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.