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.