VII

I find markedly relevant at this point a letter from Newport in the

autumn of '61 to another correspondent, one of a series several other

examples of which no less successfully appeal to me, even though it

involve my going back a little to place three or four of these latter,

written at Geneva in 1860. Mrs. William Tappan, primarily Caroline

Sturgis of Boston, was for long years and to the end of her life our

very great friend and one of my father's most constant and most

considered interlocutors, both on the ground of his gravity and on that

of his pleasantry. She had spent in Europe with her husband and her two

small daughters very much the same years, from early in the summer of

'55 till late in the autumn of '60, that we had been spending; and like

ourselves, though with less continuity for the time, she had come to

live at Newport, where, with no shadow of contention, but with an

admirable intelligence, of the incurably ironic or mocking order, she

was such a light, free, somewhat intellectually perverse but socially

impulsive presence (always for instance insatiably hospitable) as our

mustered circle could ill have spared. If play of mind, which she

carried to any point of quietly-smiling audacity that might be, had not

already become a noted, in fact I think the very most noted, value among

us, it would have seated itself there in her person with a nervous

animation, a refinement of what might have been called soundable

sincerity, that left mere plump assurance in such directions far in the

lurch. And she was interesting, she became fairly historic, with the

drawing-out of the years, as almost the only survivor of that young band

of the ardent and uplifted who had rallied in the other time to the

"transcendental" standard, the movement for organised candour of

conversation on almost all conceivable or inconceivable things which

appeared, with whatever looseness, to find its prime inspirer in Emerson

and become more familiarly, if a shade less authentically, vocal in

Margaret Fuller. Hungry, ever so cheerfully and confidently hungry, had

been much of the New England, and peculiarly the Boston, of those days;

but with no such outreaching of the well-scoured empty platter, it

probably would have struck one, as by the occasional and quite

individual agitation of it from some ruefully-observed doorstep of the

best society. It was from such a doorstep that Caroline Sturgis had

originally taken her restless flight, just as it was on such another

that, after a course of infinite freedom of inquiry and irony, she in

the later time, with a fortune inherited, an hospitality extended and a

genial gravity of expression confirmed, alighted again, to the no small

re-enrichment of a company of friends who had had meanwhile scarce any

such intellectual adventures as she was to retain, in a delicate and

casual irreverence, the just slightly sharp fragrance or fine asperity

of, but who might cultivate with complacency and in support of the

general claim to comprehensive culture and awareness unafraid the legend

of her vicarious exposure.

Mr. Frank Sanborn's school, which I have already mentioned and to which

the following alludes, was during the years immediately preceding the

War, as during those of the War itself, the last word of what was then

accounted the undauntedly modern, flourishing as it did under the

patronage of the most "advanced" thought. The "coeducational" idea had

up to that time, if I mistake not, taken on no such confident and

consistent, certainly no such graceful or plausible form; small boys and

big boys, boys from near and boys from far, consorted there and

cohabited, so far as community of board and lodging and of study and

sport went, with little girls and great girls, mainly under the earnest

tutoring and elder-sistering of young women accomplished as scholarly

accomplishment in such cases was then understood, but with Mr. Sanborn

himself of course predominantly active and instructional, and above all

with the further felicity of the participation of the generous Emerson

family by sympathy and interest and the protective spread of the rich

mantle of their presence. The case had been from the first a frank and

high-toned experiment, a step down from the tonic air, as was so

considerably felt, of radical conviction to the firm ground of radical

application, that is of happy demonstration--an admittedly new and

trustful thing, but all the brighter and wiser, all the more nobly and

beautifully workable for that. With but the scantest direct observation

of the attempted demonstration--demonstration, that is, of the excellent

fruit such a grafting might produce--I yet imagine the enacted and

considerably prolonged scene (it lasted a whole decade) to have heaped

perfectly full the measure of what it proposed. The interesting, the

curious, the characteristic thing was just, however, I seem to make

out--I seemed to have made out even at the time--in the almost complete

absence of difficulty. It might almost then be said of the affair that

it hadn't been difficult enough for interest even should one insist on

treating it as sufficiently complicated or composed for picture. The

great War was to leave so many things changed, the country over, so many

elements added, to say nothing of others subtracted, in the American

consciousness at large, that even though the coeducational idea, taking

to itself strength, has during these later years pushed its conquests to

the very verge of demonstration of its inevitable limits, my memory

speaks to me of the Concord school rather as of a supreme artless word

on the part of the old social order than as a charged intimation or

announcement on the part of the new. The later arrangements, more or

less in its likeness and when on a considerable scale, have appeared, to

attentive observation, I think, mere endlessly multiplied notes of the

range of high spirits in the light heart of communities more aware on

the whole of the size and number of their opportunity, of the boundless

spaces, the possible undertakings, the uncritical minds and the absent

standards about them, than of matters to be closely and preparedly

reckoned with. They have been, comparatively speaking, experiments in

the void--the great void that may spread so smilingly between wide

natural borders before complications have begun to grow. The name of the

complication before the fact is very apt to be the discovery--which

latter term was so promptly to figure for the faith that living and

working more intimately together than had up to then been conceived

possible would infinitely improve both the condition and the

performance of the brother and sister sexes. It takes long in new

communities for discoveries to become complications--though

complications become discoveries doubtless often in advance of this; the

large vague area, with its vast marginal ease, over which confidence

could run riot and new kinds of human relation, elatedly proposed,

flourish in the sun, was to shift to different ground the question the

Concord school had played with, during its term of life, on its smaller

stage, under the great New England elms and maples and in the

preoccupied New England air.

The preoccupation had been in a large measure, it is true, exactly with

such possibilities, such bright fresh answers to old stale riddles, as

Mr. Sanborn and his friends clubbed together to supply; but I can only,

for my argument, recover the sense of my single visit to the scene,

which must have been in the winter of '62-'63, I think, and which put

before me, as I seem now to make out, some suggested fit of

perversity--not desperate, quite harmless rather, and almost frivolously

futile, on the part of a particular little world that had been thrown

back upon itself for very boredom and, after a spell of much admired

talking and other beating of the air, wanted for a change to "do"

something. The question it "played" with I just advisedly said--for what

could my impression have been, personally if indirectly gathered, and

with my admirably communicative younger brother to testify, but that if

as a school, in strict parlance, the thing was scarce more than naught,

as a prolonged pastime it was scarce less than charming and quite filled

up in that direction its ample and original measure? I have to reckon, I

here allow, with the trick of what I used irrepressibly to read into

things in front of which I found myself, for gaping purposes, planted by

some unquestioned outer force: it seemed so prescribed to me, so imposed

on me, to read more, as through some ever-felt claim for roundness of

aspect and intensity of effect in presented matters, whatever they might

be, than the conscience of the particular affair itself was perhaps

developed enough to ask of it. The experience of many of the Concord

pupils during the freshness of the experiment must have represented for

them a free and yet ever so conveniently conditioned taste of the

idyllic--such possibilities of perfect good comradeship between

unsuspected and unalarmed youths and maidens (on a comprehensive ground

that really exposed the business to a light and put it to a test) as

they were never again to see so favoured in every way by circumstance

and, one may quite emphatically say, by atmosphere. It is the atmosphere

that comes back to me as most of all the making of the story, even when

inhaled but by an occasional whiff and from afar--the manner of my own

inhaling. In that air of charmed and cultivated good faith nothing for

which the beautiful might be so presumingly claimed--if only claimed

with a sufficiently brave clean emphasis--wouldn't have _worked_, which

was the great thing; every one must have felt that what was aspired to

did work, and as I catch the many-voiced report of it again (many-voiced

but pretty well suffused with one clear tone, this of inflections

irreproducible now) I seem to listen in convinced admiration, though not

by any means in stirred envy, to the cheerful clatter of its working. My

failure of envy has, however, no mite of historic importance, proving as

it does nothing at all but that if we had, in the family sense, so

distinctly turned our back on Europe, the distinctness was at no point

so marked as in our facing so straight to such a picture, by which I

mean to such an exhibition, as my father's letter throws off. Without

knowledge of the letter at the time I yet measured the situation much as

he did and enjoyed it as he did, because it would have been stupid not

to; but from that to any wishful vision of being in it or of it would

have been a long jump, of which I was unabashedly incapable. To have

broken so personally, so all but catastrophically, with Europe as we

had done affected me as the jump sufficient; we had landed somewhere in

quite another world or at least on the sharp edge of one; and in the

single particular sense could I, as time then went on, feel myself at

all moved, with the helpless, the baffled visionary way of it, to push

further in. What straight solicitation _that_ phase of the American

scene could exert--more coercive to the imagination than any we were

ever again, as Americans, to know--I shall presently try to explain; but

this was an intensely different matter.

I buried two of my children yesterday--at Concord, Mass., and feel

so heartbroken this morning that I shall need to adopt two more

instantly to supply their place; and lo and behold you and William

present yourselves, or if you decline the honour Ellen and Baby.

Mary and I trotted forth last Wednesday, bearing Wilky and Bob in

our arms to surrender them to the famous Mr. Sanborn. The yellowest

sunshine and an atmosphere of balm were all over the goodly land,

while the maple, the oak and the dogwood showered such splendours

upon the eye as made the Champs Elysees and the Bois appear

parvenus and comical. Mrs. Clark is a graceless enough woman

outwardly, but so tenderly feathered inwardly, so unaffectedly kind

and motherly toward the urchins under her roof, that one was glad

to leave them in that provident nest. She has three or four other

school-boarders, one of them a daughter of John Brown--tall, erect,

long-haired and freckled, as John Brown's daughter has a right to

be. I kissed her (inwardly) between the eyes, and inwardly heard

the martyred Johannes chuckle over the fat inheritance of love and

tenderness he had after all bequeathed to his children in all good

men's minds. An arch little Miss Plumley also lives there, with

eyes full of laughter and a mouth like a bed of lilies bordered

with roses. How it is going to be possible for my two boys to

pursue their studies in the midst of that bewilderment I don't

clearly see. I am only sure of one thing, which is that if I had

had such educational advantages as that in my youth I should

probably have been now far more nearly ripe for this world's

business. We asked to see Miss Waterman, one of the teachers

quartered in the house, in order to say to her how much we should

thank her if she would occasionally put out any too lively spark

she might see fall on the expectant tinder of my poor boys' bosoms;

but Miss W. herself proved of so siliceous a quality on

inspection--with round tender eyes, young, fair and womanly--that I

saw in her only new danger and no promise of safety. My present

conviction is that a general conflagration is inevitable, ending in

the total combustion of all that I hold dear on that spot. Yet I

can't but felicitate our native land that such magnificent

experiments in education go on among us.

Then we drove to Emerson's and waded up to our knees through a

harvest of apples and pears, which, tired of their mere outward or

carnal growth, had descended to the loving bosom of the lawn, there

or elsewhere to grow inwardly meet for their heavenly rest in the

veins of Ellen the saintly and others; until at last we found the

cordial Pan himself in the midst of his household, breezy with

hospitality and blowing exhilarating trumpets of welcome. Age has

just the least in the world dimmed the lustre we once knew, but an

unmistakable breath of the morning still encircles him, and the

odour of primaeval woods. Pitchpine is not more pagan than he

continues to be, and acorns as little confess the gardener's skill.

Still I insist that he is a voluntary Pan, that it is a condition

of mere wilfulness and insurrection on his part, contingent upon a

mercilessly sound digestion and an uncommon imaginative influx, and

I have no doubt that even he, as the years ripen, will at last

admit Nature to be tributary and not supreme. However this be, we

consumed juicy pears to the diligent music of Pan's pipe, while

Ellen and Edith softly gathered themselves upon two low stools in

the chimney-corner, saying never a word nor looking a look, but

apparently hemming their handkerchiefs; and good Mrs. Stearns, who

sat by the window and seemed to be the village dressmaker, ever and

anon glanced at us over her spectacles as if to say that never

before has she seen this wondrous Pan so glistening with dewdrops.

Then and upon the waves of that friendly music we were duly wafted

to our educational Zion and carefully made over our good and

promising and affectionate boys to the school-master's keeping. Out

into the field beside his house Sanborn incontinently took us to

show how his girls and boys perform together their worship of

Hygeia. It was a glimpse into that new world wherein dwelleth

righteousness and which is full surely fast coming upon our

children and our children's children; and I could hardly keep

myself, as I saw my children's eyes drink in the mingled work and

play of the inspiring scene, from shouting out a joyful Nunc

Dimittis. The short of the story is that we left them and rode home

robbed of our plumage, feeling sore and ugly and only hoping that

they wouldn't die, any of these cold winter days, before the

parental breast could get there to warm them back to life or cheer

them on to a better.

Mrs. William Hunt has just come in to tell the good news of your

near advent and that she has found the exact house for you;

instigated to that activity by one of your angels, of the Hooper

band, with whom she has been in correspondence. I don't thank angel

Hooper for putting angel Hunt upon that errand, since I should like

to have had the merit of it myself. I suspect the rent is what it

ought to be: if it's not I will lay by something every week for you

toward it, and have no doubt we shall stagger through the cold

weather.

I gather from the above the very flower of my father's irrepressible

utterance of his constitutional optimism, that optimism fed so little by

any sense of things as they were or are, but rich in its vision of the

facility with which they might become almost at any moment or from one

day to the other totally and splendidly different. A less vague or vain

idealist couldn't, I think, have been encountered; it was given him to

catch in the fact at almost any turn right or left some flagrant

assurance or promise of the state of man transfigured. The Concord

school could be to him for the hour--there were hours and hours!--such a

promise; could even figure in that light, to his amplifying sympathy, in

a degree disproportionate to its genial, but after all limited, after

all not so intensely "inflated," as he would have said, sense of itself.

In which light it is that I recognise, and even to elation, how little,

practically, of the idea of the Revolution in the vulgar or violent

sense was involved in his seeing so many things, in the whole social

order about him, and in the interest of their being more or less

immediately altered, as lamentably, and yet at the same time and under

such a coloured light, as amusingly and illustratively, wrong--wrong,

that is, with a blundering helpless human salience that kept criticism

humorous, kept it, so to speak, sociable and almost "sympathetic" even

when readiest. The case was really of his rather feeling so vast a

rightness close at hand or lurking immediately behind actual

arrangements that a single turn of the inward wheel, one real response

to pressure of the spiritual spring, would bridge the chasms, straighten

the distortions, rectify the relations and, in a word, redeem and vivify

the whole mass--after a far sounder, yet, one seemed to see, also far

subtler, fashion than any that our spasmodic annals had yet shown us. It

was of course the old story that we had only to _be_ with more

intelligence and faith--an immense deal more, certainly--in order to

work off, in the happiest manner, the many-sided ugliness of life; which

was a process that might go on, blessedly, in the quietest of all quiet

ways. _That_ wouldn't be blood and fire and tears, or would be none of

these things stupidly precipitated; it would simply have taken place by

_enjoyed_ communication and contact, enjoyed concussion or convulsion

even--since pangs and agitations, the very agitations of perception

itself, are of the highest privilege of the soul and there is always,

thank goodness, a saving sharpness of play or complexity of consequence

in the intelligence completely alive. The meaning of which remarks for

myself, I must be content to add, is that the optimists of the world,

the constructive idealists, as one has mainly known them, have too often

struck one as overlooking more of the aspects of the real than they

recognise; whereas our indefeasible impression, William's and mine, of

our parent was that he by his very constitution and intimate heritage

recognised many more of those than he overlooked. What was the finest

part of our intercourse with him--that is the most nutritive--but a

positive record of that? Such a matter as that the factitious had

absolutely no hold on him was the truest thing about him, and it was all

the while present to us, I think, as backing up his moral authority and

play of vision that never, for instance, had there been a more numerous

and candid exhibition of all the human susceptibilities than in the nest

of his original nurture. I have spoken of the fashion in which I still

see him, after the years, attentively bent over those much re-written

"papers," that we had, even at our stupidest, this warrant for going in

vague admiration of that they caught the eye, even the most filially

detached, with a final face of wrought clarity, and thereby of beauty,

that there _could_ be no thinking unimportant--and see him also fall

back from the patient posture, again and again, in long fits of remoter

consideration, wondering, pondering sessions into which I think I was

more often than not moved to read, for the fine interest and colour of

it, some story of acute inward difficulty amounting for the time to

discouragement. If one wanted drama _there_ was drama, and of the most

concrete and most immediately offered to one's view and one's suspense;

to the point verily, as might often occur, of making one go roundabout

it on troubled tiptoe even as one would have held one's breath at the

play.

These opposed glimpses, I say, hang before me as I look back, but really

fuse together in the vivid picture of the fond scribe separated but by a

pane of glass--his particular preference was always directly to face the

window--from the general human condition he was so devoutly concerned

with. He _saw_ it, through the near glass, saw it in such detail and

with a feeling for it that broke down nowhere--that was the great thing;

which truth it confirmed that his very fallings back and long waits and

stays and almost stricken musings witnessed exactly to his intensity,

the intensity that would "come out," after all, and make his passionate

philosophy and the fullest array of the appearances that couldn't be

blinked fit together and harmonise. Detached as I could during all those

years perhaps queerly enough believe myself, it would still have done my

young mind the very greatest violence to have to suppose that any plane

of conclusion for him, however rich and harmonious he might tend to make

conclusion, could be in the nature of a fool's paradise. Small vague

outsider as I was, I couldn't have borne _that_ possibility; and I see,

as I return to the case, how little I really could ever have feared it.

This would have amounted to fearing it on account of his geniality--a

shocking supposition; as if his geniality had been thin and _bete_,

patched up and poor, and not by the straightest connections, nominal and

other, of the very stuff of his genius. No, I feel myself complacently

look back to _my_ never having, even at my small poorest, been so

_bete_, either, as to conceive he might be "wrong," wrong as a

thinker-out, in his own way, of the great mysteries, because of the

interest and amusement and vividness his attesting spirit could fling

over the immediate ground. What he saw _there_ at least could be so

enlightening, so evocatory, could fall in so--which was to the most

inspiring effect within the range of perception of a scant son who was

doubtless, as to the essential, already more than anything else a

novelist _en herbe_. If it didn't sound in a manner patronising I should

say that I saw that my father saw; and that I couldn't but have given my

own case away by not believing, however obscurely, in the virtue of his

consequent and ultimate synthesis. Of course I never dreamed of any such

name for it--I only thought of it as something very great and fine

founded on those forces in him that came home to us and that touched us

all the while. As these were extraordinary forces of sympathy and

generosity, and that yet knew how to be such without falsifying any

minutest measure, the structure raised upon them might well, it would

seem, and even to the uppermost sublime reaches, be as valid as it was

beautiful. If he so endeared himself wasn't it, one asked as time went

on, through his never having sentimentalised or merely meditated away,

so to call it, the least embarrassment of the actual about him, and

having with a passion peculiarly his own kept together his stream of

thought, however transcendent and the stream of life, however humanised?

There was a kind of experiential authority in his basis, as he felt his

basis--there being no human predicament he couldn't by a sympathy more

_like_ direct experience than any I have known enter into; and this

authority, which concluded so to a widening and brightening of the

philosophic--for him the spiritual--sky, made his character, as

intercourse disclosed it, in a high degree fascinating. These things, I

think, however, are so happily illustrated in his letters that they look

out from almost any continuous passage in such a series for instance as

those addressed in the earlier time to Mrs. Tappan. His _tone_, that is,

always so effectually looks out, and the living parts of him so

singularly hung together, that one may fairly say his philosophy _was_

his tone. To cite a few passages here is at the same time to go back to

a previous year or two--which my examples, I hold, make worth while. He

had been on a visit to Paris toward the winter's end of '60, and had

returned to Geneva, whence he writes early in April.

So sleepy have I been ever since my return from Paris that I am

utterly unfit to write letters. I was thoroughly poisoned by

tobacco in those horrid railway carriages, and this with want of

sleep knocked me down. I am only half awake still, and will not

engage consequently in any of those profound inquiries which your

remembrance always suggests.

I am very sorry for you that you live in an excommunicated country,

or next door to it; and I don't wonder at your wanting to get away.

But it is provoking to think that but for your other plan

Switzerland might possess you all for the summer. It is doubtless

in part this disappointment that will unsettle us in our present

moorings and take us probably soon to Germany. What after that I

have no idea, and am always so little wilful about our movements

that I am ready the young ones should settle them. So we may be in

Europe a good while yet, always providing that war keep smooth his

wrinkled front and allow us quiet newspapers. They must fight in

Italy for some time to come, but between England and France is the

main point. If _they_ can hold aloof from tearing each other we

shall manage; otherwise we go home at once, to escape the universal

spatter that must then ensue.

What is the meaning of all these wars and rumours of wars? No

respectable person ever seems to occupy himself with the question,

but I can't help feeling it more interesting than anything in Homer

or Plato or the gallery of the Vatican. I long daily with

unappeasable longing for a righteous life, such a life as I am sure

is implied in every human possibility, and myriads are bearing me

company. What does this show but that the issue is near out of all

our existing chaos? All our evil is fossil and comes from the mere

persistence of diseased institutions in pretending to rule us when

we ought to be left free to be living spirits of God. There is no

_fresh_ evil in the world. No one now steals or commits murder or

any other offence with the least relish for it, but only to revenge

his poor starved opportunities. The superiority of America in

respect to freedom of thought over Europe comes from this fact that

she has so nearly achieved her deliverance from such tyrannies. All

she now needs to make her right is simply an intelligent

recognition of her spiritual whereabouts. If she had this she would

put her hand to the work splendidly. You and I when we get home

will try to quicken her intelligence in that respect, will do at

any rate _our_ best to put away this pestilent munching of the tree

of knowledge of good and evil, and persuade to the belief of man's

unmixed innocence.

Which, it will easily be seen, was optimism with a vengeance, and marked

especially in the immediacy, the state of being at hand for him, of a

social redemption. What made this the more signal was its being so

unattended with visions the least Apocalyptic or convulsional; the

better order slipping in amid the worse, and superseding it, so

insidiously, so quietly and, by a fair measure, so easily. It was a

faith and an accompanying philosophy that couldn't be said not to be

together simplifying; and yet nothing was more unmistakable when we saw

them at close range, I repeat, than that they weren't unnourished,

weren't what he himself would, as I hear him, have called the

"flatulent" fruit of sentimentality.

His correspondent had in a high degree, by her vivacity of expression,

the art of challenging his--as is markedly apparent from a letter the

date of which fails beyond its being of the same stay at Geneva and of

the winter's end.

If I had really imagined that I had bored you and your husband so

very little while I was in Paris in December I should long since

have repeated the experiment; the more surely that I want so much

to see again my darling nieces and delight myself in the abundance

of their large-eyed belief.... Our Alice is still under

discipline--preparing to fulfil some high destiny or other in the

future by reducing decimal fractions to their lowest possible rate

of subsistence, where they often grow so attenuated under her rapid

little fingers that my poor old eyes can no longer see them at all.

I shall go before long to England, and then perhaps--! But I shan't

promise anything on _her_ behalf.

You ask me "why I do not brandish my tomahawk and, like Walt

Whitman, raise my barbaric yawp over the roofs of all the houses."

It is because I am not yet a "cosmos" as that gentleman avowedly

is, but only a very dim nebula, doing its modest best, no doubt, to

solidify into cosmical dimensions, but still requiring an "awful

sight" of time and pains and patience on the part of its friends.

You evidently fancy that cosmoses are born to all the faculty they

shall ever have, like ducks: no such thing. There is no respectable

cosmos but what is born to such a vapoury and even gaseous

inheritance as requires long centuries of conflict on its part to

overcome the same and become pronounced or educated in its proper

mineral, vegatable or animal order. Ducks are born perfect; that is

to say they utter the same unmodified unimproved quack on their

dying pillow that they uttered on their natal day; whereas cosmoses

are destined to a life of such surprising change that you may say

their career is an incessant disavowal of their birth, or that

their highest maturation consists in their utter renunciation of

their natural father and mother. You transcendentalists make the

fatal mistake of denying education, of sundering present from past

and future from present. These things are indissolubly one, the

present deriving its consciousness only from the past, and the

future drawing all its distinctive wisdom from our present

experience. The law is the same with the individual as it is with

the race: none of us can dodge the necessity of regeneration, of

disavowing our natural ancestry in order to come forth in our own

divinely-given proportions. The secret of this necessity ought to

reconcile us to it, however onerous the obligation it imposes; for

that secret is nothing more nor less than this, that we cosmoses

have a plenary divine origin and are bound eventually to see that

divinity reproduced in our most familiar and trivial experience,

even down to the length of our shoe-ties. If the Deity were an

immense Duck capable only of emitting an eternal quack we of course

should all have been born webfooted, each as infallible in his way

as the Pope, nor ever have been at the expense and bother of

swimming-schools. But He is a perfect man, incapable of the

slightest quackery, capable only of every honest and modest and

helpful purpose, and these are perfections to which manifestly no

one is born, but only _re_-born. We come to such states not by

learning, only by _unlearning_. No natural edification issues in

spiritual architecture of this splendour, but only a natural

demolition or undoing. I dimly recognise this great truth, and

hence hold more to a present imbecility than to a too eager

efficiency. I feel myself more fit to be knocked about for some

time yet and vastated of my natural vigour than to commence cosmos

and raise the barbaric yawp. Time enough for that when I am fairly

finished. Say what we will, you and I are all the while at school

just now. The genial pedagogue may give you so little of the ferule

as to leave you to doubt whether you really are there; but this

only proves what a wonderful pedagogue it is, and how capable of

adapting himself to everyone.

His friend in Paris found herself at that time, like many other persons,

much interested in the exercise of automatic writing, of which we have

since so abundantly heard and as to which she had communicated some

striking observations.

...Your letter is full of details that interest but don't

fascinate. I haven't a doubt of a single experience you allege, and

do not agree with your friend Count S. (your writing of this name

is obscure) that the world of spirits is not an element in your

writing. I am persuaded now for a long time of the truth of these

phenomena and feel no inclination to dispute or disparage them; but

at the same time I feel to such a degree my own remoteness from

them that I am sure I could never get any personal contact with

them. The state of mind exposing one to influences of this nature,

and which makes them beneficial to it, is a sceptical state; and

this I have never known for a moment. Spiritual existence has

always been more real to me (I was going to say) than natural; and

when accordingly I am asked to believe in the spiritual world

because my senses are getting to reveal it I feel as if the ground

of my conviction were going to be weakened rather than

strengthened. Of course I should have very little respect for

spiritual things which didn't ultimately report themselves to

sense, which didn't indeed subside into things of sense as

logically as a house into its foundations. But what I deny is that

spiritual existence can be directly known on earth--known otherwise

than by correspondence or inversely. The letter of every revelation

must be directly hostile to its spirit, and only inversely

accordant, because the very pretension of revelation is that it's a

descent, an absolute coming down, of truth, a humiliation of it

from its own elevated and habitual plane to a lower one.

Admit therefore that the facts of "spiritualism" are all true;

admit that persons really deceased have been communicating with you

about the state of Europe, the approaching crisis and the persons

known to us whom you name; in that case I should insist that, to

possess the slightest spiritual interest, their revelation should

be re-translated into the spiritual tongue by correspondences;

because as to any spirit knowing or caring to know those persons,

or being bothered about any crisis of ours, that is to me simply

incredible. Such matters have in each case doubtless some spiritual

or substantial counterpart answering in every particular to its

superficial features; and Wilkinson and Emerson, for instance, with

the others, are of course shadows of some greater or less spiritual

quantities. But I'll be hanged if there's the slightest _sensible_

accord between the substance and the semblance on either hand. Your

spirits, no doubt, give you the very communications you report to

me; only Wilkinson spiritually interpreted and Emerson spiritually

interpreted mean things so very different from our two friends of

those denominations that if our spiritual eye were for a moment

open to discern the difference I think it highly probable--I'm sure

it is infinitely possible--we should renounce their acquaintance.

But I have harped on this string long enough; let me change the

tune. Your spirits tell you to repose in what they are doing for

you and, with a pathos to which I am not insensible, say "Rest now,

poor child; your struggles have been great; clasp peace to your

bosom at last." And as a general thing our ears are saluted by

assurances that these communications are all urged by philanthropy

and that everyone so addressing us wants in some way to help and

elevate us. But just this is to my mind the unpleasant side of the

business. I have been so long accustomed to see the most arrant

deviltry transact itself in the name of benevolence that the moment

I hear a profession of good-will from almost any quarter I

instinctively look about for a constable or place my hand within

reach of the bell-rope. My ideal of human intercourse would be a

state of things in which no man will ever stand in need of any

other man's help, but will derive all his satisfaction from the

great social tides which own no individual names. I am sure no man

can be put in a position of dependence upon another without that

other's very soon becoming--if he accepts the duties of the

relation--utterly degraded out of his just human proportions. No

man can play the Deity to his fellow man with impunity--I mean

spiritual impunity of course. For see: if I am at all satisfied

with that relation, if it contents me to be in a position of

generosity toward others, I must be remarkably indifferent at

bottom to the gross social inequality which permits that position,

and instead of resenting the enforced humiliation of my fellow man

to myself, in the interests of humanity, I acquiesce in it for the

sake of the profit it yields to my own self-complacency. I do hope

the reign of benevolence is over; until that event occurs I am sure

the reign of God will be impossible. But I have a shocking bad cold

that racks my head to bursting almost; I can't think to any

purpose. Let me hear soon from you that I have not been

misunderstood. I wouldn't for the world seem wilfully to depreciate

what you set a high value on. No, I really can't help my judgments.

And I always soften them to within an inch of their life as it is.

The following, no longer from the Hotel de l'Ecu, but from 5 Quai du

Mont Blanc, would indicate that his "Dear Queen Caroline," as he

addresses her, was at no loss to defend her own view of the matters in

discussion between them: in which warm light indeed it is that I was

myself in the after years ever most amusedly to see her.

Don't scold a fellow so! Exert your royal gifts in exalting only

the lowly and humbling only the proud. Precisely what I like, to

get extricated from metaphysics, is encouragement from a few

persons like yourself, such encouragement as would lie in your

intelligent apprehension and acknowledgment of the great _result_

of metaphysics, which is a godly and spotless life on earth. If I

could find anyone apt to that doctrine I should not work so hard

metaphysically to convince the world of its truth. And as for being

a metaphysical Jack Horner, the thing is contradictory, as no

metaphysician whose studies are sincere ever felt tempted to

self-complacency or disposed to reckon himself a good boy. Such

exaltations are not for him, but only for the artists and poets,

who dazzle the eyes of mankind and _don't_ recoil from the darkness

they themselves produce--as Dryden says, or Collins.

Mrs. Tappan, spending the month of June in London, continued to impute

for the time, I infer (I seem to remember a later complete detachment),

a livelier importance to the supernatural authors of her "writing" than

her correspondent was disposed to admit; but almost anything was a

quickener of the correspondent's own rich, that is always so animated,

earnestness. He had to feel an interlocutor's general sympathy, or

recognise a moral relation, even if a disturbed one, for the deep tide

of his conviction to rise outwardly higher; but when that happened the

tide overflowed indeed.

MY DEAR CAROLINA--Neither North nor South, but an eminently free

State, with no exulting shout of master and no groan of captive to

be heard in all its borders, but only the cheerful hum of happy

husband and children--how do you find London? Here in Geneva we are

so saturate with sunshine that we would fain dive to the depths of

the lake to learn coolness of the little fishes. Still, we don't

envy your two weeks of unbroken rain in dear dismal London. What a

preparation for doing justice to Lenox! You see I know--through

Mary Tweedy, who has a hearty appreciation of her London

privileges. How are A. D. and all the rest of them? _Familiar_

spirits, are they not, on a short acquaintance?--and how pleasant

an aspect it gives to the middle kingdom to think you shall be sure

to find there such lovers and friends! Only let us keep them at a

proper distance. It doesn't do for us ever to accept another only

at that other's own estimate of himself. If we do we may as well

plunge into Tartarus at once. No human being can afford to commit

his happiness to another's keeping, or, what is the same thing,

forego his own individuality with all that it imports. The first

requisite of our true relationship to each other (spiritually

speaking) is that we be wholly independent of each other: then we

may give ourselves away as much as we please, we shall do neither

them nor ourselves any harm. But until that blessed day comes, by

the advance of a scientific society among men, we shall be utterly

unworthy to love each other or be loved in return. We shall do

nothing but prey upon each other and turn each other's life to

perfect weariness.

The more of it then just now the better! The more we bite and

devour each other, the more horribly the newspapers abound in all

the evidences of our disgusting disorganisation, the

disorganisation of the old world, the readier will our dull ears be

to listen to the tidings of the new world which is aching to

appear, the world wherein dwelleth righteousness. Don't abuse the

newspapers therefore publicly, but tell everybody of the use they

are destined to promote, and set others upon the look-out. A. D. is

a very good woman, I haven't a doubt, but will fast grow a better

one if she would let herself alone, and me also, and all other mere

persons, while she diligently inquires about the Lord; that is

about that lustrous universal life which God's providence is now

forcing upon men's attention and which will obliterate for ever all

this exaggeration of our personalities. It is very well for lovers

to abase themselves in this way to each other; because love is a

_passion_ of one's nature--that is to say the lover is not

self-possessed, but is lifted for a passing moment to the level of

the Lord's life in the race, and so attuned to higher issues ever

after in his own proper sphere. But these experiences are purely

disciplinary and not final. All passion is a mere inducement to

action, and when at last activity really dawns in us we drop this

faculty of hallucination that we have been under about persons and

see and adore the abounding divinity which is in all persons alike.

Who will then ever be caught in that foolish snare again? I did

nothing but tumble into it from my boyhood up to my marriage; since

which great disillusioning--yes!--I feel that the only lovable

person is one who will never permit himself to be loved. But I have

written on without any intention and have now no time to say what

alone I intended, how charming and kind and long to be remembered

you were all those Paris days. Give my love to honest William and

tell my small nieces that I pine to pluck again the polished

cherries of their cheeks. My wife admires and loves you.

From which I jump considerably forward, for its (privately) historic

value, to a communication from Newport of the middle of August '63. My

father's two younger sons had, one the previous and one at the beginning

of the current, year obtained commissions in the Volunteer Army; as a

sequel to which my next younger brother, as Adjutant of the Fifty-fourth

Massachusetts, Colonel Robert Shaw's regiment, the first body of

coloured soldiers raised in the North, had received two grave wounds in

that unsuccessful attack on Fort Wagner from which the gallant young

leader of the movement was not to return.

Wilky had a bad day yesterday and kept me busy or I shouldn't have

delayed answering your inquiries till to-day. He is very severely

wounded both in the ankle and in the side--where he doesn't heal so

fast as the doctor wishes in consequence of the shell having made a

pouch which collects matter and retards nature. They cut it open

yesterday, and to-day he is better, or will be. The wound in the

ankle was made by a cannister ball an inch and a half in diameter,

which lodged eight days in the foot and was finally dislodged by

cutting down through (the foot) and taking it out at the sole. He

is excessively weak, unable to do anything but lie passive, even

to turn himself on his pillow. He will probably have a slow and

tedious recovery--the doctors say of a year at least; but he knows

nothing of this himself and speaks, so far as he does talk, but of

going back in the Fall. If you write please say nothing of this; he

is so distressed at the thought of a long sickness. He is vastly

attached to the negro-soldier cause; believes (I think) that the

world has existed for it; and is sure that enormous results to

civilisation are coming out of it. We heard from Bob this morning

at Morris Island; with his regiment, building earthworks and

mounting guns. Hot, he says, but breezy; also that the shells make

for them every few minutes--while he and his men betake themselves

to the trenches and holes in the earth "like so many land-crabs in

distress." He writes in the highest spirits. Cabot Russell, Wilky's

dearest friend, is, we fear, a prisoner and wounded. We hear

nothing decisive, but the indications point that way. Poor Wilky

cries aloud for his friends gone and missing, and I could hardly

have supposed he might be educated so suddenly up to serious

manhood altogether as he appears to have been. I hear from Frank

Shaw this morning, and they are all well--and admirable.

This goes beyond the moment I had lately, and doubtless too lingeringly,

reached, as I say; just as I shall here find convenience in borrowing a

few passages from my small handful of letters of the time to follow--to

the extent of its not following by a very long stretch. Such a course

keeps these fragments of record together, as scattering them would

perhaps conduce to some leakage in their characteristic tone, for which

I desire all the fulness it can keep. Impossible moreover not in some

degree to yield on the spot to _any_ brush of the huge procession of

those particular months and years, even though I shall presently take

occasion to speak as I may of my own so inevitably contracted

consciousness of what the brush, with its tremendous possibilities of

violence, could consist of in the given case. I had, under stress, to

content myself with knowing it in a more indirect and muffled fashion

than might easily have been--even should one speak of it but as a matter

of mere vision of the eyes or quickened wonder of the mind or heaviness

of the heart, as a matter in fine of the closer and more inquiring, to

say nothing of the more agitated, approach. All of which, none the less,

was not to prevent the whole quite indescribably intensified

time--intensified through all lapses of occasion and frustrations of

contact--from remaining with me as a more constituted and sustained act

of living, in proportion to my powers and opportunities, than any other

homogeneous stretch of experience that my memory now recovers. The case

had to be in a peculiar degree, alas, that of living inwardly--like so

many of my other cases; in a peculiar degree compared, that is, to the

immense and prolonged outwardness, outwardness naturally at the very

highest pitch, that was the general sign of the situation. To which I

may add that my "alas" just uttered is in the key altogether of my then

current consciousness, and not in the least in that of my present

appreciation of the same--so that I leave it, even while I thus put my

mark against it, as I should restore tenderly to the shelf any odd

rococo object that might have slipped from a reliquary. My appreciation

of what I presume at the risk of any apparent fatuity to call my

"relation to" the War is at present a thing exquisite to me, a thing of

the last refinement of romance, whereas it had to be at the time a sore

and troubled, a mixed and oppressive thing--though I promptly see, on

reflection, how it must frequently have flushed with emotions, with

small scraps of direct perception even, with particular sharpnesses in

the generalised pang of participation, that were all but touched in

themselves as with the full experience. Clear as some object presented

in high relief against the evening sky of the west, at all events, is

the presence for me beside the stretcher on which my young brother was

to lie for so many days before he could be moved, and on which he had

lain during his boat-journey from the South to New York and thence again

to Newport, of lost Cabot Russell's stricken father, who, failing, up

and down the searched field, in respect of his own irrecoverable

boy--then dying, or dead, as afterwards appeared, well within the

enemy's works--had with an admirable charity brought Wilky back to a

waiting home instead, and merged the parental ache in the next nearest

devotion he could find. Vivid to me still is one's almost ashamed sense

of this at the hurried disordered time, and of how it was impossible not

to impute to his grave steady gentleness and judgment a full awareness

of the difference it would have made for him, all the same, to be doing

such things with a still more intimate pity. Unobliterated for me, in

spite of vaguenesses, this quasi-twilight vision of the good bereft man,

bereft, if I rightly recall, of his only son, as he sat erect and

dry-eyed at the guarded feast of our relief; and so much doubtless

partly because of the image that hovers to me across the years of Cabot

Russell himself, my brother's so close comrade--dark-eyed, youthfully

brown, heartily bright, actively handsome, and with the arrested

expression, the indefinable shining stigma, worn, to the regard that

travels back to them, by those of the young figures of the fallen that

memory and fancy, wanting, never ceasing to want, to "do" something for

them, set as upright and clear-faced as may be, each in his sacred

niche. They have each to such a degree, so ranged, the strange property

or privilege--one scarce knows what to call it--of exquisitely, for all

our time, facing us out, quite blandly ignoring us, looking through us

or straight over us at something they partake of together but that we

mayn't pretend to know. We walk thus, I think, rather ruefully before

them--those of us at least who didn't at the time share more happily

their risk. William, during those first critical days, while the

stretcher itself, set down with its load just within the entrance to our

house, mightn't be moved further, preserved our poor lacerated brother's

aspect in a drawing of great and tender truth which I permit myself to

reproduce. It tells for me the double story--I mean both of Wilky's then

condition and of the draughtsman's admirable hand.

[Illustration: Sketch of G. W. James brought home wounded from the

assault on Fort Wagner]

But I find waiting my father's last letter of the small group to Mrs.

Tappan. We were by that time, the autumn of 1865, settled in Boston for

a couple of years.

MY DEAR CARRY--Are you a carry_atid_ that you consider yourself

bound to uphold that Lenox edifice through the cold winter as well

as the hot summer? Why don't you come to town? I can't _write_ what

I want to say. My brain is tired, and I gladly forego all writing

that costs thought or attention. But I have no day forgotten your

question, and am eager always to make a conquest of you; you are so

full both of the upper and the nether might as always greatly to

excite my interest and make me feel how little is accomplished

while you are left not so. I make no prayer to you; I would have no

assistance from your own vows; or the pleasure of my intercourse

with you would be slain. I would rather outrage than conciliate

your sympathies, that I might have all the joy of winning you over

at last. Hate me on my ideal side, the side that menaces you, as

much as you please meanwhile, but keep a warm corner in your regard

for me personally, as I always do for you, until we meet again.

It's a delight to know a person of your sense and depth; even the

_gaudia certaminis_ are more cheering with you than ordinary

agreements with other people.

On which note I may leave the exchange in question, feeling how equal an

honour it does to the parties.