IX

The truth is doubtless, however, much less in the wealth of my

experience than in the tenacity of my impression, the fact that I have

lost nothing of what I saw and that though I can't now quite divide the

total into separate occasions the various items surprisingly swarm for

me. I shall return to some of them, wishing at present only to make my

point of when and how the seeds were sown that afterwards so thickly

sprouted and flowered. I was greatly to love the drama, at its best, as

a "form"; whatever variations of faith or curiosity I was to know in

respect to the infirm and inadequate theatre. There was of course

anciently no question for us of the drama at its best; and indeed while

I lately by chance looked over a copious collection of theatrical

portraits, beginning with the earliest age of lithography and

photography as so applied, and documentary in the highest degree on the

personalities, as we nowadays say, of the old American stage,

stupefaction grew sharp in me and scepticism triumphed, so vulgar, so

barbarous, seemed the array of types, so extraordinarily provincial the

note of every figure, so less than scant the claim of such

physiognomies and such reputations. Rather dismal, everywhere, I admit,

the histrionic image with the artificial lights turned off--the fatigued

and disconnected face reduced to its mere self and resembling some

closed and darkened inn with the sign still swung but the place blighted

for want of custom. That consideration weighs; but what a "gang," all

the same, when thus left to their own devices, the performers, men and

women alike, of that world of queer appreciations! I ought perhaps to

bear on them lightly in view of what in especial comes back to me; the

sense of the sacred thrill with which I began to watch the green

curtain, the particular one that was to rise to The Comedy of Errors on

the occasion that must have been, for what I recall of its almost

unbearable intensity, the very first of my ever sitting at a play. I

should have been indebted for the momentous evening in that case to Mr.

William Burton, whose small theatre in Chambers Street, to the rear of

Stewart's big shop and hard by the Park, as the Park was at that time

understood, offered me then my prime initiation. Let me not complain of

my having owed the adventure to a still greater William as well, nor

think again without the right intensity, the scarce tolerable throb, of

the way the torment of the curtain was mixed, half so dark a defiance

and half so rich a promise. One's eyes bored into it in vain, and yet

one knew it _would_ rise at the named hour, the only question being if

one could exist till then. The play had been read to us during the day;

a celebrated English actor, whose name I inconsistently forget, had

arrived to match Mr. Burton as the other of the Dromios; and the

agreeable Mrs. Holman, who had to my relentless vision too retreating a

chin, was so good as to represent Adriana. I regarded Mrs. Holman as a

friend, though in no warmer light than that in which I regarded Miss

Mary Taylor--save indeed that Mrs. Holman had the pull, on one's

affections, of "coming out" to sing in white satin and quite

irrelevantly between the acts; an advantage she shared with the younger

and fairer and more dashing, the dancing, Miss Malvina, who footed it

and tambourined it and shawled it, irruptively, in lonely state. When

not admiring Mr. Burton in Shakespeare we admired him as Paul Pry, as

Mr. Toodles and as Aminadab Sleek in The Serious Family, and we must

have admired him very much--his huge fat person, his huge fat face and

his vast slightly pendulous cheek, surmounted by a sort of elephantine

wink, to which I impute a remarkable baseness, being still perfectly

present to me.

We discriminated, none the less; we thought Mr. Blake a much finer

comedian, much more of a gentleman and a scholar--"mellow" Mr. Blake,

whom with the brave and emphatic Mrs. Blake (_how_ they must have made

their points!) I connect partly with the Burton scene and partly with

that, of slightly subsequent creation, which, after flourishing awhile

slightly further up Broadway under the charmlessly commercial name of

Brougham's Lyceum (we had almost only Lyceums and Museums and Lecture

Rooms and Academies of Music for playhouse and opera then,) entered upon

a long career and a migratory life as Wallack's Theatre. I fail

doubtless to keep _all_ my associations clear, but what is important, or

what I desire at least to make pass for such, is that when we most

admired Mr. Blake we also again admired Miss Mary Taylor; and it was at

Brougham's, not at Burton's, that we rendered _her_ that

tribute--reserved for her performance of the fond theatrical daughter in

the English version of Le Pere de la Debutante, where I see the charming

panting dark-haired creature, in flowing white classically relieved by a

gold tiara and a golden scarf, rush back from the supposed stage to the

represented green-room, followed by thunders of applause, and throw

herself upon the neck of the broken-down old gentleman in a blue coat

with brass buttons who must have been after all, on second thoughts, Mr.

Placide. Greater flights or more delicate shades the art of pathetic

comedy was at that time held not to achieve; only I straighten it out

that Mr. and Mrs. Blake, not less than Miss Mary Taylor (who

preponderantly haunts my vision, even to the disadvantage of Miss Kate

Horn in Nan the Good-for-Nothing, until indeed she is displaced by the

brilliant Laura Keene) did migrate to Brougham's, where we found them

all themselves as Goldsmith's Hardcastle pair and other like matters. We

rallied especially to Blake as Dogberry, on the occasion of my second

Shakespearean night, for as such I seem to place it, when Laura Keene

and Mr. Lester--the Lester Wallack that was to be--did Beatrice and

Benedick. I yield to this further proof that we had our proportion of

Shakespeare, though perhaps antedating that rapt vision of Much Ado,

which may have been preceded by the dazzled apprehension of A Midsummer

Night's Dream at the Broadway (there _was_ a confessed Theatre;) this

latter now present to me in every bright particular. It supplied us, we

must have felt, our greatest conceivable adventure--I cannot otherwise

account for its emerging so clear. Everything here is as of yesterday,

the identity of the actors, the details of their dress, the charm

imparted by the sisters Gougenheim, the elegant elder as the infatuated

Helena and the other, the roguish "Joey" as the mischievous Puck. Hermia

was Mrs. Nagle, in a short salmon-coloured peplum over a white

petticoat, the whole bulgingly confined by a girdle of shining gilt and

forming a contrast to the loose scarves of Helena, while Mr. Nagle, not

devoid, I seem to remember, of a blue chin and the latency of a fine

brogue, was either Lysander or Demetrius; Mr. Davidge (also, I surmise,

with a brogue) was Bottom the weaver and Madame Ponisi Oberon--Madame

Ponisi whose range must have been wide, since I see her also as the

white-veiled heroine of The Cataract of the Ganges, where, preferring

death to dishonour, she dashes up the more or less perpendicular

waterfall on a fiery black steed and with an effect only a little

blighted by the chance flutter of a drapery out of which peeps the leg

of a trouser and a big male foot; and then again, though presumably at a

somewhat later time or, in strictness, _after_ childhood's fond hour, as

this and that noble matron or tragedy queen. I descry her at any rate as

representing all characters alike with a broad brown face framed in

bands or crowns or other heavy headgear out of which cropped a row of

very small tight black curls. The Cataract of the Ganges is all there as

well, a tragedy of temples and idols and wicked rajahs and real water,

with Davidge and Joey Gougenheim again for comic relief--though all in a

coarser radiance, thanks to the absence of fairies and Amazons and

moonlit mechanical effects, the charm above all, so seen, of the play

within the play; and I rank it in that relation with Green Bushes,

despite the celebrity in the latter of Madame Celeste, who came to us

straight out of London and whose admired walk up the stage as Miami the

huntress, a wonderful majestic and yet voluptuous stride enhanced by a

short kilt, black velvet leggings and a gun haughtily borne on the

shoulder, is vividly before me as I write. The piece in question was, I

recall, from the pen of Mr. Bourcicault, as he then wrote his name--he

was so early in the field and must have been from long before, inasmuch

as he now appears to me to have supplied Mr. Brougham, of the Lyceum

aforesaid, with his choicest productions.

I sit again at London Assurance, with Mrs. Wallack--"Fanny" Wallack, I

think, not that I quite know who she was--as Lady Gay Spanker, flushed

and vociferous, first in a riding-habit with a tail yards long and

afterwards in yellow satin with scarce a tail at all; I am present also

at Love in a Maze, in which the stage represented, with primitive art I

fear, a supposedly intricate garden-labyrinth, and in which I admired

for the first time Mrs. Russell, afterwards long before the public as

Mrs. Hoey, even if opining that she wanted, especially for the

low-necked ordeal, less osseous a structure. There are pieces of that

general association, I admit, the clue to which slips from me; the drama

of modern life and of French origin--though what was then not of French

origin?--in which Miss Julia Bennett, fresh from triumphs at the

Haymarket, made her first appearance, in a very becoming white bonnet,

either as a brilliant adventuress or as the innocent victim of

licentious design, I forget which, though with a sense somehow that the

white bonnet, when of true elegance, was the note at that period of the

adventuress; Miss Julia Bennett with whom at a later age one was to

renew acquaintance as the artful and ample Mrs. Barrow, full of manner

and presence and often Edwin Booth's Portia, Desdemona and Julie de

Mortemer. I figure her as having in the dimmer phase succeeded to Miss

Laura Keene at Wallack's on the secession thence of this original

charmer of our parents, the flutter of whose prime advent is perfectly

present to me, with the relish expressed for that "English" sweetness of

her speech (I already wondered why it _shouldn't_ be English) which was

not as the speech mostly known to us. The Uncles, within my hearing,

even imitated, for commendation, some of her choicer sounds, to which I

strained my ear on seeing her afterwards as Mrs. Chillington in the

refined comedietta of A Morning Call, where she made delightful game of

Mr. Lester as Sir Edward Ardent, even to the point of causing him to

crawl about on all fours and covered with her shawl after the fashion of

a horse-blanket. That delightful impression was then unconscious of the

blight to come--that of my apprehending, years after, that the

brilliant comedietta was the tribute of our Anglo-Saxon taste to Alfred

de Musset's elegant proverb of the Porte Ouverte ou Fermee, in which

nothing could find itself less at home than the horseplay of the English

version. Miss Laura Keene, with a native grace at the start, a fresh and

delicate inspiration, I infer from the kind of pleasure she appears to

have begun with giving, was to live to belie her promise and, becoming

hard and raddled, forfeit (on the evidence) all claim to the higher

distinction; a fact not surprising under the lurid light projected by

such a sign of the atmosphere of ineptitude as an accepted and condoned

perversion to vulgarity of Musset's perfect little work. How _could_

quality of talent consort with so dire an absence of quality in the

material offered it? where could such lapses lead but to dust and

desolation and what happy instinct not be smothered in an air so

dismally non-conducting? Is it a foolish fallacy that these matters may

have been on occasion, at that time, worth speaking of? is it only

presumable that everything was perfectly cheap and common and everyone

perfectly bad and barbarous and that even the least corruptible of our

typical spectators were too easily beguiled and too helplessly kind? The

beauty of the main truth as to any remembered matter looked at in due

detachment, or in other words through the haze of time, is that

comprehension has then become one with criticism, compassion, as it may

really be called, one with musing vision, and the whole company of the

anciently restless, with their elations and mistakes, their sincerities

and fallacies and vanities and triumphs, embalmed for us in the mild

essence of their collective submission to fate. We needn't be strenuous

about them unless we particularly want to, and are glad to remember in

season all that this would imply of the strenuous about our own

_origines_, our muddled initiations. If nothing is more certain for us

than that many persons, within our recollection, couldn't help being

rather generally unadmonished and unaware, so nothing is more in the

note of peace than that such a perceived state, pushed to a point, makes

our scales of judgment but ridiculously rattle. _Our_ admonition, our

superior awareness, is of many things--and, among these, of how

infinitely, at the worst, they lived, the pale superseded, and how much

it was by their virtue.

Which reflections, in the train of such memories as those just gathered,

may perhaps seem over-strained--though they really to my own eyes cause

the images to multiply. Still others of these break in upon me and

refuse to be slighted; reconstituting as I practically am the history of

my fostered imagination, for whatever it may be worth, I won't pretend

to a disrespect for _any_ contributive particle. I left myself just

above staring at the Fifth Avenue poster, and I can't but linger there

while the vision it evokes insists on swarming. It was the age of the

arrangements of Dickens for the stage, vamped-up promptly on every scene

and which must have been the roughest theatrical tinkers' work, but at

two or three of which we certainly assisted. I associate them with Mr.

Brougham's temple of the art, yet am at the same time beset with the

Captain Cuttle of Dombey and Son in the form of the big Burton, who

never, I earnestly conceive, graced that shrine, so that I wander a

trifle confusedly. Isn't it he whom I remember as a monstrous Micawber,

the coarse parody of a charming creation, with the entire baldness of a

huge Easter egg and collar-points like the sails of Mediterranean

feluccas? Dire of course for all temperance in these connections was the

need to conform to the illustrations of Phiz, himself already an

improvising parodist and happy only so long as not imitated, not

literally reproduced. Strange enough the "aesthetic" of artists who could

desire but literally to reproduce. I give the whole question up,

however, I stray too in the dust, and with a positive sense of having,

in the first place, but languished at home when my betters admired Miss

Cushman--terribly out of the picture and the frame we should to-day

pronounce her, I fear--as the Nancy of Oliver Twist: as far away this

must have been as the lifetime of the prehistoric "Park," to which it

was just within my knowledge that my elders went for opera, to come back

on us sounding those rich old Italian names, Bosio and Badiali, Ronconi

and Steffanone, I am not sure I have them quite right; signs, of a

rueful sound to us, that the line as to our infant participation _was_

somewhere drawn. It had not been drawn, I all the more like to remember,

when, under proper protection, at Castle Garden, I listened to that

rarest of infant phenomena, Adelina Patti, poised in an armchair that

had been pushed to the footlights and announcing her incomparable gift.

She was about of our own age, she was one of us, even though at the same

time the most prodigious of fairies, of glittering fables. That

principle of selection was indeed in abeyance while I sat with my mother

either at Tripler Hall or at Niblo's--I am vague about the occasion, but

the names, as for fine old confused reasons, plead alike to my pen--and

paid a homage quite other than critical, I dare say, to the then

slightly worn Henrietta Sontag, Countess Rossi, who struck us as

supremely elegant in pink silk and white lace flounces and with whom

there had been for certain members of our circle some contact or

intercourse that I have wonderingly lost. I learned at that hour in any

case what "acclamation" might mean, and have again before me the vast

high-piled auditory thundering applause at the beautiful pink lady's

clear bird-notes; a thrilling, a tremendous experience and my sole other

memory of concert-going, at that age, save the impression of a strange

huddled hour in some smaller public place, some very minor hall, under

dim lamps and again in my mother's company, where we were so near the

improvised platform that my nose was brushed by the petticoats of the

distinguished amateur who sang "Casta Diva," a very fine fair woman with

a great heaving of bosom and flirt of crinoline, and that the ringletted

Italian gentleman in black velvet and a romantic voluminous cloak who

represented, or rather who professionally and uncontrollably was, an

Improvisatore, had for me the effect, as I crouched gaping, of quite

bellowing down my throat. That occasion, I am clear, was a concert for a

charity, with the volunteer performance and the social patroness, and it

had squeezed in where it would--at the same time that I somehow connect

the place, in Broadway, on the right going down and not much below

Fourth Street (except that everything seems to me to have been just

below Fourth Street when not just above,) with the scene of my great

public exposure somewhat later, the wonderful exhibition of Signor

Blitz, the peerless conjurer, who, on my attending his entertainment

with W. J. and our frequent comrade of the early time "Hal" Coster,

practised on my innocence to seduce me to the stage and there plunge me

into the shame of my sad failure to account arithmetically for his

bewilderingly subtracted or added or divided pockethandkerchiefs and

playing-cards; a paralysis of wit as to which I once more, and with the

same wan despair, feel my companions' shy telegraphy of relief, their

snickerings and mouthings and raised numerical fingers, reach me from

the benches.

The second definite matter in the Dickens connection is the Smike of

Miss Weston--whose praenomen I frivolously forget (though I fear it was

Lizzie,) but who was afterwards Mrs. E. L. Davenport and then, sequently

to some public strife or chatter, Mrs. Charles Matthews--in a version of

Nicholas Nickleby that gracelessly managed to be all tearful melodrama,

long-lost foundlings, wicked Ralph Nicklebys and scowling Arthur Grides,

with other baffled villains, and scarcely at all Crummleses and

Kenwigses, much less Squeerses; though there must have been something of

Dotheboys Hall for the proper tragedy of Smike and for the broad

Yorkshire effect, a precious theatrical value, of John Brodie. The

ineffaceability was the anguish, to my tender sense, of Nicholas's

starved and tattered and fawning and whining protege; in face of my

sharp retention of which through all the years who shall deny the

immense authority of the theatre, or that the stage is the mightiest of

modern engines? Such at least was to be the force of the Dickens

imprint, however applied, in the soft clay of our generation; it was to

resist so serenely the wash of the waves of time. To be brought up thus

against the author of it, or to speak at all of the dawn of one's early

consciousness of it and of his presence and power, is to begin to tread

ground at once sacred and boundless, the associations of which, looming

large, warn us off even while they hold. He did too much for us surely

ever to leave us free--free of judgment, free of reaction, even should

we care to be, which heaven forbid: he laid his hand on us in a way to

undermine as in no other case the power of detached appraisement. We

react against other productions of the general kind without "liking"

them the less, but we somehow liked Dickens the more for having

forfeited half the claim to appreciation. That process belongs to the

fact that criticism, roundabout him, is somehow futile and tasteless.

His own taste is easily impugned, but he entered so early into the blood

and bone of our intelligence that it always remained better than the

taste of overhauling him. When I take him up to-day and find myself

holding off, I simply stop: not holding off, that is, but holding on,

and from the very fear to do so; which sounds, I recognise, like

perusal, like renewal, of the scantest. I don't renew, I wouldn't renew

for the world; wouldn't, that is, with one's treasure so hoarded in the

dusty chamber of youth, let in the intellectual air. Happy the house of

life in which such chambers still hold out, even with the draught of the

intellect whistling through the passages. We were practically

contemporary, contemporary with the issues, the fluttering monthly

numbers--that was the point; it made for us a good fortune, constituted

for us in itself romance, on which nothing, to the end, succeeds in

laying its hands.

The whole question dwells for me in a single small reminiscence, though

there are others still: that of my having been sent to bed one evening,

in Fourteenth Street, as a very small boy, at an hour when, in the

library and under the lamp, one of the elder cousins from Albany, the

youngest of an orphaned brood of four, of my grandmother's most

extravagant adoption, had begun to read aloud to my mother the new,

which must have been the first, instalment of David Copperfield. I had

feigned to withdraw, but had only retreated to cover close at hand, the

friendly shade of some screen or drooping table-cloth, folded up behind

which and glued to the carpet, I held my breath and listened. I listened

long and drank deep while the wondrous picture grew, but the tense cord

at last snapped under the strain of the Murdstones and I broke into the

sobs of sympathy that disclosed my subterfuge. I was this time

effectively banished, but the ply then taken was ineffaceable. I

remember indeed just afterwards finding the sequel, in especial the vast

extrusion of the Micawbers, beyond my actual capacity; which took a few

years to grow adequate--years in which the general contagious

consciousness, and our own household response not least, breathed

heavily through Hard Times, Bleak House and Little Dorrit; the seeds of

acquaintance with Chuzzlewit and Dombey and Son, these coming thickly

on, I had found already sown. I was to feel that I had been born, born

to a rich awareness, under the very meridian; there sprouted in those

years no such other crop of ready references as the golden harvest of

Copperfield. Yet if I was to wait to achieve the happier of these

recognitions I had already pored over Oliver Twist--albeit now uncertain

of the relation borne by that experience to the incident just recalled.

When Oliver was new to me, at any rate, he was already old to my

betters; whose view of his particular adventures and exposures must have

been concerned, I think, moreover, in the fact of my public and lively

wonder about them. It was an exhibition deprecated--to infant innocence

I judge; unless indeed my remembrance of enjoying it only on the terms

of fitful snatches in another, though a kindred, house is due mainly to

the existence there of George Cruikshank's splendid form of the work,

of which our own foreground was clear. It perhaps even seemed to me more

Cruikshank's than Dickens's; it was a thing of such vividly terrible

images, and all marked with that peculiarity of Cruikshank that the

offered flowers or goodnesses, the scenes and figures intended to

comfort and cheer, present themselves under his hand as but more subtly

sinister, or more suggestively queer, than the frank badnesses and

horrors. The nice people and the happy moments, in the plates,

frightened me almost as much as the low and the awkward; which didn't

however make the volumes a source of attraction the less toward that

high and square old back-parlour just westward of Sixth Avenue (as we in

the same street were related to it) that formed, romantically, half our

alternative domestic field and offered to our small inquiring steps a

larger range and privilege. If the Dickens of those years was, as I have

just called him, the great actuality of the current imagination, so I at

once meet him in force as a feature even of conditions in which he was

but indirectly involved.

For the other house, the house we most haunted after our own, was that

of our cousin Albert, still another of the blest orphans, though this

time of our mother's kindred; and if it was my habit, as I have hinted,

to attribute to orphans as orphans a circumstantial charm, a setting

necessarily more delightful than our father'd and mother'd one, so

there spread about this appointed comrade, the perfection of the type,

inasmuch as he alone was neither brother'd nor sister'd, an air of

possibilities that were none the less vivid for being quite indefinite.

He was to embody in due course, poor young man, some of these

possibilities--those that had originally been for me the vaguest of all;

but to fix his situation from my present view is not so much to wonder

that it spoke to me of a wild freedom as to see in it the elements of a

rich and rounded picture. The frame was still there but a short time

since, cracked and empty, broken and gaping, like those few others, of

the general overgrown scene, that my late quest had puzzled out; and

this has somehow helped me to read back into it the old figures and the

old long story, told as with excellent art. We knew the figures well

while they lasted and had with them the happiest relation, but without

doing justice to their truth of outline, their felicity of character and

force of expression and function, above all to the compositional harmony

in which they moved. That lives again to my considering eyes, and I

admire as never before the fine artistry of fate. Our cousin's guardian,

the natural and the legal, was his aunt, his only one, who was the

cousin of our mother and our own aunt, virtually _our_ only one, so far

as a felt and adopted closeness of kinship went; and the three,

daughters of two sole and much-united sisters, had been so brought up

together as to have quite all the signs and accents of the same strain

and the same nest. The cousin Helen of our young prospect was thus all

but the sister Helen of our mother's lifetime, as was to happen, and was

scarcely less a stout brave presence and an emphasised character for the

new generation than for the old; noted here as she is, in particular,

for her fine old-time value of clearness and straightness. I see in her

strong simplicity, that of an earlier, quieter world, a New York of

better manners and better morals and homelier beliefs, the very elements

of some portrait by a grave Dutch or other truth-seeking master; she

looks out with some of the strong marks, the anxious honesty, the modest

humour, the folded resting hands, the dark handsome serious attire, the

important composed cap, almost the badge of a guild or an order, that

hang together about the images of past worthies, of whichever sex, who

have had, as one may say, the courage of their character, and qualify

them for places in great collections. I note with appreciation that she

was strenuously, actively good, and have the liveliest impression both

that no one was ever better, and that her goodness somehow testifies for

the whole tone of a society, a remarkable cluster of private decencies.

Her value to my imagination is even most of all perhaps in her mere

local consistency, her fine old New York ignorance and rigour. Her

traditions, scant but stiff, had grown there, close to her--they were

all she needed, and she lived by them candidly and stoutly. That there

have been persons so little doubtful of duty helps to show us how

societies grow. A proportionately small amount of absolute conviction

about it will carry, we thus make out, a vast dead weight of mere

comparative. She was as anxious over hers indeed as if it had ever been

in question--which is a proof perhaps that being void of imagination,

when you are quite entirely void, makes scarcely more for comfort than

having too much, which only makes in a manner for a homeless freedom or

even at the worst for a questioned veracity. With a big installed

conscience there is virtue in a grain of the figurative faculty--it acts

as oil to the stiff machine.

Yet this life of straight and narrow insistences seated so clearly in

our view didn't take up all the room in the other house, the house of

the pictured, the intermittent Oliver, though of the fewer books in

general than ours, and of the finer proportions and less peopled spaces

(there were but three persons to fill them) as well as of the more

turbaned and powdered family portraits, one of these, the most antique,

a "French pastel," which must have been charming, of a young collateral

ancestor who had died on the European tour. A vast marginal range

seemed to me on the contrary to surround the adolescent nephew, who was

some three years, I judge, beyond me in age and had other horizons and

prospects than ours. No question of "Europe," for him, but a patriotic

preparation for acquaintance with the South and West, or what was then

called the West--he was to "see his own country first," winking at us

while he did so; though he was, in spite of differences, so nearly and

naturally neighbour'd and brother'd with us that the extensions of his

range and the charms of his position counted somehow as the limits and

the humilities of ours. He went neither to our schools nor to our

hotels, but hovered out of our view in some other educational air that I

can't now point to, and had in a remote part of the State a vast wild

property of his own, known as the Beaverkill, to which, so far from his

aunt's and his uncle's taking him there, he affably took them, and to

which also he vainly invited W. J. and me, pointing thereby to us,

however, though indirectly enough perhaps, the finest childish case we

were to know for the famous acceptance of the inevitable. It was

apparently not to be thought of that instead of the inevitable we should

accept the invitation; the place was in the wilderness, incalculably

distant, reached by a whole day's rough drive from the railroad, through

every danger of flood and field, with prowling bears thrown in and

probable loss of limb, of which there were sad examples, from swinging

scythes and axes; but we of course measured our privation just by those

facts, and grew up, so far as we did then grow, to believe that

pleasures beyond price had been cruelly denied us. I at any rate myself

grew up sufficiently to wonder if poor Albert's type, as it developed to

the anxious elder view from the first, mightn't rather have undermined

countenance; his pleasant foolish face and odd shy air of being

suspected or convicted on grounds less vague to himself than to us may

well have appeared symptoms of the course, of the "rig," he was

eventually to run. I could think of him but as the _fils de famille_

ideally constituted; not that I could then use for him that designation,

but that I felt he must belong to an important special class, which he

in fact formed in his own person. Everything was right, truly, for these

felicities--to speak of them only as dramatic or pictorial values; since

if we were present all the while at more of a drama than we knew, so at

least, to my vague divination, the scene and the figures were there, not

excluding the chorus, and I must have had the instinct of their being as

right as possible. I see the actors move again through the high, rather

bedimmed rooms--it is always a matter of winter twilight, firelight,

lamplight; each one appointed to his or her part and perfect for the

picture, which gave a sense of fulness without ever being crowded.

That composition had to wait awhile, in the earliest time, to find its

proper centre, having been from the free point of view I thus cultivate

a little encumbered by the presence of the most aged of our relatives,

the oldest person I remember to have familiarly known--if it can be

called familiar to have stood off in fear of such strange proofs of

accomplished time: our Great-aunt Wyckoff, our maternal grandmother's

elder sister, I infer, and an image of living antiquity, as I figure her

to-day, that I was never to see surpassed. I invest her in this vision

with all the idol-quality that may accrue to the venerable--solidly

seated or even throned, hooded and draped and tucked-in, with big

protective protrusive ears to her chair which helped it to the effect of

a shrine, and a large face in which the odd blackness of eyebrow and of

a couple of other touches suggested the conventional marks of a painted

image. She signified her wants as divinities do, for I recover from her

presence neither sound nor stir, remembering of her only that, as

described by her companions, the pious ministrants, she had "said" so

and so when she hadn't spoken at all. Was she really, as she seemed, so

tremendously old, so old that her daughter, our mother's cousin Helen

and ours, would have had to come to her in middle life to account for

it, or did antiquity at that time set in earlier and was surrender of

appearance and dress, matching the intrinsic decay, only more

complacent, more submissive and, as who should say, more abject? I have

my choice of these suppositions, each in its way of so lively an

interest that I scarce know which to prefer, though inclining perhaps a

little to the idea of the backward reach. If Aunt Wyckoff was, as I

first remember her, scarce more than seventy, say, the thought fills me

with one sort of joy, the joy of our modern, our so generally greater

and nobler effect of duration: who _wouldn't_ more subtly strive for

that effect and, intelligently so striving, reach it better, than such

non-questioners of fate?--the moral of whose case is surely that if they

gave up too soon and too softly we wiser witnesses can reverse the

process and fight the whole ground. But I apologise to the heavy shade

in question if she had really drained her conceivable cup, and for that

matter rather like to suppose it, so rich and strange is the pleasure of

finding the past--the Past above all--answered for to one's own touch,

this being our only way to be sure of it. It was the Past that one

touched in her, the American past of a preponderant unthinkable

queerness; and great would seem the fortune of helping on the continuity

at some other far end.

X

It was at all events the good lady's disappearance that more markedly

cleared the decks--cleared them for that long, slow, sustained action

with which I make out that nothing was afterwards to interfere. She had

sat there under her stiff old father's portrait, with which her own, on

the other side of the chimney, mildly balanced; but these presences

acted from that time but with cautious reserves. A brave, finished,

clear-eyed image of such properties as the last-named, in particular,

our already-mentioned Alexander Robertson, a faint and diminished

replica of whose picture (the really fine original, as I remember it,

having been long since perverted from our view) I lately renewed

acquaintance with in a pious institution of his founding, where, after

more than one push northward and some easy accommodations, he lives on

into a world that knows him not and of some of the high improvements of

which he can little enough have dreamed. Of the world he had personally

known there was a feature or two still extant; the legend of his acres

and his local concerns, as well as of his solid presence among them, was

considerably cherished by us, though for ourselves personally the

relics of his worth were a lean feast to sit at. They were by some

invidious turn of fate all to help to constitute the heritage of our

young kinsman, the orphaned and administered _fils de famille_, whose

father, Alexander Wyckoff, son of our great-aunt and one of the two

brothers of cousin Helen, just discernibly flushes for me through the

ominous haze that preceded the worst visitation of cholera New York was

to know. Alexander, whom, early widowed and a victim of that visitation,

I evoke as with something of a premature baldness, of a blackness of

short whisker, of an expanse of light waistcoat and of a harmless pomp

of manner, appeared to have quite predominantly "come in" for the values

in question, which he promptly transmitted to his small motherless son

and which were destined so greatly to increase. There are clues I have

only lost, not making out in the least to-day why the sons of Aunt

Wyckoff should have been so happily distinguished. Our great-uncle of

the name isn't even a dim ghost to me--he had passed away beyond recall

before I began to take notice; but I hold, rightly, I feel, that it was

not to his person these advantages were attached. They could have

descended to our grandmother but in a minor degree--we should otherwise

have been more closely aware of them. It comes to me that so far as we

had at all been aware it had mostly gone off in smoke: I have still in

my ears some rueful allusion to "lands," apparently in the general

country of the Beaverkill, which had come to my mother and her sister as

their share of their grandfather Robertson's amplitude, among the

further-apportioned shares of their four brothers, only to be sacrificed

later on at some scant appraisement. It is in the nature of "lands" at a

distance and in regions imperfectly reclaimed to be spoken of always as

immense, and I at any rate entertained the sense that we should have

been great proprietors, in the far wilderness, if we had only taken more

interest. Our interests were peculiarly urban--though not indeed that

this had helped us much. Something of the mystery of the vanished acres

hung for me about my maternal uncle, John Walsh, the only one who

appeared to have been in respect to the dim possessions much on the

spot, but I too crudely failed of my chance of learning from him what

had become of them.

Not that they had seen _him_, poor gentleman, very much further, or that

I had any strong sense of opportunity; I catch at but two or three

projections of him, and only at one of his standing much at his ease: I

see him before the fire in the Fourteenth Street library, sturdy, with

straight black hair and as if the Beaverkill had rather stamped him, but

clean-shaven, in a "stock" and a black frock-coat--I hear him perhaps

still more than I see him deliver himself on the then great subject of

Jenny Lind, whom he seemed to have emerged from the wilderness to listen

to and as to whom I remember thinking it (strange small critic that I

must have begun to be) a note of the wilderness in him that he spoke of

her as "Miss Lind"; albeit I scarce know, and must even less have known

then, what other form he could have used. The rest of my sense of him is

tinged with the ancient pity--that of our so exercised response in those

years to the general sad case of uncles, aunts and cousins obscurely

afflicted (the uncles in particular) and untimely gathered. Sharp to me

the memory of a call, one dusky wintry Sunday afternoon, in Clinton

Place, at the house of my uncle Robertson Walsh, then the head of my

mother's family, where the hapless younger brother lay dying; whom I was

taken to the top of the house to see and of the sinister twilight

grimness of whose lot, stretched there, amid odours of tobacco and of

drugs, or of some especial strong drug, in one of the chambers of what I

remember as a remote and unfriended arching attic, probably in fact the

best place of prescribed quiet, I was to carry away a fast impression.

All the uncles, of whichever kindred, were to come to seem sooner or

later to be dying, more or less before our eyes, of melancholy matters;

and yet their general story, so far as one could read it, appeared the

story of life. I conceived at any rate that John Walsh, celibate, lonely

and good-naturedly black-browed, had been sacrificed to the far-off

Robertson acres, which on their side had been sacrificed to I never knew

what. The point of my divagation, however, is that the Barmecide banquet

of another tract of the same _provenance_ was always spread for us

opposite the other house, from which point it stretched, on the north

side of the street, to Sixth Avenue; though here we were soon to see it

diminished at the corner by a structure afterwards known to us as our

prosiest New York school. This edifice, devoted to-day to other uses,

but of the same ample insignificance, still left for exploitation at

that time an uncovered town-territory the transmitted tale of which was

that our greatgrandfather, living down near the Battery, had had his

country villa or, more strictly speaking, his farm there, with free

expanses roundabout. Shrunken though the tract a part of it remained--in

particular a space that I remember, though with the last faintness, to

have seen appeal to the public as a tea-garden or open-air cafe, a haunt

of dance and song and of other forms of rather ineffective gaiety. The

subsequent conversion of the site into the premises of the French

Theatre I was to be able to note more distinctly; resorting there in the

winter of 1874-5, though not without some wan detachment, to a series

of more or less exotic performances, and admiring in especial the high

and hard virtuosity of Madame Ristori, the unfailing instinct for the

wrong emphasis of the then acclaimed Mrs. Rousby (I still hear the

assured "Great woman, great woman!" of a knowing friend met as I went

out,) and the stout fidelity to a losing game, as well as to a truth not

quite measurable among us, of the late, the but lugubriously-comic, the

blighted John Toole.

These are glimmering ghosts, though that drama of the scene hard by at

which I have glanced gives me back its agents with a finer intensity.

For the long action set in, as I have hinted, with the death of Aunt

Wyckoff, and, if rather taking its time at first to develop, maintained

to the end, which was in its full finality but a few years since, the

finest consistency and unity; with cousin Helen, in rich prominence, for

the heroine; with the pale adventurous Albert for the hero or young

protagonist, a little indeed in the sense of a small New York Orestes

ridden by Furies; with a pair of confidants in the form first of the

heroine's highly respectable but quite negligible husband and, second,

of her close friend and quasi-sister our own admirable Aunt; with

Alexander's younger brother, above all, the odd, the eccentric, the

attaching Henry, for the stake, as it were, of the game. So for the

spectator did the figures distribute themselves; the three principal,

on the large stage--it became a field of such spreading interests--well

in front, and the accessory pair, all sympathy and zeal, prompt comment

and rich resonance, hovering in the background, responsive to any call

and on the spot at a sign: this most particularly true indeed of our

anything but detached Aunt, much less a passive recipient than a vessel

constantly brimming, and destined herself to become the outstanding

agent, almost the _dea ex machina_, in the last act of the story. Her

colleague of the earlier periods (though to that title she would scarce

have granted his right) I designate rather as our earnest cousin's

husband than as our kinsman even by courtesy; since he was "Mr." to his

own wife, for whom the dread of liberties taken in general included even

those that might have been allowed to herself: he had not in the least,

like the others in his case, married into the cousinship with us, and

this apparently rather by his defect than by ours. His christian name,

if certainly not for use, was scarce even for ornament--which consorted

with the felt limits roundabout him of aids to mention and with the fact

that no man could on his journey through life well have been less

eagerly designated or apostrophised. If there are persons as to whom the

"Mr." never comes up at all, so there are those as to whom it never

subsides; but some of them all keep it by the greatness and others,

oddly enough, by the smallness of their importance. The subject of my

present reference, as I think of him, nevertheless--by which I mean in

spite of his place in the latter group--greatly helps my documentation;

he must have been of so excellent and consistent a shade of nullity. To

that value, if value it be, there almost always attaches some question

of the degree and the position: with adjuncts, with a relation, the zero

may figure as a numeral--and the neglected zero is mostly, for that

matter, endowed with a consciousness and subject to irritation. For this

dim little gentleman, so perfectly a gentleman, no appeal and no

redress, from the beginning to the end of his career, were made or

entertained or projected; no question of how to treat him, or of how

_he_ might see it or feel it, could ever possibly rise; he was blank

from whatever view, remaining so under application of whatever acid or

exposure to whatever heat; the one identity he could have was to be part

of the consensus.

Such a case is rare--that of being no case at all, that of not having

even the interest of the grievance of not being one: we as a rule catch

glimpses in the down-trodden of such resentments--they have at least

sometimes the importance of feeling the weight of our tread. The

phenomenon was here quite other--that of a natural platitude that had

never risen to the level of sensibility. When you have been wronged you

can be righted, when you have suffered you can be soothed; if you have

that amount of grasp of the "scene," however humble, the drama of your

life to some extent enacts itself, with the logical consequence of your

being proportionately its hero and _having_ to be taken for such. Let me

not dream of attempting to say for what cousin Helen took her spectral

spouse, though I think it the most marked touch in her portrait that she

kept us from ever knowing. She was a person about whom you knew

everything else, but there she was genially inscrutable, and above all

claimed no damages on the score of slights offered him. She knew nothing

whatever of these, yet could herself be much wounded or hurt--which

latter word she sounded in the wondrous old New York manner so

irreducible to notation. She covered the whole case with a mantle which

was yet much more probably that of her real simplicity than of a feigned

unconsciousness; I doubt whether she _knew_ that men could be amiable in

a different manner from that which had to serve her for supposing her

husband amiable; when the mould and the men cast in it were very

different she failed, or at least she feared, to conclude to

amiability--though _some_ women (as different themselves as such

stranger men!) might take it for that. Directly interrogated she might

(such was the innocence of these long-extinct manners) have approved of

male society in stronger doses or more vivid hues--save where

consanguinity, or indeed relationship by marriage, to which she greatly

deferred, had honestly imposed it. The singular thing for the drama to

which I return was that there it was just consanguinity that had made

the burden difficult and strange and of a nature to call on great

decisions and patient plans, even though the most ominous possibilities

were not involved. I reconstruct and reconstruct of course, but the

elements had to my childish vision at least nothing at all portentous;

if any light of the lurid played in for me just a little it was but

under much later information. What my childish vision was really most

possessed of, I think, was the figure of the spectral spouse, the dim

little gentleman, as I have called him, pacing the whole length of the

two big parlours, in prolonged repetition, much as if they had been the

deck of one of those ships anciently haunted by him, as "supercargo" or

whatever, in strange far seas--according to the only legend connected

with him save that of his early presumption in having approached, such

as he was, so fine a young woman, and his remarkable luck in having

approached her successfully; a luck surprisingly renewed for him, since

it was also part of the legend that he had previously married and lost a

bride beyond his deserts.