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Notes of a Son and Brother

by Henry James · English · Gutenberg #38424 · 775,437 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Notes of a Son and Brother

Author: Henry James


        
Release date: December 27, 2011 [eBook #38424]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER ***




Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
produced from scanned images of public domain material
from the Google Print project.)








BY HENRY JAMES

A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS

NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER




NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER

[Illustration: _Pencil-drawn portrait of William James by himself about
1866_]




NOTES OF A
SON AND BROTHER

BY

HENRY JAMES

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1914

COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Published March, 1914




ILLUSTRATIONS


Pencil-drawn portrait of William James by himself, about
1866        _Frontispiece_

FACING
PAGE

Louis Osborne. Sketch from a letter of William James
(page 18)        18

Portrait in oils of Miss Katherine Temple, 1861        96

A leaf from the letter quoted on page 129        130

Sketch of G. W. James brought home wounded from the assault
on Fort Wagner        244

"The cold water cure at Divonne--excellent for melancholia."--From
a letter of William James (page 447)       448




I


It may again perhaps betray something of that incorrigible vagueness of
current in our educational drift which I have elsewhere[1] so
unreservedly suffered to reflect itself that, though we had come abroad
in 1855 with an eye to the then supposedly supreme benefits of Swiss
schooling, our most resolute attempt to tap that supply, after twenty
distractions, waited over to the autumn of the fourth year later on,
when we in renewed good faith retraced our steps to Geneva. Our parents
began at that season a long sojourn at the old Hotel de l'Ecu, which now
erects a somewhat diminished head on the edge of the rushing Rhone--its
only rival then was the Hotel des Bergues opposite, considerably larger
and commanding more or less the view of that profiled crest of
Mont-Blanc which used to be so oddly likened to the head and face of a
singularly supine Napoleon. But on that side the shooting blue flood was
less directly and familiarly under the windows; in our position we
lived with it and hung over it, and its beauty, just where we mainly
congregated, was, I fear, my own sole happy impression during several of
those months. It was of a Sunday that we congregated most; my two
younger brothers had, in general, on that day their _sortie_ from the
Pensionnat Maquelin, a couple of miles out of town, where they were then
established, and W. J., following courses at the Academy, in its present
enriched and amplified form the University, mingled, failing livelier
recreation, in the family circle at the hotel. Livelier recreation,
during the hours of completest ease, consisted mostly, as the period
drew itself out, of those _courses_, along the lake and along the hills,
which offer to student-life in whatever phase, throughout that blest
country, the most romantic of all forms of "a little change"; enjoyed
too in some degree, but much more restrictedly, by myself--this an
effect, as I remember feeling it, of my considerably greater servitude.
I had been placed, separately, at still another Institution, that of M.
Rochette, who carried on an Ecole Preparatoire aux Ecoles Speciales, by
which was meant in particular the Polytechnic School at Zurich, with
whatever other like curricula, always "scientific," might elsewhere be
aimed at; and I had been so disposed of under a flattering misconception
of my aptitudes that leaves me to-day even more wonderstruck than at
that immediate season of my distress.

I so feared and abhorred mathematics that the simplest arithmetical
operation had always found and kept me helpless and blank--the dire
discipline of the years bringing no relief whatever to my state; and
mathematics unmitigated were at the Institution Rochette the air we
breathed, building us up as they most officiously did for those other
grim ordeals and pursuits, those of the mining and the civil engineer,
those of the architectural aspirant and the technician in still other
fields, to which we were supposed to be addressed. Nothing of the sort
was indeed supposed of me--which is in particular my present
mystification; so that my assault of the preliminaries disclosed, feeble
as it strikingly remained, was mere darkness, waste and anguish. I found
myself able to bite, as the phrase was, into no subject there deemed
savoury; it was hard and bitter fruit all and turned to ashes in my
mouth. More extraordinary however than my good parents'
belief--eccentric on their part too, in the light of their usual
practice and disposition, their habit, for the most part, of liking for
us after a gasp or two whatever we seemed to like--was my own failure to
protest with a frankness proportioned to my horror. The stiffer
intellectual discipline, the discipline of physics and of algebra,
invoked for the benefit of an understanding undisputedly weak and shy,
had been accepted on my side as a blessing perhaps in disguise. It had
come to me by I know not what perversity that if I couldn't tackle the
smallest problem in mechanics or face without dismay at the blackboard
the simplest geometric challenge I ought somehow in decency to make
myself over, oughtn't really to be so inferior to almost everyone else.
That was the pang, as it was also the marvel--that the meanest minds and
the vulgarest types approached these matters without a sign of
trepidation even when they approached them, at the worst, without
positive appetite. My attempt not therefore to remain abnormal wholly
broke down, however, and when I at last withdrew from the scene it was
not even as a conspicuous, it was only as an obscure, a deeply hushed
failure. I joined William, after what had seemed to me an eternity of
woe, at the Academy, where I followed, for too short a time but with a
comparative recovery of confidence, such literary _cours_ as I might.

I puzzle it out to-day that my parents had simply said to themselves, in
serious concern, that I read too many novels, or at least read them too
attentively--_that_ was the vice; as also that they had by the contagion
of their good faith got me in a manner to agree with them; since I
could almost always enter, to the gain of "horizon" but too often to
the perversion of experience, into any view of my real interests,
so-called, that was presented to me with a dazzling assurance. I didn't
consider certainly that I was so forming my mind, and was doubtless
curious to see whether it mightn't, by a process flourishing in other
applications, get to some extent formed. It wasn't, I think, till I felt
the rapture of that method's arrest that I knew how grotesquely little
it had done for me. And yet I bore it afterwards no malice--resorting
again to that early fatalistic philosophy of which the general sense was
that almost anything, however disagreeable, had been worth while; so
unable was I to claim that it hadn't involved impressions. I positively
felt the impressional harvest rather rich, little as any item of it
might have passed at the time for the sort of thing one exhibits as a
trophy of learning. My small exhibition was all for myself and consisted
on the whole but of a dusty, spotty, ugly picture--I took it for ugly
well-nigh to the pitch of the sinister. Its being a picture at all--and
I clung to that--came from the personal and material facts of the place,
where I was the only scholar of English speech, since my companions,
with a Genevese predominance, were variously polyglot. They wondered, I
couldn't doubt, what I was doing among them, and what lost lamb, almost
audibly bleating, I had been charged to figure. Yet I remember no crude
chaff, no very free relation of any one with any one, no high pitch,
still less any low descent, of young pleasantry or irony; our manners
must have been remarkably formed, and our general tone was that of a
man-of-the-world discretion, or at the worst of a certain small
bourgeois circumspection. The dread in the Genevese of having definitely
to "know" strangers and thereby be at costs for any sort of hospitality
to them comes back to me as written clear; not less than their being of
two sorts or societies, sons of the townspeople pure and simple and sons
of the local aristocracy perched in certain of the fine old houses of
the Cite and enjoying a background of sturdily-seated lakeside villas
and deeply umbrageous campagnes. I remember thinking the difference of
type, complexion and general _allure_ between these groups more marked,
to all the senses, than any "social distinction" I had yet encountered.
But the great thing was that I could so simplify our enclosing scene
itself, round it in and make it compose--the dark, the dreary
Institution, squeezed into a tall, dim, stony-faced and stony-hearted
house at the very top of the Cite and directly in the rear of the
Cathedral, portions of the apse of which seem to me to have straggled
above or protruded toward it, with other odd extraneous masses than
itself pressing still nearer. This simplification, quite luxuriously for
my young mind, was to mere mean blackness of an old-world sordid order.
I recognised _rich_ blackness in other connections, but this was somehow
of a harsh tradition and a tragic economy; sordid and strong was what I
had from the first felt the place, though urging myself always to rub
off history from its stones, and suffering thus, after a fashion, by the
fact that with history it ought to be interesting and that I ought to
know just how and why it was. For that, I think, was ever both the
burden and the joy--the complication, I mean, of interest, and the
sense, in the midst of the ugly and the melancholy, that queer crooked
silent corners behind cathedrals wrought in their way for one, did
something, while one haunted them, to the imagination and the taste; and
that so, once more, since the generalisation had become a habit with me,
I couldn't, seeing and feeling these things, really believe I had picked
up nothing.

When I sat in a dusky upper chamber and read "French literature" with
blighted M. Toeppfer, son of a happier sire, as I was sure the charming
writer and caricaturist, in spite of cumbrous cares, must have been; or
when, a couple of times a week and in the same eternal twilight (we
groped almost lampless through the winter days, and our glimmering
tapers, when they sparsely appeared, smelt of a past age), I worried out
Virgil and Tite-Live with M. Verchere, or Schiller and Lessing with the
ruddy noisy little professor of German, who sat always, the lesson long,
in a light brown talma, the sides of which he caused violently to flap
for emphasis like agitated wings, I was almost conscious of the breath
of culture as I modestly aspired to culture, and was at any rate safe
for the time from a summons to the blackboard at the hands of awful
little M. Galopin, that dispenser of the paralysing chalk who most
affected me. Extremely diminutive and wearing for the most part a thin
inscrutable smile, the ghost of a tribute to awkwardness happily carried
off, he found in our barren interviews, I believed, a charm to
curiosity, bending afresh each time as over the handful of specimen
dust, unprecedented product at its finest, extracted from the scratched
soil of my intelligence. With M. Toeppfer I was almost happy; with each
of these instructors my hour was unshared, my exploits unwitnessed, by
others; but M. Toeppfer became a friend, shewed himself a _causeur_,
brightened our lesson with memories of his time in Paris, where, if I am
not mistaken, he had made, with great animation, his baccalaureat, and
whence it was my possibly presumptuous impression he had brought back a
state of health, apparently much impaired, which represented contrition
for youthful spirits. He had haunted the parterre of the Theatre
Francais, and when we read Racine his vision of Rachel, whom he had seen
there as often as possible, revived; he was able to say at moments how
she had spoken and moved, and I recall in particular his telling me that
on her entrance as Phedre, borne down, in her languorous passion, by the
weight of her royal robes--"Que ces vains ornemens, que ces voiles me
pesent!"--the long lapse of time before she spoke and while she sank
upon a seat filled itself extraordinarily with her visible woe. But
where he most gave me comfort was in bringing home to me that the house
commemorated, immortalised, as we call it, in the first of his father's
Nouvelles Genevoises, La Bibliotheque de mon Oncle, was none other than
the structure facing us where we sat and which so impinged and leaned on
the cathedral walls that he had but to indicate to me certain points
from the window of our room to reconstitute thrillingly the scenery, the
drollery, the whimsical action of the tale. _There_ was a demonstration
I could feel important, votary and victim of the "scene," the scene and
the "atmosphere" only, that I had been formed to be. That I called
interesting lore--called it so at least to myself, though feeling it at
the same time of course so little _directly_ producible that I could
perhaps even then have fronted this actually remote circumstance of my
never having produced it till this moment. There abode in me, I may add,
a sense that on any subject that did appeal and that so found me
ready--such subjects being indeed as yet vague, but immensely suggestive
of number--I should have grasped the confident chalk, welcomed the very
biggest piece, not in the least have feared the blackboard. They were
inscribed, alas for me, in no recognised course. I put my hand straight
on another of them, none the less, if not on a whole group of others, in
my ascent, each morning of the spring or the early summer semestre, of
the admirable old Rue de la Tour de Boel, pronounced Boisl, which,
dusky, steep and tortuous, formed a short cut to that part of the Grand'
Rue in which the Academy was then seated.

It was a foul and malodorous way--I sniff again, during the tepid weeks,
its warm close air and that near presence of rank cheese which was in
those days almost everywhere, for the nostril, the note of urban
Switzerland; these things blessed me as I passed, for I passed straight
to freedom and away from M. Galopin; they mixed with the benediction of
the exquisite spring and the rapture, constantly renewed, though for too
short a period, of my now substituting literary, or in other words
romantic, studies for the pursuits of the Institution Rochette. I viewed
them as literary, these new branches of research, though in truth they
were loose enough and followed on loose terms. My dear parents, as if to
make up to me, characteristically, for my recent absurd strain to no
purpose, allowed me now the happiest freedom, left me to attend such
lectures as I preferred, only desiring that I should attend several a
week, and content--cherished memory that it makes of their forms with
me--that these should involve neither examinations nor reports. The
Academic authorities, good-natured in the extreme and accustomed to the
alien amateur, appear to have been equally content, and I was but too
delighted, on such lines, to attend anything or everything. My whole
impression now, with my self-respect re-established, was of something
exquisite: I was put to the proof about nothing; I deeply enjoyed the
confidence shown in my taste, not to say in my honour, and I sat out
lecture after lecture as I might have sat out drama, alternate tragedy
and comedy, beautifully performed--the professor in each case figuring
the hero, and the undergraduates, much more numerous, though not in
general maturer than those of the Institution, where I had been, to my
perception, every one's junior, partaking in an odd fashion of the
nature at once of troupe and spectators. The scientific subjects, in a
large suggestive way, figured tragedy, I seemed to feel, and I pushed
this form to the point of my following, for conscience' sake, though not
with the last regularity, lurid demonstrations, as they affected me, on
anatomy and physiology; these in turn leading to my earnest view, at the
Medical School, of the dissection of a _magnifique gendarme_--which
ordeal brought me to a stand. It was by the literary and even by the
philosophic _lecons_ that the office of bright comedy was discharged, on
the same liberal lines; at the same time that I blush to remember with
how base a blankness I must have several times listened to H. F. Amiel,
admirable writer, analyst, moralist. His name and the fact of his having
been then a mild grave oracle of the shrine are all that remain with me
(I was fit to be coupled with my cousin Anne King, named in another
place, who, on the same Genevese scene, had had early lessons from the
young Victor Cherbuliez, then with all his music in him, and was to live
to mention to me that he had been for her "like any one else"); the
shrine, not to say the temple itself, shining for me truly, all that
season, with a mere confounding blur of light. Was it an effect of my
intensity of reaction from what I had hated? was it to a great extent
the beguiling beauty of a wonderful Swiss spring, into which all things
else soothingly melted, becoming together a harmony without
parts?--whatever the cause, I owed it to some accident only to be
described, I think, as happy, that I moved, those three months, in an
acutely enjoying and yet, as would at present appear, a but scantly
comparing or distinguishing maze of the senses and the fancy. So at
least, to cover this so thin report of my intelligence and my sum of
acquisition and retention, I am reduced to supposing.

What essentially most operated, I make out, however, was that force of a
renewed sense of William's major activity which always made the
presumption of any degree of importance or success fall, with a sort of
ecstasy of resignation, from my own so minor. Whatever he might happen
to be doing made him so interesting about it, and indeed, with the
quickest concomitance, about everything else, that what I probably most
did, all the while, was but to pick up, and to the effect not a bit of
starving but quite of filling myself, the crumbs of his feast and the
echoes of his life. His life, all this Geneva period, had been more of a
feast than mine, and I recall the sense of this that I had got on the
occasion of my accompanying him, by his invitation, toward the end of
our stay, to a students' celebration or carouse, which was held at such
a distance from the town, at a village or small bourg, up in the Vaud
back-country, that we had, after a considerable journey by boat and in
heterogeneous and primitive conveyances, tightly packed, to spend two
nights there. The Genevese section of the Societe de Zoffingue, the
great Swiss students' organisation for brotherhood and beer, as it might
summarily be defined, of which my brother had become a member, was to
meet there certain other sections, now vague to me, but predominantly
from the German-speaking Cantons, and, holding a Commerce, to toast
their reunion in brimming bowls. It had been thought the impression
might amuse, might even interest me--for it was not denied that there
were directions, after all, in which I _could_ perhaps take notice; and
this was doubtless what after a fashion happened, though I felt out in
the cold (and all the more that the cold at the moment happened to be
cruel), as the only participant in view not crowned with the charming
white cap of the society, becoming to most young heads, and still less
girt with the parti-coloured ribbon or complementary scarf, which set
off even the shabby--for shabbiness considerably figured. I participated
vaguely but not too excludedly; I suffered from cold, from hunger and
from scant sleeping-space; I found the Bernese and the Balois strange
representatives of the joy of life, some of them the finest gothic
grotesques--but the time none the less very long; all of which,
however, was in the day's work if I might live, by the imagination, in
William's so adaptive skin. To see that he was adaptive, was initiated,
and to what a happy and fruitful effect, that, I recollect, was my
measure of content; which was filled again to overflowing, as I have
hinted, on my finding him so launched at the Academy after our stretch
of virtual separation, and just fancying, with a freedom of fancy, even
if with a great reserve of expression, how much he might be living and
learning, enjoying and feeling, amid work that was the right work for
him and comrades, consecrated comrades, that at the worst weren't the
wrong. What was not indeed, I always asked myself, the right work for
him, or the right thing of any kind, that he took up or looked at or
played with?--failing, as I did more than ever at the time I speak of,
of the least glimpse of his being below an occasion. Whatever he played
with or worked at entered at once into his intelligence, his talk, his
humour, as with the action of colouring-matter dropped into water or
that of the turning-on of a light within a window. Occasions waited on
him, had always done so, to my view; and there he was, that springtime,
on a level with them all: the effect of which recognition had much, had
more than aught else, to say to the charming silver haze just then
wrapped about everything of which I was conscious. He had formed two or
three young friendships that were to continue and to which even the
correspondence of his later years testifies; with which it may have had
something to do that the Swiss _jeunesse_ of the day was, thanks to the
political temperature then prevailing, in a highly inflamed and exalted
state, and particularly sensitive to foreign sympathy, however platonic,
with the national fever. It was the hour at which the French Emperor was
to be paid by Victor Emmanuel the price of the liberation of Lombardy;
the cession of Nice and Savoie were in the air--with the consequence, in
the Genevese breast, of the new immediate neighbourhood thus constituted
for its territory. Small Savoie was to be replaced, close against it, by
enormous and triumphant France, whose power to absorb great mouthfuls
was being so strikingly exhibited. Hence came much hurrying to and fro,
much springing to arms, in the way of exercise, and much flocking to the
standard--"demonstrations," in other words, of the liveliest; one of
which I recall as a huge tented banquet, largely of the white caps,
where I was present under my brother's wing, and, out of a sea of
agitated and vociferous young heads, sprang passionate protests and
toasts and vows and declaimed verses, a storm of local patriotism,
though a flurry happily short-lived.

All this was thrilling, but the term of it, by our consecrated custom,
already in view; we were transferred at a bound, for the rest of that
summer of 1860, to the care, respectively, of a pair of kindly
pedagogues at Bonn-am-Rhein; as to which rapid phase I find remembrance
again lively, with a letter or two of William's to reinforce it. Yet I
first pick up as I pass several young lines from Geneva, and would fain
pick up too the drawing that accompanied them--this by reason of the
interest of everything of the sort, without exception, that remains to
us from his hand. He at a given moment, which came quite early, as
completely ceased to ply his pencil as he had in his younger time
earnestly and curiously exercised it; and this constitutes exactly the
interest of his case. No stroke of it that I have recovered but
illustrates his aptitude for drawing, his possible real mastery of the
art that was yet, in the light of other interests, so utterly to drop
from him; and the example is rare of being so finely capable only to
become so indifferent. It was thanks to his later indifference that he
made no point of preserving what he had done--a neglect that, still more
lucklessly, communicated itself to his circle; so that we also let
things go, let them again and again stray into the desert, and that what
might be reproducible is but the handful of scraps that have happened
not to perish. "Mother," he writes to his father in absence, "does
nothing but sit and cry for you. She refuses to associate with us and
has one side of the room to herself. She and the Aunt are now in the
Aunt's room. Wilky and Bobby, at home for the day, are at church. It is
a hard grey day. H. is telling a story to Louis Osborne, and I will try
to make a sketch of them. There has been a terrible bise; the two
Cornhill Magazines have come; Mrs. Thomas has been too sick to be at
dinner, and we have seen something of some most extraordinary English
people." Mrs. Thomas, of New York, was a handsome American widow with
handsome children, all from the Avenue Gabriel in Paris, and with the
boys enjoying life, among many little compatriots, at the admired
establishment of M. Haccius, even as our small brothers were doing at
that of M. Maquelin; yet with their destiny of ultimate Europeanisation,
of finally complete absorption into the French system, already rather
written for them--as a like history, for like foredoomed young subjects,
was in those years beginning to be prefigured, through marriages of
daughters and other such beguilements, almost wherever one looked. The
extraordinary English people were perhaps an amiable family of whom I
retain an image as conversing with our parents at the season when the
latter were in their prompt flush of admiration for George Eliot's
first novel, Adam Bede, then just given to the world and their copy of
which they had rejoicingly lent to their fellow Anglo-Saxons. I catch
again the echo of their consternation on receiving it back with the
remark that all attempt at an interest in such people, village
carpenters and Methodists, had proved vain--for that style of
Anglo-Saxon; together with that of my own excited wonder about such
other people, those of the style in question, those somehow prodigiously
presented by so rare a delicacy, so proud a taste, and made thus to
irradiate a strange historic light. It _referred_ them, and to a social
order, making life more interesting and more various; even while our
clear democratic air, that of our little family circle, quivered as with
the monstrosity. It might, this note that made us, in the parlance of
to-day, sit up, fairly have opened to me that great and up to then
unsuspected door of the world from which the general collection of
monstrosities, its existence suddenly brought home to us, would
doubtless stretch grandly away. The story I told Louis Osborne has quite
passed from me, but not little Louis himself, an American child of the
most charming and appealing intelligence, marked by some malady that was
more or less permanently to cripple, or was even cruelly to destroy him,
and whom it was a constant joy to aspire to amuse. His mother was
schooling her elder son in the company of our own brothers, his father
having established them all at Geneva that he might go for a tour in the
East. Vivid to me still is the glimpse I happened to get one Sunday
betimes of the good Maquelin couple, husband and wife, in deep
mourning--a touch of the highest decency--who had come, with faces a
yard long, to announce to Mrs. Osborne the death of her husband in the
Holy Land, communicated to them, by slow letter, in the first instance.
With little Louis on one's knee one didn't at all envy M. and Madame
Maquelin; and than this small faint phantom of sociable helpless little
listening Louis none more exquisite hovers before me.

[Illustration: Most eternal love from every one, & from Louis Osborne.

Louis Osborne. Sketch from a letter of William James (page 18).]

With which mild memories thus stands out for me too the lively
importance, that winter, of the arrival, from the first number, of the
orange-covered earlier Cornhill--the thrill of each composing item of
that first number especially recoverable in its intensity. Is anything
like that thrill possible to-day--for a submerged and blinded and
deafened generation, a generation so smothered in quantity and number
that discrimination, under the gasp, has neither air to breathe nor room
to turn round? Has any like circumstance now conceivably the value, to
the charmed attention, so far as anything worth naming attention, or any
charm for it, is anywhere left, of the fact that Trollope's Framley
Parsonage there began?--let alone the still other fact that the
Roundabout Papers did and that Thackeray thus appeared to us to
guarantee personally, intimately, with a present audibility that was as
the accent of good company, the new relation with him and with others of
company not much worse, as they then seemed, that such a medium could
establish. To speak of these things, in truth, however, is to feel the
advantage of being able to live back into the time of the more sovereign
periodical appearances much of a compensation for any reduced prospect
of living forward. For these appearances, these strong time-marks in
such stretches of production as that of Dickens, that of Thackeray, that
of George Eliot, had in the first place simply a genial weight and
force, a direct importance, and in the second a command of the permeable
air and the collective sensibility, with which nothing since has begun
to deserve comparison. They were enrichments of life, they were _large_
arrivals, these particular renewals of supply--to which, frankly, I am
moved to add, the early Cornhill giving me a pretext, even the frequent
examples of Anthony Trollope's fine middle period, looked at in the
light of old affection and that of his great heavy shovelfuls of
testimony to constituted English matters; a testimony of course looser
and thinner than Balzac's to _his_ range of facts, but charged with
something of the big Balzac authority. These various, let alone
numerous, deeper-toned strokes of the great Victorian clock were so many
steps in the march of our age, besides being so many notes, full and
far-reverberating, of our having high company to keep--high, I mean, to
cover all the ground, in the sense of the genial pitch of it. So it was,
I remember too, that our parents spoke of their memory of the successive
surpassing attestations of the contemporary presence of Scott; to which
we might have replied, and doubtless after no great space began to
reply, that our state, and even their later one, allowing for a certain
gap, had nothing to envy any other. I witnessed, for that matter, with
all my senses, young as I was, the never-to-be-equalled degree of
difference made, for what may really be called the world-consciousness
happily exposed to it, by the prolonged "coming-out" of The Newcomes,
yellow number by number, and could take the general civilised
participation in the process for a sort of basking in the light of
distinction. The process repeated itself for some years under other
forms and stimuli, but the merciless change was to come--so that through
whatever bristling mazes we may now pick our way it is not to find them
open into any such vales of Arcady. My claim for our old privilege is
that we did then, with our pace of dignity, proceed from vale to vale.




II


My point at any rate, such as it is, would be that even at the age I had
reached in 1860 something of the happier time still lingered--the time
in which a given product of the press might have a situation and an
aspect, a considerability, so to speak, a circumscription and an _aura_;
room to breathe and to show in, margin for the casting of its nets. The
occasion at large was doubtless shrinking, one could note--shrinking
like the unlet "house" on a night of grandest opera, but "standing room
only" was not yet everywhere the sign, and the fine deliberate thing
could here and there find its seat. I really indeed might have held it
the golden age of letters still, and of their fond sister leisure, with
that quiet swim into our ken on its appointed day, during our Bonn
summer, of the charming Once a Week of the prime, the prime of George
Meredith and Charles Reade and J. E. Millais and George du Maurier;
which our father, to bridge our separation from him, sent us, from Paris
and elsewhere, in prompt and characteristic relief of our plotted, our
determined strict servitude to German, and to the embrace of the sweet
slim essence of which the strain of one's muscles round a circular ton
of advertisement was not a condition attached. I should like to say that
I rioted, all that season, on the supreme German classics _and_ on Evan
Harrington, with Charles Reade's A Good Fight, the assured little
prelude to The Cloister and the Hearth, thrown in; and I should indeed
be ready to say it, were not the expression gross for the really hushed
piety of my attitude during those weeks. It was perhaps not quite till
then that I fully emerged from the black shadow of the Ecole
Preparatoire aux Ecoles Speciales, not quite till we had got off beyond
the blest Rhine at Basle that I ceased to hear and feel all but just
behind me, portentous perhaps of another spring, the cold breath of the
monster. The guttery Bonn-Gasse was during those weeks of the year close
and stale, and the house of our good Herr Doctor Humpert, professor at
the Bonn Gymnasium, in which I shared a room with my brother Wilky,
contracted and dim, as well as fragrant through a range of assaults that
differed only in kind and not at all in number from those of the street
itself; and yet I held the period and the whole situation idyllic--the
slightly odd sense of which was one's being to that extent attuned to
the life of letters and of (oh the great thing!) impressions "gone in
for." To feel a unity, a character and a tone in one's impressions, to
feel them related and all harmoniously coloured, that _was_ positively
to face the aesthetic, the creative, even, quite wondrously, the critical
life and almost on the spot to commence author. They had begun, the
impressions--that was what was the matter with them--to scratch quite
audibly at the door of liberation, of extension, of projection; what
they were _of_ one more or less knew, but what they were _for_ was the
question that began to stir, though one was still to be a long time at a
loss directly to answer it.

There, for the present, was the rub, the dark difficulty at which one
could but secretly stare--secretly because one was somehow ashamed of
its being there and would have quickly removed one's eyes, or tried to
clear them, if caught in the act of watching. Impressions were not
merely all right but were the dearest things in the world; only one
would have gone to the stake rather than in the first place confessed to
some of them, or in the second announced that one really lived by them
and built on them. This failure then to take one's stand in the
connection could but come from the troubled view that they were naught
without a backing, a stout stiff hard-grained underside that would hold
them together and of which the terrible name was simply science,
otherwise learning, and learning exclusively by books, which were at
once the most beautiful and the most dreadful things in the world, some
of them right, strikingly, showily right, some of them disgracefully and
almost unmentionably wrong, that is grossly irrelevant, as for instance
a bound volume of Once a Week would be, but remarkable above all for
overwhelming number and in general for defiance of comprehension. It was
true that one had from time to time the rare adventure of one's surprise
at understanding parts of them none the less--understanding more than a
very little, more than much too little; but there was no practical
support to speak of in that, even the most one could ever hope to
understand being a mere drop in the bucket. Never did I quite strike it
off, I think, that impressions might themselves _be_ science--and this
probably because I didn't then know them, when it came to the point, as
anything but life. I knew them but by that collective and
unpractical--many persons would have said that frivolous--name; which
saw me little further. I was under the impression--this in fact the very
liveliest of what might have been called the lot--that life and
knowledge were simply mutual opposites, one inconsistent with the other;
though hovered about, together, at the same time, by the anomaly that
when knowledge impinged upon life, pushed against her, as it were, and
drove her to the wall, it was all right, and such was knowledge's way
and title; whereas when life played the like tricks with knowledge
nothing but shame for the ruder, even if lighter, party could accrue.
There was to come to me of course in time the due perception that
neither was of the least use--use to myself--without the other; but
meanwhile, and even for much after, the extreme embarrassment continued:
to whichever of the opposites one gave one's self it was with a sense of
all but basely sacrificing the other. However, the conflict and the
drama involved in the question at large was doubtless what was to make
consciousness--under whichever of the two names one preferred to
entertain it--supremely intense and interesting.

This then is by way of saying that the idyll, as I have called it, of
the happy juncture I glanced at a moment back came from the fact that I
didn't at all know how much I was living, and meanwhile quite supposed I
was considerably learning. When, rising at some extraordinary hour of
the morning, I went forth through the unawakened town (and the Germans,
at that time, heaven knows, were early afoot too), and made for the open
country and the hill, in particular, of the neighbouring Venusberg,
long, low and bosky, where the dews were still fresh and ancient mummies
of an old cloister, as I remember it, somewhere perched and exposed, I
was doing, to my sense, an attuned thing; attuned, that is, to my
coming home to bend double over Schiller's Thirty Years' War in the
strenuous spirit that would keep me at it, or that would vary it with
Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften, till late in the warm afternoon. I found
German prose much tougher than the verse, and thereby more opposed to
"life," as to which I of course couldn't really shake off the sense that
it might be worked as infinitely comprehensive, comprehensive even of
the finest discriminations against it. The felicity, present but
naturally unanalysed, was that the whole thing, our current episode,
_was_ exactly comprehensive of life, presenting it in particular as
characteristically German, and therein freshly vivid--with the great
vividness that, by our parents' vague wish, we were all three after or
out for; in spite of our comparatively restricted use, in those days, of
these verbal graces. Such therefore was the bright unity of our
experience, or at least of my own share in it--this luck that, through
the intensity of my wanting it to, all consciousness, all my own
immediate, _tasted_ German, to the great and delightful quickening of my
imagination. The quickening was of course no such matter as I was to
know nearly ten years later on plunging for the first time over the Alps
into Italy; but, letting alone that I was then so much older, I had
wondered about Italy, to put it embracingly, far more than I was
constitutionally capable of wondering about Germany. It was enough for
me at Bonn that I felt no lack of appetite--had for the time all the
illusion of being on the way to something; to something, I mean, with
which the taste of German might somehow _directly_ mix itself. Every
aspect and object round about was a part, at all events, of the actual
mixture; and when on drowsy afternoons, not a little interspaced indeed,
I attempted the articulate perusal of Hermann und Dorothea with our good
Professor, it was like dreaming, to the hum of bees, if not to the
aftertaste of "good old Rhenish," in some homely fruity
eighteenth-century garden.

The good old Rhenish is no such false note in this reconstitution; I
seem to see the Frau Doctorin and her ancient mildly-scowling sister
Fraeulein Stamm, who reminded me of Hepzibah Pyncheon in The House of the
Seven Gables, perpetually wiping green hock-glasses and holding them up
to our meagre light, as well as setting out long-necked bottles, with
rather chalky cakes, in that forward section of our general
eating-and-living-room which formed our precinct of reception and
conversation. The unbroken space was lighted at either end, from street
and court, and its various effects of tempered shade or, frankly
speaking, of rather greasy gloom, amid which the light touch of
elegance gleamed but from the polish of the glasses and the sloping
shoulders of their bottle, comes back to me as the view of an intensely
internal interior. I recall how oppressively in that apartment, how
congestedly, as in some cage of which the wires had been papered over, I
felt housed and disconnected; I scarce then, I think, knew what the
matter was, but it could only have been that in all those summer weeks,
to the best of my belief, no window was ever once opened. Still, there
was the scene, the thick, the much-mixed chiaroscuro through which the
two ladies of the family emerged from an exiguous retreat just off the
back end of the place with ample platters of food; the almost
impenetrable dusk of the middle zone, where the four or five of us,
seated with our nutcracker-faced pastor, conveyed the food to our mouths
with a confidence mainly borrowed from the play of his own deep-plunging
knife; and then the forward, the festal extension, the privilege of
occasionally lingering in which, or of returning to it for renewed
refreshment, was a recognition both of our general minding of our
business upstairs--left as we were to thumb our Fluegel's Dictionary by
the hour so long as we invoked no other oracle. Our drowsy Doctor
invited no such approach; he smiled upon us as if unseen forefingers of
great force had been inserted for the widening of his mouth at the
corners, and I had the sense of his not quite knowing what to make of
our being so very gently barbaric, or rather so informally civilised; he
safely housed and quite rankly fed us, guided us to country walks and to
the swimming-baths by the Rhine-side, introduced us to fruit-gardens
where, on payment of the scantest tribute, we were suffered to consume
off-hand bushels of cherries, plums and pears; suffered us to ascend the
Drachenfels and to partake of coffee at Rolandseck and in other friendly
open-air situations; but flung his gothic shadow as little as possible
over my so passive page at least, and took our rate of acquisition
savingly for granted.

This, in the optimism of the hour, I have no memory of resenting; the
page, though slow, managed at the same time to be stirring, and I asked
no more of any one or anything but that they should be with all due
gothicism whatever they most easily might. The long vistas of the
beeches and poplars on the other side of the Rhine, after we had crossed
by the funicular ferry, gothically rustled and murmured: I fancied their
saying perpetually "We are German woods, we are German woods--which
makes us very wonderful, do you know? and unlike any others: don't you
feel the spell of the very sound of us and of the beautiful words, 'Old
German woods, old German woods,' even if you can't tell why?" I
couldn't altogether tell why, but took everything on trust as mystically
and valuably gothic--valuably because ministering with peculiar
directness, as I gathered, to culture. I was in, or again I was "out,"
in my small way, for culture; which seemed quite to come, come from
everywhere at once, with the most absurd conciliatory rush, pitifully
small as would have been any list of the sources I tapped. The beauty
was in truth that everything was a source, giving me, by the charmingest
breach of logic, more than it at all appeared to hold; which was exactly
what had not been the case at the Institution Rochette, where things had
appeared, or at least had pretended, to hold so much more than they
gave. The oddity was that about us now everything--everything but the
murmur of the German woods and the great flow and magic name of the
Rhine--was more ugly than beautiful, tended in fact to say at every
turn: "You shall suffer, yes, indeed you _are_ doing so (stick up for
your right to!) in your sense of form; which however is quite compatible
with culture, is really one of the finest parts of it, and may decidedly
prove to you that you're getting it." I hadn't, in rubbing, with
whatever weakness, against French and, so far as might be, against
France, and in sinking, very sensibly, more and more into them,
particularly felt that I was getting it _as_ such; what I was getting
as such was decidedly rather my famous "life," and without so much as
thinking of the degree, with it all, of the valuable and the helpful.

Life meanwhile I had a good deal of at my side in the person of my
brother Wilky, who, as I have had occasion elsewhere to say, contrived
in those years to live, or to have every appearance of so doing, with an
immediacy that left me far in the lurch. I was always still wondering
how, while he had solved the question simply _ambulando_, which was for
him but by the merest sociable stroll. This represented to me
success--success of a kind, but such an assured kind--in a degree that
was my despair; and I have never forgotten how, that summer, when the
Herr Doctor did look in, did settle down a little to have the bristling
page out with us, Wilky's share of the hour took on the spot the form of
his turning at once upon our visitor the tables of earnest inquiry. He
delighted, after this tribute of eagerness, to meet the Doctor's
interrogative advance; but the communication so made was of anything and
everything except the fruit of his reading (the act of reading was
inhuman and repugnant to him), and I amazedly noted while I nursed my
small hoard that anything he offered did in the event quite as well: he
could talk with such charm, such drollery of candour, such
unexpectedness of figure, about what he had done and what he hadn't--or
talk at least before it, behind it and beside it. We had three or four
house-companions, youths from other places attending the Gymnasium and
committed to our Professor's care, as to whom I could somehow but infer
that they were, each in his personal way, inordinately gothic--which
they had to be to supply to my mind a relation, or a substitute for a
relation, with them; whereas my younger brother, without a scrap of a
view of them, a grain of theory or formula, tumbled straight into their
confidence all round. Our air for _him_ was by just so much life as it
couldn't have dreamed of being culture, and he was so far right that
when the son of the house and its only child, the slim and ardent
Theodor, who figured to me but as a case of such classic sensibility, of
the Lieder or the Werther sort, as might have made, with the toss of a
yellow lock or the gleam of a green blouse, the image for an Uhland or a
Heine stanza, had imparted to him an intention of instant suicide under
some resentment of parental misconception, he had been able to use
dissuasion, or otherwise the instinct of then most freely fraternising,
with a success to which my relish for so romantic a stroke as charmingly
in Theodor's character and setting mightn't at all have attained. There
is a small something of each of us in a passage of an ingenuous letter
addressed by him from the midst of these conditions to his parents. I
fondly catch, I confess, at any of these recoverable lights; finding
them at the best too scant for my commemorative purpose.

     Willy got his photograph this morning after three hours' hard work.
     From the post-office he was sent to the custom-house, and there was
     obliged to sign his name and to go to some neighbouring bookstore
     to buy a seal. On returning to the custom-house he was sent back to
     the post-office to get some document or other. After obtaining this
     article he turned his steps once more to the custom-house, where an
     insolent officer told him he must wait an hour. W. informed him
     that he would return at the end of the hour, and accordingly for
     the third time went to the C.H., and was conducted by the clerk to
     a cellar where the packages were kept, and there told to take off
     his hat. He obeyed, raging, and then was a fourth time sent to the
     P.O.--this time to pay money. Happily he is now in possession of
     his property. H. and he took a walk this afternoon to a
     fruit-garden, where plums, cherries, gooseberries and currants were
     abundant. After half an hour's good work H. left W. finishing
     merely the plums--the cherry and gooseberry course to come later.
     He was so enchanted that he thought H. a great fool to leave so
     soon. How does Paris now strike you? It can't be as nice as Bonn.
     You had better write to Bob.

Bob, our youngest brother, had been left at Geneva with excellent M.
Maquelin and was at that time _en course_, over the Alps, with this
gentleman and their young companions; a most desirable, delicious
excursion, which I remember following in envious fancy, as it included a
descent to the Italian Lakes and a push on as far as Genoa. In reference
to which excursion I cull a line or two from a faded scrap of a letter
addressed a little later by this youngest of us to his "Beloved Brother"
William. "This is about our Grande Course. We started at 5 o'clock in
the morning with our faces and hands all nicely washed and our nails
clean. The morning was superb, and as we waited in the court the soft
balmy air of the mountains came in bringing with it the melodious sound
of the rappel for breakfast. This finished we bade adieu, and I could
see the emotions of the kind and ever-watchful Madame Maquelin as a few
silent drops trickled down her fair cheeks. We at last arrived at the
boat, where we met Mr. Peters, a portly gentleman from the city of
Philadelphia, with his two sweet sons, one twelve, the other seven years
old, the eldest coming from Mr. E.'s school with no very good opinion of
the principal--saying he had seen him in a state of tightness several
times during his stay there." Mr. Peters appears to have been something
of a pessimist, for, when at a later stage "it began to rain hard, and
half the road was a foot deep in water, and the cocher had stopped
somewhere to get lanterns and had at the same time indulged in certain
potations which didn't make him drive any the straighter," this
gentleman "insinuated that we had all better have been with our
mothers." The letter records at some length the early phases of the
affair, but under the weight of the vision of Italy it rather breaks
down and artlessly simplifies. "Genoa is a most lively town, and there
is a continual swarm of sailors in the street. We visited several
palaces, among others that of Victor Emanuel, which is very fine, and
the fruit is very cheap. We stayed there several days, but at last
started for Turin, where we spent a Sunday--a place I didn't much like,
I suppose because of that reason. We left Turin the next day on foot,
but lost our road and had to come back." I recover even in presence of
these light accents my shade of wonder at this odd chance that made the
least developed of us the subject of what seemed to me even then a
privilege of the highest intensity; and there again keeps it company my
sense, through all the after years, that this early glimpse of the blest
old Italy, almost too early though it appears to have but just missed
being, might have done something towards preparing or enriching for Bob
the one little plot of consciousness in which his deeply troubled life
was to find rest. He was in the event also fondly to aim at painting,
like two of his brothers; but whereas they were to fumble with the
lock, in their very differing degree, only in those young years, he was
to keep at it most as he grew older, though always with a perfect
intelligence of the inevitable limits of the relation, the same
intelligence that was so sharp and sad, so extraordinarily free and fine
and detached in fact, as play of mind, play of independent talk and of
pen, for the limits of his relation to many other matters. Singularly
intelligent all round, yet with faculties that had early declined any
consummation of acquaintance with such training as under a different
sort of pressure he might have enjoyed, he had an admirable hand and
eye, and I have known no other such capacity for absorbing or storing up
the minutest truths and shades of landscape fact and giving them out
afterward, in separation from the scene, with full assurance and
felicity. He could do this still better even than he cared to do; I for
my part cared much more that he should than he ever did himself, and
then it was, I dare say, that I made the reflection: "He took in the
picture of Italy, with his firm hard gift, having the chance while
William and I were still, comparatively, small untouched and gaping
barbarians; and it should always be in him to do at some odd fine moment
a certain honour to that." I held to it that that sensibility had played
in him more than by any outward measure at the time; which was perhaps
indeed one of the signs within me of the wasteful habit or trick of a
greater feeling for people's potential propriety or felicity or full
expression than they seemed able to have themselves. At all events I was
absolutely never to cease to remember for Bob, through everything--and
there was much and of the most agitated and agitating--that he had been
dipped as a boy into the sacred stream; to some effect which, thanks to
two or three of his most saving and often so amusing sensibilities, the
turbid sea of his life might never quite wash away.

William had meanwhile come to Bonn with us, but was domiciled with
another tutor, younger and fairer and more of the world, above all more
ventilated and ventilating, Herr Stromberg, whose defect might in fact
have seemed that, with his constant exhibition of the stamp received by
him from the writings of Lord Macaulay, passages of which he could
recite by heart, and the circumstance that his other pupil, William's
comrade for a time, was of unmitigatedly English, that is of
quasi-Byronic association, he didn't quite rise to the full gothic
standard. Otherwise indeed our brother moved on the higher plane of
light and air and ease, and above all of enjoyed society, that we felt
he naturally must. Present to me yet is the thrill of learning from him
that his English fellow-pupil was the grandson, if I remember rightly
the degree of descent, of Mary Chaworth, Byron's "first love," and my
sense afterwards, in gaping at young Mr. Musters himself, that this
independently romantic contact would have been more to my own private
purpose at least than the most emphasised gothicism. None the less do I
regain it as a part of my current vision that Frau Stromberg, who was
young and fair, wrote tragedies as well as made pancakes--which were
served to each consumer double, a thick confiture within being the
reason of this luxuriance, and being also a note beyond our experience
in the Bonn-Gasse; and that with the printed five acts of a certain
"Cleopatra" before me, read aloud in the first instance to her young
inmates and by my brother passed on to me, I lost myself in the view of
I scarce knew what old-world Germanic grace, positively, or little
court-city practice of the theatre: these things so lived in the small
thick pamphlet, "grey paper with blunt type" and bristling, to my
discomfiture, with descriptive stage directions, vast dense bracketed
tracts, gothic enough in all conscience, as to which I could already
begin to wonder whether such reinforcements of presentation proved more
for or against the true expressional essence of the matter; for or
against, that is, there being nothing at all so dramatic, so chargeable
with meaning and picture, as speech, of whatever sort, made perfect.
Such speculations, I may parenthesise, might well have been fostered,
and doubtless were, by an impression that I find commemorated in a few
lines of a letter of my father's to a friend in America--he having
brought us on to Bonn, introduced us to our respective caretakers and
remained long enough to have had an evening at the theatre, to which we
accompanied him. "We had Ristori to play Mary Stuart for us last
night--which was the vulture counterfeiting Jenny Wren. Every little
while the hoarse exulting voice, the sanguinary beak, the lurid leer of
menace, and the relentless talons looked forth from the feathery mass
and sickened you with disgust. She would do Elizabeth better." I recall
the performance in every feature, as well as my absence of such
reserves, though quite also the point to which I was impressed by the
utterance of them; not that it didn't leave me at the same time free to
feel that the heroine of history represented could scarce have been at
all a dove-like, much less a wren-like person. She had indeed on Madame
Ristori's showing prodigious resources of militant mobility--of what in
fact would be called to-day mobilisation. Several years later on I was
to see the actress play the same part in America; and then, if I am not
mistaken, was to note scarce more than one point; the awful effect on
_any_ histrionic case, even on one so guardedly artful as hers, of
having been dragged round the globe and forced home, so far as might be,
to imperfect comprehensions. The big brush had come fairly to daub the
canvas. Let the above, however, serve in particular to lead in as many
examples of my father's singularly striking and personal habit of
expression and weight of thought as these pages may find room for.

The one difficulty is that to open that general door into the limbo of
old letters, charged with their exquisite ghostly appeal, is almost to
sink into depths of concession. I yield here for instance to the claim
of a page or two from William, just contemporary and addressed to our
parents in Paris--and yield perhaps but for no better reason than that
of the small historic value or recoverable charm that I am moved to find
in its illustrative items. The reference of its later lines is to a
contemporary cousin, young and blooming, by whom I have already ever so
lightly brushed[2] and who figured quite with the grand air on our young
horizon; the only daughter of the brightest of the Albany uncles (by
that time lost and mourned) now on the tour of Europe with a pair of
protective elders for her entrance upon life and at that hour
surrounding our parents, her uncle and aunt, with a notably voluminous
rustle of fresh Paris clothes, the far-spreading drapery of the more and
more draped and flounced and "sloped" second Empire. This friendly
frou-frou almost reached our ears, so sociable for us was every sound of
her, in our far-off Rhineland. She was with her stature and shape the
finest possible person to carry clothes, and I thought of her, with a
revival of the old yearning envy, as now quite transcendently orphaned
and bereft, dowered, directed and equipped.

     Your hearts, I know, would have been melted if you had had a view
     of us this Sunday morning. I went directly after breakfast for the
     boys, and though H. had an "iron stomach-ache," as he called it, we
     went off together to that low wooded hill which the Aunt could see
     from her window when you were here, and walked about till
     dinner-time, H. being all the while in great pain. In one part we
     found a platform with a stone bench commanding a view of the whole
     valley, and, as we were rather tired, sat down on it, H. and Wilky
     each with a Once a Week, while I tried to draw the view in my
     pocket-book. We wondered what our beloved parents were doing at
     that moment, 11.30, and thought you must all have been in your
     salon, Alice at the window with her eyes fixed on her novel, but
     eating some rich fruit that Father has just brought in for her from
     the Palais Royal, and the lovely Mother and Aunt in armchairs,
     their hands crossed in front of them, listening to Father, who
     walks up and down talking of the superiority of America to these
     countries after all, and how much better it is we should have done
     with them. We wished, oh we wished we could have been with you to
     join in the conversation and partake of the fruit. We got up from
     the seat and went on with a heavy sigh, but in a way so fraternal,
     presenting such a sweet picture of brotherly unitedness and
     affection, that it would have done you good to see us.

     And so it is every day that we meet for our shorter walks and
     talks. The German gets on slowly, but I notice a very marked
     improvement in talking. I have not kept at it so hard this last
     week as before, and I prevent H. from working his eyes out, which
     he seems on the whole rather less inclined to do. I am going to
     read as much as I can the rest of the time we are here. It seems a
     mere process of soaking, requiring no mental effort, but only time
     and steady patience. My room is very comfortable now I've got used
     to it, and I have a pair of slippers of green plush heavy and
     strong enough to last all my life and then be worn by my children.
     The photograph of our Zoffingen group has come, which gives me a
     moustache big enough for three lifeguardsmen. Tell us something
     more about Mary Helen. How long does she expect to stay in Europe,
     and who is this Dr. Adams--the man she is engaged to? She directs
     me to write to her in his care--so that I wish you would ask her,
     as she says she hopes to meet me, whether I shall still address her
     as Miss James? Of course it would be painful, but I think I could
     do it if Adams weren't there. Let the delicious little grey-eyed
     Alice be locked up alone on the day after the receipt of this with
     paper and envelopes to write a letter unassisted, uncorrected and
     unpunctuated to her loving brothers, who would send her novels and
     peaches if they could. What a blessing it is to have such parents,
     such a perfect Mother and magnificent Father and dear good Aunt and
     splendid little Sister!

I may mention that Mary Helen was not "engaged" to the gentleman
above-mentioned, and was eventually to marry the late Alfred Grymes,
originally of Louisiana. Also that a letter subsequent to this,
apparently of the first days in September, sounds to his father the
first note of my brother's definite personal preference, as he seemed
lately and increasingly, though not in conditions markedly propitious,
to have become aware of it, for an adoption of the "artistic career." It
was an odd enough circumstance, in respect to the attested blood in our
veins, that no less than three of our father's children, with two of his
grandsons to add to these, and with a collateral addendum representing
seven, in all, of our grandfather's, William James's, descendants in
three generations, should have found the artistic career in general and
the painter's trade in particular irresistibly solicit them.

     I wish you would as you promised set down as clearly as you can on
     paper what your idea of the nature of Art _is_, because I do not,
     probably, understand it fully, and should like to have it presented
     in a form that I might think over at my leisure. I wish you would
     do so as fully as you conveniently can, so that I may ruminate
     it--and I won't say more about it till I have heard from you again.
     As for what your last letter did contain, what can I do but thank
     you for every word of it and assure you that they went to the right
     spot. Having such a Father with us, how can we be other than in
     some measure worthy of him?--if not perhaps as eminently so as the
     distance leads his fond heart to imagine. I never value him so much
     as when I am away from him. At home I see only his striking
     defects, but here he seems all perfection, and I wonder as I write
     why I didn't cherish him more when he was beside me. I beg darling
     old Mother's forgiveness too for the rude and dastardly way in
     which I snub her, and the Aunt for the impatience and violence I
     have always shown her. I shall be a perfect sherry-cobbler to both
     of them, and to the small Alice too, young as she may be for such
     treats.

     I have just got home from dining with the boys and their Humperts;
     where I found the Doctor as genial as ever and the two old ladies
     perfect characters for Dickens. They have been so shut out from the
     world and melting together so long by the kitchen fire that the
     minds of both have become fused into one, and then seem to
     constitute a sort of two-bodied individual. I never saw anything
     more curious than the way they sit mumbling together at the end of
     the table, each using simultaneously the same comment if anything
     said at our end strikes their ear. H. pegs away pretty stoutly, but
     I don't think you need worry about him. He and Wilky appear to get
     on in great harmony and enliven themselves occasionally by
     brotherly trials of strength, quite good-natured, in their room,
     when excess of labour has made them sleepy or heavy. In these
     sometimes one, sometimes the other is victorious. They often pay me
     a visit here while I am dressing, which of course is highly
     convenient--and I have more than once been with _them_ early enough
     to be present at Wilky's tumble out of bed and consequent
     awakening, with the call on the already-at-work H.: "Why the
     mischief didn't you stop me?" Wilky and I walked to Rolandseck
     yesterday afternoon, and after a furious race back to the station
     found ourselves too late for the train by a second. So we took a
     boat and rowed down here, which was delightful. We are going to put
     H. through a splashing good walk daily. A thousand thanks to the
     cherry-lipped, apricot-nosed, double-chinned little Sister for her
     strongly dashed-off letter, which inflamed the hearts of her lonely
     brothers with an intense longing to smack her celestial cheeks.




III


I have before me another communication of about the same moment, a
letter addressed to his father in Paris within that month; from which,
in spite of its lively interest as I hold, I cull nothing--and precisely
because of that interest, which prescribes for it a later appearance in
conditions in which it may be given entire. William is from this season
on, to my sense, so livingly and admirably reflected in his letters,
which were happily through much of his career both numerous and highly
characteristic, that I feel them particularly plead, in those cases in
which they most testify to his personal history, for the separate
gathered presentation that happily awaits them. _There_ best may figure
the serious and reasoned reply drawn from him by some assuredly
characteristic enough communication of our parent's own in respect to
his declared preference for a painter's life over any other. Lost is
this original and, in the light of later matters, sufficiently quaint
declaration, and lost the paternal protest answered by my brother from
Bonn and anything _but_ infelicitous, on its side, so far as the truer
apprehension went, under the showing of the time to come. The only
thing was that our father had a wonderful way of being essentially right
without being practically or, as it were, vulgarly, determinant, and
that this relegation of his grounds of contention to the sphere of the
non-immediate, the but indirectly urgent, from the point of view of the
thing really to _do_, couldn't but often cause impatience in young
breasts conscious of gifts or desires or ideals of which the very sign
and warrant, the truth they were known by, was that they were
susceptible of application. It was in no world of close application that
our wondrous parent moved, and his indifference at the first blush to
the manifestation of special and marketable talents and faculties,
restlessly outward purposes of whatever would-be "successful" sort, was
apt to be surpassable only by his delight subsequently taken in our
attested and visible results, the very fruits of application; as to
which the possibility, perhaps even the virtual guarantee, hadn't so
much left him cold in advance as made him adversely and "spiritually"
hot. The sense of that word was the most living thing in the world for
him--to the point that the spiritual simply meant to him the practical
and the successful, so far as he could get into touch with such
denominations, or so far, that is, as he could face them or care for
them _a priori_. Fortunately, as he had observational powers of the
happiest, perceptions--perceptions of character and value, perceptions
of relation and effect, perceptions in short of the whole--turned to the
ground sensibly beneath our feet, as well as a splendid, an
extraordinarily animated and, so far as he himself at least was
concerned, guiding and governing soul, justice and generosity always
eventually played up, the case worked itself happily out, and before we
knew it he had found it quite the rightest of all cases, while we on our
side had had the liveliest, and certainly the most amusing and
civilising, moral or, as he would have insisted, spiritual recreation by
the way.

My brother challenges him, with a beautiful deference, on the imputed
damage to what might be best in a man by the professional pursuit of
"art"--which he appears to have set forth with characteristic emphasis;
and I take the example for probably one of the rarest in all the so
copious annals of parental opposition to the aesthetic as distinguished
from some other more respectable course. What was marked in our father's
prime uneasiness in presence of any particular form of success we might,
according to our lights as then glimmering, propose to invoke was that
it bravely, or with such inward assurance, dispensed with any suggestion
of an alternative. What we were to do instead was just to _be_
something, something unconnected with specific doing, something free
and uncommitted, something finer in short than being _that_, whatever it
was, might consist of. The "career of art" has again and again been
deprecated and denounced, on the lips of anxiety or authority, as a
departure from the career of business, of industry and respectability,
the so-called regular life, but it was perhaps never elsewhere to know
dissuasion on the very ground of its failing to uplift the spirit in the
ways it most pretends to. I must in fairness add, however, that if the
uneasiness I here refer to continued, and quite by exception as compared
with the development of other like episodes, during the whole of my
brother's fortunately but little prolonged studio season, it was really
because more alternatives swarmed before our parent's eyes, in the
cause, than he could bring himself to simplify it by naming. He
apprehended ever so deeply and tenderly his eldest son's other
genius--as to which he was to be so justified; though this indeed was
not to alter the fact that when afterwards that subject went in, by a
wondrous reaction, for the pursuit of science, first of chemistry and
then of anatomy and physiology and medicine, with psychology and
philosophy at last piling up the record, the rich _malaise_ at every
turn characteristically betrayed itself, each of these surrenders being,
by the measure of them in the parental imagination, so comparatively
narrowing. That was the nearest approach to any plea for some other
application of the spirit--that they _were_ narrowing. When I myself,
later on, began to "write" it was breathed upon me with the finest
bewildering eloquence, with a power of suggestion in truth which I
fairly now count it a gain to have felt play over me, that this too was
narrowing. On the subsequent history of which high paradox no better
comment could occur to me than my find of a passage in a letter long
subsequently addressed to Mr. James T. Fields, then proprietor and
editor of the Atlantic Monthly magazine--a letter under date of May 1868
and referring clearly to some published remarks on a certain young
writer which did violence to the blessedly quick paternal prejudice.

     I had no sooner left your sanctum yesterday than I was afflicted to
     remember how I had profaned it by my unmeasured talk about poor H.
     Please forget it utterly. I don't know how it is with better men,
     but the parental sentiment is so fiendish a thing with me that if
     anyone attempt to slay my young, especially in a clandestine way,
     or out of a pious regard (_e.g_.) to the welfare of the souls
     comprised in the diocese of the Atlantic, I can't help devoting him
     bag and baggage to the infernal gods. I am not aware of my animus
     until I catch, as yesterday, a courteous ear; then the unholy fire
     flames forth at such a rate as to leave me no doubt on reflection
     where it was originally lighted.

Almost all my dear father is there, making the faded page to-day
inexpressibly touching to me; his passionate tenderness, his infinite
capacity for reaction on reaction, a force in him fruitful in so many
more directions than any high smoothness of _parti-pris_ could be, and
his beautiful fresh individual utterance, always so stamped with the
very whole of him. The few lines make for me, after all the years, a
sort of silver key, so exquisitely fitting, to the treasure of living
intercourse, of a domestic air quickened and infinitely coloured,
comprised in all our younger time. The renewed sense of which, however,
has carried me for the moment too far from the straighter line of my
narrative.

The author of the young letter of which I have deferred presentation met
in Paris, shortly after that date, the other party to the discussion;
and the impression of the endless day of our journey, my elder and my
younger brothers' and mine, from Bonn to that city, has scarcely faded
from me. The railway service was so little then what it has become that
I even marvel at our having made our connections between our early rise
in the Bonn-Gasse and our midnight tumble into bed at the Hotel des
Trois Empereurs in the Place du Palais Royal; a still-felt rapture, a
revelation of the Parisian idea of bed after the rude German conception,
our sore discipline for so many weeks. I remember Cologne and its
cathedral almost in the bland dawn, and our fresh start thence for
Strasbourg, now clearly recognised, alas, as a start back to America, to
which it had been of a sudden settled that we were, still with a fine
inconsequence, to return. We had seen Cologne cathedral by excursion
from Bonn, but we saw Strasbourg, to my sorrow until a far later
occasion soothed it, only as a mild monster behind bars, that is above
chimneys, housetops and fortifications; a loss not made up to me by
other impressions or particulars, vivid and significant as I found
myself none the less supposing several of these. Those were the
September days in which French society, so far as it was of the Empire
at least, moved more or less in its mass upon Homburg and Baden-Baden;
and we met it in expressive samples, and in advance and retreat, during
our incessant stops, those long-time old stops, unknown to the modern
age, when everyone appeared to alight and walk about with the animation
of prisoners suddenly pardoned, and ask for conveniences, and clamour
for food, and get mixed with the always apparently still dustier people
of opposite trains drawn up for the same purposes. We appeared to be
concerned with none but first-class carriages, as an effect of which our
own was partly occupied, the livelong day, by the _gens_ of a noble
French house as to which we thus had frequent revelations--a pair of
footmen and a lady's maid, types of servile impudence taking its ease,
who chattered by the hour for our wonderstruck ears, treating them to
their first echo of the strange underworld, the sustaining vulgarity, of
existences classified as "great." They opened vistas, and I remember how
when, much later, I came to consider the designed picture, first in
Edmond About and then in Alphonse Daudet, of fifty features symptomatic
of the social pace at which the glittering regime hurried to its end,
there came back to me the breath of this sidewind of the frenzied dance
that we had caught during those numerous and so far from edifying hours
in our fine old deep-seated compartment. The impression, I now at any
rate perfectly recover, was one that could feed full enough any optimism
of the appointedly modest condition. It was true that Madame la
Marquise, who was young and good-natured and pretty without beauty, and
unmistakably "great," exhaling from afar, as I encouraged myself to
imagine, the scented air of the Tuileries, came on occasion and looked
in on us and smiled, and even pouted, through her elegant patience; so
that she at least, I recollect, caused to swim before me somehow such a
view of happy privilege at the highest pitch as made me sigh the more
sharply, even if the less professedly, for our turning our backs on the
complex order, the European, fresh to me still, in which contrasts
flared and flourished and through which discrimination could
unexhaustedly riot--pointing so many more morals, withal, if that was
the benefit it was supposed to be, than we should find pretexts for "on
the other side." We were to fall as soon as we were at home again to
reading the Revue des Deux Mondes--though doubtless again I should speak
here, with any emphasis, but for myself; my chin, in Europe, had scarce
risen to the level of that publication; but at Newport in Rhode Island,
our next following place of sojourn, I speedily shot up so as quite to
bend down to it: it took its place therewith as the very headspring of
culture, a mainstay in exile, and as opening wide in especial the doors
of that fictive portrayal of a society which put a price, for the
brooding young reader, on cases, on _cadres_, in the Revue parlance,
already constituted and propitiously lighted. Then it was that the
special tension of the dragged-out day from Cologne to Paris proved, on
the absurdest scale, a preparation, justified itself as a vivid point of
reference: I was to know what the high periodical meant when I
encountered in its _etudes de moeurs_ the blue-chinned corruptible,
not to say corrupt, _larbin_ and the smart soubrette; it was above all
a blessing to feel myself, in the perusal of M. Octave Feuillet, an
education, as I supposed, of the taste, not at a marked disadvantage;
since who but the Petite Comtesse herself had swung her crinoline in and
out of my prospect, or, to put it better, of my preserved past, on one
of my occasions of acutest receptivity?

The truth was that acute, that quite desperate receptivity set in for
me, under a law of its own--may really be described as having quite
raged for me--from the moment our general face, by the restless parental
decree (born not a little of parental homesickness and reinforced by a
theory of that complaint on our own part, we having somehow in Europe
"no companions," none but mere parents themselves), had been turned
again to the quarter in which there would assuredly be welcomes and
freedoms and unchecked appropriations, not to say also cousins, of both
sexes and of a more and more engaging time of life, cousins kept and
tended and adorned for us in our absence, together with the solicitation
for our favour of possible, though oh so just barely possible, habitats
before which the range of Europe paled; but which, nevertheless, to my
aching fancy, meant premature abdication, sacrifice and, in one dreadful
word, failure. I had had cousins, naturally, in the countries we were
quitting, but to a limited degree; yet I think I already knew I had had
companions in as full a measure as any I was still to know--inasmuch as
my imagination made out one, in the complex order and the coloured air,
almost wherever I turned; and, inasmuch as, further, to live by the
imagination was to live almost only in that way, so to foresee the
comparative, not to say the absolute, absence of tonic accent in the
appearances complacently awaiting me, as well as to forecast in these
appearances, at the best, a greater paucity, was really to enjoy a sharp
prevision of dearth. Certain it is that those supreme moments of Paris,
those after-days at the Trois Empereurs, were to flush for me, as they
ebbed, with images and visions; judged by any achieved act of possession
I hadn't assuredly much to give up, but intensity of sentiment, resting
on a good disposition, makes for its own sake the most of opportunity,
and I buried my associations, which had been in a manner till lately my
hopes as well, with all decent dignity and tenderness. These more or
less secret obsequies lent to our further brief delay a quality of
suppressed excitement; the "old-world" hours were numbered too
dreadfully--had shrunk but to a handful: I had waked up to that, as with
a passionate even if private need for gathering in and saving, on the
morrow of our reaching our final sticking-place: I had slipped from my
so cushioned sleep, my canopied couch, to hang, from the balcony of our
quatrieme, my brothers' and mine, over that Place du Palais Royal and up
against that sculptured and storied facade of the new Louvre which
seemed to me then to represent, in its strength, the capacity and
chiselled rim of some such potent vivifying cup as it might have been
given us, under a happier arrangement, to taste now in its fulness and
with a braver sense for it. Over against us on the great palace wall, as
I make out--if not for that occasion then for some other--were statues
of heroes, Napoleon's young generals, Hoche, Marceau, Desaix or whoever,
such a galaxy as never was or should ever be again for splendid
monumental reference; and what it somehow came to was that here massed
itself the shining second Empire, over which they stood straight aloft
and on guard, like archangels of the sword, and that the whole thing was
a high-pitched wonder and splendour, which we had already, in our small
gaping way, got into a sort of relation with and which would have ever
so much more ever so thrillingly to give us. What it would give us
loomed but vaguely enough out of the great hum and the great toned
perspective, and withal the great noble expense, of which we had
constant reminder; but that we were present at something it would be
always after accounted a privilege to have been concerned with, and that
we were perversely and inconsiderately dropping out of it, and for a
reason, so far as there might be a reason, that was scarcely less than
strange--all this loomed large to me as our interval shrank, and I even
ask myself before the memory of it whether I was ever again in the later
and more encompassing and accommodating years to have in those places so
rich a weight of consciousness to carry or so grand a presumption of
joy. The presumption so boldly entertained was, if you please, of what
the whole thing meant. It meant, immensely, the glittering regime, and
that meant in turn, prodigiously, something that would probably never be
meant quite to any such tune again: so much one positively and however
absurdly said to one's self as one stood up on the high balcony to the
great insolence of the Louvre and to all the history, all the glory
again and all the imposed applause, not to say worship, and not to speak
of the implied inferiority, on the part of everything else, that it
represented. And the sense was of course not less while one haunted at
odd hours the arcades and glass galleries of the Palais Royal close at
hand--as if to store up, for all the world, treasures of impression that
might be gnawed, in seasons or places of want, like winter pears or a
squirrel's hoard of nuts, and so perhaps keep one alive, as to one's
most vital faculty above-mentioned, till one should somehow or other be
able to scramble back.

The particular ground for our defection, which I obscurely pronounced
mistaken, was that since William was to embrace the artistic career--and
freedom for this experiment had been after all, as I repeat that it was
always in like cases to be, not in the least grudgingly granted him--our
return to America would place him in prompt and happy relation to
William Hunt, then the most distinguished of our painters as well as one
of the most original and delightful of men, and who had cordially
assured us that he would welcome such a pupil. This was judged among us
at large, other considerations aiding, a sound basis for action; but
never surely had so odd a motive operated for a break with the spell of
Paris. We named the motive generally, I think, and to the credit of our
earnest good faith, with confidence--and I am of course not sure how
often our dear father may not explicatively have mentioned the shy fact
that he himself in any case had gradually ceased to "like" Europe. This
affects me at present as in the highest degree natural: it was to be his
fortune for the rest of his life to find himself, as a worker in his own
field and as to what he held most dear, scantly enough heeded, reported
or assimilated even in his own air, no brisk conductor at any time of
his remarkable voice; but in Europe his isolation had been utter--he had
there had the sense of playing his mature and ardent thought over great
dense constituted presences and opaque surfaces that could by their very
nature scarce give back so much as a shudder. No more admirable case of
apostolic energy combined with philosophic patience, of constancy of
conviction and solitary singleness of production unperturbed, can I well
conceive; and I certainly came later on to rejoice in his having had
after a certain date to walk, if there was a preference, rather in the
thin wilderness than in the thick. I dare say that when we returned to
America toward the end of 1860, some five years and a half after our
departure, it may have been with illusions not a few for him about the
nature of the desert, or in other words about the degree of sensibility
of the public, there awaiting him; but the pretext given him by his so
prized and admired eldest son was at the worst, and however eccentric
our action, inspiring: I alone of the family perhaps made bold not to
say quite directly or literally that we went home to learn to paint.
People stared or laughed when we said it, and I disliked their thinking
us so simple--though dreaming too a little perhaps that they might have
been struck with our patriotism. This however conveyed but a chill the
more--since we didn't in the least go to our friend, who had been
Couture's and Frere's pupil, who had spent years in France and of whom
it was the common belief that you couldn't for the life of you tell him
from a French painter, because he was patriotic; but because he was
distinguished and accomplished, charming and kind, and above all known
to us and thereby in a manner guaranteed. He looked, as people get to
look under such enjoyed or even suffered exposures, extremely like a
Frenchman, and, what was noteworthy, still more like a sculptor of the
race than a painter; which doubtless had to do with my personally,
though I hope, in present cultivated anxiety, not too officiously,
sighing at all the explanation the whole thing took. I am bound to add
none the less that later on, repatriated and, as to my few contacts,
reassured, I found this amount, the apprehension of which had haunted
me, no great charge; and seem even to make out that for the first six
months of our Newport phase at least we might have passed for strikingly
wise. For here was, beyond doubt, a genial, an admirable master; and
here also--at such a rate did sparse individuals, scattered notches in
the long plain stick, count--was John La Farge. Here moreover--here and
everywhere about me, before we could quite turn round--was the War,
with its infinite, its truly quite humiliating correction of my (as I
now can but so far call it) fatuous little confidence that
"appearances," on the native scene, would run short. They were in the
event, taking one thing with another, never to hold out for me as they
held during those four years. Wondrous this force in them as I at
present look back--wondrous I mean in view of that indirectness of its
play which my conditions confined me, with such private, though I must
add, alas, such helplessly unapplied resentment, to knowing it by. If
the force was great the attenuation of its reach was none the less
preappointed and constant; so that the case must have come back again
but to the degree--call it too, frankly, the force--of one's
sensibility, or in other words the blest resource, the supremely
breatheable and thereby nourishing and favouring air of one's
imaginative life. There were of a truth during that time probably more
appearances at one's command in the way of felt aspects, images,
apprehended living relations and impressions of the stress of life, than
during any other season one was to know; only doubtless with more of the
work of their figuring to their utmost, their giving all they could, to
do by one's self and, in the last resort, deep within one's breast. The
point to be made just here, in any case, is that if we had not recrossed
the sea, by way, rather, of such an anticlimax, to William Hunt, we
should certainly with brief delay have found ourselves doing it, on the
first alarm of War, for the experience I thus too summarily glance at
and which I don't pretend to speak of as all my own.




IV


Newport, with repatriation accepted, would have been on many grounds
inevitable, I think--as it was to remain inevitable for several years,
and this quite apart from William's having to paint; since if I spoke
just now of the sweep of our view, from over the water, of a continent,
or well-nigh, waiting to receive us, the eligibility of its innumerable
sites was a matter much more of our simplified, our almost distressfully
uninvolved and unconnected state than of the inherent virtue of this,
that or the other particular group of local conditions. Our parents had
for us no definite project but to be liberally "good"--in other words so
good that the presumption of our being so would literally operate
anywhere and anyhow, would really amount in itself to a sort of situated
state, a sufficient prime position, and leave other circumstances
comparatively irrelevant. What would infallibly have occurred at the
best, however, was what did punctually happen--its having to be
definitely gathered that, though we might apparently be good, as I say,
almost on any ground, there was but one place in which we should even
at a restricted pitch be well: Newport imposed itself at that period to
so remarkable a degree as the one right residence, in all our great
country, for those tainted, under whatever attenuations, with the
quality and the effect of detachment. The effect of detachment was the
fact of the experience of Europe. Detachment might of course have come
from many causes, but it truly came in most cases but from one, though
that a fairly merciless: it came from the experience of Europe, and I
think was on the whole regarded as--what it could only have been in the
sphere of intimacy and secrecy felt to be--without an absolute remedy.
As comparatively remedial Newport none the less figured, and this for
sundry reasons into the detail of which I needn't go. Its rare
distinction and precious attribute was that, being a watering-place, a
refuge from summer heats, it had also, were the measure considerably
stretched, possibilities of hibernation. We could, under stress, brave
there the period from November to June; and it was to be under stress
not to know what else to do. That was the pinch to which Europe reduced
you; insidiously, fatally disconnected, you could but make the best, as
a penalty, of the one marked point of reattachment. The philosophy of
all of which was that to confess to disconnection was to confess by the
same stroke to leisure--which involved also an admission, however
rueful at once and deprecatory, of what might still at that time pass in
our unregenerate country for something in the nature of "means." You had
had the means, that is, to _become_, so awkwardly, detached--for you
might then do that cheaply; but the whole basis of the winter life
there, of that spare semblance of the Brighton life, the Folkestone
life, the Bath or the Cheltenham or the Leamington life, was that your
occupation or avocation should be vague enough; or that you shouldn't in
other words be, like everyone you might know save a dozen or so at the
most, in business. I remember well how when we were all young together
we had, under pressure of the American ideal in that matter, then so
rigid, felt it tasteless and even humiliating that the head of our
little family was _not_ in business, and that even among our relatives
on each side we couldn't so much as name proudly anyone who was--with
the sole exception of our maternal uncle Robertson Walsh, who looked,
ever so benevolently, after our father's "affairs," happily for us. Such
had never been the case with the father of any boy of our acquaintance;
the business in which the boy's father gloriously _was_ stood forth
inveterately as the very first note of our comrade's impressiveness.
_We_ had no note of that sort to produce, and I perfectly recover the
effect of my own repeated appeal to our parent for some presentable
account of him that would prove us respectable. Business alone was
respectable--if one meant by it, that is, the calling of a lawyer, a
doctor or a minister (we never spoke of clergymen) as well; I think that
if we had had the Pope among us we should have supposed the Pope in
business, just as I remember my friend Simpson's telling me crushingly,
at one of our New York schools, on my hanging back with the fatal truth
about our credentials, that the author of _his_ being (we spoke no more
of "governors" than we did of "parsons") was in the business of a
stevedore. That struck me as a great card to play--the word was fine and
mysterious; so that "What shall we tell them you _are_, don't you see?"
could but become on our lips at home a more constant appeal. It seemed
wantonly to be prompted for our father, and indeed greatly to amuse him,
that he should put us off with strange unheard-of attributions, such as
would have made us ridiculous in our special circles; his "Say I'm a
philosopher, say I'm a seeker for truth, say I'm a lover of my kind, say
I'm an author of books if you like; or, best of all, just say I'm a
Student," saw us so very little further. Abject it certainly appeared to
be reduced to the "student" plea; and I must have lacked even the
confidence of my brother Bob, who, challenged, in my hearing and the
usual way, was ready not only with the fact that our parent "wrote," but
with the further fact that he had written _Lectures and Miscellanies
James_. I think that when we settled awhile at Newport there was no one
there who had written but Mr. Henry T. Tuckerman, a genial and graceful
poet of the Artless Age, as it might still be called in spite of Poe and
Hawthorne and Longfellow and Lowell, the most characteristic works of
the first and the two last of whom had already appeared; especially as
those most characteristic of Mr. Tuckerman referred themselves to a past
sufficiently ample to have left that gentleman with a certain deafness
and a glossy wig and a portly presence and the reputation, positively,
of the most practised and desired of diners-out. He was to be recognised
at once as a social value on a scene not under that rubric densely
peopled; he constituted indeed such a note as would help to keep others
of the vague definability in countenance. Clearly indeed it might happen
that an association of vaguenesses would arrive in time, by fondly
cleaving together, at the semblance of a common identity; the nature of
the case then demanding, however, that they should be methodically
vague, take their stand on it and work it for all it was worth. That in
truth was made easy by the fact that what I have called our common
disconnectedness positively projected and proclaimed a void;
disconnected from business we could only be connected with the negation
of it, which had as yet no affirmative, no figurative side. This
probably would come; figures, in the void, would one by one spring up;
but what would be thus required for them was that the void should be
ample and, as it were, established. Not to be afraid of it they would
have to feel it clear of everything and everyone they knew in the air
actually peopled.

William Hunt, for that matter, was already a figure unmmistakable,
superficially speaking unsurpassable, just as John La Farge, already
mentioned, was so soon to prove to be. They were only two indeed, but
they argued the possibility; and so the great thing, as I say, was that,
to stand out, they should have margin and light. We couldn't all be
figures--on a mere margin, the margin of business, and in the light of
the general wonder of our being anything, anything _there_; but we could
at least understand the situation and cultivate the possibilities, watch
and protect the germs. This consciousness, this aim or ideal, had after
all its own intensity--it burned with a pure flame: there is a special
joy, clearly, in the hopeful conversion of the desert into the garden,
of thinness into thickness, a joy to which the conversion of the thick
into the mere dense, of the free into the rank or the close, perhaps
gives no clue. The great need that Newport met was that of a basis of
reconciliation to "America" when the habit, the taking for granted, of
America had been broken or intermitted: it would be hard to say of what
subtle secret or magic the place was possessed toward this end, and by a
common instinct, I think, we didn't attempt to formulate it--we let it
alone, only looking at each other hard, only moving gently, on the brave
hypothesis, only in fine deprecating too rude and impatient, too
precipitate a doubt of the spell that perhaps might work if we waited
and prayed. We did wait and pray, accordingly, scantly-served though the
board we might often have felt we had sat down to, and there was a fair
company of us to do so, friendliest among whom to our particular effort
was my father's excellent friend of many years Edmund Tweedy, already
named in pages preparatory to these and who, with his admirable wife,
presented himself as our main introducer and initiator. He had married,
while we were all young in New York together, a manner of Albany cousin,
Mary Temple the elder, aunt of the younger,[3] and had by this time
"been through" more than anything, more than everything, of which there
could be question for ourselves. The pair had on their marriage gone at
once to Europe to live, had put in several years of Italy and yet had at
last, particular reasons operating, returned to their native, that is to
sterner, realities; those as to which it was our general theory, of so
touching a candour as I look back to it, that they offered themselves at
Newport in a muffling mitigating air. The air, material, moral, social,
was in fact clear and clean to a degree that might well have left us but
dazed at the circumjacent blankness; yet as to that I hasten to add too
that the blowing out of our bubble, the planting of our garden, the
correction of our thinness, the discovery, under stress, of such scraps
of colour and conversation, such saving echoes and redeeming references
as might lurk for us in each other, all formed in themselves an active,
and might at last even grow to suggest an absolutely bustling, process.

I come back with a real tenderness of memory for instance to that
felicity of the personal, the social, the "literary and artistic,"
almost really the romantic, identity responding, after a fashion quite
to bring tears to the eyes, in proportion as it might have seemed to
feel by some divine insufflation what it practically could stand for.
What should one call this but the brave triumph of values conscious of
having to be almost missionary? There were many such that in "Europe"
hadn't had to be missionary at all; in Europe, as it were, one
hadn't--comparatively--seen, if not the forest for the trees, then the
trees for the forest; whereas on this other great vacuous level every
single stem seemed to enjoy for its distinction quite the totality of
the daylight and to rise into the air with a gladness that was itself a
grace. Of some of the personal importances that acted in that way I
should with easier occasion have more to say--I shall as it is have
something; but there could perhaps be no better sample of the effect of
sharpness with which the forces of culture might emerge than, say, the
fairly golden glow of romance investing the mere act of perusal of the
Revue des Deux Mondes. There was the charm--though I grant of course
that I speak here all for myself, constitutionally and, face to face
_with_ myself, quite shamelessly an inquirer, a hunter, for charm--that
whereas the spell cast had more or less inevitable limits in the world
to which such a quality as the best things of the Revue, such a
performance of the intellectual and expressional engagement as these
suggested, was native and was thereby relative to other generally like
phenomena, so it represented among _us_, where it had to take upon
itself what I have already alluded to as all the work, far more than its
face value. Few of the forces about us reached as yet the level of
representation (even if here and there some might have been felt as
trying for it); and this made all the difference. Anything suggestive or
significant, anything promising or interesting, anything in the least
finely charming above all, immensely counted, claimed tendance and
protection, almost claimed, or at any rate enjoyed, worship; as for that
matter anything finely charming does, quite rightly, anywhere. But our
care, our privilege, on occasion our felt felicity, was to foster every
symptom and breathe encouragement to every success; to hang over the
tenderest shoots that betrayed the principle of growth--or in other
words to read devoutly into everything, and as straight as possible, the
very fullest meaning we might hope it would learn to have. So at least
quite at first--and so again very considerably after the large interval
and grim intermission represented by the War; during which interest and
quality, to say nothing of quantity, at the highest pitch, ceased in any
degree to fail us, and what might be "read into" almost any aspect
without exception paled in the light of what was inevitably read out
from it. It must be added at the same time that with its long duration
the War fell into its place as part of life at large, and that when it
was over various other things still than the love of peace were found to
have grown.

Immediately, at any rate, the Albany cousins, or a particular group of
them, began again to be intensely in question for us; coloured in due
course with reflections of the War as their lives, not less than our
own, were to become--and coloured as well too, for all sorts of notation
and appreciation, from irrepressible private founts. Mrs. Edmund Tweedy,
bereft of her own young children, had at the time I speak of opened her
existence, with the amplest hospitality, to her four orphaned nieces,
who were also our father's and among whom the second in age, Mary Temple
the younger, about in her seventeenth year when she thus renewed her
appearance to our view, shone with vividest lustre, an essence that
preserves her still, more than half a century from the date of her
death, in a memory or two where many a relic once sacred has
comparatively yielded to time. Most of those who knew and loved, I was
going to say adored, her have also yielded--which is a reason the more
why thus much of her, faint echo from too far off though it prove,
should be tenderly saved. If I have spoken of the elements and presences
round about us that "counted," Mary Temple was to count, and in more
lives than can now be named, to an extraordinary degree; count as a
young and shining apparition, a creature who owed to the charm of her
every aspect (her aspects were so many!) and the originality, vivacity,
audacity, generosity, of her spirit, an indescribable grace and
weight--if one might impute weight to a being so imponderable in common
scales. Whatever other values on our scene might, as I have hinted,
appear to fail, she was one of the first order, in the sense of the
immediacy of the impression she produced, and produced altogether as by
the play of her own light spontaneity and curiosity--not, that is, as
through a sense of such a pressure and such a motive, or through a care
for them, in others. "Natural" to an effect of perfect felicity that we
were never to see surpassed is what I have already praised all the
Albany _cousinage_ of those years for being; but in none of the company
was the note so clear as in this rarest, though at the same tune
symptomatically or ominously palest, flower of the stem; who was natural
at more points and about more things, with a greater range of freedom
and ease and reach of horizon than any of the others dreamed of. They
had that way, delightfully, with the small, after all, and the common
matters--while she had it with those too, but with the great and rare
ones over and above; so that she was to remain for us the very figure
and image of a felt interest in life, an interest as magnanimously
far-spread, or as familiarly and exquisitely fixed, as her splendid
shifting sensibility, moral, personal, nervous, and having at once such
noble flights and such touchingly discouraged drops, such graces of
indifference and inconsequence, might at any moment determine. She was
really to remain, for our appreciation, the supreme case of a taste for
life as life, as personal living; of an endlessly active and yet somehow
a careless, an illusionless, a sublimely forewarned curiosity about it:
something that made her, slim and fair and quick, all straightness and
charming tossed head, with long light and yet almost sliding steps and a
large light postponing, renouncing laugh, the very muse or amateur
priestess of rash speculation. To express her in the mere terms of her
restless young mind, one felt from the first, was to place her, by a
perversion of the truth, under the shadow of female "earnestness"--for
which she was much too unliteral and too ironic; so that, superlatively
personal and yet as independent, as "off" into higher spaces, at a
touch, as all the breadth of her sympathy and her courage could send
her, she made it impossible to say whether she was just the most moving
of maidens or a disengaged and dancing flame of thought. No one to come
after her could easily seem to show either a quick inward life or a
brave, or even a bright, outward, either a consistent contempt for
social squalors or a very marked genius for moral reactions. She had in
her brief passage the enthusiasm of humanity--more, assuredly, than any
charming girl who ever circled, and would fain have continued to circle,
round a ballroom. This kept her indeed for a time more interested in the
individual, the immediate human, than in the race or the social order at
large; but that, on the other hand, made her ever so restlessly, or
quite inappeasably, "psychologic." The psychology of others, in her
shadow--I mean their general resort to it--could only for a long time
seem weak and flat and dim, above all not at all amusing. She burned
herself out; she died at twenty-four.

At the risk perhaps of appearing to make my own scant adventure the
pivot of that early Newport phase I find my reference to William Hunt
and his truly fertilising action on our common life much conditioned by
the fact that, since W. J., for the first six months or so after our
return, daily and devotedly haunted his studio, I myself did no less,
for a shorter stretch, under the irresistible contagion. The clearness
of the whole passage for me, the clearest impression, above all, of the
vivid and whimsical master, an inspirer, during a period that began a
little later on, of numberless devotions and loyalties, is what this
fond memory of my permitted contact and endeavour still has to give me.
Pupils at that time didn't flock to his gates--though they were to do
so in Boston, during years, later on; an earnest lady or two, Boston
precursors, hovered and flitted, but I remember for the rest (and I
speak of a short period) no thorough-going eleves save John La Farge and
my brother. I remember, for that matter, sitting quite in solitude in
one of the grey cool rooms of the studio, which thus comes back to me as
having several, and thinking that I really might get to copy casts
rather well, and might in particular see myself congratulated on my
sympathetic rendering of the sublime uplifted face of Michael Angelo's
"Captive" in the Louvre. I sat over this effort and a few others for
long quiet hours, and seem to feel myself again aware, just to that
tune, of how happy I ought to be. No one disturbed me; the earnest
workers were elsewhere; I had a chamber of the temple all to myself,
with immortal forms and curves, with shadows beautiful and right,
waiting there on blank-eyed faces for me to prove myself not helpless;
and with two or three of Hunt's own fine things, examples of his work in
France, transporting me at once and defying. I believed them great
productions--thought in especial endless good of the large canvas of the
girl with her back presented while she fills her bucket at the spout in
the wall, against which she leans with a tension of young muscle, a
general expression of back, beneath her dress, and with the pressure of
her raised and extended bare arm and flattened hand: this, to my
imagination, could only become the prize of some famous collection, the
light of some museum, for all the odd circumstance that it was company
just then for muddled me and for the queer figures projected by my
crayon. Frankly, intensely--that was the great thing--these were hours
of Art, art definitely named, looking me full in the face and accepting
my stare in return--no longer a tacit implication or a shy subterfuge,
but a flagrant unattenuated aim. I had somehow come into the temple by
the back door, the _porte d'honneur_ opened on another side, and I could
never have believed much at best in the length of my stay; but I was
there, day by day, as much as any one had ever been, and with a sense of
what it "meant" to be there that the most accredited of pupils couldn't
have surpassed; so that the situation to this extent really hummed with
promise. I fail, I confess, to reconstitute the relation borne by my
privilege to that of tuition "in the higher branches," to which it was
quite time I should have mounted, enjoyed at the hands of the Reverend
William C. Leverett, curate to the then "rector," Doctor Mercer, of that
fine old high-spired Trinity Church in which had throbbed, from long
before the Revolution as they used to say, the proud episcopal heart of
Newport; and feel indeed that I must pretty well have shaken off, as a
proved absurd predicament, all submission to my dilemma: all submission
of the mind, that is, for if my share of Mr. Leverett's attention was
less stinted than my share of William Hunt's (and neither had much
duration) it failed to give me the impression that anything worth naming
had opened out to me, whereas in the studio I was at the threshold of a
world.

It became itself indeed on the spot a rounded satisfying world, the
place did; enclosed within the grounds, as we then regarded them, of the
master's house, circled about with numerous trees, as we then counted
them, and representing a more direct exclusion of vulgar sounds, false
notes and harsh reminders than I had ever known. I fail in the least to
make out where the real work of the studio went forward; it took
somewhere else its earnest course, and our separation--mine from the
real workers, my indulged yet ignored state--kept me somehow the safer,
as if I had taken some mild and quite harmless drug through which
external rubs would reach me from a distance, but which left my own
rubbing power, not to say my own smearing or smutching, quite free. Into
the world so beautifully valid the master would occasionally walk,
inquiring as to what I had done or would do, but bearing on the
question with an easy lightness, a friendliness of tact, a neglect of
conclusion, which it touches me still to remember. It was impossible to
me at that time not so to admire him that his just being to such an
extent, as from top to toe and in every accent and motion, the living
and communicating Artist, made the issue, with his presence, quite cease
to be of how one got on or fell short, and become instead a mere
self-sacrificing vision of the picturesque itself, the constituted
picturesque or treated "subject," in efficient figure, personal form,
vivid human style. I then felt the man the great mystery could mark with
its stamp, when wishing the mark unmistakable, teach me just in himself
the most and best about any art that I should come to find benignantly
concerned with me, for moments however smilingly scant. William Hunt,
all muscular spareness and brownness and absence of waste, all flagrant
physiognomy, brave bony arch of handsome nose, upwardness of strong
eyebrow and glare, almost, of eyes that both recognised and wondered,
strained eyes that played over questions as if they were objects and
objects as if they were questions, might have stood, to the life, for
Don Quixote, if we could associate with that hero a far-spreading beard
already a little grizzled, a manner and range of gesture and broken form
of discourse that was like a restless reference to a palette and that
seemed to take for granted, all about, canvases and models and charming,
amusing things, the "tremendously interesting" in the seen bit or caught
moment, and the general unsayability, in comparison, of anything else.
He never would have perched, it must be added, on Rosinante--he was
fonder of horses even than of the method of Couture, and though with a
shade of resemblance, as all simple and imaginative men have, to the
knight of La Mancha, he least suggested that analogy as he passed in a
spinning buggy, his beard flying, behind a favourite trotter. But what
he perhaps most puts before me to-day is the grim truth of the merciless
manner in which a living and hurrying public educates itself, making and
devouring in a day reputations and values which represent something of
the belief in it that it has had in _them_, but at the memory of which
we wince, almost to horror, as at the legend of victims who have been
buried alive. Oh the cold grey luminaries hung about in odd corners and
back passages, and that we have known shining and warm! They serve at
the most now as beacons warning any step not to come _that_ way,
whatever it does; the various attested ways it may not with felicity
come growing thus all the while in number.

John La Farge became at once, in breaking on our view, quite the most
interesting person we knew, and for a time remained so; he became a
great many other things beside--a character, above all, if there ever
was one; but he opened up to us, though perhaps to me in particular, who
could absorb all that was given me on those suggestive lines, prospects
and possibilities that made the future flush and swarm. His foreignness,
which seemed great at that time, had gained a sharper accent from a long
stay made in France, where both on his father's and his mother's side he
had relations, and had found, to our hovering envy, all sorts of
charming occasions. He had spent much time in Brittany, among kindred
the most romantically interesting, people and places whose very names,
the De Nanteuils of Saint-Pol-de-Leon, I seem to remember for instance,
cast a spell across comparatively blank Newport sands; he had brought
home with him innumerable water-colour sketches, Breton peasants,
costumes, interiors, bits of villages and landscape; and I supposed him
to have had on such ground the most delightful adventure in the world.
How was one not to suppose it at a time when the best of one's
education, such as that was, had begun to proceed almost altogether by
the aid of the Revue des Deux Mondes, a periodical that supplied to us
then and for several years after (or again I can but speak for myself)
all that was finest in the furniture and the fittings of romance? Those
beginnings of Newport were our first contact with New England--a New
England already comparatively subdued and sophisticated, a Samson shorn
of his strength by the shears of the Southern, and more particularly of
the New York, Delilah; the result of which, still speaking for myself,
was a prompt yearning and reaching out, on the part of the spirit, for
some corrective or antidote to whatever it was that might be going, in
the season to come, least charmingly or informingly or inspiringly to
press upon us. I well recall my small anxious foresight as to a
required, an indispensable provision against either assault or dearth,
as if the question might be of standing an indefinite siege; and how a
certain particular capacious closet in a house we were presently to
occupy took on to my fond fancy the likeness at once of a store of
edibles, both substantial and succulent, and of a hoard of ammunition
for the defence of any breach--the Revue accumulating on its shelves at
last in serried rows and really building up beneath us with its slender
firm salmon-coloured blocks an alternative sphere of habitation. There
will be more to say of this, bristling or rather flowering with precious
particulars, if I stray so far; but the point for the moment was that
one would have pushed into that world of the closet, one would have
wandered or stumbled about in it quite alone if it hadn't been that La
Farge was somehow always in it with us. That was in those years his
admirable function and touch--that he affected me as knowing his way
there as absolutely no one else did, and even as having risen of a
sudden before us to bear us this quickening company. Nobody else, not
another creature, was free of it to that tune; the whole mid-century New
England--as a rough expression of what the general consciousness most
signified--was utterly out of it; which made, you see, a most unequal
division of our little working, or our totally cogitative, universe into
the wondrous esoteric quarter peopled just by us and our friend and our
common references, and the vast remainder of the public at large, the
public of the innumerably uninitiated even when apparently of the most
associated.

All of which is but a manner of expressing the intensity, as I felt it,
of our Franco-American, our most completely accomplished friend's
presence among us. Out of the safe rich home of the Revue, which opened
away into the vastness of visions, he practically stepped, and into it,
with all his ease, he mysteriously returned again: he came nearer to
being what might have been meant concretely throughout it all--though
meant most of course in its full-charged stream of fiction--than any
other visiting figure. The stream of fiction was so constant an appeal
to the charmed, by which I mean of course the predisposed, mind that it
fairly seemed at moments to overflow its banks and take to its bosom any
recognised, any congruous creature or thing that might happen to be
within reach. La Farge was of the type--the "European," and this gave
him an authority for me that it verily took the length of years to
undermine; so that as the sense of those first of them in especial comes
back to me I find it difficult, even under the appeal to me of the
attempt, to tell how he was to count in my earliest culture. If culture,
as I hold, is a matter of attitude quite as much as of opportunity, and
of the form and substance of the vessel carried to the fountain no less
than of the water-supply itself, there couldn't have been better
conditions for its operating drop by drop. It operates ever much more, I
think, by one's getting whatever there may happen to be out for one's
use than by its conforming to any abstract standard of quantity or
lustre. It may work, as between dispenser and subject, in so
incalculably personal a manner that no chemical analysis shall recover
it, no common estimate of forces or amounts find itself in the least
apply. The case was that La Farge swam into our ingenuous ken as the
figure of figures, and that such an agent, on a stage so unpeopled and
before a scene so unpainted, became salient and vivid almost in spite of
itself. The figure was at a premium, and fit for any glass case that its
vivacity should allow to enclose it--wherein it might be surrounded by
wondering, admiring and often quite inevitably misconceiving observers.
It was not that these too weren't agents in their way, agents in some
especial good cause without the furtherance of which we never should
have done at all; but they were by that very fact specialised and
stiffened, committed to their one attitude, the immediately profitable,
and incapable of that play of gesture in which we recognise
representation. A representative, a rounded figure, however, is as to
none of its relations definable or announceable beforehand; we only know
it, for good or for ill, but with something of the throb of elation
always, when we see it, and then it in general sufficiently accounts for
itself. We often for that matter insist on its being a figure, we
positively make it one, in proportion as we seem to need it--or as in
other words we too acutely miss the active virtue of representation. It
takes some extraordinary set of circumstances or time of life, I think,
either to beguile or to hustle us into indifference to some larger felt
extension roundabout us of "the world"--a sphere the confines of which
move on even as we ourselves move and which is always there, just
beyond us, to twit us with the more it should have to show if we were a
little more "of" it. Sufficiency shuts us in but till the man of the
world--never prefigured, as I say, only welcomed on the spot--appears;
when we see at once how much we have wanted him. When we fail of that
acknowledgment, that sense as of a tension, an anxiety or an indigence
relieved, it is of course but that the extraordinary set of
circumstances, or above all the extraordinary time of life I speak of,
has indeed intervened.

It was as a man of the world that, for all his youth, La Farge rose or,
still better, bowed, before us, his inclinations of obeisance, his
considerations of address being such as we had never seen and now almost
publicly celebrated. This was what most immediately and most
iridescently showed, the truth being all the while that the character
took on in him particular values without which it often enough, though
then much more grossly, flourishes. It was by these enrichments of
curiosity, of taste and genius, that he became the personality, as we
nowadays say, that I have noted--the full freshness of all of which was
to play but through his younger time, or at least through our younger
apprehension. He was so "intellectual"--that was the flower; it crowned
his being personally so finished and launched. The wealth of his
cultivation, the variety of his initiations, the inveteracy of his
forms, the degree of his _empressement_ (this in itself, I repeat, a
revelation) made him, with those elements of the dandy and the cavalier
to which he struck us as so picturesquely sacrificing, a cluster of
bright promises, a rare original and, though not at all a direct model
for simpler folk, as we then could but feel ourselves, an embodiment of
the gospel of esthetics. Those more resounding forms that our age was to
see this gospel take on were then still to come, but I was to owe them
in the later time not half the thrill that the La Farge of the prime
could set in motion. He was really an artistic, an esthetic nature of
wondrous homogeneity; one was to have known in the future many an
unfolding that went with a larger ease and a shrewder economy, but never
to have seen a subtler mind or a more generously wasteful passion, in
other words a sincerer one, addressed to the problems of the designer
and painter. Of his long later history, full of flights and drops,
advances and retreats, experiment and performance, of the endless
complications of curiosity and perversity, I say nothing here save that
if it was to contradict none of our first impressions it was to qualify
them all by others still more lively; these things belonging quite to
some other record. Yet I may just note that they were to represent in
some degree an eclipse of the so essentially harmonious person round
whom a positive grace of legend had originally formed itself. I see him
at this hour again as that bright apparition; see him, jacketed in black
velvet or clad from top to toe in old-time elegances of cool white and
leaning much forward with his protuberant and over-glazed, his doubting
yet all-seizing vision, dandle along the shining Newport sands in
far-away summer sunsets on a charming chestnut mare whose light legs and
fine head and great sweep of tail showed the Arab strain--quite as if
(what would have been characteristic of him) he had borrowed his mount
from the adorable Fromentin, whom we already knew as a painter, but
whose acquaintance as a writer we were of course so promptly to owe him
that when "Dominique" broke upon us out of the Revue as one of the most
exquisite literary events of our time it found us doubly responsive.

So, at any rate, he was there, and there to stay--intensely among us but
somehow not withal of us; his being a Catholic, and apparently a "real"
one in spite of so many other omnisciences, making perhaps by itself the
greatest difference. He had been through a Catholic college in Maryland,
the name of which, though I am not assured of it now, exhaled a sort of
educational elegance; but where and when he had so miraculously laid up
his stores of reading and achieved his universal saturation was what we
longest kept asking ourselves. Many of these depths I couldn't pretend
to sound, but it was immediate and appreciable that he revealed to us
Browning for instance; and this, oddly enough, long after Men and Women
had begun (from our Paris time on, if I remember) to lie upon our
parents' book-table. _They_ had not divined in us as yet an aptitude for
that author; whose appeal indeed John reinforced to our eyes by the
reproduction of a beautiful series of illustrative drawings, two or
three of which he was never to surpass--any more than he was to complete
his highly distinguished plan for the full set, not the least faded of
his hundred dreams. Most of all he revealed to us Balzac; having so much
to tell me of what was within that formidably-plated door, in which he
all expertly and insidiously played the key, that to re-read even after
long years the introductory pages of Eugenie Grandet, breathlessly
seized and earnestly absorbed under his instruction, is to see my
initiator's youthful face, so irregular but so refined, look out at me
between the lines as through blurred prison bars. In Merimee, after the
same fashion, I meet his expository ghost--hovering to remind me of how
he started me on La Venus d'Ille; so that nothing would do but that I
should translate it, try to render it as lovingly as if it were a
classic and old (both of which things it now indeed is) and send it off
to the New York weekly periodical of that age of crudest categories
which was to do me the honour neither of acknowledging nor printing nor,
clearly, since translations did savingly appear there, in the least
understanding it. These again are mild memories--though not differing in
that respect from most of their associates; yet I cherish them as
ineffaceable dates, sudden milestones, the first distinctly noted, on
the road of so much inward or apprehensive life. Our guest--I call him
our guest because he was so lingeringly, so abidingly and supersedingly
present--began meanwhile to paint, under our eyes, with devotion, with
exquisite perception, and above all as with the implication, a hundred
times beneficent and fertilising, that if one didn't in these
connections consistently take one's stand on supersubtlety of taste one
was a helpless outsider and at the best the basest of vulgarians or
flattest of frauds--a doctrine more salutary at that time in our world
at large than any other that might be sounded. Of all of which ingenuous
intensity and activity I should have been a much scanter witness than
his then close condisciple, my brother, had not his personal kindness,
that of the good-natured and amused elder youth to the enslaved, the
yearningly gullible younger, charmed me often into a degree of
participation. Occasions and accidents come back to me under their wash
of that distilled old Newport light as to which we more and more agreed
that it made altogether exceptionally, on our side of the world, for
possibility of the _nuance_, or in other words for picture and story;
such for example as my felt sense of how unutterably it was the real
thing, the gage of a great future, when I one morning found my
companions of the larger, the serious studio inspired to splendid
performance by the beautiful young manly form of our cousin Gus Barker,
then on a vivid little dash of a visit to us and who, perched on a
pedestal and divested of every garment, was the gayest as well as the
neatest of models. This was my first personal vision of the "life," on a
pedestal and in a pose, that had half gleamed and half gloomed through
the chiaroscuro of our old friend Haydon; and I well recall the crash,
at the sight, of all my inward emulation--so forced was I to recognise
on the spot that I might niggle for months over plaster casts and not
come within miles of any such point of attack. The bravery of my
brother's own in especial dazzled me out of every presumption; since
nothing less than that meant drawing (they were not using colour) and
since our genial kinsman's perfect gymnastic figure meant living truth,
I should certainly best testify to the whole mystery by pocketing my
pencil.

I secured and preserved for long William's finished rendering of the
happy figure--which was to speak for the original, after his gallant
death, in sharper and finer accents perhaps than aught else that
remained of him; and it wanted but another occasion somewhat later on,
that of the sitting to the pair of pupils under Hunt's direction of a
subject presented as a still larger challenge, to feel that I had
irrecoverably renounced. Very handsome were the head and shoulders of
Katherine Temple, the eldest of those Albany cousins then gathered at
Newport under their, and derivatively our, Aunt Mary's wing, who
afterwards was to become Mrs. Richard Emmet--the Temples and the Emmets
being so much addicted to alliances that a still later generation was to
bristle for us with a delightful Emmetry, each member of it a different
blessing; she sat with endless patience, the serenest of models, and W.
J.'s portrait of her in oils survives (as well as La Farge's, dealing
with her in another view) as a really mature, an almost masterly, piece
of painting, having, as has been happily suggested to me, much the air
of a characteristic Manet. Such demonstrations would throw one back
on regret, so far as my brother was concerned, if subsequent
counter-demonstrations hadn't had it in them so much to check the train.
For myself at the hour, in any case, the beautiful success with Kitty
Temple did nothing but hurry on the future, just as the sight of the
charming thing to-day, not less than that of La Farge's _profil perdu_,
or presented ear and neck and gathered braids of hair, quite as charming
and quite as painted, touchingly reanimates the past. I say touchingly
because of the remembered pang of my acceptance of an admonition so
sharply conveyed. Therefore if somewhat later on I could still so fondly
hang about in that air of production--so far at least as it enveloped
our friend, and particularly after his marriage and his setting up of
his house at Newport, vivid proofs alike, as seemed to us all, of his
consummate, his _raffine_ taste, even if we hadn't yet, I think, that
epithet for this--it was altogether in the form of mere helpless admirer
and inhaler, led captive in part by the dawning perception that the arts
were after all essentially one and that even with canvas and brush
whisked out of my grasp I still needn't feel disinherited. That was the
luxury of the friend and senior with a literary side--that if there were
futilities that he didn't bring home to me he nevertheless opened more
windows than he closed; since he couldn't have meant nothing by causing
my eyes to plunge so straight into the square and dense little formal
garden of Merimee. I might occasionally serve for an abundantly idle
young out-of-doors model--as in fact I frequently did, the best perhaps
of his early exhibitions of a rare colour-sense even now attesting it;
but mightn't it become possible that Merimee would meanwhile serve for
me? Didn't I already see, as I fumbled with a pen, of what the small
dense formal garden might be inspiringly symbolic? It was above all
wonderful in the La Farge of those years that even as he painted and
painted, very slowly and intently and belatedly--his habit of putting
back the clock and ignoring every time-scheme but his own was matched
only by his view of the constant timeliness of talk, talk as talk, for
which no moment, no suspended step, was too odd or too fleeting--he
remained as referentially and unexhaustedly bookish, he turned his back
by the act as little on our theory of his omniscience as he ceased to
disown his job, whatever it might be, while endlessly burying his
salient and reinforced eyes and his visibly active organ of scent in
some minutest rarity of print, some precious ancientry of binding,
mechanically plucked, by the hazard of a touch, from one of the shelves
of a stored collection that easily passed with us for unapproached.

[Illustration: Portrait in oils of Miss Katherine Temple, 1861.]

He lost himself on these occasions both by a natural ease and by his
early adoption and application of the principle of the imperturbable,
which promised even from those days to govern his conduct well-nigh to
the exclusion of every other. We were to know surely as time went on no
comparable case of consistency of attitude--no other such prompt grasp
by a nature essentially entire, a settled sovereign self, of the truth
of what would work for it most favourably should it but succeed in never
yielding the first inch of any ground. Immense every ground thus became
by its covering itself from edge to edge with the defence of his
serenity, which, whatever his fathomless private dealings with it, was
never consentingly, I mean publicly, to suffer a grain of abatement. The
artist's serenity, by this conception, was an intellectual and spiritual
capital that must never brook defeat--which it so easily might incur by
a single act of abdication. That was at any rate the case for the
particular artist and the particular nature he felt himself,
armour-proof as they became against the appeal of sacrifice. Sacrifice
was fallibility, and one could only of course be consistent if one
inveterately had hold of the truth. There was no safety or, otherwise,
no inward serenity or even outward--though the outward came
secondly--unless there was no deflection; none into the question, that
is, of what might make for the serenity of others, which was their own
affair and which above all seemed not urgent in comparison with the
supreme artistic. It wasn't that the artist hadn't to pay, to pay for
the general stupidity, perversity and perfidy, from the moment he might
have to deal with these things; that was the inevitable suffering, and
it was always there; but it could be more or less borne if one was
systematically, or rather if one was naturally, or even, better still,
preternaturally, in the right; since this meant the larger, the largest
serenity. That account of so fine a case of inward confidence would
indeed during those very first years have sinned somewhat by
anticipation; yet something of the beauty--that is of the unmatched
virtuosity--of the attitude finally achieved did even at the early time
colour the air of intercourse with him for those who had either few
enough or many enough of their own reserves. The second of these
conditions sprang from a due anxiety for one's own interests, more or
less defined in advance and therefore, as might be, more or less
menaced; the other proviso easily went with vagueness--vagueness as to
what things were one's interests, seeing that the exhibited working of
an esthetic and a moral confidence conjoined on that scale and at play
together unhampered would perhaps prove for the time an attraction
beyond any other. This reflection must verily, in our relation, have
brought about my own quietus--so far as that mild ecstasy could be
divorced from agitation. I recall at all events less of the agitation
than of the ecstasy; the primary months, certain aspects even of the few
following years, look out at me as from fine accommodations,
acceptances, submissions, emotions, all melted together, that one must
have taken for joys of the mind and gains of the imagination so clear as
to cost one practically nothing. They are what I see, and are all I want
to see, as I look back; there hangs about them a charm of thrilled good
faith, the flush and throb of crowding apprehensions, that has scarce
faded and of which I can only wish to give the whole picture the
benefit. I bottle this imponderable extract of the loitering summers of
youth, when every occasion really seemed to stay to be gathered and
tasted, just for the sake of its faint sweetness.

Some time since, in Boston, I spent an hour before a commemorative
cluster of La Farge's earlier productions, gathered in on the occasion
of his death, with the effect as of a plummet suddenly dropped into
obscure depths long unstirred, that of a remembered participation, it
didn't seem too much to say, in the far-away difficult business of their
getting themselves born. These things, almost all finished studies of
landscape, small and fond celebrations of the modest little Newport
harmonies, the spare felicities and delicacies of a range of aspects
that have ceased to appeal or to "count," called back into life a
hundred memories, laid bare the very footsteps of time, light and
uncertain though so often the imprint. I seemed so to have been there by
the projection of curiosity and sympathy, if not by having literally
looked in, when the greater number of such effects worked themselves
out, that they spoke to me of my own history--through the felt intensity
of my commission, as it were, to speak for my old friend. The terms on
which he was ever ready to draw out for us the interesting hours, terms
of patience as they essentially were for the edified party, lived again
in this record, but with the old supposition of profit, or in other
words the old sense of pleasure, of precious acquisition and intenser
experience, more vivid than anything else. There recurs to me for
instance one of the smallest of adventures, as tiny a thing as could
incur the name and which was of the early stage of our acquaintance,
when he proposed to me that we should drive out to the Glen, some six
miles off, to breakfast, and should afterwards paint--we paint!--in the
bosky open air. It looks at this distance a mythic time, that of felt
inducements to travel so far at such an hour and in a backless buggy on
the supposition of rustic fare. But different ages have different
measures, and I quite remember how ours, that morning, at the neat
hostel in the umbrageous valley, overflowed with coffee and
griddle-cakes that were not as other earthly refreshment, and how a
spell of romance rested for several hours on our invocation of the
genius of the scene: of such material, with the help of the attuned
spirit, may great events consent to be composed. My companion, his easel
and canvas, his palette and stool and other accessories happily placed,
settled to his subject, while I, at a respectful distance, settled to
mine and to the preparation of this strange fruit of time, my having
kept the impression as if it really mattered. It did indeed matter, it
was to continue to have done so, and when I ask myself the reason I find
this in something as rare and deep and beautiful as a passage of old
poetry, a scrap of old legend, in the vagueness of rustling murmuring
green and plashing water and woodland voices and images, flitting
hovering possibilities; the most retained of these last of course being
the chance that one's small daub (for I too had my easel and panel and
palette) might incur appreciation by the eye of friendship. This indeed
was the true source of the spell, that it was in the eye of friendship,
friendship full of character and colour, and full of amusement of its
own, that I lived on any such occasion, and that I had come forth in the
morning cool and had found our breakfast at the inn a thing of ineffable
savour, and that I now sat and flurriedly and fearfully aspired. Yes,
the interesting ineffectual and exquisite array of the Boston "show"
smote for me most the chord of the prime questions, the admirations and
expectations at first so confident, even that of those refinements of
loyalty out of which the last and highest tribute was to spring; the
consideration, I mean, of whether our extraordinary associate, neither
promptly understood nor inveterately accepted, might not eventually be
judged such a colourist and such a poet that owners of his first
felicities, those very ones over which he was actually bending, and with
a touch so inscrutable, such "tonalities" of his own, would find
themselves envied and rich. I remember positively liking to see most
people stupid about him, and to make them out, I dare say, more
numerously stupid than they really were: this perhaps in some degree as
a bright communication of his own spirit--which discerned from so far
off that of the bitterest-sweet cup it was abundantly to taste; and
partly because the case would after that fashion only have its highest
interest. The highest interest, the very highest, it certainly couldn't
fail to have; and the beauty of a final poetic justice, with exquisite
delays, the whole romance of conscious delicacy and heroic patience
intervening, was just what we seemed to see meanwhile stow itself
expectantly away.

This view of the inevitable fate of distinguished work was thus, on my
part, as it comes before me again, of early development, and I admit
that I should appear to antedate it hadn't I in renewed presence of each
of the particular predestined objects of sacrifice I have glanced at
caught myself in the very act of that invidious apprehension, that
fondest contemporaneity. There were the charming individual things round
the production of which I had so at once elatedly and resignedly
circled; and nothing remained at the end of time but to test the
historic question. _Was_ the quiet chamber of the Boston museum a
constitution of poetic justice long awaited and at last fully
cognisant?--or did the event perhaps fail to give out, after all, the
essence of our far-away forecast? I think that what showed clearest, or
what I, at any rate, most sharply felt, was the very difficulty of
saying; which fact meant of course, I recognise, that the story fell a
little short, alas, of rounding itself off. Poetic justice, when it
comes, I gather, comes ever with a great shining; so that if there is
any doubt about it the source of the doubt is in the very depths of the
case and has been from the first at work there. It literally seems to
me, besides, that there was more history and thereby more interest
recoverable as the matter stood than if every answer to every question
about it hadn't had a fine ambiguity. I like ambiguities and detest
great glares; preferring thus for my critical no less than for my
pedestrian progress the cool and the shade to the sun and dust of the
way. There was an exquisite effort of which I had been peculiarly sure;
the large canvas of the view of the Paradise Rocks over against Newport,
but within the island and beyond the "second beach"--such were our thin
designations! On the high style and the grand manner of this thing, even
though a little uneasy before the absence from it of a certain cranerie
of touch, I would have staked every grain of my grounded sensibility--in
spite of which, on second thoughts, I shall let that faded fact, and no
other contention at all, be my last word about it. For the prevailing
force, within the Boston walls, the supreme magic anything was to
distil, just melted into another connection which flung a soft mantle as
over the whole show. It became, from the question of how even a man of
perceptive genius had painted what we then locally regarded as our
scenery, a question of how we ourselves had felt and cherished that
scenery; which latter of these two memories swept for me everything
before it. The scenery we cherished--by which I really mean, I fear, but
four or five of us--has now been grossly and utterly sacrificed; in the
sense that its range was all for the pedestrian measure, that to
overwalk it was to love it and to love it to overwalk it, and that no
such relation with it as either of these appears possible or thinkable
to-day. We had, the four or five of us, the instinct--the very finest
this must have been--of its scale and constitution, the adorable wise
economy with which nature had handled it and in the light of which the
whole seaward and insular extension of the comparatively futile town,
untrodden, unsuspected, practically all inviolate, offered a course for
the long afternoon ramble more in harmony with the invocations, or for
that matter the evocations, of youth than we most of us, with
appreciation so rooted, were perhaps ever to know. We knew already, we
knew then, that no such range of airs would ever again be played for us
on but two or three silver strings. They were but two or three--the sea
so often as of the isles of Greece, the mildly but perpetually embayed
promontories of mossy rock and wasted thankless pasture, bathed in a
refinement of radiance and a sweetness of solitude which amounted in
themselves to the highest "finish"; and little more than the feeling,
with all this, or rather with no more than this, that possession,
discrimination, far frequentation, were ours alone, and that a grassy
rocky tide-washed, just a bare, though ever so fine-grained, toned and
tinted breast of nature and field of fancy stretched for us to the low
horizon's furthest rim. The vast region--it struck us then as vast--was
practically roadless, but this, far from making it a desert, made it a
kind of boundless empty carpeted saloon. It comes back to me that nobody
in those days walked, nobody but the three or four of us--or indeed I
should say, if pushed, the single pair in particular of whom I was one
and the other Thomas Sargeant Perry, superexcellent and all-reading,
all-engulfing friend of those days and still, sole survivor, of these, I
thus found deeply consecrated that love of the long, again and again of
the very longest possible, walk which was to see me, year after year,
through so many of the twists and past so many of the threatened blocks
of life's road, and which, during the early and American period, was to
make me lone and perverse even in my own sight: so little was it ever
given me then, wherever I scanned the view, to descry a
fellow-pedestrian. The pedestrians came to succumb altogether, at
Newport, to this virtual challenge of their strange agitation--by the
circumstance, that is, of their being offered at last, to importunity,
the vulgar road, under the invasion of which the old rich alternative
miserably dwindled.




V


Nothing meanwhile could have been less logical, yet at the same time
more natural, than that William's interest in the practice of painting
should have suddenly and abruptly ceased; a turn of our affair attended,
however, with no shade of commotion, no repining at proved waste; with
as little of any confessed ruefulness of mistake on one side as of any
elation of wisdom, any resonance of the ready "I told you so" on the
other. The one side would have been, with a different tone about the
matter and a different domestic habit than ours, that of my brother's
awkwardness, accompanying whatever intelligence, of disavowal, and the
other been our father's not unemphatic return to the point that his
doubts, those originally and confidently intimated, had been justified
by the fact. Tempting doubtless in a heavier household air the
opportunity on the latter's part to recall that if he had perfectly
recognised his son's probable progress to a pitch of excellence he had
exactly not granted that an attainment of this pitch was likely in the
least, however uncontested, to satisfy the nature concerned; the
foregone conclusion having all the while been that such a spirit was
competent to something larger and less superficially calculable,
something more expressive of its true inwardness. This was not the way
in which things happened among us, for I really think the committed
mistake was ever discriminated against--certainly by the head of the
family--only to the extent of its acquiring, even if but speedily again
to fade, an interest greater than was obtainable by the too obvious
success. I am not sure indeed that the kind of personal history most
appealing to my father would not have been some kind that should fairly
proceed by mistakes, mistakes more human, more associational, less
angular, less hard for others, that is less exemplary for them (since
righteousness, as mostly understood, was in our parent's view, I think,
the cruellest thing in the world) than straight and smug and declared
felicities. The qualification here, I allow, would be in his scant
measure of the difference, after all, for the life of the soul, between
the marked achievement and the marked shortcoming. He had a manner of
his own of appreciating failure, or of not at least piously rejoicing in
displayed moral, intellectual, or even material, economies, which, had
it not been that his humanity, his generosity and, for the most part,
his gaiety, were always, at the worst, consistent, might sometimes have
left us with our small savings, our little exhibitions and
complacencies, rather on our hands. As the case stood I find myself
thinking of our life in those years as profiting greatly for animation
and curiosity by the interest he shed for us on the whole side of the
human scene usually held least interesting--the element, the appearance,
of waste which plays there such a part and into which he could read
under provocation so much character and colour and charm, so many
implications of the fine and the worthy, that, since the art of missing
or of failing, or of otherwise going astray, did after all in his hands
escape becoming either a matter of real example or of absolute precept,
enlarged not a little our field and our categories of appreciation and
perception. I recover as I look back on all this the sense as of an
extraordinary young confidence, our common support, in our coming round
together, through the immense lubrication of his expressed thought,
often perhaps extravagantly working and playing, to plenty of
unbewildered rightness, a state of comfort that would always
serve--whether after strange openings into a sphere where nothing
practical mattered, or after even still quainter closings in upon us of
unexpected importances and values. Which means, to my memory, that we
breathed somehow an air in which waste, for us at least, couldn't and
didn't live, so certain were aberrations and discussions, adventures,
excursions and alarms of whatever sort, to wind up in a "transformation
scene" or, if the term be not profane, happy harlequinade; a figuration
of each involved issue and item before the footlights of a familiar
idealism, the most socialised and ironised, the most amusedly
generalised, that possibly could be.

Such an atmosphere was, taking one of its elements with another,
doubtless delightful; yet if it was friendly to the suggested or
imagined thing it promoted among us much less directly, as I have
already hinted, the act of choice--choice as to the "career" for
example, with a view of the usual proceedings thereupon consequent. I
marvel at the manner in which the door appears to have been held or at
least left open to us for experiment, though with a tendency to close,
the oddest yet most inveterately perceptible movement in that sense,
before any very earnest proposition in particular. I have no remembrance
at all of marked prejudices on our father's part, but I recall repeated
cases, in his attitude to our young affairs, of a disparagement
suggested as by stirred memories of his own; the instance most present
to me being his extreme tepidity in the matter of William's, or in fact
of my, going, on our then American basis, to college. I make out in him,
and at the time made out, a great revulsion of spirit from that incurred
experience in his own history, a revulsion I think moreover quite
independent of any particular or instrinsic attributes of the seat of
learning involved in it. Union College, Schenectady, New York, the scene
of his personal experiment and the natural resort, in his youth, of
comparatively adjacent Albanians, might easily have offered at that time
no very rare opportunities--few were the American country colleges that
then had such to offer; but when, after years, the question arose for
his sons he saw it in I scarce know what light of associational or
"subjective" dislike. He had the disadvantage--unless indeed it was much
more we who had it--of his having, after many changes and detachments,
ceased to believe in the Schenectady resource, or to revert to it
sentimentally, without his forming on the other hand, with his boys to
place, any fonder presumption or preference. There comes out to me, much
bedimmed but recognisable, the image of a day of extreme youth on which,
during a stay with our grandmother at Albany, we achieved, William and
I, with some confused and heated railway effort, a pious pilgrimage to
the small scholastic city--pious by reason, I clearly remember, of a
lively persuasion on my brother's part that to Union College, at some
indefinite future time, we should both most naturally and delightedly
repair. We invoked, I gather, among its scattered shades, fairly vague
to me now, the loyalty that our parent appeared to have dropped by the
way--even though our attitude about it can scarce have been prematurely
contentious; the whole vision is at any rate to-day bathed and blurred
for me in the air of some charmed and beguiled dream, that of the
flushed good faith of an hour of crude castle-building. We were helped
to build, on the spot, by an older friend, much older, as I remember
him, even than my brother, already a member of the college and, as it
seemed, greatly enjoying his life and those "society" badges and
trinkets with which he reappears to me as bristling and twinkling quite
to the extinction of his particular identity. This is lost, like
everything else, in the mere golden haze of the little old-time autumn
adventure. Wondrous to our sensibility may well have been the October
glamour--if October it was, and if it was not it ought to have been!--of
that big brave region of the great State over which the shade of
Fenimore Cooper's Mohawks and Mohicans (if this be not a pleonasm) might
still have been felt to hang. The castle we had built, however,
crumbled--there were plenty of others awaiting erection; these too
successively had their hour, but I needn't at this time stoop to pick up
their pieces. I see moreover vividly enough how it might have been that,
at this stage, our parents were left cold by the various appeal, in our
interest, of Columbia, Harvard and Yale. Hard by, at Providence, in the
Newport time, was also "Brown"; but I recover no connection in which
that mystic syllable swept our sky as a name to conjure with. Our
largest licence somehow didn't stray toward Brown. It was to the same
tune not conceivable that we should have been restored for educational
purposes to the swollen city, the New York of our childhood, where we
had then so tumbled in and out of school as to exhaust the measure, or
as at least greatly to deflower the image, of our teachability on that
ground. Yale, off our beat from every point of view, was as little to be
thought of, and there was moreover in our father's imagination no grain
of susceptibility to what might have been, on the general ground,
"socially expected." Even Harvard, clearly--and it was perhaps a trifle
odd--moved him in our interest as little as Schenectady could do; so
that, for authority, the voice of social expectation would have had to
sound with an art or an accent of which it had by no means up to that
time learned roundabout us the trick. This indeed (it comes to saying)
is something that, so far as our parents were concerned, it would never
have learned. They were, from other preoccupations, unaware of any such
pressure; and to become aware would, I think, primarily have been for
them to find it out of all proportion to the general pitch of
prescription. We were not at that time, when it came to such claims, in
presence of persuasive, much less of impressive, social forms and
precedents--at least those of us of the liberated mind and the really
more curious culture were not; the more curious culture, only to be
known by the positive taste of it, was nowhere in the air, nowhere
seated or embodied.

Which reflections, as I perhaps too loosely gather them in, refresh at
any rate my sense of how we in particular of our father's house actually
profited more than we lost, if the more curious culture was in question,
by the degree to which we were afloat and disconnected; since there were
at least luxuries of the spirit in this quite as much as
drawbacks--given a social order (so far as it _was_ an order) that found
its main ideal in a "strict attention to business," that is to buying
and selling over a counter or a desk, and in such an intensity of the
traffic as made, on the part of all involved, for close localisation. To
attend strictly to business was to be invariably _there_, on a certain
spot in a certain place; just as to be nowhere in particular, to _have_
to be nowhere, told the queer tale of a lack or of a forfeiture, or
possibly even of a state of intrinsic unworthiness. I have already
expressed how few of these elements of the background we ourselves had
ever had either to add to or to subtract from, and how this of itself
did after a fashion "place" us in the small Newport colony of the
despoiled and disillusioned, the mildly, the reminiscentially desperate.
As easy as might be, for the time, I have also noted, was our footing
there; but I have not, for myself, forgotten, or even now outlived, the
particular shade of satisfaction to be taken in one's thus being in New
England without being of it. To have originally been of it, or still to
have had to be, affected me, I recall, as a case I should have
regretted--unless it be more exact to say that I thought of the
condition as a danger after all escaped. Long would it take to tell why
it figured as a danger, and why that impression was during the several
following years much more to gain than to lose intensity. The question
was to fall into the rear indeed, with ever so many such secondary
others, during the War, and for reasons effective enough; but it was
afterwards to know a luxury of emergence--this, I mean, while one still
"cared," in general, as one was sooner or later to stop caring.
Infinitely interesting to recover, in the history of a mind, for those
concerned, these movements of the spirit, these tides and currents of
growth--though under the inconvenience for the historian of such
ramifications of research that here at any rate I feel myself warned
off. There appeared to us at Newport the most interesting, much, of the
Albany male cousins, William James Temple--coming, oddly enough, first
from Yale and then from Harvard; so that by contact and example the
practicability of a like experience might have been, and doubtless was,
put well before us. "Will" Temple, as we were in his short life too
scantly to know him, had made so luckless, even if so lively a start
under one alma mater that the appeal to a fresh parentship altogether
appears to have been judged the best remedy for his case: he entered
Harvard jumping, if I mistake not, a couple of years of the
undergraduate curriculum, and my personal memory of these reappearances
is a mere recapture of admiration, of prostration, before him. The
dazzled state, under his striking good looks and his manly charm, was
the common state; so that I disengage from it no presumption of a
particular plea playing in our own domestic air for his temporary
Cambridge setting; he was so much too radiant and gallant and personal,
too much a character and a figure, a splendid importance in himself, to
owe the least glamour to settings; an advantage that might have seemed
rather to be shed on whatever scene by himself in consenting to light it
up. He made all life for the hour a foreground, and one that we none of
us would have quitted for a moment while he was there.

In that form at least I see him, and no revival of those years so puts
to me the interesting question, so often aimlessly returned upon in
later life, of the amount of truth in this or that case of young
confidence in a glory to come--for another than one's self; of the
likelihood of the wonders so flatteringly forecast. Many of our
estimates were monstrous magnifications--though doing us even at that
more good than harm; so that one isn't even sure that the happiest
histories were to have been those of the least liberal mistakes. I like
at any rate to think of our easy overstrainings--the possible flaw in
many of which was not indeed to be put to the proof. That was the case
for the general, and for every particular, impression of Will Temple,
thanks to his early death in battle--at Chancellorsville, 1863; he
having, among the quickened forces of the time, and his father's record
helping him, leaped to a captaincy in the regular Army; but I cling to
the idea that the siftings and sortings of life, had he remained subject
to them, would still have left him the lustre that blinds and subdues. I
even do more, at this hour; I ask myself, while his appearance and my
personal feeling about it live for me again, what possible aftertime
could have kept up the pitch of my sentiment--aftertime either of his
or of mine. Blest beyond others, I think as we look back, the
admirations, even the fondest (and which indeed were not of their nature
fond?) that were not to know to their cost the inevitable test or
strain; they are almost the only ones, of the true high pitch, that,
without broken edges or other tatters to show, fold themselves away
entire and secure, even as rare lengths of precious old stuff, in the
scented chest of our savings. So great misadventure have too often known
at all events certain of those that were to come to trial. The others
are the _residual_, those we must keep when we can, so to be sure at
least of a few, sacrificing as many possible mistakes and misproportions
as need be to pay but for two or three of them. There could be no
mistake about Gus Barker, who threw himself into the fray, that is into
the cavalry saddle, as he might into a match at baseball (football being
then undreamt of), and my last reminiscence of whom is the sight of him,
on a brief leave for a farewell to his Harvard classmates after he had
got his commission, crossing with two or three companions the expanse of
Harvard Square that faced the old Law School, of which I found myself
for that year (1862-63) a singularly alien member. I was afterwards
sharply to regret the accident by which I on that occasion missed speech
of him; but my present vision of his charming latent agility, which any
motion showed, of his bright-coloured wagging head and of the large
gaiety of the young smile that made his handsome teeth shine out, is
after all the years but the more happily uneffaced. The point of all
which connections, however, is that they somehow managed to make in the
parental view no straight links for us with the matter-of-course of
college. There were accidents too by the aid of which they failed of
this the more easily. It comes to me that, for my own part, I thought of
William at the time as having, or rather as so much more than having,
already graduated; the effect of contact with his mind and talk, with
the free play of his spirit and the irrepressible brush of his humour,
couldn't have been greater had he carried off fifty honours. I felt in
him such authority, so perpetually quickened a state of intellect and
character, that the detail or the literal side of the question never so
much as came up for me: I must have made out that to plenty of
graduates, or of the graduating, nothing in the nature of such
appearances attached. I think of our father moreover as no less affected
by a like impression; so extremely, so immensely disposed do I see him
to generalise his eldest son's gifts as by the largest, fondest
synthesis, and not so much proceed upon them in any one direction as
proceed _from_ them, as it were, in all.

Little as such a view might have lent itself to application, my
brother's searching discovery during the summer of 1861 that his
vocation was not "after all" in the least satisfyingly for Art, took on
as a prompt sequel the recognition that it was quite positively and
before everything for Science, physical Science, strenuous Science in
all its exactitude; with the opportunity again forthcoming to put his
freshness of faith to the test. I had presumed to rejoice before at his
adoption of the studio life, that offering as well possible contacts for
myself; and yet I recall no pang for his tergiversation, there being
nothing he mightn't have done at this or at any other moment that I
shouldn't have felt as inevitable and found in my sense of his previous
age some happy and striking symptom or pledge of. As certain as that he
had been all the while "artistic" did it thus appear that he had been at
the same time quite otherwise inquiring too--addicted to "experiments"
and the consumption of chemicals, the transfusion of mysterious liquids
from glass to glass under exposure to lambent flame, the cultivation of
stained fingers, the establishment and the transport, in our wanderings,
of galvanic batteries, the administration to all he could persuade of
electric shocks, the maintenance of marine animals in splashy aquaria,
the practice of photography in the room I for a while shared with him
at Boulogne, with every stern reality of big cumbrous camera, prolonged
exposure, exposure mostly of myself, darkened development, also
interminable, and ubiquitous brown blot. Then there had been also the
constant, as I fearfully felt it, the finely speculative and boldly
disinterested absorption of curious drugs. No livelier remembrance have
I of our early years together than this inveteracy, often appalling to a
nature so incurious as mine in _that_ direction, of his interest in the
"queer" or the incalculable effects of things. There was apparently for
him no possible effect whatever that mightn't be more or less rejoiced
in as such--all exclusive of its relation to other things than merely
knowing. There recurs to me withal the shamelessness of my own
indifference--at which I also, none the less, I think, wondered a
little; as if by so much as it hadn't been given me to care for visibly
provoked or engineered phenomena, by that same amount was I open to
those of the mysteriously or insidiously aggressive, the ambushed or
suffered sort. Vivid to me in any case is still the sense of how quite
shiningly light, as an activity and an appeal, he had seemed to make
everything he gave himself to; so that at first, until the freshness of
it failed, he flung this iridescent mantle of interest over the then so
grey and scant little scene of the Harvard (the Lawrence) Scientific
School, where in the course of the months I had had a glimpse or two of
him at work. Early in the autumn of 1861 he went up from Newport to
Cambridge to enter that institution; in which thin current rather than
in the ostensibly more ample began to flow his long connection with
Harvard, gathering in time so many affluents. His letters from Cambridge
during the next couple of years, many of them before me now, breathe, I
think, all the experience the conditions could have begotten at the
best; they mark the beginning of those vivacities and varieties of
intellectual and moral reaction which were for the rest of his life to
be the more immeasurably candid and vivid, the more numerous above all,
and the more interesting and amusing, the closer view one had of him.
That of a certainty; yet these familiar pages of youth testify most of
all for me perhaps to the forces of amenity and spontaneity, the happy
working of all relations, in our family life. In such parts of them as I
may cite this will shine sufficiently through--and I shall take for
granted thus the interest of small matters that have perhaps but that
reflected light to show. It is in a letter to myself, of that September,
dated "Drear and Chill Abode," that he appears to have celebrated the
first steps of his initiation.

Sweet was your letter and grateful to my eyes. I had gone in a
mechanical way to the P.O. not hoping for anything (though "on espere
alors qu'on desespere toujours,") and, finding nothing, was turning
heavily away when a youth modestly tapped me and, holding out an
envelope inscribed in your well-known character, said, "Mr. J., this was
in our box!" 'Twas the young Pascoe, the joy of his mother--but the
graphic account I read in the letter he gave me of the sorrow of my
mother almost made me shed tears on the floor of the P.O. Not that on
reflection I should dream----! for reflection shows me a future in which
she shall regard my vacation visits as "on the whole" rather troublesome
than otherwise; or at least when she shall feel herself as blest in the
trouble I spare her when absent as in the glow of pride and happiness
she feels at the sight of me when present. But she needn't fear I can
ever think of _her_ when absent with such equanimity. I oughtn't to
"joke on such a serious subject," as Bobby would say though; for I have
had several pangs since being here at the thought of all I have left
behind at Newport--especially gushes of feeling about the _place_. I
haven't for one minute had the feeling of being at home here. Something
in my quarters precludes the possibility of it, though what this is I
don't suppose I can describe to you.

As I write now even, writing itself being a cosy cheerful-looking
amusement, and an argand gas-burner with a neat green shade merrily
singing beside me, I still feel unsettled. I write on a round table in
the middle of the room, with a fearful red and black cloth. Before me I
see another such-covered table of oblong shape against the wall, capped
by a cheap looking-glass and flanked by two windows, curtainless and
bleak, whose shades of linen flout the air as the sportive wind impels
them. To the left are two other such windows, with a horse-hair sofa
between them, and at my back a fifth window and a vast wooden
mantel-piece with nothing to relieve its nakedness but a large cast,
much plumbago'd, of a bust of Franklin. On my right the Bookcase,
imposing and respectable with its empty drawers and with my little array
of printed wisdom covering nearly _one_ of the shelves. I hear the
people breathe as they go past in the street, and the roll and jar of
the horse-cars is terrific. I have accordingly engaged the other room
from Mrs. Pascoe, with the little sleeping-room upstairs. It looks
infinitely more cheerful than this, and if I don't find the grate
sufficient I can easily have a Franklin stove put up. But she says the
grate will make an oven of it.... John Ropes I met the other day at
Harry Quincy's room, and was very much pleased with him. Don't fail to
send on Will Temple's letters to him and to Herbert Mason, which I left
in one of the library's mantelpiece jars, to use the Portuguese idiom.
Storrow Higginson has been very kind to me, making enquiries about
tables etc. We went together this morning to the house of the Curator of
the Gray collection of Engravings, which is solemnly to unfold its
glories to me to-morrow. He is a most serious stately German gentleman,
Mr. Thies by name, fully sensible of the deep vital importance of his
treasures and evidently thinking a visit to them a great affair--to
_me_. Had I known how great, how tremendous and formal, I hardly think I
should have ventured to call. Tom Ward pays me a visit almost every
evening. Poor Tom seems a-cold too. His deafness keeps him from making
acquaintances. Professor Eliot, at the School, is a fine fellow, I
suspect; a man who if he resolves to do a thing won't be prevented. I
find analysis very interesting _so far_! The Library has a
reading-room, where they take all the magazines; so I shan't want for
the Rev. des 2 M. I remain with unalterable sentiments of devotion ever,
my dear H., your Big Brother Bill.

This record of further impressions closely and copiously followed.

     Your letter this morning was such a godsend that I hasten to
     respond a line or two, though I have no business to--for I have a
     fearful lesson to-morrow and am going to Boston to-night to hear
     Agassiz lecture (12 lectures on "Methods in Nat. Hist."), so that I
     will only tell you that I am very well and my spirits just getting
     good. Miss Upham's table is much pleasanter than the other.
     Professor F. J. Child is a great joker--he's a little flaxen-headed
     boy of about 40. There is a nice old lady boarder, another man of
     about 50, of aristocratic bearing, who interests me much, and 3
     intelligent students. At the other table was no conversation at
     all; the fellows had that American solemnity, called each other
     Sir, etc. I cannot tell you, dearest Mother, how your account of
     your Sunday dinner and of your feelings thereat brought tears to my
     eyes. Give Father my ardent love and cover with kisses the round
     fair face of the most kiss-worthy Alice. Then kiss the Aunt till
     you get tired, and get all the rest of them to kiss _you_ till you
     cry hold enough!

     This morning as I was busy over the 10th page of a letter to Wilky
     in he popped and made my labour of no account. I had intended to go
     and see him yesterday, but found Edward Emerson and Tom Ward were
     going, and so thought he would have too much of a good thing. But
     he walked over this morning with, or rather without them, for he
     went astray and arrived very hot and dusty. I gave him a bath and
     took him to dinner, and he is now gone to see Andrew Robeson and E.
     E. His plump corpusculus looks as always. I write in my new parlour
     whither I moved yesterday. You have no idea what an improvement it
     is on the old affair--worth double the cost, and the little bedroom
     under the roof is perfectly delicious, with a charming outlook on
     little back yards with trees and pretty old brick walls. The sun is
     upon _this_ room from earliest dawn till late in the afternoon--a
     capital thing in winter. I like Miss Upham's very much. Dark
     "aristocratic" dining-room, with royal cheer. "Fish, roast beef,
     veal cutlets, pigeons!" says the splendid, tall, noble-looking,
     white-armed, black-eyed Juno of a handmaid as you sit down. And for
     dessert a choice of three, _three_, darling Mother, of the most
     succulent, unctuous (no, not unctuous, unless you imagine a
     celestial unction without the oil) pie-like confections, always 2
     platesful--my eye! She has an admirable chemical, not mechanical,
     combination of cake and jam and cream which I recommend to Mother
     if she is ever at a loss; though there is no well-stored pantry
     like that of good old Kay Street, or if there is it exists not for
     miserable me.

     This chemical analysis is so bewildering at first that I am
     "muddled and bet" and have to employ almost all my time reading up.
     Agassiz is evidently a great favourite with his Boston audience and
     feels it himself. But he's an admirable earnest lecturer, clear as
     day, and his accent is most fascinating. Jeffries Wyman's lectures
     on Comp. Anatomy of Verts. promise to be very good; prosy perhaps a
     little and monotonous, but plain and well-arranged and nourris.
     Eliot I have not seen much more of; I don't believe he is a _very_
     accomplished chemist, but can't tell yet. We are only about 12 in
     the Laboratory, so that we have a very cosy time. I expect to have
     a winter of "crowded life." I can be as independent as I please,
     and want to live regardless of the good or bad opinion of every
     one. I shall have a splendid chance to try, I know, and I know too
     that the native hue of resolution has never been of very great
     shade in me hitherto. I am sure that that feeling is a right one,
     and I mean to live according to it if I can. If I do so I think I
     shall turn out all right.

     I stopped this letter before tea, when Wilky the rosy-gilled and
     Frank Higginson came in. I now resume it by the light of a taper
     and that of the moon. Wilky read H.'s letter and amused me "metch"
     by his naive interpretation of Mother's most rational request that
     I should "keep a memorandum of all moneys I receive from Father."
     He thought it was that she might know exactly what sums her
     prodigal philosopher really gives out, and that mistrust of his
     generosity caused it. The phrase has a little sound that way, as H.
     subtly framed it, I confess!

     The first few days, the first week here, I really didn't know what
     to do with myself or how to fill my time. I felt as if turned out
     of doors. I then received H.'s and Mother's letters. Never before
     did I know what mystic depths of rapture lay concealed within that
     familiar word. Never did the same being look so like two different
     ones as I going in and out of the P.O. if I bring a letter with me.
     Gloomily, with despair written on my leaden brow I stalk the street
     along towards the P.O., women, children and students involuntarily
     shrinking against the wall as I pass--thus,[4] as if the curse of
     Cain were stamped upon my front. But when I come out with a letter
     an immense concourse of people generally attends me to my lodging,
     attracted by my excited wild gestures and look.

Christmas being sparely kept in the New England of those days, William
passed that of 1861, as a Cambridge letter of the afternoon indicates,
without opportunity for a seasonable dash to Newport, but with such
compensations, nearer at hand as are here exhibited. Our brother Wilky,
I should premise, had been placed with the youngest of us, Bob, for
companion, at the "co-educational" school then but a short time
previously established by Mr. F. B. Sanborn at Concord,
Massachusetts--and of which there will be more to say. "Tom" Ward,
already mentioned and who, having left the Concord school shortly
before, had just entered Harvard, was quickly to become William's
intimate, approved and trusted friend; the diversion of whose patient
originality, whose intellectual independence, ability and curiosity from
science and free inquiry to hereditary banking--consequent on the
position of the paternal Samuel Gray Ward as the representative for many
years in the United States of the house of Baring Brothers--he from the
first much regretted: the more pertinently doubtless that this companion
was of a family "connected" with ours through an intermarriage, Gus
Barker, as Mrs. S. G. Ward's nephew, being Tom's first cousin as well as
ours, and such links still counting, in that age of comparatively
less developed ramifications, when sympathy and intercourse kept pace as
it was kept between our pairs of parents.

[Illustration: A leaf from the letter quoted on page 129.]

     I have been in Boston the whole blest morning, toted round by the
     Wards, who had as usual asked me to dine with them. I had happily
     provided myself with an engagement here for all such emergencies,
     but, as is my sportive wont, I befooled Tom with divers answers,
     and finally let him believe I would come (having refused several
     dazzling chances for the purpose) supposing of course I should see
     him here yesterday at Miss Upham's board and disabuse him. But the
     young viper went home right after breakfast--so I had to go into
     Boston this morning and explain. Wilky had come up from Concord to
     dine in said Commonwealth Avenue, and I, as it turned out, found
     myself in for following the innocent lamb Lily up and down the town
     for two hours, to hold bundles and ring bells for her; Wilky and
     Tom having vanished from the scene. Clear sharp cold morning,
     thermometer 5 degrees at sunrise, and the streets covered with one
     glare of ice. I had thick smooth shoes and went sliding off like an
     avalanche every three steps, while she, having india-rubbers and
     being a Bostonian, went ahead like a swan. I had among other things
     to keep her bundles from harm, to wipe away every three minutes the
     trembling jewel with which the cold _would_ with persistent
     kindness ornament my coral nose; to keep a hypocritic watchful eye
     on her movements lest she fall; to raise my hat gracefully to more
     and more of her acquaintances every block; to skate round and round
     embracing lamp-posts and door-scrapers by the score to keep from
     falling, as well as to avoid serving old lady-promenaders in the
     same way; to cut capers 4 feet high at the rate of 20 a second,
     every now and then, for the same purpose; to keep from scooting
     off down hills and round corners as fast as my able-bodied
     companion; often to do all these at once and then fall lickety-bang
     like a chandelier, but _when_ so to preserve an expression of
     placid beatitude or easy nonchalance despite the raging fiend
     within: oh it beggars description! When finally it was over and I
     stood alone I shook my companion's dust from my feet and, biting my
     beard with rage, sware a mighty oath unto high heaven that I would
     never, while reason held her throne in this distracted orb, _never_
     NEVER, by word, look or gesture and this without mental
     reservation, acknowledge a "young lady" as a human being. The false
     and rotten spawn might die before I would wink to save it. No more
     Parties now!--at last I am a Man, etc., etc.!

     My enthusiasm ran very high for a few minutes, but I suddenly saw
     that I was a great ass and became sobered instantly, so that on the
     whole I am better for the circumstance, being a sadder and a wiser
     man. I also went to the Tappans' and gave the children slight
     presents; then, coming home to my venal board, behaved very
     considerately and paternally to a young lady who sat next to me,
     but with a shade of subdued melancholy in my manner which could not
     have been noticed at the breakfast-table. Many times and bitterly
     to-day have I thought of home and lamented that I should have to be
     away at this merry Christmastide from my rare family; wondering,
     with Wilky, if they were missing us as we miss them. And now as I
     sit in the light of my kerosene, with the fire quietly consuming in
     the grate and the twilight on the snow outside and the melancholy
     old-fashioned strains of the piano dimly rising from below, I see
     in vision those at home just going in to dinner; my aged, silvered
     Mother leaning on the arm of her stalwart yet flexible H., merry
     and garrulous as ever, my blushing Aunt with her old wild beauty
     still hanging about her, my modest Father with his rippling raven
     locks, the genial auld Rob and the mysterious Alice, all rise
     before me, a glorified throng; but two other forms, one tall,
     intellectual, swarthy, with curved nose and eagle eye, the other
     having breadth rather than depth, but a goodly morsel too, are
     wanting to complete the harmonious whole. Eftsoons they vanish and
     I am again alone, _alone_--what pathos in the word! I have two
     companions though, most all the time--remorse and despair! T. S.
     Perry took their place for a little, and to-day they have not come
     back. T. S. seemed to enjoy his visit very much. It was very
     pleasant for me to have him; his rustic wonder at the commonest
     sights was most ludicrous, and his conversation most amusing and
     instructive.

     The place here improves to me as I go on living in it, and if I
     study with Agassiz 4 or 5 years there is nothing I should like
     better than to have you all with me, regular and comfortable. I
     enclose another advertisement of a house--but which would be too
     small for us, I believe, though it might be looked at. I had a long
     talk with one of A.'s students the other night, and saw for the
     first time how a naturalist may feel about his trade exactly as an
     artist does about his. For instance Agassiz would rather take
     wholly uninstructed people--"for he has to unteach them all they
     have learnt." He doesn't let them so much as look into a book for a
     long while; what they learn they must learn for themselves and be
     _masters_ of it all. The consequence is he makes Naturalists of
     them--doesn't merely cram them; and this student (he had been there
     2 years) said he felt ready to go anywhere in the world now with
     nothing but his notebook and study out anything quite alone. A.
     must be a great teacher. Chemistry comes on tolerably, but not so
     fast as I expected. I am pretty slow with my substances, having
     done but 12 since Thanksgiving and having 38 more to do before the
     end of the term.

Comment on the abundance, the gaiety and drollery, the generous play of
vision and fancy in all this, would seem so needless as to be almost
officious, were not the commentator constantly, were he not infinitely,
arrested and reminded and solicited; which is at once his advantage and
his embarrassment. Such a letter, at all events, read over with the
general key, touches its contemporary scene and hour into an intensity
of life for him; making indeed the great sign of that life my brother's
signal vivacity and cordiality, his endless spontaneity of mind. Every
thing in it is characteristic of the genius and expressive of the mood,
and not least, of course, the pleasantry of paradox, the evocation of
each familiar image by its vivid opposite. Our mother, _e.g._, was not
at that time, nor for a good while yet, so venerably "silvered"; our
handsome-headed father had lost, occipitally, long before, all pretence
to raven locks, certainly to the effect of their "rippling"; the beauty
of our admirable aunt was as happily alien either to wildness or to the
"hanging" air as it could very well be; the "mystery" of our young
sister consisted all in the candour of her natural bloom, even if at the
same time of her lively intelligence; and H.'s mirth and garrulity
appear to have represented for the writer the veriest ironic translation
of something in that youth, I judge, not a little mildly--though oh _so_
mildly!--morose or anxiously mute. To the same tune the aquiline in his
own nose heroically derides the slightly relaxed line of that feature;
and our brother Wilky's want of physical "depth" is a glance at a
different proportion. Of a like tinge of pleasantry, I may add, is the
imputation of the provincial gape to our friend T. S. Perry, of Newport
birth and unintermitted breeding, with whom we were to live so much in
the years to come, and who was then on the eve of entering Harvard--his
face already uninterruptedly turned to that love of letters, that
practice of them by dauntless and inordinate, though never at all
vulgarly resonant, absorption which was to constitute in itself the most
disinterested of careers. I had myself felt him from the first an
exemplary, at once, and a discouraging friend; he had let himself loose
in the world of books, pressed and roamed through the most various
literatures and the most voluminous authors, with a stride that, as it
carried him beyond all view, left me dismayed and helpless at the edge
of the forest, where I listened wistfully but unemulously to the far-off
crash from within of his felled timber, the clearing of whole spaces or
periods shelf by shelf or great tree by tree. The brother-in-law of
John La Farge, he had for us further, with that reviving consciousness
of American annals which the War was at once so rudely and so
insidiously to quicken in us, the glamour of his straight descent from
the Commodores Perry of the Lake Erie in the war of 1812, respectively,
and of the portentous penetration of Japan just after the mid-century,
and his longer-drawn but equally direct and so clean and comfortable
affiliation to the great Benjamin Franklin: as these things at least
seemed to me under my habit (too musing and brooding certainly to have
made for light loquacity) of pressing every wind-borne particle of
personal history--once the persons were only other enough from
myself--into the service of what I would fain have called picture or,
less explicitly, less formulatedly, romance.

These, however, are but too fond insistences, and what mainly bears
pointing out is my brother's already restless reach forth to some new
subject of study. He had but lately addressed himself, not without
confidence, to such an investigation of Chemistry as he might become
conscious of a warrant for, yet the appeal of Agassiz's great authority,
so much in the air of the Cambridge of that time, found him at once
responsive; it opened up a world, the world of sentient life, in the
light of which Chemistry faded. He had not, however, for the moment
done with it; and what I at any rate find most to the point in the pages
before me is the charm of their so witnessing to the geniality and
harmony of our family life, exquisite as I look back on it and reflected
almost as much in any one passage taken at hazard as in any other. He
had apparently, at the date of the following, changed his lodging.

     President Felton's death has been the great event of the week--two
     funerals and I don't know how many prayers and sermons. To-day I
     thought I would go to University chapel for the sake of variety and
     hear Dr. Peabody's final word on him--and a very long and
     lugubrious one it was. The prayer was a prolonged moan in which the
     death (not in its consequences, but in itself) was treated as a
     great calamity, and the whole eulogy was almost ridiculously
     overcharged. What was most disagreeable throughout was the wailing
     tones, not a bit that of simple pagan grief at the _loss_--which
     would have been honest; but a whine consciously put on as from a
     sense of duty, and a whine at nothing definite either, only a
     purposeless clothing of all his words in tears. The whole style of
     the performance was such that I have concluded to have nothing more
     to do with funerals till they improve.

     The walking here has been terrible with ice or slush these many
     weeks, but over head celestial. No new developments in this house.
     The maniac sometimes chills my very marrow by hoarsely whispering
     outside the door, "Gulielmo, Gulielmo!" Old Sweetser sits in his
     dressing-gown smoking his pipe all day in a little uncomfortable
     old _bathroom_ next door to me. He may with truth be called a
     queer cuss. The young ladies have that very nasty immodest habit of
     hustling themselves out of sight precipitately whenever I appear. I
     dined with Mrs. ---- yesterday all alone. She was quite sick, very
     hoarse, and _he_ was in the country, so that on the whole it was a
     great bore. She is very clumsy in her way of doing things, and her
     invitation to me was for the wife of an artist--not artistic!

     I am now studying organic Chemistry. It will probably shock Mother
     to hear that I yesterday destroyed a pockethandkerchief--but it was
     an old one and I converted it into some sugar which though rather
     brown is very good. I believe I forgot to tell you that I am shorn
     of my brightest ornament. That solitary hirsute jewel which lent
     such a manly and martial aspect to my visage is gone, and the place
     thereof is naked. I don't think anyone will know the difference,
     and moreover it is not dead, it only sleeps and will some day rise
     phoenix-like from its ashes with tenfold its former beauty. When
     Father comes will he please bring Ganot's Physique _if H. doesn't
     want it_?

In none of these earlier communications from Cambridge is the element of
affectionate pleasantry more at play than in those addressed to his
sister.

     Charmante jeune fille, I find the Tappans _really_ expected me to
     bring you to them and were much disappointed at my failure. Ellen
     has grown very fat and big. Mary calls everybody "horrid." Lyly
     Barker is with the Wards. I haven't seen her yet, but shall do so
     on Saturday, when I am also to dine with the Hunts. I hope your
     neuralgia, or whatever you may believe the thing was, has gone and
     that you are back at school instead of languishing and lolling
     about the house. I send you herewith a portrait of Prof. Eliot, a
     very fair likeness, to grace your book withal. Write me whenever
     you have the slightest or most fleeting inclination to do so. If
     you have only one sentence to say, don't grudge paper and stamps
     for it. You don't know how much good you may do me at an
     appropriate time by a little easy scratching of your graceful
     nimble pen.

In another apostrophe to the same correspondent, at the same season, his
high spirits throw off the bonds of the vernacular.

     Est-ce que tu songes jamais a moi comme moi je songe a toi?--oh je
     crois bien que non! Maintes fois dans la journee l'image d'une
     espece d'ange vetue de blanc avec de longs boucles noirs qui
     encadrent une figure telle que la plupart des mortels ne font que
     l'entrevoir dans leur reves, s'impose a mes sens ravis; creature
     longue et fluette qui se dispose a se coucher dans une petite
     chambrette verte ou le gaz fait un grand jour. Eh, oua, oua, oua!
     c'est a faire mourir de douleur. Mais je parie que tout de meme pas
     une etincelle ne vibre pour moi dans les fibres de ton coeur
     endurci. Helas, oublie de mes parents et de mes semblables, je ne
     vois, ou que je regarde, qu'un abime de desespoir, un gouffre noir
     et peuple de demons, qui tot ou tard va m'engloutir. Tu ne m'ecris
     jamais sauf pour me soutirer des objets de luxe. La vaste mere me
     deteste, il n'y a que le frere qui me reste attache, et lui par
     esprit d'opposition plus que par autre chose. Eh mon Dieu, que
     vais-je devenir? En tout cas je vais clore cette lettre, qui s'est
     allongee malgre moi. Ton frere, James William.

Of the same bright complexion is this report, addressed to his parents,
of the change of lodging already noted.

     The presence of the Tweedys has been most agreeable and has
     contributed in no small degree to break the shock of removal to
     these new rooms, which are not near so cosy as the old; especially
     with the smoking of my stove, which went on all the first two days.
     That has been stopped, however, and the only trouble is now to get
     the fire alight at all. I have generally to start it 3 or 4 times,
     and the removal of the material of each failure from the grate is a
     fearful business. I have also to descend to the cellar myself to
     get my coal, and my "hod," as Ma Sweetser, my land-lady, calls it,
     not being very much bigger than a milk-pitcher, doesn't add to the
     charm. The coal is apt to drop on the stairs, and I have to pick it
     all up. At present the stove fills the room with a nephitic and
     pestilential gas, so that I have to keep the window open. I went
     last night with the Tweedys to the concert for which they came up,
     and with them this morning to hear Wendell Phillips. This Sweetser
     family is worthy of Dickens. It consists of a Mr. and Miss S., Mr.
     S.'s three gushing girls, a parrot and a maniac. The maniac is very
     obstreperous. Her husband left her boarding here 3 months ago and
     went to Cuba. When she got mad he was written to, but has sent no
     reply, and they are keeping her. For the Aunt's sake I keep my
     drawer locked against her at night. Old Sweetser is a riddle I hope
     to do justice to at some future time, but can't begin on now. His
     sister shakes like an aspen whenever she is spoken to. Oh I forgot
     the most important character of all, the black wench who "does" the
     room. She is about 20 years old and wears short frocks, but talks
     like Alice Robeson and has an antediluvian face about as large as
     the top of a flour-barrel.

I can really keep my hand from nothing, of whatever connection, that
causes his intensity of animation and spontaneity of expression to
revive. On a Sunday evening early in 1862 he had

     just returned from Milton, and, after removing from my person a
     beetle, sit down to write you immediately. Ever since 10.30 this
     A.M. the beetle s'est promene a l'envi sur ma peau. The first
     feeling I had of his becoming attached to it made me jump so as to
     scare an old lady opposite me in the car into fits. Finding him too
     hard to cru

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