I
In the attempt to place together some particulars of the early life of
William James and present him in his setting, his immediate native and
domestic air, so that any future gathered memorials of him might become
the more intelligible and interesting, I found one of the consequences
of my interrogation of the past assert itself a good deal at the expense
of some of the others. For it was to memory in the first place that my
main appeal for particulars had to be made; I had been too near a
witness of my brother's beginnings of life, and too close a participant,
by affection, admiration and sympathy, in whatever touched and moved
him, not to feel myself in possession even of a greater quantity of
significant truth, a larger handful of the fine substance of history,
than I could hope to express or apply. To recover anything like the full
treasure of scattered, wasted circumstance was at the same time to live
over the spent experience itself, so deep and rich and rare, with
whatever sadder and sorer intensities, even with whatever poorer and
thinner passages, after the manner of every one's experience; and the
effect of this in turn was to find discrimination among the parts of my
subject again and again difficult--so inseparably and beautifully they
seemed to hang together and the comprehensive case to decline mutilation
or refuse to be treated otherwise than handsomely. This meant that
aspects began to multiply and images to swarm, so far at least as they
showed, to appreciation, as true terms and happy values; and that I
might positively and exceedingly rejoice in my relation to most of them,
using it for all that, as the phrase is, it should be worth. To knock at
the door of the past was in a word to see it open to me quite wide--to
see the world within begin to "compose" with a grace of its own round
the primary figure, see it people itself vividly and insistently. Such
then is the circle of my commemoration and so much these free and
copious notes a labour of love and loyalty. We were, to my sense, the
blest group of us, such a company of characters and such a picture of
differences, and withal so fused and united and interlocked, that each
of us, to that fond fancy, pleads for preservation, and that in respect
to what I speak of myself as possessing I think I shall be ashamed, as
of a cold impiety, to find any element altogether negligible. To which I
may add perhaps that I struggle under the drawback, innate and inbred,
of seeing the whole content of memory and affection in each enacted and
recovered moment, as who should say, in the vivid image and the very
scene; the light of the only terms in which life has treated me to
experience. And I cherish the moment and evoke the image and repaint the
scene; though meanwhile indeed scarce able to convey how prevailingly
and almost exclusively, during years and years, the field was animated
and the adventure conditioned for me by my brother's nearness and that
play of genius in him of which I had never had a doubt from the first.
The "first" then--since I retrace our steps to the start, for the
pleasure, strangely mixed though it be, of feeling our small feet plant
themselves afresh and artlessly stumble forward again--the first began
long ago, far off, and yet glimmers at me there as out of a thin golden
haze, with all the charm, for imagination and memory, of pressing
pursuit rewarded, of distinctness in the dimness, of the flush of life
in the grey, of the wonder of consciousness in everything; everything
having naturally been all the while but the abject little matter of
course. Partly doubtless as the effect of a life, now getting to be a
tolerably long one, spent in the older world, I see the world of our
childhood as very young indeed, young with its own juvenility as well as
with ours; as if it wore the few and light garments and had gathered in
but the scant properties and breakable toys of the tenderest age, or
were at the most a very unformed young person, even a boisterous
hobbledehoy. It exhaled at any rate a simple freshness, and I catch its
pure breath, at our infantile Albany, as the very air of long summer
afternoons--occasions tasting of ample leisure, still bookless, yet
beginning to be bedless, or cribless; tasting of accessible garden
peaches in a liberal backward territory that was still almost part of a
country town; tasting of many-sized uncles, aunts, cousins, of strange
legendary domestics, inveterately but archaically Irish, and whose
familiar remarks and "criticism of life" were handed down, as well as of
dim family ramifications and local allusions--mystifications
always--that flowered into anecdote as into small hard plums; tasting
above all of a big much-shaded savoury house in which a softly-sighing
widowed grandmother, Catherine Barber by birth, whose attitude was a
resigned consciousness of complications and accretions, dispensed an
hospitality seemingly as joyless as it was certainly boundless. What she
_liked_, dear gentle lady of many cares and anxieties, was the "fiction
of the day," the novels, at that time promptly pirated, of Mrs. Trollope
and Mrs. Gore, of Mrs. Marsh, Mrs. Hubback and the Misses Kavanagh and
Aguilar, whose very names are forgotten now, but which used to drive
her away to quiet corners whence her figure comes back to me bent
forward on a table with the book held out at a distance and a tall
single candle placed, apparently not at all to her discomfort, in that
age of sparer and braver habits, straight between the page and her eyes.
There is a very animated allusion to one or two of her aspects in the
fragment of a "spiritual autobiography," the reminiscences of a
so-called Stephen Dewhurst printed by W. J. (1885) in The Literary
Remains of Henry James; a reference which has the interest of being very
nearly as characteristic of my father himself (which his references in
almost any connection were wont to be) as of the person or the occasion
evoked. I had reached my sixteenth year when she died, and as my only
remembered grandparent she touches the chord of attachment to a
particular vibration. She represented for us in our generation the only
English blood--that of both her own parents--flowing in our veins; I
confess that out of that association, for reasons and reasons, I feel
her image most beneficently bend. We were, as to three parts, of two
other stocks; and I recall how from far back I reflected--for I see I
must have been always reflecting--that, mixed as such a mixture, our
Scotch with our Irish, might be, it had had still a grace to borrow from
the third infusion or dimension. If I could freely have chosen moreover
it was precisely from my father's mother that, fond votary of the finest
faith in the vivifying and characterising force of mothers, I should
have wished to borrow it; even while conscious that Catherine Barber's
own people had drawn breath in American air for at least two generations
before her. Our father's father, William James, an Irishman and a
Protestant born (of county Cavan) had come to America, a very young man
and then sole of his family, shortly after the Revolutionary War; my
father, the second son of the third of the marriages to which the
country of his adoption was liberally to help him, had been born in
Albany in 1811. Our maternal greatgrandfather on the father's side, Hugh
Walsh, had reached our shores from a like Irish home, Killyleagh, county
Down, somewhat earlier, in 1764, he being then nineteen; he had settled
at Newburgh-on-the-Hudson, half way to Albany, where some of his
descendants till lately lingered. Our maternal greatgrandfather on the
mother's side--that is our mother's mother's father, Alexander Robertson
of Polmont near Edinburgh--had likewise crossed the sea in the
mid-century and prospered in New York very much as Hugh Walsh was
prospering and William James was still more markedly to prosper, further
up the Hudson; as unanimous and fortunate beholders of the course of
which admirable stream I like to think of them. I find Alexander
Robertson inscribed in a wee New York directory of the close of the
century as Merchant; and our childhood in that city was passed, as to
some of its aspects, in a sense of the afterglow, reduced and
circumscribed, it is true, but by no means wholly inanimate, of his
shining solidity.
The sweet taste of Albany probably lurked most in its being our admired
antithesis to New York; it was holiday, whereas New York was home; at
least that presently came to be the relation, for to my very very first
fleeting vision, I apprehend, Albany itself must have been the scene
exhibited. Our parents had gone there for a year or two to be near our
grandmother on their return from their first (that is our mother's
first) visit to Europe, which had quite immediately followed my birth,
which appears to have lasted some year and a half, and of which I shall
have another word to say. The Albany experiment would have been then
their first founded housekeeping, since I make them out to have betaken
themselves for the winter following their marriage to the ancient Astor
House--not indeed at that time ancient, but the great and appointed
modern hotel of New York, the only one of such pretensions, and which
somehow continued to project its massive image, that of a great square
block of granite with vast dark warm interiors, across some of the later
and more sensitive stages of my infancy. Clearly--or I should perhaps
rather say dimly--recourse to that hospitality was again occasionally
had by our parents; who had originally had it to such a happy end that
on January 9th, 1842, my elder brother had come into the world there. It
remained a tradition with him that our father's friend from an early
time, R. W. Emerson, then happening to be in New York and under that
convenient roof, was proudly and pressingly "taken upstairs" to admire
and give his blessing to the lately-born babe who was to become the
second American William James. The blessing was to be renewed, I may
mention, in the sense that among the impressions of the next early years
I easily distinguish that of the great and urbane Emerson's occasional
presence in Fourteenth Street, a centre of many images, where the
parental tent was before long to pitch itself and rest awhile. I am
interested for the moment, however, in identifying the scene of our very
first perceptions--of my very own at least, which I can here best speak
for.
One of these, and probably the promptest in order, was that of my
brother's occupying a place in the world to which I couldn't at all
aspire--to any approach to which in truth I seem to myself ever
conscious of having signally forfeited a title. It glimmers back to me
that I quite definitely and resignedly thought of him as in the most
exemplary manner already beforehand with me, already seated at his task
when the attempt to drag me crying and kicking to the first hour of my
education failed on the threshold of the Dutch House in Albany after the
fashion I have glanced at in a collection of other pages than these
(just as I remember to have once borrowed a hint from our grandmother's
"interior" in a work of imagination). That failure of my powers or that
indifference to them, my retreat shrieking from the Dutch House, was to
leave him once for all already there an embodied demonstration of the
possible--already wherever it might be that there was a question of my
arriving, when arriving at all, belatedly and ruefully; as if he had
gained such an advance of me in his sixteen months' experience of the
world before mine began that I never for all the time of childhood and
youth in the least caught up with him or overtook him. He was always
round the corner and out of sight, coming back into view but at his
hours of extremest ease. We were never in the same schoolroom, in the
same game, scarce even in step together or in the same phase at the same
time; when our phases overlapped, that is, it was only for a moment--he
was clean out before I had got well in. How far he had really at any
moment dashed forward it is not for me now to attempt to say; what
comes to me is that I at least hung inveterately and woefully back, and
that this relation alike to our interests and to each other seemed
proper and preappointed. I lose myself in wonder at the loose ways, the
strange process of waste, through which nature and fortune may deal on
occasion with those whose faculty for application is all and only in
their imagination and their sensibility. There may be during those
bewildered and brooding years so little for them to "show" that I liken
the individual dunce--as he so often must appear--to some commercial
traveller who has lost the key to his packed case of samples and can but
pass for a fool while other exhibitions go forward.
I achieve withal a dim remembrance of my final submission, though it is
the faintest ghost of an impression and consists but of the bright blur
of a dame's schoolroom, a mere medium for small piping shuffling sound
and suffered heat, as well as for the wistfulness produced by
"glimmering squares" that were fitfully screened, though not to any
revival of cheer, by a huge swaying, yet dominant object. This dominant
object, the shepherdess of the flock, was Miss Bayou or Bayhoo--I
recover but the alien sound of her name, which memory caresses only
because she may have been of like race with her temple of learning,
which faced my grandmother's house in North Pearl Street and really
justified its exotic claim by its yellow archaic gable-end: I think of
the same as of brick baked in the land of dykes and making a series of
small steps from the base of the gable to the point. These images are
subject, I confess, to a soft confusion--which is somehow consecrated,
none the less, and out of which, with its shade of contributory truth,
some sort of scene insists on glancing. The very flush of the uneven
bricks of the pavement lives in it, the very smell of the street
cobbles, the imputed grace of the arching umbrage--I see it all as from
under trees; the form of Steuben Street, which crossed our view, as
steep even to the very essence of adventure, with a summit, and still
more with a nethermost and riskiest incline, very far away. There lives
in it the aspect of the other house--the other and much smaller than my
grandmother's, conveniently near it and within sight; which was
pinkish-red picked out with white, whereas my grandmother's was
greyish-brown and very grave, and which must have stood back a little
from the street, as I seem even now to swing, or at least to perch, on a
relaxed gate of approach that was conceived to work by an iron chain
weighted with a big ball; all under a spreading tree again and with the
high, oh so high white stone steps (mustn't they have been marble?) and
fan-lighted door of the pinkish-red front behind me. I lose myself in
ravishment before the marble and the pink. There were other houses
too--one of them the occasion of the first "paid" visit that struggles
with my twilight of social consciousness; a call with my father,
conveying me presumably for fond exhibition (since if my powers were not
exhibitional my appearance and my long fair curls, of which I distinctly
remember the lachrymose sacrifice, suppositiously were), on one of our
aunts, the youngest of his three sisters, lately married and who,
predestined to an early death, hovers there for me, softly spectral, in
long light "front" ringlets, the fashion of the time and the capital
sign of all our paternal aunts seemingly; with the remembered
enhancement of her living in Elk Street, the name itself vaguely
portentous, as through beasts of the forest not yet wholly exorcised,
and more or less under the high brow of that Capitol which, as aloft
somewhere and beneath the thickest shades of all, loomed, familiar yet
impressive, at the end of almost any Albany vista of reference. I have
seen other capitols since, but the whole majesty of the matter must have
been then distilled into my mind--even though the connection was
indirect and the concrete image, that of the primitive structure, long
since pretentiously and insecurely superseded--so that, later on, the
impression was to find itself, as the phrase is, discounted. Had it not
moreover been reinforced at the time, for that particular Capitoline
hour, by the fact that our uncle, our aunt's husband, was a son of Mr.
Martin Van Buren, and that _he_ was the President? This at least led the
imagination on--or leads in any case my present imagination of that one;
ministering to what I have called the soft confusion.
The confusion clears, however, though the softness remains, when,
ceasing to press too far backward, I meet the ampler light of conscious
and educated little returns to the place; for the education of New York,
enjoyed up to my twelfth year, failed to blight its romantic appeal. The
images I really distinguish flush through the maturer medium, but with
the sense of them only the more wondrous. The other house, the house of
my parents' limited early sojourn, becomes that of those of our cousins,
numerous at that time, who pre-eminently figured for us; the various
brood presided over by my father's second sister, Catherine James, who
had married at a very early age Captain Robert Temple, U.S.A. Both these
parents were to die young, and their children, six in number, the two
eldest boys, were very markedly to people our preliminary scene; this
being true in particular of three of them, the sharply differing
brothers and the second sister, Mary Temple, radiant and rare,
extinguished in her first youth, but after having made an impression on
many persons, and on ourselves not least, which was to become in the
harmonious circle, for all time, matter of sacred legend and reference,
of associated piety. Those and others with them were the numerous
dawnings on which in many cases the deepening and final darknesses were
so soon to follow: our father's family was to offer such a chronicle of
early deaths, arrested careers, broken promises, orphaned children. It
sounds cold-blooded, but part of the charm of our grandmother's house
for us--or I should perhaps but speak for myself--was in its being so
much and so sociably a nurseried and playroomed orphanage. The children
of her lost daughters and daughters-in-law overflowed there, mainly as
girls; on whom the surviving sons-in-law and sons occasionally and most
trustingly looked in. Parentally bereft cousins were somehow more
thrilling than parentally provided ones; and most thrilling when, in the
odd fashion of that time, they were sent to school in New York as a
preliminary to their being sent to school in Europe. They spent scraps
of holidays with us in Fourteenth Street, and I think my first childish
conception of the enviable lot, formed amid these associations, was to
be so little fathered or mothered, so little sunk in the short range,
that the romance of life seemed to lie in some constant improvisation,
by vague overhovering authorities, of new situations and horizons. We
were intensely domesticated, yet for the very reason perhaps that we
felt our young bonds easy; and they were so easy compared to other small
plights of which we had stray glimpses that my first assured conception
of true richness was that we should be sent separately off among cold or
even cruel aliens in order to be there thrillingly homesick.
Homesickness was a luxury I remember craving from the tenderest age--a
luxury of which I was unnaturally, or at least prosaically, deprived.
Our motherless cousin Augustus Barker came up from Albany to the
Institution Charlier--unless it was, as I suspect, a still earlier
specimen, with a name that fades from me, of that type of French
establishment for boys which then and for years after so incongruously
flourished in New York; and though he professed a complete satisfaction
with pleasures tasted in our innocent society I felt that he was engaged
in a brave and strenuous adventure while we but hugged the comparatively
safe shore.