VII

Dimly queer and "pathetic" to me were to remain through much of the

after time indeed most of those early indigenous vogues and literary

flurries: so few of those that brushed by my childhood had been other

than a tinkling that suddenly stopped. I am afraid I mean that what was

touching was rather the fact that the tinkle _could_ penetrate than the

fact that it died away; the light of criticism might have beat so

straight--if the sense of proportion and the fact of compassion hadn't

waved it away--on the aesthetic phase during which the appeal was mainly

_by_ the tinkle. The Scarlet Letter and The Seven Gables had the deep

tone as much as one would; but of the current efforts of the imagination

they were alone in having it till Walt Whitman broke out in the later

fifties--and I was to know nothing of that happy genius till long after.

An absorbed perusal of The Lamplighter was what I was to achieve at the

fleeting hour I continue to circle round; that romance was on every

one's lips, and I recollect it as more or less thrust upon me in amends

for the imposed sacrifice of a ranker actuality--that of the improper

Mr. Robinson, I mean, as to whom there revives in me the main question

of where his impropriety, in so general a platitude of the bourgeois,

could possibly have dwelt. It was to be true indeed that Walt Whitman

achieved an impropriety of the first magnitude; that success, however,

but showed us the platitude returning in a genial rage upon itself and

getting out of control by generic excess. There was no rage at any rate

in The Lamplighter, over which I fondly hung and which would have been

my first "grown-up" novel--it had been soothingly offered me for

that--had I consented to take it as really and truly grown-up. I

couldn't have said what it lacked for the character, I only had my

secret reserves, and when one blest afternoon on the New Brighton boat I

waded into The Initials I saw how right I had been. The Initials _was_

grown-up and the difference thereby exquisite; it came over me with the

very first page, assimilated in the fluttered little cabin to which I

had retired with it--all in spite of the fact too that my attention was

distracted by a pair of remarkable little girls who lurked there out of

more public view as to hint that they weren't to be seen for nothing.

That must have been a rich hour, for I mix the marvel of the Boon

Children, strange pale little flowers of the American theatre, with my

conscious joy in bringing back to my mother, from our forage in New

York, a gift of such happy promise as the history of the long-legged Mr.

Hamilton and his two Bavarian beauties, the elder of whom, Hildegarde,

was to figure for our small generation as the very type of the haughty

as distinguished from the forward heroine (since I think our categories

really came to no more than those). I couldn't have got very far with

Hildegarde in moments so scant, but I memorably felt that romance was

thick round me--everything, at such a crisis, seeming to make for it at

once. The Boon Children, conveyed thus to New Brighton under care of a

lady in whose aspect the strain of the resolute triumphed over the note

of the battered, though the showy in it rather succumbed at the same

time to the dowdy, were already "billed," as infant phenomena, for a

performance that night at the Pavilion, where our attendance, it was a

shock to feel, couldn't be promised; and in gazing without charge at the

pair of weary and sleepy little mountebanks I found the histrionic

character and the dramatic profession for the first time revealed to me.

They filled me with fascination and yet with fear; they expressed a

melancholy grace and a sort of peevish refinement, yet seemed awfully

detached and indifferent, indifferent perhaps even to being pinched and

slapped, for art's sake, at home; they honoured me with no notice

whatever and regarded me doubtless as no better than one of the little

louts peeping through the tent of the show. In return I judged their

appearance dissipated though fascinating, and sought consolation for the

memory of their scorn and the loss of their exhibition, as time went on,

in noting that the bounds of their fame seemed somehow to have been

stayed. I neither "met" them nor heard of them again. The little

Batemans must have obscured their comparatively dim lustre, flourishing

at the same period and with a larger command of the pictorial poster and

the other primitive symbols in Broadway--such posters and such symbols

as they were at that time!--the little Batemans who were to be reserved,

in maturer form, for my much later and more grateful appreciation.

This weak reminiscence has obstructed, however, something more to the

purpose, the retained impression of those choicest of our loiterings

that took place, still far down-town, at the Bookstore, home of delights

and haunt of fancy. It was at the Bookstore we had called on the day of

The Initials and the Boon Children--and it was thence we were returning

with our spoil, of which the charming novel must have been but a

fragment. My impression composed itself of many pieces; a great and

various practice of burying my nose in the half-open book for the strong

smell of paper and printer's ink, known to us as the English smell, was

needed to account for it. _That_ was the exercise of the finest sense

that hung about us, my brother and me--or of one at least but little

less fine than the sense for the satisfaction of which we resorted to

Thompson's and to Taylor's: it bore me company during all our returns

from forages and left me persuaded that I had only to snuff up hard

enough, fresh uncut volume in hand, to taste of the very substance of

London. All our books in that age were English, at least all our

down-town ones--I personally recall scarce any that were not; and I take

the perception of that quality in them to have associated itself with

more fond dreams and glimmering pictures than any other one principle of

growth. It was all a result of the deeply _infected_ state: I had been

prematurely poisoned--as I shall presently explain. The Bookstore,

fondest of my father's resorts, though I remember no more of its public

identity than that it further enriched the brave depth of Broadway, was

overwhelmingly and irresistibly English, as not less tonically English

was our principal host there, with whom we had moreover, my father and

I, thanks to his office, such personal and genial relations that I

recall seeing him grace our board at home, in company with his wife,

whose vocal strain and complexion and coiffure and flounces I found none

the less informing, none the less "racial," for my not being then versed

in the language of analysis.

The true inwardness of these rich meanings--those above all of the

Bookstore itself--was that a tradition was thus fed, a presumption thus

created, a vague vision thus filled in: all expression is clumsy for so

mystic a process. What else can have happened but that, having taken

over, under suggestion and with singular infant promptitude, a

particular throbbing consciousness, I had become aware of the source at

which it could best be refreshed? That consciousness, so communicated,

was just simply of certain impressions, certain _sources_ of impression

again, proceeding from over the sea and situated beyond it--or even much

rather of my parents' own impression of such, the fruit of a happy time

spent in and about London with their two babies and reflected in that

portion of their talk with each other to which I best attended. Had

_all_ their talk for its subject, in my infant ears, that happy

time?--did it deal only with London and Piccadilly and the Green Park,

where, over against their dwelling, their two babies mainly took the air

under charge of Fanny of Albany, their American nurse, whose remark as

to the degree to which the British Museum fell short for one who had had

the privilege of that of Albany was handed down to us? Did it never

forbear from Windsor and Richmond and Sudbrook and Ham Common, amid the

rich complexity of which, crowding their discourse with echoes, they

had spent their summer?--all a scattering of such pearls as it seemed

that their second-born could most deftly and instinctively pick up. Our

sole maternal aunt, already mentioned as a devoted and cherished

presence during those and many later years, was in a position to share

with them the treasure of these mild memories, which strike me as having

for the most part, through some bright household habit, overflowed at

the breakfast-table, where I regularly attended with W. J.; she had

imbibed betimes in Europe the seeds of a long nostalgia, and I think of

her as ever so patiently communicative on that score under pressure of

my artless appeal. That I should have been so inquiring while still so

destitute of primary data was doubtless rather an anomaly; and it was

for that matter quite as if my infant divination proceeded by the light

of nature: I divined that it would matter to me in the future that

"English life" should be of this or that fashion. My father had

subscribed for me to a small periodical of quarto form, covered in

yellow and entitled The Charm, which shed on the question the softest

lustre, but of which the appearances were sadly intermittent, or then

struck me as being; inasmuch as many of our visits to the Bookstore were

to ask for the new number--only to learn with painful frequency that the

last consignment from London had arrived without it. I feel again the

pang of that disappointment--as if through the want of what I needed

most for going on; the English smell was exhaled by The Charm in a

peculiar degree, and I see myself affected by the failure as by that of

a vital tonic. It was not, at the same time, by a Charm the more or the

less that my salvation was to be, as it were, worked out, or my

imagination at any rate duly convinced; conviction was the result of the

very air of home, so far as I most consciously inhaled it. This

represented, no doubt, a failure to read into matters close at hand all

the interest they were capable of yielding; but I had taken the twist,

had sipped the poison, as I say, and was to feel it to that end the most

salutary cup. I saw my parents homesick, as I conceived, for the ancient

order and distressed and inconvenienced by many of the more immediate

features of the modern, as the modern pressed upon us, and since their

theory of our better living was from an early time that we should renew

the quest of the ancient on the very first possibility I simply grew

greater in the faith that somehow to manage that would constitute

success in life. I never found myself deterred from this fond view,

which was implied in every question I asked, every answer I got, and

every plan I formed.

Those are great words for the daydream of infant ignorance, yet if

success in life may perhaps be best defined as the performance in age of

some intention arrested in youth I may frankly put in a claim to it. To

press my nose against the sources of the English smell, so different for

young bibliophiles from any American, was to adopt that sweetness as the

sign of my "atmosphere"; roundabout might be the course to take, but one

was in motion from the first and one never lost sight of the goal. The

very names of places and things in the other world--the marked opposite

in most ways of that in which New York and Albany, Fort Hamilton and New

Brighton formed so fallacious a maximum--became to me values and secrets

and shibboleths; they were probably often on my tongue and employed as

ignorance determined, but I quite recall being ashamed to use them as

much as I should have liked. It was New Brighton, I reconstruct (and

indeed definitely remember) that "finished" us at last--that and our

final sordid school, W. J.'s and mine, in New York: the ancient order

_had_ somehow to be invoked when such "advantages" as those were the

best within our compass and our means. Not further to anticipate, at all

events, that climax was for a while but vaguely in sight, and the

illusion of felicity continued from season to season to shut us in. It

is only of what I took for felicity, however few the years and however

scant the scene, that I am pretending now to speak; though I shall have

strained the last drop of romance from this vision of our towny summers

with the quite sharp reminiscence of my first sitting for my

daguerreotype. I repaired with my father on an August day to the great

Broadway establishment of Mr. Brady, supreme in that then beautiful art,

and it is my impression--the only point vague with me--that though we

had come up by the Staten Island boat for the purpose we were to keep

the affair secret till the charming consequence should break, at home,

upon my mother. Strong is my conviction that our mystery, in the event,

yielded almost at once to our elation, for no tradition had a brighter

household life with us than that of our father's headlong impatience. He

moved in a cloud, if not rather in a high radiance, of precipitation and

divulgation, a chartered rebel against cold reserves. The good news in

his hand refused under any persuasion to grow stale, the sense of

communicable pleasure in his breast was positively explosive; so that we

saw those "surprises" in which he had conspired with our mother for our

benefit converted by him in every case, under our shamelessly encouraged

guesses, into common conspiracies against her--against her knowing, that

is, how thoroughly we were all compromised. He had a special and

delightful sophistry at the service of his overflow, and never so fine a

fancy as in defending it on "human" grounds. He was something very

different withal from a parent of weak mercies; weakness was never so

positive and plausible, nor could the attitude of sparing you be more

handsomely or on occasion even more comically aggressive.

My small point is simply, however, that the secresy of our conjoined

portrait was probably very soon, by his act, to begin a public and

shining life and to enjoy it till we received the picture; as to which

moreover still another remembrance steals on me, a proof of the fact

that our adventure was improvised. Sharp again is my sense of not being

so adequately dressed as I should have taken thought for had I foreseen

my exposure; though the resources of my wardrobe as then constituted

could surely have left me but few alternatives. The main resource of a

small New York boy in this line at that time was the little sheath-like

jacket, tight to the body, closed at the neck and adorned in front with

a single row of brass buttons--a garment of scant grace assuredly and

compromised to my consciousness, above all, by a strange ironic light

from an unforgotten source. It was but a short time before those days

that the great Mr. Thackeray had come to America to lecture on The

English Humourists, and still present to me is the voice proceeding from

my father's library, in which some glimpse of me hovering, at an opening

of the door, in passage or on staircase, prompted him to the formidable

words: "Come here, little boy, and show me your extraordinary jacket!"

My sense of my jacket became from that hour a heavy one--further

enriched as my vision is by my shyness of posture before the seated, the

celebrated visitor, who struck me, in the sunny light of the animated

room, as enormously big and who, though he laid on my shoulder the hand

of benevolence, bent on my native costume the spectacles of wonder. I

was to know later on why he had been so amused and why, after asking me

if this were the common uniform of my age and class, he remarked that in

England, were I to go there, I should be addressed as "Buttons." It had

been revealed to me thus in a flash that we were somehow _queer_, and

though never exactly crushed by it I became aware that I at least felt

so as I stood with my head in Mr. Brady's vise. Beautiful most decidedly

the lost art of the daguerreotype; I remember the "exposure" as on this

occasion interminably long, yet with the result of a facial anguish far

less harshly reproduced than my suffered snapshots of a later age. Too

few, I may here interject, were to remain my gathered impressions of the

great humourist, but one of them, indeed almost the only other, bears

again on the play of his humour over our perversities of dress. It

belongs to a later moment, an occasion on which I see him familiarly

seated with us, in Paris, during the spring of 1857, at some repast at

which the younger of us too, by that time, habitually flocked, in our

affluence of five. Our youngest was beside him, a small sister, then not

quite in her eighth year, and arrayed apparently after the fashion of

the period and place; and the tradition lingered long of his having

suddenly laid his hand on her little flounced person and exclaimed with

ludicrous horror: "Crinoline?--I was suspecting it! So young and so

depraved!"

A fainter image, that of one of the New York moments, just eludes me,

pursue it as I will; I recover but the setting and the fact of his brief

presence in it, with nothing that was said or done beyond my being left

with my father to watch our distinguished friend's secretary, who was

also a young artist, establish his easel and proceed to paint. The

setting, as I recall it, was an odd, oblong, blank "private parlour" at

the Clarendon Hotel, then the latest thing in hotels, but whose ancient

corner of Fourth Avenue and--was it Eighteenth Street?--long ago ceased

to know it; the gentle, very gentle, portraitist was Mr. Eyre Crowe and

the obliging sitter my father, who sat in response to Mr. Thackeray's

desire that his protege should find employment. The protector after a

little departed, blessing the business, which took the form of a small

full-length of the model seated, his arm extended and the hand on the

knob of his cane. The work, it may at this time of day be mentioned,

fell below its general possibilities; but I note the scene through which

I must duly have gaped and wondered (for I had as yet seen no one, least

of all a casual acquaintance in an hotel parlour, "really paint"

before,) as a happy example again of my parent's positive cultivation of

my society, it would seem, and thought for my social education. And then

there are other connections; I recall it as a Sunday morning, I recover

the place itself as a featureless void--bleak and bare, with its

developments all to come, the hotel parlour of other New York days--but

vivid still to me is my conscious assistance for the first time at

operations that were to mean much for many of my coming years. Those of

quiet Mr. Crowe held me spellbound--I was to circle so wistfully, as

from that beginning, round the practice of his art, which in spite of

these earnest approaches and intentions never on its own part in the

least acknowledged our acquaintance; scarcely much more than it was ever

to respond, for that matter, to the overtures of the mild aspirant

himself, known to my observation long afterwards, in the London years,

as the most touchingly resigned of the children of disappointment. Not

only by association was he a Thackerayan figure, but much as if the

master's hand had stamped him with the outline and the value, with life

and sweetness and patience--shown, as after the long futility, seated

in a quiet wait, very long too, for the end. That was sad, one couldn't

but feel; yet it was in the oddest way impossible to take him for a

failure. He might have been one of fortune's, strictly; but what was

that when he was one of Thackeray's own successes?--in the minor line,

but with such a grace and such a truth, those of some dim second cousin

to Colonel Newcome.