I judge best to place together here several passages from my father's
letters belonging to this general period, even though they again carry
me to points beyond my story proper. It is not for the story's sake that
I am moved to gather them, but for their happy illustration, once more,
of something quite else, the human beauty of the writer's spirit and the
fine breadth of his expression. This latter virtue is most striking,
doubtless, when he addresses his women correspondents, of whom there
were many, yet it so pervades for instance various notes, longer and
shorter, to Mrs. James T. Fields, wife of the eminent Boston publisher
and editor, much commended to us as founder and, for a time, chief
conductor of the Atlantic Monthly, our most adopted and enjoyed native
_recueil_ of that series of years. The Atlantic seemed somehow, while
the good season lasted, to live with us, whereas our relation to the two
or three other like organs, homegrown or foreign, of which there could
be any question, and most of all, naturally, to the great French Revue,
was that we lived with _them_. The light of literature, as we then
invoked or at any rate received it, seemed to beat into the delightful
Fields salon from a nearer heaven than upon any other scene, and played
there over a museum of relics and treasures and apparitions (these last
whether reflected and by that time legendary, or directly protrusive and
presented, wearers of the bay) with an intensity, I feel again as I look
back, every resting ray of which was a challenge to dreaming ambition. I
am bound to note, none the less, oddly enough, that my father's
communications with the charming mistress of the scene are more often
than not a bright profession of sad reasons for inability to mingle in
it. He mingled with reluctance in scenes designed and preappointed, and
was, I think, mostly content to feel almost anything near at hand become
a scene for him from the moment he had happened to cast into the arena
(which he preferred without flags or festoons) the golden apple of the
unexpected--in humorous talk, that is, in reaction without preparation,
in sincerity which was itself sociability. It was not nevertheless that
he didn't now and then "accept"--with attenuations.
...If therefore you will let Alice and me come to you on Wednesday
evening I shall still rejoice in the benignant fate that befalls my
house--even though my wife, indisposed, "feels reluctantly
constrained to count herself out of the sphere of your
hospitality;" and I will bind myself moreover by solemn vows not
to perplex the happy atmosphere which almost reigns in yours by
risking a syllable of the incongruous polemic your husband wots of.
I will listen devotedly to you and him all the evening if thereby I
may early go home repaired in my own esteem, and not dilapidated,
as has been hitherto too often the case.
He could resist persuasion even in the insidious form of an expressed
desire that he should read something, "something he was writing," to a
chosen company.
Your charming note is irresistible at first sight, and I had almost
uttered a profligate Yes!--that is a promise irrespective of a
power to perform; when my good angel arrested me by the stern
inquiry: What have you got to give them? And I could only say in
reply to this intermeddling but blest spirit: Nothing, my dear
friend, absolutely nothing! Whereupon the veracious one said again:
Sit you down immediately therefore and, confessing your literary
indigence to this lovely lady, pray her to postpone the fulfilment
of her desire to some future flood-tide in the little stream of
your inspiration, when you will be ready to serve her.
The following refers to the question of his attending with my mother at
some session of a Social Club, at which a prepared performance of some
sort was always offered, but of which they had lately found it
convenient to cease to be members.
I snatch the pen from my wife's hand to enjoy, myself, the
satisfaction of saying to you how good and kind and charming you
always are, and how we never grow tired of recounting the fact
among ourselves here, and yet how we still shall be unable to
accept your hospitality. Why? Simply because we have a due sense of
what becomes us after our late secession, and would not willingly
be seen at two successive meetings, lest the carnal observer should
argue that we had left the Club by the front door of obligation
only to be readmitted at the back door of indulgence: I put it as
Fields would phrase it. To speak of him always reminds me of
various things, so richly endowed is the creature in all good
gifts; but the dominant consideration evoked in my mind by his name
is just his beautiful home and that atmosphere of faultless womanly
worth and dignity which fills it with light and warmth, and makes
it a blessing to one's heart whenever one enters its precincts.
Please felicitate the wretch for me--!
However earnest these deprecations he could embroider them with a rare
grace.
My wife--who has just received your kind note in rapid route for
the Dedham Profane Asylum, or something of that sort--begs leave to
say, through me as a willing and sensitive medium, that you are one
of those _arva beata_, renowned in poetry, which, visit them never
so often, one is always glad to _re_visit, which are attractive in
all seasons by their own absolute light and without any Emersonian
pansies and buttercups to make them so. This enthusiastic Dedhamite
says further in effect that while she is duly grateful for your
courteous offer of a seat upon your sofa to hear the conquered
sage, she yet prefers the material banquet you summon us to in your
dining-room, since there we should be out of the mist and able to
discern between nature and cookery, between what eats and what is
eaten, at all events, and feel a thankful mind that we were in
solid comfortable Charles Street, instead of in the vague and wide
weltering galaxy, and should be sure to deem A. and J. (_I_ am sure
of A., and I think my wife feels equally sure of J.), finer
fireflies than ever sparkled in the old empyrean. But alas who
shall control his destiny? Not my wife, whom multitudinous cares
enthrall; nor yet myself, whom a couple of months' enforced
idleness now constrains to a preternatural activity, lest the world
fail of salvation. Please accept then our united apologies and
regrets....
_P.S._ Who contrived the comical title for E.'s
lectures?--"Philosophy of the People!" May it not have been a joke
of J. T. F.'s? It would be no less absurd for Emerson himself to
think of philosophising than for the rose to think of botanising.
He is the divinely pompous rose of the philosophic garden, gorgeous
with colour and fragrance; so what a sad look-out for tulip and
violet and lily, and the humbler grasses, if the rose should turn
out philosophic gardener as well.
There connects itself with a passage in another letter to the same
correspondent a memory of my own that I have always superlatively
cherished and that remains in consequence vivid enough for some light
reflection here. But I first give the passage, which is of date of
November '67. "What a charming impression of Dickens the other night at
the Nortons' dinner! How innocent and honest and sweet he is maugre his
fame! Fields was merely superb on the occasion, but Dickens was
saintly." As a young person of twenty-four I took part, restrictedly yet
exaltedly, in that occasion--and an immense privilege I held it to slip
in at all--from after dinner on; at which stage of the evening I
presented myself, in the company of my excellent friend Arthur Sedgwick,
brother to our hostess and who still lives to testify, for the honour of
introduction to the tremendous guest. How tremendously it had been laid
upon young persons of our generation to feel Dickens, down to the soles
of our shoes, no more modern instance that I might try to muster would
give, I think, the least measure of; I can imagine no actual young
person of my then age, and however like myself, so ineffably agitated,
so mystically moved, in the presence of any exhibited idol of the mind
who should be in that character at all conceivably "like" the author of
Pickwick and of Copperfield. There has been since his extinction no
corresponding case--as to the relation between benefactor and
beneficiary, or debtor and creditor; no other debt in our time has been
piled so high, for those carrying it, as the long, the purely
"Victorian" pressure of that obligation. It was the pressure, the
feeling, that made it--as it made the feeling, and no operation of
feeling on any such ground has within my observation so much as
attempted to emulate it. So that on the evening I speak of at Shady
Hill it was as a slim and shaken vessel of the feeling that one stood
there--of the feeling in the first place diffused, public and universal,
and in the second place all unfathomably, undemonstrably, unassistedly
and, as it were, unrewardedly, proper to one's self as an already
groping and fumbling, already dreaming and yearning dabbler in the
mystery, the creative, that of comedy, tragedy, evocation,
representation, erect and concrete before us there as in a sublimity of
mastership. I saw the master--nothing could be more evident--in the
light of an intense emotion, and I trembled, I remember, in every limb,
while at the same time, by a blest fortune, emotion produced no luminous
blur, but left him shining indeed, only shining with august particulars.
It was to be remarked that those of his dress, which managed to be
splendid even while remaining the general spare uniform of the
diner-out, had the effect of higher refinements, of accents stronger and
better placed, than we had ever in such a connection seen so much as
hinted. But the offered inscrutable mask was the great thing, the
extremely handsome face, the face of symmetry yet of formidable
character, as I at once recognised, and which met my dumb homage with a
straight inscrutability, a merciless _military_ eye, I might have
pronounced it, an automatic hardness, in fine, which at once indicated
to me, and in the most interesting way in the world, a kind of economy
of apprehension. Wonderful was it thus to see, and thrilling inwardly to
note, that since the question was of personal values so great no
faintest fraction of the whole could succeed in _not_ counting for
interest. The confrontation was but of a moment; our introduction, my
companion's and mine, once effected, by an arrest in a doorway, nothing
followed, as it were, or happened (what _might_ have happened it
remained in fact impossible to conceive); but intense though the
positive perception there was an immensity more left to understand--for
the long aftersense, I mean; and one, or the chief, of these later
things was that if our hero neither shook hands nor spoke, only meeting
us by the barest act, so to say, of the trained eye, the penetration of
which, to my sense, revealed again a world, there was a grim beauty, to
one's subsequently panting imagination, in that very truth of his then
so knowing himself (committed to his monstrous "readings" and with the
force required for them ominously ebbing) on the outer edge of his once
magnificent margin. So at any rate I was to like for long to consider of
it; I was to like to let the essential radiance which had nevertheless
reached me measure itself by this accompaniment of the pitying vision.
He couldn't loosely spend for grace what he had to keep for life--which
was the awful nightly, or all but nightly, exhibition: such the economy,
as I have called it, in which I was afterwards to feel sure he had been
locked up--in spite of the appearance, in the passage from my father's
letter, of the opened gates of the hour or two before. These were but a
reason the more, really, for the so exquisitely complicated image which
was to remain with me to this day and which couldn't on any other terms
have made itself nearly so important. For that was the whole sense of
the matter. It hadn't been in the least important that we should have
shaken hands or exchanged platitudes--it had only been supremely so that
one should have had the essence of the hour, the knowledge enriched by
proof that whatever the multifold or absolute reason, no accession to
sensibility from any other at all "similar" source could have compared,
for penetration, to the intimacy of this particular and prodigious
glimpse. It was as if I had carried off my strange treasure just exactly
from under the merciless military eye--placed there on guard of the
secret. All of which I recount for illustration of the force of action,
unless I call it passion, that may reside in a single pulse of time.
I allow myself not to hang back in gathering several passages from
another series for fear of their crossing in a manner the line of
privacy and giving a distinctness to old intimate things. The
distinctness is in the first place all to the honour of the persons and
the interests thus glimmering through; and I hold, in the second, that
the light touch under which they revive positively adds, by the magic of
memory, a composite fineness. The only thing is that to speak of my
father's correspondent here is to be more or less involved at once in
the vision of her frame and situation, and that to get at all into
relation with "the Nortons," as they were known to us at that period, to
say nothing of all the years to follow, is to find on my hands a much
heavier weight of reference than my scale at this point can carry. The
relation had ripened for us with the settlement of my parents at
Cambridge in the autumn of '66, and might I attempt even a sketch of the
happy fashion in which the University circle consciously accepted, for
its better satisfaction, or in other words just from a sense of what
was, within its range, in the highest degree interesting, the social
predominance of Shady Hill and the master there, and the ladies of the
master's family, I should find myself rich in material. That institution
and its administrators, however, became at once, under whatever recall
of them, a picture of great inclusions and implications; so true is it
of any community, and so true above all of one of the American
communities best to be studied fifty years ago in their homogeneous form
and native essence and identity, that a strong character reinforced by a
great culture, a culture great in the given conditions, obeys an
inevitable law in simply standing out. Charles Eliot Norton stood out,
in the air of the place and time--which for that matter, I think,
changed much as he changed, and couldn't change much beyond his own
range of experiment--with a greater salience, granting his background, I
should say, than I have ever known a human figure stand out with from
any: an effect involved of course in the nature of the background as
well as in that of the figure. He profited at any rate, to a degree that
was a lesson in all the civilities, by the fact that he represented an
ampler and easier, above all a more curious, play of the civil relation
than was to be detected anywhere about, and a play by which that
relation had the charming art of becoming extraordinarily multifold and
various without appearing to lose the note of rarity. It is not of
course through any exhibition of mere multiplicity that the instinct for
relations becomes a great example and bears its best fruit; the weight
of the example and the nature of the benefit depending so much as they
do on the achieved and preserved terms of intercourse. Here it was that
the curiosity, as I have called it, of Shady Hill was justified--so did
its action prove largely humanising. This was all the witchcraft it had
used--that of manners understood with all the extensions at once and all
the particularisations to which it is the privilege of the highest
conception of manners to lend itself. What it all came back to,
naturally, was the fact that, on so happy a ground, the application of
such an ideal and such a genius _could_ find agents expressive and
proportionate, and the least that could be said of the ladies of the
house was that they had in perfection the imagination of their
opportunity. History still at comparatively close range lays to its
lips, I admit, a warning finger--yet how can I help looking it bravely
in the face as I name in common courtesy Jane Norton? She distilled
civility and sympathy and charm, she exhaled humanity and invitation to
friendship, which latter she went through the world leaving at mortal
doors as in effect the revelation of a new amenity altogether--something
to wait, most other matters being meanwhile suspended, for her to come
back on a turn of the genial tide and take up again, according to the
stirred desire, with each beneficiary. All this to the extent, moreover,
I confess, that it takes the whole of one's measure of her rendered
service and her admirable life, cut so much too short--it takes the
full list of her fond acclaimers, the shyest with the clearest, those
who most waited or most followed, not to think almost more of the way
her blest influence went to waste as by its mere uneconomised and
selfless spread than of what would have been called (what was by the
simply-seeing freely enough called) her achieved success. It was given
her at once to shine for the simply-seeing and to abide forever with the
subtly; which latter, so far as they survive, are left again to
recognise how there plays inveterately within the beautiful, if it but
go far enough, the fine strain of the tragic. The household at Shady
Hill was leaving that residence early in the summer of '68 for a long
stay in Europe, and the following is of that moment.
When I heard the other day that you had been at our house to say
farewell I was glad and also sorry, glad because I couldn't say
before all the world so easily what I wanted to say to you in
parting, and sorry because I longed for another sight of your
beautiful countenance. And then I consoled myself with thinking
that I should write you the next morning and be able to do my
feelings better justice. But when the morning came I saw how you
would, with all your wealth of friends, scarcely value a puny
chirrup from one of my like, and by no means probably expect it,
and so I desisted. And now comes your heavenly letter this moment
to renew my happiness in showing me once more your undimmed
friendly face. How delightful that face has ever been to me since
first I beheld it; how your frank and gracious and healing manners
have shed on my soul a celestial dew whenever I have encountered
you: I despair to tell you in fitting words. You are the largest
and more generous nature I know, and one that remains always, at
the same time, so womanly; and while you leave behind you such a
memory you needn't fear that our affectionate wishes will ever fail
you for a moment. I for my part shall rest in my affection for you
till we meet where to love is to live.
Shady Hill was meanwhile occupied by other friends, out of the group of
which, especially as reflected in another of my father's letters to Miss
Norton, there rise for me beckoning ghosts; against whose deep appeal to
me to let them lead me on I have absolutely to steel myself--so far, for
the interest of it, I feel that they might take me.
We dined the other night at Shady Hill, where the Gurneys were
charming and the company excellent; but there was a perpetual
suggestion of the Elysian Fields about the banquet to me, and we
seemed met together to celebrate a memory rather than applaud a
hope. Godkin and his wife were there, and they heartily lent
themselves to discourse of you all. Ever and anon his friendship
gave itself such an emphatic _jerk_ to your address that you might
have heard it on your window-panes if you had not been asleep. As
for her--what a great clot she is of womanly health, beauty and
benignity! That is a most unwonted word to use in such a
connection, but it came of itself, and I won't refuse it, as it
means to express a wealth that seems chaotic--seems so because
apparently not enough exercised or put to specific use. The
Ashburners and Sedgwicks continue your tradition and even ornament
or variegate it with their own original force. I go there of a
Sunday afternoon, whenever possible, to read anew the gospel of
their beautiful life and manners and bring away a text for the good
of my own household. No one disputes the authenticity of that
gospel, and I have no difficulty in spreading its knowledge.
On which follows, as if inevitably, the tragic note re-echoed; news
having come from Dresden, in March '72, of the death of Mrs. Charles
Norton, still young, delightful, inestimable.
What a blow we have all had in the deeper blow that has prostrated
you! I despair to tell you how keen and how real a grief is felt
here by all who have heard the desolating news. With my own family
the brooding presence of the calamity is almost as obvious as it is
in the Kirkland Street home, and I have to make a perpetual effort
to reason it down. Reflectively, I confess, I am somewhat surprised
that I could have been so _much_ surprised by an event of this
order. I know very well that death is the secret of life
spiritually, and that this outward image of death which has just
obtruded itself upon our gaze is _only_ an image--is wholly unreal
from a spiritual point of view. I know in short that your lovely
sister lives at present more livingly than she has ever lived
before. And yet my life is so low, habitually, that when I am
called upon to put my knowledge into practice I am as superstitious
as anybody else and grovel instead of soaring. Keep me in your own
sweet and fragrant memory, for nowhere else could I feel myself
more embalmed to my own self-respect. Indeed if anything could
relieve a personal sorrow to me it would be the sense that it was
shared by a being so infinitely tender and true as yourself.
Of the mass of letters by the same hand that I further turn over too
many are of a domestic strain inconsistent with other application; but a
page here and there emerges clear, with elements of interest and notes
of the characteristic that rather invite than deprecate an emphasis.
From these I briefly glean, not minding that later dates are
involved--no particular hour at that time being far out of touch with
any other, and the value of everything gaining here, as I feel, by my
keeping my examples together. The following, addressed to me in England
early in '69, beautifully illustrates, to my sense, our father's close
participation in any once quite positive case that either one or the
other of his still somewhat undetermined, but none the less interesting
sons--interesting to themselves, to each other and to _him_--might
appear for the time to insist on constituting. William had in '68 been
appointed to an instructorship in Psychology at Harvard.
He gets on greatly with his teaching; his students--fifty-seven of
them--are elated with their luck in having him, and I feel sure he
will have next year a still larger number attracted by his fame. He
came in the other afternoon while I was sitting alone, and, after
walking the floor in an animated way for a moment, broke out:
"Bless my soul, what a difference between me as I am now and as I
was last spring at this time! Then so hypochondriachal"--he used
that word, though perhaps less in substance than form--"and now
with my mind so cleared up and restored to sanity. It's the
difference between death and life." He had a great effusion. I was
afraid of interfering with it, or possibly checking it, but I
ventured to ask what especially in his opinion had produced the
change. He said several things: the reading of Renouvier
(particularly his vindication of the freedom of the will) and of
Wordsworth, whom he has been feeding on now for a good while; but
more than anything else his having given up the notion that all
mental disorder requires to have a physical basis. This had become
perfectly untrue to him. He saw that the mind does act
irrespectively of material coercion, and could be dealt with
therefore at first hand, and this was health to his bones. It was a
splendid declaration, and though I had known from unerring signs of
the _fact_ of the change I never had been more delighted than by
hearing of it so unreservedly from his own lips. He has been
shaking off his respect for men of mere science as such, and is
even more universal and impartial in his mental judgments than I
have known him before.
Nothing in such a report could affect me more, at a distance, as indeed
nothing shines for me more sacredly now, than the writer's perfect
perception of what it would richly say to me, even if a little to my
comparative confusion and bewilderment; engaged as I must rightly have
appeared in working out, not to say in tentatively playing with, much
thinner things. I like to remember, as I do, ineffaceably, that my
attention attached itself, intensely and on the spot, to the very
picture, with whatever else, conveyed, which for that matter hangs
before me still: the vision of my brother, agitated by the growth of his
genius, moving in his burst of confidence, his bright earnestness, about
the room I knew, which must have been our admirable parent's study--with
that admirable parent himself almost holding his breath for the charm
and the accepted peace of it, after earlier discussions and reserves; to
say nothing too, if charm was in question, of the fact of rarity and
beauty I must have felt, or in any case at present feel, in the resource
for such an intellectually living and fermenting son of such a
spiritually perceiving and responding sire. What was the whole passage
but a vision of the fine private luxury of each?--with the fine private
luxury of my own almost blurred image of it superadded. Of that same
spring of '69 is another page addressed to myself in Europe. My memory
must at the very time have connected itself with what had remained to me
of our common or certainly of my own inveterate, childish appeal to him,
in early New York days, for repetition, in the winter afternoon
firelight, of his most personal, most remembering and picture-recovering
"story"; that of a visit paid by him about in his nineteenth year, as I
make it out, to his Irish relatives, his father's nephews, nieces and
cousins, with a younger brother or two perhaps, as I set the scene
forth--which it conduced to our liveliest interest to see "Billy
Taylor," the negro servant accompanying him from Albany, altogether rule
from the point of view of effect. The dignity of this apparition indeed,
I must parenthesise, would have yielded in general to the source of a
glamour still more marked--the very air in which the young emissary
would have moved as the son of his father and the representative of an
American connection prodigious surely in its power to dazzle. William
James of Albany was at that time approaching the term of his remarkably
fruitful career, and as I see the fruits of it stated on the morrow of
his death--in the New York Evening Post of December 20th 1832, for
instance, I find myself envying the friendly youth who could bring his
modest Irish kin such a fairytale from over the sea. I attach as I hang
upon the passage a melancholy gaze to the cloud of images of what might
have been for us all that it distractingly throws off. Our grandfather's
energy, exercised in Albany from the great year 1789, appears promptly
to have begun with his arrival there. "Everywhere we see his footsteps,
turn where we may, and these are the results of his informing mind and
his vast wealth. His plans of improvement embraced the entire city, and
there is scarcely a street or a square which does not exhibit some mark
of his hand or some proof of his opulence. With the exception of Mr.
Astor," this delightful report goes on to declare, "no other business
man has acquired so great a fortune in this State. To his enormous
estate of three millions of dollars there are nine surviving heirs. His
enterprises have for the last ten years furnished constant employment
for hundreds of our mechanics and labourers." The enterprises appear,
alas, to have definitely ceased, or to have fallen into less able hands,
with his death--and to the mass of property so handsomely computed the
heirs were, more exactly, not nine but a good dozen. Which fact,
however, reduces but by a little the rich ambiguity of the question that
was to flit before my father's children, as they grew up, with an air of
impenetrability that I remember no attempt on his own part to mitigate.
I doubt, for that matter, whether he could in the least have appeased
our all but haunting wonder as to what had become even in the hands of
twelve heirs, he himself naturally being one, of the admirable three
millions. The various happy and rapid courses of most of the
participants accounted for much, but did they account for the full
beautiful value, and would even the furthest stretch of the charming
legend of his own early taste for the amusements of the town really tell
us what had been the disposition, by such a measure, of _his_ share? Our
dear parent, we were later quite to feel, could have told us very
little, in all probability, under whatever pressure, what had become of
anything. There had been, by our inference, a general history--not on
the whole exhilarating, and pressure for information could never, I
think, have been applied; wherefore the question arrests me only through
the brightly associated presumption that the Irish visit was made, to
its extreme enlivening, in the character of a gilded youth, a youth
gilded an inch thick and shining to effulgence on the scene not
otherwise brilliant. Which image appeals to my filial fidelity--even
though I hasten not to sacrifice the circle evoked, that for which I a
trifle unassuredly figure a small town in county Cavan as forming an
horizon, and which consisted, we used to delight to hear with every
contributive circumstance, of the local lawyer, the doctor and the (let
us hope--for we _did_ hope) principal "merchant," whose conjoined
hospitality appeared, as it was again agreeable to know, to have more
than graced the occasion: the main definite pictorial touches that have
lingered with me being that all the doors always stood open, with the
vistas mostly raking the provision of whiskey on every table, and that
these opportunities were much less tempting (to our narrator) than that
of the quest of gooseberries in the garden with a certain beautiful
Barbara, otherwise anonymous, who was not of the kin but on a visit from
a distance at one of the genial houses. We liked to hear about Barbara,
liked the sound of her still richer rarer surname; which in spite of the
fine Irish harmony it even then struck me as making I have frivolously
forgotten. She had been matchlessly fair and she ate gooseberries with a
charm that was in itself of the nature of a brogue--so that, as I say,
we couldn't have too much of her; yet even her measure dwindled, for our
appetite, beside the almost epic shape of black Billy Taylor carrying
off at every juncture alike the laurel and the bay. He singularly
appealed, it was clear, to the Irish imagination, performing in a manner
never to disappoint it; his young master--in those days, even in the
North, young mastership hadn't too long since lapsed to have lost every
grace of its tradition--had been all cordially acclaimed, but not least,
it appeared, because so histrionically attended: he had been the
ringmaster, as it were, of the American circus, the small circus of
two, but the other had been the inimitable clown. My point is that we
repaired retrospectively to the circus as insatiably as our Irish
cousins had of old attended it in person--even for the interest of which
fact, however, my father's words have led me too far. What here follows,
I must nevertheless add, would carry me on again, for development of
reference, should I weakly allow it. The allusion to my brother Wilky's
vividly independent verbal collocations and commentative flights
re-echoes afresh, for instance, as one of the fond by-words that spoke
most of our whole humorous harmony. Just so might the glance at the next
visitor prompt a further raising of the curtain, save that this is a
portrait to which, for lack of acquaintance with the original, I have
nothing to contribute--beyond repeating again that it was ever the sign
of my father's portraits to supply almost more than anything else
material for a vision of himself.
Your enjoyment of England reminds me of my feelings on my first
visit there forty years ago nearly, when I landed in Devonshire in
the month of May or June and was so intoxicated with the roads and
lanes and hedges and fields and cottages and castles and inns that
I thought I should fairly expire with delight. You can't expatiate
too much for our entertainment on your impressions, though you make
us want consumedly to go over and follow in your footsteps. Wilky
has been at home now for 2 or 3 days and is very philosophic and
enthusiastic over your letters. I hoped to remember some of his
turns of speech for you, but one chases another out of my memory
and it is now all a blank. I will consult Alice's livelier one
before I close.
My friend ---- is a tropical phenomenon, a favourite of nature
whatever his fellow man may say of him. His face and person are
handsome rather than otherwise, and it's obvious that he is a very
unsoiled and pure piece of humanity in all _personal_ regards. And
with such a gift of oratory--such a boundless wealth of diction set
off by copious and not ungraceful gesticulation! Here is where he
belongs to the tropics, where nature claims him for her own and
flings him like a cascade in the face of conventional
good-breeding. I can't begin to describe him, he is what I have
never before met. I see that he can't help turning out excessively
tiresome, but he is not at all vulgar. He has a genius for
elocution, that is all; but a real genius and no mistake. In
comparison with Mr. F. L. or Mr. Longfellow or the restrained
Boston style of address generally, he is what the sunflower is to
the snowdrop; but on the whole, if I could kick his shins whenever
I should like to and so reduce him to silence, I prefer him to the
others.
What mainly commends to me certain other passages of other dates (these
still reaching on a little) is doubtless the fact that I myself show in
them as the object of attention and even in a manner as a claimant for
esthetic aid. This latter active sympathy overflows in a letter of the
spring of '70, which would be open to more elucidation than I have,
alas, space for. Let the sentence with which it begins merely remind me
that Forrest, the American actor, of high renown in his time, and of
several of whose appearances toward the close of his career I keep a
memory uneffaced--the impression as of a deep-toned thunderous organ, a
prodigious instrument pounded by a rank barbarian--had been literally,
from what we gathered, an early comrade of our parent: literally, I say,
because the association could seem to me, at my hours of ease, so
bravely incongruous. By my hours of ease I mean those doubtless too
devoted to that habit of wanton dispersed embroidery for which any scrap
of the human canvas would serve. From one particular peg, I at the same
time allow, the strongest sense of the incongruity depended--my
remembrance, long entertained, of my father's relating how, on an
occasion, which must have been betimes in the morning, of his calling on
the great tragedian, a man of enormous build and strength, the latter,
fresh and dripping from the bath, had entered the room absolutely upside
down, or by the rare gymnastic feat of throwing his heels into the air
and walking, as with strides, on his hands; an extraordinary performance
if kept up for more than a second or two, and the result at any rate of
mere exuberance of muscle and pride and robustious joie de vivre. It had
affected me, the picture, as one of those notes of high colour that the
experience of a young Albany viveur, the like of which I felt I was
never to come in for, alone could strike off; but what was of the finer
profit in it was less the direct illustration of the mighty mountebank
than of its being delightful on the part of a domestic character we so
respected to have had, with everything else a Bohemian past too--since I
couldn't have borne at such moments to hear it argued as not Bohemian.
What did his having dropped in after such a fashion and at a late
breakfast-hour on the glory of the footlights and the idol of the town,
what did it fall in with but the kind of thing one had caught glimpses
and echoes of from the diaries and memoirs, so far as these had been
subject to the passing peep, of the giftedly idle and the fashionably
great, the Byrons, the Bulwers, the Pelhams, the Coningsbys, or even,
for a nearer vividness perhaps, the N. P. Willises?--of all of whom it
was somehow more characteristic than anything else, to the imagination,
that they always began their day in some such fashion. Even if I cite
this as a fair example of one's instinct for making much of a
little--once this little, a chance handful of sand, could show the
twinkle of the objective, or even the reflective, grain of gold--I still
claim value for that instanced felicity, as I felt it, of being able to
yearn, thanks to whatever chance support, over Bohemia, and yet to have
proof in the paternal presence close at hand of how well even the real
frequentation of it, when achieved in romantic youth, might enable a
person at last to turn out. The lesson may now indeed seem to have been
one of those that rather more strictly adorn a tale than point a moral;
but with me, at that period, I think, the moral ever came first and the
tale more brilliantly followed. As for the recital, in such detail, of
the theme of a possible literary effort which the rest of my letter
represents, how could I feel this, when it had reached me, as anything
but a sign of the admirable anxiety with which thought could be taken,
even though "amateurishly," in my professional interest?--since
professional I by that time appeared able to pass for being. And how
above all can it not serve as an exhibition again of the manner in which
all my benevolent backer's inveterate original _malaise_ in face of
betrayed symptoms of the impulse to "narrow down" on the part of his
young found its solution always, or its almost droll simplification, as
soon as the case might reach for him a _personal_ enough, or "social"
enough, as he would have said, relation to its fruits? Then the malaise
might promptly be felt as changed, by a wave of that wand, to the
extremity of active and expatiative confidence.
Horatio Alger is writing a Life of Edwin Forrest, and I am afraid
will give him a Bowery appreciation. He reports his hero as a very
"fine" talker--in which light I myself don't so much recall him,
though he had a native breadth--as when telling Alger for example
of old Gilbert Stuart's having when in a state of dilapidation
asked him to let him paint his portrait. "I consented," said
Forrest, "and went to his studio. He was an old white lion, so
blind that he had to ask me the colour of my eyes and my hair; but
he threw his brush at the canvas, and every stroke was life." Alger
talks freely about his own late insanity--which he in fact appears
to enjoy as a subject of conversation and in which I believe he has
somewhat interested William, who has talked with him a good deal of
his experience at the Somerville Asylum. Charles Grinnell--though
not a propos of the crazy--has become a great reader and apparently
a considerable understander of my productions; Alger aforesaid
aussi. Everyone hopes that J. G. hasn't caught a Rosamund Vincy in
Miss M. I don't know whether this hope means affection to J. or
disaffection to the young lady.
I have written to Gail Hamilton to send me your story; but she does
it not as yet. I will renew my invitation to her in a day or two if
necessary. I went to see Osgood lately about his publishing a
selection from your tales. He repeated what he had told you--that
he would give you 15 per cent and do all the advertising, etc., you
paying for the plates; or he would pay everything and give you 10
per cent on every copy sold after the first thousand. I shall be
glad (in case you would like to publish, and I think it time for
you to do so) to meet the expense of your stereotyping, and if you
will pick out what you would like to be included we shall set to
work at once and have the book ready by next autumn. I have
meanwhile the materials of a story for you which I was telling
William of the other day as a regular Tourgeneff subject, and he
urged me to send it off to you at once--he was so struck with it.
Matthew Henry W. was a very cultivated and accomplished young man
in Albany at the time I was growing up. He belonged to a highly
respectable family of booksellers and publishers and was himself
bred to the law; but had such a love of literature, and more
especially of the natural sciences, that he never devoted himself
strictly to his profession. He was the intimate friend of my dear
old tutor, Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian, and of other
distinguished men of science; he corresponded with foreign
scientific bodies, and his contributions to science generally were
of so original a cast as to suggest great hopes of his future
eminence. He was a thorough gentleman, of perfect address and
perfect courage--utterly unegotistic, and one's wonder was how he
had ever grown up in Albany or resigned himself to living there.
One day he invested his money, of which he had a certain quantity,
in a scheme much favoured by the president of the bank in which he
deposited, and this adventure proved a fortune. There lived near us
as well a family of the name of K----, your cousin Mary Minturn
Post's stepmother being of its members; and this family reckoned
upon a great social sensation in bringing out their youngest
daughter, Lydia Sibyl, who had never been seen by mortal eye
outside her own immediate circle, save that of a physician who
reported that she was fabulously beautiful. She _was_ the most
beautiful girl I think I ever saw, at a little distance. Well, she
made her sensation and brought Matthew Henry promptly to her feet.
Her family wanted wealth above all things for her; but here was
wealth and something more, very much more, and they smiled upon
his suit. Everything went merrily for a while--M. H. was deeply
intoxicated with his prize. Never was man so enamoured, and never
was beauty better fitted to receive adoration. She was of an
exquisite Grecian outline as to face, with a countenance like the
tender dawn and form and manners ravishingly graceful. But W. was
not content with his adventure--he embarked again and lost almost
all he owned. The girl's father--or her mother rather, being the
ruler of the family and as hard as the nether world at heart--gave
the cue to her daughter and my friend was dismissed. He couldn't
believe his senses, he raved and cursed his fate, but it was
inexorable. What was to be done? With a bitterness of heart
inconceivable he plucked his revenge by marrying at once a stout
and blooming jade who was to Lydia Sibyl as a peony to a violet,
absolutely nothing but flesh and blood. Her he bore upon his arm at
fashionable hours through the streets; her he took to church,
preserving his admirable ease and courtesy to everyone, as if
absolutely nothing had occurred; and her he pretended to take to
his bosom in private, with what a shudder one can imagine.
Everybody stood aghast. He went daily about his affairs, as serene
and unconscious apparently as the moon in the heavens. Soon his
poverty showed itself in certain economies of his attire, which had
always been most recherche. Soon again he broke his leg and went
about on crutches, but neither poverty nor accident had the least
power to ruffle his air of equanimity. He was always superior to
his circumstances, met you exactly as he had always done, impressed
you always as the best-bred man you knew, and left you wondering
what a heart and what a brain lay behind such a fortune. One
morning we all read in the newspaper at breakfast that Mr. M. H. W.
had appealed the day before to the protection of the police
against his wife, who had taken to beating him and whom as a woman
he couldn't deal with by striking back; and the police responded
properly to his appeal. He went about his affairs as usual that day
and every day, never saying a word to any one of his trouble nor
even indirectly asking sympathy, but making you feel that here if
anywhere was a rare kind of manhood, a self-respect so eminent as
to look down with scorn on the refuges open to ordinary human
weakness. This lasted five or six years. He never drank or took to
other vices, and lived a life of such decorum, so far as his own
action was concerned, a life of such interest and science and
literature, as to be the most delightful and unconscious of
companions even when his coat was at the last shabbiness and you
didn't dare to look at him for fear of betraying your own vulgar
misintelligence. Finally Lydia Sibyl died smitten with smallpox and
all her beauty gone to hideousness. He lingered awhile, his
charming manners undismayed still, his eye as undaunted as at the
beginning, and then he suddenly died. I never knew his equal for a
manly force competent to itself in every emergency and seeking none
of the ordinary subterfuges that men so often seek to hide their
imbecility. I think it a good basis....
Returning from Europe in June '70, after a stay there of some fifteen
months, I had crossed the sea eastward again two years later, with my
sister and our admirable aunt as companions--leaving them, I may
mention, to return home at the end of six months while I betook myself
to Italy, where I chiefly remained till the autumn of '74. The following
expresses our father's liberality of recognition and constant
tenderness of tone in a manner that no comment need emphasise, but at
one or two of his references I allow myself to glance. I happen to
remember perfectly for instance the appearance of the novel of Madame
Sand's that he so invidiously alludes to in one of the first numbers of
the cherished Revue that reached us after the siege of Paris had been
raised--such a pathetically scant starved pale number, I quite recall,
as expressed the share even of the proud periodical in the late general
and so tragic dearth; with which it comes back to me that I had myself a
bit critically mused on the characteristic queerness, the oddity of the
light thrown on the stricken French consciousness by the prompt
sprouting of _such_ a flower of the native imagination in the chill air
of discipline accepted and after the administration to that
consciousness of a supposedly clarifying dose. But I hadn't gone the
length of my father, who must have taken up the tale in its republished
form, a so slim salmon-coloured volume this time: oh the repeated
arrival, during those years, of the salmon-coloured volumes in their
habit as they lived, a habit reserved, to my extreme appreciation, for
this particular series, and that, enclosing the extraordinarily fresh
fruit of their author's benign maturity, left Tamaris and Valvedre and
Mademoiselle La Quintinie in no degree ever "discounted" for us as
devotees of the Revue, I make out, by their being but renewals of
acquaintance. The sense of the salmon-coloured distinctive of Madame
Sand was even to come back to me long years after on my hearing Edmond
de Goncourt speak reminiscentially and, I permit myself to note, not at
all reverently, of the _robe de satin fleur-de-pecher_ that the
illustrious and infatuated lady, whose more peculiar or native tint, as
Blanche Amory used to say, didn't contribute to a harmony, _s'etait fait
faire_ in order to fix as much as possible the attention of Gustave
Flaubert at the Diner Magny; of Gustave Flaubert, who, according to this
most invidious of reporters, disembroiled from each other with too scant
ease his tangle of possibly incurred ridicule from the declared
sentiment of so old a woman, even in a peach-blossom dress, and the
glory reflected on him by his admirer's immense distinction. Which
vision of a complicated past, recovered even as I write--and of a past
indeed contemporary with the early complacencies I attribute to
ourselves--doesn't at all blur its also coming back to me that I was to
have found my parent "hard on" poor Francia in spite of my own
comparative reserves; these being questions and shades that I rejoice to
think of our having had so discussionally, and well at home for the most
part, the social education of. I see that general period as quite
flushed and toned by the salmon-coloured covers; so that a kind of
domestic loyalty would ever operate, as we must have all felt, to make
us take the thick with the thin and not _y regarder_ for a Francia the
more or the less. When I say all indeed I doubtless have in mind
especially my parents and myself, with my sister and our admirable aunt
(in her times of presence) thrown in--to the extent of our subjection to
the charm of such matters in particular as La Famille de Germandre, La
Ville Noire, Nanon and L'Homme de Neige, round which last above all we
sat ranged in united ecstasy; so that I was to wonder through the after
years, and I think perhaps to this day, how it could come that a case of
the "story" strain at its finest and purest, a gush of imaginative force
so free and yet so artfully directed, shouldn't have somehow "stood out"
more in literary history. Perhaps indeed L'Homme de Neige does
essentially stand out in the unwritten parts of that record--which are
content to be mere tacit tender tradition; for all the world as if,
since there are more or less dreadful perpetuated books, by the hundred,
dreadful from whatever baseness or whatever scantness, that for shame,
as it were, we never mention, so one may figure others as closeted in
dimness (than which there is nothing safer) by the very scruple of
respect at its richest. I hover for instance about the closet of L'Homme
de Neige, I stand outside a moment as if listening for a breath from
within; but I don't open the door, you see--which must mean, in all
probability, that I wouldn't for the world inconsiderately finger again
one of the three volumes; _that_ meaning, in its turn, doubtless, that I
have heard the breath I had listened for and that it can only have been
what my argument wants, the breath of life unquenched. Isn't it relevant
to this that when she was not reading Trollope our dear mother was
reading "over" La Famille de Germandre, which, with several of its
companions of the same bland period, confirmed her in the sense that
there was no one like their author for a "love-story"?--a conviction,
however, that when made articulate exposed her to the imputation of a
larger tolerance than she doubtless intended to project; till the matter
was cleared up by our generally embracing her for so sweetly not knowing
about Valentine and Jacques and suchlike, and having only begun at La
Mare au Diable and even thereafter been occasionally obliged to skip.
So far do I let myself go while, to recur to my letter, Chauncey Wright
sits for me in his customary corner of the deep library sofa and his
strange conflictingly conscious light blue eyes, appealing across the
years from under the splendid arch of his fair head, one of the
handsomest for representation of amplitude of thought that it was
possible to see, seems to say to me with a softness more aimed at the
heart than any alarm or any challenge: "But what then are you going to
do for me?" I find myself simply ache, I fear, as almost the only answer
to this--beyond his figuring for me as the most wasted and doomed, the
biggest at once and the gentlest, of the great intending and unproducing
(in anything like the just degree) bachelors of philosophy, bachelors of
attitude and of life. And as he so sits, loved and befriended and
welcomed, valued and invoked and vainly guarded and infinitely pitied,
till the end couldn't but come, he renews that appeal to the old
kindness left over, as I may say, and which must be more or less known
to all of us, for the good society that was helplessly to miss a right
chronicler, and the names of which, so full at the time of their fine
sense, were yet to be writ in water. Chauncey Wright, of the great
imperfectly-attested mind; Jane Norton, of the train, so markedly, of
the distinguished, the sacrificial, devoted; exquisite Mrs. Gurney, of
the infallible taste, the beautiful hands and the tragic fate; Gurney
himself, for so long Dean of the Faculty at Harvard and trusted judge of
all judgments (this latter pair the subject of my father's glance at
the tenantship of Shady Hill in the Nortons' absence:) they would
delightfully adorn a page and appease a piety that is still athirst if I
hadn't to let them pass. Harshly condemned to let them pass, and looking
wistfully after them as they go, how can I yet not have inconsequently
asked them to turn a moment more before disappearing?
My heart turns to you this morning, so radiant in the paternal
panoply you wear toward Alice and your aunt, and I would give a
great deal to see you. The enclosed scrap of a letter from William
is sent to show you how vastly improved are his eyes, especially
when you shall have learned that he has written us within the last
four or five days twenty pages of like density to these. He would
fain persuade us to go to Mount Desert; perhaps later we may go to
Quebec, but we are so comfortable together reading Trollope and
talking philosophy that we cheerfully drop the future from our
regard. Mamma is free and active and bracing. She is a domestic
nor'wester, carrying balm and bloom into every nook and corner of
her empire.... She hangs over The Eustace Diamonds while I try
vainly to read George Sand's Francia. I have come across nothing of
that lady's that reflects a baser light on her personal history.
What must a woman have been through to want to grovel at this time
of day in such uncleanness? Don't buy it--I wish I hadn't! The new
North American is out, with a not too interesting article of
Chauncey Wright's on Mivart, a scandalous (in point of taste) essay
of Mr. Stirling on Buckle, full of Scotch conceit, insolence and
"wut;" a very very laboured article by James Lowell on Dante, in
which he determines to exhaust all knowledge; and these are all I
have read. Mr. Stirling of course makes Buckle ridiculous, but he
stamps himself a shabby creature.
I find the following, addressed to his daughter in August '72, so
beautifully characteristic of our parents' always explicit admonition to
us, in our dependent years, against too abject an impulse to be frugal
in their interests, that I may fairly let it stand as a monument to this
particular aspect of their affection.
Your and H.'s last letters bring tears of joy to our eyes. It's a
delight above all delights to feel one's children turn out all that
the heart covets in children. Your conviction is not up to the
truth. Our "tender thoughts" of you are so constant that I have
hardly been able to settle to anything since you have been gone. I
can do little else than recount to myself "the tender mercies of
the Lord" to me and my household. Still I am not wholly useless; I
try to write every day, and though I haven't my daughter at hand to
look after my style and occasionally after my ideas, I manage to do
a little. Your conscientious economy is excessively touching, but
it's a little overstrained. You needn't be afraid of putting us to
any embarrassment so long as your expenses don't exceed their
present rate; and you can buy all you want in Paris without
stretching your tether a particle. This is Mamma's message as well
as mine. Charles Atkinson wishes me to say that Monte Genneroso
above Lugano Lake--the P.O. Mendrisio--offers a wondrous climate;
and Mamma thinks--so fearful is she that you will descend into
Italy before the warm weather is over and so compromise your
strength--that you had either better go there awhile first or else
be ready to retreat on it in case you find the summer heat in
Venice impossible.
Nor does this scrap from a letter to myself at the same season breathe a
spirit less liberal--so far as the sympathy with whatever might pass for
my fondest preoccupations was concerned. These were now quite frankly
recognised as the arduous attempt to learn somehow or other to write.
I send you The Nation, though there seems nothing in it of your
own, and I think I never fail to recognise you. A notice of Gustave
Droz's Babolain (by T. S. P., I suppose) there is; which book I
read the other day. This fumbling in the cadaver of the old world,
however, only disgusts me when so unrelieved as in this case by any
contrast or any souffle of inspiration such as you get in
Tourgueneff. It's curious to observe how uncertain the author's
step is in this story--how he seems always on the look-out for some
chance to break away. But it has mastered him, he can't lay the
ghost he has conjured.
To which I should limit myself for the commemoration of that group of
years by the gentle aid of the always vivid excerpt, were it not that I
have before me a considerable cluster of letters addressed by the writer
of the foregoing to Mr. J. Eliot Cabot, most accomplished of Bostonians,
most "cultivated" even among the cultivated, as we used to say, and of
a philosophic acuteness to which my father highly testified, with which
indeed he earnestly contended. The correspondence in question covered,
during the years I include, philosophic ground and none other; but
though no further exhibition of it than this reference may convey is to
my purpose I lay it under contribution to the extent of a passage or two
just for the pleasure of inviting recognition, as I invite it wherever
we meet an instance, of the fashion after which the intensely animated
soul can scarce fail of a harmony and a consistency of expression that
are nothing less than interesting, that in fact become at once
beautiful, in themselves. By which remark I nevertheless do not mean to
limit the significance of the writer's side of his long argument with
Mr. Eliot Cabot, into which I may not pretend to enter, nor the part
that in any such case a rare gift for style must inveterately play.
I grant then that I am often tempted to conceive, as I read your
letters, that we differ only in your terms being more abstract,
mine more concrete; and yet I really don't think this difference is
exhaustive. If I thought Philosophy capable ever of being reduced
to logical compass or realising itself as science, I should give in
at once. But this is just what I cannot think. Philosophy is the
doctrine exclusively of the infinite in the finite, and deals with
the latter therefore only as a mask, only as _harbouring_ the
former. But if you formulate it scientifically your terms are
necessarily all finite, as furnished by experience, and the
infinite is excluded or at most creeps in as the
indefinite--Hegel's _becoming_ for example. Thus Hegel's dialectic
modulates only in the sphere of his distance. His _being_ is
universal existence, and, as universals have only a logical truth,
being in se is equivalent to Nothing. But Nothing hasn't even a
logical basis. Lithe as human thought is it can't compass the
conception. It is a mere brutum fulmen devised to disguise the
absence of thought or its inanition; and Hegel, if he had been
wise, would have said no-thought instead of no-thing. For no-thing
doesn't express the complete absence of existence. Existence is of
two sorts, real and personal, sensible and conscious, quantitative
and qualitative. The most you are entitled to say therefore when
existence disappears in quantitative, real or sensible, form is
that it has been taken up into purely qualitative, personal or
conscious form; no-thing being the logical equivalent of
all-person. Thus I, who in Hegel's formula presumably extract
existence from being, survive the operation as person, and though I
am most clearly no-thing I am yet not _being_. Indeed I am not even
existence any longer, since by knocking thing out of being I have
forfeited my own reality, and consent henceforth to be pure
personality, _i.e._ phenomenality. And personal or phenomenal
existence is constituted by referring itself to a foreign source,
or, what is the same thing, confessing itself created: so that the
fundamental word of Philosophy, by Hegel's own formula, is
creation; which, however, as I understand him, he denies in any
objective sense of the word. This then is what I complain of in
him--with deference of course to your better knowledge, which,
however, you do not urge as yet in what seems to me a silencing
way--that he makes existence _essential_ to being, so that take
existence away and being becomes nothing. It would not be a whit
less preposterous in me to say that thought is essential to thing,
subject to object, marble to statue, canvas to picture, woman to
wife, mother to child. It is literally putting the cart before the
horse and converting Philosophy to a practical quagmire. Being
implies existence of course just as picture implies canvas, or as
personality implies reality, or as chick implies egg; but it
implies it only to a lower intelligence than itself, an unspiritual
intelligence to wit, which has no direct or inward intuition of
being, and requires to be agitated to discerning it. When I
recognise the spiritual life of Art I never think of marble or
canvas as entering even conditionally into its manifestations.
But I hold my case for a rare command of manner thus proved, and need go
no further; the more that I have dropped too many of those threads of my
rather niggled tapestry that belong but to the experience of my own
weaving hand and the interplay of which represents thereby a certain
gained authority. I disentangle these again, if the term be not
portentous, though reflecting too, and again with complacency, that
though I thus prize them as involved most in my own consciousness, this
is just because of their attachment somewhere else to other matters and
other lives.