 CHAPTER XVIII. I have nevertheless the memory of a restless relish of all that time, by which I mean of those final months of New York, even with so scant a record of other positive successes to console me. I had but one success, always, that of endlessly supposing, wondering, admiring. I was sunk in that luxury, which had never yet been so great, and it might well make up for anything. It made up perfectly, and more particularly as the stop-gap as which I have already defined for the scantness of the period immediately round us. Since how could I have wanted richer when the limits of reality, as I advanced upon them, seemed ever to recede and recede. It is true that, but the other day, on the scene revisited, I was to be struck rather by their weird immobility. There, on the north side, still untenanted after sixty years, a tremendous span in the life of New York was the vacant lot, undiminished, in which a friendly goat or two used to browse, whom we fed perversely with scraps of paper, just as perversely appreciated indeed through the relaxed wooden palings. There hovers for me an impression of the glass roofs of a florist, a suffered squatter for a while, but florists and goats have alike disappeared, and the barrenness of the place is as sordid as only untended gaps in great cities can seem. One of its boundaries, however, still breathes associations. The home of the wards, the more eastward of a pair of houses then, and still isolated, has remained the same through all vicissitudes, only now quite shabbily mellow and like everything else, much smaller than one had remembered it. Yet this too without prejudice to the large, the lustrous part played in our prospect by that interesting family. I saddle their mild memory a bit subjectively, perhaps, with the burden of that character, making out that they were interesting really in spite of themselves, and as unwittingly as Monsieur Jourdan expressed himself in prose, owing their wild savour as they did to that New England stamp which we took to be strong upon them, and no other exhibition of which we had yet enjoyed. It made them different, made them in their homely grace rather aridly romantic. I poured in those days over the freshness of the Franconia stories of the brother's abbot, then immediately sequined to the sweet Rallo stories, and even more admired, and there hung about the wards, to my sense, that atmosphere of apples and nuts and cheese, of pies and jack-naves and squirrels, of domestic Bible reading and attendance at evening lecture, of the fear of parental discipline, and the cultivated art of dodging it. Combined with great personal toughness and hardy-hood, an almost envied liability to warts on hard brown hands, a familiarity with garments domestically wrought, a brave rusticity in short, that yet hadn't prevented the annexation of whole tracts of town life unexplored by ourselves, and achieved by the brothers since their relatively recent migration from Connecticut, which state, in general, with the city of Hartford in particular, hung as a hazy, fruity, river-y background, and the very essence of Indian summer, in the rear of their discourse. Three in number, Johnny and Charlie and Freddie, with castigating elders, even to the second and third generation back, dimly discerned through closed windowpains, they didn't at all haunt the halls of Ferrero. It was a part of their homely grace and their social tone, if not of their want of the latter, that this couldn't in the least be in question for them. On the other hand, they frequented, Charlie and Freddie at least, the Free School, which was round in 13th Street. Johnny, the eldest, having entered the Free Academy, an institution that loomed large to us, and that I see as towered, or castellated, or otherwise impressively embellished in vague vignettes, in stray representations, perhaps only of the gray schoolbook order, which are yet associated for me with those fond images of lovely ladies, hand-painted, decorating at either end the interior of the old omnibuses. We might have been in relation with no other feeders at the public trough of learning. I can't account otherwise for the glamour as of envied privilege and strange experience that surrounded the wards. They mixed to the great sharpening of the edge of their wit in the wild life of the people, beside which the life at Mr. Pulling Jenks' and even at the Institut Saint-Verniers was colorless and commonplace. Somehow they were of the people, and still were full of family forms, which seemed, one dimly made out through the false perspective of all the cousinships, the stronger and clearer note of New England, the note that had already determined a shy yearning under perusal of the rollo and Franconia chronicles. The special mark of these friends was perhaps, however, that of being socially young while they were annually old. Little Freddy in particular, very short, very inured, and very popular, though less curiously wrinkled about eyes and mouth than Charlie, confessed to monstrous birthdays, even while crouching or hopping, even while racing or roaring, as a high superiority in the games of the street prescribed. It was to strike me later on when reading or hearing of young Americans of those parts who had turned hard or reckless by reaction from excessive discipline, theologic and economic, and had gone to sea or to California or to the bad, that Freddy and Charlie were typical of the race, even if their fortunes had taken, as I hoped, a happier form. That, I said to myself, for the interest of it, that, the stuff of the wards, their homely grace was all New England, so far at least as New England wasn't Emerson and Margaret Fuller and Mr. Channing, and the best Boston families. Such, in small, very plastic minds, is the intensity, if not the value, of early impressions. And yet how can such visions not have paled in the southern glow of the Norcoms, who had lately arrived en masse from Louisville, and had improvised a fine old Kentucky home in the last house of our row, the one to be occupied so differently after their strange and precipitant flight, as I dimly make out, by the ladies of the Sacred Heart, those who presently, if I mistake not, moved out to Bloomingdale, if they were not already in part established there. Next us westward were the Ogdens, three slim and fair sisters, who soared far above us in age and general amenity. Then came the Van Winkles, two sisters, I think, and a brother. He much the most serious and judicious, as well as the most educated of our friends. And so at last the Norcoms, during their brief but concentrated, most vivid and momentous reign, a matter, as I recall it, of a couple of breathless winters. We were provided by their presence with as happy of oil as we could have wished to the plainness and dryness of the wards. Their homely grace was all their own, and was also embodied in three brothers, Eugene, Reginald, Albert, whose ages would have corresponded, I surmise, with those of Johnny, Charlie, and Freddie, if these latter hadn't in their way, as I have hinted, defied any close notation. Elder sons, there were to my recollection no daughters, moved too as with their heads in the clouds, notably Stiffy, eldest of all, whom we supposed gorgeous, who affected us as sublime and unapproachable, and to whom we thus applied the term in use among us before we had acquired for reference to such types the notion of the nuance, the dandy, the dude, the masher. Divided as I was, I recall, between the dread and the glory of being so greeted, well, Stiffy, as a penalty of the least attempt at personal adornment. The higher intensity for our sense of the Norcoms came from the large, the lavish, ease of their hospitality, whereas our intercourse with the wards was mainly in the street or at most the yard, and it was a wonder how intimacy could, to that degree, consort with publicity. A glazed southern gallery, known to its occupants as the poach, and to the rake of which their innermost penetralia seemed ever to stand open, encompasses my other memories. Everything took place on the poach, including the free, quite the profuse, consumption of hot cakes and molasses, including even the domestic manufacture of sausages. Testified to by a strange machine that was worked like a hand organ, and by the casual haves, when not the holes, of stark, stiff hogs fresh from Kentucky stores. We must have been, for a time, constantly engaged with this delightful group, who never ceased to welcome us or to feed us, and yet of the presence of whose members, under other roofs than their own, by a return of hospitality received, I retained no image. They didn't count and didn't grudge. The sausage mill kept turning and the molasses flowing for all who came. That was the expression of their southern grace, especially embodied in Albert, my exact contemporary and chosen friend. Reggie had but crushed my fingers under the hinge of a closing door, the mark of which active in inadvertence I was to carry through life, who had profuse and tightly crinkled hair, and the moral of whose queer little triangular brown teeth, casting verily a shade on my attachment to him, was pointed for me, not by himself, as the error of a Kentucky diet. The great Kentucky error, however, had been the introduction into a free state of two pieces of precious property which our friends were to fail to preserve, the pair of affectionate black retainers, whose presence, which our friends whose presence contributed most to their exotic note. We reveled in the fact that Davy and Aunt Sylvia, pronounced Aunt Sylvy, a light brown lad with extraordinarily shining eyes and his straight, grave, deeper colored mother, not radiant as to anything but her vivid turban, had been born and kept in slavery of the most approved pattern, and such as this intensity of their condition made them a joy, a joy to the curious mind, to consort with. Davy mingled in our sports and talk, he enriched, he adorned them with a personal, a pictorial luster that none of us could emulate, and servitude in the absolute, thus did more for him socially than we had ever seen done, above stairs or below, for victims of its lighter forms. What was not our dismay, therefore, when we suddenly learned, it must have blown right up and down the street, that mother and son had fled in the dead of night from bondage, had taken advantage of their visit to the north simply to leave the house and not return, covering their tracks, successfully disappearing. They had never been for us so beautifully slaves as in this achievement of their freedom, for they did brilliantly achieve it. They escaped on northern soil beyond recall or recovery. I think we had already then, on the spot, the sense of some degree of presence at the making of history. The question of what persons of color and of their condition might or might not do was intensely in the air. This was exactly the season of our freshness of Mrs. Stowe's great novel. It must have come out at the moment of our fondest acquaintance with our neighbors. Though I have no recollection of hearing them remark upon it, any remark they made would have been sure to be so strong. I suspect they hadn't read it, as they certainly wouldn't have allowed it in the house, any more indeed than they had read or were likely ever to read any other work of fiction. I doubt whether the house contained a printed volume, unless its head had had a hand in a law book or so. I, to some extent, recover Mr. Norcombe as a lawyer who had come north on important, difficult business, on contentious, precarious grounds. A large, bald, political-looking man, very loose and ungirt, just as his wife was a desiccated, depressed lady, who mystified me by always wearing her nightcap, a feebly frilled but tightly tied and unmistakable one. And the compass of whose maternal figure, beneath a large, long, collarless cape or mantle, defined imperfectly for me, of course, its connection with the further increase of Albert's little brothers and sisters. There being already, by my impression, two or three of these in the background. Had Davy and Ann Sylvie at least read Uncle Tom? The question might well come up for us, with the certainty at any rate that they ignored him less than their owners were doing. These latter good people, who had been so fond of their humble dependence, and supposed this affection returned, were shocked at such ingratitude, though I remember taking a vague little inward northern comfort in their inability, in their discreet decision not to raise the hue and cry. Wasn't one even just dimly aware of the heavy hush that, in the glazed gallery, among the sausages and the Johnny cakes, had followed the first gasp of resentment? I think the honest norcoms were, in any case, astonished, let alone being much incommodated, just as we were, for that matter, when the genio family itself, installed so at its ease, failed us with an effect of abruptness, simply ceased in their multitude to be there. I don't remember their going, nor any pangs of parting. I remember only knowing with wonderment that they had gone, that obscurity had somehow engulfed them, and how afterwards, in the light of later things, memory and fancy attended them, figured their history as the public complication grew, and the great intersectional plot thickened. Felt even, absurdly and disproportionately, that they had helped one, too, no Southerners. The slim, the sallow, the straight-haired and dark-eyed Eugene, in particular, haunted my imagination. He had not been my comrade of election. He was too much my senior. But I cherished the thought of the fine, fearless young fire-eater he would have become, and when the war had broken out. I know not what dark but pitying vision of him stretched stark after a battle. All of which sounds certainly like a meager range, which heaven knows it was, but with a plea for the several attics already glanced at, and the positive aesthetic reach that came to us through those dim resorts, quite worth making. They were scattered, and they constituted on the part of such of our friends as had licensed to lead us up to them, a ground of authority and glory proportioned exactly to the size of the field. This extent was at Cousin Helens, with a large house and few inmates, vast and free, so that no hospitality under the eaves might have matched that offered us by the young Albert, if only that heir of all the ages had rather more imagination. He had, I think, as little as was possible, which would have counted in fact for an unmitigated blank had not W. J. among us, on that spot and elsewhere, supplied this motive force in any quantity required. He imagined, that was the point, the comprehensive comedies we were to prepare and to act, comprehensive by the fact that each one of us, even to the God-fearing but surreptitiously law-breaking wards, was in fairness to be enabled to figure. Not one of us but was somehow to be provided with a part, though I recall my brother as the constant comic star. The attics were thus, in a word, our respective temples of the drama. Temples in which the stage, the green room, and the wardrobe, however, strike me as having consumed most of our margin. I remember, that is, up and down the street, and the association is mainly with its far westward reaches, so much more preparation than performance, so much more conversation and costume than active rehearsal, and, on the part of some of us, especially doubtless on my own, so much more eager denudation, both a body and mind, than of achieved or inspired assumption. We shivered, unclad and impatient, both as to our persons and to our aims, waiting alike for ideas and for breaches. We were supposed to make our dresses no less than to create our characters, and our material was in each direction apt to run short. I remember how far ahead of us my brother seemed to keep, announcing a motive, producing a figure, throwing off into space conceptions that I could stare at across the interval, but couldn't appropriate, so that my vision of him in these connections is not so much of his coming toward me, or toward any of us, as of his moving rapidly away in fantastic garb, and with his back turned, as if to perform to some other and more assured public. There were indeed other publics, publics downstairs, who glimmer before me seated at the open folding doors of ancient parlors, but all from the point of view of an absolute supernumerary, more or less squashed into the wing but never coming on. Who were the copious hunts, whose ample house on the north side toward Seventh Avenue still stands, next or nearer that of the DePasters, so that I perhaps confound some of the attributes of each, though clear as to the blond beakman, or beak of the latter race, not less than to the robust George and the stout, very stout, Henry of the former, whom I see bounding before a gathered audience for the execution of a passo clad in a garment of turkey red, fashioned by his own hands, and giving away at the seams, to a complete absence of desu, under the strain of too fine a figure. This too I make out in those connections, that is in the twilight of hunt and DePaster garrets, our command of a comparative welter of draperies, so that I am reduced to the surmise that Henry indeed had contours. I recover further some sense of the high places of the van Winkles, but think of them as pervaded for us by the upper air of the proprieties, the proprieties that were so numerous it would appear, when once one had had a glimpse of them, rather than by the crude fruits of young improvisation. Wonderful must it clearly have been still to feel among laxities and vaguenesses, such a difference of milieu, and, as they used to say, of atmospheres. This was a word of those days. Atmospheres were a thing to recognize and cultivate, for people really wanted them, gasped for them, which was why they took them, on the whole, on easy terms, never exposing them under an apparent flush to the last analysis. Did we at any rate really vibrate to one social tone after another? Or are these adventures for me now but fond imaginations? No, we vibrated, or I'll be hanged, as I may say, if I didn't. Little as I could tell it or may have known it, little as anyone else may have known. There were shades, after all, in our democratic order. In fact, as I brewed back to it, I recognized oppositions the sharpest, contrasts the most intense. It wasn't given to us all to have a social tone, but the costars surely had one, and kept it in constant use, whereas the wards next door to them were possessed of no approach to any, and indeed, had they had such a consciousness, would never have employed it, would have put it away on a high shelf, as they put the last baked pie out of Freddy's and Charlie's reach. Heaven knows what they too would have done with it. The Van Winkles, on the other hand, were distinctly so provided, but with the special note that their provision was one, so to express it, with their educational, their informational, call it even their professional, Mr. Van Winkle, if I mistake not, was an eminent lawyer, and the note of our own house was the absence of any profession, to the quickening of our general, as distinguished from our special sensibility. There was no turkey red among those particular neighbors at all events, and if there had been, it wouldn't have gaped at the seams. I didn't then know it, but I sipped at a fount of culture, in the sense that is that, our connection with the house being through Edgar, he knew about things. Inordinately, as it struck me. So, for that matter, did little public Freddy ward, but the things one of them knew about differed wholly from the objects of knowledge of the other, all of which was splendid for giving one exactly a sense of things. It intimated more and more how many such there would be altogether, and part of the interest was that, while Freddy gathered his among the wild wastes, Edgar walked in a regular maze of culture. I didn't then know about culture, but Edgar must promptly have known. This impression was promoted by his moving in a distant, a higher sphere of study, amid scenes vague to me. I dimly describe him as appearing at jenxes and vanishing again, as if even that hadn't been good enough, though I may be here at fault, and indeed can scarce say on what arduous heights I supposed him, as a day scholar, to dwell. I took the unknown always easily for the magnificent, and was sure only of the limits of what I saw. It wasn't that the boys swarming for us at school were not often to my vision unlimited, but that those peopleing our hours of ease, as I have already noted, were almost inveterately so. They seemed to describe, always, out of view, so much larger circles. I linger thus on Edgar by reason of its having somehow seemed to us that he described. Was it Dr. Anthon's? The largest of all. If there was a bigger place than Dr. Anthon's, it was there that he would have been. I break down, as to the detail of the matter, in any push toward bastard suppositions. But let me cease to stir this imponderable dust. I try at least to recover here, however, some closer notation of W. J.'s aspects, yet only with the odd effect of my either quite losing him, or but apprehending him again at seated play with his pencil under the lamp. When I see him he is intently, though summarily, rapidly drawing. His head critically balanced and his eyebrows working, and when I don't see him it is because I have resignedly relinquished him. I can't have been often for him a deprecated, still less an actively rebuffed suitor, because, as I say again, such aggressions were so little in order for me. But I remember that on my once offering him my company in conditions, those of some planned excursion, in which it wasn't desired, his putting the question of our difference at rest, with the minimum of explanation, by the responsible remark, I play with boys who curse and swear. I had sadly to recognize that I didn't, that I couldn't pretend to have come to that yet, and truly as I look back, either the unadvisedness and inexpertness of my young contemporaries on all that ground must have been complete, an interesting note on our general manners, after all, or my personal failure to grasp must have been, besides which I wonder scarce less now than I wondered then in just what company my brother's privilege was exercised. Though if he had but richly wished to be discouraging, he quite succeeded. It wasn't that I mightn't have been drawn to the boys in question, but that I simply wasn't qualified. All boys, I rather found, were difficult to play with, unless it was that they rather found me. But who would have been so difficult as these? They account but little moreover I make out for W.J.'s ellipses, so that I take refuge easily enough in the memory of my own pursuits, absorbing enough at times to have excluded other views. I also applied the pencil, or to be more exact, the pen, even if neither implement critically, rapidly, or summarily. I was so often engaged at that period, it strikes me, in literary, or to be more precise, in dramatic, accompanied by pictorial composition, that I must again and again have delightfully lost myself. I had not on any occasion personally succeeded amid our theatric strife in reaching the footlights. But how could I have doubted, nevertheless, with our large theatrical experience of the nature and of my understanding of the dramatic form? I sacrificed to it with devotion. By the aid of certain quarto sheets of ruled paper bought in Sixth Avenue for the purpose. My father's store, though I held him to be a great fancier of the article in general, supplied but the unruled. Grateful in particular for the happy provision by which each fourth page of the folded sheet was left blank. One the drama itself had covered three pages, the last one, over which I most laboured, served for the illustration of what I had verbally presented. Each scene had thus its explanatory picture, and as each act, though I am not positively certain I arrived at acts, would have had its vivid climax. Addicted in that degree to fictive evocation, I yet recall on my part no practice whatever of narrative prose or any sort of verse. I cherished this scene as I had so vibrated to the idea of it that evening at Linwood. I thought I list at any rate I composed in scenes, though how much or how far the scenes came is another affair. Entrances, exits, the indication of business, the animation of dialogue, the multiplication of designated characters were things delightful in themselves, while I panted toward the canvas on which I should fling my figures, which it took me longer to fill than it had taken me to write what went with it. But which had on the other hand something of the interest of the dramatist's casting of his persona, and must have helped me to believe in the validity of my subject. From where on these occasions the subject can have dropped for me I am at a loss to say, and indeed have a strong impression that I didn't at any moment quite know what I was writing about. I am sure I couldn't otherwise have written so much. With scenes, when I think, what certitude did I want more? Scenes being the root of the matter, especially when they bristled with proper names and noted movements, especially above all when they flowered at every pretext into the very optic and perspective of the stage, where the boards diverged correctly from a central point of vision even as the lashes from an eyelid straight down to the footlights. Let this reminiscence remind us of how rarely in those days the real stage was carpeted. The difficulty of composition was not. The one difficulty was in so placing my figures on the fourth page that these radiations could be marked without making lines through them. The odd part of all of which was that, whereas my cultivation of the picture was maintained, my practice of the play, my addition to scenes presently quite dropped. I was capable of learning, though with inordinate slowness, to express ideas in scenes, and was not capable, with whatever patience, of making proper pictures. Yet I aspired to this form of design, to the prejudice of any other, and long after those primitive hours was still wasting time in attempts at it. I cared so much for nothing else, and that vaguely redressed as to a point my general failure of acuteness. I nursed the conviction, or at least I tried to, that if my clutch of the pencil or of the watercolor brush should once become intense enough, it would make up for other weaknesses of grasp, much as that would certainly give it to do. This was a very false scent, which had, however, the excuse that my brother's example really couldn't but act upon me. The scent was apparently so true for him. From the moment my small interest in art, that is, my bent for gaping at illustrations and exhibitions, was absorbing and genuine. There were elements in the case which made it natural. The picture, the representative design, directly and strongly appealed to me, and was to appeal all my days, and I was only slow to recognize the kind in this order that appealed most. My face was turned from the first to the idea of representation, that of the gain of charm, interest, mystery, dignity, distinction, gain of importance in fine, on the part of the represented thing, over the thing of accident, of mere actuality, still unappropriated. But in the house of representation there were many chambers, each with its own lock, and long was to be the business of sorting and trying the keys. When I at last found deep in my pocket the one I could more or less work, it was to feel, with reassurance, that the picture was still, after all, in essence one's aim. So there had been in a manner continuity, being not so much waste as one had sometimes ruthfully figured. So many wastes are sweetened for memory as by the taste of the economy they have led to or imposed, and from the vantage of which they could scarce look better if they had been current and blatant profit. Wasn't the very bareness of the field itself more over a challenge in a degree to design? Not, I mean, that there seemed to one's infant eyes too few things to paint, as to that there were always plenty, but for the very reason that there were more than anyone noticed, and that a hunger was thus engendered which one cast about to gratify. The gratification nearest home was the imitative, the emulative, that is on my part. W.J., I see, needed no reasons, no consciousness other than that of being easily able. So he drew because he could, while I did so in the main only because he did. Though I think we cast about, as I say, alike, making the most of every image within view. I doubt if he made more than I even then did, though earlier able to account for what he made. Afterwards, on other ground and in richer air, I admit, the challenge was in the fullness and not in the bareness of aspects, with their natural result of hunger appeased. Exhibitions, illustrations abounded in Paris and London. The reflected image hung everywhere about, so that if there we doved afresh and with more confidence, it was not because no one, but because everyone did. In fact, when I call our appetite appeased, I speak less of our browsing vision, which was tethered and insatiable, than of our sense of the quite normal character of our own proceedings. In Europe we knew there was art, just as there were soldiers and lodgings and concierges, and little boys in the streets who stared at us, especially at our hats and boots, as at things of derision. Just as, to put it negatively, there were practically no hot rolls and no iced water. Perhaps, too I should add, we didn't enjoy the works of Mr. Benjamin Hayden there, clustered at the pantheon in Oxford Street, which, in due course, became our favourite haunt, so infinitely more, after all, than we had enjoyed those arrayed at the Dusseldorf collection in Broadway. Whence the huge canvas of the martyrdom of John Huss comes back to me, in fact, as a revelation of representational brightness and charm, that pitched once for all in these matters my young sense of what should be. Ineffable, unsurpassable these hours of initiation which the Broadway of the fifties had been, when all was said, so adequate to supply. If one wanted pictures there were pictures, as large, I seem to remember, as the side of a house, and of a bravery of colour and luster of surface that I was never afterwards to see surpassed. We were shown, without doubt, under our genial law here, too, everything that was, and as I cast up the items I wonder, I confess, what ample affair we could have dealt with. The Dusseldorf School commanded the market, and I think of its exhibition as firmly seated, going on from year to year. New York, judging now to such another tune, must have been a brave patron of that manufacture. I believe that scandal even was on occasion not abated, rather was boldly invoked, though of what particular sacrifices to the pure plastic or undraped shocks to bourgeois prejudice, the comfortable German genius of that period, must have been capable. History has kept no record. New accessions at any rate, vividly new ones, in which the freshness and brightness of the paint, particularly lustrous in our copious light, enhanced from time to time the show, which I have the sense of our thus repeatedly and earnestly visiting, and which comes back to me with some vagueness as installed in a disaffected church, where gothic excrescences and an ecclesiastical roof of a mild order helped the importance. No impression here, however, was half so momentous, as that of the epoch-making masterpiece of Mr. Leutze, who showed us Washington crossing the Delaware in a wondrous flair of projected gaslight, and with the effect of a revelation to my young sight of the capacity of accessories to stand out. I live again in the thrill of that evening, which was the greater of course for my feeling it in my parents' company, when I should otherwise have been in bed. We went down, after dinner, in the 14th street stage, quite as if going to the theatre. The scene of exhibition was near the Stoivus and Institute, a circumstance stirring up somehow a swarm of associations, echoes probably of lectures discussed at home, yet at which my attendance had doubtless conveniently lapsed. But Mr. Leutze's drama left behind any paler proscenium. We gaped responsive to every item lost in the marvel of the wintry night, of the sharpness of the ice-blocks, of the sickness of the sick soldier, of the protrusion of the minor objects, that of the strands of the rope and the nails of the boots, that, I say, on the part of everything, of its determined purpose of standing out. But that, above all, of the profiled national hero's purpose, as might be said, of standing up, as much as possible, even indeed of doing it almost on one leg in such difficulties and successfully balancing. So memorable was that evening to remain for me, that nothing could be more strange in connection with it, than the illustration by the admired work on its in-after years again coming before me, of the cold cruelty with which time may turn and devour its children. The picture, more or less entombed in its relegation, was lividly dead, and that was bad enough, but half the substance of one's youth seemed buried with it. There were other pictorial evenings, I may add, not all of which had the thrill. Deep the disappointment on my own part, I remember, at Brian's Gallery of Christian Art, to which also, as for great emotions, we had taken the omnibus after dinner. It cast a chill, this collection of worm-eaten diptics and triptics, of angular saints and seraphs, of black Madonna's and obscure Bambino's, of such marked and approved primitives as had never yet been shipped to our shores. Mr. Brian's shipment was presently to fall, I believe, under grave suspicion, was to undergo, in fact, fatal exposure, but it seemed at the moment in apparent good faith, and I have not forgotten how, conscious that it was fresh from Europe. Fresh was beautiful in the connection. I felt that my yearning should all have gone out to it. With that in consequence to handle, I doubt whether I proclaimed that it bored me, any more than I have ever noted till now, that it made me begin badly with Christian art. I like to think that the collection consisted without abatements of frauds and fakes, and that if these had been honest things, my perception wouldn't so have slumbered. Yet the principle of interest had been somehow compromised, and I think I have never since stood before a real primitive, a primitive of the primitives, without having first to shake off the gray mantle of that night. The main disconcertment had been its ugly twist to the name of Italy, already sweet to me for all its dimness. Even could dimness have prevailed in my felt measure of the pictorial testimony of home, testimony that dropped from us from the ample canvas of Mr. Cole, the American Turner, which covered half a side of our front parlor, and in which, though not an object represented in it began to stand out after the manner of Mr. Leutze, I could always lose myself as soon as look. It depicted Florence from one side of the neighboring hills. I have often since wondered which, the picture being long ago lost to our sight. Florence with her domes and towers and old walls, the old walls Mr. Cole had engaged for, but which I was ruefully to miss on coming to know and love the place in after years. Then it was I felt how long before my attachment had started on its course. That closer vision was no beginning, it only took up the tale, just as it comes to me again today at the end of time that the contemplative monk seated on a terrace in the foreground, a constant friend of my childhood, must have been of the convent of San Miniatto, which gives me the sight from which the painter wrought. We had Italy again in the corresponding room behind. A great abundance of Italy I was free to think while I revolved between another landscape over the sofa and the classic marble bust on a pedestal between the two back windows. The figure, a part of the figure, of a lady with her head crowned with vine leaves and her hair disposed with a laxity that was emulated by the front of her dress, as my next younger brother exposed himself to my derision by calling the bit of brocade, simulated by the chisel, that, depending from a single shoulder strap, so imperfectly covered her. This image was known and admired among us as the Becanti. She had come to us straight from an American studio in Rome, and I seem by horizon flush again with the first faint dawn of conscious appreciation, or in other words of the critical spirit, while two or three of the more restrictive friends of the house find our marble lady very cold for a Becanti. Cold indeed she must have been, quite as of the tombstone temperament, but that objection would drop if she might only be called a nymph, since nymphs were mild and moderate, and since discussion of a work of art mainly hung in those days on that issue of the producible name. I fondly recall by the same token that playing on a certain occasion over the landscape above the sofa, restrictive criticism, uttered in my indulged hearing, introduced me to what had probably been my very first chance on such ground for active participation. The picture from the hand of a French painter, Monsieur Lefebvre, and of but slightly scanter extent than the work of Mr. Cole, represented in frank rich colors, and as a so-called view in Tuscany, a rural scene of some exuberance, a broken and precipitous place amid mountains and forests, where two or three bare-legged peasants or woodmen were engaged, with much emphasis of posture in felling a badly gashed but spreading oak by means of a tense rope attached to an upper limb and at which they pulled together. Tuscany? Are you sure it's Tuscany? said the voice of restrictive criticism, that of the friend of the house who in the golden age of the precursors, though we were still pretty much precursors, had lived longest in Italy, and then on my father's challenge of this demure. Oh, in Tuscany, you know, the colors are much softer. There would be a certain haze to the atmosphere. Why, of course, I can hear myself now blushingly but triumphantly intermingle, the softness and the haze of our Florence there. Isn't Florence in Tuscany? It had to be parentally admitted that Florence was, besides which our friend had been there and knew, so that thereafter within our walls a certain malaise reigned, for if the Florence wasn't like it, then the Lefebvre couldn't be, and if the Lefebvre was like it, then the Florence couldn't. A lapse from old convenience, as from the moment we couldn't name the Lefebvre, where were we, all of which it might have been open to me to feel, I had uncannily promoted? End of Chapter 19 Chapter 20 of A Small Boy and Others This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Recording by M. B. A Small Boy and Others by Henry James. Chapter 20 My own sense of the great matter, meanwhile, that is of our possibilities, still more than of our actualities, of Italy in general and of Florence in particular, was a perfectly recoverable little awareness, as I find, of certain mild, soft, irregular breathings thence, on the part of an absent pair in whom our parents were closely interested, and whose communications, whose Roman, Sorrentine, Florentine letters, letters in a special from the Baths of Lucca, kept open in our air more than any other sweet irritation that question of Europe, which was to have, after all, in the immediate years so limited, so shortened, a solution. Mary Temple, the elder, had, early in our 14th street period, married Edmund Tweedy, a haunter of that neighborhood and of our house in it from the first, but never more than during a winter spent with us there by that quasi-relative, who by an extension of interest and admiration, she was in those years quite exceedingly handsome, ranked for us with the Albany ants, adding so a twist as it were to our tie with the temple cousins, her own close kin. This couple must have been putting real relatives aside, my parents' best friends in Europe, twitching thereby hardest the fine, firm thread attached at one end to our general desire, and at the other to their supposed felicity. The real relatives, those planted out in the same countries, are a chapter by themselves, whose effect on us, whose place in our vision I should like to trace, that of the kings, for instance, of my mother's kin, that of the masons of my fathers, the kings who cultivated for years the highest instructional, social, and moral possibilities at Geneva. The masons, above all, less strenuous, but more sympathetic, who reported themselves to us hauntingly during a considerable period, as enjoying every conceivable agréable at tour, and at the then undeveloped truville, even the winter truville, on the lowest possible terms. Fane would I, as for the mere pleasure of it, under the temptation to delineate, gather into my loose net the singularly sharp and rounded image of our cousin Charlotte, of the former name, who figured for us, on the field of Europe, wherever we looked, and all the rest of time, as a character of characters, and a marvel of placid consistency. Through my vague remembrance of her return from China after the arrest of a commercial career there by her husband's death in the Red Sea, which somehow sounded like a dreadful form of death, and my scarce, less faint recovery of some Christmas treat of our childhood under her roof in Grimersie Park, amid dim chinoiserie, and in that twilight of time dimmer offspring, Vernon, Anne, Arthur, marked to us always in the distinctor years, as of all our young relatives the most intensely educated and most pointedly proper. An occasion followed by her permanent and invidious withdrawal from her own country, I would keep her in my eye through the Genovese age, and on to the crisis of the Civil War, in which Vernon, unforgiven by her stiff conservatism for his northern loyalty, laid down before Petersburg a young life of understanding and pain, uncommerated as to the gallantry of its end. He had insistently returned to the front after a recovery from first wounds, as under his mother's malediction, on the stone beneath which he lies in the old burial ground at Newport, the cradle of his father's family. I should further pursue my subject through other periods and places, other constantly quiet but vivid exhibitions, to the very end of the story, which for myself was the impression, first, of a little lonely, soft-voiced, gentle, relentless lady, in a dull surrey garden of a summer afternoon, more than half blind, and all dependent on the damned acompany who read aloud to her that Saturday review which had ever been the prop and mirror of her opinions, and to which she remained faithful, her children estranged and outworn, dead and ignored, and the vision, second and for a climax, of an old-world Raiderchauset at Versailles, goal of my final pilgrimage, almost in presence of the end, end of her very personal career I mean, but not of her perfectly fine spirit, or of her charmingly smooth address. I confess myself embarrassed by my very ease of recapture of my young consciousness, so that I perforce try to encourage lapses and keep my abundance down. The place for the laps consents with difficulty, however, to be any particular point of the past at which I catch myself, easily caught as I am, looking about me. It has certainly nothing in common with that coin of vantage enjoyed by me one June afternoon of 1855, in the form of the minor share of the box of a carriage that conveyed us for the first time since our babyhood, WJs and mine, threw so much of a vast portentous London. I was an item in the overflow of a vehicle completely occupied, and I thrilled with the spectacle my seat beside the coachman so amply commanded, without knowing at this moment why, amid other claims, I had been marked for such an eminence. I so far justify my privilege at least as still to feel that prime impression of extreme intensity underlie, deep down, the whole mass of later observation. There are London aspects, which, so far as they still touch me after all the years, touch me as just sensible reminders of this hour of early apprehension, so penetrated for me as to have kept its ineffacable stamp. For at last we had come to Europe. We had disembarked at Liverpool, but a couple of days before, from that steamer Atlantic of the Collins Line, then active, but so soon to be utterly undone, of which I had kept a romantic note ever since a certain evening of a winter or two before. I had on that occasion assisted with my parents at a varied theatrical exhibition. The theatres distinct to me as brooms, one of the features of which was the, at that time, flourishing farce of Betsy Baker, a picture of some predicament, supposed droll, of its hero, Mr. Mouser, whose wife, if I am correct, carries on a laundry and controls, as she may, a train of young assistance. A feature of the piece comes back to me as the pursuit of Mr. Mouser, round and round the premises by the troop of Laundresses, shouting his name in chorus, captured by them being abject, though whether through fear of their endearments or of their harsher violence I failed to remember. It was enough that the public nerve had at the moment been tried by the non-arrival of the Atlantic, several days overdue, to the pitch at last of extreme anxiety, so that, when after the fall of the curtain on the farce the distracted Mr. Mouser, still breathless, reappeared at the footlights, where I can see him now abate by his plight, no jot of the dignity of his announcement. Ladies and gentlemen, I rejoice to be able to tell you that the good ship Atlantic is safe. The house broke into such plaudits, so huge and prolonged a roar of relief, as I had never heard the like of, and which gave me my first measure of a great immediate public emotion, even as the incident itself today reminds me of the family party smallness of the old New York, those happy limits that could make us all care, and care to fond vociferation for the same thing at once. It was a moment of the golden age, representing too but a snatch of elation, since the wretched Arctic had gone down in mortal woe, and her other companion, the Pacific, leaving England a few months later and under the interested eyes of our family group, then temporarily settled in London, was never heard of more. Let all of which show again what traps are laid about me for unguarded acute reminiscence. I meet another of those, though I positively try to avoid it, in the sense of a day spent on the great, fusty, curtained bed, a medieval four-poster such as I had never seen, of the hotel at the London and Northwestern station, where it appeared to our great inconvenience that I had during the previous months somewhere perversely absorbed, probably on Staten Island upwards of a year before, the dull seed of malaria which now suddenly broke out in chills and fever. This condition of the intermittent order hampered our movements but left alternate days on which we could travel, and as present to me as ever is the apprehended interest of my important and determinant state, and of our complicated prospect while I lay much at my ease, for I recall in particular certain short sweet times when I could be left alone, with the thick and heavy suggestions of the London Room about me, the very smell of which was ancient, strange, and impressive, a new revelation altogether, and the window open to the English June and the far-off hum of a thousand possibilities. I consciously took them in these last, and must then, I think, have first tasted the very greatest pleasure perhaps I was ever to know, that of almost holding my breath in presence of certain aspects to the end of so taking in. It was as if in those hours that precious fine art had been disclosed to me, scantly as the poor place and the small occasion might have seemed of an order to promote it. We seize our property by an avid instinct wherever we find it, and I must have kept seizing mine at the absurdist little rate, and all by this deeply dissimilarative process of taking in through the whole succession of those summer days. The next application of it that stands out for me, or the next that I make room for here, since I note, after all, so much less than I remember, is the intensity of a fond apprehension of Paris a few days later from the balcony of an hotel that hung through the soft summer night over the rue de la paix. I hung with the balcony, and doubtless with my brothers and my sister, though I recover what I felt as so much relation and response to the larger, the largest appeal only, that of the whole perfect Parisianism I seem to myself always to have possessed mentally, even if I had but just turned twelve, and that now filled out its frame or case for me from every lighted window up and down, as if each of these had been, for strength of sense, a word in some immortal quotation, the very breath of civilized lips. How I had anciently gathered such stores of preconception is more than I shall undertake an account of, though I believe I should be able to scrape one together. Certain it is at any rate that half the beauty of the whole exposed second floor of a modest, just opposite, for instance, with the fittings and figurings, as well as the intent immobilities of busy young women described through frank and, as it were, benignant apertures, and of such bright fine strain that they but asked to work far into the night, came from the effect on the part of those things, of so exactly crowning and comforting I couldn't have said what momentous young dream. I might have been right to myself, as against some danger of being wrong, and if I had uttered my main comment on it all, this must certainly have been, I told you so, I told you so. What I had told myself was, of course, that the impression would be of the richest and at the same time of the most insinuating, and this after all didn't sail very close, but I had had before me from far back a picture which might have been hung in the very sky, and here was every touch in it repeated with a charm. Had I ever till then known what a charm was? A large, a local, a social charm, leaving out that of a few individuals. It was, at all events, this mystery, one's property, that of one's mind, and so, once for all, I helped myself to it from my balcony and tucked it away. It counted all immensely for practice in taking in. I profited by that, no doubt, still a few days later, at an hour that has never ceased to recur to me all my life as crucial, as supremely determinant. The traveling carriage had stopped at a village on the way from Lyon to Geneva, between which places there was then no railway, a village now nameless to me, and which was not yet Nantua in the Jura, where we were to spend the night. I was stretched out at my ease on a couch warmed by a plank laid from seat to seat, and covered by a small mattress and other draperies. An indulgence founded on my visitation of fever, which, though not now checking our progress, assured me in our little band these invidious luxuries. It may have been that as my body was pampered, so I was moved equally to pamper my spirit, for my appropriative instinct had neglected no item of our case from the first, by which I mean from the moment of our getting under way that morning with much elaboration, in the court of the old Hôtel de l'Univers, Saint Lyon, where we had arrived two days before and awaited my good pleasure during forty-eight hours that overflowed for us, perhaps somewhat less than any pair of days yet. But as regards which, it was afterwards my complacent theory that my contemplative rest at the ancient inn, with all the voices and graces of the past, of the court, of the French scheme of manners in general, and of ancient inns, as such in particular, had prepared me not a little when I should in due course hear of it, for what was meant by the old V de Provence, that expression which was to become later on so toned, as old fine color and old fine opinion are toned. It was the romance of travel, and it was the suggested romance, flushed with suppositions and echoes, with implications and memories, memories of one's reading, save the mark, all the more that our proper bestowal required two carriages, in which we were to post ineffable thought, and which bristled with every kind of contradiction of common experience. The postillian, in a costume rather recalling from the halls of Ferrero, that of my debardure, bobbed up and down. The Italian courier, Giorna Dali, black-whiskered and acquired in London, sat in the rumble along with Annette Godfra of Metz, fresh-colored, broad-faced and fair-braided, a bonlorenne, if ever there was, acquired in New York. I enjoy the echo of their very names, neither unprecedented nor irreproducible, yet which melt together for me to intensification with all the rest, with the recovered moment above all of our pause at the indoor in the cool sunshine, we had mounted and mounted, during which, in my absurdly cushioned state, I took in, as I have hinted, by a long, slow swig that testified to some power of elbow, a larger draft of the wine of perception than any I had ever before owed to a single throb of that faculty. The village street, which was not as village streets hitherto known to me, opened out, beyond an interval, into a high place, on which perched an object, also a fresh revelation, and that I recognized with a deep joy, though a joy that was doubtless partly the sense of fantastic ease of abated illness and of cold chicken, as at once a castle and a ruin. The only castle within my ken had been, by my impression, the meticulated villa above us the previous summer at New Brighton, and as I had seen no structure rise beyond that majesty, so I had seen none abased to the dignity of ruin. Loose boards were no expression of this latter phase, and I was already somehow aware of a deeper note in the crumbled castle than any note of the solid one, little experience as I had had either of solidity. At a point in the interval, at any rate, below the slope on which this memento stood, was a woman in a black bodice, a white shirt, and a red petticoat, engaged in some sort of field labour, the effect of whose intervention just then is almost beyond my notation. I knew her for a peasant in Sabo, the first peasant I had ever beheld, or beheld at least to such advantage. She had in the whole aspect an enormous value, emphasising with her petticoat's tonic strength the truth that sank in as I lay, the truth of one's embracing there, in all the presented character of the scene, an amount of character I had felt no scene present, not even the one I had raked from the hotel Westminster, the sort of thing that, even as mere fullness and mere weight, would sit most warmly in the mind. Supremely, in that ecstatic vision, was Europe, sublime synthesis expressed and guaranteed to me, as if by a mystic gauge, which spread all through the summer air, that I should now, only now, never lose it, hold the whole consistency of it, up to that time it might have been but mockingly whisked before me. Europe mightn't have been flattered, it was true, at my finding her thus most signified and summarised, in a sordid old woman, scraping a mean living, and an uninhabitable tower abandoned to the owls. This was but the momentary measure of a small, sick boy, however, and the virtue of the impression was proportioned to my capacity. It made a bridge over to more things than I then knew. Impressions coming back to me from that summer, which were doubtless involved in my having still for a time, on the alternate days when my complaint was active, to lie up on various couches and, for my main comfort, consider the situation. I considered it best, I think, gathering in the fruits of a quickensensibility to it, in certain unrages apartments in which my parents had settled themselves near Geneva, an old house in ample grounds, and among great spreading trees that pleasantly brushed our windows in the summer heats and airs, known, if I am not mistaken, as the campagne Gerabsof, which its mistress, an invalid Russian lady, had partly placed at our disposition while she reclined in her own quarter of the garden on a chaise longue and under a mushroom hat with a green veil. And I, in the course of the mild excursions appointed as my limit, considered her from afar in the light of the legends supplied to me, as to her identity, history, general practices and proceedings, by my younger brother Wilkie, who, according to his nature, or I may say, to his genius, had made without loss of time great advances of acquaintance with her, and quickened thereby my sense of his superior talent for life. Wilkie's age followed closely on mine, and from that time on we conversed and consorted, though with lapses and disparities. I, being on the whole, during the succession of those years, in the grateful, the really fortunate position of having one exposure, rather than northward, as it were, to the view of W. J., and the other, perhaps the more immediately sunned surface to the genial glow of my junior. Of this I shall have more to say, but to meet in memory, meanwhile, even this early flicker of him, is to know again something of the sense that I attached, all along our boyhood, to his successful sociability, his instinct for intercourse, his genius, as I have used the word, for making friends. It was the only genius he had, declaring itself from his tenderest years, never knowing the shadow of defeat, and giving me, above all, from as far back and by the very radiation of the fact endlessly much to think of. For I had, in a manner, thanks to the radiation, much of the benefit. His geniality was absolutely such that the friends he made were made almost less for himself, so to speak, than for other friends, of whom indeed we, his own adjuncts, were easily first, so far at least as he discriminated. At night all cats are gray, and in this brother's easy view all his acquaintance were his family. The trail of his sociability was over us all alike. Though it here concerns me but to the effect, as I recover it, of its weight on my comparatively so indirect faculty for what is called taking life. I must have already at the campan, Garab Sof, begun to see him take it with all his directness, begun in fact to be a trifle tormentedly aware that, though there might be many ways of doing so, we are condemned practically to a choice, not made free of them all, reduced to the use of but one at the best, which it is our sad interest to make the most of, since we may indeed sometimes make much. There was a small, sad charm, I should doubt the sad, in this operation of the contrast of the case before me with my own case. It was positively as if Wilkie's were supplying me on the occasion with the most immediate matter for my own. That was particularly marked after he had, with our elder brother, been placed at school, the pensioner, Rettiger, at Châtelin, then much esteemed, and where I was supposedly to join them on my complete recovery. I recall sociable, irrepressibly sociable, sorties thence, on the part of the pair, as promptly breaking out, not less than I recall sociable afternoon visits to the establishment, on the part of the rest of us. It was my brother's first boarding school, but as we had in the New York conditions kept punctually rejoining our family, so in these pleasant Genovese ones, our family returned the attention. Of this also, Moranon. My particular point is just the wealth of Wilkie's contribution to my rich current consciousness. The consciousness fairly made rich by my taking in, as aforesaid, at reflective hours, hours when I was in a manner alone with it, our roomy and shadowy, our almost haunted interior. Admirable the scale and solidity, in general, of the ancient villas planted about Geneva, and our house affected me as so massive and so spacious that even our own half of it seemed vast. I had never before lived so long in anything so old, and, as I somehow felt, so deep. Depth, depth upon depth, was what came out for me at certain times of my waiting above, in my immense room of thick embrasures, and rather prompt obscurity, while the summer afternoon waned and my companions, often below at dinner, lingered and left me perhaps a bit overwhelmed. There was the sense of it, the character in the whole place, pressed upon me with a force I hadn't met, and that was beyond my analysis, which is but another way of saying how directly notified I felt that such material conditions as I had known could have had no depth at all. My depth was a vague measure, no doubt, but it made space in the twilight for an occasional small sound of voice or step from the garden, or the rooms of which the great homely, the opaque green shutters opened there softly to echo in, mixed with reverberation's finer and more momentous, personal, experimental, if they might be called so, which I much encouraged. They borrowed such tone from our new surrounding medium, and half of which were reducible to Wilkie's personalities and Wilkie's experience. These latter irrepressibly communicated, being ever enviably, though a trifle bewilderingly, and even formatively, of personalities. There was the difference, and the opposition, as I really believe I was already aware, that one way of taking life was to go in for everything and everyone, which kept you abundantly occupied, and the other way was to be as occupied, quite as occupied, just with the sense and the image of it all, and on only a fifth of the actual immersion, a circumstance extremely strange. Life was taken almost equally both ways, that I mean seemed the strangeness, mere brute quantity and number being so much less in one case than the other. These latter were what I should have liked to go in for, had I but had the intrinsic faculties. That more than ever came home to me on those occasions when, as I could move further and stay out longer, I accompanied my parents on afternoon visits to Shetland, and the campagne Reddiger, a scene that has remained with me as notably placid and pastoral. The great trees stood about, casting afternoon shadows. The old thick-walled green-shuttered villa and its des pendants had the air of the happiest home. The big bearded bonomy of Monsieur Reddiger among his little polyglot charges, no petit pays show these, appeared to justify, and more, the fond New York theory of Swiss education, the kind à la portée of young New Yorkers, as a beautifully genialized, humanized, civilized, even romanticized thing, in which, amid launy mountain slopes, the languages flowed into so many beaming recipients on a stream of milk and honey, and the relation, above all, the relation from master to pupil and back again, was of an amenity that wouldn't have been of this world, save for the providential arrangement of a perfect pedagogic Switzerland. Did you notice the relation? How charming it was! Our parents were apt to say to each other after these visits, in relation to some observed show of confidence between instructor and instructed, while, as for myself, I was lost in the wonder of all the relations. My younger brother seemed to live, and to his own ingenuous relish as well, in such a happy hum of them. The languages had reason to prosper. They were so copiously represented. The English jostled the American, the Russian, the German, and there even trickled through a little funny French. A great Geneva school of those days was the Institution Asus, to which generations of our young countrymen had been dedicated, and our own faces first turned, under correction, however, by the perceived truth, that if the languages were in question, the American reigned there almost unchallenged. The establishment chosen for our experiment must have appealed by some intimate and insinuating side, and as less patronized by the rich and the sophisticated, for even in those days some Americans were rich and several sophisticated. Little indeed, as it was all to matter in the event, so short a course had the experiment just then to run. What it mainly brings back to me is the fine old candor and queerness of the New York state of mind, begotten really not a little, I think, under our own roof, by the mere charmed perusal of Rodolphe Tepfer's Voyage en Zigzag, the two goodly octavo volumes of which delightful work, an adorable book, taken with its illustrations, had come out early in the fifties, and had engaged our fondest study. It is the copious chronicle, by a schoolmaster of endless humor and sympathy, of what degree and form of authority it never occurred to one, even to ask, of his holiday excursions with his pupils, mainly on foot and with staff and knapsack, through the incomparable Switzerland of the time before the railways and the rush, before the monster hotels, the desecrated summits, the vulgarized valleys, the circular tours, the perforating tubes, the funiculars, the hordes, the horrors. To turn back to Tepfer's pages today is to get the sense of a lost paradise, and the effect for me, even yet, of having poured over them in my childhood, is to steep in sweetness and quaintness some of the pictures. His own illustrations are of the pleasantest and drolest, and the association makes that faded Swiss master of landscape, Calam, of the so-called Calamites, a quite sufficient Rue's Dale. It must have been conceived for us that we would lead in these conditions, always in pursuit of an education, a life not too dissimilar to that of the storied exiles in the forest of Arden, though one would feign not press, after all, upon ideals of culture so little organized, so little conscious up to that moment of our ferocities of comparison and competition, of imposed preparation. This particular loose ideal reached out from the desert, or what might under discouragement pass for such. It invoked the light, but a simplicity of view, which was somehow one with the beauty of other convictions accompanied its effort. And though a glance at the social psychology of some of its cheerful estimates, its relative importances, assumed and acted upon, might here seem indicated, there are depths of the ancient serenity that nothing would induce me to sound. I need linger the less, moreover, since we in fact, oddly enough, lingered so little. So very little, for reasons doubtless well known to ourselves at the time, but which I at present fail to recapture, that what next stands vividly out for me is our renewed passage through Paris on the way to London for the winter. A turn of our situation invested at the time, with nothing whatever of the wonderful, yet which would again half prompt me to soundings, were I not to recognize in it that mark of the fitful, that accent of the improvised, that general quality of earnest and reasoned, yet at the same time almost passionate, impatient, which was to devote us for some time to variety, almost to incoherency of interest. We had fared across the sea, under the glamour of the Swiss school in the abstract, but the Swiss school in the concrete soon turned stale in our hands. A fact over which I remember myself as no further critical than to feel, not without zest, that since one was all eyes and the world decidedly, at such a pace, all images administered to the panoramic, administered to begin with, through our very early start for Lyon, again in the October dawn, without Natalie or the carriages this time, but on the basis of the malpost, vast yellow and rumbling, which we availed wholly to fill, and of which the high heartiness was such, that it could stop even for an instant, only at appointed and much-disevered places. To the effect, I recall, of its vainly attempted arrest by our cousin Charlotte King, before mentioned, whom I now see suddenly emerge, fresh, confident, and pretty, from some rural retreat by the road, a scene of simple velegiatura, rien que pour saluer ces dames, as she pleaded the conductor, whom she practically, if not permittedly, overmastered, leaving with me still the wonder of her happy fusion of opposites. The coach had not in the event paused, but so neither had she, and as it ignored flush and flurry, quite as it defied delay, she was equally a match for it in these particulars, blandly achieving her visit to us while it rumbled on, making a perfect success, and a perfect grace of her idea. She dropped as elegantly out as she had gymnastically floated in, and, say, damn, must have wished that they could emulate her art. Save for this, my view of that migration has faded, though to shine out again in the sense of our early morning arrival in Paris a few days later, and our hunt there, vain at first, for an hotel that would put us numerously up, vain till we had sat a while in the rude ale there, I think, before that of an Albany uncle, luckily on the scene, and finally invoked, who after some delay descended to us with a very foreign air, I fancied, and no possibility to his regret of placing us under his own roof. As if indeed I remember reflecting, we could, such as we were, have been desired to share his foreign interests, such as they were. He espoused our cause, however, with gay good nature, while I wondered, in my admiration for him and curiosity about him, how he really liked us, and, a bit doubtfully, whether I should have liked us had I been in his place. And after some further adventure, installed us at the Hotel de la Vieux-Beparie in the Rue de la Vieux-Levec, a resort now long since extinct, though it lingered on for some years, and which I think of as rather huddled and disappointingly private to the abatement of spectacle, and standing obliquely behind a wall, a high gateway, and a more or less cobbled court. End of Chapter 21 Chapter 22 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 22 Little else of that Parisian passage remains with me. It was, probably, of the briefest. I recover only a visit with my father to the Palais de l'Andustrie, where the first of the great French exhibitions on the model much reduced of the English Crystal Palace of 1851 was still open. A fact explaining the crowded inns. And from that visit win back but the department of the English pictures, and our stopping long before the order of release of a young English painter, J. E. Millay, who had just leaped into fame. And my impression of the rare treatment of those babies bare legs, pendant from its mother's arms, is still as vivid to me as if from yesterday. The vivid yields again to the vague. I scarce know why so utterly. Till consciousness, waking up in London, renews itself, late one evening and very richly at the Gloucester Hotel, or Coffee House, as I think it was then still called, which occupied that corner of Piccadilly and Barkley Street, where more modern establishments have since succeeded it, but where a fatigued and famished American family found on that occasion a fine old British virtue in cold roast beef and bread and cheese and ale, their expert acclamation of which echoes even now in my memory. It keeps company there with other matters equally British, and as we say now, early Victorian. The thick gloom of the in-rooms, the faintness of the glimmering tapers, the blessed inexhaustibility of the fine joint, surpassed only by that of the grave waiter's reserve, plain, immutably plain, fair all, but prompting in our elders an emphasis of relief and relish, the, there is nothing like it after all, tone, which re-excited expectation, which in fact seemed this time to re-announce a basis for faith and joy. That basis presently shrank to the scale of a small house hard by the hotel at the entrance of Barkley Square, expeditiously lighted on it would thus appear, which again has been expensively superseded, but to the ancient little facts of which I fondly revert, since I owe them what I feel to have been, in the far past, the prime faint revelation, the small broken expression of the London I was afterwards to know. The place wears on the spot to this day no very different face. The house that has risen on the site of ours is still immediately neighboured at the left by the bookseller, the circulating librarian and news agent, who modestly flourished in our time under the same name. The great establishment of Mr. Gunter, just further along, is as soberly and solidly seated. The muse behind the whole row, from the foot of Hay Hill at the right, wanders away to Bruton Street with the irregular grace that spoke to my young fancy. Hay Hill itself is somehow less sharply precipitous, besides being no longer paved, as I seem to recall its having been with big boulders, and I was on the point of saying that its antique charm in some degree abides. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Its antique charm quite succumbed years ago to that erection of lumpish mansions which followed the demolition of the old world town residents, as the house agents say, standing on the south side between Court and, I suppose, Garden, where Dover Street gives way to Grafton. A house of many histories, of vague importances and cold reserves and deep suggestions, I used to think after scaling the steep, quite on purpose to wonder about it. A whole chapter of life was condensed for our young sensibility, I make out, into the couple of months. They can scarce have been more, spent by us in these quarters, which must have proved too narrow and too towny. But it can have had no passage so lively, as the occurrences at once sequent to my father's having too candidly made known in some public print, probably the times, that an American gentleman at such an address desired to arrange with a competent young man for the tuition at home of his three sons. The effect of his rash failure to invite application by letter only was the assault of an army of visitors, who filled us with consternation. They hung about the door, cumbered the hall, choked the staircase, and sat grimly individual in odd corners. How they were dealt with, given my father's precipitate and general charity, I can but feebly imagine. Our own concern, in the event, was with a soul-selected presence, that of Scotch, Mr. Robert Thompson, who gave us his care, from breakfast to luncheon each morning that winter, who afterwards carried on a school at Edinburgh, and whom, in years long subsequent, I happened to help R. L. Stevenson to recognize Galey as his early pedagogue. He was so deeply solicitous, yet with also mild and kind and shy, with no harsher injunction to us ever then, come now be getting on, that one could but think well of a world in which so gentle a spirit might flourish, while it is doubtless to the credit of his temper that remembrance is a blank in respect to his closer administrations. I recall vividly his fresh complexion, his very round, clear eyes, his tendency to trip over his own legs or feet while thoughtfully circling about us, and his constant dress coat, worn with trousers of a lighter hue, which was perhaps the prescribed uniform of a daily tutor then. But I ask myself in vain what I can have studied with him, there remaining with me afterwards to testify, this putting any scrap of stored learning aside. No single textbook saved the Lamb's tales from Shakespeare, which was given me as, of all things in the world, a reward. A reward for what I am again at a loss to say, not certainly for having got on to anything like the tune plaintively for the most part piped to me. It is a very odd and yet to myself very rich and full reminiscence, though I remember how, looking back at it from after days, W.J. denounced it to me, and with it the following year and more spent in Paris, as a poor and arid and lamentable time, in which, missing such larger chances and connections as we might have reached out to, we had done nothing, he and I, but walk about together in a state of the direst propriety, little high black hats and inveterate gloves, the childish costume of the place and period, to stare at grey street scenery, that of early Victorian London had tones of a neutrality, dawdle at shop windows, and buy watercolours and brushes with which to bedop eternal drawing blocks. We might, I dare say, have felt higher impulses and carried out larger plans, though indeed present to me for this, on my brother so expressing himself, is my then quick recognition of the deeper stirrings and braver needs he at least must have known, and my perfect, if rueful, sense of having myself had no such quarrel with our conditions. Embalmed for me did they even to that shorter retrospect appear, in a sort of fatalism of patience, spiritless in a manner no doubt, yet with an inwardly active, productive, and ingenious side. It was just the fact of our having so walked and dawdled and dodged that made the charm of memory, in addition to which what could one have asked more than to be steeped in a medium so dense that whole elements of it, forms of amusement, interest, and wonder, soaked through to some appreciative faculty and made one fail at the most of nothing but one's lessons. My brother was right, in so far as that my question, the one I have just reproduced, could have been asked only by a person incorrigible in throwing himself back upon substitutes for lost causes, substitutes that might temporarily have appeared queer and small, a person so haunted even from an early age with visions of life that aridithies for him were half a terror and half an impossibility, and that the said substitutes, the economies and ingenuities that protested in their dumb vague way against weakness of situation or of direct and applied faculty, were in themselves really a revel of spirit and thought. It had indeed again an effect of almost pathetic incoherence that our brave quest of the languages, suffering so prompt and for the time at least, so accepted, and now so inscrutably irrecoverable a check, should have contented itself with settling us by that Christmas in a house more propitious to our development in St. John's Wood, where we enjoyed a considerable garden and wistful view, though by that windowed privilege alone, of a large green expanse in which ladies and gentlemen practiced archery. Just that, and not the art even, but the mere spectacle, might have been one of the substitutes in question, if not for the languages at least for one or another of the romantic connections we seemed a little to have missed. It was a whiff of the old world of Robin Hood, as we could never have looked up from the mere thumbed story in Fourteenth Street at any rate, to any soft confidence of. More than I can begin to say, that is by a greater number of queer small channels, did the world about us, thus continuous with the old world of Robin Hood, steal into my sense. A constant state of subjection to which fact is no bad instance of those refinements of surrender that I just named as my fond practice. I seem to see today that the London of the 50s was even to the weak perception of childhood a much less generalized, a much more eccentrically and variously characterised place than the present great accommodated and accommodating city. It had few resources, but it had many more features, scarce one of which failed to help the whole to bristle, with what a little gaping American could take for an intensity of difference from his supposed order. It was extraordinarily the picture and the scene of Dickens, now so changed and superseded. It offered to my presumptuous vision still more the reflection of Thackeray, and where is the detail of the reflection of Thackeray now, so that as I trod the vast length of Baker Street, the Thackeray and Vista of other days, I throbbed with the pride of a vastly enlarged acquaintance. I daresay our perambulations of Baker Street in our little top hats and other neatnesses must have been what W.J. meant by our poverty of life, whereas it was probably one of the very things most expressive to myself of the charm and the colour of history and, from the point of view of the picturesque, of society. We were often in Baker Street by reason of those stretched out walks at the remembered frequency and long-drawn push of which I am today amazed. Recalling at the same time, however, that save for Robert Thompson's pitching ball with us in the garden, they took for us the place of all other agilities. I can't but feel them to have been marked in their way by a rare curiosity and energy. Good Mr. Thompson had followed us in our move, occupying quarters not far off above a Baker's shop on a terrace, a group of objects still untouched by time, where we occasionally by way of change attended for our lessons, and where not the least of our inspirations was the confidence, again and again justified, that our mid-morning break would determine the appearance of a self-conscious stale cake straight from below, received by us all each time as if it had been a sudden happy thought, and ushered in by a little girl who might have been a dickens foundling or orfling. Our being reduced to mumble cake in a suburban lodging by way of reaction from the strain of study would have been perhaps a pathetic picture, but we had field days, too, when we accompanied our excellent friend to the tower, the Thames Tunnel, St. Paul's and the Abbey, to say nothing of the zoological gardens, almost close at hand, and with which we took in that age of lingering forms no liberty of abbreviation, to say nothing either of Madame Tussaud's, then in our interminable, but so amiable Baker Street. The only shade on the amiability of which was just that gruesome association with the portal of the Bazaar, since Madame Tussaud had, of all her treasures, most vividly revealed to me the Mrs. Manning and the Burke and Hare of the Chamber of Horrors, which lurked just within it, whom, for days after making their acquaintance, and prolonging it no further than our conscientious friend thought advisable, I half expected, when alone, to meet quite dreadfully on the staircase or on opening a door. All this experience was valuable, but it was not the languages, savin' so far indeed as it was the English, which we hadn't in advance so much aimed at, yet which more or less and very interestingly came. It, at any rate, perhaps broke our fall a little that French, of a sort, continued to be with us in the remarkably erect person of Mademoiselle Cusang, the Swiss governess who had accompanied us from Geneva, whose quite sharply exclusive but on the whole exhilarating presence I associate with this winter, and who led in that longish procession of more or less similar domesticated presences, which was to keep the torch, that is, the accent, among us, fairly alight. The variety and frequency of the arrivals and departures of these ladies, whose ghostly names again, so far as I recall them, I like piously to preserve, Augustine Danse, Amélie Fortin, Marie Guyard, Marie Boning, Felicy Boning, Clarice Bade, mystifies me in much the same degree as our own academic vicissitudes in New York. I can no more imagine why, sociable and charitable, we so often changed governesses than I had contemporaneously grasped the principle of our succession of schools. The whole group of phenomena reflected, I gather, as a rule, much more the extreme promptitude of the parental optimism than any disproportionate habit of impatience. The optimism begot precipitation, and the precipitation had too often to confess itself. What is instructive, what is historic, is the probability that young persons offering themselves at that time as guides and communicators. The requirements of our small sister were for long modest enough, quite conceivably lacked, prepared this, and were so thrown back on the extempore, which in turn lacked substance, which in turn lacked abundance. One of these figures, that of Mamzell Danse, the most Parisian and prodigiously so, was afterwards to stand out for us quite luridly, a cloud of revelations succeeding her withdrawal, a cloud, which thick as it was, never obscured our impression of her genius and her charm. The daughter of a political proscript, who had but just escaped, by the legend, being seized in his bed on the terrible night of the De De Saum, and who wrote her macabre-ish letters from Gallipolis, Ohio, she subsequently figured, to my imagination, in the light that is of the divine revelations, too dreadful for our young years, are the most brilliant and most genial of a regular characters, exhibiting the Parisian mentality at its highest, or perhaps rather its deepest, and more remarkable for nothing than for the consummate little art and grace with which she had for a whole year draped herself in the mantle of our innocent heir. It was exciting, it was really valuable, to have to that extent rubbed shoulders with an adventurous. It showed one that for the adventurous there might on occasion be much to be said. Those, however, were later things. Extensions of view hampered for the present, as I have noted, by our mere London street scenery, which had much to build out for us. I see again that we but endlessly walked and endlessly dobbed, and that our walks, with an obsession of their own, constantly abetted our dobbing. We knew no other boys at all, and we even saw no others, I seem to remember, save the essentially rude ones, rude with the kind of medieval rudeness for which our clear New York experience had given us no precedent, and of which the great and constant sign was the artless, invidious wonder produced in them on our public appearances by the alien stamp in us that, for our comfort, we vainly sought to dissimulate. We conformed in each particular, so far as we could, to the prevailing fashion and standard of a narrow range in those days, but in our very plumage, putting our ramage aside, our wood-note wild must have seemed to sound so sharply we challenged when abroad the attention of our native contemporaries, and even sometimes of their elders pulled up at sight of us in the from head to foot stare, a curiosity void of sympathy, and that attached itself for some reason essentially to our feet, which were not abnormally large. The London people had for themselves, at the same time, an exuberance of type. We found it in particular a world of costume, often a very odd costume, the most intimate notes of which were the postmen in their frock coats of military red, and their black beaver hats, the milk women in hats that often emulated these, in little shawls and strange short full frocks, revealing enormous boots, with their pails swung from their shoulders on wooden yokes. The inveterate footman, hooked from behind the coaches of the rich, frequently in pairs and carrying staves, together with the mounted and belted grooms, without the attendance of whom riders, in whichever sex, and riders then were much more numerous, almost never went forth. The range of character, on the other hand, reached rather dreadfully down. There were embodied and exemplified horrors in the streets, beside which any present exhibition is pale, and I well remember the almost terrified sense of their salience produced in me a couple of years later on the occasion of a flying return from the continent with my father, by a long and interminable drive westward from the London Bridge railway station. It was a soft June evening, with the lingering light and swimming crowds, as they then seemed to me, of figures reminding me of George Crookshank's artful dodger and his Bill Sykes, and his Nancy, only with the bigger brutality of life, which pressed upon the cab the early Victorian four-wheeler, as we jogged over the bridge, and cropped up in more and more gaslit patches for all our course, culminating somewhere far to the west in the vivid picture, framed by the cab window, of a woman reeling backward as a man felled her to the ground with a blow in the face. The London view, at large, had in fact more than a crookshank. There still survived in it quite a Hogarth side, which I had of course then no name for, but which I was so sharply to recognize on coming back years later that it fixed for me the veracity of the great pictorial chronicler. Hogarth's mark is even yet not wholly overlaid, though time has, per contra, dealt with that stale servility of address which most expressed to our young minds the rich burden of a past, the consequence of too much history. I liked for my own part a lot of history, but felt in face of certain queer old obsequiosities and appeals, winings and sidlings and hand-rumbings and curtsy droppings, the general play of apology and humility, behind which the great dim social complexity seemed to mass itself, that one didn't quite want so inordinate a quantity. Of that particular light and shade, however, the big broom of change has swept the scene bare. More history still has been after all what it wanted. Quite another order in the whole connection strikes me as raining today, though not without the reminder from it that the relations in which manner, as a generalized thing in which tone is positively pleasant, is really assured and sound, clear and interesting, are numerous and definite, only when it has had in its past some strange phases and much misadventure.