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.