 23 We were still being but vaguely formed, yet it was a vagueness preferred apparently by our parents to the only definiteness in any degree open to us that of the English school away from home. The London private school near home they would absolutely none of, which they saw as a fearful and wonderful though seemingly effective preparation for the young, for English life and an English career. But related to that situation only, so little related in fact to any other as to make it in a differing case an educational cul-de-sac, the worst of economies. They had doubtless heard claimed for it just that no other method for boys was so splendidly general, but they had, I judge, their own sense of the matter which would have been that it all depended on what was meant by this. The truth was, above all, that to them the formative forces most closely bearing on us were not in the least vague but very definite by their measure and intention. There were advantages generally much be lauded that appealed to them scantily and other matters, conceptions of character and opportunity, ideals, values, importances, enjoying no great common credit but for which it was their belief that they, under whatever difficulties, more or less provided. In respect of which I further remind myself of the blessed fewness as yet of our years, and I come back to my own sense, benighted though it may have been, of a highly colored and remarkably active life. I recognize our immediate, our practical ferment, even in our decent perambulations, our discussions, WJs and mine, of whether we had in a given case best apply for a renewal of our artist's materials to Messer's Rony, or to Messer's Windsor and Newton, and in our pious resort, on these determinations, to Rathburn Place, more beset by our steps, probably, than any other single corner of the town, and the short but charged vista of which lives for me again in the tempered light of those old winter afternoons. Of scarce less moment than these were our frequent visits in the same general direction to the old pantheon of Oxford Street, now fallen from its high estate, but during that age a place of fine Rococo traditions, a bazaar, an exhibition, an opportunity at the end of long walks for the consumption of buns and ginger beer, and above all a monument to the genius of that wonderful painter B. R. Hayden. We must at one time quite have haunted the pantheon, where we could doubtless better than anywhere else, sink to contemplative, to ruminative rest. Hayden's huge canvases covered the walls. I wonder what has become now of the banishment of Aristides, attended to the city gate by his wife and babe, every attitude and figure in which, especially that of the foreshortened boy picking up stones to shy at the all too just, stares out at me still. We found in these works remarkable interest and beauty, the reason of which was partly no doubt that we hung, to fascination, at home, over the three volumes of the hapless artist's autobiography, than a new book, which our father, indulgent to our preoccupation, had provided us with. But I blush to think the further surmise that the grand manner, the heroic and the classic in Hayden, came home to us more warmly and humanly than in the masters commended, as old, who at the national gallery seemed to meet us so little halfway, to hold out the hand of fellowship or suggest something that we could do or could at least want to. The beauty of Hayden was just that he was new, shinningly new, and if he hinted that we might perhaps in some happy future emulate his big bravery, there was nothing so impossible about it. If we adored dobbing, we preferred it fresh, and the genius of the pantheon was fresh, whereas, strange to say, Ruben's antition were not. Even the charm of the pantheon yielded, however, to that of the English collection, the Vernon bequest to the nation, that arrayed at Marlborough House, and to which the great plumed and draped and dusty funeral car of the Duke of Wellington formed an attractive adjunct. The ground floor chambers there, none of them at that time royally inhabited, had come back to me as altogether bleak and bare, and as owing their only dignity to MacLeese, Malreddy, and Lanseer, to David Wilkie and Charles Leslie. They were, by some deep-seated English mystery, the real unattainable, just as they were, nonetheless, the directly inspiring and the endlessly delightful. I could never have enough of MacLeese's play scene in Hamlet, which I supposed the finest composition in the world, though Ophelia did look a little as if cut in silhouette out of white paper and pasted on. While, as I gazed and gazed again at Leslie's Sancho Panza and his Duchess, I pushed through the great hall of romance to the central or private apartments. Trafalgar Square had its straight message for us only in the Maytime Exhibition, the Royal Academy of those days having, without a home of its own, to borrow space from the National Gallery, space partly occupied, in the summer of 1856, by the first fresh fruits of the pre-Raphaelite efflorescence, among which I distinguish Malay's Vale of Rest, his autumn leaves, and, if I am not mistaken, his prodigious blind girl. The very word pre-Raphaelite war for us that intensity of meaning, not less than of mystery, that thrills us in its perfection but for one season, the prime hour of its first initiations, and I may perhaps somewhat mix the order of our great little passages of perception. Momentus to us again was to be the Academy show of 1858, where there were, from the same wide source, still other challenges to wonder. Holman Hunt's scapegoat, most of all, which I remember finding so charged with the awful that I was glad I saw it in company. It in company, and I the same. I believed, or tried to believe, I should have feared to face it all alone in a room. By that time, moreover, I mean by 1858, we had been more fully indoctrinated, or such was the case, at least with W. J., for whom, in Paris, during the winter of 1857, instruction at the atelier of Monsieur Léon Coignet, of a limited order and adapted to whose years had been candidly provided. That Monsieur Léon Coignet, whose merrius meditating among the ruins of Carthage impressed us the more at the Luxembourg, even more haunted by us in due course than the Pantheon had been, in consequence of this family connection. Let me not, however, nip the present thread of our aesthetic evolution, without a glance at that comparatively spare, but deeply appreciated experience of the London theatric privilege which, so far as occasion favoured us, also pressed the easy spring. The New York familiarities had to drop. Going to the play presented itself in London as a serious, ponderous business, a procession of two throbbing and heaving cabs, over vast foggy tracts of the town, after much arrangement in advance, and with a renewal of far peregrination, through twisting passages and catacombs, even after crossing the magic threshold. We sat in strange places, with still stranger ones behind or beside. We felt walls and partitions in our rear, getting so hot that we wondered if the house was to burst into flame. I recall in a special our being arrayed to the number of nine persons, all of our contingent, in a sort of rustic balcony or veranda, which, simulating the outer gallery of a Swiss cottage framed in creepers, formed a feature of Mr. Albert Smith's once famous representation of the Tour of Mont Blanc. Big, bearded, rattling, chattering, mimicking Albert Smith, again charms my senses, though subject to the reflection that his type and presence, superficially so important, so ample, were somehow at odds with such ingratiations, with the reckless levity of his performance. A performance one of the great effects of which was, as I remember it, the very brief stop and re-departure of the train at Epernais, with the ringing of bells, the bawling of guards, the cries of travellers, the slamming of doors, and the tremendous pop as of a colossal champagne cork, made all simultaneous and vivid by Mr. Smith's more personal resources and graces. But it is the publicity of our situation as a happy family that I best remember and how to our embarrassment we seem to put forward in our illustrative chalet as part of the boisterous show and of what had been paid for by the house. Two other great evenings stand out for me as not less collectively enjoyed. One of these at the princesses, then under the management of Charles Keane, the unprecedented as he was held Shakespearean revivalist. The other at the Olympic, where Alfred Wigan, the extraordinary and too short-lived Robson and the shrewd and handsome Mrs. Sterling were the high attraction. Our enjoyment of Charles Keane's presentation of Henry VIII figures to me as a momentous date in our lives. We did nothing for weeks afterwards, but tried to reproduce in watercolors Queen Catherine's dream vision of the beckoning consoling angels. A radiant group let down from the skies by machinery then thought marvellous, when indeed we were not parading across our schoolroom stage as the portentous cardinal and impressively alternating his last speech to Cromwell with Buckingham's. That is with Mr. Riders, a dress on the way to the scaffold. The spectacle had seemed to us prodigious, as it was doubtless at its time the last word of costly scenic science. Though as I look back from the high ground of an age that has mastered tone and fusion, I seem to see it as comparatively garish and violent. After the manner of the complacently approved stained glass church windows of the same period, I was to have my impression of Charles Keane renewed later on. Ten years later in America, without a rag of scenic reinforcement, when I was struck with the fact that no actor so little graced by nature probably ever went so far toward repairing it by a kind of cold rage of endeavor. Were he and his wife really not coercively interesting on that Boston night of Macbeth in particular? Hadn't there art a distinction that triumphed over battered age and sorry harshness? Or was I but too easily beguiled by the old association? I have enjoyed and forgotten numberless rich hours of spectatorship, but somehow still find hooked to the wall of memory the picture of this hushed couple in the castle court with the knocking at the gate, with Macbeth's stare of pitiful horror at his unused daggers, and with the grand manner up to the height of the argument of Mrs. Keane's coldly portentous snatch of them. What I especially owe to that lady is my sense of what she had in common as a queer, hooped and hooked-nosed figure of large circumference and archaic attire, strange, tasteless, taugry, with those performers of the past who are preserved for us on the small canvases of Hogarth and Zophany. She helped one back at that time of her life to a vision of the Mrs. Sibbers and the Mrs. Pritchards, so affecting may often be such recovered links. I see the evening at the Olympic as really itself partaking of that antiquity, even though still waters run deep, then in its flourishing freshness, and as to which I remember my fine old friend Fanny Kembles mentioning to me in the distant after-time that she had directed Tom Taylor to Charles de Bernard's novel of Un Gendre, for the subject of it, passed at the moment for a highly modern social study. It is perhaps in particular, through the memory of our dismal approach to the theatre, the squalid slum of which street, then incredibly brutal and barbarous as an avenue to joy, an avenue even sometimes for the muffled coach of royalty, that the episode affects me as antidating some of the conditions of the mid-Victorian age. The general credit of which, I should add, was highly re-established for us by the consummately quiet and natural art, as we expertly pronounced it, of Alfred Wiggins, John Mildmay, and the breadth and sincerity of the representative of the rash mother-in-law whom he so imperturbably puts in her place. This was an exhibition supposed in its day to leave its spectators little to envy in the highest finish reached by the French theatre. At a remarkable height, in a different direction, moved the strange and vivid little genius of Robson, a master of fantastic intensity, unforgettable for us, we felt that night, in Plancher's extravaganza of The Discrete Princess, a Christmas production polluting to the immemorial harlequinade, I still see Robson slide across the stage in one side-long wriggle as the small black sinister Prince Richcraft of the fairy tale. Everything he did at once very dreadful and very droll, thoroughly true and yet nonetheless macabre, the great point of it all, its parody of Charles Keane in The Corsican Brothers, a vision filled out a couple of years further on by his daddy hardacre in a two-acts version of a Parisian piece thriftily and coarsely extracted from Balzac's Eugenie Grande. This occasion must have given the real and the finer measure of his highly original talent. So present to me, despite the interval, is the distinctiveness of his little concentrated rustic miser whose daughter helps herself from his money box so that her cousin and lover shall save a desperate father, her paternal uncle from bankruptcy. And the prodigious effect of Robson's appalled descent from an upper floor, his literal head-long tumble and rattle of dismay down a steep staircase occupying the center of the stage, on the discovery of the rifling of his chest. Long was I to have in my ears the repeated shriek of his alarm, followed by a panting babble of wonder and rage as his impetus hurled him, a prostrate scrap of despair. He was a tiny figure, yet so held the stage that in his company you could see nobody else, halfway across the room. I associate a little uncertainty with the same night the sight of Charles Matthews in Sheridan's Critic, and in a comedy botched from the French, like everything else in those days that was not either Sheridan or Shakespeare, called Married for Money, an example above all this association of the heaped measure of the old bills, vast and various enumerations as they were, of the size of but slightly reduced placards, and with a strange and delightfully greasy feel and redolence of painter's ink, immensely theatrical ink somehow in their big black lettering. Charles Matthews must have been then in his mid-career, and him too, wasted and aged, infinitely marked, I was to see again ever so long after in America. An impression reminding me, as I recover it, of how one took his talent so thoroughly for granted, that he seemed somehow to get but half the credit of it. This, at least in all, save parts of mere farce and patter, which were on a footing, and no very interesting one, of their own. The other effect, that of a naturalness so easy and immediate, so friendly and intimate, that one's relation with the artist lost itself in one's relation with the character, the artist thereby somehow positively suffering, while the character gained, or at least while the spectator did. This comes back to me quite as part of even more of my earlier experience, and as testing on behalf of the actor a remarkable genius, since there are no more charming artistic cases than those of the frank result, when it is frank enough, and the dissimulated process, when the dissimulation has been deep. To drop, or appear to drop, machinery, and yet keep, or at least gain, intensity, the interesting intensity, separated by a gulf from a mere unbought coincidence of aspect or organ, is really to do something. In spite of which at the same time, what I might perhaps most retain by the light of the present, of the sense of that big and rather dusky night of dreary lane, is not so much the felt degree of anyone's talent, as the fact that personality and artistry, with their intensity, could work their spell in such a material desert, in conditions intrinsically so charmless, so bleak and bare. The conditions gave nothing of what we regard today as most indispensable, since our present fine conception is but to reduce and fill in the material desert, to people and carpet and curtain it. We may be right so far as that goes, but our predecessors were, with their eye on the essence, not wrong. Thanks to which they were the crown of our now thinking man, if we do think of them, as in their way giants and heroes. What their successors were to become is another question, very much better dressed, beyond all doubt. Chapter 24 Good Robert Thompson was followed by fan, Monsieur Larambert, who was surely good too, in his different way. Good at least for feigning an interest he could scarce have rejoicingly felt, and that he yet somehow managed to give a due impression of. That artifice being as we must dimly have divined at the time. In fact, I make bold to say that I personally did divine it, exactly a sign of his finesse. Of no such uncanny engine had Mr. Thompson, luckily, known a need. Luckily, since to what arsenal could he possibly have resorted for it? None capable of supplying it could ever have met his sight, and we ourselves should at a pinch have had to help him toward it. He was easily interested, or at least took an easy view, on such ground as we offered him, of what it was to be so. Whereas his successor attached to the condition a different value, one recognizing no secondary substitute. Perhaps this is why our connection with Monsieur Larambert can have lasted but four or five months. Time even for his sharp subterfuge to have ceased entirely to serve him. Though indeed, as I say this, I vaguely recall that our separation was attended with friction. That it took him unaware, and that he had been prepared, or so represented himself, for further sacrifices. It could have been no great one, assuredly, to deal with so intensely living a young mind, as my elder brothers. It could have been but a happy impression, constantly renewed. But we two juniors, Wilkie and I, were a drag. Wilkie's powers most displayed at that time in his preference for ingenuous talk over any other pursuit whatever, and my own aptitude showing for nil, according to our poor gentleman's report of me, when a couple of months had sped, save as to rendering Lafontaine's fables into English with a certain corresponding felicity of idiom. I remember perfectly the parental communication to me of this fel judgment. I remember as well the interest with which its so quite definite character inspired me. That character had such beauty and distinctness. Yet, and ever so strangely, I recover no sense of having been crushed. And this, even though destitute, utterly of any ground for appeal. The fact leaves me at a loss, since I also remember my not having myself thought particularly well in the connection allowed of my rendering faculty. Oh, I seem inwardly to have said, if it were to be, if it only could be, really a question of rendering. And so, without confusion, though in vague, very vague, mystification to have left it, as if so many things intrinsic and extrinsic would have to change and operate, so many would have to happen, so much water have to flow under the bridge, before I could give primary application to such a thought, much more finish such a sentence. All of which is but a way of saying that we had since the beginning of the summer settled ourselves in Paris, and that Mr. Léron Baer, by what agency invoked, by what revelation vouchsafed, I quite forget, was at this time attending us in a so-called pavilion of middling size that, between the rem pointe and the rue du Collisée, hung at no great height over the avenue des Champs-Elysées. Hung, that is, from the vantage of its own considerable terrace, surmounted as the parapet of the latter was with iron railings, rising sufficiently to protect the place for familiar use and covert contemplation. We ever so fondly used it, and yet not to the point of fencing our life. A blessed little old world refuge it must have seemed to us, with its pertubrantly paved and peculiarly resonant small court and idle commune beside it, accessible by a high grill, where the jangle of the bell and the clatter of response across the stones might have figured a comprehensive echo of all old Paris. Old Paris, then, even there considerably lingered. I recapture much of its presence for that matter within our odd relic of a house, the property of an American southerner from whom our parents had briefly hired it, and who appeared to divide his time, poor unadmonished gentleman of the eve of the revolution, between Louisiana and France. What association could have breathed more from the queer graces and queer incomodities alike, from the diffused glassy polish of floor and perilous staircase, from the redundancy of mirror and clock and ormalu vase, from the irrepressibility of the white and gold panel, from that merciless elegance of tense red damask above all, which made the guilt framed backs of sofa and chair as sumptuous no doubt, but as sumptuously stiff as the brocaded walls. It was amid these refinements that we presently resumed our studies, even explicitly far from arduous at first, as the Champs-Élysées were perforced that year our summer habitation, and some deference was due to the place and the season, lessons of any sort being at best an infraction of the latter. Monsieur Lerain Baire, who was spare and tightly blackcoated spectacled, pale and prominently intellectual, who lived in the Rouge Jacob with his mother and sister, exactly as he should have done to accentuate prophetically his resemblance, save for the spectacles, to some hero Victor Cherbouliès, and who, in fine, was conscious, not unimpressively, of his authorship of a volume of meditative verse, sympathetically mentioned by the Saint Berve of the Cozaries in a review of the Young Poets of the Hour. Monsieur Lerain Baire, too, has loved. Monsieur Lerain Baire, too, has suffered. Monsieur Lerain Baire, too, has sung, or words to that effect. This subtle personality, really a high form of sensibility, I surmise, and as qualified for other and in cancer relations as any Cherbouliès figure of them all, was naturally not to be counted on to lead us gapingly forth as good Mr. Thompson had done, so that my reminiscence of warm, somniferous mornings by the windows that opened to the clattery plashy court is quite, so far as my record goes, relievingly unbroken. The afternoons, however, glimmer back to me shamelessly different, for our circle had promptly been joined by the all-knowing and all-imposing Mamazelle Danse of Orsèd, her of the so flexible, thie, and so salient smiling eyes, than which even those of Miss Rebecca Sharp, that other epic governess, were not more pleasingly green, who provided with high efficiency for our immediate, looser needs. Mine and Wilkie, and those of our small brother Bob, L'Agenieux Petit Robertson, as she was to dub him, and of our still smaller sister at least, our first fine flannery of curiosity. Her brave, vodoise predecessor had been bequeathed by us in London to a higher sphere than service with mere earnest nomads could represent, but had left us clinging and weeping, and was for a long time afterwards to write to us faithfully in the most beautiful copper-plate hand out of the midst of her rise, with details that brought home to us, as we had never known it brought, the material and institutional difference between the nomadic and the solidly the spreadingly seated. A couple of years later, on an occasion of our being again for a while in London, she hastened to call on us, and, on departing, amably invited me to walk back with her for a gossip. It was a bustling day of June, across a long stretch of the town, when I left her at a glittering portal with the impression of my having in our transit seen much of society. The old London season filled the measure, had length and breadth and thickness to an extent now foregone, and, more particularly, achieved a small psychological study, noted the action of the massive English machinery directed to its end, which had been in this case effectually to tame the presumptuous and work-over, the crude. I remember on that occasion retracing my steps from Eaton Square to Devonshire Street, with the lively sense of observation exercised by the way, a perfect gleaning of golden straws. Our guide and philosopher of the summer days in Paris was no such character as that. She had arrived among us full-fledged and consummate, fortunately for the case altogether, as our mere candid humanity would otherwise have had scant practical pressure to bring. Thackeray's novel contains a plate from his own expressive hand, representing Miss Sharp, lost in a cynical daydream while her neglected pupils are locked in a scrimmage on the floor. But the marvel of our exemplar of the Becky type was exactly that, though her larger, her more interested and sophisticated views had a range that she not only permitted us to guess, but agreeably invited us to follow almost to their furthest limits. We never for a moment ceased to be aware of her solicitude. We might, we must, so tremendously have bored her, but no ironic artist could have caught her at any juncture in the posture of disgust. Really, I imagine, because her own ironies would have been too fine for him and too numerous and too mixed. And this remarkable creature vouchsafed us all information for the free enjoyment, on the terms proper to our tender years, of her beautiful city. It was not by the common measure then so beautiful as now. The Second Empire, too lately installed, was still more or less feeling its way, with the great free hand soon to be allowed to bear on housemen, marked as yet, but in the light, preliminary flourish. Its connections with the past, however, still hung thickly on. Its majesties and symmetries, comparatively vague in general, were subject to the happy accident, the charming lapse and the odd extrusion, a bonomy of chance, composition, and colour now quite purged away. The whole region of the Champs Elysees, where we must, after all, at first have principally prowled, was another world from the actual huge centre of repeated radiations. The splendid avenue, as we, of course, already thought it, carried the eye from the tuerie to the ark, but pleasant old places abutted on it by the way, gardens and terraces and hotels of another time, pavilions still braver than ours, cabarets and cafés of homely, almost of rural type, with a relative and doubtless, rather dusty ruralism, spreading away to the river and the wood. What was the Jardin d'Hiver, a place of entertainment standing quite over against us, and that looped itself at night with little coloured oil lamps, a mere twinkling grin upon the face of pleasure? Dim my impression of having been admitted, or rather I suppose conducted, though under conductorship now vague to me, to view it by colourless day, when it must have worn the stamp of an auction room quite void of the lots. More distinct, on the other hand, the image of the bustling barrier at the top of the avenue, on the hither side of the ark, where the old loose-skirt banlieu began at once and the two matched lodges of the octois, highly, that is expressly, even if humbly, architectural, guarded the entrance, on either side, with such a suggestion of the generations and dynasties and armies, the revolutions and restorations they had seen come and go. But the avenue of the empress, now so much more thinly, but of the wood itself, had already been traced, as the empress herself, young, more than young, attestedly and agreeably new, and fair and shining, was, up and down the vista, constantly on exhibition. With the thrill of that surpassed us, however, by the incomparable passage, as we judged it, of the baby Prince Imperial, born forth for his airing, or his progress to Sanklu, in the splendid coach that gave a glimpse of appointed and costumed nursing breasts and laps, and beside which the Sankgaard, all light blue and silver and intensely erect, quick jolt, rattled with pistols raised and cocked, was a public holiday evermore splendid than that of the Prince's baptism at Notre Dame, the Fet of Saint-Napoleon, or was any ever more immortalized, as we say, than this one was, by the wonderfully ample and vivid picture of it, in the Eugène Rougeant of Émile Zola, who must have taken it in, on the spot, as a boy of about our own number of years, though of so much more implanted and predestined and evocatory gift. The sense of that interminable hot day, a day of hanging about and waiting and shuffling in dust, in crowds, in fatigue, amid booths and peddlers, and performers and false alarms, and expectations and renewed reactions and rushes, all transfigured at the last, with all, by the biggest and brightest illumination up to that time offered even the Parisians, the blinding glare of the new empire effectually symbolized. The vision of the whole, I say, comes back to me quite in the form of a chapter from the Rougeant Maquois, with its effect of something long and dense and heavy, without shades or undertones, but immensely kept up and done. I dare say that for those months, our contemplations, our daily exercise in general, strayed little beyond the Champs Elysées, though I recall confusedly as well certain excursions to Passee and Auteuil, where we foregathered with small resident compatriots the easy gutturalism of whose French and unpremeditated art was a revelation and initiation. And whence we roamed, for purposes of picnic, into parts of the Bois-de-Blanc line, that, oddly enough, figured to us the Virgin Forest better than anything at our own American door had done. It was the social aspect of our situation that most appealed to me, nonetheless, for I detect myself as I woo it all back, disengaging a social aspect again, and more than ever from the phenomena disclosed to my reflective gape, or to otherwise associated strolls. Perceptive passages, not wholly independent even of the occupancy of two Sioux chairs within the charmed circle of Guignol and of Grignalais. I suppose I should have blushed to confess it, but Paulichinelle and his puppets, in the afternoons, under an umbrage sparse till evening fell, had still their spell to cast, as part and parcel, that is, of the general intensity of animation and variety of feature. The amusement, the aesthetic and human appeal of Paris had in those days less the air of a great shining conspiracy to please, the machinery in movement confessed less to its huge purpose. But manners and types and traditions, the detail of the scene, its pointed particulars, went their way with a straighter effect, as well as often with a homelier grace. Character, temper and tone had lost comparatively little of their emphasis. These scattered accents were matter for our eyes and ears. Not little even already for our respective imaginations. Though it is only as the season waned and we set up our fireside afresh and for the winter, that I connect any small revolution with a wider field and with the company of W.J. Again for that summer he was to be an eclipse to me. Guignol and Grignalais failed to claim his attention, and Mabzoud Danse, I make out, deprecated his theory of exact knowledge, besides thinking him perhaps a little of an urx, which came to the same thing. We adjourned that autumn to quarters not far off, a wide-faced apartment in the street then bravely known as the Rue d'Angoulême Saint-Honoré, and now after other mutations as the Rue la Boéti, which we were again to exchange a year later for an abode in the Rue Montagne. This last after a summer's absence at Boulang-sur-Mer, the earlier migration, setting up for me the frame of a considerably animated picture. Animated at best it was with the spirit and the modest facts of our family life, among which I number the cold finality of Monsieur l'Armberre, reflected in still other testimonies. That is till the date of our definite but respectful rupture with him, followed as the spring came on by our ineluctable phase at the institution Faison-dier in the Rue Bazac, of which later there will be even more to say than I shall take freedom for. With the Rue d'Angoulême came extensions, even the mere immediate view of opposite intimacies and industries, the subdivided aspects and neat ingenuities of the applied Parisian genius counting as such. Our many-windowed premier, above an entre sol of no great height, hung over the narrow, and, during the winter months, not a little dusky channel, with endless movement and interest in the vivid exhibition it supplied. What faced us was a series of subjects, with the baker at the corner for the first, the impeccable dispenser of the so softly crusty crescent rolls that we woke up each morning to hunger for a fresh, with our weak café au lait, as for the one form of European breakfast bread fit to be named even with the feeblest of our American forms. Then came the small cremerie, white picked out with blue, which by some secret of its own keeping afforded within the compass of a few feet square, prolonged savoury meals to working men, white frocked or blue frocked, to uniformed cabmen, stout or spare, but all more or less audibly bavard and discernibly critical, and next the compact embrasure of the or oyster lady, she and her paraphernalia fitted into their interstice, much as the mollusk itself into its shell. Neighbored in turn by the Marchand de Bois, peeping from as narrow a cage, his neat faggots and chopped logs stacked beside him and above him in his sentry box, quite as the niches of saints in early Italian pictures are framed with tightly packed fruits and flowers. Space and remembrance fail me for the rest of the series, the attaching note of which comes back as the note of diffused sociability and domestic, in fact more or less aesthetic ingenuity, with the street a perpetual parlor or household centre for the flitting, pausing, conversing little bourgeois or ouvrière, to sport, on every pretext and in every errand, her fluted cap, her composed head, her neat ankles, and her ready wit. Which is to say indeed, but that life and manners were more pointedly and harmoniously expressed, under our noses there, than we had perhaps found them anywhere, save in the most salient passages of stories, though I must in spite of it, not write as if these trifles were all our fare. End of Chapter 24 Chapter 25 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 25. That autumn renewed I make out, our long and beguiled walks, my own with W.J. in a special, at the same time that I have somehow the sense of the whole more broken appeal on the part of Paris, the scantor confidence and ease it inspired in us, the perhaps more numerous and composite, but obscure and more baffled intimations. Not indeed, for all my brother's later vision of an accepted flatness in it, that there was not some joy and some grasp. Why else were we forever, as I seem to conceive we were, measuring the great space that separated us from the gallery of the Luxembourg, every step of which, either way we took it, fed us with some interesting, some admirable image, kept us in relation to something nobly intended. That particular walk was not prescribed us, yet we appear to have hugged it across the Champs Elysees to the river and so over the nearest bridge and the keys of the left bank to the Rue de Sain, as if it somehow held the secret of our future, to the extent even of my more or less sneaking off on occasion to take it by myself, to taste of it with the due undiverted intensity and the throb as of the finest, which could only mean the most Parisian adventure. The further keys, with their innumerable old bookshops and print shops, the long cases of each of these commodities, exposed on the parapets in a special, must have come to know us almost as well as we knew them. With plot thickening and motion deepening steadily, however, as we mounted the long black Rue de Sain, such a stretch of perspective, such an intensity of tone as it offered in those days, where every low-browed vitrine way-laid us and we moved in a world of which the dark message, expressed in we couldn't have said what sinister way, too, might have been, art, art, art, don't you see? Learn, little gaping pilgrims, what that is. Oh, we learned! That is, we tried to, as hard as ever we could, and were fairly well at it, I always felt, even by the time we had passed up into that comparatively short, but wider and finer vista of the Rue du Tunnel, which in those days more abruptly crowned the more compressed approach and served in a manner as a great outer vestibule to the palace. Style, dimly described, looked down there, as with conscious encouragement, from the high gray-headed, clear-faced, straight-standing old houses. Very much as if wishing to say, Yes, small, staring, junaam, we are dignity and memory and measure. We are conscience and proportion and taste, not to mention strong sense, too, for all of which good things take us. You won't find one of them when you find, as you're going soon to begin to, at such a rate, vulgarity. This, I admit, was an abundance of remark to such young ears. But it did all I maintain, tremble in the air, with the sense that the Rue du Tunnel, cobbled and a little grass-grown, might more or less have figured some fine old street de province. I cherished, in short, its very name, and think I really hadn't to wait to prefer the then, the unmenaced, the inviolate Café Foyot of the left-hand corner, the much-loved and so haunted Café Foyot of the old Paris, to its, well, to its roaring successor. The wide mouth of the present Boulevard Saint Michel, a short way round the corner, had not yet been forced open to the exhibition of more or less glittering fangs. Old Paris still pressed round the palace and its gardens, which formed the right, the sober social antithesis, to the elegant Tuileries, and which, in fine with these renewals of our young confidence, reinforced, both in a general and in a particular way, one of the fondest of our literary curiosities of that time, the conscientious study of Le Francais Paix-U-Mem, rich in woodcuts of Gavarni, of Granville, of Henri Monnier, which we held it rather our duty to admire, and W. J., even a little his opportunity to copy, in pen and ink. This guilt-edged and double-column doctavo it was, that first disclosed to me, forestalling a better ground of acquaintance, the great name of Balzac, who, in common with every other light writer of his day, contributed to its pages. Hadn't I poured over his exposition there, of the contrasted types of Labitué de Tuileries, and Labitué du Luxembourg, finding it very saré, in fact, what I didn't then know enough to call very stodgy, but flavored with all, and a trifle lubricated by Gavarni's two drawings, which had somehow so much, in general, to say. Let me not, however, dally by the way, when nothing, at those hours I make out, so much spoke to us as the animated pictured halls within the palace, primarily those of the Senate of the Empire, but then also forming, as with extensions they still and much more copiously form, the great Paris Museum of Contemporary Art. This array was at that stage comparatively, though only comparatively, small affair, in spite of which fact, we supposed it vast and final, so that it would have shocked us to foreknow how, in many a case, and of the most cherished cases, the finality was to break down. Most of the works of the modern schools that we most admired are begging their bread, I fear, from door to door, that is, from one provincial museum or dim back seat to another, though we were on much subsequent returns to draw a long breath for the saved state of some of the great things, as to which our faith had been clearest. It had been clearer for none I recover than for couture's romaine de la décadence, recently acclaimed at that time as the last word of the grand manner, but of the grand manner modernized, humanized, philosophized, redeemed from academic death, so that it was to this master's school that the young American Contemporary Flutter taught its wings to fly straightest, and that I could never, in the long after-time, face his masterpiece and all its old meanings and marvels without a rush of memories, and a stir of ghosts. William Hunt, the New Englander of Genius, the Boston painter, whose authority was greatest during the thirty years from 1857 or so, and with whom, for a time in the early period, W.J. was to work all devotedly, had prolonged his studies in Paris under the inspiration of couture and of Edouard Frère, master's in a group completed by three or four of the so finely interesting landscapes of that and the directly previous age, Troyin, Rousseau, Dobigny, even Lombine and others, and which summed up for the American collector and in the New York and Boston markets, the idea of the modern in the masterly. It was a comfortable time, when appreciation could go so straight, could rise and rise higher without critical contortions, when we could, I mean, be both so intelligent and so quiet. We were in our immediate circle to know couture himself a little toward the end of his life, and I was somewhat to wonder, then, where he had picked up the aesthetic hint for the beautiful page with the falcon. If I have the designation right, his other great bid for style and capture of it, which we were long to continue to suppose, perhaps the rarest of all modern pictures. The feasting Romans were conceivable enough, I mean, as a conception. No mystery hung about them, in the sense of ones asking oneself whence they had come, and by what romantic or roundabout or nobly dangerous journey, which is the air of the poetic, shaken out as from strong wings when great presences in any one of the arts appear to a light. What I remember, on the other hand, of the splendid fair youth in black velvet and satin or whatever who, while he mounts the marble staircase, shows off the great bird on his forefinger with a grace that shows him off, was that it failed to help us to divine during that afterlapse of the glory of which I speak, by what rare chance, for the obscured old ex-celebrity we visited, the heavens had once opened. Poetry had swooped down, breathed on him for an hour, and fled. Such at any rate are the seesaws of reputations, which it contributes to the interest of any observational lingering on this planet to have caught so repeatedly in their weird motion. The question of what may happen under one's eyes in particular cases before that motion sinks to rest, whether at the up or at the down end, being really a bribe to one's own non-departure. Especially great the interest of having noted all the rises and falls, and of being able to compare the final point, so far as any certainty may go as to that, either with the greatest or the least previous altitudes. Since it is only when there have been exaltations, which is what is not commonest, that our attention is most rewarded. If the seesaw was to have operated, indeed, for Eugene de la Croix, our next young admiration, though much more intelligently my brothers than mine, that had already taken place and settled, for we were to go on seeing him, and to the end, in firm possession of his crown, and to take even, I think, a harmless pleasure in our sense of having from so far back been sure of it. I was sure of it, I must properly add, but as an effect of my brother's sureness, since I must, by what I remember, have been as sure of Paul de la Roche, for whom the pendulum was at last to be arrested at a very different point. I could see in a manner for all the queerness what W.J. meant by that beauty, and above all that living interest in La Barque du Dante, where the queerness, according to him, was perhaps what contributed most, see it doubtless in particular when he reproduced the work at home, from a memory aided by a lithograph. Yet Les Enfants d'Edouard thrilled me to a different tune, and I couldn't doubt that the long-drawn odd face of the elder prince, sad and sore and sick, with his wide crimped side locks of fair hair, and his violet legs, marked by the garter and dangling from the bed, was a reconstitution of far-off history of the subtlest and most, last word, modern or psychological kind. I had never heard of psychology and art or anywhere else, scarcely anyone then had, but I truly felt the nameless force at play. Thus, if I also in my way subtly admired one's noted practice of that virtue, mainly regarded, indeed I judge as a vice, would appear to have at that time I refer to sat in, under such encouragements, once for all, and I can surely have enjoyed up to then no formal exhibition of anything as I at one of those seasons enjoyed the commemorative show of Delaroche given soon after his death in one of the rather bleak cell of the École des Boas, to which access was had from the key. There was reconstituted history of one would, in the straw-littered scaffold, the distracted ladies with three-cornered quaffs, and those immense hanging sleeves that make them look as if they had bath towels over their arms. In the block, the headsmen, the bandaged eyes and groping hands of Lady Jane Gray, not less than in the noble indifference of Charles I, compromised king but perfect gentleman, at his inscrutable ease in his chair, and as if on his throne, while the Puritan soul joys in salt and badger him. The thrill of which was all the greater from its pertaining to that English lore, which the good Robert Thompson had, to my response of delight, rubbed into us more than anything else, and all from a fine old conservative and monarchical point of view. Yet of these things W. J. attempted no reproduction, though I remember his repeatedly laying his hands on Delacroix, whom he found always and everywhere interesting, to the point of trying effects with charcoal and crayon in his manner, and not less in the manner of Descampes, whom we regarded as more or less of a genius of the same rare family. They were touched with the ineffable, the inscrutable, and Delacroix in his special with the incalculable. Categories these towards which we had even then by happy transition begun to yearn and languish. We were not yet aware of style, though on the way to become so, but were aware of mystery, which indeed was one of its forms. While we saw all the others without exception, exhibited at the Louvre, where at first they simply overwhelmed and bewildered me. It was as if they had gathered there into a vast deafening chorus. I shall never forget how, speaking that is for my own sense, they filled those vast halls with the influence rather of some complicated sound, diffused and reverberant, than of such visibilities as one could directly deal with. To distinguish among these, in the charged and colored and confounding air, was difficult. It discouraged and defied, which was doubtless why my impression originally best entertained, was that of those magnificent parts of the Great Gallery, simply not inviting us to distinguish. They only arched over us in the wonder of their endless golden riot and relief, figured and flourished in perpetual revolution, breaking into great high hung circles and symmetries of squandered picture, opening into deep outward embrasures that threw off the rest of monumental Paris somehow as a told story, a sort of wrought effect or bold ambiguity for a vista, and yet held it there at every point as a vast bright gauge, even at moments of felt adventure of experience. This comes to saying that in those beginnings I felt myself most happily cross that bridge over to style, constituted by the wondrous Galerie d'Apollant, drawn out for me as a long but assured initiation, and seeming to form with its supreme coved ceiling and inordinately shining parquet, a prodigious tube or tunnel, through which I inhaled little by little, that is, again and again a general sense of glory. The glory meant ever so many things at once, not only beauty and art and supreme design, but history and fame and power, the world in fine, raised to the richest and noblest expression. The world there was at the same time by an odd extension or intensification, the local present fact to my small imagination of the Second Empire, which was, for my notified consciousness, new and queer and perhaps even wrong, but on the spot so amply radiant and elegant that it took to itself, took under its protection with a splendour of insolence the state and ancientry of the whole scene, profiting thus to one's dim historic vision, confusedly though it might be, by the unparalleled luxury and variety of its heritage. But who shall count the sources at which an intense young fancy, when a young fancy is intense, capriciously absurdly drinks, so that the effect is, in twenty connections, that of a love-filter or a fear-filter, which fixes for the senses their supreme symbol of the fair or the strange. The gallery d'Apollon became, for years, what I can only term a splendid scene of things, even of the quite irrelevant or as might be, almost unworthy. And I recall to this hour with the last vividness what a precious part it played for me, and exactly by that continuity of honour, on my awaking, in a summer dawn many years later, to the fortunate, the instantaneous recovery and capture of the most appalling, yet most admirable, nightmare of my life. The climax of this extraordinary experience, which stands alone for me as a dream adventure founded in the deepest, quickest, clearest act of cogitation and comparison, act indeed of life-saving energy as well as in unutterable fear, was the sudden pursuit through an open door along a huge high saloon of a just dimly-described figure that retreated in terror before my Russian dash, a glare of inspired reaction from irresistible but shameful dread. Out of the room I had a moment before being desperately, and all the more abjectly, defending by the push of my shoulder against hard pressure on lock and bar from the other side. The lucidity, not to say the sublimity, of the crisis had consisted of the great thought that I, in my appalled state, was probably still more appalling than the awful agent, creature or presence, whatever he was, whom I had guessed in the suddenest wild start from sleep, the sleep within my sleep, to be making for my place of rest. The triumph of my impulse, perceived in a flash as I acted on it by myself at a bound, forcing the door outward, was the grand thing, but the great point of the whole was the wonder of my final recognition. Routed, dismayed, the tables turned upon him by my so surpassing him for straight aggression and dire intention. My visitant was already but a diminished spot in the long perspective. The tremendous, glorious hall, as I say, over the far-gleaming floor of which, cleared for the occasion of its great line of priceless vitrine down the middle, he sped for his life, while a great storm of thunder and lightning played through the deep embrasures of high windows at the right. The lightning that revealed the retreat revealed also the wondrous place, and by the same amazing play, my young imaginative life in it of long before, the sense of which, deep within me, had kept it whole, preserved it to this thrilling use. For what in the world were the deeper embrasures and the so polished floor but those of the gallantly dapple loam of my childhood? The scene of something I had vaguely then felt it. Well, I might, since it was to be the scene of that immense hallucination. Of what, at the same time in those years, were the great rooms of the Louvre almost equally above and below, not the scene from the moment they so wrought, stage by stage upon our perceptions, literally on almost all of these in one way and another. Quite in such a manner, I more and more see, as to have been educative, formative, fertilizing, in a degree which no other intellectual experience our youth was to know could pretend as a comprehensive conducive thing to rival. The sharp and strange, the quite heart-shaking little prevision, had come to me, for myself, I make out, on the occasion of our very first visit of all, my brothers and mine, under the conduct of the good Jean Nadelle, before mentioned, trustfully deputed by our parents, in the Rue de la Paix, on the morrow of our first arrival in Paris, July 1855, and while they were otherwise concerned. I hang again, appalled, but uplifted, on brave Nadelle's arm. His professional acquaintance with the splendors about us added for me on the spot to the charm of his European character. I cling to him while I gape at Jerry Coe's Rado de la Meduse, the sensation, for splendor and terror of interest, of that juncture to me, and ever afterwards to be associated, along with two or three other more or less contemporary products. Guerin's Burial of Attala, Proudhon's Cupid and Psyche, David's Helmeted Romanisms, Madame Vigée Le Brun's ravishing portrait of herself and her little girl, with, how can I say, what foretaste, as determined by that instant as if the hour had struck from a clock, of all the fun, confusedly speaking, that one was going to have, and the kind of life, always of the queer so-called inward sort, tremendously sporting in its way, though that description didn't bend weight upon it, that one was going to lead. It came of itself this almost awful apprehension in all the presences under our courier's protection and in my brother's company. It came just there and so. There was alarm in it somehow, as well as bliss. The bliss, in fact, I think scarce disengaged itself at all, but only the sense of a freedom of contact and appreciation really too big for one, and leaving such a mark on the very place, the pictures, the frames themselves, the figures within them, the particular parts and features of each, the look of the rich light, the smell of the massively enclosed air, that I have never since renewed the old exposure without renewing again the old emotion and taking up the small, scared consciousness. That, with so many of the conditions repeated, is the charm, to feel afresh the beginning of so much that was to be. The beginning, in short, was with Jericho and David, but it went on and on and slowly spread, so that one's stretched, one's even strained perceptions, one's discoveries and extensions piece by piece come back on the great premises, almost as so many explorations of the house of life, so many circlings and hoverings round the image of the world. I have dim reminiscences of permitted independent visits, uncorrectedly juvenile though I might still be, during which the house of life and the palace of art became so mixed and interchangeable, the Louvre being under a general description, the most people of all scenes, not less than the most hushed of all temples, that an excursion to look at pictures would have but half expressed my afternoon. I had looked at pictures, looked and looked again at the vast Veronaise, at Mario's moon-born Madonna, at Leonardo's almost unholy dame with the folded hands, treasures of the salon carer as that display was then composed, but I had also looked at France and looked at Europe, looked even at America as Europe itself might be conceived so to look, looked at history as a still-felt past and a complacently personal future, at society, manners, types, characters, possibilities and prodigies and mysteries of fifty sorts, and all in the light of being splendidly on my own, as I supposed it, though we hadn't then that perfection of slang and of, in a special, coming and going along with that interminable and incomparable sen side front of the palace against which young sensibility felt itself almost rubbed for endurement and consecration as a cat invokes the friction of a protective piece of furniture. Such were, at any rate, some of the vague processes. I see for how utterly vague they must show of picking up an education, and I was, in spite of the vagueness, so far from agreeing with my brother afterwards, that we didn't pick one up and that that never is done in any sense not negligible, and also that an education might or should in particular have picked us up and yet didn't. I was so far dissentient, I say, that I think I quite came to glorify such passages and see them as part of an order really fortunate. If we had been little asses, I seem to have reasoned, a higher intention driving us wouldn't have made us less so, to any point worth mentioning, and as we extracted such impressions, to put it at the worst from redemptive accidents, to call louvres and loops and bogs nothing better, why we weren't lasses but something wholly other, which appeared all I needed to contend for. Above all it would have been stupid and ignoble, and attested and lasting dishonor not with our chance to have followed our struggling clues as many as we could and disengaging as we happily did, I felt the gold and silver ones, whatever the others might have been, not to have followed them and not to have arrived by them, so far as we were to arrive. Instinctively, for any dim designs we might have nourished, we picked out the silver and the gold, attenuated threads though they must have been, and I positively feel that there were more of these, far more, casually interwoven, than will reward any present patience for my unraveling of the two fine tissue. Small Boy and Others by Henry James Chapter 26 I allude, of course, in particular here to the aesthetic clue in general, with which it was that we most, or that I at any rate most, fumbled, without our in the least having then, as I have already noted, any such rare name for it. There were sides on which it fairly dangled about us, involving our small steps and wits, though others too where I could, for my own part, but clutch at it in the void. Our experience of the theatre, for instance, which had played such a part for us at home, almost wholly dropped in just the most propitious air. An anomaly indeed half explained by the fact that life in general, all round us, was perceptively more theatrical. And there were other reasons, whether definitely set before us or not, which we grasped in proportion as we gathered by depressing hearsay, that the French drama, great, strange, and important, was as much out of relation to our time of life, our so little native strain, and our cultivated innocence, as the American and English had been directly addressed to them. To the cirque d'été, the cirque d'hiver, the théâtre du cirque, we were on occasion conducted. We had fallen so to the level of circuses, and that name appeared a safety, in addition to which the big theatre most bravely bearing it, the special home at that time of the glittering and multitudinous ferrie, did seem to lift the whole scenic possibility for our eyes into a higher sphere of light and grace than any previously disclosed. I recall le diable d'argent, as in particular a radiant revelation, kept before us a whole long evening, and as an almost blinding glare, which was quite right for the donnae, the gradual shrinkage of the shining one, the money monster hugely inflated at first, to all the successive degrees of loose bagginess, as he leads the reckless young man he has originally contracted with, from dazzling pleasure to pleasure, till at last he is a mere shriveled silver string, such as you could almost draw through a keyhole. That was the striking moral, for the young man, however regaled, had been somehow sold, which we hadn't in the least been, who had had all his pleasures, and none of his penalty, whatever this was to be. I was to repine a little, in these connections, at a much later time, on reflecting that had we only been taken, in the Paris of that period, as we had been taken in New York, we might have come in for celebrities, supremely fine, perhaps supremely rank, flowers of the histrionic temperament, springing as they did from the soil of the richest romanticism, and adding to its richness, who practiced that braver art and finer finish, which a comparatively homogenous public, forming a compact critical body, still left possible. Rachelle was alive but dying, the memory of Mademoiselle Marre, at her latest, was still in the air. Mademoiselle Georges, a massive, a monstrous antique, had with all returned for a season to the stage. But we missed her, as we missed Déjà Zé, and Frédéric Lemaître, and Mélange, and Samson, to say nothing of others of the age before the flood, taking for the flood that actual high tide of the outer barbarian presence, the general alien and polyglot, in stalls and boxes, which I remember to have heard Gustave Flaubert lament as the ruin of the theatre, through the assumption of judgeship by a bench, to whom the very values of the speech of author and actor were virtually closed, or at the best uncertain. I enjoyed but two snatches of the older representational art, no particular of either of which, however, has faded from me. The earlier and rarer of these, and evening at the gymnase, for a spectacle coupé, with Madame Roschérie, Mélanie, de la porte, and Victoria, afterwards Victoria Lafontaine, I squeeze again with my mother, my aunt, and my brother into the stuffy bennoir, and I take to my memory in a special, Madame de Giardins, une femme qui déteste son mari, the thrilling story, as I judged it, of an admirable lady, who, to save her loyalist husband during the revolution, feigns the most Jacobin opinions, represents herself a citoyen of citoyen, in order to keep him the more safely concealed in her house. He flattens himself to almost greater peril of life, behind a panel of the wane-skut, which he has a secret for opening, when he requires air and food, and they may for a fearful fleeting instant be alone together. And the point of the picture is in the contrast between these melting moments, and the heroine's tenue, under the tremendous strain of receiving on the one side the invading investigating terrorist commissaries, sharply suspicious but successfully baffled, and on the other her noble relatives, her husband's mother and sister, if I rightly remember, who are not in the secret, and whom for perfect prudence she keeps out of it, though alone with her, and themselves in hourly danger. They might be trusted, and who, believing him concealed elsewhere, and terribly tracked, treat her in her republican rage as lost to all honour and all duty. One sense of such things, after so long a time, has of course scant authority for others. But I myself trust my vision of Rose Cherie's fine play, just as I trust that of her physique angra, her at first extremely odd and positively osseous appearance, an emaciated woman with a high bulging forehead, somewhat of the form of Rachelle's, for whom the triumphs of produced illusion, as in the second, third, and fourth great dramas of the younger Dumas, had to be triumphs indeed. My one other reminiscence of this order connects itself, and quite three years later, with the old dingy vaudeville of the Place de la Bourse, where I saw, in my brother's company, a rhymed domestic drama of the then still admired Ponsard, ce qui plaît aux femmes, a piece that enjoyed, I believe, scant success, but that was, to leave with me, ineffacable images. How was it possible, I wondered, to have more grace and talent, a rarer, cooler art, than Mabza Farjeu, the heroine, the fine lady, whom a pair of rival lovers, seeking to win her hand by offering her what will most please her, treat, in the one case, to a brilliant fate, a little play within a play at which we assist, and in the other, to the inside view of an attic of misery, into which the more cunning suitor introduces her just in time to save a poor girl, the tenant of the Place, from being ruinously, that is successfully, tempted by a terrible old woman, a prowling revendeuse, who dangles before her the condition on which so pretty a person may enjoy every comfort. Her happier sister, the courted young widow, intervenes in time, reinforces her tottering virtue, opens for her an account with baker and butcher, and doubting no longer which flame is to be crowned, charmingly shows us, that what pleases women most is the exercise of charity. Then it was, I first beheld, that extraordinary veteran of the stage, Mabza Pearson, almost immemorally attached, for later generations, to the Taillard-Français, the span of whose career thus strikes me as fabulous, though she figured as a very juvenile beauty, in the small féerie, or allegory, forming Monsieur Pançard's second act. She has been playing mothers and aunts this many and many a year, and still indeed much as a juvenile beauty. Not that light circumstance, however, pleads for commemoration, nor yet the further fact, that I was to admire Mabza-Français in the after-time, the time after she had given all Sardou's earlier successes the help of her shining firmness, when she had passed from interesting comedy, and even from romantic drama, not less, perhaps still more interesting, with Sardou's patrie as a bridge, to the use of the bigger brush of the ambigu and other homes of melodrama. The sense, such as it is, that I extract from the pair of modest memories in question, is rather their value as a glimpse of the old order that spoke so much less of our hundred modern material resources, matters the stage of today appears mainly to live by, and such volumes more of the one thing that was then, and that, given various other things, had to be of the essence. That one thing was the quality to say nothing of the quantity of the actor's personal resource, technical history, tested temper, proved experience, on which almost everything had to depend, and the thought of which makes the mere starved scene and medium of the period, the rest of the picture, a more confessed and more heroic battleground. They have been more and more eased off the scene and medium for our couple of generations, so much so, in fact, that the rest of the picture has become almost all the picture. The author and the producer among us lift the weight of the play from the performer, particularly of the play dealing with our immediate life and manners and aspects. After a fashion which does half the work, thus reducing the personal equation, the demand for the maximum of individual doing, to a contribution mostly of the loosest and sparest, as a sop to historic curiosity at all events, may even so short an impression serve. Impression of the strenuous age and its fine old masterful, a suplice monk, of its victims, who were not the expert spectators. The spectators were so expert, so broken in to material suffering for the sake of their passion, that, as the suffering was only material, they found the aesthetic reward, the critical relish of the essence, all adequate. A fact that seems in a sort to point a moral of large application. Everything but the interpretation, the personal, in the French theatre of those days, had kinds and degrees of weakness and futility, say even falsity, of which our modern habit is wholly impatient, let alone other conditions still that were detestable even at the time, and some of which, forms of discomfort and annoyance, linger on to this day. The playhouse, in short, was almost a place of physical torture, and it is still rarely in Paris a place of physical ease. Add to this the old thinness of the school of Screba, and the old emptiness of the Thousand de Vaudville East, which part of the exhibition, till modern comedy began, under the younger Dumas and Auger, had for its counterpart but the terrible dead weight, or at least the prodigious prolixity and absurdity, of much, not to say of most, of the romantic and melodramatic output. It paid, apparently, in the golden age of acting, to sit through interminable evenings in impossible places, since to assume that the age was, in that particular respect, golden, for which we have, in fact, a good deal of evidence, alone explains the patience of the public. With the public the actors were, according to their seasoned strength, almost exclusively appointed to deal, just as in the conditions most familiar today to ourselves, this charge is laid on almost everyone concerned in the case, save the representatives of the parts. And far more other people are now concerned than of old, not least those who have learned to make the playhouse indurable. All of which leaves us with this interesting vision of a possibly great truth, the truth that you can't have more than one kind of intensity, intensity worthy of the name, at once. The intensity of the golden age of the history on was the intensity of his good faith. The intensity of our period is that of the producers and machinists, to which add even that of architect, author, and critic. Between which derivative kind of that article, as we may call it, and the other, the immediate kind, it would appear that you have absolutely to choose, end of Chapter 26, Chapter 27 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 27. I see much of the rest of that particular Paris time, in the light of the Institucion Physandier, and I see the Institucion Physandier, Rubazac, in the light, if not quite of Alphonse Daudet's Lean Asylum for the Petit Pays Show, of which I have felt the previous institutions of New York sketchily remind me, at least in that of certain other of his studies in that field of the precarious, the ambiguous Paris, over parts of which the great arch at the top of the Champs Elysees flings at its hours by its wide protective plausible shadow, a precious mantle of tone. They gather these checkered parts into its vast paternal presence and enjoy at its expense a degree of reflected dignity. It was to the big square villa of the Rubazac that we turned, as pupils not unacquainted with vicissitudes, from a swine-swept bear of M. Larambert, an establishment that strikes me, at this distance of time, as of the oddest and most indescribable, or as describable at best in some of the finer turns and touches of Daudet's best method. The picture indeed should not be invidious. It so little needs that I feel for its due measure of the vivid, the queer, the droll, all coming back to me without prejudice to its air as of an equally futile felicity. I see it as bright and loose and vague, as confused and embarrassed and helpless. I see it, I fear, as quite ridiculous, but as wholly harmless to my brothers and me, at least, and as having left us with a fund of human impressions. It played before us such a variety of figure and character, and so relieved us of a sense of untoward discipline or of the pursuit of abstract knowledge. It was a recreational, or at least a social, rather than a tuitional house, which fact had, I really believed, weighed favourably with our parents, when, bereft of M. Larambert, they asked themselves, with their considerable practice, how next to bestow us. Our father, like so many free spirits of that time in New York and Boston, had been much interested in the writings of Charles Fourier, and in his scheme of the Philantery, as the solution of human troubles, and it comes to me that he must have met, or in other words, heard of, M. Fezzandier, as an active and sympathetic ex-Fulgeist. I think there were only ex-Fulgeists by that time, who was embarking, not far from us, on an experiment if not absolutely Philansteric, at least inspired, or at any rate enriched, by a bold idealism. I like to think of the institution as all but Philansteric. It's so correct, any fear that such places might be dreary. I recall this one as positively gay, bristling and bustling and resonant, untouched by the strenuous note, for instance, of Hawthorne's co-operative Blithedale. I like to think that, in its then still almost suburban, its pleasantly heterogeneous quarter, now oppressively uniform, it was close to where Balzac had ended his life. Though I question its identity, as for a while I tried not to, with the scene itself of The Great Man's Catastrophe. Round its high-walled garden at all events, he would have come and gone, a throb of inference that had for some years indeed to be postponed for me, though an association displacing today over the whole spot every other interest. I in any case can't pretend not to have been most appealed to by that special phase of our education, from which the pedagogic process as commonly understood was most fantastically absent. It excelled in this respect, the Fezondier phase, even others exceptionally appointed heaven knows for the supremacy, and yet its glory is that it was no poor blank, but that it fairly creaked and groaned, heatedly overflowed with its wealth. We were externe, the three of us, but we remained in general to luncheon, coming home then, late in the afternoon, with an almost sore experience of multiplicity and vivacity of contact. For the beauty of it all was that the institution was, speaking technically, not more a pensioner with prevailingly English and American pupils than a pension with mature beneficiaries of both sexes, and that our two categories were shaken up together to the liveliest effect. This had been Mr. Fezondier's grand conception. A son of the South, bald and slightly replete, with a delicate beard, a quick but anxious rather melancholy eye, and a slim, graceful juvenile wife who multiplied herself, though scarce knowing at moments, I think, where or how to turn. I see him as a dode meridional, but of the sensitive, not the sensual type, as something of a rolling stone, rolling rather downhill. He had enjoyed some arrested, possibly blighted, connection in America, and as ready always again for some new application of faith and funds. If fondly failing in the least to see why the particular application in the Rubal Zakh, the body of pensioners ranging from infancy to horny eld, shouldn't have been a bright success could have made it one, it would have been a most original triumph. I recover it, as for ourselves, a beautifully mixed adventure, a brave little seeing of the world on the happy pretext of lessons. We had lessons from time to time, but had them in company with ladies and gentlemen, young men and young women, of the Anglo-Saxon family, who sat at long boards of green cloth with us, and with several of our contemporaries, English and American boys, taking dictate from the head of the house himself, were from the aged and most remarkable M. Bonfin, whom we believed to have been a superannuated actor. He, above all, such a model for Daudet, and who interrupted our abashed readings allowed to him of the French classics older and newer, by wondrous reminiscences and even imitations of Talmar. He moved among us in a cloud of legend, though wigged and wrinkled, the impassioned, though I think alas, underfed M. Bonfin. It was our belief that he went back beyond the First Empire to the scenes of the Revolution, this perhaps partly by reason, in the first place, of his scorn of our pronunciation, when we met it, of the sovereign word Liberté, the poverty of which, our deplorable Liberté, without ours, he mimicked and derided, sounding the right, the revolutionary form, out splendidly, with thirty ours, the prolonged beat of a drum. And then we believed him, if artistically conservative, politically obnoxious to the powers that then were, though knowing that those so marked had to walk, and even to breathe, cautiously, for fear of the mouchard of the tyrant. We knew all about mouchard, and talked of them, as we do today of aviators or suffragettes. To remember which, in an age so candidly unconscious of them, is to feel how much history we have seen unrolled. There were times when he but paced up and down, and round the long table. I see him as never seated, but always on the move, a weary wandering Jew of the class. But in particular I hear him recite to us the combat with the Moors from Le Cid, and show us how Thalma, describing it, seemed to crouch down on his haunches in order to spring up again terrifically to the height of Nounou Levant, alors, which M. Benphin rendered as if on the carpet their fifty men at least had leaped to their feet. But he threw off these broken lights, with a quick relapse to indifference. He didn't like the Anglo-Saxon. Of the children of Albion at least his view was low. On his American specimens he had, I observed, more mercy. And this imperfection of sympathy, the question of Waterloo apart, rested, it was impossible not to feel, on his so resenting the dishonor suffered at our hands by his beautiful tongue, to which, as the great field of elocution, he was patriotically devoted. I think he fairly loathed our closed English vowels and confused consonants, our destitution of sound that he recognized as sounds. Though, why in this connection he put up best with our own compatriots, embroiled at that time often in even stranger vocables than now, is more than I can say. I think that would be explained, perhaps, by his feeling in them as an old equalitarian certain accessibility's calm man. Besides, we of the younger persuasion at least must have done his ear less violence, than those earnest ladies from beyond the sea, and then those young Englishmen qualifying for examinations and careers, who flocked with us both to the plausibly spread, and the severely-disgarnished table, and on whose part I seem to see it again, an effort of anguish to pick up the happy idiom that we had unconsciously acquired. French, in the fine old formula of those days, so much diffused, was the language of the family. But I think it must have appeared to these students in general, a family of which the youngest members were but scantily kept in their place. We piped with a greater facility and to a richer mead of recognition, which sounds as if we might have become, in these strange collocations, fairly offensive little prigs. That was nonetheless not the case, for there were, oddly enough, a few French boys as well, to whom on the lingual, or the family, ground, we felt ourselves feebly relative, and in comparison with whom, for that matter, or with one of whom, I remember an occasion of my having to sink to insignificance. There was, at the institution, little of a staff, besides waiters and bun. But it embraced, such as it was, M. Maynard, as well as M. Bonfran, M. Maynard of the new generation, instructor in whatever it might be among the arts, that didn't consist of our rolling our oars, and with them, to help us out, more or less, our eyes. It is significant that this elegant branch is now quite vague to me, and I recall M. Maynard, in fine, as no less modern and cheap than M. Bonfran, was rare and unappraisable. He had nevertheless given me his attention one morning, doubtless patiently enough, in some corner of the villa that we had for the moment practically to ourselves. I seem to see a small empty room looking on the garden, when there entered to us, benevolently ushered by M. Vizandier, a small boy of very fair and romantic aspect as it struck me, a pupil newly arrived. I remember of him mainly that he had a sort of nimbus of light curls, a face delicate and pale, and that deeply hoarse voice with which French children used to excite our wonder. M. Maynard asked of him at once, with interest, his name, and on his pronouncing it sought to know, with livelier attention, if he were then the son of M. Arsénuset, lately director of the théâtre français. To this distinction, the boy confessed, all to such intensification of our répétiture's interest, that I knew myself quite dropped in comparison from his scheme of things. Such an origin as our little visitors affected him visibly as dazzling, and I felt justified after a while in stealing away into the shade. The beautiful little boy was to live to be the late M. Henriouset, the shining Hellenist and historian. I have never forgotten the ecstasy of hope in M. Maynard's question, as a light on the reverence then entertained for the institution M. Henriouset the Elder had administered.