IX

I went up from Newport to Cambridge early in the autumn of '62, and on

one of the oddest errands, I think, that, given the several

circumstances, I could possibly have undertaken. I was nineteen years

old, and it had seemed to me for some time past that some such step as

my entering for instance the Harvard Law School more or less urgently

concerned what I could but try to help myself out by still putting

forward as my indispensable education--I am not sure indeed that the

claim didn't explicitly figure, or at least successfully dangle, as that

of my possibly graceful mere "culture." I had somehow--by which I mean

for reasons quite sufficient--to fall back on the merciful "mere" for

any statement of my pretensions even to myself: so little they seemed to

fit into any scheme of the conventional maximum as compared with those I

saw so variously and strongly asserted about me, especially since the

outbreak of the War. I am not sure whether I yet made bold to say it,

but I should surely be good for nothing, all my days, if not for

projecting into the concrete, by hook or by crook--that is my

imagination shamelessly aiding--some show of (again) mere life. This

impression was not in the least the flag I publicly brandished; in fact

I must have come as near as possible to brandishing none whatever, a

sound instinct always hinting to me, I gather, that the tune for such a

performance was much more after than before--before the perfect place

had been found for the real planting of the standard and the giving of

its folds to the air. No such happy spot had been marked, decidedly, at

that period, to my inquiring eye; in consequence of which the emblazoned

morsel (hoisted sooner or later by all of us, I think, somehow and

somewhere), might have passed for the hour as a light extravagant

bandanna rolled into the tight ball that fits it for hiding in the

pocket. There it considerably stayed, so far as I was concerned; and all

the more easily as I can but have felt how little any particular thing I

might meanwhile "do" would matter--save for some specious appearance in

it. This last, I recognise, had for me a virtue--principally that of

somehow gaining time; though I hasten to add that my approach to the Law

School can scarcely, as a means to this end, in the air of it that comes

back to me, have been in the least deceptive. By which I mean that my

appearance of intentions, qualifications, possibilities, or whatever

else, in the connection, hadn't surely so much as the grace of the

specious. I spoke above of the assumed "indispensability" of some show

of my being further subject to the "education" theory, but this was for

the moment only under failure to ask to whom, or for what, such a

tribute _was_ indispensable. The interest to myself would seem to have

been, as I recover the sense of the time, that of all the

impossibilities of action my proceeding to Cambridge on the very vaguest

grounds that probably ever determined a residence there might pass for

the least flagrant; as I breathe over again at any rate the comparative

confidence in which I so moved I feel it as a confidence in the positive

saving virtue of vagueness. Could I but work that force as an ideal I

felt it must see me through, for the beauty of it in that form was that

it should absolutely superabound. I wouldn't have allowed, either, that

it was vaguer to do nothing; for in the first place just staying at home

when everyone was on the move couldn't in any degree show the right

mark: to be properly and perfectly vague one had to be vague _about_

something; mere inaction quite lacked the note--it was nothing but

definite and dull. I thought of the Law School experiment, I remember,

in all sorts of conceivable connections, but in the connection of

dulness surely never for an hour. I thought of it under the head of

"life"--by which term at the same time, I blush to confess, I didn't in

the least mean free evening access to Boston in a jangling horse-car,

with whatever extension this might give to the joy of the liberated

senses. I simply meant--well, what was monstrously to happen; which I

shall be better inspired here to deal with as a demonstration made in

its course than as a premonition relatively crude and at the time still

to be verified. Marked in the whole matter, however these things might

be, was that irony of fate under the ugly grin of which I found my

father reply in the most offhand and liberal manner to my remark that

the step in question--my joining, in a sense, my brother at

Cambridge--wouldn't be wholly impracticable. It might have been, from

his large assent to it, a masterstroke of high policy. A certain

inconsequence in this left me wondering why then if the matter was now

so natural it hadn't been to his mind a year before equally simple that

I should go to college, and to _that_ College, after a more showy, even

though I see it would have been at the same time a less presumptuous,

fashion. To have deprecated the "college course" with such emphasis only

so soon afterwards to forswear all emphasis and practically smile, in

mild oblivion, on _any_ Harvard connection I might find it in me to take

up, was to bring it home, I well recall, that the case might originally

have been much better managed.

All of which would seem to kick up more dust than need quite have hung

about so simple a matter as my setting forth to the Cambridge scene with

no design that I could honourably exhibit. A superficial account of the

matter would have been that my father had a year or two earlier appeared

to think so ill of it as to reduce me, given the "delicacy," the inward,

not then the outward, which I have glanced at, to mild renunciation--mild

I say because I remember in fact, rather to my mystification now, no

great pang of disappointment, no soreness of submission. I didn't want

anything so much as I wanted a certain good (or wanted thus supremely

_to_ want it, if I may say so), with which a conventional going to

college wouldn't have so tremendously much to do as for the giving it up

to break my heart--or an unconventional not-going so tremendously much

either. What I "wanted to want" to be was, all intimately, just

_literary_; a decent respect for the standard hadn't yet made my

approach so straight that there weren't still difficulties that might

seem to meet it, questions it would have to depend on. Passing the

Harvard portal positively failed in fact to strike me as the shorter cut

to literature; the sounds that rose from the scene as I caught them

appeared on the contrary the most detached from any such interest that

had ever reached my ear. Merely to open the door of the big square

closet, the ample American closet, to the like of which Europe had never

treated us, on the shelves and round the walls of which the pink Revues

sat with the air, row upon row, of a choir of breathing angels, was to

take up that particular, that sacred, connection in a way that put the

coarser process to shame. The drop of the Harvard question had of a

truth really meant, as I recover it, a renewed consecration of the rites

of that chapel where the taper always twinkled--which circumstance I

mention as not only qualifying my sense of loss, but as symbolising,

after a queer fashion, the independence, blest vision (to the extent,

that is, of its being a closer compact with the life of the

imagination), that I should thus both luckily come in for and

designingly cultivate: cultivate in other words under the rich cover of

obscurity. I have already noted how the independence was, ever so few

months later, by so quaint a turn, another mere shake of the tree, to

drop into my lap in the form of a great golden apple--a value not a

simple windfall only through the fact that my father's hand had after

all just lightly loosened it. This accession pointed the moral that

there was no difficulty about anything, no intrinsic difficulty; so

that, to re-emphasise the sweet bewilderment, I was to "go" where I

liked in the Harvard direction and do what I liked in the Harvard

relation. Such was the situation as offered me; though as I had to take

it and use it I found in it no little difference. Two things and more

had come up--the biggest of which, and very wondrous as bearing on any

circumstance of mine, as having a grain of weight to spare for it, was

the breaking out of the War. The other, the infinitely small affair in

comparison, was a passage of personal history the most entirely

personal, but between which, as a private catastrophe or difficulty,

bristling with embarrassments, and the great public convulsion that

announced itself in bigger terms each day, I felt from the very first an

association of the closest, yet withal, I fear, almost of the least

clearly expressible. Scarce at all to be stated, to begin with, the

queer fusion or confusion established in my consciousness during the

soft spring of '61 by the firing on Fort Sumter, Mr. Lincoln's instant

first call for volunteers and a physical mishap, already referred to as

having overtaken me at the same dark hour, and the effects of which were

to draw themselves out incalculably and intolerably. Beyond all present

notation the interlaced, undivided way in which what had happened to me,

by a turn of fortune's hand, in twenty odious minutes, kept company of

the most unnatural--I can call it nothing less--with my view of what was

happening, with the question of what might still happen, to everyone

about me, to the country at large: it so made of these marked

disparities a single vast visitation. One had the sense, I mean, of a

huge comprehensive ache, and there were hours at which one could scarce

have told whether it came most from one's own poor organism, still so

young and so meant for better things, but which had suffered particular

wrong, or from the enclosing social body, a body rent with a thousand

wounds and that thus treated one to the honour of a sort of tragic

fellowship. The twenty minutes had sufficed, at all events, to establish

a relation--a relation to everything occurring round me not only for the

next four years but for long afterward--that was at once extraordinarily

intimate and quite awkwardly irrelevant. I must have felt in some

befooled way in presence of a crisis--the smoke of Charleston Bay still

so acrid in the air--at which the likely young should be up and doing

or, as familiarly put, lend a hand much wanted; the willing youths, all

round, were mostly starting to their feet, and to have trumped up a

lameness at such a juncture could be made to pass in no light for

graceful. Jammed into the acute angle between two high fences, where the

rhythmic play of my arms, in tune with that of several other pairs, but

at a dire disadvantage of position, induced a rural, a rusty, a

quasi-extemporised old engine to work and a saving stream to flow, I had

done myself, in face of a shabby conflagration, a horrid even if an

obscure hurt; and what was interesting from the first was my not

doubting in the least its duration--though what seemed equally clear was

that I needn't as a matter of course adopt and appropriate it, so to

speak, or place it for increase of interest on exhibition. The interest

of it, I very presently knew, would certainly be of the greatest, would

even in conditions kept as simple as I might make them become little

less than absorbing. The shortest account of what was to follow for a

long time after is therefore to plead that the interest never did fail.

It was naturally what is called a painful one, but it consistently

declined, as an influence at play, to drop for a single instant.

Circumstances, by a wonderful chance, overwhelmingly favoured it--as an

interest, an inexhaustible, I mean; since I also felt in the whole

enveloping tonic atmosphere a force promoting its growth. Interest, the

interest of life and of death, of our national existence, of the fate of

those, the vastly numerous, whom it closely concerned, the interest of

the extending War, in fine, the hurrying troops, the transfigured scene,

formed a cover for every sort of intensity, made tension itself in fact

contagious--so that almost any tension would do, would serve for one's

share.

I have here, I allow, not a little to foreshorten--have to skip sundry

particulars, certain of the steps by which I came to think of my

relation to my injury as a _modus vivendi_ workable for the time. These

steps had after the first flush of reaction inevitably _had_ to be

communications of my state, recognitions and admissions; which had the

effect, I hasten to add, of producing sympathies, supports and

reassurances. I gladly took these things, I perfectly remember, at that

value; distinct to me as it still is nevertheless that the indulgence

they conveyed lost part of its balm by involving a degree of

publication. Direfully distinct have remained to me the conditions of a

pilgrimage to Boston made that summer under my father's care for

consultation of a great surgeon, the head of his profession there; whose

opinion and advice--the more that he was a guaranteed friend of my

father's--had seemed the best light to invoke on the less and less

bearable affliction with which I had been for three or four months

seeking to strike some sort of bargain: mainly, up to that time, under

protection of a theory of temporary supine "rest" against which

everything inward and outward tended equally to conspire. Agitated

scraps of rest, snatched, to my consciousness, by the liveliest

violence, were to show for futile almost to the degree in which the

effort of our interview with the high expert was afterwards so to show;

the truth being that this interview settled my sad business, settled it

just in that saddest sense, for ever so long to come. This was so much

the case that, as the mere scene of our main appeal, the house from

which we had after its making dejectedly emerged put forth to me as I

passed it in many a subsequent season an ironic smug symbolism of its

action on my fate. That action had come from the complete failure of our

approached oracle either to warn, to comfort or to command--to do

anything but make quite unassistingly light of the bewilderment exposed

to him. In default of other attention or suggestion he might by a mere

warning as to gravities only too possible, and already well advanced,

have made such a difference; but I have little forgotten how I felt

myself, the warning absent, treated but to a comparative pooh-pooh--an

impression I long looked back to as a sharp parting of the ways, with an

adoption of the wrong one distinctly determined. It was not simply small

comfort, it was only a mystification the more, that the inconvenience of

my state had to reckon with the strange fact of there being nothing to

speak of the matter with me. The graceful course, on the whole ground

again (and where moreover was delicacy, the proposed, the intended,

without grace?) was to behave accordingly, in good set terms, as if the

assurance were true; since the time left no margin at all for one's

gainsaying with the right confidence so high an authority. There were a

hundred ways to behave--in the general sense so freely suggested, I

mean; and I think of the second half of that summer of '62 as my attempt

at selection of the best. The best still remained, under closer

comparisons, very much what it had at first seemed, and there was in

fact this charm in it that to prepare for an ordeal essentially

intellectual, as I surmised, might justly involve, in the public eye, a

season of some retirement. The beauty was--I can fairly see it now,

through the haze of time, even as beauty!--that studious retirement and

preparatory hours did after all supply the supine attitude, did invest

the ruefulness, did deck out the cynicism of lying down book in hand

with a certain fine plausibility. This was at least a negative of

combat, an organised, not a loose and empty one, something definitely

and firmly parallel to action in the tented field; and I well recall,

for that matter, how, when early in the autumn I had in fact become the

queerest of forensic recruits, the bristling horde of my Law School

comrades fairly produced the illusion of a mustered army. The Cambridge

campus was tented field enough for a conscript starting so compromised;

and I can scarce say moreover how easily it let me down that when it

came to the point one had still fine fierce young men, in great numbers,

for company, there being at the worst so many such who hadn't flown to

arms. I was to find my fancy of the merely relative right in any way to

figure, or even on such terms just to exist, I was to find it in due

course quite drop from me as the Cambridge year played itself out,

leaving me all aware that, full though the air might be of stiffer

realities, one had yet a rare handful of one's own to face and deal

with.

At Cambridge of course, when I got there, I was further to find my

brother on the scene and already at a stage of possession of its

contents that I was resigned in advance never to reach; so thoroughly I

seemed to feel a sort of quickening savoury meal in any cold scrap of

his own experience that he might pass on to my palate. This figure has

definite truth, that is, but for association at the board literally

yielding us nourishment--the happiest as to social composition and

freedom of supply of all the _tables d'hote_ of those days, a veritable

haunt of conversation ruled by that gently fatuous Miss Upham something

of whose angular grace and antique attitude has lived again for us in

William's letters. I place him, if not at the moment of my to that

extent joining him then at least from a short time afterwards, in

quarters that he occupied for the next two or three years--quiet

cloistered rooms, as they almost appeared to me, in the comparatively

sequestered Divinity Hall of that still virtually rustic age; which,

though mainly affected to the use of post-graduates and others, of a

Unitarian colour, enrolled under Harvard's theological Faculty, offered

chance accommodation, much appreciated for a certain supposedly separate

charm, not to say a finer dignity, by the more maturely studious in

other branches as well. The superstition or aftertaste of Europe had

then neither left me nor hinted that it ever might; yet I recall as a

distinct source of interest, to be desperately dealt with, and dealt

with somehow to my inward advantage, the special force of the

circumstance that I was now for the first time in presence of matters

normally, entirely, consistently American, and that more particularly I

found myself sniff up straight from the sources, such as they

unmistakably were, the sense of that New England which had been to me

till then but a name. This from the first instant was what I most took

in, and quite apart from the question of what one was going to make of

it, of whether one was going, in the simple formula, to like it, and of

what would come, could the impression so triumph, of such monstrous

assimilations. Clear to me in the light thus kindled that my American

consciousness had hitherto been after all and at the best singularly

starved, and that Newport for instance, during the couple of years, had

fed it but with sips of an adulterated strain. Newport, with its

opera-glass turned for ever across the sea--for Newport, or at least

_our_ Newport, even during the War, lived mainly, and quite visibly, by

the opera-glass--was comparatively, and in its degree incurably,

cosmopolite; and though on our first alighting there I had more or less

successfully, as I fancied, invited the local historic sense to vibrate,

it was at present left me to feel myself a poor uninitiated creature.

However, an initiation, at least by the intelligence, into some given

thing--almost anything really given would do--was essentially what I

was, as we nowadays say, after; the fault with my previous data in the

American kind had been that they weren't sufficiently given; so that

here would be Boston and Cambridge giving as with absolute authority.

The War had by itself of course, on the ground I speak of, communicated

something of the quality, or rather of the quantity, otherwise

deficient; only this was for my case, of which alone I speak, an

apprehension without a language or a channel--a revelation as sublime

as one would like to feel it, but spreading abroad as a whole and not,

alas, by any practice of mine, reducible to parts. What I promptly made

out at Cambridge was that "America" would be given, as I have called it,

to a tune altogether fresh, so that to hear this tune wholly played out

might well become on the spot an inspiring privilege. If I indeed, I

should add, said to myself "wholly," this was of course not a little

straining a point; since, putting my initiation, my grasp of the

exhibition, at its conceivable liveliest, far more of the supposed total

was I inevitably to miss than to gather to my use. But I might gather

what I could, and therein was exactly the adventure. To rinse my mouth

of the European aftertaste _in order_ to do justice to whatever of the

native bitter-sweet might offer itself in congruous vessels--such a

brave dash for discovery, and such only, would give a sense to my

posture. With which it was unmistakable that I shouldn't in the least

have painfully to strive; of such a force of impact was each impression

clearly capable that I had much rather to steady myself, at any moment,

where I stood, and quite to a sense of the luxury of the occasion, than

to cultivate inquiry at the aggressive pitch. There was no need for

curiosity--it was met by every object, I seemed to see, so much more

than half way; unless indeed I put it better by saying that as _all_ my

vision partook of that principle the impulse and the object perpetually

melted together. It wasn't for instance by the faintest process of

inquiry that the _maison_ Upham, where I three times daily sat at meat,

had scarce to wait an hour to become as vivid a translation into

American terms of Balzac's Maison Vauquer, in Le Pere Goriot, as I could

have desired to deal with.

It would have been at once uplifting to see in the American terms a vast

improvement on the prime version, had I not been here a bit baffled by

the sense that the correspondence was not quite, after all, of like with

like, and that the main scene of Balzac's action was confessedly and

curiously sordid and even sinister, whereas its equivalent under the

Harvard elms would rank decidedly as what we had _de mieux_, or in other

words of most refined, in the "boarding" line, to show. I must have been

further conscious that what we had de mieux in the social line appeared

quite liable, on occasion, to board wherever it might--the situation in

Balzac's world being on this head as different as possible. No one not

deeply distressed or dismally involved or all but fatally compromised

could have taken the chances of such an establishment at all; so that

any comparison to our own particular advantage had to be, on

reflection, nipped in the bud. There was a generic sameness, none the

less, I might still reason; enough of that at least to show the two

pictures as each in its way interesting--which was all that was

required. The Maison Vauquer, its musty air thick with heavier social

elements, might have been more so, for the Harvard elms overhung no

strange Vautrin, no old Goriot, no young Rastignac; yet the interest of

the Kirkland Street company couldn't, so to speak, help itself either,

any more than I could help taking advantage of it. In one respect

certainly, in the matter of talk as talk, we shone incomparably

brighter; and if it took what we had de mieux to make our so regular

resort a scene essentially of conversation, the point was none the less

that our materials were there. I found the effect of this, very easily,

as American as I liked--liked, that is, to think of it and to make all I

might of it for being; about which in truth all difficulty vanished from

the moment the local colour of the War broke in. So of course this

element did at that season come back to us through every outward

opening, and mean enough by contrast had been the questions amid which

the Vauquer boarders grubbed. Anything even indirectly touched by our

public story, stretching now into volume after volume of the very

biggest print, took on that reflected light of dignity, of importance,

or of mere gross salience, which passion charged with criticism, and

criticism charged with the thousand menaced affections and connections,

the whole of the reaction--charged in short with immediate intimate

life--have a power, in such conditions, to fling as from a waving torch.

The torch flared sufficiently about Miss Upham's board--save that she

herself, ancient spinster, pushed it in dismay from her top of the

table, blew upon it with vain scared sighs, and would have nothing to do

with a matter so disturbing to the right temperature of her _plats_. We

others passed it from hand to hand, so that it couldn't go quite

out--since I must in fairness add that the element of the casual and the

more _generally_ ironic, the play of the studious or the irrepressibly

social intelligence at large, couldn't fail to insist pretty constantly

on its rights. There were quarters as well, I should note, in which the

sense of local colour proceeding at all straight from the source I have

named--reflected, that is, from camp and field--could but very soon run

short; sharply enough do I recall for instance the felt, even if all so

privately felt, limits of _my_ poor stream of contributive remark

(despite my habit, so fondly practised in the connection, of expatiating

_in petto_). My poor stream would have trickled, truly, had it been able

to trickle at all, from the most effective of my few occasions of

"realising," up to that time, as to field and camp; literally as to camp

in fact, since the occasion had consisted of a visit paid, or a

pilgrimage, rather, ever so piously, so tenderly made, one August

afternoon of the summer just ended, to a vast gathering of invalid and

convalescent troops, under canvas and in roughly improvised shanties, at

some point of the Rhode Island shore that figures to my memory, though

with a certain vagueness, as Portsmouth Grove. (American local names

lend themselves strangely little to retention, I find, if one has

happened to deal for long years with almost any group of European

designations--these latter springing, as it has almost always come to

seem, straight from the soil where natural causes were anciently to root

them, each with its rare identity. The bite into interest of the

borrowed, the imposed, the "faked" label, growing but as by a dab of

glue on an article of trade, is inevitably much less sharp.) Vagueness

at best attends, however, the queer experience I glance at; what lives

of it, in the ineffaceable way, being again, by my incurable perversity,

my ambiguous economy, much less a matter of the "facts of the case," as

they should, even though so dead and buried now, revive to help me

through an anecdote, than the prodigiously subjective side of the

experience, thanks to which it still presumes to flush with the grand

air of an adventure. If I had not already so often brazened out my

confession of the far from "showy" in the terms on which impressions

could become indelibly momentous to me I might blush indeed for the thin

tatter dragged in thus as an affair of record. It consisted at the time

simply of an emotion--though the emotion, I should add, appeared to

consist of everything in the whole world that my consciousness could

hold. By _that_ intensity did it hang as bravely as possible together,

and by the title so made good has it handed itself endlessly down.

Owing to which it is that I don't at all know what troops were in

question, a "mere" couple of Rhode Island regiments (nothing in those

days could be too big to escape the application of the "mere,") or a

congeries of the temporarily incapacitated, the more or less broken,

picked from the veterans--so far as there already were such--of the East

at large and directed upon the Grove as upon a place of stowage and

sanitation. Discriminations of the prosaic order had little to do with

my first and all but sole vision of the American soldier in his

multitude, and above all--for that was markedly the colour of the whole

thing--in his depression, his wasted melancholy almost; an effect that

somehow corresponds for memory, I bethink myself, with the tender

elegiac tone in which Walt Whitman was later on so admirably to

commemorate him. The restrictions I confess to are abject, but both my

sense and my aftersense of the exhibition I here allude to had, thanks

to my situation, to do all the work they could in the way of

representation to me of what was most publicly, most heroically, most

wastefully, tragically, terribly going on. It had so to serve for my

particular nearest approach to a "contact" with the active drama--I mean

of course the collectively and scenically active, since the brush of

interest against the soldier single and salient was an affair of every

day--that were it not for just one other strange spasm of awareness,

scarce relaxed to this hour, I should have been left all but pitifully

void of any scrap of a substitute for the concrete experience. The long

hot July 1st of '63, on which the huge battle of Gettysburg had begun,

could really be--or rather couldn't possibly not be--a scrap of concrete

experience for any group of united persons, New York cousins and all,

who, in a Newport garden, restlessly strolling, sitting, neither daring

quite to move nor quite to rest, quite to go in nor quite to stay out,

actually _listened_ together, in their almost ignobly safe stillness, as

to the boom of far-away guns. This _was_, as it were, the War--the War

palpably in Pennsylvania; not less than my hour of a felt rage of

repining at my doomed absence from the sight of that march of the 54th

Massachusetts out of Boston, "Bob" Shaw at its head and our exalted

Wilky among its officers, of which a great sculptor was, on the spot of

their vividest passing, to set the image aloft forever. Poor other

visitations, comparatively, had had to suffice for me; I could take in

fact for amusing, most of all (since that, thank goodness, was high

gaiety), a couple of impressions of the brief preliminary camp life at

Readville during which we admired the charming composition of the 44th

of the same State, under Colonel Frank Lee, and which fairly made

romantic for me Wilky's quick spring out of mere juvenility and into

such brightly-bristling ranks. He had begun by volunteering in a company

that gave him half the ingenuous youth of the circle within our social

ken for brothers-in-arms, and it was to that pair of Readville

afternoons I must have owed my all so emphasised vision of handsome

young Cabot Russell, who, again to be his closest brother-in-arms in the

54th, irrecoverably lost himself, as we have seen, at Fort Wagner. A dry

desert, one must suppose, the life in which, for memory and appreciation

made one, certain single hours or compressed groups of hours have found

their reason for standing out through everything, for insistently

living on, in the cabinet of intimate reference, the museum, as it were,

of the soul's curiosities--where doubtless at the same time an

exhibition of them to mere other eyes or ears or questioning logical

minds may effect itself in no plain terms. We recognise such occasions

more and more as we go on, and are surely, as a general thing, glad

when, for the interest of memory--which it's such a business to _keep_

interesting--they constitute something of a cluster. In my queer

cluster, at any rate, that flower of the connection which answers to the

name of Portsmouth Grove still overtops other members of its class, so

that to finger it again for a moment is to make it perceptibly exhale

its very principle of life. This was, for me, at the time, neither more

nor less than that the American soldier in his multitude was the most

attaching and affecting and withal the most amusing figure of romance

conceivable; the great sense of my vision being thus that, as the

afternoon light of the place and time lingered upon him, both to the

seeming enhancement of his quality and of its own, romance of a more

confused kind than I shall now attempt words for attended his every

movement. It was the charmingest, touchingest, dreadfullest thing in the

world that my impression of him should have to be somehow of his

abandonment to a rueful humour, to a stoic reserve which could yet

melt, a relation with him once established, into a rich communicative

confidence; and, in particular, all over the place, of his own scanted

and more or less baffled, though constantly and, as I couldn't not have

it, pathetically, "knowing" devices.

The great point remained for me at all events that I could afterwards

appear to myself to have done nothing but establish with him a relation,

that I established it, to my imagination, in several cases--and all in

the three or four hours--even to the pitch of the last tenderness of

friendship. I recover that, strolling about with honest and so superior

fellow-citizens, or sitting with them by the improvised couches of their

languid rest, I drew from each his troubled tale, listened to his plaint

on his special hard case--taking form, this, in what seemed to me the

very poetry of the esoteric vernacular--and sealed the beautiful tie,

the responsive sympathy, by an earnest offer, in no instance waved away,

of such pecuniary solace as I might at brief notice draw on my poor

pocket for. Yet again, as I indulge this memory, do I feel that I might

if pushed a little rejoice in having to such an extent coincided with,

not to say perhaps positively anticipated, dear old Walt--even if I

hadn't come armed like him with oranges and peppermints. I ministered

much more summarily, though possibly in proportion to the time and

thanks to my better luck more pecuniarily; but I like to treat myself to

making out that I can scarce have brought to the occasion (in proportion

to the time again and to other elements of the case) less of the

consecrating sentiment than he. I like further to put it in a light

that, ever so curiously, if the good Walt was most inwardly stirred to

his later commemorative accents by his participating in the common

Americanism of his hospital friends, the familiar note and shared sound

of which formed its ground of appeal, I found myself victim to a like

moving force through quite another logic. It was literally, I fear,

because our common Americanism carried with it, to my imagination, such

a disclosed freshness and strangeness, working, as I might say, over

such gulfs of dissociation, that I reached across to _their_, these

hospital friends', side of the matter, even at the risk of an imperilled

consistency. It had for me, the state in question, colour and form,

accent and quality, with scarce less "authority" than if instead of the

rough tracks or worn paths of my casual labyrinth I had trod the glazed

halls of some school of natural history. What holds me now indeed is

that such an institution might have exemplified then almost nothing but

the aspects strictly native to our social and seasonal air; so simply

and easily conceivable to the kindly mind were at that time these

reciprocities, so great the freedom and pleasure of them compared with

the restrictions imposed on directness of sympathy by the awful

admixtures of to-day, those which offer to the would-be participant

among us, on returns from sojourns wherever homogeneity and its entailed

fraternity, its easy contacts, still may be seen to work, the strange

shock of such amenities declined on any terms. Really not possible then,

I think, the perception now accompanying, on American ground, this

shock--the recognition, by any sensibility at all reflective, of the

point where our national theory of absorption, assimilation and

conversion appallingly breaks down; appallingly, that is, for those to

whom the _consecrated_ association, of the sort still at play where

community has not been blighted, strongly speaks. Which remarks may

reinforce the note of my unconsciousness of any difficulty for knowing

in the old, the comparatively brothering, conditions what an American at

least _was_. Absurd thus, no doubt, that the scant experience over which

I perversely linger insists on figuring to me as quite a revel of the

right confidence.

The revel, though I didn't for the moment yet know it, was to be renewed

for me at Cambridge with less of a romantic intensity perhaps, but more

usefully, so to put it, and more informingly; surrounded as I presently

found myself at the Law School with young types, or rather with young

members of a single type, not one of whom but would have enriched my

imagined hall of congruous specimens. _That_, with the many months of

it, was to be the real disclosure, the larger revelation; that was to be

the fresh picture for a young person reaching the age of twenty in

wellnigh grotesque unawareness of the properties of the atmosphere in

which he but wanted to claim that he had been nourished. Of what I mean

by this I shall in a moment have more to say--after pointing a trifle

more, for our patience, the sense of my dilatation upon Portsmouth

Grove. Perfectly distinct has remained the sail back to Newport by that

evening's steamboat; the mere memory of which indeed--and I recall that

I felt it inordinately long--must have been for me, just above, the

spring of the whole reference. The sail was long, measured by my acute

consciousness of paying physically for my excursion--which hadn't

answered the least little bit for my impaired state. This last

disobliging fact became one, at the same time, with an intensity, indeed

a strange rapture, of reflection, which I may not in the least pretend

to offer as a clear or coherent or logical thing, and of which I can

only say, leaving myself there through the summer twilight, in too scant

rest on a deck stool and against the bulwark, that it somehow crowned

my little adventure of sympathy and wonder with a shining round of

resignation--a realisation, as we nowadays put it, that, measuring

wounds against wounds, or the compromised, the particular taxed

condition, at the least, against all the rest of the debt then so

generally and enormously due, one was no less exaltedly than wastefully

engaged in the common fact of endurance. There are memories in truth too

fine or too peculiar for notation, too intensely individual and

supersubtle--call them what one will; yet which one may thus no more

give up confusedly than one may insist on them vainly. Their kind is

nothing ever to a present purpose unless they are in a manner statable,

but is at the same time ruefully aware of threatened ridicule if they

are overstated. Not that I in the least mind such a menace, however, in

just adding that, soothed as I have called the admirable ache of my

afternoon with that inward interpretation of it, I felt the latter--or

rather doubtless simply the entire affair--absolutely overarched by the

majestic manner in which the distress of our return drew out into the

lucid charm of the night. To which I must further add that the hour

seemed, by some wondrous secret, to know itself marked and charged and

unforgettable--hinting so in its very own terms of cool beauty at

something portentous in it, an exquisite claim then and there for

lasting value and high authority.

X

All of which foregoing makes, I grant, a long parenthesis in my recovery

of the more immediate Cambridge impressions. I have left them awaiting

me, yet I am happy to say not sensibly the worse for it, in their

cluster roundabout Miss Upham and her board of beneficiary images; which

latter start up afresh and with the softest submission to any convenient

neglect--that ineffably touching and confessed dependence of such

apparitions on one's "pleasure," save the mark! for the flicker of

restorative light. The image most vividly restored is doubtless that of

Professor F. J. Child, head of the "English Department" at Harvard and

master of that great modern science of folk-lore to his accomplishment

in which his vast and slowly-published collection of the Ballad

literature of our language is a recognised monument; delightful man,

rounded character, passionate patriot, admirable talker, above all

thorough humanist and humorist. He was the genial autocrat of that

breakfast-table not only, but of our symposia otherwise timed, and as he

comes back to me with the fresh and quite circular countenance of the

time before the personal cares and complications of life had gravely

thickened for him, his aspect _all_ finely circular, with its close

rings of the fairest hair, its golden rims of the largest glasses, its

finished rotundity of figure and attitude, I see that _there_ was the

American spirit--since I was "after" it--of a quality deeply inbred,

beautifully adjusted to all extensions of knowledge and taste and, as

seemed to me, quite sublimely quickened by everything that was at the

time so tremendously in question. That vision of him was never

afterwards to yield to other lights--though these, even had occasion for

them been more frequent with me, couldn't much have interfered with it;

so that what I still most retain of him is the very flush and mobility,

the living expansion and contraction, the bright comedy and almost lunar

eclipse, of his cherubic face according as things appeared to be going

for the country. I was always just across from him, as my brother,

beside whom I took my place, had been, and I remember well how vivid a

clock-face it became to me; I found still, as in my younger time, matter

enough everywhere for gaping, but greatest of all, I think, while that

tense season lasted, was my wonder for the signs and portents, the quips

and cranks, the wreathed smiles, or otherwise the candid obscurations,

of our prime talker's presented visage. I set, as it were, the small

tick of my own poor watch by it--which private register would thump or

intermit in agreement with these indications. I recover it that, thanks

to the perpetual play of his sympathy and irony, confidence and scorn,

as well as to that of my own less certainly directed sensibility, he

struck me on the bad days, which were then so many, as fairly august,

cherubism and all, for sincerity of association with every light and

shade, every ebb and flow, of our Cause. Where he most shone out,

indeed, so that depression then wasn't a gloom in him but a darting

flame, was in the icy air of the attitude of the nations to us, that of

the couple, the most potent, across the sea, with which we were

especially concerned and which, as during the whole earlier half of the

War and still longer it more and more defined itself, drew from him at

once all the drolleries and all the asperities of his sarcasm. Nothing

more particularly touched me in him, I make out--for it lingers in a

light of its own--than the fashion after which he struck me as a fond

grave guardian, not so much of the memory and the ashes yet awhile, as

of the promise, in all its flower, of the sacrificial young men whom the

University connection had passed through his hands and whom he looked

out for with a tenderness of interest, a nursing pride, that was as

contagious as I could possibly have wished it. I didn't myself know the

young men, save three or four, and could only, at our distance, hold my

tongue and do them homage; never afterwards (as I even then foreknew

would be the case) missing, when I could help it, or failing to pick up,

a single brush, a scattered leaf, of their growing or their riper

legend. Certain of them whom I had neither seen nor, as they fell in

battle, was destined ever to see, have lived for me since just as

communicated images, figures created by his tone about them--which, I

admit, mightn't or needn't have mattered to me for all the years, yet

which couldn't help so doing from the moment the right touch had handed

them over to my restless claim.

It was not meanwhile for want of other figures that these were gathered

in, for I have again to grant that in those days figures became such for

me on easy terms, and that in particular William had only to let the

light of _his_ attention, his interest, his curiosity, his aversion even

(could he indeed have passingly lived in the helplessness of mere

aversion) visibly rest on them for me entirely to feel that they must

count for as much as might be--so far at least as my perception was

concerned, contact being truly another affair. That was the truth at

that season, if it wasn't always to remain the truth; I felt his

interpretations, his personal allowances, so largely and inveterately

liberal, always impose themselves: it was not till ever so much later,

and then only little by little, that I came to accept the strange

circumstance of my not invariably "liking," in homely parlance, his

people, and his not invariably liking mine. The process represented by

that word was for each of us, I think, a process so involved with other

operations of the spirit, so beautifully complicated and deformed by

them, that our results in this sort doubtless eventually lost themselves

in the labyrinth of our reasons; which latter, eventually--the

labyrinth, I mean--could be a frequent and not other than animated

meeting-place in spite of the play of divergence. The true case, I all

the while plentifully felt, and still more feel now, was that _I_

diverged and my brother almost never; in the sense, that is, that no man

can well have cared less for the question, or made less of the

consciousness, of dislike--have valued less their developments and

comforts. Even the opposite of that complacency scarce seemed a

recognised, or at least in any degree a cultivated, state with him; his

passion, and that a passion of the intelligence, was justice

unafraid--and this, as it were, almost unformulatedly, altogether

unpedantically: it simply made him utterly not "mind" numberless things

that with most people serve as dim lights, warnings or attractions, in

the grope of appreciation or the adventure of instinct. His luminous

indifference kept his course thus, as I was later to recognise,

extraordinarily straight--to the increase, as I have noted, of my own

poor sense of weakly straggling, unaccompanied as this at the same time

was by the least envy of such a deficiency in what is roughly called

prejudice, and what I, to save my face, in my ups and downs of

sociability or curiosity, could perhaps have found no better term for

than the play of taste as taste. Wonderful, and to me in the last resort

admirable, was William's fine heritage and awareness of that principle

without its yet affecting him on the human, the more largely social,

just the conversable and workable ground--in presence of some other

principle that might do so, whether this validly or but speciously

interfered. The triumph over _dis_taste, in one's relations, one's

exposures, one's judgments, _that_ I could understand as high virtue,

strained heroism, the ideal groaningly applied; but what left me always

impressed, to put it mildly, was the fact that in my brother's case the

incorruptibility of his candour would have had to be explained to him,

and with scant presumption too of his taking it in or having patience

while one spoke. Such an enterprise, I was well aware, would at any rate

have left _me_ a sorry enough figure afterwards. What one would have had

to be, what one could in the least decently be, _except_ candid without

alternative--this, with other like matters, I should have had to be

prepared to set forth; and, more and more addressed as I eventually

found myself to a cultivation of the absolute in taste as taste, to

repeat my expression, I was far from the wish to contend for it as

against any appearance whatever of a better way. Such was part of the

experience, or call it even the discipline, of association with a genius

so marked for the process known as giving the benefit of the doubt--and

giving it (for that was the irritating charm), not in smug charity or

for a pointed moral, but through the very nature of a mind incapable of

the shut door in any direction and of a habit of hospitality so free

that it might again and again have been observed, in contact and

intercourse, to supply weaker and less graced vessels with the very

means of bringing in response, often absolutely in retort. This last of

course was not so much the benefit of the doubt as the displayed

unconsciousness of any doubt, a perpetual aid rendered the doubtful,

especially when incarnate in persons, to be more right or more true,

more clever or more charming or whatever, than mere grudging love of

"form," standing by, could at all see it entitled to become. Anything

like William's unawareness of exertion after having helped the lame dog

of converse over stile after stile I have in no other case met.

Together with which, however, I may not forbear to add, the very

occasional and comparatively small flare in him of some blest perversity

of prejudice that one might enjoy on one's own side the vulgar luxury of

naming as such was a thing which, conformably to that elation, one

reached out for as one might for the white glint of the rare edelweiss

on some high Alpine ledge.

If these remarks illustrate in their number the inevitable bent of the

remark to multiply within me as an effect of fraternal evocation I

thereby but stick the more to my subject, or in other words to the

much-peopled scene, as I found it; which I should scarce have found

without him. Peopled as it was with _his_ people, which they at first

struck me as markedly being, it led me then to take the company, apart

from F. J. Child, for whatever he all vividly and possessively

pronounced it; I having for a long time but the scantest company of my

own, even at the Law School, where my fellow-disciples could bear the

name for me only as a troop of actors might have done on that further

side of footlights to which I never went round. This last at least with

few exceptions, while there were none to the exquisite rule, as I

positively to-day feel it, of my apprehension of William's cluster as a

concern of his--interesting exactly because of that reference. Any

concern of his was thus a thing already charged with life, _his_ life

over and above its own, if it happened by grace to have any comparable;

which, as I pick out the elements again from the savoury Upham shades,

could indeed be claimed for several of these. I pick out the ardent and

delicate and firm John May, son, as he comes back to me, of a

distinguished Abolitionist of New York State--rare bird; and seen by

that fact in a sort of glamour of picturesque justification, an air

deriving colour from the pre-established gallantry, yet the quiet and

gentlemanly triumph, of his attitude. So at least do I read back into

blurred visions the richest meanings they could have. I pick out for a

not less baffled tribute a particular friend of my brother's and a

comrade of May's, whom I identify on the superficial side but by his

name of Salter and the fact of his studentship in theology; which

pursuit, it comes over me as I write, he must have shared, of homely,

almost of sickly, New England type as he was, with May of the fine

features, the handsome smile, by my resolute recollection, the developed

moustache and short dark pointed beard, the property of vaguely

recalling in fine some old portrait supposedly Spanish (supposedly, and

perhaps to a fantastic tune, by _me_--for I dare say it was by no one

else). Salter had no such references--it even appalled me to have a bit

intelligently to imagine to what origins starved of amenity or colour

his aspect and air, the slope of his shoulders, the mode of growth of

his hair, the relation of his clothes to his person and the relation of

his person to the inevitable needs of intercourse, might refer him; but

there played about him a bright force in the highest and extraordinarily

quick flares of which one felt nothing, while the exhibition lasted, but

his intellectual elegance. He had the distinction of wit--so rare, we

ever feel it to be, when we see it beautifully act; and I remember well

how, as that was indeed for me almost the whole of intellectual

elegance, I fell back on the idea that such an odd assortment of marks

in him was at least picturesque, or much in the Maison Vauquer line:

pinched as I must have been by the question of whether a person of that

type and cut had the "right" to be witty. On what else but the power the

right rested I couldn't doubtless have said; I but recall my sense that

wit was somehow the finest of all social matters and that it seemed

impossible to be less connected with such than this product of New

England at its sparest and dryest; which fact was a sort of bad mark for

the higher civilisation. I was prepared to recognise that you might be

witty and ugly, ugly with the highest finish of ugliness--hadn't the

celebrated Voltaire been one of the scrappiest of men as well as of the

most immortally quoted?--but it cost a wrench to have to take it that

you could shine to admiration out of such a platitude of the mere

"plain." It was William in especial who guaranteed to me Salter's

superior gift, of which in the free commerce of Divinity Hall he had

frequent illustration--so that what I really most apprehended, I think,

was the circumstance of _his_ apprehending: this too with a much finer

intellectual need and competence than mine, after all, and in the course

of debates and discussions, ardent young symposia of the spirit, which

struck me as falling in with all I had ever curiously conceived of those

hours that foster the generous youth of minds preappointed to greatness.

_There_ was the note of the effective quaint on which I could put my

finger: catch a poor student only dreary enough and then light in him

the flame of irony at its intensest, the range of question and the

command of figure at their bravest, and one might, with one's appetite

for character, feed on the bold antithesis. I had only to like for my

brother, and verily almost with pride, his assured experience of any

queer concretion--his experience of abstractions I was to rise to much

more feebly and belatedly, scarce more indeed ever than most

imperfectly--to find the very scene of action, or at least of passion,

enjoyed by these my elders and betters, enriched and toned and

consecrated after the fashion of places referred to in literature and

legend.

I thus live back of a sudden--for I insist on just yielding to it--into

the odd hours when the poor little old Divinity Hall of the overgrown

present faced me as through the haze of all the past Indian summers it

had opened its brooding study-windows to; when the "avenue" of approach

to it from the outer world was a thing of dignity, a positive vista in a

composition; when the Norton woods, near by, massed themselves in

scarlet and orange, and when to penetrate and mount a stair and knock at

a door and, enjoying response, then sink into a window-bench and inhale

at once the vague golden November and the thick suggestion of the room

where nascent "thought" had again and again piped or wailed, was to

taste as I had never done before the poetry of the prime initiation and

of associated growth. With cards of such pale pasteboard could the

trick, to my vision, play itself--by which I mean that I admire under

this memory the constant "dodges" of an imagination reduced to such

straits for picking up a living. It was as if one's sense of "Europe,"

sufficiently sure of itself to risk the strategic retreat, had backed

away on tiptoe just to see how the sense of what was there facing one

would manage without it--manage for luxury, that is, with the mere

indispensable doubtless otherwise provided for. That the sense in

question did manage beautifully, when at last so hard pressed, and that

the plasticity and variety of my vision draw from me now this murmur of

elation, are truths constituting together for me the perhaps even

overloaded moral of my tale. With which I scarce need note that so

elastic a fancy, so perverse a little passion for finding good in

everything--good for what I thought of as history, which was the

consideration of life, while the given thing, whatever it was, had only

to be before me--was inevitably to work a storage of other material for

memory close-packed enough to make such disengagement as I thus attempt

at the end of time almost an act of violence. I couldn't do without the

_scene_, as I have elsewhere had occasion to hint, whether actually or

but possibly peopled (the people always calling for the background and

the background insisting on the people); and thanks to this harmless

extravagance, or thanks in other words to the visionary liberties I

constantly took (so that the plate of sense was at the time I speak of

more overscored and figured for me than sense was in the least

practically required to have it), my path is even now beset to

inconvenience with the personal image unextinct. It presents itself, I

feel, beyond reason, and yet if I turn from it the ease is less, and I

am divided when I further press the spring between compunction at not

pausing before some shade that seems individually and even hopefully to

wait, and the fear of its feeling after all scanted of service should I

name it only to leave it. I name for instance, just to hover a little,

silent Vanderpool, the mutest presence at the Upham board, and quite

with no sense of the invidious in so doing. He was save for myself, by

my remembrance, the only member of the Law School there present; I see

him moreover altogether remarkably, just incorruptibly and exquisitely

dumb, though with a "gentlemanly" presence, a quasi-conservative New

Jersey finish (so delicate those dim discriminations!) that would have

seemed naturally to go with a certain forensic assurance. He looked so

as if he came from "good people"--which was no very common appearance on

the Harvard scene of those days, as indeed it is to a positive degree no

so very common appearance on any scene at any time: it was a note of

aspect which one in any case found one's self, to whatever vague tune,

apt quite to treasure or save up. So it was impossible not to recognise

in our soundless _commensal_ the very finest flower of shyness, the very

richest shade of the deprecating blush, that one had perhaps ever

encountered; one ended in fact by fairly hanging on the question of

whether the perfection of his modesty--for it was all a true welter of

modesty, not a grain of it anything stiffer--would beautifully hold out

or would give way to comparatively brute pressure from some point of our

circle. I longed to bet on him, to see him through without a lapse; and

this in fact was so thoroughly reserved to me that my eventual relief

and homage doubtless account for the blest roundness of my impression.

He had so much "for" him, was tall and fine, equipped and appointed,

born, quite to an effect of ultimately basking, in the light of the Law,

acquainted, one couldn't fail of seeing, with a tradition of manners,

not to mention that of the forensic as aforesaid, and not to name either

the use of "means," equally imputable: how rare accordingly would be the

_quality_, letting even the quantity alone, of his inhibitions, and how

interesting in the event the fact that he was absolutely never to have

deviated! He disappeared without having spoken, and yet why should I now

be noting it if he hadn't nevertheless admirably expressed himself? What

this consisted of was that there was scarce anything he wouldn't have

done for us had it been possible, and I think, in view of the

distinctness with which he still faces me, the tenderness with which he

inspires my muse and the assurance with which I have "gone into" him,

that I can never in all my life since have seen so precious a message

delivered under such difficulties. Admirable, ineffaceable, because so

essentially all _decipherable_, Vanderpool!

It wasn't either that John Bancroft tossed the ball of talk--which but

for the presence of the supremely retentive agent just commemorated

would have appeared on occasion to remain in his keeping by a

preference, on its own part, not to be outwitted; this more or less at

all times too, but especially during the first weeks of his dawning on

us straight out of Germany and France, flushed with the alarm, as one

might have read it, of having to justify rare opportunities and account

for the time he had inordinately, obscurely, or at least not a little

mysteriously, spent--the implication of every inch of him being that he

had spent it seriously. Odd enough it certainly was that we should have

been appointed to unveil, so far as we might, a _pair_ of such marked

monuments to modesty, marble statues, as they might have been, on either

side of the portal of talk; what I at any rate preserve of my immediate

vision of Bancroft--whose very promptest identity indeed had been his

sonship to the eminent historian of our country and earlier and later

diplomatist--was an opposition, trying to me rather than engaging as its

like had been in the composition of Vanderpool, between what we somehow

wanted from him (or what I at least did) and what we too scantly

gathered. This excellent friend, as he was later on to become, with his

handsome high head, large colourable brow and eyes widely divided--brave

contribution ever to a fine countenance--sat there in a sort of glory of

experience which, had he been capable of anything so akin to a

demonstration, he would have appeared all unsociably to repudiate. It

was bruited of him that, like John La Farge, whose friend he was

admiringly to become--for he too had a Newport connection--he "painted,"

that is persisted (which was the wondrous thing!) in painting; and that

this practice had grown upon him in France, where, _en province_, his

brother had entirely taken root and where the whole art-life, as well as

the rural life, of the country had been opened to him; besides its a

little later coming to light that he had romantically practised at

Dusseldorf, where too he had personally known and tremendously liked

George du Maurier, whose first so distinguished appearances as an

illustrator had already engaged our fondest attention--were they most

dawningly in the early Cornhill, or in Punch, or in Once a Week? They

glimmer upon me, darkly and richly, as from the pages of the last named.

Not to be rendered, I may again parenthesise, our little thrilled

awareness, William's and mine, though mine indeed but panting after his,

of such peeping phenomena of the European day as the outbreak of a "new

man" upon our yearning view of the field of letters and of the arts. I

am moved to wonder at how we came by it, shifting all for ourselves, and

with the parental _flair_, so far as the sensibility of home was

concerned, turned but to directions of its own and much less restless on

the whole than ours. More touching to me now than I can say, at all

events, this recapture of the hour at which Du Maurier, consecrated to

much later, to then still far-off intimate affection, became the new man

so significantly as to make a great importance of John Bancroft's news

of him, which already bore, among many marvels, upon the supreme wonder

of his working, as he was all his life bravely to work, under impaired

and gravely menaced eyesight. When I speak, as just above, of what,

through so many veils, "came to light," I should further add, I use a

figure representing a considerable lapse of time and shading off, for

full evocation, into more associations than I can here make place for.

Nothing in this connection came _soon_ to light at least but that

endless amazement might lie in the strange facts of difference between

our companion and his distinguished sire--the latter so supremely, so

quaintly yet so brilliantly, social a figure, I apprehended, when gaped

at, a still more angular, but more polished and pacific Don Quixote, on

the sleekest of Rosinantes, with white-tipped chin protrusive, with high

sharp elbows raised and long straight legs beautifully pointed, all

after the gallantest fashion, against the clear sunset sky of old

Newport cavalcades. Mr. Bancroft the elder, the "great," was a comfort,

that is a fine high identity, a cluster of strong accents, the sort of

thing one's vision followed, in the light of history, if not of mere

misguided fancy, for illustration of conceived type--type, say in this

case, of superior person of the ancient and the more or less alien

public order, the world of affairs transacted at courts and

_chancelleries_, in which renown, one had gathered from the perusal of

memoirs, allowed for much development of detail and much incision of

outline, when not even directly resting on them. As it had been a

positive bliss to me that words and names might prove in extremity

sources of support, so it comes back to me that I had drawn mystic

strength from just obscurely sighing "Metternich!" or "Talleyrand!" as

Mr. Bancroft bounced by me--so far as a pair of widely-opened compasses

might bounce--in the August gloaming. The value of which, for

reflection, moreover, was not in the least in its being that if his son

remained so long pleadingly inscrutable any derived Metternich

suggestion had contributed to keep him so--for quite _there_ was the

curiosity of the case, that among the imputations John appeared most to

repudiate was that of having at any moment breathed the air either of

records or of protocols. If he persisted in painting for years after his

return to America without, as the legend grew, the smallest disclosure

of his work or confession of his progress to human eye or ear, he drew

the rigour of this course wholly from his singleness of nature, in the

aftertime to be so much approved to us. However, I pause before the

aftertime, into the lap of which more than one sort of stored soundness

and sweetness was to fall from him drop by drop.

I scarce know whether my impulse to lead forth these most shrinking of

my apparitions be more perverse or more natural--mainly feeling, I

confess, however it appear, that the rest of my impression of the

animated Cambridge scene, so far as I could take it in, was anything but

a vision of unasserted forces. It was only I, as now appears to me, who,

ready as yet to assert nothing, hung back, and for reasons even more

appreciable to me to-day than then; wondering, almost regretting as I

do, that I didn't with a still sharper promptness throw up the sponge

for stoppage of the absurd little boxing-match within me between the

ostensible and the real--this I mean because I might afterwards thereby

have winced a couple of times the less in haunting remembrance of

exhibited inaptitude. My condition of having nothing to exhibit was

blessedly one that there was nobody to quarrel with--and I couldn't have

sufficiently let it alone. I didn't in truth, under a misleading light,

reconsider it much; yet I have kept to this hour a black little memory

of my having attempted to argue one afternoon, by way of exercise and

under what seemed to me a perfect glare of publicity, the fierce light

of a "moot-court," some case proposed to me by a fellow-student--who can

only have been one of the most benign of men unless he was darkly the

designingest, and to whom I was at any rate to owe it that I figured my

shame for years much in the image of my having stood forth before an

audience with a fiddle and bow and trusted myself to rub them together

desperately enough (after the fashion of Rousseau in a passage of the

Confessions,) to make some appearance of music. My music, I recall,

before the look on the faces around me, quavered away into mere collapse

and cessation, a void now engulfing memory itself, so that I liken it

all to a merciful fall of the curtain on some actor stricken and

stammering. The sense of the brief glare, as I have called the luckless

exposure, revives even on this hither side of the wide gulf of time;

but I must have outlived every witness--I was so obviously there the

very youngest of all aspirants--and, in truth, save for one or two minor

and merely comparative miscarriages of the sacrificial act before my

false gods, my connection with the temple was to remain as consistently

superficial as could be possible to a relation still restlessly

perceptive through all its profaneness. Perceiving, even with its

accompaniments of noting, wondering, fantasticating, kicked up no glare,

but went on much rather under richest shades or in many-coloured

lights--a _tone_ of opportunity that I look back on as somehow at once

deliciously soothing to myself and favourable to the clearness of each

item of the picture even as the cool grey sky of a landscape is

equalising. That was of course especially when I had let everything

slide--everything but the mere act of rather difficultly living (by

reason of my scant physical ease,) and fallen back again on the hard

sofa of certain ancient rooms in the Winthrop Square, contracted nook,

of a local order now quite abolished, and held to my nose for long and

sustaining sniffs the scented flower of independence. I took my

independence for romantic, or at least for a happy form of yawning

vessel into which romance, even should it perforce consist but of mere

loose observational play, might drop in the shape of ripe fruit from a

shaken tree. Winthrop Square, as I had occasion to note a couple of

years since, is a forgotten name, and the disappearance of my lodging

spares me doubtless a reminder, possibly ironic, of the debility of

those few constructional and pictorial elements that, mustering a

wondrous good-will, I had invited myself to rejoice in as "colonial."

The house was indeed very old, as antiquity in Cambridge went, with

everything in it slanting and gaping and creaking, but with humble

antique "points" and a dignity in its decay; above all with the deep

recess or alcove, a sweet "irregularity" (so could irregularities of

architectural conception then and there count,) thrust forth from its

sitting-room toward what I supposed to be the Brighton hills and

forming, by the aid of a large window and that commanding view, not to

mention the grace of an ancient expansive bureau or secretary-desk (this

such a piece, I now venture to figure, as would to-day be pounced on at

any cunning dealer's,) a veritable bower toward which even so shy a

dreamer as I still then had to take myself for might perhaps hope to woo

the muse. The muse was of course the muse of prose fiction--never for

the briefest hour in my case the presumable, not to say the presuming,

the much-taking-for-granted muse of rhyme, with whom I had never had,

even in thought, the faintest flirtation; and she did, in the event, I

note, yield to the seduction of so appointed a nook--as to which

romantic passage, however, I may not here anticipate. I but lose myself

in the recovered sense of what it richly "meant" to me just to _have_ a

place where I could so handsomely receive her, where I could remark with

complacency that the distant horizon, an horizon long since rudely

obliterated, was not, after all, too humble to be blue, purple, tawny,

changeable in short, everything an horizon should be, and that over the

intervening marshes of the Charles (if I don't go astray in so much

geography) there was all the fine complicated cloud-scenery I could

wish--so extravagantly did I then conceive more or less associational

cloud-scenery, after the fashion, I mean, of that feature of remembered

English and Boulognese water-colours, to promote the atmosphere of

literary composition as the act had begun to glimmer for me.

Everything, however, meant, as I say, more quite other things than I can

pretend now to treat of. The mere fact of a sudden rupture, as by the

happiest thought, with the "form" of bringing home from the Law-library

sheepskin volumes that might give my table, if not, for sufficiency of

emphasis, my afflicted self, a temporary countenance, heaped up the

measure of my general intention--from the moment I embraced instead of

it the practice of resorting to Gore Hall exclusively for my

reading-matter; a practice in the light of which my general intention

took on the air of absolutely basking. To get somehow, and in spite of

everything, in spite especially of being so much disabled, at life,

_that_ was my brooding purpose, straight out of which the College

library, with its sparse bristle of aspiring granite, stood open to far

more enchanted distances than any represented by the leathery walls,

with never a breach amid their labelled and numbered blocks, that I

might pretend to beat against in the other quarter. Yet, happily enough,

on this basis of general rather than of special culture, I still loosely

rejoiced in being where I was, and by way of proof that it was all right

the swim into my ken of Sainte-Beuve, for whose presence on my table, in

still other literary company, Gore Hall aiding, I succeeded in not at

all blushing, became in the highest degree congruous with regular

attendance at lectures. The forenoon lectures at Dane Hall I never in

all my time missed, that I can recollect, and I look back on it now as

quite prodigious that I should have been so systematically faithful to

them without my understanding the first word of what they were about.

They contrived--or at least my attendance at them did, inimitably--to

be "life;" and as my wondering dips into the vast deep well of the

French critic to whom all my roused response went out brought up that

mystery to me in cupfuls of extraordinary savour, where was the

incongruity of the two rites? That the Causeries du Lundi, wholly fresh

then to my grateful lips, should so have overflowed for me was certainly

no marvel--that prime acquaintance absolutely _having_, by my measure,

to form a really sacred date in the development of any historic or

aesthetic consciousness worth mentioning; but that I could be to the

very end more or less thrilled by simply sitting, all stupid and

sentient, in the thick company of my merely nominal associates and under

the strange ministrations of Dr. Theophilus Parsons, "Governor" Washburn

and Professor Joel Parker, would have appeared to defy explanation only

for those by whom the phenomena of certain kinds of living and working

sensibility are unsuspected. For myself at any rate there was no

anomaly--the anomaly would have been much rather in any prompter

consciousness of a sated perception; I knew why I liked to "go," I knew

even why I could unabashedly keep going in face of the fact that if I

had learned my reason I had learned, and was still to learn, absolutely

nothing else; and that sufficiently supported me through a stretch of

bodily overstrain that I only afterwards allowed myself dejectedly to

measure. The mere sitting at attention for two or three hours--such

attention as I achieved--was paid for by sorry pain; yet it was but

later on that I wondered how I could have found what I "got" an

equivalent for the condition produced. The condition was one of many,

and the others for the most part declared themselves with much of an

equal, though a different, sharpness. It was acute, that is, that one

was so incommoded, but it had broken upon me with force from the first

of my taking my seat--which had the advantage, I acknowledge, of the rim

of the circle, symbolising thereby all the detachment I had been

foredoomed to--that the whole scene was going to be, and again and

again, as "American," and above all as suffused with New England colour,

however one might finally estimate that, as I could possibly have

wished. Such was the effect of one's offering such a plate for

impressions to play on at their will; as well as of one's so failing to

ask in advance what they would matter, so taking for granted that they

would all matter somehow. It would matter somehow for instance that just

a queer dusky half smothered light, as from windows placed too low, or

too many interposing heads, should hang upon our old auditorium--long

since voided of its then use and, with all its accessory chambers,

seated elsewhere afresh and in much greater state; which glimpse of a

scheme of values might well have given the measure of the sort of profit

I was, or rather wasn't, to derive. It doubtless quite ought to have

confounded me that I had come up to _faire mon droit_ by appreciations

predominantly of the local chiaroscuro and other like quantities; but I

remember no alarm--I only remember with what complacency my range of

perception on those general lines was able to spread.

It mattered, by the same law, no end that Dr. Theophilus Parsons, whose

rich, if slightly quavering, old accents were the first to fall upon my

ear from the chair of instruction beneath a huge hot portrait of Daniel

Webster should at once approve himself a vivid and curiously-composed

person, an _illustrative_ figure, as who should say--exactly with all

the marks one might have wished him, marks of a social order, a general

air, a whole history of things, or in other words of people; since there

was nothing one mightn't, by my sentiment, do with such a subject from

the moment it gave out character. Character thus was all over the place,

as it could scarce fail to be when the general subject, the one gone in

for, had become identical with the persons of all its votaries. Such was

the interest of the source of edification just named, not one ray of

whose merely professed value so much as entered my mind. Governor

Washburn was of a different, but of a no less complete consistency--queer,

ingenuous, more candidly confiding, especially as to his own pleasant

fallibility, than I had ever before known a chaired dispenser of

knowledge, and all after a fashion that endeared him to his young

hearers, whose resounding relish of the frequent tangle of his

apologetic returns upon himself, quite, almost always, to

inextricability, was really affectionate in its freedom. I could

understand and admire that--it seemed to have for me legendary

precedents; whereas of the third of our instructors I mainly recall that

he represented dryness and hardness, prose unrelieved, at their

deadliest--partly perhaps because he was most master of his subject. He

was none the less placeable for these things withal, and what mainly

comes back to me of him is the full sufficiency with which he made me

ask myself how I _could_ for a moment have seen myself really browse in

any field where the marks of the shepherd were such an oblong dome of a

bare cranium, such a fringe of dropping little ringlets toward its base,

and a mouth so meanly retentive, so ignorant of style, as I made out,

above a chin so indifferent to the duty, or at least to the opportunity,

of chins. If I had put it to myself that there was no excuse for the

presence of a young person so affected by the idea of how people looked

on a scene where the issue was altogether what they usefully taught, as

well as intelligently learned and wanted to learn, I feel I should,

after my first flush of confusion, have replied assuredly enough that

just the beauty of the former of these questions was in its being of

equal application everywhere; which was far from the case with the

latter. The question of how people looked, and of how their look counted

for a thousand relations, had risen before me too early and kept me

company too long for me not to have made a fight over it, from the very

shame of appearing at all likely to give it up, had some fleeting

delusion led me to cast a slur upon it. It would do, I was already sure,

half the work of carrying me through life, and where was better proof of

all it would have to give than just in the fact of what it was then and

there doing? It worked for appreciation--not one of the uses of which as

an act of intelligence had, all round, finer connections; and on the

day, in short, when one should cease to live in large measure by one's

eyes (with the imagination of course all the while waiting on this) one

would have taken the longest step towards not living at all. My

companions--however scantly indeed they were to become such--were

subject to my so practising in a degree which represented well-nigh the

whole of my relation with them, small reciprocity for them as there may

have been in it; since vision, and nothing but vision, was from

beginning to end the fruit of my situation among them. There was not one

of them as to whom it didn't matter that he "looked," by my fancy of

him, thus or so; the key to this disposition of the accents being for me

to such an extent that, as I have said, I was with all intensity taking

in New England and that I knew no better _immediate_ way than to take it

in by my senses. What that name really comprehended had been a mystery,

daily growing less, to which everything that fell upon those senses

referred itself, making the innumerable appearances hang together ever

so densely. Theophilus Parsons, with his tone, his unction, his homage

still to some ancient superstition, some standard of manners, reached

back as to a state of provincialism rounded and compact, quite

self-supporting, which gave it serenity and quality, something

comparatively rich and urban; the good ex-Governor, on the other hand,

of whom I think with singular tenderness, opened through every note of

aspect and expression straight into those depths of rusticity which more

and more unmistakably underlay the social order at large and out of

which one felt it to have emerged in any degree but at scattered points.

Where it did emerge, I seemed to see, it held itself as high as

possible, conscious, panting a little, elate with the fact of having

cleared its skirts, saved its life, consolidated its Boston, yet as with

wastes unredeemed, roundabout it, propping up and pushing in--all so

insistently that the light in which one for the most part considered the

scene was strongly coloured by their action. This was one's clue to the

labyrinth, if labyrinth it was to be called--a generalisation into which

everything fitted, first to surprise and then indubitably to relief,

from the moment one had begun to make it. Under its law the Puritan

capital, however visibly disposed to spread and take on new disguises,

affected me as a rural centre even to a point at which I had never known

anything as rural; there being involved with this too much further food

for curiosity and wonder. Boston was in a manner of its own stoutly and

vividly urban, not only a town, but a town of history--so that how did

it manage to be such different things at the same time? That was

doubtless its secret--more and more interesting to study in proportion

as, on closer acquaintance, yet an acquaintance before which the sense

of one's preferred view from outside never gave way, one felt the

equilibrium attained as on the whole an odd fusion and intermixture, of

the chemical sort as it were, and not a matter of elements or aspects

sharply alternating. There was in the exhibition at its best distinctly

a savour--an excellent thing for a community to have, and part of the

savour was, as who should say, the breath of the fields and woods and

waters, though at their domesticated and familiarised stage, or the echo

of a tone which had somehow become that of the most educated of our

societies without ceasing to be that of the village.

Of so much from the first I felt sure, and this all the more that by my

recollection of New York, even indeed by my recollection of Albany, we

had been aware in those places of no such strain. New York at least had

been whatever disagreeable, not to say whatever agreeable, other thing

one might have declared it--it might even have been vulgar, though that

cheap substitute for an account of anything didn't, I think, in the

connection, then exist for me; but the last reference to its nature

likely to crop up in its social soil was beyond question the flower of

the homely. New England had, by one's impression, cropped up there, but

had done so just _as_ New England, New England unabsorbed and

unreconciled; which was exactly a note in the striated, the piebald or,

more gracefully, cosmopolite local character. I am not sure that the

comparatively--I say comparatively--market-town suggestion of the city

by the Charles came out for me as a positive richness, but it did

essentially contribute to what had become so highly desirable, the

reinforcement of my vision of American life by the idea of variety. I

apparently required of anything I should take to my heart that it should

be, approached at different angles, "like" as many other things as

possible--in accordance with which it made for a various "America" that

Boston should seem really strong, really in not having, for better or

worse, the same irrepressible likenesses as New York. I invoked, I

called down the revelation of, new likenesses by the simple act of

threading the Boston streets, whether by garish day (the afterglow of

the great snowfalls of winter was to turn in particular to a blinding

glare, an unequalled hardness of light,) or under that mantle of night

which draped as with the garb of adventure our long-drawn townward

little rumbles in the interest of the theatre or of Parker's--oh the

sordid, yet never in the least deterrent conditions of transit in that

age of the unabbreviated, the dividing desert and the primitive

horse-car! (The desert is indeed, despite other local developments and

the general theory of the rate at which civilisation spreads and

ugliness wanes, still very much what it was in the last mid-century, but

the act of passage through it has been made to some extent easier.)

Parker's played in the intercourse of Cambridge with Boston a part of a

preponderance that I look back upon, I confess, as the very condition

of the purest felicity we knew--I knew at any rate myself none, whether

of a finer or a grosser strain, that competed with this precious

relation. Competition has thickened since and proportions have

altered--to no small darkening of the air, but the time was surely

happier; a single such _point de repere_ not only sufficed but richly

heaped up the measure. Parker's, on the whole side of the joy of life,

_was_ Boston--speaking as under the thrill of early occasions

recaptured; Boston could be therefore, in the acutest connections, those

of young comradeship and young esthetic experience, heaven save the

mark, fondly prepared or properly crowned, but the enjoyed and shared

repast, literally the American feast, as I then appraised such values; a

basis of native abundance on which everything else rested. The theatre,

resorted to whenever possible, rested indeed doubtless most, though with

its heaviest weight thrown perhaps at a somewhat later time; the theatre

my uncanny appetite for which strikes me as almost abnormal in the light

of what I braved to reach it from the studious suburb, or more

particularly braved to return from it. I touch alas no spring that

doesn't make a hum of memories, and pick them over as I will three or

four of that scenic strain linger on my sense. The extraordinary fact

about these--which plays into my generalisation a little way back--was

that, for all the connection of such occasions with the great interest

of the theatre at large, there was scarce an impression of the stage

wrung from current opportunity that didn't somehow underscore itself

with the special Boston emphasis; and this in spite of the fact that

plays and performers in those days were but a shade less raggedly

itinerant over the land than they are now. The implication of the

provincial in the theatric air, and of the rustic in the provincial, may

have been a matter of the "house" itself, with its twenty kinds of

redolence of barbarism--with the kind determined by the very audience

perhaps indeed plainest; vivid to me at all events is it how I felt even

at the time, in repairing to the Howard Atheneum to admire Miss Maggie

Mitchell and Miss Kate Bateman, that one would have had only to scratch

a little below the surface of the affair to come upon the but

half-buried Puritan curse not so very long before devoted to such

perversities. Wasn't the curse still in the air, and could anything less

than a curse, weighing from far back on the general conscience, have

accounted for one could scarce say what want of self-respect in the

total exhibition?--for that intimation more than anything else perhaps

of the underhand snicker with which one sat so oddly associated. By the

blest law of youth and fancy withal one did admire the actress--the

young need to admire as flatly as one could broke through all crowding

apprehensions. I like to put it down that nothing in the world qualified

my wonder at the rendering by the first of the performers I have named

of the figure of "Fanchon the Cricket" in a piece so entitled, an

artless translation from a German original, if I rightly remember, which

original had been an arrangement for the stage of La Petite Fadette,

George Sand's charming rustic idyll. I like to put it down that Miss

Maggie Mitchell's having for years, as I gathered, twanged that one

string and none other; every night of her theatric life, over the huge

country, before she was revealed to us--just as Mr. Joe Jefferson, with

no word of audible reprehension ever once addressed to him, was to have

twanged his--did nothing to bedim the brightness of our vision or the

apparent freshness of her art, and that above all it seemed a privilege

critically to disengage the delicacy of this art and the rare effect of

the natural in it from the baseness in which it was framed: so golden a

glimmer is shed, as one looks back, from any shaky little torch lighted,

by whatever fond stretch, at the high esthetic flame. Upon these faint

sparks in the night of time would I gently breathe, just to see them

again distinguishably glow, rather than leave their momentary function

uncommemorated. Strange doubtless were some of the things that

represented these momentary functions--strange I mean in proportion to

the fires they lighted. The small bower of the muse in Winthrop Square

was first to know the fluttered descent of the goddess to my appeal for

her aid in the composition of a letter from which the admired Miss

Maggie should gather the full force of my impression. Particularly do I

incline even now to mention that she testified to her having gratefully

gathered it by the despatch to me in return of a little printed copy of

the play, a scant pamphlet of "acting edition" humility, addressed in a

hand which assumed a romantic cast as soon as I had bethought myself of

finding for it a happy precedent in that of Pendennis's Miss

Fotheringay.

It had been perhaps to the person of this heroine that Pendennis

especially rendered homage, while I, without illusions, or at least

without confusions, was fain to discriminate in favour of the magic of

method, that is of genius, itself; which exactly, more than anything

else could have done (success, as I considered, crowning my

demonstration,) contributed to consecrate to an exquisite use, _the_

exquisite, my auspicious _reduit_ aforesaid. For an esthetic vibration

to whatever touch had but to be intense enough to tremble on into other

reactions under other blest contacts and commotions. It was by the

operation again of the impulse shaking me up to an expression of what

the elder star of the Howard Atheneum had artistically "meant" to me

that I first sat down beside my view of the Brighton hills to enrol

myself in the bright band of the fondly hoping and fearfully doubting

who count the days after the despatch of manuscripts. I formally

addressed myself under the protection, not to say the inspiration, of

Winthrop Square to the profession of literature, though nothing would

induce me now to name the periodical on whose protracted silence I had

thus begun to hang with my own treasures of reserve to match it. The

bearing of which shy ecstasies--shy of exhibition then, that is, save as

achievements recognised--is on their having thus begun, at any rate, to

supply all the undertone one needed to whatever positive perfunctory

show; the show proceeding as it could, all the while, thanks to much

help from the undertone, which felt called upon at times to be copious.

It is not, I allow, that memory may pretend for me to keep the two

elements of the under and the over always quite distinct--it would have

been a pity all round, in truth, should they have altogether escaped

mixing and fraternising. The positive perfunctory show, at all events,

to repeat my term, hitched itself along from point to point, and could

have no lack of outside support to complain of, I reflect, from the

moment I could make my own every image and incitement--those, as I have

noted, of the supply breaking upon me with my first glimpse of the

Cambridge scene. If I seem to make too much of these it is because I at

the time made still more, more even than my pious record has presumed to

set down. The air of truth doubtless hangs uneasy, as the matter stands,

over so queer a case as my having, by my intimation above, found

appreciability in life at the Law School even under the failure for me

of everything generally drawn upon for it, whether the glee of study,

the ardour of battle or the joy of associated adventure. Not to have

felt earlier sated with the mere mechanic amusement or vain form of

regularity at lectures would strike me to-day as a fact too "rum" for

belief if certain gathered flowers by the way, flowers of perverse

appreciation though they might but be, didn't give out again as I turn

them over their unspeakable freshness. They were perforce gathered (what

makes it still more wondrous) all too languidly; yet they massed

themselves for my sense, through the lapsing months, to the final

semblance of an intimate secret garden. Such was the odd, the almost

overwhelming consequence--or one of these, for they are many--of an

imagination to which literally everything obligingly signified. One of

the actual penalties of this is that so few of such ancient importances

remain definable or presentable. It may in the fulness of time simply

sound _bete_ that, with the crash of greater questions about one, I

should have been positively occupied with such an affair as the degree

and the exact shade to which the blest figures in the School array, each

quite for himself, might settle and fix the weight, the interest, the

function, as it were, of his Americanism. I could scarce have cleared up

even for myself, I dare say, the profit, or more pertinently the charm,

of that extravagance--and the fact was of course that I didn't feel it

as extravagance, but quite as homely thrift, moral, social, esthetic, or

indeed, as I might have been quite ready to say, practical and

professional. It was practical at least in the sense that it probably

more helped to pass the time than all other pursuits together. The real

proof of which would be of course my being able now to string together

for exhibition some of these pearls of differentiation--since it was to

differentiation exactly that I was then, in my innocence, most prompted;

not dreaming of the stiff law by which, on the whole American ground,

division of _type_, in the light of opposition and contrast, was more

and more to break down for me and fail: so that verily the recital of

my mere concomitant efforts to pick it up again and piece its parts

together and make them somehow show and serve would be a record of

clinging courage. I may note at once, however, as a light on the

anomaly, that there hung about _all_ young appearances at that period

something ever so finely derivative and which at this day rather defies

re-expression--the common character or shared function of the precious

clay so largely making up the holocausts of battle; an advantage working

for them circuitously or perhaps ambiguously enough, I grant, but still

placing them more or less under the play of its wing even when the arts

of peace happened for the hour to engage them. They potentially, they

conceivably, they indirectly paid, and nothing was for the most part

more ascertainable of them individually than that, with brothers or

other near relatives in the ranks or in commands, they came, to their

credit, of paying families. All of which again may represent the high

pitch of one's associated sensibility--there having been occasions of

crisis, were they worth recovering, when under its action places,

persons, objects animate or not, glimmered alike but through the grand

idealising, the generalising, blur. At moments of less fine a strain, it

may be added, the sources of interest presented themselves in looser

formation. The young appearances, as I like to continue to call them,

could be pleasingly, or at least robustly homogeneous, and yet, for

livelier appeal to fancy, flower here and there into special cases of

elegant deviation--"sports," of exotic complexion, one enjoyed

denominating these (or would have enjoyed had the happy figure then

flourished) thrown off from the thick stem that was rooted under our

feet. Even these rare exceptions, the few apparitions referring

themselves to other producing conditions than the New England, wrought

by contrast no havoc in the various quantities for which that section

was responsible; it was certainly refreshing--always to the fond

imagination--that there were, for a change, imprints in the stuff of

youth that didn't square with the imprint, virtually _one_ throughout,

imposed by Springfield or Worcester, by Providence or Portland, or

whatever rural wastes might lie between; yet the variations, I none the

less gather as I strive to recall them, beguiled the spirit (talking

always of my own) rather than coerced it, and this even though fitting

into life as one had already more or less known it, fitting in, that is,

with more points of contact and more reciprocation of understanding than

the New England relation seemed able to produce. It could in fact fairly

blind me to the implication of an inferior immediate _portee_ that such

and such a shape of the New York heterogeneity, however simplified by

silliness, or at least by special stupidity (though who was I to note

_that_?) pressed a certain spring of association, waiting as I always

was for such echoes, rather than left it either just soundless or

bunglingly touched.

It was for example a link with the larger life, as I am afraid I must

have privately called it, that a certain young New Yorker, an outsider

of still more unmistakable hue than I could suppose even myself, came

and went before us with an effect of cultivated detachment that I

admired at the time for its perfect consistency, and that caused him, it

was positively thrilling to note, not in the least to forfeit sympathy,

but to shine in the high light of public favour. The richest reflections

sprang for me from this, some of them inspiring even beyond the promptly

grasped truth, a comparative commonplace, that the variation or

opposition sufficiently embodied, the line of divergence sharply enough

drawn, always achieves some triumph by the fact of its emphasis, by its

putting itself through at any cost, any cost in particular of ridicule.

So much one had often observed; but what really enriched the dear

induction and made our friend's instance thus remain with me was the

part played by the utter blandness itself of his protest, such an

exhibition of the sweet in the imperturbable. This it was that

enshrined him, by my vision, in a popularity than which nothing could

have seemed in advance less indicated, and that makes me wonder to-day

whether he was simply the luckiest of gamblers or just a conscious and

consummate artist. He reappears to me as a finished fop, finished to

possibilities we hadn't then dreamt of, and as taking his stand, or

rather taking all his walks, on _that_, the magician's wand of his

ideally tight umbrella under his arm and the magician's familiar of his

bristling toy-terrier at his heels. He became thus an apparition

entrancing to the mind. His clothes were of a perfection never known nor

divined in that sphere, a revelation, straight and blindingly authentic,

of Savile Row in its prime; his single eyeglass alone, and his inspired,

his infinite use of it as at once a defensive crystal wall and a lucid

window of hospitality, one couldn't say most which, might well have

foredoomed him, by all likelihood, to execration and destruction. He

became none the less, as I recover him, our general pride and joy; his

entrances and exits were acclaimed beyond all others, and it was his

rare privilege to cause the note of derision and the note of affection

to melt together, beyond separation, in vague but virtual homage to the

refreshment of felt type. To see it dawn upon rude breasts (for rude,

comparatively, were the breasts of the typeless, or at the best of the

typed but in one character, throughout the same,) that defiant and

confident difference carried far enough might avert the impulse to slay,

was to muse ever so agreeably on the queer means by which great morals,

picking up a life as they may, can still get themselves pointed. The

"connotation" of the trivial, it was thus attaching to remark, could

perfectly serve when that of the important, roughly speaking, failed for

a grateful _connection_--from the moment some such was massed invitingly

in view. The difficulty with the type about me was that, in its

monotony, beginning and ending with itself, it _had_ no connections and

suggested none; whereas the grace of the salient apparition I have

perhaps too earnestly presented lay in its bridging over our separation

from worlds, from great far-off reservoirs, of a different mixture

altogether, another civility and complexity. Young as I was, I myself

clearly recognised that ground of reference, saw it even to some extent

in the light of experience--so could I stretch any scrap of contact;

kept hold of it by fifty clues, recalls and reminders that dangled for

me mainly out of books and magazines and heard talk, things of picture

and story, things of prose and verse and anecdotal vividness in fine,

and, as I have elsewhere allowed, for the most part hoardedly English

and French. Our "character man" of the priceless monocle and the

trotting terrier was "like" some type in a collection of types--that was

the word for it; and, there being no collection, nor the ghost of one,

roundabout us, was a lone courageous creature in the desert of our bald

reiterations. The charm of which conclusion was exactly, as I have said,

that the common voice did, by every show, bless him for rendered

service, his dropped hint of an ideal containing the germ of other

ideals--and confessed by that fact to more appetites and inward

yearnings than it the least bit consciously counted up.

Not quite the same service was rendered by G. A. J., who had no ridicule

to brave, and I can speak with confidence but of the connections, rather

confused if they were, opened up to me by his splendid aspect and which

had absolutely nothing in common with the others that hung near. It was

brilliant to a degree that none other had by so much as a single shade

the secret of, and it carried the mooning fancy to a further reach even,

on the whole, than the figure of surprise I have just commemorated; this

last comparatively scant in itself and rich only by what it made us read

into it, and G. A. J. on the other hand intrinsically and actively ample

and making us read wonders, as it were, into whatever it might be that

was, as we used to say, "back of" him. He had such a flush of life and

presence as to make that reference mysteriously and inscrutably

loom--and the fascinating thing about this, as we again would have said,

was that it could strike me as so beguilingly American. That too was

part of the glamour, that its being so could kick up a mystery which one

might have pushed on to explore, whereas our New York friend only kicked

up a certainty (for those properly prepared) and left not exploration,

but mere assured satisfaction, the mark of the case. G. A. J. reached

westward, westward even of New York, and southward at least as far as

Virginia; teeming facts that I discovered, so to speak, by my own

unaided intelligence--so little were they responsibly communicated.

Little was communicated that I recover--it would have had to drop from

too great a personal height; so that the fun, as I may call it, was the

greater for my opening all by myself to perceptions. I was getting

furiously American, in the big sense I invoked, through this felt growth

of an ability to reach out westward, southward, anywhere, everywhere, on

that apprehension of finding myself but patriotically charmed. Thus

there dawned upon me the grand possibility that, charm for charm, the

American, the assumed, the postulated, would, in the particular case of

its really acting, count double; whereas the European paid for being

less precarious by being also less miraculous. It counted single, as one

might say, and only made up for that by counting almost always. It

mightn't be anything like almost always, even at the best, no doubt,

that an American-grown value of aspect would so entirely emerge as G. A.

J.'s seemed to do; but what did this exactly point to unless that the

rarity so implied would be in the nature of the splendid? That at least

was the way the cultivation of patriotism as a resource was the

cultivation of workable aids to the same, however ingenious these. (Just

to glow belligerently with one's country was no resource, but a

primitive instinct breaking through; and besides this resources were

cooling, not heating.) It might have seemed that I might after all

perfectly dispense with friends when simple acquaintances, and rather

feared ones at that, though feared but for excess of lustre, could

kindle in the mind such bonfires of thought, feeding the flame with

gestures and sounds and light accidents of passage so beyond their own

supposing. In spite of all which, however, G. A. J. was marked for a

friend and taken for a kinsman from the day when his blaze of colour

should have sufficiently cleared itself up for me to distinguish the

component shades.