XV

It is to the Institution Vergnes that my earliest recovery of the sense

of being in any degree "educated with" W. J. attaches itself; an

establishment which occupied during the early 'fifties a site in the

very middle of Broadway, of the lower, the real Broadway, where it could

throb with the very pulse of the traffic in which we all innocently

rejoiced--believing it, I surmise, the liveliest conceivable: a fact

that is by itself, in the light of the present, an odd rococo note. The

lower Broadway--I allude to the whole Fourth Street and Bond Street

(where now _is_ the Bond Street of that antiquity?)--was then a seat of

education, since we had not done with it, as I shall presently show,

even when we had done with the Institution, a prompt disillusionment;

and I brood thus over a period which strikes me as long and during which

my personal hours of diligence were somehow more than anything else

hours of the pavement and the shopfront, or of such contemplative

exercise as the very considerable distance, for small legs, between

those regions and the westward Fourteenth Street might comprise.

Pedestrian gaping having been in childhood, as I have noted,

prevailingly my line, fate appeared to have kindly provided for it on no

small scale; to the extent even that it must have been really my sole

and single form of athletics. Vague heated competition and agitation in

the then enclosed Union Square would seem to point a little, among us

all, to nobler types of motion; but of any basis for recreation,

anything in the nature of a playground or a breathing-space, the

Institution itself was serenely innocent. This I take again for a note

extraordinarily mediaeval. It occupied the first and second floors, if I

rightly remember, of a wide front that, overhanging the endless

thoroughfare, looked out on bouncing, clattering "stages" and painfully

dragged carts and the promiscuous human shuffle--the violence of

repercussions from the New York pavement of those years to be further

taken into account; and I win it back from every side as, in spite of

these aspects of garish publicity, a dark and dreadful, and withal quite

absurd, scene. I see places of that general time, even places of

confinement, in a dusty golden light that special memories of small

misery scarce in the least bedim, and this holds true of our next and

quite neighbouring refuge; the establishment of M. Vergnes alone darkles

and shrinks to me--a sordidly _black_ interior is my main image for it;

attenuated only by its having very soon afterwards, as a suffered

ordeal, altogether lapsed and intermitted. Faintly, in the gloom, I

distinguish M. Vergnes himself--quite "old," very old indeed as I

supposed him, and highly irritated and markedly bristling; though of

nothing in particular that happened to me at his or at anyone's else

hands have I the scantest remembrance. What really most happened no

doubt, was that my brother and I should both come away with a mind

prepared for a perfect assimilation of Alphonse Daudet's chronicle of

"Jack," years and years later on; to make the acquaintance in that work

of the "petits pays chauds" among whom Jack learnt the first lessons of

life was to see the Institution Vergnes at once revive, swarming as it

did with small homesick Cubans and Mexicans; the complete failure of

blondness that marks the memory is doubtless the cumulative effect of so

many of the New York "petits pays chauds," preponderantly brown and

black and conducing to a greasy gloom. Into this gloom I fear I should

see all things recede together but for a certain salient note, the fact

that the whole "staff" appears to have been constantly in a rage; from

which naturally resulted the accent of shrillness (the only accent we

could pick up, though we were supposed to be learning, for the extreme

importance of it, quantities of French) and the sound of high

vociferation. I remember infuriated ushers, of foreign speech and

flushed complexion--the tearing across of hapless "exercises" and

_dictees_ and the hurtle through the air of dodged volumes; only never,

despite this, the extremity of smiting. There can have been at the

Institution no blows instructionally dealt--nor even from our hours of

ease do any such echoes come back to me. Little Cubans and Mexicans, I

make out, were not to be vulgarly whacked--in deference, presumably, to

some latent relic or imputed survival of Castilian pride; which would

impose withal considerations of quite practical prudence. Food for

reflection and comparison might well have been so suggested; interesting

at least the element of contrast between such opposed conceptions of

tone, temper and manner as the passion without whacks, or with whacks

only of inanimate objects, ruling the scene I have described, and the

whacks without passion, the grim, impersonal, strictly penal

applications of the rod, which then generally represented what was still

involved in our English tradition. It was the two theories of

sensibility, of personal dignity, that so diverged; but with such other

divergences now on top of those that the old comparison falls away. We

to-day go unwhacked altogether--though from a pride other than

Castilian: it is difficult to say at least what ideal has thus

triumphed. In the Vergnes air at any rate I seem myself to have sat

unscathed and unterrified--not alarmed even by so much as a call to the

blackboard; only protected by my insignificance, which yet covered such

a sense of our dusky squalor. Queer for us the whole affair, assuredly;

but how much queerer for the poor petits pays chauds who had come so far

for their privilege. _We_ had come, comparatively, but from round the

corner--and that left the "state of education" and the range of

selection all about as quaint enough. What could these things then have

been in the various native climes of the petits pays chauds?

It was by some strong wave of reaction, clearly, that we were floated

next into the quieter haven of Mr. Richard Pulling Jenks--where cleaner

waters, as I feel their coolness still, must have filled a neater

though, it was true, slightly more contracted trough. Yet the range of

selection had been even on this higher plane none too strikingly

exemplified; our jumping had scant compass--we still grubbed with a good

conscience in Broadway and sidled about Fourth Street. But I think of

the higher education as having there, from various causes, none the less

begun to glimmer for us. A diffused brightness, a kind of high

crosslight of conflicting windows, rests for me at all events on the

little realm of Mr. Pulling Jenks and bathes it as with positively sweet

limitations. Limited must it have been, I feel, with our couple of

middling rooms, front and back, our close packing, our large

unaccommodating stove, our grey and gritty oilcloth, and again our

importunate Broadway; from the aggregation of which elements there

distils itself, without my being able to account for it, a certain

perversity of romance. I speak indeed here for myself in particular, and

keen for romance must I have been in such conditions, I admit; since the

sense of it had crept into a recreational desert even as utter as that

of the Institution Vergnes. Up out of Broadway we still scrambled--I can

smell the steep and cold and dusty wooden staircase; straight into

Broadway we dropped--I feel again the generalised glare of liberation;

and I scarce know what tenuity of spirit it argues that I should neither

have enjoyed nor been aware of missing (speaking again for myself only)

a space wider than the schoolroom floor to react and knock about in. I

literally conclude that we must have knocked about in Broadway, and in

Broadway alone, like perfect little men of the world; we must have been

let loose there to stretch our legs and fill our lungs, without

prejudice either to our earlier and later freedoms of going and coming.

I as strictly infer, at the same time, that Broadway must have been then

as one of the alleys of Eden, for any sinister contact or consequence

involved for us; a circumstance that didn't in the least interfere, too,

as I have noted, with its offer of an entrancing interest. The interest

verily could have been a _calculated_ thing on the part of our dear

parents as little as on that of Mr. Jenks himself. Therefore let it be

recorded as still most odd that we should all have assented to such

deficiency of landscape, such exiguity of sport. I take the true

inwardness of the matter to have been in our having such short hours,

long as they may have appeared at the time, that the day left margin at

the worst for private inventions. I think we found landscape, for

ourselves--and wherever I at least found vision I found such sport as I

was capable of--even between the front and back rooms and the

conflicting windows; even by the stove which somehow scorched without

warming, and yet round which Mr. Coe and Mr. Dolmidge, the

drawing-master and the writing-master, arriving of a winter's day, used

notedly, and in the case of Mr. Coe lamentedly, to draw out their

delays. Is the dusty golden light of retrospect in this connection an

effluence from Mr. Dolmidge and Mr. Coe, whose ministrations come back

to me as the sole directly desired or invoked ones I was to know in my

years, such as they were, of pupilage?

I see them in any case as old-world images, figures of an antique stamp;

products, mustn't they have been, of an order in which some social

relativity or matter-of-course adjustment, some transmitted form and

pressure, were still at work? Mr. Dolmidge, inordinately lean,

clean-shaved, as was comparatively uncommon then, and in a

swallow-tailed coat and I think a black satin stock, was surely perfect

in his absolutely functional way, a pure pen-holder of a man, melancholy

and mild, who taught the most complicated flourishes--great scrolls of

them met our view in the form of surging seas and beaked and beady-eyed

eagles, the eagle being so calligraphic a bird--while he might just have

taught resignation. He was not at all funny--no one out of our immediate

family circle, in fact almost no one but W. J. himself, who flowered in

every waste, seems to have struck me as funny in those years; but he was

to remain with me a picture of somebody in Dickens, one of the Phiz if

not the Cruikshank pictures. Mr. Coe was another affair, bristling with

the question of the "hard," but somehow too with the revelation of the

soft, the deeply attaching; a worthy of immense stature and presence,

crowned as with the thick white hair of genius, wearing a great gathered

or puckered cloak, with a vast velvet collar, and resembling, as he

comes back to me, the General Winfield Scott who lived so much in our

eyes then. The oddity may well even at that hour have been present to me

of its taking so towering a person to produce such small

"drawing-cards"; it was as if some mighty bird had laid diminutive eggs.

Mr. Coe, of a truth, laid his all over the place, and though they were

not of more than handy size--very small boys could set them up in state

on very small desks--they had doubtless a great range of number and

effect. They were scattered far abroad and I surmise celebrated; they

represented crooked cottages, feathery trees, browsing and bristling

beasts and other rural objects; all rendered, as I recall them, in

little detached dashes that were like stories told in words of one

syllable, or even more perhaps in short gasps of delight. It must have

been a stammering art, but I admired its fluency, which swims for me

moreover in richer though slightly vague associations. Mr. Coe practised

on a larger scale, in colour, in oils, producing wondrous neat little

boards that make me to this day think of them and more particularly

smell them, when I hear of a "panel" picture: a glamour of greatness

attends them as brought home by W. J. from the master's own place of

instruction in that old University building which partly formed the east

side of Washington Square and figures to memory, or to fond imagination,

as throbbing with more offices and functions, a denser chiaroscuro, than

any reared hugeness of to-day, where character is so lost in quantity.

Is there any present structure that plays such a part in proportion to

its size?--though even as I ask the question I feel how nothing on earth

is proportioned to present sizes. These alone are proportioned--and to

mere sky-space and mere amount, amount of steel and stone; which is

comparatively uninteresting. Perhaps our needs and our elements were

then absurdly, were then provincially few, and that the patches of

character in that small grey granite compendium were all we had in

general to exhibit. Let me add at any rate that some of them were

exhibitional--even to my tender years, I mean; since I respond even yet

to my privilege of presence at some Commencement or Commemoration, such

as might be natural, doubtless, to any "university," where, as under a

high rich roof, before a Chancellor in a gown and amid serried admirers

and impressive applause, there was "speaking," of the finest sort, and

where above all I gathered in as a dazzling example the rare assurance

of young Winthrop Somebody or Somebody Winthrop, who, though still in

jackets, held us spellbound by his rendering of Serjeant Buzfuz's

exposure of Mr. Pickwick. Long was I to marvel at the high sufficiency

of young Winthrop Somebody or Somebody Winthrop--in which romantic

impression it is perhaps after all (though with the consecration of one

or two of the novels of the once-admired Theodore of that name, which so

remarkably insists, thrown in) the sense of the place is embalmed.

I must not forget indeed that I throw in also Mr. Coe--even if with

less assured a hand; by way of a note on those higher flights of power

and promise that I at this time began to see definitely determined in my

brother. As I catch W. J.'s image, from far back, at its most

characteristic, he sits drawing and drawing, always drawing, especially

under the lamplight of the Fourteenth Street back parlour; and not as

with a plodding patience, which I think would less have affected me, but

easily, freely and, as who should say, infallibly: always at the stage

of finishing off, his head dropped from side to side and his tongue

rubbing his lower lip. I recover a period during which to see him at all

was so to see him--the other flights and faculties removed him from my

view. These were a matter of course--he recurred, he passed nearer, but

in his moments of ease, and I clearly quite accepted the ease of his

disappearances. Didn't he always when within my view light them up and

justify them by renewed and enlarged vividness? so that my whole sense

of him as formed for assimilations scarce conceivable made our gaps of

contact too natural for me even to be lessons in humility. Humility had

nothing to do with it--as little even as envy would have had; I was

below humility, just as we were together outside of competition,

mutually "hors concours." _His_ competitions were with others--in which

how wasn't he, how could he not be, successful? while mine were with

nobody, or nobody's with me, which came to the same thing, as heaven

knows I neither braved them nor missed them. That winter, as I recover

it, represents him as sufficiently within view to make his position or

whereabouts in the upper air definite--I must have taken it for granted

before, but could now in a manner measure it; and the freshness of this

sense, something serene in my complacency, had to do, I divine, with the

effect of our moving, with the rest of our company, which was not

numerous but practically, but appreciably "select," on a higher and

fairer plane than ever yet. Predominantly of course we owed this benefit

to Richard Pulling himself; of whom I recall my brother's saying to me,

at a considerably later time, and with an authority that affected me as

absolute, that he had been of all our masters the most truly genial, in

fact the only one to whom the art of exciting an interest or inspiring a

sympathy could be in any degree imputed. I take this to have meant that

he would have adorned a higher sphere--and it may have been, to explain

his so soon swimming out of our ken, that into a higher sphere he

rapidly moved; I can account at least for our falling away from him the

very next year and declining again upon baser things and a lower

civilisation but by some probability of his flight, just thereafter

effected, to a greater distance, to one of the far upper reaches of the

town. Some years must have elapsed and some distinction have crowned

him when, being briefly in New York together, W. J. and I called on him

of a Sunday afternoon, to find--what I hadn't been at all sure of--that

he still quite knew who we were, or handsomely pretended to; handsomely

in spite of his markedly confirmed identity of appearance with the

Punch, husband to Judy, of the funny papers and the street show. Bald,

rotund, of ruddy complexion, with the nose, the chin, the arched eye,

the paunch and the _barbiche_, to say nothing of the ferule nursed in

his arms and with which, in the show, such free play is made, Mr. Jenks

yet seems to me to have preserved a dignity as well as projected an

image, and in fact have done other things besides. He whacked

occasionally--he must have been one of the last of the whackers; but I

don't remember it as ugly or dreadful or droll--don't remember, that is,

either directly feeling or reflectively enjoying it: it fails somehow to

break the spell of our civilisation; my share in which, however, comes

back to me as merely contemplative. It is beyond measure odd, doubtless,

that my main association with my "studies," whether of the infant or the

adolescent order, should be with almost anything but the fact of

learning--of learning, I mean, what I was supposed to learn. I could

only have been busy, at the same time, with other pursuits--which must

have borne some superficial likeness at least to the acquisition of

knowledge of a free irresponsible sort; since I remember few either of

the inward pangs or the outward pains of a merely graceless state. I

recognise at the same time that it was perhaps a sorry business to be so

interested in one didn't know what. Such are, whether at the worst or at

the best, some of the aspects of that season as Mr. Jenks's image

presides; in the light of which I _may_ perhaps again rather wonder at

my imputation to the general picture of so much amenity. Clearly the

good man was a civiliser--whacks and all; and by some art not now to be

detected. He was a complacent classic--which was what my brother's claim

for him, I dare say, mostly represented; though that passed over the

head of my tenth year. It was a good note for him in this particular

that, deploring the facile text-books of Doctor Anthon of Columbia

College, in which there was even more crib than text, and holding fast

to the sterner discipline of Andrews and Stoddard and of that other more

conservative commentator (he too doubtless long since superseded) whose

name I blush to forget. I think in fine of Richard Pulling's small but

sincere academy as a consistent little protest against its big and easy

and quite out-distancing rival, the Columbia College school, apparently

in those days quite the favourite of fortune.