Chapter XII (2)

There was still more in it all than that, however--which is the point of my mild demonstration; I associate the passage, to press closer, with a long summer, from May to November, spent at the then rural retreat of Swampscott, forty minutes by train northward from Boston, and that scene of fermentation, in its turn, I invest with unspeakable memories. It was the summer of '66 and of the campaign of Sadowa across the sea--we had by that time got sufficiently away from our own campaigns to take some notice of those of other combatants, on which we bestowed in fact, I think, the highest competence of attention then anywhere at play; a sympathetic sense that bore us even over to the Franco-German war four years later and helped us to know what we meant when we "felt strongly" about it. No strength of feeling indeed of which the vibration had remained to us from the other time could have been greater than our woe-stricken vision of the plight of France under the portent of Sedan; I had been back to that country and some of its neighbourhoods for some fifteen months during the previous interval, and I recover again no share in a great collective pang more vividly than our particular appalled state, that of a whole company of us, while we gaped out at the cry of reiterated bulletins from the shade of an August verandah, and then again from amid boskages of more immediate consolation, during the Saratoga and the Newport seasons of 1870. I had happened to repair to Saratoga, of all inconsequent places, on my return from the Paris and the London of the weeks immediately preceding the war, and though it was not there that the worst sound of the first crash reached us, I feel around me still all the air of our dismay--which was, in the queerest way in the world, that of something so alien mixed, to the increase of horror, with something so cherished: the great hot glare of vulgarity of the aligned hotels of the place and period drenching with its crude light the apparent collapse of everything we had supposed most massive. Which forward stretch on the part of this chronicle represents, I recognise, the practice of the discursive well-nigh overmastering its principle--or would do so, rather, weren't it that the fitful and the flickering, the extravagant advance and the corrective retreat from it, the law and the lovely art of foreshortening, have had here throughout most to serve me. It is under countenance of that law that I still grasp my capricious clue, making a jump for the moment over two or three years and brushing aside by the way quite numberless appeals, claims upon tenderness of memory not less than pleas for charm of interest, against which I must steel myself, even though I account this rank disloyalty to each. There is no quarter to which I have inclined in my brief recovery of the high tide of impression flooding the "period" of Ashburton Place that might not have drawn me on and on; so that I confess I feel myself here drag my mantle, right and left, from the clutch of suppliant hands--voluminous as it may doubtless yet appear in spite of my sense of its raggedness. Wrapped in tatters it is therefore that, with three or four of William's letters of '67 and '68 kept before me, I make my stride, not only for the sake of what I still regard as their admirable interest, but for the way they bring back again to me everything they figured at the time, every flame of faith they rekindled, every gage they held out for the future. Present for me are still others than these in particular, which I keep over for another introducing, but even the pages I here preserve overflow with connections--so many that, extravagant as it may sound, I have to make an effort to breast them. These are with a hundred matters of our then actual life--little as that virtue may perhaps show on their face; but above all just with the huge small fact that the writer was by the blest description "in Europe," and that this had verily still its way of meaning for me more than aught else beside. For what sprang in especial from his situation was the proof, with its positive air, that a like, when all was said, might become again one's own; that such luck wasn't going to be for evermore perversely out of the question with us, and that in fine I too was already in a manner transported by the intimacy with which I partook of his having been. I shouldn't have overstated it, I think, in saying that I really preferred such a form of experience (of this particular one) to the simpler--given most of our current conditions; there was somehow a greater richness, a larger accession of knowledge, vision, life, whatever one might have called it, in "having him there," as we said, and in my individually getting the good of this with the peculiar degree of ease that reinforced the general quest of a special sufficiency of that boon to which I was during those years rigidly, and yet on the whole by no means abjectly, reduced.

Our parents had in the autumn of '66 settled, virtually for the rest of their days, at Cambridge, and William had concomitantly with this, that is from soon after his return from Brazil, entered upon a season of study at the Harvard Medical School, then keeping its terms in Boston and under the wide wing of--as one supposed it, or as I at any rate did--the Massachusetts General Hospital. I have to disengage my mantle here with a force in which I invite my reader to believe--for I push through a thicket of memories in which the thousand-fingered branches arrestingly catch; otherwise I should surrender, and with a passionate sense of the logic in it, to that long and crowded Swampscott summer at which its graceless name has already failed to keep me from having glanced. The place, smothered in a dense prose of prosperity now, may have been even in those days, by any high measure, a weak enough apology for an offered breast of Nature: nevertheless it ministered to me as the only "American country" save the silky Newport fringes with which my growing imagination, not to mention my specious energy, had met at all continuous occasion to play--so that I should have but to let myself go a little, as I say, to sit up to my neck again in the warm depth of its deposit. Out of this I should lift great handfuls of variety of vision; it was to have been in its way too a season of coming and going, and with its main mark, I make out, that it somehow absurdly flowered, first and last, into some intenser example of every sort of intimation up to then vouchsafed me, whether by the inward or the outward life. I think of it thus as a big bouquet of blooms the most mixed--yet from which it is to the point just here to detach the sole reminiscence, coloured to a shade I may not reproduce, of a day's excursion to see my brother up at the Hospital. Had I not now been warned off too many of the prime images brought, for their confusion, to the final proof, I should almost risk ever so briefly "evoking" the impression this mere snatch was to leave with me, the picture as of sublime activities and prodigious possibilities, of genial communities of consideration and acquisition, all in a great bright porticoed and gardened setting, that was to hang itself in my crazy cabinet for as long as the light of the hour might allow. I put my hand on the piece still--in its now so deeply obscured corner; though the true point of my reference would seem to be in the fact that if William studied medicine long enough to qualify and to take his degree (so as to have become as roundedly "scientific" as possible) he was yet immediately afterwards, by one of those quick shifts of the scene with which we were familiar, beginning philosophic study in Germany and again writing home letters of an interest that could be but re-emphasised by our having him planted out as a reflector of impressions where impressions were both strong and as different as possible from those that more directly beat upon us. I myself could do well enough with these last, I may parenthesise, so long as none others were in question; but that complacency shrank just in proportion as we were reached by the report of difference and of the foreign note, the report particularly favourable--which was indeed what any and every report perforce appeared to me. William's, from anywhere, had ever an authority for me that attended none others; even if this be not the place for more than a word of light on the apparent disconnection of his actual course. It comes back to me that the purpose of practising medicine had at no season been flagrant in him, and he was in fact, his hospital connection once over, never to practise for a day. He was on the other hand to remain grateful for his intimate experience of the laboratory and the clinic, and I was as constantly to feel that the varieties of his application had been as little wasted for him as those of my vagueness had really been for me. His months at Dresden and his winter in Berlin were of a new variety--this last even with that tinge of the old in it which came from his sharing quarters with T. S. Perry, who, his four years at Harvard ended and his ensuing grand tour of Europe, as then comprehensively carried out, performed, was giving the Universities of Berlin and Paris a highly competent attention. To whatever else of method may have underlain the apparently lawless strain of our sequences I should add the action of a sharp lapse of health on my brother's part which the tension of a year at the dissecting table seemed to have done much to determine; as well as the fond fact that Europe was again from that crisis forth to take its place for us as a standing remedy, a regular mitigation of all suffered, or at least of all wrong, stress. Of which remarks but a couple of letters addressed to myself, I have to recognise, form here the occasion; these only, in that order, have survived the accidents of time, as I the more regret that I have in my mind's eye still much of the matter of certain others; notably of one from Paris (on his way further) recounting a pair of evenings at the theatre, first for the younger Dumas and Les Idees de Madame Aubray, with Pasca and Delaporte, this latter of an exquisite truth to him, and then for something of the Palais Royal with _four_ comedians, as he emphatically noted, who were each, wonderful to say, "de la force of Warren of the Boston Museum." He spent the summer of '67 partly in Dresden and partly at Bad-Teplitz in Bohemia, where he had been recommended the waters; he was to return for these again after a few months and was also to seek treatment by hydropathy at the establishment of Divonne, in the French back-country of Lake Leman, where a drawing sent home in a letter, and which I do my best to reproduce, very comically represents him as surrounded by the listening fair. I remember supposing even his Dresden of the empty weeks to bristle with precious images and every form of local character--this a little perhaps because of his treating us first of all to a pair of whimsical crayoned views of certain animated housetops seen from his window. It is the old names in the old letters, however, that now always most rewrite themselves to my eyes in colour--shades alas that defy plain notation, and if the two with which the following begins, and especially the first of them, only asked me to tell their story I but turn my back on the whole company of which they are part.

...I got last week an excellent letter from Frank Washburn who
writes in such a manly way. But the greatest delight I've had was
the loan of 5 Weekly Transcripts from Dick Derby. It's strange how
quickly one grows away from one's old surroundings. I never should
have believed that in so few months the tone of a Boston paper
would seem so outlandish to me. As it was, I was in one squeal of
amusement, surprise and satisfaction until deep in the night, when
I went to bed tired out with patriotism. The boisterous animal
good-humour, familiarity, reckless energy and self-confidence,
unprincipled optimism, esthetic saplessness and intellectual
imbecility, made a mixture hard to characterise, but totally
different from the tone of things here and, as the Germans would
say, whose "Existenz so voellig dasteht," that there was nothing to
do but to let yourself feel it. The Americans themselves here too
amuse me much; they have such a hungry, restless look and seem so
unhooked somehow from the general framework. The other afternoon as
I was sitting on the Terrace, a gentleman and two young ladies came
and sat down quite near me. I knew them for Americans at a glance,
and the man interested me by his exceedingly American expression: a
reddish moustache and tuft on chin, a powerful nose, a small light
eye, half insolent and _all_ sagacious, and a sort of rowdy air of
superiority that made me proud to claim him as a brother. In a few
minutes I recognised him as General M'Clellan, rather different
from his photographs of the War-time, but still not to be mistaken
(and I afterwards learned he is here). Whatever his faults may be
that of not being "one of us" is not among them.

This next is the note of a slightly earlier impression.

The Germans are certainly a most gemuethlich people. The way all the
old women told me how "freundlich" their rooms were--"so freundlich
mobilirt" and so forth--melted my heart. Whenever you tell an
inferior here to do anything (_e.g._ a cabman) he or she replies
"Schoen!" or rather "Schehn!" with an accent not quick like a
Frenchman's "Bien!" but so protracted, soothing and reassuring to
you that you feel as if he were adopting you into his family. You
say I've said nothing of the people of this house, but there is
nothing to tell about them. The Doctor is an open-hearted excellent
man as ever was, and wrapped up in his children; Frau Semler is a
sickly, miserly, petty-spirited nonentity. The children are quite
uninteresting, though the younger, Anna or Aennchen, aged five, is
very handsome and fat. The following short colloquy, which I
overheard one day after breakfast a few days since, may serve you
as a piece of local colour. Aennchen drops a book she is carrying
across the room and exclaims "Herr Jesus!"

Mother: "Ach, das sagen _Kinder_ nicht, Anna!"

Aennchen (reflectively to herself, sotto voce): "Nicht fur Kinder!"
...

What here follows from Divonne--of fourteen months later--is too full and too various to need contribution or comment.

You must have envied within the last few weeks my revisiting of the
sacred scenes of our youth, the shores of Leman, the Ecu de Geneve,
the sloping Corraterie, etc. My only pang in it all has been caused
by your absence, or rather by the fact of my presence instead of
yours; for I think your abstemious and poetic soul would have got
much more good of the things I've seen than my hardening and
definite-growing nature. I wrote a few words about Nuernberg to
Alice from Montreux. I found that about as pleasant an impression
as any I have had since being abroad--and this because I didn't
expect it. The Americans at Dresden had told me it was quite
uninteresting. I enclose you a few stereographs I got there--I
don't know why, for they are totally irrelevant to the real effect
of the place. This it would take Theophile Gautier to describe, so
I renounce. It was strange to find how little I remembered at
Geneva--I couldn't find the way I used to take up to the Academy,
and the shops and houses of the Rue du Rhone visible from our old
windows left me uncertain whether they were the same or new ones.
Kohler has set up a new hotel on the Quai du Mont-Blanc--you
remember he's the brother of our old Madame Buscarlet there; but I
went for association's sake to the Ecu. The dining-room was
differently hung, and the only thing in my whole 24 hours in the
place that stung me, so to speak, with memory, was that kind of
chinese-patterned dessert-service we used to have. So runs the
world away. I didn't try to look up Ritter, Chantre or any of ces
messieurs, but started off here the next morning, where I have now
been a week.

My impression on gradually coming from a German into a French
atmosphere of things was rather unexpected and not in all respects
happy. I have been in Germany half amused and half impatient with
the slowness of proceeding and the uncouthness of taste and
expression that prevail there so largely in all things, but on
exchanging it for the brightness and shipshapeness of these
quasi-French arrangements of life and for the tart
fire-cracker-like speech of those who make them I found myself
inclined to retreat again on what I had left, and had for a few
days quite a homesickness for the easy, ugly, substantial German
ways. The "'tarnal" smartness in which the railway refreshment
counters, for example, are dressed up, the tight waists and
"tasteful" white caps of the female servants, the everlasting
monsieur and madame, and especially the quickness and snappishness
of enunciation, suggesting such an inward impatience, quite
absurdly gave on my nerves. But I am getting used to it all, and
the French people who sit near me here at table and who repelled me
at first by the apparently cold-blooded artificiality of their
address to each other, now seem less heartless and inhuman. I am
struck more than ever I was with the hopelessness of us English,
and a _fortiori_ the Germans, ever competing with the French in
matters of form or finite taste of any sort. They are sensitive to
things that simply don't exist for us. I notice it here in manners
and speech: how can a people who speak with no tonic accents in
their words _help_ being cleaner and neater in expressing
themselves? On the other hand the limitations of _reach_ in the
French mind strike me more and more; their delight in rallying
round an official standard in all matters, in counting and dating
everything from certain great names, their use and love of
catchwords and current phrases, their sacrifice of independence of
mind for the mere sake of meeting their hearer or reader on common
ground, their metaphysical incapacity not only to deal with
questions but to know what the questions are, stand out plainer and
plainer the more headway I make in German. One wonders where the
"Versoehnung" or conciliation of all these rival national qualities
is going to take place. I imagine we English stand rather between
the French and the Germans both in taste and in spiritual
intuition. In Germany, while unable to avoid respecting that
solidity of the national mind which causes such a mass of permanent
work to be produced there annually, I couldn't help consoling
myself by the thought that whatever, after all, they might _do_,
the Germans were a plebeian crowd and could never _be_ such
gentlemen as we were. I now find myself getting over the French
superiority by an exactly inverse process of thought. The Frenchman
must sneer at us even more than we sneer at the Germans--and which
sneer is final, his at us two, or ours at him, or the Germans' at
us? It seems an insoluble question, which I fortunately haven't got
to settle.

I've read several novels lately, some of the irrepressible
George's: La Daniella and the Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Dore. (Was it
thee, by the bye that wrotest the Nation notices on her, on W.
Morris's new poem and on The Spanish Gypsy? They came to me
unmarked, but the thoughts seemed such as you would entertain, and
the style in some places like yours--in others not.) George Sand
babbles her improvisations on so that I never begin to believe a
word of what she says. I've also read The Woman in White, a couple
of Balzac's, etc., and a volume of tales by Merimee which I will
send you if I can by Frank Washburn. He is a big man; but the
things which have given me most pleasure have been some sketches of
travel by Th. Gautier. What an absolute thing genius is! That this
creature, with no more soul than a healthy poodle-dog, no
philosophy, no morality, no information (for I doubt exceedingly if
his knowledge of architectural terms and suchlike is accurate)
should give one a finer enjoyment than his betters in all these
respects by mere force of good-nature, clear eyesight and felicity
of phrase! His style seems to me perfect, and I should think it
would pay you to study it with love--principally in the most
trivial of these collections of notes of travel. T. S. P. has a
couple of them for you, and another, which I've read here and is
called Caprices et Zigzags, is worth buying. It contains wonderful
French (in the classic sense, I mean, with all those associations)
descriptions of London. I'm not sure if you know Gautier at all
save by the delicious Capitaine Fracasse. But these republished
feuilletons are all of as charming a quality and I should think
would last as long as the language.

There are 70 or 80 people in this etablissement, no one of whom I
have as yet particularly cottoned up to. It's incredible how even
so slight a barrier as the difference of language with most of
them, and still more as the absence of local and personal
associations, range of gibes and other common ground to stand on,
counts against one's scraping acquaintance. It's disgusting and
humiliating. There is a lovely maiden of _etwa_ 19 sits in sight of
me at the table with whom I am falling deeply in love. She has
never looked at me yet, and I really believe I should be quite
incapable of conversing with her even were I "introduced," from a
sense of the above difficulties and because one doesn't know what
subjects or allusions may be possible with a jeune fille. I suppose
my life for the past year would have furnished you, as the great
American nouvelliste, a good many "motives" and subjects of
observation--especially so in this place. I wish I could pass them
over to you--such as they are you'd profit by them more than I and
gather in a great many more. I should like full well an hour's, or
even longer, interview with you, and with the Parents and the
Sister and the Aunt and all; just so as to start afresh on a clean
basis. Give my love to Wendell Holmes. I've seen ---- ---- several
times; but what a cold-blooded cuss he is! Write me your impression
of T. S. P., who will probably reach you before this letter. If
Frank Washburn ever gets home be friendly to him. He is much aged
by travel and experience, and is a most charming character and
generous mind.