 1. In an attempt to place together some particular of the early life of William James, and present him in his setting his immediate native in domestic air, so that any future gathered memorials of him might become the more intelligible and interesting, I found one of the consequences of my interrogation of the past asserted itself a great deal at the expense of some of the others, for it was to memory in the first place that my main appeal for particulars had to be made. I had been too near a witness of my brother's beginnings of life, and too close a participant by affection, admiration, and sympathy, in whatever touched and moved him, not to feel myself in possession even of a greater quantity of significant truth, a larger handful of the fine substance of history than I could hope to express or apply. To recover anything like the full treasure of scattered wasted circumstance was at the same time to live over the spent experience itself, so deep and rich and rare, with whatever sadder and soarer intensities, even with whatever poorer and thinner passages after the manner of everyone's experience. And the effect of this in turn was to find discrimination among the parts of my subject again and again difficult. So inseparably and beautifully they seemed to hang together, and the comprehensive case to decline mutilation or refuse to be treated otherwise than handsomely. This meant that aspects began to multiply and images to swarm, so far at least as they showed, to appreciation as true terms and happy values, and that I might positively and exceedingly rejoice in my relation to most of them, using it for all that, as the phrase is, it should be worth. To knock at the door of the past was in a word to see it open to me quite wide, to see the world within begin to compose, with a grace of its own round the primary figure, see it people itself vividly and insistently. Such then is the circle of my commemoration, and so much these free and copious notes, a labor of love and loyalty. We were, to my sense, the blessed group of us, such a company of characters and such a picture of differences, and with also fused and united and interlocked, that each of us to that fond fancy pleads for preservation, and that in respect to what I speak of myself as possessing, I think I shall be ashamed, as of a cold impiety, to find any element altogether negligible. To which I may add, perhaps, that I struggle under the drawback innate and inbred of seeing the whole content of memory and affection in each enacted and recovered moment, as who should say, in the vivid image and the very scene, the light of the only terms in which life has treated the experience. And I cherish the moment, and evoke the image and repaint the scene, though, meanwhile, indeed scarce able to convey how prevailingly, and almost exclusively, during years and years, the field was animated and the adventure conditioned for me by my brother's nearness, and that play of genius in him, of which I had never had a doubt from the first. The first, then. Since I retrace our steps to the start, for the pleasure, strangely mixed, though it be, of feeling our small feet plant themselves afresh and artlessly stumble forward again, the first began long ago, far off, and yet glimmers at me there, as out of a thin golden haze, with all the charm, for imagination and memory, of pressing pursuit rewarded, of distinctness in the dimness, of the flush of life in the gray, of the wonder of consciousness in everything, everything having naturally been all the while but the abject little matter, of course. Partly doubtless as the effect of a life, now getting to be a tolerably long one, spent in the older world, I see the world of our childhood as very young indeed, young with its own juvenility as well as with ours, as if it wore the few and light garments and had gathered in but the scant properties and breakable toys of the tenderest age, or were at the most a very unformed young person, even a boisterous hobbly-hoi. It exhaled at any rate a simple freshness, and I catch its pure breath at our infantile albany as the very air of long summer afternoons, occasions tasting of ample leisure, still bookless, yet beginning to be bedless or cribless, tasting of accessible garden peaches in a liberal backward territory that was still almost part of a country town. Tasting of many-sized uncles, aunts, cousins, of strange legendary domestics, inveterately but archaically Irish, and whose familiar remarks and criticism of life were handed down as well as of dim family ramifications and local allusions, mystifications always, that flowered into anecdote as into small hard plums. Tasting above all of a big, much-shaded, savoury house in which a softly sighing widowed grandmother, Catherine Barber by birth, whose attitude was a resigned consciousness of complications and accretions, dispensed and hospitality seemingly as joyless as it was certainly boundless. What she liked, dear gentle lady of many cares and anxieties, was the fiction of the day, the novels at that time promptly pirated of Mrs. Trollop and Mrs. Gore, of Mrs. Marsh, Mrs. Hubbock, and the Mrs. Kavanaugh and Aguilar, whose very names are forgotten now, but which used to drive her away to quiet corners once her figure comes back to me, bent forward on table with the book held out at a distance, and a tall single candle placed, apparently not at all to her discomfort. In that age of sparrow and braver habits, straight between the page and her eyes. There is a very animated allusion to one or two of her aspects, in the fragment of a spiritual autobiography, the reminiscences of a so-called Stephen Dewhurst, printed by W.J. 1885, in the literary remains of Henry James, a reference which has the interest of being very nearly as characteristic of my father himself, which his references in almost any connection were want to be, as of the person or the occasion evoked. I had reached my sixteenth year when she died, and as my only remembered grandparent, she touches the chord of attachment to a particular vibration. She represented for us in our generation the only English blood, that of both her own parents, flowing in her veins. I confess that out of that association, for reasons and reasons, I feel her image most beneficently bend. We were as to three parts of two other stocks, and I recall how from far back I reflected, for I see I must have been always reflecting, that, mixed as such a mixture, our scotch with our Irish might be, it still had a grace to borrow from the third infusion or dimension. If I could freely have chosen, moreover, it was precisely from my father's mother that, fond votary of the finest faith in the vivifying and characterizing force of mothers, I should have wished to borrow it. Even while conscious that Catherine Barber's own people had drawn breath in American air for at least two generations before her. Our father's father, William James, an Irishman and Protestant born of County Cavern, had come to America, a very young man and then soul of his family, shortly after the Revolutionary War. My father, the second son of the third of the marriages to which the country of his adoption was liberally to help him, had been born in Albany in eighteen eleven. Our maternal great-grandfather on the father's side, Hugh Walsh, had reached our shores from a like Irish home, Kili Lee County Down, somewhat earlier, in seventeen sixty-four, he being then nineteen. He had settled at Newburgh on the Hudson, half way to Albany, where some of his descendants till lately lingered. Our maternal great-grandfather on the mother's side, that is, our mother's mother's father, Alexander Robertson of Palmont, near Edinburgh, had likewise crossed the sea in the mid-century and prospered in New York, very much as Hugh Walsh was prospering and William James was still more markedly to prosper further up the Hudson. As unanimous and fortunate beholders of the course of which admirable stream, I like to think of them. I find Alexander Robertson inscribed in a wee New York directory of the clothes of the century as merchant, and our childhood in that city was past, as to some of its aspects, in a sense of the afterglow, reduced and circumscribed it is true, but by no means wholly inanimate of his shining solidity. The sweet taste of Albany probably lurked most in its being our admired antithesis to New York. It was a holiday, whereas New York was home. At least that presently came to be the relation, for my very, very first fleeting vision I apprehend. Albany itself must have been the scene exhibited. Our parents had gone there for a year or two to be near our grandmother on their return from their first, that is, our mother's first, visit to Europe, which had quite immediately followed my birth, which appears to have lasted some year and a half, and of which I shall have another word to say. The Albany experiment would have been their first founded housekeeping, since I make them out to have been taking themselves for the winter following their marriage to the ancient Aster house, not indeed at that time ancient, but the great and appointed modern hotel of New York, the only one of such pretensions, and which somehow continued to project its massive image, that of a great square block of granite with vast, dark, warm interiors across some of the later and more sensitive stages of my infancy. Clearly, or I should perhaps rather say dimly, recourse to that hospitality was again occasionally had by our parents, who had originally had it to such a happy end that on January 9th, 1842, my elder brother had come into the world there. It remained a tradition with him that our father's friend from an early time, R. W. Emerson, then happening to be in New York, and under that convenient roof, was proudly and pressingly taken upstairs to admire and give his blessing to the lately born babe, who was to become the second American, William James. The blessing was to be renewed, I may mention, in the sense that among the impressions of the next early years, I easily distinguish that of the great and urbane Emerson's occasional presence in 14th Street, a center of many images, where the parental tent was before long to pitch itself and rest awhile. I am interested for the moment, however, in identifying the scene of our very first perceptions, of my very own at least, which I can hear best speak for. One of these, and probably the promptest in order, was that of my brother's occupying a place in the world to which I couldn't at all aspire, to any approach to which, in truth, I seem to myself ever conscious of having signally forfeited a title. It glimmers back to me that I quite definitely and resignedly thought of him as in the most exemplary manner already beforehand with me, already seated at his task when the attempt to drag me crying and kicking to the first hour of my education failed on the threshold of the Dutch house in Albany after the fashion I have glanced at in a collection of other pages than these, just as I remember to have once borrowed a hint from our grandmother's interior in a work of imagination. That failure of my powers, or that indifference to them, my retreat to shrieking from the Dutch house, was to leave him once for all already there an embodied demonstration of the possible. Already wherever it might have been that there was a question of my arriving when arriving at all, belatedly and ruefully, as if he had gained such an advance of me in his sixteen months' experience of the world before mine began that I never for all the time of childhood and youth in the least caught up with or overtook him. He was always round the corner and out of sight, coming back into view but at his hours of extremist ease. We were never in the same schoolroom, in the same game, scarce even in step-together, or in the same phase at the same time. When our phases overlapped, that is, it was only for a moment. He was clean out before I had got well in. How far he had really at any moment dashed forward it is not for me now to attempt to say. What comes to me is that I at least hung inveterately and woefully back, and that this relation alike to our interests and to each other seemed proper and pre-appointed. I lose myself in wonder at the loose ways, the strange process of waste, through which nature and fortune may deal on occasion, with those whose faculty for application is all and only in their imagination and their sensibility. There may be, during those bewildered and brooding years, so little for them to show, that I liken the individual dunce, as he so often must appear, to some commercial traveller who has lost the key to his packed case of samples, and can but pass for a fool while other exhibitions go forward. I achieve with a dim remembrance of my final submission, though it is the faintest ghost of an impression and consists, but of the bright blur of a dame's schoolroom, a mere medium for a small piping shuffling sound and suffered heat, as well as for the wistfulness produced by glimmering squares that were fitfully screened, though not to any revival of cheer, by a huge swaying yet dominant object. This dominant object, the shepherdess of the flock, was Miss Behu, or Behu. I recover but the alien sound of her name, which memory caresses only because she may have been of like race with her temple of learning, which faced my grandmother's house in North Pearl Street, and really justified its exotic claim by its yellow archaic gable end. I think of the same as a brick baked in the land of dikes, and making a series of small steps from the base of the gable to the point. These images are subject, I confess, to a soft confusion, which is somehow consecrated nonetheless, and out of which, with its shade of contributory truth, some sort of scene insists on glancing. The very flush of the uneven bricks of the pavement lives in it, the very smell of the street cobbles, the imputed grace of the arching umbridge. I see it all as from under trees, the form of Steuben Street, which crossed our view, as steep even to the very essence of adventure, with a summit and still more with another most and riskiest incline very far away. There lives in it the aspect of the other house, the other and much smaller than my grandmother's, conveniently near it and within sight, which was pinkish red picked out with white, whereas my grandmother's was grayish brown and very grave, and which must have stood back a little from the street, as I seem even now to swing, or at least to perch, on a relaxed gate of approach, which was so conceived to work by an iron chain, weighted with a big ball, all under a spreading tree again, and with the high, oh so high white stone steps, must they have been marble, and the fanlighted door of the pinkish red front behind me. I lose myself in ravishment before the marble and the pink. There were other houses, too. One of them the occasion of the first paid visit that struggles with my twilight of social consciousness. A call with my father conveying me presumably for fond exhibition, since if my powers were not exhibitional, my appearance and my long, fair curls of which I distinctly remember the lack or most sacrifice superstitiously were. On one of our aunts, the youngest of his three sisters, lately married, and who, predestined to an early death, hovers there for me, softly spectral, in the long light, front ringlets, the fashion of the time, and the capital sign of all our paternal aunts, seemingly. With the remembered enhancement of her living in Elk Street, the name itself vaguely portentous, as though beasts of the forest not yet wholly exercised, and more or less under the high brow of that capital, which, as aloft somewhere and beneath the thickest shades of all, loomed, familiar yet impressive at the end of almost any Albany vista of reference. I have seen other capitals since, but the whole majesty of the matter must have been distilled into my mind, even though the connection was indirect and the concrete image that of the primitive structure long since pretentiously and insecurely superseded. So that, later on, the impression was to find itself, as the phrase is, discounted. Had it not moreover been reinforced at the time for that particular capital line hour, by the fact that our uncle, our aunt's husband, was the son of Mr. Martin Van Buren, and that he was the president? This, at least, led the imagination on, or leads, in any case, my present imagination of that one, ministering to what I have called the soft confusion. The confusion clears, however, though the softness remains, when, ceasing to press too far backward, I meet the ampler light of conscious and educated little returns to the place. For the education of New York, enjoyed up to my 12th year, failed to blight its romantic appeal. The images I really distinguish flush through the mature medium, but with the sense of them only the more wondrous. The other house, the house of my parents, limited early sojourn, becomes that of those of our cousins, numerous at that time, who preeminently figured for us. The various brood presided over by my father's second sister, Catherine James, who had married at a very early age, Captain Robert Temple, USA. Both these parents were to die young, and their children, six in number, the two eldest boys, were very markedly to people our preliminary seen. This being true in particular of three of them, the sharply differing brothers and the second sister, Mary Temple, radiant and rare, extinguished in her first youth. But after having made an impression on many persons, and on ourselves not least, which was to become in the harmonious circle for all time, the matter of sacred legend and reference, of associated piety, those and others with them were the numerous donnings on which in many cases, the deepening and final darknesses were so soon to follow. Our father's family was to offer such a chronicle of early deaths, arrested careers, broken promises, orphan children. It sounds cold-blooded, but part of the charm of our grandmother's house for us, or I should perhaps but speak for myself, was in its being so much and so sociably a nurseried and playroomed orphanage. The children of her lost daughters and daughters-in-law overflowed there, mainly as girls, on whom the surviving sons-in-law and sons occasionally and most trustingly looked in. Parentally bereft cousins were somehow more thrilling than parentally provided ones, and most thrilling when, in the odd fashion of that time, they were sent to school in New York as a preliminary to their being sent to school in Europe. They spent scraps of holidays with us in 14th Street, and I think my first childish conception of the enviable lot formed amid these associations was to be so little fathered or mothered, so little sunk on the short range, that the romance of life seemed to lie in some constant improvisation by vague overhovering authorities of new situations and horizons. We were intensely domesticated, yet for the very reason perhaps that we felt our young bonds easy, and they were so easy compared to our small plights of which we had stray glimpses that my first assured conception of true richness was that we should be sent separately off among cold or even cruel aliens in order to be there thrillingly homesick. Homesickness was a luxury I remember craving from the tenderest age, a luxury of which I was unnaturally or at least prosaically deprived. Our motherless cousin, Augustus Barker, came up from Albany to the institution Charlier, unless it was, as I suspect, a still earlier specimen with a name that fades from me, of that type of French establishment for boys, which then and for years after so incongruously flourished in New York. And though he professed a complete satisfaction with pleasures tasted in our innocent society, I feel that he was engaged in a brave and strenuous adventure, while we but hugged comparatively safe shore. End of chapter one. Chapter two of A Small Boy and Others. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by M.B., A Small Boy and Others by Henry James. Chapter two. We were day boys, William and I, at dispensaries of learning the number and succession of which today excite my wonder. We couldn't have changed off it, it strikes me as I look back, if our presence had been inveterately objected to, and yet I enjoy an inward certainty that my brother being vividly bright and I quite blankly innocuous, this reproach was never brought home to our house. It wasn't humiliation to me at first, small boys though we were, that our instructors kept being instructresses, and thereby a grave reflection both on our attainments and our spirit. A bevy of these educative ladies passes before me. I still possess their names, as for instance that of Mrs. Daly and that of Miss Rogers, previously of the Chelsea Female Institute, though at this moment of Sixth Avenue, this latter, whose benches indeed my brother didn't haunt, but who handled us literally with gloves. I still see the elegant objects as Miss Rogers beat time with a long black feral to some species of droning chant or chorus in which we spent most of our hours. Just as I see her very tall and straight and spare in a light blue dress, her firm face framed in long black glossy ringlets and the stamp of the Chelsea Female Institute all over her. Mrs. Daly, clearly the immediate successor to the nebulous Miss Bayou remains quite substantial, perhaps because the sphere of her small influence has succeeded in not passing away up to this present writing. So that in certain notes on New York published a few years since, I was moved to refer to it with emotion as one of the small red houses on the south side of Waverly Place that really carry the imagination back to a vanished social order. They carry mine to a stout red faced lady with gray hair and a large apron, the latter convenient somehow suggesting as she stood about with the resolute air that she viewed her little pupils as so many small slices cut from the loaf of life and on which she was to dab the butter of arithmetic and spelling accompanied by way of jam with a light application of the practice of prize giving. I recall an occasion indeed, I must injustice mention when the jam really was thick. My only memory of a school feast, strange to say, threw out our young annals, something uncanny in the air of the schoolroom at the unwanted evening or late afternoon hour, and tables that seemed to me prodigiously long and on which the edibles were chunky and sticky. The stout red faced lady must have been Irish as the name she bore imported, or do I think so, but from the indescribably Irish look of her revisited house. It refers itself at any rate to a New York age in which a little more or a little less of the color was scarce noticeable in the general flush. Of pure unimported strain, however, we'll miss Sedwick and Mrs. Wright, Lavinia Dee, the next figures in the procession. The procession that was to wind up indeed with two foreign recruits, small brown snappy Mademoiselle de Lavigne, who plied us with the French tongue at home and who had been introduced to us as the niece, or could it have been the grand niece of the celebrated Casimir and a large Russian lady in an extraordinarily short cape? I like to recall the fashion of short capes, of the same stuff as her dress and Merovingian side braids that seemed to require the royal crown of Fredegonde or Bruneo to complete their effect. This final and aggravation representative of the compromising sex looms to my mind's eye, I should add, but as the creature of an hour, in spite of her having been domiciled with us. Whereas I think of Mademoiselle de Lavigne as flitting in and out on quick, fine, more or less cloth-shod feet of exemplary neatness. The flat-soled feet of Louis Philippe and of the female figures in those volumes of Gavarni, then actual, then contemporaneous, which were kept in a piece of furniture that stood between the front parlor windows in 14th Street, together with a set of bearranger enriched by steel engravings to the rich imagery of which I so wonderingly responded that all other art of illustration, ever since, has been for me comparatively weak and cold. These volumes and the tall entrancing folios of Nash's lithographed mansions of England in the olden time, formed a store lending itself particularly to distribution on the drawing room carpet. With concomitant pleasure to the same surface of the small student's stomach and relieving agitation of his backward heels. I make out that it had decidedly been given to Mademoiselle de Lavigne to represent to my first perception personal France. She was, besides not being at all pink or shy, oval and fluent and mistress somehow of the step. The step of levity that involved a whisk of her short skirts. There she was to the life on the page of Gavarni, attesting its reality, and there again did that page in return. I speak not, of course, of the unplumbed depths of the appended text, attest her own felicity. I was later on to feel, that is, I was to learn, how many impressions and appearances, how large a sense of things her type and tone prefigured. The evanescence of the large Russian lady, whom I think of as rather rank, I can't express it otherwise, may have been owing in some question of the purity of her accent in French. It was one of her attributes and her grounds of appeal to us that she had come straight from Siberia, and it is distinct to me that the purity was challenged by a friend of the house, and without, pathetically enough, provoking the only answer, the plea that the missing atticism would have been wasted on young barbarians. The Siberian note on our inmate's part may perhaps have been the least of her incongruities. She was above all too big for a little job, towered over us doubtless too heroically, and her proportions hover but to lose themselves, with the successors to her function awaiting us a little longer. Meanwhile to revert an instant, if the depressed consciousness of our still more or less quailing educationally beneath the female eye, and there was as well the deeper depth, there was the degrading fact that with us literally consorted and contended girls, that we sat and strove even though we drew the line at playing with them and at knowing them when not of the swarming cousinship at home. If that felt awkwardness didn't exactly coincide with the ironic effect of Gussie's appearances, his emergence from rich mystery and his return to it, our state was but comparatively the braver. He always had so much more to tell us than we could possibly have to tell him. On reflection I see that the most completely rueful period couldn't after all have prolonged itself since the female eye last bent on us would have been that of LaVenia D. Wright to our connection with whom a small odd reminiscence attaches a date. A little schoolmate displayed to me with pride while the connection lasted, a beautifully colored, a positively iridescent and gilded card representing the first of all the great exhibitions of our age, the London Crystal Palace of 1851, his father having lately gone out to it and sent him the dazzling memento. In 1851 I was eight years old and my brother scarce more than nine in addition to which it is distinct to me in the first place that we were never faithful long or for more than one winter to the same studious scene and in the second that among our instructors, Mrs. LaVenia had no successor of her own sex unless I count Mrs. Raidenberg of New Brighton where we spent the summer of 1854 when I had reached the age of 11 and found myself bewildered by recognition of the part that attendance at school was so meanly to play in the hitherto unclouded long vacation. This was true at least for myself and my next younger brother, Wilkie, who under the presumption now dawning of his community of pursuits with my own was from that moment off and on for a few years my extremely easy yoke fellow and play fellow. Unwilliam charged with learning. I thought of him inveterately from our younger time as charged with learning. No such trick was played. He rested or roamed that summer on his accumulations. A fact which, as I was sure I saw these more and more richly accumulate, didn't in the least make me wonder. It comes back to me in truth that I had been prepared for anything by his having said to me toward the end of our time at LaVenia D's and with characteristic authority. His enjoyment of it coming from my character, I mean, quite as much as from his own, that the lady was a very able woman as shown by the experiments upstairs. He was upstairs, of course, and I was down and I scarcely even knew what experiments were beyond their indeed requiring capability. The region of their performance was William's natural sphere, though I recall that I had a sense of peeping into it to a thrilled effect on seeing our instructors illustrate the proper way to extinguish a candle. She firmly pressed the flame between her thumb and her two forefingers, and on my remarking that I didn't see how she could do it, promptly replied that I, of course, couldn't do it myself as he could because I should be afraid. That reflection on my courage awakes another echo of the same scant season. Since the test involved must have been that of our taking our way home through Fourth Avenue from some point uptown and Mrs. Wright's situation in East 21st Street was such a point. The Hudson River Railroad was then in course of construction or was being made to traverse the upper reaches of the city through that part of which raged to my young sense a riot of explosion and a great shouting and waving of red flags when the gunpowder introduced into the rocky soil was about to take effect. It was our theory that our passage there in the early afternoon was beset with danger and our impression that we saw fragments of rock hurtle through the air and smite to the earth another and yet another of the persons engaged or exposed. The point of honour among several of us was, of course, nobly to defy the danger, and I feel again the emotion with which I both hoped and feared that the red flags, lurid signals described from afar, would enable or compel us to renew the feat. That I didn't for myself, inveterately renew it, I seem to infer from the memory of other preambulations of the period, as to which I am divided between their still-present freshness and my sense of perhaps making too much of these tiny particles of history. My stronger rule, however, I confess, and the one by which I must here consistently be guided, is that, from the moment it is a question of projecting a picture, no particle that counts for memory or is appreciable to the spirit can be too tiny. And that experience, in the name of which one speaks, is all compact of them and shining with them. There was at any rate another way home with other appeals which consisted of getting straight along westward to Broadway, a sphere of a different order of fascination and bristling, as I seem to recall, with more vivid aspects, greater curiosities and wonderments. The curiosity was, of course, the country place, as I supposed it to be, on the northeast corner of 18th Street, if I am not mistaken. A big brown house in grounds, peopled with animal life, which, little as its sight may appear to know it today, lingered on into considerably later years. I have but to close my eyes in order to open them inwardly again, while I lean against the tall brown iron rails and peer through to a romantic view of browsing and pecking and parading creatures, not numerous, but all of distinguished appearance. Two or three elegant little cows of refined form and color, two or three nibbling fawns, and a larger company above all of peacocks and guinea fowl, with, doubtless, though as to this I am vague, some of the commoner ornaments of the barnyard. I recognized that the scene as I evoke it fails of grandeur, but it nonetheless had for me the note of greatness, all of which but shows, of course, what a very town-bred small person I was, and was to remain. I see myself, moreover, as someone always alone in these and like New York flannelies and contemplations, and feel how the sense of my being so, being at any rate master of my short steps, such as they were, through all the beguiling streets, was probably the very savor of each of my chance feasts. Which stirs in me at the same time some drop of wonder at the liberty of range and opportunity of adventure allowed to my tender age. Though the puzzle may very well drop, after all, as I ruefully reflect, that I couldn't have been judged at home reckless or adventurous. What I look back to as my infant license can only have had for its ground some timely conviction on the part of my elders, that the only form of riot or revel ever known to me would be that of the visiting mind. Wasn't I myself for that matter, even at that time, all acutely and yet resignedly, even quite fatalistically, aware of what to think of this? I at any rate watched the small boy dawdle and gape again. I smell the cold dusty paint and iron as the rails of the 18th street corner rub his contemplative nose and feeling him foredoomed, withhold from him no grain of my sympathy. He is a convenient little image or warning of all that was to be for him and he might well have been even happier than he was. For there was the very pattern and measure of all he was to demand, just to be somewhere, almost anywhere would do, and somehow receive an impression or an accession, feel a relation or a vibration. He was to go without many things, ever so many, as all persons do in whom contemplation takes so much the place of action. But everywhere in the years that came soon after, and that in fact continued long in the streets of great towns, in New York still for some time and then for a while in London, in Paris, in Geneva, wherever it might be, he was to enjoy more than anything, the so far from showy practice of wandering and dawdling and gaping. He was really, I think, much to profit by it. What it all appreciably gave him, that is, gave him in producible form would be difficult to state. But it seems to him, as he even now thus indulges himself, an education like another, feeling as he has come to do more and more that no education avails for the intelligence that doesn't stir in it some subjective passion, and that, on the other hand, almost anything that does so act is largely educative, however small a figure the process might make in a scheme of training. Strange indeed, furthermore, are some of the things that have stirred a subjective passion. Stirred it, I mean, in young persons predisposed to a more or less fine-inspired application. End of chapter two. Chapter three of A Small Boy and Others. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by M.B. A Small Boy and Others by Henry James. Chapter three. But I positively dawdle and gapier. I catch myself in the act, so that I take up the thread of fond reflection that guides me through that mystification of the summer school, which I referred to a little way back, at the time when the summer school, as known in America today, was so deep in the bosom of the future. The seat of acquisition I speak of must have been contiguous to the house we occupied. I recall it as most intimately and objectionably near, and carried on in the interest of those parents from New York who, in Vellegiatura under the queer conditions of those days, with the many modern mitigations of the gregarious lot still unrevealed, and the many refinements on the individual one still undeveloped, welcomed almost any influence that might help at all to form their children to civility. Yet I remember that particular influence as one more noisy and drowsy and dusty than anything else, as to which it must have partaken strongly of the general nature of New Brighton, a neighborhood that no apt agency, whatever had up to that time concerned itself to fashion, and that was indeed to remain shabbily shapeless for years, since I recall almost as dire an impression of it received in the summer of 1875. I seem more or less to have begun life for that matter with impressions of New Brighton. There comes back to me another considerably more infantile than that of 1854, so infantile indeed that I wonder at its having stuck. That of a place called the Pavilion, which must have been an hotel sheltering us for July and August, and the form of which to childish retrospect, unprejudiced by later experience, was that of a great Greek temple shining over blue waters in the splendor of a white colonnade and a great yellow pediment. The elegant image remained, though imprinted in a child so small as to be easily portable by a stout nurse, I remember, and not less easily duckable. I gasped again and was long too gasped with the sense of salt immersion received at her strong hands. Wonderful altogether, in fact, I find as I write, the quantity, the intensity of picture recoverable from even the blankest and tenderest state of the little canvas. I connect somehow with the Pavilion period a visit paid with my father, who decidedly must have liked to seek me about, I feel so rich in that general reminiscence, to a family whom we reached in what struck me as a quite lovely, empowered place on a very hot day and among whom luxuries and eccentricities flourished together. They were numerous, the members of this family. They were beautiful. They partook of their meals or were at the moment partaking of one out of doors. And the then preeminent figure in the group was a very big Newfoundland dog on whose back I was put to ride. That must have been my first vision of the liberal life. Though I further ask myself what my age could possibly have been when my weight was so fantastically far from hinting at later developments. But the romance of the hour was particularly in what I have called the eccentric note. The fact that the children, my entertainers, riveted my gaze to stalkingless and shoeless legs and feet, conveying somehow at the same time that they were not poor and destitute, but rich and provided, just as I took their garden feast for a sign of overflowing food, and that their state as of children of nature was a refinement of freedom and grace. They were to become great and beautiful, the household of that glimmering vision. They were to figure historically, heroically and serve great public ends. But always, to my remembering eyes and fond fancy, they were to move through life as with the bare white feet of that original preferred fairness and wildness. This is rank embroidery, but the old surface itself insists on spreading. It waits at least with an air of its own. The rest is silence. I can, extraordinary encumbrance, even for the most doting of parents on a morning call, but have returned with my father to our hotel since I feel that I must not only to this, but to a still further extent, face the historic truth that we were for considerable periods during our earliest time, nothing less than hotel children. Between the far off and the later phases at New Brighton, stretched a series of summers that had seen us all regularly installed for a couple of months at an establishment passing in the view of that simpler age for a vast caravan sur I, the Hamilton House on the South Long Island shore, so called from its nearness to the fort of that name, which had Fort Lafayette, the Bastille of the Civil War, out in the channel before it, and which probably cast a stronger spell upon the spirit of our childhood, Williams and mine at least, than any scene presented to us up to our reaching our teens. I find that I draw from the singularly unobliterated memory of the particulars of all that experience the power quite to glory in our shame. Of so entrancing an interest did I feel it at the time to be an hotel child, and so little would I have exchanged any lot with that of any small person more privately bred. We were private enough in all conscience, I think I must have felt the rest of the year, and at what age mustn't I quite have succumbed to the charm of the world seen in a larger way? For there, incomparably, was the chance to dawdle and gape. There were human appearances in endless variety, and on the exhibition stage of a piazza that my gape measured almost as by miles. It was even as if I had become positively conscious that the social scene so peopled would pretty well always say more to me than anything else. What it did say, I of course, but scantly understood, but I nonetheless knew it spoke, and I listened to its voice, I seem to recall, very much as young Edwin in Dr. Beatty's poem, listened to the roar of tempests and torrents from the nobler eminence of beatling crags and an exposure to still deeper abysses. I cling for the moment, however, to the small part of our Vraedenburg summer, as we were for long afterwards invidiously to brand it. The more that it so plays its part in illustration, under the light of a later and happier age, of the growth, when not rather of the arrest, of manners and customs round about our birthplace. I think we had never been so much as during these particular months disinherited of the general and public amenities that reinforce for the young private precept and example, disinherited in favor of dust and glare and mosquitoes and pigs and shanties and rum shops, of no walks and scarce moor drives, of a repeated no less than of a strong emphasis on the more sordid sides of the Irish aspect in things. There was a castellated resonance on the hill above us, very high, I remember supposing the hill, and very stately the structure. It had towers and views and pretensions and belonged to a colonel, whom we thought very handsome and very costumed, as if befrogged and high-booted, which he couldn't have been at all, only ought to have been, would even certainly have been at a higher pitch of social effect, and whose son and heir also very handsome and known familiarly and endearingly as Chick, had a velvet coat and a pony and I think spurs, all luxuries we were without, and was cousin to the boys, the Dicapés, whom we had come to know at our school of the previous winter, and to somehow, doubtless partly as guests of the opulent Chick, hovered again about the field of idleness. The Dicapés, particularly in the person of the first-born Louie, had been of value to us, or at any rate to me, for though I was, in common with my elders then, unacquainted with the application of that word as I use it here, what was my incipient sense of persons and things? What were my first stirred observant and imaginative reactions, discriminations and categories, but a vague groping for it? The Dicapés, again as more especially and impressively interpreted by the subtle Louie, enjoyed the preeminence of being European. They had dropped during the scholastic term of 1853-54, straight from the lake of Geneva into the very bosom of Mr. Richard Pulling-Janks' select resort for young gentlemen, then situated in Broadway below 4th Street, and had lately been present at an historic pageant, whether or no celebrating the annals of the town or copay I know not, in which representatives of their family had figured in armor and on horseback as the barons, to our comprehensions, du coup or coup, their father was thus of the canton de Vaux. Only their mother had been native among ourselves and sister to the colonel of the castellations. But what was the most vivid mark of the brothers and vividest on the part of the super subtle Louie was his French treatment of certain of our native local names, Ohio and Iowa for instance, which he rendered as to their separate vowels with a daintiness and delicacy invidious and imperturbable, so that he might have been Chateaubriand declaiming Lena Chez at Madame Recamier's. Oh, E.O. and E.O. are. A proceeding in him, a violence offered to his serried circle of little staring and glaring New Yorkers, supplied with the casual allowance of fists and boot toes, which as it was clearly conscious, I recollect thinking unsurpassed for cool, calm courage. Those were the right names, which we owed wholly to the French explorers and Jesuit fathers, so much the worst for us if we vulgarly didn't know it. I lose myself in admiration of the consistency, the superiority, the sublimity of the not at all game playing, yet in his own way so singularly sporting Louie. He was naturally and incorruptibly French. As, so oddly, I have known other persons of both sexes to be, whose English was naturally and incorruptibly American. The appearance being thus that the possession of indigenous English alone forms the adequate barrier and the assured racial ground. Oh, the queer reversions observed on the part of Latinized compatriots in the course of a long life. The remarkable drops from the quite current French or Italian to the comparatively improvised native idiom with the resulting effect of the foreign tongue used as a domestic and the domestic, that is the original American used as a foreign tongue or without inherited confidence. Louis de Capay, though theoretically American and domiciled was naturally French and so pressed further home to me that sense of Europe to which I feel that my very earliest consciousness waked, a perversity that will doubtless appear to ask for all the justification I can supply and some of which I shall presently attempt to give. He opened vistas and I count ever as precious anyone, everyone who betimes does that for the small straining vision. Performing this office never so much doubtless as when during that summer he invited me to collaborate with him on the production of a romance which Ilsef you fall to get printed to get published when success or in other words completion should crown our effort. Our effort alas failed of the crown in spite of sundry, solemn and mysterious meetings. So much devoted I seem to remember to the publishing question that others more fundamental dreadfully languished. Leaving me convinced however that my friend would have got our fiction published if he could only have got it written. I think of my participation in this vain dream as of the very first gauge of visiting approval offered to the exercise of a gift. Though quite unable to conceive my companion's ground for suspecting a gift of which I must at that time quite have failed to exhibit a single in the least phenomenal symptom. It had nonetheless by his overtures been handsomely imputed to me. That was in a manner a beginning, a small start yet not wholly unattended with bravery. Louis de Coppé I must add brought to light later on as far as I know no compositions of his own. We met him long after in Switzerland and eventually heard of his having married a young Russian lady and settled at Nice. If I drop on his memory this apology for a bay leaf it is from the fact of his having given the earliest or at least the most personal tap to that pointed prefigurement of the manners of Europe which inserted wedge-like if not to say peg-like into my young allegiance was to split the tender organ into such unequal halves. Here's the toy hammer that drove in the very point of the golden nail. It was as if there had been a mild magic in that breath however scant of another world. But when I ask myself what element of the pleasing or the agreeable may have glimmered through the then general, the outer and enveloping conditions I recover many more of the connections in which forms and civilities lapsed beyond repair than of those in which they struggled at all successfully. It is for some record of the question of taste of the consciousness of an aesthetic appeal as reflected in forms and aspects that I shall like best to testify. As the promise and the development of these things on our earlier American scene are the more interesting to trace for their doubtless demanding a degree of the finer attention. The plain and happy profusions and advances and successes as one looks back reflect themselves at every turn. The quick beats of material increase and multiplication with plenty of people to tell of them and throw up their caps for them. But the edifying matters to recapture would be the adventures of the higher criticism so far as there was any and so far too as it might bear on the real quality and virtue of things. The state of manners, the terms of intercourse, the care for excellence, the sense of appearances, the intellectual reaction generally. However any breasting of those deep waters must be but in the form for me of an occasional dip. It meanwhile fairly overtakes and arrests me here as a contributive truth that our general medium of life in the situation I speak of was such as to make a large defensive veranda which seems to have very stoutly and completely surrounded us play more or less the part of a raft of rescue in too high a tide, too high a tide there beneath us as I recover it of the ugly and the graceless. My particular perspective may magnify a little wildly when it doesn't even more weirdly diminish but I read into the great hooded and guarded resource in question and evidential force as if it must really have played for us so far as its narrowness and its exposure permitted the part of a buffer state against the wilderness immediately near that of the empty, the unlovely and the mean. Interposing a little ease didn't it interpose almost all the ease we knew so that when amiable friends arriving from New York by the boat came to see us there was no rural view for them but that of our great shame, a view of the pigs and the shanties and the loose planks and scattered refuse and rude public ways. Never even a field path or a gentle walk or a garden nook in afternoon shade. I recall my prompt distaste, a strange precocity of criticism for so much aridity. Since of what lost Arcadia at that age had I really had the least glimpse. Our scant margin must have affected me more nobly I should injustice add when old Mrs. L passed or hovered for she sometimes costically joined the circle and sometimes during the highest temperatures which were very high that summer but flitted across it in a single flowing garment as we amazedly conceived. One of the signs of that grand impertinence I suppose which belonged to Dowagers. Dowagers who were recognized characters and free speakers doing and saying what they liked. This ancient lady was lodged in some outlying tract of the many roomed house which in more than one quarter stretched away into mystery. But the piazza to which she had access was unbroken and whenever she strayed from her own territory she swam afresh into ours. I definitely remember that having heard and perhaps read of Dowagers who as I was aware had scarce been provided for in our social scheme I said to myself at first sight of our emphatic neighbor a person clearly used to exceptional deference this must be a perfect specimen which was somehow very wonderful. The absolute first sight however had preceded the new brightened summer and it makes me lose myself in a queer dim vision. All the obscurities attended on my having been present as a very small boy indeed at an evening entertainment where Mrs. L figured in an attire that is still vivid to me. A blue satin gown, a long black lace shawl and a headdress consisting in equally striking parts of a brown wig, a plume of some sort waving over it and a band or filet whether of some precious metal or not I forget keeping it in place by the aid of a precious stone which adorned the center of her brow. Such was my first view of the ferroniere of our grandmothers when not of our great grandmothers. I see its wearer at this day bend that burdened brow upon me in a manner sufficiently awful while her knuckly white gloves toyed with a large fan and a vinaigrette attached to her thumb by a chain and as she was known to us afterwards for a friend of my Albany grandmothers it may have been as a tribute to this tie that she allowed me momentarily to engage her attention. Then it predominantly must have been that I knew her for a dowager though this was a light in which I had never considered my grandmother herself but what I have quite lost the clue to is the question of my extraordinary footing in such an assembly the occasion of a dance of my elders youthful elders but young married people into which really my mother as a participant must have introduced me. End of chapter three. Chapter four of A Small Boy and Others. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by M.B. A Small Boy and Others by Henry James. Chapter four. It took place in the house of our cousins Robert and Kitty Emmett, the elder for we were to have two cousin kitties of that ilk and yet another consanguinous Robert at least. The latter name being naturally among them all of a pious indeed of a glorious tradition and three of my father's nieces marrying three Emmett brothers. The first of these, the Robert aforesaid. Catherine James, the daughter of my uncle Augustus is then quite recent and as I remember her animated an attractive bride whose fair hair framed her pointed smile in full and far drooping front curls. I easily evoke as my first apprehended image of the free and happy young woman of fashion. A sign of the wondrous fact that ladies might live for pleasure, pleasure always, pleasure alone. She was distinguished for nothing whatever so much as for an insatiable love of the dance. That passion in which I think of the good, the best New York society at the time as having capered and champagne itself away. Her younger sister Gertrude, afterwards married to James or more inveterately Jim Pendleton of Virginia followed close upon her heels, literally speaking and though emulating her in other respects too was to last through many troubles much longer. Looking extraordinarily the while like the younger portraits of Queen Victoria and to have much hospitality showing it and showing everything in a singularly natural way for a considerable collection of young Hobblete Hoy Kinsman. But I am solicited a moment longer by the queer little issues involved as if a social light would somehow stream from them in my having been taken a mere might of observation to Kitty Emmet's grown up assembly. Was it that my mother really felt that to the scrap that I was other scraps would perhaps strangely adhere to the extent thus of something to distinguish me by? Nothing else probably having as yet declared itself. Such a scrap for instance as the fine germ of this actual fermentive memory and play of fancy. A retroactive vision almost intense of the faded hour and a fawn surrendered to the questions with which it bristles. All the female relatives on my father's side who reappear to me in these evocations strike me as having been intensely and admirably but at the same time almost indescribably natural. Which fact connects itself for the brooding painter and found analyst with 50 other matters and impressions? His vision of a whole social order. If the American scene might indeed have been set at that time to be positively ordered. Wasn't the fact that the dancing passion was so out of proportion to any social resource just one of the signs of the natural? And for that matter in both sexes alike of the artless kindred. It was shining to us that Jim Pendleton had a yacht. Though I was not smuggled aboard it. There the line was drawn but the deck must have been more used for the German than for other maneuvers. Often doubtless under the lead of our cousin Robert the eldest of the many light irresponsibles to whom my father was uncle. Distinct to me still being the image of that phenomenally lean and nimble choreographic hero, Bob James to us always who almost ghost fashion led the Catillion on from generation to generation. His skull like smile with its accent from the stiff points of his long mustache and the brightly hollow orbits of his eyes helping to make of him an immemorial elegant skeleton. It is at all events to the sound of fiddles and the popping of corks that I see even young brides as well as young grooms originally so formed to please and to prosper as our hosts of the restless little occasion I have glanced at vanish untimely become mysterious and legendary with such unfathomed silences and significant head shakes replacing the earlier concert. So that I feel how one's impression of so much for doomed youthful levity received constant and quite thrilling increase. It was of course an impression then obscurely gathered but into which one was later on to read strange papers to some of which I may find myself moved to revert. Mere might of observation though I have dubbed myself I won't pretend to have deciphered any of them amid the bacchanales sounds that on the evening so suggestively spent floated out into the region of Washington place. It is round that general center that my richest memories of the gay little life in general cluster as if it had been for the circle in which I seem justified in pretending to have moved of the finer essence of town. Covering as it did the stretch of Broadway down to Canal Street with closer at hand the New York Hotel which figured somehow inordinately in our family annals the two newer ones the glory of their brief and discredited their flouted and demolished age the brown metropolitan and the white St. Nicholas were much further down and rising northward the Ultima Thule of 23rd Street only second then in the supposedly ample scheme of the regular ninth wide street. I can't indeed have moved much on that night of revelations and yet of enigmas over which I still hang fascinated. I must have kept intensely still in my corner all wondering and all fearing, fearing notice most and in a definite way I but remember the formidable interest of my so convincing Dowager to hark back for a second to her and the fact that a great smooth white cloth was spread across the denuded room converted thus into a field of frolic the prospect of which much excited my curiosity. I but remember the preparations however without recovering the performance. Mrs. L and I must have been the only persons not shaking a foot and premature unconsciousness clearly in my case supervene. Out of it pops again the riddle the so quaint trait de mure of my infant participation but I set that down as representative and interesting and have done with it. The manners of the time had obviously a bonomy of their own certainly so on our particular indulgent and humane little field as to which general proposition the later applications and transformations of the bonomy would be interesting to trace. It has lingered and fermented and earned other names but I seem on the track of its prime evidence with that note of the sovereign ease of all the young persons with whom we grew up. In the after time as our view took in with new climbs and new scenes other examples of the class these were always to affect us as more formed and finished more tutored and governest warned and armed at more points for and doubtless often against the social relation so that this prepared state on their part and which at first appeared but a preparation for shyness or silence or whatever other ideal of the inconversible came to be for us the normal since it was the relative and not the positive still less the superlative state. No charming creatures of the growing girl sort were ever to be natural in the degree of these nearer and promoter ornaments of our family circle and youth. When after intervals and absences the impression was renewed we saw how right we had been about it and I feel as if we had watched it for years under the apprehension and vision of some inevitable change wondering with an affectionate interest what effect the general improvement in manners might perhaps all unfortunately have upon it. I make out as I look back that it was really to succumb at no point to this complication that it was to keep its really quite inimitable freshness to the end or in other words when it had been the first free growth of the old conditions was to pass away but with the passing of those themselves for whom it had been the sole possible expression. For it was as of an altogether special shade and sort that the New York young naturalness of our prime was touchingly to linger with us. So that myself at present with only the gentle ghosts of the so numerous exemplars of it here before me it becomes the very stuff of the soft sermons in which their gentle mild mortality is laid away. We used to have in the after time amid fresh recognitions and reminders the kindest old New York identifications for it. The special shade of its identity was thus that it was not conscious, really not conscious of anything in the world or was conscious of so few possibilities at least and these so immediate and so a matter of course that it came almost to the same thing. That was the testimony that the slight subjects in questions strike me as having born to their surrounding medium. The fact that their unconsciousness could be so preserved. They played about in it so happily and serenely and sociably as unembarrassed and loquacious as they were unadmonished and uninformed only aware at the most that a good many people within their horizon were dissipated as in point of fact alas a good many were. What it was to be dissipated that however was but in the most limited degree a feature of their vision. They would have held under pressure that it consisted more than anything else in getting tipsy. Infinitely queer and quaint, almost incongruously droll the sense somehow begotten in ourselves as very young persons of only being surrounded by a slightly remote yet dimly rich outer and quite kindred circle of the tipsy. I remember how once as a very small boy after meeting in the hall a most amiable and irreproachable gentleman all but closely consanguinous who had come to call on my mother I anticipated his further entrance by slipping into report to that parent that I thought he must be tipsy. And I was to recall perfectly afterwards the impression I so made on her in which the general proposition that the gentleman of a certain group or connection might on occasion be best described by the term I had used sought to destroy the particular presumption that our visitor wouldn't by his ordinary measure show himself for one of those. He didn't to all appearance for I was afterwards disappointed at the lapse of lurid evidence. That memory remained with me as well as a considerable subsequent wonder at my having leaped to so baseless of you. The truth was indeed that we had to in the most innocent way in the world our sense of dissipation as an abounding element in family histories. A sense fed quite directly by our fondness for making our father I can at any rate testify for the urgency of my own appeal to him. Tell us stories of the world of his youth. He regaled us with no scandals yet it somehow rarely failed to come out that each contemporary on his younger scene each hero of each thrilling adventure had in spite of brilliant promise and romantic charm ended badly as badly as possible. This became our gaping generalization. It gaped even under the moral that the anecdote was always and so familiarly, humanly and vividly designed to convey. Everyone in the little old Albany of the Dutch houses and the steep streets and the recurrent family names. Townsends, Clintons, Van Renselars, Prunes, I picked them up again at hazard and still all uninviteously out of reverberations long since still. Everyone without exception had at last taken a turn as far as possible from edifying. And what they had most in common, the hovering presences, the fitful apparitions that speaking for myself so engaged my imagination was just the fine old Albany drama in the light of which a ring of mystery as to their lives, mainly carried on at the New York Hotel aforesaid, surrounded them and their charm in veteran as I believe, shone out as through vaguely apprehended storm clouds. Their charm was in various marks of which I shall have more to say. For as I breathe all this hushed air again even the more broken things give out touching human values and faint sweet sense of character. Flushes of old beauty and goodwill. The grim little generalization remained nonetheless and I may speak of it since I speak of everything as still standing. The striking evidence that scarce art but disaster could in that so uninformed and unseasoned society overtake young man who were in the least exposed. Not to have been immediately launched in business of a rigorous sort was to be exposed. In the absence I mean of some fairly abnormal predisposition to virtue since it was a world so simply constituted that whatever was in business or exactly an office or a store, places in which people sat close and made money was just simply pleasure, sought and sought only in places in which people got tipsy. There was clearly no mean, least of all the golden one, for it was just the ready, even when the moderate possession of gold that determined that hurried on disaster. There were whole sets and groups, there were sympathetic though too susceptible races that seemed scarce to recognize or define possible any practical application of money that is of transmitted, ease, however limited but to go more or less rapidly to the bad with it which meant even then going as often as possible to Paris. The bright and empty air was as void of careers for a choice as of cathedral towers for a sketcher and I passed my younger time till within a year or two of the civil war with an absolute vagueness of impression as to how the political life of the country was carried on. The field was strictly covered to my young eyes I make out by three classes. The busy, the tipsy and Daniel Webster. This last great man must have represented for us a class in himself as if to be political was just to be Daniel Webster in his proper person and with room left over for nobody else. That he should have filled the sky of public life from pole to pole even to a childish consciousness not formed in New England and for which that strenuous section was but a name in the geography book is probably indeed a sign of how large in the general air he comparatively loomed. The public scene was otherwise a blank to our young vision I discern till later on in Paris I saw for at that unimproved period we of the unfledged didn't suppose ourselves to meet. Charles Sumner with whose name indeed there further connects itself the image of a thrilled hour in the same city some months before. The gathering of a group of indignant persons on the terrace of a small old world hotel or pavilion looking out on the avenue de Champs-Élysées slightly above the Rampouin and just opposite the Antidoluvien Jardin-Diver who remembers the Jardin-Diver who remembers the ancient lodges of the octois the pair of them facing each other at the Barrière de l'Étoile and among them a passionate lady in tears over the news fresh that morning of the assault on Sumner by the South Carolina Ruffian of the house. The wounded senator injured in health had come to Europe later on to recuperate and he offered me my first view to the best of my belief not only of a statesman but of any person whom so ever concerned in political life. I distinguish in the earlier twilight of 14th Street my father's returned to us one November day we knew he had been out to vote with the news that General Winfield Scott his and the then wig candidate had been defeated for the presidency. Just as I rescue from the same limbo my afterwards proud little impression of having met that high-piled hero of the Mexican War whom the Civil War was so soon and with so little ceremony to extinguish literally met him at my father's side in Fifth Avenue where he had just emerged from across street. I remain vague as to what had then happened and scarce suppose I was at the age of probably eight or nine presented but we must have been for some moments face-to-face while from under the vast amplitude of a dark blue military coat with a big velvet collar and loosened silver clasp which spread about him like a symbol of the tented field he greeted my parent so clear is my sense of the time it took me to gape all the way up to where he towered aloft. End of chapter four chapter five of a small boy and others. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by M.B. A Small Boy and Others by Henry James Chapter Five The not very glorious smoke of the Mexican War I note for another touch had been in the air when I was a still smaller boy and I have an association with it that hovers between the definite and the dim a vision of our uncle, captain as he then was Robert Temple, USA, in regimentals either on his way to the scene of action or on the return from it. I see him as a person half asleep sees some large object across the room and against the window light even if to the effect of my now asking myself why so far from the scene of the action he was in panoply of war. I seem to see him cock-hatted and feathered too an odd vision of dancing superior plumes which doesn't fit if he was only a captain however I cultivate the wavering shade merely for its value as my earliest glimpse of any circumstance of the public order unless indeed another the reminiscence to which I owe today my sharpest sense of personal antiquity had already given me the historic thrill. The scene of this latter stir of consciousness is for memory an apartment in one of the three Fifth Avenue houses that were not long afterwards swallowed up in the present bravort hotel and consists of the admired appearance of my uncle's Gus and John James to announce to my father that the revolution had triumphed in Paris and Louis Philippe had fled to England. These last words the flight of the king linger on my ear at this hour even as they fell there we had somehow waked early to a perception of Paris and a vibration of my very most infantine sensibility under its sky had by the same stroke got itself preserved for subsequent wondering reference. I had been there for a short time in the second year of my life and I was to communicate to my parents later on that as a baby in long clothes seated opposite to them in a carriage and on the lap of another person I had been impressed with the view framed by the clear window of the vehicle as we passed of a great stately square surrounded with high-roofed houses and having in its center a tall and glorious column I had naturally caused them to marvel but I had also under cross questioning forced them to compare notes as it were and reconstitute the miracle they knew what my observation of monumental squares had been and alas hadn't neither New York nor Albany could have offered me these splendid perspective and for that matter neither could London which moreover I had known at a younger age still conveyed along the Rue Saint-Honoré while I waggled my small feet as I definitely remember doing under my flowing robe I had crossed the Rue de Castellone and taken in for all my time the admirable aspect of the place and the Cologne Vendome I don't now pretend to measure the extent to which my interests in the events of 1848 I was five years old was quickened by that souvenir a tradition further reinforced I should add by the fact that some relative or other some member of our circle was always either there there being of course generally Europe but particularly and pointedly Paris or going there or coming back from there I at any rate revert to the sound of the rich words on my uncle's lips as to my positive initiation into history it was as if I had been ready for them and could catch on I had heard of kings presumably and also of fleeing but that kings had sometimes to flee was a new and striking image to which the apparent consternation of my elders added dramatic force so much in any case for what I may claim perhaps too idly on behalf of my backward reach it has carried me far from my rather evident proposition that if we saw the natural so happily embodied about us and in female maturity or comparative maturity scarce less than in female adolescence this was because the artificial or in other words the complicated was so little there to threaten it the complicated as we were later on to define it was but another name for those more massed and violent assaults upon the social sense that we were to recognize subsequently by their effects observing thus that a sense more subtly social had so been created and that it quite differed from that often almost complete inward blankness in respect to any circumjacent any constituted order to the exhibition of which our earlier air and our family seen had inimitably treated us we came more or less to see that our young contemporaries of another world the trained and admonished the disciplined and governess or in a word the formed relatively speaking had been made aware of many things of which those at home hadn't been yet we were also to note so far as we may be conceived as so precociously noting though we were certainly incorrigible observers that the awareness in question remaining at the best imperfect our little friends as distinguished from our companions of the cousinship greater and less advanced and presumed but to flounder and recede elated at once and abashed on the whole but feebly sophisticated the cousinship on the other hand all unalarmed and unsuspecting and unembarrassed lived by pure serenity sociability and locosity the oddest fact about its members being with all that it didn't make them bores i seem to feel as i look back or at least not worse bores than sundry specimens of the other growth there can surely never have been anything like their good faith and generally speaking their amiability i should have but to let myself go a little to wish to cite examples saving that in doing so i should lose sight of my point which is to recall again that whether we were all amiable or not and frankly i claim it in a high degree for most of us the scene on which we were so freely bloomed does not strike me when i reckon up as extraordinarily unfurnished how came it then that for the most part so simple we yet weren't more inane this was doubtless by reason of the quantity of our inward life ours of our father's house in a special i mean which made an excellent in some cases almost an incomparable fond for a thicker civility to mix with when growing experience should begin to take that in it was also quaint among us i may be reminded to have begun with inward life but we began after the manner of all men as we could and i hold that if it comes to that we might have begun much worse i was in my 17th year when the raid and capture of john brown of harper's fairy fame enjoyed its sharper reverberation among us though we were then on the other side of the world and i count this as the very first reminder that reached me of our living on our side in a political order i had perfectly taken in from the pages of punch which contributed in the highest degree to our education that the peoples on the other side so lived as there was no american punch and to this time there has been none to give small boys the sense and the imagination of living with their public administrators daniel webster and charles sumner had never become for my fancy members of a class a class which numbered in england by john leach is showing so many other members still then lords broome palmerston and john russell the war of succession soon arriving was to cause the field to bristle with features and the sense of the state in our generation infinitely to quicken but that alarm came upon the country like a thief at night and we might all have been living in a land in which there seemed at least nothing save a comparatively small amount of quite private property to steal even private property in other than the most modest amounts scarce figured for our particular selves which doubtless came partly from the fact that amid all the albany issue there was ease with the habit of ease thanks to our grandfather's fine old ability he had decently provided for so large a generation but our consciousness was positively disfurnished as that of young americans went of the actualities of business in a world of business as to that we all formed together quite a monstrous exception business in a world of business was the thing we most agreed differ as we might on minor issues in knowing nothing about we touched it and it touched us neither directly nor otherwise and i think our fond detachment not to say our helpless ignorance and on occasion since i can speak for one fine instance our settled density of understanding made us an example then probably for the ironic smart gods of the american heaven a lamentable case of course even the office and the store leave much of the provision for an approximately complete scheme of manners to be accounted for still there must have been vast numbers of people about us for whom under the usages the assault on the imagination from without was much stronger and the filling in of the general picture much richer it was exactly by the lack of that filling in that we we more especially who lived at near view of my father's admirable example had been thrown so upon the inward life no one could ever have taken to it even in the face of discouragement more kindly and naturally than he but the situation had at least that charm that in default of so many kinds of the outward people had their choice of as many kinds of the inward as they would and might practice those kinds with whatever consistency intensity and brilliancy of our father's perfect gift for practicing his kind i shall have more to say but i meanwhile glance yet again at those felicities of destitution which kept us collectively so genially interested in almost nothing but each other and which come over me now as one of the famous blessings in disguise there were artists in the prospect didn't mr tom hicks and mr paul duggin and mr cp cranch and mr felix darley this last worthy of a wider reputation capable perhaps even of a finer development than he attained more or less haunt our friendly fireside and give us also the sense of others landscapist cropsies and coals and kensits and bust producing ives's and powers's and moses hovering in an outer circle these were authors not less some of them vague and female and in this case as a rule glossily ringleted and monumentally breast pinned but mostly frequent and familiar after the manner of george curtis and park godwin and george rippley and charles dana and np willis and for brighter lights or those that in our then comparative obscurity almost deceived the mourn mr bryant washington Irving and ea po the last named of whom i cite not so much because he was personally present the extremity of personal absence had just overtaken him but as by reason of that predominant luster in him which our small opening minds themselves already recognized and which makes me wonder today at the legend of the native neglect of him was he not even at that time on all lips had not my brother promptly master of the subject beckoned on my lagging mind with the recital of the gold bug and the pit in the pendulum both of which however i was soon enough to read for myself adding to them the murders in the room org were we not also forever mounting on little platforms at our infant schools to speak the raven and lennor and the verses in which we praised the heroine as anna bellie falling thus into the trap the poet had so recklessly laid for us as he had laid one for our interminable droning not less in the other pieces i have named so far from misprising our ill-starred magician we acclaimed him surely at every turn he lay upon our tables and resounded in our mouths while we communed to safety even for boyish appetites over the thrill of his choicest pages don't i just recognize the ghost of a dim memory of a children's christmas party at the house of fourteen street neighbors they come back to me as the beans who and what and whence and wither the kindly beans where i admired over the chimney piece the full-length portrait of a lady seated on the ground in a turkish dress with hair flowing loose from a cap which was not as the caps of ladies known to me and i think with a tambourine who was somehow identified to my inquiring mind as the wife of the painter of the piece mr osgood and the so ministering friend of the unhappy mr poe there she thrown in honor like queen constants on the huge firm earth all for that and her tambourine and surely we could none of us have done more for the connection washington irving i met with infant promptitude very much as i had met general scott only this time it was on a steamboat that i apprehended the great man my father under whose ever patient protection i then was during the summer afternoon sail from new york to fort hamilton having named him to me for this long preservation before they greeted and talked and having a fact of still more moment to mention with the greatest concern afterwards mr irving had given him the news of the shipwreck of margaret fuller in those very waters fife island at least was just without our big bay during the great august storm that had within the day or two passed over us the unfortunate lady was essentially of the boston collection but she must have been and probably through emerson a friend of my parents mustn't she have held conversations in the finest exotic bostonese in new york emerson himself lecturing there to admiration since the more i squeeze the sponge of memory the more it's stored secretions flow to remind me here a game that being with those elders late one evening at an exhibition of pictures possibly that of the national academy then confined to scant quarters i was shown a small full length portrait of miss fuller seated as now appears to me and wrapped in a long white shawl the failure of which to do justice to its original my companions denounced with some emphasis was this work from the hand of mr tom hicks aforesaid or was that artist concerned only with the life sized the enormous as i took it to be the full length the violently protruded accessories in which come back to me with my infant sense of the wonder and the beauty of them as expressed above all in the image of a very long and lovely lady the new bride of the artist standing at a window before a row of plants or bulbs in tall colored glasses the light of the window playing over the figure and the treatment of its glass and of the flower pots and the other furniture passed by my impression for the sign of the master hand and was it all brave and charming or was it only very hard and stiff quite ugly and helpless i put these questions as to a vanished world and by way of pressing back into it only the more clingingly and tenderly holy regardless in other words of whether the answers to them at all matter they matter doubtless but for fond evocation and if one tries to evoke one must neglect none of the arts one must do it with all the forms why i should so like to do it is another matter and what outside interest i may suppose myself to create perhaps still another i facturously proceed at any rate i make so far as i can the small warm dusky homogenous new york world of the mid-century close about us end of chapter five