XXII

Little else of that Parisian passage remains with me--it was probably of

the briefest; I recover only a visit with my father to the Palais de

l'Industrie, where the first of the great French Exhibitions, on the

model, much reduced, of the English Crystal Palace of 1851, was still

open, a fact explaining the crowded inns; and from that visit win back

but the department of the English pictures and our stopping long before

The Order of Release of a young English painter, J. E. Millais, who had

just leaped into fame, and my impression of the rare treatment of whose

baby's bare legs, pendent from its mother's arms, is still as vivid to

me as if from yesterday. The vivid yields again to the vague--I scarce

know why so utterly--till consciousness, waking up in London, renews

itself, late one evening and very richly, at the Gloucester Hotel (or

Coffee-House, as I think it was then still called,) which occupied that

corner of Piccadilly and Berkeley Street where more modern

establishments have since succeeded it, but where a fatigued and

famished American family found on that occasion a fine old British

virtue in cold roast beef and bread and cheese and ale; their expert

acclamation of which echoes even now in my memory. It keeps company

there with other matters equally British and, as we say now, early

Victorian; the thick gloom of the inn rooms, the faintness of the

glimmering tapers, the blest inexhaustibility of the fine joint,

surpassed only by that of the grave waiter's reserve--plain, immutably

plain fare all, but prompting in our elders an emphasis of relief and

relish, the "There's nothing like it after all!" tone, which re-excited

expectation, which in fact seemed this time to re-announce a basis for

faith and joy.

That basis presently shrank to the scale of a small house hard by the

hotel, at the entrance of Berkeley Square--expeditiously lighted on, it

would thus appear, which again has been expensively superseded, but to

the ancient little facts of which I fondly revert, since I owe them what

I feel to have been, in the far past, the prime faint revelation, the

small broken expression, of the London I was afterwards to know. The

place wears on the spot, to this day, no very different face; the house

that has risen on the site of ours is still immediately neighboured at

the left by the bookseller, the circulating-librarian and news-agent,

who modestly flourished in our time under the same name; the great

establishment of Mr. Gunter, just further along, is as soberly and

solidly seated; the mews behind the whole row, from the foot of Hay Hill

at the right, wanders away to Bruton Street with the irregular grace

that spoke to my young fancy; Hay Hill itself is somehow less sharply

precipitous, besides being no longer paved, as I seem to recall its

having been, with big boulders, and I was on the point of saying that

its antique charm in some degree abides. Nothing, however, could be

further from the truth; its antique charm quite succumbed, years ago, to

that erection of lumpish "mansions" which followed the demolition of the

old-world town-residence, as the house-agents say, standing, on the

south side, between court and I suppose garden, where Dover Street gives

way to Grafton; a house of many histories, of vague importances and cold

reserves and deep suggestions, I used to think after scaling the steep

quite on purpose to wonder about it. A whole chapter of life was

condensed, for our young sensibility, I make out, into the couple of

months--they can scarce have been more--spent by us in these quarters,

which must have proved too narrow and too towny; but it can have had no

passage so lively as the occurrences at once sequent to my father's

having too candidly made known in some public print, probably The Times,

that an American gentleman, at such an address, desired to arrange with

a competent young man for the tuition at home of his three sons. The

effect of his rash failure to invite application by letter only was the

assault of an army of visitors who filled us with consternation; they

hung about the door, cumbered the hall, choked the staircase and sat

grimly individual in odd corners. How they were dealt with, given my

father's precipitate and general charity, I can but feebly imagine; our

own concern, in the event, was with a sole selected presence, that of

Scotch Mr. Robert Thompson, who gave us his care from breakfast to

luncheon each morning that winter, who afterwards carried on a school at

Edinburgh, and whom, in years long subsequent, I happened to help R. L.

Stevenson to recognise gaily as _his_ early pedagogue. He was so deeply

solicitous, yet withal so mild and kind and shy, with no harsher

injunction to us ever than "Come now, be getting on!" that one could but

think well of a world in which so gentle a spirit might flourish; while

it is doubtless to the credit of his temper that remembrance is a blank

in respect to his closer ministrations. I recall vividly his fresh

complexion, his very round clear eyes, his tendency to trip over his own

legs or feet while thoughtfully circling about us, and his constant

dress-coat, worn with trousers of a lighter hue, which was perhaps the

prescribed uniform of a daily tutor then; but I ask myself in vain what

I can have "studied" with him, there remaining with me afterwards, to

testify--this putting any scrap of stored learning aside--no single

textbook save the Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare, which was given me as

(of all things in the world) a reward. A reward for what I am again at a

loss to say--not certainly for having "got on" to anything like the tune

plaintively, for the most part, piped to me. It is a very odd and yet to

myself very rich and full reminiscence, though I remember how, looking

back at it from after days, W. J. denounced it to me, and with it the

following year and more spent in Paris, as a poor and arid and

lamentable time, in which, missing such larger chances and connections

as we might have reached out to, we had done nothing, he and I, but walk

about together, in a state of the direst propriety, little "high" black

hats and inveterate gloves, the childish costume of the place and

period, to stare at grey street-scenery (that of early Victorian London

had tones of a neutrality!) dawdle at shop-windows and buy water-colours

and brushes with which to bedaub eternal drawing-blocks. We might, I

dare say, have felt higher impulses and carried out larger plans--though

indeed present to me for this, on my brother's so expressing himself, is

my then quick recognition of the deeper stirrings and braver needs he at

least must have known, and my perfect if rueful sense of having myself

had no such quarrel with our conditions: embalmed for me did they even

to that shorter retrospect appear in a sort of fatalism of patience,

spiritless in a manner, no doubt, yet with an inwardly active,

productive and ingenious side.

It was just the fact of our having so walked and dawdled and dodged that

made the charm of memory; in addition to which what could one have asked

more than to be steeped in a medium so dense that whole elements of it,

forms of amusement, interest and wonder, soaked through to some

appreciative faculty and made one fail at the most of nothing but one's

lessons? My brother was right in so far as that my question--the one I

have just reproduced--could have been asked only by a person

incorrigible in throwing himself back upon substitutes for lost causes,

substitutes that might _temporarily_ have appeared queer and small; a

person so haunted, even from an early age, with visions of life, that

aridities, for him, were half a terror and half an impossibility, and

that the said substitutes, the economies and ingenuities that protested,

in their dumb vague way, against weakness of situation or of direct and

applied faculty, were in themselves really a revel of spirit and

thought. It _had_ indeed again an effect of almost pathetic incoherence

that our brave quest of "the languages," suffering so prompt and for the

time at least so accepted and now so inscrutably irrecoverable a check,

should have contented itself with settling us by that Christmas in a

house, more propitious to our development, in St. John's Wood, where we

enjoyed a considerable garden and wistful view, though by that windowed

privilege alone, of a large green expanse in which ladies and gentlemen

practised archery. Just _that_--and not the art even, but the mere

spectacle--might have been one of the substitutes in question; if not

for the languages at least for one or another of the romantic

connections we seemed a little to have missed: it was such a whiff of

the old world of Robin Hood as we could never have looked up from the

mere thumbed "story," in Fourteenth Street at any rate, to any soft

confidence of. More than I can begin to say, that is by a greater number

of queer small channels, did the world about us, thus continuous with

the old world of Robin Hood, steal into my sense--a constant state of

subjection to which fact is no bad instance of those refinements of

surrender that I just named as my fond practice. I seem to see to-day

that the London of the 'fifties was even to the weak perception of

childhood a much less generalised, a much more eccentrically and

variously characterised place, than the present great accommodated and

accommodating city; it had fewer resources but it had many more

features, scarce one of which failed to help the whole to bristle with

what a little gaping American could take for an intensity of difference

from _his_ supposed order. It was extraordinarily the picture and the

scene of Dickens, now so changed and superseded; it offered to my

presumptuous vision still more the reflection of Thackeray--and where is

the _detail_ of the reflection of Thackeray now?--so that as I trod the

vast length of Baker Street, the Thackerayan vista of other days, I

throbbed with the pride of a vastly enlarged acquaintance.

I dare say our perambulations of Baker Street in our little "top" hats

and other neatnesses must have been what W. J. meant by our poverty of

life--whereas it was probably one of the very things most expressive to

myself of the charm and the colour of history and (from the point of

view of the picturesque) of society. We were often in Baker Street by

reason of those stretched-out walks, at the remembered frequency and

long-drawn push of which I am to-day amazed; recalling at the same time,

however, that save for Robert Thompson's pitching ball with us in the

garden they took for us the place of all other agilities. I can't but

feel them to have been marked in their way by a rare curiosity and

energy. Good Mr. Thompson had followed us in our move, occupying

quarters, not far off, above a baker's shop on a Terrace--a group of

objects still untouched by time--where we occasionally by way of change

attended for our lessons and where not the least of our inspirations was

the confidence, again and again justified, that our mid-morning "break"

would determine the appearance of a self-conscious stale cake, straight

from below, received by us all each time as if it had been a sudden

happy thought, and ushered in by a little girl who might have been a

Dickens foundling or "orfling." Our being reduced to mumble cake in a

suburban lodging by way of reaction from the strain of study would have

been perhaps a pathetic picture, but we had field-days too, when we

accompanied our excellent friend to the Tower, the Thames Tunnel, St.

Paul's and the Abbey, to say nothing of the Zoological Gardens, almost

close at hand and with which we took in that age of lingering forms no

liberty of abbreviation; to say nothing either of Madame Tussaud's, then

in our interminable but so amiable Baker Street, the only shade on the

amiability of which was just that gruesome association with the portal

of the Bazaar--since Madame Tussaud had, of all her treasures, most

vividly revealed to me the Mrs. Manning and the Burke and Hare of the

Chamber of Horrors which lurked just within it; whom, for days after

making their acquaintance (and prolonging it no further than our

conscientious friend thought advisable) I half expected, when alone, to

meet quite dreadfully on the staircase or on opening a door. All this

experience was valuable, but it was not the languages--save in so far

indeed as it was the English, which we hadn't in advance so much aimed

at, yet which more or less, and very interestingly, came; it at any rate

perhaps broke our fall a little that French, of a sort, continued to be

with us in the remarkably erect person of Mademoiselle Cusin, the Swiss

governess who had accompanied us from Geneva, whose quite sharply

extrusive but on the whole exhilarating presence I associate with this

winter, and who led in that longish procession of more or less similar

domesticated presences which was to keep the torch, that is the accent,

among us, fairly alight. The variety and frequency of the arrivals and

departures of these ladies--whose ghostly names, again, so far as I

recall them, I like piously to preserve, Augustine Danse, Amelie Fortin,

Marie Guyard, Marie Bonningue, Felicie Bonningue, Clarisse

Bader--mystifies me in much the same degree as our own academic

vicissitudes in New York; I can no more imagine why, sociable and

charitable, we so often changed governesses than I had contemporaneously

grasped the principle of our succession of schools: the whole group of

phenomena reflected, I gather, as a rule, much more the extreme

promptitude of the parental optimism than any disproportionate habit of

impatience. The optimism begot precipitation, and the precipitation had

too often to confess itself. What is instructive, what is historic, is

the probability that young persons offering themselves at that time as

guides and communicators--the requirements of our small sister were for

long modest enough--quite conceivably lacked preparedness, and were so

thrown back on the extempore, which in turn lacked abundance. One of

these figures, that of Mademoiselle Danse, the most Parisian, and

prodigiously so, was afterwards to stand out for us quite luridly--a

cloud of revelations succeeding her withdrawal; a cloud which, thick as

it was, never obscured our impression of her genius and her charm. The

daughter of a political proscript who had but just escaped, by the

legend, being seized in his bed on the terrible night of the

Deux-Decembre, and who wrote her micawberish letters from Gallipolis,

Ohio, she subsequently figured to my imagination (in the light, that is,

of the divined revelations, too dreadful for our young ears,) as the

most brilliant and most genial of irregular characters, exhibiting the

Parisian "mentality" at its highest, or perhaps rather its deepest, and

more remarkable for nothing than for the consummate little art and grace

with which she had for a whole year draped herself in the mantle of our

innocent air. It was exciting, it was really valuable, to have to that

extent rubbed shoulders with an "adventuress"; it showed one that for

the adventuress there might on occasion be much to be said.

Those, however, were later things--extensions of view hampered for the

present, as I have noted, by our mere London street-scenery, which had

much to build out for us. I see again that we but endlessly walked and

endlessly daubed, and that our walks, with an obsession of their own,

constantly abetted our daubing. We knew no other boys at all, and we

even saw no others, I seem to remember, save the essentially rude ones,

rude with a kind of mediaeval rudeness for which our clear New York

experience had given us no precedent, and of which the great and

constant sign was the artless, invidious wonder produced in them, on our

public appearances, by the alien stamp in us that, for our comfort, we

vainly sought to dissimulate. We conformed in each particular, so far as

we could, to the prevailing fashion and standard, of a narrow range in

those days, but in our very plumage--putting our _ramage_ aside--our

wood-note wild must have seemed to sound, so sharply we challenged, when

abroad, the attention of our native contemporaries, and even sometimes

of their elders, pulled up at sight of us in the from-head-to-foot

stare, a curiosity void of sympathy and that attached itself for some

reason especially to our feet, which were not abnormally large. The

London people had for themselves, at the same time, an exuberance of

type; we found it in particular a world of costume, often of very odd

costume--the most intimate notes of which were the postmen in their

frock-coats of military red and their black beaver hats; the milkwomen,

in hats that often emulated these, in little shawls and strange short,

full frocks, revealing enormous boots, with their pails swung from their

shoulders on wooden yokes; the inveterate footmen hooked behind the

coaches of the rich, frequently in pairs and carrying staves, together

with the mounted and belted grooms without the attendance of whom

riders, of whichever sex--and riders then were much more

numerous--almost never went forth. The range of character, on the other

hand, reached rather dreadfully down; there were embodied and

exemplified "horrors" in the streets beside which any present exhibition

is pale, and I well remember the almost terrified sense of their

salience produced in me a couple of years later, on the occasion of a

flying return from the Continent with my father, by a long, an

interminable drive westward from the London Bridge railway-station. It

was a soft June evening, with a lingering light and swarming crowds, as

they then seemed to me, of figures reminding me of George Cruikshank's

Artful Dodger and his Bill Sikes and his Nancy, only with the bigger

brutality of life, which pressed upon the cab, the early-Victorian

fourwheeler, as we jogged over the Bridge, and cropped up in more and

more gas-lit patches for all our course, culminating, somewhere far to

the west, in the vivid picture, framed by the cab-window, of a woman

reeling backward as a man felled her to the ground with a blow in the

face. The London view at large had in fact more than a Cruikshank, there

still survived in it quite a Hogarth, side--which I had of course then

no name for, but which I was so sharply to recognise on coming back

years later that it fixed for me the veracity of the great pictorial

chronicler. Hogarth's mark is even yet not wholly overlaid; though time

has _per contra_ dealt with that stale servility of address which most

expressed to our young minds the rich burden of a Past, the consequence

of too much history. I liked for my own part a lot of history, but felt

in face of certain queer old obsequiosities and appeals, whinings and

sidlings and hand-rubbings and curtsey-droppings, the general play of

apology and humility, behind which the great dim social complexity

seemed to mass itself, that one didn't quite want so inordinate a

quantity. Of that particular light and shade, however, the big broom of

change has swept the scene bare; more history still has been after all

what it wanted. Quite another order, in the whole connection, strikes

me as reigning to-day--though not without the reminder from it that the

relations in which manner, as a generalised thing, in which "tone," is

_positively_ pleasant, is really assured and sound, clear and

interesting, are numerous and definite only when it has had in its past

some strange phases and much misadventure.