III

I was at any rate in the midst of sincerities enough, sincerities of

emphasis and "composition"; perversities, idiosyncrasies,

incalculabilities, delightful all as densities at first insoluble,

delightful even indeed as so much mere bewilderment and shock. When was

the shock, I ask myself as I look back, not so deadened by the general

atmospheric richness as not to melt more or less immediately into some

succulence for the mind, something that could feed the historic sense

almost to sweetness? I don't mean that it was a shock to be invited to

breakfast--there were stronger ones than that; but was in fact the

_trait de moeurs_ that disconnected me with most rapidity and

intensity from all I had left on the other side of the sea. To be so

disconnected, for the time, and in the most insidious manner, was above

all what I had come out for, and every appearance that might help it was

to be artfully and gratefully cultivated. I recollect well how many of

these combined as I sat at quite punctual fried sole and marmalade in

the comparatively disengaged sitting-room of the second floor--the

occupancy of the first has remained vague to me; disengaged from the

mantle of gloom the folds of which draped most heavily the feet of the

house, as it were, and thereby promoted in my own bower the chronic dusk

favourable to mural decoration consisting mainly of framed and glazed

"coloured" excisions from Christmas numbers of the Illustrated London

News that had been at their hour quite modern miracles. Was it for that

matter into a sudden splendour of the modern that I ascendingly emerged

under the hospitality of my kind fellow-tenant, or was it rather into

the fine classicism of a bygone age, as literature and the arts had

handed down that memory? Such were the questions whisked at every turn

under my nose and reducing me by their obscure charm but to bewildered

brooding, I fear, when I should have been myself, to repay these

attentions, quite forward and informing and affirmative.

There were eminent gentlemen, as I was sure they could only be, to

"meet" and, alas, awfully to interrogate me--for vivid has remained to

me, as the best of my bewilderment, the strangeness of finding that I

could be of interest to _them_: not indeed to call it rather the proved

humiliation of my impotence. My identity for myself was _all_ in my

sensibility to their own exhibition, with not a scrap left over for a

personal show; which made it as inconvenient as it was queer that I

should be treated as a specimen and have in the most unexpected manner

to prove that I was a good one. I knew myself the very worst

conceivable, but how to give to such other persons a decent or coherent

reason for my being so required more presence of mind than I could in

the least muster--the consequence of which failure had to be for me, I

fear, under all that confused first flush, rather an abject acceptance

of the air of imbecility. There were, it appeared, things of interest

taking place in America, and I had had, in this absurd manner, to come

to England to learn it: I had had over there on the ground itself no

conception of any such matter--nothing of the smallest interest, by any

perception of mine, as I suppose I should still blush to recall, had

taken place in America since the War. How _could_ anything, I really

wanted to ask--anything comparable, that is, to what was taking place

under my eyes in Half-Moon Street and at dear softly presiding Rutson's

table of talk. It doubtless essentially belonged to the exactly right

type and tone and general figure of my fellow-breakfasters from the

Temple, from the Home Office, the Foreign Office, the House of Commons,

from goodness knew what other scarce discernible Olympian altitudes, it

belonged to the very cut of their hair and their waistcoats and their

whiskers--for it was still more or less a whiskered age--that they

should desire from me much distinctness about General Grant's first

cabinet, upon the formation of which the light of the newspaper happened

then to beat; yet at the same time that I asked myself if it was to such

cold communities, such flat frustrations as were so proposed, that I

had sought to lift my head again in European air, I found the crisis

enriched by sundry other apprehensions.

They melted together in it to that increase of savour I have already

noted, yet leaving me vividly admonished that the blankness of my mind

as to the Washington candidates relegated me to some class unencountered

as yet by any one of my conversers, a class only not perfectly

ridiculous because perfectly insignificant. Also that politics walked

abroad in England, so that one might supremely bump against them, as

much as, by my fond impression, they took their exercise in America but

through the back streets and the ways otherwise untrodden and the very

darkness of night; that further all lively attestations were _ipso

facto_ interesting, and that finally and in the supreme degree, the

authenticity of whatever one was going to learn in the world would

probably always have for its sign that one got it at some personal cost.

To this generalisation mightn't one even add that in proportion as the

cost was great, or became fairly excruciating, the lesson, the value

acquired would probably be a thing to treasure? I remember really going

so far as to wonder if any act of acquisition of the life-loving,

life-searching sort that most appealed to me wouldn't mostly be

fallacious if unaccompanied by that tag of the price paid in personal

discomfort, in some self-exposure and some none too impossible

consequent discomfiture, for the sake of it. Didn't I even on occasion

mount to the very height of seeing it written that these bad moments

were the downright consecration of knowledge, that is of perception and,

essentially, of exploration, always dangerous and treacherous, and so

might afterwards come to figure to memory, each in its order, as the

silver nail on the wall of the temple where the trophy is hung up? All

of which remark, I freely grant, is a great ado about the long since so

bedimmed little Half-Moon Street breakfasts, and is moreover quite wide

of the mark if suggesting that the joys of recognition, those of

imaginatively, of projectively fitting in and fitting out every piece in

the puzzle and every recruit to the force of a further understanding

weren't in themselves a most bustling and cheering business.

It was bustling at least, assuredly, if not quite always in the same

degree exhilarating, to breakfast out at all, as distinguished from

lunching, without its being what the Harvard scene made of it, one of

the incidents of "boarding"; it was association at a jump with the

ghosts of Byron and Sheridan and Scott and Moore and Lockhart and Rogers

and _tutti quanti_--as well as the exciting note of a social order in

which everyone wasn't hurled straight, with the momentum of rising, upon

an office or a store. The mere vision in numbers of persons embodying

and in various ways sharply illustrating a clear alternative to that

passivity told a tale that would be more and more worth the reading with

every turn of the page. So at all events I fantasticated while harassed

by my necessity to weave into my general tapestry every thread that

would conduce to a pattern, and so the thread for instance of the great

little difference of my literally never having but once "at home" been

invited to breakfast on types as well as on toast and its accessories

could suggest an effect of silk or silver when absolutely dangled before

me. That single occasion at home came back in a light that fairly

brought tears to my eyes, for it was touching now to the last wanness

that the lady of the winter morn of the Massachusetts Sabbath, one of

those, as I recover it, of 1868, to reach whose board we had waded

through snowdrifts, had been herself fondling a reminiscence, though I

can scarce imagine supposing herself to offer for our consumption any

other type than her own. It was for that matter but the sweet staleness

of her reminiscence that made her a type, and I remember how it had had

to do thereby all the work: _she_, of an age to reach so considerably

back, had breakfasted out, in London, and with Mr. Rogers himself--that

was the point; which I am bound to say did for the hour and on that spot

supply richness of reference enough. And I am caught up, I find, in the

very act of this claim for my prior scantness of experience by a memory

that makes it not a little less perfect and which is oddly enough again

associated with a struggle, on an empty stomach, through the massed New

England whiteness of the prime Sunday hour. I still cherish the vision,

which couldn't then have faded from me, of my having, during the age of

innocence--I mean of my own--breakfasted with W. D. Howells, insidious

disturber and fertiliser of that state in me, to "meet" Bayard Taylor

and Arthur Sedgwick all in the Venetian manner, the delightful Venetian

manner which toward the later 'sixties draped any motion on our host's

part as with a habit still appropriate. _He_ had risen that morning

under the momentum of his but recently concluded consular term in

Venice, where margin, if only that of the great loungeable piazza, had a

breadth, and though Sedgwick and I had rather, as it were, to take the

jump standing, this was yet under the inspiration of feeling the case

most special. Only it had _been_ Venetian, snow-shoes and all; I had

stored it sacredly away as not American at all, and was of course to

learn in Half-Moon Street how little it had been English either.

What must have seemed to me of a fine international mixture, during

those weeks, was my thrilling opportunity to sit one morning, beside

Mrs. Charles Norton's tea-urn, in Queen's Gate Terrace, opposite to

Frederic Harrison, eminent to me at the moment as one of the subjects of

Matthew Arnold's early fine banter, one of his too confidently roaring

"young lions" of the periodical press. Has any gilding ray since that

happy season rested here and there with the sovereign charm of interest,

of drollery, of felicity and infelicity taken on by scattered selected

objects in that writer's bright critical dawn?--an element in which we

had the sense of sitting gratefully bathed, so that we fairly took out

our young minds and dabbled and soaked them in it as we were to do again

in no other. The beauty was thus at such a rate that people had

references, and that a reference was then, to my mind, whether in a

person or an object, the most glittering, the most becoming ornament

possible, a style of decoration one seemed likely to perceive figures

here and there, whether animate or not, quite groan under the

accumulation and the weight of. One had scarcely met it before--that I

now understood; at the same time that there was perhaps a wan joy in

one's never having missed it, by all appearance, having on the contrary

ever instinctively caught it, on the least glimmer of its presence. Even

when present, or what in the other time I had taken for present, it had

been of the thinnest, whereas all about me hereafter it would be by all

appearance almost glutinously thick--to the point even of one's on

occasion sticking fast in it; that is finding intelligibility smothered

in quantity. I lost breath in fact, no doubt, again and again, with this

latter increase, but was to go on and on for a long time before any

first glimmer of reaction against so special a source of interest. It

attached itself to objects often, I saw, by no merit or virtue--above

all, repeatedly, by no "cleverness"--of their own, but just by the luck

of history, by the action of multiplicity of circumstance. Condemned the

human particle "over here" was to _live_ on whatever terms, in

thickness--instead of being free, comparatively, or as I at once

ruefully and exquisitely found myself, only to feel and to think in it.

Ruefully because there were clearly a thousand contacts and sensations,

of the strong direct order, that one lost by not so living; exquisitely

because of the equal number of immunities and independences, blest

independences of perception and judgment, blest liberties of range for

the intellectual adventure, that accrued by the same stroke. These at

least had the advantage, one of the most distinguished conceivable, that

when enjoyed with a certain intensity they might produce the illusion of

the other intensity, that of being involved in the composition and the

picture itself, in the situations, the complications, the circumstances,

admirable and dreadful; while no corresponding illusion, none making for

the ideal play of reflection, conclusion, comparison, however one should

incline to appraise the luxury, seemed likely to attend the immersed or

engaged condition.

Whatever fatuity might at any rate have resided in these complacencies

of view, I made them my own with the best conscience in the world, and I

meet them again quite to extravagance of interest wherever on the whole

extent of the scene my retrospect sets me down. It wasn't in the least

at the same time that encountered celebrities only thus provoked the

shifting play of my small lamp, and this too even though they were

easily celebrated, by my measure, and though from the very first I owed

an individual here and there among them, as was highly proper, the

benefit of impression at the highest pitch. On the great supporting and

enclosing scene itself, the big generalised picture, painted in layer

upon layer and tone upon tone, one's fancy was all the while feeding;

objects and items, illustrations and aspects might perpetually overlap

or mutually interfere, but never without leaving consistency the more

marked and character the more unmistakeable. The place, the places,

bristled so for every glance with expressive particulars, that I really

conversed with them, at happy moments, more than with the figures that

moved in them, which affected me so often as but submissive articles of

furniture, "put in" by an artist duly careful of effect and yet duly

respectful of proportion. The great impression was doubtless no other

then and there than what it is under every sky and before every scene

that remind one afresh, at the given moment, of all the ways in which

producing causes and produced creatures correspond and interdepend; but

I think I must have believed at that time that these cross references

kept up their game in the English air with a frankness and a good faith

that kept the process, in all probability, the most traceable of its

kind on the globe.

What was the secret of the force of that suggestion?--which was not, I

may say, to be invalidated, to my eyes, by the further observation of

cases and conditions. Was it that the enormous "pull" enjoyed at every

point of the general surface the stoutness of the underlying belief in

what was behind all surfaces?--so that the particular visible, audible,

palpable fact, however small and subsidiary, was incomparably absolute,

or had, so to speak, such a conscience and a confidence, such an

absence of reserve and latent doubts about itself, as was not elsewhere

to be found. Didn't such elements as that represent, in the heart of

things, possibilities of scepticism, of mockery, of irony, of the return

of the matter, whatever it might be, on itself, by some play or other of

the questioning spirit, the spirit therefore weakening to entire comfort

of affirmations? Didn't I see that humour itself, which might seem

elsewhere corrosive and subversive, was, as an English faculty, turned

outward altogether and never turned inward?--by which convenient

circumstance subversion, or in other words alteration and variation were

not promoted. Such truths were wondrous things to make out in such

connections as my experience was then, and for no small time after, to

be confined to; but I positively catch myself listening to them, even

with my half-awakened ears, as if they had been all so many sermons of

the very stones of London. _There_, to come back to it, was exactly the

force with which these stones were to build me capaciously round: I

invited them, I besought them, to say all they would, and--to return to

my figure of a while back--it was soon so thoroughly as if they had

understood that, once having begun, they were to keep year after year

fairly chattering to me. Many of these pages, I fondly foresee, must

consist but of the record of their chatter. What was most of all

happening, I take it, was that under an absurd special stress I was

having, as who should say, to improvise a local medium and to arrange a

local consciousness. Against my due appropriation of those originally

closest at my hand inevitable accidents had conspired--and, to conclude

in respect to all this, if a considerable time was to be wanted, in the

event, for ideal certainty of adjustment, half the terms required by

this could then put forth the touching plea that they had quite achingly

waited.