interests that were of importance to us all. On my asking theagent in charge when the owner had last taken personal cognisance of hisproperty that gentleman replied only half to my surprise that he hadnever in all his years of possession performed such an act. Then it wasperhaps that I most took the measure of his fine faith in humanconfidence as an administrative function. He had to have a _relation_, somehow expressed--and as he was the vividest and happiest ofletter-writers it rarely failed of coming; but once it was establishedit served him, in every case, much better than fussy challenges, whichhad always the drawback of involving lapses and inattentions in regardto solicitudes more pressing. He incurably took for granted--incurablybecause whenever he did so the process succeeded; with whichassociation, however, I perhaps overdrench my complacent vision of oursummer snatches at town. Through a grave accident in early life countrywalks on rough roads were, in spite of his great constitutionalsoundness, tedious and charmless to him; he liked on the other hand thepeopled pavement, the thought of which made him restless when away. Hence the fidelities and sociabilities, however superficial, that hecouldn't _not_ reaffirm--if he could only reaffirm the others, thereally intimate and still more communicable, soon enough afterwards. 

It was these of the improvised and casual sort that I shared with himthus indelibly; for truly if we took the boat to town to do things I didthem quite as much as he, and so that a little boy could scarce havedone them more. My part may indeed but have been to surround his partwith a thick imaginative aura; but that constituted for me an activitythan which I could dream of none braver or wilder. We went to the officeof The New York Tribune--my father's relations with that journal wereactual and close; and that was a wonderful world indeed, with strangesteepnesses and machineries and noises and hurrying bare-armed, bright-eyed men, and amid the agitation clever, easy, kindly, jocular, partly undressed gentlemen (it was always July or August) some of whom Iknew at home, taking it all as if it were the most natural place in theworld. It was big to me, big to me with the breath of great vagueconnections, and I supposed the gentlemen very old, though since awarethat they must have been, for the connections, remarkably young; and theconversation of one of them, the one I saw oftenest up town, whoattained to great local and to considerable national eminenceafterwards, and who talked often and thrillingly about the theatres, Iretain as many bright fragments of as if I had been another littleBoswell. It was as if he had dropped into my mind the germ of certaininterests that were long afterwards to flower--as for instance on hisannouncing the receipt from Paris of news of the appearance at theThéâtre Français of an actress, Madame Judith, who was formidably tocompete with her coreligionary Rachel and to endanger that artist'slaurels. Why should Madame Judith's name have stuck to me through allthe years, since I was never to see her and she is as forgotten asRachel is remembered? Why should that scrap of gossip have made a datefor my consciousness, turning it to the Comédie with an intensity thatwas long afterwards to culminate? Why was it equally to abide for methat the same gentleman had on one of these occasions mentioned hishaving just come back from a wonderful city of the West, Chicago, which, though but a year or two old, with plank sidewalks when there were any, and holes and humps where there were none, and shanties where there werenot big blocks, and everything where there had yesterday been nothing, had already developed a huge energy and curiosity, and also an appetitefor lectures? I became aware of the Comédie, I became aware of Chicago;I also became aware that even the most alluring fiction was not alwaysfor little boys to read. It was mentioned at the Tribune office that oneof its reporters, Mr. Solon Robinson, had put forth a novel rather oddlyentitled "Hot Corn" and more or less having for its subject the careerof a little girl who hawked that familiar American luxury in thestreets. The volume, I think, was put into my father's hand, and Irecall my prompt desire to make acquaintance with it no less than theremark, as promptly addressed to my companion, that the work, howeverengaging, was not one that should be left accessible to an innocentchild. The pang occasioned by this warning has scarcely yet died out forme, nor my sense of my first wonder at the discrimination--so greatbecame from that moment the mystery of the tabooed book, of whateveridentity; the question, in my breast, of why, if it was to be so rightfor others, it was only to be wrong for me. I remember the soreness ofthe thought that it was I rather who was wrong for the book--which wassomehow humiliating: in that amount of discredit one couldn't but beinvolved. Neither then nor afterwards was the secret of "Hot Corn"revealed to me, and the sense of privation was to be more prolonged, Ifear, than the vogue of the tale, which even as a success of scandalcouldn't have been great. 

VII

Dimly queer and "pathetic" to me were to remain through much of theafter time indeed most of those early indigenous vogues and literaryflurries: so few of those that brushed by my childhood had been otherthan a tinkling that suddenly stopped. I am afraid I mean that what wastouching was rather the fact that the tinkle _could_ penetrate than thefact that it died away; the light of criticism might have beat sostraight--if the sense of proportion and the fact of compassion hadn'twaved it away--on the æsthetic phase during which the appeal was mainly_by_ the tinkle. The Scarlet Letter and The Seven Gables had the deeptone as much as one would; but of the current efforts of the imaginationthey were alone in having it till Walt Whitman broke out in the laterfifties--and I was to know nothing of that happy genius till long after. An absorbed perusal of The Lamplighter was what I was to achieve at thefleeting hour I continue to circle round; that romance was on everyone's lips, and I recollect it as more or less thrust upon me in amendsfor the imposed sacrifice of a ranker actuality--that of the improperMr. Robinson, I mean, as to whom there revives in me the main questionof where his impropriety, in so general a platitude of the bourgeois, could possibly have dwelt. It was to be true indeed that Walt Whitmanachieved an impropriety of the first magnitude; that success, however, but showed us the platitude returning in a genial rage upon itself andgetting out of control by generic excess. There was no rage at any ratein The Lamplighter, over which I fondly hung and which would have beenmy first "grown-up" novel--it had been soothingly offered me forthat--had I consented to take it as really and truly grown-up. Icouldn't have said what it lacked for the character, I only had mysecret reserves, and when one blest afternoon on the New Brighton boat Iwaded into The Initials I saw how right I had been. The Initials _was_grown-up and the difference thereby exquisite; it came over me with thevery first page, assimilated in the fluttered little cabin to which Ihad retired with it--all in spite of the fact too that my attention wasdistracted by a pair of remarkable little girls who lurked there out ofmore public view as to hint that they weren't to be seen for nothing. 

That must have been a rich hour, for I mix the marvel of the BoonChildren, strange pale little flowers of the American theatre, with myconscious joy in bringing back to my mother, from our forage in NewYork, a gift of such happy promise as the history of the long-legged Mr. Hamilton and his two Bavarian beauties, the elder of whom, Hildegarde, was to figure for our small generation as the very type of the haughtyas distinguished from the forward heroine (since I think our categoriesreally came to no more than those). I couldn't have got very far withHildegarde in moments so scant, but I memorably felt that romance wasthick round me--everything, at such a crisis, seeming to make for it atonce. The Boon Children, conveyed thus to New Brighton under care of alady in whose aspect the strain of the resolute triumphed over the noteof the battered, though the showy in it rather succumbed at the sametime to the dowdy, were already "billed, " as infant phenomena, for aperformance that night at the Pavilion, where our attendance, it was ashock to feel, couldn't be promised; and in gazing without charge at thepair of weary and sleepy little mountebanks I found the histrioniccharacter and the dramatic profession for the first time revealed to me. They filled me with fascination and yet with fear; they expressed amelancholy grace and a sort of peevish refinement, yet seemed awfullydetached and indifferent, indifferent perhaps even to being pinched andslapped, for art's sake, at home; they honoured me with no noticewhatever and regarded me doubtless as no better than one of the littlelouts peeping through the tent of the show. In return I judged theirappearance dissipated though fascinating, and sought consolation for thememory of their scorn and the loss of their exhibition, as time went on, in noting that the bounds of their fame seemed somehow to have beenstayed. I neither "met" them nor heard of them again. The littleBatemans must have obscured their comparatively dim lustre, flourishingat the same period and with a larger command of the pictorial poster andthe other primitive symbols in Broadway--such posters and such symbolsas they were at that time!--the little Batemans who were to be reserved, in maturer form, for my much later and more grateful appreciation. 

This weak reminiscence has obstructed, however, something more to thepurpose, the retained impression of those choicest of our loiteringsthat took place, still far down-town, at the Bookstore, home of delightsand haunt of fancy. It was at the Bookstore we had called on the day ofThe Initials and the Boon Children--and it was thence we were returningwith our spoil, of which the charming novel must have been but afragment. My impression composed itself of many pieces; a great andvarious practice of burying my nose in the half-open book for the strongsmell of paper and printer's ink, known to us as the English smell, wasneeded to account for it. _That_ was the exercise of the finest sensethat hung about us, my brother and me--or of one at least but littleless fine than the sense for the satisfaction of which we resorted toThompson's and to Taylor's: it bore me company during all our returnsfrom forages and left me persuaded that I had only to snuff up hardenough, fresh uncut volume in hand, to taste of the very substance ofLondon. All our books in that age were English, at least all ourdown-town ones--I personally recall scarce any that were not; and I takethe perception of that quality in them to have associated itself withmore fond dreams and glimmering pictures than any other one principle ofgrowth. It was all a result of the deeply _infected_ state: I had beenprematurely poisoned--as I shall presently explain. The Bookstore, fondest of my father's resorts, though I remember no more of its publicidentity than that it further enriched the brave depth of Broadway, wasoverwhelmingly and irresistibly English, as not less tonically Englishwas our principal host there, with whom we had moreover, my father andI, thanks to his office, such personal and genial relations that Irecall seeing him grace our board at home, in company with his wife, whose vocal strain and complexion and coiffure and flounces I found nonethe less informing, none the less "racial, " for my not being then versedin the language of analysis. 

The true inwardness of these rich meanings--those above all of theBookstore itself--was that a tradition was thus fed, a presumption thuscreated, a vague vision thus filled in: all expression is clumsy for somystic a process. What else can have happened but that, having takenover, under suggestion and with singular infant promptitude, aparticular throbbing consciousness, I had become aware of the source atwhich it could best be refreshed? That consciousness, so communicated, was just simply of certain impressions, certain _sources_ of impressionagain, proceeding from over the sea and situated beyond it--or even muchrather of my parents' own impression of such, the fruit of a happy timespent in and about London with their two babies and reflected in thatportion of their talk with each other to which I best attended. Had_all_ their talk for its subject, in my infant ears, that happytime?--did it deal only with London and Piccadilly and the Green Park, where, over against their dwelling, their two babies mainly took the airunder charge of Fanny of Albany, their American nurse, whose remark asto the degree to which the British Museum fell short for one who had hadthe privilege of that of Albany was handed down to us? Did it neverforbear from Windsor and Richmond and Sudbrook and Ham Common, amid therich complexity of which, crowding their discourse with echoes, theyhad spent their summer?--all a scattering of such pearls as it seemedthat their second-born could most deftly and instinctively pick up. Oursole maternal aunt, already mentioned as a devoted and cherishedpresence during those and many later years, was in a position to sharewith them the treasure of these mild memories, which strike me as havingfor the most part, through some bright household habit, overflowed atthe breakfast-table, where I regularly attended with W. J. ; she hadimbibed betimes in Europe the seeds of a long nostalgia, and I think ofher as ever so patiently communicative on that score under pressure ofmy artless appeal. That I should have been so inquiring while still sodestitute of primary data was doubtless rather an anomaly; and it wasfor that matter quite as if my infant divination proceeded by the lightof nature: I divined that it would matter to me in the future that"English life" should be of this or that fashion. My father hadsubscribed for me to a small periodical of quarto form, covered inyellow and entitled The Charm, which shed on the question the softestlustre, but of which the appearances were sadly intermittent, or thenstruck me as being; inasmuch as many of our visits to the Bookstore wereto ask for the new number--only to learn with painful frequency that thelast consignment from London had arrived without it. I feel again thepang of that disappointment--as if through the want of what I neededmost for going on; the English smell was exhaled by The Charm in apeculiar degree, and I see myself affected by the failure as by that ofa vital tonic. It was not, at the same time, by a Charm the more or theless that my salvation was to be, as it were, worked out, or myimagination at any rate duly convinced; conviction was the result of thevery air of home, so far as I most consciously inhaled it. Thisrepresented, no doubt, a failure to read into matters close at hand allthe interest they were capable of yielding; but I had taken the twist, had sipped the poison, as I say, and was to feel it to that end the mostsalutary cup. I saw my parents homesick, as I conceived, for the ancientorder and distressed and inconvenienced by many of the more immediatefeatures of the modern, as the modern pressed upon us, and since theirtheory of our better living was from an early time that we should renewthe quest of the ancient on the very first possibility I simply grewgreater in the faith that somehow to manage that would constitutesuccess in life. I never found myself deterred from this fond view, which was implied in every question I asked, every answer I got, andevery plan I formed. 

Those are great words for the daydream of infant ignorance, yet ifsuccess in life may perhaps be best defined as the performance in age ofsome intention arrested in youth I may frankly put in a claim to it. Topress my nose against the sources of the English smell, so different foryoung bibliophiles from any American, was to adopt that sweetness as thesign of my "atmosphere"; roundabout might be the course to take, but onewas in motion from the first and one never lost sight of the goal. Thevery names of places and things in the other world--the marked oppositein most ways of that in which New York and Albany, Fort Hamilton and NewBrighton formed so fallacious a maximum--became to me values and secretsand shibboleths; they were probably often on my tongue and employed asignorance determined, but I quite recall being ashamed to use them asmuch as I should have liked. It was New Brighton, I reconstruct (andindeed definitely remember) that "finished" us at last--that and ourfinal sordid school, W. J. 's and mine, in New York: the ancient order_had_ somehow to be invoked when such "advantages" as those were thebest within our compass and our means. Not further to anticipate, at allevents, that climax was for a while but vaguely in sight, and theillusion of felicity continued from season to season to shut us in. Itis only of what I took for felicity, however few the years and howeverscant the scene, that I am pretending now to speak; though I shall havestrained the last drop of romance from this vision of our towny summerswith the quite sharp reminiscence of my first sitting for mydaguerreotype. I repaired with my father on an August day to the greatBroadway establishment of Mr. Brady, supreme in that then beautiful art, and it is my impression--the only point vague with me--that though wehad come up by the Staten Island boat for the purpose we were to keepthe affair secret till the charming consequence should break, at home, upon my mother. Strong is my conviction that our mystery, in the event, yielded almost at once to our elation, for no tradition had a brighterhousehold life with us than that of our father's headlong impatience. Hemoved in a cloud, if not rather in a high radiance, of precipitation anddivulgation, a chartered rebel against cold reserves. The good news inhis hand refused under any persuasion to grow stale, the sense ofcommunicable pleasure in his breast was positively explosive; so that wesaw those "surprises" in which he had conspired with our mother for ourbenefit converted by him in every case, under our shamelessly encouragedguesses, into common conspiracies against her--against her knowing, thatis, how thoroughly we were all compromised. He had a special anddelightful sophistry at the service of his overflow, and never so fine afancy as in defending it on "human" grounds. He was something verydifferent withal from a parent of weak mercies; weakness was never sopositive and plausible, nor could the attitude of sparing you be morehandsomely or on occasion even more comically aggressive. 

My small point is simply, however, that the secresy of our conjoinedportrait was probably very soon, by his act, to begin a public andshining life and to enjoy it till we received the picture; as to whichmoreover still another remembrance steals on me, a proof of the factthat our adventure was improvised. Sharp again is my sense of not beingso adequately dressed as I should have taken thought for had I foreseenmy exposure; though the resources of my wardrobe as then constitutedcould surely have left me but few alternatives. The main resource of asmall New York boy in this line at that time was the little sheath-likejacket, tight to the body, closed at the neck and adorned in front witha single row of brass buttons--a garment of scant grace assuredly andcompromised to my consciousness, above all, by a strange ironic lightfrom an unforgotten source. It was but a short time before those daysthat the great Mr. Thackeray had come to America to lecture on TheEnglish Humourists, and still present to me is the voice proceeding frommy father's library, in which some glimpse of me hovering, at an openingof the door, in passage or on staircase, prompted him to the formidablewords: "Come here, little boy, and show me your extraordinary jacket!"My sense of my jacket became from that hour a heavy one--furtherenriched as my vision is by my shyness of posture before the seated, thecelebrated visitor, who struck me, in the sunny light of the animatedroom, as enormously big and who, though he laid on my shoulder the handof benevolence, bent on my native costume the spectacles of wonder. Iwas to know later on why he had been so amused and why, after asking meif this were the common uniform of my age and class, he remarked that inEngland, were I to go there, I should be addressed as "Buttons. " It hadbeen revealed to me thus in a flash that we were somehow _queer_, andthough never exactly crushed by it I became aware that I at least feltso as I stood with my head in Mr. Brady's vise. Beautiful most decidedlythe lost art of the daguerreotype; I remember the "exposure" as on thisoccasion interminably long, yet with the result of a facial anguish farless harshly reproduced than my suffered snapshots of a later age. Toofew, I may here interject, were to remain my gathered impressions of thegreat humourist, but one of them, indeed almost the only other, bearsagain on the play of his humour over our perversities of dress. Itbelongs to a later moment, an occasion on which I see him familiarlyseated with us, in Paris, during the spring of 1857, at some repast atwhich the younger of us too, by that time, habitually flocked, in ouraffluence of five. Our youngest was beside him, a small sister, then notquite in her eighth year, and arrayed apparently after the fashion ofthe period and place; and the tradition lingered long of his havingsuddenly laid his hand on her little flounced person and exclaimed withludicrous horror: "Crinoline?--I was suspecting it! So young and sodepraved!"

A fainter image, that of one of the New York moments, just eludes me, pursue it as I will; I recover but the setting and the fact of his briefpresence in it, with nothing that was said or done beyond my being leftwith my father to watch our distinguished friend's secretary, who wasalso a young artist, establish his easel and proceed to paint. Thesetting, as I recall it, was an odd, oblong, blank "private parlour" atthe Clarendon Hotel, then the latest thing in hotels, but whose ancientcorner of Fourth Avenue and--was it Eighteenth Street?--long ago ceasedto know it; the gentle, very gentle, portraitist was Mr. Eyre Crowe andthe obliging sitter my father, who sat in response to Mr. Thackeray'sdesire that his protégé should find employment. The protector after alittle departed, blessing the business, which took the form of a smallfull-length of the model seated, his arm extended and the hand on theknob of his cane. The work, it may at this time of day be mentioned, fell below its general possibilities; but I note the scene through whichI must duly have gaped and wondered (for I had as yet seen no one, leastof all a casual acquaintance in an hotel parlour, "really paint"before, ) as a happy example again of my parent's positive cultivation ofmy society, it would seem, and thought for my social education. And thenthere are other connections; I recall it as a Sunday morning, I recoverthe place itself as a featureless void--bleak and bare, with itsdevelopments all to come, the hotel parlour of other New York days--butvivid still to me is my conscious assistance for the first time atoperations that were to mean much for many of my coming years. Those ofquiet Mr. Crowe held me spellbound--I was to circle so wistfully, asfrom that beginning, round the practice of his art, which in spite ofthese earnest approaches and intentions never on its own part in theleast acknowledged our acquaintance; scarcely much more than it was everto respond, for that matter, to the overtures of the mild aspiranthimself, known to my observation long afterwards, in the London years, as the most touchingly resigned of the children of disappointment. Notonly by association was he a Thackerayan figure, but much as if themaster's hand had stamped him with the outline and the value, with lifeand sweetness and patience--shown, as after the long futility, seatedin a quiet wait, very long too, for the end. That was sad, one couldn'tbut feel; yet it was in the oddest way impossible to take him for afailure. He might have been one of fortune's, strictly; but what wasthat when he was one of Thackeray's own successes?--in the minor line, but with such a grace and such a truth, those of some dim second cousinto Colonel Newcome. 

VIII

I feel that at such a rate I remember too much, and yet this mildapparitionism is only part of it. To look back at all is to meet theapparitional and to find in its ghostly face the silent stare of anappeal. When I fix it, the hovering shade, whether of person or place, it fixes me back and seems the less lost--not to my consciousness, forthat is nothing, but to its own--by my stopping however idly for it. Theday of the daguerreotype, the August afternoon, what was it if not oneof the days when we went to Union Square for luncheon and for moreice-cream and more peaches and even more, even most, enjoyment of easeaccompanied by stimulation of wonder? It may have been indeed that avisit to Mrs. Cannon rather on that occasion engaged us--memory selectsa little confusedly from such a wealth of experience. For the wonder wasthe experience, and that was everywhere, even if I didn't so much findit as take it with me, to be sure of not falling short. Mrs. Cannonlurked near Fourth Street--_that_ I abundantly grasp, not moredefinitely placing her than in what seemed to me a labyrinth of gravebye-streets westwardly "back of" Broadway, yet at no great distancefrom it, where she must have occupied a house at a corner, since wereached her not by steps that went up to a front door but by others thatwent slightly down and formed clearly an independent side access, afeature that affected me as rich and strange. What the steps went downto was a spacious room, light and friendly, so that it couldn't havebeen compromised by an "area, " which offered the brave mystification, amid other mystifications, of being at once a parlour and a shop, a shopin particular for the relief of gentlemen in want ofpockethandkerchiefs, neckties, collars, umbrellas and straw-coveredbottles of the essence known in old New York as "Cullone"--with a verylong and big O. Mrs. Cannon was always seated at some delicate white orother needlework, as if she herself made the collars and the necktiesand hemmed the pockethandkerchiefs, though the air of this conflictswith the sense of importation from remoter centres of fashion breathedby some of the more thrilling of the remarks I heard exchanged, at thesame time that it quickened the oddity of the place. For the oddity wasin many things--above all perhaps in there being no counter, no rows ofshelves and no vulgar till for Mrs. Cannon's commerce; the parlourclearly dissimulated the shop--and positively to that extent that Imight uncannily have wondered what the shop dissimulated. Itrepresented, honestly, I made out in the course of visits that seem tome to have been delightfully repeated, the more informal of theapproaches to our friend's brave background or hinterland, the realm ofher main industry, the array of the furnished apartments forgentlemen--gentlemen largely for whom she imported the Eau de Cologneand the neckties and who struck me as principally consisting of the everremarkable Uncles, desirous at times, on their restless returns fromAlbany or wherever, of an intimacy of comfort that the New York Hotelcouldn't yield. Fascinating thus the implications of Mrs. Cannon'sestablishment, where the talk took the turn, in particular, of Mr. Johnand Mr. Edward and Mr. Howard, and where Miss Maggie or Miss Susie, whowere on the spot in other rocking chairs and with other poised needles, made their points as well as the rest of us. The interest of the placewas that the uncles were somehow always under discussion--as to wherethey at the moment might be, or as to when they were expected, or aboveall as to how (the "how" was the great matter and the fine emphasis)they had last appeared and might be conceived as carrying themselves;and that their consumption of neckties and Eau de Cologne was somehowinordinate: I might have been judging it in my innocence as their only_consommation_. I refer to those sources, I say, the charm of thescene, the finer part of which must yet have been that it didn't, as itregularly lapsed, dispose of _all_ mystifications. If I didn'tunderstand, however, the beauty was that Mrs. Cannon understood (thatwas what she did most of all, even more than hem pockethandkerchiefs andcollars) and my father understood, and each understood that the otherdid, Miss Maggie and Miss Susie being no whit behind. It was only I whodidn't understand--save in so far as I understood _that_, which was akind of pale joy; and meanwhile there would be more to come from unclesso attachingly, so almost portentously, discussable. The vision at anyrate was to stick by me as through its old-world friendly grace, itslight on the elder amenity; the prettier manners, the tender personalnote in the good lady's importations and anxieties, that of thehand-made fabric and the discriminating service. Fit to figure as avalue anywhere--by which I meant in the right corner of any socialpicture, I afterwards said to myself--that refined and composedsignificance of Mrs. Cannon's scene. 

Union Square was a different matter, though with the element there alsothat I made out that I _didn't_ make out (my sense of drama was in thiscase, I think, rather more frightened off than led on;) a drawback forwhich, however, I consoled myself by baked apples and custards, aninveterate feature of our Sunday luncheon there (those of weekdaysbeing various and casual) and by a study of a great store, as it seemedto me, of steel-plated volumes, devoted mainly to the heroines ofRomance, with one in particular, presenting those of Shakespeare, inwhich the plates were so artfully coloured and varnished, and complexionand dress thereby so endeared to memory, that it was for long afterwardsa shock to me at the theatre not to see just those bright images, withtheir peculiar toggeries, come on. I was able but the other day, moreover, to renew almost on the very spot the continuity ofcontemplation; large lumpish presences, precarious creations of a day, seemed to have elbowed out of the Square all but one or two of the minormonuments, pleasant appreciable things, of the other time; yet close toUniversity Place the old house of the picture-books and the custards andthe domestic situation had, though disfigured and overscored, not quitereceived its death-stroke; I disengaged, by a mere identification ofobscured window and profaned portico, a whole chapter of history; whichfact should indeed be a warning to penetration, a practical plea herefor the superficial--by its exhibition of the rate at which therelations of any gage of experience multiply and ramify from the momentthe mind begins to handle it. I pursued a swarm of such relations, onthe occasion I speak of, up and down West Fourteenth Street and over toSeventh Avenue, running most of them to earth with difficulty, butfinding them at half a dozen points quite confess to a queer stalesameness. The gage of experience, as I say, had in these cases beenstrangely spared--the sameness had in two or three of them held out aswith conscious craft. But these are impressions I shall presently findit impossible not to take up again at any cost. 

I first "realised" Fourteenth Street at a very tender age, and Iperfectly recall that flush of initiation, consisting as it did of anafternoon call with my father at a house there situated, one of analready fairly mature row on the south side and quite near Sixth Avenue. It was as "our" house, just acquired by us, that he thus invited myapproval of it--heaping as that does once more the measure of my smalladhesiveness. I thoroughly approved--quite as if I had foreseen that theplace was to become to me for ever so long afterwards a sort ofanchorage of the spirit, being at the hour as well a fascination for theeyes, since it was there I first fondly gaped at the process of"decorating. " I saw charming men in little caps ingeniously formed offolded newspaper--where in the roaring city are those quaint badges ofthe handicrafts now?--mounted on platforms and casting plaster intomoulds; I saw them in particular paste long strips of yellowish grainedpaper upon walls, and I vividly remember thinking the grain and thepattern (for there was a pattern from waist-high down, a complication ofdragons and sphinxes and scrolls and other fine flourishes) a wonderfuland sumptuous thing. I would give much, I protest, to recover its lostsecret, to see what it really was--so interesting ever to retrace, andsometimes so difficult of belief, in a community of one's own knowing, is the general æsthetic adventure, are the dangers and delusions, theall but fatal accidents and mortal ailments, that Taste has smilinglysurvived and after which the fickle creature may still quite brazenlylook one in the face. Our quarter must have bristled in those years withthe very worst of the danger-signals--though indeed they figured but ascoarse complacencies; the age of "brown stone" had just been ushered in, and that material, in deplorable, in monstrous form, over all the vacantspaces and eligible sites then numerous between the Fifth and SixthAvenues, more and more affronted the day. We seemed to have come up froma world of quieter harmonies, the world of Washington Square andthereabouts, so decent in its dignity, so instinctively unpretentious. There were even there spots of shabbiness that I recall, such as thecharmless void reaching westward from the two houses that formed theFifth Avenue corner to our grandfather's, our New York grandfather'shouse, itself built by him, with the happiest judgment, not so longbefore, and at no distant time in truth to be solidly but much lesspleasingly neighboured. The ancient name of the Parade-ground still hungabout the central space, and the ancient wooden palings, then sogenerally accounted proper for central spaces--the whole imageinfinitely recedes--affected even my innocent childhood as rustic andmean. Union Square, at the top of the Avenue--or what practically thencounted for the top--was encased, more smartly, in iron rails andfurther adorned with a fountain and an aged amateur-looking constable, awful to my generation in virtue of his star and his switch. I associateless elegance with the Parade-ground, into which we turned forrecreation from my neighbouring dame's-school and where the paradesdeployed on no scale to check our own evolutions; though indeed theswitch of office abounded there, for what I best recover in theconnection is a sense and smell of perpetual autumn, with the ground somuffled in the leaves and twigs of the now long defunct ailanthus-treethat most of our own motions were a kicking of them up--the semi-sweetrankness of the plant was all in the air--and small boys pranced aboutas cavaliers whacking their steeds. There were bigger boys, bolderstill, to whom this vegetation, or something kindred that escapes me, yielded long black beanlike slips which they lighted and smoked, thesmaller ones staring and impressed; I at any rate think of the small oneI can best speak for as constantly wading through an Indian summer ofthese _disjecta_, fascinated by the leaf-kicking process, the joy oflonely trudges, over a course in which those parts and the slightly morenorthward pleasantly confound themselves. These were the homely joys ofthe nobler neighbourhood, elements that had their match, and more, hardby the Fourteenth Street home, in the poplars, the pigs, the poultry, and the "Irish houses, " two or three in number, exclusive of a very fineDutch one, seated then, this last, almost as among gardens and groves--abreadth of territory still apparent, on the spot, in that marginal ease, that spread of occupation, to the nearly complete absence of which NewYork aspects owe their general failure of "style. "

But there were finer vibrations as well--for the safely-prowling infant, though none perhaps so fine as when he stood long and drank deep atthose founts of romance that gushed from the huge placards of thetheatre. These announcements, at a day when advertisement wascontentedly but information, had very much the form of magnifiedplaybills; they consisted of vast oblong sheets, yellow or white, pastedupon tall wooden screens or into hollow sockets, and acquainting thepossible playgoer with every circumstance that might seriously interesthim. These screens rested sociably against trees and lamp-posts as wellas against walls and fences, to all of which they were, I suppose, familiarly attached; but the sweetest note of their confidence was that, in parallel lines and the good old way, characters facing performers, they gave the whole cast, which in the "palmy days" of the drama ofteninvolved many names. I catch myself again in the fact of endlessstations in Fifth Avenue near the southwest corner of Ninth Street, as Ithink it must have been, since the dull long "run" didn't exist then forthe young _badaud_ and the poster there was constantly and bravelyrenewed. It engaged my attention, whenever I passed, as the canvas of agreat master in a great gallery holds that of the pious tourist, andeven though I can't at this day be sure of its special reference I waswith precocious passion "at home" among the theatres--thanks to ourparents' fond interest in them (as from this distance I see it flourishfor the time) and to the liberal law and happy view under which theaddiction was shared with us, they never caring much for things wecouldn't care for and generally holding that what was good to them wouldbe also good for their children. It had the effect certainly ofpreparing for these, so far as we should incline to cherish it, astrange little fund of theatrical reminiscence, a small hoard ofmemories maintaining itself in my own case for a lifetime and causingme to wonder to-day, before its abundance, on how many evenings of themonth, or perhaps even of the week, we were torn from the pursuits ofhome. 

IX

The truth is doubtless, however, much less in the wealth of myexperience than in the tenacity of my impression, the fact that I havelost nothing of what I saw and that though I can't now quite divide thetotal into separate occasions the various items surprisingly swarm forme. I shall return to some of them, wishing at present only to make mypoint of when and how the seeds were sown that afterwards so thicklysprouted and flowered. I was greatly to love the drama, at its best, asa "form"; whatever variations of faith or curiosity I was to know inrespect to the infirm and inadequate theatre. There was of courseanciently no question for us of the drama at its best; and indeed whileI lately by chance looked over a copious collection of theatricalportraits, beginning with the earliest age of lithography andphotography as so applied, and documentary in the highest degree on thepersonalities, as we nowadays say, of the old American stage, stupefaction grew sharp in me and scepticism triumphed, so vulgar, sobarbarous, seemed the array of types, so extraordinarily provincial thenote of every figure, so less than scant the claim of suchphysiognomies and such reputations. Rather dismal, everywhere, I admit, the histrionic image with the artificial lights turned off--the fatiguedand disconnected face reduced to its mere self and resembling someclosed and darkened inn with the sign still swung but the place blightedfor want of custom. That consideration weighs; but what a "gang, " allthe same, when thus left to their own devices, the performers, men andwomen alike, of that world of queer appreciations! I ought perhaps tobear on them lightly in view of what in especial comes back to me; thesense of the sacred thrill with which I began to watch the greencurtain, the particular one that was to rise to The Comedy of Errors onthe occasion that must have been, for what I recall of its almostunbearable intensity, the very first of my ever sitting at a play. Ishould have been indebted for the momentous evening in that case to Mr. William Burton, whose small theatre in Chambers Street, to the rear ofStewart's big shop and hard by the Park, as the Park was at that timeunderstood, offered me then my prime initiation. Let me not complain ofmy having owed the adventure to a still greater William as well, northink again without the right intensity, the scarce tolerable throb, ofthe way the torment of the curtain was mixed, half so dark a defianceand half so rich a promise. One's eyes bored into it in vain, and yetone knew it _would_ rise at the named hour, the only question being ifone could exist till then. The play had been read to us during the day;a celebrated English actor, whose name I inconsistently forget, hadarrived to match Mr. Burton as the other of the Dromios; and theagreeable Mrs. Holman, who had to my relentless vision too retreating achin, was so good as to represent Adriana. I regarded Mrs. Holman as afriend, though in no warmer light than that in which I regarded MissMary Taylor--save indeed that Mrs. Holman had the pull, on one'saffections, of "coming out" to sing in white satin and quiteirrelevantly between the acts; an advantage she shared with the youngerand fairer and more dashing, the dancing, Miss Malvina, who footed itand tambourined it and shawled it, irruptively, in lonely state. Whennot admiring Mr. Burton in Shakespeare we admired him as Paul Pry, asMr. Toodles and as Aminadab Sleek in The Serious Family, and we musthave admired him very much--his huge fat person, his huge fat face andhis vast slightly pendulous cheek, surmounted by a sort of elephantinewink, to which I impute a remarkable baseness, being still perfectlypresent to me. 

We discriminated, none the less; we thought Mr. Blake a much finercomedian, much more of a gentleman and a scholar--"mellow" Mr. Blake, whom with the brave and emphatic Mrs. Blake (_how_ they must have madetheir points!) I connect partly with the Burton scene and partly withthat, of slightly subsequent creation, which, after flourishing awhileslightly further up Broadway under the charmlessly commercial name ofBrougham's Lyceum (we had almost only Lyceums and Museums and LectureRooms and Academies of Music for playhouse and opera then, ) entered upona long career and a migratory life as Wallack's Theatre. I faildoubtless to keep _all_ my associations clear, but what is important, orwhat I desire at least to make pass for such, is that when we mostadmired Mr. Blake we also again admired Miss Mary Taylor; and it was atBrougham's, not at Burton's, that we rendered _her_ thattribute--reserved for her performance of the fond theatrical daughter inthe English version of Le Père de la Débutante, where I see the charmingpanting dark-haired creature, in flowing white classically relieved by agold tiara and a golden scarf, rush back from the supposed stage to therepresented green-room, followed by thunders of applause, and throwherself upon the neck of the broken-down old gentleman in a blue coatwith brass buttons who must have been after all, on second thoughts, Mr. Placide. Greater flights or more delicate shades the art of patheticcomedy was at that time held not to achieve; only I straighten it outthat Mr. And Mrs. Blake, not less than Miss Mary Taylor (whopreponderantly haunts my vision, even to the disadvantage of Miss KateHorn in Nan the Good-for-Nothing, until indeed she is displaced by thebrilliant Laura Keene) did migrate to Brougham's, where we found themall themselves as Goldsmith's Hardcastle pair and other like matters. Werallied especially to Blake as Dogberry, on the occasion of my secondShakespearean night, for as such I seem to place it, when Laura Keeneand Mr. Lester--the Lester Wallack that was to be--did Beatrice andBenedick. I yield to this further proof that we had our proportion ofShakespeare, though perhaps antedating that rapt vision of Much Ado, which may have been preceded by the dazzled apprehension of A MidsummerNight's Dream at the Broadway (there _was_ a confessed Theatre;) thislatter now present to me in every bright particular. It supplied us, wemust have felt, our greatest conceivable adventure--I cannot otherwiseaccount for its emerging so clear. Everything here is as of yesterday, the identity of the actors, the details of their dress, the charmimparted by the sisters Gougenheim, the elegant elder as the infatuatedHelena and the other, the roguish "Joey" as the mischievous Puck. Hermiawas Mrs. Nagle, in a short salmon-coloured peplum over a whitepetticoat, the whole bulgingly confined by a girdle of shining gilt andforming a contrast to the loose scarves of Helena, while Mr. Nagle, notdevoid, I seem to remember, of a blue chin and the latency of a finebrogue, was either Lysander or Demetrius; Mr. Davidge (also, I surmise, with a brogue) was Bottom the weaver and Madame Ponisi Oberon--MadamePonisi whose range must have been wide, since I see her also as thewhite-veiled heroine of The Cataract of the Ganges, where, preferringdeath to dishonour, she dashes up the more or less perpendicularwaterfall on a fiery black steed and with an effect only a littleblighted by the chance flutter of a drapery out of which peeps the legof a trouser and a big male foot; and then again, though presumably at asomewhat later time or, in strictness, _after_ childhood's fond hour, asthis and that noble matron or tragedy queen. I descry her at any rate asrepresenting all characters alike with a broad brown face framed inbands or crowns or other heavy headgear out of which cropped a row ofvery small tight black curls. The Cataract of the Ganges is all there aswell, a tragedy of temples and idols and wicked rajahs and real water, with Davidge and Joey Gougenheim again for comic relief--though all in acoarser radiance, thanks to the absence of fairies and Amazons andmoonlit mechanical effects, the charm above all, so seen, of the playwithin the play; and I rank it in that relation with Green Bushes, despite the celebrity in the latter of Madame Céleste, who came to usstraight out of London and whose admired walk up the stage as Miami thehuntress, a wonderful majestic and yet voluptuous stride enhanced by ashort kilt, black velvet leggings and a gun haughtily borne on theshoulder, is vividly before me as I write. The piece in question was, Irecall, from the pen of Mr. Bourcicault, as he then wrote his name--hewas so early in the field and must have been from long before, inasmuchas he now appears to me to have supplied Mr. Brougham, of the Lyceumaforesaid, with his choicest productions. 

I sit again at London Assurance, with Mrs. Wallack--"Fanny" Wallack, Ithink, not that I quite know who she was--as Lady Gay Spanker, flushedand vociferous, first in a riding-habit with a tail yards long andafterwards in yellow satin with scarce a tail at all; I am present alsoat Love in a Maze, in which the stage represented, with primitive art Ifear, a supposedly intricate garden-labyrinth, and in which I admiredfor the first time Mrs. Russell, afterwards long before the public asMrs. Hoey, even if opining that she wanted, especially for thelow-necked ordeal, less osseous a structure. There are pieces of thatgeneral association, I admit, the clue to which slips from me; the dramaof modern life and of French origin--though what was then not of Frenchorigin?--in which Miss Julia Bennett, fresh from triumphs at theHaymarket, made her first appearance, in a very becoming white bonnet, either as a brilliant adventuress or as the innocent victim oflicentious design, I forget which, though with a sense somehow that thewhite bonnet, when of true elegance, was the note at that period of theadventuress; Miss Julia Bennett with whom at a later age one was torenew acquaintance as the artful and ample Mrs. Barrow, full of mannerand presence and often Edwin Booth's Portia, Desdemona and Julie deMortemer. I figure her as having in the dimmer phase succeeded to MissLaura Keene at Wallack's on the secession thence of this originalcharmer of our parents, the flutter of whose prime advent is perfectlypresent to me, with the relish expressed for that "English" sweetness ofher speech (I already wondered why it _shouldn't_ be English) which wasnot as the speech mostly known to us. The Uncles, within my hearing, even imitated, for commendation, some of her choicer sounds, to which Istrained my ear on seeing her afterwards as Mrs. Chillington in therefined comedietta of A Morning Call, where she made delightful game ofMr. Lester as Sir Edward Ardent, even to the point of causing him tocrawl about on all fours and covered with her shawl after the fashion ofa horse-blanket. That delightful impression was then unconscious of theblight to come--that of my apprehending, years after, that thebrilliant comedietta was the tribute of our Anglo-Saxon taste to Alfredde Musset's elegant proverb of the Porte Ouverte ou Fermée, in whichnothing could find itself less at home than the horseplay of the Englishversion. Miss Laura Keene, with a native grace at the start, a fresh anddelicate inspiration, I infer from the kind of pleasure she appears tohave begun with giving, was to live to belie her promise and, becominghard and raddled, forfeit (on the evidence) all claim to the higherdistinction; a fact not surprising under the lurid light projected bysuch a sign of the atmosphere of ineptitude as an accepted and condonedperversion to vulgarity of Musset's perfect little work. How _could_quality of talent consort with so dire an absence of quality in thematerial offered it? where could such lapses lead but to dust anddesolation and what happy instinct not be smothered in an air sodismally non-conducting? Is it a foolish fallacy that these matters mayhave been on occasion, at that time, worth speaking of? is it onlypresumable that everything was perfectly cheap and common and everyoneperfectly bad and barbarous and that even the least corruptible of ourtypical spectators were too easily beguiled and too helplessly kind? Thebeauty of the main truth as to any remembered matter looked at in duedetachment, or in other words through the haze of time, is thatcomprehension has then become one with criticism, compassion, as it mayreally be called, one with musing vision, and the whole company of theanciently restless, with their elations and mistakes, their sinceritiesand fallacies and vanities and triumphs, embalmed for us in the mildessence of their collective submission to fate. We needn't be strenuousabout them unless we particularly want to, and are glad to remember inseason all that this would imply of the strenuous about our own_origines_, our muddled initiations. If nothing is more certain for usthan that many persons, within our recollection, couldn't help beingrather generally unadmonished and unaware, so nothing is more in thenote of peace than that such a perceived state, pushed to a point, makesour scales of judgment but ridiculously rattle. _Our_ admonition, oursuperior awareness, is of many things--and, among these, of howinfinitely, at the worst, they lived, the pale superseded, and how muchit was by their virtue. 

Which reflections, in the train of such memories as those just gathered, may perhaps seem over-strained--though they really to my own eyes causethe images to multiply. Still others of these break in upon me andrefuse to be slighted; reconstituting as I practically am the history ofmy fostered imagination, for whatever it may be worth, I won't pretendto a disrespect for _any_ contributive particle. I left myself justabove staring at the Fifth Avenue poster, and I can't but linger therewhile the vision it evokes insists on swarming. It was the age of thearrangements of Dickens for the stage, vamped-up promptly on every sceneand which must have been the roughest theatrical tinkers' work, but attwo or three of which we certainly assisted. I associate them with Mr. Brougham's temple of the art, yet am at the same time beset with theCaptain Cuttle of Dombey and Son in the form of the big Burton, whonever, I earnestly conceive, graced that shrine, so that I wander atrifle confusedly. Isn't it he whom I remember as a monstrous Micawber, the coarse parody of a charming creation, with the entire baldness of ahuge Easter egg and collar-points like the sails of Mediterraneanfeluccas? Dire of course for all temperance in these connections was theneed to conform to the illustrations of Phiz, himself already animprovising parodist and happy only so long as not imitated, notliterally reproduced. Strange enough the "æsthetic" of artists who coulddesire but literally to reproduce. I give the whole question up, however, I stray too in the dust, and with a positive sense of having, in the first place, but languished at home when my betters admired MissCushman--terribly out of the picture and the frame we should to-daypronounce her, I fear--as the Nancy of Oliver Twist: as far away thismust have been as the lifetime of the prehistoric "Park, " to which itwas just within my knowledge that my elders went for opera, to come backon us sounding those rich old Italian names, Bosio and Badiali, Ronconiand Steffanone, I am not sure I have them quite right; signs, of arueful sound to us, that the line as to our infant participation _was_somewhere drawn. It had not been drawn, I all the more like to remember, when, under proper protection, at Castle Garden, I listened to thatrarest of infant phenomena, Adelina Patti, poised in an armchair thathad been pushed to the footlights and announcing her incomparable gift. She was about of our own age, she was one of us, even though at the sametime the most prodigious of fairies, of glittering fables. Thatprinciple of selection was indeed in abeyance while I sat with my mothereither at Tripler Hall or at Niblo's--I am vague about the occasion, butthe names, as for fine old confused reasons, plead alike to my pen--andpaid a homage quite other than critical, I dare say, to the thenslightly worn Henrietta Sontag, Countess Rossi, who struck us assupremely elegant in pink silk and white lace flounces and with whomthere had been for certain members of our circle some contact orintercourse that I have wonderingly lost. I learned at that hour in anycase what "acclamation" might mean, and have again before me the vasthigh-piled auditory thundering applause at the beautiful pink lady'sclear bird-notes; a thrilling, a tremendous experience and my sole othermemory of concert-going, at that age, save the impression of a strangehuddled hour in some smaller public place, some very minor hall, underdim lamps and again in my mother's company, where we were so near theimprovised platform that my nose was brushed by the petticoats of thedistinguished amateur who sang "Casta Diva, " a very fine fair woman witha great heaving of bosom and flirt of crinoline, and that the ringlettedItalian gentleman in black velvet and a romantic voluminous cloak whorepresented, or rather who professionally and uncontrollably was, anImprovisatore, had for me the effect, as I crouched gaping, of quitebellowing down my throat. That occasion, I am clear, was a concert for acharity, with the volunteer performance and the social patroness, and ithad squeezed in where it would--at the same time that I somehow connectthe place, in Broadway, on the right going down and not much belowFourth Street (except that everything seems to me to have been justbelow Fourth Street when not just above, ) with the scene of my greatpublic exposure somewhat later, the wonderful exhibition of SignorBlitz, the peerless conjurer, who, on my attending his entertainmentwith W. J. And our frequent comrade of the early time "Hal" Coster, practised on my innocence to seduce me to the stage and there plunge meinto the shame of my sad failure to account arithmetically for hisbewilderingly subtracted or added or divided pockethandkerchiefs andplaying-cards; a paralysis of wit as to which I once more, and with thesame wan despair, feel my companions' shy telegraphy of relief, theirsnickerings and mouthings and raised numerical fingers, reach me fromthe benches. 

The second definite matter in the Dickens connection is the Smike ofMiss Weston--whose prænomen I frivolously forget (though I fear it wasLizzie, ) but who was afterwards Mrs. E. L. Davenport and then, sequentlyto some public strife or chatter, Mrs. Charles Matthews--in a version ofNicholas Nickleby that gracelessly managed to be all tearful melodrama, long-lost foundlings, wicked Ralph Nicklebys and scowling Arthur Grides, with other baffled villains, and scarcely at all Crummleses andKenwigses, much less Squeerses; though there must have been something ofDotheboys Hall for the proper tragedy of Smike and for the broadYorkshire effect, a precious theatrical value, of John Brodie. Theineffaceability was the anguish, to my tender sense, of Nicholas'sstarved and tattered and fawning and whining protégé; in face of mysharp retention of which through all the years who shall deny theimmense authority of the theatre, or that the stage is the mightiest ofmodern engines? Such at least was to be the force of the Dickensimprint, however applied, in the soft clay of our generation; it was toresist so serenely the wash of the waves of time. To be brought up thusagainst the author of it, or to speak at all of the dawn of one's earlyconsciousness of it and of his presence and power, is to begin to treadground at once sacred and boundless, the associations of which, loominglarge, warn us off even while they hold. He did too much for us surelyever to leave us free--free of judgment, free of reaction, even shouldwe care to be, which heaven forbid: he laid his hand on us in a way toundermine as in no other case the power of detached appraisement. Wereact against other productions of the general kind without "liking"them the less, but we somehow liked Dickens the more for havingforfeited half the claim to appreciation. That process belongs to thefact that criticism, roundabout him, is somehow futile and tasteless. His own taste is easily impugned, but he entered so early into the bloodand bone of our intelligence that it always remained better than thetaste of overhauling him. When I take him up to-day and find myselfholding off, I simply stop: not holding off, that is, but holding on, and from the very fear to do so; which sounds, I recognise, likeperusal, like renewal, of the scantest. I don't renew, I wouldn't renewfor the world; wouldn't, that is, with one's treasure so hoarded in thedusty chamber of youth, let in the intellectual air. Happy the house oflife in which such chambers still hold out, even with the draught of theintellect whistling through the passages. We were practicallycontemporary, contemporary with the issues, the fluttering monthlynumbers--that was the point; it made for us a good fortune, constitutedfor us in itself romance, on which nothing, to the end, succeeds inlaying its hands. 

The whole question dwells for me in a single small reminiscence, thoughthere are others still: that of my having been sent to bed one evening, in Fourteenth Street, as a very small boy, at an hour when, in thelibrary and under the lamp, one of the elder cousins from Albany, theyoungest of an orphaned brood of four, of my grandmother's mostextravagant adoption, had begun to read aloud to my mother the new, which must have been the first, instalment of David Copperfield. I hadfeigned to withdraw, but had only retreated to cover close at hand, thefriendly shade of some screen or drooping table-cloth, folded up behindwhich and glued to the carpet, I held my breath and listened. I listenedlong and drank deep while the wondrous picture grew, but the tense cordat last snapped under the strain of the Murdstones and I broke into thesobs of sympathy that disclosed my subterfuge. I was this timeeffectively banished, but the ply then taken was ineffaceable. Iremember indeed just afterwards finding the sequel, in especial the vastextrusion of the Micawbers, beyond my actual capacity; which took a fewyears to grow adequate--years in which the general contagiousconsciousness, and our own household response not least, breathedheavily through Hard Times, Bleak House and Little Dorrit; the seeds ofacquaintance with Chuzzlewit and Dombey and Son, these coming thicklyon, I had found already sown. I was to feel that I had been born, bornto a rich awareness, under the very meridian; there sprouted in thoseyears no such other crop of ready references as the golden harvest ofCopperfield. Yet if I was to wait to achieve the happier of theserecognitions I had already pored over Oliver Twist--albeit now uncertainof the relation borne by that experience to the incident just recalled. When Oliver was new to me, at any rate, he was already old to mybetters; whose view of his particular adventures and exposures must havebeen concerned, I think, moreover, in the fact of my public and livelywonder about them. It was an exhibition deprecated--to infant innocenceI judge; unless indeed my remembrance of enjoying it only on the termsof fitful snatches in another, though a kindred, house is due mainly tothe existence there of George Cruikshank's splendid form of the work, of which our own foreground was clear. It perhaps even seemed to me moreCruikshank's than Dickens's; it was a thing of such vividly terribleimages, and all marked with that peculiarity of Cruikshank that theoffered flowers or goodnesses, the scenes and figures intended tocomfort and cheer, present themselves under his hand as but more subtlysinister, or more suggestively queer, than the frank badnesses andhorrors. The nice people and the happy moments, in the plates, frightened me almost as much as the low and the awkward; which didn'thowever make the volumes a source of attraction the less toward thathigh and square old back-parlour just westward of Sixth Avenue (as we inthe same street were related to it) that formed, romantically, half ouralternative domestic field and offered to our small inquiring steps alarger range and privilege. If the Dickens of those years was, as I havejust called him, the great actuality of the current imagination, so I atonce meet him in force as a feature even of conditions in which he wasbut indirectly involved. 

For the other house, the house we most haunted after our own, was thatof our cousin Albert, still another of the blest orphans, though thistime of our mother's kindred; and if it was my habit, as I have hinted, to attribute to orphans as orphans a circumstantial charm, a settingnecessarily more delightful than our father'd and mother'd one, sothere spread about this appointed comrade, the perfection of the type, inasmuch as he alone was neither brother'd nor sister'd, an air ofpossibilities that were none the less vivid for being quite indefinite. He was to embody in due course, poor young man, some of thesepossibilities--those that had originally been for me the vaguest of all;but to fix his situation from my present view is not so much to wonderthat it spoke to me of a wild freedom as to see in it the elements of arich and rounded picture. The frame was still there but a short timesince, cracked and empty, broken and gaping, like those few others, ofthe general overgrown scene, that my late quest had puzzled out; andthis has somehow helped me to read back into it the old figures and theold long story, told as with excellent art. We knew the figures wellwhile they lasted and had with them the happiest relation, but withoutdoing justice to their truth of outline, their felicity of character andforce of expression and function, above all to the compositional harmonyin which they moved. That lives again to my considering eyes, and Iadmire as never before the fine artistry of fate. Our cousin's guardian, the natural and the legal, was his aunt, his only one, who was thecousin of our mother and our own aunt, virtually _our_ only one, so faras a felt and adopted closeness of kinship went; and the three, daughters of two sole and much-united sisters, had been so brought uptogether as to have quite all the signs and accents of the same strainand the same nest. The cousin Helen of our young prospect was thus allbut the sister Helen of our mother's lifetime, as was to happen, and wasscarcely less a stout brave presence and an emphasised character for thenew generation than for the old; noted here as she is, in particular, for her fine old-time value of clearness and straightness. I see in herstrong simplicity, that of an earlier, quieter world, a New York ofbetter manners and better morals and homelier beliefs, the very elementsof some portrait by a grave Dutch or other truth-seeking master; shelooks out with some of the strong marks, the anxious honesty, the modesthumour, the folded resting hands, the dark handsome serious attire, theimportant composed cap, almost the badge of a guild or an order, thathang together about the images of past worthies, of whichever sex, whohave had, as one may say, the courage of their character, and qualifythem for places in great collections. I note with appreciation that shewas strenuously, actively good, and have the liveliest impression boththat no one was ever better, and that her goodness somehow testifies forthe whole tone of a society, a remarkable cluster of private decencies. Her value to my imagination is even most of all perhaps in her merelocal consistency, her fine old New York ignorance and rigour. Hertraditions, scant but stiff, had grown there, close to her--they wereall she needed, and she lived by them candidly and stoutly. That therehave been persons so little doubtful of duty helps to show us howsocieties grow. A proportionately small amount of absolute convictionabout it will carry, we thus make out, a vast dead weight of merecomparative. She was as anxious over hers indeed as if it had ever beenin question--which is a proof perhaps that being void of imagination, when you are quite entirely void, makes scarcely more for comfort thanhaving too much, which only makes in a manner for a homeless freedom oreven at the worst for a questioned veracity. With a big installedconscience there is virtue in a grain of the figurative faculty--it actsas oil to the stiff machine. 

Yet this life of straight and narrow insistences seated so clearly inour view didn't take up all the room in the other house, the house ofthe pictured, the intermittent Oliver, though of the fewer books ingeneral than ours, and of the finer proportions and less peopled spaces(there were but three persons to fill them) as well as of the moreturbaned and powdered family portraits, one of these, the most antique, a "French pastel, " which must have been charming, of a young collateralancestor who had died on the European tour. A vast marginal rangeseemed to me on the contrary to surround the adolescent nephew, who wassome three years, I judge, beyond me in age and had other horizons andprospects than ours. No question of "Europe, " for him, but a patrioticpreparation for acquaintance with the South and West, or what was thencalled the West--he was to "see his own country first, " winking at uswhile he did so; though he was, in spite of differences, so nearly andnaturally neighbour'd and brother'd with us that the extensions of hisrange and the charms of his position counted somehow as the limits andthe humilities of ours. He went neither to our schools nor to ourhotels, but hovered out of our view in some other educational air that Ican't now point to, and had in a remote part of the State a vast wildproperty of his own, known as the Beaverkill, to which, so far from hisaunt's and his uncle's taking him there, he affably took them, and towhich also he vainly invited W. J. And me, pointing thereby to us, however, though indirectly enough perhaps, the finest childish case wewere to know for the famous acceptance of the inevitable. It wasapparently not to be thought of that instead of the inevitable we shouldaccept the invitation; the place was in the wilderness, incalculablydistant, reached by a whole day's rough drive from the railroad, throughevery danger of flood and field, with prowling bears thrown in andprobable loss of limb, of which there were sad examples, from swingingscythes and axes; but we of course measured our privation just by thosefacts, and grew up, so far as we did then grow, to believe thatpleasures beyond price had been cruelly denied us. I at any rate myselfgrew up sufficiently to wonder if poor Albert's type, as it developed tothe anxious elder view from the first, mightn't rather have underminedcountenance; his pleasant foolish face and odd shy air of beingsuspected or convicted on grounds less vague to himself than to us maywell have appeared symptoms of the course, of the "rig, " he waseventually to run. I could think of him but as the _fils de famille_ideally constituted; not that I could then use for him that designation, but that I felt he must belong to an important special class, which hein fact formed in his own person. Everything was right, truly, for thesefelicities--to speak of them only as dramatic or pictorial values; sinceif we were present all the while at more of a drama than we knew, so atleast, to my vague divination, the scene and the figures were there, notexcluding the chorus, and I must have had the instinct of their being asright as possible. I see the actors move again through the high, ratherbedimmed rooms--it is always a matter of winter twilight, firelight, lamplight; each one appointed to his or her part and perfect for thepicture, which gave a sense of fulness without ever being crowded. 

That composition had to wait awhile, in the earliest time, to find itsproper centre, having been from the free point of view I thus cultivatea little encumbered by the presence of the most aged of our relatives, the oldest person I remember to have familiarly known--if it can becalled familiar to have stood off in fear of such strange proofs ofaccomplished time: our Great-aunt Wyckoff, our maternal grandmother'selder sister, I infer, and an image of living antiquity, as I figure herto-day, that I was never to see surpassed. I invest her in this visionwith all the idol-quality that may accrue to the venerable--solidlyseated or even throned, hooded and draped and tucked-in, with bigprotective protrusive ears to her chair which helped it to the effect ofa shrine, and a large face in which the odd blackness of eyebrow and ofa couple of other touches suggested the conventional marks of a paintedimage. She signified her wants as divinities do, for I recover from herpresence neither sound nor stir, remembering of her only that, asdescribed by her companions, the pious ministrants, she had "said" soand so when she hadn't spoken at all. Was she really, as she seemed, sotremendously old, so old that her daughter, our mother's cousin Helenand ours, would have had to come to her in middle life to account forit, or did antiquity at that time set in earlier and was surrender ofappearance and dress, matching the intrinsic decay, only morecomplacent, more submissive and, as who should say, more abject? I havemy choice of these suppositions, each in its way of so lively aninterest that I scarce know which to prefer, though inclining perhaps alittle to the idea of the backward reach. If Aunt Wyckoff was, as Ifirst remember her, scarce more than seventy, say, the thought fills mewith one sort of joy, the joy of our modern, our so generally greaterand nobler effect of duration: who _wouldn't_ more subtly strive forthat effect and, intelligently so striving, reach it better, than suchnon-questioners of fate?--the moral of whose case is surely that if theygave up too soon and too softly we wiser witnesses can reverse theprocess and fight the whole ground. But I apologise to the heavy shadein question if she had really drained her conceivable cup, and for thatmatter rather like to suppose it, so rich and strange is the pleasure offinding the past--the Past above all--answered for to one's own touch, this being our only way to be sure of it. It was the Past that onetouched in her, the American past of a preponderant unthinkablequeerness; and great would seem the fortune of helping on the continuityat some other far end. 

X

It was at all events the good lady's disappearance that more markedlycleared the decks--cleared them for that long, slow, sustained actionwith which I make out that nothing was afterwards to interfere. She hadsat there under her stiff old father's portrait, with which her own, onthe other side of the chimney, mildly balanced; but these presencesacted from that time but with cautious reserves. A brave, finished, clear-eyed image of such properties as the last-named, in particular, our already-mentioned Alexander Robertson, a faint and diminishedreplica of whose picture (the really fine original, as I remember it, having been long since perverted from our view) I lately renewedacquaintance with in a pious institution of his founding, where, aftermore than one push northward and some easy accommodations, he lives oninto a world that knows him not and of some of the high improvements ofwhich he can little enough have dreamed. Of the world he had personallyknown there was a feature or two still extant; the legend of his acresand his local concerns, as well as of his solid presence among them, wasconsiderably cherished by us, though for ourselves personally therelics of his worth were a lean feast to sit at. They were by someinvidious turn of fate all to help to constitute the heritage of ouryoung kinsman, the orphaned and administered _fils de famille_, whosefather, Alexander Wyckoff, son of our great-aunt and one of the twobrothers of cousin Helen, just discernibly flushes for me through theominous haze that preceded the worst visitation of cholera New York wasto know. Alexander, whom, early widowed and a victim of that visitation, I evoke as with something of a premature baldness, of a blackness ofshort whisker, of an expanse of light waistcoat and of a harmless pompof manner, appeared to have quite predominantly "come in" for the valuesin question, which he promptly transmitted to his small motherless sonand which were destined so greatly to increase. There are clues I haveonly lost, not making out in the least to-day why the sons of AuntWyckoff should have been so happily distinguished. Our great-uncle ofthe name isn't even a dim ghost to me--he had passed away beyond recallbefore I began to take notice; but I hold, rightly, I feel, that it wasnot to his person these advantages were attached. They could havedescended to our grandmother but in a minor degree--we should otherwisehave been more closely aware of them. It comes to me that so far as wehad at all been aware it had mostly gone off in smoke: I have still inmy ears some rueful allusion to "lands, " apparently in the generalcountry of the Beaverkill, which had come to my mother and her sister astheir share of their grandfather Robertson's amplitude, among thefurther-apportioned shares of their four brothers, only to be sacrificedlater on at some scant appraisement. It is in the nature of "lands" at adistance and in regions imperfectly reclaimed to be spoken of always asimmense, and I at any rate entertained the sense that we should havebeen great proprietors, in the far wilderness, if we had only taken moreinterest. Our interests were peculiarly urban--though not indeed thatthis had helped us much. Something of the mystery of the vanished acreshung for me about my maternal uncle, John Walsh, the only one whoappeared to have been in respect to the dim possessions much on thespot, but I too crudely failed of my chance of learning from him whathad become of them. 

Not that they had seen _him_, poor gentleman, very much further, or thatI had any strong sense of opportunity; I catch at but two or threeprojections of him, and only at one of his standing much at his ease: Isee him before the fire in the Fourteenth Street library, sturdy, withstraight black hair and as if the Beaverkill had rather stamped him, butclean-shaven, in a "stock" and a black frock-coat--I hear him perhapsstill more than I see him deliver himself on the then great subject ofJenny Lind, whom he seemed to have emerged from the wilderness to listento and as to whom I remember thinking it (strange small critic that Imust have begun to be) a note of the wilderness in him that he spoke ofher as "Miss Lind"; albeit I scarce know, and must even less have knownthen, what other form he could have used. The rest of my sense of him istinged with the ancient pity--that of our so exercised response in thoseyears to the general sad case of uncles, aunts and cousins obscurelyafflicted (the uncles in particular) and untimely gathered. Sharp to methe memory of a call, one dusky wintry Sunday afternoon, in ClintonPlace, at the house of my uncle Robertson Walsh, then the head of mymother's family, where the hapless younger brother lay dying; whom I wastaken to the top of the house to see and of the sinister twilightgrimness of whose lot, stretched there, amid odours of tobacco and ofdrugs, or of some especial strong drug, in one of the chambers of what Iremember as a remote and unfriended arching attic, probably in fact thebest place of prescribed quiet, I was to carry away a fast impression. All the uncles, of whichever kindred, were to come to seem sooner orlater to be dying, more or less before our eyes, of melancholy matters;and yet their general story, so far as one could read it, appeared thestory of life. I conceived at any rate that John Walsh, celibate, lonelyand good-naturedly black-browed, had been sacrificed to the far-offRobertson acres, which on their side had been sacrificed to I never knewwhat. The point of my divagation, however, is that the Barmecide banquetof another tract of the same _provenance_ was always spread for usopposite the other house, from which point it stretched, on the northside of the street, to Sixth Avenue; though here we were soon to see itdiminished at the corner by a structure afterwards known to us as ourprosiest New York school. This edifice, devoted to-day to other uses, but of the same ample insignificance, still left for exploitation atthat time an uncovered town-territory the transmitted tale of which wasthat our greatgrandfather, living down near the Battery, had had hiscountry villa or, more strictly speaking, his farm there, with freeexpanses roundabout. Shrunken though the tract a part of it remained--inparticular a space that I remember, though with the last faintness, tohave seen appeal to the public as a tea-garden or open-air café, a hauntof dance and song and of other forms of rather ineffective gaiety. Thesubsequent conversion of the site into the premises of the FrenchTheatre I was to be able to note more distinctly; resorting there in thewinter of 1874-5, though not without some wan detachment, to a seriesof more or less exotic performances, and admiring in especial the highand hard virtuosity of Madame Ristori, the unfailing instinct for thewrong emphasis of the then acclaimed Mrs. Rousby (I still hear theassured "Great woman, great woman!" of a knowing friend met as I wentout, ) and the stout fidelity to a losing game, as well as to a truth notquite measurable among us, of the late, the but lugubriously-comic, theblighted John Toole. 

These are glimmering ghosts, though that drama of the scene hard by atwhich I have glanced gives me back its agents with a finer intensity. For the long action set in, as I have hinted, with the death of AuntWyckoff, and, if rather taking its time at first to develop, maintainedto the end, which was in its full finality but a few years since, thefinest consistency and unity; with cousin Helen, in rich prominence, forthe heroine; with the pale adventurous Albert for the hero or youngprotagonist, a little indeed in the sense of a small New York Orestesridden by Furies; with a pair of confidants in the form first of theheroine's highly respectable but quite negligible husband and, second, of her close friend and quasi-sister our own admirable Aunt; withAlexander's younger brother, above all, the odd, the eccentric, theattaching Henry, for the stake, as it were, of the game. So for thespectator did the figures distribute themselves; the three principal, on the large stage--it became a field of such spreading interests--wellin front, and the accessory pair, all sympathy and zeal, prompt commentand rich resonance, hovering in the background, responsive to any calland on the spot at a sign: this most particularly true indeed of ouranything but detached Aunt, much less a passive recipient than a vesselconstantly brimming, and destined herself to become the outstandingagent, almost the _dea ex machina_, in the last act of the story. Hercolleague of the earlier periods (though to that title she would scarcehave granted his right) I designate rather as our earnest cousin'shusband than as our kinsman even by courtesy; since he was "Mr. " to hisown wife, for whom the dread of liberties taken in general included eventhose that might have been allowed to herself: he had not in the least, like the others in his case, married into the cousinship with us, andthis apparently rather by his defect than by ours. His christian name, if certainly not for use, was scarce even for ornament--which consortedwith the felt limits roundabout him of aids to mention and with the factthat no man could on his journey through life well have been lesseagerly designated or apostrophised. If there are persons as to whom the"Mr. " never comes up at all, so there are those as to whom it neversubsides; but some of them all keep it by the greatness and others, oddly enough, by the smallness of their importance. The subject of mypresent reference, as I think of him, nevertheless--by which I mean inspite of his place in the latter group--greatly helps my documentation;he must have been of so excellent and consistent a shade of nullity. Tothat value, if value it be, there almost always attaches some questionof the degree and the position: with adjuncts, with a relation, the zeromay figure as a numeral--and the neglected zero is mostly, for thatmatter, endowed with a consciousness and subject to irritation. For thisdim little gentleman, so perfectly a gentleman, no appeal and noredress, from the beginning to the end of his career, were made orentertained or projected; no question of how to treat him, or of how_he_ might see it or feel it, could ever possibly rise; he was blankfrom whatever view, remaining so under application of whatever acid orexposure to whatever heat; the one identity he could have was to be partof the consensus. 

Such a case is rare--that of being no case at all, that of not havingeven the interest of the grievance of not being one: we as a rule catchglimpses in the down-trodden of such resentments--they have at leastsometimes the importance of feeling the weight of our tread. Thephenomenon was here quite other--that of a natural platitude that hadnever risen to the level of sensibility. When you have been wronged youcan be righted, when you have suffered you can be soothed; if you havethat amount of grasp of the "scene, " however humble, the drama of yourlife to some extent enacts itself, with the logical consequence of yourbeing proportionately its hero and _having_ to be taken for such. Let menot dream of attempting to say for what cousin Helen took her spectralspouse, though I think it the most marked touch in her portrait that shekept us from ever knowing. She was a person about whom you kneweverything else, but there she was genially inscrutable, and above allclaimed no damages on the score of slights offered him. She knew nothingwhatever of these, yet could herself be much wounded or hurt--whichlatter word she sounded in the wondrous old New York manner soirreducible to notation. She covered the whole case with a mantle whichwas yet much more probably that of her real simplicity than of a feignedunconsciousness; I doubt whether she _knew_ that men could be amiable ina different manner from that which had to serve her for supposing herhusband amiable; when the mould and the men cast in it were verydifferent she failed, or at least she feared, to conclude toamiability--though _some_ women (as different themselves as suchstranger men!) might take it for that. Directly interrogated she might(such was the innocence of these long-extinct manners) have approved ofmale society in stronger doses or more vivid hues--save whereconsanguinity, or indeed relationship by marriage, to which she greatlydeferred, had honestly imposed it. The singular thing for the drama towhich I return was that there it was just consanguinity that had madethe burden difficult and strange and of a nature to call on greatdecisions and patient plans, even though the most ominous possibilitieswere not involved. I reconstruct and reconstruct of course, but theelements had to my childish vision at least nothing at all portentous;if any light of the lurid played in for me just a little it was butunder much later information. What my childish vision was really mostpossessed of, I think, was the figure of the spectral spouse, the dimlittle gentleman, as I have called him, pacing the whole length of thetwo big parlours, in prolonged repetition, much as if they had been thedeck of one of those ships anciently haunted by him, as "supercargo" orwhatever, in strange far seas--according to the only legend connectedwith him save that of his early presumption in having approached, suchas he was, so fine a young woman, and his remarkable luck in havingapproached her successfully; a luck surprisingly renewed for him, sinceit was also part of the legend that he had previously married and lost abride beyond his deserts. 

XI

I am, strictly speaking, at this point, on a visit to Albert, who attimes sociably condescended to my fewer years--I still appreciate theman-of-the-world ease of it; but my host seems for the minute to haveleft me, and I am attached but to the rich perspective in which "Uncle"(for Albert too he was only all namelessly Uncle) comes and goes; out ofthe comparative high brownness of the back room, commanding braveextensions, as I thought them, a covered piazza over which, in season, Isabella grapes accessibly clustered and beyond which stretched, further, a "yard" that was as an ample garden compared to ours at home;I keep in view his little rounded back, at the base of which his armsare interlocked behind him, and I know how his bald head, yet with thehair bristling up almost in short-horn fashion at the sides, is thrustinquiringly, not to say appealingly, forward; I assist at his emergence, where the fine old mahogany doors of separation are rolled back on whatused to seem to me silver wheels, into the brighter yet colder half ofthe scene, and attend him while he at last looks out awhile intoFourteenth Street for news of whatever may be remarkably, objectionablyor mercifully taking place there; and then I await his regular return, preparatory to a renewed advance, far from indifferent as I innocentlyam to his discoveries or his comments. It is cousin Helen however whopreferentially takes them up, attaching to them the right importance, which is for the moment the very greatest that could possibly beattached to anything in the world; I for my part occupied with thosemarks of character in our pacing companion--his long, slightly equinecountenance, his eyebrows ever elevated as in the curiosity of alarm, and the so limited play from side to side of his extremely protrusivehead, as if somehow through tightness of the "wash" neckcloths that hehabitually wore and that, wound and re-wound in their successive stages, made his neck very long without making it in the least thick and reachedtheir climax in a proportionately very small knot tied with the neatestart. I scarce can have known at the time that this was as complete alittle old-world figure as any that might then have been noted there, far or near; yet if I didn't somehow "subtly" feel it, why am I now soconvinced that I must have had familiarly before me a masterpiece of thegreat Daumier, say, or Henri Monnier, or any other then contemporaryprojector of Monsieur Prudhomme, the timorous Philistine in a world ofdangers, with whom I was later on to make acquaintance? I put myselfthe question, of scant importance though it may seem; but there is areflection perhaps more timely than any answer to it. I catch myself inthe act of seeing poor anonymous "Dear, " as cousin Helen confinedherself, her life long, to calling him, in the light of an imagearrested by the French genius, and this in truth opens up vistas. Iscarce know what it _doesn't_ suggest for the fact of sharpness, ofintensity of type; which fact in turn leads my imagination almost anydance, making me ask myself quite most of all whether a person so markedby it mustn't really have been a highly finished figure. 

That degree of finish was surely rare among us--rare at a time when thecharm of so much of the cousinship and the uncleship, the kinshipgenerally, had to be found in their so engagingly dispensing with anyfinish at all. They happened to be amiable, to be delightful; but--Ithink I have already put the question--what would have become of us allif they hadn't been? a question the shudder of which could never havebeen suggested by the presence I am considering. He too was gentle andbland, as it happened--and I indeed see it all as a world quiteunfavourable to arrogance or insolence or any hard and high assumption;but the more I think of him (even at the risk of thinking too much) themore I make out in him a tone and a manner that deprecated crude ease. Plenty of this was already in the air, but if he hadn't so spoken of anorder in which forms still counted it might scarce have occurred to onethat there had ever been any. It comes over me therefore that hetestified--and perhaps quite beautifully; I remember his voice and hisspeech, which were not those of _that_ New York at all, and with theecho, faint as it is, arrives the wonder of where he could possibly havepicked such things up. They were, as forms, adjusted and settled things;from what finer civilisation therefore had they come down to him? Tobrood on this the least little bit is verily, as I have said, to open upvistas--out of the depths of one of which fairly glimmers the queerestof questions. Mayn't we accordingly have been, the rest of us, allwrong, and the dim little gentleman the only one among us who was right?May not his truth to type have been a matter that, as mostly typelessourselves, we neither perceived nor appreciated?--so that if, as isconceivable, he felt and measured the situation and simply chose to bebland and quiet and keep his sense to himself, he was a hero without thelaurel as well as a martyr without the crown. The light of whichpossibility is, however, too fierce; I turn it off, I tear myself fromthe view--noting further but the one fact in his history that, by myglimpse of it, quite escapes ambiguity. The youthful Albert, I havementioned, was to resist successfully through those years thatsolicitation of "Europe" our own response to which, both as a generaland a particular solution, kept breaking out in choral wails; but theother house none the less nourished projects so earnest that they couldinvoke the dignity of comparative silence and patience. The other housedidn't aspire to the tongues, but it aspired to the grand tour, of whichours was on many grounds incapable. Only after years and when endlessthings had happened--Albert having long before, in especial, quite takenup his stake and ostensibly dropped out of the game--did the greatadventure get itself enacted, with the effect of one of the liveliestillustrations of the irony of fate. What had most of all flushed throughthe dream of it during years was the legend, at last quite antediluvian, of the dim little gentleman's early Wanderjahre, that experience ofdistant lands and seas which would find an application none the lesslively for having had long to wait. It had had to wait in truth half acentury, yet its confidence had apparently not been impaired when NewYork, on the happy day, began to recede from view. Europe had surprises, none the less, and who knows to what extent it may after half a centuryhave had shocks? The coming true of the old dream produced at any rate asnap of the tense cord, and the ancient worthy my imagination has, inthe tenderest of intentions, thus played with, disembarked in Englandonly to indulge in the last of his startled stares, only to look abouthim in vague deprecation and give it all up. He just landed and died;but the grand tour was none the less proceeded with--cousin Helenherself, aided by resources personal, social and financial that leftnothing to desire, triumphantly performed it, though as with a feelingof delicacy about it firmly overcome. 

But it has taken me quite out of the other house, so that I patch upagain, at a stroke, that early scene of her double guardianship at whichmy small wonder assisted. It even then glimmered on me, I think, that ifAlbert was, all so romantically, in charge of his aunt--which was aperfectly nondescript relation--so his uncle Henry, her odd brother, washer more or less legal ward, not less, despite his being so very muchAlbert's senior. In these facts and in the character of each of thethree persons involved resided the drama; which must more or less havebegun, as I have hinted, when simple-minded Henry, at a date I seem tohave seized, definitely emerged from rustication--the Beaverkill had butfor a certain term protected, or promoted, his simplicity--and began, onhis side, to pace the well-worn field between the Fourteenth Streetwindows and the piazza of the Isabella grapes. I see him there lessvividly than his fellow-pedestrian only because he was afterwards toloom so much larger, whereas his companion, even while still present, was weakly to shrink and fade. At this late day only do I devise forthat companion a possible history; the simple-minded Henry's annals onthe other hand grew in interest as soon as they became interesting atall. This happened as soon as one took in the ground and some of thefeatures of his tutelage. The basis of it all was that, harmless as heappeared, he was not to be trusted; I remember how portentous that truthsoon looked, both in the light of his intense amiability and of sisterHelen's absolute certitude. He wasn't to be trusted--it was the solevery definite fact about him except the fact that he had so kindly comedown from the far-off Beaverkill to regale us with the perfectdemonstration, dutifully, resignedly setting himself among us to pointthe whole moral himself. He appeared, from the moment we really took itin, to be doing, in the matter, no more than he ought; he exposedhimself to our invidious gaze, on this ground, with a humility, a quietcourtesy and an instinctive dignity that come back to me as simplyheroic. He had himself accepted, under strenuous suggestion, thedreadful view, and I see him to-day, in the light of the granddénouement, deferred for long years, but fairly dazzling when it came, as fairly sublime in his decision not to put anyone in the wrong abouthim a day sooner than he could possibly help. The whole circle of uswould in that event be so dreadfully "sold, " as to our wisdom andjustice, he proving only noble and exquisite. It didn't so immenselymatter to him as that, the establishment of his true character didn't;so he went on as if for all the years--and they really piled themselvesup: his passing for a dangerous idiot, or at least for a slave of hispassions from the moment he was allowed the wherewithal in the least toindulge them, was a less evil for him than seeing us rudely corrected. It was in truth an extraordinary situation and would have offered asplendid subject, as we used to say, to the painter of character, thenovelist or the dramatist, with the hand to treat it. After I had readDavid Copperfield an analogy glimmered--it struck me even in the earlytime: cousin Henry was more or less another Mr. Dick, just as cousinHelen was in her relation to him more or less another Miss Trotwood. There were disparities indeed: Mr. Dick was the harmless lunatic on thatlady's premises, but she admired him and appealed to him; lunatics, inher generous view, might be oracles, and there is no evidence, if Icorrectly remember, that she kept him low. Our Mr. Dick was suffered toindulge his passions but on ten cents a day, while his fortune, underconscientious, under admirable care--cousin Helen being no less thewise and keen woman of business than the devoted sister--rolled up andbecame large; likewise Miss Trotwood's inmate hadn't at all theperplexed brooding brow, with the troubled fold in it, that representedpoor Henry's only form of criticism of adverse fate. They had alike thelarge smooth open countenance of those for whom life has beensimplified, and if Mr. Dick had had a fortune he would have remained allhis days as modestly vague about the figure of it as our relativeconsented to remain. The latter's interests were agricultural, while hispredecessor's, as we remember, were mainly historical; each at any ratehad in a general way his Miss Trotwood, not to say his sister Helen. 

The good Henry's Miss Trotwood lived and died without an instant'svisitation of doubt as to the due exercise of her authority, as to whatwould happen if it faltered; her victim waiting in the handsomest mannertill she had passed away to show us all--all who remained, after solong, to do him justice--that nothing but what was charming and touchingcould possibly happen. This was, in part at least, the dazzlingdénouement I have spoken of: he became, as soon as fortunatedispositions could take effect, the care of our admirable Aunt, betweenwhom and his sister and himself close cousinship, from far back, hadpractically amounted to sisterhood: by which time the other house hadlong been another house altogether, its ancient site relinquished, itscontents planted afresh far northward, with new traditions invoked, though with that of its great friendliness to all of us, for ourmother's sake, still confirmed. Here with brief brightness, clouded atthe very last, the solution emerged; we became aware, not withoutembarrassment, that poor Henry at large and supplied with funds wasexactly as harmless and blameless as poor Henry stinted and captive; asto which if anything had been wanting to our confusion or to his owndignity it would have been his supreme abstinence, his suppression ofthe least "Didn't I tell you?" He didn't even pretend to have told us, when he so abundantly might, and nothing could exceed the grace withwhich he appeared to have noticed nothing. He "handled" dollars asdecently, and just as profusely, as he had handled dimes; the only lightshade on the scene--except of course for its being so belated, which didmake it pathetically dim--was the question of how nearly he at allmeasured his resources. Not his heart, but his imagination, in the longyears, had been starved; and though he was now all discreetly and wiselyencouraged to feel rich, it was rather sadly visible that, thanks toalmost half a century of over-discipline, he failed quite to rise to hisestate. He did feel rich, just as he felt generous; the misfortune wasonly in his weak sense for meanings. That, with the whole situation, made delicacy of the first importance; as indeed what was perhaps moststriking in the entire connection was the part played by delicacy fromthe first. It had all been a drama of the delicate: the consummatelyscrupulous and successful administration of his resources for thebenefit of his virtue, so that they could be handed over, in the event, without the leakage of a fraction, what was that but a triumph ofdelicacy? So delicacy conspired, delicacy surrounded him; the casehaving been from the early time that, could he only be regarded assufficiently responsible, could the sources of his bounty be judgedfairly open to light pressure (there was question of none but thelightest) that bounty might blessedly flow. This had been MissTrotwood's own enlightened view, on behalf of one of the oddest and mostappealing collections of wistful wondering single gentlewomen that agreat calculating benevolence perhaps ever found arrayed beforeit--ornaments these all of the second and third cousinship andinterested spectators of the almost inexpressible facts. 

I should have liked completely to express them, in spite of thedifficulty--if not indeed just by reason of that; the difficulty oftheir consisting so much more of "character" than of "incident" (heavensave the artless opposition!) though this last element figured bravelyenough too, thanks to some of the forms taken by our young Albert's wildwilfulness. He was so weak--after the most approved fashion ofdistressing young men of means--that his successive exhibitions of ithad a fine high positive effect, such as would have served beautifully, act after act, for the descent of the curtain. The issue, however(differing in this from the common theatrical trick) depended less onwho should die than on who should live; the younger of cousin Helen'spair of wards--putting them even only as vessels of her attemptedearnestness--had violently broken away, but a remedy to this grief, forreasons too many to tell, dwelt in the possible duration, could it onlynot be arrested, of two other lives, one of these her own, the secondthe guileless Henry's. The single gentlewomen, to a remarkable number, whom she regarded and treated as nieces, though they were only daughtersof cousins, were such objects of her tender solicitude that, she andHenry and Albert being alike childless, the delightful thing to think ofwas, on certain contingencies, the nieces' prospective wealth. Therewere contingencies of course--and they exactly produced the pity andterror. Her estate would go at her death to her nearest of kin, represented by her brother and nephew; it would be only of hersavings--fortunately, with her kind eye on the gentlewomen, zealous andlong continued--that she might dispose by will; and it was but atroubled comfort that, should he be living at the time of her death, thesusceptible Henry would profit no less than the wanton Albert. Henry wasat any cost to be kept in life that he _might_ profit; the woefulquestion, the question of delicacy, for a woman devoutly conscientious, was how could anyone else, how, above all, could fifteen other persons, be made to profit by his profiting? She had been as earnest a steward ofher brother's fortune as if directness of pressure on him, in a sensefavourable to her interests--that is to her sympathies, which were heronly interests--had been a matter of course with her; whereas in factshe would have held it a crime, given his simplicity, to attempt in theleast to guide his hand. If he didn't outlive his nephew--and he wasolder, though, as would appear, so much more virtuous--his inheritedproperty, she being dead, would accrue to that unedifying person. _There_ was the pity; and as for the question of the disposition ofHenry's savings without the initiative of Henry's intelligence, in that, alas, was the terror. Henry's savings--there had been no terror for her, naturally, in beautifully husbanding his resources _for_ him--dangled, naturally, with no small vividness, before the wistful gentlewomen, towhom, if he had but _had_ the initiative, he might have made the mostprincely presents. Such was the oddity, not to say the rather tragicdrollery, of the situation: that Henry's idea of a present was tencents' worth of popcorn, or some similar homely trifle; and that whenone had created for him a world of these proportions there was no honestway of inspiring him to write cheques for hundreds; all congruous thoughthese would be with the generosity of his nature as shown by theexuberance of his popcorn. The ideal solution would be his flashing tointelligence just long enough to apprehend the case and, of his ownmagnanimous movement, sign away everything; but that was a fairy-talestroke, and the fairies here somehow stood off. 

Thus between the wealth of her earnestness and the poverty of hercourage--her dread, that is, of exposing herself to a legal process forundue influence--our good lady was not at peace; or, to be exact, wasonly at such peace as came to her by the free bestowal of her ownaccumulations during her lifetime and after her death. She predeceasedher brother and had the pang of feeling that if half her residuum wouldbe deplorably diverted the other half would be, by the same stroke, imperfectly applied; the artless Henry remained at once so well providedand so dimly inspired. Here was suspense indeed for a last "curtain" butone; and my fancy glows, all expertly, for the disclosure of the finalscene, than which nothing could well have been happier, on all thepremises, save for a single flaw: the installation in Forty-fourthStreet of our admirable aunt, often, through the later years, domiciledthere, but now settled to community of life with a touching charge andrepresenting near him his extinguished, _their_ extinguished, sister. The too few years that followed were the good man's Indian summer and avery wonderful time--so charmingly it shone forth, for all concerned, that he was a person fitted to adorn, as the phrase is, almost anyposition. Our admirable aunt, not less devoted and less disinterestedthan his former protectress, had yet much more imagination; she hadenough, in a word, for perfect confidence, and under confidence whatremained of poor Henry's life bloomed like a garden freshly watered. Sadalas the fact that so scant a patch was now left. It sufficed, however, and he rose, just in time, to every conception; it was, as I havealready noted, as if he had all the while known, as if he had reallybeen a conscious victim to the superstition of his blackness. His finalcompanion recognised, as it were, his powers; and it may be imaginedwhether when he absolutely himself proposed to benefit the gentlewomenshe passed him, or not, the blessed pen. He had taken a year or two topublish by his behaviour the perfection of his civility, and so, on thatsafe ground, made use of the pen. His competence was afterwardsattacked, and it emerged triumphant, exactly as his perfect charity andhumility and amenity, and his long inward loneliness, of half a century, did. He had bowed his head and sometimes softly scratched it during thatimmense period; he had occasionally, after roaming downstairs with thetroubled fold in his brow and the difficult, the smothered statement onhis lips (his vocabulary was scant and stiff, the vocabulary of pleadingexplanation, often found too complicated by the witty, ) retired oncemore to his room sometimes indeed for hours, to think it all over again;but had never failed of sobriety or propriety or punctuality orregularity, never failed of one of the virtues his imputed indifferenceto which had been the ground of his discipline. It was veryextraordinary, and of all the stories I know is I think the mostbeautiful--so far at least as _he_ was concerned! The flaw I havementioned, the one break in the final harmony, was the death of ouradmirable aunt too soon, shortly before his own and while, taken withillness at the same time, he lay there deprived of her attention. He hadthat of the gentlewomen, however, two or three of the wisest andtenderest being deputed by the others; and if his original estatereverted at law they presently none the less had occasion to bless hisname. 

XII

I turn round again to where I last left myself gaping at the oldricketty bill-board in Fifth Avenue; and am almost as sharply aware asever of the main source of its spell, the fact that it most often blazedwith the rich appeal of Mr. Barnum, whose "lecture-room, " attached tothe Great American Museum, overflowed into posters of all the theatricalbravery disavowed by its title. It was my rueful theory of thosedays--though tasteful I may call it too as well as rueful--that on allthe holidays on which we weren't dragged to the dentist's we attended asa matter of course at Barnum's, that is when we were so happy as to beable to; which, to my own particular consciousness, wasn't every timethe case. The case was too often, to my melancholy view, that W. J. , quite regularly, on the non-dental Saturdays, repaired to this seat ofjoy with the easy Albert--_he_ at home there and master of the scene toa degree at which, somehow, neither of us could at the best arrive; hequite moulded, truly, in those years of plasticity, as to the æstheticbent and the determination of curiosity, I seem to make out, by thegeneral Barnum association and revelation. It was not, I hasten to add, that I too didn't, to the extent of my minor chance, drink at thespring; for how else should I have come by the whole undimmed sense ofthe connection?--the weary waiting, in the dusty halls of humbug, amidbottled mermaids, "bearded ladies" and chill dioramas, for thelecture-room, the true centre of the seat of joy, to open: vivid inespecial to me is my almost sick wondering of whether I mightn't be raptaway before it did open. The impression appears to have been mixed; thedrinking deep and the holding out, holding out in particular againstfailure of food and of stage-fares, provision for transport to and fro, being questions equally intense: the appeal of the lecture-room, in itsessence a heavy extra, so exhausted our resources that even thesustaining doughnut of the refreshment-counter would mock our desire andthe long homeward crawl, the length of Broadway and further, seem todefy repetition. Those desperate days, none the less, affect me now ashaving flushed with the very complexion of romance; their aches andinanitions were part of the adventure; the homeward straggle, interminable as it appeared, flowered at moments into raptcontemplations--that for instance of the painted portrait, large aslife, of the celebrity of the hour, then "dancing" at the BroadwayTheatre, Lola Montes, Countess of Lansfeldt, of a dazzling and unrealbeauty and in a riding-habit lavishly open at the throat. 

It was thus quite in order that I should pore longest, there at myfondest corner, over the Barnum announcements--my present inability tobe superficial about which has given in fact the measure of mycontemporary care. These announcements must have been in their waymarvels of attractive composition, the placard bristling from top to toewith its analytic "synopsis of scenery and incidents"; the synopticalview cast its net of fine meshes and the very word savoured ofincantation. It is odd at the same time that when I question memory asto the living hours themselves, those of the stuffed and dim little hallof audience, smelling of peppermint and orange-peel, where the curtainrose on our gasping but rewarded patience, two performances only standout for me, though these in the highest relief. Love, or the Countessand the Serf, by J. Sheridan Knowles--I see that still as the blazonryof one of them, just as I see Miss Emily Mestayer, large, red in theface, coifed in a tangle of small, fine, damp-looking short curls andclad in a light-blue garment edged with swans-down, shout at the top ofher lungs that a "pur-r-r-se of gold" would be the fair guerdon of theminion who should start on the spot to do her bidding at some desperatecrisis that I forget. I forget Huon the serf, whom I yet recallimmensely admiring for his nobleness; I forget everyone but MissMestayer, who gave form to my conception of the tragic actress at herhighest. She had a hooked nose, a great play of nostril, a vastprotuberance of bosom and always the "crop" of close moist ringlets; Isay always, for I was to see her often again, during a much later phase, the mid-most years of that Boston Museum which aimed at so vastly highera distinction than the exploded lecture-room had really done, though inan age that snickered even abnormally low it still lacked the courage tocall itself a theatre. She must have been in comedy, which I believe shealso usefully and fearlessly practised, rather unimaginable; but therewas no one like her in the Boston time for cursing queens andeagle-beaked mothers; the Shakespeare of the Booths and other such wouldhave been unproducible without her; she had a rusty, rasping, heavingand tossing "authority" of which the bitterness is still in my ears. Iam revisited by an outer glimpse of her in that after age when she hadcome, comparatively speaking, into her own--the sight of her, accidentally incurred, one tremendously hot summer night, as she slowlymoved from her lodgings or wherever, in the high Bowdoin Street region, down to the not distant theatre from which even the temperature hadgiven her no reprieve; and well remember how, the queer light of myyoung impression playing up again in her path, she struck me as thevery image of mere sore histrionic habit and use, a worn and weary, abattered even though almost sordidly smoothed, _thing_ of the theatre, very much as an old infinitely-handled and greasy violoncello of theorchestra might have been. It was but an effect doubtless of the heatthat she scarcely seemed clad at all; slippered, shuffling and, thoughsomehow hatted and vaguely veiled or streamered, wrapt in a gauzy sketchof a dressing-gown, she pointed to my extravagant attention the moral ofthankless personal service, of the reverse of the picture, of the costof "amusing the public" in a case of amusing it, as who should say, every hour. And I had thrilled before her as the Countess in"Love"--such contrasted combinations! But she carried her head veryhigh, as with the habit of crowns and trains and tirades--had in factmuch the air of some deposed and reduced sovereign living on a scantallowance; so that, all invisibly and compassionately, I took off my hatto her. 

To which I must add the other of my two Barnumite scenic memories, myhaving anciently admired her as the Eliza of Uncle Tom's Cabin, herswelling bust encased in a neat cotton gown and her flight across theice-blocks of the Ohio, if I rightly remember the perilous stream, intrepidly and gracefully performed. We lived and moved at that time, with great intensity, in Mrs. Stowe's novel--which, recalling my promptand charmed acquaintance with it, I should perhaps substitute for TheInitials, earlier mentioned here, as my first experiment in grown-upfiction. There was, however, I think, for that triumphant work noclassified condition; it was for no sort of reader as distinct from anyother sort, save indeed for Northern as differing from Southern: it knewthe large felicity of gathering in alike the small and the simple andthe big and the wise, and had above all the extraordinary fortune offinding itself, for an immense number of people, much less a book than astate of vision, of feeling and of consciousness, in which they didn'tsit and read and appraise and pass the time, but walked and talked andlaughed and cried and, in a manner of which Mrs. Stowe was theirresistible cause, generally conducted themselves. Appreciation andjudgment, the whole impression, were thus an effect for which there hadbeen no process--any process so related having in other cases _had_ tobe at some point or other critical; nothing in the guise of a writtenbook, therefore, a book printed, published, sold, bought and "noticed, "probably ever reached its mark, the mark of exciting interest, withouthaving at least groped for that goal _as_ a book or by the exposure ofsome literary side. Letters, here, languished unconscious, and UncleTom, instead of making even one of the cheap short cuts through themedium in which books breathe, even as fishes in water, went gailyroundabout it altogether, as if a fish, a wonderful "leaping" fish, hadsimply flown through the air. This feat accomplished, the surprisingcreature could naturally fly anywhere, and one of the first things itdid was thus to flutter down on every stage, literally withoutexception, in America and Europe. If the amount of life represented insuch a work is measurable by the ease with which representation is takenup and carried further, carried even violently furthest, the fate ofMrs. Stowe's picture was conclusive: it simply sat down wherever itlighted and made itself, so to speak, at home; thither multitudesflocked afresh and there, in each case, it rose to its height again andwent, with all its vivacity and good faith, through all its motions. 

These latter were to leave me, however, with a fonder vision still thanthat of the comparatively jejune "lecture-room" version; for the firstexhibition of them to spring to the front was the fine free renderingachieved at a playhouse till then ignored by fashion and culture, theNational Theatre, deep down on the East side, whence echoes had comefaintest to ears polite, but where a sincerity vivid though rude was nowsupposed to reward the curious. Our numerous attendance there under thisspell was my first experience of the "theatre party" as we have enjoyedit in our time--each emotion and impression of which is as fresh to meas the most recent of the same family. Precious through all indeedperhaps is the sense, strange only to later sophistication, of my smallencouraged state as a free playgoer--a state doubly wondrous while Ithus evoke the full contingent from Union Square; where, for thatmatter, I think, the wild evening must have been planned. I am lostagain in all the goodnature from which small boys, on wild evenings, could dangle so unchidden--since the state of unchiddenness is whatcomes back to me well-nigh clearest. How without that complacency ofconscience could every felt impression so live again? It is true thatfor my present sense of the matter snubs and raps would still tingle, would count double; just wherefore it is exactly, however, that I mirrormyself in these depths of propriety. The social scheme, as we knew it, was, in its careless charity, worthy of the golden age--though I can'tsufficiently repeat that we knew it both at its easiest and its safest:the fruits dropped right upon the board to which we flocked together, the least of us and the greatest, with differences of appetite and ofreach, doubtless, but not with differences of place and of proportionateshare. My appetite and my reach in respect to the more full-bodied UncleTom might have brooked certainly any comparison; I must have partakenthoroughly of the feast to have left the various aftertastes so separateand so strong. It was a great thing to have a canon to judge by--ithelped conscious criticism, which was to fit on wings (for use everafter) to the shoulders of appreciation. In the light of that advantageI could be _sure_ my second Eliza was less dramatic than my first, andthat my first "Cassy, " that of the great and blood-curdling Mrs. Bellamyof the lecture-room, touched depths which made the lady at the Nationalprosaic and placid (I could already be "down" on a placid Cassy;) justas on the other hand the rocking of the ice-floes of the Ohio, with thedesperate Eliza, infant in arms, balancing for a leap from one to theother, had here less of the audible creak of carpentry, emulated atrifle more, to my perception, the real water of Mr. Crummles's pump. They can't, even at that, have emulated it much, and one almost envies(quite making up one's mind not to denounce) the simple faith of an agebeguiled by arts so rude. 

However, the point exactly was that we attended this spectacle just inorder _not_ to be beguiled, just in order to enjoy with ironicdetachment and, at the very most, to be amused ourselves at oursensibility should it prove to have been trapped and caught. To havebecome thus aware of our collective attitude constituted for one smallspectator at least a great initiation; he got his first glimpse of thatpossibility of a "free play of mind" over a subject which was to throwhim with force at a later stage of culture, when subjects hadconsiderably multiplied, into the critical arms of Matthew Arnold. So heis himself at least interested in seeing the matter--as a progress inwhich the first step was taken, before that crude scenic appeal, by hiswondering, among his companions, where the absurd, the absurd for_them_, ended and the fun, the real fun, which was the gravity, thetragedy, the drollery, the beauty, the thing itself, briefly, might belegitimately and tastefully held to begin. Uncanny though the remarkperhaps, I am not sure I wasn't thus more interested in the pulse of ourparty, under my tiny recording thumb, than in the beat of the drama andthe shock of its opposed forces--vivid and touching as the contrast wasthen found for instance between the tragi-comical Topsy, the slave-girlclad in a pinafore of sackcloth and destined to become for Anglo-Saxonmillions the type of the absolute in the artless, and her littlemistress the blonde Eva, a figure rather in the Kenwigs tradition ofpantalettes and pigtails, whom I recall as perching quite suicidally, with her elbows out and a preliminary shriek, on that bulwark of theMississippi steamboat which was to facilitate her all but fatalimmersion in the flood. Why should I have duly noted that no littlegame on her part could well less have resembled or simulated anaccident, and yet have been no less moved by her reappearance, rescuedfrom the river but perfectly dry, in the arms of faithful Tom, who hadplunged in to save her, without either so much as wetting his shoes, than if I had been engaged with her in a reckless romp? I could countthe white stitches in the loose patchwork, and yet could take it for astory rich and harmonious; I could know we had all intellectuallycondescended and that we had yet had the thrill of an æstheticadventure; and this was a brave beginning for a consciousness that wasto be nothing if not mixed and a curiosity that was to be nothing if notrestless. 

The principle of this prolonged arrest, which I insist on prolonging alittle further, is doubtless in my instinct to grope for our earliestæsthetic seeds. Careless at once and generous the hands by which theywere sown, but practically appointed none the less to cause thatpeculiarly flurried hare to run--flurried because over ground so littlenative to it--when so many others held back. Is it _that_ air of romancethat gilds for me then the Barnum background--taking it as a symbol;that makes me resist, to this effect of a passionate adverse loyalty, any impulse to translate into harsh terms any old sordidities andpoverties? The Great American Museum, the down-town scenery and aspectsat large, and even the up-town improvements on them, as thenflourishing?--why, they must have been for the most part of the lastmeanness: the Barnum picture above all ignoble and awful, its blatantface or frame stuck about with innumerable flags that waved, poorvulgar-sized ensigns, over spurious relics and catchpenny monsters ineffigy, to say nothing of the promise within of the still more monstrousand abnormal living--from the total impression of which things weplucked somehow the flower of the ideal. It grew, I must in justiceproceed, much more sweetly and naturally at Niblo's, which representedin our scheme the ideal evening, while Barnum figured the ideal day; sothat I ask myself, with that sense of our resorting there under the richcover of night (which was the supreme charm, ) how it comes that thislarger memory hasn't swallowed up all others. For here, absolutely, _was_ the flower at its finest and grown as nowhere else--grown in thegreat garden of the Ravel Family and offered again and again to our deepinhalation. I see the Ravels, French acrobats, dancers and pantomimists, as representing, for our culture, pure grace and charm and civility; sothat one doubts whether any candid community was ever so much in debt toa race of entertainers or had so happy and prolonged, so personal andgrateful a relation with them. They must have been, with theiroffshoots of Martinettis and others, of three or four generations, besides being of a rich theatrical stock generally, and we had ourparticular friends and favourites among them; we seemed to follow themthrough every phase of their career, to assist at their tottering stepsalong the tight-rope as very small children kept in equilibrium by verybig balancing-poles (caretakers here walking under in case of falls;) togreet them as Madame Axel, of robust maturity and in a Spanish costume, bounding on the same tense cord more heavily but more assuredly; andfinally to know the climax of the art with them in Raoul or theNight-Owl and Jocko or the Brazilian Ape--and all this in the course ofour own brief infancy. My impression of them bristles so with memoriesthat we seem to have rallied to their different productions with muchthe same regularity with which we formed fresh educational connections;and they were so much our property and our pride that they supported ushandsomely through all fluttered entertainment of the occasional Albanycousins. I remember how when one of these visitors, wound up, in honourof New York, to the very fever of perception, broke out one eveningwhile we waited for the curtain to rise, "Oh don't you hear the cries?They're _beating_ them, I'm sure they are; can't it be stopped?" weresented the charge as a slur on our very honour; for what our romanticrelative had heatedly imagined to reach us, in a hushed-up manner frombehind, was the sounds attendant on the application of blows to someacrobatic infant who had "funked" his little job. Impossible suchhorrors in the world of pure poetry opened out to us at Niblo's, atemple of illusion, of tragedy and comedy and pathos that, though its_abords_ of stony brown Metropolitan Hotel, on the "wrong side, " musthave been bleak and vulgar, flung its glamour forth into Broadway. Whatmore pathetic for instance, so that we publicly wept, than the fate ofwondrous Martinetti Jocko, who, after befriending a hapless Frenchfamily wrecked on the coast of Brazil and bringing back to life a smallboy rescued from the waves (I see even now, with every detail, thisinanimate victim supine on the strand) met his death by some cruelbullet of which I have forgotten the determinant cause, only rememberingthe final agony as something we could scarce bear and a strain of oursensibility to which our parents repeatedly questioned the wisdom ofexposing us. 

These performers and these things were in all probability but of amiddling skill and splendour--it was the pre-trapèze age, and we werecaught by mild marvels, even if a friendly good faith in them, somethingsweet and sympathetic, was after all a value, whether of their ownhumanity, their own special quality, or only of our innocence, never tobe renewed; but I light this taper to the initiators, so to call them, whom I remembered, when we had left them behind, as if they had given usa silver key to carry off and so to refit, after long years, to sweetnames never thought of from then till now. Signor Léon Javelli, in whomthe French and the Italian charm appear to have met, who was he, andwhat did he brilliantly do, and why of a sudden do I thus recall andadmire him? I am afraid he but danced the tight-rope, the most domesticof our friends' resources, as it brought them out, by the far stretch ofthe rope, into the bosom of the house and against our very hearts, wherethey leapt and bounded and wavered and recovered closely face to facewith us; but I dare say he bounded, brave Signor Léon, to the greatestheight of all: let this vague agility, in any case, connect him withthat revelation of the ballet, the sentimental-pastoral, of other years, which, in The Four Lovers for example, a pantomimic lesson as in wordsof one syllable, but all quick and gay and droll, would have affected usas classic, I am sure, had we then had at our disposal that term ofappreciation. When we read in English story-books about the pantomimesin London, which somehow cropped up in them so often, those were theonly things that didn't make us yearn; so much we felt we were mastersof the type, and so almost sufficiently was that a stop-gap for Londonconstantly deferred. We hadn't the transformation-scene, it was true, though what this really seemed to come to was clown and harlequin takingliberties with policemen--these last evidently a sharp note in apicturesqueness that we lacked, our own slouchy "officers" sayingnothing to us of that sort; but we had at Niblo's harlequin andcolumbine, albeit of less pure a tradition, and we knew moreover allabout clowns, for we went to circuses too, and so repeatedly that when Iadd them to our list of recreations, the good old orthodox circusesunder tents set up in vacant lots, with which New York appears at thattime to have bristled, time and place would seem to have shrunken formost other pursuits, and not least for that of serious learning. And thecase is aggravated as I remember Franconi's, which we more or lesshaunted and which, aiming at the grander style and the monumentaleffect, blazed with fresh paint and rang with Roman chariot-races upthere among the deserts of Twenty-ninth Street or wherever; considerablysouth, perhaps, but only a little east, of the vaster desolations thatgave scope to the Crystal Palace, second of its name since, following--not _passibus æquis_, alas--the London structure of 1851, this enterprise forestalled by a year or two the Paris Palais del'Industrie of 1855. Such as it was I feel again its majesty on thoseoccasions on which I dragged--if I must here once more speak for myselfonly--after Albany cousins through its courts of edification: I rememberbeing very tired and cold and hungry there, in a little light drab andvery glossy or shiny "talma" breasted with rather troublesomebuttonhole-embroideries; though concomitantly conscious that I wassomehow in Europe, since everything about me had been "brought over, "which ought to have been consoling, and seems in fact to have been so insome degree, inasmuch as both my own pain and the sense of the cousinly, the Albany, headaches quite fade in that recovered presence of bigEuropean Art embodied in Thorwaldsen's enormous Christ and theDisciples, a shining marble company ranged in a semicircle of darkmaroon walls. If this was Europe then Europe was beautiful indeed, andwe rose to it on the wings of wonder; never were we afterwards to seegreat showy sculpture, in whatever profuse exhibition or of whateverperiod or school, without some renewal of that charmed Thorwaldsen hour, some taste again of the almost sugary or confectionery sweetness withwhich the great white images had affected us under their supper-tablegaslight. The Crystal Palace was vast and various and dense, which waswhat Europe was going to be; it was a deep-down jungle of impressionsthat were somehow challenges, even as we might, helplessly defied, findforeign words and practices; over which formidably towered Kiss'smounted Amazon attacked by a leopard or whatever, a work judged at thatday sublime and the glory of the place; so that I felt the journey backin the autumn dusk and the Sixth Avenue cars (established just in time)a relapse into soothing flatness, a return to the Fourteenth Streethorizon from a far journey and a hundred looming questions that wouldstill, tremendous thought, come up for all the personal answers of whichone cultivated the seed. 

XIII

Let me hurry, however, to catch again that thread I left dangling frommy glance at our small vague spasms of school--my personal sense of thembeing as vague and small, I mean, in contrast with the fuller andstronger cup meted out all round to the Albany cousins, much moreprivileged, I felt, in every stroke of fortune; or at least much moreinteresting, though it might be wicked to call them more happy, throughthose numberless bereavements that had so enriched their existence. Imentioned above in particular the enviable consciousness of our littlered-headed kinsman Gus Barker, who, as by a sharp prevision, snatchedwhat gaiety he might from a life to be cut short, in a cavalry dash, byone of the Confederate bullets of 1863: he blew out at us, on New YorkSundays, as I have said, sharp puffs of the atmosphere of theInstitution Charlier--strong to us, that is, the atmosphere of whoseinstitutions was weak; but it was above all during a gregarious visitpaid him in a livelier field still that I knew myself merely mother'dand brother'd. It had been his fate to be but scantly the latter andnever at all the former--our aunt Janet had not survived his birth; buton this day of our collective pilgrimage to Sing-Sing, where he was at a"military" school and clad in a fashion that represented to me the verypanoply of war, he shone with a rare radiance of privation. Ingenuousand responsive, of a social disposition, a candour of gaiety, thatmatched his physical activity--the most beautifully made athletic littleperson, and in the highest degree appealing and engaging--he not onlydid us the honours of his dazzling academy (dazzling at least to me) buthad all the air of showing us over the great State prison which eventhen flourished near at hand and to which he accompanied us; a party ofa composition that comes back to me as wonderful, the New York andAlbany cousinships appearing to have converged and met, for the happyoccasion, with the generations and sexes melting together and moving ina loose harmonious band. The party must have been less numerous than bythe romantic tradition or confused notation of my youth, and what Imainly remember of it beyond my sense of our being at once an attendanttrain to my aged and gentle and in general most unadventurousgrandmother, and a chorus of curiosity and amusement roundabout thevivid Gussy, is our collective impression that State prisons were on thewhole delightful places, vast, bright and breezy, with a gay, freecirculation in corridors and on stairs, a pleasant prevalence of hotsoup and fresh crusty rolls, in tins, of which visitors admiringlypartook, and for the latter, in chance corners and on sunny landings, much interesting light brush of gentlemen remarkable but for gentlemanlycrimes--that is defalcations and malversations to striking andimpressive amounts. 

I recall our coming on such a figure at the foot of a staircase and hishaving been announced to us by our conductor or friend in charge aslikely to be there; and what a charm I found in his cool loose uniformof shining white (as I was afterwards to figure it, ) as well as in hisgenerally refined and distinguished appearance and in the fact that hewas engaged, while exposed to our attention, in the commendable act ofparing his nails with a smart penknife and that he didn't allow us tointerrupt him. One of my companions, I forget which, had advised me thatin these contacts with illustrious misfortune I was to be careful not tostare; and present to me at this moment is the wonder of whether hewould think it staring to note that _he_ quite stared, and also that hishands were fine and fair and one of them adorned with a signet ring. Iwas to have later in life a glimpse of two or three dismalpenitentiaries, places affecting me as sordid, as dark and dreadful; butif the revelation of Sing-Sing had involved the idea of a timely warningto the young mind my small sensibility at least was not reached by thelesson. I envied the bold-eyed celebrity in the array of a planter athis ease--we might have been _his_ slaves--quite as much as I enviedGussy; in connection with which I may remark here that though in thatearly time I seem to have been constantly eager to exchange my lot forthat of somebody else, on the assumed certainty of gaining by thebargain, I fail to remember feeling jealous of such happier persons--inthe measure open to children of spirit. I had rather a positive lack ofthe passion, and thereby, I suppose, a lack of spirit; since if jealousybears, as I think, on what one sees one's companions able to do--asagainst one's own falling short--envy, as I knew it at least, was simplyof what they _were_, or in other words of a certain sort of richerconsciousness supposed, doubtless often too freely supposed, in them. They were so _other_--that was what I felt; and to _be_ other, otheralmost anyhow, seemed as good as the probable taste of the brightcompound wistfully watched in the confectioner's window; unattainable, impossible, of course, but as to which just this impossibility and justthat privation kept those active proceedings in which jealousy seeksrelief quite out of the question. A platitude of acceptance of the pooractual, the absence of all vision of how in any degree to change it, combined with a complacency, an acuity of perception of alternatives, though a view of them as only through the confectioner's hardglass--that is what I recover as the nearest approach to an apology, inthe soil of my nature, for the springing seed of emulation. I neverdreamed of competing--a business having in it at the best, for mytemper, if not for my total failure of temper, a displeasing ferocity. If competing was bad snatching was therefore still worse, and jealousywas a sort of spiritual snatching. With which, nevertheless, all thewhile, one might have been "like" So-and-So, who had such horizons. Ahelpless little love of horizons I certainly cherished, and couldsometimes even care for my own. These always shrank, however, underalmost any suggestion of a further range or finer shade in the purplerim offered to other eyes--and that is what I take for the restlessnessof envy. It wasn't that I wished to change with everyone, with anyone ata venture, but that I saw "gifts" everywhere but as mine and that Iscarce know whether to call the effect of this miserable or monstrous. It was the effect at least of self-abandonment--I mean to visions. 

There must have been on that occasion of the Sing-Sing day--which itdeeply interests me to piece together--some state of connection for someof us with the hospitalities of Rhinebeck, the place of abode of theeldest of the Albany uncles--that is of the three most in our view; forthere were two others, the eldest of all a half-uncle only, who formed aclass quite by himself, and the very youngest, who, with livelyinterests of his own, had still less attention for us than either of histhree brothers. The house at Rhinebeck and all its accessories (whichstruck our young sense as innumerable, ) in especial the great bluff ofthe Hudson on which it stood, yields me images scarcely dimmed, thoughas the effect but of snatches of acquaintance; there at all events thegently-groaning--ever so gently and dryly--Albany grandmother, with theAlbany cousins as to whom I here discriminate, her two adopteddaughters, maturest and mildest of the general tribe, must have pausedfor a stay; a feature of which would be perhaps her juncture with theNew York contingent, somewhere sociably achieved, for the befriending ofjuvenile Gussy. It shimmers there, the whole circumstance, with I scarceknow what large innocence of charity and ease; the Gussy-pretext, forreunion, all so thin yet so important an appeal, the simplicity of theinterests and the doings, the assumptions and the concessions, eachto-day so touching, almost so edifying. We were surely all gentle andgenerous together, floating in such a clean light social order, sweetlyproof against ennui--unless it be a bad note, as is conceivable, never, _never_ to feel bored--and thankful for the smallest æsthetic orromantic mercies. My vision loses itself withal in vasterconnections--above all in my general sense of the then grand newness ofthe Hudson River Railroad; so far at least as its completion to Albanywas concerned, a modern blessing that even the youngest of us were in aposition to appraise. The time had been when the steamboat had tocontent us--and I feel how amply it must have done so as I recall thethrill of docking in dim early dawns, the whole hour of the Albanywaterside, the night of huge strange paddling and pattering andshrieking and creaking once ended, and contrast with it all certain longsessions in the train at an age and in conditions when neither train nortraveller had suffered chastening; sessions of a high animation, as Irecast them, but at the same time of mortal intensities of lassitude. The elements here indeed are much confused and mixed--I must have knownthat discipline of the hectic interest and the extravagant strain inrelation to Rhinebeck only; an _étape_, doubtless, on the way to NewYork, for the Albany kinship, but the limit to our smaller patiences ofany northward land-journey. And yet not the young fatigue, I repeat, butthe state of easy wonder, is what most comes back: the stops toorepeated, but perversely engaging; the heat and the glare too great, butthe river, by the window, making reaches and glimpses, so that thegreat swing of picture and force of light and colour were themselves aconstant adventure; the uncles, above all, too pre-eminent, toorecurrent, to the creation of a positive soreness of sympathy, ofcuriosity, and yet constituting by their presence half the enlargementof the time. For the presence of uncles, incoherent Albany uncles, issomehow what most gives these hours their stamp for memory. I scarceknow why, nor do I much, I confess, distinguish occasions--but I seewhat I see: the long, the rattling car of the old open native form andthe old harsh native exposure; the sense of arrival forever postponed, qualified however also by that of having in my hands a volume of M. Arsène Houssaye, Philosophes et Comédiennes, remarkably submitted by oneof my relatives to my judgment. I see them always, the relatives, inslow circulation; restless and nervous and casual their note, not lessthan strikingly genial, but with vaguenesses, lapses, eclipses, thatdeprived their society of a tactless weight. They cheered us on, intheir way; born optimists, clearly, if not logically determined ones, they were always reassuring and sustaining, though with a bright brevitythat must have taken immensities, I think, for granted. They wore theirhats slightly toward the nose, they strolled, they hung about, theyreported of progress and of the company, they dropped suggestions, newmagazines, packets of the edible deprecated for the immature; theyfigured in fine to a small nephew as the principal men of their timeand, so far as the two younger and more familiar were concerned, themost splendid as to aspect and apparel. It was none the less to theleast shining, though not essentially the least comforting, of thissocial trio that, if I rightly remember, I owed my introduction to the_chronique galante_ of the eighteenth century. 

There tags itself at any rate to the impression a flutter as of somefaint, some recaptured, grimace for another of his kindly offices (whichI associate somehow with the deck of a steamboat:) his production forour vague benefit of a literary classic, the Confessions, as he calledour attention to them, of the celebrated "Rosseau" I catch again theecho of the mirth excited, to my surprise, by this communication, andrecover as well my responsive advance toward a work that seemed so topromise; but especially have I it before me that some play of lightcriticism mostly attended, on the part of any circle, this speaker'smore ambitious remarks. For all that, and in spite of oddities ofappearance and type, it was Augustus James who spread widest, in defaultof towering highest, to my wistful view of the larger life, and whocovered definite and accessible ground. This ground, the house andprecincts of Linwood, at Rhinebeck, harboured our tender years, Isurmise, but at few and brief moments; but it hadn't taken many of theseto make it the image of an hospitality liberal as I supposed greatsocial situations were liberal; suppositions on this score having inchildhood (or at least they had in mine) as little as possible to dowith dry data. Didn't Linwood bristle with great views and otherglories, with gardens and graperies and black ponies, to say nothing ofgardeners and grooms who were notoriously and quotedly droll; to saynothing, in particular, of our aunt Elizabeth, who had been Miss Bay ofAlbany, who was the mother of the fair and free young waltzing-women inNew York, and who floats back to me through the Rhinebeck picture, aquiline but easy, with an effect of handsome highbrowed, high-nosedlooseness, of dressing-gowns or streaming shawls (the dowdy, thedelightful shawl of the period;) and of claws of bright benevolent steelthat kept nipping for our charmed advantage: roses and grapes andpeaches and currant-clusters, together with turns of phrase and scrapsof remark that fell as by quite a like flash of shears. These are merescrapings of gold-dust, but my mind owes her a vibration that, howevertiny, was to insist all these years on _marking_--on figuring in a wholecomplex of picture and drama, the clearest note of which was that ofworry and woe: a crisis prolonged, in deep-roofed outer galleries, through hot August evenings and amid the dim flare of open windows, tothe hum of domesticated insects. All but inexpressible the part played, in the young mind naturally even though perversely, even thoughinordinately, arranged as a stage for the procession and exhibition ofappearances, by matters all of a usual cast, contacts and impressionsnot arriving at the dignity of shocks, but happening to be to the taste, as one may say, of the little intelligence, happening to be such as thefond fancy could assimilate. One's record becomes, under memories ofthis order--and that is the only trouble--a tale of assimilations smalland fine; out of which refuse, directly interesting to thesubject-victim only, the most branching vegetations may be conceived ashaving sprung. Such are the absurdities of the poor dear inwardlife--when translated, that is, and perhaps ineffectually translated, into terms of the outward and trying at all to flourish on the lines ofthe outward; a reflection that might stay me here weren't it that Isomehow feel morally affiliated, tied as by knotted fibres, to theelements involved. 

One of these was assuredly that my father had again, characteristically, suffered me to dangle; he having been called to Linwood by the diretrouble of his sister, Mrs. Temple, and brought me with him from StatenIsland--I make the matter out as of the summer of '54. We had come up, he and I, to New York; but our doings there, with the journey following, are a blank to me; I recover but my sense, on our arrival, of being forthe first time in the presence of tragedy, which the shining scene, roundabout, made more sinister--sharpened even to the point of myfeeling abashed and irrelevant, wondering why I had come. My aunt, underher brother's roof, had left her husband, wasted with consumption, neardeath at Albany; gravely ill herself--she had taken the disease from himas it was taken in those days, and was in the event very scantly tosurvive him--she had been ordered away in her own interest, for whichshe cared no scrap, and my father, the person in all his family mostjustly appealed and most anxiously listened to, had been urged to comeand support her in a separation that she passionately rejected. Vivid tome still, as floating across verandahs into the hot afternoon stillness, is the wail of her protest and her grief; I remember being scared andhushed by it and stealing away beyond its reach. I remember not lesswhat resources of high control the whole case imputed, for myimagination, to my father; and how, creeping off to the edge of theeminence above the Hudson, I somehow felt the great bright harmonies ofair and space becoming one with my rather proud assurance andconfidence, that of my own connection, for life, for interest, withsuch sources of light. The great impression, however, the one that hasbrought me so far, was another matter: only that of the close, lamp-tempered, outer evening aforesaid, with my parent again, somewheredeep within, yet not too far to make us hold our breath for it, tenderlyopposing his sister's purpose of flight, and the presence at my side ofmy young cousin Marie, youngest daughter of the house, exactly of my ownage, and named in honour of her having been born in Paris, to theinfluence of which fact her shining black eyes, her small quickness andbrownness, marking sharply her difference from her sisters, so oddly, soalmost extravagantly testified. It had come home to me by some voice ofthe air that she was "spoiled, " and it made her in the highest degreeinteresting; we ourselves had been so associated, at home, without beingin the least spoiled (I think we even rather missed it:) so that I knewabout these subjects of invidious reflection only by literature--mainly, no doubt, that of the nursery--in which they formed, quite bythemselves, a romantic class; and, the fond fancy always predominant, Iprized even while a little dreading the chance to see the condition atwork. This chance was given me, it was clear--though I risk in my recordof it a final anticlimax--by a remark from my uncle Augustus to hisdaughter: seated duskily in our group, which included two or three dimdependent forms, he expressed the strong opinion that Marie should go tobed--expressed it, that is, with the casual cursory humour that was tostrike me as the main expressional resource of outstanding members ofthe family and that would perhaps have had under analysis the defect ofmaking judgment very personal without quite making authority so. Authority they hadn't, of a truth, these all so human outstanding ones;they made shift but with light appreciation, sudden suggestion, apeculiar variety of happy remark in the air. It had been remarked but inthe air, I feel sure, that Marie should seek her couch--a truth by thedark wing of which I ruefully felt myself brushed; and the words seemedtherefore to fall with a certain ironic weight. What I have retained oftheir effect, at any rate, is the vague fact of some objection raised bymy cousin and some sharper point to his sentence supplied by her father;promptly merged in a visible commotion, a flutter of my young companionacross the gallery as for refuge in the maternal arms, a protest and anappeal in short which drew from my aunt the simple phrase that was fromthat moment so preposterously to "count" for me. "Come now, my dear;don't make a scene--I _insist_ on your not making a scene!" That was allthe witchcraft the occasion used, but the note was none the lessepoch-making. The expression, so vivid, so portentous, was one I hadnever heard--it had never been addressed to us at home; and who shouldsay now what a world one mightn't at once read into it? It seemedfreighted to sail so far; it told me so much about life. Life at theseintensities clearly became "scenes"; but the great thing, the immenseillumination, was that we could make them or not as we chose. It was along time of course before I began to distinguish between those withinour compass more particularly as spoiled and those producible on adifferent basis and which should involve detachment, involve presence ofmind; just the qualities in which Marie's possible output was apparentlydeficient. It didn't in the least matter accordingly whether or no ascene _was_ then proceeded to--and I have lost all count of whatimmediately happened. The mark had been made for me and the door flungopen; the passage, gathering up _all_ the elements of the troubled time, had been itself a scene, quite enough of one, and I had become awarewith it of a rich accession of possibilities. 

XIV

It must have been after the Sing-Sing episode that Gussy came to us, inNew York, for Sundays and holidays, from scarce further off than roundthe corner--his foreign Institution flourishing, I seem to remember, inWest Tenth Street or wherever--and yet as floated by exotic airs andwith the scent of the spice-islands hanging about him. He was beingeducated largely with Cubans and Mexicans, in those New York days morethan half the little flock of the foreign Institutions in general; overwhom his easy triumphs, while he wagged his little red head for them, were abundantly credible; reinforced as my special sense of them wasmoreover by the similar situation of his sister, older than he but alsosteeped in the exotic medium and also sometimes bringing us queer echoesof the tongues. I remember being deputed by my mother to go and conversewith her, on some question of her coming to us, at the establishment ofMadame Reichhardt (pronounced, à la française, Réchard, ) where I feltthat I had crossed, for the hour, the very threshold of "Europe"; itbeing impressed on me by my cousin, who was tall and handsome and happy, with a laugh of more beautiful sound than any laugh we were to knowagain, that French only was speakable on the premises. I sniffed it uparomatically, the superior language, in passage and parlour--it took theform of some strong savoury soup, an educational _potage Réchard_ thatmust excellently have formed the taste: that was again, I felt as I cameaway, a part of the rich experience of being thrown in tender juvenileform upon the world. This genial girl, like her brother, was in thegrand situation of having no home and of carrying on life, such asplendid kind of life, by successive visits to relations; though neithershe nor Gussy quite achieved the range of their elder brother, "Bob" ofthat ilk, a handsome young man, a just blurred, attractive, illusivepresence, who hovered a bit beyond our real reach and apparentlydisplayed the undomesticated character at its highest. _He_ seemedexposed, for his pleasure--if pleasure it was!--and my wonder, to everyassault of experience; his very name took on, from these imputations, abrowner glow; and it was all in the right key that, a few years later, he should, after "showing some talent for sculpture, " have gone thehapless way of most of the Albany youth, have become a theme for sadvague headshakes (kind and very pitying in his case) and diedprematurely and pointlessly, or in other words, by my conception, picturesquely. The headshakes were heavier and the sighs sharper foranother slim shade, one of the younger and I believe quite the mosthapless of those I have called the outstanding ones; he too, severalyears older than we again, a tormenting hoverer and vanisher; he toocharmingly sister'd, though sister'd only, and succumbing to monstrousearly trouble after having "shown some talent" for music. Theghostliness of these æsthetic manifestations, as I allude to them, isthe thinnest conceivable chip of stray marble, the faintest far-offtwang of old chords; I ask myself, for the odd obscurity of it, underwhat inspiration music and sculpture may have tinkled and glimmered tothe Albany ear and eye (as we at least knew those organs) and with whatqueer and weak delusions our unfortunates may have played. Quiteineffably quaint and _falot_ this proposition of _that_ sort of resourcefor the battle of life as it then and there opened; and above allbeautifully suggestive of our sudden collective disconnectedness (oursas the whole kinship's) from _the_ American resource of those days, Albanian or other. That precious light was the light of "business" only;and we, by a common instinct, artlessly joining hands, went forth intothe wilderness without so much as a twinkling taper. 

Our consensus, on all this ground, was amazing--it brooked no exception;the word had been passed, all round, that we didn't, that we couldn'tand shouldn't, understand these things, questions of arithmetic and offond calculation, questions of the counting-house and the market; and weappear to have held to our agreement as loyally and to have accepted ourdoom as serenely as if our faith had been mutually pledged. The rupturewith my grandfather's tradition and attitude was complete; we were neverin a single case, I think, for two generations, guilty of a stroke ofbusiness; the most that could be said of us was that, though aboutequally wanting, all round, in any faculty of acquisition, we happenedto pay for the amiable weakness less in some connections than in others. The point was that we moved so oddly and consistently--as it was ouronly form of consistency--over our limited pasture, never straying tonibble in the strange or the steep places. What was the matter with usunder this spell, and what the moral might have been for our case, areissues of small moment, after all, in face of the fact of our mainly sobrief duration. It was given to but few of us to be taught by the event, to be made to wonder with the last intensity what _had_ been the matter. This it would be interesting to worry out, might I take the time; forthe story wouldn't be told, I conceive, by any mere rueful glance atother avidities, the preference for ease, the play of the passions, theappetite for pleasure. These things have often accompanied the businessimagination; just as the love of life and the love of other persons, andof many of the things of the world, just as quickness of soul and sense, have again and again not excluded it. However, it comes back, as I havealready hinted, to the manner in which the "things of the world" couldbut present themselves; there were not enough of these, and they werenot fine and fair enough, to engage happily so much unapplied, so muchloose and crude attention. We hadn't doubtless at all a complete play ofintelligence--if I may not so far discriminate as to say _they_ hadn't;or our lack of the instinct of the market needn't have been so muchworth speaking of: other curiosities, other sympathies might haveredressed the balance. I make out our young cousin J. J. As dimly awareof this while composing the light melodies that preluded to hisextinction, and which that catastrophe so tried to admonish us to thinkof as promising; but his image is more present to me still as the greatincitement, during the few previous years, to our constant dream of"educational" relief, of some finer kind of social issue, throughEurope. 

It was to Europe J. J. Had been committed; he was over there forging thesmall apologetic arms that were so little to avail him, but it was quiteenough for us that he pointed the way to the Pension Sillig, at Vevey, which shone at us, from afar, as our own more particular solution. Itwas true that the Pension Sillig figured mainly as the solution in casesof recognised wildness; there long flourished among New York parentswhose view of such resources had the proper range a faith in it for thatcomplaint; and it was as an act of faith that, failing other remedies, our young wifeless uncle, conscious himself of no gift for control orfor edification, had placed there his difficult son. He returned withdelight from this judicious course and there was an hour when weinvoked, to intensity, a similar one in our own interest and when theair of home did little but reflect from afar the glitter of blue Swisslakes, the tinkle of cattle-bells in Alpine pastures, the rich_bonhomie_ that M. Sillig, dispensing an education all of milk and honeyand edelweiss and ranz-des-vaches, combined with his celebrated firmnessfor tough subjects. Poor J. J. Came back, I fear, much the same subjectthat he went; but he had verily performed his scant office on earth, that of having brought our then prospect, our apparent possibility, atrifle nearer. He seemed to have been wild even beyond M. Sillig'smeasure--which was highly disappointing; but if we might on the otherhand be open to the reproach of falling too short of it there wereestablishments adapted to every phase of the American predicament; sothat our general direction could but gain in vividness. I think withcompassion, altogether, of the comparative obscurity to which oureventual success in gathering the fruits, few and scant though theymight be, thus relegates those to whom it was given but to toy sobriefly with the flowers. They make collectively their tragic trio: J. J. The elder, most loved, most beautiful, most sacrificed of the Albanyuncles; J. J. The younger--they were young together, they were lucklesstogether, and the combination was as strange as the disaster wassweeping; and the daughter and sister, amplest of the "natural, " easiestof the idle, who lived on to dress their memory with every thread andpatch of her own perfect temper and then confirm the tradition, afterall, by too early and woeful an end. 

If it comes over me under the brush of multiplied memories that we mightwell have invoked the educational "relief" I just spoke of, I shoulddoubtless as promptly add that my own case must have been intrinsicallyof the poorest, and indeed make the point once for all that I should betaken as having seen and felt much of the whole queerness through themedium of rare inaptitudes. I can only have been inapt, I make out, tohave retained so positively joyless a sense of it all, to be aware ofmost of it now but as dim confusion, as bewildered anxiety. There wasinterest always, certainly--but it strikes me to-day as interest ineverything that wasn't supposedly or prescriptively of the question atall, and in nothing that _was_ so respectably involved and accredited. Without some sharpness of interest I shouldn't now have the memories;but these stick to me somehow with none of the hard glue of recovered"spirits, " recovered vivacities, assurances, successes. I can't havehad, through it all, I think, a throb of assurance or success; withoutwhich, at the same time, absurdly and indescribably, I lived andwriggled, floundered and failed, lost the clue of everything but ageneral lucid consciousness (lucid, that is, for my tender years;) whichI clutched with a sense of its value. What happened all the while, Iconceive, was that I imagined things--and as if quite on system--whollyother than as they were, and so carried on in the midst of the actualones an existence that somehow floated and saved me even while cuttingme off from any degree of direct performance, in fact from any degree ofdirect participation, at all. _There_ presumably was the interest--inthe intensity and plausibility and variety of the irrelevance: anirrelevance which, for instance, made all pastors and masters, andespecially all fellow-occupants of benches and desks, all elbowing andkicking presences within touch or view, so many monsters and horrors, somany wonders and splendours and mysteries, but never, so far as I canrecollect, realities of relation, dispensers either of knowledge or offate, playmates, intimates, mere coævals and coequals. They weresomething better--better above all than the coequal or coæval; they wereso thoroughly figures and characters, divinities or demons, and endowedin this light with a vividness that the mere reality of relation, acommoner directness of contact, would have made, I surmise, comparatively poor. This superior shade of interest was not, none theless, so beguiling that I recall without unmitigated horror, orsomething very like it, a winter passed with my brother at theInstitution Vergnès; our sorry subjection to which argues to my presentsense an unmitigated surrounding aridity. To a "French school" must havebeen earnestly imputed the virtue of keeping us in patience till easierdays should come; infinitely touching our parents' view of that New Yorkfetish of our young time, an "acquisition of the languages"--anacquisition reinforcing those opportunities which we enjoyed at home, sofar as they mustered, and at which I have briefly glanced. Charming andamusing to me indeed certain faint echoes, wavering images, of thissuperstition as it played about our path: ladies and gentlemen, dimlyforeign, mere broken syllables of whose names come back to me, attendingthere to converse in tongues and then giving way to others throughfailures of persistence--whether in pupils or preceptors I know not. There hovers even Count Adam Gurowski, Polish, patriotic, exiled, temporarily famous, with the vision of _his_ being invoked for facilityand then relinquished for difficulty; though I scarce guess on which ofhis battle-grounds--he was so polyglot that he even had a rich commandof New Yorkese. 

XV

It is to the Institution Vergnès that my earliest recovery of the senseof being in any degree "educated with" W. J. Attaches itself; anestablishment which occupied during the early 'fifties a site in thevery middle of Broadway, of the lower, the real Broadway, where it couldthrob with the very pulse of the traffic in which we all innocentlyrejoiced--believing it, I surmise, the liveliest conceivable: a factthat is by itself, in the light of the present, an odd rococo note. Thelower Broadway--I allude to the whole Fourth Street and Bond Street(where now _is_ the Bond Street of that antiquity?)--was then a seat ofeducation, since we had not done with it, as I shall presently show, even when we had done with the Institution, a prompt disillusionment;and I brood thus over a period which strikes me as long and during whichmy personal hours of diligence were somehow more than anything elsehours of the pavement and the shopfront, or of such contemplativeexercise as the very considerable distance, for small legs, betweenthose regions and the westward Fourteenth Street might comprise. Pedestrian gaping having been in childhood, as I have noted, prevailingly my line, fate appeared to have kindly provided for it on nosmall scale; to the extent even that it must have been really my soleand single form of athletics. Vague heated competition and agitation inthe then enclosed Union Square would seem to point a little, among usall, to nobler types of motion; but of any basis for recreation, anything in the nature of a playground or a breathing-space, theInstitution itself was serenely innocent. This I take again for a noteextraordinarily mediæval. It occupied the first and second floors, if Irightly remember, of a wide front that, overhanging the endlessthoroughfare, looked out on bouncing, clattering "stages" and painfullydragged carts and the promiscuous human shuffle--the violence ofrepercussions from the New York pavement of those years to be furthertaken into account; and I win it back from every side as, in spite ofthese aspects of garish publicity, a dark and dreadful, and withal quiteabsurd, scene. I see places of that general time, even places ofconfinement, in a dusty golden light that special memories of smallmisery scarce in the least bedim, and this holds true of our next andquite neighbouring refuge; the establishment of M. Vergnès alone darklesand shrinks to me--a sordidly _black_ interior is my main image for it;attenuated only by its having very soon afterwards, as a sufferedordeal, altogether lapsed and intermitted. Faintly, in the gloom, Idistinguish M. Vergnès himself--quite "old, " very old indeed as Isupposed him, and highly irritated and markedly bristling; though ofnothing in particular that happened to me at his or at anyone's elsehands have I the scantest remembrance. What really most happened nodoubt, was that my brother and I should both come away with a mindprepared for a perfect assimilation of Alphonse Daudet's chronicle of"Jack, " years and years later on; to make the acquaintance in that workof the "petits pays chauds" among whom Jack learnt the first lessons oflife was to see the Institution Vergnès at once revive, swarming as itdid with small homesick Cubans and Mexicans; the complete failure ofblondness that marks the memory is doubtless the cumulative effect of somany of the New York "petits pays chauds, " preponderantly brown andblack and conducing to a greasy gloom. Into this gloom I fear I shouldsee all things recede together but for a certain salient note, the factthat the whole "staff" appears to have been constantly in a rage; fromwhich naturally resulted the accent of shrillness (the only accent wecould pick up, though we were supposed to be learning, for the extremeimportance of it, quantities of French) and the sound of highvociferation. I remember infuriated ushers, of foreign speech andflushed complexion--the tearing across of hapless "exercises" and_dictées_ and the hurtle through the air of dodged volumes; only never, despite this, the extremity of smiting. There can have been at theInstitution no blows instructionally dealt--nor even from our hours ofease do any such echoes come back to me. Little Cubans and Mexicans, Imake out, were not to be vulgarly whacked--in deference, presumably, tosome latent relic or imputed survival of Castilian pride; which wouldimpose withal considerations of quite practical prudence. Food forreflection and comparison might well have been so suggested; interestingat least the element of contrast between such opposed conceptions oftone, temper and manner as the passion without whacks, or with whacksonly of inanimate objects, ruling the scene I have described, and thewhacks without passion, the grim, impersonal, strictly penalapplications of the rod, which then generally represented what was stillinvolved in our English tradition. It was the two theories ofsensibility, of personal dignity, that so diverged; but with such otherdivergences now on top of those that the old comparison falls away. Weto-day go unwhacked altogether--though from a pride other thanCastilian: it is difficult to say at least what ideal has thustriumphed. In the Vergnès air at any rate I seem myself to have satunscathed and unterrified--not alarmed even by so much as a call to theblackboard; only protected by my insignificance, which yet covered sucha sense of our dusky squalor. Queer for us the whole affair, assuredly;but how much queerer for the poor petits pays chauds who had come so farfor their privilege. _We_ had come, comparatively, but from round thecorner--and that left the "state of education" and the range ofselection all about as quaint enough. What could these things then havebeen in the various native climes of the petits pays chauds?

It was by some strong wave of reaction, clearly, that we were floatednext into the quieter haven of Mr. Richard Pulling Jenks--where cleanerwaters, as I feel their coolness still, must have filled a neaterthough, it was true, slightly more contracted trough. Yet the range ofselection had been even on this higher plane none too strikinglyexemplified; our jumping had scant compass--we still grubbed with a goodconscience in Broadway and sidled about Fourth Street. But I think ofthe higher education as having there, from various causes, none the lessbegun to glimmer for us. A diffused brightness, a kind of highcrosslight of conflicting windows, rests for me at all events on thelittle realm of Mr. Pulling Jenks and bathes it as with positively sweetlimitations. Limited must it have been, I feel, with our couple ofmiddling rooms, front and back, our close packing, our largeunaccommodating stove, our grey and gritty oilcloth, and again ourimportunate Broadway; from the aggregation of which elements theredistils itself, without my being able to account for it, a certainperversity of romance. I speak indeed here for myself in particular, andkeen for romance must I have been in such conditions, I admit; since thesense of it had crept into a recreational desert even as utter as thatof the Institution Vergnès. Up out of Broadway we still scrambled--I cansmell the steep and cold and dusty wooden staircase; straight intoBroadway we dropped--I feel again the generalised glare of liberation;and I scarce know what tenuity of spirit it argues that I should neitherhave enjoyed nor been aware of missing (speaking again for myself only)a space wider than the schoolroom floor to react and knock about in. Iliterally conclude that we must have knocked about in Broadway, and inBroadway alone, like perfect little men of the world; we must have beenlet loose there to stretch our legs and fill our lungs, withoutprejudice either to our earlier and later freedoms of going and coming. I as strictly infer, at the same time, that Broadway must have been thenas one of the alleys of Eden, for any sinister contact or consequenceinvolved for us; a circumstance that didn't in the least interfere, too, as I have noted, with its offer of an entrancing interest. The interestverily could have been a _calculated_ thing on the part of our dearparents as little as on that of Mr. Jenks himself. Therefore let it berecorded as still most odd that we should all have assented to suchdeficiency of landscape, such exiguity of sport. I take the trueinwardness of the matter to have been in our having such short hours, long as they may have appeared at the time, that the day left margin atthe worst for private inventions. I think we found landscape, forourselves--and wherever I at least found vision I found such sport as Iwas capable of--even between the front and back rooms and theconflicting windows; even by the stove which somehow scorched withoutwarming, and yet round which Mr. Coe and Mr. Dolmidge, thedrawing-master and the writing-master, arriving of a winter's day, usednotedly, and in the case of Mr. Coe lamentedly, to draw out theirdelays. Is the dusty golden light of retrospect in this connection aneffluence from Mr. Dolmidge and Mr. Coe, whose ministrations come backto me as the sole directly desired or invoked ones I was to know in myyears, such as they were, of pupilage?

I see them in any case as old-world images, figures of an antique stamp;products, mustn't they have been, of an order in which some socialrelativity or matter-of-course adjustment, some transmitted form andpressure, were still at work? Mr. Dolmidge, inordinately lean, clean-shaved, as was comparatively uncommon then, and in aswallow-tailed coat and I think a black satin stock, was surely perfectin his absolutely functional way, a pure pen-holder of a man, melancholyand mild, who taught the most complicated flourishes--great scrolls ofthem met our view in the form of surging seas and beaked and beady-eyedeagles, the eagle being so calligraphic a bird--while he might just havetaught resignation. He was not at all funny--no one out of our immediatefamily circle, in fact almost no one but W. J. Himself, who flowered inevery waste, seems to have struck me as funny in those years; but he wasto remain with me a picture of somebody in Dickens, one of the Phiz ifnot the Cruikshank pictures. Mr. Coe was another affair, bristling withthe question of the "hard, " but somehow too with the revelation of thesoft, the deeply attaching; a worthy of immense stature and presence, crowned as with the thick white hair of genius, wearing a great gatheredor puckered cloak, with a vast velvet collar, and resembling, as hecomes back to me, the General Winfield Scott who lived so much in oureyes then. The oddity may well even at that hour have been present to meof its taking so towering a person to produce such small"drawing-cards"; it was as if some mighty bird had laid diminutive eggs. Mr. Coe, of a truth, laid his all over the place, and though they werenot of more than handy size--very small boys could set them up in stateon very small desks--they had doubtless a great range of number andeffect. They were scattered far abroad and I surmise celebrated; theyrepresented crooked cottages, feathery trees, browsing and bristlingbeasts and other rural objects; all rendered, as I recall them, inlittle detached dashes that were like stories told in words of onesyllable, or even more perhaps in short gasps of delight. It must havebeen a stammering art, but I admired its fluency, which swims for memoreover in richer though slightly vague associations. Mr. Coe practisedon a larger scale, in colour, in oils, producing wondrous neat littleboards that make me to this day think of them and more particularlysmell them, when I hear of a "panel" picture: a glamour of greatnessattends them as brought home by W. J. From the master's own place ofinstruction in that old University building which partly formed the eastside of Washington Square and figures to memory, or to fond imagination, as throbbing with more offices and functions, a denser chiaroscuro, thanany reared hugeness of to-day, where character is so lost in quantity. Is there any present structure that plays such a part in proportion toits size?--though even as I ask the question I feel how nothing on earthis proportioned to present sizes. These alone are proportioned--and tomere sky-space and mere amount, amount of steel and stone; which iscomparatively uninteresting. Perhaps our needs and our elements werethen absurdly, were then provincially few, and that the patches ofcharacter in that small grey granite compendium were all we had ingeneral to exhibit. Let me add at any rate that some of them wereexhibitional--even to my tender years, I mean; since I respond even yetto my privilege of presence at some Commencement or Commemoration, suchas might be natural, doubtless, to any "university, " where, as under ahigh rich roof, before a Chancellor in a gown and amid serried admirersand impressive applause, there was "speaking, " of the finest sort, andwhere above all I gathered in as a dazzling example the rare assuranceof young Winthrop Somebody or Somebody Winthrop, who, though still injackets, held us spellbound by his rendering of Serjeant Buzfuz'sexposure of Mr. Pickwick. Long was I to marvel at the high sufficiencyof young Winthrop Somebody or Somebody Winthrop--in which romanticimpression it is perhaps after all (though with the consecration of oneor two of the novels of the once-admired Theodore of that name, which soremarkably insists, thrown in) the sense of the place is embalmed. 

I must not forget indeed that I throw in also Mr. Coe--even if withless assured a hand; by way of a note on those higher flights of powerand promise that I at this time began to see definitely determined in mybrother. As I catch W. J. 's image, from far back, at its mostcharacteristic, he sits drawing and drawing, always drawing, especiallyunder the lamplight of the Fourteenth Street back parlour; and not aswith a plodding patience, which I think would less have affected me, buteasily, freely and, as who should say, infallibly: always at the stageof finishing off, his head dropped from side to side and his tonguerubbing his lower lip. I recover a period during which to see him at allwas so to see him--the other flights and faculties removed him from myview. These were a matter of course--he recurred, he passed nearer, butin his moments of ease, and I clearly quite accepted the ease of hisdisappearances. Didn't he always when within my view light them up andjustify them by renewed and enlarged vividness? so that my whole senseof him as formed for assimilations scarce conceivable made our gaps ofcontact too natural for me even to be lessons in humility. Humility hadnothing to do with it--as little even as envy would have had; I wasbelow humility, just as we were together outside of competition, mutually "hors concours. " _His_ competitions were with others--in whichhow wasn't he, how could he not be, successful? while mine were withnobody, or nobody's with me, which came to the same thing, as heavenknows I neither braved them nor missed them. That winter, as I recoverit, represents him as sufficiently within view to make his position orwhereabouts in the upper air definite--I must have taken it for grantedbefore, but could now in a manner measure it; and the freshness of thissense, something serene in my complacency, had to do, I divine, with theeffect of our moving, with the rest of our company, which was notnumerous but practically, but appreciably "select, " on a higher andfairer plane than ever yet. Predominantly of course we owed this benefitto Richard Pulling himself; of whom I recall my brother's saying to me, at a considerably later time, and with an authority that affected me asabsolute, that he had been of all our masters the most truly genial, infact the only one to whom the art of exciting an interest or inspiring asympathy could be in any degree imputed. I take this to have meant thathe would have adorned a higher sphere--and it may have been, to explainhis so soon swimming out of our ken, that into a higher sphere herapidly moved; I can account at least for our falling away from him thevery next year and declining again upon baser things and a lowercivilisation but by some probability of his flight, just thereaftereffected, to a greater distance, to one of the far upper reaches of thetown. Some years must have elapsed and some distinction have crownedhim when, being briefly in New York together, W. J. And I called on himof a Sunday afternoon, to find--what I hadn't been at all sure of--thathe still quite knew who we were, or handsomely pretended to; handsomelyin spite of his markedly confirmed identity of appearance with thePunch, husband to Judy, of the funny papers and the street show. Bald, rotund, of ruddy complexion, with the nose, the chin, the arched eye, the paunch and the _barbiche_, to say nothing of the ferule nursed inhis arms and with which, in the show, such free play is made, Mr. Jenksyet seems to me to have preserved a dignity as well as projected animage, and in fact have done other things besides. He whackedoccasionally--he must have been one of the last of the whackers; but Idon't remember it as ugly or dreadful or droll--don't remember, that is, either directly feeling or reflectively enjoying it: it fails somehow tobreak the spell of our civilisation; my share in which, however, comesback to me as merely contemplative. It is beyond measure odd, doubtless, that my main association with my "studies, " whether of the infant or theadolescent order, should be with almost anything but the fact oflearning--of learning, I mean, what I was supposed to learn. I couldonly have been busy, at the same time, with other pursuits--which musthave borne some superficial likeness at least to the acquisition ofknowledge of a free irresponsible sort; since I remember few either ofthe inward pangs or the outward pains of a merely graceless state. Irecognise at the same time that it was perhaps a sorry business to be sointerested in one didn't know what. Such are, whether at the worst or atthe best, some of the aspects of that season as Mr. Jenks's imagepresides; in the light of which I _may_ perhaps again rather wonder atmy imputation to the general picture of so much amenity. Clearly thegood man was a civiliser--whacks and all; and by some art not now to bedetected. He was a complacent classic--which was what my brother's claimfor him, I dare say, mostly represented; though that passed over thehead of my tenth year. It was a good note for him in this particularthat, deploring the facile text-books of Doctor Anthon of ColumbiaCollege, in which there was even more crib than text, and holding fastto the sterner discipline of Andrews and Stoddard and of that other moreconservative commentator (he too doubtless long since superseded) whosename I blush to forget. I think in fine of Richard Pulling's small butsincere academy as a consistent little protest against its big and easyand quite out-distancing rival, the Columbia College school, apparentlyin those days quite the favourite of fortune. 

XVI

I must in some degree have felt it a charm there that we were not, underhis rule, inordinately prepared for "business, " but were on the contraryto remember that the taste of Cornelius Nepos in the air, even ratherstale though it may have been, had lacked the black bitterness markingour next ordeal and that I conceive to have proceeded from some rankpredominance of the theory and practice of book-keeping. It hadconsorted with this that we found ourselves, by I know not whatinconsequence, a pair of the "assets" of a firm; Messrs. Forest andQuackenboss, who carried on business at the northwest corner ofFourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue, having for the winter of 1854-5taken our education in hand. As their establishment had the style, so Iwas conscious at the time of its having the general stamp and sense, ofa shop--a shop of long standing, of numerous clients, of lively bustleand traffic. The structure itself was to my recent recognition stillthere and more than ever a shop, with improvements and extensions, butdealing in other wares than those anciently and as I suppose then quitefreshly purveyed; so far at least as freshness was imputable to thesenior member of the firm, who had come down to our generation from alegendary past and with a striking resemblance of head and general airto Benjamin Franklin. Mr. Forest, under whose more particular attentionI languished, had lasted on from a plainer age and, having formed, bythe legend, in their youth, the taste of two or three of our New Yorkuncles--though for what it could have been goodness only knew--was stillof a _trempe_ to whack in the fine old way at their nephews and sons. Isee him aloft, benevolent and hard, mildly massive, in a black dresscoat and trousers and a white neckcloth that should have figured, if itdidn't, a frill, and on the highest rostrum of our experience, whence hecomes back to me as the dryest of all our founts of knowledge, thoughquite again as a link with far-off manners and forms and as the most"historic" figure we had ever had to do with. W. J. , as I distinguish, had in truth scarcely to do with him--W. J. Lost again on upper floors, in higher classes, in real pursuits, and connecting me, in an indirectand almost deprecated manner, with a strange, curly, glossy, an anointedand bearded, Mr. Quackenboss, the junior partner, who conducted theclassical department and never whacked--only sent down his subjects, with every confidence, to his friend. I make out with clearness that Mr. Forest was awful and arid, and yet that somehow, by the same stroke, wedidn't, under his sway, go in terror, only went exceedingly in want;even if in want indeed of I scarce (for myself) know what, since itmight well have been enough for me, in so resounding an air, to escapewith nothing worse than a failure of thrill. If I didn't feel thatinterest I must clearly not have inspired it, and I marvel afresh, underthese memories, at the few points at which I appear to have touchedconstituted reality. That, however, is a different connectionaltogether, and I read back into the one I have been noting much of thechill, or at least the indifference, of a foreseen and foredoomeddetachment: it was during that winter that I began to live byanticipation in another world and to feel our uneasy connection with NewYork loosen beyond recovery. I remember for how many months, when therupture took place, we had been to my particular consciousness virtuallyin motion; though I regain at the same time the impression of moreexperience on the spot than had marked our small previous history: this, however, a branch of the matter that I must for the moment brush aside. For it would have been meanwhile odd enough to hold us in arrest amoment--that quality of our situation that could suffer such elements asthose I have glanced at to take so considerably the place of educationas more usually and conventionally understood, and by thatunderstanding more earnestly mapped out; a deficiency, in the wholething, that I fail at all consistently to deplore, however--struck as Iam with the rare fashion after which, in any small victim of life, theinward perversity may work. 

It works by converting to its uses things vain and unintended, to thegreat discomposure of their prepared opposites, which it by the samestroke so often reduces to naught; with the result indeed that one maymost of all see it--so at least have I quite exclusively seen it, thelittle life out for its chance--as proceeding by the inveterate processof conversion. As I reconsider both my own and my brother's earlystart--even his too, made under stronger propulsions--it is quite for meas if the authors of our being and guardians of our youth had virtuallysaid to us but one thing, directed our course but by one word, thoughconstantly repeated: Convert, convert, convert! With which I have noteven the sense of any needed appeal in us for further apprehension ofthe particular precious metal our chemistry was to have in view. I tasteagain in that pure air no ghost of a hint, for instance, that theprecious metal was the refined gold of "success"--a reward of effort forwhich I remember to have heard at home no good word, nor any sort ofword, ever faintly breathed. It was a case of the presumption that weshould hear words enough abundantly elsewhere; so that any dignity theidea might claim was in the first place not worth insisting on, and inthe second might well be overstated. We were to convert and convert, success--in the sense that was in the general air--or no success; andsimply everything that should happen to us, every contact, everyimpression and every experience we should know, were to form our solublestuff; with only ourselves to thank should we remain unaware, by thetime our perceptions were decently developed, of the substance finallyprojected and most desirable. That substance might be just consummatelyVirtue, as a social grace and value--and as a matter furthermore onwhich pretexts for ambiguity of view and of measure were as little aspossible called upon to flourish. This last luxury therefore quitefailed us, and we understood no whit the less what was suggested andexpected because of the highly liberal way in which the pill, if I maycall it so, was gilded: it had been made up--to emphasise my image--inso bright an air of humanity and gaiety, of charity and humour. What Ispeak of is the medium itself, of course, that we were most immediatelysteeped in--I am glancing now at no particular turn of our youngattitude in it, and I can scarce sufficiently express how little itcould have conduced to the formation of prigs. Our father's primehorror was of _them_--he only cared for virtue that was more or lessashamed of itself; and nothing could have been of a happier whimsicalitythan the mixture in him, and in all his walk and conversation, of thestrongest instinct for the human and the liveliest reaction from theliteral. The literal played in our education as small a part as itperhaps ever played in any, and we wholesomely breathed inconsistencyand ate and drank contradictions. The presence of paradox was so brightamong us--though fluttering ever with as light a wing and as short aflight as need have been--that we fairly grew used to allow, from anearly time, for the so many and odd declarations we heard launched, tothe extent of happily "discounting" them; the moral of all of which wasthat we need never fear not to be good enough if we were only socialenough: a splendid meaning indeed being attached to the latter term. 

Thus we had ever the amusement, since I can really call it nothing less, of hearing morality, or moralism, as it was more invidiously worded, made hay of in the very interest of character and conduct; these thingssuffering much, it seemed, by their association with theconscience--that is the _conscious_ conscience--the very home of theliteral, the haunt of so many pedantries. Pedantries, on all thisground, were anathema; and if our dear parent had at all minded his notbeing consistent, and had entertained about us generally lesspassionate an optimism (not an easy but an arduous state in himmoreover, ) he might have found it difficult to apply to the promotion ofour studies so free a suspicion of the inhumanity of Method. Methodcertainly never quite raged among us; but it was our fortunenevertheless that everything had its turn, and that such indifferenceswere no more pedantic than certain rigours might perhaps have been; ofall of which odd notes of our situation there would, and possibly will, be more to say--my present aim is really but to testify to what mostcomes up for me to-day in the queer educative air I have been trying tobreathe again. That definite reflection is that if we had not had in usto some degree the root of the matter no method, however confessedly oraggressively "pedantic, " would much have availed for us; and that sincewe apparently did have it, deep down and inert in our small patches ofvirgin soil, the fashion after which it struggled forth was anexperience as intense as any other and a record of as great a dignity. It may be asked me, I recognise, of the root of "what" matter I socomplacently speak, and if I say "Why, of the matter of our having withconsiderable intensity _proved_ educable, or, if you like better, teachable, that is accessible to experience, " it may again be retorted:"That won't do for a decent account of a young consciousness; for thinkof all the things that the failure of method, of which you make solight, didn't put into yours; think of the splendid economy of areal--or at least of a planned and attempted education, a 'regularcourse of instruction'--and then think of the waste involved in the soinferior substitute of which the pair of you were evidently victims. " Anadmonition this on which I brood, less, however, than on the still othersense, rising from the whole retrospect, of my now feeling sure, of myhaving mastered the particular history of just that waste--to the pointof its actually affecting me as blooming with interest, to the pointeven of its making me ask myself how in the world, if the question is ofthe injection of more things into the consciousness (as would seem thecase, ) mine could have "done" with more: thanks to its small trick, perhaps vicious I admit, of having felt itself from an early time almostuncomfortably stuffed. I see my critic, by whom I mean my representativeof method at any price, take in this plea only to crush it with hisconfidence--that without the signal effects of method one must have hadby an inexorable law to resort to shifts and ingenuities, and cantherefore only have been an artful dodger more or less successfullydodging. I take full account of the respectability of the prejudiceagainst one or two of the uses to which the intelligence may at a pinchbe put--the criminal use in particular of falsifying its history, offorging its records even, and of appearing greater than the traceablegrounds warrant. One can but fall back, none the less, on the particular_un_traceability of grounds--when it comes to that: cases abound so inwhich, with the grounds all there, the intelligence itself is not to beidentified. I contend for nothing moreover but the lively interest ofthe view, and above all of the measure, of almost any mental historyafter the fact. Of less interest, comparatively, is that sight of themind _before_--before the demonstration of the fact, that is, and whilestill muffled in theories and presumptions (purple and fine linen, andas such highly becoming though these be) of what shall prove best forit. 

Which doubtless too numerous remarks have been determined by my sense ofthe tenuity of some of my clues: I had begun to count our wavering stepsfrom so very far back, and with a lively disposition, I confess, not tomiss even the vaguest of them. I can scarce indeed overstate thevagueness that quite _had_ to attend a great number in presence of thefact that our father, caring for our spiritual decency unspeakably morethan for anything else, anything at all that might be or might becomeours, would have seemed to regard this cultivation of it as professionand career enough for us, had he but betrayed more interest in ourmastery of _any_ art or craft. It was not certainly that the professionof virtue would have been anything less than abhorrent to him, but that, singular though the circumstance, there were times when he might havestruck us as having after all more patience with it than with this, thator the other more technical thrifty scheme. Of the beauty of hisdissimulated anxiety and tenderness on these and various other suchlikeheads, however, other examples will arise; for I see him now as fairlyafraid to recognise certain anxieties, fairly declining to dabble in theharshness of practical precautions or impositions. The effect of hisattitude, so little thought out as shrewd or as vulgarly providential, but in spite of this so socially and affectionally founded, could onlybe to make life interesting to us at the worst, in default of making itextraordinarily "paying. " He had a theory that it would somehow or otheralways be paying enough--and this much less by any poor conception ofour wants (for he delighted in our wants and so sympathetically andsketchily and summarily wanted _for_ us) than by a happy and friendly, though slightly nebulous, conception of our resources. Delighting everin the truth while generously contemptuous of the facts, so far as wemight make the difference--the facts having a way of being many and thetruth remaining but one--he held that there would always be enough;since the truth, the true truth, was never ugly and dreadful, and wedidn't and wouldn't depart from it by any cruelty or stupidity (for hewouldn't have had us stupid, ) and might therefore depend on it for dueabundance even of meat and drink and raiment, even of wisdom and wit andhonour. It is too much to say that our so preponderantly humanised andsocialised adolescence was to make us look out for these things with asubtle indirectness; but I return to my proposition that there may stillbe a charm in seeing such hazards at work through a given, even if notin a systematised, case. My cases are of course given, so that economyof observation after the fact, as I have called it, becomes inspiring, not less than the amusement, or whatever it may be, of the question ofwhat might happen, of what in point of fact did happen, to several verytowny and domesticated little persons, who were confirmed in theirtowniness and fairly enriched in their sensibility, instead of beingchucked into a scramble or exposed on breezy uplands under the she-wolfof competition and discipline. Perhaps any success that attended theexperiment--which was really, as I have hinted, no plotted thing at all, but only an accident of accidents--proceeded just from the fact that thesmall subjects, a defeated Romulus, a prematurely sacrificed Remus, hadin their very sensibility an asset, as we have come to say, a principleof life and even of "fun. " Perhaps on the other hand the success wouldhave been greater with less of that particular complication orfacilitation and more of some other which I shall be at a loss toidentify. What I find in my path happens to be the fact of thesensibility, and from the light it sheds the curious, as also thecommon, things that did from occasion to occasion play into it seem eachto borrow a separate and vivifying glow. 

As at the Institution Vergnès and at Mr. Pulling Jenks's, however thismight be, so at "Forest's, " or in other words at the more numerousestablishment of Messrs. Forest and Quackenboss, where we spent thewinter of 1854, reality, in the form of multitudinous mates, was to haveswarmed about me increasingly: at Forest's the prolonged roll-call inthe morning, as I sit in the vast bright crowded smelly smoky room, inwhich rusty black stove-shafts were the nearest hint of architecture, bristles with names, Hoes and Havemeyers, Stokeses, Phelpses, Colgatesand others, of a subsequently great New York salience. It was sociableand gay, it was sordidly spectacular, one was then, by an inch or two, abigger boy--though with crushing superiorities in that line all round;and when I wonder why the scene was sterile (which was what I took itfor at the worst) the reason glooms out again in the dreadful blight ofarithmetic, which affected me at the time as filling all the air. Thequantity imposed may not in fact have been positively gross, yet it iswhat I most definitely remember--not, I mean, that I have retained thedimmest notion of the science, but only of the dire image of our beingin one way or another always supposedly addressed to it. I recallstrange neighbours and deskfellows who, not otherwise too objectionable, were uncanny and monstrous through their possession, cultivation, imitation of ledgers, daybooks, double-entry, tall pages of figures, interspaces streaked with oblique ruled lines that weirdly "balanced, "whatever that might mean, and other like horrors. Nothing in truth ismore distinct to me than the tune to which they were, without exception, at their ease on such ground--unless it be my general dazzled, humiliated sense, through those years, of the common, the baffling, mastery, all round me, of a hundred handy arts and devices. Everyone didthings and had things--everyone knew how, even when it was a question ofthe small animals, the dormice and grasshoppers, or the hoards of foodand stationery, that they kept in their desks, just as they kept intheir heads such secrets for how to do sums--those secrets that I musteven then have foreseen I should even so late in life as this havefailed to discover. I may have known things, have by that time learnt afew, myself, but I didn't know _that_--what I did know; whereas thosewho surrounded me were all agog, to my vision, with the benefit of theirknowledge. I see them, in this light, across the years, fairly grin andgrimace with it; and the presumable vulgarity of some of them, certainscattered shades of baseness still discernible, comes to me as but oneof the appearances of an abounding play of genius. Who was it I everthought stupid?--even when knowing, or at least feeling, that sundryexpressions of life or force, which I yet had no name for, representedsomehow art without grace, or (what after a fashion came to the samething) presence without type. All of which, I should add, didn't in theleast prevent my moving on the plane of the remarkable; so that if, as Ihave noted, the general blank of consciousness, in the conditions ofthat winter, rather tended to spread, this could perhaps have but hadfor its best reason that I was fairly gorged with wonders. They were toomuch of the same kind; the result, that is, of everyone's seeming toknow everything--to the effect, a little, that everything suffered byit. There was a boy called Simpson my juxtaposition to whom I recall asuninterruptedly close, and whose origin can only have been, I think, quite immediately Irish--and Simpson, I feel sure, was a friendly andhelpful character. Yet even he reeked, to my sense, with strangeaccomplishment--no single show of which but was accompanied in him by asmart protrusion of the lower lip, a crude complacency of power, thatalmost crushed me to sadness. It is as if I had passed in that sadnessmost of those ostensibly animated months; an effect however doubtless insome degree proceeding, for later appreciation, from the moreintelligible nearness of the time--it had brought me to the end of mytwelfth year; which helps not a little to turn it to prose. How I gaveto that state, in any case, such an air of occupation as to beguile notonly myself but my instructors--which I infer I did from their sointensely letting me alone--I am quite at a loss to say; I have in truthmainly the remembrance of _being_ consistently either ignored orexquisitely considered (I know not which to call it;) even if withoutthe belief, which would explain it, that I passed for generally"wanting" any more than for naturally odious. It was strange, at allevents--it could only have been--to be so stupid without being morebrutish and so perceptive without being more keen. Here were a case anda problem to which no honest master with other and better cases couldhave felt justified in giving time; he would have had at least to bemorbidly curious, and I recall from that sphere of rule no instancewhatever of the least refinement of inquiry. I should even probably havemissed one of these more flattering shades of attention had I missedattention at all; but I think I was never really aware of how little Igot or how much I did without. I read back into the whole connectionindeed the chill, or at least the indifference, of a foreseen andforedoomed detachment: I have noted how at this desperate juncture themild forces making for our conscious relief, pushing the door to Europedefinitely open, began at last to be effective. Nothing seemed to matterat all but that I should become personally and incredibly acquaintedwith Piccadilly and Richmond Park and Ham Common. I regain at the sametime the impression of more experience on the spot than had marked oursmall previous history. 

Pitiful as it looks to these ampler days the mere little fact that asmall court for recreation was attached to our academy added somethingof a grace to life. We descended in relays, for "intermission, " into apaved and walled yard of the scantest size; the only provision for anysuch privilege--not counting the street itself, of which, at the worstof other conditions, we must have had free range--that I recover fromthose years. The ground is built over now, but I could still figure, ona recent occasion, our small breathing-space; together with my thenabject little sense that it richly sufficed--or rather, positively, thatnothing could have been more romantic. For within our limit we freelyconversed, and at nothing did I assist with more interest than at freeconversation. Certain boys hover before me, the biggest, the fairest, the most worthy of freedom, dominating the scene and scattering uponfifty subjects the most surprising lights. One of these heroes, whosestature and complexion are still there for me to admire, did tricks oflegerdemain, with the scant apparatus of a handkerchief, a key, apocket-knife--as to some one of which it is as fresh as yesterday that Iingenuously invited him to show me how to do it, and then, on histreating me with scorn, renewed without dignity my fond solicitation. Fresher even than yesterday, fadelessly fresh for me at this hour, isthe cutting remark thereupon of another boy, who certainly wasn'tSimpson and whose identity is lost for me in his mere inspiredauthority: "Oh, oh, oh, I should think you'd be too proud--!" I hadneither been too proud nor so much as conceived that one might be, but Iremember well how it flashed on me with this that I had failed therebyof a high luxury or privilege--which the whole future, however, mighthelp me to make up for. To what extent it _has_ helped is anothermatter, but so fine was the force of the suggestion that I think I havenever in all the years made certain returns upon my spirit without againfeeling the pang from the cool little voice of the Fourteenth Streetyard. Such was the moral exercise it at least allowed us room for. Italso allowed us room, to be just, for an inordinate consumption of hotwaffles retailed by a benevolent black "auntie" who presided, with herhusband's aid as I remember, at a portable stove set up in a passage orrecess opening from the court; to which we flocked and pushed, in amerciless squeeze, with all our coppers, and the products of which, theoblong farinaceous compound, faintly yet richly brown, stamped andsmoking, not crisp nor brittle, but softly absorbent of the syrup dabbedupon it for a finish, revealed to me I for a long time, even for a verylong time supposed, the highest pleasure of sense. We stamped about, wefreely conversed, we ate sticky waffles by the hundred--I recall noworse acts of violence unless I count as such our intermissional rushesto Pynsent's of the Avenue, a few doors off, in the particular interestof a confection that ran the waffle close, as the phrase is, forpopularity, while even surpassing it for stickiness. Pynsent's washigher up in the row in which Forest's had its front--other and dearernames have dropped from me, but Pynsent's adheres with all the force ofthe strong saccharine principle. This principle, at its highest, weconceived, was embodied in small amber-coloured mounds of choppedcocoanut or whatever other substance, if a finer there be; profusely, lusciously endued and distributed on small tin trays in the manner ofhaycocks in a field. We acquired, we appropriated, we transported, weenjoyed them, they fairly formed perhaps, after all, our highestenjoyment; but with consequences to our pockets--and I speak of thoseother than financial, with an intimacy, a reciprocity of contact at any, or at every, personal point, that I lose myself in the thought of. 

XVII

I lose myself, of a truth, under the whole pressure of the spring ofmemory proceeding from recent revisitings and recognitions--the actionof the fact that time until lately had spared hereabouts, and may stillbe sparing, in the most exceptional way, by an anomaly or a mercy of therarest in New York, a whole cluster of landmarks, leaving me to "spot"and verify, right and left, the smallest preserved particulars. Thesethings, at the pressure, flush together again, interweave their patternand quite thrust it at me, the absurd little fusion of images, for ahistory or a picture of the time--the background of which I see afterall so much less as the harsh Sixth Avenue corner than as many othermatters. Those scant shades claimed us but briefly and superficially, and it comes back to me that oddly enough, in the light of autumnafternoons, our associates, the most animated or at any rate the best"put in" little figures of our landscape, were not our comparativelyobscure schoolmates, who seem mostly to have swum out of our ken betweenany day and its morrow. Our other companions, those we practically knew"at home, " ignored our school, having better or worse of their own, butpeopled somehow for us the social scene, which, figuring there for me indocumentary vividness, bristles with Van Burens, Van Winkles, DePeysters, Costers, Senters, Norcoms, Robinsons (these last composinground a stone-throwing "Eugene, ") Wards, Hunts and _tutti quanti_--towhose ranks I must add our invariable Albert, before-mentioned, and whoswarm from up and down and east and west, appearing to me surely to haveformed a rich and various society. Our salon, it is true, was mainly thestreet, loose and rude and crude in those days at best--though with arapid increase of redeeming features, to the extent to which the spreadof micaceous brown stone could redeem: as exhibited especially in theample face of the Scotch Presbyterian church promptly rising justopposite our own peculiar row and which it now marks for me somewhatgrimly a span of life to have seen laboriously rear itself, continuouslyflourish and utterly disappear. While in construction it was only lessinteresting than the dancing-academy of Mr. Edward Ferrero, slightlywest of it and forming with it, in their embryonic stage, a large anddelightfully dangerous adjunct to our playground, though with thedistinction of coming much to surpass it for interest in the finalphase. While we clambered about on ladders and toyed with the peril ofunfloored abysses, while we trespassed and pried and pervaded, snatching a scant impression from sorry material enough, clearly, thesacred edifice enjoyed a credit beyond that of the profane; but whenboth were finished and opened we flocked to the sound of the fiddle morefreely, it need scarce be said, than to that of the psalm. "Freely"indeed, in our particular case, scarce expresses the latter relation;since our young liberty in respect to church-going was absolute and wemight range at will, through the great city, from one place of worshipand one form of faith to another, or might on occasion ignore them allequally, which was what we mainly did; whereas we rallied without abreak to the halls of Ferrero, a view of the staringly and, as Isupposed dazzlingly, frescoed walls, the internal economy, the highamenity, the general æsthetic and social appeal, of which still hangs inits wealth before me. Dr. McElroy, uplifting tight-closed eyes, strangelong-drawn accents and gaunt scraggy chin, squirming and swaying andcushion-thumping in _his_ only a shade more chastely adorned temple, isdistinct enough too--just as we enjoyed this bleak intensity the more, to my personal vision, through the vague legend (and no legend was toovague for me to cherish) of his being the next pastor in succession tothe one under whom our mother, thereto predirected by our goodgreatgrandfather, Alexander Robertson already named, who was nothing ifnot Scotch and Presbyterian and authoritative, as his brave old portraitby the elder Jarves attests, had "sat" before her marriage; the marriageso lamentedly diverting her indeed from this tradition that, to mark therueful rupture, it had invoked, one evening, with the aid of Indiamuslin and a wondrous gold headband, in the maternal, the WashingtonSquare "parlours, " but the secular nuptial consecration of the thenMayor of the city--I think Mr. Varick. 

We progeny were of course after this mild convulsion not at all in thefold; yet it strikes me as the happy note of a simple age that we werepractically, of a Sunday at least, wherever we might have chosen toenter: since, going forth hand in hand into the sunshine (and I connectmyself here with my next younger, not with my elder, brother, whoseorbit was other and larger) we sampled, in modern phrase, as smallunprejudiced inquirers obeying their inspiration, any resort of anycongregation detected by us; doing so, I make out moreover, with a senseof earnest provision for any contemporary challenge. "What church do yougo to?"--the challenge took in childish circles that searching form; ofthe form it took among our elders my impression is more vague. To whichI must add as well that our "fending" in this fashion for ourselvesdidn't so prepare us for invidious remark--remark I mean upon ourpewless state, which involved, to my imagination, much the samediscredit that a houseless or a cookless would have done--as to hush inmy breast the appeal to our parents, not for religious instruction (ofwhich we had plenty, and of the most charming and familiar) but simplyfor instruction (a very different thing) as to where we should say we"went, " in our world, under cold scrutiny or derisive comment. It wascolder than any criticism, I recall, to hear our father reply that wecould plead nothing less than the whole privilege of Christendom andthat there was no communion, even that of the Catholics, even that ofthe Jews, even that of the Swedenborgians, from which we need findourselves excluded. With the freedom we enjoyed our dilemma clearlyamused him: it would have been impossible, he affirmed, to betheologically more _en règle_. How as mere detached unaccompaniedinfants we enjoyed such impunity of range and confidence of welcome isbeyond comprehension save by the light of the old manners andconditions, the old local bonhomie, the comparatively primal innocence, the absence of complications; with the several notes of which lastbeatitude my reminiscence surely shines. It was the theory of the timeand place that the young, were they but young enough, could takepublicly no harm; to which adds itself moreover, and touchingly enough, all the difference of the old importances. It wasn't doubtless that thesocial, or call it simply the human, position of the child was higherthan to-day--a circumstance not conceivable; it was simply that otherdignities and values and claims, other social and human positions, wereless definite and settled, less prescriptive and absolute. A richsophistication is after all a gradual growth, and it would have beensophisticated to fear for us, before such bright and vacant vistas, theperils of the way or to see us received anywhere even with the irony ofpatronage. We hadn't in fact seats of honour, but that justice was doneus--that is that we were placed to our advantage--I infer from my havingliked so to "go, " even though my grounds may have been but the love ofthe _exhibition_ in general, thanks to which figures, faces, furniture, sounds, smells and colours became for me, wherever enjoyed, and enjoyedmost where most collected, a positive little orgy of the senses and riotof the mind. Let me at the same time make the point that--such may bethe snobbery of extreme youth--I not only failed quite to rise to theparental reasoning, but made out in it rather a certain sophistry; sucha prevarication for instance as if we had habitually said we kept thecarriage we observably didn't keep, kept it because we sent when wewanted one to University Place, where Mr. Hathorn had hislivery-stable: a connection, this last, promoted by my father'sfrequent need of the aid to circulate (his walks were limited through aninjury received in youth) and promoting in turn and at a touch, to myconsciousness, the stir of small, the smallest remembered things. Irecall the adventure, no infrequent one, of being despatched to Mr. Hathorn to bespeak a conveyance, and the very air and odour, the genialwarmth, at a fine steaming Irish pitch, of the stables and theirstamping and backing beasts, their resounding boardedness, their chairstipped up at such an angle for lifted heels, a pair of which latter seekthe floor again, at my appeal, as those of big bearded Mr. Hathornhimself: an impression enriched by the drive home in lolling and bumpingpossession of the great vehicle and associated further with Sundayafternoons in spring, with the question of distant Harlem and remoterBloomingdale, with the experience at one of these junctures of far-awayHoboken, if it wasn't Williamsburg, which fits in fancifully somewhere;when the carriage was reinforced by a ferry and the ferry by something, something to my present vision very dim and dusty and archaic, somethingquite ragged and graceless, in the nature of a public tea-garden andices. The finest link here, however, is, for some reason, with the NewYork Hotel, and thereby with Albany uncles; thereby also with Mr. Hathorn in person waiting and waiting expensively on his box before thehouse and somehow felt as attuned to Albany uncles even as Mrs. Cannonhad subtly struck me as being. 

Intenser than these vague shades meanwhile is my vision of the halls ofFerrero--where the orgy of the senses and even the riot of the mind, ofwhich I have just spoken, must quite literally have led me more of adance than anywhere. Let this sketch of a lost order note withal thatunder so scant a general provision for infant exercise, as distinguishedfrom infant ease, our hopping and sliding in tune had to be deemedurgent. It was the sense for this form of relief that clearly wasgeneral, superseding as the ampler Ferrero scene did previous limitedexhibitions; even those, for that matter, coming back to me in theancient person of M. Charriau--I guess at the writing of his name--whomI work in but confusedly as a professional visitor, a subject gaped atacross a gulf of fear, in one of our huddled schools; all the more thatI perfectly evoke him as resembling, with a difference or two, theportraits of the aged Voltaire, and that he had, fiddle in hand and_jarret tendu_, incited the young agility of our mother and aunt. EdwardFerrero was another matter; in the prime of life, good-looking, romanticand moustachio'd, he was suddenly to figure, on the outbreak of theCivil War, as a General of volunteers--very much as if he had been oneof Bonaparte's improvised young marshals; in anticipation of which, however, he wasn't at all fierce or superior, to my remembrance, butmost kind to sprawling youth, in a charming man of the world fashion andas if _we_ wanted but a touch to become also men of the world. Remarkably good-looking, as I say, by the measure of that period, andextraordinarily agile--he could so gracefully leap and bound that hisbounding into the military saddle, such occasion offering, had all thefelicity, and only wanted the pink fleshings, of the circus--he wasstill more admired by the mothers, with whom he had to my eyes a mostelegant relation, than by the pupils; among all of whom, at the frequentand delightful soirées, he caused trays laden with lucent syrupsrepeatedly to circulate. The scale of these entertainments, as I figuredit, and the florid frescoes, just damp though they were with newness, and the free lemonade, and the freedom of remark, equally great, withthe mothers, were the lavish note in him--just as the fact that he neverhimself fiddled, but was followed, over the shining parquet, byattendant fiddlers, represented doubtless a shadow the less on his laterdignity, so far as that dignity was compassed. Dignity marked in fullmeasure even at the time the presence of his sister Madame Dubreuil, ahandsome authoritative person who instructed us equally, in factpreponderantly, and who, though comparatively not sympathetic, soengaged, physiognomically, my wondering interest, that I hear to thishour her shrill Franco-American accent: "Don't look at _me_, littleboy--look at my feet. " I see them now, these somewhat fat members, beneath the uplifted skirt, encased in "bronzed" slippers, without heelsbut attached, by graceful cross-bands over her white stockings, to hersolid ankles--an emphatic sign of the time; not less than I recover mysurprised sense of their supporting her without loss of balance, substantial as she was, in the "first position"; her command of which, her ankles clapped close together and her body very erect, was soperfect that even with her toes, right and left, fairly turning thecorner backward, she never fell prone on her face. 

It consorted somehow with this wealth of resource in her that sheappeared at the soirées, or at least at the great fancy-dress soirée inwhich the historic truth of my experience, free lemonade and all, isdoubtless really shut up, as the "genius of California, " a dazzlingvision of white satin and golden flounces--her brother meanwhilemaintaining that more distinctively European colour which I feel to havebeen for my young presumption the convincing essence of the scene in thecharacter of a mousquetaire de Louis Quinze, highly consonant with histype. There hovered in the background a flushed, full-chested andtawnily short-bearded M. Dubreuil, who, as a singer of the heavy order, at the Opera, carried us off into larger things still--the Opera havingat last about then, after dwelling for years, down town, in shifty tentsand tabernacles, set up its own spacious pavilion and reared its head asthe Academy of Music: all at the end, or what served for the end, of ourvery street, where, though it wasn't exactly near and Union Squarebristled between, I could yet occasionally gape at the great billsbeside the portal, in which M. Dubreuil always so serviceably came in atthe bottom of the cast. A subordinate artist, a "grand utility" at thebest, I believe, and presently to become, on that scene, slightly raggedI fear even in its freshness, permanent stage-manager or, as we saynowadays, producer, he had yet eminently, to my imagination, the richer, the "European" value; especially for instance when our air thrilled, inthe sense that our attentive parents re-echoed, with the visit of thegreat Grisi and the great Mario, and I seemed, though the art ofadvertisement was then comparatively so young and so chaste, to see ourpersonal acquaintance, as he could almost be called, thickly sandwichedbetween them. Such was one's strange sense for the connections of thingsthat they drew out the halls of Ferrero till these too seemed fairly toresound with Norma and Lucrezia Borgia, as if opening straight upon thestage, and Europe, by the stroke, had come to us in such force that wehad but to enjoy it on the spot. That could never have been more thecase than on the occasion of my assuming, for the famous fancy-ball--notat the operatic Academy, but at the dancing-school, which came so nearlyto the same thing--the dress of a débardeur, whatever that might be, which carried in its puckered folds of dark green relieved with scarletand silver such an exotic fragrance and appealed to me by such a legend. The legend had come round to us, it was true, by way of Albany, whencewe learned at the moment of our need, that one of the adventures, one ofthe least lamentable, of our cousin Johnny had been his figuring as adébardeur at some Parisian revel; the elegant evidence of which, neatlypacked, though with but vague instructions for use, was helpfully senton to us. The instructions for use were in fact so vague that I wasafterward to become a bit ruefully conscious of having sadlydishonoured, or at least abbreviated, my model. I fell, that is I stood, short of my proper form by no less than half a leg; the essence of thedébardeur being, it appeared, that he emerged at the knees, in whitesilk stockings and with neat calves, from the beribboned breeches whichI artlessly suffered to flap at my ankles. The discovery, after thefact, was disconcerting--yet had been best made withal, too late; forit would have seemed, I conceive, a less monstrous act to attempt tolengthen my legs than to shorten Johnny's _culotte_. The trouble hadbeen that we hadn't really known what a débardeur _was_, and I am notsure indeed that I know to this day. It had been more fatal still thateven fond Albany couldn't tell us. 

XVIII

I have nevertheless the memory of a restless relish of all that time--bywhich I mean of those final months of New York, even with so scant arecord of other positive successes to console me. I had but one success, always--that of endlessly supposing, wondering, admiring: I was sunk inthat luxury, which had never yet been so great, and it might well makeup for anything. It made up perfectly, and more particularly as thestopgap as which I have already defined it, for the scantness of theperiod immediately round us; since how could I have wanted richer whenthe limits of reality, as I advanced upon them, seemed ever to recedeand recede? It is true that but the other day, on the scene revisited, Iwas to be struck rather as by their weird immobility: there on the northside, still untenanted after sixty years, a tremendous span in the lifeof New York, was the vacant lot, undiminished, in which a friendly goator two used to browse, whom we fed perversely with scraps of paper, justas perversely appreciated indeed, through the relaxed wooden palings. There hovers for me an impression of the glass roofs of a florist, asuffered squatter for a while; but florists and goats have alikedisappeared and the barrenness of the place is as sordid as onlyuntended gaps in great cities can seem. One of its boundaries, however, still breathes associations--the home of the Wards, the more eastward ofa pair of houses then and still isolated has remained the same throughall vicissitudes, only now quite shabbily mellow and, like everythingelse, much smaller than one had remembered it; yet this too withoutprejudice to the large, the lustrous part played in our prospect by thatinteresting family. I saddle their mild memory a bit "subjectively"perhaps with the burden of that character--making out that they wereinteresting really in spite of themselves and as unwittingly as M. Jourdain expressed himself in prose; owing their wild savour as they didto that New England stamp which we took to be strong upon them and noother exhibition of which we had yet enjoyed. It made them different, made them, in their homely grace, rather aridly romantic: I pored inthose days over the freshness of the Franconia Stories of the brothersAbbott, then immediately sequent to the sweet Rollo series and even moreadmired; and there hung about the Wards, to my sense, that atmosphere ofapples and nuts and cheese, of pies and jack-knives and "squrruls, " ofdomestic Bible-reading and attendance at "evening lecture, " of the fearof parental discipline and the cultivated art of dodging it, combinedwith great personal toughness and hardihood, an almost envied liabilityto warts on hard brown hands, a familiarity with garments domesticallywrought, a brave rusticity in short that yet hadn't prevented theannexation of whole tracts of town life unexplored by ourselves andachieved by the brothers since their relatively recent migration fromConnecticut--which State in general, with the city of Hartford inparticular, hung as a hazy, fruity, rivery background, the very essenceof Indian summer, in the rear of their discourse. Three in number, Johnny and Charley and Freddy, with castigating elders, even to thesecond and third generation back, dimly discerned through closedwindow-panes, they didn't at all haunt the halls of Ferrero--it was apart of their homely grace and their social tone, if not of their wantof the latter, that this couldn't in the least be in question for them;on the other hand they frequented, Charley and Freddy at least, the FreeSchool, which was round in Thirteenth Street--Johnny, the eldest, havingentered the Free Academy, an institution that loomed large to us andthat I see as towered or castellated or otherwise impressivelyembellished in vague vignettes, in stray representations, perhaps onlyof the grey schoolbook order, which are yet associated for me with thosefond images of lovely ladies, "hand-painted, " decorating at either endthe interior of the old omnibusses. We must have been in relation withno other feeders at the public trough of learning--I can't accountotherwise for the glamour as of envied privilege and strange experiencethat surrounded the Wards; they mixed, to the great sharpening of theedge of their wit, in the wild life _of_ the people, beside which thelife at Mr. Pulling Jenks's and even at the Institution Vergnès wascolourless and commonplace. Somehow they were of the people, and stillwere full of family forms--which seemed, one dimly made out through thefalse perspective of all the cousinships, the stronger and clearer noteof New England; the note that had already determined a shy yearningunder perusal of the Rollo and Franconia chronicles. The special mark ofthese friends was perhaps however that of being socially young whilethey were annually old; little Freddy in particular, very short, veryinured and very popular, though less curiously wrinkled about eyes andmouth than Charley, confessed to monstrous birthdays even whilecrouching or hopping, even while racing or roaring, as a highsuperiority in the games of the street prescribed. It was to strike melater on, when reading or hearing of young Americans of those parts whohad turned "hard" or reckless by reaction from excessive discipline, theologic and economic, and had gone to sea or to California or to the"bad, " that Freddy and Charley were typical of the race, even if theirfortunes had taken, as I hoped, a happier form. That, I said to myselffor the interest of it, _that_, the stuff of the Wards, their homelygrace, was all New England--so far at least as New England wasn'tEmerson and Margaret Fuller and Mr. Channing and the "best Boston"families. Such, in small very plastic minds, is the intensity, if notthe value, of early impressions. 

And yet how can such visions not have paled in the southern glow of theNorcoms, who had lately arrived _en masse_ from Louisville and hadimprovised a fine old Kentucky home in the last house of our row--theone to be occupied so differently, after their strange and precipitateflight, as I dimly make out, by the Ladies of the Sacred Heart; thosewho presently, if I mistake not, moved out to Bloomingdale, if they werenot already in part established there. Next us westward were the Ogdens, three slim and fair sisters, who soared far above us in age and generalamenity; then came the Van Winkles, two sisters, I think, and abrother--he much the most serious and judicious, as well as the mosteducated, of our friends; and so at last the Norcoms, during their briefbut concentrated, most vivid and momentous, reign, a matter, as I recallit, of a couple of breathless winters. We were provided by theirpresence with as happy a foil as we could have wished to the plainnessand dryness of the Wards; their homely grace was all their own and wasalso embodied in three brothers, Eugene, Reginald, Albert, whose ageswould have corresponded, I surmise, with those of Johnny, Charley andFreddy if these latter hadn't, in their way, as I have hinted, defiedany close notation. Elder sons--there were to my recollection nodaughters--moved too as with their heads in the clouds; notably"Stiffy, " eldest of all, whom we supposed gorgeous, who affected us assublime and unapproachable and to whom we thus applied the term in useamong us before we had acquired for reference to such types the notionof the _nuance_, the dandy, the dude, the masher. (Divided I was, Irecall, between the dread and the glory of being so greeted, "Well, Stiffy--!" as a penalty of the least attempt at personal adornment. ) Thehigher intensity for our sense of the Norcoms came from the large, thelavish, ease of their hospitality; whereas our intercourse with theWards was mainly in the street or at most the "yard"--and it was awonder how intimacy _could_ to that degree consort with publicity. Aglazed southern gallery, known to its occupants as the "poo'ch" and tothe rake of which their innermost penetralia seemed ever to stand open, encompasses my other memories. Everything took place on the poo'ch, including the free, quite the profuse, consumption of hot cakes andmolasses, including even the domestic manufacture of sausages, testifiedto by a strange machine that was worked like a handorgan and by thecasual halves, when not the wholes, of stark stiff hogs fresh fromKentucky stores. We must have been for a time constantly engaged withthis delightful group, who never ceased to welcome us or to feed us, andyet of the presence of whose members under other roofs than their own, by a return of hospitality received, I retain no image. They didn'tcount and didn't grudge--the sausage-mill kept turning and the molassesflowing for all who came; that was the expression of their southerngrace, especially embodied in Albert, my exact contemporary and chosenfriend (Reggie had but crushed my fingers under the hinge of a closingdoor, the mark of which act of inadvertence I was to carry throughlife, ) who had profuse and tightly-crinkled hair, and the moral of whosequeer little triangular brown teeth, casting verily a shade on myattachment to him, was pointed for me, not by himself, as the error of aKentucky diet. 

The great Kentucky error, however, had been the introduction into a freeState of two pieces of precious property which our friends were to failto preserve, the pair of affectionate black retainers whose presencecontributed most to their exotic note. We revelled in the fact that Davyand Aunt Sylvia (pronounced An'silvy, ) a light-brown lad withextraordinarily shining eyes and his straight, grave, deeper-colouredmother, not radiant as to anything but her vivid turban, had been bornand kept in slavery of the most approved pattern and such as thisintensity of their condition made them a joy, a joy to the curious mind, to consort with. Davy mingled in our sports and talk, he enriched, headorned them with a personal, a pictorial lustre that none of us couldemulate, and servitude in the absolute thus did more for him sociallythan we had ever seen done, above stairs or below, for victims of itslighter forms. What was not our dismay therefore when we suddenlylearnt--it must have blown right up and down the street--that mother andson had fled, in the dead of night, from bondage? had taken advantage oftheir visit to the North simply to leave the house and not return, covering their tracks, successfully disappearing. They had never beenfor us so beautifully slaves as in this achievement of their freedom;for they did brilliantly achieve it--they escaped, on northern soil, beyond recall or recovery. I think we had already then, on the spot, thesense of some degree of presence at the making of history; the questionof what persons of colour and of their condition might or mightn't dowas intensely in the air; this was exactly the season of the freshnessof Mrs. Stowe's great novel. It must have come out at the moment of ourfondest acquaintance with our neighbours, though I have no recollectionof hearing them remark upon it--any remark they made would have beensure to be so strong. I suspect they hadn't read it, as they certainlywouldn't have allowed it in the house; any more indeed than they hadread or were likely ever to read any other work of fiction; I doubtwhether the house contained a printed volume, unless its head had had inhand a law-book or so: I to some extent recover Mr. Norcom as a lawyerwho had come north on important, difficult business, on contentious, precarious grounds--a large bald political-looking man, very loose andungirt, just as his wife was a desiccated, depressed lady who mystifiedme by always wearing her nightcap, a feebly-frilled but tightly-tied andunmistakable one, and the compass of whose maternal figure beneath alarge long collarless cape or mantle defined imperfectly for me ofcourse its connection with the further increase of Albert's littlebrothers and sisters, there being already, by my impression, two orthree of these in the background. Had Davy and An'silvy at least readUncle Tom?--that question might well come up for us, with the certaintyat any rate that they ignored him less than their owners were doing. These latter good people, who had been so fond of their humbledependents and supposed this affection returned, were shocked at suchingratitude, though I remember taking a vague little inward Northerncomfort in their inability, in their discreet decision, not to raise thehue and cry. Wasn't one even just dimly aware of the heavy hush that, inthe glazed gallery, among the sausages and the johnny-cakes, hadfollowed the first gasp of resentment? I think the honest Norcoms werein any case astonished, let alone being much incommoded; just as _we_were, for that matter, when the genial family itself, installed so atits ease, failed us with an effect of abruptness, simply ceased, intheir multitude, to be there. I don't remember their going, nor anypangs of parting; I remember only knowing with wonderment that they hadgone, that obscurity had somehow engulfed them; and how afterwards, inthe light of later things, memory and fancy attended them, figured theirhistory as the public complication grew and the great intersectionalplot thickened; felt even, absurdly and disproportionately, that theyhad helped one to "know Southerners. " The slim, the sallow, thestraight-haired and dark-eyed Eugene in particular haunted myimagination; he had not been my comrade of election--he was too much mysenior; but I cherished the thought of the fine fearless youngfire-eater he would have become and, when the War had broken out, I knownot what dark but pitying vision of him stretched stark after a battle. 

All of which sounds certainly like a meagre range--which heaven knows itwas; but with a plea for the several attics, already glanced at, and thepositive æsthetic reach that came to us through those dim resorts, quiteworth making. They were scattered and they constituted on the part ofsuch of our friends as had license to lead us up to them a ground ofauthority and glory proportioned exactly to the size of the field. Thisextent was at cousin Helen's, with a large house and few inmates, vastand free, so that no hospitality, under the eaves, might have matchedthat offered us by the young Albert--if only that heir of all the ageshad had rather more imagination. He had, I think, as little as waspossible--which would have counted in fact for an unmitigated blank hadnot W. J. , among us, on that spot and elsewhere, supplied this motiveforce in any quantity required. He imagined--that was the point--thecomprehensive comedies we were to prepare and to act; comprehensive bythe fact that each one of us, even to the God-fearing butsurreptitiously law-breaking Wards, was in fairness to be enabled tofigure. Not one of us but was somehow to be provided with a part, thoughI recall my brother as the constant comic star. The attics were thus ina word our respective temples of the drama--temples in which the stage, the green-room and the wardrobe, however, strike me as having consumedmost of our margin. I remember, that is, up and down the street--and theassociation is mainly with its far westward reaches--so much morepreparation than performance, so much more conversation and costume thanactive rehearsal, and, on the part of some of us, especially doubtlesson my own, so much more eager denudation, both of body and mind, than ofachieved or inspired assumption. We shivered unclad and impatient bothas to our persons and to our aims, waiting alike for ideas and forbreeches; we were supposed to make our dresses no less than to createour characters, and our material was in each direction apt to run short. I remember how far ahead of us my brother seemed to keep, announcing a"motive, " producing a figure, throwing off into space conceptions that Icould stare at across the interval but couldn't appropriate; so that myvision of him in these connections is not so much of his coming towardme, or toward any of us, as of his moving rapidly away in fantastic garband with his back turned, as if to perform to some other and moreassured public. There were indeed other publics, publics downstairs, whoglimmer before me seated at the open folding-doors of ancient parlours, but all from the point of view of an absolute supernumerary, more orless squashed into the wing but never coming on. Who were the copiousHunts?--whose ample house, on the north side, toward Seventh Avenue, still stands, next or near that of the De Peysters, so that I perhapsconfound some of the attributes of each, though clear as to the blondBeekman, or "Beek, " of the latter race, not less than to the robustGeorge and the stout, the very stout, Henry of the former, whom I seebounding before a gathered audience for the execution of a _pas seul_, clad in a garment of "Turkey red" fashioned by his own hands and givingway at the seams, to a complete absence of _dessous_, under the strainof too fine a figure: this too though I make out in those connections, that is in the twilight of Hunt and De Peyster garrets, our command of acomparative welter of draperies; so that I am reduced to the surmisethat Henry indeed had contours. 

I recover, further, some sense of the high places of the Van Winkles, but think of them as pervaded for us by the upper air of theproprieties, the proprieties that were so numerous, it would appear, when once one had had a glimpse of them, rather than by the crude fruitsof young improvisation. Wonderful must it clearly have been still to fedamid laxities and vaguenesses such a difference of _milieux_ and, asthey used to say, of atmospheres. This was a word of thosedays--atmospheres were a thing to recognise and cultivate, for peoplereally wanted them, gasped for them; which was why they took them, onthe whole, on easy terms, never exposing them, under an apparent flush, to the last analysis. Did we at any rate really vibrate to one socialtone after another, or are these adventures for me now but fondimaginations? No, we vibrated--or I'll be hanged, as I may say, if _I_didn't; little as I could tell it or may have known it, little as anyoneelse may have known. There were shades, after all, in our democraticorder; in fact as I brood back to it I recognise oppositions thesharpest, contrasts the most intense. It wasn't given to us all to havea social tone, but the Costers surely had one and kept it in constantuse; whereas the Wards, next door to them, were possessed of no approachto any, and indeed had the case been other, had they had such aconsciousness, would never have employed it, would have put it away on ahigh shelf, as they put the last-baked pie, out of Freddy's andCharley's reach--heaven knows what _they_ two would have done with it. The Van Winkles on the other hand were distinctly so provided, but withthe special note that their provision was one, so to express it, withtheir educational, their informational, call it even their professional:Mr. Van Winkle, if I mistake not, was an eminent lawyer, and the note ofour own house was the absence of any profession, to the quickening ofour general as distinguished from our special sensibility. There was noTurkey red among those particular neighbours at all events, and if therehad been it wouldn't have gaped at the seams. I didn't then know it, butI sipped at a fount of culture; in the sense, that is, that, ourconnection with the house being through Edgar, he knew aboutthings--inordinately, as it struck me. So, for that matter, did littlepublic Freddy Ward; but the things one of them knew about differedwholly from the objects of knowledge of the other: all of which wassplendid for giving one exactly a sense of things. It intimated more andmore how many such there would be altogether. And part of the interestwas that while Freddy gathered his among the wild wastes Edgar walked ina regular maze of culture. I didn't then know about culture, but Edgarmust promptly have known. This impression was promoted by his moving ina distant, a higher sphere of study, amid scenes vague to me; I dimlydescry him as appearing at Jenks's and vanishing again, as if even thathadn't been good enough--though I may be here at fault, and indeed canscarce say on what arduous heights I supposed him, as a day-scholar, todwell. I took the unknown always easily for the magnificent and was sureonly of the limits of what I saw. It wasn't that the boys swarming forus at school were not often, to my vision, unlimited, but that thosepeopling our hours of ease, as I have already noted, were almostinveterately so--they seemed to describe always, out of view, so muchlarger circles. I linger thus on Edgar by reason of its having somehowseemed to us that he described--was it at Doctor Anthon's?--the largestof all. If there was a bigger place than Doctor Anthon's it was there hewould have been. I break down, as to the detail of the matter, in anypush toward vaster suppositions. But let me cease to stir thisimponderable dust. 

XIX

I try at least to recover here, however, some closer notation of W. J. 'saspects--yet only with the odd effect of my either quite losing him orbut apprehending him again at seated play with his pencil under thelamp. When I see him he is intently, though summarily, rapidly drawing, his head critically balanced and his eyebrows working, and when I don'tsee him it is because I have resignedly relinquished him. I can't havebeen often for him a deprecated, still less an actively rebuffed suitor, because, as I say again, such aggressions were so little in order forme; but I remember that on my once offering him my company inconditions, those of some planned excursion, in which it wasn't desired, his putting the question of our difference at rest, with the minimum ofexplanation, by the responsible remark: "_I_ play with boys who curseand swear!" I had sadly to recognise that I didn't, that I couldn'tpretend to have come to that yet--and truly, as I look back, either theunadvisedness and inexpertness of my young contemporaries on all thatground must have been complete (an interesting note on our generalmanners after all, ) or my personal failure to grasp must have been. Besides which I wonder scarce less now than I wondered then in just whatcompany my brother's privilege was exercised; though if he had butrichly wished to be discouraging he quite succeeded. It wasn't that Imightn't have been drawn to the boys in question, but that I simplywasn't qualified. All boys, I rather found, were difficult to playwith--unless it was that they rather found _me_; but who would have beenso difficult as these? They account but little, moreover, I make out, for W. J. 's eclipses; so that I take refuge easily enough in the memoryof my own pursuits, absorbing enough at times to have excluded otherviews. I also plied the pencil, or to be more exact the pen--even ifneither implement critically, rapidly or summarily. I was so oftenengaged at that period, it strikes me, in literary--or, to be moreprecise in dramatic, accompanied by pictorial composition--that I mustagain and again have delightfully lost myself. I had not on any occasionpersonally succeeded, amid our theatric strife, in reaching thefootlights; but how could I have doubted, nevertheless, with our largetheatrical experience, of the nature, and of my understanding, of thedramatic form? I sacrificed to it with devotion--by the aid of certainquarto sheets of ruled paper bought in Sixth Avenue for the purpose (myfather's store, though I held him a great fancier of the article ingeneral, supplied but the unruled;) grateful in particular for the happyprovision by which each fourth page of the folded sheet was left blank. When the drama itself had covered three pages the last one, over which Imost laboured, served for the illustration of what I had verballypresented. Every scene had thus its explanatory picture, and as eachact--though I am not positively certain I arrived at acts--would havehad its vivid climax. Addicted in that degree to fictive evocation, Iyet recall, on my part, no practice whatever of narrative prose or anysort of verse. I cherished the "scene"--as I had so vibrated to the ideaof it that evening at Linwood; I thought, I lisped, at any rate Icomposed, in scenes; though how much, or how far, the scenes "came" isanother affair. Entrances, exits, the indication of "business, " theanimation of dialogue, the multiplication of designated characters, werethings delightful in themselves--while I panted toward the canvas onwhich I should fling my figures; which it took me longer to fill than ithad taken me to write what went with it, but which had on the other handsomething of the interest of the dramatist's casting of his _personæ_, and must have helped me to believe in the validity of my subject. 

From where on these occasions that subject can have dropped for me I amat a loss to say, and indeed have a strong impression that I didn't atany moment quite know what I was writing about: I am sure I couldn'totherwise have written so much. With scenes, when I think, whatcertitude did I want more?--scenes being the root of the matter, especially when they bristled with proper names and noted movements;especially, above all, when they flowered at every pretext into the veryoptic and perspective of the stage, where the boards diverged correctly, from a central point of vision, even as the lashes from an eyelid, straight down to the footlights. Let this reminiscence remind us of howrarely in those days the real stage was carpeted. The difficulty ofcomposition was naught; the one difficulty was in so placing my figureson the fourth page that these radiations could be marked without makinglines through them. The odd part of all of which was that whereas mycultivation of the picture was maintained my practice of the play, myaddiction to scenes, presently quite dropped. I was capable of learning, though with inordinate slowness, to express ideas in scenes, and was notcapable, with whatever patience, of making proper pictures; yet Iaspired to this form of design to the prejudice of any other, and longafter those primitive hours was still wasting time in attempts at it. Icared so much for nothing else, and that vaguely redressed, as to apoint, my general failure of acuteness. I nursed the conviction, or atleast I tried to, that if my clutch of the pencil or of the watercolourbrush should once become intense enough it would make up for otherweaknesses of grasp--much as that would certainly give it to do. Thiswas a very false scent, which had however the excuse that my brother'sexample really couldn't but act upon me--the scent was apparently sotrue for _him_; from the moment my small "interest in art, " that is mybent for gaping at illustrations and exhibitions, was absorbing andgenuine. There were elements in the case that made it natural: thepicture, the representative design, directly and strongly appealed tome, and was to appeal all my days, and I was only slow to recognise the_kind_, in this order, that appealed most. My face was turned from thefirst to the idea of representation--that of the gain of charm, interest, mystery, dignity, distinction, gain of importance in fine, onthe part of the represented thing (over the thing of accident, of mereactuality, still unappropriated;) but in the house of representationthere were many chambers, each with its own lock, and long was to be thebusiness of sorting and trying the keys. When I at last found deep in mypocket the one I could more or less work, it was to feel, withreassurance, that the picture was still after all in essence one's aim. So there had been in a manner continuity, been not so much waste as onehad sometimes ruefully figured; so many wastes are sweetened for memoryas by the taste of the economy they have led to or imposed and from thevantage of which they could scarce look better if they had been currentand blatant profit. Wasn't the very bareness of the field itselfmoreover a challenge, in a degree, to design?--not, I mean, that thereseemed to one's infant eyes too few things to paint: as to that therewere always plenty--but for the very reason that there were more thananyone noticed, and that a hunger was thus engendered which one castabout to gratify. The gratification nearest home was the imitative, theemulative--that is on my part: W. J. , I see, needed no reasons, noconsciousness other than that of being easily able. So he drew becausehe could, while I did so in the main only because he did; though I thinkwe cast about, as I say, alike, making the most of every image withinview. I doubt if he made more than I even then did, though earlier ableto account for what he made. Afterwards, on other ground and in richerair, I admit, the challenge was in the fulness and not in the barenessof aspects, with their natural result of hunger appeased; exhibitions, illustrations abounded in Paris and London--the reflected image hungeverywhere about; so that if there we daubed afresh and with moreconfidence it was not because no-one but because everyone did. In factwhen I call our appetite appeased I speak less of our browsing vision, which was tethered and insatiable, than of our sense of the quite normalcharacter of our own proceedings. In Europe we knew there was Art, justas there were soldiers and lodgings and concierges and little boys inthe streets who stared at us, especially at our hats and boots, as atthings of derision--just as, to put it negatively, there werepractically no hot rolls and no iced water. Perhaps too, I should add, we didn't enjoy the works of Mr. Benjamin Haydon, then clustered at thePantheon in Oxford Street, which in due course became our favouritehaunt, so infinitely more, after all, than we had enjoyed those arrayedat the Düsseldorf collection in Broadway; whence the huge canvas of theMartyrdom of John Huss comes back to me in fact as a revelation ofrepresentational brightness and charm that pitched once for all in thesematters my young sense of what should be. 

Ineffable, unsurpassable those hours of initiation which the Broadway ofthe 'fifties had been, when all was said, so adequate to supply. If onewanted pictures there _were_ pictures, as large, I seem to remember, asthe side of a house, and of a bravery of colour and lustre of surfacethat I was never afterwards to see surpassed. We were shown withoutdoubt, under our genial law here too, everything there was, and as Icast up the items I wonder, I confess, what ampler fare we could havedealt with. The Düsseldorf school commanded the market, and I think ofits exhibition as firmly seated, going on from year to year--New York, judging now to such another tune, must have been a brave patron of thatmanufacture; I believe that scandal even was on occasion not evaded, rather was boldly invoked, though of what particular sacrifices to thepure plastic or undraped shocks to bourgeois prejudice the comfortableGerman genius of that period may have been capable history has kept norecord. New accessions, at any rate, vividly new ones, in which thefreshness and brightness of the paint, particularly lustrous in ourcopious light, enhanced from time to time the show, which I have thesense of our thus repeatedly and earnestly visiting and which comes backto me with some vagueness as installed in a disaffected church, wheregothic excrescences and an ecclesiastical roof of a mild order helpedthe importance. No impression here, however, was half so momentous asthat of the epoch-making masterpiece of Mr. Leutze, which showed usWashington crossing the Delaware in a wondrous flare of projectedgaslight and with the effect of a revelation to my young sight of thecapacity of accessories to "stand out. " I live again in the thrill ofthat evening--which was the greater of course for my feeling it, in myparents' company, when I should otherwise have been in bed. We wentdown, after dinner, in the Fourteenth Street stage, quite as if going tothe theatre; the scene of exhibition was near the Stuyvesant Institute(a circumstance stirring up somehow a swarm of associations, echoesprobably of lectures discussed at home, yet at which my attendance haddoubtless conveniently lapsed, ) but Mr. Leutze's drama left behind anypaler proscenium. We gaped responsive to every item, lost in the marvelof the wintry light, of the sharpness of the ice-blocks, of the sicknessof the sick soldier, of the protrusion of the minor objects, that of thestrands of the rope and the nails of the boots, that, I say, on the partof everything, of its determined purpose of standing out; but that, above all, of the profiled national hero's purpose, as might be said, ofstanding _up_, as much as possible, even indeed of doing it almost onone leg, in such difficulties, and successfully balancing. So memorablewas that evening to remain for me that nothing could be more strange, inconnection with it, than the illustration by the admired work, on its inafter years again coming before me, of the cold cruelty with which timemay turn and devour its children. The picture, more or less entombed inits relegation, was lividly dead--and that was bad enough. But half thesubstance of one's youth seemed buried with it. There were otherpictorial evenings, I may add, not all of which had the thrill. Deep thedisappointment, on my own part, I remember, at Bryan's Gallery ofChristian Art, to which also, as for great emotions, we had taken theomnibus after dinner. It cast a chill, this collection of worm-eatendiptychs and triptychs, of angular saints and seraphs, of black Madonnasand obscure Bambinos, of such marked and approved "primitives" as hadnever yet been shipped to our shores. Mr. Bryan's shipment was presentlyto fall, I believe, under grave suspicion, was to undergo in fact fatalexposure; but it appealed at the moment in apparent good faith, and Ihave not forgotten how, conscious that it was fresh from Europe--"fresh"was beautiful in the connection!--I felt that my yearning should allhave gone out to it. With that inconsequence to handle I doubt whether Iproclaimed that it bored me--any more than I have ever noted till nowthat it made me begin badly with Christian art. I like to think that thecollection consisted without abatement of frauds and "fakes" and that ifthese had been honest things my perception wouldn't so have slumbered;yet the principle of interest had been somehow compromised, and I thinkI have never since stood before a real Primitive, a primitive of theprimitives, without having first to shake off the grey mantle of thatnight. The main disconcertment had been its ugly twist to the name ofItaly, already sweet to me for all its dimness--even could dimness haveprevailed in my felt measure of the pictorial testimony of home, testimony that dropped for us from the ample canvas of Mr. Cole, "theAmerican Turner" which covered half a side of our front parlour, and inwhich, though not an object represented in it began to stand out afterthe manner of Mr. Leutze, I could always lose myself as soon as look. Itdepicted Florence from one of the neighbouring hills--I have often sincewondered which, the picture being long ago lost to our sight; Florencewith her domes and towers and old walls, the old walls Mr. Cole hadengaged for, but which I was ruefully to miss on coming to know and lovethe place in after years. Then it was I felt how long before myattachment had started on its course--that closer vision was nobeginning, it only took up the tale; just as it comes to me againto-day, at the end of time, that the contemplative monk seated on aterrace in the foreground, a constant friend of my childhood, must havebeen of the convent of San Miniato, which gives me the site from whichthe painter wrought. We had Italy again in the corresponding roombehind--a great abundance of Italy I was free to think while I revolvedbetween another large landscape over the sofa and the classic marblebust on a pedestal between the two back windows, the figure, a part ofthe figure, of a lady with her head crowned with vine-leaves and herhair disposed with a laxity that was emulated by the front of her dress, as my next younger brother exposed himself to my derision by calling thebit of brocade (simulated by the chisel) that, depending from a singleshoulder-strap, so imperfectly covered her. This image was known andadmired among us as the Bacchante; she had come to us straight from anAmerican studio in Rome, and I see my horizon flush again with the firstfaint dawn of conscious appreciation, or in other words of the criticalspirit, while two or three of the more restrictive friends of the housefind our marble lady very "cold" for a Bacchante. Cold indeed she musthave been--quite as of the tombstone temperament; but that objectionwould drop if she might only be called a Nymph, since nymphs were mildand moderate, and since discussion of a work of art mainly hung in thosedays on that issue of the producible _name_. I fondly recall, by thesame token, that playing on a certain occasion over the landscape abovethe sofa, restrictive criticism, uttered in my indulged hearing, introduced me to what had probably been my very first chance, on suchground, for active participation. The picture, from the hand of aFrench painter, M. Lefèvre, and of but slightly scanter extent than thework of Mr. Cole, represented in frank rich colours and as a so-called"view in Tuscany" a rural scene of some exuberance, a broken andprecipitous place, amid mountains and forests, where two or threebare-legged peasants or woodmen were engaged, with much emphasis ofposture, in felling a badly gashed but spreading oak by means of a tenserope attached to an upper limb and at which they pulled together. "Tuscany?--are you sure it's Tuscany?" said the voice of restrictivecriticism, that of the friend of the house who in the golden age of theprecursors, though we were still pretty much precursors, had livedlongest in Italy. And then on my father's challenge of this demur: "Ohin Tuscany, you know, the colours are much softer--there would be acertain haze in the atmosphere. " "Why, of course, " I can hear myself nowblushingly but triumphantly intermingle--"the softness and the haze ofour Florence there: isn't Florence in Tuscany?" It had to be parentallyadmitted that Florence was--besides which our friend had been there andknew; so that thereafter, within our walls, a certain _malaise_ reigned, for if the Florence was "like it" then the Lefèvre couldn't be, and ifthe Lefèvre was like it then the Florence couldn't: a lapse from oldconvenience--as from the moment we couldn't name the Lefèvre where werewe? All of which it might have been open to me to feel I had uncannilypromoted. 

XX

My own sense of the great matter, meanwhile--that is of ourpossibilities, still more than of our actualities, of Italy in generaland of Florence in particular--was a perfectly recoverable littleawareness, as I find, of certain mild soft irregular breathings thenceon the part of an absent pair in whom our parents were closelyinterested and whose communications, whose Roman, Sorrentine, Florentineletters, letters in especial from the Baths of Lucca, kept open, in ourair, more than any other sweet irritation, that "question of Europe"which was to have after all, in the immediate years, so limited, soshortened, a solution. Mary Temple the elder had, early in ourFourteenth Street period, married Edmund Tweedy, a haunter of thatneighbourhood and of our house in it from the first, but never more thanduring a winter spent with us there by that quasi-relative, who, by anextension of interest and admiration--she was in those years quiteexceedingly handsome--ranked for us with the Albany aunts, adding so atwist, as it were, to our tie with the Temple cousins, her own closekin. This couple must have been, putting real relatives aside, myparents' best friends in Europe, twitching thereby hardest the fine firmthread attached at one end to our general desire and at the other totheir supposed felicity. The real relatives, those planted out in thesame countries, are a chapter by themselves, whose effect on us, whoseplace in our vision, I should like to trace: that of the Kings, forinstance, of my mother's kin, that of the Masons, of my father's--theKings who cultivated, for years, the highest instructional, social andmoral possibilities at Geneva, the Masons, above all, less strenuous butmore sympathetic, who reported themselves to us hauntingly, during aconsiderable period, as enjoying every conceivable _agrément_ at Toursand at the then undeveloped Trouville, even the winter Trouville, on thelowest possible terms. Fain would I, as for the "mere pleasure" of it, under the temptation to delineate, gather into my loose net thesingularly sharp and rounded image of our cousin Charlotte of the formername, who figured for us, on the field of Europe, wherever we looked, and all the rest of time, as a character of characters and a marvel ofplacid consistency; through my vague remembrance of her return fromChina after the arrest of a commercial career there by her husband'sdeath in the Red Sea--which somehow sounded like a dreadful form ofdeath, and my scarce less faint recovery of some Christmas treat of ourchildhood under her roof in Gramercy Park, amid dim chinoiseries and, inthat twilight of time, dimmer offspring, Vernon, Anne, Arthur, marked tous always, in the distincter years, as of all our young relatives themost intensely educated and most pointedly proper--an occasion followedby her permanent and invidious withdrawal from her own country. I wouldkeep her in my eye through the Genevese age and on to the crisis of theCivil War, in which Vernon, unforgiven by her stiff conservatism for hisNorthern loyalty, laid down before Petersburg a young life ofunderstanding and pain, uncommemorated as to the gallantry of itsend--he had insistently returned to the front, after a recovery fromfirst wounds, as under his mother's malediction--on the stone beneathwhich he lies in the old burial ground at Newport, the cradle of hisfather's family. I should further pursue my subject through otherperiods and places, other constantly "quiet" but vivid exhibitions, tothe very end of the story--which for myself was the impression, first, of a little lonely, soft-voiced, gentle, relentless lady, in a dullSurrey garden of a summer afternoon, more than half blind and alldependent on the _dame de compagnie_ who read aloud to her that SaturdayReview which had ever been the prop and mirror of her opinions and towhich she remained faithful, her children estranged and outworn, deadand ignored; and the vision, second and for a climax, of an old-worldrez-de-chaussée at Versailles, goal of my final pilgrimage, almost inpresence of the end (end of her very personal career, I mean, but not ofher perfectly firm spirit or of her charmingly smooth address). 

I confess myself embarrassed by my very ease of re-capture of my youngconsciousness; so that I perforce try to encourage lapses and keep myabundance down. The place for the lapse consents with difficulty, however, to be _any_ particular point of the past at which I catchmyself (easily caught as I am) looking about me; it has certainlynothing in common with that coign of vantage enjoyed by me one Juneafternoon of 1855 in the form of the minor share of the box of acarriage that conveyed us for the first time since our babyhood, W. J. 'sand mine, through so much of a vast portentous London. I was an item inthe overflow of a vehicle completely occupied, and I thrilled with thespectacle my seat beside the coachman so amply commanded--withoutknowing at this moment why, amid other claims, I had been marked forsuch an eminence. I so far justify my privilege at least as still tofeel that prime impression, of extreme intensity, underlie, deep down, the whole mass of later observation. There are London aspects which, sofar as they still touch me, after all the years, touch me as justsensible reminders of this hour of early apprehension, so penetrated forme as to have kept its ineffaceable stamp. For at last we had come toEurope--we had disembarked at Liverpool, but a couple of days before, from that steamer Atlantic, of the Collins line, then active but so soonto be utterly undone, of which I had kept a romantic note ever since acertain evening of a winter or two before. I had on that occasionassisted with my parents at a varied theatrical exhibition--the theatreis distinct to me as Brougham's--one of the features of which was the atthat time flourishing farce of Betsy Baker, a picture of somepredicament, supposed droll, of its hero Mr. Mouser, whose wife, if I amcorrect, carries on a laundry and controls as she may a train of youngassistants. A feature of the piece comes back to me as the pursuit ofMr. Mouser round and round the premises by the troop of laundresses, shouting his name in chorus, capture by them being abject, thoughwhether through fear of their endearments or of their harsher violence Ifail to remember. It was enough that the public nerve had at the momentbeen tried by the non-arrival of the Atlantic, several days overdue, tothe pitch at last of extreme anxiety; so that, when after the fall ofthe curtain on the farce the distracted Mr. Mouser, still breathless, reappeared at the footlights, where I can see him now abate by hisplight no jot of the dignity of his announcement, "Ladies andgentlemen, I rejoice to be able to tell you that the good ship Atlanticis safe!" the house broke into such plaudits, so huge and prolonged aroar of relief, as I had never heard the like of and which gave me myfirst measure of a great immediate public emotion--even as the incidentitself to-day reminds me of the family-party smallness of the old NewYork, those happy limits that could make us all care, and care to fondvociferation, for the same thing at once. It was a moment of the goldenage--representing too but a snatch of elation, since the wretched Arctichad gone down in mortal woe and her other companion, the Pacific, leaving England a few months later and under the interested eyes of ourfamily group, then temporarily settled in London, was never heard ofmore. Let all of which show again what traps are laid about me forunguarded acute reminiscence. 

I meet another of these, though I positively try to avoid it, in thesense of a day spent on the great fusty curtained bed, a mediævalfour-poster such as I had never seen, of the hotel at the London andNorth-Western station, where it appeared, to our great inconvenience, that I had during the previous months somewhere perversely absorbed(probably on Staten Island upwards of a year before) the dull seed ofmalaria, which now suddenly broke out in chills and fever. Thiscondition, of the intermittent order, hampered our movements but leftalternate days on which we could travel, and as present to me as ever isthe apprehended interest of my important and determinant state and ofour complicated prospect while I lay, much at my ease--for I recall inparticular certain short sweet times when I could be left alone--withthe thick and heavy suggestions of the London room about me, the verysmell of which was ancient, strange and impressive, a new revelationaltogether, and the window open to the English June and the far off humof a thousand possibilities. I consciously took them in, these last, andmust then, I think, have first tasted the very greatest pleasure perhapsI was ever to know--that of almost holding my breath in presence ofcertain aspects to the end of so taking in. It was as if in those hoursthat precious fine art had been disclosed to me--scantly as the poorplace and the small occasion might have seemed of an order to promoteit. We seize our property by an avid instinct wherever we find it, and Imust have kept seizing mine at the absurdest little rate, and all bythis deeply dissimulative process of taking in, through the wholesuccession of those summer days. The next application of it that standsout for me, or the next that I make room for here, since I note afterall so much less than I remember, is the intensity of a fondapprehension of Paris, a few days later, from the balcony of an hotelthat hung, through the soft summer night, over the Rue de la Paix. Ihung with the balcony, and doubtless with my brothers and my sister, though I recover what I felt as so much relation and response to thelarger, the largest appeal only, that of the whole perfect Parisianism Iseemed to myself always to have possessed mentally--even if I had butjust turned twelve!--and that now filled out its frame or case for mefrom every lighted window, up and down, as if each of these had been, for strength of sense, a word in some immortal quotation, the verybreath of civilised lips. How I had anciently gathered such stores ofpreconception is more than I shall undertake an account of--though Ibelieve I should be able to scrape one together; certain it is at anyrate that half the beauty of the whole exposed second floor of a_modiste_ just opposite, for instance, with the fittings and figurings, as well as the intent immobilities, of busy young women descried throughfrank, and, as it were, benignant apertures, and of such bright finestrain that they but asked to work far into the night, came from theeffect on the part of these things of so exactly crowning and comfortingI couldn't have said what momentous young dream. I might have been_right_ to myself--as against some danger of being wrong, and if I haduttered my main comment on it all this must certainly have been "I toldyou so, I told you so!" What I had told myself was of course that theimpression would be of the richest and at the same time of the mostinsinuating, and this after all didn't sail very close; but I had hadbefore me from far back a picture (which might have been hung in thevery sky, ) and here was every touch in it repeated with a charm. Had Iever till then known what a charm _was_?--a large, a local, a socialcharm, leaving out that of a few individuals. It was at all events, thismystery, one's property--that of one's mind; and so, once for all, Ihelped myself to it from my balcony and tucked it away. It counted allimmensely for practice in taking in. 

I profited by that, no doubt, still a few days later, at an hour thathas never ceased to recur to me all my life as crucial, as supremelydeterminant. The travelling-carriage had stopped at a village on the wayfrom Lyons to Geneva, between which places there was then no railway; avillage now nameless to me and which was not yet Nantua, in the Jura, where we were to spend the night. I was stretched at my ease on a couchformed by a plank laid from seat to seat and covered by a small mattressand other draperies; an indulgence founded on my visitation of fever, which, though not now checking our progress, assured me, in our littleband, these invidious luxuries. It may have been that as my body waspampered so I was moved equally to pamper my spirit, for myappropriative instinct had neglected no item of our case from thefirst--by which I mean from the moment of our getting under way, thatmorning, with much elaboration, in the court of the old Hôtel del'Univers at Lyons, where we had arrived two days before and awaited mygood pleasure during forty-eight hours that overflowed for us perhapssomewhat less than any pair of days yet, but as regards which it wasafterwards my complacent theory that my contemplative rest at theancient inn, with all the voices and graces of the past, of the court, of the French scheme of manners in general and of ancient inns, as such, in particular, had prepared me not a little, when I should in due coursehear of it, for what was meant by the _vie de province_--that expressionwhich was to become later on so _toned_, as old fine colour and old fineopinion are toned. It was the romance of travel, and it was the_suggested_ romance, flushed with suppositions and echoes, withimplications and memories, memories of one's "reading, " save the mark!all the more that our proper bestowal required two carriages, in whichwe were to "post, " ineffable thought, and which bristled with every kindof contradiction of common experience. The postilion, in a costumerather recalling, from the halls of Ferrero, that of my débardeur, bobbed up and down, the Italian courier, Jean Nadali, black-whiskeredand acquired in London, sat in the rumble along with Annette Godefroi ofMetz, fresh-coloured, broad-faced and fair-braided, a "bonne Lorraine"if ever there was, acquired in New York: I enjoy the echo of their verynames, neither unprecedented nor irreproducible, yet which melt togetherfor me, to intensification, with all the rest; with the recoveredmoment, above all, of our pause at the inn-door in the cool sunshine--wehad mounted and mounted--during which, in my absurdly cushioned state, Itook in, as I have hinted, by a long slow swig that testified to somepower of elbow, a larger draught of the wine of perception than any Ihad ever before owed to a single throb of that faculty. The villagestreet, which was not as village streets hitherto known to me, openedout, beyond an interval, into a high place on which perched an objectalso a fresh revelation and that I recognised with a deep joy--though ajoy that was doubtless partly the sense of fantastic ease, of abatedillness and of cold chicken--as at once a castle and a ruin. The onlycastle within my ken had been, by my impression, the machicolated villaabove us the previous summer at New Brighton, and as I had seen nostructure rise beyond that majesty so I had seen none abased to thedignity of ruin. Loose boards were no expression of this latter phase, and I was already somehow aware of a deeper note in the crumbled castlethan any note of the solid one--little experience as I had had either ofsolidity. At a point in the interval, at any rate, below the slope onwhich this memento stood, was a woman in a black bodice, a white shirtand a red petticoat, engaged in some sort of field labour, the effect ofwhose intervention just then is almost beyond my notation. I knew herfor a peasant in sabots--the first peasant I had ever beheld, or beheldat least to such advantage. She had in the whole aspect an enormousvalue, emphasising with her petticoat's tonic strength the truth thatsank in as I lay--the truth of one's embracing there, in all thepresented character of the scene, an amount of character I had felt noscene present, not even the one I had raked from the Hôtel Westminster;the sort of thing that, even as mere fulness and mere weight, would sitmost warmly in the mind. Supremely, in that ecstatic vision, was"Europe, " sublime synthesis, expressed and guaranteed to me--as if by amystic gage, which spread all through the summer air, that I should now, only now, never lose it, hold the whole consistency of it: up to thattime it might have been but mockingly whisked before me. Europe mightn'thave been flattered, it was true, at my finding her thus most signifiedand summarised in a sordid old woman scraping a mean living and anuninhabitable tower abandoned to the owls; that was but the momentarymeasure of a small sick boy, however, and the virtue of the impressionwas proportioned to my capacity. It made a bridge over to more thingsthan I then knew. 

XXI

How shall I render certain other impressions coming back to me from thatsummer, which were doubtless involved in my having still for a time, onthe alternate days when my complaint was active, to lie up on variouscouches and, for my main comfort, consider the situation? I consideredit best, I think, gathering in the fruits of a quickened sensibility toit, in certain umbrageous apartments in which my parents had settledthemselves near Geneva; an old house, in ample grounds and among greatspreading trees that pleasantly brushed our windows in the summer heatsand airs, known, if I am not mistaken, as the Campagne Gerebsoff--whichits mistress, an invalid Russian lady, had partly placed at ourdisposition while she reclined in her own quarter of the garden, on achaise longue and under a mushroom hat with a green veil, and I, in thecourse of the mild excursions appointed as my limit, considered her fromafar in the light of the legends supplied to me, as to her identity, history, general practices and proceedings, by my younger brother Wilky, who, according to his nature, or I may say to his genius, had madewithout loss of time great advances of acquaintance with her andquickened thereby my sense of his superior talent for life. Wilky's agefollowed closely on mine, and from that time on we conversed andconsorted, though with lapses and disparities; I being on the whole, during the succession of those years, in the grateful, the reallyfortunate position of having one exposure, rather the northward, as itwere, to the view of W. J. , and the other, perhaps the more immediatelysunned surface, to the genial glow of my junior. Of this I shall havemore to say, but to meet in memory meanwhile even this early flicker ofhim is to know again something of the sense that I attached all alongour boyhood to his successful sociability, his instinct for intercourse, his genius (as I have used the word) for making friends. It was the onlygenius he had, declaring itself from his tenderest years, never knowingthe shadow of defeat, and giving me, above all, from as far back and bythe very radiation of the fact, endlessly much to think of. For I had ina manner, thanks to the radiation, much of the benefit; his genialitywas absolutely such that the friends he made were made almost less forhimself, so to speak, than for other friends--of whom indeed we, his ownadjuncts, were easily first--so far at least as he discriminated. Atnight all cats are grey, and in this brother's easy view all hisacquaintance were his family. The trail of his sociability was over usall alike--though it here concerns me but to the effect, as I recoverit, of its weight on my comparatively so indirect faculty for what iscalled taking life. I must have already at the Campagne Gerebsoff begunto see him take it with all his directness--begun in fact to be a trifletormentedly aware that, though there might be many ways of so doing, weare condemned practically to a choice, not made free of them all;reduced to the use of but one, at the best, which it is to our interestto make the most of, since we may indeed sometimes make much. There wasa small sad charm, I should doubtless add, in this operation of thecontrast of the case before me with my own case; it was positively as ifWilky's were supplying me on occasion with the most immediate matter formy own. That was particularly marked after he had, with our elderbrother, been placed at school, the Pensionnat Roediger, at Châtelaine, then much esteemed and where I was supposedly to join them on mycomplete recovery: I recall sociable, irrepressibly sociable _sorties_thence on the part of the pair as promptly breaking out, not less than Irecall sociable afternoon visits to the establishment on the part of therest of us: it was my brothers' first boarding school, but as we had inthe New York conditions kept punctually rejoining our family, so inthese pleasant Genevese ones our family returned the attention. Of thisalso more anon; my particular point is just the wealth of Wilky'scontribution to my rich current consciousness--the consciousness fairly_made_ rich by my taking in, as aforesaid, at reflective hours, hourswhen I was in a manner alone with it, our roomy and shadowy, our almosthaunted interior. 

Admirable the scale and solidity, in general, of the ancient villasplanted about Geneva, and our house affected me as so massive and sospacious that even our own half of it seemed vast. I had never beforelived so long in anything so old and, as I somehow felt, so deep; depth, depth upon depth, was what came out for me at certain times of mywaiting above, in my immense room of thick embrasures and rather promptobscurity, while the summer afternoon waned and my companions, oftenbelow at dinner, lingered and left me just perhaps a bit overwhelmed. That was the sense of it--the _character_, in the whole place, pressedupon me with a force I hadn't met and that was beyond my analysis--whichis but another way of saying how directly notified I felt that suchmaterial conditions as I _had_ known could have had no depth at all. Mydepth was a vague measure, no doubt, but it made space, in the twilight, for an occasional small sound of voice or step from the garden or therooms of which the great homely, the opaque green shutters opened theresoftly to echo in--mixed with reverberations finer and more momentous, personal, experimental, if they might be called so; which I muchencouraged (they borrowed such tone from our new surrounding medium) andhalf of which were reducible to Wilky's personalities and Wilky'sexperience: these latter, irrepressibly communicated, being ever, enviably, though a trifle bewilderingly and even formidably, _of_personalities. There was the difference and the opposition, as I reallybelieve I was already aware--that one way of taking life was to go infor everything and everyone, which kept you abundantly occupied, and theother way was to be as occupied, quite as occupied, just with the senseand the image of it all, and on only a fifth of the actual immersion: acircumstance extremely strange. Life was taken almost equally bothways--that, I mean, seemed the strangeness; mere brute quantity andnumber being so much less in one case than the other. These latter werewhat I should have _liked_ to go in for, had I but had the intrinsicfaculties; that more than ever came home to me on those occasions when, as I could move further and stay out longer, I accompanied my parents onafternoon visits to Châtelaine and the Campagne Roediger, a scene thathas remained with me as nobly placid and pastoral. The great trees stoodabout, casting afternoon shadows; the old thick-walled green-shutteredvilla and its dépendances had the air of the happiest home; the bigbearded bonhomie of M. Roediger among his little polyglot charges--nopetits pays chauds these--appeared to justify, and more, the fond NewYork theory of Swiss education, the kind _à la portée_ of young NewYorkers, as a beautifully genialised, humanised, civilised, evenromanticised thing, in which, amid lawny mountain slopes, "thelanguages" flowed into so many beaming recipients on a stream of milkand honey, and "the relation, " above all, the relation from master topupil and back again, was of an amenity that wouldn't have been of thisworld save for the providential arrangement of a perfect pedagogicSwitzerland. "Did you notice the relation--how charming it was?" ourparents were apt to say to each other after these visits, in referenceto some observed show of confidence between instructor and instructed;while, as for myself, I was lost in the wonder of _all_ therelations--my younger brother seemed to live, and to his own ingenuousrelish as well, in such a happy hum of them. The languages had reason toprosper--they were so copiously represented; the English jostled theAmerican, the Russian the German, and there even trickled through alittle funny French. 

A great Geneva school of those days was the Institution Haccius, towhich generations of our young countrymen had been dedicated and our ownfaces first turned--under correction, however, by the perceived truththat if the languages were in question the American reigned there almostunchallenged. The establishment chosen for our experiment must haveappealed by some intimate and insinuating side, and as less patronisedby the rich and the sophisticated--for even in those days some Americanswere rich and several sophisticated; little indeed as it was all tomatter in the event, so short a course had the experiment just then torun. What it mainly brings back to me is the fine old candour andqueerness of the New York state of mind, begotten really not a little, Ithink, under our own roof, by the mere charmed perusal of RodolpheToeppfer's Voyages en Zigzag, the two goodly octavo volumes of whichdelightful work, an adorable book, taken with its illustrations, hadcome out early in the 'fifties and had engaged our fondest study. It isthe copious chronicle, by a schoolmaster o£ endless humour andsympathy--of what degree and form of "authority" it never occurred toone even to ask--of his holiday excursions with his pupils, mainly onfoot and with staff and knapsack, through the incomparable Switzerlandof the time before the railways and the "rush, " before the monsterhotels, the desecrated summits, the vulgarised valleys, the circulartours, the perforating tubes, the funiculars, the hordes, the horrors. To turn back to Toeppfer's pages to-day is to get the sense of a lostparadise, and the effect for me even yet of having pored over them in mychildhood is to steep in sweetness and quaintness some of thepictures--his own illustrations are of the pleasantest and drollest, andthe association makes that faded Swiss master of landscape Calame, ofthe so-called calamités, a quite sufficient Ruysdael. It must have beenconceived for us that we would lead in these conditions--always inpursuit of an education--a life not too dissimilar to that of thestoried exiles in the forest of Arden; though one would fain not press, after all, upon ideals of culture so little organised, so littleconscious, up to that moment, of our ferocities of comparison andcompetition, of imposed preparation. This particular loose ideal reachedout from the desert--or what might under discouragement pass for such;it invoked the light, but a simplicity of view which was somehow onewith the beauty of other convictions accompanied its effort; and thougha glance at the social "psychology" of some of its cheerful estimates, its relative importances, assumed and acted upon, might here seemindicated, there are depths of the ancient serenity that nothing wouldinduce me to sound. 

I need linger the less, moreover, since we in fact, oddly enough, lingered so little; so very little, for reasons doubtless well known toourselves at the time but which I at present fail to recapture, thatwhat next stands vividly out for me is our renewed passage through Parison the way to London for the winter; a turn of our situation invested atthe time with nothing whatever of the wonderful, yet which would againhalf prompt me to soundings were I not to recognise in it that mark ofthe fitful, that accent of the improvised, that general quality ofearnest and reasoned, yet at the same time almost passionate, impatiencewhich was to devote us for some time to variety, almost to incoherency, of interest. We had fared across the sea under the glamour of the Swissschool in the abstract, but the Swiss school in the concrete soon turnedstale on our hands; a fact over which I remember myself as no furthercritical than to feel, not without zest, that, since one was all eyesand the world decidedly, at such a pace, all images, it ministered tothe panoramic. It ministered, to begin with, through our very earlystart for Lyons again in the October dawn--without Nadali or thecarriages this time, but on the basis of the malle-poste, vast, yellowand rumbling, which we availed wholly to fill and of which the highhaughtiness was such that it could stop, even for an instant, only atappointed and much dissevered places--to the effect, I recall, of itsvainly attempted arrest by our cousin Charlotte King, beforementioned, whom I see now suddenly emerge, fresh, confident and pretty, from somerural retreat by the road, a scene of simple villeggiatura, "rien quepour saluer ces dames, " as she pleaded to the conductor; whom shepractically, if not permittedly, overmastered, leaving with me still thewonder of her happy fusion of opposites. The coach had not, in theevent, paused, but so neither had she, and as it ignored flush andflurry quite as it defied delay, she was equally a match for it in theseparticulars, blandly achieving her visit to us while it rumbled on, making a perfect success and a perfect grace of her idea. She dropped aselegantly out as she had gymnastically floated in, and "ces dames" mustmuch have wished they could emulate her art. Save for this my view ofthat migration has faded, though to shine out again to the sense of ourearly morning arrival in Paris a couple of days later, and our huntthere, vain at first, for an hotel that would put us numerously up; vaintill we had sat awhile, in the Rue du Helder, I think, before that of anAlbany uncle, luckily on the scene and finally invoked, who after somedelay descended to us with a very foreign air, I fancied, and nopossibility, to his regret, of placing us under his own roof; as ifindeed, I remember reflecting, we could, such as we were, have beendesired to share his foreign interests--such as _they_ were. He espousedour cause, however, with gay goodnature--while I wondered, in myadmiration for him and curiosity about him, how he really liked us, and(a bit doubtfully) whether I should have liked us had I been in hisplace; and after some further adventure installed us at the Hôtel de laVille de Paris in the Rue de la Ville-l'Evèque, a resort now long sinceextinct, though it lingered on for some years, and which I think of asrather huddled and disappointingly private, to the abatement ofspectacle, and standing obliquely beyond a wall, a high gateway and amore or less cobbled court. 

XXII

Little else of that Parisian passage remains with me--it was probably ofthe briefest; I recover only a visit with my father to the Palais del'Industrie, where the first of the great French Exhibitions, on themodel, much reduced, of the English Crystal Palace of 1851, was stillopen, a fact explaining the crowded inns; and from that visit win backbut the department of the English pictures and our stopping long beforeThe Order of Release of a young English painter, J. E. Millais, who hadjust leaped into fame, and my impression of the rare treatment of whosebaby's bare legs, pendent from its mother's arms, is still as vivid tome as if from yesterday. The vivid yields again to the vague--I scarceknow why so utterly--till consciousness, waking up in London, renewsitself, late one evening and very richly, at the Gloucester Hotel (orCoffee-House, as I think it was then still called, ) which occupied thatcorner of Piccadilly and Berkeley Street where more modernestablishments have since succeeded it, but where a fatigued andfamished American family found on that occasion a fine old Britishvirtue in cold roast beef and bread and cheese and ale; their expertacclamation of which echoes even now in my memory. It keeps companythere with other matters equally British and, as we say now, earlyVictorian; the thick gloom of the inn rooms, the faintness of theglimmering tapers, the blest inexhaustibility of the fine joint, surpassed only by that of the grave waiter's reserve--plain, immutablyplain fare all, but prompting in our elders an emphasis of relief andrelish, the "There's nothing like it after all!" tone, which re-excitedexpectation, which in fact seemed this time to re-announce a basis forfaith and joy. 

That basis presently shrank to the scale of a small house hard by thehotel, at the entrance of Berkeley Square--expeditiously lighted on, itwould thus appear, which again has been expensively superseded, but tothe ancient little facts of which I fondly revert, since I owe them whatI feel to have been, in the far past, the prime faint revelation, thesmall broken expression, of the London I was afterwards to know. Theplace wears on the spot, to this day, no very different face; the housethat has risen on the site of ours is still immediately neighboured atthe left by the bookseller, the circulating-librarian and news-agent, who modestly flourished in our time under the same name; the greatestablishment of Mr. Gunter, just further along, is as soberly andsolidly seated; the mews behind the whole row, from the foot of Hay Hillat the right, wanders away to Bruton Street with the irregular gracethat spoke to my young fancy; Hay Hill itself is somehow less sharplyprecipitous, besides being no longer paved, as I seem to recall itshaving been, with big boulders, and I was on the point of saying thatits antique charm in some degree abides. Nothing, however, could befurther from the truth; its antique charm quite succumbed, years ago, tothat erection of lumpish "mansions" which followed the demolition of theold-world town-residence, as the house-agents say, standing, on thesouth side, between court and I suppose garden, where Dover Street givesway to Grafton; a house of many histories, of vague importances and coldreserves and deep suggestions, I used to think after scaling the steepquite on purpose to wonder about it. A whole chapter of life wascondensed, for our young sensibility, I make out, into the couple ofmonths--they can scarce have been more--spent by us in these quarters, which must have proved too narrow and too towny; but it can have had nopassage so lively as the occurrences at once sequent to my father'shaving too candidly made known in some public print, probably The Times, that an American gentleman, at such an address, desired to arrange witha competent young man for the tuition at home of his three sons. Theeffect of his rash failure to invite application by letter only was theassault of an army of visitors who filled us with consternation; theyhung about the door, cumbered the hall, choked the staircase and satgrimly individual in odd corners. How they were dealt with, given myfather's precipitate and general charity, I can but feebly imagine; ourown concern, in the event, was with a sole selected presence, that ofScotch Mr. Robert Thompson, who gave us his care from breakfast toluncheon each morning that winter, who afterwards carried on a school atEdinburgh, and whom, in years long subsequent, I happened to help R. L. Stevenson to recognise gaily as _his_ early pedagogue. He was so deeplysolicitous, yet withal so mild and kind and shy, with no harsherinjunction to us ever than "Come now, be getting on!" that one could butthink well of a world in which so gentle a spirit might flourish; whileit is doubtless to the credit of his temper that remembrance is a blankin respect to his closer ministrations. I recall vividly his freshcomplexion, his very round clear eyes, his tendency to trip over his ownlegs or feet while thoughtfully circling about us, and his constantdress-coat, worn with trousers of a lighter hue, which was perhaps theprescribed uniform of a daily tutor then; but I ask myself in vain whatI can have "studied" with him, there remaining with me afterwards, totestify--this putting any scrap of stored learning aside--no singletextbook save the Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare, which was given me as(of all things in the world) a reward. A reward for what I am again at aloss to say--not certainly for having "got on" to anything like the tuneplaintively, for the most part, piped to me. It is a very odd and yet tomyself very rich and full reminiscence, though I remember how, lookingback at it from after days, W. J. Denounced it to me, and with it thefollowing year and more spent in Paris, as a poor and arid andlamentable time, in which, missing such larger chances and connectionsas we might have reached out to, we had done nothing, he and I, but walkabout together, in a state of the direst propriety, little "high" blackhats and inveterate gloves, the childish costume of the place andperiod, to stare at grey street-scenery (that of early Victorian Londonhad tones of a neutrality!) dawdle at shop-windows and buy water-coloursand brushes with which to bedaub eternal drawing-blocks. We might, Idare say, have felt higher impulses and carried out larger plans--thoughindeed present to me for this, on my brother's so expressing himself, ismy then quick recognition of the deeper stirrings and braver needs he atleast must have known, and my perfect if rueful sense of having myselfhad no such quarrel with our conditions: embalmed for me did they evento that shorter retrospect appear in a sort of fatalism of patience, spiritless in a manner, no doubt, yet with an inwardly active, productive and ingenious side. 

It was just the fact of our having so walked and dawdled and dodged thatmade the charm of memory; in addition to which what could one have askedmore than to be steeped in a medium so dense that whole elements of it, forms of amusement, interest and wonder, soaked through to someappreciative faculty and made one fail at the most of nothing but one'slessons? My brother was right in so far as that my question--the one Ihave just reproduced--could have been asked only by a personincorrigible in throwing himself back upon substitutes for lost causes, substitutes that might _temporarily_ have appeared queer and small; aperson so haunted, even from an early age, with visions of life, thataridities, for him, were half a terror and half an impossibility, andthat the said substitutes, the economies and ingenuities that protested, in their dumb vague way, against weakness of situation or of direct andapplied faculty, were in themselves really a revel of spirit andthought. It _had_ indeed again an effect of almost pathetic incoherencethat our brave quest of "the languages, " suffering so prompt and for thetime at least so accepted and now so inscrutably irrecoverable a check, should have contented itself with settling us by that Christmas in ahouse, more propitious to our development, in St. John's Wood, where weenjoyed a considerable garden and wistful view, though by that windowedprivilege alone, of a large green expanse in which ladies and gentlemenpractised archery. Just _that_--and not the art even, but the merespectacle--might have been one of the substitutes in question; if notfor the languages at least for one or another of the romanticconnections we seemed a little to have missed: it was such a whiff ofthe old world of Robin Hood as we could never have looked up from themere thumbed "story, " in Fourteenth Street at any rate, to any softconfidence of. More than I can begin to say, that is by a greater numberof queer small channels, did the world about us, thus continuous withthe old world of Robin Hood, steal into my sense--a constant state ofsubjection to which fact is no bad instance of those refinements ofsurrender that I just named as my fond practice. I seem to see to-daythat the London of the 'fifties was even to the weak perception ofchildhood a much less generalised, a much more eccentrically andvariously characterised place, than the present great accommodated andaccommodating city; it had fewer resources but it had many morefeatures, scarce one of which failed to help the whole to bristle withwhat a little gaping American could take for an intensity of differencefrom _his_ supposed order. It was extraordinarily the picture and thescene of Dickens, now so changed and superseded; it offered to mypresumptuous vision still more the reflection of Thackeray--and where isthe _detail_ of the reflection of Thackeray now?--so that as I trod thevast length of Baker Street, the Thackerayan vista of other days, Ithrobbed with the pride of a vastly enlarged acquaintance. 

I dare say our perambulations of Baker Street in our little "top" hatsand other neatnesses must have been what W. J. Meant by our poverty oflife--whereas it was probably one of the very things most expressive tomyself of the charm and the colour of history and (from the point ofview of the picturesque) of society. We were often in Baker Street byreason of those stretched-out walks, at the remembered frequency andlong-drawn push of which I am to-day amazed; recalling at the same time, however, that save for Robert Thompson's pitching ball with us in thegarden they took for us the place of all other agilities. I can't butfeel them to have been marked in their way by a rare curiosity andenergy. Good Mr. Thompson had followed us in our move, occupyingquarters, not far off, above a baker's shop on a Terrace--a group ofobjects still untouched by time--where we occasionally by way of changeattended for our lessons and where not the least of our inspirations wasthe confidence, again and again justified, that our mid-morning "break"would determine the appearance of a self-conscious stale cake, straightfrom below, received by us all each time as if it had been a suddenhappy thought, and ushered in by a little girl who might have been aDickens foundling or "orfling. " Our being reduced to mumble cake in asuburban lodging by way of reaction from the strain of study would havebeen perhaps a pathetic picture, but we had field-days too, when weaccompanied our excellent friend to the Tower, the Thames Tunnel, St. Paul's and the Abbey, to say nothing of the Zoological Gardens, almostclose at hand and with which we took in that age of lingering forms noliberty of abbreviation; to say nothing either of Madame Tussaud's, thenin our interminable but so amiable Baker Street, the only shade on theamiability of which was just that gruesome association with the portalof the Bazaar--since Madame Tussaud had, of all her treasures, mostvividly revealed to me the Mrs. Manning and the Burke and Hare of theChamber of Horrors which lurked just within it; whom, for days aftermaking their acquaintance (and prolonging it no further than ourconscientious friend thought advisable) I half expected, when alone, tomeet quite dreadfully on the staircase or on opening a door. All thisexperience was valuable, but it was not the languages--save in so farindeed as it was the English, which we hadn't in advance so much aimedat, yet which more or less, and very interestingly, came; it at any rateperhaps broke our fall a little that French, of a sort, continued to bewith us in the remarkably erect person of Mademoiselle Cusin, the Swissgoverness who had accompanied us from Geneva, whose quite sharplyextrusive but on the whole exhilarating presence I associate with thiswinter, and who led in that longish procession of more or less similardomesticated presences which was to keep the torch, that is the accent, among us, fairly alight. The variety and frequency of the arrivals anddepartures of these ladies--whose ghostly names, again, so far as Irecall them, I like piously to preserve, Augustine Danse, Amélie Fortin, Marie Guyard, Marie Bonningue, Félicie Bonningue, ClarisseBader--mystifies me in much the same degree as our own academicvicissitudes in New York; I can no more imagine why, sociable andcharitable, we so often changed governesses than I had contemporaneouslygrasped the principle of our succession of schools: the whole group ofphenomena reflected, I gather, as a rule, much more the extremepromptitude of the parental optimism than any disproportionate habit ofimpatience. The optimism begot precipitation, and the precipitation hadtoo often to confess itself. What is instructive, what is historic, isthe probability that young persons offering themselves at that time asguides and communicators--the requirements of our small sister were forlong modest enough--quite conceivably lacked preparedness, and were sothrown back on the extempore, which in turn lacked abundance. One ofthese figures, that of Mademoiselle Danse, the most Parisian, andprodigiously so, was afterwards to stand out for us quite luridly--acloud of revelations succeeding her withdrawal; a cloud which, thick asit was, never obscured our impression of her genius and her charm. Thedaughter of a political proscript who had but just escaped, by thelegend, being seized in his bed on the terrible night of theDeux-Décembre, and who wrote her micawberish letters from Gallipolis, Ohio, she subsequently figured to my imagination (in the light, that is, of the divined revelations, too dreadful for our young ears, ) as themost brilliant and most genial of irregular characters, exhibiting theParisian "mentality" at its highest, or perhaps rather its deepest, andmore remarkable for nothing than for the consummate little art and gracewith which she had for a whole year draped herself in the mantle of ourinnocent air. It was exciting, it was really valuable, to have to thatextent rubbed shoulders with an "adventuress"; it showed one that forthe adventuress there might on occasion be much to be said. 

Those, however, were later things--extensions of view hampered for thepresent, as I have noted, by our mere London street-scenery, which hadmuch to build out for us. I see again that we but endlessly walked andendlessly daubed, and that our walks, with an obsession of their own, constantly abetted our daubing. We knew no other boys at all, and weeven saw no others, I seem to remember, save the essentially rude ones, rude with a kind of mediæval rudeness for which our clear New Yorkexperience had given us no precedent, and of which the great andconstant sign was the artless, invidious wonder produced in them, on ourpublic appearances, by the alien stamp in us that, for our comfort, wevainly sought to dissimulate. We conformed in each particular, so far aswe could, to the prevailing fashion and standard, of a narrow range inthose days, but in our very plumage--putting our _ramage_ aside--ourwood-note wild must have seemed to sound, so sharply we challenged, whenabroad, the attention of our native contemporaries, and even sometimesof their elders, pulled up at sight of us in the from-head-to-footstare, a curiosity void of sympathy and that attached itself for somereason especially to our feet, which were not abnormally large. TheLondon people had for themselves, at the same time, an exuberance oftype; we found it in particular a world of costume, often of very oddcostume--the most intimate notes of which were the postmen in theirfrock-coats of military red and their black beaver hats; the milkwomen, in hats that often emulated these, in little shawls and strange short, full frocks, revealing enormous boots, with their pails swung from theirshoulders on wooden yokes; the inveterate footmen hooked behind thecoaches of the rich, frequently in pairs and carrying staves, togetherwith the mounted and belted grooms without the attendance of whomriders, of whichever sex--and riders then were much morenumerous--almost never went forth. The range of character, on the otherhand, reached rather dreadfully down; there were embodied andexemplified "horrors" in the streets beside which any present exhibitionis pale, and I well remember the almost terrified sense of theirsalience produced in me a couple of years later, on the occasion of aflying return from the Continent with my father, by a long, aninterminable drive westward from the London Bridge railway-station. Itwas a soft June evening, with a lingering light and swarming crowds, asthey then seemed to me, of figures reminding me of George Cruikshank'sArtful Dodger and his Bill Sikes and his Nancy, only with the biggerbrutality of life, which pressed upon the cab, the early-Victorianfourwheeler, as we jogged over the Bridge, and cropped up in more andmore gas-lit patches for all our course, culminating, somewhere far tothe west, in the vivid picture, framed by the cab-window, of a womanreeling backward as a man felled her to the ground with a blow in theface. The London view at large had in fact more than a Cruikshank, therestill survived in it quite a Hogarth, side--which I had of course thenno name for, but which I was so sharply to recognise on coming backyears later that it fixed for me the veracity of the great pictorialchronicler. Hogarth's mark is even yet not wholly overlaid; though timehas _per contra_ dealt with that stale servility of address which mostexpressed to our young minds the rich burden of a Past, the consequenceof too much history. I liked for my own part a lot of history, but feltin face of certain queer old obsequiosities and appeals, whinings andsidlings and hand-rubbings and curtsey-droppings, the general play ofapology and humility, behind which the great dim social complexityseemed to mass itself, that one didn't quite want so inordinate aquantity. Of that particular light and shade, however, the big broom ofchange has swept the scene bare; more history still has been after allwhat it wanted. Quite another order, in the whole connection, strikesme as reigning to-day--though not without the reminder from it that therelations in which manner, as a generalised thing, in which "tone, " is_positively_ pleasant, is really assured and sound, clear andinteresting, are numerous and definite only when it has had in its pastsome strange phases and much misadventure. 

XXIII

We were still being but vaguely "formed, " yet it was a vaguenesspreferred apparently by our parents to the only definiteness in anydegree open to us, that of the English school away from home (the Londonprivate school near home they would absolutely none of;) which they sawas a fearful and wonderful, though seemingly effective, preparation ofthe young for English life and an English career, but related to thatsituation only, so little related in fact to any other as to make it, ina differing case, an educational cul-de-sac, the worst of economies. They had doubtless heard claimed for it just that no other method forboys _was_ so splendidly general, but they had, I judge, their own senseof the matter--which would have been that it all depended on what wasmeant by this. The truth was, above all, that to them the formativeforces most closely bearing on us were not in the least vague, but verydefinite by _their_ measure and intention; there were "advantages, "generally much belauded, that appealed to them scantly, and othermatters, conceptions of character and opportunity, ideals, values, importances, enjoying no great common credit but for which it was theirbelief that they, under whatever difficulties, more or less provided. Inrespect of which I further remind myself of the blest fewness, as yet, of our years; and I come back to my own sense, benighted though it mayhave been, of a highly-coloured and remarkably active life. I recogniseour immediate, our practical ferment even in our decent perambulations, our discussions, W. J. 's and mine, of whether we had in a given casebest apply for a renewal of our "artists' materials" to Messrs. Rowneyor to Messrs. Windsor and Newton, and in our pious resort, on thesedeterminations, to Rathbone Place, more beset by our steps, probably, than any other single corner of the town, and the short but chargedvista of which lives for me again in the tempered light of those oldwinter afternoons. Of scarce less moment than these were our frequentvisits, in the same general connection, to the old Pantheon of OxfordStreet, now fallen from its high estate, but during that age a place offine rococo traditions, a bazaar, an exhibition, an opportunity, at theend of long walks, for the consumption of buns and ginger-beer, andabove all a monument to the genius of that wonderful painter B. R. Haydon. We must at one time quite have haunted the Pantheon, where wedoubtless could better than elsewhere sink to contemplative, toruminative rest: Haydon's huge canvases covered the walls--I wonderwhat has become now of The Banishment of Aristides, attended to the citygate by his wife and babe, every attitude and figure in which, especially that of the foreshortened boy picking up stones to shy at theall-too-just, stares out at me still. We found in these works remarkableinterest and beauty, the reason of which was partly, no doubt, that wehung, to fascination, at home, over the three volumes of the haplessartist's Autobiography, then a new book, which our father, indulgent toour preoccupation, had provided us with; but I blush to risk the furthersurmise that the grand manner, the heroic and the classic, in Haydon, came home to us more warmly and humanly than in the masters commended as"old, " who, at the National Gallery, seemed to meet us so littlehalf-way, to hold out the hand of fellowship or suggest something that_we_ could do, or could at least want to. The beauty of Haydon was justthat he was new, shiningly new, and if he hinted that we might perhapsin some happy future emulate his big bravery there was nothing soimpossible about it. If we adored daubing we preferred it _fresh_, andthe genius of the Pantheon was fresh, whereas, strange to say, Rubensand Titian were not. Even the charm of the Pantheon yielded, however, tothat of the English collection, the Vernon bequest to the nation, thenarrayed at Marlborough House and to which the great plumed and drapedand dusty funeral car of the Duke of Wellington formed an attractiveadjunct. The ground-floor chambers there, none of them at that timeroyally inhabited, come back to me as altogether bleak and bare and asowing their only dignity to Maclise, Mulready and Landseer, to DavidWilkie and Charles Leslie. _They_ were, by some deep-seated Englishmystery, the real unattainable, just as they were none the less thedirectly inspiring and the endlessly delightful. I could never haveenough of Maclise's Play-scene in Hamlet, which I supposed the finestcomposition in the world (though Ophelia did look a little as if cut insilhouette out of white paper and pasted on;) while as I gazed, andgazed again, at Leslie's Sancho Panza and his Duchess I pushed throughthe great hall of romance to the central or private apartments. Trafalgar Square had its straight message for us only in the May-timeexhibition, the Royal Academy of those days having, without a home ofits own, to borrow space from the National Gallery--space partlyoccupied, in the summer of 1856, by the first fresh fruits of thePre-Raphaelite efflorescence, among which I distinguish Millais's Valeof Rest, his Autumn Leaves and, if I am not mistaken, his prodigiousBlind Girl. The very word Pre-Raphaelite wore for us that intensity ofmeaning, not less than of mystery, that thrills us in its perfection butfor one season, the prime hour of first initiations, and I may perhapssomewhat mix the order of our great little passages of perception. Momentous to us again was to be the Academy show of 1858, where therewere, from the same wide source, still other challenges to wonder, Holman Hunt's Scapegoat most of all, which I remember finding so chargedwith the awful that I was glad I saw it in company--_it_ in company andI the same: I believed, or tried to believe, I should have feared toface it all alone in a room. By that time moreover--I mean by 1858--wehad been more fully indoctrinated, or such was the case at least withW. J. , for whom, in Paris, during the winter of 1857, instruction at theatelier of M. Léon Coigniet, of a limited order and adapted to hisyears, had been candidly provided--that M. Léon Coigniet whose Mariusmeditating among the Ruins of Carthage impressed us the more, at theLuxembourg (even more haunted by us in due course than the Pantheon hadbeen, ) in consequence of this family connection. 

Let me not, however, nip the present thread of our æsthetic evolutionwithout a glance at that comparatively spare but deeply appreciatedexperience of the London theatric privilege which, so far as occasionfavoured us, also pressed the easy spring. The New York familiaritieshad to drop; going to the play presented itself in London as a serious, ponderous business: a procession of two throbbing and heaving cabs overvast foggy tracts of the town, after much arrangement in advance andwith a renewal of far peregrination, through twisting passages andcatacombs, even after crossing the magic threshold. We sat in strangeplaces, with still stranger ones behind or beside; we felt walls andpartitions, in our rear, getting so hot that we wondered if the housewas to burst into flame; I recall in especial our being arrayed, to thenumber of nine persons, all of our contingent, in a sort of rusticbalcony or verandah which, simulating the outer gallery of a Swisscottage framed in creepers, formed a feature of Mr. Albert Smith'sonce-famous representation of the Tour of Mont Blanc. Big, bearded, rattling, chattering, mimicking Albert Smith again charms my senses, though subject to the reflection that his type and presence, superficially so important, so ample, were somehow at odds with suchingratiations, with the reckless levity of his performance--aperformance one of the great effects of which was, as I remember it, thevery brief stop and re-departure of the train at Épernay, with theringing of bells, the bawling of guards, the cries of travellers, theslamming of doors and the tremendous pop as of a colossalchampagne-cork, made all simultaneous and vivid by Mr. Smith's merepersonal resources and graces. But it is the publicity of our situationas a happy family that I best remember, and how, to our embarrassment, we seemed put forward in our illustrative châlet as part of theboisterous show and of what had been paid for by the house. Two othergreat evenings stand out for me as not less collectively enjoyed, one ofthese at the Princess's, then under the management of Charles Kean, theunprecedented (as he was held) Shakespearean revivalist, the other atthe Olympic, where Alfred Wigan, the extraordinary and too short-livedRobson and the shrewd and handsome Mrs. Stirling were the highattraction. Our enjoyment of Charles Kean's presentation of Henry theEighth figures to me as a momentous date in our lives: we did nothingfor weeks afterwards but try to reproduce in water-colours QueenKatharine's dream-vision of the beckoning, consoling angels, a radiantgroup let down from the skies by machinery then thought marvellous--whenindeed we were not parading across our schoolroom stage as theportentous Cardinal and impressively alternating his last speech toCromwell with Buckingham's, that is with Mr. Ryder's, address on the wayto the scaffold. The spectacle had seemed to us prodigious--as it wasdoubtless at its time the last word of costly scenic science; though asI look back from the high ground of an age that has mastered tone andfusion I seem to see it as comparatively garish and violent, after themanner of the complacently approved stained-glass church-windows of thesame period. I was to have my impression of Charles Kean renewed lateron--ten years later, in America--without a rag of scenic reinforcement;when I was struck with the fact that no actor so little graced by natureprobably ever went so far toward repairing it by a kind of cold rage ofendeavour. Were he and his wife really not _coercively_ interesting onthat Boston night of Macbeth in particular, hadn't their art adistinction that triumphed over battered age and sorry harshness, or wasI but too easily beguiled by the old association? I have enjoyed andforgotten numberless rich hours of spectatorship, but somehow still findhooked to the wall of memory the picture of this hushed couple in thecastle court, with the knocking at the gate, with Macbeth's stare ofpitiful horror at his unused daggers and with the grand manner, up tothe height of the argument, of Mrs. Kean's coldly portentous snatch ofthem. What I especially owe that lady is my sense of what she had incommon, as a queer hooped and hook-nosed figure, of large circumferenceand archaic attire, strange tasteless toggery, with those performers ofthe past who are preserved for us on the small canvases of Hogarth andZoffany; she helped one back at that time of her life to a vision ofthe Mrs. Cibbers and the Mrs. Pritchards--so affecting may often be suchrecovered links. 

I see the evening at the Olympic as really itself partaking of thatantiquity, even though Still Waters Run Deep, then in its flourishingfreshness and as to which I remember my fine old friend Fanny Kemble'smentioning to me in the distant after-time that she had directed TomTaylor to Charles de Bernard's novel of Un Gendre for the subject of it, passed at the moment for a highly modern "social study. " It is perhapsin particular through the memory of our dismal approach to the theatre, the squalid slum of Wych Street, then incredibly brutal and barbarous asan avenue to joy, an avenue even sometimes for the muffled coach ofRoyalty, that the episode affects me as antedating some of theconditions of the mid-Victorian age; the general credit of which, Ishould add, was highly re-established for us by the consummately quietand natural art, as we expertly pronounced it, of Alfred Wigan's JohnMildmay and the breadth and sincerity of the representative of the rashmother-in-law whom he so imperturbably puts in her place. This was anexhibition supposed in its day to leave its spectators little to envy inthe highest finish reached by the French theatre. At a remarkableheight, in a different direction, moved the strange and vivid littlegenius of Robson, a master of fantastic intensity, unforgettable forus, we felt that night, in Planché's extravaganza of The DiscreetPrincess, a Christmas production preluding to the immemorialharlequinade. I still see Robson slide across the stage, in one sidelongwriggle, as the small black sinister Prince Richcraft of the fairy-tale, everything he did at once very dreadful and very droll, thoroughly trueand yet none the less _macabre_, the great point of it all its parody ofCharles Kean in The Corsican Brothers; a vision filled out a couple ofyears further on by his Daddy Hardacre in a two-acts version of aParisian piece thriftily and coarsely extracted from Balzac's EugénieGrandet. This occasion must have given the real and the finer measure ofhis highly original talent; so present to me, despite the interval, isthe distinctiveness of his little concentrated rustic miser whosedaughter helps herself from his money-box so that her cousin and lovershall save a desperate father, her paternal uncle, from bankruptcy; andthe prodigious effect of Robson's appalled descent, from an upper floor, his literal headlong tumble and rattle of dismay down a steep staircaseoccupying the centre of the stage, on his discovery of the rifling ofhis chest. Long was I to have in my ears the repeated shriek of hisalarm, followed by a panting babble of wonder and rage as his impetushurled him, a prostrate scrap of despair (he was a tiny figure, yet "soheld the stage" that in his company you could see nobody else) half wayacross the room. I associate a little uncertainly with the same nightthe sight of Charles Matthews in Sheridan's Critic and in a comedybotched from the French, like everything else in those days that was noteither Sheridan or Shakespeare, called Married for Money; an exampleabove all, this association, of the heaped measure of the oldbills--vast and various enumerations as they were, of the size of butslightly reduced placards and with a strange and delightful greasy feeland redolence of printer's ink, intensely theatrical ink somehow, intheir big black lettering. Charles Matthews must have been then in hismid-career, and him too, wasted and aged, infinitely "marked, " I was tosee again, ever so long after, in America; an impression reminding me, as I recover it, of how one took his talent so thoroughly for grantedthat he seemed somehow to get but half the credit of it: this at leastin all save parts of mere farce and "patter, " which were on a footing, and no very interesting one, of their own. The other effect, that of anaturalness so easy and immediate, so friendly and intimate, that one'srelation with the artist lost itself in one's relation with thecharacter, the artist thereby somehow positively suffering while thecharacter gained, or at least while the spectator did--this comes backto me quite as a part even of my earlier experience and as attesting onbehalf of the actor a remarkable genius; since there are no morecharming artistic cases than those of the frank result, when it is frank_enough_, and the dissimulated process, when the dissimulation has beendeep. To drop, or appear to drop, machinery and yet keep, or at leastgain, intensity, the interesting intensity separated by a gulf from amere unbought coincidence of aspect or organ, is really to do something. In spite of which, at the same time, what I perhaps most retain, by thelight of the present, of the sense of that big and rather dusky night ofDrury Lane is not so much the felt degree of anyone's talent as the factthat personality and artistry, _with_ their intensity, could work theirspell in such a material desert, in conditions intrinsically socharmless, so bleak and bare. The conditions gave nothing of what weregard to-day as most indispensable--since our present fine conceptionis but to reduce and fill in the material desert, to people and carpetand curtain it. We may be right, so far as that goes, but ourpredecessors were, with their eye on the essence, not wrong; thanks towhich they wear the crown of our now thinking of them--if we do think ofthem--as in their way giants and heroes. What their successors were tobecome is another question; very much better dressed, beyond all doubt. 

XXIV

Good Robert Thompson was followed by _fin_ M. Lerambert--who was surelygood too, in his different way; good at least for feigning an interesthe could scarce have rejoicingly felt and that he yet somehow managed togive a due impression of: that artifice being, as we must dimly havedivined at the time (in fact I make bold to say that I personally diddivine it, ) exactly a sign of his _finesse_. Of no such uncanny enginehad Mr. Thompson, luckily, known a need--luckily since to what arsenalcould he possibly have resorted for it? None capable of supplying itcould ever have met his sight, and we ourselves should at a pinch havehad to help him toward it. He was easily interested, or at least took aneasy view, on such ground as we offered him, of what it was to be so;whereas his successor attached to the condition a different value--onerecognising no secondary substitute. Perhaps this was why our connectionwith M. Lerambert can have lasted but four or five months--time even forhis sharp subterfuge to have ceased entirely to serve him; though indeedeven as I say this I vaguely recall that our separation was attendedwith friction, that it took him unaware and that he had been prepared(or so represented himself) for further sacrifices. It could have beenno great one, assuredly, to deal with so intensely living a young mindas my elder brother's, it could have been but a happy impressionconstantly renewed; but we two juniors, Wilky and I, were adrag--Wilky's powers most displayed at that time in his preference foringenuous talk over any other pursuit whatever, and my own aptitudeshowing for nil, according to our poor gentleman's report of me when acouple of months had sped, save as to rendering La Fontaine's fablesinto English with a certain corresponding felicity of idiom. I rememberperfectly the parental communication to me of this fell judgment, Iremember as well the interest with which its so quite definite characterinspired me--that character had such beauty and distinctness; yet, andever so strangely, I recover no sense of having been crushed, and thiseven though destitute, utterly, of any ground of appeal. The fact leavesme at a loss, since I also remember my not having myself thoughtparticularly well, in the connection allowed, of my "rendering" faculty. "Oh, " I seem inwardly to have said, "if it were to be, if it only couldbe, _really_ a question of rendering--!" and so, without confusion, though in vague, very vague, mystification to have left it: as if somany things, intrinsic and extrinsic, would have to change and operate, so many would have to happen, so much water have to flow under thebridge, before I could give primary application to such a thought, muchmore finish such a sentence. 

All of which is but a way of saying that we had since the beginning ofthe summer settled ourselves in Paris, and that M. Lerambert--by whatagency invoked, by what revelation vouchsafed, I quite forget--was atthis time attending us in a so-called pavilion, of middling size, that, between the Rond-Point and the Rue du Colisée, hung, at no great height, over the Avenue des Champs-Elysées; hung, that is, from the vantage ofits own considerable terrace, surmounted as the parapet of the latterwas with iron railings rising sufficiently to protect the place forfamiliar use and covert contemplation (we ever so fondly used it, ) andyet not to the point of fencing out life. A blest little old-worldrefuge it must have seemed to us, with its protuberantly-paved andpeculiarly resonant small court and idle _communs_ beside it, accessibleby a high grille where the jangle of the bell and the clatter ofresponse across the stones might have figured a comprehensive echo ofall old Paris. Old Paris then even there considerably lingered; Irecapture much of its presence, for that matter, within our odd relicof a house, the property of an American southerner from whom ourparents had briefly hired it and who appeared to divide his time, poorunadmonished gentleman of the eve of the Revolution, between Louisianaand France. What association could have breathed more from the queergraces and the queer incommodities alike, from the diffused glassypolish of floor and perilous staircase, from the redundancy of mirrorand clock and ormolu vase, from the irrepressibility of the white andgold panel, from that merciless elegance of tense red damask, above all, which made the gilt-framed backs of sofa and chair as sumptuous, nodoubt, but as sumptuously stiff, as the brocaded walls? It was amidthese refinements that we presently resumed our studies--even explicitlyfar from arduous at first, as the Champs-Elysées were perforce that yearour summer habitation and some deference was due to the place and theseason, lessons of any sort being at best an infraction of the latter. M. Lerambert, who was spare and tightly black-coated, spectacled, paleand prominently intellectual, who lived in the Rue Jacob with his motherand sister, exactly as he should have done to accentuate propheticallyhis resemblance, save for the spectacles, to some hero of VictorCherbuliez, and who, in fine, was conscious, not unimpressively, of hisauthorship of a volume of meditative verse sympathetically mentioned bythe Sainte-Beuve of the Causeries in a review of the young poets of thehour ("M. Lerambert too has loved, M. Lerambert too has suffered, M. Lerambert too has sung!" or words to that effect:) this subtlepersonality, really a high form of sensibility I surmise, and asqualified for other and intenser relations as any Cherbuliez figure ofthem all, was naturally not to be counted on to lead us gapingly forthas good Mr. Thompson had done; so that my reminiscence of warmsomniferous mornings by the windows that opened to the clattery, plashycourt is quite, so far as my record goes, relievingly unbroken. 

The afternoons, however, glimmer back to me shamelessly different, forour circle had promptly been joined by the all-knowing and all-imposingMademoiselle Danse aforesaid, her of the so flexible _taille_ and the sosalient smiling eyes, than which even those of Miss Rebecca Sharp, thatother epic governess, were not more pleasingly green; who provided withhigh efficiency for our immediate looser needs--mine and Wilky's andthose of our small brother Bob (l'ingénieux petit Robertson as she wasto dub him, ) and of our still smaller sister at least--our first fine_flâneries_ of curiosity. Her brave Vaudoise predecessor had beenbequeathed by us in London to a higher sphere than service with mereearnest nomads could represent; but had left us clinging and weepingand was for a long time afterwards to write to us, faithfully, in themost beautiful copper-plate hand, out of the midst of her "rise"; withdetails that brought home to us as we had never known it brought thematerial and institutional difference between the nomadic and thesolidly, the spreadingly seated. A couple of years later, on an occasionof our being again for a while in London, she hastened to call on us, and, on departing, amiably invited me to walk back with her, for agossip--it was a bustling day of June--across a long stretch of thetown; when I left her at a glittering portal with the impression of myhaving in our transit seen much of Society (the old London "season"filled the measure, had length and breadth and thickness, to an extentnow foregone, ) and, more particularly, achieved a small psychologicstudy, noted the action of the massive English machinery directed to itsend, which had been in this case effectually to tame the presumptuousand "work over" the crude. I remember on that occasion retracing mysteps from Eaton Square to Devonshire Street with a lively sense ofobservation exercised by the way, a perfect gleaning of golden straws. Our guide and philosopher of the summer days in Paris was no suchcharacter as that; she had arrived among us full-fledged and consummate, fortunately for the case altogether--as our mere candid humanity wouldotherwise have had scant practical pressure to bring. Thackeray's novelcontains a plate from his own expressive hand representing Miss Sharplost in a cynical day-dream while her neglected pupils are locked in ascrimmage on the floor; but the marvel of _our_ exemplar of the Beckytype was exactly that though her larger, her more interested andsophisticated views had a range that she not only permitted us to guessbut agreeably invited us to follow almost to their furthest limits, wenever for a moment ceased to be aware of her solicitude. We might, wemust, so tremendously have bored her, but no ironic artist could havecaught her at any juncture in the posture of disgust: really, I imagine, because her own ironies would have been too fine for him and toonumerous and too mixed. And this remarkable creature vouchsafed us allinformation for the free enjoyment--on the terms proper to our tenderyears--of her beautiful city. 

It was not by the common measure then so beautiful as now; the secondEmpire, too lately installed, was still more or less feeling its way, with the great free hand soon to be allowed to Baron Haussmann marked asyet but in the light preliminary flourish. Its connections with thepast, however, still hung thickly on; its majesties and symmetries, comparatively vague and general, were subject to the happy accident, thecharming lapse and the odd extrusion, a bonhomie of chance compositionand colour now quite purged away. The whole region of theChamps-Elysées, where we must after all at first have principallyprowled, was another world from the actual huge centre of repeatedradiations; the splendid Avenue, as we of course already thought it, carried the eye from the Tuileries to the Arch, but pleasant old placesabutted on it by the way, gardens and terraces and hôtels of anothertime, pavilions still braver than ours, cabarets and cafés of homely, almost of rural type, with a relative and doubtless rather dustyruralism, spreading away to the River and the Wood. What was the Jardind'Hiver, a place of entertainment standing quite over against us andthat looped itself at night with little coloured oil-lamps, a meretwinkling grin upon the face of pleasure? Dim my impression of havingbeen admitted--or rather, I suppose, conducted, though underconductorship now vague to me--to view it by colourless day, when itmust have worn the stamp of an auction-room quite void of the "lots. "More distinct on the other hand the image of the bustling barrière atthe top of the Avenue, on the hither side of the Arch, where the oldloose-girt _banlieue_ began at once and the two matched lodges of theoctroi, highly, that is expressly even if humbly, architectural, guardedthe entrance, on either side, with such a suggestion of the generationsand dynasties and armies, the revolutions and restorations they hadseen come and go. But the Avenue of the Empress, now, so much morethinly, but of the Wood itself, had already been traced, as the Empressherself, young, more than young, attestedly and agreeably _new_, andfair and shining, was, up and down the vista, constantly on exhibition;with the thrill of that surpassed for us, however, by the incomparablepassage, as we judged it, of the baby Prince Imperial borne forth forhis airing or his progress to Saint-Cloud in the splendid coach thatgave a glimpse of appointed and costumed nursing breasts and laps, andbeside which the _cent-gardes_, all light-blue and silver and intenselyerect quick jolt, rattled with pistols raised and cocked. Was a publicholiday ever more splendid than that of the Prince's baptism at NotreDame, the fête of Saint-Napoléon, or was any ever more immortalised, aswe say, than this one was to be by the wonderfully ample and vividpicture of it in the Eugène Rougon of Emile Zola, who must have taken itin, on the spot, as a boy of about our own number of years, though of somuch more implanted and predestined an evocatory gift? The sense of thatinterminable hot day, a day of hanging about and waiting and shufflingin dust, in crowds, in fatigue, amid booths and pedlars and performersand false alarms and expectations and renewed reactions and rushes, alltransfigured at the last, withal, by the biggest and brightestillumination up to that time offered even the Parisians, the blindingglare of the new Empire effectually symbolised--the vision of the whole, I say, comes back to me quite in the form of a chapter from theRougon-Macquart, with its effect of something long and dense and heavy, without shades or undertones, but immensely kept-up and done. I dare saythat for those months our contemplations, our daily exercise in general, strayed little beyond the Champs-Elysées, though I recall confusedly aswell certain excursions to Passy and Auteuil, where we foregathered withsmall resident compatriots the easy gutturalism of whose French, anunpremeditated art, was a revelation, an initiation, and whence weroamed, for purposes of picnic, into parts of the Bois de Boulogne that, oddly enough, figured to us the virgin forest better than anything atour own American door had done. 

It was the social aspect of our situation that most appealed to me, nonethe less--for I detect myself, as I woo it all back, disengaging asocial aspect again, and more than ever, from the phenomena disclosed tomy reflective gape or to otherwise associated strolls; perceptivepassages not wholly independent even of the occupancy of two-sous chairswithin the charmed circle of Guignol and of Gringalet. I suppose Ishould have blushed to confess it, but Polichinelle and his puppets, inthe afternoons, under an umbrage sparse till evening fell, had stilltheir spell to cast--as part and parcel, that is, of the generalintensity of animation and variety of feature. The "amusement, " theæsthetic and human appeal, of Paris had in those days less the air of agreat shining conspiracy to please, the machinery in movement confessedless to its huge purpose; but manners and types and traditions, thedetail of the scene, its pointed particulars, went their way with astraighter effect, as well as often with a homelier grace--character, temper and tone had lost comparatively little of their emphasis. Thesescattered accents were matter for our eyes and ears--not a little evenalready for our respective imaginations; though it is only as the seasonwaned and we set up our fireside afresh and for the winter that Iconnect my small revolution with a wider field and with the company ofW. J. Again for that summer he was to be in eclipse to me; Guignol andGringalet failed to claim his attention, and Mademoiselle Danse, I makeout, deprecated his theory of exact knowledge, besides thinking himperhaps a little of an _ours_--which came to the same thing. Weadjourned that autumn to quarters not far off, a wide-faced apartment inthe street then bravely known as the Rue d'Angoulême-St. -Honoré and now, after other mutations, as the Rue La Boëtie; which we were again toexchange a year later for an abode in the Rue Montaigne, this lastafter a summer's absence at Boulogne-sur-Mer; the earlier migrationsetting up for me the frame of a considerably animated picture. Animatedat best it was with the spirit and the modest facts of our family life, among which I number the cold finality of M. Lerambert, reflected instill other testimonies--that is till the date of our definite butrespectful rupture with him, followed as the spring came on by ourineluctable phase at the Institution Fezandié in the Rue Balzac; ofwhich latter there will be even more to say than I shall take freedomfor. With the Rue d'Angoulême came extensions--even the mere immediateview of opposite intimacies and industries, the subdivided aspects andneat ingenuities of the applied Parisian genius counting as such: ourmany-windowed _premier_, above an entresol of no great height, hung overthe narrow and, during the winter months, not a little dusky channel, with endless movement and interest in the vivid exhibition it supplied. What faced us was a series of subjects, with the baker, at the corner, for the first--the impeccable dispenser of the so softly-crustycrescent-rolls that we woke up each morning to hunger for afresh, withour weak café-au-lait, as for the one form of "European" breakfast-breadfit to be named even with the feeblest of our American forms. Then camethe small crêmerie, white picked out with blue, which, by some secretof its own keeping, afforded, within the compass of a few feet square, prolonged savoury meals to working men, white-frocked or blue-frocked, to uniformed cabmen, stout or spare, but all more or less audibly_bavards_ and discernibly critical; and next the compact embrasure ofthe écaillère or oyster-lady, she and her paraphernalia fitted intotheir interstice much as the mollusc itself into its shell; neighbouredin turn by the marchand-de-bois, peeping from as narrow a cage, his neatfaggots and chopped logs stacked beside him and above him in hissentry-box quite as the niches of saints, in early Italian pictures, areframed with tightly-packed fruits and flowers. Space and remembrancefail me for the rest of the series, the attaching note of which comesback as the note of diffused sociability and domestic, in fact more orless æsthetic, ingenuity, with the street a perpetual parlour orhousehold centre for the flitting, pausing, conversing little bourgeoiseor ouvrière to sport, on every pretext and in every errand, her flutedcap, her composed head, her neat ankles and her ready wit. Which is tosay indeed but that life and manners were more pointedly andharmoniously expressed, under our noses there, than we had perhaps foundthem anywhere save in the most salient passages of "stories"; though Imust in spite of it not write as if these trifles were all our fare. 

XXV

That autumn renewed, I make out, our long and beguiled walks, my ownwith W. J. In especial; at the same time that I have somehow the senseof the whole more broken appeal on the part of Paris, the scanterconfidence and ease it inspired in us, the perhaps more numerous andcomposite, but obscurer and more baffled intimations. Not indeed--forall my brother's later vision of an accepted flatness in it--that therewas not some joy and some grasp; why else were we forever (as I seem toconceive we were) measuring the great space that separated us from thegallery of the Luxembourg, every step of which, either way we took it, fed us with some interesting, some admirable image, kept us in relationto something nobly intended? That particular walk was not prescribed us, yet we appear to have hugged it, across the Champs-Elysées to the river, and so over the nearest bridge and the quays of the left bank to the Ruede Seine, as if it somehow held the secret of our future; to the extenteven of my more or less sneaking off on occasion to take it by myself, to taste of it with a due undiverted intensity and the throb as of thefinest, which _could_ only mean the most Parisian, adventure. Thefurther quays, with their innumerable old bookshops and print-shops, thelong cases of each of these commodities, exposed on the parapets inespecial, must have come to know us almost as well as we knew them; withplot thickening and emotion deepening steadily, however, as we mountedthe long, black Rue de Seine--_such_ a stretch of perspective, _such_ anintensity of tone as it offered in those days; where every low-browedvitrine waylaid us and we moved in a world of which the dark message, expressed in we couldn't have said what sinister way too, might havebeen "Art, art, art, don't you see? Learn, little gaping pilgrims, what_that_ is!" Oh we learned, that is we tried to, as hard as ever wecould, and were fairly well at it, I always felt, even by the time wehad passed up into that comparatively short but wider and finer vista ofthe Rue de Tournon, which in those days more abruptly crowned the morecompressed approach and served in a manner as a great outer vestibule tothe Palace. Style, dimly described, looked down there, as with consciousencouragement, from the high grey-headed, clear-faced, straight-standingold houses--very much as if wishing to say "Yes, small staring jeunehomme, we are dignity and memory and measure, we are conscience andproportion and taste, not to mention strong sense too: for all of whichgood things take us--you won't find one of them when you find (as you'regoing soon to begin to at such a rate) vulgarity. " This, I admit, was anabundance of remark to such young ears; but it did all, I maintain, tremble in the air, with the sense that the Rue de Tournon, cobbled anda little grass-grown, might more or less have figured some fine oldstreet _de province_: I cherished in short its very name and think Ireally hadn't to wait to prefer the then, the unmenaced, the inviolateCafé Foyot of the left hand corner, the much-loved and so haunted CaféFoyot of the old Paris, to its--well, to its roaring successor. The widemouth of the present Boulevard Saint-Michel, a short way round thecorner, had not yet been forced open to the exhibition of more or lessglittering fangs; old Paris still pressed round the Palace and itsgardens, which formed the right, the sober social antithesis to the"elegant" Tuileries, and which in fine, with these renewals of our youngconfidence, reinforced both in a general and in a particular way one ofthe fondest of our literary curiosities of that time, the conscientiousstudy of Les Français Peints par Eux-Mêmes, rich in wood-cuts ofGavarni, of Grandville, of Henri-Monnier, which we held it rather ourduty to admire and W. J. Even a little his opportunity to copy inpen-and-ink. This gilt-edged and double-columned octavo it was thatfirst disclosed to me, forestalling a better ground of acquaintance, thegreat name of Balzac, who, in common with every other "light" writer ofhis day, contributed to its pages: hadn't I pored over his expositionthere of the contrasted types of L'Habituée des Tuileries and L'Habituéedu Luxembourg?--finding it very _serré_, in fact what I didn't then knowenough to call very stodgy, but flavoured withal and a trifle lubricatedby Gavarni's two drawings, which had somehow so much, in general, tosay. 

Let me not however dally by the way, when nothing, at those hours, Imake out, so much spoke to us as the animated pictured halls within thePalace, primarily those of the Senate of the Empire, but then alsoforming, as with extensions they still and much more copiously form, thegreat Paris museum of contemporary art. This array was at that stage acomparatively (though only comparatively) small affair; in spite ofwhich fact we supposed it vast and final--so that it would have shockedus to foreknow how in many a case, and of the most cherished cases, thefinality was to break down. Most of the works of the modern schools thatwe most admired are begging their bread, I fear, from door to door--thatis from one provincial museum or dim back seat to another; though wewere on much-subsequent returns to draw a long breath for the savedstate of some of the great things as to which our faith had beenclearest. It had been clearer for none, I recover, than for Couture'sRomains de la Décadence, recently acclaimed, at that time, as the lastword of the grand manner, but of the grand manner modernised, humanised, philosophised, redeemed from academic death; so that it was to thismaster's school that the young American contemporary flutter taught itswings to fly straightest, and that I could never, in the long aftertime, face his masterpiece and all its old meanings and marvels without a rushof memories and a stir of ghosts. William Hunt, the New Englander ofgenius, the "Boston painter" whose authority was greatest during thethirty years from 1857 or so, and with whom for a time in the earlyperiod W. J. Was to work all devotedly, had prolonged his studies inParis under the inspiration of Couture and of Edouard Frère; masters ina group completed by three or four of the so finely interestinglandscapists of that and the directly previous age, Troyon, Rousseau, Daubigny, even Lambinet and others, and which summed up for the Americancollector and in the New York and Boston markets the idea of the modernin the masterly. It was a comfortable time--when appreciation could goso straight, could rise, and rise higher, without critical contortions;when we could, I mean, be both so intelligent and so "quiet. " We werein our immediate circle to know Couture himself a little toward the endof his life, and I was somewhat to wonder then where he had picked upthe æsthetic hint for the beautiful Page with a Falcon, if I have thedesignation right, his other great bid for style and capture ofit--which we were long to continue to suppose perhaps the rarest of allmodern pictures. The feasting Romans were conceivable enough, I mean_as_ a conception; no mystery hung about them--in the sense of one'sasking one's self whence they had come and by what romantic orroundabout or nobly-dangerous journey; which is that air of the poeticshaken out as from strong wings when great presences, in any one of thearts, appear to alight. What I remember, on the other hand, of thesplendid fair youth in black velvet and satin or whatever who, while hemounts the marble staircase, shows off the great bird on his forefingerwith a grace that shows _him_ off, was that it failed to help us todivine, during that after-lapse of the glory of which I speak, by whatrare chance, for the obscured old ex-celebrity we visited, the heavenshad once opened. Poetry had swooped down, breathed on him for an hourand fled. Such at any rate are the see-saws of reputations--which itcontributes to the interest of any observational lingering on thisplanet to have caught so repeatedly in their weird motion; the questionof what may happen, under one's eyes, in particular cases, before thatmotion sinks to rest, whether at the up or at the down end, being reallya bribe to one's own non-departure. Especially great the interest ofhaving noted all the rises and falls and of being able to compare thefinal point--so far as any certainty may go as to that--either with thegreatest or the least previous altitudes; since it is only when therehave been exaltations (which is what is not commonest), that ourattention is most rewarded. 

If the see-saw was to have operated indeed for Eugène Delacroix, ournext young admiration, though much more intelligently my brother's thanmine, that had already taken place and settled, for we were to go onseeing him, and to the end, in firm possession of his crown, and to takeeven, I think, a harmless pleasure in our sense of having from so farback been sure of it. I was sure of it, I must properly add, but as aneffect of my brother's sureness; since I must, by what I remember, havebeen as sure of Paul Delaroche--for whom the pendulum was at last to bearrested at a very different point. I could see in a manner, for all thequeerness, what W. J. Meant by that beauty and, above all, that livinginterest in La Barque du Dante, where the queerness, according to him, was perhaps what contributed most; see it doubtless in particular whenhe reproduced the work, at home, from a memory aided by a lithograph. Yet Les Enfants d'Edouard thrilled me to a different tune, and Icouldn't doubt that the long-drawn odd face of the elder prince, sad andsore and sick, with his wide crimped side-locks of fair hair and hisviolet legs marked by the Garter and dangling from the bed, was areconstitution of far-off history of the subtlest and most "last word"modern or psychologic kind. I had never heard of psychology in art oranywhere else--scarcely anyone then had; but I truly felt the namelessforce at play. Thus if I also in my way "subtly" admired, one's notedpractice of that virtue (mainly regarded indeed, I judge, as a vice)would appear to have at the time I refer to set in, under suchencouragements, once for all; and I can surely have enjoyed up to thenno formal exhibition of anything as I at one of those seasons enjoyedthe commemorative show of Delaroche given, soon after his death, in oneof the rather bleak salles of the École des Beaux-Arts to which accesswas had from the quay. _There_ was reconstituted history if one would, in the straw-littered scaffold, the distracted ladies withthree-cornered coifs and those immense hanging sleeves that made themlook as if they had bath-towels over their arms; in the block, theheadsman, the bandaged eyes and groping hands, of Lady Jane Grey--notless than in the noble indifference of Charles the First, compromisedking but perfect gentleman, at his inscrutable ease in his chair and asif on his throne, while the Puritan soldiers insult and badger him: thethrill of which was all the greater from its pertaining to that Englishlore which the good Robert Thompson had, to my responsive delight, rubbed into us more than anything else and all from a fine oldconservative and monarchical point of view. Yet of these things W. J. Attempted no reproduction, though I remember his repeatedly laying hishand on Delacroix, whom he found always and everywhere interesting--tothe point of trying effects, with charcoal and crayon, in his manner;and not less in the manner of Decamps, whom we regarded as more or lessof a genius of the same rare family. They were touched with theineffable, the inscrutable, and Delacroix in especial with theincalculable; categories these toward which we had even then, by a happytransition, begun to yearn and languish. We were not yet aware of style, though on the way to become so, but were aware of mystery, which indeedwas one of its forms--while we saw all the others, without exception, exhibited at the Louvre, where at first they simply overwhelmed andbewildered me. 

It was as if they had gathered there into a vast deafening chorus; Ishall never forget how--speaking, that is, for my own sense--theyfilled those vast halls with the influence rather of some complicatedsound, diffused and reverberant, than of such visibilities as one coulddirectly deal with. To distinguish among these, in the charged andcoloured and confounding air, was difficult--it discouraged and defied;which was doubtless why my impression originally best entertained wasthat of those magnificent parts of the great gallery simply not invitingus to distinguish. They only arched over us in the wonder of theirendless golden riot and relief, figured and flourished in perpetualrevolution, breaking into great high-hung circles and symmetries ofsquandered picture, opening into deep outward embrasures that threw offthe rest of monumental Paris somehow as a told story, a sort of wroughteffect or bold ambiguity for a vista, and yet held it there, at everypoint, as a vast bright gage, even at moments a felt adventure, ofexperience. This comes to saying that in those beginnings I felt myselfmost happily cross that bridge over to Style constituted by the wondrousGalerie d'Apollon, drawn out for me as a long but assured initiation andseeming to form with its supreme coved ceiling and inordinately shiningparquet a prodigious tube or tunnel through which I inhaled little bylittle, that is again and again, a general sense of _glory_. The glorymeant ever so many things at once, not only beauty and art and supremedesign, but history and fame and power, the world in fine raised to therichest and noblest expression. The world there was at the same time, byan odd extension or intensification, the local present fact, to my smallimagination, of the Second Empire, which was (for my notifiedconsciousness) new and queer and perhaps even wrong, but on the spot soamply radiant and elegant that it took to itself, took under itsprotection with a splendour of insolence, the state and ancientry of thewhole scene, profiting thus, to one's dim historic vision, confusedlythough it might be, by the unparalleled luxury and variety of itsheritage. But who shall count the sources at which an intense youngfancy (when a young fancy _is_ intense) capriciously, absurdlydrinks?--so that the effect is, in twenty connections, that of alove-philtre or fear-philtre which fixes for the senses their supremesymbol of the fair or the strange. The Galerie d'Apollon became foryears what I can only term a splendid scene of things, even of the quiteirrelevant or, as might be, almost unworthy; and I recall to this hour, with the last vividness, what a precious part it played for me, andexactly by that continuity of honour, on my awaking, in a summer dawnmany years later, to the fortunate, the instantaneous recovery andcapture of the most appalling yet most admirable nightmare of my life. The climax of this extraordinary experience--which stands alone for meas a dream-adventure founded in the deepest, quickest, clearest act ofcogitation and comparison, act indeed of life-saving energy, as well asin unutterable fear--was the sudden pursuit, through an open door, alonga huge high saloon, of a just dimly-descried figure that retreated interror before my rush and dash (a glare of inspired reaction fromirresistible but shameful dread, ) out of the room I had a moment beforebeen desperately, and all the more abjectly, defending by the push of myshoulder against hard pressure on lock and bar from the other side. Thelucidity, not to say the sublimity, of the crisis had consisted of thegreat thought that I, in my appalled state, was probably still moreappalling than the awful agent, creature or presence, whatever he was, whom I had guessed, in the suddenest wild start from sleep, the sleepwithin my sleep, to be making for my place of rest. The triumph of myimpulse, perceived in a flash as I acted on it by myself at a bound, forcing the door outward, was the grand thing, but the great point ofthe whole was the wonder of my final recognition. Routed, dismayed, thetables turned upon him by my so surpassing him for straight aggressionand dire intention, my visitant was already but a diminished spot in thelong perspective, the tremendous, glorious hall, as I say, over thefar-gleaming floor of which, cleared for the occasion of its great lineof priceless vitrines down the middle, he sped for _his_ life, while agreat storm of thunder and lightning played through the deep embrasuresof high windows at the right. The lightning that revealed the retreatrevealed also the wondrous place and, by the same amazing play, my youngimaginative life in it of long before, the sense of which, deep withinme, had kept it whole, preserved it to this thrilling use; for what inthe world were the deep embrasures and the so polished floor but thoseof the Galerie d'Apollon of my childhood? The "scene of something" I hadvaguely then felt it? Well I might, since it was to be the scene of thatimmense hallucination. 

Of what, at the same time, in those years, were the great rooms of theLouvre almost equally, above and below, not the scene, from the momentthey so wrought, stage by stage, upon our perceptions?--literally onalmost all of these, in one way and another; quite in such a manner, Imore and more see, as to have been educative, formative, fertilising, ina degree which no other "intellectual experience" our youth was to knowcould pretend, as a comprehensive, conducive thing, to rival. The sharpand strange, the quite heart-shaking little prevision had come to me, for myself, I make out, on the occasion of our very first visit of all, my brother's and mine, under conduct of the good Jean Nadali, before-mentioned, trustfully deputed by our parents, in the Rue de laPaix, on the morrow of our first arrival in Paris (July 1855) and whilethey were otherwise concerned. I hang again, appalled but uplifted, onbrave Nadali's arm--his professional acquaintance with the splendoursabout us added for me on the spot to the charm of his "European"character: I cling to him while I gape at Géricault's Radeau de laMéduse, _the_ sensation, for splendour and terror of interest, of thatjuncture to me, and ever afterwards to be associated, along with two orthree other more or less contemporary products, Guérin's Burial ofAtala, Prudhon's Cupid and Psyche, David's helmetted Romanisms, MadameVigée-Lebrun's "ravishing" portrait of herself and her little girl, withhow can I say what foretaste (as determined by that instant as if thehour had struck from a clock) of all the fun, confusedly speaking, thatone was going to have, and the kind of life, always of the queerso-called inward sort, tremendously "sporting" in its way--though thatdescription didn't then wait upon it, that one was going to lead. Itcame of itself, this almost awful apprehension in all the presences, under our courier's protection and in my brother's company--it came justthere and so; there was alarm in it somehow as well as bliss. The blissin fact I think scarce disengaged itself at all, but only the sense ofa freedom of contact and appreciation really too big for one, andleaving such a mark on the very place, the pictures, the framesthemselves, the figures within them, the particular parts and featuresof each, the look of the rich light, the smell of the massively enclosedair, that I have never since renewed the old exposure without renewingagain the old emotion and taking up the small scared consciousness. _That_, with so many of the conditions repeated, is the charm--to feelafresh the beginning of so much that was to be. The beginning in shortwas with Géricault and David, but it went on and on and slowly spread;so that one's stretched, one's even strained, perceptions, one'sdiscoveries and extensions piece by piece, come back, on the greatpremises, almost as so many explorations of the house of life, so manycirclings and hoverings round the image of the world. I have dimreminiscences of permitted independent visits, uncorrectedly juvenilethough I might still be, during which the house of life and the palaceof art became so mixed and interchangeable--the Louvre being, under ageneral description, the most peopled of all scenes not less than themost hushed of all temples--that an excursion to look at pictures wouldhave but half expressed my afternoon. I had looked at pictures, lookedand looked again, at the vast Veronese, at Murillo's moon-borneMadonna, at Leonardo's almost unholy dame with the folded hands, treasures of the Salon Carré as that display was then composed; but Ihad also looked at France and looked at Europe, looked even at Americaas Europe itself might be conceived so to look, looked at history, as astill-felt past and a complacently personal future, at society, manners, types, characters, possibilities and prodigies and mysteries of fiftysorts; and all in the light of being splendidly "on my own, " as Isupposed it, though we hadn't then that perfection of slang, and of (inespecial) going and coming along that interminable and incomparableSeine-side front of the Palace against which young sensibility feltitself almost rub, for endearment and consecration, as a cat invokes thefriction of a protective piece of furniture. Such were at any rate someof the vague processes--I see for how utterly vague they must show--ofpicking up an education; and I was, in spite of the vagueness, so farfrom agreeing with my brother afterwards that we didn't pick one up andthat that never _is_ done, in any sense not negligible, and also that aneducation might, or should, in particular, have picked _us_ up, and yetdidn't--I was so far dissentient, I say, that I think I quite came toglorify such passages and see them as part of an order really fortunate. If we had been little asses, I seem to have reasoned, a higherintention driving us wouldn't have made us less so--to any point worthmentioning; and as we extracted such impressions, to put it at theworst, from redemptive accidents (to call Louvres and Luxembourgsnothing better) why we weren't little asses, but something wholly other:which appeared all I needed to contend for. Above all it would have beenstupid and ignoble, an attested and lasting dishonour, not, with ourchance, to have followed our straggling clues, as many as we could anddisengaging as we happily did, I felt, the gold and the silver ones, whatever the others might have been--not to have followed them and notto have arrived by them, so far as we were to arrive. Instinctively, forany dim designs we might have nourished, we picked out the silver andthe gold, attenuated threads though they must have been, and Ipositively feel that there were more of these, far more, casuallyinterwoven, than will reward any present patience for my unravelling ofthe too fine tissue. 

XXVI

I allude of course in particular here to the æsthetic clue in general, with which it was that we most (or that I at any rate most) fumbled, without our in the least having then, as I have already noted, any suchrare name for it. There were sides on which it fairly dangled about us, involving our small steps and wits; though others too where I could, formy own part, but clutch at it in the void. Our experience of the theatrefor instance, which had played such a part for us at home, almost whollydropped in just the most propitious air: an anomaly indeed halfexplained by the fact that life in general, all round us, wasperceptibly more theatrical. And there were other reasons, whetherdefinitely set before us or not, which we grasped in proportion as wegathered, by depressing hearsay, that the French drama, great, strangeand important, was as much out of relation to our time of life, our solittle native strain and our cultivated innocence, as the American andEnglish had been directly addressed to them. To the Cirque d'Été, theCirque d'Hiver, the Théâtre du Cirque we were on occasion conducted--wehad fallen so to the level of circuses, and that name appeared asafety; in addition to which the big theatre most bravely bearing it, the especial home at that time of the glittering and multitudinous_féerie_, did seem to lift the whole scenic possibility, for our eyes, into a higher sphere of light and grace than any previously disclosed. Irecall Le Diable d'Argent as in particular a radiant revelation--keptbefore us a whole long evening and as an almost blinding glare; whichwas quite right for the _donnée_, the gradual shrinkage of the ShiningOne, the money-monster hugely inflated at first, to all the successivedegrees of loose bagginess as he leads the reckless young man he hasoriginally contracted with from dazzling pleasure to pleasure, till atlast he is a mere shrivelled silver string such as you could almost drawthrough a keyhole. That was the striking moral, for the young man, however regaled, had been somehow "sold"; which _we_ hadn't in the leastbeen, who had had all his pleasures and none of his penalty, whateverthis was to be. I was to repine a little, in these connections, at amuch later time, on reflecting that had we only been "taken" in theParis of that period as we had been taken in New York we might have comein for celebrities--supremely fine, perhaps supremely rank, flowers ofthe histrionic temperament, springing as they did from the soil of therichest romanticism and adding to its richness--who practised thatbraver art and finer finish which a comparatively homogenous public, forming a compact critical body, still left possible. Rachel was alive, but dying; the memory of Mademoiselle Mars, at her latest, was still inthe air; Mademoiselle Georges, a massive, a monstrous antique, hadwithal returned for a season to the stage; but we missed her, as wemissed Déjazet and Frédéric Lemâitre and Mélingue and Samson; to saynothing of others of the age before the flood--taking for the flood thatactual high tide of the outer barbarian presence, the general alien andpolyglot, in stalls and boxes, which I remember to have heard GustaveFlaubert lament as the ruin of the theatre through the assumption ofjudgeship by a bench to whom the very values of the speech of author andactor were virtually closed, or at the best uncertain. 

I enjoyed but two snatches of the older representational art--noparticular of either of which, however, has faded from me; the earlierand rarer of these an evening at the Gymnase for a _spectacle coupé_, with Mesdames Rose Chéri, Mélanie, Delaporte and Victoria (afterwardsVictoria-La-fontaine). I squeeze again with my mother, my aunt and mybrother into the stuffy baignoire, and I take to my memory in especialMadame de Girardin's Une Femme qui Déteste son Mari; the thrillingstory, as I judged it, of an admirable lady who, to save her loyalisthusband, during the Revolution, feigns the most Jacobin opinions, represents herself a citoyenne of citoyennes, in order to keep him themore safely concealed in her house. He flattens himself, to almostgreater peril of life, behind a panel of the wainscot, which she has asecret for opening when he requires air and food and they may for afearful fleeting instant be alone together; and the point of the pictureis in the contrast between these melting moments and the heroine's_tenue_ under the tremendous strain of receiving on the one side theinvading, investigating Terrorist commissaries, sharply suspicious butsuccessfully baffled, and on the other her noble relatives, herhusband's mother and sister if I rightly remember, who are not in thesecret and whom, for perfect prudence, she keeps out of it, though alonewith her, and themselves in hourly danger, they might be trusted, andwho, believing him concealed elsewhere and terribly tracked, treat her, in her republican rage, as lost to all honour and all duty. One's senseof such things after so long a time has of course scant authority forothers; but I myself trust my vision of Rose Chéri's fine play just as Itrust that of her _physique ingrat_, her at first extremely odd andpositively osseous appearance; an emaciated woman with a high bulgingforehead, somewhat of the form of Rachel's, for whom the triumphs ofproduced illusion, as in the second, third and fourth great dramas ofthe younger Dumas, had to be triumphs indeed. My one other reminiscenceof this order connects itself, and quite three years later, with the olddingy Vaudeville of the Place de la Bourse, where I saw in my brother'scompany a rhymed domestic drama of the then still admired Ponsard, Cequi Plaît aux Femmes; a piece that enjoyed, I believe, scant success, but that was to leave with me ineffaceable images. How was it possible, I wondered, to have more grace and talent, a rarer, cooler art, thanMademoiselle Fargeuil, the heroine?--the fine lady whom a pair of rivallovers, seeking to win her hand by offering her what will most pleaseher, treat, in the one case, to a brilliant fête, a little play within aplay, at which we assist, and in the other to the inside view of anattic of misery, into which the more cunning suitor introduces her justin time to save a poor girl, the tenant of the place, from beingruinously, that is successfully, tempted by a terrible old woman, aprowling _revendeuse_, who dangles before her the condition on which sopretty a person may enjoy every comfort. Her happier sister, the courtedyoung widow, intervenes in time, reinforces her tottering virtue, opensfor her an account with baker and butcher, and, doubting no longer whichflame is to be crowned, charmingly shows us that what pleases women mostis the exercise of charity. 

Then it was I first beheld that extraordinary veteran of the stage, Mademoiselle Pierson, almost immemorially attached, for latergenerations, to the Théâtre Français, the span of whose career thusstrikes me as fabulous, though she figured as a very juvenile beauty inthe small _féerie_ or allegory forming M. Ponsard's second act. She hasbeen playing mothers and aunts this many and many a year--and stillindeed much as a juvenile beauty. Not that light circumstance, however, pleads for commemoration, nor yet the further fact that I was to admireMademoiselle Fargeuil, in the after-time, the time after she had givenall Sardou's earlier successes the help of her shining firmness, whenshe had passed from interesting comedy and even from romantic drama--notless, perhaps still more, interesting, with Sardou's Patrie as abridge--to the use of the bigger brush of the Ambigu and other homes ofmelodrama. The sense, such as it is, that I extract from the pair ofmodest memories in question is rather their value as a glimpse of theold order that spoke so much less of our hundred modern materialresources, matters the stage of to-day appears mainly to live by, andsuch volumes more of the one thing that was then, and that, givenvarious other things, had to be, of the essence. That one thing was thequality, to say nothing of the quantity, of the actor's personalresource, technical history, tested temper, proved experience; on whichalmost everything had to depend, and the thought of which makes the merestarved scene and medium of the period, the _rest_ of the picture, amore confessed and more heroic battle-ground. They have been more andmore eased off, the scene and medium, for our couple of generations, somuch so in fact that the rest of the picture has become almost _all_ thepicture: the author and the producer, among us, lift the weight of theplay from the performer--particularly of the play dealing with ourimmediate life and manners and aspects--after a fashion which does halfthe work, thus reducing the "personal equation, " the demand for themaximum of individual doing, to a contribution mostly of the loosest andsparest. As a sop to historic curiosity at all events may even so shortan impression serve; impression of the strenuous age and its fine oldmasterful _assouplissement_ of its victims--who were not the expertspectators. The spectators were so expert, so broken in to materialsuffering for the sake of their passion, that, as the suffering was onlymaterial, they found the æsthetic reward, the critical relish of theessence, all adequate; a fact that seems in a sort to point a moral oflarge application. Everything but the "interpretation, " the personal, inthe French theatre of those days, had kinds and degrees of weakness andfutility, say even falsity, of which our modern habit is whollyimpatient--let alone other conditions still that were detestable even atthe time, and some of which, forms of discomfort and annoyance, lingeron to this day. The playhouse, in short, was almost a place of physicaltorture, and it is still rarely in Paris a place of physical ease. Addto this the old thinness of the school of Scribe and the old emptinessof the thousand vaudevillistes; which part of the exhibition, tillmodern comedy began, under the younger Dumas and Augier, had for itscounterpart but the terrible dead weight, or at least the prodigiousprolixity and absurdity, of much, not to say of most, of the romanticand melodramatic "output. " It _paid_ apparently, in the golden age ofacting, to sit through interminable evenings in impossible places--sinceto assume that the age _was_ in that particular respect golden (forwhich we have in fact a good deal of evidence) alone explains thepatience of the public. With the public the _actors_ were, according totheir seasoned strength, almost exclusively appointed to deal, just asin the conditions most familiar to-day to ourselves this charge is laidon almost everyone concerned in the case save the representatives of theparts. And far more other people are now concerned than of old; notleast those who have learned to make the playhouse endurable. All ofwhich leaves us with this interesting vision of a possibly great truth, the truth that you can't have more than one kind of intensity--intensityworthy of the name--at once. The intensity of the golden age of thehistrion was the intensity of _his_ good faith. The intensity of ourperiod is that of the "producer's" and machinist's, to which add eventhat of architect, author and critic. Between which derivative kind ofthat article, as we may call it, and the other, the immediate kind, itwould appear that you have absolutely to choose. 

XXVII

I see much of the rest of that particular Paris time in the light of theInstitution Fezandié, and I see the Institution Fezandié, Rue Balzac, inthe light, if not quite of Alphonse Daudet's lean asylum for the _petitspays chauds_, of which I have felt the previous institutions of New Yorksketchily remind me, at least in that of certain other of his studies inthat field of the precarious, the ambiguous Paris over parts of whichthe great Arch at the top of the Champs-Elysées flings, at its hours, byits wide protective plausible shadow, a precious mantle of "tone. " Theygather, these chequered parts, into its vast paternal presence and enjoyat its expense a degree of reflected dignity. It was to the big squarevilla of the Rue Balzac that we turned, as pupils not unacquainted withvicissitudes, from a scene swept bare of M. Lerambert, an establishmentthat strikes me, at this distance of time, as of the oddest and mostindescribable--or as describable at best in some of the finer turns andtouches of Daudet's best method. The picture indeed should not beinvidious--it so little needs that, I feel, for its due measure of thevivid, the queer, the droll, all coming back to me without prejudice toits air as of an equally futile felicity. I see it as bright and looseand vague, as confused and embarrassed and helpless; I see it, I fear, as quite ridiculous, but as wholly harmless to my brothers and me atleast, and as having left us with a fund of human impressions; it playedbefore us such a variety of figure and character and so relieved us of asense of untoward discipline or of the pursuit of abstract knowledge. Itwas a recreational, or at least a social, rather than a tuitional house;which fact had, I really believe, weighed favourably with our parents, when, bereft of M. Lerambert, they asked themselves, with theirconsiderable practice, how next to bestow us. Our father, like so manyfree spirits of that time in New York and Boston, had been muchinterested in the writings of Charles Fourier and in his scheme of the"phalanstery" as the solution of human troubles, and it comes to me thathe must have met or in other words heard of M. Fezandié as an active andsympathetic ex-Fourierist (I think there were only ex-Fourierists bythat time, ) who was embarking, not far from us, on an experiment if notabsolutely phalansteric at least inspired, or at any rate enriched, by abold idealism. I like to think of the Institution as all butphalansteric--it so corrects any fear that such places might be dreary. I recall this one as positively gay--bristling and bustling andresonant, untouched by the strenuous note, for instance, of Hawthorne'sco-operative Blithedale. I like to think that, in its then still almostsuburban, its pleasantly heterogeneous quarter, now oppressivelyuniform, it was close to where Balzac had ended his life, though Iquestion its identity--as for a while I tried not to--with the sceneitself of the great man's catastrophe. Round its high-walled garden atall events he would have come and gone--a throb of inference that hadfor some years indeed to be postponed for me; though an associationdisplacing to-day, over the whole spot, every other interest. I in anycase can't pretend not to have been most appealed to by that especialphase of our education from which the pedagogic process as commonlyunderstood was most fantastically absent. It excelled in this respect, the Fezandié phase, even others exceptionally appointed, heaven knows, for the supremacy; and yet its glory is that it was no poor blank, butthat it fairly creaked and groaned, heatedly overflowed, with itswealth. We were _externes_, the three of us, but we remained in generalto luncheon; coming home then, late in the afternoon, with an almostsore experience of multiplicity and vivacity of contact. For the beautyof it all was that the Institution was, speaking technically, not more a_pensionnat_, with prevailingly English and American pupils, than a_pension_, with mature beneficiaries of both sexes, and that our twocategories were shaken up together to the liveliest effect. This hadbeen M. Fezandié's grand conception; a son of the south, bald andslightly replete, with a delicate beard, a quick but anxious, rathermelancholy eye and a slim, graceful, juvenile wife, who multipliedherself, though scarce knowing at moments, I think, where or how toturn; I see him as a Daudet _méridional_, but of the sensitive, not thesensual, type, as something of a rolling stone, rolling rather downhill--he had enjoyed some arrested, possibly blighted, connection inAmerica--and as ready always again for some new application of faith andfunds. If fondly failing in the least to see why the particularapplication in the Rue Balzac--the body of pensioners ranging frominfancy to hoary eld--shouldn't have been a bright success could havemade it one, it would have been a most original triumph. 

I recover it as for ourselves a beautifully mixed adventure, a bravelittle seeing of the world on the happy pretext of "lessons. " We _had_lessons from time to time, but had them in company with ladies andgentlemen, young men and young women of the Anglo-Saxon family, who satat long boards of green cloth with us and with several of ourcontemporaries, English and American boys, taking _dictées_ from thehead of the house himself or from the aged and most remarkable M. Bonnefons, whom we believed to have been a superannuated actor (he aboveall such a model for Daudet!) and who interrupted our abashed readingsaloud to him of the French classics older and newer by wondrousreminiscences and even imitations of Talma. He moved among us in a cloudof legend, the wigged and wrinkled, the impassioned, though I think alasunderfed, M. Bonnefons: it was our belief that he "went back, " beyondthe first Empire, to the scenes of the Revolution--this perhaps partlyby reason, in the first place, of his scorn of our pronunciation, whenwe met it, of the sovereign word _liberté_, the poverty of which, ourdeplorable "libbeté, " without r's, he mimicked and derided, sounding theright, the revolutionary form out splendidly, with thirty r's, theprolonged beat of a drum. And then we believed him, if artisticallyconservative, politically obnoxious to the powers that then were, thoughknowing that those so marked had to walk, and even to breathe, cautiously for fear of the _mouchards_ of the tyrant; we knew all aboutmouchards and talked of them as we do to-day of aviators orsuffragettes--to remember which in an age so candidly unconscious ofthem is to feel how much history we have seen unrolled. There were timeswhen he but paced up and down and round the long table--I see him asnever seated, but always on the move, a weary Wandering Jew of the_classe_; but in particular I hear him recite to us the combat with theMoors from Le Cid and show us how Talma, describing it, seemed to crouchdown on his haunches in order to spring up again terrifically to theheight of "Nous nous levons alors!" which M. Bonnefons rendered as if onthe carpet there fifty men at least had leaped to their feet. But hethrew off these broken lights with a quick relapse to indifference; hedidn't like the Anglo-Saxon--of the children of Albion at least his viewwas low; on his American specimens he had, I observed, more mercy; andthis imperfection of sympathy (the question of Waterloo apart) rested, it was impossible not to feel, on his so resenting the dishonoursuffered at our hands by his beautiful tongue, to which, as the greatfield of elocution, he was patriotically devoted. I think he fairlyloathed our closed English vowels and confused consonants, ourdestitution of sounds that he recognised as sounds; though why in thisconnection he put up best with our own compatriots, embroiled at thattime often in even stranger vocables than now, is more than I can say. Ithink that would be explained perhaps by his feeling in them as an oldequalitarian certain accessibilities _quand même_. Besides, we of theyounger persuasion at least must have done his ear less violence thanthose earnest ladies from beyond the sea and than those young Englishmenqualifying for examinations and careers who flocked with us both to theplausibly spread and the severely disgarnished table, and on whose partI seem to see it again an effort of anguish to "pick up" the happy idiomthat we had unconsciously acquired. French, in the fine old formula ofthose days, so much diffused, "was the language of the family"; but Ithink it must have appeared to these students in general a family ofwhich the youngest members were but scantly kept in their place. Wepiped with a greater facility and to a richer meed of recognition; whichsounds as if we might have become, in these strange collocations, fairlyoffensive little prigs. That was none the less not the case, for therewere, oddly enough, a few French boys as well, to whom on the lingual orthe "family" ground, we felt ourselves feebly relative, and incomparison with whom, for that matter, or with one of whom, I rememberan occasion of my having to sink to insignificance. There was at theInstitution little of a staff--besides waiters and bonnes; but itembraced, such as it was, M. Mesnard as well as M. Bonnefons--M. Mesnardof the new generation, instructor in whatever it might be, among thearts, that didn't consist of our rolling our r's, and with them, to helpus out, more or less our eyes. It is significant that this elegantbranch is now quite vague to me; and I recall M. Mesnard, in fine, as noless modern and cheap than M. Bonnefons was rare and unappraiseable. Hehad nevertheless given me his attention, one morning, doubtlesspatiently enough, in some corner of the villa that we had for the momentpractically to ourselves--I seem to see a small empty room looking onthe garden; when there entered to us, benevolently ushered by MadameFezandié, a small boy of very fair and romantic aspect, as it struck me, a pupil newly arrived. I remember of him mainly that he had a sort ofnimbus of light curls, a face delicate and pale and that deeply hoarsevoice with which French children used to excite our wonder. M. Mesnardasked of him at once, with interest, his name, and on his pronouncing itsought to know, with livelier attention, if he were then the son of M. Arsène Houssaye, lately director of the Théâtre Français. To thisdistinction the boy confessed--all to such intensification of ourrépétiteur's interest that I knew myself quite dropped, in comparison, from his scheme of things. Such an origin as our little visitor'saffected him visibly as dazzling, and I felt justified after a while, instealing away into the shade. The beautiful little boy was to live to bethe late M. Henry Houssaye, the shining hellenist and historian. I havenever forgotten the ecstasy of hope in M. Mesnard's question--as alight on the reverence then entertained for the institution M. Houssayethe elder had administered. 

XXVIII

There comes to me, in spite of these memories of an extended connection, a sense as of some shrinkage or decline in the _beaux jours_ of theInstitution; which seems to have found its current run a bit thick andtroubled, rather than with the pleasant plash in which we at firstappeared all equally to bathe. I gather, as I try to reconstitute, thatthe general enterprise simply proved a fantasy not workable, and that atany rate the elders, and often such queer elders, tended to outnumberthe candid _jeunesse_; so that I wonder by the same token on what theoryof the Castalian spring, as taught there to trickle, if not to flow, M. Houssaye, holding his small son by the heel as it were, may have beenmoved to dip him into our well. Shall I blush to relate that my ownimpression of its virtue must have come exactly from this uncanny turntaken--and quite in spite of the high Fezandié ideals--by the_invraisemblable_ house of entertainment where the assimilation of noform of innocence was doubted of by reason of the forms of experiencethat insisted somehow on cropping up, and no form of experience toodirectly deprecated by reason of the originally plotted tender growthsof innocence. And some of these shapes were precisely those from whichour good principal may well have first drawn his liveliest reassurance:I seem to remember such ancient American virgins in especial and suchodd and either distinctively long-necked or more particularlylong-haired and chinless compatriots, in black frock-coats of no type or"cut, " no suggested application at all as garments--application, thatis, to anything in the nature of character or circumstance, function orposition--gathered about in the groups that M. Bonnefons almostterrorised by his refusal to recognise, among the barbarous races, anyapproach to his view of the great principle of Diction. I rememberdeeply and privately enjoying some of his shades of scorn and seeinghow, given his own background, they were thoroughly founded; I rememberabove all as burnt in by the impression he gave me of the creature_wholly_ animated and containing no waste expressional spaces, noimaginative flatnesses, the notion of the luxury of life, though indeedof the amount of trouble of it too, when _none_ of the letters of thealphabet of sensibility might be dropped, involved in being a Frenchman. The liveliest lesson I must have drawn, however, from that source makesin any case, at the best, an odd educational connection, given the kindof concentration at which education, even such as ours, is supposedespecially to aim: I speak of that direct promiscuity of insights whichmight easily have been pronounced profitless, with their attendantimpressions and quickened sensibilities--yielding, as these last did, harvests of apparitions. I positively cherish at the present hour thefond fancy that we all soaked in some such sublime element as mightstill have hung about there--I mean on the very spot--from the vitalpresence, so lately extinct, of the prodigious Balzac; which hadinvolved, as by its mere respiration, so dense a cloud of otherpresences, so arrayed an army of interrelated shades, that the air wasstill thick as with the fumes of witchcraft, with infinite seeing andsupposing and creating, with a whole imaginative traffic. The PensionVauquer, then but lately existent, according to Le Père Goriot, on theother side of the Seine, was still to be revealed to me; but the figurespeopling it are not to-day essentially more intense (that is as a matterof the marked and featured, the terrible and the touching, as comparedwith the paleness of the conned page in general, ) than I persuademyself, with so little difficulty, that I found the more numerous andmore shifting, though properly doubtless less inspiring, constituents ofthe Pension Fezandié. Fantastic and all "subjective" that I shouldattribute a part of their interest, or that of the scene spreading roundthem, to any competent perception, in the small-boy mind, that thegeneral or public moment had a rarity and a brevity, a sharp intensity, of its own; ruffling all things, as they came, with the morning breathof the Second Empire and making them twinkle back with a light ofresigned acceptance, a freshness of cynicism, the force of a greatgrimacing example. The grimace might have been legibly there in the air, to the young apprehension, and could I but simplify this record enough Ishould represent everything as part of it. I seemed at any ratemeanwhile to think of the Fezandié young men, young Englishmen mostly, who were getting up their French, in that many-coloured air, for what Isupposed, in my candour, to be appointments and "posts, " diplomatic, commercial, vaguely official, and who, as I now infer, though I didn'taltogether embrace it at the time, must, under the loose rule of theestablishment, have been amusing themselves not a little. It was as aside-wind of their free criticism, I take it, that I felt the firstchill of an apprehended decline of the establishment, some pang ofprevision of what might come, and come as with a crash, of the generalfine fallacy on which it rested. Their criticism was for that matterfree enough, causing me to admire it even while it terrified. Theyexpressed themselves in terms of magnificent scorn--such as mightnaturally proceed, I think I felt, from a mightier race; they spoke ofpoor old Bonnefons, they spoke of our good Fezandié himself, they spokemore or less of everyone within view, as beggars and beasts, and Iremember to have heard on their lips no qualification of any dish servedto us at dêjeuner (and still more at the later meal, of which mybrothers and I didn't partake) but as rotten. These were expressions, absent from our domestic, our American air either of fonderdiscriminations or vaguer estimates, which fairly extended for me therange of intellectual, or at least of social resource; and as thegeneral tone of them to-day comes back to me it floods somehow withlight the image of the fine old insular confidence (so intellectuallyunregenerate then that such a name scarce covers it, though inwardstirrings and the growth of a _comparative_ sense of things have nowbegun unnaturally to agitate and disfigure it, ) in which the generaloutward concussion of the English "abroad" with the fact of being abroadtook place. The Fezandié young men were as much abroad as might be, andyet figured to me--largely by the upsetting force of that confidence, all but physically exercised--as the finest, handsomest, knowingestcreatures; so that when I met them of an afternoon descending theChamps-Elysées with fine long strides and in the costume of the period, for which we can always refer to contemporary numbers of "Punch, " thefact that I was for the most part walking sedately either with my motheror my aunt, or even with my sister and her governess, caused the sparkof my vision that they were armed for conquest, or at the least foradventure, more expansively to glow. I am not sure whether as a generalthing they honoured me at such instants with a sign of recognition; butI recover in especial the sense of an evening hour during which I hadaccompanied my mother to the Hôtel Meurice, where one of the New Yorkcousins aforementioned, daughter of one of the Albany uncles--that is ofthe Rhinebeck member of the group--had perched for a time, soincongruously, one already seemed to feel, after the sorriest stroke offate. I see again the gaslit glare of the Rue de Rivoli in the spring orthe autumn evening (I forget which, for our year of the Rue d'Angoulêmehad been followed by a migration to the Rue Montaigne, with a period, orrather with two periods, of Boulogne-sur-mer interwoven, and we mighthave made our beguiled way from either domicile); and the wholeimpression seemed to hang too numerous lamps and too glittering_vitrines_ about the poor Pendletons' bereavement, their loss of theironly, their so sturdily handsome, little boy, and to suffuse their statewith the warm rich exhalations of subterraneous cookery with which Ifind my recall of Paris from those years so disproportionately and soquite other than stomachically charged. The point of all of which issimply that just as we had issued from the hotel, my mother anxiouslyurging me through the cross currents and queer contacts, as it were, ofthe great bazaar (of which the Rue de Rivoli was then a much morebristling avenue than now) rather than depending on me for support andprotection, there swung into view the most splendid, as I at leastesteemed him, of my elders and betters in the Rue Balzac, who had leftthe questions there supposedly engaging us far behind, and, with hishigh hat a trifle askew and his cigar actively alight, revealed to me ata glance what it was to be in full possession of Paris. There was speedin his step, assurance in his air, he was visibly, impatiently on theway; and he gave me thereby my first full image of what it was exactlyto _be_ on the way. He gave it the more, doubtless, through the factthat, with a flourish of the aforesaid high hat (from which theEnglishman of that age was so singularly inseparable) he testified tothe act of recognition, and to deference to my companion, but with agrand big-boy good-humour that--as I remember from childhood the sofrequent effect of an easy patronage, compared with a top-mostoverlooking, on the part of an admired senior--only gave an accent tothe difference. As if he cared, or could have, that I but went forththrough the Paris night in the hand of my mamma; while he had greeted uswith a grace that was as a beat of the very wings of freedom! Of suchshreds, at any rate, proves to be woven the stuff of youngsensibility--when memory (if sensibility has at all existed for it)rummages over our old trunkful of spiritual duds and, drawing forth everso tenderly this, that and the other tattered web, holds up the patternto the light. I find myself in this connection so restlessly andtenderly rummage that the tatters, however thin, come out in handsfuland every shred seems tangled with another. 

Gertrude Pendleton's mere name, for instance, becomes, and verypreferably, the frame of another and a better picture, drawing to itcognate associations, those of that element of the New York cousinshipwhich had originally operated to place there in a shining and even, asit were, an economic light a "preference for Paris"--which preference, during the period of the Rue d'Angoulême and the Rue Montaigne, wewistfully saw at play, the very lightest and freest, on the part of theinimitable Masons. Their earlier days of Tours and Trouville were over;a period of relative rigour at the Florence of the still encirclingwalls, the still so existent abuses and felicities, was also, I seem togather, a thing of the past; great accessions, consciously awaitedduring the previous leaner time, had beautifully befallen them, and myown whole consciousness of the general air--so insistently Idiscriminate for that alone--was coloured by a familiar view of theirenjoyment of these on a tremendously draped and festooned _premier_ ofthe Rue-St. -Honoré, bristling with ormolu and Pradier statuettes andlooking almost straight across to the British Embassy; rather a lowpremier, after the manner of an entresol, as I remember it, and wherethe closed windows, which but scantly distinguished between our ownsounds and those of the sociable, and yet the terrible, street ofrecords and memories, seemed to maintain an air and a light thick with amixture of every sort of queer old Parisian amenity and reference: as ifto look or to listen or to touch were somehow at the same time to probe, to recover and communicate, to behold, to taste and even to smell--toone's greater assault by suggestion, no doubt, but also to the effect ofsome sweet and strange repletion, as from the continued consumption, say, out of flounced and puckered boxes, of serried rows of chocolateand other bonbons. I must have felt the whole thing as something forone's developed senses to live up to and make light of, and have beenrather ashamed of my own for just a little sickishly staggering underit. This goes, however, with the fondest recall of our cousins' inbredease, from far back, in all such assumable relations; and of how, fourof the simplest, sweetest, best-natured girls as they were (with theeldest, a charming beauty, to settle on the general ground, aftermarriage and widowhood, and still to be blooming there), they werepossessed of the scene and its great reaches and resources andpossibilities in a degree that reduced us to small provincialism and ahanging on their lips when they told us, that is when the gentlest ofmammas and the lovely daughter who was "out" did, of presentations atthe Tuileries to the then all-wonderful, the ineffable Empress: reportstouchingly qualified, on the part of our so exposed, yet after all soscantily indurated relatives, by the question of whether occasions sogreat didn't perhaps nevertheless profane the Sundays for which theywere usually appointed. There was something of an implication in the airof those days, when young Americans were more numerously lovely thannow, or at least more wide-eyed, it would fairly appear, that someaccount of the only tradition they had ever been rumoured to observe(that of the Lord's day) might have been taken even at the Tuileries. 

But what most comes back to me as the very note and fragrance of the NewYork cousinship in this general connection is a time that I remember tohave glanced at on a page distinct from these, when the particularcousins I now speak of had conceived, under the influence of I know notwhat unextinguished morning star, the liveliest taste for the earliestpossible rambles and researches, in which they were so good as to allowme, when I was otherwise allowed, to participate: health-giving walks, of an extraordinarily _matinal_ character, at the hour of the meticulousrag-pickers and exceptionally French polishers known to the Paris dawnsof the Second Empire as at no time since; which made us all feeltogether, under the conduct of Honorine, bright child of the pavementherself, as if _we_, in our fresh curiosity and admiration, had alsosomething to say to the great show presently to be opened, and werefree, throughout the place, as those are free of a house who know itsaspects of attic and cellar or how it looks from behind. I call ourshepherdess Honorine even though perhaps not infallibly naming thesociable soubrette who might, with all her gay bold confidence, havebeen an official inspectress in person, and to whose easy care or, moreparticularly, expert sensibility and candour of sympathy and curiosity, our flock was freely confided. If she wasn't Honorine she was Clémentineor Augustine--which is a trifle; since what I thus recover, in any case, of these brushings of the strange Parisian dew, is those communities ofcontemplation that made us most hang about the jewellers' windows in thePalais Royal and the public playbills of the theatres on the Boulevard. The Palais Royal, now so dishonoured and disavowed, was then the veryParis of Paris; the shutters of the shops seemed taken down, at thathour, for our especial benefit, and I remember well how, the "dressing"of so large a number of the compact and richly condensed fronts beingmore often than not a matter of diamonds and pearls, rubies andsapphires, that represented, in their ingenuities of combination andcontortion, the highest taste of the time, I found open to me any amountof superior study of the fact that the spell of gems seemed for thefeminine nature almost alarmingly boundless. I stared too, it comes backto me, at these exhibitions, and perhaps even thought it became a youngman of the world to express as to this or that object a refined andintelligent preference; but what I really most had before me was thechorus of abjection, as I might well have called it, led, at the highestpitch, by Honorine and vaguely suggesting to me, by the crudity, so tosay, of its wistfulness, a natural frankness of passion--goodness knewin fact (for my small intelligence really didn't) what depths ofcorruptibility. Droll enough, as I win them again, these queer dim playsof consciousness: my sense that my innocent companions, Honorine _entête_, would have done anything or everything for the richest ruby, andthat though one couldn't one's self be decently dead to that richnessone didn't at all know what "anything" might be or in the least what"everything" was. The gushing cousins, at the same time, assuredly knewstill less of that, and Honorine's brave gloss of a whole range alike ofpossibilities and actualities was in itself a true social grace. 

They all enjoyed, in fine, while I somehow but wastefully mused--whichwas after all my form of enjoyment; I was shy for it, though it was atruth and perhaps odd enough withal, that I didn't really at all carefor gems, that rubies and pearls, in no matter what collocations, leftme comparatively cold; that I actually cared for them about as littleas, monstrously, secretly, painfully, I cared for flowers. Later on Iwas to become aware that I "adored" trees and architecturalmarbles--that for a sufficient slab of a sufficiently rare, sufficientlybestreaked or empurpled marble in particular I would have given a bag ofrubies; but by then the time had passed for my being troubled to makeout what in that case would represent on a small boy's part thecorruptibility, so to call it, proclaimed, before the _vitrines_, by thecousins. That hadn't, as a question, later on, its actuality; but it hadso much at the time that if it had been frankly put to me I must havequite confessed my inability to say--and must, I gather, by the samestroke, have been ashamed of such inward penury; feeling that as a boy Ishowed more poorly than girls. There was a difference meanwhile for suchpuzzlements before the porticos of the theatres; all questions meltedfor me there into the single depth of envy--envy of the equal, thebeatific command of the evening hour, in the _régime_ of Honorine'syoung train, who were fresh for the early sparrow and the chiffoniereven after shedding buckets of tears the night before, and not so muchas for the first or the second time, over the beautiful story of La Dameaux Camélias. There indeed was another humiliation, but by my weaknessof position much more than of nature: whatever doing of "everything"might have been revealed to me as a means to the end, I would certainlyhave done it for a sight of Madame Doche and Fechter in Dumas'striumphant idyll--now enjoying the fullest honours of innocuousclassicism; with which, as with the merits of its interpreters, Honorine's happy charges had become perfectly and if not quite serenely, at least ever so responsively and feelingly, familiar. Of a wondrousmixed sweetness and sharpness and queerness of uneffaced reminiscence isall that aspect of the cousins and the rambles and the overlappingnights melting along the odorously bedamped and retouched streets andarcades; bright in the ineffable morning light, above all, of ourpeculiar young culture and candour!

All of which again has too easily led me to drop for a moment my moreleading clue of that radiation of goodnature from Gertrude Pendleton andher headlong hospitalities in which we perhaps most complacently basked. The becraped passage at Meurice's alluded to a little back was of alater season, and the radiation, as I recall it, had been, that firstwinter, mainly from a _petit hôtel_ somewhere "on the other side, " aswe used with a large sketchiness to say, of the Champs Elysées; a regionat that time reduced to no regularity, but figuring to my fond fancy asa chaos of accidents and contrasts where _petits hôtels_ of archaic typewere elbowed by woodyards and cabarets, and pavilions ever socharacteristic, yet ever so indefinable, snuggled between frankindustries and vulgarities--all brightened these indeed by the sociablenote of Paris, be it only that of chaffering or of other _bavardise_. The great consistencies of arch-refinement, now of so large a harmony, were still to come, so that it seemed rather original to live there; inspite of which the attraction of the hazard of it on the part of ourthen so uniformly natural young kinswoman, not so much ingeniously, oreven expressively, as just gesticulatively and helplessly gay--sincethat earlier pitch of New York parlance scarce arrived at, or for thatmatter pretended to, enunciation--was quite in what I at least took tobe the glitter of her very conventions and traditions themselves;exemplified for instance by a bright nocturnal christening-party inhonour of the small son of all hopes whom she was so precipitately tolose: an occasion which, as we had, in our way, known the act of baptismbut as so abbreviated and in fact so tacit a business, had the effectfor us of one of the great "forms" of a society taking itself withtypical seriousness. We were much more serious than the Pendletons, but, paradoxically enough, there was that weakness in our state of ourbeing able to make no such attestation of it. The evening can have beenbut of the friendliest, easiest and least pompous nature, with smallguests, in congruity with its small hero, as well as large; but I musthave found myself more than ever yet in presence of a "rite, " one ofthose round which as many kinds of circumstance as possibleclustered--so that the more of these there were the more one mightimagine a great social order observed. How shall I now pretend to sayhow many kinds of circumstance I supposed I recognised?--with theremarkable one, to begin with, and which led fancy so far afield, thatthe "religious ceremony" was at the same time a "party, " of twinklinglustres and disposed flowers and ladies with bare shoulders (thatplatitudinous bareness of the period that suggested somehow the moralline, drawn as with a ruler and a firm pencil); with little Englishgirls, daughters of a famous physician of that nationality then pursuinga Parisian career (he must have helped the little victim into theworld), and whose emphasised type much impressed itself; with roundglazed and beribboned boxes of multi-coloured sugared almonds, dragéesde baptême above all, which we harvested, in their heaps, as we mighthave gathered apples from a shaken tree, and which symbolised as nothingelse the ritual dignity. Perhaps this grand impression really came backbut to the dragées de baptême, not strictly more immemorial to our youngappreciation than the New Year's cake and the "Election" cake known tous in New York, yet immensely more official and of the nature ofscattered largesse; partly through the days and days, as it seemed tome, that our life was to be furnished, reinforced and almost encumberedwith them. It wasn't simply that they were so toothsome, but that theywere somehow so important and so historic. 

It was with no such frippery, however, that I connected the occasionalpresence among us of the young member of the cousinship (in this case ofthe maternal) who most moved me to wistfulness of wonder, though not atall, with his then marked difference of age, by inviting my freeapproach. Vernon King, to whom I have in another part of this recordalluded, at that time doing his baccalauréat on the other side of theSeine and coming over to our world at scraps of moments (for I recall myawe of the tremendous nature, as I supposed it, of his toil), as toquite a make-believe and gingerbread place, the lightest of substitutesfor the "Europe" in which he had been from the first so technicallyplunged. His mother and sister, also on an earlier page referred to, had, from their distance, committed him to the great city to be"finished, " educationally, to the point that for our strenuous cousinCharlotte was the only proper one--and I feel sure he can have acquittedhimself in this particular in a manner that would have passed forbrilliant if such lights didn't, thanks to her stiff little standards, always tend to burn low in her presence. These ladies were to developmore and more the practice of living in odd places for abstract inhumanreasons--at Marseilles, at Düsseldorf (if I rightly recall theirprincipal German sojourn), at Naples, above all, for a long stage;where, in particular, their grounds of residence were somehow not asthose of others, even though I recollect, from a much later time, attending them there at the opera, an experience which, in theirfashion, they succeeded in despoiling for me of every element of theconcrete, or at least of the pleasantly vulgar. Later impressions, fewbut firm, were so to enhance one's tenderness for Vernon's own image, the most interesting surely in all the troop of our young kinsmen earlybaffled and gathered, that he glances at me out of the Paris period, fresh-coloured, just blond-bearded, always smiling and catching hisbreath a little as from a mixture of eagerness and shyness, with such anappeal to the right idealisation, or to belated justice, as makes ofmere evocation a sort of exercise of loyalty. It seemed quite richlylaid upon me at the time--I get it all back--that he, two or three yearsolder than my elder brother and dipped more early, as well as held morefirmly, in the deep, the refining waters the virtue of which we alltogether, though with our differences of consistency, recognised, wasthe positive and living proof of what the process, comparatively poorfor ourselves, could do at its best and with clay originally anddomestically kneaded to the right plasticity; besides which he shone, tomy fancy, and all the more for its seeming so brightly and quietly inhis very grain, with the vague, the supposititious, but the intenselyaccent-giving stamp of the Latin quarter, which we so thinly imaginedand so superficially brushed on our pious walks to the Luxembourg andthrough the parts where the glamour might have hung thickest. We were tosee him a little--but two or three times--three or four years later, when, just before our own return, he had come back to America for thepurpose, if my memory serves, of entering the Harvard Law School; and tosee him still always with the smile that was essentially as facial, aslivingly and loosely fixed, somehow, as his fresh complexion itself;always too with the air of caring so little for what he had been putthrough that, under any appeal to give out, more or less wonderfully, some sample or echo of it, as who should say, he still mostly panted asfrom a laughing mental embarrassment: he had been put through too much;it was all stale to him, and he wouldn't have known where to begin. Hedid give out, a little, on occasion--speaking, that is, on my differentplane, as it were, and by the roundabout report of my brother; he gaveout, it appeared, as they walked together across shining Newport sands, some fragment, some beginning of a very youthful poem that "Europe" had, with other results, moved him to, and a faint thin shred of which was tostick in my remembrance for reasons independent of its quality:

 "Harold, rememberest thou the day, We rode along the Appian Way? Neglected tomb and altar cast Their lengthening shadow o'er the plain, And while we talked the mighty past Around us lived and breathed again!"

That was European enough, and yet he had returned to America really tofind himself, even with every effort made immediately near him to defeatthe discovery. He found himself, with the outbreak of the War, simply asthe American soldier, and not under any bribe, however dim, of theepaulette or the girt sword; but just as the common enlisting native, which he smiled and gasped--to the increase of his happy shortness ofbreath, as from a repletion of culture, since it suggested no lack ofpersonal soundness--at feeling himself so _like_ to be. As strange, yetas still more touching than strange, I recall the sight, even at adistance, of the drop straight off him of all his layers of educationalvarnish, the possession of the "advantages, " the tongues, the degrees, the diplomas, the reminiscences, a saturation too that had all sunkin--a sacrifice of precious attributes that might almost have beenviewed as a wild bonfire. So his prodigious mother, whom I have perhapssufficiently presented for my reader to understand, didn't fail to viewit--judging it also, sharply hostile to the action of the North as thewhole dreadful situation found her, with deep and resentful displeasure. I remember how I thought of Vernon himself, during the business, as atonce so despoiled, so diverted, and above all so resistantly bright, asvaguely to suggest something more in him still, some deep-down reaction, some extremity of indifference and defiance, some exhibition of a youngcharacter too long pressed and impressed, too long prescribed to andwith too much expected of it, and all under too firmer a will; so thatthe public pretext had given him a lift, or lent him wings, whichwithout its greatness might have failed him. As the case was to turnnothing--that is nothing he most wanted and, remarkably, mostenjoyed--did fail him at all. I forget with which of the possibleStates, New York, Massachusetts or Rhode Island (though I think thefirst) he had taken service; only seeming to remember that this all wenton for him at the start in McClellan's and later on in Grant's army, and that, badly wounded in a Virginia battle, he came home to be nursedby his mother, recently restored to America for a brief stay. She held, I believe, in the event, that he had, under her care, given her his vowthat, his term being up, he would not, should he get sufficiently well, re-engage. The question here was between them, but it was definite that, materially speaking, she was in no degree dependent on him. The old, theirrepressible adage, however, was to live again between them: when thedevil was sick the devil a saint would be; when the devil was well thedevil a saint was he!

The devil a saint, at all events, was Vernon, who denied that he hadpassed his word, and who, as soon as he had surmounted his firstdisablement, passionately and quite admirably re-enlisted. At oncerestored to the front and to what now gave life for him itsindispensable relish, he was in the thick, again, of the great carnageroundabout Richmond, where, again gravely wounded, he (as I figure stillincorrigibly smiling) succumbed. His mother had by this time indignantlyreturned to Europe, accompanied by her daughter and her younger son--theformer of whom accepted, for our great pity, a little later on, theoffice of closing the story. Anne King, young and frail, but not lessfirm, under stress, than the others of her blood, came back, on herbrother's death, and, quietest, most colourless Electra of a lucidestOrestes, making her difficult way amid massed armies and battle-drenchedfields, got possession of his buried body and bore it for reinterment toNewport, the old habitation, as I have mentioned, of their father'speople, both Vernons and Kings. It must have been to see my mother, aswell as to sail again for Europe, that she afterwards came to Boston, where I remember going down with her, at the last, to the dock of theEnglish steamer, some black and tub-like Cunarder, an archaic "Africa"or "Asia" sufficing to the Boston service of those days. I saw her offdrearily and helplessly enough, I well remember, and even at that momentfound for her another image: what was she most like, though in a stillsparer and dryer form, but some low-toned, some employed little Brontëheroine?--though more indeed a Lucy Snowe than a Jane Eyre, and with noshade of a Brontë hero within sight. To this all the fine privilege andfine culture of all the fine countries (collective matter, from farback, of our intimated envy) had "amounted"; just as it had amounted forVernon to the bare headstone on the Newport hillside where, by hismother's decree, as I have already noted, there figured no hint of themanner of his death. So grand, so finely personal a manner it appearedto me at the time, and has indeed appeared ever since, that this briefrecord irrepressibly springs from that. His mother, as I have equallynoted, was however, with her views, to find no grace in it so long asshe lived; and his sister went back to her, and to Marseille, as theyalways called it, but prematurely to die. 

XXIX

I feel that much might be made of my memories of Boulogne-sur-Mer had Ibut here left room for the vast little subject; in which I shouldprobably, once started, wander to and fro as exploringly, asperceivingly, as discoveringly, I am fairly tempted to call it, as mightreally give the measure of my small operations at the time. I was almostwholly reduced there to operations of that mere inward and superficiallyidle order at which we have already so freely assisted; reduced by acause I shall presently mention, the production of a great blur, well-nigh after the fashion of some mild domestic but quite considerablyspreading grease-spot, in respect to the world of action, such as itwas, more or less immediately about me. I must personally have livedduring this pale predicament almost only by seeing what I could, aftermy incorrigible ambulant fashion--a practice that may well have made mepass for bringing home nothing in the least exhibitional--rather than bypursuing the inquiries and interests that agitated, to whateverintensity, our on the whole widening little circle. The images I speakof as matter for more evocation that I can spare them were the fruit oftwo different periods at Boulogne, a shorter and a longer; this secondappearing to us all, at the time, I gather, too endlessly andblightingly prolonged: so sharply, before it was over, did I at any ratecome to yearn for the Rue Montaigne again, the Rue Montaigne "sublet"for a term under a flurry produced in my parents' breasts by a"financial crisis" of great violence to which the American world, as amatter now of recorded history, I believe, had tragically fallen victim, and which had imperilled or curtailed for some months our moderate meansof existence. We were to recover, I make out, our disturbed balance, andwere to pursue awhile further our chase of the alien, the somehowrepeatedly postponed _real_ opportunity; and the second, thecomparatively cramped and depressed connection with the classic refuge, as it then was, of spasmodic thrift, when not of settled indigence, forthe embarrassed of our race in the largest sense of this matter, was tobe shuffled off at last with no scant relief and reaction. This isperhaps exactly why the whole picture of our existence at thePas-de-Calais watering place pleads to me now for the full indulgence, what would be in other words every touch of tenderness workable, afterall the years, over the lost and confused and above all, on their ownside, poor ultimately rather vulgarised and violated little sources ofimpression: items and aspects these which while they in their degreeand after their sort flourished we only asked to admire, or at least toappreciate, for their rewarding extreme queerness. The very centre of myparticular consciousness of the place turned too soon to the fact of mycoming in there for the gravest illness of my life, an all but mortalattack of the malignant typhus of old days; which, after laying me aslow as I could well be laid for many weeks, condemned me to aconvalescence so arduous that I saw my apparently scant possibilities, by the measure of them then taken, even as through a glass darkly, orthrough the expansive blur for which I found just above a homely image. 

This experience was to become when I had emerged from it the greatreminiscence or circumstance of old Boulogne for me, and I was to regardit, with much intelligence, I should have maintained, as the markedlimit of my state of being a small boy. I took on, when I had decently, and all the more because I had so retardedly, recovered, the sense ofbeing a boy of other dimensions somehow altogether, and even with a newdimension introduced and acquired; a dimension that I was eventually tothink of as a stretch in the direction of essential change or of livingstraight into a part of myself previously quite unvisited and now madeaccessible as by the sharp forcing of a closed door. The blur ofconsciousness imaged by my grease-spot was not, I hasten to declare, without its relenting edges and even, during its major insistence, fainter thicknesses; short of which, I see, my picture, the picture Iwas always so incurably "after, " would have failed of animationaltogether--quite have failed to bristle with characteristics, withfigures and objects and scenic facts, particular passages and moments, the stuff, in short, of that scrap of minor gain which I have spoken ofas our multiplied memories. Wasn't I even at the time, and much morelater on, to feel how we had been, through the thick and thin of thewhole adventure, assaulted as never before in so concentrated a way bylocal and social character? Such was the fashion after which theBoulogne of long ago--I have known next to nothing of it since--couldcome forth, come more than half-way, as we say, to meet the imaginationopen to such advances. It was, taking one thing with another, so verilydrenched in character that I see myself catching this fine flagrancyalmost equally in everything; unless indeed I may have felt it rathersmothered than presented on the comparatively sordid scene of theCollège Communal, not long afterwards to expand, I believe, into thelocal Lycée, to which the inimitable process of our education promptlyintroduced us. I was to have less of the Collège than my elder and myyounger brother, thanks to the interrupting illness that placed me solong, with its trail of after-effects, half complacently, half ruefullyapart; but I suffered for a few early weeks the mainly malodorous senseof the braver life, produced as this was by a deeply democraticinstitution from which no small son even of the most soapless home couldpossibly know exclusion. Odd, I recognise, that I should inhale the airof the place so particularly, so almost only, to that dismal effect;since character was there too, for whom it should concern, and my viewof some of the material conditions, of the general collegiate presencetoward the top of the steepish Grand' Rue, on the right and not muchshort, as it comes back to me, of the then closely clustered andinviolate haute ville, the more or less surviving old town, the idlegrey rampart, the moated and towered citadel, the tree-shaded bastionfor strolling and sitting "immortalised" by Thackeray, achieved themonumental, in its degree, after a fashion never yet associated for uswith the pursuit of learning. Didn't the Campaigner, suffering indigenceat the misapplied hands of Colonel Newcome, rage at that hushed victimsupremely and dreadfully just thereabouts--by which I mean in the _hauteville_--over some question of a sacrificed sweetbread or a cold hackedjoint that somebody had been "at"? Beside such builded approaches to aneducation as we had elsewhere known the Collège exhibited, with whateverreserves, the measure of style which almost any French accident of theadministratively architectural order more easily rises to than failsof; even if the matter be but a question of the shyest similitude of a_cour d'honneur_, the court disconnecting the scene, by intention atleast, from the basely bourgeois and giving value to the whole effect ofopposed and windowed wall and important, or balanced and "placed, "_perron_. These are many words for the dull precinct, as then presented, I admit, and they are perhaps half prompted by a special association, too ghostly now quite to catch again--the sense of certain Sundays, distinct from the grim, that is the flatly instructional, body of theweek, when I seem to myself to have successfully flouted the wholeconstituted field by passing across it and from it to some quite ideallyold-world little annexed _musée de province_, as inviolate in its way asthe grey rampart and bare citadel, and very like them in unrelievedtone, where I repeatedly, and without another presence to hinder, lookedabout me at goodness knows what weird ancientries of stale academic art. Not one of these treasures, in its habit as it lived, do I recall; yetthe sense and the "note" of them was at the time, none the less, not soelusive that I didn't somehow draw straight from them intimations of theinteresting, that is revelations of the æsthetic, the historic, thecritical mystery and charm of things (of such things taken altogether), that added to my small loose handful of the seed of culture. 

That apprehension was, in its way, of our house of learning too, andyet I recall how, on the scant and simple terms I have glanced at, Iquite revelled in it; whereas other impressions of my brief ordealshrink, for anything in the nature of interest, but to three or fourrecovered marks of the social composition of the school. There were thesons of all the small shop-keepers and not less, by my remembrance, ofcertain of the mechanics and artisans; but there was also the Englishcontingent, these predominantly _internes_ and uniformed, blue-jacketedand brass-buttoned, even to an effect of odd redundancy, who by myconceit gave our association a lift. Vivid still to me is the summermorning on which, in the wide court--as wide, that is, as I liked tosuppose it, and where we hung about helplessly enough for recreation--abrownish black-eyed youth, of about my own degree of youthfulness, mentioned to me with an air that comes back as that of the liveliestinformational resource the outbreak, just heard of, of an awful Mutinyin India, where his military parents, who had not so long before senthim over thence, with such weakness of imagination, as I measured it, tothe poor spot on which we stood, were in mortal danger of their lives;so that news of their having been killed would perhaps be already on theway. They might well have been military, these impressively exposedcharacters, since my friend's name was Napier, or Nappié as he wascalled at the school, and since, I may add also, there attached to him, in my eyes, the glamour of an altogether new emphasis of type. TheEnglish boys within our ken since our coming abroad had been of thefewest--the Fezandié youths, whether English or American, besides beingbut scantly boys, had been so lost, on that scene, in our heap ofdisparities; and it pressed upon me after a fashion of its own thatthose we had known in New York, and all aware of their varieties and"personalities" as one had supposed one's self, had in no casechallenged the restless "placing" impulse with any such force as thefinished little Nappié. They had not been, as he was by the veryperversity of his finish, resultants of forces at all--or comparativelyspeaking; it was as if their producing elements had been simple and few, whereas behind this more mixed and, as we have learnt to say, evolvedcompanion (his very simplicities, his gaps of possibility, being stillevolved), there massed itself I couldn't have said what protectivesocial order, what tangled creative complexity. Why I should havethought him almost Indian of stamp and hue because his English parentswere of the so general Indian peril is more than I can say; yet I havehis exotic and above all his bold, his imaginably even "bad, " youngface, finely unacquainted with law, before me at this hour quiteundimmed--announcing, as I conceived it, and quite as a shock, anyawful adventure one would, as well as something that I must even at thetime have vaguely taken as the play of the "passions. " He vanishes, andI dare say I but make him over, as I make everything; and he must haveled his life, whatever it was to become, with the least possible waitingon the hour or the major consequence and no waste of energy at all inmooning, no patience with any substitute for his very own humour. We hadanother schoolmate, this one native to the soil, whose references werewith the last vividness local and who was yet to escape with brilliancyin the aftertime the smallest shadow of effacement. His most directreference at that season was to the principal pastry-cook's of the town, an establishment we then found supreme for little criss-crossed appletartlets and melting _babas_--young Coquelin's home life amid which wethe more acutely envied that the upward cock of his so all-importantnose testified, for my fancy, to the largest range of free familiarsniffing. C. -B. Coquelin is personally most present to me, in the formof that hour, by the value, as we were to learn to put it, of this nose, the fine assurance and impudence of which fairly made it a trumpet forpromises; yet in spite of that, the very gage, as it were, of his longcareer as the most interesting and many-sided comedian, or at least mostunsurpassed dramatic _diseur_ of his time, I failed to doubt that, withthe rich recesses of the parental industry for his background, hissubtlest identity was in his privilege, or perhaps even in his expertesttrick, of helping himself well. 

These images, however, were but drops in the bucket of my sense ofcatching character, roundabout us, as I say, at every turn and in everyaspect; character that began even, as I was pleased to think, in our ownhabitation, the most spacious and pompous Europe had yet treated us to, in spite of its fronting on the Rue Neuve Chaussée, a street of livelyshopping, by the measure of that innocent age, and with its ownground-floor occupied by a bristling exhibition of indescribably futile_articles de Paris_. Modern and commodious itself, it looked from itsbalcony at serried and mismatched and quaintly-named haunts of oldprovincial, of sedately passive rather than confidently eager, traffic;but this made, among us, for much harmless inquisitory life--while wewere fairly assaulted, at home, by the scale and some of the strikingnotes of our fine modernity. The young, the agreeable (agreeable toanything), the apparently opulent M. Prosper Sauvage--wasn't it?--hadnot long before, unless I mistake, inherited the place as a monument of"family, " quite modestly local yet propitious family, ambition; with anample extension in the rear, and across the clearest prettiest court, for his own dwelling, which thus became elegant, _entre cour etjardin_, and showed all the happy symmetries and proper conventions. Here flourished, or rather, I surmise at this time of day, herelanguished, a domestic drama of which we enjoyed the murmurous overflow:frankly astounding to me, I confess, how I remain still in sensitivepresence of our resigned proprietor's domestic drama, in and out ofwhich I see a pair of figures quite up to the dramatic mark flit againwith their air of the very rightest finish. I must but note thesethings, none the less, and pass; for scarce another item of the wholeBoulogne concert of salient images failed, after all, of a significanceeither still more strangely social or more distinctively spectacular. These appearances indeed melt together for my interest, I once morefeel, as, during the interminable stretch of the prescribed and for themost part solitary airings and outings involved in my slow convalescencefrom the extremity of fever, I approached that straitened and somewhatbedarkened issue of the Rue de l'Écu (was it?) toward thebright-coloured, strongly-peopled Port just where Merridew's EnglishLibrary, solace of my vacuous hours and temple, in its degree too, ofdeep initiations, mounted guard at the right. Here, frankly, discrimination drops--every particular in the impression once so quickand fresh sits interlinked with every other in the large lap of thewhole. The motley, sunny, breezy, bustling Port, with its classic, itsadmirable fisher-folk of both sexes, models of type and tone and of whatmight be handsomest in the thoroughly weathered condition, would haveseemed the straightest appeal to curiosity had not the old Thackerayanside, as I may comprehensively call it, and the scattered wealth ofillustration of _his_ sharpest satiric range, not so constantlyinterposed and competed with it. The scene bristled, as I look back atit, with images from Men's Wives, from the society of Mr. Deuceace andthat of fifty other figures of the same creation, with Bareacreses andRawdon Crawleys and of course with Mrs. Macks, with Roseys of a more orless crumpled freshness and blighted bloom, with battered and bent, though doubtless never quite so fine, Colonel Newcomes not less; withmore reminders in short than I can now gather in. Of those forms of theseedy, the subtly sinister, the vainly "genteel, " the generally damagedand desperate, and in particular perhaps the invincibly impudent, allthe marks, I feel sure, were stronger and straighter than such as wemeet in generally like cases under our present levelling light. Suchanointed and whiskered and eked-out, such brazen, bluffing, swaggeringgentlemen, such floridly repaired ladies, their mates, all looking ashard as they could as if they were there for mere harmless amusement--itwas as good, among them, as just _being_ Arthur Pendennis to know sowell, or at least to guess so fearfully, who and what they might be. They were floated on the tide of the manners then prevailing, I judge, with a rich processional effect that so many of our own grand lapses, when not of our mere final flatnesses, leave no material for; so thatthe living note of Boulogne was really, on a more sustained view, theopposition between a native race the most happily tempered, the mostbecomingly seasoned and salted and self-dependent, and a shiftingcolony--so far as the persons composing it _could_ either urgently orspeculatively shift--inimitably at odds with any active freshness. Andthe stale and the light, even though so scantly rebounding, the toodensely socialised, group was the English, and the "positive" and hardyand steady and wind-washed the French; and it was all as flushed withcolour and patched with costume and referable to record and picture, toliterature and history, as a more easily amusing and less earnestlyuniform age could make it. When I speak of this opposition indeed I seeit again most take effect in an antithesis that, on one side and theother, swallowed all differences at a gulp. The general British show, aswe had it there, in the artless mid-Victorian desert, had, I think, forits most sweeping sign the high assurance of its dowdiness; whereas onehad only to glance about at the sea-faring and fisher-folk who were thereal strength of the place to feel them shed at every step and by theirevery instinct of appearance the perfect lesson of taste. There it wasto be learnt and taken home--with never a moral, none the less, drawnfrom it by the "higher types. " I speak of course in particular of thetanned and trussed and kerchiefed, the active and productive women, allso short-skirted and free-limbed under stress; for as by the rule of thedowdy their sex is ever the finer example, so where the sense of thesuitable, of the charmingly and harmoniously right prevails, theypreserve the pitch even as a treasure committed to their piety. To hitthat happy mean of rightness amid the mixed occupations of a home-motherand a fishwife, to be in especial both so bravely stripped below and soperfectly enveloped above as the deep-wading, far-striding, shrimp-netting, crab-gathering matrons or maidens who played, waist-high, with the tides and racily quickened the market, was to makegrace thoroughly practical and discretion thoroughly vivid. Theseattributes had with them all, for the eye, however, a range too greatfor me to follow, since, as their professional undress was a turn-outpositively self-consistent, so their household, or more responsiblypublic, or altogether festal, array played through the varied essentialsof fluted coif and folded kerchief and sober skirt and tense, dark, displayed stocking and clicking wooden slipper, to say nothing of longgold ear-drop or solid short-hung pectoral cross, with a respect forthe rigour of conventions that had the beauty of self-respect. 

I owe to no season of the general period such a preserved sense ofinnumerable unaccompanied walks--at the reason of which luxury offreedom I have glanced; which as often as not were through the steep andlow-browed and brightly-daubed _ruelles_ of the fishing-town and eitheracross and along the level sea-marge and sustained cliff beyond; thislatter the site of the first Napoleon's so tremendously mustered camp ofinvasion, with a monument as futile, by my remembrance, as thatenterprise itself had proved, to give it all the special accent I couldask for. Or I was as free for the _haute ville_ and the ramparts and thescattered, battered benches of reverie--if I may so honour my use ofthem; they kept me not less complacently in touch with those of the soanciently odd and mainly contracted houses over which the stiff citadeland the ghost of Catherine de Médicis, who had dismally sojourned in it, struck me as throwing such a chill, and one of which precisely must havewitnessed the never-to-be-forgotten Campaigner's passage in respect toher cold beef. Far from extinct for me is my small question of thosehours, doubtless so mentally, so shamelessly wanton, as to what humanlife might be tucked away in such retreats, which expressed the lastacceptance whether of desired or of imposed quiet; so absolutelyappointed and obliged did I feel to make out, so far as I could, what, in so significant a world, they on their part _represented_. I think theforce mainly sustaining me at that rather dreary time--as I see it canonly show for--was this lively felt need that everything shouldrepresent something more than what immediately and all too blankly metthe eye; I seem to myself to have carried it about everywhere and, though of course only without outward signs that might have betrayed myfatuity, and insistently, quite yearningly applied it. What I wanted, inmy presumption, was that the object, the place, the person, theunreduced impression, often doubtless so difficult or so impossible toreduce, should give out to me something of a situation; living as I didin confused and confusing situations and thus hooking them on, howeverawkwardly, to almost any at all living surface I chanced to meet. Mymemory of Boulogne is that we had almost no society of any sort athome--there appearing to be about us but one sort, and that of far toogreat, or too fearful, an immediate bravery. Yet there were occasionalfigures that I recover from our scant circle and that I associate, whatever links I may miss, with the small still houses on the rampart;figures of the quaintest, quite perhaps the frowsiest, little Englishladies in such mushroom hats, such extremely circular and bestripedscarlet petticoats, such perpetual tight gauntlets, such explicitclaims to long descent, which showed them for everything that everyoneelse at Boulogne was not. These mid-Victorian samples of a perfectconsistency "represented, " by my measure, as hard as ever theycould--and represented, of all things, literature and history andsociety. The literature was that of the three-volume novel, then, andfor much after, enjoying its loosest and serenest spread; for theyseparately and anxiously and awfully "wrote"--and that must almost byitself have amounted in them to all the history I evoked. 

The dreary months, as I am content that in their second phase especiallythey should be called, are subject, I repeat, to the perversion, quiteperhaps to the obscuration, of my temporarily hindered health--whichshould keep me from being too sure of these small _proportions_ ofexperience--I was to look back afterwards as over so grey a desert;through which, none the less, there flush as sharp little certainties, not to be disallowed, such matters as the general romance of Merridew, the English Librarian, before mentioned, at the mouth of the Port; aconnection that thrusts itself upon me now as after all the truestcentre of my perceptions--waylaying my steps at the time, as I came andwent, more than any other object or impression. The question of what_that_ spot represented, or could be encouraged, could be aided andabetted, to represent, may well have supremely engaged me--for depthwithin depth there could only open before me. The place "meant, " onthese terms, to begin with, frank and licensed fiction, licensed to myrecordedly relaxed state; and what this particular luxury represented itmight have taken me even more time than I had to give to make out. Theblest novel in three volumes exercised through its form, to my sense, ongrounds lying deeper for me to-day than my deepest sounding, an appealthat fairly made it do with me what it would. Possibly a drivellingconfession, and the more drivelling perhaps the more development Ishould attempt for it; from which, however, the very difficulty of thecase saves me. Too many associations, too much of the ferment of memoryand fancy, are somehow stirred; they beset me again, they hover andwhirl about me while I stand, as I used to stand, within the positivelysanctified walls of the shop (so of the _vieux temps_ now their aspectand fashion and worked system: by which I mean again of the frumpiestand civillest mid-Victorian), and surrender to the vision of the shelvespacked with their rich individual trinities. Why should it have affectedme so that my choice, so difficult in such a dazzle, could only be for atrinity? I am unable fully to say--such a magic dwelt in the mere richfact of the trio. When the novel of that age was "bad, " as it sohelplessly, so abjectly and prevailingly consented to be, the threevolumes still did something for it, a something that was, all strangely, not an aggravation of its case. When it was "good" (our analysis, ourterms of appreciation, had a simplicity that has lingered on) they madeit copiously, opulently better; so that when, after the span of theyears, my relation with them became, from that of comparatively artlessreader, and to the effect of a superior fondness and acuteness, that ofcomplacent author, the tradition of infatuated youth still flung overthem its mantle: this at least till _all_ relation, by one of the veryrudest turns of life we of the profession were to have known, broke off, in clumsy interfering hands and with almost no notice given, in a day, in an hour. Besides connecting me with the lost but unforgotten note ofwaiting service and sympathy that quavered on the Merridew air, theyrepresented just for intrinsic charm more than I could at any momenthave given a plain account of; they fell, by their ineffable history, every trio I ever touched, into the category of such prized phenomena asmy memory, for instance, of fairly hanging about the Rue des Vieillards, at the season I speak of, through the apprehension that something vagueand sweet--if I shouldn't indeed rather say something of infinite futurepoint and application--would come of it. This is a reminiscence thatnothing would induce me to verify, as for example by any revisitinglight; but it was going to be good for me, good, that is, for what I waspleased to regard as my intelligence or my imagination, in fine for myobscurely specific sense of things, that I _should_ so have hung about. The name of the street was by itself of so gentle and intimate apersuasion that I must have been ashamed not to proceed, for the verygrace of it, to some shade of active response. And there was always aplace of particular arrest in the vista brief and blank, but inclusivelyblank, blank _after_ ancient, settled, more and more subsiding things, blank almost, in short, with all Matthew Arnold's "ennui of the middleages, " rather than, poorly and meanly and emptily, before such states, which was previously what I had most known of blankness. This determinedpause was at the window of a spare and solitary shop, a place of noamplitude at all, but as of an inveterate cheerful confidence, where, among a few artists' materials, an exhibited water-colour from somenative and possibly then admired hand was changed but once in ever solong. That was perhaps after all the pivot of my revolution--thequestion of whether or no I should at a given moment find the oldpicture replaced. I made this, when I had the luck, pass for anevent--yet an event which would _have_ to have had for its scene theprecious Rue des Vieillards, and pale though may be the recital of suchpleasures I lose myself in depths of kindness for my strain ofingenuity. 

All of which, and to that extent to be corrected, leaves small allowancefor my service to good M. Ansiot, rendered while my elder and youngerbrothers--the younger completing our group of the ungovernessed--werecontinuously subject to collegial durance. Their ordeal was, I stillblush to think, appreciably the heavier, as compared with mine, duringour longer term of thrifty exile from Paris--the time of stress, as Ifind I recall it, when we had turned our backs on the Rue Montaigne andmy privilege was so to roam on the winter and the spring afternoons. Mild M. Ansiot, "under" whom I for some three hours each forenoon satsole and underided--and actually by himself too--was a curiosity, abenignity, a futility even, I gather; but save for a felt and rememberedimpulse in me to open the window of our scene of study as soon as he hadgone was in no degree an ideal. He might rise here, could I do himjustice, as the rarest of my poor evocations; for he it was, to befrank, who most literally smelt of the vieux temps--as to which I havenoted myself as wondering and musing as much as might be, with recoveredscraps and glimpses and other intimations, only never yet for such atriumph of that particular sense. To be still frank, he was little lessthan a monster--for mere unresisting or unresilient mass of personalpresence I mean; so that I fairly think of him as a form of blandporpoise, violently blowing in an age not his own, as by having had toexchange deep water for thin air. Thus he impressed me as with anabsolute ancientry of type, of tone, of responsible taste, above all;this last I mean in literature, since it was literature we sociablyexplored, to my at once charmed and shamed apprehension of the severalfirm traditions, the pure proprieties, the discussabilities, in theoddest way both so many and so few, of that field as they prevailed tohis pious view. I must have had hold, in this mere sovereign sample ofthe accidentally, the quite unconsciously and unpretentiously, the allnegligibly or superfluously handed-down, of a rare case of theprovincial and academic _cuistre_; though even while I record it I seethe good man as too helpless and unaggressive, too smothered in his poorfacts of person and circumstance, of overgrown time of life alone, toincur with justness the harshness of classification. He rested with aweight I scarce even felt--such easy terms he made, without scruple, forboth of us--on the cheerful innocence of my barbarism; and though ourmornings were short and subject, I think, to quite drowsy lapses andother honest aridities, we did scumble together, I make out, by the aidof the collected extracts from the truly and academically great whichformed his sole resource and which he had, in a small portable andpocketed library rather greasily preserved, some patch of picture of asaving as distinguished from a losing classicism. The point remains forme that when all was said--and even with everything that might directlyhave counted unsaid--he discharged for me such an office that I was toremain to this far-off hour in a state of possession of him that is thevery opposite of a blank: quite after the fashion again in which I hadall along and elsewhere suffered and resisted, and yet so perversely andintimately appropriated, tutoring; which was with as little as ever toshow for my profit of his own express showings. The blank he fills outcrowds itself with a wealth of value, since I shouldn't without him havebeen able to claim, for whatever it may be worth, a tenth (at that letme handsomely put it), of my "working" sense of the vieux temps. How canI allow then that we hadn't planted together, with a loose felicity, some of the seed of work?--even though the sprouting was so long putoff. Everything, I have mentioned, had come at this time to beacceptedly, though far from braggingly, put off; and the ministrationsof M. Ansiot really wash themselves over with the weak mixture that hadbegun to spread for me, to immensity, during that summer day or two ofour earlier residence when, betraying strange pains and apprehensions, Iwas with all decision put to bed. Present to me still is the fact of mysharper sense, after an hour or two, of my being there in distress and, as happened for the moment, alone; present to me are the sounds of thesoft afternoon, the mild animation of the Boulogne street through thehalf-open windows; present to me above all the strange sense thatsomething had begun that would make more difference to me, directly andindirectly, than anything had ever yet made. I might verily, on thespot, have seen, as in a fading of day and a change to somethingsuddenly queer, the whole large extent of it. I must thus, muchimpressed but half scared, have wanted to appeal; to which end Itumbled, all too weakly, out of bed and wavered toward the bell justacross the room. The question of whether I really reached and rang itwas to remain lost afterwards in the strong sick whirl of everythingabout me, under which I fell into a lapse of consciousness that I shallconveniently here treat as a considerable gap. 

THE END