It had been, however, neither at Newport nor at Cambridge--the Cambridge
at least of that single year--that the plot began most to thicken for
me: I figure it as a sudden stride into conditions of a sort to minister
and inspire much more, all round, that we early in 1864 migrated, as a
family, to Boston, and that I now seem to see the scene of our existence
there for a couple of years packed with drama of a finer consistency
than any I had yet tasted. We settled for the interesting time in
Ashburton Place--the "sympathetic" old house we occupied, one of a pair
of tallish brick fronts based, as to its ground floor, upon the dignity
of time-darkened granite, was lately swept away in the interest of I
know not what grander cause; and when I wish to think of such
intercourse as I have enjoyed with the good city at its closest and, as
who should say its kindest, though this comes doubtless but to saying at
its freshest, I live over again the story of that sojourn, a period
bristling, while I recover my sense of it, with an unprecedented number
of simultaneous particulars. To stick, as I can only do, to the point
from which my own young outlook worked, the things going on for me so
tremendously all at once were in the first place the last impressions of
the War, a whole social relation to it crowding upon us there as for
many reasons, all of the best, it couldn't have done elsewhere; and
then, more personally speaking, the prodigious little assurance I found
myself gathering as from one day to another that fortune had in store
some response to my deeply reserved but quite unabashed design of
becoming as "literary" as might be. It was as if, our whole new medium
of existence aiding, I had begun to see much further into the question
of how that end was gained. The vision, quickened by a wealth, a great
mixture, of new appearances, became such a throbbing affair that my
memory of the time from the spring of '64 to the autumn of '66 moves as
through an apartment hung with garlands and lights--where I have but to
breathe for an instant on the flowers again to see them flush with
colour, and but tenderly to snuff the candles to see them twinkle
afresh. Things happened, and happened repeatedly, the mere brush or
side-wind of which was the stir of life; and the fact that I see, when I
consider, how it was mostly the mere side-wind I got, doesn't draw from
the picture a shade of its virtue. I literally, and under whatever felt
restriction of my power to knock about, formed independent
relations--several; and two or three of them, as I then thought, of the
very most momentous. I may not attempt just here to go far into these,
save for the exception of the easiest to treat, which I also, by good
fortune, win back as by no means the least absorbing--the beautiful, the
entrancing presumption that I should have but to write with sufficient
difficulty and sufficient felicity to get once for all (that was the
point) into the incredibility of print. I see before me, in the rich,
the many-hued light of my room that overhung dear Ashburton Place from
our third floor, the very greenbacks, to the total value of twelve
dollars, into which I had changed the cheque representing my first
earned wage. I had earned it, I couldn't but feel, with fabulous
felicity: a circumstance so strangely mixed with the fact that literary
composition of a high order had, at that very table where the greenbacks
were spread out, quite viciously declined, and with the air of its being
also once for all, to "come" on any save its own essential terms, which
it seemed to distinguish in the most invidious manner conceivable from
mine. It was to insist through all my course on this distinction, and
sordid gain thereby never again to seem so easy as in that prime
handling of my fee. Other guerdons, of the same queer, the same often
rather greasy, complexion followed; for what had I done, to the
accompaniment of a thrill the most ineffable, an agitation that, as I
recapture it, affects me as never exceeded in all my life for fineness,
but go one beautiful morning out to Shady Hill at Cambridge and there
drink to the lees the offered cup of editorial sweetness?--none ever
again to be more delicately mixed. I had addressed in trembling hope my
first fond attempt at literary criticism to Charles Eliot Norton, who
had lately, and with the highest, brightest competence, come to the
rescue of the North American Review, submerged in a stale tradition and
gasping for life, and he had not only published it in his very next
number--the interval for me of breathless brevity--but had expressed the
liveliest further hospitality, the gage of which was thus at once his
welcome to me at home. I was to grow fond of regarding as a positive
consecration to letters that half-hour in the long library at Shady
Hill, where the winter sunshine touched serene book-shelves and arrayed
pictures, the whole embrowned composition of objects in my view, with I
knew not what golden light of promise, what assurance of things to come:
there was to be nothing exactly like it later on--the conditions of
perfect rightness for a certain fresh felicity, certain decisive
pressures of the spring, _can_ occur, it would seem, but once. This was
on the other hand the beginning of so many intentions that it mattered
little if the particular occasion was not repeated; for what did I do
again and again, through all the years, but handle in plenty what I
might have called the small change of it?
I despair, however, as I look back, of rendering the _fusions_ in that
much-mixed little time, every feature of which had something of the
quality and interest of every other, and the more salient, the more
"epoch-making"--I apply with complacency the portentous term--to drape
themselves romantically in the purple folds of the whole. I think it
must have been the sense of the various climaxes, the enjoyed, because
so long postponed, revenges of the War, that lifted the moment in the
largest embrace: the general consciousness was of such big things at
last in sight, the huge national emergence, the widening assurance,
however overdarkened, it is true, by the vast black cost of what General
Grant (no light-handed artist he!) was doing for us. He was at all
events working to an end, and something strange and immense, even like
the light of a new day rising above a definite rim, shot its rays
through the chinks of the immediate, the high-piled screen of sacrifice
behind which he wrought. I fail to seize again, to my wonder, the
particular scene of our acclamation of Lee's surrender, but I feel in
the air the exhalation of our relief, which mingled, near and far, with
the breath of the springtime itself and positively seemed to become
over the land, over the world at large in fact, an element of reviving
Nature. Sensible again are certain other sharpest vibrations then
communicated from the public consciousness: Ashburton Place resounds for
me with a wild cry, rocks as from a convulsed breast, on that early
morning of our news of Lincoln's death by murder; and, in a different
order, but also darkening the early day, there associates itself with my
cherished chamber of application the fact that of a sudden, and while we
were always and as much as ever awaiting him, Hawthorne was dead. What I
have called the fusion strikes me as indeed beyond any rendering when I
think of the peculiar assault on my private consciousness of _that_
news: I sit once more, half-dressed, late of a summer morning and in a
bedimmed light which is somehow at once that of dear old green American
shutters drawn to against openest windows and that of a moral shadow
projected as with violence--I sit on my belated bed, I say, and yield to
the pang that made me positively and loyally cry. I didn't rise early in
those days of scant ease--I now even ask myself how sometimes I rose at
all; which ungrudged license withal, I thus make out, was not less
blessedly effective in the harmony I glance at than several showier
facts. To tell at all adequately why the pang was fine would
nevertheless too closely involve my going back, as we have learned to
say, on the whole rich interpenetration. I fondly felt it in those days
invaluable that I had during certain last and otherwise rather blank
months at Newport taken in for the first time and at one straight
draught the full sweet sense of our one fine romancer's work--for sweet
it then above all seemed to me; and I remember well how, while the
process day after day drew itself admirably out, I found the actual
exquisite taste of it, the strain of the revelation, justify up to the
notch whatever had been weak in my delay. This prolonged hanging off
from true knowledge had been the more odd, so that I couldn't have
explained it, I felt, through the fact that The Wonder-Book and
Twice-Told Tales had helped to enchant our childhood; the consequence at
any rate seemed happy, since without it, very measurably, the sudden
sense of recognition would have been less uplifting a wave. The joy of
the recognition was to know at the time no lapse--was in fact through
the years never to know one, and this by some rare action of a principle
or a sentiment, I scarce know whether to call it a clinging consistency
or a singular silliness, that placed the Seven Gables, the Blithedale
Romance and the story of Donatello and Miriam (the accepted title of
which I dislike to use, not the "marble" but very particularly the human
Faun being throughout in question) somewhere on a shelf unvisited by
harsh inquiry. The feeling had perhaps at the time been marked by
presumption, by a touch of the fatuity of patronage; yet wasn't
well-nigh the best charm of a relation with the works just named in the
impulse, known from the first, somehow to stand in _between_ them and
harsh inquiry? If I had asked myself what I meant by that term, at which
freedom of appreciation, in fact of intelligence, might have looked
askance, I hope I should have found a sufficient answer in the mere plea
of a sort of _betise_ of tenderness. I recall how once, in the air of
Rome at a time ever so long subsequent, a friend and countryman now no
more, who had spent most of his life in Italy and who remains for me,
with his accomplishment, his distinction, his extraordinary play of mind
and his too early and too tragic death, the clearest case of
"cosmopolitan culture" I was to have known, exclaimed with surprise on
my happening to speak as from an ancient fondness for Hawthorne's
treatment of the Roman scene: "Why, can you read _that_ thing, and
_here_?--to me it means nothing at all!" I remember well that under the
breath of this disallowance of any possibility of association, and quite
most of such a one as I had from far back positively cultivated, the
gentle perforated book tumbled before me from its shelf very much as old
Polonius, at the thrust of Hamlet's sword, must have collapsed behind
the pictured arras. Of course I might have picked it up and brushed it
off, but I seem to feel again that I didn't so much as want to, lost as
I could only have been in the sense that the note of harsh inquiry, or
in other words of the very stroke I had anciently wished to avert,
_there_ fell straight upon my ear. It represented everything I had so
early known we must have none of; though there was interest galore at
the same time (as there almost always is in lively oppositions of
sensibility, with the sharpness of each, its special exclusions, well
exhibited), in an "American" measure that could so reject our beautiful
genius and in a Roman, as it were, that could so little see he had done
anything for Rome. H. B. Brewster in truth, literary master of three
tongues at least, was scarce American at all; homely superstitions had
no hold on him; he was French, Italian, above all perhaps German; and
there would have been small use, even had there been any importance, in
my trying to tell him for instance why it had particularly been, in the
gentle time, that I had settled once for all to take our author's case
as simply exquisite and not budge from that taking. Which indeed scarce
bears telling now, with matters of relative (if _but_ of relative!)
urgence on hand--consisting as it mainly did in the fact that his work
was all charged with a _tone_, a full and rare tone of prose, and that
this made for it an extraordinary value in an air in which absolutely
nobody's else was or has shown since any aptitude for being. And the
tone had been, in its beauty--for me at least--ever so appreciably
American; which proved to what a use American matter could be put by an
American hand: a consummation involving, it appeared, the happiest
moral. For the moral was that an American could be an artist, one of the
finest, without "going outside" about it, as I liked to say; quite in
fact as if Hawthorne had become one just by being American _enough_, by
the felicity of how the artist in him missed nothing, suspected nothing,
that the ambient air didn't affect him as containing. Thus he was at
once so clear and so entire--clear without thinness, for he might have
seemed underfed, it was his danger; and entire without heterogeneity,
which might, with less luck and to the discredit of our sufficing
manners, have had to be his help. These remarks, as I say, were those I
couldn't, or at any rate didn't, make to my Roman critic; if only
because I was so held by the other case he offered me--that of a culture
for which, in the dense medium around us, Miriam and Donatello and
their friends hadn't the virtue that shines or pushes through. I tried
to feel that this _constatation_ left me musing--and perhaps in truth it
did; though doubtless if my attachment to the arranger of those images
had involved, to repeat, my not budging, my meditation, whatever it was,
respected that condition.
It has renewed itself, however, but too much on this spot, and the scene
viewed from Ashburton Place claims at the best more filling in than I
can give it. Any illustration of anything worth illustrating has beauty,
to my vision, largely by its developments; and developments, alas, are
the whole flowering of the plant, while what really meets such attention
as one may hope to beguile is at the best but a plucked and tossed sprig
or two. That my elder brother was during these months away with
Professor Agassiz, a member of the party recruited by that great
naturalist for a prolonged exploration of Brazil, is one of the few
blooms, I see, that I must content myself with detaching--the main sense
of it being for myself, no doubt, that his absence (and he had never
been at anything like such a distance from us,) left me the more
exposed, and thereby the more responsive, to contact with impressions
that had to learn to suffice for me in their uncorrected, when not still
more in their inspiringly emphasised, state. The main sense for William
himself is recorded in a series of letters from him addressed to us at
home and for which, against my hope, these pages succeed in affording no
space--they are to have ampler presentation; but the arrival of which at
irregular intervals for the greater part of a year comes back to me as
perhaps a fuller enrichment of my consciousness than it owed for the
time to any other single source. We all still hung so together that this
replete organ could yet go on helping itself, with whatever awkwardness,
from the conception or projection of others of a like _general_ strain,
such as those of one's brothers might appear; thanks to which constant
hum of borrowed experience, in addition to the quicker play of whatever
could pass as more honestly earned, my stage of life knew no drop of the
curtain. I literally came and went, I had never practised such coming
and going; I went in particular, during summer weeks, and even if
carrying my general difficulty with me, to the White Mountains of New
Hampshire, with some repetition, and again and again back to Newport, on
visits to John La Farge and to the Edmund Tweedys (_their_ house almost
a second summer home to us;) to say nothing of winter attempts, a little
weak, but still more or less achieved, upon New York--which city was
rapidly taking on the capital quality, the large worldly sense that
dear old London and dear old Paris, with other matters in hand for them
as time went on, the time they were "biding" for me, indulgently didn't
grudge it. The matters they had in hand wandered indeed as stray vague
airs across to us--this I think I have noted; but Boston itself could
easily rule, in default even of New York, when to "go," in particular,
was an act of such easy virtue. To go from Ashburton Place was to go
verily round the corner not less than further afield; to go to the
Athenaeum, to the Museum, to a certain door of importances, in fact of
immensities, defiant of vulgar notation, in Charles Street, at the
opposite end from Beacon. The fruit of these mixed proceedings I found
abundant at the time, and I think quite inveterately sweet, but to
gather it in again now--by which I mean set it forth as a banquet for
imaginations already provided--would be to presume too far; not least
indeed even on my own cultivated art of exhibition. The fruit of golden
youth is all and always golden--it touches to gold what it gathers; this
was so the essence of the case that in the first place everything was in
some degree an adventure, and in the second any differences of degree
guiding my selection would be imperceptible at this end of time to the
cold eye of criticism. Not least moreover in the third place the very
terms would fail, under whatever ingenuity, for my really justifying so
bland an account of the period at large. Do I speak of it as a thumping
sum but to show it in the small change, the handful of separate copper
and silver coin, the scattered occasions reduced to their individual
cash value, that, spread upon the table as a treasure of reminiscence,
might only excite derision? _Why_ was "staying at Newport" so absurdly,
insistently romantic, romantic out of all proportion, as we say--why
unless I can truly tell in proportion to what it became so? It consisted
often in my "sitting" to John La Farge, within his own precincts and in
the open air of attenuated summer days, and lounging thereby just
passive to the surge of culture that broke upon me in waves the most
desultory and disjointed, it was true, but to an absolute effect of
unceasingly scented spray. Particular hours and old (that is young!)
ineffable reactions come back to me; it's like putting one's ear,
doctor-fashion, to the breast of time--or say as the subtle savage puts
his to the ground--and catching at its start some vibratory hum that has
been going on more or less for the fifty years since. Newport, the
barren isle of our return from Europe, had thus become--and at no such
great expense if the shock of public affairs, everywhere making
interests start to their feet, be counted out of the process--a source
of fifty suggestions to me; which it would have been much less,
however, I hasten to add, if the call of La Farge hadn't worked in with
our other most standing attraction, and this in turn hadn't practically
been part of the positive affluence of certain elements of spectacle.
Why again I should have been able to see the pictorial so freely
suggested, that pictorial which was ever for me the dramatic, the
social, the effectively human aspect, would be doubtless a baffling
inquiry in presence of the queer and dear old phenomena themselves;
those that, taken together, may be described at the best, I suppose,
rather as a much-mixed grope or halting struggle, call it even a
competitive scramble, toward the larger, the ideal elegance, the
traditional forms of good society in possession, than as a presentation
of great noble assurances.
Spectacle in any case broke out, spectacle accumulated, by our then
measure, many thicknesses deep, flushing in the sovereign light, as one
felt it, of the waning Rhode Island afternoons of August and September
with the most "evolved" material civilisation our American world could
then show; the vividest note of this in those years, unconscious, even
to an artless innocence, of the wider wings still to spread, being the
long daily _corso_ or processional drive (with cavaliers and amazons not
otherwise than conveniently intermixed,) which, with a different
direction for different days, offered doubtless as good an example of
that gregarious exercise at any cost distinguishing "fashionable life"
as was anywhere on the globe to be observed. The price paid for the
sticking together was what emphasised, I mean, the wondrous resolve to
stick, however scant and narrow and unadjusted for processional effect
the various fields of evolution. The variety moreover was short, just as
the incongruities of composition in the yearning array were marked; but
the tender grace of old sunset hours, the happier breadth of old shining
sands under favour of friendly tides, the glitter _quand meme_ of
"caparisoned" animals, appointed vehicles and approved charioteers, to
say nothing of the other and more freely exchanged and interrelated
brightnesses then at play (in the softer ease of women, the more
moustachio'd swagger of men, the braver bonhomie of the social aspect at
large), melted together for fond fancy into a tone, a rhythm, a
representational virtue charged, as to the amenities, with authority.
The amenities thus sought their occasion to multiply even to the sound
of far cannonades, and I well remember at once reflecting, in such
maturity as I could muster, that the luckier half of a nation able to
carry a huge war-burden without sacrifice of amusement might well
overcome the fraction that had to feed but on shrinkage and privation;
at the same time that the so sad and handsome face of the most frequent
of our hostesses, Mary Temple the elder as she had been, now the apt
image of a stern priestess of the public altar, was to leave with me for
the years to come the grand expression and tragic irony of its revulsion
from those who, offering us some high entertainment during days of
particular tension, could fiddle, as she scathingly said, while Rome was
burning. Blest again the state of youth which could appreciate that
admirable look and preserve it for illustration of one of the forms of
ancient piety lost to us, and yet at the same time stow away as part of
the poetry of the general drama just the luxury and pride, overhanging
summer seas and projecting into summer nights great shafts of light and
sound, that prompted the noble scorn. The "round of pleasure" all this
with a grand good conscience of course--for it always in the like case
has that, had it at least when arranging performances, dramatic and
musical, at ever so much a ticket, under the advantage of rare amateur
talent, in aid of the great Sanitary Commission that walked in the
footsteps and renewed in various forms the example of Florence
Nightingale; these exhibitions taking place indeed more particularly in
the tributary cities, New York, Philadelphia, Boston (we were then shut
up to those,) but with the shining stars marked for triumphant
appearance announced in advance on the Newport scene and glittering
there as beauties, as elegantes, as vocalists, as heroines of European
legend. Hadn't there broken upon us, under public stress, a refluent
wave from Paris, the mid-Empire Paris of the highest pitch, which was to
raise our social water-mark to a point unprecedented and there
strikingly leave it? We were learning new lessons in every branch--that
was the sense of the so immensely quickened general pace; and though my
examples may seem rather spectral I like to believe this bigger
breathing of the freshness of the future to have been what the
collective rumble and shimmer of the whole business most meant. It
exhaled an artless confidence which yet momently increased; it had no
great sense of a direction, but gratefully took any of which the least
hint was given, gathering up by the way and after the fact whatever
account of itself a vague voice might strike off. There were times when
the account of itself as flooding Lawton's Valley for afternoon tea was
doubtless what it would most comfortably have welcomed--Lawton's Valley,
at a good drive's length from the seaward quarter, being the scene of
villeggiatura of the Boston muse, as it were, and the Boston muse
having in those after all battle-haunted seasons an authority and a
finish of accent beyond any other Tyrtaean strain. The New York and
perhaps still more the Philadelphia of the time fumbled more helplessly,
even if aspiringly, with the Boston evidences in general, I think, than
they were to be reduced to doing later on; and by the happy pretext,
certainly, that these superior signs had then a bravery they were not
perhaps on their own side indefinitely to keep up.
They rustled, with the other leafage of the umbrageous grove, in the
summer airs that hung over the long tea-tables; afternoon tea was itself
but a new and romantic possibility, with the lesson of it gratefully
learnt at hands that dispensed, with the tea and sugar and in the
charmingest voice perhaps then to be heard among us, a tone of talk that
New York took for exotic and inimitable, yet all the more felt "good,"
much better than it might if left _all_ to itself, for thus flocking in
every sort of conveyance to listen to. The Valley was deep, winding and
pastoral--or at least looks so now to my attached vision; the infancy of
a finer self-consciousness seemed cradled there; the inconsequent
vehicles fraternised, the dim, the more dejected, with the burnished and
upstanding; so that I may really perhaps take most for the note of the
hour the first tremor of the sense on the part of fashion that, if it
could, as it already more or less suspected, get its thinking and
reading and writing, almost everything in fact but its arithmetic, a bit
dingily, but just by that sign cleverly, done for it, so occasion seemed
easy, after all, for a nearer view, without responsibility, of the odd
performers of the service. When these last were not literally all
Bostonians they were New Yorkers who might have been mistaken for
such--never indeed by Bostonians themselves, but only by other New
Yorkers, the rich and guileless; so the effect as of a vague tribute to
culture the most authentic (if I speak not too portentously) was left
over for the aftertaste of simple and subtle alike. Those were
comparatively thin seasons, I recognise, in the so ample career of Mrs.
Howe, mistress of the Valley and wife of the eminent, the militant
Phil-Hellene, Dr. S. G. of the honoured name, who reached back to the
Byronic time and had dedicated his own later to still more distinguished
liberating work on behalf of deaf mutes; for if she was thus the most
attuned of interlocutors, most urbane of disputants, most insidious of
wits, even before her gathered fame as Julia Ward and the established
fortune of her elegant Battle-Hymn, she was perhaps to have served the
State scarce better through final organised activities and shining
optimisms and great lucky lyric hits than by having in her vale of
heterogeneous hospitality undermined the blank assurance of her thicker
contingent--after all too but to an _amusing_ vague unrest--and thereby
scattered the first rare seed of new assimilations. I am moved to add
that, by the old terminology, the Avenue might have been figured, in the
connection, as descending into the glen to meet the Point--which, save
for a very small number of the rarest representatives of the latter, it
could meet nowhere else. The difficulty was that of an encounter of
birds and fishes; the two tribes were native to elements as opposed as
air and water, the Avenue essentially nothing if not exalted on wheels
or otherwise expertly mounted, and the Point hopelessly pedestrian and
unequipped with stables, so that the very levels at which they
materially moved were but upper and lower, dreadfully lower, parallels.
And indeed the way to see the Point--which, without playing on the word,
naturally became our highest law--was at the Point, where it appeared to
much higher advantage than in its trudge through the purple haze or
golden dust of supercilious parades. Of the advantage to which it did so
appear, off in its own more languorous climate and on its own ground, we
fairly cultivated a conviction, rejoicing by that aid very much as in
certain old French towns it was possible to distinguish invidiously the
Ville from the Cite. The Point was our _cite_, the primal aboriginal
Newport--which, striking us on a first acquaintance as not other than
dilapidated, might well have been "restored" quite as M. Viollet-le-Duc
was even then restoring Carcassonne; and this all the more because our
elder Newport, the only seat of history, had a dismantled grassy fort or
archaic citadel that dozed over the waterside and that might (though I
do take the vision, at close quarters, for horrible) be smartly waked
up. The waterside, which was that of the inner bay, the ample reach
toward Providence, so much more susceptible of quality than the
extravagant open sea, the "old houses," the old elms, the old Quaker
faces at the small-paned old windows, the appointedness of the scene for
the literary and artistic people, who, by our fond constructive theory,
lodged and boarded with the Quakers, always thrifty these, for the sake
of all the sweetness and quaintness, for the sake above all somehow of
_our_ hungry felicity of view, by which I mean mine and that of a trusty
friend or two, T. S. Perry in especial--those attributes, meeting a
want, as the phrase is, of the decent imagination, made us perhaps
overdramatise the sphere of the clever people, but made them at least
also, when they unmistakably hovered, affect us as truly the finest
touches in the picture. For they were in their way ironic about the
rest, and that was a tremendous lift in face of an Avenue that not only,
as one could see at a glance, had no irony, but hadn't yet risen, the
magazines and the Point aiding, to so much as a suspicion of the effect,
familiar to later generations, with which the word can conversationally
come in. Oh the old clever people, with their difference of shade from
that of the clever old ones--some few of these to have been discerned,
no doubt, as of Avenue position: I read back into their various
presences I know not what queer little functional value the exercise and
privilege of which, uncontested, uncontrasted (save with the absence of
everything but stables) represents a felicity for the individual that is
lost to our age. It could count as functional then, it could count as
felicitous, to have been reabsorbed into Boston, or to propose to absorb
even, for the first time, New York, under cover of the mantle, the old
artistic draped cloak, that had almost in each case trailed round in
Florence, in Rome, in Venice, in conversations with Landor, in pencilled
commemoration, a little niggling possibly but withal so sincere, of the
"haunts" of Dante, in a general claim of having known the Brownings (ah
"the Brownings" of those days!) in a disposition to arrange readings of
these and the most oddly associated other poets about the great bleak
parlours of the hotels. I despair, however, of any really right register
of the art with which the cite ingratiated itself with me in this
character of a vivid missionary Bohemia; I met it of course more than
half way, as I met everything in the faintest degree ingratiating, even
suggesting to it with an art of my own that it should become so--though
in this matter I rather missed, I fear, a happy conversion, as if the
authenticity were there but my sort of personal dash too absent.
I appear to myself none the less to have had dash for approaches to a
confidence more largely seated; since I recall how, having commenced
critic under Charles Norton's weighty protection, I was to find myself,
on all but the very morrow, invited to the high glory, as I felt it, of
aiding to launch, though on the obscurer side of the enterprise, a
weekly journal which, putting forth its first leaves in the summer of
'65 and under the highest auspices, was soon to enjoy a fortune and
achieve an authority and a dignity of which neither newspaper nor
critical review among us had hitherto so much as hinted the possibility.
The New York Nation had from the first, to the enlivening of several
persons consciously and ruefully astray in our desert, made no secret of
a literary leaning; and indeed its few foremost months shine most for
me in the light of their bestowal of one of the longest and happiest
friendships of my life, a relation with Edwin Lawrence Godkin, the
Nation incarnate as he was to become, which bore fruit of affection for
years after it had ceased to involve the comparatively poorer exercise.
Godkin's paper, Godkin's occasional presence and interesting history and
vivid ability and, above all, admirably aggressive and ironic editorial
humour, of a quality and authority new in the air of a journalism that
had meant for the most part the heavy hand alone, these things, with the
sudden sweet discovery that I might for my own part acceptedly stammer a
style, are so many shades and shifting tints in the positive historic
iridescence that flings itself for my memory, as I have noted, over the
"period" of Ashburton Place. Wherever I dip, again, I pull out a plum
from under the tooth of time--this at least so to my own rapt sense that
had I more space I might pull both freely and at a venture. The
strongest savour of the feast--with the fumes of a feast it comes
back--was, I need scarce once more insist, the very taste of the War as
ending and ended; through which blessing, more and more, the quantity of
military life or at least the images of military experience seemed all
about us, quite paradoxically, to grow greater. This I take to have been
a result, first of the impending, and then of the effective, break-up
of the vast veteran Army, swamping much of the scene as with the flow of
a monster tide and bringing literally home to us, in bronzed, matured
faces and even more in bronzed, matured characters, above all in the
absolutely acquired and stored resource of overwhelming reference,
reference usually of most substance the less it was immediately
explicit, the more in fact it was faded and jaded to indifference, what
was meant by having patiently served. The very smell of having so served
was somehow, at least to my super-sensitive nostril, in the larger and
cooler air, where it might have been an emanation, the most masculine,
the most communicative as to associated far-off things (according to the
nature, ever, of elements vaguely exhaled), from the operation of the
general huge gesture of relief--from worn toggery put off, from old
army-cloth and other fittings at a discount, from swordbelts and
buckles, from a myriad saturated articles now not even lying about but
brushed away with an effect upon the passing breeze and all relegated to
the dim state of some mere theoretic commemorative panoply that was
never in the event to be objectively disposed. The generalisation grew
richly or, as it were, quite adorably familiar, that life was ever so
handsomely reinforced, and manners, not to say manner at large,
refreshed, and personal aspects and types accented, and categories
multiplied (no category, for the dreaming painter of things, could our
scene afford not to grab at on the chance), just by the fact of the
discharge upon society of such an amount of out-of-the-way experience,
as it might roughly be termed--such a quantity and variety of possession
and assimilation of unprecedented history. It had been unprecedented at
least among ourselves, we had had it in our own highly original
conditions--or "they," to be more exact, had had it admirably in theirs;
and I think I was never to know a case in which his having been directly
touched by it, or, in a word, having consistently "soldiered," learnt
all about it and exhausted it, wasn't to count all the while on behalf
of the happy man for one's own individual impression or attention; call
it again, as everything came back to that, one's own need to interpret.
The discharge upon "society" is moreover what I especially mean; it
being the sense of how society in _our_ image of the word was taking it
all in that I was most concerned with; plenty of other images figured of
course for other entertainers of such. The world immediately roundabout
us at any rate bristled with more of the young, or the younger, cases I
speak of, cases of "things seen" and felt, and a delectable difference
in the man thereby made imputable, than I could begin here to name even
had I kept the record. I think I fairly cultivated the perceiving of it
all, so that nothing of it, under some face or other, shouldn't brush my
sense and add to my impression; yet my point is more particularly that
the body social itself was for the time so permeated, in the light I
glance at, that it became to its own consciousness more interesting. As
so many existent parts of it, however unstoried yet, to their minor
credit, various thrilled persons could inhale the interest to their
fullest capacity and feel that they too had been pushed forward--and
were even to find themselves by so much the more pushable yet.
I resort thus to the lift and the push as the most expressive figures
for that immensely _remonte_ state which coincided for us all with the
great disconcerting irony of the hour, the unforgettable death of
Lincoln. I think of the springtime of '65 as it breathed through Boston
streets--my remembrance of all those days is a matter, strangely enough,
of the out-of-door vision, of one's constantly dropping down from Beacon
Hill, to the brave edge of which we clung, for appreciation of those
premonitory gusts of April that one felt most perhaps where Park Street
Church stood dominant, where the mouth of the Common itself uttered
promises, more signs and portents than one could count, more prodigies
than one could keep apart, and where further strange matters seemed to
charge up out of the lower districts and of the "business world,"
generative as never before of news. The streets were restless, the
meeting of the seasons couldn't but be inordinately so, and one's own
poor pulses matched--at the supreme pitch of that fusion, for instance,
which condensed itself to blackness roundabout the dawn of April 15th: I
was fairly to go in shame of its being my birthday. These would have
been the hours of the streets if none others had been--when the huge
general gasp filled them like a great earth-shudder and people's eyes
met people's eyes without the vulgarity of speech. Even this was, all so
strangely, part of the lift and the swell, as tragedy has but to be of a
pure enough strain and a high enough connection to sow with its dark
hand the seed of greater life. The collective sense of what had occurred
was of a sadness too noble not somehow to inspire, and it was truly in
the air that, whatever we had as a nation produced or failed to produce,
we could at least gather round this perfection of a classic woe. True
enough, as we were to see, the immediate harvest of our loss was almost
too ugly to be borne--for nothing more sharply comes back to me than the
tune to which the "esthetic sense," if one glanced but from _that_ high
window (which was after all one of many too), recoiled in dismay from
the sight of Mr. Andrew Johnson perched on the stricken scene. We had
given ourselves a figure-head, and the figure-head sat there in its
habit as it lived, and we were to have it in our eyes for three or four
years and to ask ourselves in horror what monstrous thing we had done. I
speak but of aspects, those aspects which, under a certain turn of them,
may be all but everything; gathered together they become a symbol of
what is behind, and it was open to us to waver at shop-windows exposing
the new photograph, exposing, that is, _the_ photograph, and ask
ourselves what we had been guilty of as a people, when all was said, to
deserve the infliction of that form. It was vain to say that we had
deliberately invoked the "common" in authority and must drink the wine
we had drawn. No countenance, no salience of aspect nor composed symbol,
could superficially have referred itself less than Lincoln's
mould-smashing mask to any mere matter-of-course type of propriety; but
his admirable unrelated head had itself revealed a type--as if by the
very fact that what made in it for roughness of kind looked out only
less than what made in it for splendid final stamp, in other words for
commanding Style. The result thus determined had been precious for
representation, and above all for fine suggestional function, in a
degree that left behind every medal we had ever played at striking;
whereas before the image now substituted representation veiled her head
in silence and the element of the suggested was exactly the direst.
What, however, on the further view, was to be more refreshing than to
find that there were excesses of native habit which truly we couldn't
bear? so that it was for the next two or three years fairly sustaining
to consider that, let the reasons publicly given for the impeachment of
the official in question be any that would serve, the grand inward logic
or mystic law had been that we really couldn't go on offering each other
before the nations the consciousness of such a presence. That was at any
rate the style of reflection to which the humiliating case reduced me;
just this withal now especially working, I feel, into that image of our
generally quickened activity of spirit, our having by the turn of events
more ideas to apply and even to play with, that I have tried to throw
off. Everything I recover, I again risk repeating, fits into the vast
miscellany--the detail of which I may well seem, however, too poorly to
have handled.
Let it serve then for a scrap of detail that the appearance of William's
further fortune enjoyed thereabouts a grasp of my attention scarce
menaced even by the call on that faculty of such appearances of my own
as I had naturally in some degree also to take for graces of the
banquet. I associate the sense of his being, in a great cause, far away
on the billow with that clearance of the air through the tremendous
draught, from sea to sea, of the Northern triumph, which seemed to make
a good-natured infinitude of room for all the individual interests and
personal lives that might help the pot to bubble--if the expression be
not too mean for the size of our confidence; that the cause on which the
Agassiz expedition to South America embarked _was_ of the greatest being
happily a presumption altogether within my scope. It reawoke the mild
divinatory rage with which I had followed, with so little to show for
it, the military fortune of my younger brothers--feeding the gentle
passion indeed, it must be added, thanks to the letter-writing grace of
which the case had now the benefit, with report and picture of a
vividness greater than any ever to be shed from a like source upon our
waiting circle. Everything of the kind, for me, was company; but I
dwelt, for that matter and as I put it all together, in company so
constant and so enchanting that this amounted to moving, in whatever
direction, with the mass--more and more aware as I was of the "fun" (to
express it grossly) of living by my imagination and thereby finding that
company, in countless different forms, could only swarm about me.
Seeing further into the figurable world _made_ company of persons and
places, objects and subjects alike: it gave them all without exception
chances to be somehow or other interesting, and the imaginative ply of
finding interest once taken (I think I had by that time got much beyond
looking for it), the whole conspiracy of aspects danced round me in a
ring. It formed, by my present vision of it, a shining escort to one's
possibly often hampered or mystified, but never long stayed and
absolutely never wasted, steps; it hung about, after the fashion of
winter evening adumbrations just outside the reach of the lamplight,
while one sat writing, reading, listening, watching--perhaps even again,
incurably, but dawdling and gaping; and most of all doubtless, if it
supplied with colour people and things often by themselves, I dare say,
neutral enough, how it painted thick, how it fairly smothered, any
surface that did it the turn of showing positive and intrinsic life! Ah
the things and the people, the hours and scenes and circumstances, the
_inenarrables_ occasions and relations, that I might still present in
its light if I would, and with the enormous advantage now (for this I
should unblushingly claim), of being able to mark for present irony or
pity or wonder, or just for a better intelligence, or again for the high
humour or extreme strangeness of the thing, the rare indebtedness,
calculated by the long run, in which it could leave particular cases!
This necessity I was under that everything should be interesting--for
fear of the collapse otherwise of one's sustaining intention--would have
confessed doubtless to a closest connection, of all the connections,
with the small inkpot in which I seemed at last definitely destined to
dip to the exclusion of any stream more Pactolean: a modest manner of
saying that difficulty and slowness of composition were clearly by this
time not in the least appointed to blight me, however inveterate they
were likely to prove; that production, such as it was, floundered on in
spite of them; and that, to put it frankly, if I enjoyed as much company
as I have said no small part of it was of my very own earning. The
freshness of first creations--since we are exalted, in art, to these
arrogant expressions--never fails, I take it, to beguile the creator, in
default of any other victim, even to the last extravagance; so that what
happened was that one found all the swarm of one's intentions, one's
projected images, quite "good enough" to mix with the rest of one's
society, setting up with it terms of interpenetration, an admirable
commerce of borrowing and lending, taking and giving, not to say
stealing and keeping. Did it verily _all_, this freshness of felt
contact, of curiosity and wonder, come back perhaps to certain small and
relatively ridiculous achievements of "production" as aforesaid?--ridiculous
causes, I mean, of such prodigious effects. I am divided between the
shame on the one hand of claiming for them, these concocted "short
stories," that they played so great a part, and a downright admiring
tenderness on the other for their holding up their stiff little heads in
such a bustle of life and traffic of affairs. I of course really and
truly cared for them, as we say, more than for aught else
whatever--cared for them with that kind of care, infatuated though it
may seem, that makes it bliss for the fond votary never to so much as
speak of the loved object, makes it a refinement of piety to perform his
rites under cover of a perfect freedom of mind as to everything _but_
them. These secrets of the imaginative life were in fact more various
than I may dream of trying to tell; they referred to actual concretions
of existence as well as to the supposititious; the joy of life indeed,
drawbacks and all, was just in the constant quick flit of association,
to and fro, and through a hundred open doors, between the two great
chambers (if it be not absurd, or even base, to separate them) of direct
and indirect experience. If it is of the great comprehensive _fusion_
that I speak as the richest note of all those hours, what could truly
have been more in the sense of it than exactly such a perfect muddle of
pleasure for instance as my having (and, as I seem to remember, at his
positive invitation) addressed the most presuming as yet of my fictional
bids to my distinguished friend of a virtual lifetime, as he was to
become, William Dean Howells, whom I rejoice to name here and who had
shortly before returned from a considerable term of exile in Venice and
was in the act of taking all but complete charge of the Boston
"Atlantic"? The confusion was, to be plain, of more things than can hope
to go into my picture with any effect of keeping distinct there--the
felt felicity, literally, in my performance, the felt ecstasy, the still
greater, in my receipt of Howells's message; and then, naturally, most
of all, the at once to be recorded blest violence in the break upon my
consciousness of his glittering response after perusal.
There was still more in it all than that, however--which is the point of
my mild demonstration; I associate the passage, to press closer, with a
long summer, from May to November, spent at the then rural retreat of
Swampscott, forty minutes by train northward from Boston, and that scene
of fermentation, in its turn, I invest with unspeakable memories. It was
the summer of '66 and of the campaign of Sadowa across the sea--we had
by that time got sufficiently away from our own campaigns to take some
notice of those of other combatants, on which we bestowed in fact, I
think, the highest competence of attention then anywhere at play; a
sympathetic sense that bore us even over to the Franco-German war four
years later and helped us to know what we meant when we "felt strongly"
about it. No strength of feeling indeed of which the vibration had
remained to us from the other time could have been greater than our
woe-stricken vision of the plight of France under the portent of Sedan;
I had been back to that country and some of its neighbourhoods for some
fifteen months during the previous interval, and I recover again no
share in a great collective pang more vividly than our particular
appalled state, that of a whole company of us, while we gaped out at the
cry of reiterated bulletins from the shade of an August verandah, and
then again from amid boskages of more immediate consolation, during the
Saratoga and the Newport seasons of 1870. I had happened to repair to
Saratoga, of all inconsequent places, on my return from the Paris and
the London of the weeks immediately preceding the war, and though it was
not there that the worst sound of the first crash reached us, I feel
around me still all the air of our dismay--which was, in the queerest
way in the world, that of something so alien mixed, to the increase of
horror, with something so cherished: the great hot glare of vulgarity of
the aligned hotels of the place and period drenching with its crude
light the apparent collapse of everything we had supposed most massive.
Which forward stretch on the part of this chronicle represents, I
recognise, the practice of the discursive well-nigh overmastering its
principle--or would do so, rather, weren't it that the fitful and the
flickering, the extravagant advance and the corrective retreat from it,
the law and the lovely art of foreshortening, have had here throughout
most to serve me. It is under countenance of that law that I still grasp
my capricious clue, making a jump for the moment over two or three years
and brushing aside by the way quite numberless appeals, claims upon
tenderness of memory not less than pleas for charm of interest, against
which I must steel myself, even though I account this rank disloyalty to
each. There is no quarter to which I have inclined in my brief recovery
of the high tide of impression flooding the "period" of Ashburton Place
that might not have drawn me on and on; so that I confess I feel myself
here drag my mantle, right and left, from the clutch of suppliant
hands--voluminous as it may doubtless yet appear in spite of my sense of
its raggedness. Wrapped in tatters it is therefore that, with three or
four of William's letters of '67 and '68 kept before me, I make my
stride, not only for the sake of what I still regard as their admirable
interest, but for the way they bring back again to me everything they
figured at the time, every flame of faith they rekindled, every gage
they held out for the future. Present for me are still others than these
in particular, which I keep over for another introducing, but even the
pages I here preserve overflow with connections--so many that,
extravagant as it may sound, I have to make an effort to breast them.
These are with a hundred matters of our then actual life--little as that
virtue may perhaps show on their face; but above all just with the huge
small fact that the writer was by the blest description "in Europe," and
that this had verily still its way of meaning for me more than aught
else beside. For what sprang in especial from his situation was the
proof, with its positive air, that a like, when all was said, might
become again one's own; that such luck wasn't going to be for evermore
perversely out of the question with us, and that in fine I too was
already in a manner transported by the intimacy with which I partook of
his having been. I shouldn't have overstated it, I think, in saying that
I really preferred such a form of experience (of this particular one) to
the simpler--given most of our current conditions; there was somehow a
greater richness, a larger accession of knowledge, vision, life,
whatever one might have called it, in "having him there," as we said,
and in my individually getting the good of this with the peculiar degree
of ease that reinforced the general quest of a special sufficiency of
that boon to which I was during those years rigidly, and yet on the
whole by no means abjectly, reduced.
Our parents had in the autumn of '66 settled, virtually for the rest of
their days, at Cambridge, and William had concomitantly with this, that
is from soon after his return from Brazil, entered upon a season of
study at the Harvard Medical School, then keeping its terms in Boston
and under the wide wing of--as one supposed it, or as I at any rate
did--the Massachusetts General Hospital. I have to disengage my mantle
here with a force in which I invite my reader to believe--for I push
through a thicket of memories in which the thousand-fingered branches
arrestingly catch; otherwise I should surrender, and with a passionate
sense of the logic in it, to that long and crowded Swampscott summer at
which its graceless name has already failed to keep me from having
glanced. The place, smothered in a dense prose of prosperity now, may
have been even in those days, by any high measure, a weak enough apology
for an offered breast of Nature: nevertheless it ministered to me as
the only "American country" save the silky Newport fringes with which my
growing imagination, not to mention my specious energy, had met at all
continuous occasion to play--so that I should have but to let myself go
a little, as I say, to sit up to my neck again in the warm depth of its
deposit. Out of this I should lift great handfuls of variety of vision;
it was to have been in its way too a season of coming and going, and
with its main mark, I make out, that it somehow absurdly flowered, first
and last, into some intenser example of every sort of intimation up to
then vouchsafed me, whether by the inward or the outward life. I think
of it thus as a big bouquet of blooms the most mixed--yet from which it
is to the point just here to detach the sole reminiscence, coloured to a
shade I may not reproduce, of a day's excursion to see my brother up at
the Hospital. Had I not now been warned off too many of the prime images
brought, for their confusion, to the final proof, I should almost risk
ever so briefly "evoking" the impression this mere snatch was to leave
with me, the picture as of sublime activities and prodigious
possibilities, of genial communities of consideration and acquisition,
all in a great bright porticoed and gardened setting, that was to hang
itself in my crazy cabinet for as long as the light of the hour might
allow. I put my hand on the piece still--in its now so deeply obscured
corner; though the true point of my reference would seem to be in the
fact that if William studied medicine long enough to qualify and to take
his degree (so as to have become as roundedly "scientific" as possible)
he was yet immediately afterwards, by one of those quick shifts of the
scene with which we were familiar, beginning philosophic study in
Germany and again writing home letters of an interest that could be but
re-emphasised by our having him planted out as a reflector of
impressions where impressions were both strong and as different as
possible from those that more directly beat upon us. I myself could do
well enough with these last, I may parenthesise, so long as none others
were in question; but that complacency shrank just in proportion as we
were reached by the report of difference and of the foreign note, the
report particularly favourable--which was indeed what any and every
report perforce appeared to me. William's, from anywhere, had ever an
authority for me that attended none others; even if this be not the
place for more than a word of light on the apparent disconnection of his
actual course. It comes back to me that the purpose of practising
medicine had at no season been flagrant in him, and he was in fact, his
hospital connection once over, never to practise for a day. He was on
the other hand to remain grateful for his intimate experience of the
laboratory and the clinic, and I was as constantly to feel that the
varieties of his application had been as little wasted for him as those
of my vagueness had really been for me. His months at Dresden and his
winter in Berlin were of a new variety--this last even with that tinge
of the old in it which came from his sharing quarters with T. S. Perry,
who, his four years at Harvard ended and his ensuing grand tour of
Europe, as then comprehensively carried out, performed, was giving the
Universities of Berlin and Paris a highly competent attention. To
whatever else of method may have underlain the apparently lawless strain
of our sequences I should add the action of a sharp lapse of health on
my brother's part which the tension of a year at the dissecting table
seemed to have done much to determine; as well as the fond fact that
Europe was again from that crisis forth to take its place for us as a
standing remedy, a regular mitigation of all suffered, or at least of
all wrong, stress. Of which remarks but a couple of letters addressed to
myself, I have to recognise, form here the occasion; these only, in that
order, have survived the accidents of time, as I the more regret that I
have in my mind's eye still much of the matter of certain others;
notably of one from Paris (on his way further) recounting a pair of
evenings at the theatre, first for the younger Dumas and Les Idees de
Madame Aubray, with Pasca and Delaporte, this latter of an exquisite
truth to him, and then for something of the Palais Royal with _four_
comedians, as he emphatically noted, who were each, wonderful to say,
"de la force of Warren of the Boston Museum." He spent the summer of '67
partly in Dresden and partly at Bad-Teplitz in Bohemia, where he had
been recommended the waters; he was to return for these again after a
few months and was also to seek treatment by hydropathy at the
establishment of Divonne, in the French back-country of Lake Leman,
where a drawing sent home in a letter, and which I do my best to
reproduce, very comically represents him as surrounded by the listening
fair. I remember supposing even his Dresden of the empty weeks to
bristle with precious images and every form of local character--this a
little perhaps because of his treating us first of all to a pair of
whimsical crayoned views of certain animated housetops seen from his
window. It is the old names in the old letters, however, that now always
most rewrite themselves to my eyes in colour--shades alas that defy
plain notation, and if the two with which the following begins, and
especially the first of them, only asked me to tell their story I but
turn my back on the whole company of which they are part.
...I got last week an excellent letter from Frank Washburn who
writes in such a manly way. But the greatest delight I've had was
the loan of 5 Weekly Transcripts from Dick Derby. It's strange how
quickly one grows away from one's old surroundings. I never should
have believed that in so few months the tone of a Boston paper
would seem so outlandish to me. As it was, I was in one squeal of
amusement, surprise and satisfaction until deep in the night, when
I went to bed tired out with patriotism. The boisterous animal
good-humour, familiarity, reckless energy and self-confidence,
unprincipled optimism, esthetic saplessness and intellectual
imbecility, made a mixture hard to characterise, but totally
different from the tone of things here and, as the Germans would
say, whose "Existenz so voellig dasteht," that there was nothing to
do but to let yourself feel it. The Americans themselves here too
amuse me much; they have such a hungry, restless look and seem so
unhooked somehow from the general framework. The other afternoon as
I was sitting on the Terrace, a gentleman and two young ladies came
and sat down quite near me. I knew them for Americans at a glance,
and the man interested me by his exceedingly American expression: a
reddish moustache and tuft on chin, a powerful nose, a small light
eye, half insolent and _all_ sagacious, and a sort of rowdy air of
superiority that made me proud to claim him as a brother. In a few
minutes I recognised him as General M'Clellan, rather different
from his photographs of the War-time, but still not to be mistaken
(and I afterwards learned he is here). Whatever his faults may be
that of not being "one of us" is not among them.
This next is the note of a slightly earlier impression.
The Germans are certainly a most gemuethlich people. The way all the
old women told me how "freundlich" their rooms were--"so freundlich
mobilirt" and so forth--melted my heart. Whenever you tell an
inferior here to do anything (_e.g._ a cabman) he or she replies
"Schoen!" or rather "Schehn!" with an accent not quick like a
Frenchman's "Bien!" but so protracted, soothing and reassuring to
you that you feel as if he were adopting you into his family. You
say I've said nothing of the people of this house, but there is
nothing to tell about them. The Doctor is an open-hearted excellent
man as ever was, and wrapped up in his children; Frau Semler is a
sickly, miserly, petty-spirited nonentity. The children are quite
uninteresting, though the younger, Anna or Aennchen, aged five, is
very handsome and fat. The following short colloquy, which I
overheard one day after breakfast a few days since, may serve you
as a piece of local colour. Aennchen drops a book she is carrying
across the room and exclaims "Herr Jesus!"