Chapter VI (2)

The moral of this, I fear, amounts to little more than that, putting aside the substance of his anecdote, my father had not set foot in New England till toward his thirty-fifth year, and my mother was not to do so till later still; circumstances not in the least preventing the birth of what I have called the falsifying legend. The allusion to the walking at Ventnor touches his inability to deal with rural roads and paths, then rougher things than now; by reason of an accident received in early youth and which had so lamed him for life that he could circulate to any convenience but on even surfaces and was indeed mainly reduced to driving--it had made him for all his earlier time an excellent whip. His constitution had been happily of the strongest, but as I look back I see his grave disability, which it took a strong constitution to carry, mainly in the light of a consistency of patience that we were never to have heard broken. The two acceptances melt together for me--that of the limits of his material action, his doing and enjoying, set so narrowly, and that of his scant allowance of "public recognition," or of the support and encouragement that spring, and spring so naturally and rightly, when the relation of effect to cause is close and straight, from any at all attested and glad understanding of a formula, as we say nowadays a message, richly and sincerely urged. Too many such reflections, however, beset me here by the way. My letters jump meanwhile to the summer of 1849, when I find in another of them, addressed to Emerson, a passage as characteristic as possible of one of the writer's liveliest and, as I confess it was ever to seem to me, most genially perverse idiosyncrasies, his distinctly low opinion of "mere" literary men. This note his letters in general again and again strike--not a little to the diversion of those who were to have observed and remembered his constant charmed subjection, in the matter of practice, to the masters, even quite the lighter, in the depreciated group. His sensibility to their spell was in fact so marked that it became from an early time a household game with us to detect him in evasive tears over their pages, when these were either real or romantic enough, and to publish without mercy that he had so been caught. There was a period in particular during which this pastime enjoyed, indeed quite revelled in, the form of our dragging to the light, with every circumstance of derision, the fact of his clandestine and deeply moved perusal of G. P. R. James, our nominal congener, at that time ceasing to be prescribed. It was his plea, in the "'fifties," that this romancer had been his idol in the 'forties and the 'thirties, and that under renewed, even if but experimental, surrender the associations of youth flocked back to life--so that _we_, profane about the unduly displaced master, were deplorably the poorer. He loved the novel in fine, he followed its constant course in the Revue with a beautiful inconsequence, and the more it was literature loved it the better, which was just how he loved, as well, criticism and journalism; the particular instance, with him, once he was in relation with it, quite sufficiently taking care of the invidiously-viewed type--as this was indeed viewed but a _priori_ and at its most general--and making him ever so cheerfully forget to be consistent. Work was verily cut out for the particular instance, as against the type, in an air and at a time favouring so, again and again, and up and down the "literary world," a dire mediocrity. It was the distillers of _that_ thinness, the "mere" ones, that must have been present to him when he wrote to Emerson in 1849: "There is nothing I dread so much as literary men, especially _our_ literary men; catch them out of the range of mere personal gossip about authors and books and ask them for honest sympathy in your sentiment, or for an honest repugnancy of it, and you will find the company of stage-drivers sweeter and more comforting to your soul. In truth the questions which are beginning to fill the best books, and will fill the best for a long time to come, are not related to what we have called literature, and are as well judged--I think better--by those whom books have at all events not belittled. When a man _lives_, that is lives enough, he can scarcely write. He cannot read, I apprehend, at all. All his writing will be algebraicised, put into the form of sonnets and proverbs, and the community will feel itself insulted to be offered a big bunch of pages, as though it were stupid and wanted tedious drilling like a child." When I begin to quote my father, however, I hang over him perhaps even too historically; for his expression leads me on and on so by its force and felicity that I scarce know where to stop. "The fact is that I am afraid I am in a very bad way, for I cannot heartily engage in any topic in which I shall appear to advantage"--the question having been, _de part et d'autre_, of possible courses of lectures for which the appetite of New York and Boston already announced itself as of the largest. And it still more beguiles me that "my wife and I are obliged--so numerous has waxed our family--to enlarge our house in town and get a country house for the summer." Here came in that earnest dream of the solutional "Europe" with which I have elsewhere noted that my very youngest sensibility was fed. "These things look expensive and temporary to us, besides being an additional care; and so, considering with much pity our four stout boys, who have no play-room within doors and import shocking bad manners from the street, we gravely ponder whether it wouldn't be better to go abroad for a few years with them, allowing them to absorb French and German and get such a sensuous education as they can't get here."

In 1850, however, we had still not departed for Europe--as we were not to do for several years yet; one advantage of which was that my father remained for the time in intercourse by letter with his English friend Dr. J. J. Garth Wilkinson, first known during my parents' considerable stay in London of several years before, 1843-44; and whose admirable style of expression, in its way as personal and as vivid as Henry James's own, with an added and doubtless more perceptibly full-blooded massiveness, is so attested by his earlier writings,[8] to say nothing of the rich collection of his letters (1845-55) lately before me--notably by The Human Body and its Connection with Man, dedicated in 1851 to my father--that I wonder at the absence of such a master, in more than one happy specimen, from the common educational exhibitions of English prose. Dr. Wilkinson was a friend of Emerson's as well, which leads the latter's New York correspondent to cite to him in February 1850 a highly characteristic passage from one of the London communications.

Carlyle came up here (presumably to Hampstead) on Monday to see
Neuberg, and spoke much of you with very kind recollections. He
remembered your metaphysics also and asked with terrible solicitude
whether they yet persevered. I couldn't absolutely say that they
did not, though I did my best to stammer out something about the
great social movement. He was suffering dreadfully from _malaise_
and indigestion and gave with his usual force his usual putrid
theory of the universe. All great men were most miserable; the day
on which any man could say he was not miserable, that day he was a
scoundrel; God was a Divine Sorrow; to no moment could he, Carlyle,
ever say Linger, but only Goodbye and never let me see your face
again. And all this interpolated with convulsive laughter, showing
that joy would come into him were it even by the path of hysteria
and disease. To me he is an unprofitable man, and though he gave me
the most kind invitation I have too much respect for my stomach to
go much into his company. Where hope is feeble genius and the human
voice are on the way to die. By the next boat I will endeavour to
send you over my thoughts on his recent pamphlet, the first of a
series of Latter-Day-Tracts. He is very rapidly falling out with
all his present admirers, for which I like them all the better; and
indeed is driving fast toward social views--only his is to be a
compulsory, not an attractive, socialism.

After quoting which my father comments: "Never was anything more false than this worship of sorrow by Carlyle; he has picked it up out of past history and spouts it for mere display, as a virtuoso delights in the style of his grandfather. It is the merest babble in him, as everyone who has ever talked an hour with him will acquit him of the least grain of humility. A man who has once uttered a cry of despair should ever after clothe himself in sackcloth and ashes."

The writer was to have meanwhile, before our migration of 1855, a considerable lecturing activity. A confused, yet perfectly recoverable recollection, on my own part, of these years, connects itself with our knowledge that our father engaged in that practice and that he went forth for the purpose, with my mother always in earnest and confident even though slightly fluttered attendance, at about the hour of our upward procession to bed; which fact lent to the proceeding--that is to _his_--a strange air of unnatural riot, quite as of torch-lighted and wind-blown dissipation. We went to plays and to ballets, and they had comparatively speaking no mystery; but at no lecture had we ever been present, and these put on for my fancy at least a richer light and shade, very much as if we ourselves had been on the performing side of the curtain, or the wonder of admiring (in our mother's person) and of being admired (in our father's) had been rolled for us into a single glory. This glory moreover was not menaced, but only made more of a thrill by the prime admirer's anxiety, always displayed at the last, as to whether they were not starting without the feature of features, the _corpus delicti_ or manuscript itself; which it was legendary with us that the admired had been known to drive back for in an abashed flurry at the moment we were launched in dreams of him as in full, though mysterious, operation. I can see him now, from the parlour window, at the door of the carriage and under the gusty street-lamp, produce it from a coat-tail pocket and shake it, for her ideal comfort, in the face of his companion. The following, to Emerson, I surmise, is of some early date in the autumn of '52.

I give three lectures in Boston at the Masonic Temple; the first
and second on Nov. 5th and 8th respectively. I should be greatly
appalled in some respects, but still charmed, to have you for an
auditor, seeing thus a hundred empty seats obliterated; but, I beg
of you, don't let any engagement suffer by such kindness to me.
Looking over the lectures again they horrify me with their
loud-mouthed imbecility!--but I hope they may fall upon less
hardened ears in some cases. I am sure that the thought which is in
them, or rather seems to me to struggle to be in them, is worthy of
all men's rapturous homage, and I will trust that a glimpse of it
may somehow befall my patient auditory. The fact is that a vital
truth can never be transferred from one mind to another, because
life alone appreciates it. The most one can do for another is to
plant some rude formula of such truths in his memory, leaving his
own spiritual chemistry to set free the germ whenever the demands
of his life exact it. The reason why the gods seem so powerless to
the sensuous understanding, and suffer themselves to be so long
defamed by our crazy theologies, is that they are life, and can
consequently be revealed only to life. But life is simply the
passage of idea into action; and our crazy theologies forbid ideas
to come into action any further than our existing institutions
warrant. Hence man leads a mere limping life, and the poor gods who
are dependent upon his manliness for their true revelation and for
their real knowledge, are doomed to remain forever unknown, and
even denied by such solemn pedants as Mr. Atkinson and Miss
Martineau. However, I shall try to convert _myself_ at least into
an army of Goths and Huns, to overcome and destroy our existing
sanctities, that the supernal splendours may at length become
credible and even visible. Good-bye till we meet in Boston, and
cultivate your goodnature according to my extensive needs.

I bridge the interval before our migration of 1855 exactly for the sake of certain further passages addressed to the same correspondent, from London, in the following year. The letter is a long one and highly significant of the writer's familiar frankness, but I must keep down my examples--the first of which glances at his general sense of the men he mainly met.

They are all of them depressed or embittered by the public
embarrassments that beset them; deflected, distorted, somehow
despoiled of their rich individual manliness by the necessity of
providing for these imbecile old inheritances of church and state.
Carlyle is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own
grease, only infinitely _more_ unreconciled to the blest Providence
which guides human affairs. He names God frequently and alludes to
the highest things as if they were realities, but all only as for a
picturesque effect, so completely does he seem to regard them as
habitually circumvented and set at naught by the politicians. I
took our friend M. to see him, and he came away greatly distressed
and desillusionne, Carlyle having taken the utmost pains to deny
and descry and deride the idea of his having done the least good to
anybody, and to profess indeed the utmost contempt for everybody
who thought he had, and poor M. being intent on giving him a
plenary assurance of this fact in his own case.... Arthur Helps
seems an amiable kindly little man with friendly offers, but I told
him I had no intention to bore him, and would at most apply to him
when I might want a good hatter or bootmaker. He fancied a
little--at least I thought this was the case--that I was going to
make a book, and might be indiscreet enough to put him in!.... ----
disappoints me, he is so eaten up with the "spirits" and all that.
His imagination is so vast as to dwarf all the higher faculties,
and his sympathy as narrow as Dr. Cheever's or Brownson's. No
reasonable man, it is true, likes the clergy or the philosophers,
but ----'s dislike of them seems as envenomed as that between rival
tradesmen or rival beauties. One can't endure the nonsense they
talk, to be sure, but when one considers the dear human meaning and
effort struggling at the bottom of it all one can feel still less
any personal separation from the men themselves. ----'s sarcasm is
of the fiercest, and on the whole he is only now at last sowing his
intellectual wild oats--he will grow more genial in good time. This
is it: I think he is but now finding his youth! That which we on
our side of the water find so early and exhaust so prodigally he
has found thus much later--I mean an emancipation from the shackles
of custom; and the kicking up of his heels consequently is
proportionate to his greater maturity of muscle. Mrs. ---- is a
dear little goose of a thing, who fancies the divine providence in
closer league with herself than with others, giving her intimations
of events about to happen and endowing her with peculiar
perspicacity in the intuition of remedies for disease; and ----,
the great brawny fellow, sits by and says never a word in abatement
of this enormous domestic inflation, though the visitor feels
himself crowded by it into the most inconsiderable of corners. A
sweet, loving, innocent woman like Mrs. ---- oughtn't to grow
egotistical in the company of a truly wise man, and this
accordingly is another quarrel I have with ----. In short I am
getting to the time of life when one values one's friends for what
they are more than for what they do. I am just as much impressed as
ever by his enormous power, but the goodness out of which it is
born and the wisdom by which it is nurtured and bred are things I
don't so much see.

The correspondence grew more interspaced, and with the year 1861 and the following, when we were at home again, became a matter of the occasional note. I have before me a series of beautiful examples of Emerson's share in it--during the earlier time copious enough; but these belong essentially to another case. I am all but limited, for any further show of the interesting relation than I have already given, to reproducing a few lines from Emerson's Diary, passages unpublished at the moment I write, and the first of them of April 1850. "I have made no note of these long weary absences at New York and Philadelphia. I am a bad traveller, and the hotels are mortifications to all sense of well-being in me. The people who fill them oppress me with their excessive virility, and would soon become intolerable if it were not for a few friends who, like women, tempered the acrid mass. Henry James was true comfort--wise, gentle, polished, with heroic manners and a serenity like the sun." The hotels of those days may well have been an ordeal--distinct to me still, from no few childish glimpses of their bareness of ease and rudeness of _acceuil_; yet that our justly fastidious friend was not wholly left to their mercy seems signified by my not less vivid remembrance of his staying with us on occasion in New York; some occasion, or occasions, I infer, of his coming on to lecture there. Do I roll several occasions into one, or amplify one beyond reason?--this last being ever, I allow, the waiting pitfall of a chronicler too memory-ridden. I "visualise" at any rate the winter firelight of our back-parlour at dusk and the great Emerson--I knew he was great, greater than any of our friends--sitting in it between my parents, before the lamps had been lighted, as a visitor consentingly housed only could have done, and affecting me the more as an apparition sinuously and, I held, elegantly slim, benevolently aquiline, and commanding a tone alien, beautifully alien, to any we heard roundabout, that he bent this benignity upon me by an invitation to draw nearer to him, off the hearth-rug, and know myself as never yet, as I was not indeed to know myself again for years, in touch with the wonder of Boston. The wonder of Boston was above all just then and there for me in the sweetness of the voice and the finish of the speech--this latter through a sort of attenuated emphasis which at the same time made sounds more important, more interesting in themselves, than by any revelation yet vouchsafed us. Was not this my first glimmer of a sense that the human tone _could_, in that independent and original way, be interesting? and didn't it for a long time keep me going, however unwittingly, in that faith, carrying me in fact more or less on to my day of recognising that it took much more than simply not being of New York to produce the music I had listened to. The point was that, however that might be, I had had given me there in the firelight an absolutely abiding measure. If I didn't know from that hour forth quite all it was to _not_ utter sounds worth mentioning, I make out that I had at least the opposite knowledge. And all by the operation of those signal moments--the truth of which I find somehow reflected in the fact of my afterwards knowing one of our household rooms for the time--it must have been our only guest-chamber--as "Mr. Emerson's room." The evening firelight played so long for me upon the door--that is to the length probably of three days, the length of a child's impression. But I must not let this carry me beyond the second note of the Diary, this time of May 1852. "'I do not wish this or that thing my fortune will procure, I wish the great fortune,' said Henry James, and said it in the noblest sense." The report has a beauty to me without my quite understanding it; the union of the two voices in it signifies quite enough. The last very relevant echo of my father's by itself, in the connection, I hasten now to find in a communication that must have been of the summer of 1869, when Dr. Wilkinson paid his only visit to America--this apparently of the briefest. The letter to Emerson from Cambridge notes that his appearance there had been delayed.

He may come to-morrow possibly: if in the morning I will telegraph
you; if in the evening I shall try to keep him over Monday that you
may meet him here at dinner on that day. But I fear this bothersome
Sabbath and its motionless cars may play us a trick. I shall hope
for a generous Monday all the same, and if that hope is baulked
shall owe Sunday a black-eye--and will pay my debt on the first
suitable occasion, I warrant you. What an awkward story (the letter
continues) The Nation to-day tells of Charles Sumner! Charles's
burly voice has always had for me a dreadfully hollow sound, as if
it came from a great copper vat, and I have loved him but with fear
and trembling accordingly. Is he _really_, like all American
politicians, tricky, or is The Nation--so careful about facts
ordinarily--only slanderous?... Carlyle nowadays is a palpable
nuisance. If he holds to his present mouthing ways to the end he
will find no showman la-bas to match him, for I hold Barnum a much
more innocent personage. I shouldn't wonder if Barnum grew
regenerate in some far off day by mere force of his democracy. But
Carlyle's intellectual pride is so stupid that one can hardly
imagine anything able to cope with it.

The following, in so different a key, is of some seven years earlier date--apparently '62; but I have let it stand over, for reasons, that it may figure here as the last of the communications addressed to Emerson that I shall cite. Written at an hotel, the Tremont House, in Boston, it marks his having come up from Newport for attendance at some meeting of a dining-club, highly distinguished in composition, as it still happily remains, of which he was a member--though but so occasionally present that this circumstance perhaps explains a little the even more than usual vivacity of his impression. Not indeed, I may add, that mustered reasons or apologies were ever much called for in any case of the play of that really prime note of his spontaneity.

I go to Concord in the morning, but shall have barely time to see
you there, even if I do as much as that; so that I can't forbear to
say to you now the word I wanted as to my impression of yesterday
about Hawthorne and Ellery Channing. Hawthorne isn't to me a
prepossessing figure, nor apparently at all an _enjoying_ person in
any way: he has all the while the look--or would have to the
unknowing--of a rogue who suddenly finds himself in a company of
detectives. But in spite of his rusticity I felt a sympathy for
him fairly amounting to anguish, and couldn't take my eyes off him
all dinner, nor my rapt attention: as that indecisive little Dr.
Hedge[9] found, I am afraid, to his cost, for I hardly heard a word
of what he kept on saying to me, and resented his maliciously
putting his artificial person between me and the profitable object
of study. (It isn't however that I now feel any ill-will to him--I
could recommend anyone but myself to go and hear him preach. The
thing was that Hawthorne seemed to me to possess human substance
and not to have dissipated it all away like that culturally
debauched ----, or even like good inoffensive comforting
Longfellow.) John Forbes and you kept up the human balance at the
other end of the table, but my region was a desert with H. for its
only oasis. It was so pathetic to see him, contented sprawling
Concord owl that he was and always has been, brought blindfold into
that brilliant daylight and expected to wink and be lively, like
some dapper Tommy Titmouse. I felt him bury his eyes in his plate
and eat with such voracity that no one should dare to speak to him.
My heart broke for him as his attenuated left-hand neighbour kept
putting forth _his_ long antennae to stroke his face and try
whether his eyes were open. It was heavenly to see him persist in
ignoring the spectral smiles--in eating his dinner and doing
nothing but that, and then go home to his Concord den to fall upon
his knees and ask his heavenly Father why it was that an owl
couldn't remain an owl and not be forced into the diversions of a
canary. I have no doubt that all the tenderest angels saw to his
case that night and poured oil into his wounds more soothing than
gentlemen ever know. W. Ellery Channing too seemed so human and
good--sweet as summer and fragrant as pinewoods. He is more
sophisticated than Hawthorne of course, but still he was kin; and I
felt the world richer by two _men_, who had not yet lost themselves
in mere members of society. This is what I suspect--that we are
fast getting so fearful one to another, we "members of society"
that we shall ere long begin to kill one another in self-defence
and give place in that way at last to a more veracious state of
things. The old world is breaking up on all hands: the glimpse of
the everlasting granite I caught in H. and W. E. shows me that
there is stock enough left for fifty better. Let the old impostors
go, bag and baggage, for a very real and substantial one is aching
to come in, in which the churl shall not be exalted to a place of
dignity, in which innocence shall never be tarnished nor trafficked
in, in which every man's freedom shall be respected down to its
feeblest filament as the radiant altar of God. To the angels, says
Swedenborg, death means resurrection to life; by that necessary
rule of inversion which keeps them separate from us and us from
them, and so prevents our being mutual nuisances. Let us then
accept political and all other distraction that chooses to come;
because what is disorder and wrath and contention on the surface is
sure to be the greatest peace at the centre, working its way thus
to a surface that shall never be disorderly.

But it is in the postscript that the mixture and the transition strike me as most inevitable.

Weren't you shocked at ----'s engagement? To think of that prim old
snuffers imposing himself on that pure young flame! What a world,
what a world! But once we get rid of Slavery the new heavens and
new earth will swim into reality.

No better example could there be, I think, of my father's remarkable and constant belief, proof against all confusion, in the imminence of a transformation-scene in human affairs--"spiritually" speaking of course always--which was to be enacted somehow without gross or vulgar visibility, or at least violence, as I have said, but was none the less straining to the front, and all by reason of the world's being, deep within and at heart, as he conceived, so achingly anxious for it. He had the happiness--though not so untroubled, all the while, doubtless, as some of his declarations would appear to represent--of being able to see his own period and environment as the field of the sensible change, and thereby as a great historic hour; that is, I at once subjoin, I more or less _suppose_ he had. His measure of the imminent and immediate, of the socially and historically visible and sensible was not a thing easy to answer for, and when treated to any one of the loud vaticinations or particular revolutionary messages and promises our age was to have so much abounded in, all his sense of proportion and of the whole, of the real and the ridiculous, asserted itself with the last emphasis. In that mixture in him of faith and humour, criticism and conviction, that mark of a love of his kind which fed on discriminations and was never so moved to a certain extravagance as by an exhibited, above all by a cultivated or in the least sententious vagueness in respect to these, dwelt largely the original charm, the peculiarly social and living challenge (in that it was so straight and bright a reflection of life) of his talk and temper. Almost all of my father shines for me at any rate in the above passages, and in another that follows, with their so easy glide from discrimination, as I have called it, that is from analytic play, in the outward sphere, to serenity of synthesis and confidence and high joy in the inward. It was as if he might have liked so to see his fellow-humans, fellow-diners, fellow-celebrities or whatever, in that acuity of individual salience, in order to proceed thence to some enormous final doubt or dry renouncement--instead of concluding, on the contrary, and on the same free and familiar note, to the eminently "worth while" character of life, or its susceptibility to vast and happy conversions. With which too, more than I can say, have I the sense here of his so finely contentious or genially perverse impulse to carry his wares of observation to the market in which they would on the whole bring least rather than most--where his offering them at all would produce rather a flurry (there might have been markets in which it had been known to produce almost a scandal), and where he would in fact give them away for nothing if thereby he might show that such produce grew. Never was there more of a case of the direct friendliness to startling growths--if so they might be held--of the very soil that lies under our windows. I don't think he liked to scandalise--certainly he didn't in the least for scandal's sake; but nothing inspired him more to the act and the pleasure of appreciation for appropriation, as it might be termed, than the deprecating attitude of others on such ground--that degree of shyness of appropriation on their part which practically left appreciation vague. It was true that the appreciation for a human use, as it might be called--that is for the high optimistic transition--could here carry the writer far.