But I positively dawdle and gape here--I catch myself in the act; so
that I take up the thread of fond reflection that guides me through that
mystification of the summer school, which I referred to a little way
back, at the time when the Summer School as known in America to-day was
so deep in the bosom of the future. The seat of acquisition I speak of
must have been contiguous to the house we occupied--I recall it as most
intimately and objectionably near--and carried on in the interest of
those parents from New York who, in villeggiatura under the queer
conditions of those days, with the many modern mitigations of the
gregarious lot still unrevealed and the many refinements on the
individual one still undeveloped, welcomed almost any influence that
might help at all to form their children to civility. Yet I remember
that particular influence as more noisy and drowsy and dusty than
anything else--as to which it must have partaken strongly of the general
nature of New Brighton; a neighbourhood that no apt agency whatever had
up to that time concerned itself to fashion, and that was indeed to
remain shabbily shapeless for years; since I recall almost as dire an
impression of it received in the summer of 1875. I seem more or less to
have begun life, for that matter, with impressions of New Brighton;
there comes back to me another, considerably more infantile than that of
1854, so infantile indeed that I wonder at its having stuck--that of a
place called the Pavilion, which must have been an hotel sheltering us
for July and August, and the form of which to childish retrospect,
unprejudiced by later experience, was that of a great Greek temple
shining over blue waters in the splendour of a white colonnade and a
great yellow pediment. The elegant image remained, though imprinted in a
child so small as to be easily portable by a stout nurse, I remember,
and not less easily duckable; I gasp again, and was long to gasp, with
the sense of salt immersion received at her strong hands. Wonderful
altogether in fact, I find as I write, the quantity, the intensity of
picture recoverable from even the blankest and tenderest state of the
little canvas.
I connect somehow with the Pavilion period a visit paid with my
father--who decidedly must have liked to take me about, I feel so rich
in that general reminiscence--to a family whom we reached in what struck
me as a quite lovely embowered place, on a very hot day, and among whom
luxuries and eccentricities flourished together. They were numerous, the
members of this family, they were beautiful, they partook of their
meals, or were at the moment partaking of one, out of doors, and the
then pre-eminent figure in the group was a very big Newfoundland dog on
whose back I was put to ride. That must have been my first vision of the
liberal life--though I further ask myself what my age could possibly
have been when my weight was so fantastically far from hinting at later
developments. But the romance of the hour was particularly in what I
have called the eccentric note, the fact that the children, my
entertainers, riveted my gaze to stockingless and shoeless legs and
feet, conveying somehow at the same time that they were not poor and
destitute but rich and provided--just as I took their garden-feast for a
sign of overflowing food--and that their state as of children of nature
was a refinement of freedom and grace. They were to become great and
beautiful, the household of that glimmering vision, they were to figure
historically, heroically, and serve great public ends; but always, to my
remembering eyes and fond fancy, they were to move through life as with
the bare white feet of that original preferred fairness and wildness.
This is rank embroidery, but the old surface itself insists on
spreading--it waits at least with an air of its own. The rest is
silence; I can--extraordinary encumbrance even for the most doating of
parents on a morning call--but have returned with my father to "our
hotel"; since I feel that I must not only to this but to a still further
extent face the historic truth that we were for considerable periods,
during our earliest time, nothing less than hotel children. Between the
far-off and the later phases at New Brighton stretched a series of
summers that had seen us all regularly installed for a couple of months
at an establishment passing in the view of that simpler age for a vast
caravansery--the Hamilton House, on the south Long Island shore, so
called from its nearness to the Fort of that name, which had Fort
Lafayette, the Bastille of the Civil War, out in the channel before it
and which probably cast a stronger spell upon the spirit of our
childhood, William's and mine at least, than any scene presented to us
up to our reaching our teens.
I find that I draw from the singularly unobliterated memory of the
particulars of all that experience the power quite to glory in our
shame; of so entrancing an interest did I feel it at the time to _be_ an
hotel child, and so little would I have exchanged my lot with that of
any small person more privately bred. We were private enough in all
conscience, I think I must have felt, the rest of the year; and at what
age mustn't I quite have succumbed to the charm of the world seen in a
larger way? For there, incomparably, was the chance to dawdle and gape;
there were human appearances in endless variety and on the
exhibition-stage of a piazza that my gape measured almost as by miles;
it was even as if I had become positively conscious that the social
scene so peopled would pretty well always say more to me than anything
else. What it did say I of course but scantly understood; but I none the
less knew it spoke, and I listened to its voice, I seem to recall, very
much as "young Edwin," in Dr. Beattie's poem, listened to the roar of
tempests and torrents from the nobler eminence of beetling crags and in
exposure to still deeper abysses. I cling for the moment, however, to
the small story of our Vredenburg summer, as we were for long afterwards
invidiously to brand it; the more that it so plays its part in
illustration, under the light of a later and happier age, of the growth,
when not rather of the arrest, of manners and customs roundabout our
birthplace. I think we had never been so much as during these particular
months disinherited of the general and public amenities that reinforce
for the young private precept and example--disinherited in favour of
dust and glare and mosquitoes and pigs and shanties and rumshops, of no
walks and scarce more drives, of a repeated no less than of a strong
emphasis on the more sordid sides of the Irish aspect in things. There
was a castellated residence on the hill above us--very high I remember
supposing the hill and very stately the structure; it had towers and
views and pretensions and belonged to a Colonel, whom we thought very
handsome and very costumed, (as if befrogged and high-booted, which he
couldn't have been at all, only _ought_ to have been, would even
certainly have been at a higher pitch of social effect,) and whose son
and heir, also very handsome and known familiarly and endearingly as
Chick, had a velvet coat and a pony and I think spurs, all luxuries we
were without, and was cousin to boys, the De Coppets, whom we had come
to know at our school of the previous winter and who somehow--doubtless
partly as guests of the opulent Chick--hovered again about the field of
idleness.
The De Coppets, particularly in the person of the first-born Louis, had
been a value to us, or at any rate to me--for though I was, in common
with my elders then, unacquainted with the application of that word as I
use it here, what was my incipient sense of persons and things, what
were my first stirred observant and imaginative reactions,
discriminations and categories, but a vague groping for it? The De
Coppets (again as more especially and most impressively interpreted by
the subtle Louis) enjoyed the pre-eminence of being European; they had
dropped during the scholastic term of 1853-4 straight from the lake of
Geneva into the very bosom of Mr. Richard Pulling Jenks's select resort
for young gentlemen, then situated in Broadway below Fourth Street; and
had lately been present at an historic pageant--whether or no
celebrating the annals of the town of Coppet I know not--in which
representatives of their family had figured in armour and on horseback
as the Barons (to our comprehension) de Coup or Cou. Their father was
thus of the Canton de Vaud--only their mother had been native among
ourselves and sister to the Colonel of the castellations. But what was
the most vivid mark of the brothers, and vividest on the part of the
supersubtle Louis, was his French treatment of certain of our native
local names, Ohio and Iowa for instance, which he rendered, as to their
separate vowels, with a daintiness and a delicacy invidious and
imperturbable, so that he might have been Chateaubriand declaiming Les
Natchez at Madame Recamier's--O-ee-oh and Ee-o-wah; a proceeding in him,
a violence offered to his serried circle of little staring and glaring
New Yorkers supplied with the usual allowance of fists and boot-toes,
which, as it was clearly conscious, I recollect thinking unsurpassed for
cool calm courage. Those _were_ the right names--which we owed wholly to
the French explorers and Jesuit Fathers; so much the worse for us if we
vulgarly didn't know it. I lose myself in admiration of the consistency,
the superiority, the sublimity, of the not at all game-playing, yet in
his own way so singularly sporting, Louis. He was naturally and
incorruptibly French--as, so oddly, I have known other persons of both
sexes to be whose English was naturally and incorruptibly American; the
appearance being thus that the possession of indigenous English alone
forms the adequate barrier and the assured racial ground. (Oh the queer
reversions observed on the part of Latinized compatriots in the course
of a long life--the remarkable drops from the quite current French or
Italian to the comparatively improvised native idiom, with the resulting
effect of the foreign tongue used as a domestic and the domestic, that
is the original American, used as a foreign tongue, or without inherited
confidence!)
Louis De Coppet, though theoretically American and domiciled, was
_naturally_ French, and so pressed further home to me that "sense of
Europe" to which I feel that my very earliest consciousness waked--a
perversity that will doubtless appear to ask for all the justification I
can supply and some of which I shall presently attempt to give. He
opened vistas, and I count ever as precious anyone, everyone, who
betimes does that for the small straining vision; performing this office
never so much, doubtless, as when, during that summer, he invited me to
collaborate with him in the production of a romance which _il se fit
fort_ to get printed, to get published, when success, or in other words
completion, should crown our effort. Our effort, alas, failed of the
crown, in spite of sundry solemn and mysterious meetings--so much
devoted, I seem to remember, to the publishing question that others more
fundamental dreadfully languished; leaving me convinced, however, that
my friend would have got our fiction published if he could only have got
it written. I think of my participation in this vain dream as of the
very first gage of visiting approval offered to the exercise of a
gift--though quite unable to conceive my companion's ground for
suspecting a gift of which I must at that time quite have failed to
exhibit a single in the least "phenomenal" symptom. It had none the less
by his overtures been handsomely _imputed_ to me; that was in a manner a
beginning--a small start, yet not wholly unattended with bravery. Louis
De Coppet, I must add, brought to light later on, so far as I know, no
compositions of his own; we met him long after in Switzerland and
eventually heard of his having married a young Russian lady and settled
at Nice. If I drop on his memory this apology for a bay-leaf it is from
the fact of his having given the earliest, or at least the most
personal, tap to that pointed prefigurement of the manners of "Europe,"
which, inserted wedge-like, if not to say peg-like, into my young
allegiance, was to split the tender organ into such unequal halves. His
the toy hammer that drove in the very point of the golden nail.
It was as if there had been a mild magic in that breath, however scant,
of another world; but when I ask myself what element of the pleasing or
the agreeable may have glimmered through the then general, the outer and
enveloping conditions, I recover many more of the connections in which
forms and civilities lapsed beyond repair than of those in which they
struggled at all successfully. It is for some record of the question of
taste, of the consciousness of an aesthetic appeal, as reflected in forms
and aspects, that I shall like best to testify; as the promise and the
development of these things on our earlier American scene are the more
interesting to trace for their doubtless demanding a degree of the finer
attention. The plain and happy profusions and advances and successes, as
one looks back, reflect themselves at every turn; the quick beats of
material increase and multiplication, with plenty of people to tell of
them and throw up their caps for them; but the edifying matters to
recapture would be the adventures of the "higher criticism" so far as
there was any--and so far too as it might bear on the real quality and
virtue of things; the state of manners, the terms of intercourse, the
care for excellence, the sense of appearances, the intellectual reaction
generally. However, any breasting of those deep waters must be but in
the form for me of an occasional dip. It meanwhile fairly overtakes and
arrests me here as a contributive truth that our general medium of life
in the situation I speak of was such as to make a large defensive
verandah, which seems to have very stoutly and completely surrounded us,
play more or less the part of a raft of rescue in too high a tide--too
high a tide there beneath us, as I recover it, of the ugly and the
graceless. My particular perspective may magnify a little wildly--when
it doesn't even more weirdly diminish; but I read into the great hooded
and guarded resource in question an evidential force: as if it must
really have played for us, so far as its narrowness and its exposure
permitted, the part of a buffer-state against the wilderness immediately
near, that of the empty, the unlovely and the mean. Interposing a little
ease, didn't it interpose almost all the ease we knew?--so that when
amiable friends, arriving from New York by the boat, came to see us,
there was no rural view for them but that of our great shame, a view of
the pigs and the shanties and the loose planks and scattered refuse and
rude public ways; never even a field-path for a gentle walk or a garden
nook in afternoon shade. I recall my prompt distaste, a strange
precocity of criticism, for so much aridity--since of what lost Arcadia,
at that age, had I really had the least glimpse?
Our scant margin must have affected me more nobly, I should in justice
add, when old Mrs. L. passed or hovered, for she sometimes caustically
joined the circle and sometimes, during the highest temperatures, which
were very high that summer, but flitted across it in a single flowing
garment, as we amazedly conceived; one of the signs of that grand
impertinence, I supposed, which belonged to "dowagers"--dowagers who
were recognised characters and free speakers, doing and saying what they
liked. This ancient lady was lodged in some outlying tract of the
many-roomed house, which in more than one quarter stretched away into
mystery; but the piazza, to which she had access, was unbroken, and
whenever she strayed from her own territory she swam afresh into ours. I
definitely remember that, having heard and perhaps read of dowagers,
who, as I was aware, had scarce been provided for in our social scheme,
I said to myself at first sight of our emphatic neighbour, a person
clearly used to exceptional deference, "This must be a perfect
specimen;" which was somehow very wonderful. The absolute first sight,
however, had preceded the New Brighton summer, and it makes me lose
myself in a queer dim vision, all the obscurities attendant on my having
been present, as a very small boy indeed, at an evening entertainment
where Mrs. L. figured in an attire that is still vivid to me: a blue
satin gown, a long black lace shawl and a head-dress consisting in
equally striking parts of a brown wig, a plume of some sort waving over
it and a band or fillet, whether of some precious metal or not I forget,
keeping it in place by the aid of a precious stone which adorned the
centre of her brow. Such was my first view of the _feronniere_ of our
grandmothers, when not of our greatgrandmothers. I see its wearer at
this day bend that burdened brow upon me in a manner sufficiently awful,
while her knuckly white gloves toyed with a large fan and a vinaigrette
attached to her thumb by a chain; and as she was known to us afterwards
for a friend of my Albany grandmother's it may have been as a tribute to
this tie that she allowed me momentarily to engage her attention. _Then_
it predominantly must have been that I knew her for a dowager--though
this was a light in which I had never considered my grandmother herself;
but what I have quite lost the clue to is the question of my
extraordinary footing in such an assembly, the occasion of a dance of my
elders, youthful elders but young married people, into which, really, my
mother, as a participant, must have introduced me.