That autumn renewed, I make out, our long and beguiled walks, my own
with W. J. in especial; at the same time that I have somehow the sense
of the whole more broken appeal on the part of Paris, the scanter
confidence and ease it inspired in us, the perhaps more numerous and
composite, but obscurer and more baffled intimations. Not indeed--for
all my brother's later vision of an accepted flatness in it--that there
was not some joy and some grasp; why else were we forever (as I seem to
conceive we were) measuring the great space that separated us from the
gallery of the Luxembourg, every step of which, either way we took it,
fed us with some interesting, some admirable image, kept us in relation
to something nobly intended? That particular walk was not prescribed us,
yet we appear to have hugged it, across the Champs-Elysees to the river,
and so over the nearest bridge and the quays of the left bank to the Rue
de Seine, as if it somehow held the secret of our future; to the extent
even of my more or less sneaking off on occasion to take it by myself,
to taste of it with a due undiverted intensity and the throb as of the
finest, which _could_ only mean the most Parisian, adventure. The
further quays, with their innumerable old bookshops and print-shops, the
long cases of each of these commodities, exposed on the parapets in
especial, must have come to know us almost as well as we knew them; with
plot thickening and emotion deepening steadily, however, as we mounted
the long, black Rue de Seine--_such_ a stretch of perspective, _such_ an
intensity of tone as it offered in those days; where every low-browed
vitrine waylaid us and we moved in a world of which the dark message,
expressed in we couldn't have said what sinister way too, might have
been "Art, art, art, don't you see? Learn, little gaping pilgrims, what
_that_ is!" Oh we learned, that is we tried to, as hard as ever we
could, and were fairly well at it, I always felt, even by the time we
had passed up into that comparatively short but wider and finer vista of
the Rue de Tournon, which in those days more abruptly crowned the more
compressed approach and served in a manner as a great outer vestibule to
the Palace. Style, dimly described, looked down there, as with conscious
encouragement, from the high grey-headed, clear-faced, straight-standing
old houses--very much as if wishing to say "Yes, small staring jeune
homme, we are dignity and memory and measure, we are conscience and
proportion and taste, not to mention strong sense too: for all of which
good things take us--you won't find one of them when you find (as you're
going soon to begin to at such a rate) vulgarity." This, I admit, was an
abundance of remark to such young ears; but it did all, I maintain,
tremble in the air, with the sense that the Rue de Tournon, cobbled and
a little grass-grown, might more or less have figured some fine old
street _de province_: I cherished in short its very name and think I
really hadn't to wait to prefer the then, the unmenaced, the inviolate
Cafe Foyot of the left hand corner, the much-loved and so haunted Cafe
Foyot of the old Paris, to its--well, to its roaring successor. The wide
mouth of the present Boulevard Saint-Michel, a short way round the
corner, had not yet been forced open to the exhibition of more or less
glittering fangs; old Paris still pressed round the Palace and its
gardens, which formed the right, the sober social antithesis to the
"elegant" Tuileries, and which in fine, with these renewals of our young
confidence, reinforced both in a general and in a particular way one of
the fondest of our literary curiosities of that time, the conscientious
study of Les Francais Peints par Eux-Memes, rich in wood-cuts of
Gavarni, of Grandville, of Henri-Monnier, which we held it rather our
duty to admire and W. J. even a little his opportunity to copy in
pen-and-ink. This gilt-edged and double-columned octavo it was that
first disclosed to me, forestalling a better ground of acquaintance, the
great name of Balzac, who, in common with every other "light" writer of
his day, contributed to its pages: hadn't I pored over his exposition
there of the contrasted types of L'Habituee des Tuileries and L'Habituee
du Luxembourg?--finding it very _serre_, in fact what I didn't then know
enough to call very stodgy, but flavoured withal and a trifle lubricated
by Gavarni's two drawings, which had somehow so much, in general, to
say.
Let me not however dally by the way, when nothing, at those hours, I
make out, so much spoke to us as the animated pictured halls within the
Palace, primarily those of the Senate of the Empire, but then also
forming, as with extensions they still and much more copiously form, the
great Paris museum of contemporary art. This array was at that stage a
comparatively (though only comparatively) small affair; in spite of
which fact we supposed it vast and final--so that it would have shocked
us to foreknow how in many a case, and of the most cherished cases, the
finality was to break down. Most of the works of the modern schools that
we most admired are begging their bread, I fear, from door to door--that
is from one provincial museum or dim back seat to another; though we
were on much-subsequent returns to draw a long breath for the saved
state of some of the great things as to which our faith had been
clearest. It had been clearer for none, I recover, than for Couture's
Romains de la Decadence, recently acclaimed, at that time, as the last
word of the grand manner, but of the grand manner modernised, humanised,
philosophised, redeemed from academic death; so that it was to this
master's school that the young American contemporary flutter taught its
wings to fly straightest, and that I could never, in the long aftertime,
face his masterpiece and all its old meanings and marvels without a rush
of memories and a stir of ghosts. William Hunt, the New Englander of
genius, the "Boston painter" whose authority was greatest during the
thirty years from 1857 or so, and with whom for a time in the early
period W. J. was to work all devotedly, had prolonged his studies in
Paris under the inspiration of Couture and of Edouard Frere; masters in
a group completed by three or four of the so finely interesting
landscapists of that and the directly previous age, Troyon, Rousseau,
Daubigny, even Lambinet and others, and which summed up for the American
collector and in the New York and Boston markets the idea of the modern
in the masterly. It was a comfortable time--when appreciation could go
so straight, could rise, and rise higher, without critical contortions;
when we could, I mean, be both so intelligent and so "quiet." We were
in our immediate circle to know Couture himself a little toward the end
of his life, and I was somewhat to wonder then where he had picked up
the aesthetic hint for the beautiful Page with a Falcon, if I have the
designation right, his other great bid for style and capture of
it--which we were long to continue to suppose perhaps the rarest of all
modern pictures. The feasting Romans were conceivable enough, I mean
_as_ a conception; no mystery hung about them--in the sense of one's
asking one's self whence they had come and by what romantic or
roundabout or nobly-dangerous journey; which is that air of the poetic
shaken out as from strong wings when great presences, in any one of the
arts, appear to alight. What I remember, on the other hand, of the
splendid fair youth in black velvet and satin or whatever who, while he
mounts the marble staircase, shows off the great bird on his forefinger
with a grace that shows _him_ off, was that it failed to help us to
divine, during that after-lapse of the glory of which I speak, by what
rare chance, for the obscured old ex-celebrity we visited, the heavens
had once opened. Poetry had swooped down, breathed on him for an hour
and fled. Such at any rate are the see-saws of reputations--which it
contributes to the interest of any observational lingering on this
planet to have caught so repeatedly in their weird motion; the question
of what may happen, under one's eyes, in particular cases, before that
motion sinks to rest, whether at the up or at the down end, being really
a bribe to one's own non-departure. Especially great the interest of
having noted all the rises and falls and of being able to compare the
final point--so far as any certainty may go as to that--either with the
greatest or the least previous altitudes; since it is only when there
have been exaltations (which is what is not commonest), that our
attention is most rewarded.
If the see-saw was to have operated indeed for Eugene Delacroix, our
next young admiration, though much more intelligently my brother's than
mine, that had already taken place and settled, for we were to go on
seeing him, and to the end, in firm possession of his crown, and to take
even, I think, a harmless pleasure in our sense of having from so far
back been sure of it. I was sure of it, I must properly add, but as an
effect of my brother's sureness; since I must, by what I remember, have
been as sure of Paul Delaroche--for whom the pendulum was at last to be
arrested at a very different point. I could see in a manner, for all the
queerness, what W. J. meant by that beauty and, above all, that living
interest in La Barque du Dante, where the queerness, according to him,
was perhaps what contributed most; see it doubtless in particular when
he reproduced the work, at home, from a memory aided by a lithograph.
Yet Les Enfants d'Edouard thrilled me to a different tune, and I
couldn't doubt that the long-drawn odd face of the elder prince, sad and
sore and sick, with his wide crimped side-locks of fair hair and his
violet legs marked by the Garter and dangling from the bed, was a
reconstitution of far-off history of the subtlest and most "last word"
modern or psychologic kind. I had never heard of psychology in art or
anywhere else--scarcely anyone then had; but I truly felt the nameless
force at play. Thus if I also in my way "subtly" admired, one's noted
practice of that virtue (mainly regarded indeed, I judge, as a vice)
would appear to have at the time I refer to set in, under such
encouragements, once for all; and I can surely have enjoyed up to then
no formal exhibition of anything as I at one of those seasons enjoyed
the commemorative show of Delaroche given, soon after his death, in one
of the rather bleak salles of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts to which access
was had from the quay. _There_ was reconstituted history if one would,
in the straw-littered scaffold, the distracted ladies with
three-cornered coifs and those immense hanging sleeves that made them
look as if they had bath-towels over their arms; in the block, the
headsman, the bandaged eyes and groping hands, of Lady Jane Grey--not
less than in the noble indifference of Charles the First, compromised
king but perfect gentleman, at his inscrutable ease in his chair and as
if on his throne, while the Puritan soldiers insult and badger him: the
thrill of which was all the greater from its pertaining to that English
lore which the good Robert Thompson had, to my responsive delight,
rubbed into us more than anything else and all from a fine old
conservative and monarchical point of view. Yet of these things W. J.
attempted no reproduction, though I remember his repeatedly laying his
hand on Delacroix, whom he found always and everywhere interesting--to
the point of trying effects, with charcoal and crayon, in his manner;
and not less in the manner of Decamps, whom we regarded as more or less
of a genius of the same rare family. They were touched with the
ineffable, the inscrutable, and Delacroix in especial with the
incalculable; categories these toward which we had even then, by a happy
transition, begun to yearn and languish. We were not yet aware of style,
though on the way to become so, but were aware of mystery, which indeed
was one of its forms--while we saw all the others, without exception,
exhibited at the Louvre, where at first they simply overwhelmed and
bewildered me.
It was as if they had gathered there into a vast deafening chorus; I
shall never forget how--speaking, that is, for my own sense--they
filled those vast halls with the influence rather of some complicated
sound, diffused and reverberant, than of such visibilities as one could
directly deal with. To distinguish among these, in the charged and
coloured and confounding air, was difficult--it discouraged and defied;
which was doubtless why my impression originally best entertained was
that of those magnificent parts of the great gallery simply not inviting
us to distinguish. They only arched over us in the wonder of their
endless golden riot and relief, figured and flourished in perpetual
revolution, breaking into great high-hung circles and symmetries of
squandered picture, opening into deep outward embrasures that threw off
the rest of monumental Paris somehow as a told story, a sort of wrought
effect or bold ambiguity for a vista, and yet held it there, at every
point, as a vast bright gage, even at moments a felt adventure, of
experience. This comes to saying that in those beginnings I felt myself
most happily cross that bridge over to Style constituted by the wondrous
Galerie d'Apollon, drawn out for me as a long but assured initiation and
seeming to form with its supreme coved ceiling and inordinately shining
parquet a prodigious tube or tunnel through which I inhaled little by
little, that is again and again, a general sense of _glory_. The glory
meant ever so many things at once, not only beauty and art and supreme
design, but history and fame and power, the world in fine raised to the
richest and noblest expression. The world there was at the same time, by
an odd extension or intensification, the local present fact, to my small
imagination, of the Second Empire, which was (for my notified
consciousness) new and queer and perhaps even wrong, but on the spot so
amply radiant and elegant that it took to itself, took under its
protection with a splendour of insolence, the state and ancientry of the
whole scene, profiting thus, to one's dim historic vision, confusedly
though it might be, by the unparalleled luxury and variety of its
heritage. But who shall count the sources at which an intense young
fancy (when a young fancy _is_ intense) capriciously, absurdly
drinks?--so that the effect is, in twenty connections, that of a
love-philtre or fear-philtre which fixes for the senses their supreme
symbol of the fair or the strange. The Galerie d'Apollon became for
years what I can only term a splendid scene of things, even of the quite
irrelevant or, as might be, almost unworthy; and I recall to this hour,
with the last vividness, what a precious part it played for me, and
exactly by that continuity of honour, on my awaking, in a summer dawn
many years later, to the fortunate, the instantaneous recovery and
capture of the most appalling yet most admirable nightmare of my life.
The climax of this extraordinary experience--which stands alone for me
as a dream-adventure founded in the deepest, quickest, clearest act of
cogitation and comparison, act indeed of life-saving energy, as well as
in unutterable fear--was the sudden pursuit, through an open door, along
a huge high saloon, of a just dimly-descried figure that retreated in
terror before my rush and dash (a glare of inspired reaction from
irresistible but shameful dread,) out of the room I had a moment before
been desperately, and all the more abjectly, defending by the push of my
shoulder against hard pressure on lock and bar from the other side. The
lucidity, not to say the sublimity, of the crisis had consisted of the
great thought that I, in my appalled state, was probably still more
appalling than the awful agent, creature or presence, whatever he was,
whom I had guessed, in the suddenest wild start from sleep, the sleep
within my sleep, to be making for my place of rest. The triumph of my
impulse, perceived in a flash as I acted on it by myself at a bound,
forcing the door outward, was the grand thing, but the great point of
the whole was the wonder of my final recognition. Routed, dismayed, the
tables turned upon him by my so surpassing him for straight aggression
and dire intention, my visitant was already but a diminished spot in the
long perspective, the tremendous, glorious hall, as I say, over the
far-gleaming floor of which, cleared for the occasion of its great line
of priceless vitrines down the middle, he sped for _his_ life, while a
great storm of thunder and lightning played through the deep embrasures
of high windows at the right. The lightning that revealed the retreat
revealed also the wondrous place and, by the same amazing play, my young
imaginative life in it of long before, the sense of which, deep within
me, had kept it whole, preserved it to this thrilling use; for what in
the world were the deep embrasures and the so polished floor but those
of the Galerie d'Apollon of my childhood? The "scene of something" I had
vaguely then felt it? Well I might, since it was to be the scene of that
immense hallucination.
Of what, at the same time, in those years, were the great rooms of the
Louvre almost equally, above and below, not the scene, from the moment
they so wrought, stage by stage, upon our perceptions?--literally on
almost all of these, in one way and another; quite in such a manner, I
more and more see, as to have been educative, formative, fertilising, in
a degree which no other "intellectual experience" our youth was to know
could pretend, as a comprehensive, conducive thing, to rival. The sharp
and strange, the quite heart-shaking little prevision had come to me,
for myself, I make out, on the occasion of our very first visit of all,
my brother's and mine, under conduct of the good Jean Nadali,
before-mentioned, trustfully deputed by our parents, in the Rue de la
Paix, on the morrow of our first arrival in Paris (July 1855) and while
they were otherwise concerned. I hang again, appalled but uplifted, on
brave Nadali's arm--his professional acquaintance with the splendours
about us added for me on the spot to the charm of his "European"
character: I cling to him while I gape at Gericault's Radeau de la
Meduse, _the_ sensation, for splendour and terror of interest, of that
juncture to me, and ever afterwards to be associated, along with two or
three other more or less contemporary products, Guerin's Burial of
Atala, Prudhon's Cupid and Psyche, David's helmetted Romanisms, Madame
Vigee-Lebrun's "ravishing" portrait of herself and her little girl, with
how can I say what foretaste (as determined by that instant as if the
hour had struck from a clock) of all the fun, confusedly speaking, that
one was going to have, and the kind of life, always of the queer
so-called inward sort, tremendously "sporting" in its way--though that
description didn't then wait upon it, that one was going to lead. It
came of itself, this almost awful apprehension in all the presences,
under our courier's protection and in my brother's company--it came just
there and so; there was alarm in it somehow as well as bliss. The bliss
in fact I think scarce disengaged itself at all, but only the sense of
a freedom of contact and appreciation really too big for one, and
leaving such a mark on the very place, the pictures, the frames
themselves, the figures within them, the particular parts and features
of each, the look of the rich light, the smell of the massively enclosed
air, that I have never since renewed the old exposure without renewing
again the old emotion and taking up the small scared consciousness.
_That_, with so many of the conditions repeated, is the charm--to feel
afresh the beginning of so much that was to be. The beginning in short
was with Gericault and David, but it went on and on and slowly spread;
so that one's stretched, one's even strained, perceptions, one's
discoveries and extensions piece by piece, come back, on the great
premises, almost as so many explorations of the house of life, so many
circlings and hoverings round the image of the world. I have dim
reminiscences of permitted independent visits, uncorrectedly juvenile
though I might still be, during which the house of life and the palace
of art became so mixed and interchangeable--the Louvre being, under a
general description, the most peopled of all scenes not less than the
most hushed of all temples--that an excursion to look at pictures would
have but half expressed my afternoon. I had looked at pictures, looked
and looked again, at the vast Veronese, at Murillo's moon-borne
Madonna, at Leonardo's almost unholy dame with the folded hands,
treasures of the Salon Carre as that display was then composed; but I
had also looked at France and looked at Europe, looked even at America
as Europe itself might be conceived so to look, looked at history, as a
still-felt past and a complacently personal future, at society, manners,
types, characters, possibilities and prodigies and mysteries of fifty
sorts; and all in the light of being splendidly "on my own," as I
supposed it, though we hadn't then that perfection of slang, and of (in
especial) going and coming along that interminable and incomparable
Seine-side front of the Palace against which young sensibility felt
itself almost rub, for endearment and consecration, as a cat invokes the
friction of a protective piece of furniture. Such were at any rate some
of the vague processes--I see for how utterly vague they must show--of
picking up an education; and I was, in spite of the vagueness, so far
from agreeing with my brother afterwards that we didn't pick one up and
that that never _is_ done, in any sense not negligible, and also that an
education might, or should, in particular, have picked _us_ up, and yet
didn't--I was so far dissentient, I say, that I think I quite came to
glorify such passages and see them as part of an order really fortunate.
If we had been little asses, I seem to have reasoned, a higher
intention driving us wouldn't have made us less so--to any point worth
mentioning; and as we extracted such impressions, to put it at the
worst, from redemptive accidents (to call Louvres and Luxembourgs
nothing better) why we weren't little asses, but something wholly other:
which appeared all I needed to contend for. Above all it would have been
stupid and ignoble, an attested and lasting dishonour, not, with our
chance, to have followed our straggling clues, as many as we could and
disengaging as we happily did, I felt, the gold and the silver ones,
whatever the others might have been--not to have followed them and not
to have arrived by them, so far as we were to arrive. Instinctively, for
any dim designs we might have nourished, we picked out the silver and
the gold, attenuated threads though they must have been, and I
positively feel that there were more of these, far more, casually
interwoven, than will reward any present patience for my unravelling of
the too fine tissue.