II

We were day-boys, William and I, at dispensaries of learning the number

and succession of which to-day excite my wonder; we couldn't have

changed oftener, it strikes me as I look back, if our presence had been

inveterately objected to, and yet I enjoy an inward certainty that, my

brother being vividly bright and I quite blankly innocuous, this

reproach was never brought home to our house. It was an humiliation to

me at first, small boys though we were, that our instructors kept being

instructresses and thereby a grave reflection both on our attainments

and our spirit. A bevy of these educative ladies passes before me, I

still possess their names; as for instance that of Mrs. Daly and that of

Miss Rogers (previously of the "Chelsea Female Institute," though at the

moment of Sixth Avenue this latter), whose benches indeed my brother

didn't haunt, but who handled us literally with gloves--I still see the

elegant objects as Miss Rogers beat time with a long black ferule to

some species of droning chant or chorus in which we spent most of our

hours; just as I see her very tall and straight and spare, in a light

blue dress, her firm face framed in long black glossy ringlets and the

stamp of the Chelsea Female Institute all over her. Mrs. Daly, clearly

the immediate successor to the nebulous Miss Bayou, remains quite

substantial--perhaps because the sphere of her small influence has

succeeded in not passing away, up to this present writing; so that in

certain notes on New York published a few years since I was moved to

refer to it with emotion as one of the small red houses on the south

side of Waverley Place that really carry the imagination back to a

vanished social order. They carry mine to a stout red-faced lady with

grey hair and a large apron, the latter convenience somehow suggesting,

as she stood about with a resolute air, that she viewed her little

pupils as so many small slices cut from the loaf of life and on which

she was to dab the butter of arithmetic and spelling, accompanied by way

of jam with a light application of the practice of prize-giving. I

recall an occasion indeed, I must in justice mention, when the jam

really was thick--my only memory of a schoolfeast, strange to say,

throughout our young annals: something uncanny in the air of the

schoolroom at the unwonted evening or late afternoon hour, and tables

that seemed to me prodigiously long and on which the edibles were chunky

and sticky. The stout red-faced lady must have been Irish, as the name

she bore imported--or do I think so but from the indescribably Irish

look of her revisited house? It refers itself at any rate to a New York

age in which a little more or a little less of the colour was scarce

notable in the general flush.

Of pure unimported strain, however, were Miss Sedgwick and Mrs. Wright

(Lavinia D.), the next figures in the procession--the procession that

was to wind up indeed with two foreign recruits, small brown snappy

Mademoiselle Delavigne, who plied us with the French tongue at home and

who had been introduced to us as the niece--or could it have been the

grandniece?--of the celebrated Casimir, and a large Russian lady in an

extraordinarily short cape (I like to recall the fashion of short capes)

of the same stuff as her dress, and Merovingian sidebraids that seemed

to require the royal crown of Fredegonde or Brunehaut to complete their

effect. This final and aggravational representative of the compromising

sex looms to my mind's eye, I should add, but as the creature of an

hour, in spite of her having been domiciled with us; whereas I think of

Mademoiselle Delavigne as flitting in and out on quick, fine, more or

less cloth-shod feet of exemplary neatness, the flat-soled feet of Louis

Philippe and of the female figures in those volumes of Gavarni then

actual, then contemporaneous, which were kept in a piece of furniture

that stood between the front-parlour windows in Fourteenth Street,

together with a set of Beranger enriched by steel engravings to the

strange imagery of which I so wonderingly responded that all other art

of illustration, ever since, has been for me comparatively weak and

cold. These volumes and the tall entrancing folios of Nash's

lithographed Mansions of England in the Olden Time formed a store

lending itself particularly to distribution on the drawingroom carpet,

with concomitant pressure to the same surface of the small student's

stomach and relieving agitation of his backward heels. I make out that

it had decidedly been given to Mlle. Delavigne to represent to my first

perception personal France; she was, besides not being at all pink or

shy, oval and fluent and mistress somehow of the step--the step of

levity that involved a whisk of her short skirts; there she was, to the

life, on the page of Gavarni, attesting its reality, and there again did

that page in return (I speak not of course of the unplumbed depths of

the appended text) attest her own felicity. I was later on to feel--that

is I was to learn--how many impressions and appearances, how large a

sense of things, her type and tone prefigured. The evanescence of the

large Russian lady, whom I think of as rather rank, I can't express it

otherwise, may have been owing to some question of the purity of her

accent in French; it was one of her attributes and her grounds of appeal

to us that she had come straight from Siberia, and it is distinct to me

that the purity was challenged by a friend of the house, and

without--pathetically enough!--provoking the only answer, the plea that

the missing Atticism would have been wasted on young barbarians. The

Siberian note, on our inmate's part, may perhaps have been the least of

her incongruities; she was above all too big for a little job, towered

over us doubtless too heroically; and her proportions hover but to lose

themselves--with the successors to her function awaiting us a little

longer.

Meanwhile, to revert an instant, if the depressed consciousness of our

still more or less quailing, educationally, beneath the female eye--and

there was as well the deeper depth, there was the degrading fact, that

with us literally consorted and contended Girls, that we sat and strove,

even though we drew the line at playing with them and at knowing them,

when not of the swarming cousinship, at home--if that felt awkwardness

didn't exactly coincide with the ironic effect of "Gussy's" appearances,

his emergence from rich mystery and his return to it, our state was but

comparatively the braver: he always had so much more to tell us than we

could possibly have to tell him. On reflection I see that the most

completely rueful period couldn't after all greatly have prolonged

itself; since the female eye last bent on us would have been that of

Lavinia D. Wright, to our connection with whom a small odd reminiscence

attaches a date. A little schoolmate displayed to me with pride, while

the connection lasted, a beautiful coloured, a positively iridescent and

gilded card representing the first of all the "great exhibitions" of our

age, the London Crystal Palace of 1851--his father having lately gone

out to it and sent him the dazzling memento. In 1851 I was eight years

old and my brother scarce more than nine; in addition to which it is

distinct to me in the first place that we were never faithful long, or

for more than one winter, to the same studious scene, and in the second

that among our instructors Mrs. Lavinia had no successor of her own sex

unless I count Mrs. Vredenburg, of New Brighton, where we spent the

summer of 1854, when I had reached the age of eleven and found myself

bewildered by recognition of the part that "attendance at school" was so

meanly to play in the hitherto unclouded long vacation. This was true at

least for myself and my next younger brother, Wilky, who, under the

presumption now dawning of his "community of pursuits" with my own, was

from that moment, off and on, for a few years, my extremely easy

yokefellow and playfellow. On William, charged with learning--I thought

of him inveterately from our younger time as charged with learning--no

such trick was played; he rested or roamed, that summer, on his

accumulations; a fact which, as I was sure I saw these more and more

richly accumulate, didn't in the least make me wonder. It comes back to

me in truth that I had been prepared for anything by his having said to

me toward the end of our time at Lavinia D's and with characteristic

authority--his enjoyment of it coming from my character, I mean, quite

as much as from his own--that that lady was a very able woman, as shown

by the Experiments upstairs. He was upstairs of course, and I was down,

and I scarce even knew what Experiments were, beyond their indeed

requiring capability. The region of their performance was William's

natural sphere, though I recall that I had a sense of peeping into it to

a thrilled effect on seeing our instructress illustrate the proper way

to extinguish a candle. She firmly pressed the flame between her thumb

and her two forefingers, and, on my remarking that I didn't see how she

could do it, promptly replied that I of course couldn't do it myself (as

_he_ could) because I should be afraid.

That reflection on my courage awakes another echo of the same scant

season--since the test involved must have been that of our taking our

way home through Fourth Avenue from some point up town, and Mrs.

Wright's situation in East Twenty-first Street was such a point. The

Hudson River Railroad was then in course of construction, or was being

made to traverse the upper reaches of the city, through that part of

which raged, to my young sense, a riot of explosion and a great shouting

and waving of red flags when the gunpowder introduced into the rocky

soil was about to take effect. It was our theory that our passage there,

in the early afternoon, was beset with danger, and our impression that

we saw fragments of rock hurtle through the air and smite to the earth

another and yet another of the persons engaged or exposed. The point of

honour, among several of us, was of course nobly to defy the danger, and

I feel again the emotion with which I both hoped and feared that the red

flags, lurid signals descried from afar, would enable or compel us to

renew the feat. That I didn't for myself inveterately renew it I seem to

infer from the memory of other perambulations of the period--as to which

I am divided between their still present freshness and my sense of

perhaps making too much of these tiny particles of history. My stronger

rule, however, I confess, and the one by which I must here consistently

be guided, is that, from the moment it is a question of projecting a

picture, no particle that counts for memory or is appreciable to the

spirit _can_ be too tiny, and that experience, in the name of which one

speaks, is all compact of them and shining with them. There was at any

rate another way home, with other appeals, which consisted of getting

straight along westward to Broadway, a sphere of a different order of

fascination and bristling, as I seem to recall, with more vivid aspects,

greater curiosities and wonderments. _The_ curiosity was of course the

country-place, as I supposed it to be, on the northeast corner of

Eighteenth Street, if I am not mistaken; a big brown house in "grounds"

peopled with animal life, which, little as its site may appear to know

it to-day, lingered on into considerably later years. I have but to

close my eyes in order to open them inwardly again, while I lean against

the tall brown iron rails and peer through, to a romantic view of

browsing and pecking and parading creatures, not numerous, but all of

distinguished appearance: two or three elegant little cows of refined

form and colour, two or three nibbling fawns and a larger company, above

all, of peacocks and guineafowl, with, doubtless--though as to this I am

vague--some of the commoner ornaments of the barnyard. I recognise that

the scene as I evoke it fails of grandeur; but it none the less had for

me the note of greatness--all of which but shows of course what a very

town-bred small person I was, and was to remain.

I see myself moreover as somehow always alone in these and like New York

_flaneries_ and contemplations, and feel how the sense of my being so,

being at any rate master of my short steps, such as they were, through

all the beguiling streets, was probably the very savour of each of my

chance feasts. Which stirs in me at the same time some wonder at the

liberty of range and opportunity of adventure allowed to my tender age;

though the puzzle may very well drop, after all, as I ruefully reflect

that I couldn't have been judged at home reckless or adventurous. What I

look back to as my infant license can only have had for its ground some

timely conviction on the part of my elders that the only form of riot or

revel ever known to me would be that of the visiting mind. Wasn't I

myself for that matter even at that time all acutely and yet resignedly,

even quite fatalistically, aware of what to think of this? I at any rate

watch the small boy dawdle and gape again. I smell the cold dusty paint

and iron as the rails of the Eighteenth Street corner rub his

contemplative nose, and, feeling him foredoomed, withhold from him no

grain of my sympathy. He is a convenient little image or warning of all

that was to be for him, and he might well have been even happier than he

was. For there was the very pattern and measure of all he was to demand:

just to _be_ somewhere--almost anywhere would do--and somehow receive an

impression or an accession, feel a relation or a vibration. He was to go

without many things, ever so many--as all persons do in whom

contemplation takes so much the place of action; but everywhere, in the

years that came soon after, and that in fact continued long, in the

streets of great towns, in New York still for some time, and then for a

while in London, in Paris, in Geneva, wherever it might be, he was to

enjoy more than anything the so far from showy practice of wondering and

dawdling and gaping: he was really, I think, much to profit by it. What

it at all appreciably gave him--that is gave him in producible

form--would be difficult to state; but it seems to him, as he even now

thus indulges himself, an education like another: feeling, as he has

come to do more and more, that no education avails for the intelligence

that doesn't stir in it some subjective passion, and that on the other

hand almost anything that does so act is largely educative, however

small a figure the process might make in a scheme of training. Strange

indeed, furthermore, are some of the things that _have_ stirred a

subjective passion--stirred it, I mean, in young persons predisposed to

a more or less fine inspired application.