IV

It took place in the house of our cousins Robert and Kitty Emmet the

elder--for we were to have two cousin Kittys of that ilk and yet another

consanguineous Robert at least; the latter name being naturally, among

them all, of a pious, indeed of a glorious, tradition, and three of my

father's nieces marrying three Emmet brothers, the first of these the

Robert aforesaid. Catherine James, daughter of my uncle Augustus, his

then quite recent and, as I remember her, animated and attractive bride,

whose fair hair framed her pointed smile in full and far-drooping

"front" curls, I easily evoke as my first apprehended image of the free

and happy young woman of fashion, a sign of the wondrous fact that

ladies might live for pleasure, pleasure always, pleasure alone. She was

distinguished for nothing whatever so much as for an insatiable love of

the dance; that passion in which I think of the "good," the best, New

York society of the time as having capered and champagned itself away.

Her younger sister Gertrude, afterwards married to James--or more

inveterately Jim--Pendleton, of Virginia, followed close upon her heels,

literally speaking, and though emulating her in other respects too, was

to last, through many troubles, much longer (looking extraordinarily the

while like the younger portraits of Queen Victoria) and to have much

hospitality, showing it, and showing everything, in a singularly natural

way, for a considerable collection of young hobbledehoy kinsmen. But I

am solicited a moment longer by the queer little issues involved--as if

a social light would somehow stream from them--in my having been taken,

a mere mite of observation, to Kitty Emmet's "grown-up" assembly. Was it

that my mother really felt that to the scrap that I was other scraps

would perhaps strangely adhere, to the extent thus of something to

distinguish me by, nothing else probably having as yet declared

itself--such a scrap for instance as the fine germ of this actual

ferment of memory and play of fancy, a retroactive vision almost intense

of the faded hour and a fond surrender to the questions with which it

bristles? All the female relatives on my father's side who reappear to

me in these evocations strike me as having been intensely and admirably,

but at the same time almost indescribably, _natural_; which fact

connects itself for the brooding painter and fond analyst with fifty

other matters and impressions, his vision of a whole social order--if

the American scene might indeed have been said at that time to be

positively ordered. Wasn't the fact that the dancing passion was so out

of proportion to any social resource just one of the signs of the

natural?--and for that matter in both sexes alike of the artless

kindred. It was shining to us that Jim Pendleton had a yacht--though I

was not smuggled aboard it; there the line was drawn--but the deck must

have been more used for the "German" than for other manoeuvres, often

doubtless under the lead of our cousin Robert, the eldest of the many

light irresponsibles to whom my father was uncle: distinct to me still

being the image of that phenomenally lean and nimble choreographic hero,

"Bob" James to us always, who, almost ghost-fashion, led the cotillion

on from generation to generation, his skull-like smile, with its accent

from the stiff points of his long moustache and the brightly hollow

orbits of his eyes, helping to make of him an immemorial elegant

skeleton.

It is at all events to the sound of fiddles and the popping of corks

that I see even young brides, as well as young grooms, originally so

formed to please and to prosper as our hosts of the restless little

occasion I have glanced at, vanish untimely, become mysterious and

legendary, with such unfathomed silences and significant headshakes

replacing the earlier concert; so that I feel how one's impression of so

much foredoomed youthful levity received constant and quite thrilling

increase. It was of course an impression then obscurely gathered, but

into which one was later on to read strange pages--to some of which I

may find myself moved to revert. Mere mite of observation though I have

dubbed myself, I won't pretend to have deciphered any of them amid the

bacchanal sounds that, on the evening so suggestively spent, floated out

into the region of Washington Place. It is round that general centre

that my richest memories of the "gay" little life in general cluster--as

if it had been, for the circle in which I seem justified in pretending

to have "moved," of the finer essence of "town"; covering as it did the

stretch of Broadway down to Canal Street, with, closer at hand, the New

York Hotel, which figured somehow inordinately in our family annals (the

two newer ones, the glory of their brief and discredited, their flouted

and demolished age, the brown Metropolitan and the white St. Nicholas,

were much further down) and rising northward to the Ultima Thule of

Twenty-third Street, only second then in the supposedly ample scheme of

the regular ninth "wide" street. I can't indeed have moved much on that

night of revelations and yet of enigmas over which I still hang

fascinated; I must have kept intensely still in my corner, all wondering

and all fearing--fearing notice most; and in a definite way I but

remember the formidable interest of my so convincing dowager (to hark

back for a second to _her_) and the fact that a great smooth white cloth

was spread across the denuded room, converted thus into a field of

frolic the prospect of which much excited my curiosity. I but recover

the preparations, however, without recovering the performance; Mrs. L.

and I must have been the only persons not shaking a foot, and premature

unconsciousness clearly in my case supervened. Out of it peeps again the

riddle, the so quaint _trait de moeurs_, of my infant participation.

But I set that down as representative and interesting, and have done

with it.

The manners of the time had obviously a _bonhomie_ of their

own--certainly so on our particularly indulgent and humane little field;

as to which general proposition the later applications and

transformations of the bonhomie would be interesting to trace. It has

lingered and fermented and earned other names, but I seem on the track

of its prime evidence with that note of the sovereign ease of all the

young persons with whom we grew up. In the after-time, as our view took

in, with new climes and new scenes, other examples of the class, these

were always to affect us as more formed and finished, more tutored and

governessed, warned and armed at more points for, and doubtless often

against, the social relation; so that this prepared state on their part,

and which at first appeared but a preparation for shyness or silence or

whatever other ideal of the unconversable, came to be for us the normal,

since it was the relative and not the positive, still less the

superlative, state. No charming creatures of the growing girl sort were

ever to be natural in the degree of these nearer and remoter ornaments

of our family circle in youth; when after intervals and absences the

impression was renewed we saw how right we had been about it, and I feel

as if we had watched it for years under the apprehension and the vision

of some inevitable change, wondering with an affectionate interest what

effect the general improvement in manners might, perhaps all

unfortunately, have upon it. I make out as I look back that it was

really to succumb at no point to this complication, that it was to keep

its really quite inimitable freshness to the end, or, in other words,

when it had been the first free growth of the old conditions, was to

pass away but with the passing of those themselves for whom it had been

the sole possible expression. For it was as of an altogether special

shade and sort that the New York young naturalness of our prime was

touchingly to linger with us--so that to myself, at present, with only

the gentle ghosts of the so numerous exemplars of it before me, it

becomes the very stuff of the soft cerements in which their general mild

mortality is laid away. We used to have in the after-time, amid fresh

recognitions and reminders, the kindest "old New York" identifications

for it. The special shade of its identity was thus that it was not

conscious--really not conscious of anything in the world; or was

conscious of so few possibilities at least, and these so immediate and

so a matter of course, that it came almost to the same thing. That was

the testimony that the slight subjects in question strike me as having

borne to their surrounding medium--the fact that their unconsciousness

could be so preserved. They played about in it so happily and serenely

and sociably, as unembarrassed and loquacious as they were unadmonished

and uninformed--only aware at the most that a good many people within

their horizon were "dissipated"; as in point of fact, alas, a good many

_were_. What it was to be dissipated--that, however, was but in the most

limited degree a feature of their vision; they would have held, under

pressure, that it consisted more than anything else in getting tipsy.

Infinitely queer and quaint, almost incongruously droll, the sense

somehow begotten in ourselves, as very young persons, of our being

surrounded by a slightly remote, yet dimly rich, outer and quite kindred

circle of the tipsy. I remember how, once, as a very small boy, after

meeting in the hall a most amiable and irreproachable gentleman, all

but closely consanguineous, who had come to call on my mother, I

anticipated his further entrance by slipping in to report to that parent

that I thought _he_ must be tipsy. And I was to recall perfectly

afterwards the impression I so made on her--in which the general

proposition that the gentlemen of a certain group or connection might on

occasion be best described by the term I had used sought to destroy the

particular presumption that our visitor wouldn't, by his ordinary

measure, show himself for one of those. He didn't, to all appearance,

for I was afterwards disappointed at the lapse of lurid evidence: that

memory remained with me, as well as a considerable subsequent wonder at

my having leaped to so baseless a view. The truth was indeed that we had

too, in the most innocent way in the world, our sense of "dissipation"

as an abounding element in family histories; a sense fed quite directly

by our fondness for making our father--I can at any rate testify for the

urgency of my own appeal to him--tell us stories of the world of his

youth. He regaled us with no scandals, yet it somehow rarely failed to

come out that each contemporary on his younger scene, each hero of each

thrilling adventure, had, in spite of brilliant promise and romantic

charm, ended badly, as badly as possible. This became our gaping

generalisation--it gaped even under the moral that the anecdote was

always, and so familiarly, humanly and vividly, designed to convey:

everyone in the little old Albany of the Dutch houses and the steep

streets and the recurrent family names--Townsends, Clintons, Van

Rensselaers, Pruyns: I pick them up again at hazard, and all

uninvidiously, out of reverberations long since still--everyone without

exception had at last taken a turn as far as possible from edifying. And

what they had most in common, the hovering presences, the fitful

apparitions that, speaking for myself, so engaged my imagination, was

just the fine old Albany drama--in the light of which a ring of mystery

as to their lives (mainly carried on at the New York Hotel aforesaid)

surrounded them, and their charm, inveterate, as I believed, shone out

as through vaguely-apprehended storm-clouds. Their charm was in various

marks of which I shall have more to say--for as I breathe all this

hushed air again even the more broken things give out touching human

values and faint sweet scents of character, flushes of old beauty and

good-will.

The grim little generalisation remained, none the less, and I may speak

of it--since I speak of everything--as still standing: the striking

evidence that scarce aught but disaster _could_, in that so unformed and

unseasoned society, overtake young men who were in the least exposed.

Not to have been immediately launched in business of a rigorous sort

was to _be_ exposed--in the absence I mean of some fairly abnormal

predisposition to virtue; since it was a world so simply constituted

that whatever wasn't business, or exactly an office or a "store," places

in which people sat close and made money, was just simply pleasure,

sought, and sought only, in places in which people got tipsy. There was

clearly no mean, least of all the golden one, for it was just the ready,

even when the moderate, possession of gold that determined, that hurried

on, disaster. There were whole sets and groups, there were

"sympathetic," though too susceptible, races, that seemed scarce to

recognise or to find possible any practical application of moneyed, that

is of transmitted, ease, however limited, but to go more or less rapidly

to the bad with it--which meant even then going as often as possible to

Paris. The bright and empty air was as void of "careers" for a choice as

of cathedral towers for a sketcher, and I passed my younger time, till

within a year or two of the Civil War, with an absolute vagueness of

impression as to how the political life of the country was carried on.

The field was strictly covered, to my young eyes, I make out, by three

classes, the busy, the tipsy, and Daniel Webster. This last great man

must have represented for us a class in himself; as if to be "political"

was just to _be_ Daniel Webster in his proper person and with room left

over for nobody else. That he should have filled the sky of public life

from pole to pole, even to a childish consciousness not formed in New

England and for which that strenuous section was but a name in the

geography-book, is probably indeed a sign of how large, in the general

air, he comparatively loomed. The public scene was otherwise a blank to

our young vision, I discern, till, later on, in Paris, I saw--for at

that unimproved period we of the unfledged didn't suppose ourselves to

"meet"--Charles Sumner; with whose name indeed there further connects

itself the image of a thrilled hour in the same city some months before:

the gathering of a group of indignant persons on the terrace of a small

old-world _hotel_ or pavilion looking out on the Avenue des Champs

Elysees, slightly above the Rond-Point and just opposite the

antediluvian Jardin d'Hiver (who remembers the Jardin d'Hiver, who

remembers the ancient lodges of the _octroi_, the pair of them facing

each other at the Barriere de l'Etoile?) and among them a passionate

lady in tears over the news, fresh that morning, of the assault on

Sumner by the South Carolina ruffian of the House. The wounded Senator,

injured in health, had come to Europe later on to recuperate, and he

offered me my first view, to the best of my belief, not only of a

"statesman," but of any person whomsoever concerned in political life. I

distinguish in the earlier twilight of Fourteenth Street my father's

return to us one November day--we knew he had been out to vote--with the

news that General Winfield Scott, his and the then "Whig" candidate, had

been defeated for the Presidency; just as I rescue from the same limbo

my afterwards proud little impression of having "met" that high-piled

hero of the Mexican War, whom the Civil War was so soon and with so

little ceremony to extinguish, literally met him, at my father's side,

in Fifth Avenue, where he had just emerged from a cross-street. I remain

vague as to what had then happened and scarce suppose I was, at the age

probably of eight or nine, "presented"; but we must have been for some

moments face to face while from under the vast amplitude of a dark blue

military cloak with a big velvet collar and loosened silver clasp, which

spread about him like a symbol of the tented field, he greeted my

parent--so clear is my sense of the time it took me to gape _all_ the

way up to where he towered aloft.

V

The not very glorious smoke of the Mexican War, I note for another

touch, had been in the air when I was a still smaller boy, and I have an

association with it that hovers between the definite and the dim, a

vision of our uncle (Captain as he then was) Robert Temple, U.S.A., in

regimentals, either on his way to the scene of action or on the return

from it. I see him as a person half asleep sees some large object across

the room and against the window-light--even if to the effect of my now

asking myself why, so far from the scene of action, he was in panoply of

war. I seem to see him cock-hatted and feathered too--an odd vision of

dancing superior plumes which doesn't fit if he was only a captain.

However, I cultivate the wavering shade merely for its value as my

earliest glimpse of any circumstance of the public order--unless indeed

another, the reminiscence to which I owe to-day my sharpest sense of

personal antiquity, had already given me the historic thrill. The scene

of this latter stir of consciousness is, for memory, an apartment in one

of the three Fifth Avenue houses that were not long afterward swallowed

up in the present Brevoort Hotel, and consists of the admired

appearance of my uncles "Gus" and John James to announce to my father

that the Revolution had triumphed in Paris and Louis Philippe had fled

to England. These last words, the flight of the king, linger on my ear

at this hour even as they fell there; we had somehow waked early to a

perception of Paris, and a vibration of my very most infantine

sensibility under its sky had by the same stroke got itself preserved

for subsequent wondering reference. I had been there for a short time in

the second year of my life, and I was to communicate to my parents later

on that as a baby in long clothes, seated opposite to them in a carriage

and on the lap of another person, I had been impressed with the view,

framed by the clear window of the vehicle as we passed, of a great

stately square surrounded with high-roofed houses and having in its

centre a tall and glorious column. I had naturally caused them to

marvel, but I had also, under cross-questioning, forced them to compare

notes, as it were, and reconstitute the miracle. They knew what my

observation of monumental squares had been--and alas hadn't; neither New

York nor Albany could have offered me the splendid perspective, and, for

that matter, neither could London, which moreover I had known at a

younger age still. Conveyed along the Rue St.-Honore while I waggled my

small feet, as I definitely remember doing, under my flowing robe, I had

crossed the Rue de Castiglione and taken in, for all my time, the

admirable aspect of the Place and the Colonne Vendome. I don't now

pretend to measure the extent to which my interest in the events of

1848--I was five years old--was quickened by that _souvenir_, a

tradition further reinforced, I should add, by the fact that some

relative or other, some member of our circle, was always either "there"

("there" being of course generally Europe, but particularly and

pointedly Paris) or going there or coming back from there: I at any rate

revert to the sound of the rich words on my uncles' lips as to my

positive initiation into History. It was as if I had been ready for them

and could catch on; I had heard of kings presumably, and also of

fleeing: but that kings had sometimes to flee was a new and striking

image, to which the apparent consternation of my elders added dramatic

force. So much, in any case, for what I may claim--perhaps too idly--on

behalf of my backward reach.

It has carried me far from my rather evident proposition that if we saw

the "natural" so happily embodied about us--and in female maturity, or

comparative maturity, scarce less than in female adolescence--this was

because the artificial, or in other words the complicated, was so

little there to threaten it. The complicated, as we were later on to

define it, was but another name for those more massed and violent

assaults upon the social sense that we were to recognise subsequently by

their effects--observing thus that a sense more subtly social had so

been created, and that it quite differed from that often almost complete

inward blankness, in respect to any circumjacent, any constituted, order

to the exhibition of which our earlier air and our family scene had

inimitably treated us. We came more or less to see that our young

contemporaries of another world, the trained and admonished, the

disciplined and governessed, or in a word the formed, relatively

speaking, had been made aware of many things of which those at home

hadn't been; yet we were also to note--so far as we may be conceived as

so precociously "noting," though we were certainly incorrigible

observers--that, the awareness in question remaining at the best

imperfect, our little friends as distinguished from our companions of

the cousinship, greater and less, advanced and presumed but to flounder

and recede, elated at once and abashed and on the whole but _feebly_

sophisticated. The cousinship, on the other hand, all unalarmed and

unsuspecting and unembarrassed, lived by pure serenity, sociability and

loquacity; the oddest fact about its members being withal that it didn't

make them bores, I seem to feel as I look back, or at least not worse

bores than sundry specimens of the other growth. There can surely never

have been anything like their good faith and, generally speaking, their

amiability. I should have but to let myself go a little to wish to cite

examples--save that in doing so I should lose sight of my point; which

is to recall again that whether we were all amiable or not (and,

frankly, I claim it in a high degree for most of us) the scene on which

we so freely bloomed does strike me, when I reckon up, as

extraordinarily unfurnished. How came it then that for the most part so

simple we yet weren't more inane? This was doubtless by reason of the

quantity of our inward life--ours of our father's house in especial I

mean--which made an excellent, in some cases almost an incomparable,

_fond_ for a thicker civility to mix with when growing experience should

begin to take that in. It was also quaint, among us, I may be reminded,

to have _begun_ with the inward life; but we began, after the manner of

all men, as we could, and I hold that if it comes to that we might have

begun much worse.

I was in my seventeenth year when the raid and the capture of John

Brown, of Harper's Ferry fame, enjoyed its sharp reverberation among us,

though we were then on the other side of the world; and I count this as

the very first reminder that reached me of our living, on our side, in

a political order: I had perfectly taken in from the pages of "Punch,"

which contributed in the highest degree to our education, that the

peoples on the other side so lived. As there was no American "Punch,"

and to this time has been none, to give small boys the sense and the

imagination of living with their public administrators, Daniel Webster

and Charles Sumner had never become, for my fancy, members of a class, a

class which numbered in England, by John Leech's showing, so many other

members still than Lords Brougham, Palmerston and John Russell. The war

of Secession, soon arriving, was to cause the field to bristle with

features and the sense of the State, in our generation, infinitely to

quicken; but that alarm came upon the country like a thief at night, and

we might all have been living in a land in which there seemed at least

nothing save a comparatively small amount of quite private property to

steal. Even private property in other than the most modest amounts

scarce figured for our particular selves; which doubtless came partly

from the fact that amid all the Albany issue there was ease, with the

habit of ease, thanks to our grandfather's fine old ability--he had

decently provided for so large a generation; but our consciousness was

positively disfurnished, as that of young Americans went, of the

actualities of "business" in a world of business. As to that we all

formed together quite a monstrous exception; business in a world of

business was the thing we most agreed (differ as we might on minor

issues) in knowing nothing about. We touched it and it touched us

neither directly nor otherwise, and I think our fond detachment, not to

say our helpless ignorance and on occasion (since I can speak for one

fine instance) our settled density of understanding, made us an

unexampled and probably, for the ironic "smart" gods of the American

heaven, a lamentable case. Of course even the office and the "store"

leave much of the provision for an approximately complete scheme of

manners to be accounted for; still there must have been vast numbers of

people about us for whom, under the usages, the assault on the

imagination from without was much stronger and the filling-in of the

general picture much richer. It was exactly by the lack of that

filling-in that we--we more especially who lived at near view of my

father's admirable example--had been thrown so upon the inward life. No

one could ever have taken to it, even in the face of discouragement,

more kindly and naturally than he; but the situation had at least that

charm that, in default of so many kinds of the outward, people had their

choice of as many kinds of the inward as they would, and might practise

those kinds with whatever consistency, intensity and brilliancy. Of our

father's perfect gift for practising _his_ kind I shall have more to

say; but I meanwhile glance yet again at those felicities of destitution

which kept us, collectively, so genially interested in almost nothing

but each other and which come over me now as one of the famous blessings

in disguise.

There were "artists" in the prospect--didn't Mr. Tom Hicks and Mr. Paul

Duggan and Mr. C. P. Cranch and Mr. Felix Darley, this last worthy of a

wider reputation, capable perhaps even of a finer development, than he

attained, more or less haunt our friendly fireside, and give us also the

sense of others, landscapist Cropseys and Coles and Kensetts, and

bust-producing Iveses and Powerses and Moziers, hovering in an outer

circle? There were authors not less, some of them vague and female and

in this case, as a rule, glossily ringletted and monumentally

breastpinned, but mostly frequent and familiar, after the manner of

George Curtis and Parke Godwin and George Ripley and Charles Dana and N.

P. Willis and, for brighter lights or those that in our then comparative

obscurity almost deceived the morn, Mr. Bryant, Washington Irving and E.

A. Poe--the last-named of whom I cite not so much because he was

personally present (the extremity of personal absence had just overtaken

him) as by reason of that predominant lustre in him which our small

opening minds themselves already recognised and which makes me wonder

to-day at the legend of the native neglect of him. Was he not even at

that time on all lips, had not my brother, promptly master of the

subject, beckoned on my lagging mind with a recital of The Gold-Bug and

The Pit and the Pendulum?--both of which, however, I was soon enough to

read for myself, adding to them The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Were we

not also forever mounting on little platforms at our infant schools to

"speak" The Raven and Lenore and the verses in which we phrased the

heroine as Annabellee?--falling thus into the trap the poet had so

recklessly laid for us, as he had laid one for our interminable droning,

not less, in the other pieces I have named. So far from misprizing our

ill-starred magician we acclaimed him surely at every turn; he lay upon

our tables and resounded in our mouths, while we communed to satiety,

even for boyish appetites, over the thrill of his choicest pages. Don't

I just recognise the ghost of a dim memory of a children's Christmas

party at the house of Fourteenth Street neighbours--they come back to me

as "the Beans": who and what and whence and whither the kindly

Beans?--where I admired over the chimney piece the full-length portrait

of a lady seated on the ground in a Turkish dress, with hair flowing

loose from a cap which was not as the caps of ladies known to me, and I

think with a tambourine, who was somehow identified to my enquiring

mind as the wife of the painter of the piece, Mr. Osgood, and the so

ministering friend of the unhappy Mr. Poe. There she throned in honour,

like Queen Constance on the "huge firm earth"--all for _that_ and her

tambourine; and surely we could none of us have done more for the

connection.

Washington Irving I "met," with infant promptitude, very much as I had

met General Scott; only this time it was on a steamboat that I

apprehended the great man; my father, under whose ever-patient

protection I then was--during the summer afternoon's sail from New York

to Fort Hamilton--having named him to me, for this long preservation,

before they greeted and talked, and having a fact of still more moment

to mention, with the greatest concern, afterwards: Mr. Irving had given

him the news of the shipwreck of Margaret Fuller in those very waters

(Fire Island at least was but just without our big Bay) during the great

August storm that had within the day or two passed over us. The

unfortunate lady was essentially of the Boston connection; but she must

have been, and probably through Emerson, a friend of my parents--mustn't

she have held "conversations," in the finest exotic Bostonese, in New

York, Emerson himself lecturing there to admiration?--since the more I

squeeze the sponge of memory the more its stored secretions flow, to

remind me here again that, being with those elders late one evening at

an exhibition of pictures, possibly that of the National Academy, then

confined to scant quarters, I was shown a small full-length portrait of

Miss Fuller, seated as now appears to me and wrapped in a long white

shawl, the failure of which to do justice to its original my companions

denounced with some emphasis. Was this work from the hand of Mr. Tom

Hicks aforesaid, or was that artist concerned only with the life-sized,

the enormous (as I took it to be) the full-length, the violently

protruded accessories in which come back to me with my infant sense of

the wonder and the beauty of them, as expressed above all in the image

of a very long and lovely lady, the new bride of the artist, standing at

a window before a row of plants or bulbs in tall coloured glasses. The

light of the window playing over the figure and the "treatment" of its

glass and of the flower-pots and the other furniture, passed, by my

impression, for the sign of the master hand; and _was_ it all brave and

charming, or was it only very hard and stiff, quite ugly and helpless? I

put these questions as to a vanished world and by way of pressing back

into it only the more clingingly and tenderly--wholly regardless in

other words of whether the answers to them at all matter. They matter

doubtless but for fond evocation, and if one tries to evoke one must

neglect none of the arts, one must do it with all the forms. Why I

_should_ so like to do it is another matter--and what "outside

interest" I may suppose myself to create perhaps still another: I

fatuously proceed at any rate, I make so far as I can the small warm

dusky homogeneous New York world of the mid-century close about us.