VI

These returns to that first year or two at Newport contribute meanwhile

to filling out as nothing in the present pages has yet done for me that

vision of our father's unsurpassable patience and independence, in the

interest of the convictions he cherished and the expression of them, as

richly emphatic as it was scantly heeded, to which he daily gave

himself. We took his "writing" infinitely for granted--we had always so

taken it, and the sense of him, each long morning, at his study table

either with bent considering brow or with a half-spent and checked

intensity, a lapse backward in his chair and a musing lift of perhaps

troubled and baffled eyes, seems to me the most constant fact, the most

closely interwoven and underlying, among all our breaks and variations.

He applied himself there with a regularity and a piety as little subject

to sighing abatements or betrayed fears as if he had been working under

pressure for his bread and ours and the question were too urgent for his

daring to doubt. This play of his remarkable genius brought him in fact

throughout the long years no ghost of a reward in the form of pence, and

could proceed to publicity, as it repeatedly did, not only by the

copious and resigned sacrifice of such calculations, but by his meeting

in every single case all the expenses of the process. The untired

impulse to this devotion figured for us, comprehensively and familiarly,

as "Father's Ideas," of the force and truth of which in his own view we

were always so respectfully, even though at times so bewilderedly and

confoundedly persuaded, that we felt there was nothing in his exhibition

of life that they didn't or couldn't account for. They pervaded and

supported his existence, and very considerably our own; but what comes

back to me, to the production of a tenderness and an admiration scarce

to be expressed, is the fact that though we thus easily and naturally

lived with them and indeed, as to their more general effects, the colour

and savour they gave to his talk, breathed them in and enjoyed both

their quickening and their embarrassing presence, to say nothing of

their almost never less than amusing, we were left as free and

unattacked by them as if they had been so many droppings of gold and

silver coin on tables and chimney-pieces, to be "taken" or not according

to our sense and delicacy, that is our felt need and felt honour. The

combination in him of his different vivacities, his living interest in

his philosophy, his living interest in us and his living superiority to

all greed of authority, all overreaching or overemphasising "success",

at least in the heated short run, gave his character a magnanimity by

which it was impossible to us not to profit in all sorts of responsive

and in fact quite luxurious ways. It was a luxury, I to-day see, to have

all the benefit of his intellectual and spiritual, his religious, his

philosophic and his social passion, without ever feeling the pressure of

it to our direct irritation or discomfort. It would perhaps more truly

figure the relation in which he left us to these things to have likened

our opportunities rather to so many scattered glasses of the liquor of

faith, poured-out cups stood about for our either sipping or draining

down or leaving alone, in the measure of our thirst, our curiosity or

our strength of head and heart. If there was much leaving alone in

us--and I freely confess that, so far as the taking any of it all

"straight" went, my lips rarely adventured--this was doubtless because

we drank so largely at the source itself, the personally overflowing and

irrigating. What it then comes to, for my present vision, was that he

treated us most of all on the whole, as he in fact treated everything,

by his saving imagination--which set us, and the more as we were

naturally so inclined, the example of living as much as we might in some

such light of our own. If we had been asked in our younger time for

instance what _were_ our father's ideas, or to give an example of one

of them, I think we should promptly have answered (I should myself have

hastened to do so) that the principal was a devoted attachment to the

writings of Swedenborg; as to whom we were to remember betimes, with

intimate appreciation, that in reply to somebody's plea of not finding

him credible our parent had pronounced him, on the contrary, fairly

"insipid with veracity." We liked that partly, I think, because it

disposed in a manner, that is in favour of our detachment, of the great

Emanuel, but when I remember the part played, so close beside us, by

this latter's copious revelation, I feel almost ashamed for my own

incurious conduct. The part played consisted to a large extent in the

vast, even though incomplete, array of Swedenborg's works, the old faded

covers of which, anciently red, actually apt to be loose, and backed

with labels of impressive, though to my sense somewhat sinister London

imprint, Arcana Coelestia, Heaven and Hell and other such matters--they

all had, as from other days, a sort of black emphasis of dignity--ranged

themselves before us wherever, and however briefly, we disposed

ourselves, forming even for short journeys the base of our father's

travelling library and perhaps at some seasons therewith the accepted

strain on our mother's patience. I recall them as inveterately part of

our very luggage, requiring proportionate receptacles; I recall them as,

in a number considerable even when reduced, part of their proprietor's

own most particular dependence on his leaving home, during our more

agitated years, for those speculative visits to possible better places

(than whatever place of the moment) from which, as I have elsewhere

mentioned, he was apt to return under premature, under passionate

nostalgic, reaction. The Swedenborgs were promptly out again on their

customary shelves or sometimes more improvised perches, and it was

somehow not till we had assured ourselves of this that we felt _that_

incident closed.

Nothing could have exceeded at the same time our general sense--unless I

all discreetly again confine myself to the spare record of my own--for

our good fortune in never having been, even when most helpless, dragged

by any approach to a faint jerk over the threshold of the inhabited

temple. It stood there in the centre of our family life, into which its

doors of fine austere bronze opened straight; we passed and repassed

them when we didn't more consciously go round and behind; we took for

granted vague grand things within, but we never paused to peer or

penetrate, and none the less never had the so natural and wistful,

perhaps even the so properly resentful, "Oh I say, do look in a moment

for manners if for nothing else!" called after us as we went. Our

admirable mother sat on the steps at least and caught reverberations of

the inward mystic choir; but there were positive contemporary moments

when I well-nigh became aware, I think, of something graceless,

something not to the credit of my aspiring "intellectual life," or of

whatever small pretensions to seriousness I might have begun to nourish,

in the anything but heroic impunity of my inattention. William, later

on, made up for this not a little, redeeming so, to a large extent, as

he grew older, our filial honour in the matter of a decent sympathy, if

not of a noble curiosity: distinct to me even are certain echoes of

passages between our father and his eldest son that I assisted at, more

or less indirectly and wonderingly, as at intellectual "scenes,"

gathering from them portents of my brother's independent range of

speculation, agitations of thought and announcements of difference,

which could but have represented, far beyond anything I should ever have

to show, a gained and to a considerable degree an enjoyed, confessedly

an interested, acquaintance with the paternal philosophic _penetralia_.

That particular impression refers indeed to hours which at the point I

have reached had not yet struck; but I am touched even now, after all

the years, with something exquisite in my half-grasped premonitory

vision of their belonging, these belated discussions that were but the

flowering of the first germs of such _other_, doubtless already such

opposed, perceptions and conclusions, to that order of thin consolations

and broken rewards which long figured as the most and the best of what

was to have been waited for on our companion's part without the escape

of a plaint. Yet I feel I may claim that our awareness of all that was

so serenely dispensed with--to call it missed would have been quite to

falsify the story and reflect meanly on the spirit--never in the least

brutally lapsed from admiration, however unuttered the sentiment itself,

after the fashion of raw youth; it is in fact quite distinct to me that,

had there been danger of this, there came to us from our mother's lips

at intervals long enough to emphasise the final sincerity and beauty a

fairly sacred reminder of that strain of almost solely self-nourished

equanimity, or in other words insuperable gaiety, in her life's comrade,

which she had never seen give way. This was the very gaiety that kept

through the years coming out for us--to the point of inviting free jokes

and other light familiarities from us at its expense. The happiest

household pleasantry invested our legend of our mother's fond habit of

address, "Your father's _ideas_, you know--!" which was always the

signal for our embracing her with the last responsive finality (and, for

the full pleasure of it, in his presence). Nothing indeed so much as his

presence encouraged the licence, as I may truly call it, of the

legend--that is of our treatment _en famille_ of any reference to the

attested public weight of his labours; which, I hasten to add, was much

too esoteric a ground of geniality, a dear old family joke, not to be

kept, for its value, to ourselves. But there comes back to me the

impression of his appearing on occasion quite moved to the exuberance of

cheer--as a form of refreshment he could draw on for a stronger and

brighter spurt, I mean--by such an apology for resonance of reputation

as our harmless, our of course utterly edgeless, profanity represented.

It might have been for him, by a happy stretch, a sign that the world

_did_ know--taking us for the moment, in our selfish young babble, as a

part of the noise of the world. Nothing, at the same time, could alter

the truth of his case, or can at least alter it to me now: he had,

intellectually, convictionally, passionally speaking, a selfless

detachment, a lack of what is called the eye for effect--always I mean

of the elated and interested order--which I can but marvel at in the

light of the rare aptitude of his means to his end, and in that of the

beauty of both, though the stamp was doubtless most vivid, for so

differing, so gropingly "esthetic" a mind as my own, in his unfailingly

personal and admirable style. We knew he had thoroughly his own

"unconventional" form, which, by the unspeakable law of youth, we

managed to feel the distinction of as not platitudinous even while we a

bit sneakingly felt it as quotable, on possible occasions, against our

presence of mind; the great thing was at all events that we couldn't

live with him without the sense that if his books resembled his talk and

his character--as we moreover felt they couldn't help almost violently

doing--they might want for this, that or the other which kept the

conventional true to its type, but could as little fail to flush with

the strong colour, colour so remarkably given and not taken, projected

and not reflected, colour of thought and faith and moral and

expressional atmosphere, as they could leave us without that felt

side-wind of their strong composition which made after all so much of

the air we breathed and was in the last resort the gage of something

perpetually fine going on.

It is not too much to say, I think, that our religious education, so far

as we had any, consisted wholly in that loose yet enlightening

impression: I say so far as we had any in spite of my very definitely

holding that it would absolutely not have been possible to us, in the

measure of our sensibility, to breathe more the air of that reference to

an order of goodness and power greater than any this world by itself can

show which we understand as the religious spirit. Wondrous to me, as I

consider again, that my father's possession of this spirit, in a degree

that made it more deeply one with his life than I can conceive another

or a different case of its being, should have been unaccompanied with a

single one of the outward or formal, the theological, devotional,

ritual, or even implicitly pietistic signs by which we usually know it.

The fact of course was that his religion was nothing if not a

philosophy, extraordinarily complex and worked out and original,

intensely personal as an exposition, yet not only susceptible of

application, but clamorous for it, to the whole field of consciousness,

nature and society, history, knowledge, all human relations and

questions, every pulse of the process of our destiny. Of this vast and

interesting conception, as striking an expression of the religious

spirit surely as ever was put forth, his eldest son has given an

account[6]--so far as this was possible at once with brevity and with

full comprehension--that I should have been unable even to dream of

aspiring to, and in the masterly clearness and justice of which the

opportunity of the son blends with that of the critic, each character

acting in perfect felicity, after a fashion of which I know elsewhere no

such fine example. It conveys the whole sense of our father's

philosophic passion, which was theologic, by my direct impression of it,

to a degree fairly outdistancing all theologies; representing its

weight, reproducing its utterance, placing it in the eye of the world,

and making for it the strong and single claim it suggests, in a manner

that leaves nothing to be added to the subject. I am not concerned with

the intrinsic meaning of these things here, and should not be even had

they touched me more directly, or more converted me from what I can best

call, to my doubtless scant honour, a total otherness of contemplation,

during the years when my privilege was greatest and my situation for

inquiry and response amplest; but the active, not to say the obvious,

moral of them, in all our younger time, was that a life of the most

richly consequent flowed straight out of them, that in this life, the

most abundantly, and above all naturally, communicated _as_ life that it

was possible to imagine, we had an absolutely equal share, and that in

fine I was to live to go back with wonder and admiration to the quantity

of secreted thought in our daily medium, the quality of intellectual

passion, the force of cogitation and aspiration, as to the explanation

both of a thousand surface incoherences and a thousand felt felicities.

A religion that was so systematically a philosophy, a philosophy that

was so sweepingly a religion, being together, by their necessity, as I

have said, an intensity of relation to the actual, the consciousness so

determined was furnished forth in a way that met by itself the whole

question of the attitude of "worship" for instance; as I have attempted

a little to show that it met, with a beautiful good faith and the

easiest sufficiency, every other when such came up: those of education,

acquisition, material vindication, what is called success generally. In

the beauty of the whole thing, again, I lose myself--by which I mean in

the fact that we were all the while partaking, to our most intimate

benefit, of an influence of direction and enlargement attended with

scarce a single consecrated form and which would have made many of

these, had we been exposed to intrusion from them, absurdly irrelevant.

My father liked in our quite younger period to read us chapters from the

New Testament and the Old, and I hope we liked to listen to them--though

I recall their seeming dreary from their association with school

practice; but that was the sole approach to a challenge of our complete

freedom of inward, not less than our natural ingenuity of outward,

experience. No other explicit address to us in the name of the Divine

could, I see, have been made with any congruity--in face of the fact

that invitations issued in all the vividest social terms, terms of

living appreciation, of spiritual perception, of "human fellowship," to

use the expression that was perhaps oftenest on his lips and his pen

alike, were the very substance of the food supplied in the parental

nest.

The freedom from pressure that we enjoyed in every direction, all those

immunities and exemptions that had been, in protracted childhood,

positively embarrassing to us, as I have already noted, before the

framework, ecclesiastical and mercantile, squared at us as with

reprobation from other households, where it seemed so to conduce to

their range of resource--these things consorted with our yet being

yearned over or prescribed for, by every implication, after a fashion

that was to make the social organisation of such invidious homes, under

my subsequent observation of life, affect me as so much bleak penury or

domestic desert where these things of the spirit, these genialities of

faith were concerned. Well do I remember, none the less, how I was

troubled all along just by this particular crookedness of our being so

extremely religious without having, as it were, anything in the least

classified or striking to show for it; so that the measure of

other-worldliness pervading our premises was rather a waste, though at

the same time oddly enough a congestion--projecting outwardly as it did

no single one of those usual symptoms of propriety any of which,

gathered at a venture from the general prospect, might by my sense have

served: I shouldn't have been particular, I thought, as to the

selection. Religion was a matter, by this imagination, to be worked off

much more than to be worked in, and I fear my real vague sentiment to

have been but that life would under the common equipment be somehow more

amusing; and this even though, as I don't forget, there was not an item

of the detail of devotional practice that we had been so much as allowed

to divine. I scarce know why I should have wanted anything more amusing,

as most of our coevals would have regarded it, than that we had from as

far back as I could remember indulged in no shade of an approach to

"keeping Sunday"; which is one of the reasons why to speak as if piety

could have borne for us any sense but the tender human, or to speak at

all of devotion, unction, initiation, even of the vaguest, into the

exercises or professions, as among our attributes, would falsify

altogether our mere fortune of a general liberty of living, of making

ourselves as brightly at home as might be, in that "spiritual world"

which we were in the habit of hearing as freely alluded to as we heard

the prospect of dinner or the call of the postman. The oddity of my own

case, as I make it out so far as it involved a confused criticism, was

that my small uneasy mind, bulging and tightening in the wrong, or at

least in unnatural and unexpected, places, like a little jacket ill cut

or ill sewn, attached its gaping view, as I have already more than

enough noted, to things and persons, objects and aspects, frivolities

all, I dare say I was willing to grant, compared with whatever

manifestations of the serious, these being by need, apparently, the

abstract; and that in fine I should have been thankful for a state of

faith, a conviction of the Divine, an interpretation of the

universe--anything one might have made bold to call it--which would have

supplied more features or appearances. Feeling myself "after" persons so

much more than after anything else--to recur to that side of my earliest

and most constant consciousness which might have been judged most

deplorable--I take it that I found the sphere of our more nobly

supposititious habitation too imperceptibly peopled; whereas the

religious life of every other family that could boast of any such (and

what family didn't boast?) affected my fancy as with a social and

material crowdedness. That faculty alone was affected--this I hasten to

add; no directness of experience ever stirred for me; it being the case

in the first place that I scarce remember, as to all our young time, the

crossing of our threshold by any faint shade of an ecclesiastical

presence, or the lightest encounter with any such elsewhere, and equally

of the essence, over and above, that the clerical race, the

pre-eminently restrictive tribe, as I apprehended them, couldn't very

well have agreed less with the general colour of my fondest vision: if

it be not indeed more correct to say that I was reduced to _supposing_

they couldn't. We knew in truth nothing whatever about them, a fact

that, as I recover it, also flushes for me with its fine

awkwardness--the social scene in general handsomely bristling with them

to the rueful view I sketch, and they yet remaining for us, or at any

rate for myself, such creatures of pure hearsay that when late in my

teens, and in particular after my twentieth year, I began to see them

portrayed by George Eliot and Anthony Trollope the effect was a

disclosure of a new and romantic species. Strange beyond my present

power to account for it this anomaly that amid a civilisation replete

with "ministers"--for we at least knew the word--actively,

competitively, indeed as would often appear quite violently,

ministering, so little sense of a brush against approved examples was

ever to attend me that I had finally to draw my nearest sufficiency of

a true image from pictures of a social order largely alien to our own.

All of which, at the same time, I allow myself to add, didn't mitigate

the simple fact of my felt--my indeed so luxuriously permitted--detachment

of sensibility from everything, everything, that is, in the way of great

relations, as to which our father's emphasis was richest. _There_ was

the dim dissociation, there my comparative poverty, or call it even

frivolity, of instinct: I gaped imaginatively, as it were, to such a

different set of relations. I couldn't have framed stories that would

have succeeded in involving the least of the relations that seemed most

present to _him_; while those most present to myself, that is more

complementary to whatever it was I thought of as humanly most

interesting, attaching, inviting, were the ones his schemes of

importances seemed virtually to do without. Didn't I discern in this

from the first a kind of implied snub to the significance of mine?--so

that, in the blest absence of "pressure" which I just sought here

passingly to celebrate, I could brood to my heart's content on the so

conceivable alternative of a field of exposure crammed with those

objective appearances that my faculty seemed alone fitted to grasp. In

which there was ever the small torment of the fact--though I don't quite

see to-day why it should not have been of a purely pleasant

irritation--that what our parent most overflowed with was just the brave

contradiction or opposition between all his parts, a thing which made

for perfect variety, which he carried ever so easily and brightly, and

which would have put one no less in the wrong had one accused him of

knowing only the abstract (as I was so complacently and invidiously

disposed to name it) than if one had foolishly remarked on his living

and concluding without it. But I have already made clear his great mixed

range--which of course couldn't _not_ have been the sign of a mind

conceiving our very own breathing humanity in its every fibre the

absolute expression of a resident Divinity. No element of character, no

spontaneity of life, but instantly seized his attention and incurred his

greeting and his comment; which things could never possibly have been so

genially alert and expert--as I have, again, before this,

superabundantly recorded--if it had not fairly fed on active observation

and contact. He could answer one with the radiant when one challenged

him with the obscure, just as he could respond with the general when one

pulled at the particular; and I needn't repeat that this made for us,

during all our time, anything but a starved actuality.

None the less, however, I remember it as savouring of loss to me--which

is my present point--that our so thoroughly informal scene of

susceptibility seemed to result from a positive excess of familiarity,

in his earlier past, with such types of the shepherd and the flock, to

say nothing of such forms of the pasture, as might have met in some

degree my appetite for the illustrational. This was one of the things

that made me often wish, as I remember, that I might have caught him

sooner or younger, less developed, as who should say; the matters that

appeared, however confusedly, to have started his development being by

this measure stranger and livelier than most of those that finally

crowned it, marked with their own colour as many of these doubtless

were. Three or four strongest pages in the fragment of autobiography

gathered by his eldest son into the sheaf of his Literary Remains

describe the state of soul undergone by him in England, in '44, just

previous to the hour at which Mrs. Chichester, a gentle lady of his

acquaintance there, brought to his knowledge, by a wondrous chance, the

possibility that the great Swedenborg, from whom she had drawn much

light, might have something to say to his case; so that under the

impression of his talk with her he posted at once up to London from the

neighbourhood of Windsor, where he was staying, possessed himself of

certain volumes of the writings of the eminent mystic (so-called I

mean, for to my father this description of him was grotesque), and

passed rapidly into that grateful infinitude of recognition and

application which he was to inhabit for the rest of his days. I saw him

move about there after the fashion of the oldest and easiest native, and

this had on some sides its own considerable effect, tinged even on

occasion with romance; yet I felt how the _real_ right thing for me

would have been the hurrying drama of the original rush, the interview

with the admirable Mrs. Chichester, the sweet legend of his and my

mother's charmed impression of whom had lingered with us--I admired her

very name, there seeming none other among us at all like it; and then

the return with the tokens of light, the splendid agitation as the light

deepened, and the laying in of that majestic array of volumes which were

to form afterward the purplest rim of his library's horizon and which I

was thus capable, for my poor part, of finding valuable, in default of

other values, as coloured properties in a fine fifth act. It was all a

play I hadn't "been to," consciously at least--that was the trouble; the

curtain had fallen while I was still tucked in my crib, and I assisted

but on a comparatively flat home scene at the echo of a great success. I

could still have done, for the worst, with a consciousness of Swedenborg

that should have been graced at least with Swedenborgians--aware as I

was of the existence of such enrolled disciples, ornaments of a church

of their own, yet known to us only as persons rather acidly mystified by

the inconvenience, as we even fancied them to feel it, of our father's

frankly independent and disturbingly irregular (all the more for its

being so expressive) connection with their inspirer. In the light or the

dusk of all this it was surely impossible to make out that he professed

any faint shade of that clerical character as to his having incurred

which we were, "in the world," to our bewilderment, not infrequently

questioned. Those of the enrolled order, in the matter of his and their

subject of study, might in their way too have raised to my regard a

fretted vault or opened a long-drawn aisle, but they were never at all,

in the language of a later day, to materialise to me; we neither on a

single occasion sat in their circle, nor did one of them, to the best of

my belief, ever stray, remonstrantly or invitingly, into ours; where

Swedenborg was read not in the least as the Bible scarce more than just

escaped being, but even as Shakespeare or Dickens or Macaulay was

content to be--which was without our arranging or subscribing for it. I

seem to distinguish that if a fugitive or a shy straggler from the

pitched camp did turn up it was under cover of night or of curiosity and

with much panting and putting off of the mantle, much nervous laughter

above all--this safe, however, to become on the shortest order amusement

easy and intimate. That _figured_ something in a slight way--as at least

I suppose I may infer from the faint adumbration I retain; but nothing

none the less much attenuated what I suppose I should have denounced as

the falsity of our position (meaning thereby of mine) had I been

constitutionally at all voluble for such flights. Constructionally we

had all the fun of licence, while the truth seemed really to be that fun

in the religious connection closely depended on bondage. The fun was of

course that I wanted in this line of diversion something of the coarser

strain; which came home to me in especial, to cut the matter short, when

I was present, as I yielded first and last to many an occasion for

being, at my father's reading out to my mother with an appreciation of

that modest grasp of somebody's attention, the brief illusion of

publicity, which has now for me the exquisite grace of the touching,

some series of pages from among his "papers" that were to show her how

he had this time at last done it. No touch of the beautiful or the

sacred in the disinterested life can have been absent from such

scenes--I find every such ideally there; and my memory rejoices above

all in their presentation of our mother at her very perfectest of

soundless and yet absolutely all-saving service and trust. To have

attempted any projection of our father's aspect without an immediate

reference to her sovereign care for him and for all of us as the so

widely open, yet so softly enclosing, lap of all his liberties and all

our securities, all our variety and withal our harmony, the harmony that

was for nine-tenths of it our sense of her gathered life in us, and of

her having no other--to have so proceeded has been but to defer by

instinct and by scruple to the kind of truth and of beauty before which

the direct report breaks down. I may well have stopped short with what

there would be to say, and yet what account of us all can pretend to

have gone the least bit deep without coming to our mother at every

penetration? We simply lived by her, in proportion as we lived

spontaneously, with an equanimity of confidence, an independence of

something that I should now find myself think of as decent compunction

if I didn't try to call it instead morbid delicacy, which left us free

for detachments of thought and flights of mind, experiments, so to

speak, on the assumption of our genius and our intrinsic interest, that

I look back upon as to a luxury of the unworried that is scarce of this

world. This was a support on which my father rested with the absolute

whole of his weight, and it was when I felt her listen with the whole of

her usefulness, which needed no other force, being as it was the whole

of her tenderness and amply sufficing by itself, that I understood most

what it was so to rest and so to act. When in the fulness of the years

she was to die, and he then to give us time, a few months, as with a

beatific depth of design, to marvel at the manner of his acceptance of

the stroke, a shown triumph of his philosophy, he simply one day

consciously ceased, quietly declined to continue, as an offered measure

of his loss of interest. Nothing--he had enabled himself to make

perfectly sure--was in the least worth while without her; this attested,

he passed away or went out, with entire simplicity, promptness and ease,

for the definite reason that his support had failed. His philosophy had

been not his support but his suspension, and he had never, I am sure,

felt so lifted as at that hour, which splendidly crowned his faith. It

showed us more intimately still what, in this world of cleft components,

one human being can yet be for another, and how a form of vital aid may

have operated for years with such perfection as fairly to have made

recognition seem at the time a sort of excess of reaction, an

interference or a pedantry. All which is imaged for me while I see our

mother listen, at her work, to the full music of the "papers." She could

do that by the mere force of her complete availability, and could do it

with a smoothness of surrender that was like an array of all the

perceptions. The only thing that I might well have questioned on these

occasions was the possibility on the part of a selflessness so

consistently and unabatedly active of its having anything ever left

_acutely_ to offer; to abide so unbrokenly in such inaptness for the

personal claim might have seemed to render difficult such a special show

of it as any particular pointedness of hospitality would propose to

represent. I dare say it was our sense of this that so often made us

all, when the explicit or the categoric, the impulse of acclamation,

flowered out in her, find our happiest play of filial humour in just

embracing her for the sound of it; than which I can imagine no more

expressive tribute to our constant depths of indebtedness. She lived in

ourselves so exclusively, with such a want of use for anything in her

consciousness that was not about us and for us, that I think we almost

contested her being separate enough to be proud of us--it was too like

our being proud of ourselves. We were delightedly derisive with her even

about pride in our father--it was the most domestic of our pastimes; for

what really could exceed the tenderness of our fastening on her that she

_was_ he, _was_ each of us, was our pride and our humility, our

possibility of _any_ relation, and the very canvas itself on which we

were floridly embroidered? How can I better express what she seemed to

do for her second son in especial than by saying that even with her

deepest delicacy of attention present I could still feel, while my

father read, why it was that I most of all seemed to wish we might have

been either much less religious or much more so? Was not the reason at

bottom that I so suffered, I might almost have put it, under the

impression of his style, which affected me as somehow too philosophic

for life, and at the same time too living, as I made out, for

thought?--since I must weirdly have opined that by so much as you were

individual, which meant personal, which meant monotonous, which meant

limitedly allusive and verbally repetitive, by so much you were not

literary or, so to speak, _largely_ figurative. My father had terms,

evidently strong, but in which I presumed to feel, with a shade of

irritation, a certain narrowness of exclusion as to images

otherwise--and oh, since it was a question of the pen, so

multitudinously!--entertainable. Variety, variety--_that_ sweet ideal,

_that_ straight contradiction of any dialectic, hummed for me all the

while as a direct, if perverse and most unedified, effect of the

parental concentration, with some of its consequent, though heedless,

dissociations. I heard it, felt it, saw it, both shamefully enjoyed and

shamefully denied it as form, though as form only; and I owed thus

supremely to my mother that I could, in whatever obscure levity, muddle

out some sense of my own preoccupation under the singular softness of

the connection that she kept for me, by the outward graces, with that

other and truly much intenser which I was so little framed to share.

If meanwhile my father's tone, so far as that went, was to remain the

same, save for a natural growth of assurance, and thereby of amplitude,

all his life, I find it already, and his very voice as we were to know

them, in a letter to R. W. Emerson of 1842, without more specific date,

after the loose fashion of those days, but from 2 Washington Place, New

York, the second house in the row between the University building and

Broadway, as he was next to note to his correspondent in expressing the

hope of a visit from him. (It was the house in which, the following

year, his second son was born.)

I came home to-night from my lecture a little disposed to think,

from the smart reduction of my audience, that I had about as well

not have prepared my course, especially as I get no tidings of

having interested one of the sort (the religious) for whom they are

wholly designed. When I next see you I want a half-hour's support

from you under this discouragement, and the purpose of this letter

is to secure it. When I am _with_ you I get no help from you--of

the sort you can give me, I feel sure; though you must know what I

want before I listen to you next. Usually the temper you show, of

perfect repose and candour, free from all sickening partisanship

and full of magnanimous tenderness for every creature, makes me

forget my wants in your lavish plenty. But I know you have the same

as I have, deep down in your breast, and it is by these I would

fain know you. I am led, quite without any conscious wilfulness

either, to seek the _laws_ of these appearances that swim round us

in God's great museum, to get hold of some central facts which may

make all other facts properly circumferential and orderly; and you

continually dishearten me by your apparent indifference to such law

and such facts, by the dishonour you seem to cast on our

intelligence as if it were what stands in our way. Now my

conviction is that my intelligence is the necessary digestive

apparatus for my life; that there is nihil in vita--worth anything,

that is--quod non prius in intellectu. Now is it not so in truth

with you? Can you not report your life to me by some intellectual

symbol which my intellect appreciates? Do you not know your

activity? But fudge--I cannot say what I want to say, what aches to

say itself in me, and so I'll hold up till I see you, and try once

more to get some better furtherance by my own effort. Here I am

these thirty-one years in life, ignorant in all outward science,

but having patient habits of meditation which never know disgust or

weariness, and feeling a force of impulsive love toward all

humanity which will not let me rest wholly mute, a force which

grows against all resistance that I can muster against it. What

shall I do? Shall I get me a little nook in the country and

communicate with my _living_ kind--not my talking kind--by life

only; a word perhaps of _that_ communication, a fit word once a

year? Or shall I follow some commoner method--learn science and

bring myself first into man's respect, that I may thus the better

speak to him? I confess this last theory seems rank with

earthliness--to belong to days forever past.

His appeal to Emerson at this hour was, as he elsewhere then puts it, to

the "invisible" man in the matter, who affected him as somewhere behind

the more or less immediately visible, the beautifully but mystifyingly

audible, the Emerson of honeyed lectures and addresses, suggestive and

inspiring as that one might be, and who might, as we say to-day, have

something, something more at least, for him. "I will tell him that I do

not value his substantive discoveries, whatever they may be, perhaps

half so largely as he values them, but that I chiefly cherish that erect

attitude of mind in him which in God's universe undauntedly seeks the

worthiest tidings of God, and calmly defies every mumbling phantom which

would challenge its freedom. Should his zeal for realities and contempt

of vulgar shows abide the ordeal I have thus contrived for them I shall

gladly await his visit to me. So much at least is what I have been

saying to myself. Now that I have told it to you also you have become a

sort of confidant between me and myself, and so bound to promote harmony

there." The correspondence expands, however, beyond my space for

reporting of it; I but pick out a few passages.

I am cheered by the coming of Carlyle's new book, which Greeley

announces, and shall hasten off for it as soon as I have

leisure.[7] The title is provokingly enigmatical, but thought

enough there will be in it no doubt, whatever the name; thought

heaped up to topheaviness and inevitable lopsidedness, but more

interesting to me than comes from any other quarter of

Europe--interesting for the man's sake whom it shows. According to

my notion he is the very best interpreter of a spiritual philosophy

that could be devised for _this age_, the age of transition and

conflict; and what renders him so is his natural

birth-and-education-place. Just to think of a Scotchman with a

heart widened to German spiritualities! To have overcome his

educational bigotries far enough to listen to the new ideas, this

by itself was wonderful; and then to give all his native shrewdness

and humour to the service of making them _tell_ to the minds of his

people--what more fortunate thing for the time could there be? You

don't look upon Calvinism as a fact at all; wherein you are to my

mind philosophically infirm--impaired in your universality. I can

see in Carlyle the advantage his familiarity with it gives him over

you with a general audience. What is highest in him is built upon

that lowest. At least so I read; I believe Jonathan Edwards

redivivus in true blue would, after an honest study of the

philosophy that has grown up since his day, make the best possible

reconciler and critic of this philosophy--far better than Schelling

redivivus.

In the autumn of 1843 the "nook in the country" above alluded to had

become a question renounced, so far at least as the American country

was concerned, and never again afterwards flushed into life. "I think it

probable I shall winter in some mild English climate, Devonshire

perhaps, and go on with my studies as at home. I shall miss the stimulus

of your candid and generous society, and I confess we don't like the

aspect of the journey; but one's destiny puts on many garments as it

goes shaping itself in secret--so let us not cling to any particular

fashion." Very marked, and above all very characteristic of my father,

in this interesting relation, which I may but so imperfectly illustrate,

his constant appeal to his so inspired, yet so uninflamed, so

irreducible and, as it were, inapplicable, friend for intellectual and,

as he would have said, spiritual help of the immediate and adjustable,

the more concretely vital, kind, the kind translatable into terms of the

real, the particular human terms of action and passion. "Oh you man

without a _handle_! Shall one never be able to help himself out of you,

according to his needs, and be dependent only upon your fitful

tippings-up?"--a remarkably felicitous expression, as it strikes me, of

that difficulty often felt by the passionately-living of the earlier

time, as they may be called, to draw down their noble philosopher's

great overhanging heaven of universal and ethereal answers to the plane

of their comparatively terrestrial and personal questions; the note of

the answers and their great anticipatory spirit being somehow that they

seemed to anticipate everything but the unaccommodating individual case.

My father, on his side, bristled with "handles"--there could scarce be a

better general account of him--and tipped himself up for you almost

before you could take hold of one; of which truth, for that matter, this

same letter happens to give, even if just trivially, the hint. "Can I do

anything for you in the way of taking parcels, no matter how large or

expensive?--or for any of your friends? If you see Margaret Fuller ask

her to give me some service to render her abroad, the dear noble woman:

it seems a real hardship to be leaving the country now that I have just

come to talk with her." Emerson, I should add, did offer personally so

solid a handle that my father appears to have taken from him two

introductions to be made use of in London, one to Carlyle and the other

to John Sterling, the result of which shortly afterwards was as vivid

and as deeply appropriated an impression of each eminent character as it

was probably to be given either of them ever to have made. The

impression of Carlyle was recorded but long subsequently, I note, and is

included in William's gathering-in of our father's Literary Remains

(1885); and of the acquaintance with Sterling no reflection remains but

a passage in a letter, under date of Ventnor and of the winter of 1843,

from the latter to his biographer to be; Carlyle having already

mentioned in the Life that "Two American gentlemen, acquaintances also

of mine, had been recommended to him, by Emerson most likely"; and that

"one morning Sterling appeared here with a strenuous proposal that we

should come to Knightsbridge and dine with him and them.... And

accordingly we went," it goes on. "I remember it as one of the saddest

dinners; though Sterling talked copiously, and our friends, Theodore

Parker one of them, were pleasant and distinguished men." My father,

with Theodore Parker his friend and the date fitting, would quite seem

to have been one of the pair were it not that "our conversation was

waste and logical, I forget quite on what, not joyful and harmoniously

effusive." It is _that_ that doesn't fit with any real participation of

his--nothing could well do less so; unless the occasion had but too

closely conformed to the biographer's darkly and richly prophetic view

of it as tragic and ominous, "sad as if one had been dining in a ruin,

in the crypt of a mausoleum"--all this "painfully apparent through the

bright mask (Sterling) had bound himself to wear." The end of his life

was then, to Carlyle's view, in sight; but his own note, in the Isle of

Wight, on "Mr. James, your New-England friend," was genial enough--"I

saw him several times and liked him. They went on the 24th of last month

back to London--or so purposed," he adds, "because there is no pavement

here for him to walk on. I want to know where he is, and thought I

should be able to learn from you. I gave him a note for Mill, who may

perhaps have seen him."

My main interest in which is, I confess, for the far-off germ of the odd

legend, destined much to grow later on, that--already the nucleus of a

household--we were New England products; which I think my parents could

then have even so much as seemed only to eyes naturally unaware of our

American "sectional" differences. My father, when considerably past his

thirtieth year, if I am not mistaken, had travelled "East," within our

borders, but once in his life--on the occasion of his spending two or

three months in Boston as a very young man; there connecting itself with

this for me a reminiscence so bedimmed at once and so suggestive as now

almost to torment me. It must have been in '67 or '68 that, giving him

my arm, of a slippery Boston day, up or down one of the steep streets

that used to mount, from behind, and as slightly sullen with the effort,

to Beacon Hill, and between which my now relaxed memory rather fails to

discriminate, I was arrested by his pointing out to me opposite us a

house in which he had for a while had rooms, long before and quite in

his early time. I but recall that we were more or less skirting the base

of an ancient town-reservoir, the seat of the water-supply as then

constituted, a monument rugged and dark, massively granitic, perched all

perversely, as it seemed to look, on the precipitous slope, and

which--at least as I see it through the years--struck quite handsomely

the Babylonian note. I at any rate mix up with this frowning object--it

had somehow a sinister presence and suggestion--my companion's mention

there in front of it that he had anciently taken refuge under its shadow

from certain effects of a misunderstanding, if indeed not of a sharp

rupture, for the time, with a highly generous but also on occasion

strongly protesting parent at Albany, a parent displeased with some

course he had taken or had declined to take (there was a tradition among

us that he had been for a period quite definitely "wild"), and relief

from further discussion with whom he had sought, and had more or less

found, on that spot. It was an age in which a flight from Albany to

Boston--there being then no Boston and Albany Railroad--counted as a far

flight; though it wasn't to occur to me either then or afterwards that

the ground of this manoeuvre had been any plotted wildness in the

Puritan air. What was clear at the moment, and what he remarked upon,

was that the street-scene about us showed for all the lapse of time no

scrap of change, and I remember well for myself how my first impression

of Boston gave it to me under certain aspects as more expressive than I

had supposed an American city could be of a seated and rooted social

order, an order not complex but sensibly fixed--gathered in or folded

back to intensity upon itself; and this, again and again, when the

compass of the posture, its narrow field, might almost have made the

fold excruciating. It had given however no sign of excruciation--that

itself had been part of the Puritan stoicism; which perhaps was exactly

why the local look, recognised to the point I speak of by the visitor,

was so contained and yet comparatively so full: full, very nearly, I

originally fancied, after the appraisable fashion of some composed

town-face in one of Balzac's _villes de province_. All of which, I

grant, is much to say for the occasion of that dropped confidence, on

the sloshy hillside, to which I allude--and part of the action of which

was that it had never been dropped before; this circumstance somehow a

peculiar source of interest, an interest I the more regret to have lost

my grasp of as it must have been sharp, or in other words founded, to

account for the long reverberation here noted. I had still--as I was

indeed to keep having through life--the good fortune that elements of

interest easily sprang, to my incurable sense, from any ghost of a drama

at all _presented_; though I of course can't in the least pretend to

generalise on what may or may not have constituted living presentation.

This felicity occurred, I make out, quite incalculably, just as it could

or would; the effect depended on some particular touch of the spring,

which was set in motion the instant the touch happened to be right. My

father's was always right, to my receptive mind; as receptive, that is,

of any scrap of enacted story or evoked picture as it was closed to the

dry or the abstract proposition; so that I blush the deeper at not being

able, in honour of his reference, to make the latter more vividly

flower--I still so feel that I quite thrilled with it and with the

standing background at the moment lighted by it. There were things in

it, and other persons, old actualities, old meanings and furnishings of

the other old Boston, as I by that time couldn't but appraise it; and

the really archaic, the overhung and sombre and secret-keeping street,

"socially" disconnected, socially mysterious--as I like at any rate to

remember it--was there to testify (testify to the ancient time of

tension, expansion, sore meditation or whatever) by its positively

conscious gloom.

The moral of this, I fear, amounts to little more than that, putting

aside the substance of his anecdote, my father had not set foot in New

England till toward his thirty-fifth year, and my mother was not to do

so till later still; circumstances not in the least preventing the birth

of what I have called the falsifying legend. The allusion to the walking

at Ventnor touches his inability to deal with rural roads and paths,

then rougher things than now; by reason of an accident received in early

youth and which had so lamed him for life that he could circulate to any

convenience but on even surfaces and was indeed mainly reduced to

driving--it had made him for all his earlier time an excellent whip. His

constitution had been happily of the strongest, but as I look back I see

his grave disability, which it took a strong constitution to carry,

mainly in the light of a consistency of patience that we were never to

have heard broken. The two acceptances melt together for me--that of the

limits of his material action, his doing and enjoying, set so narrowly,

and that of his scant allowance of "public recognition," or of the

support and encouragement that spring, and spring so naturally and

rightly, when the relation of effect to cause is close and straight,

from any at all attested and glad understanding of a formula, as we say

nowadays a message, richly and sincerely urged. Too many such

reflections, however, beset me here by the way. My letters jump

meanwhile to the summer of 1849, when I find in another of them,

addressed to Emerson, a passage as characteristic as possible of one of

the writer's liveliest and, as I confess it was ever to seem to me, most

genially perverse idiosyncrasies, his distinctly low opinion of "mere"

literary men. This note his letters in general again and again

strike--not a little to the diversion of those who were to have observed

and remembered his constant charmed subjection, in the matter of

practice, to the masters, even quite the lighter, in the depreciated

group. His sensibility to their spell was in fact so marked that it

became from an early time a household game with us to detect him in

evasive tears over their pages, when these were either real or romantic

enough, and to publish without mercy that he had so been caught. There

was a period in particular during which this pastime enjoyed, indeed

quite revelled in, the form of our dragging to the light, with every

circumstance of derision, the fact of his clandestine and deeply moved

perusal of G. P. R. James, our nominal congener, at that time ceasing to

be prescribed. It was his plea, in the "'fifties," that this romancer

had been his idol in the 'forties and the 'thirties, and that under

renewed, even if but experimental, surrender the associations of youth

flocked back to life--so that _we_, profane about the unduly displaced

master, were deplorably the poorer. He loved the novel in fine, he

followed its constant course in the Revue with a beautiful

inconsequence, and the more it was literature loved it the better, which

was just how he loved, as well, criticism and journalism; the particular

instance, with him, once he was in relation with it, quite sufficiently

taking care of the invidiously-viewed type--as this was indeed viewed

but a _priori_ and at its most general--and making him ever so

cheerfully forget to be consistent. Work was verily cut out for the

particular instance, as against the type, in an air and at a time

favouring so, again and again, and up and down the "literary world," a

dire mediocrity. It was the distillers of _that_ thinness, the "mere"

ones, that must have been present to him when he wrote to Emerson in

1849: "There is nothing I dread so much as literary men, especially

_our_ literary men; catch them out of the range of mere personal gossip

about authors and books and ask them for honest sympathy in your

sentiment, or for an honest repugnancy of it, and you will find the

company of stage-drivers sweeter and more comforting to your soul. In

truth the questions which are beginning to fill the best books, and will

fill the best for a long time to come, are not related to what we have

called literature, and are as well judged--I think better--by those

whom books have at all events not belittled. When a man _lives_, that is

lives enough, he can scarcely write. He cannot read, I apprehend, at

all. All his writing will be algebraicised, put into the form of sonnets

and proverbs, and the community will feel itself insulted to be offered

a big bunch of pages, as though it were stupid and wanted tedious

drilling like a child." When I begin to quote my father, however, I hang

over him perhaps even too historically; for his expression leads me on

and on so by its force and felicity that I scarce know where to stop.

"The fact is that I am afraid I am in a very bad way, for I cannot

heartily engage in any topic in which I shall appear to advantage"--the

question having been, _de part et d'autre_, of possible courses of

lectures for which the appetite of New York and Boston already announced

itself as of the largest. And it still more beguiles me that "my wife

and I are obliged--so numerous has waxed our family--to enlarge our

house in town and get a country house for the summer." Here came in that

earnest dream of the solutional "Europe" with which I have elsewhere

noted that my very youngest sensibility was fed. "These things look

expensive and temporary to us, besides being an additional care; and so,

considering with much pity our four stout boys, who have no play-room

within doors and import shocking bad manners from the street, we gravely

ponder whether it wouldn't be better to go abroad for a few years with

them, allowing them to absorb French and German and get such a sensuous

education as they can't get here."

In 1850, however, we had still not departed for Europe--as we were not

to do for several years yet; one advantage of which was that my father

remained for the time in intercourse by letter with his English friend

Dr. J. J. Garth Wilkinson, first known during my parents' considerable

stay in London of several years before, 1843-44; and whose admirable

style of expression, in its way as personal and as vivid as Henry

James's own, with an added and doubtless more perceptibly full-blooded

massiveness, is so attested by his earlier writings,[8] to say nothing

of the rich collection of his letters (1845-55) lately before

me--notably by The Human Body and its Connection with Man, dedicated in

1851 to my father--that I wonder at the absence of such a master, in

more than one happy specimen, from the common educational exhibitions of

English prose. Dr. Wilkinson was a friend of Emerson's as well, which

leads the latter's New York correspondent to cite to him in February

1850 a highly characteristic passage from one of the London

communications.

Carlyle came up here (presumably to Hampstead) on Monday to see

Neuberg, and spoke much of you with very kind recollections. He

remembered your metaphysics also and asked with terrible solicitude

whether they yet persevered. I couldn't absolutely say that they

did not, though I did my best to stammer out something about the

great social movement. He was suffering dreadfully from _malaise_

and indigestion and gave with his usual force his usual putrid

theory of the universe. All great men were most miserable; the day

on which any man could say he was not miserable, that day he was a

scoundrel; God was a Divine Sorrow; to no moment could he, Carlyle,

ever say Linger, but only Goodbye and never let me see your face

again. And all this interpolated with convulsive laughter, showing

that joy would come into him were it even by the path of hysteria

and disease. To me he is an unprofitable man, and though he gave me

the most kind invitation I have too much respect for my stomach to

go much into his company. Where hope is feeble genius and the human

voice are on the way to die. By the next boat I will endeavour to

send you over my thoughts on his recent pamphlet, the first of a

series of Latter-Day-Tracts. He is very rapidly falling out with

all his present admirers, for which I like them all the better; and

indeed is driving fast toward social views--only his is to be a

compulsory, not an attractive, socialism.

After quoting which my father comments: "Never was anything more false

than this worship of sorrow by Carlyle; he has picked it up out of past

history and spouts it for mere display, as a virtuoso delights in the

style of his grandfather. It is the merest babble in him, as everyone

who has ever talked an hour with him will acquit him of the least grain

of humility. A man who has once uttered a cry of despair should ever

after clothe himself in sackcloth and ashes."

The writer was to have meanwhile, before our migration of 1855, a

considerable lecturing activity. A confused, yet perfectly recoverable

recollection, on my own part, of these years, connects itself with our

knowledge that our father engaged in that practice and that he went

forth for the purpose, with my mother always in earnest and confident

even though slightly fluttered attendance, at about the hour of our

upward procession to bed; which fact lent to the proceeding--that is to

_his_--a strange air of unnatural riot, quite as of torch-lighted and

wind-blown dissipation. We went to plays and to ballets, and they had

comparatively speaking no mystery; but at no lecture had we ever been

present, and these put on for my fancy at least a richer light and

shade, very much as if we ourselves had been on the performing side of

the curtain, or the wonder of admiring (in our mother's person) and of

being admired (in our father's) had been rolled for us into a single

glory. This glory moreover was not menaced, but only made more of a

thrill by the prime admirer's anxiety, always displayed at the last, as

to whether they were not starting without the feature of features, the

_corpus delicti_ or manuscript itself; which it was legendary with us

that the admired had been known to drive back for in an abashed flurry

at the moment we were launched in dreams of him as in full, though

mysterious, operation. I can see him now, from the parlour window, at

the door of the carriage and under the gusty street-lamp, produce it

from a coat-tail pocket and shake it, for her ideal comfort, in the

face of his companion. The following, to Emerson, I surmise, is of some

early date in the autumn of '52.

I give three lectures in Boston at the Masonic Temple; the first

and second on Nov. 5th and 8th respectively. I should be greatly

appalled in some respects, but still charmed, to have you for an

auditor, seeing thus a hundred empty seats obliterated; but, I beg

of you, don't let any engagement suffer by such kindness to me.

Looking over the lectures again they horrify me with their

loud-mouthed imbecility!--but I hope they may fall upon less

hardened ears in some cases. I am sure that the thought which is in

them, or rather seems to me to struggle to be in them, is worthy of

all men's rapturous homage, and I will trust that a glimpse of it

may somehow befall my patient auditory. The fact is that a vital

truth can never be transferred from one mind to another, because

life alone appreciates it. The most one can do for another is to

plant some rude formula of such truths in his memory, leaving his

own spiritual chemistry to set free the germ whenever the demands

of his life exact it. The reason why the gods seem so powerless to

the sensuous understanding, and suffer themselves to be so long

defamed by our crazy theologies, is that they are life, and can

consequently be revealed only to life. But life is simply the

passage of idea into action; and our crazy theologies forbid ideas

to come into action any further than our existing institutions

warrant. Hence man leads a mere limping life, and the poor gods who

are dependent upon his manliness for their true revelation and for

their real knowledge, are doomed to remain forever unknown, and

even denied by such solemn pedants as Mr. Atkinson and Miss

Martineau. However, I shall try to convert _myself_ at least into

an army of Goths and Huns, to overcome and destroy our existing

sanctities, that the supernal splendours may at length become

credible and even visible. Good-bye till we meet in Boston, and

cultivate your goodnature according to my extensive needs.

I bridge the interval before our migration of 1855 exactly for the sake

of certain further passages addressed to the same correspondent, from

London, in the following year. The letter is a long one and highly

significant of the writer's familiar frankness, but I must keep down my

examples--the first of which glances at his general sense of the men he

mainly met.

They are all of them depressed or embittered by the public

embarrassments that beset them; deflected, distorted, somehow

despoiled of their rich individual manliness by the necessity of

providing for these imbecile old inheritances of church and state.

Carlyle is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own

grease, only infinitely _more_ unreconciled to the blest Providence

which guides human affairs. He names God frequently and alludes to

the highest things as if they were realities, but all only as for a

picturesque effect, so completely does he seem to regard them as

habitually circumvented and set at naught by the politicians. I

took our friend M. to see him, and he came away greatly distressed

and desillusionne, Carlyle having taken the utmost pains to deny

and descry and deride the idea of his having done the least good to

anybody, and to profess indeed the utmost contempt for everybody

who thought he had, and poor M. being intent on giving him a

plenary assurance of this fact in his own case.... Arthur Helps

seems an amiable kindly little man with friendly offers, but I told

him I had no intention to bore him, and would at most apply to him

when I might want a good hatter or bootmaker. He fancied a

little--at least I thought this was the case--that I was going to

make a book, and might be indiscreet enough to put him in!.... ----

disappoints me, he is so eaten up with the "spirits" and all that.

His imagination is so vast as to dwarf all the higher faculties,

and his sympathy as narrow as Dr. Cheever's or Brownson's. No

reasonable man, it is true, likes the clergy or the philosophers,

but ----'s dislike of them seems as envenomed as that between rival

tradesmen or rival beauties. One can't endure the nonsense they

talk, to be sure, but when one considers the dear human meaning and

effort struggling at the bottom of it all one can feel still less

any personal separation from the men themselves. ----'s sarcasm is

of the fiercest, and on the whole he is only now at last sowing his

intellectual wild oats--he will grow more genial in good time. This

is it: I think he is but now finding his youth! That which we on

our side of the water find so early and exhaust so prodigally he

has found thus much later--I mean an emancipation from the shackles

of custom; and the kicking up of his heels consequently is

proportionate to his greater maturity of muscle. Mrs. ---- is a

dear little goose of a thing, who fancies the divine providence in

closer league with herself than with others, giving her intimations

of events about to happen and endowing her with peculiar

perspicacity in the intuition of remedies for disease; and ----,

the great brawny fellow, sits by and says never a word in abatement

of this enormous domestic inflation, though the visitor feels

himself crowded by it into the most inconsiderable of corners. A

sweet, loving, innocent woman like Mrs. ---- oughtn't to grow

egotistical in the company of a truly wise man, and this

accordingly is another quarrel I have with ----. In short I am

getting to the time of life when one values one's friends for what

they are more than for what they do. I am just as much impressed as

ever by his enormous power, but the goodness out of which it is

born and the wisdom by which it is nurtured and bred are things I

don't so much see.

The correspondence grew more interspaced, and with the year 1861 and the

following, when we were at home again, became a matter of the occasional

note. I have before me a series of beautiful examples of Emerson's share

in it--during the earlier time copious enough; but these belong

essentially to another case. I am all but limited, for any further show

of the interesting relation than I have already given, to reproducing a

few lines from Emerson's Diary, passages unpublished at the moment I

write, and the first of them of April 1850. "I have made no note of

these long weary absences at New York and Philadelphia. I am a bad

traveller, and the hotels are mortifications to all sense of well-being

in me. The people who fill them oppress me with their excessive

virility, and would soon become intolerable if it were not for a few

friends who, like women, tempered the acrid mass. Henry James was true

comfort--wise, gentle, polished, with heroic manners and a serenity like

the sun." The hotels of those days may well have been an

ordeal--distinct to me still, from no few childish glimpses of their

bareness of ease and rudeness of _acceuil_; yet that our justly

fastidious friend was not wholly left to their mercy seems signified by

my not less vivid remembrance of his staying with us on occasion in New

York; some occasion, or occasions, I infer, of his coming on to lecture

there. Do I roll several occasions into one, or amplify one beyond

reason?--this last being ever, I allow, the waiting pitfall of a

chronicler too memory-ridden. I "visualise" at any rate the winter

firelight of our back-parlour at dusk and the great Emerson--I knew he

was great, greater than any of our friends--sitting in it between my

parents, before the lamps had been lighted, as a visitor consentingly

housed only could have done, and affecting me the more as an apparition

sinuously and, I held, elegantly slim, benevolently aquiline, and

commanding a tone alien, beautifully alien, to any we heard roundabout,

that he bent this benignity upon me by an invitation to draw nearer to

him, off the hearth-rug, and know myself as never yet, as I was not

indeed to know myself again for years, in touch with the wonder of

Boston. The wonder of Boston was above all just then and there for me

in the sweetness of the voice and the finish of the speech--this latter

through a sort of attenuated emphasis which at the same time made sounds

more important, more interesting in themselves, than by any revelation

yet vouchsafed us. Was not this my first glimmer of a sense that the

human tone _could_, in that independent and original way, be

interesting? and didn't it for a long time keep me going, however

unwittingly, in that faith, carrying me in fact more or less on to my

day of recognising that it took much more than simply not being of New

York to produce the music I had listened to. The point was that, however

that might be, I had had given me there in the firelight an absolutely

abiding measure. If I didn't know from that hour forth quite all it was

to _not_ utter sounds worth mentioning, I make out that I had at least

the opposite knowledge. And all by the operation of those signal

moments--the truth of which I find somehow reflected in the fact of my

afterwards knowing one of our household rooms for the time--it must have

been our only guest-chamber--as "Mr. Emerson's room." The evening

firelight played so long for me upon the door--that is to the length

probably of three days, the length of a child's impression. But I must

not let this carry me beyond the second note of the Diary, this time of

May 1852. "'I do not wish this or that thing my fortune will procure, I

wish the great fortune,' said Henry James, and said it in the noblest

sense." The report has a beauty to me without my quite understanding it;

the union of the two voices in it signifies quite enough. The last very

relevant echo of my father's by itself, in the connection, I hasten now

to find in a communication that must have been of the summer of 1869,

when Dr. Wilkinson paid his only visit to America--this apparently of

the briefest. The letter to Emerson from Cambridge notes that his

appearance there had been delayed.

He may come to-morrow possibly: if in the morning I will telegraph

you; if in the evening I shall try to keep him over Monday that you

may meet him here at dinner on that day. But I fear this bothersome

Sabbath and its motionless cars may play us a trick. I shall hope

for a generous Monday all the same, and if that hope is baulked

shall owe Sunday a black-eye--and will pay my debt on the first

suitable occasion, I warrant you. What an awkward story (the letter

continues) The Nation to-day tells of Charles Sumner! Charles's

burly voice has always had for me a dreadfully hollow sound, as if

it came from a great copper vat, and I have loved him but with fear

and trembling accordingly. Is he _really_, like all American

politicians, tricky, or is The Nation--so careful about facts

ordinarily--only slanderous?... Carlyle nowadays is a palpable

nuisance. If he holds to his present mouthing ways to the end he

will find no showman la-bas to match him, for I hold Barnum a much

more innocent personage. I shouldn't wonder if Barnum grew

regenerate in some far off day by mere force of his democracy. But

Carlyle's intellectual pride is so stupid that one can hardly

imagine anything able to cope with it.

The following, in so different a key, is of some seven years earlier

date--apparently '62; but I have let it stand over, for reasons, that it

may figure here as the last of the communications addressed to Emerson

that I shall cite. Written at an hotel, the Tremont House, in Boston, it

marks his having come up from Newport for attendance at some meeting of

a dining-club, highly distinguished in composition, as it still happily

remains, of which he was a member--though but so occasionally present

that this circumstance perhaps explains a little the even more than

usual vivacity of his impression. Not indeed, I may add, that mustered

reasons or apologies were ever much called for in any case of the play

of that really prime note of his spontaneity.

I go to Concord in the morning, but shall have barely time to see

you there, even if I do as much as that; so that I can't forbear to

say to you now the word I wanted as to my impression of yesterday

about Hawthorne and Ellery Channing. Hawthorne isn't to me a

prepossessing figure, nor apparently at all an _enjoying_ person in

any way: he has all the while the look--or would have to the

unknowing--of a rogue who suddenly finds himself in a company of

detectives. But in spite of his rusticity I felt a sympathy for

him fairly amounting to anguish, and couldn't take my eyes off him

all dinner, nor my rapt attention: as that indecisive little Dr.

Hedge[9] found, I am afraid, to his cost, for I hardly heard a word

of what he kept on saying to me, and resented his maliciously

putting his artificial person between me and the profitable object

of study. (It isn't however that I now feel any ill-will to him--I

could recommend anyone but myself to go and hear him preach. The

thing was that Hawthorne seemed to me to possess human substance

and not to have dissipated it all away like that culturally

debauched ----, or even like good inoffensive comforting

Longfellow.) John Forbes and you kept up the human balance at the

other end of the table, but my region was a desert with H. for its

only oasis. It was so pathetic to see him, contented sprawling

Concord owl that he was and always has been, brought blindfold into

that brilliant daylight and expected to wink and be lively, like

some dapper Tommy Titmouse. I felt him bury his eyes in his plate

and eat with such voracity that no one should dare to speak to him.

My heart broke for him as his attenuated left-hand neighbour kept

putting forth _his_ long antennae to stroke his face and try

whether his eyes were open. It was heavenly to see him persist in

ignoring the spectral smiles--in eating his dinner and doing

nothing but that, and then go home to his Concord den to fall upon

his knees and ask his heavenly Father why it was that an owl

couldn't remain an owl and not be forced into the diversions of a

canary. I have no doubt that all the tenderest angels saw to his

case that night and poured oil into his wounds more soothing than

gentlemen ever know. W. Ellery Channing too seemed so human and

good--sweet as summer and fragrant as pinewoods. He is more

sophisticated than Hawthorne of course, but still he was kin; and I

felt the world richer by two _men_, who had not yet lost themselves

in mere members of society. This is what I suspect--that we are

fast getting so fearful one to another, we "members of society"

that we shall ere long begin to kill one another in self-defence

and give place in that way at last to a more veracious state of

things. The old world is breaking up on all hands: the glimpse of

the everlasting granite I caught in H. and W. E. shows me that

there is stock enough left for fifty better. Let the old impostors

go, bag and baggage, for a very real and substantial one is aching

to come in, in which the churl shall not be exalted to a place of

dignity, in which innocence shall never be tarnished nor trafficked

in, in which every man's freedom shall be respected down to its

feeblest filament as the radiant altar of God. To the angels, says

Swedenborg, death means resurrection to life; by that necessary

rule of inversion which keeps them separate from us and us from

them, and so prevents our being mutual nuisances. Let us then

accept political and all other distraction that chooses to come;

because what is disorder and wrath and contention on the surface is

sure to be the greatest peace at the centre, working its way thus

to a surface that shall never be disorderly.

But it is in the postscript that the mixture and the transition strike

me as most inevitable.

Weren't you shocked at ----'s engagement? To think of that prim old

snuffers imposing himself on that pure young flame! What a world,

what a world! But once we get rid of Slavery the new heavens and

new earth will swim into reality.

No better example could there be, I think, of my father's remarkable and

constant belief, proof against all confusion, in the imminence of a

transformation-scene in human affairs--"spiritually" speaking of course

always--which was to be enacted somehow without gross or vulgar

visibility, or at least violence, as I have said, but was none the less

straining to the front, and all by reason of the world's being, deep

within and at heart, as he conceived, so achingly anxious for it. He had

the happiness--though not so untroubled, all the while, doubtless, as

some of his declarations would appear to represent--of being able to see

his own period and environment as the field of the sensible change, and

thereby as a great historic hour; that is, I at once subjoin, I more or

less _suppose_ he had. His measure of the imminent and immediate, of the

socially and historically visible and sensible was not a thing easy to

answer for, and when treated to any one of the loud vaticinations or

particular revolutionary messages and promises our age was to have so

much abounded in, all his sense of proportion and of the whole, of the

real and the ridiculous, asserted itself with the last emphasis. In that

mixture in him of faith and humour, criticism and conviction, that mark

of a love of his kind which fed on discriminations and was never so

moved to a certain extravagance as by an exhibited, above all by a

cultivated or in the least sententious vagueness in respect to these,

dwelt largely the original charm, the peculiarly social and living

challenge (in that it was so straight and bright a reflection of life)

of his talk and temper. Almost all of my father shines for me at any

rate in the above passages, and in another that follows, with their so

easy glide from discrimination, as I have called it, that is from

analytic play, in the outward sphere, to serenity of synthesis and

confidence and high joy in the inward. It was as if he might have liked

so to see his fellow-humans, fellow-diners, fellow-celebrities or

whatever, in that acuity of individual salience, in order to proceed

thence to some enormous final doubt or dry renouncement--instead of

concluding, on the contrary, and on the same free and familiar note, to

the eminently "worth while" character of life, or its susceptibility to

vast and happy conversions. With which too, more than I can say, have I

the sense here of his so finely contentious or genially perverse impulse

to carry his wares of observation to the market in which they would on

the whole bring least rather than most--where his offering them at all

would produce rather a flurry (there might have been markets in which it

had been known to produce almost a scandal), and where he would in fact

give them away for nothing if thereby he might show that such produce

grew. Never was there more of a case of the direct friendliness to

startling growths--if so they might be held--of the very soil that lies

under our windows. I don't think he liked to scandalise--certainly he

didn't in the least for scandal's sake; but nothing inspired him more to

the act and the pleasure of appreciation for appropriation, as it might

be termed, than the deprecating attitude of others on such ground--that

degree of shyness of appropriation on their part which practically left

appreciation vague. It was true that the appreciation for a human use,

as it might be called--that is for the high optimistic transition--could

here carry the writer far.