I have gathered into this volume several short fictions of the type I
have already found it convenient to refer to as “international”—though I
freely recognise, before the array of my productions, of whatever length
and whatever brevity, the general applicability of that term. On the
interest of _contrasted_ things any painter of life and manners
inevitably much depends, and contrast, fortunately for him, is easy to
seek and to recognise; the only difficulty is in presenting it again with
effect, in extracting from it its sense and its lesson. The reader of
these volumes will certainly see it offered in no form so frequent or so
salient as that of the opposition of aspects from country to country.
Their author, I am quite aware, would seem struck with no possibility of
contrast in the human lot so great as that encountered as we turn back
and forth between the distinctively American and the distinctively
European outlook. He might even perhaps on such a showing be represented
as scarce aware, before the human scene, of any other sharp antithesis at
all. He is far from denying that this one has always been vivid for him;
yet there are cases in which, however obvious and however contributive,
its office for the particular demonstration has been quite secondary, and
in which the work is by no means merely addressed to the illustration of
it. These things have had in the latter case their proper subject: as,
for instance, the subject of “The Wings of the Dove,” or that of “The
Golden Bowl,” has not been the exhibited behaviour of certain Americans
as Americans, of certain English persons as English, of certain Romans as
Romans. Americans, Englishmen, Romans are, in the whole matter, agents
or victims; but this is in virtue of an association nowadays so
developed, so easily to be taken for granted, as to have created a new
scale of relations altogether, a state of things from which _emphasised_
internationalism has either quite dropped or is well on its way to drop.
The dramatic side of human situations subsists of course on contrast; and
when we come to the two novels I have just named we shall see, for
example, just how they positively provide themselves with that source of
interest. We shall see nevertheless at the same time that the subject
could in each case have been perfectly expressed had _all_ the persons
concerned been only American or only English or only Roman or whatever.
If it be asked then, in this light, why they deviate from that natural
harmony, why the author resorts to the greater extravagance when the less
would serve, the answer is simply that the course taken has been, on
reflexion, the course of the greater amusement. That is an explanation
adequate, I admit, only when itself a little explained—but I shall have
due occasion to explain it. Let me for the moment merely note that the
very condition I here glance at—that of the achieved social fusion, say,
without the sense and experience of which neither “The Wings of the
Dove,” nor “The Golden Bowl,” nor “The Portrait of a Lady,” nor even,
after all, I think, “The Ambassadors,” would have been written—represents
a series of facts of the highest interest and one that, at this time of
day, the late-coming observer and painter, the novelist sometimes
depressed by all the drawbacks of a literary form overworked and relaxed,
can only rejoice to meet in his path and to measure more and more as a
portent and an opportunity. In proportion as he intelligently meets it,
and more especially in proportion as he may happen to have “assisted”
from far back at so many of the odd and fresh phenomena involved, must he
see a vast new province, infinitely peopled and infinitely elastic—by
which I mean with incalculable power to grow—annexed to the kingdom of
the dramatist. On this point, however, much more is to be said than I
can touch on by the way—so that I return to my minor contention; which is
that in a whole group of tales I here collect the principle of
illustration has on the other hand quite definitely been that the idea
could _not_ have expressed itself without the narrower application of
international terms. The contrast in “Lady Barbarina” depends altogether
on the immitigable Anglicism of this young woman and that equally marked
projection of New York elements and objects which, surrounding and
framing her figure, throws it into eminent relief. She has her personal
qualities, but the very interest, the very curiosity of the matter is
that her imbroglio is able to attest itself with scarce so much as a
reference to them. It plays itself out quite consistently on the plane
of her general, her instinctive, her exasperatedly conscious ones. The
others, the more intimate, the subtler, the finer—so far as there may
have been such—virtually become, while the story is enacted, not
relevant, though their relevancy might have come up on some other basis.
But that this is true, always in its degree, of each of the other
contributions to the class before us, we shall sufficiently make out, I
think, as we take them in their order. I am only struck, I may indeed
parenthesise, with the inveteracy of the general ground (not to say of
the extension I give it) over which my present remarks play. It does
thus in truth come home to me that, combining and comparing in whatever
proportions and by whatever lights, my “America” and its products would
doubtless, as a theme, have betrayed gaps and infirmities enough without
such a kicking-up of the dramatic dust (mainly in the foreground) as I
could set my “Europe” in motion for; just as my Europe would probably
have limped across our stage to no great effect of processional state
without an ingenuous young America (constantly seen as ingenuous and
young) to hold up its legendary train. At the same time I pretend not at
all to regret my having had from the very first to see my workable world
all and only as an unnatural mixture. No mixture, for that matter, is
quite unnatural unless quite sterile, and the particular range of
associations that betimes, to my eyes, blocked out everything else,
blocked out aspects and combinations more simply conditioned, was at
least not open to the reproach of not giving me results. These were but
what they could be, of course; but such as they were, at all events, here
am I at this time of day quite earnestly grouping, distinguishing,
discussing them. The great truth in the whole connexion, however, is, I
think, that one never really chooses one’s general range of vision—the
experience from which ideas and themes and suggestions spring: this
proves ever what it has had to be, this is one with the very turn one’s
life has taken; so that whenever it “gives,” whatever it makes us feel
and think of, we regard very much as imposed and inevitable. The subject
thus pressed upon the artist is the necessity of his case and the fruit
of his consciousness; which truth makes and has ever made of any quarrel
with his subject, and stupid attempt to go behind _that_, the true
stultification of criticism. The author of these remarks has in any case
felt it, from far back, quite his least stupid course to meet halfway, as
it were, the turn taken and the perceptions engendered by the tenor of
his days. Here it is that he has never pretended to “go behind”—which
would have been for him a deplorable waste of time. The thing of profit
is to have your experience—to recognise and understand it, and for this
almost any will do; there being surely no absolute ideal about it beyond
getting from it all it has to give. The artist—for it is of this strange
brood we speak—has but to have his honest sense of life to find it fed at
every pore even as the birds of the air are fed; with more and more to
give, in turn, as a consequence, and, quite by the same law that governs
the responsive affection of a kindly-used animal, in proportion as more
and more is confidently asked.
All of which, however, doubtless wanders a little far from my mild
argument—that of my so grateful and above all so well-advised primary
acceptance of a _determined_ array of appearances. What I was clearly to
be treated to by fate—with the early-taken ply I have already elsewhere
glanced at—was (should I have the intelligence to embrace it) some
considerable occasion to appreciate the mixture of manners. So, as I
say, there would be a decent economy in cultivating the intelligence;
through the sincerity of which process I have plucked, I hold, every
little flower of a “subject” pressed between the leaves of these volumes.
I am tempted indeed to make for my original lucidity the claim of
something more than bare prudence—almost that of a happy instinctive
foresight. This is what I mean by having been “well-advised.” It was as
if I had, vulgarly speaking, received quite at first the “straight
tip”—to back the right horse or buy the right shares. The mixture of
manners was to become in other words not a less but a very much more
appreciable and interesting subject of study. The mixture of manners was
in fine to loom large and constantly larger all round; it was to be a
matter, plainly, about which the future would have much to say. Nothing
appeals to me more, I confess, as a “critic of life” in any sense worthy
of the name, than the finer—if indeed thereby the less easily
formulated—group of the conquests of civilisation, the multiplied
symptoms among educated people, from wherever drawn, of a common
intelligence and a social fusion tending to abridge old rigours of
separation. This too, I must admit, in spite of the many-coloured
sanctity of such rigours in general, which have hitherto made countries
smaller but kept the globe larger, and by which immediate strangeness,
immediate beauty, immediate curiosity were so much fostered. Half our
instincts work for the maintained differences; without them, for
instance, what would have been the point of the history of poor Lady
Barbarina? I have but to put that question, I must add, to feel it
beautifully large; for there looms before me at its touch the vision of a
Lady Barbarina reconciled, domesticated, developed, of possibly greater
vividness than the quite other vision expressed in these pages. It is a
question, however, of the tendency, perceptive as well as reflective too,
of the braver imagination—which faculty, in our future, strikes me as
likely to be appealed to much less by the fact, by the pity and the
misery and the greater or less grotesqueness, of the courageous, or even
of the timid, missing their lives beyond certain stiff barriers, than by
the picture of their more and more steadily making out their
opportunities and their possible communications. Behind all the small
comedies and tragedies of the international, in a word, has exquisitely
lurked for me the idea of some eventual sublime consensus of the
educated; the exquisite conceivabilities of which, intellectual, moral,
emotional, sensual, social, political—all, I mean, in the face of felt
difficulty and danger—constitute stuff for such “situations” as may
easily make many of those of a more familiar type turn pale. _There_, if
one will—in the dauntless fusions to come—is the personal drama of the
future.
We are far from it certainly—as I have delayed much too long to remark—in
the chronicle of Lady Barb. I have placed this composition (1888) at the
top of my list, in the present cluster, despite the earlier date of some
of its companions; consistently giving it precedence by reason of its
greatest length. The idea at the root of it scarcely brooks indication,
so inevitable had it surely become, in all the conditions, that a young
Englishwoman in some such predicament should figure as the happy
pictorial thought. The whole thing rests, I need scarce point out, on
the most primitive logic. The international relation had begun to
present itself “socially,” after the liveliest fashion, a quarter of a
century ago and earlier, as a relation of intermarrying; but nothing was
meanwhile so striking as that these manifestations took always the same
turn. The European of “position” married the young American woman, or
the young American woman married the European of position—one scarce knew
how best to express the regularity of it; but the social field was
scanned in vain for a different pairing. No American citizen appeared to
offer his hand to the “European” girl, or if he did so offered it in
vain. The bridal migrations were eastward without exception—as rigidly
as if settled by statute. Custom clearly had acquired the force of law;
a fact remarkable, significant, interesting and even amusing. And yet,
withal, it seemed scarce to demand explanations. So far as they appeared
indeed they were confident on the American side. The representatives of
that interest had no call in life to go “outside” for their wives—having
obviously close at hand the largest and choicest assortment of such
conveniences; as was sufficiently proved by the European “run” on the
market. What American run on any foreign market had been noted?—save
indeed always on the part of the women! It all redounded to the honour
and glory of the young woman grown in American conditions—to cast
discredit on whose general peerlessness by attested preference for other
types could but strike the domestic aspirant as an act of disloyalty or
treachery. It was just the observed rarity of the case therefore that
prompted one to put it to the imaginative test. Any case so unlikely to
happen—taking it for at all conceivable—could only be worth attention
when it _should_, once in a blue moon, occur. There was nothing
meanwhile, in truth, to “go by”; we had seen the American girl “of
position” absorbed again and again into the European social system, but
we had only seen young foreign candidates for places as cooks and
housemaids absorbed into the American. The more one viewed the possible
instance, accordingly, the more it appealed to speculative study; so
that, failing all valid testimony, one had studiously, as it were, to
forge the very documents.
I have only to add that I found mine, once I had produced them,
thoroughly convincing: the most one could do, in the conditions, was to
make one’s picture appear to hang together, and I should have broken
down, no doubt, had my own, after a superficial question or two, not
struck me as decently hanging. The essential, at the threshold, I seem
to recall, was to get my young man right—I somehow quite took for granted
the getting of my young woman. Was this because, for the portrait of
Lady Barb, I felt appealed to so little in the name of _shades_? Shades
would be decidedly neither of her general world nor of her particular
consciousness: the image I had in view was a maiden nature that, after a
fashion all its own, should show as fine and complete, show as neither
coarse nor poor, show above all as a resultant of many causes, quite
without them. I felt in short sure of Lady Barb, and I think there is no
question about her, or about the depth of root she might strike in
American soil, that I shouldn’t have been ready on the spot to answer.
Such is the luck of the conception that imposes itself _en bloc_—or such
at least the artist’s luck in face of it; such certainly, to begin with
and “subjectively” speaking, is the great advantage of a character all of
a piece: immediacy of representation, the best omens for felicity, then
so honourably await it. It was Jackson Lemon and _his_ shades,
comparatively, and his comparative sense for shades, that, in the tale,
most interested me. The one thing fine-drawn in his wife was that she
had been able to care for him as he was: to almost every one and every
thing else equally American, to almost every one and everything else so
sensibly stamped, toned and warranted, she was to find herself quite
otherwise affected. With her husband the law was reversed—he had, much
rather, imputed authority and dignity, imputed weight and charm, to the
antecedents of which she was so fine and so direct a consequence; his
estimate, his appreciation of her being founded thus on a vision of
innumerable close correspondences. It is that vision in him that is
racked, and at so many fine points, when he finds their experiment come
so near failure; all of which—at least as I seem to see it again so late
in the day—lights his inward drama as with the never-quenched lamp of a
sacred place. His wife’s, on the other hand, goes on in comparatively
close darkness.
It is indeed late in the day that I thus project the ray of _my_ critical
lantern, however; for it comes over me even as I write that the general
air in which most of these particular flowers of fancy bloom is an air we
have pretty well ceased to breathe. “Lady Barbarina” is, as I have said,
scarce a quarter of a century old; but so many of the perceived
conditions in which it took birth have changed that the account of them
embodied in that tale and its associates will already pass for ancient
history. “Civilisation” and education move fast, after all, and too many
things have happened; too many _sorts_ of things, above all, seem more
and more likely to happen. This multiplication of kinds of occurrences,
I make no doubt, will promote the inspiration of observers and poets to
come; but it may meanwhile well make for an effect of superannuation in
any record of the leaner years. Jackson Lemon’s has become a more
frequent adventure, and Lady Barbarina is to-day as much at her ease in
New York, in Washington, at Newport, as in London or in Rome. If this is
her case, moreover, it is still more that of little Mrs. Headway, of “The
Siege of London” (1883), who suffers, I feel, by the sad circumstance
that her type of complication, or, more exactly speaking perhaps, that of
the gentlemen concerned with her, is no longer eminent, or at least
salient. Both she and her friends have had too many companions and
successors; so that to reinvest them with historic importance, with
individual dignity, I have to think of them rather as brave precursors,
as adventurous skirmishers and _éclaireurs_. This doesn’t diminish, I
recognise, any interest that may reside in the form either of “The Siege”
aforesaid or of its congeners “An International Episode,” “A Bundle of
Letters” and “The Pension Beaurepas.” Or rather indeed perhaps I should
distinguish among these things and, if presuming to claim for several
some hint of the distinction we may see exemplified in any first-class
art-museum, the distinction of the archaic subject treated by a
“primitive” master of high finish, yet notice duly that others are no
more “quaint” than need be. What has really happened, I think, is that
the _great_ international cases, those that bristle with fifty sorts of
social reference and overflow, and, by the same token, with a hundred
illustrations of social incoherence, are now equally taken for granted on
all sides of the sea, have simply become incidents and examples of the
mixture of manners, as I call it, and the thicker fusion: which may mean
nothing more, in truth, but that social incoherence (with the sense for
its opposite practically extinct among the nations) has at last got
itself accepted, right and left, as normal.
So much, as I put it, for the great cases; but a certain freshness, I
make out, still hangs strangely enough about the smaller and the more
numerous; those to which we owe it that such anecdotes—in my general
array—as “Pandora,” as “Fordham Castle,” as “Flickerbridge,” as “Miss
Gunton of Poughkeepsie,” are by no means false even to present
appearances. “The Pension Beaurepas” is not alone, thanks to some of its
associations, in glowing for me with the tender grace of a day that is
dead; and yet, though the accidents and accessories, in such a picture,
may have been marked for change, why shall not the essence of the matter,
the situation of Mr. and Mrs. Ruck and their daughter at old Geneva—for
there is of course a new, a newer Geneva—freely recur? I am careful to
put it as a question, and all for a particular reason—the reason that, to
be frank, I find myself, before the vast diluvian occidental presence in
Europe, with its remorseless rising tide and its positive expression of
almost nothing but quantity and number, deprived, on definite and ample
grounds, of the precious faculty of confidence. This confidence was of
old all instinctive, in face of the “common run” of appearances, the even
then multitudinous, miscellaneous minor international phenomena, those of
which the “short story,” as contemporaneously practised, could effect a
fairly prompt and easy notation; but it is now unmistakable that to come
forth, from whatever privacy, to almost any one of the great European
highways, and more particularly perhaps to approach the ports of traffic
for the lately-developed and so flourishing “southern route” from New
York and Boston, is to encounter one of those big general questions that
sturdily brush away the multiplication of small answers. “Who are they,
what are they, whence and whither and why,” the “critic of life,”
international or other, still, or more and more, asks himself, as he of
course always asked, but with the actual difference that the reply that
used to come so conveniently straight, “Why, they’re just the American
vague variety of the dear old Anglo-Saxon race,” not only hangs fire and
leaves him to wait and wonder, but really affects him as having for this
act of deference (as to which he can’t choose, I admit) little more than
a conscious mocking, baffling, in fact a just all but sinister, grimace.
“Don’t you wish you knew, or even _could_ know?” the inscrutable grin
seems to convey; and with resources of cynicism behind it not in the
least to be disturbed by any such cheap retort as “Don’t you wish that,
on your side, _you_ could say—or even, for your own convenience, so much
as guess?”
For there is no communicating to the diluvian presence, on such a scale,
any suspicion that convenience shall anywhere fail it: all its
consciousness, on that general head, is that of itself representing and
actively _being_ the biggest convenience of the world. Little need to
insist on the guarantee of subjective ease involved in such an
attitude—the immense noted growth of which casts its chill, as I
intimate, on the inquirer proceeding from settled premisses. He was
aware formerly, when it came to an analysis, of all his presumptions; he
had but to glance for an immemorial assurance at a dozen of the myriad
“registers” disposed in the vestibules of bankers, the reading-rooms of
hotels and “exchanges,” open on the most conspicuous table of visited
palace and castle, to see them bristle with names of a more or less
conceivable tradition. Queer enough often, whether in isolation or in
association, were these gages of identity: but their queerness, not
independent of some more or less traceable weird law, was exactly, after
all, their most familiar note. They had their way of not breaking,
through it all, the old sweet Anglo-Saxon spell; they had their way of
not failing, when all was said, to suggest more communities and
comprehensions than conundrums and “stunts.” He would be brave, however,
who should say that any such ghost of a quiet conformity presides in the
fulness of time over the interminable passenger-lists that proclaim the
prosperity of the great conveying companies. If little books have their
fates, little names—and long ones still more—have their eloquence; the
emphasis of nominal reference in the general roll-call falls so strongly
upon alien syllables and sounds, representative signs that fit into our
“English” legend (as we were mainly conscious up to a few years since of
having inherited that boon) scarcely more than if borrowed from the stony
slabs of Nineveh. I may not here attempt to weigh the question of what
these exotic symbols positively represent—a prodigious question, I cannot
but think; I content myself with noting the difference made for fond
fancy by the so rapidly established change, by the so considerable drop
of old associations. The point is of one’s having the heart to assume
that the Ninevites, as I may momentarily call them for convenience, are
to be constantly taken as feeling in the same way about fifty
associational matters as we used, in all satisfaction, to observe our
earlier generations feel. One can but speak for one’s self, and my
imagination, on the great highways, I find, doesn’t rise to such people,
who are obviously beyond my divination. They strike one, above all, as
giving no account of themselves in any terms already consecrated by human
use; to this inarticulate state they probably form, collectively, the
most unprecedented of monuments; abysmal the mystery of what they think,
what they feel, what they want, what they suppose themselves to be
saying. There would appear to be to-day no slim scrap even of a Daisy
Miller to bridge the chasm; no light-footed Francie Dosson or Pandora Day
to dance before one across the wavering plank.
I plead a blank of memory as to the origin of “The Siege of London”; I
get no nearer to the birth of the idea than by recalling a certain
agitation of the spirit, a lively irritation of the temper, under which,
one evening early in the autumn of 1877, that is more than thirty years
ago, I walked away from the close of a performance at the Théâtre
Français. The play had been “Le Demi-Monde” of the younger Dumas, a
masterpiece which I had not heard for the first time, but a particular
feature of which on this occasion more than ever yet filled up the
measure of my impatience. I could less than ever swallow it, Olivier de
Jalin’s denunciation of Madame d’Ange; the play, from the beginning,
marches toward it—it is the main hinge of the action; but the very
perfection with which the part was rendered in those years by Delaunay
(just as Croizette was pure perfection as Suzanne) seemed to have made me
present at something inhuman and odious. It was the old story—that from
the positive, the prodigious _morality_ of such a painter of the
sophisticated life as Dumas, not from anything else or less edifying, one
must pray to be delivered. There are doubtless many possible views of
such a dilemma as Olivier’s, the conflict of propriety for him between
the man he likes and esteems and the woman he has loved but hasn’t
esteemed and doesn’t, and as to whom he sees his friend blind, and, as he
thinks, befooled; in consequence of which I am not re-judging his case.
But I recover with a pensive pleasure that is almost all a pang the
intensity with which I could then feel it; to the extent of wondering
whether the general situation of the three persons concerned, or
something like it, mightn’t be shown as taking quite another turn. Was
there not conceivable an Olivier of our race, a different Olivier
altogether, moved to ask himself how at such a juncture a “real
gentleman,” distressed and perplexed, would yet most naturally act? The
question would be interesting, it was easy to judge, if only by the light
it might throw on some of the other, the antecedent and concomitant,
phases of a real gentleman’s connexion “at all at all” with such a
business and such a world. It remained with me, at all events, and was
to prove in time the germ of “The Siege of London”; of the conception of
which the state of mind so reflected strikes me as making, I confess,
very ancient history.
Far away and unspeakably regretted the days, alas, or, more exactly, the
nights, on which one could walk away from the Français under the spell of
such fond convictions and such deep and agitating problems. The emphasis
of the international proposition has indeed had time, as I say, to place
itself elsewhere—if, for that matter, there be any emphasis or any
proposition left at all—since the age when that particular pleasure
seemed the keenest in life. A few months ago, one evening, I found
myself withdrawing from the very temple and the supposedly sacred rites
before these latter were a third over: beneath that haunted dome itself
they seemed to have become at last so accessible, cynically making their
bargain with them, to the profanations long kept at bay. Only, with that
evolution of taste possible on the part of the old worshipper in
question, what world-convulsions mightn’t, in general, well have taken
place? Let me continue to speak of the rest of the matter here before us
as therefore of almost prehistoric reference. I was to make, in due
course, at any rate, my limited application of that glimmering image of a
M. de Jalin with whom we might have more fellow-feeling, and I sent “The
Siege of London” accordingly to my admirable friend the late Leslie
Stephen, then editor of _The Cornhill Magazine_, where it appeared during
the first two months of 1883. That is all I remember about it save
always the particular London light in which at that period I invoked the
muse and drove the pen and with which the compositions resulting strike
my fancy to-day as so closely interfused that in reading over those of
them I here preserve every aspect and element of my scene of application
lives again for me. This scene consisted of small chambers in a small
street that opened, at a very near corner, into Piccadilly and a view of
the Green Park; I had dropped into them almost instantaneously, under the
accepted heavy pressure of the autumnal London of 1876, and was to sit
scribbling in them for nearly ten years. The big human rumble of
Piccadilly (all human and equine then and long after) was close at hand;
I liked to think that Thackeray’s Curzon Street, in which Becky Sharp, or
rather Mrs. Rawdon Crawley, had lived, was not much further off: I
thought of it preponderantly, in my comings and goings, as Becky’s and
her creator’s; just as I was to find fifty other London neighbourhoods
speak to me almost only with the voice, the thousand voices, of Dickens.
A “great house,” forming the south-west corner of Piccadilly and with its
long and practically featureless side, continued by the high wall of its
ample court, opposite my open-eyed windows, gloomed, in dusty brick, as
the extent of my view, but with a vast convenient neutrality which I
found, soon enough, protective and not inquisitive, so that whatever
there was of my sedentary life and regular habits took a sort of local
wealth of colour from the special greyish-brown tone of the surface
always before me. This surface hung there like the most voluminous of
curtains—it masked the very stage of the great theatre of the town. To
sit for certain hours at one’s desk before it was somehow to occupy in
the most suitable way in the world the proportionately ample interacts of
the mightiest of dramas. When I went out it was as if the curtain rose;
so that, to repeat, I think of my tolerably copious artistry of that time
as all the fruit of the interacts, with the curtain more or less quietly
down and with the tuning of fiddles and only the vague rumble of shifted
scenery playing round it and through it. There were absences of course:
“A Bundle of Letters,” here reproduced, took birth (1879) during certain
autumn weeks spent in Paris, where a friend of those years, a young
London journalist, the late Theodore Child (of Merton College, Oxford,
who was to die, prematurely and lamentedly, during a gallant professional
tour of exploration in Persia) was fondly carrying on, under
difficulties, an Anglo-American periodical called _The Parisian_. He
invited me to contribute to its pages, and, again, a small
sharply-resonant street off the Rue de la Paix, where all existence
somehow went on as a repercussion from well-brushed asphalt, lives for me
as the scene of my response. A snowstorm of a violence rare in Paris
raged, I recollect, for many hours, for the greater part of a couple of
days; muffling me noiselessly into the small shiny shabby salon of an
_hôtel garni_ with a droll combinational, almost cosmic sign, and
promoting (it comes back to me) a deep concentration, an unusual
straightness of labour. “A Bundle of Letters” was written in a single
long session and, the temperature apart, at a “heat.” Its
companion-piece, “The Point of View,” marks not less for memory, I find,
an excursion associated with diligence. I have no heart to “go into”
these mere ingenious and more or less effective pleasantries to any tune
beyond this of glancing at the _other_, the extinct, actualities they
hold up the glimmering taper to. They are still faintly scented,
doubtless, with something of that authenticity, and a living work of art,
however limited, pretends always, as for part of its grace, to some good
faith of community, however indirect, with its period and place.
To read over “The Point of View” has opened up for me, I confess, no
contentious vista whatever, nothing but the faded iridescence of a
far-away Washington spring. This, in 1881, had been my first glimpse of
that interesting city, where I then spent a few weeks, a visit repeated
the following year; and I remember beginning on the first occasion a
short imaginary correspondence after the pattern of the then already
published “Bundle of Letters.” After an absence from America of some
five years I inevitably, on the spot again, had impressions; and not less
inevitably and promptly, I remember, recognised the truth that if one
really was subject to such, and to a good many, and they were at all
worth entertaining or imparting, one was likely to bristle with a quite
proportionately smaller number of neat and complacent conclusions.
Impressions could mutually conflict—which was exactly the interest of
them; whereas in ninety-nine connexions out of a hundred, conclusions
could but raise the wind for large groups of persons incapable, to all
appearance, of intelligently opening their eyes, though much occupied, to
make up for it, with opening, and all vociferously, their mouths. “The
Point of View,” in fine, I fear, was but to commemorate, punctually
enough, its author’s perverse and incurable disposition to interest
himself less in his own (always so quickly stale) experience, under
certain sorts of pressure, than in that of conceivable fellow mortals,
which might be mysteriously and refreshingly different. The thing indeed
may also serve, in its degree, as a punctual small monument to a
recognition that was never to fail; that of the nature of the burden
bequeathed by such rash multiplications of the candid consciousness.
They are splendid for experience, the multiplications, each in its way an
intensifier; but expression, liking things above all to be made
comfortable and easy for it, views them askance. The case remains, none
the less—alas for this faculty!—that no representation of life worth
speaking of can go forward without them. All of which will perhaps be
judged to have but a strained relevance, however, to the fact that,
though the design of the short imaginary correspondence I speak of was
interrupted during those first weeks in Washington, a second visit, the
following spring, served it better; I had kept the thread (through a
return to London and a return again thence) and, if I remember rightly, I
brought my small scheme to a climax on the spot. The finished thing
appeared in _The Century Magazine_ of December 1882. I recently had the
chance to “look up,” for old sake’s sake, that momentary seat of the
good-humoured satiric muse—the seats of the muses, even when the merest
flutter of one of their robes has been involved, losing no scrap of
sanctity for me, I profess, by the accident of my having myself had the
honour to offer the visitant the chair. The chair I had anciently been
able to push forward in Washington had not, I found, survived the ravage
of nearly thirty years; its place knew it no more, infirm and precarious
dependence as it had struck me even at the time as being. So, quite
exquisitely, as whenever that lapse occurs, the lost presence, the
obliterated scene, translated itself for me at last into terms of almost
more than earthly beauty and poetry. Fifty intimate figures and objects
flushed with life in the other time had passed away since then; a great
chapter of history had made itself, tremendous things had happened; the
ghosts of old cherished names, of old tragedies, of old comedies, even of
old mere mystifications, had marshalled their array. Only the little
rounded composition remained; which glowed, ever so strangely, like a
swinging playing lantern, with a light that brought out the past. The
past had been most concretely that vanished and slightly sordid tenement
of the current housing of the muse. I had had “rooms” in it, and I could
remember how the rooms, how the whole place, a nest of rickety tables and
chairs, lame and disqualified utensils of every sort, and of smiling
shuffling procrastinating persons of colour, had exhaled for me, to
pungency, the domestic spirit of the “old South.” I had nursed the
unmistakable scent; I had read history by its aid; I had learned more
than I could say of what had anciently been the matter under the reign of
the great problem of persons of colour—so badly the matter, by my vision,
that a deluge of blood and fire and tears had been needed to correct it.
These complacencies of perception swarmed for me again—while yet no brick
of the little old temple of the revelation stood on another.
I could scarcely have said where the bricks _had_ stood; the other, the
superseded Washington of the exquisite springtime, of the earlier
initiation, of the hovering plaintive ghosts, reduced itself to a great
vague blur of warmth and colour and fragrance. It kept flushing through
the present—very much as if I had had my small secret for making it. I
could turn on my finger the magic ring—it was strange how slight a thing,
a mere handful of pages of light persistent prose, could act as that
talisman. So, at all events, I like to date, and essentially to
synchronise, these sincere little studies in general. Nothing perhaps
can vouch better for their having applied to conditions that
superficially at least have changed than the fact that to fond memory—I
speak of my own—there hangs about the last item on this list, the picture
of “The Pension Beaurepas,” the unearthly poetry, as I call it, of the
Paquis, and that I should yet have to plunge into gulfs of explanation as
to where and what the Paquis may have been. An old-world nook of one’s
youth was so named, a scrap of the lakeside fringe of ancient Geneva, now
practically quite reformed and improved away. The Pension Beaurepas,
across the years, looks to me prodigiously archaic and incredibly quaint;
I ask myself why, at the time, I so wasted the precious treasure of a
sense that absolutely primitive pre-revolutionary “Europe” had never
really been swept out of its cupboards, shaken out of its curtains,
thumped out of its mattresses. The echoes of the eighteenth century, to
go no further back, must have been thick on its rather greasy stone
staircase, up down which, unconscious of the character of the fine old
wrought-iron _rampe_, as of most other things in the world besides, Mr.
and Mrs. and Miss Ruck, to speak only of them, used mournfully to
straggle. But I mustn’t really so _much_ as speak only, as even speak,
of them. They would carry me too far back—which possibly outlived
verisimilitude in them is what I wish to acknowledge.